i just won this:
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for $23.50. ebay is a good thing.
All posts by przxqgl
588
thanks to
10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job
but then again, i’m the one who is always talking about how much better a workless society would be than the current fiasco in which we’re currently inundated, which we continue to delude ourselves into believing that it’s really the way humans should exist with one another on the planet, when it is actually destroying us… 8/
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i’ve got 11 parts completely transposed, and i’m working on the 12th. i haven’t figured out how to insert just the chord names instead of the actual chords, so the last one i’m doing by hand, but it would have taken a lot longer if i had had to do all of them by hand.
this is so cool!
586
this is kewl!
and for those of you who know how much i abhor using terminology like that, it’s an indication of truly how kewl it really is… 8)
check this out: LilyPond.org
there you will find a free program with which you can typeset music, called Lilypond. it’s a small, intuitive, easy to use, text-based markup language similar to HTML, and the shell script it uses to turn .ly files, which you create with any text editor, into .pdf files of typeset music.
apparently it’s also good for midi stuff, but i haven’t gotten that far yet…
however this:
\header {
title = "Game Show Theme"
composer = "Fred Hawkinson"
instrument = "Bb Sousaphone"
}
{
\clef bass
\time 2/2
\repeat volta 2
{
g2 e2 a4. d8 r2 g2 e2 a4. d8 r2 g2 b2 a4. b8 r2 d4 r4-POP r4 r8 e8 d8. fis16 g4 r2
}
}
turns into this:
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with far less trouble than it would take me to write out anything half as legible! is that not one of the kewelest things you have ever seen??? w00t!
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this time it was because somebody clicked the “submit” button on my feedback form, however, and they sent me the following message:
Whilst I was in Sri Lanka I bought a gift box ‘from the memory of trees’ . It contained a terracotta burner, charcoal tablets, gum benzoin resin, frankincense resin, gum damar powder and myrrh resin. I bought the gift box from Barefoot. I cannot seem to find this item on your wed site. Can you help please as I would like to order some more if possible.
now i appreciate that she thought of Hybrid Elephant first – i really do – and i am going to do my utmost to see that, when she does finally order, she orders from Hybrid Elephant, but at the same time… does she really think that i will have exactly the same selection of incense as a (probably tourist) shop in sri lanka!?!? does she think that all incense shops have the same supplier? i don’t have gum damar, and the burner, both of which can be special ordered, but i’ve got everything else… it’s fairly obvious on the web site – click on “Incense” and then click on “Resins”… and that’s not to mention the fact the likelyhood of her finding that particular gift box on my web site – or not – is a good way to tell whether i market that particular gift box – or not!
<grumble, mutter> why are people so flaming, gawd-awful stupid????
584
what, is this an epidemic now? first it all but became illegal to be homeless in las vegas, and now, not more than a week and a few days later, it’s orlando… soon they’ll start interning homeless people in camps, and at that point it won’t be too big a step to just make it illegal to be anything they want to be illegal! this must be what it was like in the early days of nazi germany, before anybody realised how dangerous the nazis really were…
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) – City officials have banned charitable groups from feeding homeless people in parks downtown, arguing that transients who gather for weekly meals create safety and sanitary problems for businesses.
The measure, approved Monday, prevents serving large groups in parks and other public property within three kilometres of City Hall without a permit. The American Civil Liberties Union vowed to sue, saying it’s a superficial fix that ignores the city’s homeless problem.
City commissioner Patty Sheehan pushed for the ordinance after complaints from business owners and residents that homeless people were causing problems at a downtown park popular with joggers and dog walkers.
A group called Food Not Bombs, which has served weekly vegetarian meals to homeless people for more than a year there, said it would continue illegally.
Robin Stotter, who is opening a restaurant downtown, said he would support homeless people by pledging money for food and shelter, but supported the ordinance.
“The homeless issue is not going to be solved today,” he said. “It’s a safety issue, and the public deserves a safe place to be.”
Two of the city’s five commissioners voted against the ordinance – including Robert Stuart, the head of a homeless shelter.
Stuart said the city was moving to “criminalize good-hearted people.”
“We’re putting a Band-Aid on a critical problem,” said commissioner Sam Ings, the other opposing vote.
The House of Representatives has passed a bill that would force schools and libraries to block chat and social networking sites as a condition of receiving federal E-rate funding. This bill goes far beyond the already broad mandate that requires schools and libraries to filter out obscenity and “harmful-to-minors” content and would block access to many legal and valuable web sites and Internet tools. Because chat and social networking are woven into the fabric of Internet communication, a huge range of sites may be declared off limits in libraries and schools. The bill appoints the Federal Communications Commission as the arbiter of what can and cannot be accessed in libraries around the country, meaning that for the first time, the federal government would be getting into the business of evaluating and screening wholly lawful Internet content.
29 July 2006
By Anne Penketh, The Independent
A 12-year-old boy dead on a stretcher. A mother in shock and disbelief after her son was shot dead for standing on their roof. A phone rings and a voice in broken Arabic orders residents to abandon their home on pain of death.
Those are snapshots of a day in Gaza where Israel is waging a hidden war, as the world looks the other way, focusing on Lebanon.
It is a war of containment and control that has turned the besieged Strip into a prison with no way in or out, and no protection from an fearsome battery of drones, precision missiles, tank shells and artillery rounds.
As of last night, 29 people had been killed in the most concentrated 48 hours of violence since an Israeli soldier was abducted by Palestinian militants just more than a month ago.
The operation is codenamed “Samson’s Pillars”, a collective punishment of the 1.4 million Gazans, subjecting them to a Lebanese-style offensive that has targeted the civilian infrastructure by destroying water mains, the main power station and bridges.
The similarities with Israel’s blitz on Lebanon are striking, raising suspicions that the Gaza offensive has been the testing ground for the military strategy now unfolding on the second front in the north.
In Gaza, following the victory of the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas in January, Israel, with the help of the US, initiated an immediate boycott and ensured the rest of the world fell into line after months of hand-wringing. Israel has secured the same flashing green light from the Bush administration over Lebanon, while the rest of the world appeals in vain for an immediate ceasefire.
The Israelis, who launched their Lebanon offensive on 12 July after the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hizbollah fighters, intend to create a “sterile” zone devoid of militants in a mile-wide stretch inside Lebanon.
In Gaza, Palestinian land has already been bulldozed to form a 300-metre open area along the border with Israel proper. And in both cases, the crisis will doubtless end up being defused by a prisoner exchange. With Lebanon dominating the headlines, Israel has “rearranged the occupation” in Gaza, in the words of the Palestinian academic and MP, Hanan Ashrawi. But unlike the Lebanese, the desperate Gazans have nowhere to flee from their humanitarian crisis.
Before Israeli tanks moved into northern Gaza, yesterday, 12-year-old Anas Zumlut joined the ranks of dead Palestinians, numbering more than 100. His body was wrapped in a funeral shroud, just like those of the two sisters, a three-year-old and an eight-month-old baby, who were killed three days ago in the same area of Jablaya.
In the past three weeks, the foreign ministry and the interior ministry in Gaza city have been smashed, prompting speculation that Israel’s offensive is not only aimed at securing the release of Cpl Gilad Shalit, or bringing an end to the Qassam rocket attacks that have wounded one person in the past month and jarred the nerves of the residents of the nearest Israeli town of Sderot.
“At first we thought they were bombing the Hamas leaders by targeting Haniyeh and Zahar,” a Palestinian official said, referring to the Palestinian Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister. “But when they targeted the economy ministry we decided they wanted to completely destroy the entire government.”
The only functioning crossing, Erez, is closed to Palestinians who are almost hermetically sealed inside the Strip. As the local economy has been strangled by donor countries, Gaza City’s 1,800 municipal employees have not been paid since the beginning of April. Families are borrowing to the hilt, selling their jewellery, ignoring electricity bills and tax demands and throwing themselves on the mercy of shopkeepers.
Western officials say they hope the pressure will coerce Hamas into recognising Israel but the Palestinians believe the real goal is the collapse of the Hamas government – six of whose cabinet members have been arrested, the rest are in hiding.
The signs on the ground are that Israel’s military pressure is proving counter-productive. There is the risk of a total breakdown of the fabric of society at a time when the main political parties, Fatah and Hamas, are at each other’s throats. “The popularity of Hamas is increasing,” says the Palestinian deputy foreign minister, Ahmed Soboh, from the comparative safety of his West Bank office in Ramallah.
The situation has become unbearable for Gazans, says Nabil Shaath, a veteran Fatah official who is a former foreign and planning minister. Through the window, small fishing boats are anchored uselessly in the harbour, penned in by Israeli sea patrols.
All mechanisms for coping are being exhausted.
Mr Shaath, who had a daughter, Mimi, late in life, says that he tried “laughter therapy” with his five-year-old at home in northern Gaza. “Every time there was a shell, I would burst out laughing and she would laugh with me. But then the Israelis occupied everything around us, and there were tanks, and shrapnel in the garden, and she saw where the shells were coming from, and she was terrified. So Mimi now gets angry when I laugh.”
Only a few miles away, on the other side of the border, the Israeli army says it is taking pains to minimise civilian casualties. Hila, a 21-year old paratrooper who is not allowed to give her last name, says the Hamas fighters in Gaza – like Hizbollah in Lebanon – deliberately mingle with the civilian population as a tactic. Weapons are stored in the upper storeys of houses where families live downstairs, she says. “The terrorists deliberately choose places where we can’t retaliate.”
But these places are being hit. And Mr Shaath is scornful of the disproportionate Israeli reaction to the Palestinian rockets. Five Israelis have been killed by the 10km range Qassams since 2000.
Mrs Ashrawi believes Samson’s Pillars are no closer to falling. “Israelis think they are searing the consciousness of the Palestinians and the Lebanese with a branding iron. But if people have a cause they will never be defeated.”
Day 17
- Israeli aircraft kill 12 in southern Lebanon, with hill villages near Tyre among the targets.
- Hizbollah fires a new long-range missile, the Khaibar-1, at Afula south of Haifa, the furthest a Hizbollah rocket has landed inside Israel.
- At least six people are wounded in rocket attacks on northern Israel. One rocket hits a hospital in Nahariya.
- US State Department describes Israel’s remarks that the Rome conference gave it a “green light” to continue its attack on Lebanon as “outrageous”.
- Emergency relief co-ordinator Jan Egeland asks Israel and Hizbollah for a 72-hour ceasefire to allow evacuation of the elderly.
- Israeli aircraft attack homes owned by Palestinian militants and a metal workshop in the Gaza Strip, wounding seven, doctors say.
Death toll:
- At least 459 people, mostly civilians, in Lebanon
- 51 Israelis, including 18 civilians, according to Reuters’ tally.
- Israeli military says 200 Hizbollah fighters killed, Hizbollah has said 31 of its fighters killed.
Annabelle McDonald
25 july 06
NOBEL peace laureate Betty Williams displayed a flash of her feisty Irish spirit yesterday, lashing out at US President George W.Bush during a speech to hundreds of schoolchildren.
Campaigning on the rights of young people at the Earth Dialogues forum, being held in Brisbane, Ms Williams spoke passionately about the deaths of innocent children during wartime, particularly in the Middle East, and lambasted Mr Bush.
“I have a very hard time with this word ‘non-violence’, because I don’t believe that I am non-violent,” said Ms Williams, 64.
“Right now, I would love to kill George Bush.” Her young audience at the Brisbane City Hall clapped and cheered.
“I don’t know how I ever got a Nobel Peace Prize, because when I see children die the anger in me is just beyond belief. It’s our duty as human beings, whatever age we are, to become the protectors of human life.”
Ms Williams was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 30 years ago, when she circulated a petition to end violence in Northern Ireland after witnessing British soldiers shoot dead an IRA member who was driving a car. He veered on to the footpath, killing two children from one family instantly and fatally injuring a third.
Ms Williams’s petition had tens of thousands of Protestant and Catholic women walking the streets together in protest. Now the former office receptionist heads the World Centres of Compassion for Children International, a non-profit group working to create a political voice for children.
“My job is to tell you their stories,” Ms Williams said of a recent trip to Iraq.
“We went to a hospital where there were 200 children; they were beautiful, all of them, but they had cancers that the doctors couldn’t even recognise. From the first Gulf War, the mothers’ wombs were infected.
“As I was leaving the hospital, I said to the doctor, ‘How many of these babies do you think are going to live?’
“He looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘None, not one’. They needed five different kinds of medication to treat the cancers that the children had, and the embargoes laid on by the United States and the United Nations only allowed them three.”
Wrapping up the three-day forum yesterday, delegates agreed to a 26-point action plan.
“There can be no sustainable peace while the majority of the world’s population lives in poverty,” they said.
“There can be no sustainable peace if we fail to rise to the global challenge presented by climate change.
“There can be no sustainable peace while military spending takes precedence over human development.”
scottish highland games
i went to the scottish highland games yesterday, where i performed four times as part of the tattoo, with the ballard sedentary sousa band. it was, apparently, the third or fourth time the BSSB has performed at the highland games, but it was my first time performing, and the first time i had been to the highland games since i was very young – i remember going with my parents, before my older younger sister was born, so i must have been five or six years old. i very clearly remember being absolutly in awe of the pipe bands, and i also remember the drummers twirling their sticks in fancy patterns. it’s probably where i developed my love of the highland pipes, but even the memory of that event did nothing to prepare me for the awesomeness that came from playing in the middle of the massed bands at the tattoo last night. i had pipers standing all around me, i was playing my trombone, and i was in heaven. words are not enough to describe how awesome it was. other players in the BSSB were complaining about the noise, and at least one of the trumpet players was actually wearing earplugs, which i find almost insulting. it was heaven and i was right there in the middle of it!
first i played in the fanfare, which was just the trombones and the trumpets, along with our “drum major” (a diminutive woman who plays clarinet or flute, and is also the world’s only sedentary baton twirler), and we played the fanfare from “The Poet, The Peasant and The Light Cavalryman” march by Henry Filmore (who was part of sousa’s band, so it’s okay) while military people did things with the flag, and then we sauntered off the “stage” – after all, we are a sedentary band, and the concept of standing up, even for a fanfare, grated on most of us – we sat around for a while, during which time we heard performances by a pipe band from port coquitlam, a group called “Molly’s Revenge”, a guy with a guitar, and the silent drill team from some military outfit. then we did a short set, only three marches, and then there was a pipe band from some place in california, and another guy with a guitar, and another group or two, or possibly three (i don’t remember), then we played another short set of four marches. then the pipe band from SFU (Simon Fraser University) came on, and they were incredible. they started from all different sides of the stage, and came together, while playing. they did an arrangement of pachelbel’s canon, which must have been written especially for a pipe band, because otherwise it would have sounded wrong, and they did a piece that was for drums only, with massive quantites of twirling drumsticks in fancy ways and only one mistake. then we came out again, and played with all three pipe bands, and it was incredible.
we left home around 5:00, got to enumclaw at around 5:30, and we finished performing around 10:30. because of the fact that there was also a “rock concert” or something like that at the white river amphitheatre and traffic was backed up, we didn’t get home until after midnight. i have to remember not to eat, because moe and i, and a bunch of moe’s friends are going to maneki this evening.
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A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America
On the 50th anniversary of our national motto, “In God We Trust,” we reflect on these words that guide millions of Americans, recognize the blessings of the Creator, and offer our thanks for His great gift of liberty.
From its earliest days, the United States has been a Nation of faith. During the War of 1812, as the morning light revealed that the battle torn American flag still flew above Fort McHenry, Francis Scott Key penned, “And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust!'” His poem became our National Anthem, reminding generations of Americans to “Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.” On July 30, 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the law officially establishing “In God We Trust” as our national motto.
Today, our country stands strong as a beacon of religious freedom. Our citizens, whatever their faith or background, worship freely and millions answer the universal call to love their neighbor and serve a cause greater than self.
As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of our national motto and remember with thanksgiving God’s mercies throughout our history, we recognize a divine plan that stands above all human plans and continue to seek His will.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim July 30, 2006, as the 50th Anniversary of our National Motto, “In God We Trust.” I call upon the people of the United States to observe this day with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-seventh day of July, in the year of our Lord two thousand six, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-first.
GEORGE W. BUSH
you know, when i was in high school, “bush” was a common slang term that meant “unacceptable” or “un-cool”. i always thought it was derived from “bush league”, but now i’m not so sure…
‘IN GOD WE TRUST’ — On Our Money!?
Striking The Motto: Is It Defacing U.S. Currency?
If it is happiness you are seeking a move to Denmark could be in order, according to the first scientist to make a world map of happiness.
Adrian White, from the UK’s University of Leicester, used the responses of 80,000 people worldwide to map out subjective wellbeing.
Denmark came top, followed closely by Switzerland and Austria. The UK ranked 41st. Zimbabwe and Burundi came bottom.
A nation’s level of happiness was most closely associated with health levels.
Wealth and education were the next strongest determinants of national happiness.
Mr White, who is an analytic social psychologist at the university, said: “When people are asked if they are happy with their lives, people in countries with good healthcare, a higher GDP [gross domestic product] per captia, and access to education were much more likely to report being happy.”
He acknowledged that these measures of happiness are not perfect, but said they were the best available and were the measures that politicians were talking of using to measure the relative performance of each country.
He said it would be possible to use these parameters to track changes in happiness, and what events may cause that, such as the effects a war, famine or national success might have on the happiness of people in a particular country.
Measuring happiness
He said: “There is increasing political interest in using measures of happiness as a national indicator in conjunction with measures of wealth.
“A recent BBC survey found that 81% of the population think the government should focus on making us happier rather than wealthier.
“It is worth remembering that the UK is doing relatively well in this area, coming 41st out of 178 nations.”
He said he was surprised to see countries in Asia scoring so low, with China 82nd, Japan 90th and India 125th, because these are countries that are thought as having a strong sense of collective identity which other researchers have associated with well-being.
“It is also notable that many of the largest countries in terms of population do quite badly,” he said.
He said: “The frustrations of modern life, and the anxieties of the age, seem to be much less significant compared to the health, financial and educational needs in other parts of the world.”
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yay!
i bought a sousaphone!
580
26 July 2006
Israel ignored repeated warnings it was shelling close to United Nations observers in southern Lebanon before an Israeli bomb killed four for them, the Irish foreign ministry has said.
The ministry said on Wednesday a senior Irish army officer had called Israeli military liasion officers at least six times to warn them that Israeli munitions were landing close to UN installations in the region.
The peacekeepers were killed on Tuesday night when an aerial bomb struck a United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) building in Khiam, southern Lebanon, an UNIFIL spokesman said.
“On six separate occasions he [the officer] was in contact with the Israelis to warn them that their bombardment was endangering the lives of UN staff in South Lebanon,” a department of foreign affairs spokesman said.
The dead were Canadian, Finnish, Austrian and Chinese nationals.
Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, has condemned Israel, saying he was shocked by the “apparently deliberate targeting” of the post, and calling for it to investigate the incident.
Several international governments and organisations also expressed their anger at the bombing.
‘Deep regrets’
Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, expressed “deep regrets” earlier on Wednesday over the deaths in a telephone conversation with Annan, his office said, but the Israeli premier said it was “inconceivable” for the UN to think that the incident was deliberate.
Dan Gillerman, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, also said that Annan’s comments were “premature and erroneous” for implying that Israel had deliberately targeted the observers.
The US government on Wednesday defended Israel, saying that although the attack was “horrible” there was no indication that the post had been targeted.
Since clashes between Israel and Hezbollah fighters began two weeks ago, there have been several incidents of firing close to UN peacekeepers and observers, including direct hits on nine positions, a UN official told the Associated Press news agency.
UNIFIL has almost 2,000 peacekeepers and has been deployed in the southern Lebanon for almost 30 years, mainly providing protection and humanitarian assistance to the local population.
Israeli/Lebanese Coffin Counter – currently at Lebanon: 423, UN: 4, Israel: 51… 8/
word is that the whole world is now a target for al qaida because of this. no wonder. more power to them. i support the idea of israel existing as much as the next guy, but when it comes to violating the commandment from God that says “THOU SHALT NOT KILL”, especially when it’s that unequal, my personal opinion is that the sooner we, as a unifed people, get these morons out of office, by whatever means necessary, the better. if we don’t, it won’t be long before we don’t have a habitable planet to live on, and, regardless of how much these morons wish it would happen, i think that once it does happen, these morons will be having second thoughts about the whole thing… but, of course, by then it will be too late.
baqiya ib hayatkum. akhir il ahzan.
579
see also here…
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You scored as XIII: Death. Death is probably the most well known Tarot card – and also the most misunderstood. Most Tarot novices would consider Death to be a bad card, especially given its connection with the number thirteen. In fact this card rarely indicates literal death.Without “death” there can be no change, only eventual stagnation. The “death” of the child allows for the “birth” of the adult. This change is not always easy. The appearance of Death in a Tarot reading can indicate pain and short term loss, however it also represents hope for a new future.
Which Major Arcana Tarot Card Are You? |
growf!
the washington state supreme court has just ruled in favour of upholding the defense of marriage act (marriage equals one man and one woman), in spite of the fact that the state constitution clearly states that “No law shall be passed granting to any citizen, class of citizens, or corporation other than municipal, privileges or immunities which upon the same terms shall not equally belong to all citizens, or corporations.” (Washington State Constitution, Article 1, Section 12)
i don’t think that laws which limit marriage to only heterosexual couples can possibly fall under this category… what? do they think that homosexual couples simply don’t exist? at this point, i think that if they want to call it “marriage,” they should qualify it by saying that it is “marriage for only those people who those people who make the laws think should get married” and have “gay marriage” be called something completely different. 8/
why is this even an issue when we have israel bombing lebanon and killing hundreds of innocent children and other civilians over one kidnapped israeli soldier when the people who kidnapped him are willing to accept a cease fire?
GROWF!
577
July 21, 2006
LAS VEGAS — A battle is brewing over a new Las Vegas ordinance that bans providing food or meals to the indigent at city parks.
The Las Vegas City Council unanimously passed a law, which went into effect Thursday, making it a crime to feed the homeless at city parks. It carries a maximum penalty of $1,000 and six months in jail.
The law bans giving away or selling food to anyone who could get assistance from official sources under state law, and officials said city marshals will get specialized training to enforce it.
The city’s mayor, Oscar Goodman, dismissed questions about how marshals will identify the homeless so that they can enforce the ordinance.
“Certain truths are self-evident,” Goodman said. “You know who’s homeless.”
Marshals recently began arresting the homeless in parks under a campaign to force people who are unable or unwilling to care for themselves to get mental help.
City officials call the measure an attempt to stop so-called “mobile soup kitchens” from attracting the homeless to parks.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada calls it unconstitutional, unenforceable and the latest attempt by the city to hide and harass the homeless instead of constructively addressing their plight.
“So, the only people who get to eat are those who have enough money? Those who get (government) assistance can’t eat at your picnic?” asked ACLU attorney Allen Lichtenstein, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “I’ve heard of some rather strange and extreme measures from other cities. I’ve never heard of something like this. It’s mind-boggling.”
One advocate for the homeless said she will continue to feed the homeless, despite being cited twice already.
“I’m going to do whatever I think is necessary to keep people alive,” Gail Sacco told the paper.
She said her previous citations came while she was feeding the homeless for holding a gathering of 25 or more people without a permit.
Jul. 25, 2006
MINNEAPOLIS – Six friends spruced up in fake blood and tattered clothing were arrested in downtown Minneapolis on suspicion of toting “simulated weapons of mass destruction.”
Police said the group were allegedly carrying bags with wires sticking out, making it look like a bomb, while meandering and dancing to music as part of a “zombie dance party” Saturday night.
“They were arrested for behavior that was suspicious and disturbing,” said Lt. Gregory Reinhardt, a police spokesman. Police also said the group was uncooperative and intimidated people with their “ghoulish” makeup.
One group member said the “weapons” were actually backpacks modified to carry a homemade stereos and the suspects were jailed without reason. None of the six adults and one juvenile arrested have been charged.
“Given the circumstance of them being uncooperative … why would you have those (bags) if not to intimidate people?” said Inspector Janee Harteau. “It’s not a case of (police) overreacting.”
Harteau also said police were on high alert because they’d gotten a bulletin about men who wear clown makeup while attacking and robbing people in other states.
Kate Kibby, one of those arrested, said previous zombie dance parties at the Mall of America and on light-rail trains have occurred without incident. Last fall, nearly 200 people took part in a “zombie pub crawl” in northeast Minneapolis.
Kibby said they were cooperative and followed the two officers to the station where they were questioned and eventually loaded into a van and booked into jail.
“It was clear to us that they were trying to get a rise out of us,” Kibby said.
Members of the group could face lesser charges like disorderly conduct, police said.
576
it’s HOT! friday and saturday it was hotter than it has ever been around here, since they started keeping records of such things. it was 114 (farenheit) in pasco yesterday, which is east of the mountains and in the middle of the desert, but it’s also obscenely hot. on friday, it was 104 in issaquah, which is just up the road from where we live. today it’s only 9:30 in the morning and it is already in the 80s, and while they say that it’s not going to be as hot today, they still said that we will have temperatures in the mid-90s, which is hotter than i’d like it to be.
and bush says global warming doesn’t exist… idiot.
it’s HOT!
moe and i went to see circus contraption last night, and despite the oppressive heat (it was the middle of the 18th century and air conditioning hadn’t been invented yet) the show was amazing. i actually know quite a few of the people involved, because of the moisture festival, drunk puppet night, and from hanging out at the pike place market. it gave me all kinds of ideas about what to do with my sousaphone, once i actually get it. it was amazing to see the performers in all kinds of costumes that had to be hotter than hell, doing as well as they did. there was one guy (girl? i don’t really know – their web site says it was a girl, but really there was no way to tell) who was entirely wrapped from head to toe in a giant worm costume who was lead out on stage, tethered to one of the sets with a leather leash, and left there the entire intermission. also, in the song “Over The Rails” when the singer sang “I’ll pull out my hair” and then doffed his wig (he was bald underneath), he also said “thank god!” their final piece, “Carousel” was entirely performed on bottles of various sizes, some tuned with water, and i, personally, thought that was the best part of the entire show.
the ballard sedentary sousa band has a performance today at the ballard locks. moe has to work today, again (this is day 6), and she’s only supposed to be working 4 days a week, but she’s the hospital manager, which means that she has to cover for people who are sick, and there have been two of her co-workers who have been sick on and off for several weeks, and moe has been having to work at least 6 days a week for long enough that i have been encouraging her to hire me to do stuff that doesn’t require veterinary medical training (answering phones, making appointments, cleaning kennels, sweeping, mopping, etc.) so that she doesn’t have to work as much.
574
today is ? day in the united states – 22/7 – happy ? day everyone.
for those who don’t know, 22 divided by 7 – 22/7 – is the simple fraction that is the closest to ?:
22/7 = 3.142957142857…
? = 3.1415926535…
it’s ? day in the united states because 22/7 is the simple fraction that is closest to representing ?. everywhere else in the world, ? day is march 14 (3.14) because everywhere else in the world they have gone beyond using simple fractions to represent decimal fractions.
take a circle to lunch today.
573
i got home from rehearsal last night and my computer was turned off, which is odd since i didn’t turn it off before i left. i tried to turn it on, and it wouldn’t go, so i pulled everything out from it’s niche and sprayed compressed air at various places inside, checked the sockets and determined that it wasn’t a hardware failure, so i plugged everything back in and it didn’t work again, but this time it gave me a keyboard error. after mucking about until well after midnight, i determined that it was the cable from the KVM switch to the computer. fortunately i had a spare, so i replaced it and now everything is operational again, but it’s hot enough today that i’m probably going to shut everything down anyway, once i get a label made for the incense order that is sitting here next to me.
the upshot of the rehearsal yesterday is that we’ve postponed the cirque shows until the last weekend of september and the first weekend of october, which increases the probability that we’re going to get rained out (shades of vancouver), but it will also give us a couple of months to finish the show, rather than opening next weekend, like was originally planned. also we got news that one of the colleges in portland has been begging for us to come down and do a show for them, which is intriguing, since they’ve not only offered to pay us room and board (to the total of around $15,000), but they have no fire regulations, unlike seattle which has been basically regulating us out of business. it’s going to be the “summer barbecue” show, with two “families”, the “Carnivores” and the “Veganis” (not “Vaginas”), which is going to be a take-off of “Romeo and Juliet” (Rodeo and Achooliet), with the requisite feud between the two families, including the “grandfathers” of each family going after each other with flaming canes, a pyrotechnic barbecue grill (which actually works as a barbecue grill) in the shape of a bull – El Diablo – and BBWP stuck in the middle. also, i’m on the verge of buying a sousaphone, so i won’t have to transpose unless i want to. the sousaphone is currently in the new bathroom at the powerhouse, and there was nobody there yesterday when i went to check it out, but it’s there, and it will soon be mine! now i’ve got to figure out how i’m going to schlepp it around from performance to home and back, and i’ve got to figure out where i’m going to keep it when i’m not actually performing – i live in a tiny little house without enough room for a proper workshop and, like a genius, i’ve bought an instrument that is so large that there’s currently no place to keep it, but i’m sure i can work out something.
572
When they took the fourth amendment,
I was quiet because I didn’t deal drugs.
When they took the sixth amendment,
I was quiet because I was innocent.
When they took the second amendment,
I was quiet because I didn’t own a gun.
Now they’ve taken the first amendment,
and I can say nothing about it.
MORGAN CITY, La. — Residents of trailer parks set up by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to house hurricane victims in Louisiana aren’t allowed to talk to the press without an official escort, The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reported.
In one instance, a security guard ordered an Advocate reporter out of a trailer during an interview in Morgan City. Similar FEMA rules were enforced in Davant, in Plaquemines Parish.
FEMA spokeswoman Rachel Rodi wouldn’t say whether the security guards’ actions complied with FEMA policy, saying the matter was being reviewed. But she confirmed that FEMA does not allow the news media to speak alone to residents in their trailers.
“If a resident invites the media to the trailer, they have to be escorted by a FEMA representative who sits in on the interview,” Rodi told the newspaper for its July 15 report. “That’s just a policy.”
Gregg Leslie, legal defense director for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said FEMA’s refusal to allow trailer-park residents to invite news media into their homes unescorted was unconstitutional.
Morgan City Mayor Timothy Matte told The Advocate that he was surprised residents were being barred from talking to reporters.
“I would think anyone who lives there would be allowed to have any visitor they wanted,” he said.
FEMA leases the land for the trailer park from the city, Matte said. “It’s public property. There’s no question about that. You would think the people would have the same freedom there as everyone else has,” he told the newspaper.
Hundreds of trailers at FEMA parks sit empty and unused in Louisiana, according to The Advocate.
Officials in Morgan City estimate that FEMA has spent about $7.5 million to build the trailer park but that only about 15 of the 198 trailers are being used.
“We all wonder why no one lives there,” Matte said.
FEMA officials refuse to say how much was spent to build the park or why 183 of the trailers are vacant.
“We’re not going to talk about cost,” Rodi told the newspaper.
As in Morgan City, the 334-trailer FEMA park in Davant in Plaquemines Parish is greatly underused.
The north side of the park is empty, and 92 families live in the south side, Rodi said, adding that the empty trailers would be removed.
“We put them there at the parish’s request,” she said. “Now we’ve found that the need is not as great there or that people don’t want to live there.”
The trailers are going to be put on private property or in private parks in the parish as needed, Rodi said. She refused to disclose how much the park cost to build.
Meanwhile, Plaquemines Parish President Benny Rousselle blamed FEMA, in part, for the slow return of residents to the parish.
Rousselle said FEMA knows where many evacuees relocated after the storm but won’t give that information to parish officials.
“FEMA told us because of privacy issues, they can’t give us the addresses of our residents who are spread out in all 50 states. And no one but FEMA has that information,” Rousselle said. “If we could contact them, I think a lot of them would come back if they knew we had places for them to live.
571
my style is back to the way i want it again, but it was not because of anything the lj “technicians” did, it was due to my being frustrated and clicking around in the advanced customisation page until i found something that worked. it really irritates me that they took a month to get around to looking at my issue before offering me several “solutions” that didn’t really work, and it irritates me even more that some “technician” made 10 points for closing an issue that wasn’t resolved, but i guess it’s okay now that things are more or less back to normal. it would be a lot easier for everyone if they didn’t have “internal caches” that got corrupt, and it would be a lot easier if they had “technicians” that actually knew something about CSS and HTML.
570
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
July 19, 2006
NEW DELHI — As India’s financial capital, Mumbai, observed a moment of silence on Tuesday to commemorate the seven bombings of commuter trains seven days ago, a blistering silence blanketed the Indian blogosphere.
For reasons yet to be articulated by the authorities, the government has directed local Internet service providers to block access to a handful of Web sites that are hosts to blogs, including the popular blogspot.com, according to government officials and some of the providers.
The move has sown anger and confusion among Indian bloggers, who accuse the government of censorship and demand to know why their sites have been jammed.
Nilanjana Roy, a Delhi-based writer who runs kitabkhana.blogspot.com, a literary blog, called it “a dangerous precedent.”
“You have a right to know what is being banned, and why it’s being banned,” she said. “I can understand if it’s China or Iran or Saudi Arabia. I’m truly appalled when it’s my country doing this.”
The ban, which has come into effect in recent days, means that people living in India are, in theory, kept from reading anything that appears on the blocked platforms, whether Indian blogs or otherwise.
But the ban seems far from effective. Some Internet providers have blocked access. Others have not, and many more blog aficionados have figured out how to continue reading their favorite sites.
One Web site offers help, by way of a free blog “gateway.” “Is your blog blocked in India, Pakistan, Iran or China?” it asks, and goes on to offer instructions for outwitting the restrictions.
That site was prompted by the efforts of the Pakistan Telecom Authority to block blogspot.com in February, as a way to prevent the proliferation of Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad.
On Thursday, a technician at a Bangalore-based service center of one Internet provider said the government had ordered the block of blogspot.com “due to security reasons.” Another service provider in Delhi said the government, without explanation, had directed his company to block access to fewer than a dozen sites; he could offer no details on the nature of those sites.
Officials at the Ministry of Communications did not return repeated calls. Gulshan Rai, an official at the ministry’s department of information and technology, said he was aware of “two pages” that had been blocked for spreading what he called anti-national sentiments, but did not provide details.
The secretary for telecommunications, D. S. Mathur, the highest-ranking civil servant in the sector, hung up the phone when reached at home.
The tempest is a testament to growing government anxiety about how to control this mushrooming medium.
Like blogs anywhere, Indian blogs serve as forums to pontificate on national passions: books, movies, politics, cricket. There are blogs devoted to everyday self-indulgence: One blogger, a self-described amateur photographer, writes of jogging in the monsoon, while another recalls what she wore to a cocktail party.
And there are blogs that strive to be public service tools, including one that within hours of the Mumbai train bombings began listing phone numbers of hospitals where victims were taken. Called mumbaihelp.blogspot.com, it is now blocked.
The attacks in Mumbai killed 182 people and injured more than 700. Frenetic Mumbai observed a short silence on Tuesday in memory of the victims.
It is impossible to know how many Indian blogs are affected. One blogger, Mitesh Vasa, from Vienna, Va., has documented “40,128 Indian bloggers who mention India as their country.” That does not include those who do not identify the country they are based in, nor others who identify their country of origin, as Peter Griffin does from Mumbai, as “utopia.”
Mr. Griffin, who helped set up the mumbaihelp site, said he woke up Tuesday morning to a furious litany of 300 e-mail messages, mostly from bloggers enraged by the blockade.
Among the speculation offered was that certain blogs could be used by terrorists to coordinate operations. “Even if that were true, it doesn’t make sense,” Mr. Griffin argued. Anyone with a domain name, he said, could effectively do the same thing on an ordinary Web site.
569
568
sigh… i’m depressed.
we were supposed to start cirque de flambé performances in two weeks, but apart from not having enough rehearsals, now the guy who wrote 90% of the music that we were going to perform for them can’t be there, so we’ve decided that we’re going to postpone the performances until after burning man, which means later in august. there have been a whole bunch of difficulties with performing in seattle to begin with: the fact that the city of seattle is trying to make it as difficult as possible for us to perform here, the fact that they’re now charging us what they charged us for the entire run two years ago, for one show – that’s right, they want to charge us $800 for one show where they charged us the same amount for a three week run two years ago – and to make matters worse, they want to tell us what we can and cannot perform – no fire cyclone, no meteors, no poi, etc. – and they want to tell us how close we can allow our audiences… and now the guy who wrote most of the music can’t be there, so we’re going to put off the show until things get worked out.
fred works as a musical instrument repair technician for a music store in marysville, and apparently the music store has told him that he can’t take time off to rehearse or do the shows until after school starts. it’s kind of odd, actually, because they said that they were thinking about hiring another repair tech, and i’ve been pestering him about getting me a job as a repair tech, but then there would be two of us that couldn’t make the shows. not only that, but fred’s not completely certain that, even after school starts, he would be able to take the time off to rehearse and do the shows. at the same time, he mentioned to me before OCF that he was concerned about people not being available for shows, about people not being prepared, and not taking it seriously, and now he’s the one who can’t make the performances.
one way or the other, there’s a good probability that this is going to be our last show in seattle, and the cirque de flambé will be moving it’s base of operations to somewhere other than seattle at some point within the next year.
567
yesterday i found out that monique isn’t attracted to me, and that she loves someone else. she says that it was written down in a “psychotherapy” notebook that i shouldn’t have had access to, but i’m not sure, especially since she left the notebook open, in her car, and when i said i was going to take a nap (in her car, at the EAT picnic yesterday) she didn’t seem too concerned about it. in any event, she has been gone most of the day, teaching, and now she is gone because she had a lunch scheduled with one of her clients on friday, that she and the client determined would be better if they had it today. i don’t know what to do. blah.
566
Member’s children threatened by name; teacher’s position under assault.
Duluth, MN July 4, 2006 — The author of an article about the attack on the World Trade Center has found himself under attack for having published it in a new on-line publication, Journal of 9/11 Studies. Entitled “The Third Elephant”, the article discusses evidence that a third airplane was captured on video at the time of the WTC attack. He has now received a thinly-veiled threat against his children, who are cited by name, suggesting it would be a good idea if his article were to simply “go away”.
Scholars for 9/11 Truth is a non-partisan society of experts and scholars committed to exposing falsehoods and revealing truths about the events of 9/11. The journal, which is archived at journalof911studies.com, is its latest attempt to create forums for discussion and debate about these important issues beyond its web site, which is archived at st911.org. The author, Reynolds Dixon, a writer and Professor of English, former lecturer and Fellow at Stanford University, has withdrawn from the society.
“Threats of this kind have no place in a democratic nation”, said James H. Fetzer, the founder of S9/11T. “These are the tactics of brown-shirts and totalitarians who fear the discussion of controversial questions that threaten the government’s control over the governed. This is a despicable act and we are not going to back down!” He added that the organization itself will assume responsibility for the study, which Reynolds has relinquished. “We cannot allow advances in understanding what happened on 9/11 to be suppressed by threats to our members. The stakes are simply too high.”
In Wisconsin, another member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, Kevin Barrett, who has been active in efforts to inform the American people about discoveries that have been made by Scholars–including that the Twin Towers were destroyed, not by the impact of airplanes or the ensuing fires, but by sophisticated controlled demolition; that Vice President Dick Cheney gave a “stand down” order to not shoot down the plane approaching the Pentagon; and that the FBI has now confirmed that it has “no hard evidence” connecting Osama bin Laden to 9/11–confronts the loss of his job.
A Wisconsin legislator, Stephen Nass, Republican of Whitewater, has called for the University of Wisconsin-Madison to immediately fire him from his teaching position. The UW Office of the Provost has announced that it will conduct a 10-day review of Barrett’s plans for an introductory fall course in Islam and of his past performance as a teacher at UW-Madison. Provost Patrick Farrell has endorsed his freedom of speech, but “We have an obligation to insure that his course content is academically appropriate, of high quality, and that he is not imposing his views on his students.”
Prominent experts and scholars who are members of S9/11T include Steven Jones, a professor of physics at Brigham Young University; Morgan Reynolds, former Chief Economist for the Department of Labor in the George W. Bush administration; Bob Bowman, who directed research on the “Star Wars” program in both Republican and Democratic administrations; Andreas von Buelow, the former director of Science and Technology for Germany; and David Ray Griffin, professor emeritus of theology at the Claremont Graduate School and author or editor of four books on the events of 9/11.
Concern about academic freedom at UW-Madison extends beyond the Scholars group. Ron Rattner, an attorney from San Francisco, CA, for example, has written to Provost Farrell with the observation that, “When teachers are intimidated against seeking and speaking truth on a campus renowned for its liberal and progressive traditions, we are in trouble”. He added, “Universities are for inquiries, not inquisitions. UW must operate in the traditions of La Follette, not McCarthy”. Robert La Follette was noted as a progressive leader, while Joe McCarthy portrayed his opponents as subversives.
Fetzer observed that the right wing is continuing to attack faculty who speak out on 9/11. “During an appearance on Hannity & Colmes (June 22, 2006), with Ollie North sitting in for Hannity, I made points about controlled demolition, the “stand down” order, and the FBI’s position,” he said, “but they were more interested in whether I was discussing these things with my students than whether they were true.” On a subsequent appearance on Laura Ingraham’s program (June 30, 2006), “She had her staff chanting about ‘nutty professors’ before I was even introduced. Then, after I made some telling points at the end of the program, they edited their archived copy and cut it off after a long harangue attacking me. That is intellectually dishonest.”
Many other members of S9/11T, including Morgan Reynolds and David Ray Griffin, have spoken out in defense of academic freedom and in opposition to censorship and curtailing research into 9/11. “These nasty threats against the children of one member and the freedom of speech of another”, Fetzer said, “make a sorry statement about this nation on the eve of the 4th of July.” Coincidentally, Fetzer will appear with Barrett at the Mid-West Social Forum on Sunday, July 9, 2006, from 9-10:30 AM, at the Student Union of UW-Milwaukee, to discuss 9/11.
July 13, 2006
U.N. diplomatic team heads to ‘major crisis’
(CNN) — The United States on Thursday vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution demanding Israel halt its attacks in Gaza.
The proposal also demanded that Palestinian militants release the Israeli soldier abducted June 25 in a raid in Israel and stop launching rockets at Israel from Gaza. In addition, it called on Israel to release Palestinian government officials and lawmakers it took into custody after the soldier’s abduction.
Ten nations on the council voted in favor of the resolution, and four abstained.
John Bolton, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said that “in light of the fluid events on the ground,” the United States believed the Qatar-sponsored resolution was untimely and out of date, and would have helped inflame passions in the Middle East.
As one of the five permanent members on the Security Council, the United States has veto power over resolutions.
Earlier Thursday, the United Nations called fighting between Hezbollah militants and Israel a “major crisis” and said it was sending a diplomatic team to the region.
A U.N. statement said the team will urge all parties to exercise restraint.
The three-member team first will visit Cairo to meet with Egyptian officials and consult with Arab League Foreign Ministers, who will be meeting there Saturday.
Vijay Nambiar, Alvaro de Soto and Terje Roed Larsen are also expected to travel to Israel, the occupied Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Syria, with other stops added as needed.
Israel has bombed runways at civilian and military airports in Lebanon, as well as a Hezbollah-run television station in response to Wednesday’s abduction of two Israeli soldiers. It also has imposed a full naval blockade on the country. Hezbollah fighters have been lobbing Katyusha rockets into northern Israel. (Full story)
Lebanese Interior Minister Ahmed Fatfat called the airport strikes a “general act of war.” He said they had nothing to do with Hezbollah but were, instead, an attack against Lebanon’s “economic interests,” especially its tourism industry.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Wednesday said the attack and abductions were an “act of war” and said the Lebanese government would be held responsible for the soldiers’ safe release.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said he is concerned that a “regional war is mounting” with Israel’s military campaigns in Lebanon and Gaza, where forces were deployed after last month’s capture of an Israeli soldier.
“This is not our interest and will not bring peace and stability to the region,” Abbas said, referring to “this [Israeli] aggression.”
Bashar Ja’afari, Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations, said Thursday that Syria supports Hezbollah because it is engaging in “national resistance against foreign occupation.”
Ja’afari said the roots of the current conflict go far beyond the recent escalation of tensions.
“The Arab-Israeli conflict did not start with the capture of an Israeli soldier in Gaza or two other Israeli soldiers in south Lebanon. The Arab-Israeli conflict is 60 years old, and nobody was giving any care to solving this conflict,” he said. “Those who should be blamed are the Israeli policies, not the Arab policies.”
Asked whether Syria has direct contact with Hezbollah, Ja’afari said, “We have been having direct contacts with everybody, except, of course, the American administration and the Israeli side.”
President Bush, speaking during a trip to Germany, said that “Israel has a right to defend herself.” But he warned that Israel should take care not to weaken Lebanon’s government.
“The democracy of Lebanon is an important part of laying a foundation of peace in that region,” Bush said.
Bush also said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad “needs to show some leadership toward peace.”
Ja’afari said Damascus “is deploying a huge effort within the Arab circles … as well as at the international level through direct contacts.”
“We are doing our utmost,” he said. “Saturday there will be a meeting of Arab foreign affairs ministers in Cairo to discuss the Israeli escalation. We will do our best. But, mainly speaking, those who have the upper hand with regard to the Security Council should deal with the Arab-Israeli conflict in its … wider spectrum.”
Bush said the United States was working to calm the situation.
“We’ve got diplomats in the region. Secretary of State [Condoleezza] Rice, who is here, is on the phone talking to her counterparts. I’ll be making calls,” Bush said.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that the abduction of the soldiers was unacceptable and blamed Hezbollah for starting the crisis.
The European Union reportedly condemned the fighting and criticized Israel for using what it called “disproportionate” force. It said the blockade of Lebanon was not justified.
“Actions which are contrary to international humanitarian law can only aggravate the vicious circle of violence and retribution,” the EU president said in a statement, according to Reuters.
Hezbollah is designated a terrorist organization by the United States and Israel, but the Islamic militia is a significant player in Lebanon’s fractious politics. Its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, told reporters Wednesday that abducting the soldiers was “our natural, only and logical right” to win freedom for Hezbollah prisoners held by Israel.
Nasrallah said the two soldiers had been taken to a place “far, far away” and that an Israeli military campaign would not win their release.
The new fighting on Israel’s northern border comes amid a two-week-old Israeli campaign in Gaza in search of Israeli army Cpl. Gilad Shalit, a soldier captured by Palestinian militants there.
by Nir Rosen
Three years into an occupation of Iraq replete with so-called milestones, turning points and individual events hailed as “sea changes” that would “break the back” of the insurgency, a different type of incident received an intense, if ephemeral, amount of attention. A local human rights worker and aspiring journalist in the western Iraqi town of Haditha filmed the aftermath of the massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians. The video made its way to an Iraqi working for Time magazine, and the story was finally publicized months later. The Haditha massacre was compared to the Vietnam War’s My Lai massacre, and like the well-publicized and embarrassing Abu Ghraib scandal two years earlier, the attention it received made it seem as if it were a horrible aberration perpetrated by a few bad apples who might have overreacted to the stress they endured as occupiers.
In reality both Abu Ghraib and Haditha were merely more extreme versions of the day-to-day workings of the American occupation in Iraq, and what makes them unique is not so much how bad they were, or how embarrassing, but the fact that they made their way to the media and were publicized despite attempts to cover them up. Focusing on Abu Ghraib and Haditha distracts us from the daily, little Abu Ghraibs and small-scale Hadithas that have made up the occupation. The occupation has been one vast extended crime against the Iraqi people, and most of it has occurred unnoticed by the American people and the media.
Americans, led to believe that their soldiers and Marines would be welcomed as liberators by the Iraqi people, have no idea what the occupation is really like from the perspective of Iraqis who endure it. Although I am American, born and raised in New York City, I came closer to experiencing what it might feel like to be Iraqi than many of my colleagues. I often say that the secret to my success in Iraq as a journalist is my melanin advantage. I inherited my Iranian father’s Middle Eastern features, which allowed me to go unnoticed in Iraq, blend into crowds, march in demonstrations, sit in mosques, walk through Falluja’s worst neighborhoods.
I also benefited from being able to speak Arabic—in particular its Iraqi dialect, which I hastily learned in Baghdad upon my arrival and continued to develop throughout my time in Iraq.
My skin color and language skills allowed me to relate to the American occupier in a different way, for he looked at me as if I were just another haji, the “gook” of the war in Iraq. I first realized my advantage in April 2003, when I was sitting with a group of American soldiers and another soldier walked up and wondered what this haji (me) had done to get arrested by them. Later that summer I walked in the direction of an American tank and heard one soldier say about me, “That’s the biggest fuckin’ Iraqi (pronounced eye-raki) I ever saw.” A soldier by the gun said, “I don’t care how big he is, if he doesn’t stop movin’ I’m gonna shoot him.”
I was lucky enough to have an American passport in my pocket, which I promptly took out and waved, shouting: “Don’t shoot! I’m an American!” It was my first encounter with hostile American checkpoints but hardly my last, and I grew to fear the unpredictable American military, which could kill me for looking like an Iraqi male of fighting age. Countless Iraqis were not lucky enough to speak American English or carry a U.S. passport, and often entire families were killed in their cars when they approached American checkpoints.
In 2004 the British medical journal The Lancet estimated that by September 2004 100,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the American occupation and said that most of them had died violently, mostly in American airstrikes. Although this figure was challenged by many, especially partisans of the war, it seems perfectly plausible to me based on what I have seen in Iraq, having spent most of the postwar period there. What I never understood was why more journalists did not focus on this, choosing instead to look for the “good news” and go along with the official story.
My first direct encounter with American Marines was from the Iraqi side. In late April 2003, I was attending the Friday prayers in a Sunni bastion in Baghdad. Thousands of people were praying and the devout flooded out of the mosque and laid their prayer rugs on the street and the square in front of it. A Marine patrol rounded a corner and walked right into hundreds of people praying on the street and listening to the sermon, even approaching the separate section for women. Dozens of men rose and put their shoes on, forming a virtual wall to block the armed Marines, who seemed unaware of the danger. The Marines did not understand Arabic. “Irjau!” “Go back!” the demonstrators screamed, and some waved their fists, shouting “America is the enemy of God!” as they were restrained by a few cooler-headed men from within their ranks. I ran to advise the Marines that Friday prayers was not a good time to show up fully armed. The men sensed this and asked me to tell their lieutenant, who appeared oblivious to the public relations catastrophe he might be provoking. He told me: “That’s why we’ve got the guns.”
A nervous soldier asked me to go explain the situation to the bespectacled staff sergeant, who had been attempting to calm the situation by telling the demonstrators, who did not speak English, that the U.S. patrol meant no harm. He finally lost his temper when an Iraqi told him gently, “You must go.” “I have the weapons,” the sergeant said. “You back off.”
“Let’s get the fuck out!” one Marine shouted to another as the tension increased. I was certain that a shove, a tossed stone or a shot fired could have provoked a massacre and turned the city violently against the American occupation. Finally the Marines retreated cautiously around a corner as the worshipers were held back by their own comrades. It could have ended worse, and a week later it did when 17 demonstrators were killed by American soldiers in Falluja, and several more were killed in a subsequent demonstration, a massacre that contributed to the city’s support of the resistance.
I believe that any journalist who spent even a brief period embedded with American soldiers must have witnessed crimes being committed against innocent Iraqis, so I have always been baffled by how few were reported and how skeptically the Western media treated Arabic reports of such crimes. These crimes were not committed because Americans are bad or malicious; they were intrinsic to the occupation, and even if the Girl Scouts had occupied Iraq they would have resorted to these methods. In the end, it is those who dispatched decent young American men and women to commit crimes who should be held accountable.
I still feel guilt over my complicity in crimes the one time I was embedded, in the fall of 2003. (I spent two weeks with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment stationed in Husaybah, an Iraqi town near the Syrian border that is a suspected entry point for foreign insurgent fighters.) Normally, I like to think, if I witnessed an act of bullying of the weak or the elderly, or the terrorizing of children, I would interfere and try to stop it. After all, a passion for justice is what propelled me into this career. It started when I arrived in the main base in the desert. Local Iraqi laborers were sitting in the sun waiting to be acknowledged by the American soldiers. Every so often a representative would come to the soldiers to explain in Arabic that they were waiting for their American overseer. The soldier would shout back in English. Finally I translated between them. One soldier, upset with an Iraqi man for looking at him, asked him: “Do I owe you money? So why the fuck are you looking at me?”
After a week, the Army unit I was living with went on a raid targeting alleged Al Qaeda cells. Included were safe houses, financiers and fighters as well as alleged resistance leaders such as senior military officers from elite units of the former Iraqi army. All together there were 62 names on the wanted list. A minimum of 29 locations would be raided, taking out the “nervous system” of the area resistance “and the guys who actually do the shooting.”
The raids began at night. The men descended upon villages by the border with Syria in the western desert. After half an hour of bumpy navigating in the dark the convoy approached the first house and the vehicles switched their lights on, illuminating the target area as a tank broke the stone wall. “Fuck yeah!” cheered one sergeant, “Hi honey I’m home!” The teams charged over the rubble from the wall, breaking through the door with a sledgehammer and dragging several men out. The barefoot prisoners, dazed from their slumber, were forcefully marched over rocks and hard ground. One short middle-aged man, clearly injured and limping with painful difficulty, was violently pushed forward in the grip of a Brobdingnagian soldier who said, “You’ll fucking learn how to walk.” Each male was asked his name. None matched the names on the list. A prisoner was asked where the targeted military officer lived. “Down the road,” he pointed. “Show us!” he was ordered, and he was shoved ahead, stumbling over the rocky street, terrified that he would be seen as an informer in the neighborhood, terrified that he too would be taken away. He stopped at the house but the soldiers ran ahead. “No, no, it’s here,” yelled a sergeant, and they ran back, breaking through the gate and bursting into the house. It was a large villa, with grape vines covering the driveway. Women and children from within were ordered to sit in the garden. The men were pushed to the ground on the driveway and asked their names. One was indeed the first high-value target. His son begged the soldiers, “Take me for 10 years but leave my father!” Both were taken. The children screamed ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ as the men were led out and the women were given leaflets in Arabic explaining that the men had been arrested.
Home after home met the same fate. Some homes had only women; these houses too were ransacked, closets broken, mattresses overturned, clothes thrown out of drawers. Men were dragged on the ground by their legs to be handcuffed outside. One bony ancient sheik walked out with docility and was pushed forcefully to the ground, where he was wrestled by soldiers who had trouble cuffing his arms. A commando grabbed him from them, and tightly squeezed the old man’s arms together, lifting him in the air and throwing him down on the ground, nearly breaking his fragile arms.
As her husband was taken away, one woman angrily asked Allah to curse the soldiers, calling them “Dogs! Jews!” over and over. When his soldiers left a home, one officer emerged to slap them on the back like a coach congratulating his players during halftime in a winning game. In a big compound of several houses the soldiers took all the men, even the ones not on the list. A sergeant explained that the others would be held for questioning to see whether they had any useful information. The men cried out that they had children still inside. In several houses soldiers tenderly carried out babies who had been left sleeping in their cribs and handed them to the women. When the work at a house was complete, or at the Home Run stage (stages were divided into 1st, 2nd, 3rd, Home Run and Grand Slam, meaning ready to move on), the soldiers relaxed and joked, breaking their own tension and ignoring the trembling and shocked women and children crouched together on the lawns behind them.
Prisoners with duct tape on their eyes and their hands cuffed behind them with plastic “zip ties” sat in the back of the truck for hours, without water. They moved their heads toward sounds, disoriented and frightened, trying to understand what was happening around them. Any time a prisoner moved or twitched, a soldier bellowed at him angrily and cursed. Thrown among the tightly crowded men in one truck was a boy no more than 15 years old, his eyes wide in terror as the duct tape was placed on them. By daylight the whole town could see a large truck full of prisoners. Two men walking to work with their breakfast in a basket were stopped at gunpoint, ordered to the ground, cuffed and told to “Shut the fuck up” as their basket’s contents were tossed out and they were questioned about the location of a suspect.
The soldier guarding them spoke of the importance of intimidating Iraqis and instilling fear in them. “If they got something to tell us I’d rather they be scared,” he explained. An Iraqi policeman drove by in a white SUV clearly marked “Police.” He too was stopped at gunpoint and ordered not to move or talk until the last raid was complete. From the list of 34 names, the troop I was with brought in about 16 positively identified men, along with 54 men who were neighbors, relatives or just happened to be around. By 08:30 the Americans were done and started driving back to base. As the main element departed, the psychological operations vehicle blasted AC/DC rock music through neighborhood streets. “It’s good for morale after such a long mission,” a captain said. Crowds of children clustered on porches smiling, waving and giving the passing soldiers little thumbs up. A sergeant waved back. Neighbors awakened by the noise huddled outside and watched the convoy. One little girl stood before her father and guarded him from the soldiers with her arms outstretched and legs wide.
In Baghdad, coalition officials announced that 112 suspects had been arrested in a major raid near the Syrian border, including a high-ranking official in the former Republican Guard. “The general officer that they captured, Abed Hamed Mowhoush al-Mahalowi, was reported to have links with Saddam Hussein and was a financier of anti-coalition activities, according to intelligence sources,” a military spokeswoman said. “Troops from the 1st and 4th squadrons of the Third Armored Cavalry cordoned off sections of the town and searched 29 houses to find ‘subversive elements,’ including 12 of the 13 suspects they had targeted for capture,” she said.
That night the prisoners were visible on a large dirt field in a square of concertina wire. Beneath immense spotlights and near loud generators, they slept on the ground, guarded by soldiers. One sergeant was surprised by the high number of prisoners taken by the troop I was with. “Did they just arrest every man they found?” he asked, wondering if “we just made another 300 people hate us.” The following day 57 prisoners were transported to a larger base for further interrogation. Some were not the suspects, just relatives of the suspects or men suspected of being the suspects.
The next night the troop departed the base at 0200, hoping to find those alleged Al Qaeda suspects who had not been home during the previous operation. Soldiers descended upon homes in a large compound, their boots trampling over mattresses in rooms the inhabitants did not enter with shoes on. Most of the wanted men were nowhere to be found, their women and children prevaricating about their locations. Some of their relatives were arrested instead. “That woman is annoying!” one young soldier complained about a mother’s desperate ululations as her son was taken from his house. “How do you think your mother would sound if they were taking you away?” a sergeant asked him.
Three days after the operation, a dozen prisoners could be seen marching in a circle outside their detention cells, surrounded by barbed wire. They were shouting “USA, USA!” over and over. “They were talkin’ when we told ’em not to, so we made ’em talk somethin’ we liked to hear,” one of the soldiers guarding them said with a grin. Another gestured up with his hands, letting them know they had to raise their voices. A first sergeant quipped that the ones who were not guilty “will be guilty next time,” after such treatment. Even if the men were guilty, no proof would be provided to the community. There would be no process of transparent justice. The only thing evident to the Iraqi public would be the American guilt.
In November 2003 a major from the judge advocate general’s office working on establishing an Iraqi judicial process told me that there were at least 7,000 Iraqis detained by American forces. Many languished in prisons indefinitely, lost in a system that imposed the English language on Arabic speakers with Arabic names not easily transcribed. Some were termed “security detainees” and held for six months pending a review to determine whether they were still a “security risk.” Most were innocent. Many were arrested simply because a neighbor did not like them. A lieutenant colonel familiar with the process told me that there is no judicial process for the thousands of detainees. If the military were to try them, there would be a court-martial, which would imply that the U.S. was occupying Iraq, and lawyers working for the administration are still debating whether it is an occupation or liberation. Two years later, 50,000 Iraqis had been imprisoned by the Americans and only 2% had ever been found guilty of anything.
The S2 (intelligence) section in the Army unit I was with had not proved itself very reliable in the past—a fact that frustrated soldiers to no end. “You get all psyched up to do a hard mission,” said one sergeant, “and it turns out to be three little girls. The little kids get to me, especially when they cry.”
The reason for the lack of confidence in S2 was made clear by the case of a man called Ayoub. I accompanied the troop when it raided Ayoub’s home based on intelligence S2 provided: intercepted phone calls, in which Ayoub spoke of proceeding to the next level and obtaining land mines and other weapons.
On the day of the raid, tanks, Bradleys and Humvees squeezed between the neighborhood walls. A CIA operator angrily eyed the rooftops and windows of nearby houses, a silencer on his assault weapon. Soldiers broke through Ayoub’s door early in the morning and when he did not immediately respond to their orders he was shot with nonlethal ordinance, little pellets exploding like gunshot from the weapons grenade launcher. The floor of the house was covered in his blood. He was dragged into a room and interrogated forcefully as his family was pushed back against a garden fence. Ayoub’s frail mother, covered in a shawl, with traditional tribal tattoos marking her face, pleaded with an immense soldier to spare her son’s life, protesting his innocence. She took the soldier’s hand and kissed it repeatedly while on her knees. He pushed her to the grass along with Ayoub’s four girls and two boys, all small, and his wife. They squatted barefoot, screaming, their eyes wide in terror, clutching each other as soldiers emerged with bags full of documents, photo albums and two CDs with Saddam and his cronies on the cover. These CDs, called “The Crimes of Saddam,” are common on every Iraqi street, and as their title suggests, they were not made by Saddam supporters; however, the soldiers saw only the picture of Saddam and assumed they were proof of guilt.
Ayoub was brought out and pushed onto the truck. He gestured to his shrieking relatives to remain where they were. He was an avuncular man, small and round—balding and unshaven with a hooked nose and slightly pockmarked face. He could not have looked more innocent. He sat frozen, staring numbly ahead as the soldiers ignored him, occasionally glancing down at their prisoner with sneering disdain. The medic looked at Ayoub’s injured hand and chuckled to his friends, “It ain’t my hand.” The truck blasted country music on the way back to the base. Ayoub was thrown in the detainment center. After the operation there were smiles of relief among the soldiers, slaps on the back and thumbs up.
Several hours later, a call was intercepted from the Ayoub whom the Americans were seeking. “Oh shit,” said the S2 captain, “[we’ve got] the wrong Ayoub.” The innocent father of six who was in custody actually was a worker in a phosphate plant the Americans were running. But he was not let go. If he was released, there would be a risk that the other Ayoub would learn he was being sought. The night after his arrest a relieved Ayoub could be seen escorted by soldiers to call his family and report he was fine but would not be home for a few days. “It was not the wrong guy,” the troop’s captain said defensively, shifting blame elsewhere. “We raided the house we were supposed and arrested the man we were told to.”
When the soldiers who had captured Ayoub learned of the mistake, they were not surprised. “Oops,” said one. Another one wondered, “What do you tell a guy like that, sorry?” “It’s depressing,” a third said. “We trashed the wrong guy’s house and the guy that’s been shooting at us is out there with his house not trashed.” The soldier who shot the nonlethal ordinance at Ayoub said, “I’m just glad he didn’t do something that made me shoot him [with a bullet].” Then the soldiers resumed their banter.
A few days later, the Army did a further analysis of the phone calls that had originally sent them in search of a man named Ayoub. In the calls, Ayoub had indeed spoken of proceeding to the next level and obtaining land mines and other weapons. This had rightfully alarmed the Army’s intelligence officers. But at some point an analyst realized that Ayoub was not a terrorist intent on obtaining weapons; he turned out to be a kid playing video games and talking about them with his friend on the phone.
The Procrustean application of spurious information gathered by intelligence officers who cannot speak Arabic and are not familiar with Iraqi, Arab or Muslim culture is creating enemies instead of eliminating them. The S2 captain could barely hide his disdain for Iraqis. “Oh he just hates anything Iraqi,” another captain said of him, adding that the intelligence officers do not venture off the base or interact with Iraqis or develop any relations with the people they are expected to understand. A lieutenant colonel from the Army’s civil affairs command explained that these officers do not read about the soldiers engaging with Iraqis, sharing cigarettes, tea, meals and conversations. They read only the reports of “incidents” and they view Iraqis solely as security threat. The intelligence officers in Iraq do not know Iraq.
In every market in Iraq hundreds of wooden crates can be found piled one atop the other. Sold for storage, upon further examination these crates reveal themselves to be former ammunition crates. For the past 25 years Iraq has been importing weapons to feed its army’s appetite for war against Iran, the Kurds, Kuwait and America. When empty, the crates were sold for domestic use. The soldiers with the Army unit I was with assumed the crates they found in nearly every home implicated the owners in terrorist activities, rather than the much simpler truth. During the operation described here I saw one of the soldiers find such a crate overturned above a small hole in a man’s backyard. “He was trying to bury it when he saw us coming,” one soldier deduced confidently. He did not lift the crate to discover that it was protecting irrigation pipes and hoses in a pit.
Saddam bestowed his largesse upon the security services that served as his praetorian guard and executioners. Elite fighters received Jawa motorcycles. Immediately after the war, Jawa motorcycles were available in every market in Iraq that sold scooters and motorcycles. Some had been stolen from government buildings in the frenzy of looting that followed the war and was directed primarily against institutions of the former government. Soldiers of the Army unit I accompanied were always alert for Jawa motorcycles, and indeed it was true that many Iraqi paramilitaries had used them against the Americans. On a night the troop had received RPG fire, its members drove back to base through the town. When they spotted a man on a Jawa motorcycle they fired warning shots. When he did not stop they shot him to death. “He was up to no good,” the captain explained.
On Nov. 26, 2003, after two weeks of brutal daily interrogations by military intelligence officers, Special Forces soldiers and CIA personnel, Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush, the former chief of Iraqi air defenses whose arrest I had witnessed, died in a U.S. detention facility. Twenty-four to 48 hours before that, he had been interrogated and beaten by CIA personnel. The Army’s Criminal Investigation Division began looking into Mowhoush’s death that same day. The next day an Army news release stated that he had died of natural causes. “Mowhoush said he didn’t feel well and subsequently lost consciousness,” according to the statement, “ … the soldier questioning him found no pulse and called for medical authorities. A surgeon responded within five minutes to continue advanced cardiac life support techniques, but they were ineffective.” On Dec. 2, 2003, an Army medical examiner’s autopsy said the general’s death was “a homicide by asphyxia,” but it was not until May 12, 2004, that the death certificate was issued, with homicide as the cause. The Pentagon autopsy report in May said he had died of “asphyxia due to smothering and chest compression” and that there was “evidence of blunt force trauma to the chest and legs.” Mowhoush was one of several Iraqis whose death certificates were not issued until May of 2004, long after their deaths.
American soldiers had no mission and viewed Iraqis as “the enemy” through a prism of “us and them.” An officer returning from a fact-finding mission complained of “a lot of damn good individuals who received no guidance, training or plan and who are operating in a vacuum.” Inside the G2, or intelligence, section of the Army’s civil affairs headquarters in Baghdad, on a bulletin board I saw an anecdote meant to be didactic. It told of American soldiers suppressing Muslim Filipino insurgents a century before. They dipped bullets in pig’s blood and shot some Muslim rebels, to send a warning to the others. A Latino civil affairs officer, fed up with Iraqis, explained that the only solution was to shut down Baghdad entirely. Military civil affairs officers are supposed to provide civil administration in the absence of local power structures, minimize friction between the military and civilians, restore normalcy and empower local institutions. One brigade commander explained to a civil affairs major that “I am not here to win hearts and minds, I am here to kill the enemy.” He failed to provide his civil affairs team with security, so it could not operate.
One morning in Albu Hishma, a village north of Baghdad cordoned off with barbed wire, the local U.S. commander decided to bulldoze any house that had pro-Saddam graffiti on it, and gave half a dozen families a few minutes to remove whatever they cared about the most before their homes were flattened. In Baquba, two 13-year-old girls were killed by a Bradley armored personnel carrier. They were digging through trash and the American rule was that anybody digging on road sides would be shot.
The 4th Infantry Division was especially notorious in Iraq. Its soldiers in Samara handcuffed two suspects and threw them off a bridge into a river. One of them died. In Basra, seven Iraqi prisoners were beaten to death by British soldiers. A high-ranking Iraqi police official in Basra identified one of the victims as his son. It is common practice for soldiers to arrest the wives and children of suspects as “material witnesses” when the suspects are not captured in raids. In some cases the soldiers leave notes for the suspects, letting them know their families will be released should they turn themselves in. Soldiers claim this is a very effective tactic. Soldiers on military vehicles routinely shoot at Iraqi cars that approach too fast or come too close, and at Iraqis wandering in fields. “They were up to no good,” they explain. Every commander is a law unto himself. He is advised by a judge advocate general who interprets the rules as he wants. A war crime to one is legitimate practice to another. After the Center for Army Lessons Learned sent a team of personnel to Israel to study that country’s counterinsurgency tactics, the Army implemented the lessons it learned, and initiated house demolitions in Samara and Tikrit, blowing up homes of suspected insurgents.
It is hard to be patient when mosques are raided, when protesters are shot, when innocent families are gunned down at checkpoints or by frightened soldiers in vehicles. It is hard to be patient in hours of izdiham, or traffic jams, that are blamed on Americans closing off main roads throughout Baghdad. The Americans close roads after “incidents” or when they are looking for planted bombs. Their vehicles block the roads and they answer no questions, refusing to let any Iraqi approach. Cars are forced to drive “wrong side,” as Iraqis call it, with near fatal results. Iraqis have become experts in walking over the concertina wire that divides so much of their cities: First one foot presses the razor wire down, then the other steps over. They are experts in driving slowly through lakes and rivers of sewage. They are experts in sifting through mountains of garbage for anything that can be reused.
It is hard to relax when the soldier in the Humvee or armored personnel carrier in front of you aims his machine gun at you; when aggressive white men race by, running you off the road as they scowl behind their wraparound sunglasses; when soldiers shoot at any car that comes too close. Iraqis in their own country are reminded at all times who has control over their lives, who can take them with impunity.
An old Iraqi woman approached the gate to Baghdad international airport. Draped in a black ebaya, she was carrying a picture of her missing son. She did not speak English, and the soldier in body armor she asked for help did not speak Arabic. He shouted at her to “get the fuck away.” She did not understand and continued beseeching him. The soldier was joined by another. Together they locked and loaded their machine guns, chambering a round, aiming the guns at the old woman and shouting at her that if she did not leave “we will kill you.”
The explosive-sniffing dog in front of the Sheraton and Palestine hotels is hated by the Iraqi security guards as well as the American soldiers who stand there because it, like the rest of us who live in the area, is subject to olfactory whims as it imagines every day that it smells a bomb, forcing them to close off the street for several hours. Two of my friends were arrested for not having a bomb last week when the dog decided their bag smelled funny. They were jailed for four days.
Imagine. The American occupation of Iraq has lasted over three years. The above stories are based on my two weeks with one unit in a small part of the country. Imagine how many Iraqi homes have been destroyed. How many families have been traumatized. How many men have disappeared into American military vehicles in the night. How many crimes have been committed against the Iraqi people every single day in the course of the normal operations of the occupation, when soldiers were merely doing their duty, when they were not angry or vengeful as in Haditha. Imagine what we have done to the Iraqi people, tortured by Saddam for years, then released from three decades of his bloody rule only to find their hope stolen from them and a new terror unleashed.
Last week’s headlines prove the point: North Korea fires missiles, Iran talks of nukes again, Iraq carnage continues, Israel invades Gaza, England observes one-year anniversary of subway bombing. And, oh, yes, the feds stop a plot to blow up tunnels under the Hudson River.
World War III has begun.
It’s not perfectly clear when it started. Perhaps it was after the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended. Perhaps it was the first bombing of the World Trade Center, in 1993.
What is clear is that this war has a long fuse and, while we are not in the full-scale combat phase that marked World Wars I and II, we seem to be heading there. The expanding hostilities mean it’s time to give this conflict a name, one that focuses the mind and clarifies the big picture.
The war on terror, or the war of terror, has tentacles that reach much of the globe. It is a world war.
While it is often a war of loose or no affiliation, and sometimes just amateur copycats, the similar goals of destruction add up to a threat against modern society. Even the hapless wanna-bes busted in Miami ordered guns and military equipment from a man they thought was from Al Qaeda. Islamic fascists are the driving force, but anti-American hatred is a global membership card for any and all who have a grievance and a gun.
The feeling that the wheels are coming off the world has only one recent comparison, the time when America’s head-butt with communism sprouted hot spots from Cuba to Vietnam. Yet ultimately the policy of mutual assured destruction worked because American and Soviet leaders didn’t want their countries hit by nuclear bombs.
Such rational thinking is quaint next to the ravings of North Korean nut Kim Jong Il and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They both seem to be dying to die – and set the world on fire.
And don’t forget Osama Bin Laden’s declaration that it is the duty of every Muslim to acquire a “Muslim bomb.” Is there any doubt he would use it if he had it?
I sound pessimistic because I am. Even worse than the problems is the fact that our political system is failing us. Democratic Party leaders want to pretend we can declare peace and everything will be fine, while President Bush is out of ideas. Witness Bush now counseling patience and diplomacy on North Korea. This from a man who scorned both for five years.
But what choice does he have now that the pillars of his post-9/11 foreign policy are crumbling? As Harvard Prof. Joseph Nye argues in Foreign Affairs magazine, Bush’s strategy of “reducing Washington’s reliance on permanent alliances and international institutions, expanding the traditional right of preemption into a new doctrine of preventive war and advocating coercive democratization as a solution to Middle Eastern terrorism” amounted to a bid for a “legacy of transformation.”
The first two ideas have been repealed. The third brought Hamas into power and has so far failed to take root in Iraq or anywhere else.
I believed Iraq was the key, that if we prevailed there, momentum would shift in our favor. Now I’m not sure. We still must prevail there, but Iraq could mean nothing if Iran or Bin Laden get the bomb or North Korea uses one.
Meanwhile, I’m definitely not using any tunnels.
heh heh heh… 8)
i wasn’t going to post anything about this, but then the guy wrote me back with more “gobbledy-gook”, which was so amusing that i had to post something…
i recently was made aware of rapture ready dot com, which has a "check your spiritual health" section, and in that section, they have a common word that is misspelled: "currupted". i wrote to them and essentially told them that if they’re going to have any hope of convincing me that what they say has even the remotest possibility of being “the truth”, then they’re going to have to learn how to spell.
here’s what i said:
if you’re going to try to convince people that you know the way things are really are, then you are going to have to learn to spell common words first. how are we to expect that you know who God really is if you don’t know how to spell “currupted”?
the guy wrote me back, and said:
And, YOU must learn to edit sufficiently, so that you write your e-mails to correct us in a cogent manner, not with gobbledy-gook in your message, such as you did in the following.
so i wrote back to him and said:
i am not trying to convince anyone of anything… even in this email message.
you, on the other hand, are trying to convince every non-“christian” that you are the one that has all the information, and you don’t spell “currupted” correctly, which makes me think that you’re talking through your hat.
it’s extremely amusing, which, i think, is not the intended purpose of your web site.
i don’t know how much longer this will go on, but i think it’s very funny that apparently he can’t figure out what i am trying to say… of course i didn’t give him the exact URI of the page with “currupted” on it, but you would think that the editor of a web site such as this would know how to use spell check…
564
The Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday heard testimony from Steven Bradbury, head of the Justice Department’s office of legal counsel. When questioned by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) on whether the President’s interpretation of the Hamdan case was right or wrong, Bradbury replied, “The President is always right.”
LEAHY: The president has said very specifically, and he’s said it to our European allies, he’s waiting for the Supreme Court decision to tell him whether or not he was supposed to close Guantanamo or not. After, he said it upheld his position on Guantanamo, and in fact it said neither. Where did he get that impression? The President’s not a lawyer, you are, the Justice Department advised him. Did you give him such a cockamamie idea or what?
BRADBURY: Well, I try not to give anybody cockamamie ideas.
LEAHY: Well, where’d he get the idea?
BRADBURY: The Hamdan decision, senator, does implicitly recognize we’re in a war, that the President’s war powers were triggered by the attacks on the country, and that law of war paradigm applies. That’s what the whole case —
LEAHY: I don’t think the President was talking about the nuances of the law of war paradigm, he was saying this was going to tell him that he could keep Guantanamo open or not, after it said he could.
BRADBURY: Well, it’s not —
LEAHY: Was the President right or was he wrong?
BRABURY: It’s under the law of war –
LEAHY: Was the President right or was he wrong?
BRADBURY: The President is always right.
Jan. 09, 2006
By JENNIFER VAN BERGEN
When President Bush signed the new law, sponsored by Senator McCain, restricting the use of torture when interrogating detainees, he also issued a Presidential signing statement. That statement asserted that his power as Commander-in-Chief gives him the authority to bypass the very law he had just signed.
This news came fast on the heels of Bush’s shocking admission that, since 2002, he has repeatedly authorized the National Security Agency to conduct electronic surveillance without a warrant, in flagrant violation of applicable federal law.
And before that, Bush declared he had the unilateral authority to ignore the Geneva Conventions and to indefinitely detain without due process both immigrants and citizens as enemy combatants.
All these declarations echo the refrain Bush has been asserting from the outset of his presidency. That refrain is simple: Presidential power must be unilateral, and unchecked.
But the most recent and blatant presidential intrusions on the law and Constitution supply the verse to that refrain. They not only claim unilateral executive power, but also supply the train of the President’s thinking, the texture of his motivations, and the root of his intentions.
They make clear, for instance, that the phrase “unitary executive” is a code word for a doctrine that favors nearly unlimited executive power. Bush has used the doctrine in his signing statements to quietly expand presidential authority.
In this column, I will consider the meaning of the unitary executive doctrine within a democratic government that respects the separation of powers. I will ask: Can our government remain true to its nature, yet also embrace this doctrine?
I will also consider what the President and his legal advisers mean by applying the unitary executive doctrine. And I will argue that the doctrine violates basic tenets of our system of checks and balances, quietly crossing longstanding legal and moral boundaries that are essential to a democratic society.
President Bush’s Aggressive Use of Presidential Signing Statements
Bush has used presidential “signing statements” – statements issued by the President upon signing a bill into law — to expand his power. Each of his signing statements says that he will interpret the law in question “in a manner consistent with his constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch.”
Presidential signing statements have gotten very little media attention. They are, however, highly important documents that define how the President interprets the laws he signs. Presidents use such statements to protects the prerogative of their office and ensure control over the executive branch functions.
Presidents also — since Reagan — have used such statements to create a kind of alternative legislative history. Attorney General Ed Meese explained in 1986 that:
To make sure that the President’s own understanding of what’s in a bill is the same . . . is given consideration at the time of statutory construction later on by a court, we have now arranged with West Publishing Company that the presidential statement on the signing of a bill will accompany the legislative history from Congress so that all can be available to the court for future construction of what that statute really means.
The alternative legislative history would, according to Dr. Christopher S. Kelley, professor of political science at the Miami University at Oxford, Ohio, “contain certain policy or principles that the administration had lost in its negotiations” with Congress.
The Supreme Court has paid close attention to presidential signing statements. Indeed, in two important decisions — the Chadha and Bowsher decisions – the Court relied in part on president signing statements in interpreting laws. Other federal courts, sources show, have taken note of them too.
President Bush has used presidential signing statements more than any previous president. From President Monroe’s administration (1817-25) to the Carter administration (1977-81), the executive branch issued a total of 75 signing statements to protect presidential prerogatives. From Reagan’s administration through Clinton’s, the total number of signing statements ever issued, by all presidents, rose to a total 322.
In striking contrast to his predecessors, President Bush issued at least 435 signing statements in his first term alone. And, in these statements and in his executive orders, Bush used the term “unitary executive” 95 times. It is important, therefore, to understand what this doctrine means.
What Does the Administration Mean When It Refers to the “Unitary Executive”?
Dr. Kelley notes that the unitary executive doctrine arose as the result of the twin circumstances of Vietnam and Watergate. Kelley asserts that “the faith and trust placed into the presidency was broken as a result of the lies of Vietnam and Watergate,” which resulted in a congressional assault on presidential prerogatives.
For example, consider the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which Bush evaded when authorizing the NSA to tap without warrants — even those issued by the FISA court. FISA was enacted after the fall of Nixon with the precise intention of curbing unchecked executive branch surveillance. (Indeed, Nixon’s improper use of domestic surveillance was included in Article 2 paragraph (2) of the impeachment articles against him.)
According to Kelley, these congressional limits on the presidency, in turn, led “some very creative people” in the White House and the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) to fight back, in an attempt to foil or blunt these limits. In their view, these laws were legislative attempts to strip the president of his rightful powers. Prominent among those in the movement to preserve presidential power and champion the unitary executive doctrine were the founding members of the Federalist Society, nearly all of whom worked in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan White Houses.
The unitary executive doctrine arises out of a theory called “departmentalism,” or “coordinate construction.” According to legal scholars Christopher Yoo, Steven Calabresi, and Anthony Colangelo, the coordinate construction approach “holds that all three branches of the federal government have the power and duty to interpret the Constitution.” According to this theory, the president may (and indeed, must) interpret laws, equally as much as the courts.
The Unitary Executive Versus Judicial Supremacy
The coordinate construction theory counters the long-standing notion of “judicial supremacy,” articulated by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall in 1803, in the famous case of Marbury v. Madison, which held that the Court is the final arbiter of what is and is not the law. Marshall famously wrote there: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”
Of course, the President has a duty not to undermine his own office, as University of Miami law professor A. Michael Froomkin notes. And, as Kelley points out, the President is bound by his oath of office and the “Take Care clause” to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution and to “take care” that the laws are faithfully executed. And those duties require, in turn, that the President interpret what is, and is not constitutional, at least when overseeing the actions of executive agencies.
However, Bush’s recent actions make it clear that he interprets the coordinate construction approach extremely aggressively. In his view, and the view of his Administration, that doctrine gives him license to overrule and bypass Congress or the courts, based on his own interpretations of the Constitution — even where that violates long-established laws and treaties, counters recent legislation that he has himself signed, or (as shown by recent developments in the Padilla case) involves offering a federal court contradictory justifications for a detention.
This is a form of presidential rebellion against Congress and the courts, and possibly a violation of President Bush’s oath of office, as well.
After all, can it be possible that that oath means that the President must uphold the Constitution only as he construes it – and not as the federal courts do?
And can it be possible that the oath means that the President need not uphold laws he simply doesn’t like – even though they were validly passed by Congress and signed into law by him?
Analyzing Bush’s Disturbing Signing Statement for the McCain Anti-Torture Bill
Let’s take a close look at Bush’s most recent signing statement, on the torture bill. It says:
The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.
In this signing statement, Bush asserts not only his authority to internally supervise the “unitary executive branch,” but also his power as Commander-in-Chief, as the basis for his interpretation of the law — which observers have noted allows Bush to create a loophole to permit the use of torture when he wants.
Clearly, Bush believes he can ignore the intentions of Congress. Not only that but by this statement, he has evinced his intent to do so, if he so chooses.
On top of this, Bush asserts that the law must be consistent with “constitutional limitations on judicial power.” But what about presidential power? Does Bush see any constitutional or statutory limitations on that? And does this mean that Bush will ignore the courts, too, if he chooses – as he attempted, recently, to do in the Padilla case?
The Unitary Executive Doctrine Violates the Separation of Powers
As Findlaw columnist Edward Lazarus recently showed, the President does not have unlimited executive authority, not even as Commander-in-Chief of the military. Our government was purposely created with power split between three branches, not concentrated in one.
Separation of powers, then, is not simply a talisman: It is the foundation of our system. James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers, No. 47, that:
The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.
Another early American, George Nicholas, eloquently articulated the concept of “power divided” in one of his letters:
The most effectual guard which has yet been discovered against the abuse of power, is the division of it. It is our happiness to have a constitution which contains within it a sufficient limitation to the power granted by it, and also a proper division of that power. But no constitution affords any real security to liberty unless it is considered as sacred and preserved inviolate; because that security can only arise from an actual and not from a nominal limitation and division of power.
Yet it seems a nominal limitation and division of power – with real power concentrated solely in the “unitary executive” – is exactly what President Bush seeks. His signing statements make the point quite clearly, and his overt refusal to follow the laws illustrates that point: In Bush’s view, there is no actual limitation or division of power; it all resides in the executive.
Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense:
In America, the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.
The unitary executive doctrine conflicts with Paine’s principle – one that is fundamental to our constitutional system. If Bush can ignore or evade laws, then the law is no longer king. Americans need to decide whether we are still a country of laws – and if we are, we need to decide whether a President who has determined to ignore or evade the law has not acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government.
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(Click here to post your own answers for this meme.)
| × I miss somebody right now. | ✓ I don’t watch much TV these days. (i don’t watch any TV ever, if i can help it.) | ✓ I own lots of books. |
| ✓I wear glasses or contact lenses. | × I love to play video games. | ✓ I’ve tried marijuana. (i am a cannabis legalisation activist.) |
| × I’ve watched porn movies. | × I have been the psycho-ex in a past relationship. | ✓ I believe honesty is usually the best policy. |
| ✓ I curse sometimes. (god damn it, i curse all the time!) | ✓ I have changed a lot mentally over the last year. | ✓ I carry my knife/razor everywhere with me. |
| × I have broken someone’s bones. | ✓ I have a secret that I am ashamed to reveal. | × I hate the rain. |
| ✓ I’m paranoid at times. | × I would get plastic surgery if it were 100% safe, free of cost, and scar-free. | ✓ I need/want money right now. |
| × I love sushi. | × I talk really, really fast. | × I have fresh breath in the morning. |
| × I have long hair. | × I have lost money in Las Vegas. | ✓ I have at least one sibling. (two younger sisters and a younger brother, none of whom have spoken to me in 20 years.) |
| × I was born in a country outside of the U.S. | × I have worn fake hair/fingernails/eyelashes in the past. | × I couldn’t survive without Caller I.D. |
| ✓ I like the way that I look. | × I have lied to a good friend in the last 6 months. | ✓ I am usually pessimistic. |
| ✓ I have a lot of mood swings. | ✓ I think prostitution should be legalized. | ✓ I slept with a roommate. (if you consider my wife to be a roommate…) |
| ✓ I have a hidden talent. | × I’m always hyper no matter how much sugar I have. | × I have a lot of friends. |
| ✓ I have pecked someone of the same sex. | × I enjoy talking on the phone. | × I practically live in sweatpants or PJ pants. |
| × I love to shop and/or window shop. | × I’m obsessed with my Xanga or Livejournal. | ✓ I’m completely embarrassed to be seen with my mother. |
| ✓ I have a mobile phone. | × I have passed out drunk in the past 6 months. (i have passed out from smoking cannabis, though…) | × I’ve rejected someone before. |
| ✓ I currently like/love someone. | × I have no idea what I want to do for the rest of my life. | × I want to have children in the future. |
| ✓ I have changed a diaper before. | ✓ I’ve called the cops on a friend before. | × I’m not allergic to anything. (tobacco…) |
| ✓ I have a lot to learn. | ✓ I am shy around the opposite sex. | ✓ I’m online 24/7, even as an away message. |
| × I have at least 5 away messages saved. | ✓ I have tried alcohol or drugs before. | × I have made a move on a friend’s significant other or crush in the past. |
| ✓ I own the “South Park” movie. | × I have avoided assignments at work/school to be on Xanga or Livejournal. | × I enjoy some country music. |
| × I would die for my best friends. | ✓ I’m obsessive, and often a perfectionist. | × I have used my sexuality to advance my career. |
| × I think Halloween is awesome because you get free candy. | × I have dated a close friend’s ex. | × I am happy at this moment. |
| × I’m obsessed with guys. | × Democrat. | × Republican. |
| × I don’t even know what I am. | × I am punk rockish. | × I go for older guys/girls, not younger. |
| × I study for tests most of the time. | × I tie my shoelaces differently from anyone I’ve ever met. | × I can work on a car. |
| × I love my job(s). | ✓ I am comfortable with who I am right now. | ✓ I have more than just my ears pierced. |
| ✓ I walk barefoot wherever I can. | ✓ I have jumped off a bridge. | ✓ I love sea turtles. |
| × I spend ridiculous amounts of money on makeup. | ✓ I plan on achieving a major goal/dream. | ✓ I am proficient on a musical instrument. (i am proficient on many musical instruments.) |
| ✓ I hate office jobs. | × I went to college out of state. | × I am adopted. (i might as well be adopted, since my own family wants nothing to do with me.) |
| ✓ I am a pyro. | × I have thrown up from crying too much. | ✓ I have been intentionally hurt by people that I loved. |
| × I fall for the worst people. | ✓ I adore bright colours. | × I usually like covers better than originals. |
| ✓ I hate chain theme restaurants like Applebees and TGIFridays. | ✓ I can pick up things with my toes. | × I can’t whistle. |
| ✓ I have ridden/owned a horse. | ✓ I still have every journal I’ve ever written in. | × I talk in my sleep. |
| ✓ I’ve often thought that I was born in the wrong century. | × I try to forget things by drowning them out with loads of distractions. | × I wear a toe ring. |
| ✓ I have a tattoo. | × I can’t stand at LEAST one person that I work with. (being self employed means that the only co-worker i can get angry with is myself.) | × I am a caffeine junkie. |
| ✓ I am completely tree-huggy spiritual, and I’m not ashamed at all. | × If I knew I would get away with it, I would commit at least one murder. | ✓ I will collect anything, and the more nonsensical, the better. |
| × I enjoy a nice glass of wine with dinner. | ✓ I’m an artist. | ✓ I am ambidextrous. |
| × I sleep with so many stuffed animals, I can hardly fit on my bed. | × If it weren’t for having to see other people naked, I’d live in a nudist colony. | × I have terrible teeth. |
| ✓ I hate my toes. (i modified my toes so that i will like them better, but i still hate them.) | ✓ I did this meme even though I wasn’t tagged by the person who took it before me. | ✓ I have more friends on the internet than in real life. |
| ✓ I have lived in either three different states or countries. | ✓ I am extremely flexible. | × I love hugs more than kisses. |
| ✓ I want to own my own business. (http://www.hybridelephant.com/) | ✓ I smoke. (cannabis.) | ✓ I spend way too much time on the computer than on anything else. |
| ✓ Nobody has ever said I’m normal. | ✓ Sad movies, games, and the like can cause a trickle of tears every now and then. | × I am proficient in the use of many types of firearms and combat weapons. |
| ✓ I like the way women look in stylized men’s suits. | ✓ I don’t like it when people are unpleased or seem unpleased with me. | ✓ I have been described as a dreamer or likely to have my head up in the clouds. |
| ✓ I have played strip poker with someone else before. | ✓ I have had emotional problems for which I have sought professional help. (25 years of counselling and i’m still fucked up.) | ✓ I believe in ghosts and the paranormal. (i don’t believe in the paranormal, i know it exists.) |
| × I can’t stand being alone. | ✓ I have at least one obsession at any given time. | × I weigh myself, pee/poo, and then weigh myself again. |
| ✓ I consistently spend way too much money on obsessions-of-the-moment. | × I’m a judgmental asshole. | × I’m a HUGE drama-queen. |
| × I have travelled on more than one continent. | ✓ I sometimes wish my father would just disappear. | ✓ I need people to tell me I’m good at something in order to feel that I am. |
| ✓ I am a Libertarian. | ✓ I can speak more than one language. | ✓ I can fall asleep even if the whole room is as noisy as it can be. |
| ✓ I would rather read than watch TV. | ✓ I like reading fact more than fiction. (as long as you consider scripture to be fact…) | × I have pulled an all-nighter on an assignment I was given a month to do. |
| × I have no piercings. | ✓ I have spent the night in a train station or other public place. | × I have been so upset over my physical gender that I cried. |
| × I once spent Christmas completely alone because there was a miscommunication on which parent was supposed to have me that night. | ✓ There have been times when I have wondered “Why was I born?” and may/may not have cried over it. | ✓ I like most animals better than most people. |
| × I own a collection of retro games consoles. | × The thought of physical exercise makes me shiver. | × I have hit someone with a dead fish. |
| ✓ I am compulsively honest. | ✓ I was born with a congenital birth defect that has never been repaired. (it has been resected, otherwise i wouldn’t be here…) | ✓ I have danced topless in front of dozens of complete strangers. |
| ✓ I have gone from wishing I was a girl to revelling in being a boy to feeling like a girl again in the span of five minutes, and not cared a whit for my actual sex. | ✓ I am unashamedly bisexual, and have different motivations for my desires for different genders. | ✓ I sometimes won’t sleep a whole night or eat a whole day because I forget to. |
| × I find it impossible to get to sleep without some kind of music on. | × I dislike milk. | × I obsessively wash my hands. |
| ✓ I always carry something significant around with me. | × Sometimes I’d rather wear a wig in day-to-day life than use my own hair. | ✓ I’ve pushed myself to become more self-aware and thereby more aware of others. |
| × Even though I live on my own I still cry sometimes because I miss my mother. | ✓ I hand wrote all the HTML tags in this document. (and they all validate!) | ✓ I’ve liked something which a majority of people claimed was either bad or weird. |
| ✓ I have been clinically dead for a brief period of time. (10 days in intensive care.) | × Instead of feeling sympathy/empathy with people and their problems, I simply become annoyed. | × I participate/have participated in auto drag races and won. |
| × I do not ‘get’ most comedy acts. | ✓ I don’t think strippers are money-greedy or slutty for dancing. | ✓ I don’t like to chew gum. |
| ✓ I am obsessed with history/historical things and can’t wait for someone to build a time machine so I can be the first to use it. | ✓ I can never remember for the life of me where I parked the car. | × I had the TEEN ANGST thing going for at least 2-3 years. |
| ✓ I wish people would be more empathic and honest with each other. | × I play Dungeons and Dragons weekly. | ✓ I love to sing. |
| × I want to live in my mother’s basement when I grow up. | ✓ I have a custom-built computer. | × I want to create a certain someone’s babies, even though there’s a 0% possiblity of ever achieving it. |
| ✓ I would be in a relationship with one of my pets if they were human. | ✓ I’ve gone skinny-dipping. | ✓ I’ve performed in three plays. |
| ✓ I enjoy burritos. | × I’m Irish and loving it. | ✓ I have a thing for redheads. |
| × I am a twin! | ✓ Most of the times, I’d rather do something intellectual instead of doing something generically ‘fun’. | ✓ Once I set out to finish something, I always stay at it until it is completed before I move on to something else. |
| ✓ I wish there were a way to erase past mistakes. | ✓ I sleep more than 12 hours a day. | ✓ I wish I could be prouder of what I’ve accomplished, but it’s never enough. |
| × I need more time to myself. | × I wish I was more open-minded. | ✓ I hope that I go really prematurely grey. (it’s too late, i’m already prematurely grey.) |
| ✓ I download songs from the internet. | × I’ve just reenacted chapter 58 of Death Note with my best friend. (what is death note?) | ✓ I say random things to freak people out. |
| × I’m still a little mad about the ending of Death Note. (what is death note?) | × I love playing Truth or Dare. | × I love listening to slow music, but I hate singing to it. |
| × Music helps me remember that I am not alone. | × Playing my favorite sport makes me temporarily forget my problems. | ✓ I think this survey is particularly long. |
| × I prefer my LJ friends to my real-life ones. | ✓ I can only hate someone that I love. | × I’ve ordered an extra two shots of espresso to an Americano at Starbucks. |
562
this is one of the saddest birthdays i have ever had… 8(
Syd Barrett, one of the original members of legendary rock group Pink Floyd, has died at the age of 60 from complications arising from diabetes.
The guitarist was the band’s first creative force and an influential songwriter, penning their early hits.
He joined Pink Floyd in 1965 but left three years later after one album. He went on to live as a recluse, with his mental deterioration blamed on drugs.
“He died very peacefully a couple of days ago,” the band’s spokeswoman said.
“There will be a private family funeral.”
A statement from Pink Floyd said: “The band are naturally very upset and sad to learn of Syd Barrett’s death.
“Syd was the guiding light of the early band line-up and leaves a legacy which continues to inspire.”
David Bowie described Barrett as a “major inspiration”, saying: “I can’t tell you how sad I feel.
“The few times I saw him perform in London at UFO and the Marquee clubs during the ’60s will forever be etched in my mind.
“He was so charismatic and such a startlingly original songwriter. Also, along with Anthony Newley, he was the first guy I’d heard to sing pop or rock with a British accent.
“His impact on my thinking was enormous. A major regret is that I never got to know him. A diamond indeed.”
Born Roger Barrett in Cambridge, he composed songs including See Emily Play and Arnold Layne, both from 1967.
He also wrote most of their album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. But he struggled to cope with fame and drugs.
Dave Gilmour was brought in to the band in February 1968 and Barrett left that April, releasing two solo albums soon after.
The band’s biggest-selling releases, Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall, emerged in the post-Barrett era, with the band selling an estimated 200 million albums worldwide.
Just as Pink Floyd were about to achieve global success, Barrett retreated from public life and returned to Cambridge.
Little was known about his whereabouts for 20 years until he was tracked down living with his mother.
But his influence remained, with younger fans and artists discovering his music.
Former Blur guitarist Graham Coxon released a statement saying: “Lost him again… for bang on 20 years Syd led me to better places.”
“From my agape 17-year-old first listen to Bike to, just the other day, Jugband Blues.
“Languished in his noise… dreamt in his night… stared at his eyes for answers…”
Barrett’s biographer Tim Willis said the guitarist’s music left a lasting legacy.
“I don’t think we would have the David Bowie we have today if it wasn’t for Syd,” he told BBC Radio Five Live.
“Bowie was very much a kind of clone of Syd in the early years. His influence is still going.
“New bands discover him all the time. There’s always a Syd revival going on – if it wasn’t the punks, it was REM, and I’m sure that Arnold Layne and Emily Play as pop songs will live forever.”
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whoo… another weekend of OCF come and gone, but it was almost 5 days, so calling it a weekend is a bit of a misnomer. i left on wednesday. i had originally planned on leaving tuesday and attending moe’s family’s “traditional” fourth of july, but moe wasn’t feeling well and didn’t want to make the drive by herself back, while i went on to veneta, so i got up early wednesday morning and made the 5 hour drive. i was on the outskirts of eugene on the way to veneta when i went over 166,666 miles in ganesha the car. i’m not sure if that’s a good sign, but the fair went well, so i’ll take it as one even if it’s not.
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i worked on the backstage area for the remainder of wednesday and all of thursday, helping larry the carpenter build the band box, helping create the lower part of the stage where the band sat, and making a sign for our “recruitment mirror” (Dwarves Needed – Apply Here), which was a carnival-style mirror that was convex, so that everyone who walked by it looked like a dwarf. the three dwarves (dwarfs, dorfs) were a play on the three stooges, among other things, but there was a lot of fun to be had with unsuspecting hippies who wanted to know why we only had three dwarves. we would tell them all kinds of weird stuff, usually that we made up on the spot, including that the four other dwarves were in jail in california, and we were at the fair to raise money for their legal defense. we made up several ruses to give unsuspecting hippies who wanted to know how to audition for the part of dwarves. one was that the guy to talk to was named “ruben” and he was wearing tie-dye and was around “somewhere”… of course, there was no “ruben”, or if there was, he certainly didn’t know about anything having to do with us or dwarf auditions.
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i was introduced to the concept of “tribes” at the fair, for example: the flamingo tribe is responsible for the ritz. so we created a new tribe, the bacon tribe, which is the people surrounding the big boys with poise performances. BBWP, once again, played to rave reviews, both for the friday night fire show and the sunday night comedie/varieté show (for which we used practice poi so that we wouldn’t set the stage on fire). the friday night show was spectacular. it was easily 2000 people in the audience, and possibly more. all of the other artists were talented, and graceful, and flashy, and innovative, and they danced and breathed and spun fire with alacrity that is extremely difficult to match anywhere, but BBWP, all of whom are over the age of 45, weigh more than 180 pounds, and have absolutely no talent, grace or artistry, is the show that everyone will remember for years to come. we chanted “WE’RE BIG, WE’RE BOYS, WE’RE BIG BOYS WITH POISE, COME ON NOW AND MAKE SOME NOISE, WE’RE BIG BOYS…” and the crowd literally roared “WITH POISE!!!”
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i talked with beau, who made the cute little skull that is my icon. it turns out he made me three skulls that have the craniotomy in the correct place. one is just the upper part of the skull, with no lower jaw, and it either has multiple craniotomies, or a place to put a leather strap through to make it into something that you wear around your neck, one is a complete skull with a lower jaw and only one craniotomy, and one is my skull, with a beard and moustache, and a sikha. i also saw jeff and gary, who i know from drunk puppet night. gary is also a tuba player, and it turns out that he’s buying a “new” sousaphone, so he said he would sell me his old one for $250 or so, which is the upper limit of what i can afford, but he also said that, since it is in the family, he probably wouldn’t need all the money right away.
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saturday and sunday there was a workshop put on by people from gamelan-x on performing the balinese ramayana monkey chant (which is actually called “kecak”). it’s another one of those things that, if i were to learn all about it, i would probably have to give up any preconceived ideas about music as we know of it in the west, and start from scratch. it’s simple enough that it’s fairly easy to learn, especially if you have experience performing pretty much anything with a group of people, but it’s deep and powerful enough that it’s easy to understand how, when it’s performed correctly, it actually has the power to transform the guy in the middle of the group from an ordinary human being into the monkey god Hanuman.
there’s probably more of this post, but it probably won’t be posted until at least tomorrow. meanwhile, go look at a whole pile of pictures and wonder why you weren’t there enjoying yourself.
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The CIA has disbanded a unit set up to capture Osama Bin Laden and other senior al-Qaeda leaders.
05 July 2006
Members of the unit, which was set up in 1996, have been transferred to broader operations that track Islamist groups.
The bin Laden unit, codenamed Alec Station, became less valuable as the movement’s focus shifted more to regional networks of militants, said a US intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity on Tuesday.
“Al-Qaeda is no longer the hierarchical organisation that it was before 9/11. Three-quarters of its senior leaders have been killed or captured,” the official said.
“What you have had since 9/11 is growth in the Islamic jihadist movement around the world among groups and individuals who may be associated with al-Qaeda, and may have financial and operation links with al-Qaeda, but have no command and control relationship with it,” he added.
Hiding
Alec Station was established in 1996 after bin Laden’s initial calls for global jihad, and employed about two dozen people.
The unit was strengthened after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington that killed about 3,000 people.
The New York Times reported on Tuesday that the bin Laden unit was disbanded late last year and quoted its first director, Michael Scheuer, as predicting the move would harm the CIA’s efforts to find bin Laden.
Bin Laden and his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, are believed to be hiding in the mountains along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
There’s one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.
But this service isn’t going to go through the interent and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.
Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?
I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.
So you want to talk about the consumer? Let’s talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren’t using it for commercial purposes.
We aren’t earning anything by going on that internet. Now I’m not saying you have to or you want to discrimnate against those people […]
The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory in the sense that it says “No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet”. No, I’m not finished. I want people to understand my position, I’m not going to take a lot of time. [?]
They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.
It’s a series of tubes.
And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?
Do you know why?
Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can’t afford getting delayed by other people.
[…]
Now I think these people are arguing whether they should be able to dump all that stuff on the internet ought to consider if they should develop a system themselves.
Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it’s not using what consumers use every day.
It’s not using the messaging service that is essential to small businesses, to our operation of families.
The whole concept is that we should not go into this until someone shows that there is something that has been done that really is a viloation of net neutraility that hits you and me.
When it comes to spending, the President is far from conservative
Is President Bush a die-hard spendthrift in Republican’s clothing? Would former President Reagan roll over in his grave if he knew how big government is getting under his vice president’s son? Conservative Bruce Bartlett says, “Oh, yes,” to both questions.
Bartlett worked in the Reagan White House and advised this president early in his first term. He’s now the author of “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.” Bartlett joined Tucker on ‘Situation’ to asses the president’s spending habits.
TUCKER CARLSON, HOST, ‘SITUATION’: Bush is a liberal? I mean, this is going to come as a huge shock to the many obsessive Bush haters who think he’s a right-wing maniac. Explain.
BRUCE BARTLETT, AUTHOR, “IMPOSTOR”: Well, I think there’s a difference between saying somebody is not a conservative and saying they’re a liberal. I believe it was Bill Buckley who said George Bush is conservative, but he is not a conservative. He’s not one of us, basically.
His conservatism is the conservatism of the guy who says, you know, like Archie Bunker, the good old days and why is everything, you know, not working the way it used to? It’s not borne out of thought or reason or analysis.
CARLSON: Now, you make the point, I think, very convincingly, in your book, that he is a big government conservative, or big government president anyway.
You’re an economist familiar with numbers. Explain in a way that our viewers—many of them are not economists—can understand just how big a spender this president is.
BARTLETT: I did a calculation the other day based on officially—official Treasury Department data that showed that in the first four years of the Bush administration, our national debt, not just what we call the national debt, but all of the indebtedness—had increased by $20 trillion under this president.
Let me give you another figure. The Medicare drug benefit that he rammed through Congress a couple years ago has an unfunded liability of $18 trillion. The Social Security system, which he talked so much about fixing last year, has an unfunded liability of only $11 trillion. We could repeal the drug benefit, keep Social Security exactly as it is forever, and still cut $7 trillion off our national debt.
CARLSON: You can never repeal the drug benefit.
BARTLETT: I know.
CARLSON: I mean, as a political matter, that is going to be—our great-grandchildren will be weeping over it 75 years from now.
BARTLETT: I say in the book, and a lot of people criticized me for this, that because of that program and because of the utter unwillingness to deal with entitlements, we’re looking at, really, a massive tax increase over the next generation that I think we’re going to need a new source of revenue to pay for.
CARLSON: I just want to restate, so it’s perfectly clear to those watching, you are not a liberal, you are, in Washington anyway, a very well known conservative. You are not attacking Bush from the left at all.
You say something interesting, and given that, this is a fascinating statement that you think the nation might actually be better off with a Democrat in the White House after this president.
BARTLETT: Well, I look at one of the most recent good old days we had, which was from 1994 to 2000, when we had gridlock. I think perhaps the optimum policy from the point of few of fiscal conservatives like me is a Democrat in the White House and Republican control of Congress. Because neither one can do anything, and we’re on automatic pilot and we ended up with surpluses instead of deficits.
CARLSON: I think that’s a very smart point. This government, of course, was designed to produce gridlock. And a Republican Congress and a Republican president turned out to be bad.
You said Bush has hurt his party by not designating a successor. What do you mean?
BARTLETT: Well, obviously, Dick Cheney is not going to be running to replace George Bush in 2008, and I think the Democrats are going to be united. I think they’re going to have a stronger candidate than they’ve had recently.
And I think that the Republicans are going to be handicapped by the fact that they’re going to have a wide open race, no frontrunner. And it’s going to be very difficult.
And it would be a lot better if President Bush had had, as his vice president, somebody who was in a better position to replace him, which is normally what we do after two-term presidents.
CARLSON: Right. But presidents with fragile egos can’t deal with the idea of a competitor in the same building. Is that the idea?
BARTLETT: That’s right. But on the other hand, they also want their own success ratified, so they want their vice president to succeed them, because that is a way of the electorate saying that you did a good job.
CARLSON: Right. Well, a long-term thinker might perceive that. This president did not.
by George Lakoff, Sam Ferguson, Marc Ettlinger
Progressives have fallen into a trap. Emboldened by President Bush’s plummeting approval ratings, progressives increasingly point to Bush’s “failures” and label him and his administration as incompetent. Self-satisfying as this criticism may be, it misses the bigger point. Bush’s disasters — Katrina, the Iraq War, the budget deficit — are not so much a testament to his incompetence or a failure of execution. Rather, they are the natural, even inevitable result of his conservative governing philosophy. It is conservatism itself, carried out according to plan, that is at fault.
Progressives have fallen into a trap. Emboldened by President Bush’s plummeting approval ratings, progressives increasingly point to Bush’s “failures” and label him and his administration as incompetent. For example, Nancy Pelosi said “The situation in Iraq and the reckless economic policies in the United States speak to one issue for me, and that is the competence of our leader.” Self-satisfying as this criticism may be, it misses the bigger point. Bush’s disasters — Katrina, the Iraq War, the budget deficit — are not so much a testament to his incompetence or a failure of execution. Rather, they are the natural, even inevitable result of his conservative governing philosophy. It is conservatism itself, carried out according to plan, that is at fault. Bush will not be running again, but other conservatives will. His governing philosophy is theirs as well. We should be putting the onus where it belongs, on all conservative office holders and candidates who would lead us off the same cliff.
To Bush’s base, his bumbling folksiness is part of his charm — it fosters conservative populism. Bush plays up this image by proudly stating his lack of interest in reading and current events, his fondness for naps and vacations and his self-deprecating jokes. This image causes the opposition to underestimate his capacities — disregarding him as a complete idiot — and deflects criticism of his conservative allies. If incompetence is the problem, it’s all about Bush. But, if conservatism is the problem, it is about a set of ideas, a movement and its many adherents.
The idea that Bush is incompetent is a curious one. Consider the following (incomplete) list of major initiatives the Bush administration, with a loyal conservative Congress, has accomplished:
- Centralizing power within the executive branch to an unprecedented degree
- Starting two major wars, one started with questionable intelligence and in a manner with which the military disagreed
- Placing on the Supreme Court two far-right justices, and stacking the lower federal courts with many more
- Cutting taxes during wartime, an unprecedented event
- Passing a number of controversial bills such as the PATRIOT Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, the Medicare Drug bill, the Bankruptcy bill and a number of massive tax cuts
- Rolling back and refusing to enforce a host of basic regulatory protections
- Appointing industry officials to oversee regulatory agencies
- Establishing a greater role for religion through faith-based initiatives
- Passing Orwellian-titled legislation assaulting the environment – “The Healthy Forests Act” and the “Clear Skies Initiative” – to deforest public lands, and put more pollution in our skies
- Winning re-election and solidifying his party’s grip on Congress
These aren’t signs of incompetence. As should be painfully clear, the Bush administration has been overwhelmingly competent in advancing its conservative vision. It has been all too effective in achieving its goals by determinedly pursuing a conservative philosophy.
It’s not Bush the man who has been so harmful, it’s the conservative agenda.
The Conservative Agenda
Conservative philosophy has three fundamental tenets: individual initiative, that is, government’s positive role in people’s lives outside of the military and police should be minimized; the President is the moral authority; and free markets are enough to foster freedom and opportunity.
The conservative vision for government is to shrink it – to “starve the beast” in Conservative Grover Norquist’s words. The conservative tagline for this rationale is that “you can spend your money better than the government can.” Social programs are considered unnecessary or “discretionary” since the primary role of government is to defend the country’s border and police its interior. Stewardship of the commons, such as allocation of healthcare or energy policy, is left to people’s own initiative within the free market. Where profits cannot be made — conservation, healthcare for the poor — charity is meant to replace justice and the government should not be involved.
Given this philosophy, then, is it any wonder that the government wasn’t there for the residents of Louisiana and Mississippi in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? Conservative philosophy places emphasis on the individual acting alone, independent of anything the government could provide. Some conservative Sunday morning talk show guests suggested that those who chose to live in New Orleans accepted the risk of a devastating hurricane, the implication being that they thus forfeited any entitlement to government assistance. If the people of New Orleans suffered, it was because of their own actions, their own choices and their own lack of preparedness. Bush couldn’t have failed if he bore no responsibility.
The response to Hurricane Katrina — rather, the lack of response — was what one should expect from a philosophy that espouses that the government can have no positive role in its citizen’s lives. This response was not about Bush’s incompetence, it was a conservative, shrink-government response to a natural disaster.
Another failure of this administration during the Katrina fiasco was its wholesale disregard of the numerous and serious hurricane warnings. But this failure was a natural outgrowth of the conservative insistence on denying the validity of global warming, not ineptitude. Conservatives continue to deny the validity of global warming, because it runs contrary to their moral system. Recognizing global warming would call for environmental regulation and governmental efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Regulation is a perceived interference with the free-market, Conservatives’ golden calf. So, the predictions of imminent hurricanes — based on recognizing global warming — were not heeded. Conservative free market convictions trumped the hurricane warnings.
Our budget deficit is not the result of incompetent fiscal management. It too is an outgrowth of conservative philosophy. What better way than massive deficits to rid social programs of their funding?
In Iraq, we also see the impact of philosophy as much as a failure of execution.
The idea for the war itself was born out of deep conservative convictions about the nature and capacity of US military force. Among the Project for a New American Century’s statement of principles (signed in 1997 by a who’s who of the architects of the Iraq war — Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, I. Lewis Libby among others) are four critical points:
- we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future
- we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values
- we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad
- we need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.
Implicit in these ideas is that the United States military can spread democracy through the barrel of a gun. Our military might and power can be a force for good.
It also indicates that the real motive behind the Iraq war wasn’t to stop Iraq’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, but was a test of neoconservative theory that the US military could reshape Middle East geo-politics. The manipulation and disregard of intelligence to sell the war was not incompetence, it was the product of a conservative agenda.
Unfortunately, this theory exalts a hubristic vision over the lessons of history. It neglects the realization that there is a limit to a foreign army’s ability to shape foreign politics for the good. Our military involvement in Vietnam, Lebanon, the Philippines, Cuba (prior to Castro) and Panama, or European imperialist endeavors around the globe should have taught us this lesson. Democracy needs to be an organic, homegrown movement, as it was in this country. If we believe so deeply in our ideals, they will speak for themselves and inspire others.
During the debate over Iraq, the conservative belief in the unquestioned authority and moral leadership of the President helped shape public support. We see this deference to the President constantly: when Conservatives call those questioning the President’s military decisions “unpatriotic”; when Conservatives defend the executive branch’s use of domestic spying in the war on terror; when Bush simply refers to himself as the “decider.” “I support our President” was a common justification of assent to the Iraq policy.
Additionally, as the implementer of the neoconservative vision and an unquestioned moral authority, our President felt he had no burden to forge international consensus or listen to the critiques of our allies. “You’re with us, or you’re against us,” he proclaimed after 9/11.
Much criticism continues to be launched against this administration for ineptitude in its reconstruction efforts. Tragically, it is here too that the administration’s actions have been shaped less by ineptitude than by deeply held conservative convictions about the role of government.
As noted above, Conservatives believe that government’s role is limited to security and maintaining a free market. Given this conviction, it’s no accident that administration policies have focused almost exclusively on the training of Iraqi police, and US access to the newly free Iraqi market — the invisible hand of the market will take care of the rest. Indeed, George Packer has recently reported that the reconstruction effort in Iraq is nearing its end (“The Lessons of Tal Affar,” The New Yorker, April 10th, 2006). Iraqis must find ways to rebuild themselves, and the free market we have constructed for them is supposed to do this. This is not ineptitude. This is the result of deep convictions over the nature of freedom and the responsibilities of governments to their people.
Finally, many of the miscalculations are the result of a conservative analytic focus on narrow causes and effects, rather than mere incompetence. Evidence for this focus can be seen in conservative domestic policies: Crime policy is based on punishing the criminals, independent of any effort to remedy the larger social issues that cause crime; immigration policy focuses on border issues and the immigrants, and ignores the effects of international and domestic economic policy on population migration; environmental policy is based on what profits there are to be gained or lost today, without attention paid to what the immeasurable long-term costs will be to the shared resource of our environment; education policy, in the form of vouchers, ignores the devastating effects that dismantling the public school system will have on our whole society.
Is it any surprise that the systemic impacts of the Iraq invasion were not part of the conservative moral or strategic calculus used in pursuing the war?
The conservative war rhetoric focused narrowly on ousting Saddam — he was an evil dictator, and evil cannot be tolerated, period. The moral implications of unleashing social chaos and collateral damage in addition to the lessons of history were not relevant concerns.
As a consequence, we expected to be greeted as liberators. The conservative plan failed to appreciate the complexities of the situation that would have called for broader contingency planning. It lacked an analysis of what else would happen in Iraq and the Middle East as a result of ousting the Hussein Government, such as an Iranian push to obtain nuclear weapons.
Joe Biden recently said, “if I had known the president was going to be this incompetent in his administration, I would not have given him the authority [to go to war].” Had Bush actually been incompetent, he would have never been able to lead us to war in Iraq. Had Bush been incompetent, he would not have been able to ram through hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts. Had Bush been incompetent, he would have been blocked from stacking the courts with right-wing judges. Incompetence, on reflection, might have actually been better for the country.
Hidden Successes
Perhaps the biggest irony of the Bush-is-incompetent frame is that these “failures” — Iraq, Katrina and the budget deficit — have been successes in terms of advancing the conservative agenda.
One of the goals of Conservatives is to keep people from relying on the federal government. Under Bush, FEMA was reorganized to no longer be a first responder in major natural disasters, but to provide support for local agencies. This led to the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina. Now citizens, as well as local and state governments, have become distrustful of the federal government’s capacity to help ordinary citizens. Though Bush’s popularity may have suffered, enhancing the perception of federal government as inept turned out to be a conservative victory.
Conservatives also strive to get rid of protective agencies and social programs. The deficit Bush created through irresponsible tax cuts and a costly war in Iraq will require drastic budget cuts to remedy. Those cuts, conservatives know, won’t come from military spending, particularly when they raise the constant specter of war. Instead, the cuts will be from what Conservatives have begun to call “non-military, discretionary spending;” that is, the programs that contribute to the common good like the FDA, EPA, FCC, FEMA, OSHA and the NLRB. Yet another success for the conservative agenda.
Both Iraq and Katrina have enriched the coffers of the conservative corporate elite, thus further advancing the conservative agenda. Halliburton, Lockhead Martin and US oil companies have enjoyed huge profit margins in the last six years. Taking Iraq’s oil production off-line in the face of rising international demand meant prices would rise, making the oil inventories of Exxon and other firms that much more valuable, leading to record profits. The destruction wrought by Katrina and Iraq meant billions in reconstruction contracts. The war in Iraq (and the war in Afghanistan) meant billions in military equipment contracts. Was there any doubt where those contracts would go? Chalk up another success for Bush’s conservative agenda.
Bush also used Katrina as an opportunity to suspend the environmental and labor protection laws that Conservatives despise so much. In the wake of Katrina, environmental standards for oil refineries were temporarily suspended to increase production. Labor laws are being thwarted to drive down the cost of reconstruction efforts. So, amidst these “disasters,” Conservatives win again.
Where most Americans see failure in Iraq – George Miller recently called Iraq a “blunder of historic proportions” – conservative militarists are seeing many successes. Conservatives stress the importance of our military — our national pride and worth is expressed through its power and influence. Permanent bases are being constructed as planned in Iraq, and America has shown the rest of the world that we can and will preemptively strike with little provocation. They succeeded in a mobilization of our military forces based on ideological pretenses to impact foreign policy. The war has struck fear in other nations with a hostile show of American power. The conservatives have succeeded in strengthening what they perceive to be the locus of the national interest —military power.
It’s NOT Incompetence
When Progressives shout “Incompetence!” it obscures the many conservative successes. The incompetence frame drastically misses the point, that the conservative vision is doing great harm to this country and the world. An understanding of this and an articulate progressive response is needed. Progressives know that government can and should have a positive role in our lives beyond simple, physical security. It had a positive impact during the progressive era, busting trusts, and establishing basic labor standards. It had a positive impact during the new deal, softening the blow of the depression by creating jobs and stimulating the economy. It had a positive role in advancing the civil rights movement, extending rights to previously disenfranchised groups. And the United States can have a positive role in world affairs without the use of its military and expressions of raw power. Progressives acknowledge that we are all in this together, with “we” meaning all people, across all spectrums of race, class, religion, sex, sexual preference and age. “We” also means across party lines, state lines and international borders.
The mantra of incompetence has been an unfortunate one. The incompetence frame assumes that there was a sound plan, and that the trouble has been in the execution. It turns public debate into a referendum on Bush’s management capabilities, and deflects a critique of the impact of his guiding philosophy. It also leaves open the possibility that voters will opt for another radically conservative president in 2008, so long as he or she can manage better. Bush will not be running again, so thinking, talking and joking about him being incompetent offers no lessons to draw from his presidency.
Incompetence obscures the real issue. Bush’s conservative philosophy is what has damaged this country and it is his philosophy of conservatism that must be rejected, whoever endorses it.
Conservatism itself is the villain that is harming our people, destroying our environment, and weakening our nation. Conservatives are undermining American values through legislation almost every day. This message applies to every conservative bill proposed to Congress. The issue that arises every day is which philosophy of governing should shape our country. It is the issue of our times. Unless conservative philosophy itself is discredited, Conservatives will continue their domination of public discourse, and with it, will continue their domination of politics.
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tickets are now on sale for cirque de flambé’s summer barbecue… $15 and all the clowns you can shake a stick of dynamite at…
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moe has been sick for the past few days, and she’s got to work tomorrow, so the possibility that we are going to portland on tuesday has been considerably diminished. i am always hesitant to go anywhere without moe for more than 12 hours, but it’s even more of a stretch for me to prepare to go away for 5 days when she’s sick… 8(
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as good a reason as any to be hindu, or muslim, or pretty much anything except “christian”…
by the Not-So-Reverend Jerry Falwell
“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.”
(Ecclesiastes 3:1-8)
Christians have struggled with the issue of war for centuries. Before Jesus arrived on the scene, all good people wrestled with war and the existence of evil. Thankfully, the Bible is not silent on the subject.
Before we examine war, though, let’s look at the God of Peace.
One of God’s primary attributes is peace. Isaiah said the Messiah would bear these names: Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6). God longs for all people to live in peace. That is how He created the universe – in total peace and harmony.
Christians are to be people of peace.
One of the most notable biblical commands to live in peace is in Romans 12:18: “If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.”
With the Bible clear on our responsibility to live peaceably, it seems that there would be no reason to ever go to war. However, if one depends on the Bible as a guidepost for living, it is readily apparent that war is sometimes a necessary option. In fact, just as there are numerous references to peace in the Bible, there are frequent references to God-ordained war.
Many present-day pacifists hold Jesus as their example for unvarying peace. But they ignore the full revelation concerning Jesus pictured in the book of Revelation 19, where He is depicted bearing a “sharp sword” and smiting nations, ruling them with “a rod of iron.”
Moreover, the Song of Victory in Exodus 15 hails God as a God of war: “… The Lord is a man of war: the Lord is his name.” And, as the verses that open this column indicate, there is indeed a time for war.
God actually strengthened individuals for war, including Moses, Joshua and many of the Old Testament judges who demonstrated great faith in battle. And God destroyed many armies challenging the Israelites. I Chronicles 14:15 describes God striking down the Philistines.
God even gives counsel to be wise in war. Proverbs 20:18: “Every purpose is established by counsel: and with good advice make war.”
Today, America continues to face the horrible realities of our fallen world. Suicide bombings and terrorist actions are beamed live into our homes daily. This serves as a constant reminder of the frailty of our flesh.
It is apparent that our God-authored freedoms must be defended.
Throughout the book of Judges, God calls the Israelites to go to war against the Midianites and Philistines. Why? Because these nations were trying to conquer Israel, and God’s people were called to defend themselves.
President Bush declared war in Iraq to defend innocent people. This is a worthy pursuit. In fact, Proverbs 21:15 tells us: “It is joy to the just to do judgment: but destruction shall be to the workers of iniquity.”
One of the primary purposes of the church is to stop the spread of evil, even at the cost of human lives. If we do not stop the spread of evil, many innocent lives will be lost and the kingdom of God suffers.
Finally, some reading this column will surely ask, “Doesn’t the sixth commandment say, ‘Thou shalt not kill?'”
Actually, no; it says: “Thou shalt not commit murder.”
There is a difference between killing and murdering. In fact, many times God commanded capital punishment for those who break the law.
We continue to live in violent times. The Bible tells us war will be a reality until Christ returns. And when the time is right, Jesus will indeed come again, ending all wars.
Until that time, however, Christians must live as Galatians 6:2 instructs: “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.”
what?
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the ballard sedentary sousa band has a performance at the king street station, for something having to do with amtrak today at 10:00 am. then it’s off to the post office where i have to mail a couple of packages, and then i am officially of the books until OCF on wednestay. in the mean time i hope that it will be cool enough that i can mow the lawn, because if i don’t get the chance to do it now, it’s going to be hell to do when i get home. we also have plans to go to portland for moe’s “traditional”(?) “family”(?) fourth of july, which, in spite of the fact that it means spending the night at her mom’s place without moe to protect me from her mom and her mom’s female housemate (who, in spite of obvious connotations, are conservative, flag-waving, right-wing women who happen to be platonic – although neither of them even know who plato was), only adds to my plans for getting to OCF early wednesday by giving me a 300 mile head start.
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Measure passes by wide margin; bill’s chances in Senate are uncertain
30 June, 2006
WASHINGTON – Congress on Thursday took a major step toward allowing oil and gas drilling in coastal waters that have been off limits for a quarter-century, but a battle looms in the Senate over the issue.
And the Bush administration’s support for the legislation, which was approved by a 232-187 vote in the House, is lukewarm.
The House bill would end an Outer Continental Shelf drilling moratorium that Congress has renewed every year since 1981. It covers 85 percent of the country’s coastal waters — everywhere except the central and western Gulf of Mexico and some areas off Alaska.
Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., a leading proponent for lifting the ban, said he believes a majority of the Senate wants to open the protected waters to energy companies.
Asked about White House opposition to some parts of the bill, especially a provision that would give tens of billions of dollars to states that have drilling rigs off their coasts, Pombo said, “I dare them to veto this bill.”
“They don’t like us giving money back to the states. I think it’s right,” Pombo told reporters after the vote. Forty Democrats joined most Republicans in favor of ending the drilling moratorium.
Florida filibuster possible
In the Senate, the measure is likely to face a filibuster from Florida senators and possibly others from coastal states that fear offshore energy development could threaten multibillion-dollar tourist and recreation businesses if there were a spill.
The Senate is considering a limited measure that would open an area in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, known as Lease Area 181, that goes within 100 miles of Florida. It is not under the moratorium. Even that is unlikely to pass unless its sponsors get 60 votes to overcome a filibuster from the Floridians.
Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said he would pursue efforts to open the Lease 181 Area. The committee’s ranking Democrat, Sen. Jeff Bingaman, also of New Mexico, criticized the House-passed bill, saying it would eventually create “a huge hole in our federal budget and undermine environmental protections on our lands and off our coasts.”
Environmentalists, for their part, turned their focus to the Senate.
“Instead of catering to Big Oil and Gas, the Senate will have a chance to focus on the many faster, cheaper and cleaner ways to meet our energy needs — renewable sources of energy like home-grown biofuels, greater fuel efficiency in our vehicles, smart-growth policies, and wind and solar energy,” said Karen Wayland, legislative director of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The group said the bill would exempt seismic testing and individual oil and gas lease sales from environmental impact statements; reduce the amount of royalties that oil and gas companies must pay for tar sands and oil shale development; and no longer require companies to remove offshore drilling rigs when they are done drilling.
The House vote was a huge victory for Pombo, two Louisiana lawmakers – Republican Bobby Jindal and Democrat Charlie Melancon – and Rep. John Peterson, R-Pa., who spearheaded the drive to lift the moratorium.
Only six weeks ago, a proposal by Peterson to open coastal waters to natural gas development fell 14 votes short.
This time, they included a provision that would allow states to keep the moratorium in place if they opposed drilling and changed the revenue sharing so that states’ share of royalties would soar eventually as much as 75 percent.
The Gulf states where most U.S. offshore energy resources are being tapped, now get less than 5 percent of the royalties. For example, Louisiana’s royalties would go from $32 million last year to a total of $8.6 billion over the next 10 years — and even higher after that.
Loss of federal revenue
The Interior Department estimated that the changes could cost the federal government as much as $69 billion in lost royalties over 15 years and “several hundred billion dollars” over 60 years.
The White House issued a statement saying it favors much of the bill but strongly opposes the changes in royalty revenue sharing, which it said “would have a long-term impact on the federal deficit.”
The Interior Department estimates there are about 19 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 86 trillion cubic feet of natural gas beneath waters under drilling bans from New England to southern Alaska.
Supporters of the drilling moratorium argue there’s four times that amount of oil and gas available in offshore waters open to energy companies, mainly in the central and western Gulf of Mexico and off parts of Alaska. And they say energy companies are only developing a fraction of the government leases they have available to them.
The country uses about 21 million barrels of oil a day.
While critics of the offshore drilling restrictions argue the additional oil and gas is needed if the country is to move toward greater energy independence, supporters or the bill fear energy development could despoil coastal beaches and threatens their recreation and tourism based economies.
“Our beaches and our coastline is what is critical to Floridians,” declared Rep. Jim Davis, D-Fla. “We should not be sacrificing our economy, our environment for a little oil and gas.”
Pombo countered that drilling still would be prohibited within 50 miles of shore under the bill and states could extend the ban up to 100 miles. He ridiculed the bill’s critics as “opposing everything” when it comes to increasing domestic energy production.
“You can’t say no on everything,” Pombo proclaimed.
Rep. Lois Capps, D-Calif., said states would have to overcome numerous hurdles to continue the drilling restrictions, including having state legislatures and the government seek such protection every five years.
Rainbow Family Gathering Expected To Draw Tens Of Thousands
21 June, 2006
STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. — U.S. Forest Service officers drew their shotguns but then got into their vehicles and abandoned a checkpoint without firing a shot after about 200 people at the Rainbow Family gathering surrounded the officers, an agency spokeswoman said.
“We’re not going to compromise the safety of our officers,” agency spokeswoman Denise Ottaviano said Tuesday. “We have to reavaluate whether or not we’re going to continue any checkpoints because of what happened.”
At least 500 people have converged in Routt National Forest for the gathering but the Forest Service had been turning away new arrivals from entering because the group hasn’t gotten a permit for large groups. The group’s annual event, often described as a huge gathering of hippies, is expected to draw between 15,000 and 20,000 people to the Routt National Forest for a weeklong July 4th event.
About 60 to 80 people already at the event site approached the officers who had been turning people away and surrounded them in a “hostile manner”, Ottaviano said.
She said more than 100 other people who had been hanging out near the checkpoint because they were not allowed in joined the smaller group, forcing the officers to retreat.
Ottaviano said the checkpoint has been disbanded. No one was stopping people from entering the area but officers will continue their patrols, she said.
The Forest Service began issuing citations on Monday and so far about 60 people have been cited, she said.
Groups of 74 or more are required to get a free permit but no one has responded to the agency’s request to apply for one, she said. The group can still apply for a permit and the Forest Service must issue a response within 48 hours.
In the meantime, the Forest Service has closed two motorized trails near the gathering near Big Red Park to avoid any potential conflict between recreationists and the Rainbow Family, she said. Trails 1204 and 1199 are set to be closed through Aug. 20 because it could take that long for all the participants to leave.
The group gathers each year on public lands. Last year, about 15,000 turned out for the event in Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia and the 2004 event drew about 19,000 to the Modoc National Forest in California.
An attorney claims a right to public trials. Meanwhile, forestry officials and the group continue to face off.
06/29/2006
An attorney for a Rainbow Family member filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday asserting that closed court hearings being held on dozens of minor infractions associated with the group’s annual gathering violate a constitutional right to public trials.
The annual Rainbow Family gathering, a counterculture bacchanal that federal officials said could attract as many as 20,000 modern-day hippies to the woods about 35 miles north of Steamboat Springs, has stirred controversy since its first adherents arrived this month.
Forest Service officials Wednesday released details of another violent confrontation with the Rainbows that required slightly injured law enforcement officers to retreat in a mist of pepper spray.
Meanwhile, Routt County commissioners and officials of the Routt National Forest enacted a regionwide ban on open fires and smoking because of the high danger of wildfires – just in time for the gathering’s July 4 climax.
Forest officials said the Rainbow Family may get permission to continue using some large fires in “kitchen” areas but campfires are prohibited.
Federal officials contend the gathering is being held illegally, and officers last week began issuing citations to dozens of participants.
The civil case, filed Tuesday by Denver attorney David Lane, argues that closed hearings on those citations being held in a nearby firehouse violate the Sixth Amendment.
The case was filed on behalf of Adam Mayo, a Colorado attorney, and William Randell III of New York, claiming that the makeshift courtroom is too small to accommodate all of those who wanted to attend.
The lawsuit seeks an emergency court order that would force the court to proceed in a way that doesn’t infringe on the plaintiffs’ rights to have a public trial.
A hearing on the case had not been set by Wednesday evening.
Many members of the Rainbow Family have claimed that law enforcement by the Forest Service has been particularly heavy-handed, boiling up into Monday’s confrontation, in which three officers were injured when two men being sought for arrest incited a crowd into an intimidating mob, according to Forest Service spokeswoman Denise Ottaviano.
“They were surrounded by a hostile crowd of approximately 200 people who were verbally abusive and hostile in their behavior,” Ottaviano said. “Individuals assaulted some of the officers and pulled the suspects away and, in one case, piled on top of one of the suspects to prevent his apprehension. The officers were forced to defend themselves with the use of pepper spray and batons.”
It is at least the third physical confrontation reported between Forest Service officers and the Rainbow Family, although accounts have differed between the two sides.
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i haven’t written that much about OCF, even though it’s a week away now, but that’s primarily because i’ve been busy with rehearsals for it for about the past 3 weeks. about a week ago i went out and bought a bunch of bird whistles and other noisemakers to re-stock my supply of sound effects. i’ve already got a crash box and two sets of coconut shells, but i needed a ratchet and a bunch of new sounds to make the effect of a forest scene (see 22 June, 2006 for stuff i already wrote about, but forgot. 8/ ) i got the nightengale call to work, after searching out an audio clip of an actual nightengale. it’s a bit more complicated than i figured, but not so much that i can’t teach pam, who is playing it.
i bought a slide whistle last year, and while it makes precisely the sound i want it to when it is in one piece, it is made of a very brittle plastic (not PVC or ABS, but something similar) and it has broken so many times that the mouthpiece is mostly glue, and the stopper at the end is being held together with a hose clamp. it shouldn’t be too difficult to make a similar thing out of one of the many plastic soprano recorders i have lying around, some PVC tubing and a bit of ingenuity.
the Big Bois With Poise are performing at the friday night fire show, which means that i won’t be performing with the philharmonic at the friday late night burlesque, but BBWP takes priority now that RA is gone. the philharmonic has been invited to play at the ritz again “sometime” (we don’t know precise details, and probably won’t until the day it happens), and we’re also sawing a lady in half every day at noon at the morningwood odditorium.
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i foresee extremely bad things happening to me, and everybody even remotely like me (which includes everybody on my friends list) if this trend continues… today it’s israel, but who’s to say that tomorrow it may be chicago or new york… or seattle…
June 29, 2006
By STEVEN GUTKIN
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israeli forces arrested nearly one-third of the Hamas-led Palestinian Cabinet and 20 lawmakers early Thursday and pressed their incursion into Gaza, responding to the abduction of one of its soldiers.
Israeli warplanes also buzzed the summer home of Syria’s president, accused by Israel of harboring the hard-line Hamas leaders its blames for masterminding the kidnapping.
Palestinian witnesses told The Associated Press that Israeli tanks and bulldozers entered northern Gaza before daybreak Thursday, adding a second front to the Israeli action in Gaza that began early Wednesday when thousands of Israeli troops crossed into southern Gaza.
The Israeli military denied it moved into northern Gaza.
Adding to the tension, a Palestinian militant group said it killed an 18-year-old Jewish settler kidnapped in the West Bank. Israeli security officials said Eliahu Asheri’s body was found buried near Ramallah. They said he was shot in the head, apparently soon after he was abducted on Sunday.
Army Radio said the arrested Hamas leaders might be used to trade for the captured soldier. Israel had refused earlier to trade prisoners for the soldier’s release.
Palestinian security officials said seven ministers of the 24-member Hamas-led Cabinet and 20 lawmakers were arrested. Earlier reports that Deputy Prime Minister Nasser Shaer was among them were incorrect, they said.
No deaths or injuries were reported in the Israeli actions. But the warplanes knocked out Gaza’s electric power plant, raising the specter of a humanitarian crisis. The Hamas-led government warned of “epidemics and health disasters” because of damaged water pipes to central Gaza and the lack of power to pump water.
Although the Israeli action was sparked by the abduction of the soldier, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government also is alarmed by the firing of homemade rockets on Israeli communities around Gaza and support for Hamas in the Arab world, especially from Syria.
In a clear warning to Syrian President Bashar Assad, Israeli airplanes flew ovecr his seaside home near the Mediterranean port city of Latakia in northwestern Syria, military officials confirmed, citing the “direct link” between his government and Hamas. Israeli television reports said four planes were involved in the low-altitude flight, and that Assad was there at the time.
Syria confirmed Israeli warplanes entered its airspace, but said its air defenses forced the Israeli aircraft to flee.
In Gaza late Wednesday, Israeli missiles also hit two empty Hamas training camps, a rocket-building factory and several roads. Warplanes flew low over the coastal strip, rocking it with sonic booms and shattering windows. Troops in Israel backed up the assault with artillery fire.
The area’s normally bustling streets were eerily deserted, with people taking refuge inside their homes.
Witnesses reported heavy shelling around Gaza’s long-closed airport, which Israeli troops took over. Dozens of people living near the airport fled to nearby Rafah.
The militant Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades said it fired a rocket with a chemical warhead at the Israeli town of Sderot Wednesday night, the first such claim. The Israeli military said it did not detect a rocket fired then. Al Aqsa is linked to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah faction.
In Rafah, Nivine Abu Shbeke, a 23-year-old mother of three, hoarded bags of flour, boxes of vegetables and other supplies. “We’re worried about how long the food will last,” she said. “The children devour everything.”
Prior to the latest incursion into northern Gaza, the Israeli army dropped leaflets warning residents of impending military activity.
Dozens of Palestinian militants – armed with automatic weapons and grenades – took up positions, bracing for the attack.
Anxious Palestinians pondered whether the incursion, the first large-scale ground offensive since Israel withdrew from Gaza last year, was essentially a “shock and awe” display designed to intimidate militants, or the prelude to a full-scale invasion.
Olmert threatened harsher action, though he said there was no plan to reoccupy Gaza. Abbas deplored the incursion as a “crime against humanity.”
The Israeli assault came as diplomatic efforts to free the 19-year-old Israeli soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, bogged down with Hamas demanding a prisoner swap and Israel refusing, demanding Shalit’s unconditional release. Shalit was abducted by Hamas-linked militants on Sunday and is believed to be in southern Gaza.
“We won’t hesitate to carry out extreme action to bring Gilad back to his family,” Olmert declared.
Abbas and Egyptian dignitaries urged Assad to use his influence with Khaled Mashaal, the Hamas leader exiled in Syria, to free Shalit. Assad agreed, but without results, said a senior Abbas aide.
As for Mashaal, Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon said the hard-line Hamas leader, who appears to be increasingly at odds with more moderate Hamas politicians in Gaza, is in Israel’s sights for assassination.
“Khaled Mashaal, as someone who is overseeing, actually commanding the terror acts, is definitely a target,” Ramon told Army Radio.
Israel tried to kill Mashaal in a botched assassination attempt in Jordan in 1997. Two Mossad agents injected Mashaal with poison, but were caught. As Mashaal lay in a Jordanian hospital, King Hussein of Jordan forced Israel to provide the antidote in return for the release of the Mossad agents.
The United Nations and European Union on Wednesday urged both Israel and the Palestinians to step back from the brink and, echoing a statement from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, to give diplomacy a chance.
The White House kept up its pressure on Hamas, saying the Palestinian government must “stop all acts of violence and terror.” But the U.S. also urged Israel to show restraint.
“In any actions the government of Israel may undertake, the United States urges that it ensures that innocent civilians are not harmed, and also that it avoid the unnecessary destruction of property and infrastructure,” said White House press secretary Tony Snow.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged restraint in a phone call to Olmert, saying he had spoken with Assad and Abbas and asked them to do everything possible to release the soldier. Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa called on the U.S. to assume its role as “honest broker” and to make the Palestinian-Israeli conflict its top priority in the Middle East.
Hamas’ negotiators’ tentative acceptance Tuesday of a document that Abbas allies claimed implicitly recognizes Israel appeared beside the point a day later, with Israel saying no political agreement can substitute for Shalit’s freedom.
On Wednesday, Palestinian militants braced for a major strike, fanning out across neighborhoods, taking up positions behind sand embankments and firing several rockets into Israeli communities bordering Gaza. Civilians stockpiled food, water, batteries and candles after warplanes destroyed the coastal strip’s only power plant, and main roads linking north to south.
Gaza’s economy was already in the doldrums before the Israeli assault, a result of five years of Israeli-Palestinian violence and an international aid boycott that followed Hamas’ parliamentary election victory in January. The Israeli assault threatened to turn a bad situation into a disaster – underscoring the extent to which hopes have been dashed following the optimism that accompanied Israel’s pullout.
Palestinian plans for high-rise apartments, sports complexes and industrial parks in lands evacuated by Israel have given way to despair, with rising poverty, increasingly violent relations with Israel and a looming threat of civil war.
waitaminute… it is happening here at home… against good old american homegrown terrorists hippies!!! that’s it… the first chance i get, i’m outta here, and i’m not coming back.
June 27, 2006
Dear Friends and Family,
I need your help to protect my family, the collective efforts of tens of thousands of citizens known as the “Rainbow Family.” This week, near Steamboat Springs, Colorado, the U.S. Forest Service has taken illegal action to stop this annual assembly for expression and prayer, in gross violation of the participants essential Constitutional rights.
The ‘Rainbow’ Gatherings have borne a legacy of spiritual & cultural pilgrimage to the National Forests since 1972, the purest exercise of open consensual assembly in our time. The annual ‘Gathering of the Tribes’ draws thousands over the first week of July, focusing on the 4th as a holy day of prayer for peace and freedom. In recent years small regional events in this mode have emerged, and such gatherings have taken place in many nations around the world.
THE GATHERING EXPERIENCE —
Some say the “Rainbow” Gathering is the continuation of the idealism of Woodstock. I think of it more as my annual spiritual retreat and family reunion. Since 1980, I have gathered with my family to compare ideas and pray for peace. I arrive loaded with the burdens of my work, depressed about the world situation. Each year I depart with my faith in humankind renewed and with the energy to fight the beast another year.
The rainbow family is not organized in any way; it is an exercise in self-determination and cooperation in the public interest, without need of government controls. We understand that no matter what comes down, it is the respect and care for each other that win in the end. We have no leaders or leadership, we have no offices or officers, we have no treasurer or treasury. We sit in counsel, often for days at a time in order to make mutual decisions, but there is no power to enforce these decisions on any individual. In the end, just like in society, it works because enough responsible people make sure that what needs to be done gets done.
We have been doing rainbow gatherings for over 30 years, each time in a different national forest across the country. We come in and set up a village in the woods. Cooperative kitchens pour out a wide variety of foods. Seminars on just about any topic are run by the hour.
The Rainbow is known as a healing gathering; people with various ailments come for help. Here in one place they can receive healing, from herbalists, acupuncturists, chiropractors and masseuses working with osteopaths and physicians. These healers work as a team and share their knowledge in a holistic approach that teaches all involved a lot about the roots of medicine.
Religious groups, ranging from Christians to Hare Krishnas set up camps. It’s truly a free society. We go pretty far back in the woods to get away from the ills of civilization like alcohol and hard drugs. We have our gathering and then restore any damage we cause to the woods. And we have a perfect record of restoration of the forest.
It’s great to walk through a gathering and see so many people but not a scrap of paper on the ground, not a cigarette butt in sight. Each year we train thousands of newcomers how to get along in the woods without destroying the place. Knowledgeable Forest Servide ‘Resource’ personnel love us; it’s the Federal bureaucrats and police from Washington who are on our case.
REPRESSIVE FEDERAL POLICIES —
The Bush Administration has spent millions of dollars trying to stop the Rainbow Gatherings. They are enforcing a ‘Noncommercial Group Use’ permit regulation that is impossible for unaffiliated individuals to comply with. 36 CFR 251.54 They require that that someone sign as an agent for a fictional group entity named as permit Holder — which then must assume full liability from the Government and bind participants vicariously to its terms.
By the creed of the gatherings, no one can appoint themselves to such a position. More importantly, such an ad hoc gathering has no legal capacity to designate agents or act as a group party in any way. As a result, individuals are denied personal standing in First Amendment exercise and subjected to harsh criminal prosecution for being anywhere near the area
The Forest Service requires that a permit be applied for in advance of the gathering. And they use any excuse possible to deny a permit application when we manage to submit one. This year their denial was based on the fact that a logging company had a permit to log in a nearby parcel of the national forest, even though there is no logging activity present whatsoever. The site is far remote from any inhabitants — but still the Forest Service is all over our case.
Millions of taxpayer dollars are being spent to block this harmless gathering from taking place. The scariest aspect of all this is how Homeland Security is using these gatherings to perfect their techniques of martial law. Regulations written for the Federal Emergency Management Authority to deal with natural disasters are now being used to crush dissent in this country.
Each year the Rainbow Gathering is declared a “National Incident” and federal military law ensues. A Special Agent is appointed “Incident Commander”, with a Delegation of Authority, a large law enforcement “Team”, and huge budget to control the gathering. Qualified Forest Service administrators lose their power, while the county sheriff and other officials are brought into targeted law enforcement actions by inclusion in the Incident Team and other inter-agency agreements.
Each year Homeland Security gains more power over the individuals involved.
RIGHTS CRISIS IN COLORADO —
At this writing Forest Service law enforcement has issued over 500 tickets to the early arrivals at the gathering in Colorado. They have blocked the road and have prevented food and water from reaching those who managed to get into the gathering before the police roadblock was set up.
The 500 people with tickets are being herded into trials like none anyone has seen before in America. These pseudo trials are prototypes for what Homeland Security will use in the cases of insurrection or even a plague. Defendants lose the right to a public hearing (this year these hearings are being held behind closed doors in a firehouse garage near the site.
Attorneys and legal observers have been denied the right to even view these trials. The defendants are not explained their rights nor afforded the right to an attorney, the right to summon witnesses, the right to a jury trial, etc. Defendants ordered to appear each day at 9:00 a.m. and sit in the hot sun without water or sanitary facilities until their trials. Some have now been waiting for several days. These abbreviated trials only take a few minutes. Last year I tried to help a string of defendants defend themselves in these trials but felt helpless to do much as the system was clearly stacked against them.
This year is especially frustrating to me as I have to watch this come down from 6000 miles away. Right now I am in Hungary at a medical conference for my employment. I am flying home on Thursday and plan on being in court Saturday, July 1st, to defend some of my best friends who got a ticket for illegally gathering as they drove down a public highway.
WHAT TO DO —
The confrontation this year is getting more intense by the minute, which is why I am asking for your help. The only way to stop a massive conflagration in Colorado in the next few days is to get thousands of people to contact their political representatives as well as the responsible administrators at the Forest Service to demand that this repression stop immediately.
Please, even if you can never conceive of yourself at a Rainbow Gathering, you must understand that if these citizens lose their constitutional right to gather, we all lose such rights. This year the Rainbow Gathering is being used to set precedents that will be turned against drug policy, civil liberty, anti-war or other activists in the near future.
**********************
Following are some instructions on who to write and/or call
We hope to start flooding the Department of Agriculture and the Forest Service with complaints starting Monday morning and not stopping until harassment stops. It is especially important that we get a few Congressional representative and Senators concerned enough to write the Forest Service for an explanation of why so much money is being spent to keep people from camping in the National Forest set aside for exactly that purpose.
Please keep the pressure on these bureaucrats until we are able to spread the word that the government has backed off and that the gathering can proceed unhindered.
If you do not know the contact information for your Congressman or Senator, you can find this here. You can call your representative at 212-224-3121. Besides your representatives in Washington, please call and write the following people to voice your protest to this harsh treatment of people who just want to go on a camping trip in the woods. Keep the calls coming until word is passed around that the government has called off their dogs. Please forward this letter to your friends and feel free to re-post it on any listserv or website you wish. Email me if you have any questions.
Don E Wirtshafter
Attorney at Law
Box 18 Guysville, OH 45735
740 662 5297
don [at] hempery.com
USDA, Natural Resources & Environment
Mark Rey, USDA Undersecretary
1400 Independence Ave. SW, .. 217-E
Washington, DC 20250
202-720-7173 Fax: 202-720-0632
mark.rey [at] usda.gov
Kathleen Gause, Director 202-205-8534
USDA Forest Service
Civil Rights Staff
Stop Code 1142
1400 Independence Ave., S.W.
Washington., DC 20250-1142
Tel (202) 205-1585
Office of the Chief
Dale Bosworth, Chief
USDA Forest Service
Yates Federal Building (4NW Yates)
201 14th Street, SW – Washington, DCÊ20250
202-205-1661; Fx: 202-205-1765
Executive Assistant…Karla Hawley, 202 -205-1195
Medicine Bow-Routt National Forests,
Mary H. Peterson, Supervisor
2468 Jackson Street — Laramie, WY 82070-6535
307-745-2300 Fax: 307-745-2398
U.S. Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Region (R-2)
Rick Cables, Regional Forester
Mail: P.O. Box 25127 — Lakewood, CO 80225-0127
303-275-5451
Richard Stem, Deputy Regional Forester, Resources: 303-275-5451
Steve Silverman, Office of General Counsel, Regional Attorney: 303-275-5536
Bill Fox, Law Enforcement & Investigations, Special Agent in Charge: 303-275-5253
Jerome Romero, Deputy Director of Civil Rights: 303-275-5340
Some resources to research these issues further:
The best Rainbow website:
http://www.welcomehome.org
A good article written before the feds came down hard:
http://www.csindy.com
More recent coverage:
http://www.rockymountainnews.com and http://www.denverpost.com
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i wonder how the “christian” right-wing will respond to this, which appears to be more scientific evidence to support the idea that they’re wrong…
Research adds to idea of biological basis for sexual orientation
WASHINGTON – Having several older brothers increases the likelihood of a man being gay, a finding researchers say adds weight to the idea that there is a biological basis for sexual orientation.
“It’s likely to be a prenatal effect,” said Anthony F. Bogaert of Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada, “This and other studies suggest that there is probably a biological basis for” homosexuality.
S. Marc Breedlove of Michigan State University said the finding “absolutely” confirms a physical basis.
“Anybody’s first guess would have been that the older brothers were having an effect socially, but this data doesn’t support that,” Breedlove said in a telephone interview.
The only link between the brothers is the mother and so the effect has to be through the mother, especially since stepbrothers didn’t have the effect, said Breedlove, who was not part of the research.
Bogaert studied four groups of Canadian men, a total of 944 people, analyzing the number of brothers and sisters each had, whether or not they lived with those siblings and whether the siblings were related by blood or adopted.
He reports in a paper appearing in Tuesday’s issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that having several biological older brothers increased the chance of a man being gay.
It’s an effect that can be detected with one older brother and becomes stronger with three or four or more, Bogaert said in a telephone interview.
‘Some sort of prenatal factor’
But, he added, this needs to be looked at in context of the overall rate of homosexuality in men, which he suggested is about 3 percent. With several older brothers the rate may increase from 3 percent to 5 percent, he said, but that still means 95 percent of men with several older brothers are heterosexual.
The effect of birth order on male homosexuality has been reported previously but Bogaert’s work is the first designed to rule out social or environmental effects.
Bogaert said he concluded the effect was biological by comparing men with biological brothers to those with brothers to whom they were not biologically related.
The increase in the likelihood of being gay was seen only in those whose brothers had the same mothers, whether they were raised together or not, he said.
Men raised with several older step- or adopted brothers do not have an increased chance of being gay.
“So what that means is that the environment a person is raised in really makes not much difference,” he said.
What makes a difference, he said, is having older brothers who shared the same womb and gestational experience, suggesting the difference is because of “some sort of prenatal factor.”
One possibility, he suggests, is a maternal immune response to succeeding male fetuses. The mother may react to a male fetus as foreign but not to a female fetus because the mother is also female.
It might be like the maternal immune response that can occur when a mother has Rh-negative blood but her fetus has Rh-positive blood. Without treatment, the mother can develop antibodies that may attack the fetus during future pregnancies.
Whether that’s what is happening remains to be seen, but it is a provocative hypothesis, said a commentary by Breedlove, David A. Puts and Cynthia L. Jordan, all of Michigan State.
The research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
and then, there’s a public toilet in thailand designed to make you uncomfortable.
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Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.
— President Ronald Reagan
Americans demand top-quality service from the private sector. They should get the same top-quality service from their government.
— President George W. Bush
it’s really strange for me to be agreeing with the great satan, but at the same time, why isn’t the government doing a better job of protecting our rights? it makes one wonder when they are they are the champions of democracy everywhere but in their own back yard…
BY MARNI GOLDBERG
26 June, 2006
WASHINGTON – Culminating emotional debate on patriotism and individual rights in the age of terrorism, the Senate is preparing to vote as early as Tuesday on a constitutional amendment to ban the burning or desecration of the U.S. flag.
It could become the first change to the Constitution approved by Congress in 35 years.
Supporters and opponents said the final result would be a cliffhanger, likely coming within one vote either way of the 67 needed to achieve a two-thirds majority and send the amendment to the states. If the Senate joins the House in approving the amendment, ratification by three-fourths of the states (at least 38) appears likely as many have already passed resolutions saying they would ratify it.
On one level, the debate takes its place among other culturally contentious issues the Republican congressional leadership has introduced in recent weeks, including a proposed ban on same-sex marriage. The issues are designed to appeal to the GOP’s conservative base ahead of the November congressional elections, but unlike some of those proposals, the flag desecration ban is seen as having a chance of passage.
The battle to ban the desecration of the flag has a long history. In 1989, the Supreme Court ruled that burning an American flag was a form of speech protected by the Constitution. In response to that ruling, Congress passed a law that would have punished anyone who purposefully mutilated, defaced, burned or trampled on the flag, among other actions. However in 1990, a 5-4 Supreme Court decision invalidated that law, once again coming down on the side of free speech.
Congress in response has attempted several times to change the Constitution and ban the activity, falling short each time. But a greater Republican majority and conservative presence in the Senate makes passage more likely this time, as does the emotional resonance of the Sept. 11 attacks. The amendment passed the House for the sixth time in 2005, on a 286-130 vote.
As the debate began Monday, the amendment’s supporters on the Senate floor used patriotic rhetoric to suggest the importance of the flag as representation of patriotism, liberty and the American union.
“I think of the veterans in our society,” said Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I think of the veterans’ expectation of the sanctity of the flag, I think of the flag as a symbol of what the veterans fought for, what they sustained wounds for, what they sustained loss of limbs for, what they sustained loss of life for.”
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, one of the amendment’s chief supporters, said, “The flag is a unique symbol of our nationhood that demands protection. There are few public symbols that we do share as people.”
Hatch along with such organizations as the Citizens Flag Alliance, an umbrella group that favors the amendment, say that the court erred in labeling flag desecration a form of protected speech.
If the amendment becomes part of the Constitution, it would return to Congress the authority to pass federal legislation protecting the American flag.
Those who oppose the amendment suggest that the measure has nothing to do with flag protection, and they are frustrated by Congress’ frequent attempts to amend the Constitution in what they call a political tactic.
“(Republicans) want to exploit America’s patriotism for their gain in November,” said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., adding, however, that he finds flag burning cruel and contemptible. “The real issue here is not the protection of the flag, it’s the protection of the Republican majority.”
Other organizations opposing the amendment said this debate diverts attention from ongoing issues facing Congress, and contributes to turning the Constitution into a bulletin board for posting the latest slogan.
“The Constitution has served the country well with a limited number of amendments,” said Elliot Mincberg of People for the American Way, a group that has spoken out against the amendment. “I have never seen (an amendment) like this one that would cut away from free speech.”
First Amendment concerns resonated on the Senate floor and elsewhere. Robert Corn-Revere, who wrote a report on the Flag Desecration Amendment for the First Amendment Center, pointed to history, suggesting that attempts to limit using the flag for political protest have only increased instances of flag burning.
Furthermore, the amendment would raise new problems while lawmakers and the courts struggled to define the terms “flag” and “desecration.”
For example, a shirt displaying the image of the flag may fall outside the law, as may a 47-star flag, which has never existed in U.S. history.
Opponents of the measure say the amendment would increase law enforcement’s ability to selectively prosecute people whose political messages were disagreeable.
“(The amendment) will open up a great period of uncertainty in a lot of litigation,” Corn-Revere said. “What it won’t do is increase respect for the flag, because you can’t force what goes on inside another person’s mind, and what it also won’t do is reduce the amount of flag burning and desecration.”
Senate Republicans are trying to torch a hole in the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee by passing an amendment to the Constitution that would allow federal and state authorities to punish flag-burning.
With the Fourth of July fast approaching, Senate Republicans are holding a barbecue. Unfortunately, instead of grilling hot dogs and hamburgers, they are trying to torch a hole in the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee by passing an amendment to the Constitution that would allow federal and state authorities to punish flag-burning.
Some things should be out of bounds even in a competitive election year. Messing with the Constitution is one of them.
In reality, of course, the Stars and Stripes are in no urgent need of protection from scruffy match-wielding protesters. The Senate has been debating the flag issue on and off for years – ever since the Supreme Court’s 1989 decision holding, quite properly, that flag-burning, however offensive it may seem, is constitutionally protected free speech. The amendment’s return – just in time to distract voters from G.O.P. failures on more pressing fronts – might be dismissed as a bad joke except for two things: an intense lobbying campaign on its behalf by the American Legion, and the fact that no lawmaker relishes taking a stand that might be portrayed as unpatriotic, especially in an election year.
The last time the full Senate voted on the amendment, in 2000, the measure came up just four votes short of the required two-thirds. Nose counters on both sides say that supporters of the amendment are now just a single vote shy. That means that when the roll call is taken on the amendment later this week, there are no freebies. On this round, every vote counts. The House has already approved the amendment, and its ratification by the states is virtually certain should the Senate go along.
As an alternative to the amendment, two of its opponents, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, and Robert Bennett, Republican of Utah, have proposed a statute against flag-burning instead. Unquestionably, passing a law to address this nonproblem is preferable to rewriting the Constitution. But in crafting a bill with a comparatively narrow reach, its sponsors have not cured the affront to free speech. For that reason, it deserves to be defeated.
As debate on the amendment proceeds, past supporters like Harry Reid, the Democratic minority leader, owe a duty to search their consciences. Each senator must cast a vote as if it is the deciding one. Given the political math, it well could be.
548
i’ve been feeling overwhelmed recently, so i went from reading community blogs as well as individual blogs, to only reading individual blogs… and this is precisely the reason why:
As we, the American people, approach the anniversary of our independence from tyranny in 1776, it pays to consider the Bill of Rights threatened by the secrecy-obsessed Bush administration.
Freedom of the press and religion, the right to peacefully assembly, freedom from unlawful searches and seizures have all been endangered by this administration’s reckless conduct in the global war on terror.
The Clinton administration brought us the end to welfare as we knew it.
The Bush administration has brought us an end to the Constitution as we knew it.
We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare, must examine the Bush administration’s excesses, misconduct and unlawful agenda affecting individual liberties and democracy.
To paraphrase Edward R. Murrow, the Bushvolk have defended democracy abroad and denied it at home. They have out-Nixoned Nixon.
In the next few weeks, expect several columns that celebrate our independence by describing our threatened liberties.
Let’s have an open and honest public debate about issues of importance to our national identity.
We should all question why the federal government silenced librarians until after Congress renewed the USA Patriot Act.
Librarians who had wanted to speak publicly or testify before Congress during hearings were prohibited from doing so. They were threatened with federal imprisonment if they did. Once the Patriot Act was renewed, the gag was lifted.
We should question why animal-rights groups, environmental organizations and civil rights interests fall under the label “domestic terrorism.” Since when is People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals equal to al-Qaida?
Since when does telling the public about global warming threaten national security? Expect to learn why this White House considers your phone calls and e-mails the government’s business not yours.
This White House has sought to quell debate by invoking such things as “executive privilege,” “state secrets” and “national security.” It has made the U.S. attorney general, sworn to uphold the Constitution, its lapdog.
It has made citizens fearful of writing signed op-eds and letters to newspaper editors that might get them labeled as subversive or “anti-Bush.”
The Bushvolk are goose-stepping their way into history. They’re trampling the Constitution. They have slandered jurists as “activist judges.” They have misinterpreted Congressional intent and bent and/or broken laws.
Through indefinite incarcerations of people not charged with crimes, they have deprived people of the right to outside legal counsel and privileged communications.
With the oversight of an emasculated Congress, the administration has abused its powers to establish an imperial presidency.
We escaped one King George only to have crowned another.
We can keep America safe and free. We must confront terrorism and resist tyranny.
We, the people, must let freedom ring. To do anything less is to lose America.
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thanks to
546
courtesy of
1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.”
2. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.
and
1. Apart from the oft-mentioned tuba and the occasionally-mentioned synthesizer, what musical instruments do you play?
earlier in life, i would have said that it would be easier to name the musical instruments i don’t play, but since my injury, the number of instruments that i have actually determined that i can play again is relatively small. before my injury the only instruments that i couldn’t play were ones with strings (although my wife will tell you that i played guitar, i didn’t really play guitar, i just plunked around). since my injury, i play tuba and trombone, sort of… other brass instruments that use 3, 4 or 5 valves are more or less of a possibility, depending on how small their embrochure is, and although i used to play flute, clarinet and saxophone quite well, i’ve lost enough use of my right hand that they are probably a lost cause. i also play keyboards, but not as well as i used to before my injury, which wasn’t as good as i wanted to play keyboards, but good enough that i had done gigs in several bands.
2. How did you become aware of the positive meanings of the swastika?
i have been intrested in swastikas ever since i was first able to draw one, and was reprimanded for drawing something that people made a fuss about. at that time, it was probably more that i was reprimanded for drawing something that people made a fuss about that was attractive to me than the fact that it was a swastika, regardless of what it meant, but once i put the two together, it has always been a source of fascination to me. i first learned about the spiritual significance of the swastika when i was in high school, approximately 30 years ago, which added a new layer of fascination to the whole thing. my next step is to get a swastika tattoo on my scalp.
3. How do those around you generally react when you listen to the music of Arnold Schoenberg? (Yes, I look at peoples’ info pages for question ideas…)
about 95% of people that hear me listening to arnold shönberg have responded with varying degrees of “what the hell are you listening to anyway??”, and about 4% of the remainder (like my mother, for example) have been made physically ill… it’s always impressed me that somebody actually succeeds in doing that and calling it music, but even moreso when it actually is music.
in case you’re interested, the remaining 1% are people who, like me, listen to just about anything with enjoyment.
4. What’s your favorite band/musician, of any genre?
you have to ask?
frank zappa.
5. Why a duck? (I had to slip a silly one in, most people just got serious stuff…)
the tone that is played when you call a radio station and you’re call being recorded for broadcast – a short, repeated tone that does not interfere with the conversation and is repeated at reasonable intervals as long as the recording is taking place – is called a duck, and is required by the federal communications commission unless the person making the recording has a warrant to record your conversation without your knowledge.
545
my style disappeared again, and, unlike the last time, there doesn’t appear to be any way to fix it. i have re-opened one of my bug reports, but there has been no action on it for a couple of days, so i don’t expect much.
i went out and bought $100 worth of sound effects for “Snow White and The Three Stooges Dwarves“… i bought a ratchet, a frog/creak cuico-like thing (which is my favourite), a duck-call like thing, a samba-whistle “solitary tinamou” bird-call, and a nightengale call which i haven’t yet figured out how to work… i’m assuming that you put water in it, blow it, and it makes a “chirp-chirp-chirp” noise, but when i put water in it and blow, it makes a single-pitched whistle, unless i hold it so that the water comes out the mouthpiece, in which case it makes a single, slow chirp while spraying water all over my face. the phil has a rehearsal this evening, supposedly at hales, but that has yet to be confirmed. we go to OCF in two weeks, so i’d better learn how to make the nightengale call work before then.
it turned out that moe had to work late, so we didn’t get to go to the park we had originally planned on (dash point park) or fly our kites, and instead we went to the park near our house (five mile lake park), and had a picnic while watching the bats flutter about over the lake until the mosquitos drove us inside. i’ve got my wedding anniversary on my calendar now, so presumably i won’t forget it next time.
544
tomorrow is my 8th wedding anniversary, and i forgot, and scheduled a rehearsal for that day several weeks ago… now i’ve got to cancel the rehearsal at the last minute and think of some way to un-dissapoint moe, who had to remind me. 8P
Solstice!
the parade went well. i got to the site at 8:00 am, and, because of the fact that i was driving an art car, i was able to drive right in and park a block and a half away from the center of the universe, and park without hassle. strangely enough, although the parade and the pageant were higher profile,
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i think a lot of this update is going to be about the art car blowout, because having the art car was the main reason why everything else went so smoothly. i didn’t even have to unpack my gear for the parade until 10:00, although i did put a whole bunch of ganesha murtis and a siva murti in the back window, and 5 sivalingams in the front window (no picture, sorry), so i hung around and saw the entire fair before all the crowds, and basically relaxed. jeremy was back from the berklee school, which was the first time in almost a year that i’ve played with him. earlier emails from him said he was going to be at OCF this year, but instead he’s going to greece and italy with two other (female) students for something related to school, but i get the very strong impression that it may be a lot more than that – nudge nudge wink wink… i saw my father, and he looked as though he were pointing his camera right at me (you’d think that i would know by this time), but he didn’t say anything to me and didn’t even acknowledge my presence – admittedly, there were thousands of people, at the same time, he pointed his camera right at me. don’t be too surprised if pictures of me don’t turn up on my father’s photo CDs some day…
after the parade i went back to my car and dropped off my tuba and gear, and picked up my trombone and headed up to gasworks park for the pageant. my call was at 3:00 pm, and we were done with the parade by 2:00, so i was able to relax and take my time. there’s apparently a new hare kṛṣṇa restaurant in the university district which had set up a booth at gasworks, so i got the chance to hang out and talk with the vaisnava devotees who said that most of them actually work at microsoft. they make a really good curry.
i haven’t written much about the pageant, and i’m probably going to make this it, because honestly, i didn’t have a clue what was going on. there was apparently something having to do with the four elements, plus a “techno tribe” that represented æthyr, or something like that, i suppose. apparently brian kooser had been busy, because there were a whole bunch of giant puppets that had his hands all over them, including a whole bunch of giant, deformed baby heads, a puppet that grew from merely giant to truly enormous (which was accomplished with the use of a man-lift, which i could see from “back stage”), and a giant floating bear puppet that transformed into something else, which i was not able to get a clear view of what it was. the trombone choir (which was actually three trombonists, joined for the last song by a fourth, on stilts, who came up from the cast) was directed by mark nichols, who i know from the moisture festival, but all he had us doing was making more or less bizarre noises on cue, and because of the fact that i only saw the performance from back stage, i never really got a good idea of what it was about.
when that was done, i wandered back to my car and packed up my trombone, but it was around 5:00, and there were still crowds of people hanging around, so it was impossible for me to drive anywhere anyway, so i perused the fair again, which was mostly home-crafted stuff, imported stuff, food, and other commercial enterprises with random music acts. i was able to drive out at 8:00, whereupon i went and dropped off orrin’s sax (for which he paid me $120).
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sunday, i got to the art car parade staging location, which was the phinney community centre, at 9:30 am, and took a few pictures of the cars as they were showing up. there was one in particular that was tremendously detailed, but totally meaningless. then we drove around greenlake and back to the fair.
i saw three broad groups of people that wandered by ganesha the car: the first were the people who said something along the lines of “i wonder what it says” and then walked on without bothering to find out. of these, there was an interesting sub-group, which said, usually with some authority to the group of people that they were travelling with, that it was some language or another, which was usually wrong. the languages generally were hebrew, and arabic (farsi and persian were the two main variants), but one i heard really boggles my mind: they said “oh, that’s french.”…
WHAT???
the second group of people were the most likely to stop and ask questions, and they ranged from the merely curious but clueless, to the people who actually knew what language it is, and could sound out words. these people were usually discernable by long pauses and thoughtful expressions as they sounded out the words.
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the third group were indians or people who are into yoga or hinduism, who knew what the car was without having to say anything. i only talked with a few of them, but they were universally positive in their reactions. they’re the people for whom ganesha the car was made originally, and although there were comparitively few of them, i’m glad to have been there if it was only for them.
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not everybody that walked by was exactly “normal”. this baby has a weird hat… cute, but weird… and what do you suppose his indian parents are looking at?
i talked to a guy who had seen my car in auburn about a month ago. he writes down all of the vanity license plates he sees, and the impressions he has about what kind of people drive the cars they’re attached to. he’s got a whole bunch of information from 3 years of research, and is planning on putting it all in a book soon.
i talked with a couple of teenage girls who were in seattle with a group from their church, to do prison ministry (hah!). i talked with them for about 45 minutes and by the time they walked away, they were thoroughly confused and sincerely questioning the version of reality presented by the prison ministry trip with which they had been brainwashed.
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i got a chance to talk with don ehlen, creator of the fish mobile and others. don was the original inspiration for ganesha the car. i met don in 1999, when he and i were in the production of “Rock Opera”, an opera about geology by my friend pliny the weird. i had thought about writing sanskrit on my car for a couple of years, but when i saw the fish mobile i asked don about how he had done it, and from there it was all downhill.
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the owner of ‘VAINVAN’ has had brain surgery as well, as has her husband.
the frog car, rev. bill’s vacation bible camp, and one or two other cars had an mp3 player hooked up to a loudspeaker under the hood. i also saw a couple of cars that had “guest books” attached to them. art cars mean that the owner is an artist, which can mean that when you see one, there’s a possibility that they will be selling their artwork, which may or may not have anything to do with the art on their car. also, there are other “art car blowouts”, those that i know of are in canada, oregon and california, that pay your gas, food and lodging if you bring an art car to their blowout.
542
my style mysteriously returned. apparently i had “pasted a new layer over” over my layout, which is news to me… of course i was unaware that i was working with “layers”, i thought i was working with “wizards” who are supposed to keep track of the “layers” for me, but apparently i was mistaken because once i reverted to the “layer” that i was familiar with, everything went back to the way it should have been all along… before things on the server end got screwed up to begin with… grumble, mutter… 8/
a whole bunch of stuff surrounding the solstice parade, solstice pageant and art-car blowout will have to wait until tomorrow, because i’m beat.
541
blah. my style disappeared and there is apparently no way to get it back. i filed what amounts to a bug report, which got responded to a couple of times, but at least one of them was a canned response, and i don’t even think they looked at the replies. the other one hasn’t even been looked at for two days now, and i seriously suspect that they’re ignoring it.
540
busy. i’ve had a rehearsal every day so far this week: monday and wednesday snow white, tuesday the BSSB, and today is the trombone choir that’s performing for the solstice pageant after the parade. i’ve got two performances saturday, one at the parade and one at the pageant, plus the art car blowout that is saturday and sunday, so i’ve got to wash ganesha the car tomorrow.
another order for $40 worth of incense from someone in denver.
not a workshop update:
i picked up the octave key from orrin last night. so i’ve officially finished the alto sax. i made a new screw for the octave key, put on a new pad and provided a flat spring that wasn’t there, and adjusted the linkage so that it worked correctly. if the octave mechanism on a sax isn’t working correctly, the probabilty is good that the entire horn won’t play right. when you’re playing in the second octave, above the G key, the upper octave key is open and the lower octave key is closed, but as soon as you activate the G key, the mechanism automatically closes the upper octave key and opens the lower octave key at the same time. it’s a pretty sensitive balance between 5 springs, and i got it to work the first time without having to figure out what it was actually supposed to do.
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538
according to the spam LJ support sent me, my style should be back “in a few hours, once the internal cache is cleared out”… why it takes a few hours to clear an internal cache is beyond me, but apparently my style has been randomly changing for more than a year because of “the internal caches becoming corrupted in some form”… now i understand “internal cache”, and i understand “corrupt”, but what i don’t understand is why it takes so long to clear a corrupt internal cache. admittedly, i’m sure they’re running a whole farm of multi-terrabyte disk arrays, but my impression is that they’d take less time if they just rebooted the machines, and while that doesn’t necessarily produce the most desirable results for us end-users, at the same time, if it would replace information that has become corrupt with the corresponding uncorrupted information, i would do that rather than taking hours to clear out a cache on the off chance of finding something that points to the source of corruption.
i suppose that’s what they get for running a system that is in test off of servers that are in production.
537
my style changed again, unexpectedly, and unexplained… component to generator, purple to blue, serif to ariel, left to top… and now the customisation page for component is not the same, so there’s no way to change it back.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/przxqgl/39141.html – Mon, 21 Mar 2005
http://www.livejournal.com/users/przxqgl/39442.html – Fri, 25 Mar 2005
8/
8(
8P
536
Do-It-Yourself Impeachment – this is another one of those quirks that’s still left in our rapidly disappearing government rights that, if carried out in just exactly the right way, by enough people, just might work… it’s worth a try. nothing else has helped… 8/
Opponents say $648 million proposal too expensive
June 8, 2006
By KRISTEN MILLARES BOLT
Nearly $650 million to increase scrutiny of containers shipping into Seattle and every other U.S. port was stripped out of a national security funding package moving through Congress this week in a move critics say makes the country more vulnerable to terrorist attacks.
Opponents of the $648 million for port security said it was too expensive and needed to be cut to satisfy President Bush’s request that the supplemental budget for things such as the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina reconstruction be brought under control.
Though the action by Congress was not unexpected, port safety advocates such as Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Port of Seattle Chief Executive Mic Dinsmore were dismayed.
“We are not going to have the money we need for screening machines, customs inspectors, Coast Guard inspectors, radiation monitors, gates, fences and more,” Murray said. “The administration keeps talking a good game, but words do not provide security.”
The decision came on the heels of the House passage Tuesday of a separate Department of Homeland Security spending bill. Absent in that bill was a controversial provision requiring that all U.S.-bound containers be scanned at overseas ports, which Democrats had tried to push through after the national uproar over the Dubai Ports World deal this spring.
Currently, about 5 percent of U.S.-bound containers are inspected.
The $648 million in port security funding was supported by Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Homeland Security panel. It would have paid for inspectors to be added at 50 foreign ports, additional Coast Guard inspectors to oversee security abroad and domestically, and 60 cargo container imaging machines.
Byrd’s amendment passed in the Senate but was not included in the House version. Though the final version of the funding package still needs to be voted on by the Senate and the House, the committee that eliminated the amendment early Wednesday took further measures to ensure that it could not be reinstated this year.
“Like many people who have been strong advocates of getting this national security issue right, I am disappointed,” Port of Seattle chief Dinsmore said. “We have not determined what kind of negative impact it will have, but if it takes money away from projects we need, it is going to hurt Seattle, as well as Tacoma and Everett.”
The American Association of Port Authorities said the move was especially inopportune, given the additional costs incurred by ports implementing the government mandate for standardized federal identification for port workers.
Those rules, announced last month, create a national standardized identification procedure for all who have unescorted access to ports: longshore workers, truck drivers, port staff and contractors, and vessel and rail operators. Making that happen could cost from $299 million to $325 million, according to the Department of Homeland Security figures cited by the port association. However, the Homeland Security bill passed by the House contains only $40 million specifically designated for that.
“It’s a grave disappointment that’s not putting money into real port security,” said Herald Ugles, president of Local 19 International Longshore and Warehouse Union.
“They paid money to inspect American workers, but should be spending it more wisely on inspecting cargo.”
Ugles said the government, as part of a nationwide effort, asked for and received a list of the names and birthdates of all Local 19 longshoremen. Their information, he said, will be checked against the terrorist watch list.
“We understand that it has to be done, but they need to be inspecting the containers,” Ugles said.
The Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill passed by the House does include $4.2 billion for port, container and cargo security, but Murray said those funds are “not enough, that is why we asked for more.”
Murray said that ports need the kind of hardened security now present at the airports, and that the cost of doing so far exceeds the bill’s budget for it. The bill will go onto a committee that will resolve the differences between the Senate and the House versions, then pass through a final vote.
It includes $2.1 billion for the Coast Guard port security operations, $1.7 billion for Customs and Border Protection cargo inspection and trade operation, $139 million for a Container Security Initiative, $178 million for radiation portal monitors, $70.1 million for a Customs Trade Partnership Against Terrorism, and $200 million in port security grants.
“You’re talking less then bare bones with those numbers,” said Murray, calling the emergency security funding package “the smallest budget number we’ve seen in a long time.” She is co-writing legislation that would “push the borders back” and have containers inspected in foreign ports, among other things.
The White House had urged Congress to keep to its limit, or risk veto of the emergency funding bill that will send much-needed cash to Iraq and areas damaged by Hurricane Katrina.
535
| This Is My Life, Rated | |
| Life: |  6.4 |
| Mind: |  7.3 |
| Body: | 7.3 |
| Spirit: |  8 |
| Friends/Family: | 6.6 |
| Love: |  9.1 |
| Finance: |  2.7 |
| Take the Rate My Life Quiz | |
not a workshop update:
it’s as finished as i can make it, but it’s missing the upper octave key (orin’s father has it, for some unknown reason), but it makes all the correct popping noises when i close the keys, and with a piece of tape over the upper octave tone hole, i was able to play all the way down to Bb without any difficulty… and i figure if i can play it, there’s a good chance that an experienced sax player without a brain injury will do just fine.
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i also put a new mouthpiece cork on the neck, but, alas, i will have to wait for orin to get the key from his father before i can actually finish the horn…
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533
not a workshop update: i finally found my cork and felt cement, and got my leak light set up. finished the lower stack, the C-D# keys, and the D-B-Bb key/G# key combination. mostly pad leveling, regulation, and spring tensioning, although i broke the spring on the C# key twice (doh!). it’s really incredible to be able to do this, because i’m basically running on automatic… if i were to stop and think about what i’m doing, it would never get finished.
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i tried to take a picture of the leak light in action, but it was too dark, and if i use the flash then you can’t see the leak light. i’ll figure out something and post a picture of it later. now i’ve got to go to a ballard sedentary sousa band performance at small faces child development center.
SPAM SUCKS!
this is to let you spammers know that i have been in contact with the administrators for the following site, which is NOT what it looks like:
http://ss1.secureprocessor.com/wcart/tucci-imports/images/pp/primapagina.htm
they have assured me that the site will be removed without any further hesitation, and those responsible will be put in contact with the appropriate authorities.
the site is a “phishing” site, which fools you into believing that it’s paypal (it’s not, DO NOT try to log in there). i have also reported it to spoof at paypal, the administrator of the place where you originally sent your spam (vi.net), and the FBI.
the last thing the spammer expects to see… IS THE MALLET!
531
WASHINGTON, May 11 – President Bush appears to be losing support among a key group of voters who had hitherto stood firmly with the president even as his poll numbers among other groups fell dramatically.
A new Gallup poll shows that, for the first time, Bush’s approval rating has fallen below 50% among total fucking morons, and now stands at 44%. This represents a dramatic drop compared to a poll taken just last December, when 62% of total fucking morons expressed support for the president and his policies.
The current poll, conducted by phone with 1,409 total fucking morons between May 4 and May 8, reveals that only 44% of those polled believe the president is doing a good job, while 27% believe he is doing a poor job and 29% don’t understand the question.
The December poll, conducted by phone with 1,530 total fucking morons, showed 62% approved of the president, 7% disapproved and 31% didn’t understand the question.
Faltering approval ratings for the president among a group once thought to be a reliable source of loyal support gives Republicans one more reason to be nervous about the upcoming mid-term elections. “If we can’t depend on the support of total fucking morons,” says Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), “then we’ve got a big problem. They’re a key factor in our electoral strategy, and an important part of today’s Republican coalition.”
“We’ve taken the total fucking moron vote for granted,” says Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL), “and now we’re paying for it. We’ve let the Democrats control the debate lately, and they’ve dragged discourse back into the realm of complex, nuanced issues. So your average total fucking moron turns on his TV and sees his Republican Congressman arguing about Constitutional law or the complexities of state formation in the Middle East, and he tunes out. He wants to hear comforting, pandering, flattering bromides and he doesn’t want to hear a logical argument more complex than what you’d find on a bumper sticker.”
For Feeney, the poll is a dire warning that Republicans can ignore only at their peril. “This should send a signal that we have to regain control of the debate if we want the support of our key constituencies in the coming election and beyond. We need to bring public discourse back into the realm of stupidity and vacuity. We should be talking about homosexual illegal immigrants burning flags. We should be talking about the power of pride. We should be talking about freedom fries. These are the issues that resonate with total fucking morons.”
But some total fucking morons say it’s too late. Bill Snarpel of Enid, Oklahoma is a total fucking moron who voted for Bush in both 2000 and 2004. But he says he won’t be voting for Bush in 2008. “I don’t like it that he was going to sell our ports to the Arabs. If the Arabs own the ports then that means they’ll let all the Arabs in and then we’ll all be riding camels and wearing towels on our heads. I don’t want my children singing the Star Spangled Banner in Muslim.”
Total fucking moron Kurt Meyer of Turlock, California also says his once solid support for Bush has collapsed. “He invaded Iraq and all those soldiers died, and for what? We destroyed all their WMDs, but now their new president is making fun of us and saying he’s going to build nuclear bombs and that we can’t stop him. Well, nuclear bombs are even worse than WMDs, so what did we accomplish?”
Laura McDonald, a total fucking moron from Chandler, Arizona, says she is disappointed that the president hasn’t been a more forceful advocate of Christian values. “This country was founded on Christian values,” she says, “but you’d never know it looking around and seeing all the Mexicans running around. I thought Bush was going to bring Jesus back into the government. Instead, Christians are being persecuted worse than ever before in history, because all these Mexicans come here and tell Christians that we have to respect their religious beliefs. So now it’s illegal for children to pray in school. Soon it will be illegal for them to speak English.”
Not all total fucking morons have turned their backs on the president. Jeb Larkin of Topeka, Kansas says he still fully supports Bush. “He is doing a great job. He is a great president. He is a great decider. I have a puppy. His tail sticks straight up and you can see his butthole.”
And not all Republican lawmakers are concerned about the poll. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), for one, does not find it a cause for anxiety. While he agrees that his party should not take total fucking morons for granted, they “really don’t have anywhere else to go. They’re never going to be able to understand someone like Al Gore or John Kerry or anybody intelligent and articulate who wants to talk about substantive issues. Just try having a conversation with one of them about global warming. They’ll say, ‘Oh, but Rush says volcanoes consume more ozone than humans do.’ I mean, they’re morons! Total fucking morons!”
“They’ve got nowhere else to go,” Alexander reaffirms with a smile, “and they always vote.”
Ban backers still hopeful, citing a few new votes in favor
WASHINGTON – A constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage went down to Senate defeat Wednesday, but supporters said that several new votes for the measure represent progress that gives the GOP’s base reason to vote on Election Day.
The 49-48 vote fell 11 short of the 60 required to send the matter for an up-or-down tally by the full Senate.
Had the amendment survived, a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress would have been required to send it to the states. It then would have had to be ratified by at least 38 state legislatures.
But ban supporters took solace in the fact that the idea received several new votes from Republican freshmen elected after the amendment received its last vote in 2004.
“We’re building votes,” Sen. David Vitter, R-La., a new supporter, said before the vote. “That’s often what’s required over several years to get there, particularly to a two-thirds vote.”
A majority of Americans define marriage as a union of a man and a woman, as does the amendment, according to a new ABC News poll. But just as many oppose amending the Constitution, the poll found.
Forty-five of the 50 states have acted to define traditional marriage in ways that would ban same-sex marriage — 19 with their own state constitutional amendments and 26 with statutes.
“Most Americans are not yet convinced that their elected representatives or the judiciary are likely to expand decisively the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples,” said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a possible presidential candidate in 2008. He told the Senate on Tuesday he does not support the federal amendment.
The measure’s defeat in the Senate is by no means its last stand, said its supporters.
“I do not believe the sponsors are going to fall back and cry about it,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. “I think they are going to keep bringing it up.”
not a workshop update:
got my bench motor set up and working, and found cork and felt, but not cement for them. got to set up my leak light, because when i got the lower stack steel un-bent and re-tapped (3:48NF), i discovered that the pads needed leveling (naturally), but i don’t know where my leak light is, so locating that and getting it set up will be my next goal.
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in spite of the fact that i don’t have a “real” workshop set up, i took in orin’s buescher alto saxophone because i figured that i could. and so far, i’m doing marginally okay, although i’m going to have to set up my bench motor (the grey box in the lower left), because he’s got three bent steels that need to be straightened, and for that you need to be able to spin the steel laterally. also he has one steel on the lower stack which needs to be re-tapped to the correct size, and to be re-slotted so that the next guy who works on it won’t have to remove it with a pair of pliers, like i did. i’ve already replaced two springs, and i think there’s at least one more. also i have to figure out where my cork cement is so that i can replace most of the key corks, and i’ve got to figure out which box my key felts are in, so that it doesn’t go clank clatter. i didn’t realise this until after i had started taking it apart, but i believe this is the first alto sax that i have repaired since my injury. intellectually, i look at the pile of bits and pieces and wonder how i’m going to get it back together again, but i’m sure that it will come back to me… partially because i was able to take it apart with minimal trouble. orin has another sax, a conn, which also needs help, and i’ll probably take it on as well, but one thing at a time.
528
But State Department objects to removal of protection from degrading treatment
By Julian E. Barnes
June 5, 2006
Washington — The Pentagon has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that bans “humiliating and degrading treatment,” according to military officials, a step that would mark a potentially permanent shift away from strict adherence to international human rights standards.
The decision culminates a lengthy debate within the Department of Defense, but will not become final until the Pentagon makes new guidelines public, a step that has been delayed.
However, the State Department fiercely opposes the military’s decision to exclude Geneva Convention protections and has been pushing for the Pentagon and White House to reconsider, Defense officials acknowledged.
For more than a year, the Pentagon has been redrawing policies on detainees and interrogation, and intends to issue a new Army Field Manual, which, along with accompanying directives, represents core instructions to U.S. soldiers worldwide.
The process has been beset by debate and controversy, but the decision to omit Geneva Convention protections from a principal directive comes at a time of growing worldwide criticism of U.S. detention practices and the conduct of American forces in Iraq.
The directive on interrogations, a senior Defense official said, is being rewritten to create safeguards so that detainees are treated humanely but can still be questioned effectively.
President Bush’s critics and supporters have debated whether it is possible to prove a direct link between administration declarations that it will not be bound by Geneva and events such as the abuses at Abu Ghraib or the killings of civilians last year at Haditha, Iraq, allegedly by U.S. Marines. But the exclusion of the Geneva provisions may make it more difficult for the administration to portray such incidents as aberrations.
The detainee directive was due to be released in April along with the Army Field Manual on interrogations. But objections from several senators on other Field Manual issues forced a delay. Senators objected to provisions allowing harsher interrogation techniques for unlawful combatants, such as suspected terrorists, as opposed to traditional prisoners of war.
The lawmakers argue that differing standards of treatment allowed by the Field Manual would violate a broadly supported anti-torture measure advanced by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. McCain last year pushed Congress to ban torture and cruel treatment and to establish the Army Field Manual as the uniform standard for treatment of all detainees. Despite administration opposition, the measure passed and became law.
For decades, it was the official policy of the U.S. military to follow minimum standards for treating detainees as laid out in the Geneva Convention. But, in 2002, President Bush suspended portions of the Geneva Convention for captured al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.
Among the directives being rewritten following Bush’s 2002 order is one governing U.S. detention operations. Military lawyers and other Defense officials wanted the redrawn version of the document to again embrace Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention. The protections for detainees in Article 3 go beyond the McCain amendment by prohibiting humiliation, treatment that falls short of cruelty or torture. However, the move to restore U.S. adherence to Article 3 was opposed by Vice President Dick Cheney’s office and by the Pentagon’s intelligence arm, government sources said.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told New York to drop dead yesterday as he slashed the city’s federal anti-terror funding in a traitorous action that endangers the lives of 8 million people and demands his immediate firing.
Chertoff’s decision to cut the flow of U.S. money by 40% was at the least gross incompetence and at the worst vengeful payback by a petty bureaucrat who tangled last year with the NYPD and wound up humiliated. Either way, President Bush must give Chertoff the boot with a hearty, “Heck of a job, Mikey.”
This city, America’s No. 1 target, had to fight long and hard for federal terror aid while Congress doled out the money as pork rather than based on threat. That was supposed to change this year because Chertoff was given the power to allocate much of the funding based on where it was needed most. Instead, fresh from monumentally bungling the U.S. response to Hurricane Katrina, he went out of his way to whack New York’s slice of the national pie from $208 million to $124 million. The No. 2 target, Washington, also took a huge hit from Chertoff’s team.
Homeland Security’s rationale for stabbing the city in the back, as Rep. Pete King put it, was based on figments of the imagination and outright lies, all recorded in black and white on the score sheet used by the department for determining which cities got funding. By Chertoff’s reckoning, New York has not a single national monument or icon that needs special security. No Ground Zero. No Empire State Building. No New York Stock Exchange. No Federal Reserve Bank. No St. Patrick’s Cathedral. No Statue of Liberty. No nothing.
Even more outrageous, Chertoff concluded that New York’s Police and Fire departments are clueless in the war on terror. In his official estimation, giving them all the money they requested would have been a complete waste. Among the units Chertoff rated as in the bottom 15% nationwide, and requiring special federal baby-sitting, was the NYPD’s globally recognized counterterrorism bureau, the very outfit that shamed him in October when Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Ray Kelly wisely put the city subways on alert for an attack. Coincidence? We think not, and we dare Chertoff to repeat the same despicable libel face to face with Kelly.
He wouldn’t have the nerve. He has got to go.
WHEW!
i got up at 6:00 so that moe could jump start ganesha the car so i could drop it off in burien at 9:00 (which meant a couple of hours of “hanging around” waiting for jack to get there). then i took the bus into downtown seattle and “hung around” until my appointment with ned at 2:00, during which jack called and said that ganesha the car was working again, so i finished up with ned and took the bus back down to burien, picked up the car at around 3:45, and jack only charged me $45, which i actually had!
after 4 hours of “hanging around” in seattle, i realised that i really miss living in the city. living out in the sticks is okay, but it would be a lot better if i had a workshop and/or some way to bring in money. but the lack of a job and/or a workshop wouldn’t matter so much if we were living in the city, because there’s so much to look at, even if i don’t have anything else to do.
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according to what ezra tells me, katharyn is back in the state loony bin, because she ran away from managed care facility a few weeks ago instead of taking her medications. she still won’t admit that she’s there involuntarily. she still thinks the state is persecuting her…
i’m so glad that i’m not a part of her life any longer…
525
Anal Sex in Accordance with God’s Will – much as some “christians” would like to think, i believe that the person who made this web site is completely serious in an ironic sort of way. of particular interest are Oral Sex in Accordance with God’s Will and Fisting and God’s Will
!!!!
When they took the fourth amendment,
I was quiet because I didn’t deal drugs.
When they took the sixth amendment,
I was quiet because I was innocent.
When they took the second amendment,
I was quiet because I didn’t own a gun.
Now they’ve taken the first amendment,
and I can say nothing about it.
there goes the first amendment…
The following is a first-hand account of police harrassment and brutality against a World Can’t Wait organizer in Cleveland. If anything like this happens to you, let us know asap! Contact [email protected].
My name is Carol Fisher, and I am on the staff of Revolution Books in Cleveland OH. At the bookstore we have been immersed in building and supporting the initiatives of World Cant Wait. Yesterday, 1.28.06, while putting “Bush Step Down” posters on telephone poles along a major thoroughfare on a sunny Saturday afternoon, I was brutalized by Cleveland Heights police, charged with 2 counts of felony assault and held incommunicado under police custody in the hospital! This outrage and others like it must be exposed and opposed by all who hate the direction that the Bush regime is taking this country and the world.
Here is what happened:
I had set out from my house with a full agenda, to contact lots of people and get out materials about our upcoming Cleveland event to Drown Out the State of the Union address, and the call to march around the White House on Feb. 4th. My first stop was the an area known for its community of artists and progressives, where I stapled up posters for blocks and was greeted warmly by those who saw and appreciated what World Cant Wait is doing. I talked to an artist, and a Palestinian store owner who took fliers to distribute to customers.
Next stop, to the east side. I drove down a street in Cleveland Heights, another area known for its diversity and progressive history. This street was badly in need of postering too and though i was in a big hurry, I couldnt drive on without getting up a few signs. Before long a cop called from across the street: “Ma’am! Hundred dollar fine for doing that!” Oh really, since when? Another way of keeping us from getting the word out, eh? But not wanting to get arrested, I said ok and put up my staplegun and walked away. But that wasnt the end of it. “Ma’am! Hundred dollar fine unless you take those posters down.” He is pursuing me across the street. Damn! OK fine, I say, I will take them down (not wanting to get into a confrontation, because I have lots to do today!) But this too is not enough for the cop. He wants my ID. I say I dont have my ID. He grabs my arm. I say let go of me, I am not doing anything wrong, I will take the posters down. People are watching to see what happens, are outraged but very afraid. The cop wont let go, he clearly wants more grief from me, and he is in the spotlight. He wants people to be scared. He pushes me against a store window and next thing I know I am face down on the sidewalk with two cops on top of me, one with his knee in my back. I am trying to call out to people, to tell them what the posters are about. They keep pushing my face into the sidewalk. I cant breathe.
I have osteoradionecrosis in my jaw, resulting from radiation treatments for cancer. My jawbone is slowly deteriorating, is very fragile, and doesnt heal well. I am 53 years old, not exactly a spring chicken. A hand comes down again to push my chin against the concrete. By this time there are four cops on the scene. My hands are tightly cuffed behind my back. They lift me up and shove me onto a parkbench and shackle my legs. I am still calling out, telling people what this is about. One of the cops says to me, “Shut up or I will kill you!”, “I am sick of this anti-Bush shit!” “You are definitely going to the psyche ward.” Then somebody calls the EMS, and a fire squad shows up. The cop superviser appears and puts his finger in my face: “I dont like it when people treat my men like this and if you don’t obey the law you will suffer the consequences.”
I am lifted into the EMS truck, hands still cuffed behind my back. I ask to make a call and this is refused, but a fireman offers to make a quick call for me. If not for this, no one would have known where I was or what was happening, a fate shared by many immigrants in this country. At the hospital, I am treated as an arch-criminal. Escorted by four policemen, I shuffle into the emergency room, legs still shackled, covered with leaves and mud. I think to myself, if I was Black, I would not have made it this far. I would probably be dead by now. People in the emergency room are shocked by the scene and by what I am saying happened. I probably do look pretty crazy by now.
They put me on a gurney and pull the curtains around. One female nurse and four male cops. They want me to undress in front of the cops. I refuse. The cops refuse to leave. Finally the nurse shields my body with a gown as I undress and put on hospital clothes. I am cuffed to the bed, and two cops remain guarding me the whole time. They put in an IV. I have no idea what they have in mind. Questions, probes, tests and a tetanus shot, a hint from the nurses that friends are calling to find out whats going on. First they say that one friend is coming in to see me, but that never happens.
After many hours a psychiatrist appears to determine my sanity. I dont want to talk to him, but have no choice. “This information is confidential”, I say. Well yes, he says, but if the police want the information, I don’t know if I can refuse… “This information is confidential”, I repeat, and I tell him, there are times when you have to decide which side you are on. I have told him why I have wound up here and what they did to me, and I tell him, this is a moment in history when people have to stand firm against these repressive measures. He replies, “Fair enough”, and proceeds to write a detailed record of my injuries.
I dont know it at the time, but outside in the waiting room all hell had broken loose. In a very short period of time, over a dozen WCW people showed up at the emergency room to demand that someone be allowed to see me. The WCW people discussed what was happening with the folks waiting in the ER, who were horrified at what was happening, and very supportive when they were shown the posters I had been putting up. The police and hospital staff claimed over and over that the police were in charge of me, and they determine what happens, not the doctors! Another example of a police state.
At one point, there was a big confrontation between the WCW people and the police, right in the ER. My supporters said that we weren’t going to leave until someone saw me. Some of them were sitting in the waiting room holding the big green WCW posters.
The main cop tried to have a “private conversation” with the person with medical power of attorney. ” NO! Come out here in the open where we can all hear!” As people gathered to listen to the conversation, and enter in their own opinions, the police threatened WCW folks with arrest! They argued, stood their ground, called this shameful (both to the police but also to the nurses who did nothing to stand against this shit). The cops kept saying that there was no legal right to see me, but people responded that, in Bush’s America, the law is whatever the police say it is and that there is a moral and ethical right to to check on someone who is in the hospital.
Then a large phalanx of cops came. My friends pushed it as far as they could, then marched out of the ER, followed by the cops, all the way up to the street. 4 more people showed up who’d heard about what was happening and wanted to help.
A lawyer and a doctor, who are endorsers of the WCW Call, persisted in getting what info they could. All the while, people were calling the local media (who never showed up!), calling in complaints to the Cleveland Heights Police Department, and Cleveland Heights City Hall. I was never able to be seen by my own nurse or doctor or communicate by phone with anyone.
Shortly after being released from the hospital, I was released on my own recognizance. The battle is far from over. This is but one example of the attempts that the state, their authorities and spokespeople will make to try to keep us from opposing the crimes of this regime, and especially now, 2 days before the State of the Union address. Our cause is as righteous as it gets, and no attempts to intimidate or suppress, with threats or laws or physical abuse, should stop us but instead strengthen the resolve, build our organization and further demonstrate to the world that this regime is doomed, they are vicious, and they must be stopped.
As it says in the Call, “If we speak the turh, they will try to silence us. If we act, they will try to stop us. But we speak for the majority, here and around the world, and as we get this going we are going to reach out to the people who have been so badly fooled by Sush and we are NOT going to stop…The future is unwritten. Which one we get is up to us.”
There are plans in the works for possibly a press conference, suing the Cleveland Heights Police Department, taking this issue of brutality to the Cleveland Heights City Council Meeting on Feb 6, doing a press conference, and circulating a pledge of medical personnel to not allow medical treatment to be run by the police. We will also be working with lawyers to fight these outrageous charges. If any legal aid could be offered nationally, it would really help.
Call the Cleveland Heights Police at 216-291-3883
Call Cleveland Heights City Hall at 216-291-4444
Please contact us at [email protected] or 216-633-6200
For as long as we have had some kind of mental health system, women who “behave incorrectly” have been ordered to undergo its treatments. At one time or another, feminists, suffragists, menopausal women, and women who question authority in any way have been sent to institutions so that they could recieve “help.” The latest woman to get such help is Carol Fisher of Cleveland. Fisher is on the staff of Revolution Books, and on January 28, while she was putting Bush Step Down posters on telephone polls in Cleveland Heights, she was ordered by a police officer to take them down or face a fine. When she complied, she was asked for her ID, which she did not have on her. He then grabbed her by the arm, pushed her against a store window, and knocked her face down onto the sidewalk. He was joined by another officer, and they both pressed their feet against her back until she could not breathe. Her chin was pressed down into the concrete; Fisher has osteoradionecrosis in her jaw from radiation treatments for cancer.
Fisher was handcuffed and shackled. During this time, Fisher yelled out to everyone who passed what the posters were about. One of the police officers then told her, Fisher says, to “Shut up or I will kill you! I am sick of this anti-Bush shit! You are definitely going to the psyche ward.”
She was then threatened some more and taken away in an EMS truck. At the hospital, Fisher was asked to undress in front of the police officers, which she refused to do. The officers refused to leave, so a nurse attempted to shield her while she undressed. Fisher says she was then cuffed to the bed, given an IV of some sort, and made to wait hours for a psychiatrist to interview her. By this time, members of her World Can’t Wait group were in the emergency room having a confrontation with the police, who refused to let them see Fisher. Someone called the news media, who never made an appearance.
Fisher was eventually released and sent home. On May 2, she went to court and was found guilty of two counts of felonious assault of two police officers. The prosecution’s “witnesses” had not seen the alleged assault; rather, they claimed that Fisher lacked respect for authority. It took a jury more than eight hours to find her guilty. According to a letter to the editor of The Free Press, the prosecution misquoted Fisher’s testimony and gave the jury incorrect information about the city’s arrestable offenses. When asked to clarify the law, the judge refused.
As part of the pre-sentencing procedure, the judge, Timothy McGinty, had Fisher undergo a state psychological exam. He had already surmised publicly that Fisher must be mentally unstable to resist arrest. McGinty then declared her “delusional,” and on May 9, ordered her to be incarcerated in a psychiatric unit of the Cuyahoga County Jail in downtown Cleveland, where she now sits and waits; she could face a three-year prison sentence. According to Mark Crispin Miller, who has spoken with Fisher by telephone, Fisher has also been placed on suicide watch, has had her eyeglasses taken from her, and–if she refuses to take the psych exam–she will be sent to North Coast Mental Institute for a 20-day evaluation.
523
Sat Jun 3, 2006
CHARLESTON, W.Va. – Monty Coles was 3,000 feet in the air when he discovered a stowaway peeking out at him from the plane’s instrument panel: a 4½-foot snake.
Coles was taking a leisurely flight over the West Virginia countryside in his Piper Cherokee last weekend and was preparing to land in Ohio when the snake revealed itself.
“Nothing in any of the manuals ever described anything like this,” said the 62-year-old Cross Lanes resident.
But advice given 25 years earlier from his flight instructor sprung to mind: “No matter what happens, fly the plane.”
Coles attempted to swat the snake but it fell to the pilot’s feet, then darted to the other side of the cockpit.
While maintaining control of the single-engine plane with one hand, Coles grabbed the reptile behind its head with his other.
“There was no way I was letting that thing go,” he said. “It coiled all around my arm, and its tail grabbed hold of a lever on the floor and started pulling.”
The next step was to radio for emergency landing clearance.
“They came back and asked what my problem was,” he said. “I told them I had one hand full of snake and the other hand full of plane. They cleared me in.”
After a smooth landing, Coles posed for pictures with the snake, then let it loose.
“That snake resides in Ohio now,” he said.
The perfect female breast – even if you don’t have female breasts, for whatever reason, they can fix you right up…
522
now i think Aleister Crowley is one of the most interesting people in history, and i hesitate to say anything that might be construed as being uncomplimentary to him (he has so many fans, after all), but this really makes me wonder about the influences that caused the current corruption in power…
George W. Bush, Barbara Bush, and Aleister Crowley
maybe my OTO-affiliated friends could confirm or deny?
521
grr
before the performance yesterday, i couldn’t get the car started.
last year about this time, the car started being intermittent about starting, but i found that if i got a jump, everything worked fine. i thought it might be the battery or the alternator, but i checked both of them and they were working fine, as far as i could tell. it was an intermittent problem, which, of course, meant that it didn’t do it any time when a mechanic was present, and it didn’t do it often enough that carrying jumper cables and hoping that i would be able to find a jump if necessary didn’t solve the problem. and to add to that, it seemed to be a problem that only happened when we had dry weather, because once it started raining regularly, the problem went away.
but this time it was slightly more sinister. i noticed that when i hit the brakes, the tachometer “glitched” – briefly went down to zero, and then back up to running speed. it was subtle enough that the first few times it happened, i either didn’t see it at all, or caught the movement of the needle as it was flying back up to normal running speed, but i wached, and finally figured out what was going on. this was something i had never seen before, but it went along with what i had figured out previously, that either the battery or the alternator was faulty in some way, and when the brake lights went on, it caused an electrical surge in the car.
after my performance, at the seatac mariott hotel, i went out to the car, and it wouldn’t start… no problem, i figure… just roll it backwards so that someone can pull along side it, jump start it, and i’ll be on my way. but no, now i can’t shift it, either. i checked to see if the shift lever was locked because it has a locking steering column, but the steering wheel was moving freely, and i couldn’t have someone pull in beside me because the parking places on both sides of the car were blocked by other people. after about an hour and a half on the phone, finally, monique came up to “rescue” me, and she and i jury-rigged jump starting it by connecting two sets of cables together – which reminded me a lot of a long time ago when ian and i were hitchhiking on whidbey island, and we were picked up by a person who we later realised was very drunk, but not before he had attempted to jump start his car using coat hanger wire, and then just about ran over ian as he was getting his backpack on…
anyway, we got ganesha the car started and rolling home. as i was getting on the freeway, i turned on the lights, and there was a big electrical surge – it was almost as if i had turned the engine off. i was accellerating, and suddenly it shifted down into first, the RPMs went through the roof, all of the accessories, like my ipod, turned off, the “overdrive off” light went out, and there was a definite jerk as the car slowed down, and then sped up again.
and when i got home and turned off the car, it wouldn’t start, and i couldn’t shift it again.
grr
it’s going to see jack on monday, if i can get it started, but god knows how we’re going to pay for it…
and i just painted it. 8(
520
May 31, 2006
SALEM, Ore. – Police say a Salem man accidentally shot and killed himself Tuesday morning while he and his family were trying to climb out of a ravine after a car accident.
According to police, 38-year-old Vladimir Gorkavchenko was driving near Detroit early in the morning when he lost control of his minivan.
The car rolled multiple times, before coming to a rest at the bottom of a rocky embankment.
Gorkavchenko, his wife, and their daughter were uninjured in the crash.
Police say Gorkavchenko then removed a rifle from his van to take it with him as the three started climbing out of the ravine.
According to police, Gorkavchenko was using the rifle as a brace as he climbed and apparently slipped, causing the gun to fire a round that hit him in his thumb and his head.
It appears he died as a result of his injuries.
Detectives are continuing to investigate.
you might think that if pat robertson talks with God as much as he claims, that he might have some advance warning of things like this…
Religious broadcaster’s Learjet downed half mile from airport; 3 survive
GROTON, Conn. – Authorities in Connecticut say two people died after a plane owned by religious broadcaster Pat Robertson went down in heavy fog today.
Robertson was not aboard.
The bodies were recovered from Long Island Sound.
Three other people were in the Learjet 35 when it went down about a half-mile short of the runway at Groton New London Airport. They were able to escape with minor injuries. They were pulled from the water and taken to a hospital in New London.
The plane is registered to Virginia-based Robertson Asset Management. The company is owned by Robertson and is separate from the Christian Broadcasting Network.
Coast Guard officials said the chartered, twin-engine plane took off from Norfolk, Va., and stopped in Atlantic City, N.J., to drop off two passengers before heading to Connecticut.
By GINA VERGEL
EDISON — After a day of boating and swimming in the summer, Edison police officer Ioannis Mpletsakis said he drove in the nude so he wouldn’t ruin the leather seats in his BMW.
“I was in the Raritan River and a pool with chemicals,” the officer testified in Dunellen Municipal Court yesterday. “I decided, it’s dark out, it’s 10 o’clock at night, and it’s four or five minutes to my house.”
Mpletsakis, 26, took the stand in a trial where he is accused of assault by auto, because a passenger of a truck was injured; hindering apprehension and leaving the scene of an accident.
“It was the most foolish thing I’ve ever done, and I’ve been regretting it for the past 11 months,” Mpletsakis said. “I embarrassed myself, my family and the police department I work for.”
Mpletsakis crashed his 2002 BMW 330is into a box truck on Route 27 near Talmadge Road on July 20.
He testified yesterday that he got out of his car, checked to see the passengers of the truck were OK and ran to conceal his nudity.
Mpletsakis, who was suspended without pay after the July 20 accident, was found by a colleague behind a car in the parking lot of a building about 300 feet away from the scene.
Mpletsakis said he fled because he couldn’t get to a pair of shorts he had stashed on the foot well of the passenger side and didn’t feel safe in the vehicle. He said he ran toward the Pines Manor, where he hoped to get help and use the phone to call police.
“In my state of nakedness, I didn’t want to run down Route 27,” he said. “I didn’t want people to see me like that.”
Mpletsakis said his decision to drive naked was influenced by a love he had for the metallic green BMW, which he said he cared for meticulously.
“Even my family teased me on how I was always out there doing something to it — cleaning it; vacuuming it,” Mpletsakis said.
Middlesex County Assistant Prosecutor Brian Gillet asked Mpletsakis about the amount of alcohol he drank on July 20.
Mpletsakis testified to drinking three beers, but he said the reason he swerved into the box truck was because a third vehicle struck the left side of his BMW.
“I was going straight home,” Mpletsakis told Gillet. “If it wasn’t for that other vehicle, the accident wouldn’t have ever happened.”
Mpletsakis could not describe the third vehicle, which he said “whizzed by” his peripheral vision.
“Everything happened so fast,” he said.
As to why he left the scene of the accident, Mpletsakis said: “No one appeared to be in distress … no one was crying.”
Mpletsakis added the driver and passenger of the box truck were laughing at him when they saw him naked.
Like his colleagues who testified earlier in the trial, Mpletsakis said he would only charge someone with a summons for leaving the scene of the accident after he had all the facts.
“We try to locate the driver to give them the benefit of the doubt,” he said.
Gillet attempted to question Mpletsakis on the nature of a phone call made to his cell phone on the evening before the crash. But Dunellen Municipal Court Judge Joe Leonard sustained an objection by defense attorney Darren M. Gelber.
Gillet was also forbidden from asking about a prior car accident that left Mpletsakis badly injured in 2004. In that accident, Mpletsakis was driving southbound on Route 1 in a 2000 Honda Prelude when the vehicle left the road near Forest Haven Boulevard and struck a concrete wall near the old Ford plant, police said.
The next phase of the trial — motions and summations — will take place at 1 p.m. Monday. The trial is being held in Dunellen to avoid a conflict of interest in Edison.
Warning: Reading this post may be dangerous to your health. – If you have ever seen the Monty Python skit about the Most Dangerous Joke in the World, you will understand. Engrish at it’s all time best.
519
acupuncture in a couple of hours, and a gig at the seatac daughters of the american revolution with BSSB at 6:00. planting irises if there’s time, otherwise tomorrow.
518
June 01, 2006
by Richard Esposito
New York has no national monuments or icons, according to the Department of Homeland Security form obtained by ABC News. That was a key factor used to determine that New York City should have its anti-terror funds slashed by 40 percent–from $207.5 million in 2005 to $124.4 million in 2006.
The formula did not consider as landmarks or icons: The Empire State Building, The United Nations, The Statue of Liberty and others found on several terror target hit lists. It also left off notable landmarks, such as the New York Public Library, Times Square, City Hall and at least three of the nation’s most renowned museums: The Guggenheim, The Metropolitan and The Museum of Natural History.
The form ignored that New York City is the capital of the world financial markets and merely stated the city had four significant bank assets.
New York City is home to Chase, JP Morgan, Citi Group, The New York Stock Exchange, The Commodities Exchange, American Express, George Soros funds, Michael Gabelli’s funds, Lazard Frere and Salomon Brothers, to name just a few of the more prominent banking interests located there.
The formula did note a commuter population of more than 16 million around the city twice struck by fundamentalist terrorists and twice more targeted in plots halted in pre-operational stages. It noted the more than eight million residents and the largest rail ridership in the nation – more than five million. It is those commuters and rail riders who are expected to suffer most from the cuts since mass transit is listed on most DHS alerts as the top terror target. (Click here for the Strategic Threat Document obtained by ABC News.)
The report lists as classified “visitors of interest destination city,” immigration cases, suspicious incidents and FBI cases. New York City is home to the largest FBI field office in the country, which actively monitors 24/7 the Iranian Mission. The city has also had the most significant terror trials in the nation and is home to one of the largest air hubs in the nation.
Are gyms, not mosques, the main breeding ground for Islamic terrorists?
By Brendan O’Neill
June 1, 2006
There have been three major terror attacks in the West over the past five years—9/11, the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, and the 7/7 suicide attacks on the London Underground. For all the talk of a radical Islamist conspiracy to topple Western civilization, there are many differences between the men who executed these attacks. The ringleaders of 9/11 were middle-class students; the organizers of the Madrid bombings were mainly immigrants from North Africa; the 7/7 bombers were British citizens, well-liked and respected in their local communities. And interpretations of Islam also varied wildly from one terror cell to another. Mohammad Atta embraced a mystical (and pretty much made-up) version of Islam. For the Madrid attackers, Islam was a kind of comfort blanket. The men behind 7/7 were into community-based Islam, which emphasized being good and resisting a life of decadence.
The three cells appear to have had at least one thing in common, though—their members’ immersion in gym culture. Often, they met and bonded over a workout. If you’ll forgive the pun, they were fitness fanatics. Is there something about today’s preening and narcissistic gym culture that either nurtures terrorists or massages their self-delusions and desires? Mosques, even radical ones, emphasize Muslims’ relationships with others—whether it be God, the ummah (Islamic world), or the local community. The gym, on the other hand, allows individuals to focus myopically on themselves. Perhaps it was there, among the weightlifting and rowing machines, that these Western-based terror cells really set their course.
The British government recently published its Report of the Official Account of the Bombings in London on 7th July 2005. It reveals that three of the four members of the 7/7 cell seem to have become radicalized in gyms rather than in mosques. Mohammed Sidique Khan, leader of the cell, worked on his protégés in “informal settings,” primarily at a local Islamic bookshop where they watched radical DVDs and at local gyms, some of which were based in rooms below mosques. According to the report, “Khan gave talks [at the gyms], and worked out.” He set up two gyms, one in 2000 with local government money—which means that government officials unwittingly funded one of the settings for his efforts—and another in 2004. Shehzad Tanweer, the 22-year-old who seems to have been the second-in-command of the 7/7 cell, “got to know [Khan] again (having known him a little as a child) through one of the gyms.” Indeed, Tanweer was as much a fitness fanatic as he was a religious one. Shortly after 7/7, one of his former friends told the Guardian: “Shehzad went to a few mosques around here but he was more interested in his jujitsu. I trained with him all the time. He is really fit.” Jermaine Lindsay, another of the 7/7 bombers, has also been described as a “fitness fanatic.” A report published by the Terrorism Monitor at the end of July 2005 said that he “met his fellow bombers while attending one of the gyms set up by Khan.”
According to the British government’s report, one of Khan’s gyms was known locally as “the al-Qaida gym.” Khan also seems to have used outdoor sporting activities to win over and indoctrinate recruits, and the report suggests that other alleged terror cells in the United Kingdom may have done so as well. “Camping, canoeing, white-water rafting, paintballing and other outward bound type activities are of particular interest because they appear common factors for the 7 July bombers and other cells disrupted previously and since.” The report asks if such outings may have been used to “help with bonding between members of cells.”
Khan seemed to view gym and sports activities as more than an opportunity for physical bonding; he also appeared to consider them moral and pure, an alternative to the decadent temptations of contemporary society. Healthy living, as a doctrine, appears to have been close to his radical heart. In Khan’s talks to young Muslims and potential recruits, he reportedly made numerous references to keeping fit. His talks “focused on clean living, staying away from crime and drugs, and the value of sport and outdoor activity,” says the British government’s 7/7 report. Perhaps it was the gym setting that nurtured the 7/7 cell’s combination of arrogance and fury, its seeming belief that they were good and the rest of us were rotten.
One of the chief suspects in the Madrid bombings, Moroccan immigrant Jamal Zougam, was also known for his devotion to keeping fit. Zougam ran a mobile-phone shop in an immigrant quarter in Madrid, and he is thought to have provided the mobile phones for the remote detonators that exploded the bombs and killed 191 commuters in March 2004. According to reports, he was a “gym-loving man.” The French newspaper Le Monde reported that his friends and acquaintances were shocked to discover Zougam’s involvement in the Madrid bombings, because he liked nothing better than attending the “gym or the discotèchque.” The bomb that did not explode, and that subsequently led police to Zougam’s shop, had been planted in a gym bag. It is also reported that Zougam and Sarhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, the Tunisian ringleader of the Madrid bombings who blew himself up when surrounded by Spanish police a few weeks later, attended gym together and sometimes discussed politics there.
The 9/11 hijackers spent a great deal of time in gyms. Mohammad Atta joined one in Hamburg in 1999. Upon arrival in America in 2000, he and other leaders of his cell—Ziad Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi—signed up for gym memberships. When the “muscle hijackers” from Saudi Arabia, whose job was to use physical force on 9/11, joined the ringleaders in the United States, they were encouraged to find housing close to gyms and to get gym memberships. In the first week of September 2001, five of the muscle hijackers—Khalid Almihdhar, Nawaf al-Hazmi, Salem al-Hazmi, Majed Moqed, and Hani Hanjour—were regularly seen training and talking at Gold’s Gym in Greenbelt, Md.
The 9/11 hijackers needed to be reasonably fit for their operation. They had to overpower airline staff and passengers in order to commandeer the jets. Yet there seems to have been more to their interest in gyms than building up muscle. One gym owner said the men seemed to gather for “social reasons.” And it was Atta, Jarrah, and al-Shehhi, the pilots of 9/11 who would spend that fateful morning locked inside the cockpit, who seemed most keen on keeping fit. According to Complete 9/11 Timeline, published by the Center for Cooperative Research, Jarrah “train[ed] intensively” from May to August 2001 and Atta and al-Shehhi “also took exercising very seriously.” The muscle hijackers, meanwhile, tended to “simply cluster around a small circuit of machines, never asking for help and, according to a trainer, never pushing any weights.”
Perhaps the ringleaders of 9/11, like one of the prime suspects in Madrid and three of the four 7/7 bombers, had a penchant for healthy living. Certainly Atta seemed to be obsessed with bodily appearance. He advised his team of hijackers to shave off their pubic hair and to douse themselves in cologne the night before the attacks, to ready themselves for arrival in paradise. Islamic scholars have pointed out that these stipulations have little grounding in Quranic law. But they do reflect our keep-fit age. Bodybuilders, among others, are known to shave off their body hair in order to make the contours of their bodies look more impressive.
Today’s gym culture seems like the perfect vehicle for nurturing the combination of narcissism and loathing of the masses necessary to carry out a terrorist suicide mission. If some of these attackers viewed their own bodies as pure instruments, and everyone else as wasteful and deserving of punishment, they could just as well have come to that conclusion through absorbing the healthy-living agenda of the gym as by reading the Quran. At the gym, Atta, Khan, and the others could focus on perfecting the self, the body, as a pure and righteous thing—and hone their disdain for others.
So, should we shut down all gyms in the name of fighting terrorism? Of course not. It’s a ludicrous idea. But no more ludicrous, perhaps, than the infiltration of Western mosques.
Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted — enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.
BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.
Jun 01, 2006
Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush — and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush’s victory as nut cases in ”tinfoil hats,” while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ”conspiracy theories,”(1) and The New York Times declared that ”there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.”(2)
But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots — or received them too late to vote(4) — after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment — roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)
The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush’s victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11)
Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America’s voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. ”We didn’t have one election for president in 2004,” says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. ”We didn’t have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.”
But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I’ve become convinced that the president’s party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) — more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio’s Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes — enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)
”It was terrible,” says Sen. Christopher Dodd, who helped craft reforms in 2002 that were supposed to prevent such electoral abuses. ”People waiting in line for twelve hours to cast their ballots, people not being allowed to vote because they were in the wrong precinct — it was an outrage. In Ohio, you had a secretary of state who was determined to guarantee a Republican outcome. I’m terribly disheartened.”
Indeed, the extent of the GOP’s effort to rig the vote shocked even the most experienced observers of American elections. ”Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,” Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me. ”You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb.”
I. The Exit Polls
The first indication that something was gravely amiss on November 2nd, 2004, was the inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote counts. Polls in thirty states weren’t just off the mark — they deviated to an extent that cannot be accounted for by their margin of error. In all but four states, the discrepancy favored President Bush.(16)
Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science. Indeed, among pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be the most reliable. Unlike pre-election polls, in which voters are asked to predict their own behavior at some point in the future, exit polls ask voters leaving the voting booth to report an action they just executed. The results are exquisitely accurate: Exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the mark by more than three-tenths of one percent.(17) ”Exit polls are almost never wrong,” Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are ”so reliable,” he added, ”that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.”(18) In 2003, vote tampering revealed by exit polling in the Republic of Georgia forced Eduard Shevardnadze to step down.(19) And in November 2004, exit polling in the Ukraine — paid for by the Bush administration — exposed election fraud that denied Viktor Yushchenko the presidency.(20)
But that same month, when exit polls revealed disturbing disparities in the U.S. election, the six media organizations that had commissioned the survey treated its very existence as an embarrassment. Instead of treating the discrepancies as a story meriting investigation, the networks scrubbed the offending results from their Web sites and substituted them with ”corrected” numbers that had been weighted, retroactively, to match the official vote count. Rather than finding fault with the election results, the mainstream media preferred to dismiss the polls as flawed.(21)
”The people who ran the exit polling, and all those of us who were their clients, recognized that it was deeply flawed,” says Tom Brokaw, who served as anchor for NBC News during the 2004 election. ”They were really screwed up — the old models just don’t work anymore. I would not go on the air with them again.”
In fact, the exit poll created for the 2004 election was designed to be the most reliable voter survey in history. The six news organizations — running the ideological gamut from CBS to Fox News — retained Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International,(22) whose principal, Warren Mitofsky, pioneered the exit poll for CBS in 1967(23) and is widely credited with assuring the credibility of Mexico’s elections in 1994.(24) For its nationwide poll, Edison/Mitofsky selected a random subsample of 12,219 voters(25) — approximately six times larger than those normally used in national polls(26) — driving the margin of error down to approximately plus or minus one percent.(27)
On the evening of the vote, reporters at each of the major networks were briefed by pollsters at 7:54 p.m. Kerry, they were informed, had an insurmountable lead and would win by a rout: at least 309 electoral votes to Bush’s 174, with fifty-five too close to call.(28) In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair went to bed contemplating his relationship with President-elect Kerry.(29)
As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states — including commanding leads in Ohio and Florida — and winning by a million and a half votes nationally. The exit polls even showed Kerry breathing down Bush’s neck in supposed GOP strongholds Virginia and North Carolina.(30) Against these numbers, the statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000.(31) ”Either the exit polls, by and large, are completely wrong,” a Fox News analyst declared, ”or George Bush loses.”(32)
But as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show implausible disparities — as much as 9.5 percent — with the exit polls. In ten of the eleven battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls had predicted. In every case, the shift favored Bush. Based on exit polls, CNN had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points. Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent. Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more than the polls had predicted in Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.(33)
According to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in research methodology, the odds against all three of those shifts occurring in concert are one in 660,000. ”As much as we can say in sound science that something is impossible,” he says, ”it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.” (See The Tale of the Exit Polls)
Puzzled by the discrepancies, Freeman laboriously examined the raw polling data released by Edison/Mitofsky in January 2005. ”I’m not even political — I despise the Democrats,” he says. ”I’m a survey expert. I got into this because I was mystified about how the exit polls could have been so wrong.” In his forthcoming book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count, Freeman lays out a statistical analysis of the polls that is deeply troubling.
In its official postmortem report issued two months after the election, Edison/Mitofsky was unable to identify any flaw in its methodology — so the pollsters, in essence, invented one for the electorate. According to Mitofsky, Bush partisans were simply disinclined to talk to exit pollsters on November 2nd(34) — displaying a heretofore unknown and undocumented aversion that skewed the polls in Kerry’s favor by a margin of 6.5 percent nationwide.(35)
Industry peers didn’t buy it. John Zogby, one of the nation’s leading pollsters, told me that Mitofsky’s ”reluctant responder” hypothesis is ”preposterous.”(36) Even Mitofsky, in his official report, underscored the hollowness of his theory: ”It is difficult to pinpoint precisely the reasons that, in general, Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters.”(37)
Now, thanks to careful examination of Mitofsky’s own data by Freeman and a team of eight researchers, we can say conclusively that the theory is dead wrong. In fact it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were more disinclined to answer pollsters’ questions on Election Day. In Bush strongholds, Freeman and the other researchers found that fifty-six percent of voters completed the exit survey — compared to only fifty-three percent in Kerry strongholds.(38) ”The data presented to support the claim not only fails to substantiate it,” observes Freeman, ”but actually contradicts it.”
What’s more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit polls and the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent — a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country.(39)
”When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of data that supports the supposition of election fraud,” concludes Freeman. ”The discrepancies are higher in battleground states, higher where there were Republican governors, higher in states with greater proportions of African-American communities and higher in states where there were the most Election Day complaints. All these are strong indicators of fraud — and yet this supposition has been utterly ignored by the press and, oddly, by the Democratic Party.”
The evidence is especially strong in Ohio. In January, a team of mathematicians from the National Election Data Archive, a nonpartisan watchdog group, compared the state’s exit polls against the certified vote count in each of the forty-nine precincts polled by Edison/Mitofsky. In twenty-two of those precincts — nearly half of those polled — they discovered results that differed widely from the official tally. Once again — against all odds — the widespread discrepancies were stacked massively in Bush’s favor: In only two of the suspect twenty-two precincts did the disparity benefit Kerry. The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered ”27,” in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.(40)
Such results, according to the archive, provide ”virtually irrefutable evidence of vote miscount.” The discrepancies, the experts add, ”are consistent with the hypothesis that Kerry would have won Ohio’s electoral votes if Ohio’s official vote counts had accurately reflected voter intent.”(41) According to Ron Baiman, vice president of the archive and a public policy analyst at Loyola University in Chicago, ”No rigorous statistical explanation” can explain the ”completely nonrandom” disparities that almost uniformly benefited Bush. The final results, he adds, are ”completely consistent with election fraud — specifically vote shifting.”
II. The Partisan Official
No state was more important in the 2004 election than Ohio. The state has been key to every Republican presidential victory since Abraham Lincoln’s, and both parties overwhelmed the state with television ads, field organizers and volunteers in an effort to register new voters and energize old ones. Bush and Kerry traveled to Ohio a total of forty-nine times during the campaign — more than to any other state.(42)
But in the battle for Ohio, Republicans had a distinct advantage: The man in charge of the counting was Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of President Bush’s re-election committee.(43) As Ohio’s secretary of state, Blackwell had broad powers to interpret and implement state and federal election laws — setting standards for everything from the processing of voter registration to the conduct of official recounts.(44) And as Bush’s re-election chair in Ohio, he had a powerful motivation to rig the rules for his candidate. Blackwell, in fact, served as the ”principal electoral system adviser” for Bush during the 2000 recount in Florida,(45) where he witnessed firsthand the success of his counterpart Katherine Harris, the Florida secretary of state who co-chaired Bush’s campaign there.(46)
Blackwell — now the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio(47) — is well-known in the state as a fierce partisan eager to rise in the GOP. An outspoken leader of Ohio’s right-wing fundamentalists, he opposes abortion even in cases of rape(48) and was the chief cheerleader for the anti-gay-marriage amendment that Republicans employed to spark turnout in rural counties(49). He has openly denounced Kerry as ”an unapologetic liberal Democrat,”(50) and during the 2004 election he used his official powers to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens in Democratic strongholds. In a ruling issued two weeks before the election, a federal judge rebuked Blackwell for seeking to ”accomplish the same result in Ohio in 2004 that occurred in Florida in 2000.”(51)
”The secretary of state is supposed to administer elections — not throw them,” says Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Cleveland who has dealt with Blackwell for years. ”The election in Ohio in 2004 stands out as an example of how, under color of law, a state election official can frustrate the exercise of the right to vote.”
The most extensive investigation of what happened in Ohio was conducted by Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.(52) Frustrated by his party’s failure to follow up on the widespread evidence of voter intimidation and fraud, Conyers and the committee’s minority staff held public hearings in Ohio, where they looked into more than 50,000 complaints from voters.(53) In January 2005, Conyers issued a detailed report that outlined ”massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio.” The problems, the report concludes, were ”caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.”(54)
”Blackwell made Katherine Harris look like a cupcake,” Conyers told me. ”He saw his role as limiting the participation of Democratic voters. We had hearings in Columbus for two days. We could have stayed two weeks, the level of fury was so high. Thousands of people wanted to testify. Nothing like this had ever happened to them before.”
When ROLLING STONE confronted Blackwell about his overtly partisan attempts to subvert the election, he dismissed any such claim as ”silly on its face.” Ohio, he insisted in a telephone interview, set a ”gold standard” for electoral fairness. In fact, his campaign to subvert the will of the voters had begun long before Election Day. Instead of welcoming the avalanche of citizen involvement sparked by the campaign, Blackwell permitted election officials in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo to conduct a massive purge of their voter rolls, summarily expunging the names of more than 300,000 voters who had failed to cast ballots in the previous two national elections.(55) In Cleveland, which went five-to-one for Kerry, nearly one in four voters were wiped from the rolls between 2000 and 2004.(56)
There were legitimate reasons to clean up voting lists: Many of the names undoubtedly belonged to people who had moved or died. But thousands more were duly registered voters who were deprived of their constitutional right to vote — often without any notification — simply because they had decided not to go to the polls in prior elections.(57) In Cleveland’s precinct 6C, where more than half the voters on the rolls were deleted,(58) turnout was only 7.1 percent(59) — the lowest in the state.
According to the Conyers report, improper purging ”likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters statewide.”(60) If only one in ten of the 300,000 purged voters showed up on Election Day — a conservative estimate, according to election scholars — that is 30,000 citizens who were unfairly denied the opportunity to cast ballots.
III. The Strike Force
In the months leading up to the election, Ohio was in the midst of the biggest registration drive in its history. Tens of thousands of volunteers and paid political operatives from both parties canvassed the state, racing to register new voters in advance of the October 4th deadline. To those on the ground, it was clear that Democrats were outpacing their Republican counterparts: A New York Times analysis before the election found that new registrations in traditional Democratic strongholds were up 250 percent, compared to only twenty-five percent in Republican-leaning counties.(61) ”The Democrats have been beating the pants off us in the air and on the ground,” a GOP county official in Columbus confessed to The Washington Times.(62)
To stem the tide of new registrations, the Republican National Committee and the Ohio Republican Party attempted to knock tens of thousands of predominantly minority and urban voters off the rolls through illegal mailings known in electioneering jargon as ”caging.” During the Eighties, after the GOP used such mailings to disenfranchise nearly 76,000 black voters in New Jersey and Louisiana, it was forced to sign two separate court orders agreeing to abstain from caging.(63) But during the summer of 2004, the GOP targeted minority voters in Ohio by zip code, sending registered letters to more than 200,000 newly registered voters(64) in sixty-five counties.(65) On October 22nd, a mere eleven days before the election, Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett — who also chairs the board of elections in Cuyahoga County — sought to invalidate the registrations of 35,427 voters who had refused to sign for the letters or whose mail came back as undeliverable.(66) Almost half of the challenged voters were from Democratic strongholds in and around Cleveland.(67)
There were plenty of valid reasons that voters had failed to respond to the mailings: The list included people who couldn’t sign for the letters because they were serving in the U.S. military, college students whose school and home addresses differed,(68) and more than 1,000 homeless people who had no permanent mailing address.(69) But the undeliverable mail, Bennett claimed, proved the new registrations were fraudulent.
By law, each voter was supposed to receive a hearing before being stricken from the rolls.(70) Instead, in the week before the election, kangaroo courts were rapidly set up across the state at Blackwell’s direction that would inevitably disenfranchise thousands of voters at a time(71) — a process that one Democratic election official in Toledo likened to an ”inquisition.”(72) Not that anyone was given a chance to actually show up and defend their right to vote: Notices to challenged voters were not only sent out impossibly late in the process, they were mailed to the very addresses that the Republicans contended were faulty.(73) Adding to the atmosphere of intimidation, sheriff’s detectives in Sandusky County were dispatched to the homes of challenged voters to investigate the GOP’s claims of fraud.(74)
—
1) Manual Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating, ”Latest Conspiracy Theory — Kerry Won — Hits the Ether,” The Washington Post, November 11, 2004. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41106-2004Nov10.html
2) The New York Times Editorial Desk, ”About Those Election Results,” The New York Times, November 14, 2004. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70615FA3C5B0C778DDDA80994DC404482&n
=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fSubjects%2fE%2fElection%20Results
3) United States Department of Defense, ”Defense Department Special Briefing on Federal Voting Assistance Program,” August 6, 2004. http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2004/tr20040806-1502.html
4) Overseas Vote Foundation, ”2004 Post Election Survey Results,” June 2005, page 11. http://www.overseasvotefoundation.org/downloads/surveys/ovf_survey_01jun2005_
v1.0_usletter.pdf
5) Jennifer Joan Lee, ”Pentagon Blocks Site for Voters Outside U.S.,” International Herald Tribune, September 20, 2004.
6) Meg Landers, ”Librarian Bares Possible Voter Registration Dodge,” Mail Tribune (Jackson County, OR), September 21, 2004. http://www.mailtribune.com/archive/2004/0921/local/stories/02local.htm
7) Mark Brunswick and Pat Doyle, ”Voter Registration; 3 former workers: Firm paid pro-Bush bonuses; One said he was told his job was to bring back cards for GOP voters,” Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), October 27, 2004.
8) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election Results for the U.S. President. http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2004/2004pres.pdf
9) Ellen Theisen and Warren Stewart, Summary Report on New Mexico State Election Data, January 4, 2005, pg. 2. http://www.democracyfornewmexico.com/democracy_for_new_mexico/files/
NewMexico2004ElectionDataReport-v2.pdf
James W. Bronsan, ”In 2004, New Mexico Worst at Counting Votes,” Scripps Howard News Service, December 22, 2004. 10) ”A Summary of the 2004 Election Day Survey; How We Voted: People, Ballots & Polling Places; A Report to the American People by the United States Election Assistance Commission,” September 2005, pg. 10. http://www.eac.gov/election_survey_2004/pdf/EDS%20exec.%20summary.pdf
11) Facts mentioned in this paragraph are subsequently cited throughout the story.
12) See ”Ohio’s Missing Votes.”
13) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election Results for the U.S. President. http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2004/2004pres.pdf
14) Democratic National Committee, Voting Rights Institute, “Democracy at Risk: The 2004 Election in Ohio,” June 22, 2005. Page 5 http://a9.g.akamai.net/7/9/8082/v001/www.democrats.org/pdfs/ohvrireport/fullreport.pdf
15) See ”VIII. Rural Counties.”
16) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofksy International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 3 http://www.exit-poll.net/election-night/EvaluationJan192005.pdf
17) This refers to data for German national elections in 1994, 1998 and 2002, previously cited by Steven F. Freeman.
18) Dick Morris, “Those Faulty Exit Polls Were Sabotage,” The Hill, November 4, 2004. http://www.hillnews.com/morris/110404.aspx
19) Martin Plissner, “Exit Polls to Protect the Vote,” The New York Times, October 17, 2004.
20) Matt Kelley, “U.S. Money has Helped Opposition in Ukraine,” Associated Press, December 11, 2004. http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20041211/news_1n11usaid.html
Daniel Williams, “Court Rejects Ukraine Vote; Justices Cite Massive Fraud in Runoff, Set New Election,” The Washington Post, December 4, 2004.
21) Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss, “Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count,” Seven Stories Press, July 2006, Page 102.
22) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 3. http://www.exit-poll.net/election-night/EvaluationJan192005.pdf
23) Mitofsky International Web site. http://www.mitofskyinternational.com/company.htm
24) Tim Golden, “Election Near, Mexicans Question the Questioners,” The New York Times, August 10, 1994.
25) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 59.
26) Jonathan D. Simon, J.D., and Ron P. Baiman, Ph.D., “The 2004 Presidential Election: Who Won the Popular Vote? An Examination of the Comparative Validity of Exit Poll and Vote Count Data.” FreePress.org, December 29, 2004, P. 9 http://freepress.org/images/departments/PopularVotePaper181_1.pdf
27) Analysis by Steven F. Freeman.
28) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134
29) Jim Rutenberg, ”Report Says Problems Led to Skewing Survey Data,” The New York Times, November 5, 2004.
30) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134
31) Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies. U.S. Count Votes. Baiman R, et al. March 31, 2005. Page 3. http://www.electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Exit_Polls_2004_Edison-Mitofsky.pdf
32) Notes From Campaign Trail, Fox News Network, Live Event, 8:00 p.m. EST, November 2, 2004.
33) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 101-102
34) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 4.
35) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 120.
36) Interview with John Zogby
37) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 4.
38) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 128.
39) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 130.
40) “The Gun is Smoking: 2004 Ohio Precinct-level Exit Poll Data Show Virtually Irrefutable Evidence of Vote Miscount,” U.S. Count Votes, National Election Data Archive, January 23, 2006. http://uscountvotes.org/ucvAnalysis/OH/Ohio-Exit-Polls-2004.pdf
41) ”The Gun is Smoking,” pg. 16.
42) The Washington Post, “Charting the Campaign: Top Five Most Visited States,” November 2, 2004. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/elections/2004/charting.html
43) John McCarthy, “Nearly a Month Later, Ohio Fight Goes On,” Associated Press Online, November 30, 2004.
44) Ohio Revised Code, 3501.04, Chief Election Officer http://onlinedocs.andersonpublishing.com/oh/lpExt.dll?f=templates&fn=main-h.htm&cp=PORC
45) Joe Hallett, ”Blackwell Joins GOP?s Spin Team,” The Columbus Dispatch, November 30, 2004.
46) Gary Fineout, ”Records Indicate Harris on Defense,” Ledger (Lakeland, Florida), November 18, 2000.
47) http://www.kenblackwell.com/
48) Joe Hallett, ”Governor; Aggressive First Round Culminates Tuesday,” Columbus Dispatch, April 30, 2006. http://www.dispatch.com/extra/extra.php?story=dispatch/2006/04/30/20060430-B1-02.html
49) Sandy Theis, ”Blackwell Accused of Breaking Law by Pushing Same-Sex Marriage Ban,” Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), October 29, 2004.
50) Raw Story, “Republican Ohio Secretary of State Boasts About Delivering Ohio to Bush.” http://rawstory.rawprint.com/105/blackwell_campaign_letter2_105.php
51) In the United States District Court For the Northern District of Ohio Northern Division, The Sandusky County Democratic Party et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case No. 3:04CV7582, Page 8. http://electionlawblog.org/archives/10-20%20Order.pdf
52) Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff (Rep. John Conyers, Jr.), January 5, 2005. http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/ohiostatusrept1505.pdf
53) Preserving Democracy, pg. 8.
54) Preserving Democracy, pg. 4.
55) The board of elections in Cuyahoga, Franklin and Hamilton counties.
56) Analysis by Richard Hayes Phillips, a voting rights advocate.
57) Fritz Wenzel, ”Purging of Rolls, Confusion Anger Voters; 41% of Nov. 2 Provisional Ballots Axed in Lucas County,” Toledo Blade, January 9, 2005. http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050109/NEWS09/501090334&SearchID
=73195662517954
58) Analysis by Hayes Phillips.
59) Cuyahoga County Board of Elections
60) Preserving Democracy, pg. 6.
61) Ford Fessenden, ”A Big Increase of New Voters in Swing States,” The New York Times, September 26, 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/26/politics/campaign/26vote.html?ex=1254024000&en=
cd9ae70cb6e69619&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt
62) Ralph Z. Hallow, ”Republicans Go ?Under the Radar? in Rural Ohio,” The Washington Times, October 28, 2004. http://washtimes.com/national/20041027-115211-1609r.htm
63) Jo Becker, ”GOP Challenging Voter Registrations,” The Washington Post, October 29, 2004. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7422-2004Oct28.html
64) Janet Babin, ”Voter Registrations Challenged in Ohio,” NPR, All Things Considered, October 28, 2004.
65) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division, Amy Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case no. C-1-04-735, Page 2. http://fl1.findlaw.com/news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/election2004/mlrblackwell102704ord.pdf
66) Sandy Theis, “Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP?s Blanket Challenge Backfires in a Big Way,” Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004.
67) Daniel Tokaji, “Early Returns on Election Reform,” George Washington Law Review, Vol. 74, 2005, page 1235
68) Sandy Theis, “Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP?s Blanket Challenge Backfires in a Big Way,” Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004.
69) Andrew Welsh-Huggins, ”Out of Country, Off Beaten Path; Reason for Voting Challenges Vary,” Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), October 27, 2004.
70) Ohio Revised Code; 3505.19
71) Directive No. 2004-44 from J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio Sec?y of State, to All County Boards of Elections Members, Directors, and Deputy Directors 1 (Oct. 26, 2004).
72) Fritz Wenzel, ”Challenges Filed Against 931 Lucas County Voters,” Toledo Blade, October 27, 2004. http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041027/
NEWS09/410270361/-1/NEWS
73) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division, Amy Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case no. C-1-04-735, Page 4. http://news.corporatecounselcentre.ca/hdocs/docs/election2004/mlrblackwell102704ord.pdf
74) LaRaye Brown, ”Elections Board Plans Hearing For Challenges,” The News Messenger, October 26, 2004.
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Better to put people, not computers, in charge of investigating potential plots.
By Bruce Schneier
May 31, 2006
Collecting information about every American’s phone calls is an example of data mining. The basic idea is to collect as much information as possible on everyone, sift through it with massive computers, and uncover terrorist plots. It’s a compelling idea, and convinces many. But it’s wrong. We’re not going to find terrorist plots through systems like this, and we’re going to waste valuable resources chasing down false alarms. To understand why, we have to look at the economics of the system.
Data mining works best when you’re searching for a well-defined profile, a reasonable number of attacks per year, and a low cost of false alarms. Credit-card fraud is one of data mining’s success stories: All credit-card companies mine their transaction databases for data for spending patterns that indicate a stolen card.
Many credit-card thieves share a pattern — purchase expensive luxury goods, purchase things that can be easily fenced, etc. — and data mining systems can minimize the losses in many cases by shutting down the card. In addition, the cost of false alarms is only a phone call to the cardholder asking him to verify a couple of purchases. The cardholders don’t even resent these phone calls — as long as they’re infrequent — so the cost is just a few minutes of operator time.
Terrorist plots are different; there is no well-defined profile and attacks are very rare. This means that data-mining systems won’t uncover any terrorist plots until they are very accurate, and that even very accurate systems will be so flooded with false alarms that they will be useless.
Just in the United States, there are trillions of connections between people and events — things that the data-mining system will have to “look at” — and very few plots. This rarity makes even accurate identification systems useless.
Let’s look at some numbers. We’ll be optimistic — we’ll assume the system has a one in 100 false-positive rate (99 percent accurate), and a one in 1,000 false-negative rate (99.9 percent accurate). Assume 1 trillion possible indicators to sift through: that’s about 10 events — e-mails, phone calls, purchases, Web destinations, whatever — per person in the United States per day. Also assume that 10 of them actually indicate terrorists plotting.
This unrealistically accurate system will generate 1 billion false alarms for every real terrorist plot it uncovers. Every day, the police will have to investigate 27 million potential plots in order to find the one real terrorist plot per month. Clearly ridiculous.
This isn’t anything new. In statistics, it’s called the “base rate fallacy,” and it applies in other domains as well. And this is exactly the sort of thing we saw with the National Security Agency (NSA) eavesdropping program: The New York Times reported that the computers spat out thousands of tips per month. Every one of them turned out to be a false alarm, at enormous cost in money and civil liberties.
Finding terrorism plots is not a problem that lends itself to data mining. It’s a needle-in-a-haystack problem, and throwing more hay on the pile doesn’t make that problem any easier. We’d be far better off putting people in charge of investigating potential plots and letting them direct the computers, instead of putting the computers in charge and letting them decide who should be investigated.
By allowing the NSA to eavesdrop on us all, we’re not trading privacy for security. We’re giving up privacy without getting any security in return.
Bruce Schneier is the CTO of Counterpane Internet Security and the author of “Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.”
NSA’s Hunt for Terrorists Scrutinizes Thousands of Americans, but Most Are Later Cleared
By Barton Gellman, Dafna Linzer and Carol D. Leonnig
February 5, 2006
Intelligence officers who eavesdropped on thousands of Americans in overseas calls under authority from President Bush have dismissed nearly all of them as potential suspects after hearing nothing pertinent to a terrorist threat, according to accounts from current and former government officials and private-sector sources with knowledge of the technologies in use.
Bush has recently described the warrantless operation as “terrorist surveillance” and summed it up by declaring that “if you’re talking to a member of al Qaeda, we want to know why.” But officials conversant with the program said a far more common question for eavesdroppers is whether, not why, a terrorist plotter is on either end of the call. The answer, they said, is usually no.
Fewer than 10 U.S. citizens or residents a year, according to an authoritative account, have aroused enough suspicion during warrantless eavesdropping to justify interception of their domestic calls, as well. That step still requires a warrant from a federal judge, for which the government must supply evidence of probable cause.
The Bush administration refuses to say — in public or in closed session of Congress — how many Americans in the past four years have had their conversations recorded or their e-mails read by intelligence analysts without court authority. Two knowledgeable sources placed that number in the thousands; one of them, more specific, said about 5,000.
The program has touched many more Americans than that. Surveillance takes place in several stages, officials said, the earliest by machine. Computer-controlled systems collect and sift basic information about hundreds of thousands of faxes, e-mails and telephone calls into and out of the United States before selecting the ones for scrutiny by human eyes and ears.
Successive stages of filtering grow more intrusive as artificial intelligence systems rank voice and data traffic in order of likeliest interest to human analysts. But intelligence officers, who test the computer judgments by listening initially to brief fragments of conversation, “wash out” most of the leads within days or weeks.
The scale of warrantless surveillance, and the high proportion of bystanders swept in, sheds new light on Bush’s circumvention of the courts. National security lawyers, in and out of government, said the washout rate raised fresh doubts about the program’s lawfulness under the Fourth Amendment, because a search cannot be judged “reasonable” if it is based on evidence that experience shows to be unreliable. Other officials said the disclosures might shift the terms of public debate, altering perceptions about the balance between privacy lost and security gained.
Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the nation’s second-ranking intelligence officer, acknowledged in a news briefing last month that eavesdroppers “have to go down some blind alleys to find the tips that pay off.” Other officials, nearly all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not permitted to discuss the program, said the prevalence of false leads is especially pronounced when U.S. citizens or residents are surveilled. No intelligence agency, they said, believes that “terrorist . . . operatives inside our country,” as Bush described the surveillance targets, number anywhere near the thousands who have been subject to eavesdropping.
The Bush administration declined to address the washout rate or answer any other question for this article about the policies and operations of its warrantless eavesdropping.
Vice President Cheney has made the administration’s strongest claim about the program’s intelligence value, telling CNN in December that eavesdropping without warrants “has saved thousands of lives.” Asked about that Thursday, Hayden told senators he “cannot personally estimate” such a figure but that the program supplied information “that would not otherwise have been available.” FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said at the same hearing that the information helped identify “individuals who were providing material support to terrorists.”
Supporters speaking unofficially said the program is designed to warn of unexpected threats, and they argued that success cannot be measured by the number of suspects it confirms. Even unwitting Americans, they said, can take part in communications — arranging a car rental, for example, without knowing its purpose — that supply “indications and warnings” of an attack. Contributors to the technology said it is a triumph for artificial intelligence if a fraction of 1 percent of the computer-flagged conversations guide human analysts to meaningful leads.
Those arguments point to a conflict between the program’s operational aims and the legal and political limits described by the president and his advisers. For purposes of threat detection, officials said, the analysis of a telephone call is indifferent to whether an American is on the line. Since Sept. 11, 2001, a former CIA official said, “there is a lot of discussion” among analysts “that we shouldn’t be dividing Americans and foreigners, but terrorists and non-terrorists.” But under the Constitution, and in the Bush administration’s portrait of its warrantless eavesdropping, the distinction is fundamental.
Valuable information remains valuable even if it comes from one in a thousand intercepts. But government officials and lawyers said the ratio of success to failure matters greatly when eavesdropping subjects are Americans or U.S. visitors with constitutional protection. The minimum legal definition of probable cause, said a government official who has studied the program closely, is that evidence used to support eavesdropping ought to turn out to be “right for one out of every two guys at least.” Those who devised the surveillance plan, the official said, “knew they could never meet that standard — that’s why they didn’t go through” the court that supervises the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.
Michael J. Woods, who was chief of the FBI’s national security law unit until 2002, said in an e-mail interview that even using the lesser standard of a “reasonable basis” requires evidence “that would lead a prudent, appropriately experienced person” to believe the American is a terrorist agent. If a factor returned “a large number of false positives, I would have to conclude that the factor is not a sufficiently reliable indicator and thus would carry less (or no) weight.”
Bush has said his program covers only overseas calls to or from the United States and stated categorically that “we will not listen inside this country” without a warrant. Hayden said the government goes to the intelligence court when an eavesdropping subject becomes important enough to “drill down,” as he put it, “to the degree that we need all communications.”
Yet a special channel set up for just that purpose four years ago has gone largely unused, according to an authoritative account. Since early 2002, when the presiding judge of the federal intelligence court first learned of Bush’s program, he agreed to a system in which prosecutors may apply for a domestic warrant after warrantless eavesdropping on the same person’s overseas communications. The annual number of such applications, a source said, has been in the single digits.
Many features of the surveillance program remain unknown, including what becomes of the non-threatening U.S. e-mails and conversations that the NSA intercepts. Participants, according to a national security lawyer who represents one of them privately, are growing “uncomfortable with the mountain of data they have now begun to accumulate.” Spokesmen for the Bush administration declined to say whether any are discarded.
New Imperatives
Recent interviews have described the program’s origins after Sept. 11 in what Hayden has called a three-way collision of “operational, technical and legal imperatives.”
Intelligence agencies had an urgent mission to find hidden plotters before they could strike again.
About the same time, advances in technology — involving acoustic engineering, statistical theory and efficient use of computing power to apply them — offered new hope of plucking valuable messages from the vast flow of global voice and data traffic. And rapidly changing commercial trends, which had worked against the NSA in the 1990s as traffic shifted from satellites to fiber-optic cable, now presented the eavesdroppers with a gift. Market forces were steering as much as a third of global communications traffic on routes that passed through the United States.
The Bush administration had incentive and capabilities for a new kind of espionage, but 23 years of law and White House policy stood in the way.
FISA, passed in 1978, was ambiguous about some of the president’s plans, according to current and retired government national security lawyers. But other features of the eavesdropping program fell outside its boundaries.
One thing the NSA wanted was access to the growing fraction of global telecommunications that passed through junctions on U.S. territory. According to former senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who chaired the Intelligence Committee at the time, briefers told him in Cheney’s office in October 2002 that Bush had authorized the agency to tap into those junctions. That decision, Graham said in an interview first reported in The Washington Post on Dec. 18, allowed the NSA to intercept “conversations that . . . went through a transit facility inside the United States.”
According to surveys by TeleGeography Inc., nearly all voice and data traffic to and from the United States now travels by fiber-optic cable. About one-third of that volume is in transit from one foreign country to another, traversing U.S. networks along its route. The traffic passes through cable landing stations, where undersea communications lines meet the East and West coasts; warehouse-size gateways where competing international carriers join their networks; and major Internet hubs known as metropolitan area ethernets.
Until Bush secretly changed the rules, the government could not tap into access points on U.S. soil without a warrant to collect the “contents” of any communication “to or from a person in the United States.” But the FISA law was silent on calls and e-mails that began and ended abroad.
Even for U.S. communications, the law was less than clear about whether the NSA could harvest information about that communication that was not part of its “contents.”
“We debated a lot of issues involving the ‘metadata,'” one government lawyer said. Valuable for analyzing calling patterns, the metadata for telephone calls identify their origin, destination, duration and time. E-mail headers carry much the same information, along with the numeric address of each network switch through which a message has passed.
Intelligence lawyers said FISA plainly requires a warrant if the government wants real-time access to that information for any one person at a time. But the FISA court, as some lawyers saw it, had no explicit jurisdiction over wholesale collection of records that do not include the content of communications. One high-ranking intelligence official who argued for a more cautious approach said he found himself pushed aside. Awkward silences began to intrude on meetings that discussed the evolving rules.
“I became aware at some point of things I was not being told about,” the intelligence official said.
‘Subtly Softer Trigger’
Hayden has described a “subtly softer trigger” for eavesdropping, based on a powerful “line of logic,” but no Bush administration official has acknowledged explicitly that automated filters play a role in selecting American targets. But Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), who chairs the Judiciary Committee, referred in a recent letter to “mechanical surveillance” that is taking place before U.S. citizens and residents are “subject to human surveillance.”
Machine selection would be simple if the typical U.S. eavesdropping subject took part in direct calls to or from the “phone numbers of known al Qaeda” terrorists, the only criterion Bush has mentioned.
That is unusual. The NSA more commonly looks for less-obvious clues in the “terabytes of speech, text, and image data” that its global operations collect each day, according to an unclassified report by the National Science Foundation soliciting research on behalf of U.S. intelligence.
NSA Inspector General Joel F. Brenner said in 2004 that the agency’s intelligence officers have no choice but to rely on “electronic filtering, sorting and dissemination systems of amazing sophistication but that are imperfect.”
One method in use, the NSF report said, is “link analysis.” It takes an established starting point — such as a terrorist just captured or killed — and looks for associated people, places, things and events. Those links can be far more tenuous than they initially appear.
In an unclassified report for the Pentagon’s since-abandoned Total Information Awareness program, consultant Mary DeRosa showed how “degrees of separation” among the Sept. 11 conspirators concealed the significance of clues that linked them.
Khalid Almihdhar, one of the hijackers, was on a government watch list for terrorists and thus a known suspect. Mohamed Atta, another hijacker, was linked to Almihdhar by one degree of separation because he used the same contact address when booking his flight. Wail M. Alshehri, another hijacker, was linked by two degrees of separation because he shared a telephone number with Atta. Satam M.A. Al Suqami, still another hijacker, shared a post office box with Alshehri and, therefore, had three degrees of separation from the original suspect.
‘Look for Patterns’
Those links were not obvious before the identity of the hijackers became known. A major problem for analysts is that a given suspect may have hundreds of links to others with one degree of separation, including high school classmates and former neighbors in a high-rise building who never knew his name. Most people are linked to thousands or tens of thousands of people by two degrees of separation, and hundreds of thousands or millions by three degrees.
Published government reports say the NSA and other data miners use mathematical techniques to form hypotheses about which of the countless theoretical ties are likeliest to represent a real-world relationship.
A more fundamental problem, according to a high-ranking former official with firsthand knowledge, is that “the number of identifiable terrorist entities is decreasing.” There are fewer starting points, he said, for link analysis.
“At that point, your only recourse is to look for patterns,” the official said.
Pattern analysis, also described in the NSF and DeRosa reports, does not depend on ties to a known suspect. It begins with places terrorists go, such as the Pakistani province of Waziristan, and things they do, such as using disposable cell phones and changing them frequently, which U.S. officials have publicly cited as a challenge for counterterrorism.
“These people don’t want to be on the phone too long,” said Russell Tice, a former NSA analyst, offering another example.
Analysts build a model of hypothetical terrorist behavior, and computers look for people who fit the model. Among the drawbacks of this method is that nearly all its selection criteria are innocent on their own. There is little precedent, lawyers said, for using such a model as probable cause to get a court-issued warrant for electronic surveillance.
Jeff Jonas, now chief scientist at IBM Entity Analytics, invented a data-mining technology used widely in the private sector and by the government. He sympathizes, he said, with an analyst facing an unknown threat who gathers enormous volumes of data “and says, ‘There must be a secret in there.’ ”
But pattern matching, he argued, will not find it. Techniques that “look at people’s behavior to predict terrorist intent,” he said, “are so far from reaching the level of accuracy that’s necessary that I see them as nothing but civil liberty infringement engines.”
‘A Lot Better Than Chance’
Even with 38,000 employees, the NSA is incapable of translating, transcribing and analyzing more than a fraction of the conversations it intercepts. For years, including in public testimony by Hayden, the agency has acknowledged use of automated equipment to analyze the contents and guide analysts to the most important ones.
According to one knowledgeable source, the warrantless program also uses those methods. That is significant to the public debate because this kind of filtering intrudes into content, and machines “listen” to more Americans than humans do. NSA rules since the late 1970s, when machine filtering was far less capable, have said “acquisition” of content does not take place until a conversation is intercepted and processed “into an intelligible form intended for human inspection.”
The agency’s filters are capable of comparing spoken language to a “dictionary” of key words, but Roger W. Cressey, a senior White House counterterrorism official until late 2002, said terrorists and other surveillance subjects make frequent changes in their code words. He said, ” ‘Wedding’ was martyrdom day and the ‘bride’ and ‘groom’ were the martyrs.” But al Qaeda has stopped using those codes.
An alternative approach, in which a knowledgeable source said the NSA’s work parallels academic and commercial counterparts, relies on “decomposing an audio signal” to find qualities useful to pattern analysis. Among the fields involved are acoustic engineering, behavioral psychology and computational linguistics.
A published report for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said machines can easily determine the sex, approximate age and social class of a speaker. They are also learning to look for clues to deceptive intent in the words and “paralinguistic” features of a conversation, such as pitch, tone, cadence and latency.
This kind of analysis can predict with results “a hell of a lot better than chance” the likelihood that the speakers are trying to conceal their true meaning, according to James W. Pennebaker, who chairs the psychology department at the University of Texas at Austin.
“Frankly, we’ll probably be wrong 99 percent of the time,” he said, “but 1 percent is far better than 1 in 100 million times if you were just guessing at random. And this is where the culture has to make some decisions.”
516
By DOUG THOMPSON
May 31, 2006
Now that he is officially sworn in as the new head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gen. Michael Hayden plans to build a vast domestic spying network that will pry into the lives of most Americans around the clock.
President George W. Bush told Hayden to “take whatever steps necessary” to monitor Americans 24/7 by listening in on their phone calls, bugging their homes and offices, probing their private lives, snooping into their financial records and watching their travel habits.
Can I prove this in a court of law? No. Do I know it is happening? Yes, without a doubt. Enough sources within the CIA, FBI, NSA and Pentagon have come forward in recent days to warn about Hayden’s plans for an expanded, consolidated spy network aimed at Americans, not terrorists, and violating numerous laws that prohibit such activities against citizens of this country.
“What Hayden plans to do is not only illegal, it is immoral,” says a longtime CIA operative who may retire early rather than participate in what he sees as an illegal extension of the spy agency’s activities.
Hayden, who oversaw the National Security Agency’s questionable monitoring of phone calls and emails of Americas, plans to consolidate much of the country’s domestic spying into a new desk at the CIA, calling it a “domestic terrorism prevention” operation.
The desk will oversee not only NSA’s increased monitoring of electronic communications by Americans but also the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s “terrorist information awareness” program that monitors travel and financial activities by Americans by gathering real-time data from banks, airlines, travel agencies and credit card companies.
The CIA operation will also coordinate with the Pentagon’s domestic spying program that monitors activities of anti-war groups, organizations critical of the Bush administrations and others tagged as enemies of the state.
FBI agents will step up monitoring of journalists to identify leaks of stories embarrassing to the government. The bureau is already monitoring phone calls and emails by reporters on a routine basis and has increased surveillance of writers for major news organizations and monitoring of travel and financial records using the DARPA computers.
“This is not ‘total information awareness’ but ‘total information control’ aimed at watching Americans fulltime and ignoring the protections that are supposed to be guaranteed by the Constitution,” says an FBI agent familiar with the programs. “I didn’t sign on for this and I’m getting the hell out.”
In fact, resignations at major U.S. spy agencies are at an all-time high. Exact numbers are classified but sources say field agents, data analysts and others are leaving in droves rather than join the frenzy to spy on Americans.
Hayden sailed through the Senate confirmation process defending his domestic spying program at NSA, claiming it was legal. Privacy experts and Constitutional law professors say otherwise but the Senate rubber-stamped Bush’s choice anyway, choosing to ignore the threats to freedom.
Hayden will have little problem concealing the operation from the public and Congress. Many of the CIA’s programs are classified and the agency has, in the past, concealed programs even from the intelligence committees in both the House and Senate. The DARPA project and the Pentagon domestic spying programs are “black bag” operations that do not require Congressional approval or oversight.
Likewise, many of the details of the NSA domestic spying program were withheld from Congress and escaped public notice until media reports unearthed them and the Bush administration now threatens to jail the reporters who broke the story.
I wish I could prove this. I wish one, just one, source on the inside was willing to come forward and allow his or her name to be used but those who might be tempted see what happened to Mary McCarthy, the CIA employee fired and under threat of prosecution for leaking information about CIA torture camps in Europe.
But I know it is happening. People I’ve known for years and trust tell me it is happening and the past record of spying, lies and deceit by the Bush administration point to just such an operation.
This nation is under attack. We, the people, are under attack. And the enemy in this case is not an Islamic radical hiding in a cave in Afghanistan but a cabal of truly evil men and women at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and on Capitol Hill aided by carefully-picked, law-ignoring appointees at the Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, a black glass-walled building at Fort Meade, MD, and a complex in Langley, Virginia.
5.30.06
Canadians are healthier than Americans, have better access to health care and have fewer unmet health needs, a new study of both countries reveals.
The findings come in spite of the fact that the United States spends almost twice as much per capita on health care as Canada, the researchers noted.
“This shows that you can spend much less than we [Americans] do, and deliver much more and better care then we do,” said study co-author Dr. David U. Himmelstein, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Mass.
The new study appears to reinforce the findings of a Rand Corporation report issued earlier this month that showed a similar health care gap between the U.S. system and that of Great Britain, which, like Canada, has a universal health care system — subsidized by tax dollars.
In the current study, Himmelstein and his colleagues reviewed responses from more than 3,500 Canadians and almost 5,200 Americans over the age of 18 who participated in the Joint Canada/U.S. Survey of Health — a one-time phone survey conducted between 2002 and 2003.
In addition to documenting race, class and immigrant status, the survey sought to assess each individual’s current health status, access to health care, use of health care, history of illness, and ongoing behaviors — such as smoking — considered to be health risks.
Reporting in the July issue of the American Journal of Public Health, the researchers found that although Canadians smoke more than Americans, Americans are more likely to be inactive and obese, and have higher rates of diabetes, high blood pressure, arthritis and lung disease.
Specifically, Americans are one-third less likely to have a regular doctor, two times less likely to take needed medications, and one-fourth more likely to have unmet health care needs than Canadians.
While Americans were more likely to identify cost as the impediment to care, Canadians were more likely to cite waiting times as their main obstacle to good care. However, just 3.5 percent of Canadians were impacted by treatment delays, the survey found.
Despite generally better health and access to care, however, Canadians do not appear to be any happier with their health care system than Americans.
In fact, Americans said they were more satisfied than Canadians with the quality of care they received at either a hospital or a community-based facility. Canadians were happier with their physicians, however.
As well, American health care did excel in some areas compared to the Canadian system. For example, American women were more likely to have had a Pap smear and a mammogram than their Canadian counterparts.
Nevertheless, the American health system appears weakest in relation to the Canadian approach when it comes to caring for the uninsured.
Americans lacking insurance were found to have a much worse health care experience than both insured Americans, and (universally insured) Canadians. The survey found that nearly one in every three (30.4 percent) uninsured Americans had gone without some kind of needed care because of cost.
Overall, 7 percent of all U.S. residents cited cost as a barrier preventing them from getting needed care. That number was just 0.8 percent for Canadians.
The influence of wealth on access was also less acute in Canada, where poorer patients have better access to health care than low-income Americans.
In terms of race and health, non-whites in both countries were less satisfied with their health care than whites. However, racial differences in accessing care appear to be less drastic in Canada.
Based on the results, the researchers conclude that universal health care coverage should be implemented in the United States. But they also called for the health care community to improve services to the poor, and particularly the immigrant populations. They also urged reforms to prevent waiting-period issues that have impeded Canada’s system.
Although this research indicts the American health care system, Himmelstein said he wanted to accent the positive.
“Actually it’s a very hopeful message,” he said. “We (Americans) have the best doctors, best hospitals, and best nurses in the world. But the way we finance healthcare just doesn’t let us do the job. Given what we are now spending on our healthcare system, we can do better — if we just had national health insurance and were allowed to do it right.”
Jon Gabel, vice president of the Washington, D.C.-based non-partisan research organization Center for Studying Health System Change, agreed. He said the absence of a national health insurance system in the U.S. means patients don’t get full access to care or a better bang for their health-care buck.
However, Gabel noted that any between-country comparison depends in large part on whether the focus is on each system’s “haves” or “have-nots”.
“For example, once you’re in the U.S. health care system, patient satisfaction is higher than in Canada,” he noted.
Greg Scandlen, the founder of the non-profit Consumers for Health Care Choices based in Hagerstown, Md., disputed the findings.
“In terms of overall satisfaction with the health care system, Americans score better,” noted Scandlen. “So, the headline coming out of this ought to be that ‘Americans are more satisfied with their healthcare system than Canadians are.'”
Scandlen also criticized the way the study was conducted, noting that there was too much focus on routine health issues, to the relative exclusion of crisis situations that can demand more costly and dramatic interventions.
“Canada clearly emphasizes primary care pretty strongly, and I give them credit for that,” he said. But he added, “This survey doesn’t look at the more serious stuff, like surgery and cardiac care — serious, expensive things that apply to a minority of the population.”
515
Egg came first, ‘eggsperts’ agree
May 26, 2006
LONDON, England — It’s a question that has baffled scientists, academics and pub bores through the ages: What came first, the chicken or the egg?
Now a team made up of a geneticist, philosopher and chicken farmer claim to have found an answer. It was the egg.
Put simply, the reason is down to the fact that genetic material does not change during an animal’s life.
Therefore the first bird that evolved into what we would call a chicken, probably in prehistoric times, must have first existed as an embryo inside an egg.
Professor John Brookfield, a specialist in evolutionary genetics at the University of Nottingham, told the UK Press Association the pecking order was clear.
The living organism inside the eggshell would have had the same DNA as the chicken it would develop into, he said.
“Therefore, the first living thing which we could say unequivocally was a member of the species would be this first egg,” he added. “So, I would conclude that the egg came first.”
The same conclusion was reached by his fellow “eggsperts” Professor David Papineau, of King’s College London, and poultry farmer Charles Bourns.
Mr Papineau, an expert in the philosophy of science, agreed that the first chicken came from an egg and that proves there were chicken eggs before chickens.
He told PA people were mistaken if they argued that the mutant egg belonged to the “non-chicken” bird parents.
“I would argue it is a chicken egg if it has a chicken in it,” he said.
“If a kangaroo laid an egg from which an ostrich hatched, that would surely be an ostrich egg, not a kangaroo egg.”
Bourns, chairman of trade body Great British Chicken, said he was also firmly in the pro-egg camp.
He said: “Eggs were around long before the first chicken arrived. Of course, they may not have been chicken eggs as we see them today, but they were eggs.”
The debate, which may come as a relief to those with argumentative relatives, was organized by Disney to promote the release of the film “Chicken Little” on DVD.
Magic Bean Wishes – “Within each hot stamped velour pouch is a collection of agricultural and heirloom beans that have been marked with thoughtful words using a patent pending process.”
Patently Silly – home of Alcoholic beverages derived from animal extract, and methods for the production thereof and the Gas combustion type hair drier…
514
May 30, 2006
 |
SHANGHAI, China — Doctors in Shanghai on Tuesday were considering surgery options for a 2-month-old boy born with an unusually well-formed third arm.
Neither of the boy’s two left arms is fully functional and tests have so far been unable to determine which was more developed, said Dr. Chen Bochang, head of the orthopedics department at Shanghai Children’s Medical Center.
“His case is quite peculiar. We have no record of any child with such a complete third arm,” Chen said in a telephone interview.
The boy, identified only as “Jie-jie,” also was born with just one kidney and may have problems that could lead to curvature of the spine, local media reports said. Jie-jie cried when either of his left arms was touched, but smiled and responded normally to other stimuli, the reports said.
Chen said doctors hoped to work out a plan for surgery, but the boy’s small size made it impossible to perform certain tests that would help them prepare.
Media reports said other children have been reported born with additional arms and legs, but in those cases it was clear what limb was more developed.
Chen’s hospital is one of China’s most experienced in dealing with unusual birth defects, including separating conjoined twins.
513
By Andrew Buncombe
29 May 2006
Federal authorities are actively investigating dozens of American television stations for broadcasting items produced by the Bush administration and major corporations, and passing them off as normal news. Some of the fake news segments talked up success in the war in Iraq, or promoted the companies’ products.
Investigators from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are seeking information about stations across the country after a report produced by a campaign group detailed the extraordinary extent of the use of such items.
The report, by the non-profit group Centre for Media and Democracy, found that over a 10-month period at least 77 television stations were making use of the faux news broadcasts, known as Video News Releases (VNRs). Not one told viewers who had produced the items.
“We know we only had partial access to these VNRs and yet we found 77 stations using them,” said Diana Farsetta, one of the group’s researchers. “I would say it’s pretty extraordinary. The picture we found was much worse than we expected going into the investigation in terms of just how widely these get played and how frequently these pre-packaged segments are put on the air.”
Ms Farsetta said the public relations companies commissioned to produce these segments by corporations had become increasingly sophisticated in their techniques in order to get the VNRs broadcast. “They have got very good at mimicking what a real, independently produced television report would look like,” she said.
The FCC has declined to comment on the investigation but investigators from the commission’s enforcement unit recently approached Ms Farsetta for a copy of her group’s report.
The range of VNR is wide. Among items provided by the Bush administration to news stations was one in which an Iraqi-American in Kansas City was seen saying “Thank you Bush. Thank you USA” in response to the 2003 fall of Baghdad. The footage was actually produced by the State Department, one of 20 federal agencies that have produced and distributed such items.
Many of the corporate reports, produced by drugs manufacturers such as Pfizer, focus on health issues and promote the manufacturer’s product. One example cited by the report was a Hallowe’en segment produced by the confectionery giant Mars, which featured Snickers, M&Ms and other company brands. While the original VNR disclosed that it was produced by Mars, such information was removed when it was broadcast by the television channel – in this case a Fox-owned station in St Louis, Missouri.
Bloomberg news service said that other companies that sponsored the promotions included General Motors, the world’s largest car maker, and Intel, the biggest maker of semi-conductors. All of the companies said they included full disclosure of their involvement in the VNRs. “We in no way attempt to hide that we are providing the video,” said Chuck Mulloy, a spokesman for Intel. “In fact, we bend over backward to make this disclosure.”
The FCC was urged to act by a lobbying campaign organised by Free Press, another non-profit group that focuses on media policy. Spokesman Craig Aaron said more than 25,000 people had written to the FCC about the VNRs. “Essentially it’s corporate advertising or propaganda masquerading as news,” he said. “The public obviously expects their news reports are going to be based on real reporting and real information. If they are watching an advertisement for a company or a government policy, they need to be told.”
The controversy over the use of VNRs by television stations first erupted last spring. At the time the FCC issued a public notice warning broadcasters that they were obliged to inform viewers if items were sponsored. The maximum fine for each violation is $32,500 (£17,500).
okay, here we go again… 8/
if this gets much worse, i’ll probably do something like Pliny the Weird (a very good friend of mine) came up with the last time this was an issue, and make “FLAG BURNING KITS” with an american flag on a cocktail toothpick and a strike-anywhere match…
May 28, 2006
Some time this summer, the Congress will likely set in motion the steps needed to amend the U.S. Constitution to make it unlawful to desecrate the flag.
The amendment, which has bipartisan support, will make it against the law to burn the American flag. Unfortunately, in the process, it will trample all over the very thing the flag stands for: your personal freedom.
The Constitution, and specifically the first ten amendments known as the Bill of Rights, set out the freedoms that protect every citizen and set us apart from virtually every other country in the world.
Burning, mutilating or destroying the flag is a juvenile and despicable form of protest best suited for unruly mobs in faraway dictatorships, not the streets of America.
But as wrong-headed as it is, flag desecrating shouldn’t be against the law.
The flag is a proud symbol of America. We show our respect (or should) by removing our hats when it passes in a parade. We pledge our allegiance to the United States of America while facing the flag. It has been carried into battle around the world and our troops have died beneath it.
However, we should not confuse the symbol for the substance. The flag is a symbol of the freedoms that make America great. One of our most important freedoms is the freedom to disagree with the government and our neighbors. When we make it against the law to disagree, even in a way that is offensive, we are desecrating the Constitution.
Dissent is not a sign of weakness – it is a sign of strength. Only in a country that is strong is dissenting a freedom that enjoys equal protection under the law.
Demanding everyone support a particular cause or face consequences, real or social, is contrary to the personal liberties that have made our country strong.
You are free to express your thoughts, no matter how contrary to prevailing sentiment, because the First Amendment guarantees you that right. Thanks to that same amendment, the government can’t open your mail or listen to your phone calls without a search warrant. The First Amendment also permits us to publish this newspaper without prior approval of any government authority.
The only way supporters can make burning a flag illegal is to amend the Constitution and specifically exclude that activity from First Amendment protection.
This exercise is an unfortunate example of how politicians of both parties pander to voters on issues that sound profound and patriotic, but in reality will do great harm to the very institution they profess to protect.
Ironically, the number of reported flag burning incidents declined rapidly following 9/11 and hasn’t shown any signs of rebounding – further evidence that this constitutional amendment is a solution in search of a problem or, more accurately, in search of votes.
If the backers of this travesty are successful in amending the Constitution, America will join an elite club of nations that punish flag burners: China, Cuba and Iran.
Memorial Day is a time to remember those who gave their lives in service to our country. No doubt, many veterans past and present, along with many other citizens, join us in deploring flag burning.
The only thing worse than desecrating the flag is violating the Constitution to punish offenders.
May 28, 2006
Members of Congress last week finally decided that invasion of privacy and the president’s overstepping his power are matters of grave importance.
And it took an FBI raid of the office of one of their own to get them all worked up.
As The Washington Post first reported, FBI agents obtained a warrant to search the offices of Rep. William Jefferson, a long-time New Orleans Democrat after they secretly taped him accepting $100,000, ostensibly to help a company win Internet contracts in Africa.
Never mind that this time the FBI obtained a search warrant unlike, say, the CIA or the NSA in their attempts to listen in on Americans’ private phone conversations.
Democrats and Republicans alike called on the FBI to return the documents seized from Jefferson’s office, saying along the way that it represented an extraordinary overreaching of power on the part of the executive branch.
“No person is above the law, neither the one being investigated nor those conducting the investigation,” said a letter signed by both House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. “The Justice Department must immediately return the papers it unconstitutionally seized. Once that is done, Congressman Jefferson can and should fully cooperate with the Justice Department’s efforts, consistent with his constitutional rights.”
It was apparently the first time in Congress’ history that a member’s office had been raided by the Justice Department. Of course, as The Washington Post explained in an editorial, “this was no fishing expedition.”
It’s great that there is bipartisan anger at law enforcement officials executing a lawfully obtained search warrant against someone suspected of wrongdoing. That should play well here in the rest of America.
Vermonters are no strangers to outrage over invasions of privacy on the part of our congressional delegation. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., has been one of the most vocal critics of the recently disclosed collection of millions of phone records by the country’s top spy agency. Rep. Bernard Sanders, I-Vt., has been one of the loudest opponents of the Patriot Act and provisions that allow government snooping into our library borrowing habits.
Heck, a former member of Congress who couldn’t disagree more with Sanders’ socialist leanings, came to the state a few weeks ago to decry the ever-encroaching nature of the current president’s administration.
“I can’t understand that while you have a president thumbing his nose at Congress and the country and expressing disdain for the Constitution that Congress just sits there and takes it,” former Rep. Bob Barr, a Republican from Georgia, said during his visit here. “How is it that one individual can take power from the people and not be held accountable?”
How is it, indeed? On the one hand, Congress seems to just sit by and do nothing more than express frustration when the executive branch is reaching its tentacles into the private lives of the people from whom it derives its powers.
But if one of their own – no matter what party or what wrongdoing is suspected – is the recipient of a little intrusion from the executive branch, well, then, something must be done.
Vermonters are proud of their government’s relative absence from our lives and about its strong protection of individual liberties. Recall that when the latest phone-records scandal broke, calls for an immediate investigation of the state’s largest telephone company were swift and bipartisan.
I suspect, however, that Vermonters and other Americans will look at Pelosi and Hastert and Jefferson with more than a little skepticism.
It’s one thing for the crew of insiders to act like they’ve somehow been wronged by what looks like, from all accounts, a perfectly lawful and reasonable search of a crime suspect’s office, a suspect whom authorities say didn’t cooperate with them for months.
It’s quite another for them to expect that we will share their outrage.
After all, they certainly don’t seem to share ours when it is our privacy that is being violated.
512
Every little man thinks that only Jesus Christ himself is good enough to be his teacher. But you can learn from the most ordinary circumstances once you have the key that opens all doors.
— Georges I. Gurdjeiff
511
jac is waiting to hear from his supplier, and has been for the past 3 days, i haven’t been able to get hold of jim because he has moved since the last time i called (typical), and gunnar isn’t answering his phone. bleh.
510
May 26, 2006
by Tony Long
1968. It was the height of the Vietnam War, the year of My Lai and the Tet offensive. Student riots in Paris nearly brought down the French government. Soviet tanks put a premature end to Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring.
In the United States, the streets were teeming with antiwar protesters and civil rights demonstrators. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated within two months of each other. The Democratic convention in Chicago dissolved into chaos. And by the summer, America’s cities were in flames.
The world was seething, and for good reason. There was a lot to be angry about. It was a lousy year, 1968.
I was in high school then. I quit the baseball team because, frankly, sports seemed frivolous. In 1968, there were more important things to worry about than perfecting a curveball. All very high-minded and, in retrospect, more than a little pompous. But nearly 40 years down the road I don’t regret having done it. My political consciousness was awakened and I was actively engaged in the world around me.
But as bad as things were then, they seem infinitely worse now.
So why aren’t the streets clogged with angry Americans demanding to know why their president lied and deceived them so he could attack a country that had absolutely nothing to do with his so-called war on terror? To an extent, we got suckered into Vietnam. We can’t make that claim about Iraq. Iraq was the premeditated, willful invasion of a sovereign nation that was threatening nobody. “Saddam Hussein is a prick who treats the Kurds miserably” is no justification. By the principles established by the Nuremberg Tribunal and international law, our president is a war criminal.
Why aren’t we marching to demand an end to the illegal surveillance of American citizens by their own government, again under the pretext of waging war on terror? Why do we so blithely surrender our civil liberties — the very thing that supposedly separates us from other societies — to the illusion of security? All the high-tech snooping in the world won’t stop a determined terrorist from striking. If it could, Israel would be the safest country on earth.
Why aren’t irate Americans camping out in the lobby of every newspaper and TV station from coast to coast, demanding that the press reassert the right to perform its single most important function, that of government watchdog? The ghost of Richard Nixon, and a very corporeal Bill Clinton, must be cursing their rotten luck.
Why aren’t enraged college students occupying their campus administration buildings, demanding that the United States sign the Kyoto Protocol? Hell, it might already be too late, but is the luxury of driving your mom’s SUV really worth the coming dystopian world that you, more than I, will inherit?
Why aren’t we storming the battlements of every filthy oil company in America, demanding that their executives be tossed into fetid dungeons for cynically manipulating gas prices while raking in obscene profits?
Why aren’t we demanding that religion return to the pulpit, where it belongs, and keep out of the White House and the courts?
In short, where the hell is everybody?
I’ll tell you where they are. They’re at home, tuning in to root for the next “American idol.” They’re plugged into their iPods, utterly self-involved and disconnected from what lies just outside their doors. They’re spending 25 hours a week playing video games in virtual worlds instead of fighting to save the only world that really matters. They’re surfing porn. They’re text messaging and e-mailing and scheming to close that next big deal. They’re flogging their useless crap on eBay.
All that technology at their fingertips, and they’re completely blind. Two terms for George W. Bush? They’re deaf and dumb, too.
Bread and circuses. The government and the corporations are giving us bread and circuses to keep us sufficiently distracted so the powers that be can pursue their agendas. Television (flat screens only, please) serves up Donald Trump and Paris Hilton as role models, and gives us the abomination of Fox News, which is more a wolf in sheep’s clothing than any Vulpes vulpes you’re likely to encounter.
Hollywood only cares about blockbusters, chick flicks and inane buddy movies. Tiresome reality doesn’t make for good escapism and, more importantly, it doesn’t fill coffers. And George Clooney can’t be expected to produce every movie.
Whither the press? Forget it. Britney Spears gets more ink — and better play — than global warming does.
May 26, 2006
By ROBERT BURNS
WASHINGTON – Military investigators probing the deaths last November of about two dozen Iraqi civilians have evidence that points toward unprovoked murders by Marines, a senior defense official said Friday.
The Marine Corps initially reported 15 deaths and said they were caused by a roadside bomb and an ensuing firefight with insurgents. A separate investigation is aimed at determining if Marines lied to cover up the events, which included the deaths of women and children.
If confirmed as unjustified killings, the episode could be the most serious case of criminal misconduct by U.S. troops during three years of combat in Iraq. Until now the most infamous occurrence was the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse involving Army soldiers, which came to light in April 2004 and which President Bush said Thursday he considered to be the worst U.S. mistake of the entire war.
The defense official discussed the matter Friday only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk publicly about the investigation. He said the evidence found thus far strongly indicated the killings in the insurgent-plagued city of Haditha in the western province of Anbar were unjustified. He cautioned that the probe was not finished.
Once the investigation is completed, perhaps in June, it will be up to a senior Marine commander in Iraq to decide whether to press charges of murder or other violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Three officers from the unit involved — 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, based at Camp Pendleton, Calif. — have been relieved of duty, although officials have not explicitly linked them to the criminal investigation.
In an indication of how concerned the Marines are about the implications of the Haditha case, their top officer, Gen. Michael W. Hagee, flew to Iraq on Thursday. He was to reinforce what the military said was a need to adhere to Marine values and standards of behavior and to avoid the use of excess force.
“Many of our Marines have been involved in life or death combat or have witnessed the loss of their fellow Marines, and the effects of these events can be numbing,” Hagee said a statement announcing his trip. “There is the risk of becoming indifferent to the loss of a human life, as well as bringing dishonor upon ourselves.”
A spokesman at Marine Corps headquarters in the Pentagon, Lt. Col. Scott Fazekas, declined to comment on the status of the Haditha investigation. He said no information would be provided until the probe was completed.
According to a congressional aide, lawmakers were told in a briefing Thursday that it appears as many as two dozen civilians were killed in the episode at Haditha. And they were told that the investigation will find that “it will be clear that this was not the result of an accident or a normal combat situation.”
Another congressional official said lawmakers were told it would be about 30 days before a report would be issued by the investigating agency, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.
Both the House and Senate armed services committees plan to hold hearings on the matter.
The New York Times reported on Friday that the civilians killed at Haditha included five men who had been traveling in a taxi and others in two nearby houses. The newspaper quoted an unidentified official as saying it was a sustained operation over as long as five hours.
Hagee met with top lawmakers from those panels this week to bring them up to date on the investigation.
“I can say that there are established facts that incidents of a very serious nature did take place,” Sen. John Warner (news, bio, voting record), chairman of the Senate panel, said Thursday. He would not provide details or confirm reports that about 24 civilians were killed. He told reporters he had “no basis to believe” the military engaged in a cover-up.
Separately, the Marines announced this week that a criminal investigation was under way in connection with an alleged killing on April 26 of an Iraqi civilian by Marines in Hamandiyah, west of Baghdad. No details about that case have been made public.
In the Haditha case, videotape aired by an Arab television station showed images purportedly taken in the aftermath of the encounter: a bloody bedroom floor, walls with bullet holes and bodies of women and children. An Iraqi human rights group called for an investigation of what it described as a deadly mistake that had harmed civilians.
On May 17, Rep. John Murtha (news, bio, voting record), D-Pa., a former Marine, said Corps officials told him the toll in the Haditha attack was far worse than originally reported and that U.S. troops killed innocent women and children “in cold blood.” He said that nearly twice as many people were killed as first reported and maintained that U.S. forces were “overstretched and overstressed” by the war in Iraq.
Pentagon spokesman Eric Ruff said Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was being kept apprised. Ruff said he did not expect any announcements in the next few days.
26 May 2006
The coach of Iraq’s tennis team and two players were shot dead in Baghdad on Thursday, said Iraqi Olympic officials.
Coach Hussein Ahmed Rashid and players Nasser Ali Hatem and Wissam Adel Auda were killed in the al-Saidiya district of the capital.
Witnesses said the three were dressed in shorts and were killed days after militants issued a warning forbidding the wearing of shorts.
Other Iraqi athletes have been targeted in recent incidents.
In this case, according to accounts, the men dropped off laundry and were then stopped in their vehicle by gunmen.
Leaflets
Two of the athletes stepped out of the car and were shot in the head, said one witness. The third was shot dead in the vehicle.
“The gunman took the body out of the car and threw it on top of the other two bodies before stealing the car,” said the witness, who requested anonymity.
He said leaflets had been recently distributed in the area warning residents not to wear shorts.
Last week, 15 members of Iraq’s taekwondo team were kidnapped between Falluja and Ramadi, west of Baghdad, said a member of the Iraqi Olympic Committee. The kidnappers have demanded $100,000 for their release.
509
i left for seattle at 7:30 this morning because i wanted to get a good parking place, which i did, right across from the “skybridge”. it was early enough that most of the vendors weren’t even there yet, so i wandered for a couple of hours. minor things have changed recently: the second floor of the center house no longer goes all the way around, and some things have vanished from the main floor, like an escalator and a stairway. i found the place to check in and confused the volunteers when i wasn’t the whole group. got my button and went and wandered for a couple more hours until the performance. it was raining until we got onstage, and then it stopped. liz said that it always happens that way, which is a good thing, i think. they told me (i’ve got it written down in email) that our performance was at 11:45, but it was really at 12:45. also, the volunteers at the check in said that we had two performances, and that the second one was at 1:00, but we really only had one performance… i think that maybe the volunteers’ schedule was broken up into 15 minute increments, but i don’t know because they were pretty confused without me adding to it. we’re performing again for a party given by the canadian consulate at the intiman theatre at 10:00 tonight… one piece – oh canada – and we’ve never played it before, so it should be exciting.
anyway, after the band played, i went up to swamp creek to fill my water bottles and then i came home.
508
the ballard sedentary sousa band is playing tomorrow at folklife, at approximately 12:30 pm at the fountain lawn stage. we’re also playing at 10:00 pm for the party after.
i got an incense order today. first one in almost 2 months.
507
4/27/2006
By Adam Shub
GASTONIA, N.C. — Eyebrows are being raised because of a new sign along Highway 74 and a pagan group’s promise to keep the road clean.
The Silvermoon Pagan Wicca Group, through the state’s Adopt-A-Highway program, recently sponsored the stretch of road in Gastonia. At the head of the group is Kym Miller, a self-proclaimed witch who owns the Witch’s Brew Café in Lincolnton.
“We want to be community-minded and active in the area, and we wanted to do something to help keep the area clean,” Miller said Thursday.
But many Gastonia residents have their objections.
“I’m not for it if it’s got anything to do with witchcraft,” resident Mildred Bumgardner said.
Resident Cody Sams said, “They should change the name or something.”
Miller insists that her group does nothing more than cast spells and experiment with herbal magic.
“We don’t worship the devil, we don’t believe in the devil,” she said. “We’re not Satanists.”
Miller said she has been receiving death threats since her café opened last summer, but she hopes the highway adoption can prove to people that her group wants to make a positive impact on the community. She said it also intends to adopt another highway in the near future.
“So that they realize that we’re not evil people doing evil things,” she said.
Bumgardner doesn’t buy it.
“They’re just trying to get into our communities with that type of thing,” she said.
The North Carolina Department of Transportation said it has not received any written complaints about the Silvermoon sign. Officials said it’s unfair to discriminate against any group that wants to adopt a highway.
It doesn’t cost any money to adopt a highway, but whoever does must pledge to clean it up at least a couple of times a year.
The Transportation Department said the program saves taxpayers $4 million a year in cleanup costs.
506
26 May, 2006
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Desmond Dekker, the first Jamaican pop act to score a major hit in the UK, has died.
The singer died of a heart attack in London on Wednesday night. Dekker was 64 years old.
Born Desmond Adolphus Dacres in Kingston, on July 16, 1941, Dekker and his backing group the Aces (consisting of Wilson James and Easton Barrington Howard), had the first international Jamaican hit with Israelites. Other hits include 007 (Shanty Town), from 1967, and It Mek (1969).
Orphaned as a teenager, Dekker began working as a welder, singing around his workplace while his coworkers encouraged him. In 1961, he auditioned for the late Coxsone Dodd at Studio One and Dodd’s archrival, Duke Reid at Treasure Isle. Neither was impressed by his talents, and Dekker moved on to Leslie Kong’s Beverley’s label, where he auditioned before Derrick Morgan. With Morgan’s support, Dekker was signed but did not record until 1963, because Kong was reportedly waiting for the perfect song. That came in the form of Dekker’s Honour Your Father And Mother.
The song was a hit and Dekker followed up with Sinners Come Home and Labour for Learning. It was at this time that he changed his surname from Dacres to Dekker.
His next hit, King of Ska, on which he was backed by the The Cherrypies (also known as The Maytals), became one of his early signature tunes and remains well-known among ska fans.
Until 1967, Dekker’s songs, including Parents, Get Up Edina, This Woman and Mount Zion. were polite and conveyed mainstream messages. In that year, however, he appeared on Morgan’s Tougher Than Tough, which marked the beginning of the rude boy craze. Dekker’s own songs did not go to the extremes of many other popular tunes, though he did introduce lyrics which resonated with the rude boys, starting with the aforementioned 007 (Shanty Town). The song established Dekker as a rude boy icon, and helped him become a leading figure in the British mod scene.
Dekker continued with songs in the same vein, such as Rude Boy Train and Rudie Got Soul, as well as continuing with his previous themes of religion and morality in songs like It’s a Shame, Wise Man, Unity, It Pays, and Sabotage. His Pretty Africa is among the earliest popular songs to promote repatriation.
Israelites, released in 1968, appeared on both the US and UK charts, eventually topping the latter and peaking in the Top Ten of the former. He was the first Jamaican performer to enter US markets with pure Jamaican music, but he never managed to repeat in the US. That same year saw the release of Beautiful And Dangerous, Writing On The Wall, the Jamaica Festival song winner Intensified [Music Like Dirt], Bongo Girl and Shing a Ling.
At the end of the 1970s, Dekker signed with Stiff Records, a punk label linked with the Two-Tone movement, a fusion of punk and ska. He recorded an album called Black & Dekker, which featured his previous hits backed by The Rumour, Graham Parker’s backing band. Dekker’s next album was Compass Point, produced by Robert Palmer. Though that album did not sell well, Dekker remained a popular live performer, and he toured with The Rumour.
Only a live album was released in the late 80s, but a new version of Israelites reawakened public interest in 1990, following its use in a commercial for the audio recording products maker Maxell and on the soundtrack for the 1989 movie Drugstore Cowboy. He re-recorded some old singles, and worked with The Specials for 1992’s King of Kings, which used hits from Dekker’s musical heroes, including Derrick Morgan.
505
despite the fact that i haven’t had any orders for more than a month, i signed up as a distributor for shoyeido incense (they now have a “resell from internet” policy, which they haven’t in the past), and ordered $125 worth of incense from them, primarily because chris wants more hori-kawa. the added bonus is that i get to order their $100 a box incense at wholesale.
504
May, 22, 2006
Former AT&T technician Mark Klein is the key witness in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s class-action lawsuit against the telecommunications company, which alleges that AT&T cooperated in an illegal National Security Agency domestic surveillance program.
In a public statement Klein issued last month, he described the NSA’s visit to an AT&T office. In an older, less-public statement recently acquired by Wired News, Klein goes into additional details of his discovery of an alleged surveillance operation in an AT&T building in San Francisco.
Klein supports his claim by attaching excerpts of three internal company documents: a Dec. 10, 2002, manual titled “Study Group 3, LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco,” a Jan. 13, 2003, document titled “SIMS, Splitter Cut-In and Test Procedure” and a second “Cut-In and Test Procedure” dated Jan. 24, 2003.
AT&T’s Implementation of NSA Spying on American Citizens
31 December 2005
I wrote the following document in 2004 when it became clear to me that AT&T, at the behest of the National Security Agency, had illegally installed secret computer gear designed to spy on internet traffic. At the time I thought this was an outgrowth of the notorious Total Information Awareness program, which was attacked by defenders of civil liberties. But now it’s been revealed by The New York Times that the spying program is vastly bigger and was directly authorized by President Bush, as he himself has now admitted, in flagrant violation of specific statutes and constitutional protections for civil liberties. I am presenting this information to facilitate the dismantling of this dangerous Orwellian project.
AT&T Deploys Government Spy Gear on WorldNet Network
16 January, 2004
In 2003 AT&T built “secret rooms” hidden deep in the bowels of its central offices in various cities, housing computer gear for a government spy operation which taps into the company’s popular WorldNet service and the entire internet. These installations enable the government to look at every individual message on the internet and analyze exactly what people are doing. Documents showing the hardwire installation in San Francisco suggest that there are similar locations being installed in numerous other cities.
The physical arrangement, the timing of its construction, the government-imposed secrecy surrounding it and other factors all strongly suggest that its origins are rooted in the Defense Department’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) program which brought forth vigorous protests from defenders of constitutionally protected civil liberties last year:
“As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant.” The New York Times, 9 November 2002
To mollify critics, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) spokesmen have repeatedly asserted that they are only conducting “research” using “artificial synthetic data” or information from “normal DOD intelligence channels” and hence there are “no U.S. citizen privacy implications” (Department of Defense, Office of the Inspector General report on TIA, December 12, 2003). They also changed the name of the program to “Terrorism Information Awareness” to make it more politically palatable. But feeling the heat, Congress made a big show of allegedly cutting off funding for TIA in late 2003, and the political fallout resulted in Adm. Poindexter’s abrupt resignation last August. However, the fine print reveals that Congress eliminated funding only for “the majority of the TIA components,” allowing several “components” to continue (DOD, ibid). The essential hardware elements of a TIA-type spy program are being surreptitiously slipped into “real world” telecommunications offices.
In San Francisco the “secret room” is Room 641A at 611 Folsom Street, the site of a large SBC phone building, three floors of which are occupied by AT&T. High-speed fiber-optic circuits come in on the 8th floor and run down to the 7th floor where they connect to routers for AT&T’s WorldNet service, part of the latter’s vital “Common Backbone.” In order to snoop on these circuits, a special cabinet was installed and cabled to the “secret room” on the 6th floor to monitor the information going through the circuits. (The location code of the cabinet is 070177.04, which denotes the 7th floor, aisle 177 and bay 04.) The “secret room” itself is roughly 24-by-48 feet, containing perhaps a dozen cabinets including such equipment as Sun servers and two Juniper routers, plus an industrial-size air conditioner.
The normal work force of unionized technicians in the office are forbidden to enter the “secret room,” which has a special combination lock on the main door. The telltale sign of an illicit government spy operation is the fact that only people with security clearance from the National Security Agency can enter this room. In practice this has meant that only one management-level technician works in there. Ironically, the one who set up the room was laid off in late 2003 in one of the company’s endless “downsizings,” but he was quickly replaced by another.
Plans for the “secret room” were fully drawn up by December 2002, curiously only four months after Darpa started awarding contracts for TIA. One 60-page document, identified as coming from “AT&T Labs Connectivity & Net Services” and authored by the labs’ consultant Mathew F. Casamassima, is titled Study Group 3, LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco and dated 12/10/02. This document addresses the special problem of trying to spy on fiber-optic circuits. Unlike copper wire circuits which emit electromagnetic fields that can be tapped into without disturbing the circuits, fiber-optic circuits do not “leak” their light signals. In order to monitor such communications, one has to physically cut into the fiber somehow and divert a portion of the light signal to see the information.
This problem is solved with “splitters” which literally split off a percentage of the light signal so it can be examined. This is the purpose of the special cabinet referred to above: Circuits are connected into it, the light signal is split into two signals, one of which is diverted to the “secret room.” The cabinet is totally unnecessary for the circuit to perform — in fact it introduces problems since the signal level is reduced by the splitter — its only purpose is to enable a third party to examine the data flowing between sender and recipient on the internet.
The above-referenced document includes a diagram showing the splitting of the light signal, a portion of which is diverted to “SG3 Secure Room,” i.e., the so-called “Study Group” spy room. Another page headlined “Cabinet Naming” lists not only the “splitter” cabinet but also the equipment installed in the “SG3” room, including various Sun devices, and Juniper M40e and M160 “backbone” routers. PDF file 4 shows one of many tables detailing the connections between the “splitter” cabinet on the 7th floor (location 070177.04) and a cabinet in the “secret room” on the 6th floor (location 060903.01). Since the San Francisco “secret room” is numbered 3, the implication is that there are at least several more in other cities (Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego are some of the rumored locations), which likely are spread across the United States.
One of the devices in the “Cabinet Naming” list is particularly revealing as to the purpose of the “secret room”: a Narus STA 6400. Narus is a 7-year-old company which, because of its particular niche, appeals not only to businessmen (it is backed by AT&T, JP Morgan and Intel, among others) but also to police, military and intelligence officials. Last November 13-14, for instance, Narus was the “Lead Sponsor” for a technical conference held in McLean, Virginia, titled “Intelligence Support Systems for Lawful Interception and Internet Surveillance.” Police officials, FBI and DEA agents, and major telecommunications companies eager to cash in on the “war on terror” had gathered in the hometown of the CIA to discuss their special problems. Among the attendees were AT&T, BellSouth, MCI, Sprint and Verizon. Narus founder, Dr. Ori Cohen, gave a keynote speech. So what does the Narus STA 6400 do?
“The (Narus) STA Platform consists of standalone traffic analyzers that collect network and customer usage information in real time directly from the message…. These analyzers sit on the message pipe into the ISP (internet service provider) cloud rather than tap into each router or ISP device” (Telecommunications magazine, April 2000). A Narus press release (1 Dec., 1999) also boasts that its Semantic Traffic Analysis (STA) technology “captures comprehensive customer usage data … and transforms it into actionable information…. (It) is the only technology that provides complete visibility for all internet applications.”
To implement this scheme, WorldNet’s high-speed data circuits already in service had to be rerouted to go through the special “splitter” cabinet. This was addressed in another document of 44 pages from AT&T Labs, titled SIMS, Splitter Cut-In and Test Procedure, dated 01/13/03. “SIMS” is an unexplained reference to the secret room. Part of this reads as follows:
“A WMS (work) Ticket will be issued by the AT&T Bridgeton Network Operation Center (NOC) to charge time for performing the work described in this procedure document…. “This procedure covers the steps required to insert optical splitters into select live Common Backbone (CBB) OC3, OC12 and OC48 optical circuits.”
The NOC referred to is in Bridgeton, Missouri, and controls WorldNet operations. (As a sign that government spying goes hand-in-hand with union-busting, the entire (Communication Workers of America) Local 6377 which had jurisdiction over the Bridgeton NOC was wiped out in early 2002 when AT&T fired the union work force and later rehired them as nonunion “management” employees.) The cut-in work was performed in 2003, and since then new circuits are connected through the “splitter” cabinet.
Another Cut-In and Test Procedure document dated January 24, 2003, provides diagrams of how AT&T Core Network circuits were to be run through the “splitter” cabinet. One page lists the circuit IDs of key Peering Links which were “cut-in” in February 2003, including ConXion, Verio, XO, Genuity, Qwest, PAIX, Allegiance, AboveNet, Global Crossing, C&W, UUNET, Level 3, Sprint, Telia, PSINet and Mae West. By the way, Mae West is one of two key internet nodal points in the United States (the other, Mae East, is in Vienna, Virginia). It’s not just WorldNet customers who are being spied on — it’s the entire internet.
The next logical question is, what central command is collecting the data sent by the various “secret rooms”? One can only make educated guesses, but perhaps the answer was inadvertently given in the DOD Inspector General’s report (cited above):
“For testing TIA capabilities, Darpa and the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) created an operational research and development environment that uses real-time feedback. The main node of TIA is located at INSCOM (in Fort Belvoir, Virginia)….”
Among the agencies participating or planning to participate in the INSCOM “testing” are the “National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the DOD Counterintelligence Field Activity, the U.S. Strategic Command, the Special Operations Command, the Joint Forces Command and the Joint Warfare Analysis Center.” There are also “discussions” going on to bring in “non-DOD federal agencies” such as the FBI.
This is the infrastructure for an Orwellian police state. It must be shut down!
503
this is sort of a backhanded compliment… they say that there’s no link between pot and lung cancer, but they still recommend not smoking pot because of problems like “cognitive impairment and chronic bronchitis”, in spite of the fact that there’s no mention of alcohol or other “legal” drugs that have identical, if not more severe problems linked with them. also i’d be willing to bet that they didn’t test pot smoked through a water filtration device like a bong because tobacco isn’t smoked that way… 8/
Baby-boomer research results surprise doctors expecting to find connection
May 23, 2006
LOS ANGELES – Marijuana smoking does not increase a person’s risk of developing lung cancer, according to the findings of a new study at the University of California Los Angeles that surprised even the researchers.
They had expected to find that a history of heavy marijuana use, like cigarette smoking, would increase the risk of cancer.
Instead, the study, which compared the lifestyles of 611 Los Angeles County lung cancer patients and 601 patients with head and neck cancers with those of 1,040 people without cancer, found no elevated cancer risk for even the heaviest pot smokers. It did find a 20-fold increased risk of lung cancer in people who smoked two or more packs of cigarettes a day.
The study results were presented in San Diego on Tuesday at a meeting of the American Thoracic Society.
The study was confined to people under age 60 since baby boomers were the most likely age group to have long-term exposure to marijuana, said Dr. Donald Tashkin, senior researcher and professor at the UCLA School of Medicine.
The results should not be taken as a blank check to smoke pot, which has been associated with problems like cognitive impairment and chronic bronchitis, said Dr. John Hansen-Flaschen, chief of pulmonary and critical care at the University of Pennsylvania Health System in Philadelphia. He was not involved in the study.
Previous studies showed marijuana tar contained about 50 percent more of the chemicals linked to lung cancer, compared with tobacco tar, Tashkin said. In addition, smoking a marijuana joint deposits four times more tar in the lungs than smoking an equivalent amount of tobacco.
“Marijuana is packed more loosely than tobacco, so there’s less filtration through the rod of the cigarette, so more particles will be inhaled,” Tashkin said in a statement. “And marijuana smokers typically smoke differently than tobacco smokers — they hold their breath about four times longer, allowing more time for extra fine particles to deposit in the lung.”
He theorized that tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, a chemical in marijuana smoke that produces its psychotropic effect, may encourage aging, damaged cells to die off before they become cancerous.
Hansen-Flaschen also cautioned a cancer-marijuana link could emerge as baby boomers age and there may be smaller population groups, based on genetics or other factors, still at risk for marijuana-related cancers.
502
May 22, 2006
By James Polk, Drew Griffin and Kate Albright-Hanna
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana — Autopsy results obtained by CNN show a retarded man was shot in the back when he was killed by New Orleans police in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
This contradicts testimony by a police sergeant that the victim had turned toward officers and was reaching into his waistband when shot.
“Clearly he was shot from behind,” said famed New York pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, who examined the body for the family’s lawyer.
A prosecutor said the case will go before a grand jury soon and acknowledged the investigation includes the possibility of police wrong-doing.
Ronald Madison, 40, was mentally retarded and lived at home with his mother. He had no criminal record. He was shot when police responded to a report of gunfire on a bridge over the flooded Industrial Canal on Sunday, September 4, six days after Katrina hit New Orleans last year.
It was a week of dire flooding, rampant looting, death by drowning. Police were strained, beset by suicides and desertion. Four people were killed in confrontations with police that weekend alone.
Madison’s older brother, Lance, said he and Ronald were walking across the Danziger bridge toward another brother’s dental office when teen-agers ran up behind him and opened fire that Sunday morning.
By his account, he and Ronald were running away toward the crest of the bridge when a police team, responding to the report of gunshots, arrived in a rental truck and opened fire on people on the bridge.
Police Superintendent Warren Riley told CNN, “Several of the people were shot and two were killed by our officers in a running gun battle… Most police shoot-outs last somewhere between six and twelve seconds, and it’s over with. This was a running gun battle that went on several minutes.”
One teen-ager, still unidentified, was killed near the base of the bridge. Another was critically wounded. Three other people with them were also shot and were hospitalized.
Lance Madison said a policeman pointed a rifle at Ronald and shot him as the two of them were running up the bridge. Lance said he helped carry his wounded brother to a motel on the other side of the canal and left him there as Lance kept running to seek help.
The Police Department said in a press release last fall that Ronald Madison, whom it called a second unidentified gunman, “was confronted by a New Orleans Police Officer. The suspect reached into his waist and turned toward the officer who fired one shot fatally wounding him.”
Testifying in a preliminary hearing last fall, Police Sgt. Arthur Kaufman said much the same thing: “One subject turned, reached in his waistband, turned on the officers.”
Autopsy results, made available to CNN by a source involved in the investigation, directly contradict that police account.
The findings list five separate gunshot wounds in Ronald Madison’s back. Three went through the body and exited in front. There were two other wounds in his right shoulder. None of the shots entered his body from the front.
CNN had sued the coroner of Orleans Parish to try to get official access to the autopsy report. At a court hearing on that lawsuit in New Orleans a week ago, the coroner, Dr. Frank Minyard, verified the handwritten autopsy report obtained elsewhere by CNN was indeed prepared in his office by a pathologist on his staff who listed the wounds in the victim’s right back.
Under cross-examination by a CNN lawyer, Dr. Minyard testified those five wounds in the back “were entrance wounds, yes.”
Dr. Michael Baden, chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police, met with CNN in New York City two weeks ago to discuss his own observations when he examined Ronald Madison’s body for the family lawyer last fall. Asked if Ronald could have been facing the police when shot, Dr. Baden said, “Absolutely not.”
No weapon was found on or near Ronald Madison’s body.
Asst. District Attorney Dustin Davis, testifying in the same court hearing on the CNN lawsuit, said a grand jury has been assigned to investigate the Danziger Bridge shootings. However, the grand jury has not yet met on the case because the New Orleans Police Dept. has yet to complete its final report, eight months after those deaths.
The CNN attorney asked Davis, “What you are investigating in that case is whether any of the police officers may be indicted for homicide, is that correct?”
Davis answered, “That’s partially correct. We are also looking at Mr. Madison’s involvement in the incident.”
Lance Madison was arrested on the other side of the bridge where his brother was killed and was accused of shooting at the police officers in the gun battle. He, too, had no weapon when taken into custody. He was released from bail after six months because the District Attorney’s office had not initiated any prosecution, although the investigation remains pending.
Sgt. Kaufman testified at the bail hearing for Lance Madison last fall that another policeman saw Lance throw a gun into the Industrial Canal as he was going over the bridge. Lance Madison denies that. He told CNN correspondent Drew Griffin, “I had no gun, at all.” Asked if Ronald had a gun, Lance answered, “No, he didn’t.”
In a CNN interview earlier this month, Griffin told Police Chief Warren Riley, “We understand Ronald Madison was shot in the back five times.”
Riley said, “Those are things I can’t comment on and no one can comment on until the investigation is concluded.”
Griffin asked Riley if he was concerned about his officers’ actions and Riley replied, “Certainly, we do not condone our officers overreacting, even in the most chaotic time,” but he went on, “We don’t know that they overreacted. From the radio transmission, it sounds like their lives were in danger.”
Riley turned down a request by CNN to interview the officers who were involved.
A 25-year career employee at Federal Express, Lance Madison has no criminal record.
At the end of the CNN interview, Riley conceded the two Madison brothers may not have been connected with the other people on the bridge that day.
“I don’t know if those young men were innocent or not. I really don’t know if they were with that group or not,” Riley said. “I really don’t know.”
501
you know how hard it is to place a coin on it’s edge when you’re trying… you can do it, but it’s difficult, and especially so when the surface is uneven. i wasn’t paying attention, and wasn’t trying to put this penny down in any particular way, and it came to rest like this anyway.
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500
urgh… depressed…
in the past four days, i’ve updated
499
| You Are Lightning |
 Beautiful yet dangerous. People will stop and watch you when you appear even though you’re capable of random violence You are best known for: your power Your dominant state: performing |
498
okay, i’ve been looking for a version of this meme that i can do with minimal effort, and i found one yesterday. i would have done it yesterday except for the fact that i was depressed and cleaned up the house instead of listening to music.
- Turn on your favorite media player and turn your shuffle feature on.
- Hit “play” and keep track of the next 10 songs that come up.
- Post your 10 shuffled songs, along with these instructions. You are not allowed to lie, omit tracks or otherwise try to make your musical taste seem hipper than it actually is.
- Tag five people on your friends list to do the same. horseshit. tag yourselves.
- Hollowmusic – St. Fred, Hollow Music — yeah, listening to music that you, yourself, created is a guaranteed way to move up on the “hip” list… 8/
- Fantastic Voyage – David Bowie, Lodger
- Bulky Rhythm – The Bobs, My I’m Large
- Under Wraps #1 – Jethro Tull, Under Wraps
- Kill Him! – The Residents, Wormwood
- Loss Of Innocence – The Residents, Commercial Album
- Francisco – Brian Eno, The Shutov Assembly
- Catholic Girls – Frank Zappa, You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore vol. 6
- African Reggae – Nina Hagen, Nunsexmonkrock
- The Attack – Roger Wateres, When The Wind Blows
497
okay, i’m depressed again.
there have been no hybrid elephant orders for over a month, since that guy who runs an oriental medicine practice in nevada was talking about ordering $1,000 worth of incense, and then decided that he only wanted $400 worth, and then – after i had already ordered it – he decided that he wasn’t going to order from me at all, so i had to send $400 worth of incense back to the supplier. not only do i not know where he’s getting it from, but since then i have had no orders of any kind. i’m getting concerned, and i don’t know what to do.
i have decided that i’ve got to have a workshop… i’m going crazy not having anything to do. so i’m looking into buying a 8’x8.5’x20′ shipping container and transforming it into a workshop… but i get the very strong impression that moe would much rather i get a more building-like “shed”. the problem is that i have exactly enough money to buy either one or the other, and at this point, i don’t have any money to make the “improvements” necessary to make both into a functioning workshop. i get the very strong impression that, of the two, the shipping container would come in a state that is much more workshop-ready – all i’d have to do is put in some overhead lights and run a couple of extension cords, but, as i said, i get the very strong impression that moe would much rather i get something other than a shipping container, and at this point, i feel like if i don’t do what she wants, there’s likely to be bigger problems.
the other option, if i decide that i’m not buying a workshop structure, is that i could buy a new computer. if i were to do so, it would very likely be either a mac book, or a G5 mac mini. however, if i get a new computer, a workshop of any kind is going to be completely out of the question for at least another year, unless the hybrid elephant market does an amazing turnaround.
i replied to a post whose subject was “seattle’s most fabulous horn players” about a month ago, and it turned out to be someone i know from bellingham, 25 years ago. well, it turns out that, like 25 years ago, the guy has grandiose dreams of stuff he’d like to do, but he doesn’t have the talent or the organisational skills to do it the way he wants to. the third rehearsal is coming up on saturday, and this week he emailed me to say that he hasn’t been able to get any other horn players (unlike last week when i showed up only to find that i was the only horn player out of three people at the rehearsal), so “in case you don’t want to be the only horn again” i can cancel… what i’m going to tell him is that when he’s ready for horn players to show up, that he can give me a call, but i’m not expecting a call any time soon.
496
Dell is apparently putting hardware keyloggers in their laptops at the behest of the Department of Clownland Security,although when asked about it, they say “the intregrated service tag identifier is there for assisting customers in the event of lost or misplaced personal information” and hang up. the only thing i know for sure is that the guy who submitted a FOIA request for an explanation of why his new laptop had a device that can and is used to spy on terrorists (among other, less legal uses) got a reply that included the following statement from DHS: “the requested records are exempt from being disclosed under FOIA”… dude, i’m not getting a dell!!! (and here’s evidence that the whole thing is a hoax, but i’m not getting a dell anyway, i’m getting a mac, if i’m getting a computer at all)
CIA Nominee Gen. Michael Hayden Insists NSA Warrantless Surveillance Program Is Legal
By KATHERINE SHRADER
May 18, 2006
WASHINGTON — CIA nominee Gen. Michael Hayden insisted on Thursday that the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program was legal and that it was designed to ensnare terrorists not spy on ordinary people.
“Clearly the privacy of American citizens is a concern constantly,” the four-star Air Force general told the Senate Intelligence Committee at his confirmation hearing. “We always balance privacy and security.”
Hayden was peppered by as many questions about the National Security Agency, the super-secret agency that he headed from 1999-2005, as about his visions for the CIA.
Senators grilled him on the NSA’s eavesdropping without warrants on conversations and e-mails believed by the government to involve terrorism suspects, and reports of the tracking of millions of phone calls made and received by ordinary Americans.
After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush decided that more anti-terrorism surveillance was necessary than the NSA had been doing, said Hayden.
Hayden said he decided to go ahead with the then-covert surveillance program, which has been confirmed by Bush, believing it to be legal and necessary.
“When I had to make this personal decision in October 2001 … the math was pretty straightforward. I could not not do this,” Hayden said.
He said the surveillance program used a “probable cause” standard that made it unlikely that information about average Americans would be scrutinized.
But he declined to openly discuss reports that the NSA was engaged in even broader surveillance, including a story in USA Today that the NSA has been secretly collecting phone-call records of tens of millions of U.S. citizens.
Under questioning from Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, Hayden said he would only talk about the part of the program the president had confirmed.
“Is that the whole program?” asked Levin.
“I’m not at liberty to talk about that in open session,” Hayden said. A closed-door session was planned for later in the day.
Hayden was asked about reported friction between him and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld over how the NSA and other intelligence agencies would work with the Pentagon, which has the lion’s share of intelligence dollars.
Had they disagreed, he was asked by Levin? “Yes sir,” said Hayden.
Some critics have suggested that Hayden, 61, who remains an active general, is too closely aligned with the Pentagon to objectively run the civilian CIA.
Hayden declined to answer a string of questions by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., saying he would answer them later in a closed-door session.
They included whether he believed that “waterboarding,” in which prisoners are strapped to a plank and dunked in water until nearly drowning, was an acceptable form of interrogation. He also declined to say publicly how long he believed the United States could hold terror suspects without a trial.
“He didn’t answer any of them,” Feinstein said into an open mike as the hearing recessed for lunch.
Meanwhile, White House spokesman Tony Snow expressed the president’s full confidence in Hayden. “The guy’s got a record of trying to take on big reform tasks and carrying them out,” Snow told reporters.
Hayden acknowledged a series of intelligence failures in the run-up to the U.S. decision to invade Iraq and promised to take steps to guard against a repeat of such errors.
“We just took too much for granted. We didn’t challenge our basic assumptions,” he told the Senate Intelligence Committee at his confirmation hearing.
He said that since launching the surveillance program a month after the terror attacks, targeting decisions have been made by NSA experts on al-Qaida.
Asked by Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., whether a NSA analyst could intentionally look at information unrelated to suspected terrorist activity, Hayden said, “I don’t know how that could survive.”
Committee Chairman Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas complained about the CIA’s performance on Iraq. While “nobody bats 1,000 in the intelligence world,” Roberts cited “a terribly flawed trade craft” in the CIA’s intelligence suggesting the presence of weapons of mass destruction there.
At the same time, Roberts complained that the discussion among lawmakers had not been over Hayden’s long intelligence-services resume “but rather the debate is focused almost entirely” on controversy over NSA surveillance and eavesdropping programs.
Hayden, as expected, drew the most fire from Democratic members. “I now have a difficult time with your credibility,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.
In an opening statement, Hayden said that intelligence-gathering has become “the football in American political discourse” since the terror attacks of Sept. 11.
He said the embattled agency “must be transformed, without slowing the high tempo under which it already operates, to counter today’s threats.”
“Yes, there have been failures, but there have also been many great successes,” Hayden said.
If confirmed, “I would reaffirm the CIA’s proud culture of risk-taking,” said Hayden, who was selected by President Bush to succeed Porter Goss, who was forced out after serving for 18 months.
Hayden’s hearing before the Intelligence Committee was much different than a year ago, when the panel approved him unanimously to be the nation’s first principal deputy director of national intelligence.
Bush chose Hayden as CIA director-nominee after consultation with Hayden’s current boss, National Intelligence Director John Negroponte. Goss announced his retirement earlier this month after disputes with Hayden and Negroponte about the CIA’s direction.
Robertson says warning was for this year; tsunami might hit Northwest
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. – In another in a series of notable pronouncements, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson says God told him storms and possibly a tsunami will hit America’s coastline this year.
Robertson has made the predictions at least four times in the past two weeks on his news-and-talk television show “The 700 Club” on the Christian Broadcasting Network, which he founded.
Robertson said the revelations about this year’s weather came to him during his annual personal prayer retreat in January.
“If I heard the Lord right about 2006, the coasts of America will be lashed by storms,” Robertson said May 8. On Wednesday, he added, “There well may be something as bad as a tsunami in the Pacific Northwest.”
Robertson has come under intense criticism in recent months for suggesting that American agents should assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s stroke was divine retribution for Israel’s pullout from the Gaza Strip.
not to mention blaming 9/11 on gays and "liberal" groups”…
495
today i spent 9 hours working on Ganesha The Car. if i had it to do all over again i would make all the writing the size of the new red & black lines, but it’s pretty good the way it is.
494
okay, this is strange…
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Black and white twins
By LUCY LAING
21st February 2006
When Kylie Hodgson gave birth to twin daughters by caesarean section, she was just relieved that they had arrived safely.
It was only when the midwife handed them over for her to hold that she noticed the difference between them.
Remee, who weighed 5lb 15oz, was blonde and fair skinned. Her sister Kian, born a minute later weighing 6lb, was black.
‘Our two gorgeous little girls’
“It was a shock when I realised that my twins were two different colours,” said Kylie, 19. “But it doesn’t matter to us – they are just our two gorgeous little girls.”
The amazing conception happened after two eggs were fertilised at the same time in the womb.
Both Kylie and her partner Remi Horder, 17, are of mixed race. Their mothers are both white and their fathers are black.
According to the Multiple Births Foundation, baby Kian must have inherited the black genes from both sides of the family, whilst Remee inherited the white ones.
Kylie, from Nottingham, discovered she was pregnant in the summer of 2004 and a scan at the Queen’s Medical Centre revealed that twins were on the way.
“It was a shock at first to discover I was expecting as we hadn’t been trying for a family,” she said I had my 14-week scan and the sonographer ran the scanner over my stomach and announced that I was carrying twins.
“We couldn’t believe it. Neither of us could take our eyes off the scanner – you could just see two of everything, even the outline of their little noses. We were both overwhelmed.”
The twins were born by caesarean in April last year because one of the girls was lying in an awkward position in the womb.
“I didn’t see them at first,” added their mother. “They were both whisked away to be checked over and then the midwife came back and placed them both in my arms.
“I noticed that both of them had beautiful blue eyes, but whilst Remee was blonde, Kian’s hair was black and she had darker skin.
“It seemed strange, but I was feeling so ill that I didn’t really take it in at that stage.”
The next day she mentioned the colour difference to her mother, who told her that Remee’s skin would darken as she grew older.
But as the weeks passed, Remee became lighter still while Kian went darker. And while Remee’s eyes stayed blue, Kian’s turned brown.
“There are some similarities between them,” said their mother. “They both love apples and grapes, and their favourite television programme is Teletubbies.
“If they haven’t seen each other for a few hours, they are so pleased to see each other and will hold out their arms, wanting to hug each other. And their smiles just light up their faces.
“I’ll explain it all to them when they get older about why they look so different.”
Million to one odds
The odds against of a mixed race couple having twins of dramatically different colour are a million to one.
Skin colour is believed to be determined by up to seven different genes working together.
If a woman is of mixed race, her eggs will usually contain a mixture of genes coding for both black and white skin.
Similarly, a man of mixed race will have a variety of different genes in his sperm. When these eggs and sperm come together, they will create a baby of mixed race.
But, very occasionally, the egg or sperm might contain genes coding for one skin colour. If both the egg and sperm contain all white genes, the baby will be white. And if both contain just the versions necessary for black skin, the baby will be black.
For a mixed-race couple, the odds of either of these scenarios is around 100 to one. But both scenarios can occur at the same time if the woman conceives non-identical twins, another 100 to one chance.
This involves two eggs being fertilised by two sperm at the same time, which also has odds of around 100 to one.
If a sperm containing all-white genes fuses with a similar egg and a sperm coding for purely black skin fuses with a similar egg, two babies of dramatically different colours will be born.
The odds of this happening are 100 x 100 x 100 – a million to one.
493
By Brian Ross and Richard Esposito
May 15, 2006
A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we (Brian Ross and Richard Esposito) call in an effort to root out confidential sources.
“It’s time for you to get some new cell phones, quick,” the source told us in an in-person conversation.
ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.
Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.
One former official was asked to sign a document stating he was not a confidential source for New York Times reporter James Risen.
Our reports on the CIA’s secret prisons in Romania and Poland were known to have upset CIA officials. The CIA asked for an FBI investigation of leaks of classified information following those reports.
People questioned by the FBI about leaks of intelligence information say the CIA was also disturbed by ABC News reports that revealed the use of CIA predator missiles inside Pakistan.
Under Bush Administration guidelines, it is not considered illegal for the government to keep track of numbers dialed by phone customers.
The official who warned ABC News said there was no indication our phones were being tapped so the content of the conversation could be recorded.
A pattern of phone calls from a reporter, however, could provide valuable clues for leak investigators.
and
By Brian Ross and Richard Esposito
May 15, 2006
The FBI acknowledged late Monday that it is increasingly seeking reporters’ phone records in leak investigations.
“It used to be very hard and complicated to do this, but it no longer is in the Bush administration,” said a senior federal official.
The acknowledgement followed our blotter item that ABC News reporters had been warned by a federal source that the government knew who we were calling.
The official said our blotter item was wrong to suggest that ABC News phone calls were being “tracked.”
“Think of it more as backtracking,” said a senior federal official.
But FBI officials did not deny that phone records of ABC News, the New York Times and the Washington Post had been sought as part of a investigation of leaks at the CIA.
In a statement, the FBI press office said its leak investigations begin with the examination of government phone records.
“The FBI will take logical investigative steps to determine if a criminal act was committed by a government employee by the unauthorized release of classified information,” the statement said.
Officials say that means that phone records of reporters will be sought if government records are not sufficient.
Officials say the FBI makes extensive use of a new provision of the Patriot Act which allows agents to seek information with what are called National Security Letters (NSL).
The NSLs are a version of an administrative subpoena and are not signed by a judge. Under the law, a phone company receiving a NSL for phone records must provide them and may not divulge to the customer that the records have been given to the government.
 |
492
how to build a HandySwipe portable magnetic card reader for less than $20.
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more information about my (new) icon can be found here and here… interesting, no?
491
May 14, 2006
HARTFORD, Conn. – U.S. military troops with severe psychological problems have been sent to Iraq or kept in combat, even when superiors have been aware of signs of mental illness, a newspaper reported for Sunday editions.
The Hartford Courant, citing records obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act and more than 100 interviews of families and military personnel, reported numerous cases in which the military failed to follow its own regulations in screening, treating and evacuating mentally unfit troops from Iraq.
In 1997, Congress ordered the military to assess the mental health of all deploying troops. The newspaper, citing Pentagon statistics, said fewer than 1 in 300 service members were referred to a mental health professional before shipping out for Iraq as of October 2005.
Twenty-two U.S. troops committed suicide in Iraq last year, accounting for nearly one in five of all non-combat deaths and the highest suicide rate since the war started, the newspaper said.
Some service members who committed suicide in 2004 and 2005 were kept on duty despite clear signs of mental distress, sometimes after being prescribed antidepressants with little or no mental health counseling or monitoring, the Courant reported. Those findings conflict with regulations adopted last year by the Army that caution against the use of antidepressants for “extended deployments.”
“I can’t imagine something more irresponsible than putting a soldier suffering from stress on (antidepressants), when you know these drugs can cause people to become suicidal and homicidal,” said Vera Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, a New York-based advocacy group. “You’re creating chemically activated time bombs.”
Although Defense Department standards for enlistment disqualify recruits who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, the military also is redeploying service members to Iraq who fit that criteria, the newspaper said.
“I’m concerned that people who are symptomatic are being sent back. That has not happened before in our country,” said Dr. Arthur S. Blank, Jr., a Yale-trained psychiatrist who helped to get post-traumatic stress disorder recognized as a diagnosis after the Vietnam War.
The Army’s top mental health expert, Col. Elspeth Ritchie, acknowledged that some deployment practices, such as sending service members diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome back into combat, have been driven in part by a troop shortage.
“The challenge for us … is that the Army has a mission to fight. And, as you know, recruiting has been a challenge,” she said. “And so we have to weigh the needs of the Army, the needs of the mission, with the soldiers’ personal needs.”
Ritchie insisted the military works hard to prevent suicides, but said that is a challenge because every soldier has access to a weapon.
Commanders, not medical professionals, have final say over whether a troubled soldier is retained in the war zone. Ritchie and other military officials said they believe most commanders are alert to mental health problems and are open to referring troubled soldiers for treatment.
“Your average commander doesn’t want to deal with a whacked-out soldier. But on the other hand, he doesn’t want to send a message to his troops that if you act up, he’s willing to send you home,” said Maj. Andrew Efaw, a judge advocate general officer in the Army Reserves who handled trial defense for soldiers in northern Iraq last year.
Mentally Unfit, Forced To Fight – a report in three parts, of which the following is one…
May 14, 2006
By LISA CHEDEKEL And MATTHEW KAUFFMAN
Despite a congressional order that the military assess the mental health of all deploying troops, fewer than 1 in 300 service members see a mental health professional before shipping out.
Once at war, some unstable troops are kept on the front lines while on potent antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs, with little or no counseling or medical monitoring.
And some troops who developed post-traumatic stress disorder after serving in Iraq are being sent back to the war zone, increasing the risk to their mental health.
These practices, which have received little public scrutiny and in some cases violate the military’s own policies, have helped to fuel an increase in the suicide rate among troops serving in Iraq, which reached an all-time high in 2005 when 22 soldiers killed themselves – accounting for nearly one in five of all Army non-combat deaths.
The Courant’s investigation found that at least 11 service members who committed suicide in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 were kept on duty despite exhibiting signs of significant psychological distress. In at least seven of the cases, superiors were aware of the problems, military investigative records and interviews with families indicate.
Among the troops who plunged through the gaps in the mental health system was Army Spec. Jeffrey Henthorn, a young father and third-generation soldier, whose death last year is still being mourned by his native Choctaw, Okla.
What his hometown does not know is that Henthorn, 25, had been sent back to Iraq for a second tour, even though his superiors knew he was unstable and had threatened suicide at least twice, according to Army investigative reports and interviews. When he finally succeeded in killing himself on Feb. 8, 2005, at Camp Anaconda in Balad, Iraq, an Army report says, the work of the M-16 rifle was so thorough that fragments of his skull pierced the barracks ceiling.
In a case last July, a 20-year-old soldier who had written a suicide note to his mother was relieved of his gun and referred for a psychological evaluation, but then was accused of faking his mental problems and warned he could be disciplined, according to what he told his family. Three weeks later, after his gun had been handed back, Pfc. Jason Scheuerman, of Lynchburg, Va., used it to end his life.
Also kept in the war zone was Army Pfc. David L. Potter, 22, of Johnson City, Tenn., who was diagnosed with anxiety and depression while serving in Iraq in 2004. Potter remained with his unit in Baghdad despite a suicide attempt and a psychiatrist’s recommendation that he be separated from the Army, records show. Ten days after the recommendation was signed, he slid a gun out from under another soldier’s bed, climbed to the second floor of an abandoned building and shot himself through the mouth, the Army has concluded.
The spike in suicides among the all-volunteer force is a setback for military officials, who had pledged in late 2003 to improve mental health services, after expressing alarm that 11 soldiers and two Marines had killed themselves in Iraq in the first seven months of the war. When the number of suicides tumbled in 2004, top Army officials had credited their renewed prevention efforts.
But The Courant’s review found that since 2003, the military has increasingly sent, kept and recycled troubled troops into combat – practices that undercut its assurances of improvements. Besides causing suicides, experts say, gaps in mental health care can cause violence between soldiers, accidents and critical mistakes in judgment during combat operations.
Military experts and advocates point to recruiting shortfalls and intense wartime pressure to maintain troop levels as reasons more service members with psychiatric problems are being deployed to the war zone and kept there.
“What you have is a military stretched so thin, they’ve resorted to keeping psychologically unfit soldiers at the front,” said Stephen Robinson, the former longtime director of the National Gulf War Resource Center. “It’s a policy that can do an awful lot of damage over time.”
Army officials confirmed that 22 soldiers killed themselves in Iraq, and three in Afghanistan, in 2005. The Army suicide rate was about 20 per 100,000 soldiers serving in Iraq – nearly double the 2004 rate, and higher than the 2003 rate that had prompted alarm. Three Marines also committed suicide in Iraq last year.
The military does not discuss or even identify individual suicide cases, which are grouped with other non-combat deaths. The Courant identified suicide victims through Army investigative reports and interviews with families.
Although The Courant determined that a spate of six suicides occurred within eight weeks last year, from late May to July, there is no indication that the military took steps to respond to the cluster.
While the 2005 jump in self-inflicted deaths was as pronounced as the 2003 spike that had stirred action, Army officials said last week that there were no immediate plans to change the approach or resources targeted to mental health. They said they had confidence in the initiatives put in place two years ago – additional combat stress teams to treat deployed troops and increased suicide prevention programs.
Col. Elspeth Ritchie, the top psychiatry expert for the Army surgeon general, said that while the Army is reviewing the 2005 suicides as a way to gauge its mental health efforts, “suicide rates go up and down, and we expect some variation.”
Ritchie said the mental health of troops remains a priority as the war enters its fourth year. But she also acknowledged that some practices, such as sending service members diagnosed with PTSD back into combat, have been driven in part by a troop shortage.
“The challenge for us … is that the Army has a mission to fight. And as you know, recruiting has been a challenge,” she said. “And so we have to weigh the needs of the Army, the needs of the mission, with the soldiers’ personal needs.”
But The Courant’s investigation shows that troubled soldiers are getting lost in the balance:
Under the military’s pre-deployment screening process, troops with serious mental disorders are not being identified – and others whose mental illness is known are being deployed anyway.
A law passed in 1997 requires the military to conduct an “assessment of mental health” on all deploying troops. But the “assessment” now being used is a single mental health question on a pre-deployment form filled out by service members.
Even using that limited tool, troops who self-report psychological problems are rarely referred for evaluations by mental health professionals, Department of Defense records obtained by The Courant indicate. From March 2003 to October 2005, only 6.5 percent of deploying service members who indicated a mental health problem were referred for evaluations; overall, fewer than 1 in 300 deploying troops, or 0.3 percent, were referred.
That rate of referral is dramatically lower than the more than 9 percent of deploying troops that the Army itself acknowledges in studies have serious psychiatric disorders.
In addition, despite its pledges in 2004 to improve mental health care, the military was more likely to deploy troops who indicated psychological problems in 2005 than it was during the first year of the war, the data show.
The Courant found that at least seven, or about one-third, of the 22 soldiers who killed themselves in Iraq in 2005 had been deployed less than three months, raising questions about the adequacy of pre-deployment screening. Some of them had exhibited earlier signs of distress.
Also, at least three soldiers who killed themselves since the war began were deployed despite serious mental conditions, including bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
The military relies increasingly on antidepressants, some with potentially dangerous side effects, to keep troops with known psychological problems in the war zone.
Military investigative reports and interviews with family members indicate that some service members who committed suicide in 2004 and 2005 were kept on duty despite clear signs of mental distress, sometimes after being prescribed antidepressants, including a class of drugs known as SSRIs.
In one case, a 26-year-old Marine who was having trouble sleeping was put on a strong dose of Zoloft, an SSRI that carries a warning urging doctors to closely monitor new patients for suicidal urges. Last April, within two months of starting the drug, the Marine killed himself in Iraq.
Some service members who experienced depression or stress before or during deployments to Iraq described being placed on Zoloft, Wellbutrin and other antidepressants, with little or no mental health counseling or monitoring. Some of the drugs carry warnings of an increased risk of suicide, within the first weeks of their use.
Those anecdotal findings conflict with regulations adopted last year by the Army cautioning that antidepressants for cases of moderate or severe depression “are not usually suitable for extended deployments.”
Also, the military’s top health official, Assistant Defense Secretary William Winkenwerder Jr., indicated in testimony to Congress last summer that service members were being allowed to deploy on psychotropic medications only when their conditions had “fully resolved.”
The use of psychiatric drugs has alarmed some medical experts and ethicists, who say the medications cannot be properly monitored in a war zone. The Army’s own reports indicate that the availability and use of such medications in Iraq and Kuwait have increased since mid-2004, when a team of psychiatrists approved making Prozac, Zoloft, Trazodone, Ambien and other drugs more widely available throughout the combat zone.
“I can’t imagine something more irresponsible than putting a soldier suffering from stress on SSRIs, when you know these drugs can cause people to become suicidal and homicidal,” said Vera Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, a patient advocacy group. “You’re creating chemically activated time bombs.”
The military is sending troops back into combat for second and third tours despite diagnoses of PTSD or other combat-related psychological problems – a practice that some mental health experts fear will fuel incidents of suicide and violence among troops abroad and at home.
Although Department of Defense standards for enlistment in the armed forces disqualify recruits who suffer from PTSD, the military is redeploying service members to Iraq who fit that criteria. The practice, which military experts concede is driven partly by pressure to maintain troop levels, runs counter to accepted medical doctrine and research, which cautions that re-exposure to trauma increases the risk of psychological problems.
At least seven troops who are believed to have committed suicide in 2005 and early 2006, and one who has been charged with killing a fellow soldier, were serving second or third tours in Iraq. Some of them had exhibited signs of combat stress after their first deployments, according to family members and friends.
Some soldiers now serving second tours in Iraq say they are wrestling with debilitating PTSD symptoms, despite being placed on medications.
Jason Sedotal, a 21-year-old military policeman from Pierre Part, La., returned home in March 2005 after seven months in Iraq, during which a Humvee he was driving rolled over a land mine, badly injuring his sergeant. After completing his tour, Sedotal was diagnosed with PTSD and placed on Prozac, he said.
Last October, after being transferred to a new unit, he was shipped back to Iraq for a one-year tour. During a short visit home last week, he described being wracked by nightmares and depression and convinced that “somebody’s following me.” When he conveyed his symptoms to a doctor at Fort Polk in Louisiana last Tuesday, he said, he was given a higher dose of medication and the sleeping pill Ambien and told that he was to go back to Iraq.
“I can’t keep going through this mentally. All they do is fill me up on medicine and send me back,” he said. “What’s this going to do to me in the future? I’m going to be 60 years old, hiding under my kitchen table? I’m real scared.”
More than 378,000 active-duty, Reserve and National Guard troops have served more than one tour in Iraq or Afghanistan, representing nearly a third of the 1.3 million troops who have been deployed, according to Department of Defense statistics. That repeat exposure to combat could dramatically increase the percentage of soldiers and Marines who experience PTSD, major depression or other disorders, some experts say.
Recent studies have estimated that at least 18 percent of returning Iraq veterans are at risk of developing PTSD after just one combat tour.
“The [Department of Defense] is in the business of keeping people deployable,” said Cathleen Wiblemo, deputy director for health care for the American Legion. “What the consequences of that are, we haven’t begun to see.
“This is uncharted territory. You’re looking at guys being extended or sent back multiple times into an extremely stressful situation, which is different than past wars. … I think the number of troops that will be affected, it will be a huge number.”
Preserving The Force
Military officials insist they have made aggressive efforts to improve mental health services to troops in Iraq in the past two years. After the spate of suicides in 2003, the Army dispatched a mental health advisory team, which issued a report recommending additional combat-stress specialists to treat troops close to the front lines, and encouraging training and outreach to reduce the stigma associated with mental health problems.
A follow-up report, released January 2005, cited the drop in suicides in 2004 as evidence that the Army’s efforts were successful. It also highlighted a decline in the number of soldiers who were evacuated out of Iraq for mental health problems – from about 75 a month in 2003 to 36 a month in 2004. In 2005, an average of 46 soldiers were evacuated each month, Army data show.
Overall, barely more than one-tenth of 1 percent of the 1.3 million troops who have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have been evacuated because of psychiatric problems.
Both advisory team reports recommended that soldiers with mental health problems be kept in the combat zone in order to improve return-to-duty rates and help soldiers avoid being labeled unfit.
“If you take people out of their unit and send them home, they have the shame and the stigma,” said Ritchie, the Army’s mental health expert.
But with the suicide rate climbing, the emphasis on treating psychologically damaged soldiers in the war zone is raising new questions.
“You think it’s a stigma to be sent home from the Iraq war? That might be the line they’re using” to justify retaining troops, said Dr. Arthur S. Blank Jr., a psychiatrist who formerly served as national director of the Veterans Administration’s counseling centers. “I wouldn’t say that.”
Mental health specialists who have served in Iraq acknowledge that their main goal, under military guidelines, is to preserve the fighting force. Some have grappled with making tough calls about how much more stress a soldier can handle.
“You have to become comfortable with things we wouldn’t normally be comfortable with,” said Bob Johnson, a psychologist in Atlanta who counseled soldiers last year as chief of combat stress control for the Army’s 2nd Brigade. “If there were an endless supply [of soldiers], the compassionate side of you just wants to get these people out of here. They’re miserable. You can see it in their faces. But I had to kind of put that aside.”
Army statistics show that 59 soldiers killed themselves in Iraq through the end of last year – 25 in 2003, 12 in 2004, and 22 in 2005. Twelve Marine deaths also have been ruled self-inflicted.
The only confirmed Connecticut suicide is that of Army Pfc. Jeffrey Braun, 19, of Stafford, who died in December 2003. His father, William Braun, told The Courant he still did not have a full explanation of what happened to Jeffrey, but said, “I’ve chosen not to pursue it or question it. It’s over and done with.”
Military data show that deaths in Iraq due to all non-combat causes, such as accidents, rose by 32 percent from 2004 to 2005. Of the more than 500 non-combat deaths among all service branches since the start of the war, gunshot wounds were the second-leading cause of death, behind vehicle crashes but ahead of heart attacks and other medical ailments.
While many families of service members who died of non-combat causes say they are not familiar with military deployment policies, some question whether the military knowingly put their loved ones at risk.
Among them are relatives of Army Spec. Michael S. Deem, a 35-year-old father of two, who was deployed to Iraq in January 2005 despite a history of depression that family members say was known to the military. Shortly before Deem deployed, a military psychiatrist gave him a long-term supply of Prozac to help him handle the stress, his wife said.
Just 3½ weeks after he arrived in Iraq, Deem died in his sleep of what the Army later determined was an enlarged heart “complicated by elevated levels of fluoxetine” – the generic name for Prozac.
Family members of some troops whose deaths have been labeled suicides complain that the military has given them limited information about the circumstances of the deaths. Some have had to wait more than a year for autopsies and investigative reports, which they say still leave questions unanswered.
Barbara Butler, mother of Army National Guard 1st Lt. Debra A. Banaszak, 35, of Bloomington, Ill., said she has trouble understanding why her daughter would have taken her own life in Kuwait last October, as the military has determined. She said that while Banaszak, the single mother of a teenage son, was proud to serve her country and had not complained, the stresses of the deployment may have exacerbated her depression.
“She was used to being in charge and being a leader, but never in these circumstances,” said Butler. “If the Army is right that she did this, it was nothing she would have done ordinarily. It was that war that brought it about.”
Recognizing Trouble
Some autopsy and investigative reports obtained by The Courant make clear that service members who committed suicide were experiencing serious psychological problems during deployment.
In the months before Army Pfc. Samuel Lee, of Anaheim, Calif., killed himself in March 2005, an investigative report says, the 19-year-old had talked to fellow soldiers about a dream in which he tried to kill his sergeant before taking his own life, and of kidnapping, raping and killing Iraqi children. Three times, a soldier recounted in a sworn statement, Lee had pointed his gun at himself and depressed the trigger, stopping just before a round fired.
But two of Lee’s superiors gave statements saying they did not realize Lee was having trouble until the day he balanced the butt of his rifle on a cot, put his mouth over the muzzle and fired.
But a number of other reports on 2004 and 2005 suicides indicate that military superiors were aware that soldiers were self-destructing.
Among them was Army Staff Sgt. Cory W. Brooks, 32, of Philip, S.D., who shot himself in the head on April 24, 2004. In sworn statements, a major and first lieutenant acknowledged they had conducted “counseling” with Brooks, and a first sergeant “detailed his knowledge of SSG Brooks’ suicidal ideations.”
Brooks’ father, Darral, said he believes his son’s death stemmed from a combination of personal and combat-related stress, and he does not blame the military for retaining him in Iraq.
“Cory was a dedicated soldier. He wanted to be there,” he said. “If his captain told him to walk off a cliff, he’d do it.”
But in other cases in which superiors retained a soldier who was experiencing mental health problems, families are not so forgiving.
Ann Scheuerman, mother of the soldier who shot himself after his suicide note was discounted by Army officials, said her family has had a frustrating time getting the military to acknowledge mistakes in the way her son was treated.
“We wanted to make sure that whatever protocol they have in place is used, and if it doesn’t work, fix it,” Scheuerman said. “And to date, we’re just not getting anything at all.
“Nothing can bring back my son,” she said. “But if something can be done to prevent any more deaths, then if I offend a couple of people, I’ll go ahead and apologize up front. Go ahead and come after me, but something needs to be done.”
Family members of Jeffrey Henthorn, the Choctaw, Okla., native, are concerned that the Army ignored blatant warnings that Henthorn was suicidal.
An investigative report into Henthorn’s death contains statements indicating that Henthorn’s “chain of command” was aware that he had tried to harm himself in November 2004 – by slashing his arm “intentionally, in a [horizontal] manner” – in the weeks leading up to his second deployment to Iraq, while he was stationed at Fort Riley in Kansas.
Then, soon after his deployment in December, a distressed Henthorn took his gun into a latrine in Kuwait and charged it, in what fellow soldiers feared was a suicide gesture. Although his superiors at the scene grabbed the weapon away, his platoon sergeant returned the gun the same day, after talking to Henthorn for about a half-hour, according to a sworn statement. The platoon’s first lieutenant was notified, but there is no indication that Henthorn was referred for a mental health evaluation or counseling.
Eighteen days later, after crossing into Iraq with his unit, Henthorn finished what he had started.
“If you lock yourself in a latrine for 10 minutes with your gun and threaten to hurt yourself, you don’t just get your gun back. You get relieved of duty and sent home,” said Henthorn’s father, Warren, who is still struggling to understand what happened to his only son.
“It’s the same as Vietnam – all they care about is the numbers in the field,” he said. “That’s all that matters, having the numbers.”
Ritchie insisted the military is working hard to prevent suicides, which she said is a challenge, given that soldiers have access to weapons.
“When you go back, in retrospect, there may be warning signs,” she acknowledged.
Addressing The Courant’s findings, she added, “What you don’t see from that are the other cases that perhaps had the same warning signs and were kept in [the combat] theater and went on to do OK in their job.”
While they would not comment on particular cases, Ritchie and other military officials said they believe most commanders are alert to mental health problems and open to referring troubled soldiers for treatment. It is commanders, not medical professionals, who have final say over whether a troubled soldier is retained in the war zone.
“I think the majority of our commanders are very receptive,” Ritchie said.
But some service members say commanders’ sensitivity to mental health issues varies.
“As a practical matter, the quality … of the military’s mental health care professional is uneven,” said Maj. Andrew Efaw, a judge advocate general officer in the Army Reserve who handled trial defense for soldiers in northern Iraq last year. “Likewise, the understanding of mental health issues by commanders may also be spotty.”
He said commanders weighing whether a service member should be retained have to be mindful of how their troops will perceive the decision.
“Your average commander doesn’t want to deal with a whacked-out soldier. But on the other hand, he doesn’t want to send a message to his troops that if you act up, he’s willing to send you home,” Efaw said.
Some troops and their families say the military has not made good on its pledge to make mental health care easily accessible in the field.
Summer Lipford of Statesville, N.C., said she urged her son, Pfc. Steven Sirko, to talk to a counselor in April of last year, after he complained in a phone call from Iraq that he was having nightmares, losing weight and not sleeping.
“I asked Steven, `If you’re having dreams that are so [messed] up, why don’t you go talk to somebody?'” Lipford recalled. “He said, `Yeah, Mom, like that’s gonna happen.’ He said it was an act of God to get to see somebody.”
Four days later, Sirko, a 20-year-old medic, injected himself with vecuronium, an anesthetic that causes muscular paralysis, and died of an accidental overdose, according to what the military has told Lipford.
Some returning troops acknowledge that their own fear of being stigmatized kept them from seeking psychological help during deployments. Despite the military’s efforts to improve mental health care, soldiers’ perceptions of a stigma associated with seeking such care remained unchanged between 2004 and 2005, with more than half of the soldiers surveyed by Army teams expressing concerns that they would be viewed as weak.
Matthew Denton, a Camp Pendleton Marine and helicopter mechanic, said he spent most of his six-month deployment in 2005 quietly contemplating his own death aboard a ship in the Persian Gulf.
“My head was in a scary place. I remember thinking, `I can’t believe I’m working on a $14 million aircraft. I just don’t care about this,'” he said. “When I’d come out of my daze, I was worried about messing up and endangering the life of my guys.”
Denton, 30, said his depression was easy to keep secret – pre- and post-deployment health screenings were self-reported, and commanders hustling Marines through six-month rotations never probed his mental state.
Now back home, Denton, who is being treated for depression, isn’t sure whether he managed to stay below the radar – or whether there was any radar to stay below.
duh…
May 12, 2006
(CNN) — In a new poll comparing President Bush’s job performance with that of his predecessor, a strong majority of respondents said President Clinton outperformed Bush on a host of issues.
The poll of 1,021 adult Americans was conducted May 5-7 by Opinion Research Corp. for CNN. It had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Respondents favored Clinton by greater than 2-to-1 margins when asked who did a better job at handling the economy (63 percent Clinton, 26 percent Bush) and solving the problems of ordinary Americans (62 percent Clinton, 25 percent Bush).
On foreign affairs, the margin was 56 percent to 32 percent in Clinton’s favor; on taxes, it was 51 percent to 35 percent for Clinton; and on handling natural disasters, it was 51 percent to 30 percent, also favoring Clinton.
Moreover, 59 percent said Bush has done more to divide the country, while only 27 percent said Clinton had.
When asked which man was more honest as president, poll respondents were more evenly divided, with the numbers — 46 percent Clinton to 41 percent Bush — falling within the poll’s margin of error. The same was true for a question on handling national security: 46 percent said Clinton performed better; 42 percent picked Bush.
Clinton was impeached in 1998 over testimony he gave in a deposition about an extramarital sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinksy. He was later aquitted by the Senate.
490
By DAVID KRAVETS
SAN FRANCISCO – As lawmakers demand answers about warrantless electronic eavesdropping on Americans, the Bush administration says its secretive program’s constitutionality cannot be challenged.
The government is taking that position in seeking the dismissal of a lawsuit filed in federal court here against AT&T Inc. over its alleged involvement in the surveillance program adopted after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.
The federal government is invoking the “state secrets privilege” in arguing that the lawsuit must be thrown out because it threatens to divulge information that is deemed critical to national security.
“The state secrets privilege permits the government to protect against the unauthorized disclosure in litigation of information that may harm national security interests,” the Justice Department wrote to the judge presiding over the lawsuit filed by the San Francisco-based Internet privacy advocate Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The government announced that position in a legal brief late last month and is expected to expand on its arguments in an upcoming filing.
The tactic, first recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court in a McCarthy-era lawsuit, has been increasingly invoked by federal lawyers seeking to shield the government from scrutiny by the courts.
Legal experts say it usually prevails.
“The state secrets privilege is sometimes called the ‘nuclear option,'” said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists. “In almost every case, it terminates the lawsuit.”
He suspects the San Francisco case will meet the same fate.
The government invoked the state secrets privilege to defeat a similar lawsuit in 1979 that accused the National Security Agency of illegally spying on Americans.
Lawmakers erupted Thursday when USA Today reported the NSA was secretly collecting the records of phone calls by millions of ordinary Americans to build a database of all calls within the country.
The revelation renewed debate about whether Americans’ privacy rights were being violated. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., announced he would demand phone companies to appear before the panel.
President Bush quickly weighed in. “We’re not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans,” he said.
The president confirmed in December that the NSA has been conducting warrantless surveillance of calls and e-mails thought to involve al-Qaida terrorists.
Experts said the Bush administration has turned often to the state secrets defense, from espionage cases and patent disputes to routine employment discrimination lawsuits.
On Friday, citing the state secrets defense, the government urged a federal judge in Virginia to block a lawsuit filed by a German national who says he was illegally held in a CIA-run prison in Afghanistan for four months and tortured.
The Supreme Court upheld the defense as recently as January, when it rejected an appeal from a former covert CIA officer who accused the agency of race discrimination.
The high court first recognized the doctrine in 1953, when it dismissed a lawsuit against the government brought by family members of people killed in a plane wreck while testing secret electronic surveillance equipment.
Gregory Sisk, an expert on the state secrets doctrine at the St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, Minn., said legal precedent dictates that judges should give the “utmost deference” to the government when it raises the privilege.
“The thesis is that the courts lack the competence to second-guess the executive on military needs or national security threats,” he said.
Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit, filed in January, differs slightly from past cases in that it does not name the government, instead targeting AT&T.
The group accuses the telecommunications giant of cooperating with the NSA to make all communications on AT&T networks available to the spy agency without warrants.
Legal experts suggest it’s possible for the judge to rule on whether the president possesses wartime powers to authorize warrantless eavesdropping in the United States without disclosing any classified or sensitive material.
“I’m not surprised that the defense is being asserted,” said Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law. “There’s no reason necessarily that the case should be dismissed.”
AT&T, the San Antonio-based telecommunications giant, says it is following all applicable laws.
U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker has scheduled a hearing Wednesday to determine whether documents supplied to the Electronic Frontier Foundation by a former AT&T technician should remain under seal.
The case is based largely on the technician’s documents, which the technician and EFF assert show that the NSA is capable of monitoring all communications on AT&T’s network after the NSA installed equipment at AT&T offices in San Francisco and elsewhere.
The case is Hepting v. AT&T Inc., 06-0672.
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thanks to ![[info]](https://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
St. Fred:
This morning, USA Today reported that three telecommunications companies – AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth – provided “phone call records of tens of millions of Americans” to the National Security Agency. Such conduct appears to be illegal and could make the telco firms liable for tens of billions of dollars. Here’s why:
- It violates the Stored Communications Act. The Stored Communications Act, Section 2703(c), provides exactly five exceptions that would permit a phone company to disclose to the government the list of calls to or from a subscriber: (i) a warrant; (ii) a court order; (iii) the customer’s consent; (iv) for telemarketing enforcement; or (v) by “administrative subpoena.” The first four clearly don’t apply. As for administrative subpoenas, where a government agency asks for records without court approval, there is a simple answer – the NSA has no administrative subpoena authority, and it is the NSA that reportedly got the phone records.
- The penalty for violating the Stored Communications Act is $1000 per individual violation. Section 2707 of the Stored Communications Act gives a private right of action to any telephone customer “aggrieved by any violation.” If the phone company acted with a “knowing or intentional state of mind,” then the customer wins actual harm, attorney’s fees, and “in no case shall a person entitled to recover receive less than the sum of $1,000.”
(The phone companies might say they didn’t “know” they were violating the law. But USA Today reports that Qwest’s lawyers knew about the legal risks, which are bright and clear in the statute book.)
- The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act doesn’t get the telcos off the hook. According to USA Today, the NSA did not go to the FISA court to get a court order. And Qwest is quoted as saying that the Attorney General would not certify that the request was lawful under FISA. So FISA provides no defense for the phone companies, either.
In other words, for every 1 million Americans whose records were turned over to NSA, the telcos could be liable for $1 billion in penalties, plus attorneys fees. You do the math.
– Peter Swire and Judd Legum
then, to top everything off…
Officials say machines have ‘dangerous’ holes
By Ian Hoffman
Elections officials in several states are scrambling to understand and limit the risk from a “dangerous” security hole found in Diebold Election Systems Inc.’s ATM-like touch-screen voting machines.
The hole is considered more worrisome than most security problems discovered on modern voting machines, such as weak encryption, easily pickable locks and use of the same, weak password nationwide.
Armed with a little basic knowledge of Diebold voting systems and a standard component available at any computer store, someone with a minute or two of access to a Diebold touch screen could load virtually any software into the machine and disable it, redistribute votes or alter its performance in myriad ways.
“This one is worse than any of the others I’ve seen. It’s more fundamental,” said Douglas Jones, a University of Iowa computer scientist and veteran voting-system examiner for the state of Iowa.
“In the other ones, we’ve been arguing about the security of the locks on the front door,” Jones said. “Now we find that there’s no back door. This is the kind of thing where if the states don’t get out in front of the hackers, there’s a real threat.”
This newspaper is withholding some details of the vulnerability at the request of several elections officials and scientists, partly because exploiting it is so simple and the tools for doing so are widely available.
A Finnish computer expert working with Black Box Voting, a nonprofit organization critical of electronic voting, found the security hole in March after Emery County, Utah, was forced by state officials to accept Diebold touch screens, and a local elections official let the expert examine the machines.
Black Box Voting was to issue two reports today on the security hole, one of limited distribution that explains the vulnerability fully and one for public release that withholds key technical details.
The computer expert, Harri Hursti, quietly sent word of the vulnerability in March to several computer scientists who advise various states on voting systems. At least two of those scientists verified some or all of Hursti’s findings. Several notified their states and requested meetings with Diebold to understand the problem.
The National Association of State Elections Directors, the nongovernmental group that issues national-level approvals for voting systems, learned of the vulnerability Tuesday and was weighing its response. States are scheduled to hold primaries in May, June and July.
“Our voting systems board is looking at this issue,” said NASED Chairman Kevin Kennedy, a Wisconsin elections official. “The states are talking among themselves and looking at plans to mitigate this.”
California, Pennsylvania and Iowa are issuing emergency notices to local elections officials, generally telling them to “sequester” their Diebold touch screens and reprogram them with “trusted” software issued by the state capital. Then elections officials are to keep the machines sealed with tamper-resistant tape until Election Day.
In California, three counties — San Joaquin, Butte and Kern — plan to rely exclusively on Diebold touch screens in their polling places for the June primary.
Nine other counties, including Alameda, Los Angeles and San Diego, will use Diebold touch screens for early voting or for limited, handicapped-accessible voting in their polling places.
California elections officials told those counties Friday that the risk from the vulnerability was “low” and that any vote tampering would be revealed to voters on the paper read-out that prints when they cast their ballots, as well as to elections officials when they recount those printouts for 1 percent of their precincts after the election.
“I think the likelihood of this happening is low,” said assistant Secretary of State for elections Susan Lapsley. “It assumes access and control for a lengthy period of time.”
But scientists say that is not necessarily true.
Preparations could be made days or weeks beforehand, and the loading of the software could take only a minute or so once the machines are delivered to the polling places. In some cases, machines are delivered several days before an election to schools, churches, homes and other common polling places.
Scientists said Diebold appeared to have opened the hole by making it as easy as possible to upgrade the software inside its machines. The result, said Iowa’s Jones, is a violation of federal voting system rules.
“All of us who have heard the technical details of this are really shocked. It defies reason that anyone who works with security would tolerate this design,” he said.
Armed Madhouse, the new book by Greg Palast
May 10, 2006
THE CON
Kerry Won. Now Get Over It . . .
…because they’re putting ’08 in their pocket. Republicans just seem to have that winning spirit. They also have caging lists, felons of the future,
rotting ballots, snuffed canaries, and a lock on the votes of Kissinger- Americans and the undead.
WARNING! There are cranks and kooks and crazies out there on the Internet who say that George Bush lost the 2004 election, like one titled, “Kerry Won” published on the TomPaine.com web site two days after the election. I wrote it.
On November 11, a week after TomPaine.com published it, I received an e-mail from The New York Times Washington Bureau. Hot on the investigation of the veracity of the vote, The Times reporter asked me pointed questions:
Question #1: Are you a “sore loser”?
Question #2: Are you a “conspiracy nut”?
There was no third question. Investigation of the vote was, for The Times at any rate, complete. The next day, the paper’s thorough analysis of the evidence yielded this front-page story, “VOTE FRAUD THEORIES, SPREAD BY BLOGS, ARE QUICKLY BURIED.”
As America’s self-proclaimed Paper of Record had no space for the facts, I thought I’d share some with you here.
“Kerry Won” was not a two-day inquiry à la Times. It was the latest in a series of investigative reports coming out of a four-year team examination, begun for BBC Television’s Newsnight, Britain’s Guardian papers and Harper’s Magazine, dissecting that greasy sausage called American electoral democracy.
And, by the way, the answer to Question #1: I didn’t lose, so I’m not sore. This investigation isn’t about John Kerry. As a journalist, I don’t give a toss which rich white kid won the game. But I’m not so blasé that I don’t care about the disappearance of American democracy. And I really wanted to know how the Bushes swallowed the sausage.
How’d they do it? Again. And how will they do it in ’08? The answer arrived just after midnight on October 8, 2004, three weeks before the official voting, in a series of extraordinary e-mails. The e-mails were intended for the chieftains of the President’s re-election campaign in Washington. Strangely enough, they were misaddressed and ended up in my mailbox. Such things happen.
Night of the Uncounted: How to Disappear Three Million Votes
But the e-mails and their technical attachments won’t mean a thing unless you understand some arcane facts about elections American-style.
First, consider CNN’s Ohio exit polls broadcast just after midnight after the voting ended on Election Day. They show John Kerry defeated George Bush among women voters by 53% to 47%. And among men voters, Kerry defeated Bush 51% to 49%.
So here’s your question, class: What third sex put George Bush over the top in Ohio and gave him the White House?
Answer: The Uncounted.
In Ohio, there were 153,237 ballots simply thrown away, more than the Bush “victory” margin. In New Mexico the uncounted vote was fives times the Bush alleged victory margin of 5,988. In Iowa, Bush’s triumph of 13,498 was overwhelmed by 36,811 votes rejected. In all, over three million votes were cast but never counted in the 2004 presidential election. The official number is bad enough-1,855,827 ballots cast not counted, reported to the federal government’s Election’s Assistance Commission. But the feds are missing data from several cities and entire states too embarrassed to report the votes they failed to count. Correcting for the under-reporting of the undercount, the number of ballots cast but never counted goes to 3,600,380. And there are certainly more we couldn’t locate to tote up.
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Why doesn’t your government tell you this? Hey, they do. It’s right there in black-and-white on a U.S. Census Bureau announcement released seven months after the election-in a footnote to the report on voter turn-out. The Census tabulation of voters voting “differs,” from ballots tallied by the Clerk of the House of Representatives for the 2004 presidential race by 3.4 million votes.
This is the hidden presidential count which, excepting the Census’ whispered footnote, has not been reported.
Unfortunately, that’s not all. In addition to the 3 million ballots uncounted due to technical “glitches,” millions more were lost because the voters were prevented from casting their ballots in the first place. This group of un-votes includes voters illegally denied registration or wrongly purged from the registries.
In the voting biz, most of these lost votes are called “spoilage.” Spoilage, not the voters, picked our president for us.
Joe Stalin, the story goes, said, “It’s not the people who vote that count; it’s the people who count the votes.” That may have been true in the old Soviet Union, but in the U.S.A, the game is much, much subtler: He who makes sure votes don’t get counted decides our winners.
In the lead-up to the 2004 race, millions of Americans were, not unreasonably, panicked about computer voting machines, “black boxes,” that could flip your vote from John Kerry to George Bush. Images abounded of an evil hacker-genius in Dick Cheney’s bunker rewriting code and zapping the totals. But that’s not how it went down. The computer scare was the McGuffin, the fake detail used by magicians to keep your eye off their hands. The new black boxes played their role, albeit minor, but the principal means of the election heist-voiding ballots, overwhelmingly of the poor and Black-went unexposed, unreported and most importantly, uncorrected and ready to roll out on a grander scale in 2008.
I went to sleep election night with the exit polls showing Kerry ahead in swing states. But between 1:05 am and 6:41 am the next morning, goblins went to work. By dawn, the network’s exit poll for Ohio showed Kerry dead even with Bush among women, and down by five percentage points among men.
What happened? Were thousands of Bush voters locked in the voting booths, released at 2am, then queried about their choices? Not quite. The network’s polling company applied a fancy “algorithm,” a mathematical magic wand, to slowly transform the exit polls to match the official count.
And that’s bad. By deliberately contaminating the exit polls, the networks snuffed the canary that would signal that something was deeply wrong about the vote count.
Hunting for a Democrat to defend the Twilight Zone between the exit polls and the “official” polls, media grabbed on Dick Morris, Bill Clinton’s old advisor. An expert at walking that fine line between minor criminality and psychopathic ambition, Morris knows which way his next client’s wind blows.
Morris said:
“Exit polls are almost never wrong. So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they’re used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World Countries. To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible.”
His opening was promising, but then he switches into full Morris:
“It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here.”
So, Dick, you’re telling us there was an evil cabal among six pollsters, competitors who don’t even like each other, conspiring one dark night to make George Bush look like a vote thief.
There’s another explanation: Kerry won.
We’ve got the body (the wounded elections), we’ve got the bullet holes (the missing votes), now where are the smoking guns? How does the GOP disappear the vote? And why do Democratic ballots spoil so much more readily than Republican ballots? How’s it done?
But that little Bill O’Reilly in your head is screaming, Get over it; let’s move on already. That’s the point of investigation. What they tested in 2000 and practiced in 2004, they are preparing to roll out in 2008 big time.
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by the way, today is wesak… happy wesak everyone. may you all achieve enlightenment.
486
oh my god, every time i think bush couldn’t get any stupider, he pulls something like this…
President cites powers of his office
By Charlie Savage
April 30, 2006
WASHINGTON — President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.
Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, “whistle-blower” protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research.
Legal scholars say the scope and aggression of Bush’s assertions that he can bypass laws represent a concerted effort to expand his power at the expense of Congress, upsetting the balance between the branches of government. The Constitution is clear in assigning to Congress the power to write the laws and to the president a duty “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to “execute” a law he believes is unconstitutional.
Former administration officials contend that just because Bush reserves the right to disobey a law does not mean he is not enforcing it: In many cases, he is simply asserting his belief that a certain requirement encroaches on presidential power.
But with the disclosure of Bush’s domestic spying program, in which he ignored a law requiring warrants to tap the phones of Americans, many legal specialists say Bush is hardly reluctant to bypass laws he believes he has the constitutional authority to override.
Far more than any predecessor, Bush has been aggressive about declaring his right to ignore vast swaths of laws — many of which he says infringe on power he believes the Constitution assigns to him alone as the head of the executive branch or the commander in chief of the military.
Many legal scholars say they believe that Bush’s theory about his own powers goes too far and that he is seizing for himself some of the law-making role of Congress and the Constitution-interpreting role of the courts.
Phillip Cooper, a Portland State University law professor who has studied the executive power claims Bush made during his first term, said Bush and his legal team have spent the past five years quietly working to concentrate ever more governmental power into the White House.
“There is no question that this administration has been involved in a very carefully thought-out, systematic process of expanding presidential power at the expense of the other branches of government,” Cooper said. ”This is really big, very expansive, and very significant.”
For the first five years of Bush’s presidency, his legal claims attracted little attention in Congress or the media. Then, twice in recent months, Bush drew scrutiny after challenging new laws: a torture ban and a requirement that he give detailed reports to Congress about how he is using the Patriot Act.
Bush administration spokesmen declined to make White House or Justice Department attorneys available to discuss any of Bush’s challenges to the laws he has signed.
Instead, they referred a Globe reporter to their response to questions about Bush’s position that he could ignore provisions of the Patriot Act. They said at the time that Bush was following a practice that has “been used for several administrations” and that “the president will faithfully execute the law in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution.”
But the words “in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution” are the catch, legal scholars say, because Bush is according himself the ultimate interpretation of the Constitution. And he is quietly exercising that authority to a degree that is unprecedented in US history.
Bush is the first president in modern history who has never vetoed a bill, giving Congress no chance to override his judgments. Instead, he has signed every bill that reached his desk, often inviting the legislation’s sponsors to signing ceremonies at which he lavishes praise upon their work.
Then, after the media and the lawmakers have left the White House, Bush quietly files “signing statements” — official documents in which a president lays out his legal interpretation of a bill for the federal bureaucracy to follow when implementing the new law. The statements are recorded in the federal register.
In his signing statements, Bush has repeatedly asserted that the Constitution gives him the right to ignore numerous sections of the bills — sometimes including provisions that were the subject of negotiations with Congress in order to get lawmakers to pass the bill. He has appended such statements to more than one of every 10 bills he has signed.
“He agrees to a compromise with members of Congress, and all of them are there for a public bill-signing ceremony, but then he takes back those compromises — and more often than not, without the Congress or the press or the public knowing what has happened,” said Christopher Kelley, a Miami University of Ohio political science professor who studies executive power.
Military link
Many of the laws Bush said he can bypass — including the torture ban — involve the military.
The Constitution grants Congress the power to create armies, to declare war, to make rules for captured enemies, and “to make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces.” But, citing his role as commander in chief, Bush says he can ignore any act of Congress that seeks to regulate the military.
On at least four occasions while Bush has been president, Congress has passed laws forbidding US troops from engaging in combat in Colombia, where the US military is advising the government in its struggle against narcotics-funded Marxist rebels.
After signing each bill, Bush declared in his signing statement that he did not have to obey any of the Colombia restrictions because he is commander in chief.
Bush has also said he can bypass laws requiring him to tell Congress before diverting money from an authorized program in order to start a secret operation, such as the “black sites” where suspected terrorists are secretly imprisoned.
Congress has also twice passed laws forbidding the military from using intelligence that was not “lawfully collected,” including any information on Americans that was gathered in violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches.
Congress first passed this provision in August 2004, when Bush’s warrantless domestic spying program was still a secret, and passed it again after the program’s existence was disclosed in December 2005.
On both occasions, Bush declared in signing statements that only he, as commander in chief, could decide whether such intelligence can be used by the military.
In October 2004, five months after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in Iraq came to light, Congress passed a series of new rules and regulations for military prisons. Bush signed the provisions into law, then said he could ignore them all. One provision made clear that military lawyers can give their commanders independent advice on such issues as what would constitute torture. But Bush declared that military lawyers could not contradict his administration’s lawyers.
Other provisions required the Pentagon to retrain military prison guards on the requirements for humane treatment of detainees under the Geneva Conventions, to perform background checks on civilian contractors in Iraq, and to ban such contractors from performing “security, intelligence, law enforcement, and criminal justice functions.” Bush reserved the right to ignore any of the requirements.
The new law also created the position of inspector general for Iraq. But Bush wrote in his signing statement that the inspector “shall refrain” from investigating any intelligence or national security matter, or any crime the Pentagon says it prefers to investigate for itself.
Bush had placed similar limits on an inspector general position created by Congress in November 2003 for the initial stage of the US occupation of Iraq. The earlier law also empowered the inspector to notify Congress if a US official refused to cooperate. Bush said the inspector could not give any information to Congress without permission from the administration.
Oversight questioned
Many laws Bush has asserted he can bypass involve requirements to give information about government activity to congressional oversight committees.
In December 2004, Congress passed an intelligence bill requiring the Justice Department to tell them how often, and in what situations, the FBI was using special national security wiretaps on US soil. The law also required the Justice Department to give oversight committees copies of administration memos outlining any new interpretations of domestic-spying laws. And it contained 11 other requirements for reports about such issues as civil liberties, security clearances, border security, and counternarcotics efforts.
After signing the bill, Bush issued a signing statement saying he could withhold all the information sought by Congress.
Likewise, when Congress passed the law creating the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, it said oversight committees must be given information about vulnerabilities at chemical plants and the screening of checked bags at airports.
It also said Congress must be shown unaltered reports about problems with visa services prepared by a new immigration ombudsman. Bush asserted the right to withhold the information and alter the reports.
On several other occasions, Bush contended he could nullify laws creating “whistle-blower” job protections for federal employees that would stop any attempt to fire them as punishment for telling a member of Congress about possible government wrongdoing.
When Congress passed a massive energy package in August, for example, it strengthened whistle-blower protections for employees at the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The provision was included because lawmakers feared that Bush appointees were intimidating nuclear specialists so they would not testify about safety issues related to a planned nuclear-waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada — a facility the administration supported, but both Republicans and Democrats from Nevada opposed.
When Bush signed the energy bill, he issued a signing statement declaring that the executive branch could ignore the whistle-blower protections.
Bush’s statement did more than send a threatening message to federal energy specialists inclined to raise concerns with Congress; it also raised the possibility that Bush would not feel bound to obey similar whistle-blower laws that were on the books before he became president. His domestic spying program, for example, violated a surveillance law enacted 23 years before he took office.
David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive-power issues, said Bush has cast a cloud over “the whole idea that there is a rule of law,” because no one can be certain of which laws Bush thinks are valid and which he thinks he can ignore.
“Where you have a president who is willing to declare vast quantities of the legislation that is passed during his term unconstitutional, it implies that he also thinks a very significant amount of the other laws that were already on the books before he became president are also unconstitutional,” Golove said.
Defying Supreme Court
Bush has also challenged statutes in which Congress gave certain executive branch officials the power to act independently of the president. The Supreme Court has repeatedly endorsed the power of Congress to make such arrangements. For example, the court has upheld laws creating special prosecutors free of Justice Department oversight and insulating the board of the Federal Trade Commission from political interference.
Nonetheless, Bush has said in his signing statements that the Constitution lets him control any executive official, no matter what a statute passed by Congress might say.
In November 2002, for example, Congress, seeking to generate independent statistics about student performance, passed a law setting up an educational research institute to conduct studies and publish reports “without the approval” of the Secretary of Education. Bush, however, decreed that the institute’s director would be “subject to the supervision and direction of the secretary of education.”
Similarly, the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld affirmative-action programs, as long as they do not include quotas. Most recently, in 2003, the court upheld a race-conscious university admissions program over the strong objections of Bush, who argued that such programs should be struck down as unconstitutional.
Yet despite the court’s rulings, Bush has taken exception at least nine times to provisions that seek to ensure that minorities are represented among recipients of government jobs, contracts, and grants. Each time, he singled out the provisions, declaring that he would construe them “in a manner consistent with” the Constitution’s guarantee of “equal protection” to all — which some legal scholars say amounts to an argument that the affirmative-action provisions represent reverse discrimination against whites.
Golove said that to the extent Bush is interpreting the Constitution in defiance of the Supreme Court’s precedents, he threatens to “overturn the existing structures of constitutional law.”
A president who ignores the court, backed by a Congress that is unwilling to challenge him, Golove said, can make the Constitution simply ”disappear.”
Common practice in ’80s
Though Bush has gone further than any previous president, his actions are not unprecedented.
Since the early 19th century, American presidents have occasionally signed a large bill while declaring that they would not enforce a specific provision they believed was unconstitutional. On rare occasions, historians say, presidents also issued signing statements interpreting a law and explaining any concerns about it.
But it was not until the mid-1980s, midway through the tenure of President Reagan, that it became common for the president to issue signing statements. The change came about after then-Attorney General Edwin Meese decided that signing statements could be used to increase the power of the president.
When interpreting an ambiguous law, courts often look at the statute’s legislative history, debate and testimony, to see what Congress intended it to mean. Meese realized that recording what the president thought the law meant in a signing statement might increase a president’s influence over future court rulings.
Under Meese’s direction in 1986, a young Justice Department lawyer named Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote a strategy memo about signing statements. It came to light in late 2005, after Bush named Alito to the Supreme Court.
In the memo, Alito predicted that Congress would resent the president’s attempt to grab some of its power by seizing “the last word on questions of interpretation.” He suggested that Reagan’s legal team should “concentrate on points of true ambiguity, rather than issuing interpretations that may seem to conflict with those of Congress.”
Reagan’s successors continued this practice. George H.W. Bush challenged 232 statutes over four years in office, and Bill Clinton objected to 140 laws over his eight years, according to Kelley, the Miami University of Ohio professor.
Many of the challenges involved longstanding legal ambiguities and points of conflict between the president and Congress.
Throughout the past two decades, for example, each president — including the current one — has objected to provisions requiring him to get permission from a congressional committee before taking action. The Supreme Court made clear in 1983 that only the full Congress can direct the executive branch to do things, but lawmakers have continued writing laws giving congressional committees such a role.
Still, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton used the presidential veto instead of the signing statement if they had a serious problem with a bill, giving Congress a chance to override their decisions.
But the current President Bush has abandoned the veto entirely, as well as any semblance of the political caution that Alito counseled back in 1986. In just five years, Bush has challenged more than 750 new laws, by far a record for any president, while becoming the first president since Thomas Jefferson to stay so long in office without issuing a veto.
“What we haven’t seen until this administration is the sheer number of objections that are being raised on every bill passed through the White House,” said Kelley, who has studied presidential signing statements through history. “That is what is staggering. The numbers are well out of the norm from any previous administration.”
Exaggerated fears?
Some administration defenders say that concerns about Bush’s signing statements are overblown. Bush’s signing statements, they say, should be seen as little more than political chest-thumping by administration lawyers who are dedicated to protecting presidential prerogatives.
Defenders say the fact that Bush is reserving the right to disobey the laws does not necessarily mean he has gone on to disobey them.
Indeed, in some cases, the administration has ended up following laws that Bush said he could bypass. For example, citing his power to ”withhold information” in September 2002, Bush declared that he could ignore a law requiring the State Department to list the number of overseas deaths of US citizens in foreign countries. Nevertheless, the department has still put the list on its website.
Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who until last year oversaw the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel for the administration, said the statements do not change the law; they just let people know how the president is interpreting it.
“Nobody reads them,” said Goldsmith. “They have no significance. Nothing in the world changes by the publication of a signing statement. The statements merely serve as public notice about how the administration is interpreting the law. Criticism of this practice is surprising, since the usual complaint is that the administration is too secretive in its legal interpretations.”
But Cooper, the Portland State University professor who has studied Bush’s first-term signing statements, said the documents are being read closely by one key group of people: the bureaucrats who are charged with implementing new laws.
Lower-level officials will follow the president’s instructions even when his understanding of a law conflicts with the clear intent of Congress, crafting policies that may endure long after Bush leaves office, Cooper said.
“Years down the road, people will not understand why the policy doesn’t look like the legislation,” he said.
And in many cases, critics contend, there is no way to know whether the administration is violating laws — or merely preserving the right to do so.
Many of the laws Bush has challenged involve national security, where it is almost impossible to verify what the government is doing. And since the disclosure of Bush’s domestic spying program, many people have expressed alarm about his sweeping claims of the authority to violate laws.
In January, after the Globe first wrote about Bush’s contention that he could disobey the torture ban, three Republicans who were the bill’s principal sponsors in the Senate — John McCain of Arizona, John W. Warner of Virginia, and Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina — all publicly rebuked the president.
“We believe the president understands Congress’s intent in passing, by very large majorities, legislation governing the treatment of detainees,” McCain and Warner said in a joint statement. “The Congress declined when asked by administration officials to include a presidential waiver of the restrictions included in our legislation.”
Added Graham: “I do not believe that any political figure in the country has the ability to set aside any… law of armed conflict that we have adopted or treaties that we have ratified.”
And in March, when the Globe first wrote about Bush’s contention that he could ignore the oversight provisions of the Patriot Act, several Democrats lodged complaints.
Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, accused Bush of trying to “cherry-pick the laws he decides he wants to follow.”
And Representatives Jane Harman of California and John Conyers Jr. of Michigan — the ranking Democrats on the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees, respectively — sent a letter to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales demanding that Bush rescind his claim and abide by the law.
“Many members who supported the final law did so based upon the guarantee of additional reporting and oversight,” they wrote. “The administration cannot, after the fact, unilaterally repeal provisions of the law implementing such oversight…. Once the president signs a bill, he and all of us are bound by it.”
Lack of court review
Such political fallout from Congress is likely to be the only check on Bush’s claims, legal specialists said.
The courts have little chance of reviewing Bush’s assertions, especially in the secret realm of national security matters.
“There can’t be judicial review if nobody knows about it,” said Neil Kinkopf, a Georgia State law professor who was a Justice Department official in the Clinton administration. “And if they avoid judicial review, they avoid having their constitutional theories rebuked.”
Without court involvement, only Congress can check a president who goes too far. But Bush’s fellow Republicans control both chambers, and they have shown limited interest in launching the kind of oversight that could damage their party.
“The president is daring Congress to act against his positions, and they’re not taking action because they don’t want to appear to be too critical of the president, given that their own fortunes are tied to his because they are all Republicans,” said Jack Beermann, a Boston University law professor. “Oversight gets much reduced in a situation where the president and Congress are controlled by the same party.”
Said Golove, the New York University law professor: “Bush has essentially said that ‘We’re the executive branch and we’re going to carry this law out as we please, and if Congress wants to impeach us, go ahead and try it.'”
Bruce Fein, a deputy attorney general in the Reagan administration, said the American system of government relies upon the leaders of each branch ”to exercise some self-restraint.” But Bush has declared himself the sole judge of his own powers, he said, and then ruled for himself every time.
“This is an attempt by the president to have the final word on his own constitutional powers, which eliminates the checks and balances that keep the country a democracy,” Fein said. “There is no way for an independent judiciary to check his assertions of power, and Congress isn’t doing it, either. So this is moving us toward an unlimited executive power.”
the only thing that really surprises me about this is that qwest is turning out to be the best possible option, unlike my previous rants about qwest would seem to have indicated… maybe it’s time i re-examined my bias about them…
5/11/2006
By Leslie Cauley
The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.
The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.
“It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA’s activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders, this person added.
For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made — across town or across the country — to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.
The three telecommunications companies are working under contract with the NSA, which launched the program in 2001 shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the sources said. The program is aimed at identifying and tracking suspected terrorists, they said.
The sources would talk only under a guarantee of anonymity because the NSA program is secret.
Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, nominated Monday by President Bush to become the director of the CIA, headed the NSA from March 1999 to April 2005. In that post, Hayden would have overseen the agency’s domestic call-tracking program. Hayden declined to comment about the program.
The NSA’s domestic program, as described by sources, is far more expansive than what the White House has acknowledged. Last year, Bush said he had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop — without warrants — on international calls and international e-mails of people suspected of having links to terrorists when one party to the communication is in the USA. Warrants have also not been used in the NSA’s efforts to create a national call database.
In defending the previously disclosed program, Bush insisted that the NSA was focused exclusively on international calls. “In other words,” Bush explained, “one end of the communication must be outside the United States.”
As a result, domestic call records — those of calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders — were believed to be private.
Sources, however, say that is not the case. With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. Customers’ names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA’s domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information.
Don Weber, a senior spokesman for the NSA, declined to discuss the agency’s operations. “Given the nature of the work we do, it would be irresponsible to comment on actual or alleged operational issues; therefore, we have no information to provide,” he said. “However, it is important to note that NSA takes its legal responsibilities seriously and operates within the law.”
The White House would not discuss the domestic call-tracking program. “There is no domestic surveillance without court approval,” said Dana Perino, deputy press secretary, referring to actual eavesdropping.
She added that all national intelligence activities undertaken by the federal government “are lawful, necessary and required for the pursuit of al-Qaeda and affiliated terrorists.” All government-sponsored intelligence activities “are carefully reviewed and monitored,” Perino said. She also noted that “all appropriate members of Congress have been briefed on the intelligence efforts of the United States.”
The government is collecting “external” data on domestic phone calls but is not intercepting “internals,” a term for the actual content of the communication, according to a U.S. intelligence official familiar with the program. This kind of data collection from phone companies is not uncommon; it’s been done before, though never on this large a scale, the official said. The data are used for “social network analysis,” the official said, meaning to study how terrorist networks contact each other and how they are tied together.
Carriers uniquely positioned
AT&T recently merged with SBC and kept the AT&T name. Verizon, BellSouth and AT&T are the nation’s three biggest telecommunications companies; they provide local and wireless phone service to more than 200 million customers.
The three carriers control vast networks with the latest communications technologies. They provide an array of services: local and long-distance calling, wireless and high-speed broadband, including video. Their direct access to millions of homes and businesses has them uniquely positioned to help the government keep tabs on the calling habits of Americans.
Among the big telecommunications companies, only Qwest has refused to help the NSA, the sources said. According to multiple sources, Qwest declined to participate because it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants.
Qwest’s refusal to participate has left the NSA with a hole in its database. Based in Denver, Qwest provides local phone service to 14 million customers in 14 states in the West and Northwest. But AT&T and Verizon also provide some services — primarily long-distance and wireless — to people who live in Qwest’s region. Therefore, they can provide the NSA with at least some access in that area.
Created by President Truman in 1952, during the Korean War, the NSA is charged with protecting the United States from foreign security threats. The agency was considered so secret that for years the government refused to even confirm its existence. Government insiders used to joke that NSA stood for “No Such Agency.”
In 1975, a congressional investigation revealed that the NSA had been intercepting, without warrants, international communications for more than 20 years at the behest of the CIA and other agencies. The spy campaign, code-named “Shamrock,” led to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was designed to protect Americans from illegal eavesdropping.
Enacted in 1978, FISA lays out procedures that the U.S. government must follow to conduct electronic surveillance and physical searches of people believed to be engaged in espionage or international terrorism against the United States. A special court, which has 11 members, is responsible for adjudicating requests under FISA.
Over the years, NSA code-cracking techniques have continued to improve along with technology. The agency today is considered expert in the practice of “data mining” — sifting through reams of information in search of patterns. Data mining is just one of many tools NSA analysts and mathematicians use to crack codes and track international communications.
Paul Butler, a former U.S. prosecutor who specialized in terrorism crimes, said FISA approval generally isn’t necessary for government data-mining operations. “FISA does not prohibit the government from doing data mining,” said Butler, now a partner with the law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in Washington, D.C.
The caveat, he said, is that “personal identifiers” — such as names, Social Security numbers and street addresses — can’t be included as part of the search. “That requires an additional level of probable cause,” he said.
The usefulness of the NSA’s domestic phone-call database as a counterterrorism tool is unclear. Also unclear is whether the database has been used for other purposes.
The NSA’s domestic program raises legal questions. Historically, AT&T and the regional phone companies have required law enforcement agencies to present a court order before they would even consider turning over a customer’s calling data. Part of that owed to the personality of the old Bell Telephone System, out of which those companies grew.
Ma Bell’s bedrock principle — protection of the customer — guided the company for decades, said Gene Kimmelman, senior public policy director of Consumers Union. “No court order, no customer information — period. That’s how it was for decades,” he said.
The concern for the customer was also based on law: Under Section 222 of the Communications Act, first passed in 1934, telephone companies are prohibited from giving out information regarding their customers’ calling habits: whom a person calls, how often and what routes those calls take to reach their final destination. Inbound calls, as well as wireless calls, also are covered.
The financial penalties for violating Section 222, one of many privacy reinforcements that have been added to the law over the years, can be stiff. The Federal Communications Commission, the nation’s top telecommunications regulatory agency, can levy fines of up to $130,000 per day per violation, with a cap of $1.325 million per violation. The FCC has no hard definition of “violation.” In practice, that means a single “violation” could cover one customer or 1 million.
In the case of the NSA’s international call-tracking program, Bush signed an executive order allowing the NSA to engage in eavesdropping without a warrant. The president and his representatives have since argued that an executive order was sufficient for the agency to proceed. Some civil liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, disagree.
Companies approached
The NSA’s domestic program began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the sources. Right around that time, they said, NSA representatives approached the nation’s biggest telecommunications companies. The agency made an urgent pitch: National security is at risk, and we need your help to protect the country from attacks.
The agency told the companies that it wanted them to turn over their “call-detail records,” a complete listing of the calling histories of their millions of customers. In addition, the NSA wanted the carriers to provide updates, which would enable the agency to keep tabs on the nation’s calling habits.
The sources said the NSA made clear that it was willing to pay for the cooperation. AT&T, which at the time was headed by C. Michael Armstrong, agreed to help the NSA. So did BellSouth, headed by F. Duane Ackerman; SBC, headed by Ed Whitacre; and Verizon, headed by Ivan Seidenberg.
With that, the NSA’s domestic program began in earnest.
AT&T, when asked about the program, replied with a comment prepared for USA TODAY: “We do not comment on matters of national security, except to say that we only assist law enforcement and government agencies charged with protecting national security in strict accordance with the law.”
In another prepared comment, BellSouth said: “BellSouth does not provide any confidential customer information to the NSA or any governmental agency without proper legal authority.”
Verizon, the USA’s No. 2 telecommunications company behind AT&T, gave this statement: “We do not comment on national security matters, we act in full compliance with the law and we are committed to safeguarding our customers’ privacy.”
Qwest spokesman Robert Charlton said: “We can’t talk about this. It’s a classified situation.”
In December, The New York Times revealed that Bush had authorized the NSA to wiretap, without warrants, international phone calls and e-mails that travel to or from the USA. The following month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group, filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T. The lawsuit accuses the company of helping the NSA spy on U.S. phone customers.
Last month, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales alluded to that possibility. Appearing at a House Judiciary Committee hearing, Gonzales was asked whether he thought the White House has the legal authority to monitor domestic traffic without a warrant. Gonzales’ reply: “I wouldn’t rule it out.” His comment marked the first time a Bush appointee publicly asserted that the White House might have that authority.
Similarities in programs
The domestic and international call-tracking programs have things in common, according to the sources. Both are being conducted without warrants and without the approval of the FISA court. The Bush administration has argued that FISA’s procedures are too slow in some cases. Officials, including Gonzales, also make the case that the USA Patriot Act gives them broad authority to protect the safety of the nation’s citizens.
The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., would not confirm the existence of the program. In a statement, he said, “I can say generally, however, that our subcommittee has been fully briefed on all aspects of the Terrorist Surveillance Program. … I remain convinced that the program authorized by the president is lawful and absolutely necessary to protect this nation from future attacks.”
The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., declined to comment.
One company differs
One major telecommunications company declined to participate in the program: Qwest.
According to sources familiar with the events, Qwest’s CEO at the time, Joe Nacchio, was deeply troubled by the NSA’s assertion that Qwest didn’t need a court order — or approval under FISA — to proceed. Adding to the tension, Qwest was unclear about who, exactly, would have access to its customers’ information and how that information might be used.
Financial implications were also a concern, the sources said. Carriers that illegally divulge calling information can be subjected to heavy fines. The NSA was asking Qwest to turn over millions of records. The fines, in the aggregate, could have been substantial.
The NSA told Qwest that other government agencies, including the FBI, CIA and DEA, also might have access to the database, the sources said. As a matter of practice, the NSA regularly shares its information — known as “product” in intelligence circles — with other intelligence groups. Even so, Qwest’s lawyers were troubled by the expansiveness of the NSA request, the sources said.
The NSA, which needed Qwest’s participation to completely cover the country, pushed back hard.
Trying to put pressure on Qwest, NSA representatives pointedly told Qwest that it was the lone holdout among the big telecommunications companies. It also tried appealing to Qwest’s patriotic side: In one meeting, an NSA representative suggested that Qwest’s refusal to contribute to the database could compromise national security, one person recalled.
In addition, the agency suggested that Qwest’s foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government. Like other big telecommunications companies, Qwest already had classified contracts and hoped to get more.
Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest’s lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.
The NSA’s explanation did little to satisfy Qwest’s lawyers. “They told (Qwest) they didn’t want to do that because FISA might not agree with them,” one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest’s suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general’s office. A second person confirmed this version of events.
In June 2002, Nacchio resigned amid allegations that he had misled investors about Qwest’s financial health. But Qwest’s legal questions about the NSA request remained.
Unable to reach agreement, Nacchio’s successor, Richard Notebaert, finally pulled the plug on the NSA talks in late 2004, the sources said.
Q: Does the NSA’s domestic program mean that my calling records have been secretly collected?
A: In all likelihood, yes. The NSA collected the records of billions of domestic calls. Those include calls from home phones and wireless phones.
Q: Does that mean people listened to my conversations?
A: Eavesdropping is not part of this program.
Q: What was the NSA doing?
A: The NSA collected “call-detail” records. That’s telephone industry lingo for the numbers being dialed. Phone customers’ names, addresses and other personal information are not being collected as part of this program. The agency, however, has the means to assemble that sort of information, if it so chooses.
Q: When did this start?
A: After the Sept. 11 attacks.
Q: Can I find out if my call records were collected?
A: No. The NSA’s work is secret, and the agency won’t publicly discuss its operations.
Q: Why did they do this?
A: The agency won’t say officially. But sources say it was a way to identify, and monitor, people suspected of terrorist activities.
Q: But I’m not calling terrorists. Why do they need my calls?
A: By cross-checking a vast database of phone calling records, NSA experts can try to pick out patterns that help identify people involved in terrorism.
Q: How is this different from the other NSA programs?
A: NSA programs have historically focused on international communications. In December, The New York Times disclosed that President Bush had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop — without warrants — on international phone calls to and from the USA. The call-collecting program is focused on domestic calls, those that originate and terminate within U.S. borders.
Q: Is this legal?
A: That will be a matter of debate. In the past, law enforcement officials had to obtain a court warrant before getting calling records. Telecommunications law assesses hefty fines on phone companies that violate customer privacy by divulging such records without warrants. But in discussing the eavesdropping program last December, Bush said he has the authority to order the NSA to get information without court warrants.
Q: Who has access to my records?
A: Unclear. The NSA routinely provides its analysis and other cryptological work to the Pentagon and other government agencies.
USA Today reports NSA building massive phone records database
May 11, 2006
WASHINGTON (CNN) — President Bush said Thursday the government is “not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans” with a reported program to create a massive database of U.S. phone calls.
“Our efforts are focused on links to al Qaeda and their known affiliates,” Bush said. “The privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities.”
Bush’s comments came after USA Today reported Thursday that three telecommunication firms provided the National Security Agency with domestic telephone call records from tens of millions of Americans beginning shortly after the attacks on September 11, 2001.
According to the report, Qwest, a Denver-based telecommunications company, refused to cooperate with the program.
Bush did not specifically mention the newspaper’s report.
In response to the USA Today article, NSA spokesman Don Weber issued a statement saying, “Given the nature of the work we do, it would be irresponsible to comment on actual or alleged operational issues; therefore, we have no information to provide.
“However, it is important to note that NSA takes its legal responsibilities seriously and operates within the law.”
The report comes at an awkward time for CIA director nominee Gen. Michael Hayden, whom President Bush named this week to replace Porter Goss as head of the spy agency. Hayden, whose confirmation hearings are to begin next Thursday, headed the NSA from March 1999 to April 2005. Hayden on Thursday met with Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican whip, about his nomination.
Afterward, Hayden refused to comment about the report when meeting with reporters but said, “Everything that NSA does is lawful and very carefully done, and the appropriate members of the Congress — both House and Senate — are briefed on all NSA activities.”
The report comes months after the Bush administration came under criticism on Capitol Hill for ordering an NSA surveillance program, that allowed communication to be monitored between people in the United States and terrorism suspects overseas without a court order.
Hayden headed the NSA when the wiretapping program was launched in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks.
Lawmakers concerned
Members of Congress expressed concern Thursday about the report. (Watch angry senator say, “Shame on us” — 3:56)
“It’s our government, government of every single American — Republican, Democrat or independent,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “… Those entrusted with great power have a duty to answer to Americans what they are doing.”
In the House, Majority Leader Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, said, “I’m concerned about what I read with regard to the NSA database of phone calls. … I’m not sure why it’s necessary to us to keep and have that kind of information.”
Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania, said he would call on representatives from the companies named in the USA Today story; AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth; to testify.
However, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tennessee, told reporters he “strongly” agrees that the program is necessary, and said, “We’ll discuss whether hearings are necessary.”
In the House, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-California, asked Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Illinois, for hearings into the program during a Thursday afternoon meeting.
Pelosi said the hearings should be conducted by the House Intelligence Committee because “those people have the clearance.”
Pelosi declined to say how Hastert responded to her request.
Conservatives defend program
During a morning session, Republican members of the committee defended the legality and necessity of such a database.
The USA Today report said the program did not involve the NSA “listening to or recording conversations,” a point that Sen. Jeff Sessions touched on.
“No recordings and no conversations were intercepted here, so there was no wiretapping here,” the Alabama Republican said.
Republican Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona also faulted the revelation of the program as harmful to national security.
“This is nuts,” Kyl said. “We are in a war and we’ve go to collect intelligence on the enemy, and you can’t tell the enemy in advance how you are going to do it. And discussing all of this in public leads to that.”
Hayden nomination to proceed
Despite the controversy, the White House intends to go “full steam ahead” with Hayden’s nomination, Reuters reported.
“I think General Hayden has had a really good start to his confirmation process. He’s met with several members, the feedback is positive and we’re full steam ahead on his nomination,” White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters while traveling with President Bush to Mississippi.
Facing Senate confirmation hearings before the Senate Intelligence Committee on May 18, Hayden’s meeting today with Republican Sens. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska were canceled.
The meeting with Santorum has been tentatively rescheduled for Tuesday afternoon, said Santorum aide Robert Traynham. “But the White House called it very tentative,” Traynham said.
Investigation dropped
The Justice Department has been denied security clearances for access to information, which prompted it to drop an investigation into the domestic spying program revealed late last year by the New York Times.
The Democrats’ No. 2 member of the Senate, Sen. Richard Durbin, called the development “evidence of a cover-up.”
“The fact … that the Department of Justice has abandoned their own investigation of this administration’s wrongdoing because there’s been a refusal to give investigators security clearances is clear evidence of a cover-up within the administration.”
by the way… that doesn’t make it any more legal, or excuse the nastiness of having to view everyone as suspects until proven otherwise, which is sort of like the ideas that this country was founded to get away from… 8/
Sen. Trent Lott tells Hardball he would ‘not be supportive’ of the candidacy
May 10, 2006
ORLANDO, Fla. – President Bush suggested Wednesday that he’d like to see his family’s White House legacy continue, perhaps with his younger brother Jeb as the chief executive.
The president said Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is well-suited for another office and would make “a great president.”
“I would like to see Jeb run at some point in time, but I have no idea if that’s his intention or not,” Bush said in an interview with Florida reporters, according to an account on the St. Petersburg Times Web site.
The president said he had “pushed him fairly hard about what he intends to do,” but the younger Bush has not said.
“I have no idea what he’s going to do. I’ve asked him that question myself. I truly don’t think he knows,” Bush said.
Jeb Bush, 53, will end his second term as governor in January. His brother George ends his second presidential term in January 2009. Neither can seek re-election because of term limits.
Lott to ‘Hardball’: Not a good idea
Jeb Bush has repeatedly said he is not going to run in 2008. And one veteran Republican Party leader suggested Wednesday that it wouldn’t be a good idea.
Just hours after President Bush endorsed a presidential run someday by his brother, Sen. Trent Lott, the Mississippi Republican, flatly rejected the idea in an interview with Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews.”
Lott, whose ouster from the Senate Republican leadership in 2002 was helped in part by the Bush administration, offered a swift assessment of another Bush presidential campaign.
“I would not be supportive of Jeb Bush running for president, but I certainly understand why the president would say that about his own brother,” Lott said.
Lott has previously said he is supporting fellow Sen. John McCain of Arizona for the 2008 Republican nomination.
Asked if Gov. Bush could beat Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York in a 2008 matchup, Lott said, “I don’t think so. No.”
Lott went on to say that “the Republican nominee will eventually be able to win, will be able to beat Hillary Clinton or any Democrat.” But he repeated that the president’s brother would not be the right choice in his mind.
“I don’t think he’d be the best candidate for the nomination. You know, I’ve said that before, and I’m not backing off of that,” Lott said.
Dad: Jeb would be ‘awfully good’
Former President George H.W. Bush told CNN’s “Larry King Live” last year that he would like Jeb Bush to run one day and that he would be “awfully good” as president.
The Florida governor laughed when asked about his father’s comments last June. “Oh, Lord,” he said and shook his head no. “I love my dad.”
The brothers Bush appeared together Tuesday during the president’s visit to the Tampa area. Gov. Bush was waiting on the tarmac when Air Force One arrived and greeted the president with a politician’s handshake and “Welcome to Florida.” The president brushed aside the formality and playfully adjusted his younger brother’s necktie.
Jeb Bush introduced his brother at a retirement community in Sun City Center, where the president touted the new Medicare prescription drug benefit as the governor watched intently from a politically appropriate seat stage right.
Brotherly love
They had a private lunch together with political supporters, then visited a fire station and appeared together before television cameras to express concern about wildfires that were blazing across the state.
The governor was not with the president during his visit to the Puerto Rican Club of Central Florida in Orlando on Wednesday — the president’s final stop on a three-day trip to the state. But the president was sure his brother still got some attention.
“Yesterday I checked in with my brother,” President Bush said as he took the stage. “Make sure everything’s going all right. I’m real proud of Jeb. He’s a good, decent man, and I love him dearly.”
and finally
Bush Ratings Hit New Low
which i’m too lazy to copy, but goes right along with everything else…
485
wouldn’t you know it… the bush administration is afraid of what an inquiry into the domestic spying issue might uncover, so…
NSA won’t grant Justice Department lawyers required security clearance
WASHINGTON – The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance to probe the matter.
The inquiry headed by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers’ role in the program.
“We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program,” OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey. Hinchey’s office shared the letter with The Associated Press.
Jarrett wrote that beginning in January 2006, his office has made a series of requests for the necessary clearances. Those requests were denied Tuesday.
“Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation,” wrote Jarrett.
Hinchey is one of many House Democrats who have been highly critical of the domestic eavesdropping program first revealed in December.
In February, the OPR announced it would examine the conduct of their own agency’s lawyers in the program, though they were not authorized to investigate NSA activities.
Bush’s decision to authorize the largest U.S. spy agency to monitor people inside the United States, without warrants, generated a host of questions about the program’s legal justification.
The administration has vehemently defended the eavesdropping, saying the NSA’s activities were narrowly targeted to intercept international calls and e-mails of Americans and others inside the U.S. with suspected ties to the al-Qaida terrorist network.
can we say “watergate”?
can we even remember watergate?
8/
Recruiting Abuses Mount as Army Struggles to Meet Goals
BY MICHELLE ROBERTS
May 7, 2006
PORTLAND, Ore. — Jared Guinther is 18. Tall and lanky, he will graduate from high school in June. Girls think he’s cute, until they try to talk to him and he stammers or just stands there — silent.
Diagnosed with autism at age 3, Jared is polite but won’t talk to people unless they address him first. It’s hard for him to make friends. He lives in his own private world.
Jared didn’t know there was a war raging in Iraq until his parents told him last fall — shortly after a military recruiter stopped him outside a Portland strip mall and complimented his black Converse All-Stars.
“When Jared first started talking about joining the Army, I thought, `Well, that isn’t going to happen,”‘ said Paul Guinther, Jared’s father. “I told my wife not to worry about it. They’re not going to take anybody in the service who’s autistic.”
But they did. Last month, Jared came home with papers showing that he had not only enlisted, but signed up for the Army’s most dangerous job: cavalry scout. He is scheduled to leave for basic training Aug. 16.
Officials are now investigating whether recruiters at the U.S. Army Recruiting Station in southeast Portland improperly concealed Jared’s disability, which should have made him ineligible for service.
What happened to Jared is a growing national problem as the military faces increasing pressure to hit recruiting targets during an unpopular war.
Tracking by the Pentagon shows that complaints about recruiting improprieties are on pace to again reach record highs set in 2003 and 2004. Both the active Army and Reserve missed recruiting targets last year, and reports of recruiting abuses continue from across the country.
A family in Ohio reported that its mentally ill son was signed up, despite rules banning such enlistments and the fact that records about his illness were readily available.
In Houston, a recruiter warned a potential enlistee that if he backed out of a meeting he’d be arrested.
And in Colorado, a high school student working undercover told recruiters he’d dropped out and had a drug problem. The recruiter told the boy to fake a diploma and buy a product to help him beat a drug test.
Violations such as these forced the Army to halt recruiting for a day last May so recruiters could be retrained and reminded of the job’s ethical requirements.
The Portland Army Recruiting Battalion Headquarters opened its investigation into Jared’s case last week after his parents called The Oregonian and the newspaper began asking questions about his enlistment.
Maj. Curt Steinagel, commander of the Military Entrance Processing Station in Portland, said the papers filled out by Jared’s recruiters contained no indication of his disability. Steinagel acknowledged that the current climate is tough on recruiters.
“I can’t speak for Army,” he said, “but it’s no secret that recruiters stretch and bend the rules because of all the pressure they’re under. The problem exists, and we all know it exists.”
* * *
Jared lives in a tiny brown house in southeast Portland that looks as worn out as his parents do when they get home from work.
Paul Guinther, 57, labors 50- to 60-hour weeks as a painter-sandblaster at a tug and barge works. His wife, Brenda, 50, has the graveyard housekeeping shift at a medical center.
The couple got together nearly 16 years ago when Jared was 3. Brenda, who had two young children of her own, immediately noticed that Jared was different and pushed Paul to have the boy tested.
“Jared would play with buttons for hours on end,” she said. “He’d play with one toy for days. Loud noises bothered him. He was scared to death of the toilet flushing, the lawn mower.”
Jared didn’t speak until he was almost 4 and could not tolerate the feel of grass on his feet.
Doctors diagnosed him with moderate to severe autism, a developmental disorder that strikes when children are toddlers. It causes problems with social interaction, language and intelligence. No one knows its cause or cure.
School and medical records show that Jared, whose recent verbal IQ tested very low, spent years in special education classes. It was only as a high school senior that Brenda pushed for Jared to take regular classes because she wanted him to get a normal rather than a modified diploma.
Jared required extensive tutoring and accommodations to pass, but in June he will graduate alongside his younger stepbrother, Matthew Thorsen.
Last fall, Jared began talking about joining the military after a recruiter stopped him on his way home from school and offered a $4,000 signing bonus, $67,000 for college and more buddies than he could count.
Matthew told his mother that military recruiting at the school and surrounding neighborhoods was so intense that one recruiter had pulled him out of football practice.
Recruiters nationwide spend several hours a day cold-calling high school students, whose phone numbers are provided by schools under the No Child Left Behind Law. They also prospect at malls, high school cafeterias, colleges and wherever else young people gather.
Brenda phoned her two brothers, both veterans. She said they laughed and told her not to worry. The military would never take Jared.
The Guinthers, meanwhile, tried to refocus their son.
“I told him, `Jared, you get out of high school. I know you don’t want to be a janitor all your life. You work this job, you go to community college, you find out what you want. You can live here as long as you want,”‘ Paul said.
They thought it had worked until five weeks ago. Brenda said she called Jared on his cell phone to check what time he’d be home.
“I said Jared, `What are you doing?’ `I’m taking the test’ — he said the entrance test. I go, `Wait a minute.’ I said, `Who’s giving you the test?’ He said, `Corporal.’ I said, `Well let me talk to him.”‘
Brenda said she spoke to Cpl. Ronan Ansley and explained that Jared had a disability, autism, that could not be outgrown. She said Ansley told her he had been in special classes, too — for dyslexia.
“I said, `Wait a minute, there’s a big difference between autism and your problem,”‘ Brenda said.
Military rules prohibit enlisting anyone with a mental disorder that interferes with school or employment, unless a recruit can show he or she hasn’t required special academic or job accommodations for 12 months.
Jared has been in special education classes since preschool. Through a special program for disabled workers, he has a part-time job scrubbing toilets and dumping trash.
Jared scored 43 out of 99 on the Army’s basic entrance exam — 31 is lowest grade the Army allows for enlistment, military officials said.
After learning Jared had cleared this first hurdle toward enlistment, Brenda said she called and asked for Ansley’s supervisor and got Sgt. Alejandro Velasco.
She said she begged Velasco to review Jared’s medical and school records. Brenda said Velasco declined, asserting that he didn’t need any paperwork. Under military rules, recruiters are required to gather all available information about a recruit and fill out a medical screening form.
“He was real cocky and he says, `Well, Jared’s an 18-year-old man. He doesn’t need his mommy to make his decisions for him.”‘
* * *
The Guinthers are not political activists. They supported the Iraq war in the beginning but have started to question it as fighting drags on. Brenda Guinther said that if her son Matthew had enlisted, she “wouldn’t like it, but I would learn to live with it because I know he would understand the consequences.”
But Jared doesn’t understand the dangers or the details of what he’s done, the Guinthers said.
When they asked Jared how long he would be in the Army, he said he didn’t know. His enlistment papers show it’s just over four years. Jared also was disappointed to learn that he wouldn’t be paid the $4,000 signing bonus until after basic training.
During a recent family gathering, a relative asked Jared what he would do if an enemy was shooting at him. Jared ran to his video game console, killed a digital Xbox soldier and announced, “See! I can do it!”
“My concern is that if he got into a combat situation he really couldn’t take someone’s back,” said Mary Lou Perry, 51, longtime friend of the Guinthers. “He wouldn’t really know a dangerous thing. This job they have him doing, it’s like send him in and if he doesn’t get blown up, it’s safe for the rest of us.”
Steinagel, the processing station commander, told The Oregonian that Jared showed up after passing his written exam. None of his paperwork indicated that he was autistic, but if it had, Jared almost certainly would have been disqualified, he said.
On Tuesday, a reporter visited the U.S. Army Recruiting Station at the Eastport Plaza Shopping Center, where Velasco said he had not been told about Jared’s autism.
“Cpl. Ansley is Guinther’s recruiter,” he said. “I was unaware of any type of autism or anything like that.”
Velasco initially denied knowing Jared, but later said he’d spent a lot of time mentoring him because Jared was going to become a cavalry scout. The job entails “engaging the enemy with anti-armor weapons and scout vehicles,” according to an Army recruiting Web site.
After he’d spoken for a few moments, Velasco suddenly grabbed the reporter’s tape recorder and tried to tear out the tape, stopping only after the reporter threatened to call the police.
With the Guinthers’ permission, The Oregonian faxed Jared’s medical records to the U.S. Army Recruiting Battalion commander Lt. Col. David Carlton in Portland, who on Wednesday ordered the investigation.
The Guinthers said that on Tuesday evening, Cpl. Ansley showed up at their door. They said Ansley stated that he would probably lose his job and face dishonorable discharge unless they could stop the newspaper’s story.
Ansley, reached at his recruiting office Thursday, declined to comment for this story.
S. Douglas Smith, spokesman for the U.S. Army Recruiting Command, in Fort Knox, Ky., said he could not comment on specifics of the investigation in Portland. But he defended the 8,200 recruiters working for the active Army and Army Reserve.
Last year, the Army relieved 44 recruiters from duty and admonished 369.
“Everyone in recruiting is let down when one of our recruiters fails to uphold the Army’s and Recruiting Command’s standards,” Smith said.
The Guinthers are eager to hear whether the Army will release Jared from his enlistment. Jared is disappointed he might not go because he thought the recruiters were his friends, they said. But they’re willing to accept that.
“If he went to Iraq and got hurt or killed,” Paul Guinther said, “I couldn’t live with myself knowing I didn’t try to stop it.”
484
have you ever wondered what that long stick with a ball on the end of it that sign painters use to steady their hands when they’re lettering is called? i know i have… for a long time… i’ve known what it is used for, and i’ve actually made a couple of them (the most recent one is a piece of dowl with a rubber ball on the end, that i made to assist with the Ganesha the car project), but i didn’t know what it was called before yesterday. it’s called a mahlstick (also called a “maulstick”, from the dutch malen – to paint. definition here), and here is the next logical step in mahlstick evolution, which is a pretty slick idea indeed. now we both know.
Seattle Art Car Blowout – i went to a “djazz djam” at gasworks park on saturday, and when i went back to my car, there was a thing that looked, at first, like a ticket on the window, which i thought was strange since i parked in a public, no-pay parking lot… but when i looked at it more closely, it was an invitation to be a part of this… which, it turns out, will be very convenient, as i need to find a place close to the center of the universe to park while i’m playing with the fremont philharmonic at the solstice parade. the “djazz djam”, by itself, was really interesting… i went to it as the result of responding to someone in a LJ community (i don’t remember if the actual post was in
i posted yesterday from edinburgh, tristan de cunha, and what came up when i clicked the “Location” link was edinburgh, scotland, which is not the same place… edinburgh, tristan de cunha is 37° 4′ south latitude, 12° 19′ west longitude, and it is the largest city (which isn’t saying much) on the most remote island in the world. livejournal, if you’re going to post locations, then at least make them in the correct hemisphere… 8/
finally,
Dolphins communicate like humans by calling each other by name, scientists in Fife have found.
The mammals are able to recognise themselves and other members of the same species as individuals with separate identities.
St Andrews University researchers studying in Florida discovered bottlenose dolphins used names rather than sound to identify each other.
The three-year-study was funded by the Royal Society of London.
Dr Vincent Janik, of the Sea Mammal Unit at St Andrews University, said they conducted the research on wild dolphins.
He said: “We captured wild dolphins using nets when they came near the shore.
“Then in the shallow water we recoded their whistles before synthesising them on a computer so that we had a computer voice of a dolphin.
“Then we played it back to the dolphins and we found they responded. This showed us that the dolphins know each other’s signature whistle instead of just the voice.
“I think it is a very exciting discovery because it means that these animals have evolved the same abilities as humans.
“Now we know they have labels for each other like we do.”
The research was conducted in Sarasota Bay off Florida’s west coast.
The findings are published in the US journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
483
[As if any further argumentation were needed, this merely underlines the great truth of this war. There is no enemy in Iraq. There never was any enemy in Iraq. The common enemies of the U.S. troops and the Iraqis are to be found in Washington DC, running their Imperial government for their own personal private profit.
[“Traitors” is too mild a term to describe them. At a certain point, rhetoric becomes exhausted, and only bright, white rage remains. A government that would do this, on top all the greed, lies, and stupidity that have characterized this war, has long outlived its usefulness, and has become a mere collection of incompetent cancerous predators.
[Of all the reasons to bring all the troops home now, immediately, one reason begins to tower above all the rest: we need them here to protect us against the filth in command at every level of power in this society. Our troops have the power to sweep that filth away, forever. Payback is overdue.]
02 MAY 06 By BOB KERR, The Providence Journal
The Iraq war has been the war fought on the cheap: not enough body armor, not enough armor on vehicles, not enough night vision equipment.
It has been the war in which packages from back home have had to fill some crucial needs.
Now, we have chow call at the Greenwood Credit Union in Warwick, R.I. It’s the latest in home-front intervention. It’s partially in response to the unthinkable image of U.S. Marines approaching Iraqi citizens and asking for food because they do not have enough.
There’s a big barrel in the lobby of the credit union on Post Road in Warwick. It’s decorated with ribbons and it’s there because Karen Boucher-Andoscia’s son, Nick Andoscia, called and asked his mother to send food.
Nick’s a Marine corporal. He was in Afghanistan last year, where there was enough to eat. He’s in Iraq now even though his enlistment was up last year.
He’s one of those Marines who can’t walk away. His unit, the 3rd Battalion of the 3rd Marines, was headed for Iraq and he just couldn’t head for civilian life while those he had served with were heading to their second war.
“He extended,” says Karen. “He told me, ‘I really have to go. I can’t let my guys go alone.’”
There are a lot of stories like that. We don’t hear them much. They’re kind of personal.
So Nick Andoscia went to Iraq. And hunger soon followed.
“I got a letter,” says Karen. “And he had called me before that. He said, ‘Send lots of tuna.’”
Nick told his mother that he and the men in his unit were all about 10 pounds lighter in their first few weeks in Iraq. They were pulling 22-hour patrol shifts. They were getting two meals a day and they were not meals to remember.
“He told me the two meals just weren’t cutting it. He said the Iraqi food was usually better. They were going to the Iraqis and basically saying, ‘feed me.’”
Karen started packing in that wartime tradition as old as mothers and sons. She packed a lot of the packaged tuna, not the canned.
She happened to mention her hungry son to people she works with at Greenwood Credit Union, where she is a teller and has worked for 30 years.
Pounds and pounds of food started showing up amid the daily business of loans and deposits and withdrawals. Marianne Barao, the branch manager, said it could be done, the credit union could become the place where people help feed hungry Marines who are risking their lives on a skimpy diet.
“We sent out 51 pounds this week,” says Karen. “There are customers coming in saying, ‘What do you need?’”
The credit union is paying the cost of packing and shipping.
Any packaged food is welcome. So are baby wipes because showers are even rarer than a full meal. And foot powder.
Nick Andoscia, who is 22, is due to come home later this year. He wants to study criminal justice, his mother says, then go to work for a fire or police department.
But for the next few months he will be on patrol in western Iraq, dealing with the heat and the dirt and the danger.
The last thing he should have to worry about is an empty stomach. The last thing he should have to do is approach Iraqis and ask for food.
You have to wonder what the gracious hosts must think when a fighting man from the richest country on earth comes to their door in search of something to eat.
A. Way too much
A simple airline stub, picked out of a bin near Heathrow, led Steve Boggan to investigate a shocking breach of security
Wednesday May 3, 2006
The Guardian
This is the story of a piece of paper no bigger than a credit card, thrown away in a dustbin on the Heathrow Express to Paddington station. It was nestling among chewing gum wrappers and baggage tags, cast off by some weary traveller, when I first laid eyes on it just over a month ago.
The traveller’s name was Mark Broer. I know this because the paper – actually a flimsy piece of card – was a discarded British Airways boarding-pass stub, the small section of the pass displaying your name and seat number. The stub you probably throw away as soon as you leave your flight.
It said Broer had flown from Brussels to London on March 15 at 7.10am on BA flight 389 in seat 03C. It also told me he was a “Gold” standard passenger and gave me his frequent-flyer number. I picked up the stub, mindful of a conversation I had had with a computer security expert two months earlier, and put it in my pocket.
If the expert was right, this stub would enable me to access Broer’s personal information, including his passport number, date of birth and nationality. It would provide the building blocks for stealing his identity, ruining his future travel plans – and even allow me to fake his passport.
It would also serve as the perfect tool for demonstrating the chaotic collection, storage and security of personal information gathered as a result of America’s near-fanatical desire to collect data on travellers flying to the US – and raise serious questions about the sort of problems we can expect when ID cards are introduced in 2008.
To understand why the piece of paper I found on the Heathrow Express is important, it is necessary to go back not, as you might expect, to 9/11, but to 1996 and the crash of TWA Flight 800 over Long Island Sound, 12 minutes out of New York, with the loss of 230 lives. Initially, crash investigators suspected a terrorist bomb might have brought down the aircraft. This was later ruled out, but already the Clinton administration had decided it was time to devise a security system that would weed out potential terrorists before they boarded a flight. This was called Capps, the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System.
It was a prosaic, relatively unambitious idea at first. For example, in highly simplistic terms, if someone bought a one-way ticket, paid in cash and checked in no baggage, they would be flagged up as an individual who had no intention of arriving or of going home. A bomber, perhaps.
After 9/11, the ambitions for such screening grew exponentially and the newly founded Department of Homeland Security began inviting computer companies to develop intelligent systems that could “mine” data on individuals, whizzing round state, private and public databases to establish what kind of person was buying the ticket.
In 2003, one of the pioneers of the system, speaking anonymously, told me that the project, by now called Capps II, was being designed to designate travellers as green, amber or red risks. Green would be an individual with no criminal record – a US citizen, perhaps, who had a steady job and a settled home, was a frequent flyer and so on. Amber would be someone who had not provided enough information to confirm all of this and who might be stopped at US Immigration and asked to provide clearer proof of ID. Red would be someone who might be linked to an ever-growing list of suspected terrorists – or someone whose name matched such a suspect.
“If you are an American who has volunteered lots of details proving that you are who you say you are, that you have a stable home, live in a community, aren’t a criminal, [Capps II] will flag you up as green and you will be automatically allowed on to your flight,” the pioneer told me. “The problem is that if the system doesn’t have a lot of information on you, or you have ordered a halal meal, or have a name similar to a known terrorist, or even if you are a foreigner, you’ll most likely be flagged amber and held back to be asked for further details. If you are European and the US government is short of information on you – or, as is likely, has incorrect information on you – you can reckon on delay after delay unless you agree to let them delve into your private details.
“That is inconvenient enough but, as we tested the system, it became clear that information was going to be used to build a complete picture of you from lots of private databases – your credit record, your travel history, your criminal record, whether you had the remotest dubious links with anyone at your college who became a terrorist. I began to feel more and more uncomfortable about it.”
Eventually, he quit the programme.
All of this was on my mind as I sat down with my computer expert, Adam Laurie, one of the founders of a company called the Bunker Secure Hosting, to examine Broer’s boarding-pass stub. Laurie is known in cyber-circles as something of a white knight, a computer wizard who not only advises companies on how to make their systems secure, but also cares about civil rights and privacy. He and his brother Ben are renowned among web designers as the men who developed Apache SSL – the software that makes most of the world’s web pages secure – and then gave it away for free.
We logged on to the BA website, bought a ticket in Broer’s name and then, using the frequent flyer number on his boarding pass stub, without typing in a password, were given full access to all his personal details – including his passport number, the date it expired, his nationality (he is Dutch, living in the UK) and his date of birth. The system even allowed us to change the information.
Using this information and surfing publicly available databases, we were able – within 15 minutes – to find out where Broer lived, who lived there with him, where he worked, which universities he had attended and even how much his house was worth when he bought it two years ago. (This was particularly easy given his unusual name, but it would have been possible even if his name had been John Smith. We now had his date of birth and passport number, so we would have known exactly which John Smith.)
Laurie was anything but smug.
“This is terrible,” he said. “It just shows what happens when governments begin demanding more and more of our personal information and then entrust it to companies simply not geared up for collecting or securing it as it gets shared around more and more people. It doesn’t enhance our security; it undermines it.”
Just over $100m had been spent on Capps II before it was scrapped in July 2004. Campaigners in the US had objected to it on grounds of privacy, and airlines such as JetBlue and American faced boycotts when it emerged that they were involved in trials – handing over passenger information – with the Department of Homeland Security’s Transportation Security Administration. Even worse, JetBlue admitted it had given the private records of 5 million passengers to a commercial company for analysis – and some of this was posted on the internet.
But the problems did not end with the demise of Capps II. Earlier that month, after 18 months of acrimonious negotiation, the EU caved in to American demands that European airlines, too, should hand over passenger information to the United States Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, BCBP, before their aircraft would be allowed to land on US soil. The BCBP wanted up to 60 pieces of information routinely gathered by booking agencies and stored as a Passenger Name Record, PNR. This included not only your flight details, name, address and so on, but also your travel itinerary, where you were staying, with whom you travelled, whether you booked a hire car in the US, whether you booked a smoking room in your hotel, even if you ordered a halal or kosher meal. And the US authorities wanted to keep it all for 50 years.
At first, the European Commission argued that surrendering such information would be in breach of European data protection law. Eventually, however, in the face of huge fines for airlines and cancelled landing slots, it agreed that 34 items from PNRs could be handed over and kept by the US for three and a half years.
Capps II was superseded by a new system called Secure Flight in August 2004. Later, in October last year, the BCBP demanded that airlines travelling to, or through, the US should forward “advance passenger information”, including passport number and date of birth, before passengers would be allowed to travel. It called this the advance passenger information system, or APIS. This is the information that Laurie and I had accessed through the BA website.
“The problem here is that a commercial organisation is being given the task of collecting data on behalf of a foreign government, for which it gets no financial reward, and which offers no business benefit in return,” says Laurie. “Naturally, in such a case, they will seek to minimise their costs, which they do by handing the problem off to the passengers themselves. This has the neat side-effect of also handing off liability for data errors.
“You can imagine the case where a businessman’s trip gets delayed because his passport details were incorrectly entered and he was mistaken for a terrorist. Since BA didn’t enter the data – frequent flyers are asked to do it themselves – they can’t be held responsible and can’t be sued for his lost business.”
By the time I found the ticket stub and went to Laurie, he had already reported his suspicions about a potential security lapse to BA (on January 20) by email. He received no response, so followed up with a telephone call asking for the airline’s security officer. He was told there wasn’t one, so he explained the lapse to an employee. Nothing was done and he still has not been contacted.
Three months ago, after further objections in the US, but before our investigation, Secure Flight was suspended after costing the US taxpayer $144m. At the time, Kip Hawley, transportation security administrator, said: “While the Secure Flight regulation is being developed, this is the time to ensure that the Secure Flight security, operational and privacy foundation is solid.”
The TSA said it would continue its passenger pre-screening programme in yet another guise after it had been audited and added that it had plans to introduce more security, privacy and redress for errors – confirming critics’ suspicions that no such systems were yet in place. To the consternation of privacy activists in Europe, the TSA also spelled out plans for its desire for various US government departments to share information, including yours and mine.
Dr Gus Hosein, a visiting fellow specialising in privacy and terrorism at the London School of Economics, is concerned about where the whole project will go next.
“They want to extend the advance passenger information system [APIS] to include data on where passengers are going and where they are staying because of concerns over plagues,” he says. “For example, if bird flu breaks out, they want to know where all the foreign travellers are. The airlines hate this. It is a security nightmare. Soon the US will demand biometric information [fingerprints, retina scans etc] and they will share that around.
“But what the BA lapse shows is that companies cannot be trusted to gather this information without it getting out to criminals who would abuse it. The potential for identity theft is huge, but the number of agencies among which it will be shared is just growing and growing.”
And that is where concern comes in over the UK’s proposed ID cards, which may one day be needed to travel to the US. According to the Home Office, the identity cards bill currently going through Parliament allows for up to 40 pieces of personal information to be held on the proposed ID card, with digital biometric details of all of your fingerprints, both your irises and your face, all of which can be transmitted to electronic readers. The cards will contain a microchip the size of a grain of sand linked to a tiny embedded antenna that transmits all the information when contacted by an electronic reader.
This readable system, known as Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, has recently been installed in new British passports. The Home Office says the information can be transmitted across a distance of only a couple of centimetres because the chips have no power of their own – they simply bounce back a response to a weak signal sent from passport readers at immigration points.
However, the suspicion is that the distance over which the signal can be read relates only to the weakness of the signal sent out by the readers. What if the readers sent out much stronger signals? Potentially, then, criminals with powerful readers could suck out your information as you passed by. The Government denies that this scenario is viable, but, in January, Dutch security specialists Riscure successfully read and de-encrypted information from its country’s new biometric passports from a distance of about 30ft in just two hours.
“The Home Office says British passport information is encrypted, but it’s a pretty basic form of encryption,” says Hosein. “Everyone expects the ID cards to be equally insecure. If the government insists they won’t be cracked, read or copied, they’re kidding themselves and us.”
BA has now closed its security loophole after being contacted by the Guardian in March, but that particular lapse is beside the point. Because of the pressure being applied to airlines by the US, breaches will happen again elsewhere as our personal data whizzes around the globe, often without our knowledge or consent.
Meanwhile, accountability remains lamentable. Several calls to the US Transportation Security Administration were not returned.
Perhaps the last word should go to Mark Broer, the man whose boarding pass stub started off this virtual paper chase. He is aged 41 and is a successful executive with a pharmaceutical recruitment company. When I told him what we had done with his boarding pass stub, he was appalled.
“I travel regularly and, because I go to the US, I submitted my personal information and passport number – it is required if you are a frequent flyer and want to check yourself in,” he says. “Experienced travellers today know that they have to give up information for ease of travel and to fight terrorism. It is an exchange of information in return for convenience. But as far as I’m concerned, having that information leaked out to people who could steal my identity wasn’t part of the deal.”
482
those who frequent the LJ pic feed sites may have noticed pics from this site. it’s a rather amusing little site that takes you through a quick 25-question “IQ” test, and give you a quick thumbnail sketch of your “real” IQ.
unfortunately, there’s a catch. here’s what I see as my results on my home computer
but here’s what everyone else sees
apparently, the site uses some sort of script that shows your IP one graphic and shows everyone else another. a rather juvenile (but funny, in a really nasty way) trick that seems to have nailed hundreds (myself included).
by the way, the person who foisted this off on all of us (which is easily available to the general public by typing
whois iq-challenge.com
) is:
Kevin Kelm, otherwise known as
8240 Lighthouse Court
970- -0967
and the stooge he used as an artist is
481
what do you know… today is 6/6/06 5/6/06… brain injury… 8/
By DON THOMPSON
SACRAMENTO, Calif. – Federal prosecutors will retry an ice cream vendor on charges that he lied to the FBI about his son’s attendance at a terrorist training camp, authorities announced Friday.
Umer Hayat’s first trial ended with the jury deadlocked last month. The same day, a separate jury convicted his son, Hamid Hayat, of supporting terrorism by attending an al-Qaida camp in Pakistan.
U.S. District Court Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. set June 5 to begin selecting a new jury for the father’s retrial.
“This case is simply too serious to walk away after one hung jury,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Larry Brown said Friday as he left the courthouse.
Brown said prosecutors interviewed jurors in the first trial, and found that “there was not a lot of dispute about whether or not Umer Hayat lied to the FBI. Still, there were some jurors who looked down upon the investigative techniques that were used by agents.”
During the nine-week trial, jurors heard separate videotaped confessions the father and son made to FBI agents. The defense said the two were worn down by hours of questioning and were merely responding to leading questions by agents.
Umer Hayat, a 48-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen, was released from federal custody Monday after Burrell lowered his bail from $1.2 million to $390,000. He will remain under house arrest in the Central Valley town. If convicted of the charges, he could face up to 16 years in prison.
His 23-year-old son, also a U.S. citizen, was working at a cherry-packing shed when he was arrested. Hamid Hayat faces up to 39 years in prison at sentencing July 14.
The FBI began focusing on the 2,500-member Pakistani community in Lodi shortly after the September 2001 terrorist attacks.
Agents initially were interested in pursuing a tip that Lodi businesses were sending money to terror groups abroad. They recruited a 32-year-old former Lodi resident of Pakistani descent who was then living in Oregon.
The informant soon befriended Hamid Hayat and secretly recorded their conversations. In some of those discussions, the younger Hayat said he planned to attend a terrorist training camp in Pakistan during a visit there from 2003 to 2005.
Hamid Hayat’s attorney, Wazhma Mojaddidi, said her client never actually attended the camp and argued that prosecutors had no direct evidence that he had. She has requested a new trial for her client.
The Hayats were arrested in June, shortly after Hamid Hayat returned from Pakistan, along with two Muslim clerics who later were deported for immigration violations.
U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott said lying to the FBI during a terrorism investigation could cause them to lose valuable time that would be better spent foiling deadly plots.
“Seven citizens serving as jurors in the Umer Hayat trial found beyond a reasonable doubt that he had lied to the FBI about his son’s attendance at a terrorist training camp,” Scott said in a statement Friday.
By Stephanie Nebehay
May 5, 2006
GENEVA – The United States on Friday defended its treatment of foreign terrorism suspects held abroad, telling a U.N. committee it backed a ban on torture and stressing there had been “relatively few actual cases of abuse.”
John Bellinger, the U.S. State Department’s top legal adviser, said Washington was “absolutely committed to uphold its national and international obligations to eradicate torture.”
Human rights groups this week accused the United States of mistreating detainees through cruel interrogation methods including “water-boarding,” a form of mock drowning.
Bellinger, who heads the American delegation to the U.N. Committee Against Torture, said allegations of U.S. abuse had been greatly exaggerated.
“This committee should not lose sight of the fact that these incidents are not systemic,” he told the 10-member panel at the start of a two-day review of U.S. compliance with the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment.
“Relatively few actual cases of abuse and wrongdoing have occurred in the context of U.S. armed conflict with al Qaeda,” he said.
The United States is holding hundreds of terrorism suspects, most arrested since al Qaeda’s September 11 attacks in 2001, at its prisons in
Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Barry Lowenkron told the committee the “notorious” abuses that occurred at
Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq “inexcusable and indefensible.”
“We know that the image of Abu Ghraib and questions about Guantanamo have been damaging to the reputation of the United States,” Bellinger told a news briefing after the session.
“That is one reason the U.S. government is trying very hard to set things on the right course through investigations that have been conducted and through our appearance at the committee today,” he said.
CHAIN OF COMMAND
The 10-member U.N. committee grilled the U.S. delegation on whether criminal responsibility has been established for known abuses, and challenged the U.S. definition of torture.
“We would like to have more details regarding the chain of command,” said Andreas Mavrommatis, the committee’s chairman.
Vice-chairman Wang Xuexian from China asked: “Where would you put such methods as interrogation by mock drownings — as torture or as other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment?”
“Are there measures to monitor CIA operations to ensure they are not violating the Convention Against Torture?”
The panel also asked about “extraordinary renditions” whereby prisoners are moved to other countries where, critics say, they can face torture, and asked whether seeking “diplomatic assurances” from governments was enough to prevent abuse of those moved.
“I would like to emphasize that the United States has not transported detainees to countries for purposes of interrogation using torture and will not,” Bellinger said in response, adding diplomatic assurances were relied on only “sparingly.”
Speaking after the session, Jennifer Daskal of Human Rights Watch decried what she called “a continued attempt by the U.S. to say that the abuse we see in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan was just limited to a few bad apples.”
“The (Bush) administration is unwilling to assume responsibility for policies and practices that were promulgated at a high level, which allow a climate of abuse to flourish,” she said.
apparently, now the movie of flight 93 has become “the official history”, and the war against terror has officially become “world war III”… he said it, i didn’t… 8/
May 05, 2006
US President George W. Bush said the September 11 revolt of passengers against their hijackers on board Flight 93 had struck the first blow of “World War III.”
In an interview with the financial news network CNBC, Bush said he had yet to see the recently released film of the uprising, a dramatic portrayal of events on the United Airlines plane before it crashed in a Pennsylvania field.
But he said he agreed with the description of David Beamer, whose son Todd died in the crash, who in a Wall Street Journal commentary last month called it “our first successful counter-attack in our homeland in this new global war — World War III”.
Bush said: “I believe that. I believe that it was the first counter-attack to World War III.
“It was, it was unbelievably heroic of those folks on the airplane to recognize the danger and save lives,” he said.
Flight 93 crashed on the morning of September 11, 2001, killing the 33 passengers, seven crew members and four hijackers, after passengers stormed the cockpit and battled the hijackers for control of the aircraft.
The president has repeatedly praised the heroism of the passengers in fighting back and so launching the first blow of what he usually calls the “war on terror”.
In 2002, then-White House spokesman Ari Fleischer explicitly declined to call the hunt for Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda group and its followers “World War III.”
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very weird situation: i went to the bank to deposit my (substantially more than i expected it to be) check from the moisture festival, and the ATMs were acting strangely, wouldn’t let me make deposits, and said my balance is $2,700… the computer says the account has $233 in it, which is a lot closer to what i expected, but i can always hope… and if nothing else, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to deposit anything in the machine until they get the machines straightened out anyway.
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Literszámra nyakalták és vitték haza a jóféle rumot a pincében álló 300 literes hordóból egy szegedi családi ház felújításán dolgozó melósok. Amikor az utolsó csepp szesz is elfogyott, odébb akarták tenni a kiivott fahordót, de még kotyogott benne valami. Szétbontották, egy összeaszalódott holttest d?lt ki bel?le.
A rémregénybe ill? történet több évtizedes múltra tekint vissza. A Szeged kertvárosában lév? régi ház els? tulajdonosa egy nyolcvanas éveiben járó özvegyaszszony volt, aki csendes öregségben, magányosan éldegélt. A zárkózott, úri all?rökkel megáldott nénikér?l keveset tudtak a szomszédok.
Sajátos íz
Az a hír járta, hogy a matróna valaha nagyvilági életet élt a Karib térségben diplomataként dolgozó urával, ám egyedül tért haza a mesés tengerentúlról. Egyetlen távoli rokona volt, akinek annyit mondott, hogy a férje meghalt, azt azonban senki nem firtatta, hol nyugszik a szebb napokat idéz? fotókon fest?i szépség? nejét átkaroló, daliás ember. Az otthonából ki sem mozduló, ?sz öregasszony egy nap nem nyitott ajtót a nála kopogtató szomszédoknak, akik rosszat sejtvén rend?rt hívtak. A behatoló zsaruk az ágyban találtak rá a holttestére, halálát végelgyengülés okozta. A titokzatos házat néhány hónap múlva egy fiatal pár vette meg, és elkezdték felújíttatni új otthonukat. Az átépítési munkálatok azonban kissé elhúzódtak, mert a melósok rájártak a pincében talált 300 literes, rummal teli hordóra. Sajátos íze volt, osztályozták kés?bbi vallomásaikban a jóféle szeszt, amivel hetekig locsolgatták a torkukat. Még haza is vittek bel?le néhány flaskával, s csodájára járt, aki belekóstolt.
Konzervált ember
? Fél év sem telt el az id?s asszony halála óta, amikor ismét riasztottak minket a házhoz ? emlékezett a felejthetetlen eseményekre Pénzes Zoltán százados. ? Egy meztelen férfi holttestre bukkantak a munkások a rumos hordóban, amit azért szedtek szét, mert bár elfogyott bel?le a szesz, mégis kotyogott benne valami, ahogy mozgatták. Az összeaszalódott halott embriópózban helyezkedett el a hordósírban. Külsérelmi nyom nem volt rajta, a boncolás megállapította, hogy természetes halállal halt meg. A rum, amiben a munkások megjelenéséig információink szerint legalább 20 éven keresztül ázott, tartósította, így csupán valamelyest összetöpörödött. A helyszíni szemlét végz? szegedi zsaruk szerint a múmiát megtaláló brigád tagjainak arcáról lerítt, hogy jó id?re elment a kedvük az ismeretlen eredet? szeszes hordók megcsapolásától. A tanúkihallgatások során többen rosszul lettek, amikor szóba került, hogy ittak a konzerválóléb?l.
Pincesírból temet?be
A rend?rségi vizsgálat kiderítette, hogy az elhunyt a ház egykori asszonyának diplomata ura, akit Jamaica partjainál ért a végzet. A holttest hivatalos hazahozatása azonban túl költséges és a szükséges okmányok beszerzése miatt körülményes is lett volna, ezért a találékony özvegy a kurrens jamaicai rummal teli hordóban, hajón csempészte haza az urát. Azt azonban senki sem tudja, hogy kés?bb miért nem temettette el, és titkolta a pincében lév? hordósírt. Az öregurat végül a szegedi köztemet?ben helyezték végs? nyugalomra.
Body at bottom of barrel shocks rum-drinking workers
Budapest, May 4 – Workers renovating an empty house in Szeged, SE Hungary, dipped deep into a 300 litre barrel of rum they found in the basement, but the drinking came to a screeching halt when they discovered a long-dead body at the bottom of the barrel, the website of a police magazine reported.
The house had been owned by an elderly lady who had spent many years in the Caribbean region with her diplomat husband before returning home alone some 20 years ago, Zsaru Magazine wrote. Her husband had died abroad, she said.
The lady herself died recently and the house was sold to a young couple who ordered a basement-to-attic renovation.
Workers soon discovered that a 300-litre barrel left behind by the former owner was filled with rum, and they took it upon themselves to empty it, commenting on its unusual bouquet. The rum tasting lasted some six months before the body was discovered, preserved in the alcohol. Stunned by the discovery, they called police.
Yes, the body was that of the diplomat husband, but no, he had not met with foul play, police found. An autopsy revealed that death had been due to natural causes, and a bit of investigation found that he had died in or around Jamaica over 20 years earlier. The widow, on learning how expensive and complicated it was to return a corpse to Hungary, avoided officialdom by having him packaged in a barrel of rum, which she brought home and kept in her basement until her own death.
The man was finally buried in Szeged cemetery.
By Cathy Hayden
May 4, 2006
Jackson Mayor Frank Melton said he impulsively asked his police escort to pull four Callaway High buses over on I-220 on Friday afternoon because he needed a hug.
The buses were taking students home from school, about 4:30 p.m.
“It’s been such a stressful two weeks,” Melton said. “I wanted to shake their hands. I wanted to touch them. That’s all it was. … I went through the buses and shook their hand and hugged them and told then how proud I was of them.”
Melton said students saw him out their windows and waved before he had the buses stopped. “I told the kids to have a great weekend and a safe weekend,” he said. “I didn’t do anything stupid or illegal.”
He said there was no safety hazard. The drivers pulled the buses off the interstate on the right median.
Jackson school officials learned about Melton’s actions from a television video clip and called his office to see if there was a problem on any of the buses.
Superintendent Earl Watkins was out of town.
“It is certainly unorthodox,” Watkins said Wednesday. “Unless there is an issue occurring on a bus, it is always better not to prevent bus drivers from transporting their kids.”
Watkins said something like this opens up “unintended problems and consequences.”
“We don’t want to get into a negative conversation with the mayor,” said Michael Thomas, deputy superintendent for operations. “Our concern was purely perception – people thinking buses had done anything wrong.”
Melton has long been known to interact with students, going into schools unannounced when he was director of the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics and touring schools when he was a member of the state Board of Education.
“I reserve the right to go into our schools. I reserve the right to encourage kids. I reserve the right as the mayor,” he said.
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BY FRANK MAIN
May 1, 2006
The Gangster Disciples, Latin Kings and Vice Lords were born decades ago in Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods. Now, their gang graffiti is showing up 6,400 miles away in one of the world’s most dangerous neighborhoods — Iraq.
Armored vehicles, concrete barricades and bathroom walls all have served as canvasses for their spray-painted gang art. At Camp Cedar II, about 185 miles southeast of Baghdad, a guard shack was recently defaced with “GDN” for Gangster Disciple Nation, along with the gang’s six-pointed star and the word “Chitown,” a soldier who photographed it said.
The graffiti, captured on film by an Army Reservist and provided to the Chicago Sun-Times, highlights increasing gang activity in the Army in the United States and overseas, some experts say.
Military and civilian police investigators familiar with three major Army bases in the United States — Fort Lewis, Fort Hood and Fort Bragg — said they have been focusing recently on soldiers with gang affiliations. These bases ship out many of the soldiers fighting in Iraq.
“I have identified 320 soldiers as gang members from April 2002 to present,” said Scott Barfield, a Defense Department gang detective at Fort Lewis in Washington state. “I think that’s the tip of the iceberg.”
Of paramount concern is whether gang-affiliated soldiers’ training will make them deadly urban warriors when they return to civilian life and if some are using their access to military equipment to supply gangs at home, said Barfield and other experts.
‘They don’t try to hide it’
Jeffrey Stoleson, an Army Reserve sergeant in Iraq for almost a year, said he has taken hundreds of photos of gang graffiti there.
In a storage yard in Taji, about 18 miles north of Baghdad, dozens of tanks were vandalized with painted gang symbols, Stoleson said in a phone interview from Iraq. He said he also took pictures of graffiti at Camp Scania, about 108 miles southeast of Baghdad, and Camp Anaconda, about 40 miles north of Baghdad. Much of the graffiti was by Chicago-based gangs, he said.
In civilian life, Stoleson is a correctional officer and co-founder of the gang interdiction team at a Wisconsin maximum-security prison. Now he is a truck commander for security escorts in Iraq. He said he watched two fellow soldiers in the Wisconsin Army National Guard 2nd Battalion, 127th Infantry, die Sept. 26 when a roadside bomb exploded. Five of Stoleson’s friends have been wounded.
Because of the extreme danger of his mission in Iraq, Stoleson said he does not relish the idea of working alongside gang members, whom he does not trust. Stoleson said he once reported to a supervisor that he suspected a company of soldiers in Iraq was rife with gang members.
“My E-8 [supervising sergeant] told me not to ruffle their feathers because they were doing a good job,” he said.
Stoleson said he has spotted soldiers in Iraq with tattoos signifying their allegiance to the Vice Lords and the Simon City Royals, another street gang spawned in Chicago.
“They don’t try to hide it,” Stoleson said.
Army doesn’t see significant trend
Christopher Grey, spokesman for the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, did not deny the existence of gang members in the military, but he disputed that the problem is rampant — or even significant.
In the last year, the Criminal Investigation Command has looked into 10 cases in which there was credible evidence of gang-related criminal activity in the Army, Grey said. He would not discuss specific cases.
“We recently conducted an Army-wide study, and we don’t see a significant trend in this kind of activity, especially when you compare this with a million-man Army,” Grey said.
‘Lowering our standards’
“Sometimes there is a definition issue here on what constitutes gang activity. If someone wears baggy pants and a scarf, that does not make them a gang member unless there is evidence to show that person is involved in violent or criminal activity,” Grey said.
Barfield said Army recruiters eager to meet their goals have been overlooking applicants’ gang tattoos and getting waivers for criminal backgrounds.
“We’re lowering our standards,” Barfield said.
“A friend of mine is a recruiter,” he said. “They are being told less than five tattoos is not an issue. More than five, you do a waiver saying it’s not gang-related. You’ll see soldiers with a six-pointed star with GD [Gangster Disciples] on the right forearm.”
Fort Lewis offers free tattoo removal, but few if any soldiers with gang tattoos have taken advantage of the service, Barfield said.
In interviews with the almost 320 soldiers who admitted they were gang members, only two said they wanted out of gangs, Barfield said.
None has been arrested for a gang-related felony on the base, Barfield said. But some are suspected of criminal activity off base, he said.
“They’re not here for the red, white and blue. They’re here for the black and gold,” he said, referring to the gang colors of the Latin Kings.
Barfield said most of the gang members he has identified are black and Latino. He has linked white soldiers to racist groups such as the Aryan Nations.
Barfield acknowledged that the soldiers he pegged as gang members represent a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of soldiers based at Fort Lewis in the period he reviewed. But he stressed that he only investigates a fraction of the soldiers on base.
Barfield said he normally identifies gang members during barracks inspections requested by unit commanders. He interviews them about possible gang affiliation when he sees gang graffiti in their rooms, photos of a soldier flashing gang hand signals or a soldier with gang tattoos.
Learning urban warfare
“I know there is a lot more going on here,” he said. “I don’t inspect off-base housing or married soldiers’ housing.”
The Gangster Disciples are the most worrisome street gang at Fort Lewis because they are the most organized, Barfield said.
Barfield said gangs are encouraging their members to join the military to learn urban warfare techniques they can teach when they go back to their neighborhoods.
“Gang members are telling us in the interviews that their gang is putting them in,” he said.
Joe Sparks, a retired Chicago Police gang specialist and the Midwest adviser to the International Latino Gang Investigators Association, said he is concerned about the military know-how that gang-affiliated soldiers might bring back to the streets here.
“Even though they are ‘bangers, they are still fighting for America, so I have to give them that,” Sparks said. “The sound of enemy gunfire is nothing new to them. I’m sure in battle it’s a truce — GDs and P Stones are fighting a common enemy. But when they get home, forget about it.”
Barfield said he knows of an Army private who fought valiantly in Iraq but still maintained his gang affiliation when he returned home.
The private, a Florencia 13 gang member from Southern California, spoke to Barfield of battling a 38th Street Gang member when they were civilians.
Then the 38th Street Gang member became a sergeant in the Army and the Florencia 13 member became a private. They served in Iraq together, Barfield said.
“They had exchanged blows in Inglewood [a city near Los Angeles], but in the Army, they did get the mission done,” he said. “The private is a decorated war veteran with a Purple Heart.”
The private still has his gang tattoos and identifies himself as a Florencia 13, Barfield said.
Marine killed cop in California
Barfield said a big concern is what such gang members trained in urban warfare will do when they return home.
He pointed to Marine Lance Cpl. Andres Raya, a suspected Norteno gang member who shot two officers with a rifle outside a liquor store in Ceres, Calif., on Jan. 9, 2005, before police returned fire and killed him. One officer died, and the other was wounded by the 19-year-old Raya, who was high on cocaine. Raya had spent seven months in Iraq before returning to Camp Pendleton near San Diego.
Photos of Raya wearing the gang’s red colors and making gang hand signs were reportedly found in a safe in his room.
Hunter Glass, a Fayetteville, N.C., police detective, said he has seen an increase in gang activity involving soldiers from nearby Fort Bragg. A Fort Bragg soldier — a member of the Insane Gangster Crips — is charged with a gang-related robbery in Fayetteville that ended in the slaying of a Korean store owner in November, said Glass, a veteran of the elite 82nd Airborne based at Fort Bragg.
He estimated that hundreds of gang members are stationed at the base as soldiers.
“I have talked to guys who say ‘I’m a SUR 13 [gang member], but I am a soldier,’ ” Glass said. “Although I see the [gang] problem as a threat, I do believe the majority of the military are good people and that many of those [military officials] that I have made aware of the situation have expressed concern in dealing with it. It is safe to say that I am less worried about a gang war in the sand box [Iraq] but more about the one on our streets upon its end.”
Glass has given presentations to military leaders in Washington, D.C., about gang members in the military.
Sending flak jackets home
A law enforcement source in Chicago said police see some evidence of soldiers working with gangs here. Police recently stopped a vehicle and found 10 military flak jackets inside. A gang member in the vehicle told investigators his brother was a Marine and sent the jackets home, the source said.
Barfield said he knows of civilian gang members in the Seattle area who also have been caught with flak jackets that he suspects were stolen from Fort Lewis.
Barfield said he has documented gang-affiliated soldiers’ involvement in drug dealing, gunrunning and other criminal activity off base. More than a year ago, a soldier tied to a white supremacy group was caught trying to ship an assault rifle from Iraq to the United States in pieces, he said.
In Texas, the FBI is bracing for the transfer of gang-connected soldiers from Fort Hood in central Texas to Fort Bliss near El Paso as part of the nation’s base realignments. FBI Special Agent Andrea Simmons said gang-affiliated soldiers from Fort Hood could clash with civilian gang members in El Paso.
“We understand that [some] soldiers and dependents at Fort Hood tend to be under the Folk Nation umbrella, including the Gangster Disciples and Crips,” Simmons said. “In El Paso, the predominant gang, without much competition, is the Barrio Azteca. We could see some kind of turf war between the Barrio Aztecas and the Folk Nation.”
FBI agents have visited Fort Hood to learn about the gang activity on the base, Simmons said.
“We found most of the police departments say they do see gang activity due to the military — soldiers and dependents,” she said. “Our agents also have been in contact with Fort Bliss to discuss the issue.”
Simmons said investigators may conduct background checks on soldiers relocating from Fort Hood to Fort Bliss to assess the level of the potential gang problem.
Barfield said he welcomes the FBI’s scrutiny of gang members in the Army.
“Investigators as a whole across the military aren’t getting the support to remove gang members from the ranks,” he said.
But Grey, the spokesman for the Criminal Investigation Command, said the unit is open to any tips about gang activity in the Army.
“If anyone has any information, we strongly recommend they bring it to our attention,” he said.
Producer says song not meant to discourage learning English
April 28, 2006
WASHINGTON — The national anthem should be sung in English — not Spanish — President Bush declared Friday, amid growing restlessness over the millions of immigrants here illegally.
“One of the things that’s very important is, when we debate this issue, that we not lose our national soul,” the president exclaimed. “One of the great things about America is that we’ve been able to take people from all walks of life bound as one nation under God. And that’s the challenge ahead of us.”
A Spanish language version of the national anthem was released Friday by a British music producer, Adam Kidron, who said he wanted to honor America’s immigrants.
When the president was asked at a Rose Garden question-and-answer session whether the anthem should be sung in Spanish, he replied: “I think the national anthem ought to be sung in English, and I think people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English and they ought to learn to sing the national anthem in English.”
He made his remarks during a wide-ranging briefing with reporters.
“The intention of recording ‘Nuestro Himno’ (Our Anthem) has never been to discourage immigrants from learning English and embracing American culture,” Kidron said in a statement issued after the president spoke.
“We instead view ‘Nuestro Himno’ as a song that affords those immigrants that have not yet learned the English language the opportunity to fully understand the character of the Star-Spangled Banner, the American flag and the ideals of freedom that they represent,” Kidron said.
The president’s comments came amid a burgeoning national debate — and congressional fight — over legislation pending in Congress, and pushed by Bush, to overhaul U.S. immigration law.
Bush called on lawmakers to move forward on legislation — now stalled — that would revamp immigration laws.
“I want a comprehensive bill,” Bush said, that includes enforcement as well as giving temporary worker status to some illegal immigrants.
Large numbers of immigrant groups have planned an economic boycott next week to dramatize their call for legislation providing legal status for millions of people in the United States illegally.
“You know, I’m not a supporter of boycotts,” Bush said. “I am a supporter of comprehensive immigration … I think most Americans agree that we’ve got to enforce our border. I don’t think there’s any question about that.”
The president’s remarks followed the release of the Spanish language version of the song.
May 4, 2006
WASHINGTON — President Bush likes to drop a few words of Spanish in his speeches and act like he’s proficient in the language. But he’s really not that good, his spokesman said Thursday.
“The president can speak Spanish but not that well,” White House press secretary Scott McClellan said. “He’s not that good with his Spanish.”
McClellan’s comment was noticeable because presidential press secretaries usually boast about a president’s ability rather than talk about any shortcomings. McClellan is in the last days of his job, leaving the White House next week.
McClellan made his remark in response to a report that Bush had sung the Star-Spangled Banner in Spanish during the 2000 campaign. Just last week Bush said the national anthem should be sung in English, not Spanish.
“It’s absurd,” McClellan said of the report, suggesting that Bush couldn’t have sung it in Spanish even if he had wanted to.
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this is a test of my new icon…
all kinds of sexual goodies, with no exception for foot fetishists, although i’ve got to wonder what if the foot fetishist was female…
By Noel Randewich
May 2, 2006
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico’s president will approve a law that decriminalizes possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine and other drugs to concentrate on fighting violent drug gangs, the government said on Tuesday.
President Vicente Fox will not oppose the bill, passed by senators last week, presidential spokesman Ruben Aguilar told reporters, despite likely tensions with the United States.
“The president is going to sign that law. There would be no objection,” he said. “It appears to be a good law and an advance in combating narcotics trafficking.”
Public Security Minister Eduardo Medina-Mora said Mexico’s legal changes are in line with other countries and warned drug users they should not expect lenient treatment from the police if they are caught.
The approval of the legislation, passed earlier by the lower house of Congress, surprised Washington, which counts on Mexico’s support in its war against gangs that move massive quantities of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamines through Mexico to U.S. consumers.
Under the federal law, police will not criminally prosecute people or hand out jail terms for possessing up to 5 grams of marijuana, 5 grams of opium, or 25 milligrams of heroin. Nor does the law penalize possession of 500 milligrams of cocaine — enough for a few lines.
The legal changes will also decriminalize the possession of limited quantities of LSD, hallucinogenic mushrooms, amphetamines, ecstasy and peyote — a psychotropic cactus found in Mexico’s northern deserts.
STILL ILLEGAL
But city and state governments may pass their own misdemeanor laws against drug possession, levying fines, forcing law-breakers to spend up to 48 hours in police station holding cells or even making them accept medical treatment for substance addiction, Medina-Mora told reporters.
“International practice, including in the United States, in many cases dictates that possession of small amounts of drugs does not require a penal sanction,” he said.
Hundreds of people, including many police officers, have been killed in Mexico in the past year as drug cartels battle for control of lucrative smuggling routes into the United States.
The violence has raged mostly in northern Mexico but in recent months has spread south to cities such as vacation resort Acapulco.
Medina-Mora warned that vacationing college students and other foreigners caught with even with small amounts of drugs could be breaking municipal or state misdemeanor laws and could easily be shown to the airport or the border.
Vacation cities including Cancun, Acapulco, Tijuana and Mazatlan already have their own laws against drug possession, he said.
The legislation is expected to make the rules clearer for local judges and police, who currently decide on a case-by-case basis whether people should be criminally prosecuted for possessing small quantities of drugs, often leading to corruption.
While likely to complicate relations with the U.S. government, the legislation has drawn relatively little attention from the media in Mexico, where drug use is less common than in the United States.
Medina-Mora said Fox has until September to sign the bill, but neither he nor Aguilar could say more specifically when it might be signed.
By Rossella Lorenzi
May 3, 2006 — King Tutankhamun’s rediscovered penis could make the pharaoh stand out in the shrunken world of male mummies, according to a close look into old pictures of the 3,300-year-old mummified king.
The formerly missing sex organ has been just another puzzle in the story of the best-known pharaoh of ancient Egypt.
Photographed intact by Harry Burton (1879-1940) during Howard Carter’s excavation of Tut’s tomb in 1922, the royal penis was reported missing in 1968, when British scientist Ronald Harrison took a series of X-rays of the mummy.
Speculation abounded that the penis had been stolen and sold.
“Instead, it has always been there. I found it during the CT scan last year, when the mummy was lifted. It lay loose in the sand around the king’s body. It was mummified,” Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, told Discovery News.
At first look, Burton’s pictures may seem to indicate that King Tut could have been a little better endowed. But according to mummy expert Eduard Egarter Vigl, the pharaoh was normally built.
Caretaker of Ötzi the Iceman, the world’s oldest and best-preserved mummy, Egarter was also a member of the Egyptian-led research team that examined King Tut’s CT scan images.
“The pharaoh’s sex organ is clearly visible in Burton’s pictures. All was normal in King Tut. The penis is a highly vascularized organ and shrinks when it is mummified. Actually, King Tut has been flattered by the embalmers’ work. There is no comparison with Ötzi’s penis,” Egarter told Discovery News.
Ötzi’s natural mummification and dehydration in an Alpine glacier produced a “collapse of the genitalia,” which left the Iceman with an almost invisible member.
“He would not make a bella figura today,” Egarter said.
According to the mummy expert, it is not possible to see if King Tut was circumcised or not.
Eugene Cruz-Uribe, professor of history at Northern Arizona University and an expert on Tutankhamun, told Discovery that some earlier documents mention circumcision at King Tut’s time.
“It was probably done for hygienic reasons, but some ritual issues may have occurred as well,” Cruz-Uribe said.
Tut.ankh.Amun, “the living image of Amun,” ascended the throne in 1333 B.C. at the age of nine, and reigned until his death in 1325 B.C., aged 19.
He married 13-year-old Ankhesenpaaten, who was probably his stepsister, on his accession to the throne. During their marriage, Ankhesenpaaten, who had changed her name to Ankhesenamun, gave birth to two stillborn girls.
Keith Richards, a guitarist of Rolling Stones British Rock Group, is still nursing a sore head in an Auckland hospital after falling out of a tree in Fiji last week. The English Guitarist, 62, was airlifted brought from Fiji to Auckland by air and admitted to the Ascot Hospital with mild concussion.
Richards suffered a head injury and concussion after falling from a coconut tree at a luxurious resort in the Fiji Islands on April 29, where Richards and fellow band member, Ron Wood, 58, were apparently climbing the tree.
After initial treatment in Suva-the capital of Fiji, he was airlifted to a private hospital in Auckland, New Zealand, where he was given a brain scan to check for neurological damage.
However, neither the Hospital nor the air ambulance company which transported him to Auckland from Fiji said anything about his fall or his condition. During the treatment his wife, Patti Hansen, was beside him at the hospital. They had been staying at the luxury Club Resort on Wakaya.
Richards-the songwriter, best recognized for his work with The Rolling Stones, is better known for his drug-related outlaw image than for his songwriting contributions, to the general public.
Richards is no stranger to unforeseen injuries as in 1998 the Stones had to delay a tour after he fell off a ladder while trying to find a book in the library of his Connecticut residence. He needed treatment for rib and chest injuries and there were even fears he had punctured a lung when he fell while stretching amid the library’s floor-to-ceiling shelves. In another incident, according to band mate Ron Wood, he once slipped on a frankfurter lobbed on stage while playing a concert in Frankfurt, Germany.
The fall story of the guitarist is on the top of Newspapers and news networks throughout America and the United Kingdom, who are giving the story a good airing. An American newsreader tried to conceal her laugh as she asked, after reading the story, why was the Stone up a tree in the first place.
According to the overseas reports, the reformed heroin addict and one-time hell raiser – who still smokes and drinks – was halfway up the five-meter tree when he slipped and fell, hitting his head.
Richards, who once kicked a serious heroin habit by having his entire blood supply replaced in a Swiss clinic, fell out of the tree on Wednesday but refused to go to hospital until his holiday ended on Friday.
The rock star, who is nearly into his seventh decade, does not let the age come between him and his good time.
more than i’d care to speculate, apparently… i suppose that could be a good thing or a bad thing…
| Outcast Genius 60 % Nerd, 56% Geek, 69% Dork |
| For The Record:
A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia. Outcast geniuses can be very lonely, due to their being outcast from most normal groups and too smart for the room among many other types of dorks and geeks, but they can also be the types to eventually rule the world, ala Bill Gates, the prototypical Outcast Genius. Congratulations! |
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My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
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| Link: The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test written by donathos on Ok Cupid. |
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this is the “disguise” i came up with for the swastika, but to me it still looks enough like a swastika that i wonder what other people see… especially when they see the car from the outside, as it is travelling down the street…
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i’ve decided to “disguise” the swastika on Ganesha the car. i think i can do a pretty good job of it by duplicating it in different colours, and rotating it. after the incident with
Thanks for supporting the swastika. It can be trying and even dangerous. I have been very close to people getting very violent in their denial of the perceived violence of the swastika.
I would not paint one on my car because, I fear that sooner or later some angry person will do society a favor by vandalising it. People see a swastika and it is like waving a red flag in front of a bull, rationality goes out the window.
I honor you for your vision and understanding around the sacredness of the symbol. Please do not martyr yourself needlessly. I need you in the world, quietly educating others about its vast sacred history.
— ManWoman
it is really depressing to realise that even someone with as much notariety as manwoman would not put a swastika on his car. every time i read about some neo-nazi horseshit in the newspaper or see them on TV i shudder to think about how many people still buy their crap and equate the swastika with them instead of what the swastika really means. the swastika has been around as a symbol of auspiciousness and good luck for thousands of years and the nazis have only been around for less than one hundred years, and yet the majority of people completely reject the swastika’s thousands of years of history and focus on the wrong stuff that has only been around for a comparitively short period of time… which strikes me as just about as ridiculous a way of doing things as any that i can think of…
but then again, it’s the same group of people, more or less, which “elected” george w. bush into office, so i guess i may be expecting too much from these folks… 8/
UPDATE: pictures are available.
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i knew there was a reason i was avoiding signing up for a myspace account… myspace is owned by faux news, and if you post your videos, text, artwork, music or what-have-you on your myspace account, the people at faux news can alter it, edit it, sell it, etc. WITHOUT giving you credit…
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April 30, 2006
by Cindy Sheehan
May 1st, 2006 will be the 3rd Anniversary of the end of “major combat” in Iraq. It was a glorious day when George Bush flew onto the deck of the Abraham Lincoln and was hailed by the rapturous throngs of toadie “news” persons such as Chris Matthews (“And that’s the president looking very much like a jet, you know, a high-flying jet star,” Hardball, May 1, 2003) and Bob Schieffer (“As far as I’m concerned, that was one of the great pictures of all time. And if you’re a political consultant, you can just see campaign commercial written all over the pictures of George Bush.” Meet the Press, May 4, 2003). What a fast and clean war! G. Gordon Liddy was enthralled with the president’s package (“all those women who say size doesn’t count — they’re all liars.” Hardball, May 7, 2003) and a new era free from terrorism was ushered in.
This is the faith based fable of what happened almost exactly three years ago. The reality based scenario goes something like this:
*Over 2400 American soldiers (including my son who was killed almost a year after Mission Accomplished Day) have come home in cardboard boxes in cargo areas of planes in the secrecy of the night.
*Thousands of our young people wounded, many grievously also bused into Walter Reed and other hospitals in the dark of the night.
*Tons of rubble upon rubble in Iraq with inconsistent electrical power still and not much clean water or chance of future power and clean water.
*Hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians are dead, being punished for the sins of a leader who was propped up, armed and supported by many US Regimes.
The Mission Accomplished Day (or, Operation Codpiece) public relations’ dream for the presidential pelvic zone has turned into a frighteningly real nightmare for so many people around the world who have had sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and oftentimes entire families wiped out and devastated by the strutting and smirking terrorist who was feeling mighty “chipper” last night at the Washington Correspondent’s annual dinner as the 2400 th soldier was being killed and as the 2400th Gold Star Mother was falling on the floor screaming for her child. There are hundreds of thousands of people on our planet who will have a hard time ever feeling chipper again because of George Bush, no matter how good he looks in a flight suit.
Now that BushCo has done such a fantastic job with the invasion and occupation of Iraq that never should have happened, but now that it has happened is extraordinarily evil in its scope and tactics, he is warning Iran that if it doesn’t shape up the US is going to come and impose freedom and democracy on that country. The rah-rah, “yes, sir” Congress who has an easy job of approving everything that George Bush does, thereby eliminating critical thinking, debate, or any semblance of rational discussion has voted for sanctions that will lead to an attack on Iran which will be devastating for our troops in Iraq and for that poor region that had the unfortunate luck to be built upon tremendous oil and natural gas reserves.
Only 21 Congress people voted “nay” on the Iran Freedom Support Act which is incredible considering what happened when they voted “yea” to give George Bush the green light for every sanction against Iraq and to invade it. I ran into one of the “yea” voters on the Iran Freedom Support Act, Rep. Major Owens, and I asked him why he voted that way. He said it was because he hated the “evil” regime of Iran. I asked him about our own evil, irresponsible regime! The radical President of Iran says very irresponsible and inflammatory things, but by all accounts is over a decade away from a nuclear weapon and is reigned in by the mullahs and the young population of Iran that is very westernized. We are in trouble with our one party system of government, which is the War Party.
Before we the people need to be subjected to another swaggering spectacle from George after he has bombed Iran back into the stone ages and has made we the people of the United States of America even more hated around the world, it is time to rein him in ourselves. Congress won’t do it and the media is falling into lockstep behind the murder again.
It is time to fire the warniks whose bloodlust cannot be slated and hire people who will finally use their wisdom, integrity, and non-violence to solve problems, and won’t create imaginary problems out of smoke and mirrors. We need a Congress that will hold George accountable not one that is complicit in the war crimes.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “We must live together as brothers, or perish together as fools.” God protect us from the fools that we elected to protect us!
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Friday, April 28, 2006
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Rush Limbaugh and prosecutors in the long-running painkiller fraud case against him have reached a deal calling for the only charge against the conservative commentator to be dropped if he continues treatment, his attorney said Friday.
Limbaugh was booked on a single charge that was filed Friday, said Teri Barbera, a spokeswoman for the Palm Beach County Jail. He left about an hour later, after Limbaugh was photographed and fingerprinted and he posted $3,000 bail, Barbera said.
The radio giant’s agreement to enter a diversionary program ends a three-year state investigation that began after Limbaugh publicly acknowledged being addicted to pain medication and entered a rehabilitation program.
Prosecutors accuse him of “doctor shopping,” or illegally deceiving multiple doctors to receive overlapping prescriptions. They learned that he received about 2,000 painkillers, prescribed by four doctors in six months, at a pharmacy near his Palm Beach mansion.
Limbaugh pleaded not guilty Friday to a charge of fraud to conceal information to obtain prescriptions. Though he steadfastly denies doctor shopping, the charge will be dismissed in 18 months if Limbaugh complies with court guidelines, his lawyer Roy Black said.
“Mr. Limbaugh and I have maintained from the start that there was no doctor shopping, and we continue to hold this position,” Black said in an e-mailed statement.
Limbaugh spokesman Tony Knight said the commentator signed the agreement Thursday, and that it called for him to enter the not guilty plea. “It’s not in the system moving toward trial. It was all a formality. It’s a concluded deal,” Knight said.
Mike Edmondson, a spokesman for the state attorney’s office, said prosecutors had not yet received the signed agreement.
“I am not disputing the facts, the conditions that Black represented, but until his client signed the agreement, we don’t have a full agreement,” Edmondson said. “I am sure it’s just a timeline issue.”
He refused to comment further.
As a primary condition of the dismissal, Limbaugh must continue to seek treatment from the doctor he has seen for the past 2 1/2 years, Black said. Among other provisions, he also has agreed to pay the state $30,000 to defray its investigative costs, Black said.
The warrant alleges that sometime between February and August 2003, Limbaugh withheld information from a medical practitioner from whom he sought to obtain a controlled substance or a prescription for a controlled substance.
Prosecutors began investigating Limbaugh in 2003 after the National Enquirer reported his housekeeper’s allegations that he had abused OxyContin and other painkillers. He soon took a five-week leave from his radio show to enter a rehabilitation program and acknowledged he had become addicted to pain medication. He blamed it on severe back pain.
Before his own problems became public, Limbaugh had decried drug use and abuse and mocked President Clinton for saying he had not inhaled when he tried marijuana. He often made the case that drug crimes deserve punishment.
“Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. … And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up,” Limbaugh said on his short-lived television show on Oct. 5, 1995.
Prosecutors seized Limbaugh’s medical records after learning about the painkillers he had received at the Palm Beach pharmacy. The investigation was held up as the prosecutors and Black battled in court over whether the records were properly seized.
Limbaugh reported five years ago that he had lost most of his hearing because of an autoimmune inner-ear disease. He had surgery to have an electronic device placed in his skull to restore his hearing. But research shows that abusing opiate-based painkillers also can cause profound hearing loss.
Rush’s mugshot and other interesting information…
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By JULIANA BARBASSA
Apr 28, 2006
FRESNO, Calif. – A jury awarded $500,000 Friday to a woman who was spanked in front of her colleagues in what her employer called a camaraderie-building exercise.
The jury of six men and six women found that Janet Orlando, 53, was subjected to sexual harassment and sexual battery when she was paddled on the rear end two years ago at Alarm One Inc., a home security company in Fresno. The jury said Orlando did not suffer from sexual assault, as she had alleged.
Alarm One was ordered to pay her damages for lost wages, medical costs and pain and suffering. She had asked for at least $1.2 million.
The next phase of the trial — to determine whether she should receive punitive damages — was scheduled to begin Friday afternoon.
Orlando’s attorney, Nicholas “Butch” Wagner, said of the verdict: “It’s in the ballpark.”
K. Pancho Baker, an attorney for Alarm One, said it was excessive. “I think the jury was so upset at Alarm One that they went overboard,” Baker said. “Not to say that what Alarm One did was right, but this allows her to manipulate the system.”
Orlando quit in 2004, less than a year after she was hired, saying she was humiliated during the company’s camaraderie-building exercises.
Sales teams were encouraged to compete, and the losers were made fun of, forced to eat baby food, required to wear diapers and spanked with a rival company’s yard signs, according to court documents.
Lawyers for the company said Orlando and others took part in the exercises willingly. The company has since abandoned the practice.
During the trial, company attorneys revealed that Orlando had sued a previous employer, also claiming that she had been sexually harassed.
Birth Erotica – i know, some of you are going to say either “eeewww! that’s gross” or “giving birth is very definitely NOT sexy” but it has a strong scientific basis: the orgasm is an analgesic that is 10 times more powerful than any drug, and the orgasm is also exactly equal to a very powerful uterine contraction. it aids the birthing process in two very profound physical ways, plus getting it on also guarantees that the baby will be born into an even more intimate, loving environment than it would be already, so i say, without being facetious (although it is a nice pun) what the fuck?
It’s Just A Plant – even if you’re not a parent, YOU MUST BUY THIS BOOK!
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i suppose it was too good to be true…
i went over to
i hate hatred just as much as he does, if not more, but when hatred is directed at me, particularly when i don’t deserve it, then i just want to get out of there. i packed up my keyboards and left as quickly as possible. of course, i had the small car, so i couldn’t get both keyboards, but i’ll go back on sunday (i’m going to bellingham tomorrow to fix a saxophone for warren) with the big car to get it.
people shouldn’t be angry with the swastika because of the nazis, they should be angry at the nazis because of the swastika.
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April 5, 2006
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A local school employee said a rough run-in with a couple of Homeland Security officers has left him with a strong sense of insecurity. Leander Pickett says he was handcuffed, roughed up and humiliated by two Homeland Security officers who refused to move their car from the path of waiting school buses.
Leander Pickett, a teacher’s assistant at Englewood Elementary, said he was manhandled and handcuffed by two plain clothed Homeland Security officers in front of the school Tuesday for no reason at all.
“I would like to treat people the way I would want to be treated, and yesterday I wasn’t treated that way,” Pickett said.
Pickett has been working at Englewood for two years, and his principal and colleagues told Channel 4 they have never met a harder worker or nicer guy.
“He’s well loved by everyone because he’s willing to do anything to help children,” said the Englewood Elementary Principal Gail Brinson.
However, Tuesday afternoon Pickett’s niceness turned to anger, disappointment, and betrayal when, as Pickett was directing bus traffic, he said he was handcuffed and roughed up and humiliated by the very people that were supposed to protect him.
“I walked up to him and said, ‘Sir, you need to move.’ That’s when he said ‘I’m a police officer. I’m with Homeland Security … I’ll move it when I want to.’ That’s when he started grabbing me on my arm,” Pickett said.
However, Homeland Security tells a different story.
The department said the only reason the officers were at the school was because they pulled over to look at a map.
The department also said it’s looking into what happened, and that Pickett’s version is wrong. It claims he was antagonizing the officers.
Several people were outside of the school, watching the incident take place, and those witnesses agree with Pickett’s story.
“Mr. Pickett asked the guy blocking the bus loading zone to move, and the guy told him he would move his car when he got ready to move it,” said Englewood coach Alton Jackson.
“At that point I intervened and I went up to the gentleman and said, ‘Mr. Pickett is an employee here,’ and they said that didn’t matter,” said Englewood media specialist, Terri Dreisonstok.
“‘We’re with Homeland Security,’ and on and on they went, and pretty soon, before you know it, he’s handcuffed and slammed against a car,” Brinson said. “All the children are watching, they’re all upset.”
After about 30 minutes, the men released Pickett.
“The part that really upsets me is all these students were watching, and that and it isn’t good,” Jackson said.
Pickett said he plans to sue.
“You now you hear these stories everyday and say, ‘This will never happen to me,’ but yesterday it happened to me,” Pickett said.
“If this is Homeland Security, I think we ought to be a little afraid,” Brinson said.
The central office of Homeland Security contacted Channel 4 about the incident and stated that it considers all allegations seriously and the matter has been referred to a neutral investigative entity.
By David Montgomery
April 28, 2006
Oh say can you see — a la luz de la aurora?
The national anthem that once endured the radical transformation administered by Jimi Hendrix’s fuzzed and frantic Stratocaster now faces an artistic dare at least as extreme: translation into Spanish.
The new take is scheduled to hit the airwaves today. It’s called “Nuestro Himno” — “Our Anthem” — and it was recorded over the past week by Latin pop stars including Ivy Queen, Gloria Trevi, Carlos Ponce, Tito “El Bambino,” Olga Tañon and the group Aventura. Joining and singing in Spanish is Haitian American artist Wyclef Jean.
The different voices contribute lines the way 1985’s “We Are the World” was put together by an ensemble of stars. The national anthem’s familiar melody and structure are preserved, while the rhythms and instrumentation come straight out of Latin pop.
Can “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the republic for which it stands, survive? Outrage over what’s being called “The Illegal Alien Anthem” is already building in the blogosphere and among conservative commentators.
Timed to debut the week Congress returned to debate immigration reform, with the country riven by the issue, “Nuestro Himno” is intended to be an anthem of solidarity for the movement that has drawn hundreds of thousands of people to march peacefully for immigrant rights in Washington and cities across the country, says Adam Kidron, president of Urban Box Office, the New York-based entertainment company that launched the project.
“It’s the one thing everybody has in common, the aspiration to have a relationship with the United States . . . and also to express gratitude and patriotism to the United States for providing the opportunity,” says Kidron.
The song was being prepared for e-mailing as MP3 packages to scores of Latino radio stations and other media last night, and Kidron was calling for stations to play the song simultaneously at 7 Eastern Time this evening.
Rejecting assimilation?
However, the same advance buzz that drew singers to scramble for inclusion in the recording sessions this week in New York, Miami, Texas, Mexico, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic has also spurred critics who say rendering the song in Spanish is a rejection of assimilation into the United States.
Even some movement supporters are puzzled by the use of Spanish.
“Even our Spanish media are saying, ‘Why are we doing this, what are you trying to do?’ ” said Pedro Biaggi, the morning host with El Zol (99.1 FM), the most popular Hispanic radio station in the Washington area. “It’s not for us to be going around singing the national anthem in Spanish. . . . We don’t want to impose, we don’t own the place. . . . We want to be accepted.”
Still, Biaggi says he will play “Nuestro Himno” this morning if the song reaches the station in time. But he will talk about the language issue on the air and solicit listeners’ views. He says he accepts the producers’ explanation that the purpose is to spread the values of the anthem to a wider audience. He adds he will also play a version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” in English — as he aired the Whitney Houston version earlier this week, when the controversy was beginning to brew.
In the Spanish version, the translation of the first stanza is relatively faithful to the spirit of the original, though Kidron says the producers wanted to avoid references to bombs and rockets. Instead, there is “fierce combat.” The translation of the more obscure second stanza is almost a rewrite, with phrases such as “we are equal, we are brothers.”
An alternate version to be released next month includes a rap in English that never occurred to Francis Scott Key:
Let’s not start a war
With all these hard workers
They can’t help where they were born
“Nuestro Himno” is as fraught with controversial cultural messages as the psychedelic “Banner” Hendrix delivered at the height of the Vietnam War.
Pressed on what he was trying to say with his Woodstock performance in 1969, Hendrix replied (according to biographer Charles Cross), “We’re all Americans. . . . It was like ‘Go America!’ . . . We play it the way the air is in America today.”
Now the national anthem is being remade again according to the way the air is in America, and the people behind “Nuestro Himno” say the message once more is: We’re all Americans. It will be the lead track on an album about the immigrant experience called “Somos Americanos,” due for release May 16. One dollar from each sale will go to immigrant rights groups, including the National Capital Immigration Coalition, which organized the march on the Mall on April 10.
But critics including columnist Michelle Malkin, who coined it “The Illegal Alien Anthem” nickname say the rendition crosses a line that Hendrix never stepped over with his instrumental version. Transforming the musical idiom of “The Star-Spangled Banner” is one thing, argue the skeptics, but translating the words sends the opposite message: We are not Americans.
“I’m really appalled. . . . We are not a bilingual nation,” said George Taplin, director of the Virginia Chapter of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, part of a national countermovement that emphasizes border control and tougher enforcement, and objects to public funding for day-laborer sites. “When people are talking about becoming a part of this country, they should assimilate to the norm that’s already here,” Taplin said. “What we’re talking about here is a sovereign nation with our ideals and our national identity, and that [anthem] is one of the icons of our nation’s identity. I believe it should be in English as it was penned.”
Yet, even in English, 61 percent of adults don’t know all the words, a recent Harris poll found.
Appealing to such symbols of national identity to plug into their profound potency is how new movements compete for space within that identity. During the rally on the Mall, the immigrants and their supporters also waved thousands of American flags and recited the Pledge of Allegiance. But they didn’t translate the pledge into Spanish. They said it in English.
Juan Carlos Ruiz, the general coordinator of the National Capital Immigration Coalition, said there’s not a contradiction. The pledge was printed phonetically for Spanish speakers, and many reciting the sounds may not have understood the meaning. Putting the anthem in Spanish is a way to relay the meaning to people who haven’t learned English yet, Ruiz said.
“It’s part of the process to learn English,” not a rejection of English, he said.
‘A communal shout’
While critics sketch a nightmare scenario of a Canada-like land with an anthem sung in two languages, immigrant rights advocates say they agree learning English is essential. Studies of immigrant families suggest the process is inevitable: Eighty-two percent to 90 percent of the children of immigrants prefer English.
“The first step to understanding something is to understand it in the language you understand, and then you can understand it in another language,” said Leo Chavez, director of Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California at Irvine. “What this song represents at this moment is a communal shout, that the dream of America, which is represented by the song, is their dream, too.”
Since its origins as the melody to an English drinking song called “To Anacreon in Heaven,” circa 1780, “The Star-Spangled Banner” has had a long, strange trip. Key wrote the poem after watching the bombardment of Fort McHenry in 1814. It became the national anthem in 1931.
At least 389 versions have been recorded, according to Allmusic.com, a quick reference used by musicologists to get a sense of what’s on the market. Now that Hendrix’s “Banner” has mellowed into classic rock, it’s hard to imagine that once some considered it disrespectful. The other recordings embrace a vast musical universe: from Duke Ellington to Dolly Parton to Tiny Tim. But musicologists cannot name another foreign-language version.
“America is a pluralistic society, but the anthem is a way that we can express our unity. If that’s done in a different language, that doesn’t seem to me personally to be a bad thing,” said Michael Blakeslee, deputy executive director of the National Association for Music Education, which is leading a National Anthem Project to highlight the song and the school bands that play it in every style, from mariachi to steel drum.
‘A noble intent’
“I assume the intent is one of making a statement about ‘we are a part of this nation,’ and those are wonderful sentiments and a noble intent,” said Dan Sheehy, director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
Benigno “Benny” Layton wonders. He’s the leader of Los Hermanos Layton, a band of conjunto- and Tejano-style musicians in Elsa, Tex., 22 miles from Mexico. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he recorded a traditional conjunto version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was instrumental.
“I’m a second-generation American,” Layton said. “I love my country, and I love my [Mexican musical] heritage, and I try to keep it alive. But some things are sacred that you don’t do. And translating the national anthem is one of them.”
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House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Ill., center, gets out of a Hydrogen Alternative Fueled automobile, left, as he prepares to board his SUV, which uses gasoline, after holding a news conference at a local gas station in Washington, Thursday, April 27, 2006 to discuss the recent rise in gas prices. Hastert and other members of Congress drove off in the Hydrogen-Fueled cars only to switch to their official cars to drive the few blocks back to the U.S. Capitol.
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i have to say this:
on september 11, 2001, the united states was the victim of a crime. if we are to follow “the rules,” the victim of a crime cannot be involved in the investigation or prosecution of whoever committed that crime, apart from giving evidence. any other way of doing it makes the probability of the victim mentality creeping in and affecting the outcome very high, and, as we all know, justice is blind.
the united states has no right to declare war on, or to extract legal justice from afghanistan, iraq, iran, or any other place that may have been involved in the commission of the crime on september 11, 2001, regardless of what you might think. to do so would be just as much an act of terrorism as the crime itself.
i don’t know what the solution to the problem is, but the current situation is so far beyond fucked that i don’t even have an appropriate way to describe it.
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 Find your own pose! |
| Ernie You scored 33% Organization, 73% abstract, and 54% extroverted! |
| This test measured 3 variables.
First, this test measured how organized you are. Some muppets like Cookie Monster make big messes, while others like Bert are quite anal about things being clean. Second, this test measured if you prefer a concrete or an abstract viewpoint. For the purposes of this test, concrete people are considered to gravitate more to mathematical and logical approaches, whereas abstract people are more the dreamers and artistic type. Third, this test measured if you are more of an introvert or an extrovert. By definition, an introvert concentrates more on herself and an extrovert focuses more on others. In this test an introvert was somebody that either tends to spend more time alone or thinks more about herself. You are more sloppy, more abstract, and bothintroverted and extroverted. Here is why are you Ernie. You are both sloppy. You might not always know where everything you need is. Perhaps you don’t even care. Ernie sure doesn’t. Hey, when you got a best friend that is anal about cleaning you can afford to not worry about it. Sure Ernie likes taking baths, but that’s just to spend time with his ducky. You both can be abstract thinkers. Ernie is a dreamer by nature, always making up songs while he plays. He comes up with fanciful adventures. You definitely are not afraid to take chances in life. You only live once. You may notice others around you playing it safe, but you are more concerned with not compromising your desires, and getting everything you can out of life. This is a very romantic approach to life, but hopefully you are also grounded enough to get by. You are both somewhat introverted. Ernie enjoys spending time with others, but he is also quite content to be in his own fantasy world with his duckies. Unlike Bert, he has other friends to spend time with. Like Ernie, you probably like to have some time to yourself, but you do appreciate spending time with your friends, and you aren’t scared of social situations. The other possible characters are |
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My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
|
| Your SESAME STREET Persona Test written by greencowsgomoo on Ok Cupid |
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the bush administration has got to be stopped. at this point, we’ve moved far beyond funny, ridiculous, ironic, and even tragic… the bush administration has got to be stopped!
they’re going to release about a third of the detainees in gitmo, because they pose no threat to the united states.
these are the people bush & co. said were “the worst of the worst” terrorists… even though only 10 have ever been charged with a crime.
The Guantanamo prison detainees pose no threat, an official says. Most of those still in custody have no charges pending against them.
By Carol J. Williams
April 25, 2006
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL STATION, Cuba — The Pentagon plans to release nearly a third of those held at the prison for terrorism suspects here because they pose no threat to U.S. security, an official of the war crimes tribunal said Monday.
Charges are pending against about two dozen of the remaining prisoners, the chief prosecutor said. But he left unclear why the rest face neither imminent freedom nor a day in court after as many as four years in custody.
Only 10 of the roughly 490 alleged “enemy combatants” currently detained at the facility have been charged; none has been charged with a capital offense.
That leaves the majority of the U.S. government’s prisoners from the war on terrorism in limbo and its war crimes tribunal exposed to allegations by international human rights advocates that it is illegitimate and abusive.
The decision to release 141 detainees — the largest group to be reclassified and moved off the island — follows a yearlong review of their cases in which interrogators also determined that they could provide no further intelligence. It was unclear when or where the detainees would be released.
About 250 detainees have been released since the prison camps were established in 2002.
Longtime critics of the Guantanamo facility said the announcement of the planned release marked a milestone in the four years the base had held suspected terrorists.
The prison has been dogged by allegations of torture and has brought choruses of international condemnation, including calls from a United Nations panel and the European Parliament to shut it down.
The detainees determined by last year’s Administrative Review Boards to pose no threat to U.S. national security are “no longer enemy combatants,” explained Lt. Cmdr. Chito Peppler of the Pentagon office in charge of reviewing detainee status.
He contended that the men’s detention had been justified. Battlefield commanders in Afghanistan and Pakistan had determined when the men were arrested that they were a threat to U.S. forces in the region, he said.
“Every detainee who came to the Combatant Status Review Tribunals went though multiple reviews” before their arrival at Guantanamo, Peppler said.
Although Peppler said the majority would be leaving the island “in the near future,” he noted that some detainees who had been cleared might remain until an appropriate release site could be found. The government decided, for example, that minority Muslim Uighurs from China should not be handed over to their governments because they could face persecution, torture or execution.
Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director of Human Rights Watch, said the full significance of freeing the detainees could not be assessed until their fates were clear. Because of pressure from their governments, most European nationals have been released or transferred.
Many of the remaining detainees are from Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, Malinowski said.
Afghanistan has a process for granting amnesty to low-level Taliban members and prosecuting senior leaders of the old regime, making it an appropriate place to release the prisoners, he said.
“If they have committed crimes, we support their prosecution,” Malinowski said. “If their crime was that they were Taliban, then they should be sent back to Afghanistan.” Officials in Guantanamo would not release any information about the nationalities of the men cleared for release.
Pentagon officials have said previously that most of the men being held here were likely to be freed.
The former chief of interrogations, Steve Rodriguez, said in January 2005 that the majority held no further intelligence value.
Officials in Washington indicated last week that a group of about 120 Saudi prisoners could be released to their government.
A defense lawyer for one Saudi suspect said the government in Riyadh was doing little to expedite repatriation of its nationals.
“I believe the Saudi government could do much more like the British government has done” to take its citizens home, said Lt. Col. Bryan Boyles, whose client, Jabran Said bin Al-Qahtani, was to make his first appearance before the tribunal today.
The Army defense lawyer said Riyadh was being “unhelpful” by refusing to get involved.
He noted that the British government’s activism had resulted in the transfer and release of all British suspects who had passed through the prison network created by President Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Malinowksi of Human Rights Watch said transferring detainees into Saudi custody was troublesome.
“Saudi Arabia is not a struggling democracy,” he said. “Anyone sent to a Saudi prison … is in a worse place than Guantanamo.”
Announcement of the pending releases coincided with a considerable drop in the number of detainees likely to be charged, suggesting that the U.S. government either lacks the evidence to convict more or — as defense lawyers and human rights monitors contend — feels little pressure to accord the terror suspects a speedy trial or due process.
Air Force Col. Morris Davis, the chief prosecutor, said earlier this month that the government was actively pursuing charges against about 70 additional prisoners.
But in a meeting with journalists on Monday, he said charges would be forthcoming on “about two dozen” other jailed suspects, including some who would face the death penalty.
Davis was responding to media questions as to why so few of the detainees — all described by defense attorneys as “small fry” — have been formally charged as the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks approaches.
“We’re working on about two dozen additional cases,” Davis said.
“I anticipate some of these will certainly present the possibility of death penalty cases.”
The man steering the government’s cases against war-crimes suspects insisted that some big fish had been ensnared in the U.S. counter-terrorism net.
“I think it’s pretty significant when you’re specifically training to build bombs to kill coalition forces,” he said of three men who will appear before the tribunal this week on charges of having plotted to build remote-controlled explosive devices at an alleged Al Qaeda safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan.
Davis conceded, though, that “they’re certainly not Osama bin Laden, if you look at that as the top of the pyramid.”
Boyles, Al-Qahtani’s lawyer, expressed bafflement at the government’s proceedings.
“I can’t for the life of me figure out how they picked the people they’ve picked,” he said. “If these are the worst of the worst, as the secretary of Defense alleges, then someone other than Osama bin Laden’s chauffeur would be here.”
He was referring to Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemen native whose challenge of the Guantanamo tribunal’s legality is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court and is expected to be decided in late June.
The high court could take one of three paths, Davis noted: uphold the whole process, order modifications or deem the entire Guantanamo tribunal illegitimate.
but don’t let the fact that they’re releasing some of them lull you into thinking that they don’t torture prisoners at gitmo…
G.I. Attacked During Training
Nov. 3, 2004
(CBS) Pictures from Abu Ghraib prison tell a story that has shocked the world.
There are no pictures of what happened in the prison camp at Guantanamo last year. But Correspondent Bob Simon has a shocking story — and it’s not about what Americans did to foreign detainees. It’s about what Americans did to a fellow American soldier, Sean Baker. Sean Baker has seizures an average of four times a week. 60 Minutes Wednesday went to see him a few weeks ago in a New York hospital.
Baker, a National Guardsman, was working last year as a military policeman in the Guantanamo Bay prison when other MPs injured him during a training drill. It was a drill during which Baker was only obeying orders.
“I was assaulted by these individuals,” says Baker. “Pure and simple.”
It’s all the more bizarre because Baker was considered a model soldier and he had served as an MP in Saudi Arabia during the First Gulf War.
Then, minutes after the attack on the Pentagon on Sept. 11, Baker made a phone call from the auto repair shop in Lexington, Ky., where he was working. “I had to get back in the military right then,” recalls Baker. “I had to go back then. I had to do something.”
And he did. At 35, married and with a child, Baker volunteered to join the 438th Military Police Company in Murray, Ky., because it was about to be deployed overseas.
Ron England was Baker’s first sergeant. “He seemed to like being a soldier,” says England. “He loved being a soldier. He was always more than willing to give his part and somebody else’s, or to pitch in for somebody else.”
In November 2002, Baker’s unit was sent to Guantanamo Bay, home to what the Pentagon called the most vicious terrorists in the world. Spc. Baker’s job was to escort prisoners and walk the causeways of the prison block.
He was the new guy on the block, and he says he got special treatment from the detainees: “They wanna try the new guy. See how much they can push you. You know? How much water they can throw on you. How much urine they can throw on you. How much feces they can dump on you.”
His unit was on duty at 2 a.m. on Jan. 24, 2003, when his squad leader got a message. “‘Someone needs to go for training,'” says Baker. “And I looked around the room. I couldn’t believe that everyone had not stood up, and said, ‘I’ll go.’ But I said, ‘Right here, Sarg.'”
Baker was always the first to volunteer. This time, it was to go to the block where the most dangerous detainees were kept in isolated cells. There, Baker was met by Second Lt. Shaw Locke of the 303rd Military Police Company from Michigan. Locke, who was in charge of an IRF (Immediate Reaction Force) team, briefed Baker about the training drill he was planning.
“‘We’re going to put you in a cell and extract you, have their IRF team come in and extract you. And what I’d like you to do is go ahead and strip your uniform off and put on this orange suit,'” says Baker, who was ordered to wear an orange jumpsuit, just like the ones worn by the detainees at Guantanamo.
“I’d never questioned an order before. But, at first I said, my only remark was, ‘Sir?’ Just in the form of a question. And he said, ‘You’ll be fine,’” recalls Baker. “I said, ‘Well, you know what’s gonna happen when they come in there on me?’ And he said, ‘Trust me, Spc. Baker. You will be fine.’”
Drills to practice extracting uncooperative prisoners took place every day, with a U.S. soldier playing the role of a detainee, but not in an orange jumpsuit, and not at full force.
“You always train at 70 percent. Never 100 percent,” says Michael Riley, who was Baker’s platoon sergeant. “Seventy percent means you want to practice and be proficient, but not get anybody hurt.”
Baker says his orders that night were to get under a bunk on a steel floor in a dark cell, and wait: “I said, ‘Sir, you’re going to tell that IRF team that I’m a U.S. soldier?’ He said, ‘Yes, you’ll be fine, Spc. Baker. Trust me.'”
But in fact, Locke later acknowledged in a sworn statement that he did not indicate “whether the scenario was a drill or not a drill to the IRF team.” Locke did, however, tell the team the detainee had not responded to pepper spray.
“They wanted to make training a little more realistic,” says Baker. “Put this orange suit on.”
Locke gave Baker a code word – red – to shout out in case of trouble. From under the bunk, Baker heard the extraction team coming down the causeway. In sworn statements, however, four members of the team said they thought they were going after a real detainee.
“My face was down. And of course, they’re pushing it down against the steel floor, you know, my right temple, pushing it down against the floor,” recalls Baker. “And someone’s holding me by the throat, using a pressure point on me and holding my throat. And I used the word, ‘red.’ At that point I, you know, I became afraid.”
Apparently, no one heard the code word ‘red’ because Baker says he continued to be manhandled, especially by an MP named Scott Sinclair who was holding onto his head.
“And when I said the word ‘Red,’ he forced my head down against the steel floor and was sort of just grinding it into the floor. The individual then, when I picked up my head and said, ‘Red,’ slammed my head down against the floor,” says Baker. “I was so afraid, I groaned out, ‘I’m a U.S. soldier.’ And when I said that, he slammed my head again, one more time against the floor. And I groaned out one more time, I said, ‘I’m a U.S. soldier.’ And I heard them say, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa,’ you know, like he wanted to, he was telling the other guy to stop.”
Bloodied and disoriented, Baker somehow made it back to his unit, and his first thought was to get hold of the videotape. “I said, ‘Go get the tape,'” recalls Baker. “‘They’ve got a tape. Go get the tape.’ My squad leader went to get the tape.”
Every extraction drill at Guantanamo was routinely videotaped, and the tape of this drill would show what happened. But Baker says his squad leader came back and said, “There is no tape.”
“That was the only time that I heard that a tape had gone missing,” says Riley, Baker’s platoon sergeant.
“Of all the tapes, this was probably the most important one that we should have kept,” adds England.
Baker started having a seizure that morning and was whisked to the Naval Hospital at Guantanamo. “[He looked like] he’d had the crap beat out of him. He had a concussion. I mean, it was textbook,” says Riley. “[His face} was blank. You know, a dead stare, like he was seeing you, but really looking through you.”
Baker was airlifted to the Portsmouth Naval Medical Center in Virginia, where doctors determined he had suffered an injury to the right side of his brain. He was released after four days, and Baker says he requested to go back to Cuba.
“I wanted to go back and perform my duties,” says Baker. “I wanted to be back with my unit.”
Baker got back to Guantanamo, and hoped no one would notice he was having seizures, but they got to the point where he says he couldn’t hide them: “I was shaking and convulsing around people.”
Some days, he says, he was having 10 to 12 seizures per day.
What does he think would have happened if he had been a real detainee? “I think they would have busted him up,” says Baker. “I’ve seen detainees come outta there with blood on ’em. …If there wasn’t someone to say, ‘I’m a U.S. soldier,’ if you were speaking Arabic or Pashto or Urdu or some other language in the camp, we may never know what would have happened to that individual.”
Baker was finally taken off Guantanamo and sent to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he was put in a psychiatric ward. His diagnosis: traumatic brain injury. After 47 days, he was ordered to report to a medical hold unit at Fort Dix, N.J. But the seizures continued.
“He was shaking all over his whole body. It just looked like he was — you ever seen ‘The Exorcist?’ That’s what it looked like. It was pretty freaky,” says Spc. Sean Bateman, who saw Baker. “He had plenty [of seizures]. I can’t count them all is pretty much what I’m saying. He had some so often, it was pretty much expected.”
But back at Guantanamo, a promised investigation into what happened to Baker wasn’t getting anywhere.
“There was what was called a commander’s inquiry. It doesn’t really tell me anything,” says England. “And after that it more or less seemed like, least said the best said. That was my opinion of it.”
Riley says he and England approached Capt. Judith Brown, the commander of the Kentucky National Guard at Guantanamo, and asked her what was going on with that investigation. What did the captain say? “I’ll paraphrase. It’s something like, it’s being looked into, but we really don’t wanna get anybody in trouble,” says Riley.
Nobody got into trouble because the Army didn’t conduct a serious investigation into what happened to Spc. Baker — not for 17 months. Only then, and only after word of Baker’s beating got leaked to the media, did the Pentagon launch a criminal investigation into how he got so badly hurt that January morning in Guantanamo.
The criminal investigation is still going on. 60 Minutes Wednesday wanted to talk to someone at the Pentagon about the Baker case, but was told no one would talk about it.
Despite repeated calls, Capt. Judith Brown refused to speak to 60 Minutes Wednesday. Crews tried to interview Shaw Locke, the man in charge that night, and Scott Sinclair, the man Baker accused of bashing his head, but they wouldn’t meet with 60 Minutes Wednesday either. Sinclair did write in a sworn statement after the incident that Baker was resisting and that Sinclair merely placed his head back on the floor of the cell.
Meanwhile, Baker was stuck in bureaucratic limbo at Fort Dix for 10 months, long after Locke, Sinclair and the 303rd returned home to Michigan to a celebration in September 2003.
Baker was left to fight the Pentagon for a disability check, and he says it took four months to get his first check. Meantime, he says drew unemployment insurance, about half of what he was accustomed to making, to get by.
“These are our American veterans,” says England. “Sean Baker was one that wasn’t taken care of. In my own personal opinion, Sean Baker wasn’t taken care of.”
When Baker got home to Kentucky, he didn’t complain. But he needed help just to get his disability check. Attorney Bruce Simpson agreed to help Baker, pro bono. But Baker is unable to sue because of a 1950 Supreme Court ruling that bars members of the military from suing the government.
“He’ll not get a dime from what happened to him through the court system because the doors to the federal courthouse as to Sean Baker are closed,” says Simpson, who adds that no one has paid a price for what happened to Baker that night. “He’s been destined to a life of walking in a minefield of unexploded seizures. He doesn’t know when they’re gonna come. And he doesn’t know when they are gonna bring him to his knees.”
“It’s as if they just went on living their lives, as if they’ve done nothing. Nothing wrong,” adds Baker, who now takes nine medications a day, can’t get a job, has put on 50 pounds and has constant nightmares.
At the end of September, Baker went to Columbia University Medical Center in New York to consult with Dr. Carl Bazil, a seizure specialist, and one of the top neurologists in the country.
While undergoing testing, Baker suffered a seizure in front of Bazil, who believes Baker has intractable epilepsy – which means his seizures are difficult to control.
Is it an injury Baker could have received as a result of having his head repeatedly knocked against a steel floor? “Oh, absolutely. That is the kind of injury that would be severe enough to result in epilepsy,” says Bazil, who believes that with better treatment, Baker’s condition could improve. “If he doesn’t get better treatment, that will probably continue indefinitely.”
“So, if you got your health back, I take it, after your experience with the Army, you’d never serve again,” Simon asks Baker.
“I’d be in,” says Baker. “Till the day I die.”
and if that wasn’t enough, the neocons have stooped to making sexual slurs and death threats to a 15-year-old peace activist who has had the temerity to make an animation that implies that
the animation can be seen here.
Animation Producer Gets Ugly Slurs
By Matthew Rothschild
April 24, 2006
Ava Lowery is a fifteen-year-old who lives in Alabama. She calls herself a peace activist, and for the past year, she’s been producing her own short animations on her website, peacetakescourage.com. All in all, she’s made about seventy of them, she says, and most of them oppose Bush and his Iraq War.
“I was just so mad about it,” she explains. “And the media are not showing the real images of the war, so I did a lot research and started my own website.”
She submitted one of her latest creations, “WWJD,” to the monthly “contagious” contest that huffingtonpost.com is running. (It’s an open contest that ranks the number of viewers for each submission.)
“WWJD” (“What Would Jesus Do”) is a powerful animation that features a soundtrack of a child singing “Jesus loves me, this I know” while one picture after another of a wounded, bloody, or screaming Iraqi child fills the screen.
“The object of the animation,” says Lowery, is “to get the following point across: Jesus loves Iraqis, too.”
Lowery ends the video with quotations from Beatitudes, including, “Blessed are they who mourn” and “Blessed are the meek” and “Blessed are the merciful” and “Blessed are the peacemakers.”
She says she’s received a lot of positive feedback in short messages back to her site. And she understands that the fact that “people are on the web, and they just let loose.” But she was unprepared for the viciousness of the negative feedback—especially the ugly sexual slurs similar to those that Cindy Sheehan has faced. (If you can’t stand foul language, stop reading now.)
“It’s people like you who need to fucking die and get raped while your corpse rots in the sun,” said one e-mail Lowery shared with me. “Fuck you, I would jack off on your parents if I could. If you don’t like the team, get out of the park. That means take ur small dick and get the fuck off of my homeland you faggot chocolate gulper.”
“You are a TRAITOR to your country and should be executed for treason,” another one said. “All you do is bitch about the US. If you hate it so much, why don’t you GET THE FUCK OUT.”
“Why don’t you go masterbate [sic] to a pic of Sheehan and fuck off,” said a third.
“Are you a muslem [sic] terrorist?” asked another.
She says there was a threat against her that was circulating “on the conservative underground.” And she says she received one e-mail from someone who said, “Contact me ASAP. It concerns a danger to your life.”
When her mom called the number, the person who answered denied any knowledge of the threat, Lowery says.
She adds: “I was really weirded out by it.”
and finally, to top it all off,
Jagger wins suite war against Dubya
Asian News International
London, April 24, 2006
It was the battle of the hotel room for George W Bush and Rolling Stone frontman Mick Jagger, when the singer refused to give up his suite to the US President.
Jagger hired the luxury Royal Suite at the five-star Imperial Hotel in Vienna, Austria, which is rated to be among the top 100 hotel rooms in the world, where the Stones are due to perform in June.
In doing so, he beat Bush’s aides to the punch, when they tried to book it to tie in with a summit meeting.
A source said that Jagger, an out-spoken Bush critic, had refused to budge from the 3,600 a night suite when the US President’s aides came calling.
“White House officials had wanted to reserve the suite and all the other rooms on the first floor. But Mick and the Stones had already booked every one of them. Bush’s people seemed to be under the impression that they would just hand over the suites but there was no way Mick was going to do that,” The Sun quoted the source, as saying.
And, it was Bush throwing in the towel first, for the hotel confirmed that he would no longer be staying there.
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from
"Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose — and you allow him to make war at pleasure. . . . If, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, ‘I see no probability of the British invading us’; but he will say to you, ‘Be silent; I see it, if you don’t.’"
— Rep. Abraham Lincoln, explaining his opposition to the Mexican War
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i just got a very strange call which i assume to be a sales call…
the phone rang and i answered it and it was a recording. i’ve noticed that it’s a recording under one of two different circumstances: either it’s somebody really important to talk to, like the utility company, the phone company or the cable company, who wants to tell us that, if we don’t pay our bill immediately, some essential service is going to be disconnected, or it’s a sales call.
i didn’t catch what the guy was saying at first, but as i was realising that it was a recording, i did hear that it was concerning our “private line retail service”, which sounded important enough that i held on rather than hanging up immediately… but after keeping me waiting for five minutes, the recording apologised for taking my time, said they would call back later, and hung up.
W. T. F.???
oh, this as well…
HJ0125 LRB094 20306 RLC 58347 r 1 HOUSE JOINT RESOLUTION 2 WHEREAS, Section 603 of Jefferson's Manual of the Rules of 3 the United States House of Representatives allows federal 4 impeachment proceedings to be initiated by joint resolution of 5 a state legislature; and 6 WHEREAS, President Bush has publicly admitted to ordering 7 the National Security Agency to violate provisions of the 1978 8 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a felony, specifically 9 authorizing the Agency to spy on American citizens without 10 warrant; and 11 WHEREAS, Evidence suggests that President Bush authorized 12 violation of the Torture Convention of the Geneva Conventions, 13 a treaty regarded a supreme law by the United States 14 Constitution; and 15 WHEREAS, The Bush Administration has held American 16 citizens and citizens of other nations as prisoners of war 17 without charge or trial; and 18 WHEREAS, Evidence suggests that the Bush Administration 19 has manipulated intelligence for the purpose of initiating a 20 war against the sovereign nation of Iraq, resulting in the 21 deaths of large numbers of Iraqi civilians and causing the 22 United States to incur loss of life, diminished security and 23 billions of dollars in unnecessary expenses; and 24 WHEREAS, The Bush Administration leaked classified 25 national secrets to further a political agenda, exposing an 26 unknown number of covert U. S. intelligence agents to potential 27 harm and retribution while simultaneously refusing to 28 investigate the matter; and 29 WHEREAS, The Republican-controlled Congress has declined HJ0125 - 2 - LRB094 20306 RLC 58347 r 1 to fully investigate these charges to date; therefore, be it 2 RESOLVED, BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE 3 NINETY-FOURTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, THE 4 SENATE CONCURRING HEREIN, that the General Assembly of the 5 State of Illinois has good cause to submit charges to the U. S. 6 House of Representatives under Section 603 that the President 7 of the United States has willfully violated his Oath of Office 8 to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United 9 States; and be it further 10 RESOLVED, That George W. Bush, if found guilty of the 11 charges contained herein, should be removed from office and 12 disqualified to hold any other office in the United States.
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blatantly stolen from
- was 24 years old.
- was a soon-to-be ex-student of the Renton Vocational Technical Institute in their Musical Instrument Repair program
- thought i was going to graduate, move back to bellingham (which is where my girlfriend and our four-year-old son lived), get the ideal job as a musical instrument repair technician and live happily ever after
10 years ago I…
- was 34 years old
- was working as a technical support engineer for mac products at microsoft (so much for technical school training and the “ideal” job)
- was living in a tiny, 1-room apartment in the basement of a building in downtown seattle, and was in the middle of an intense legal battle over custody of my fourteen-year-old son.
5 years ago I…
- was 39 years old
- was working as a test lead at STLabs
- started Hybrid Elephant, the business that moe and i had been playing around with for 3 years or so.
3 years ago I…
- was 41 years old
- was working as a graphic artist at a minuteman press shop, from which i was fired for having a brain injury instead of showing up for work for two months
- was two months away from having a brain injury, but had no clue that it was going to happen
1 year ago I…
- was working as a graphic artist at a different minuteman press shop, very quickly getting fed up with the owner who is a mental midget… and this opinion is coming from a person who doesn’t have a complete brain!
- was living in a RV in juanita, because we still hadn’t figured out where we were going to move to after having to move out of our big house in renton because i was unable to find a steady job after my injury
- was getting really fed up with having to have a job in order to survive, and was actively looking for alternatives
So far this past year I…
- have decided that i don’t really need a traditional job
- put a shopping cart on the Hybrid Elephant web site
- discussed the details of a large grafitti art project with my 24-year-old son
Yesterday I…
- finished painting my car… i am now driving an art-car! 8)
- met with my press operator and discussed whether or not he could print a business card for my acupuncturist
- stayed up until 3:00 in the morning watching TV because i was so depressed
Today I…
- slept until noon
- got my replacement tent poles in the mail
- logged a bug with the LJ rich text editor, which i fully expect to be ignored
Tomorrow I will…
- attend my 2nd rehearsal of the Ballard Sedentary Sousa Band
- probably still be depressed… it’s getting really tiring
- do something else which i haven’t yet figured out, and probably won’t until just before i do it
In the next year I will…
- completely recover and develop new, unusual, super-powers because of the extra space i now have in my skull
- learn sanskrit
- permanently move to uranus
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okay, i’m going to see if i can actually post pictures without having to delete everything and start over, like i had to yesterday… by the way, for anybody who cares, LJ has in mind converting to “rich text” editing by defalt, rather than the “plain text” editing that they currently have, and the rich text editor currently sucks big fat rancid donkey dicks. regardless of where you want to put <lj-cut> tags, it has the tendency to put them where it thinks they should go, which means around the text instead of around the pictures, regardless of how big they are, and the “edit source” button lets you edit the raw html, but when you click the “Okay” button on the source window, the “rich text” editor goes back to the same, incorrect html code that it had before, and there doesn’t appear to be any way to go back to plain text once you’ve chosen the rich text editor. it reminds me very much of the HTML editor i worked on at micro$lop a few years ago, which didn’t recognise HTML standards and had a number of bugs which it still has because micro$lop developers decided that, despite the fact that i logged several bugs against it, “nobody would notice”…
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 |
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now that’s the way HTML code should look, and it displays the way i want it to…
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i finished painting my car. pictures to come eventually.
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whee! 8)
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by the way, if you commented on this previously and your comment was deleted, it was because i was having some problems with the update page not allowing me to input HTML that i am familiar with, not putting in <lj-cut>s where they were supposed to go, and displaying an annoying HTML toolbar which didn’t do all of the things that a HTML toolbar should do… so i deleted it and started over again, and i did so before any comments had shown up from my point of view… but i think i got at least one comment shortly afterward and it wasn’t on this version, so i have to wonder…
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Ron Brynaert
Saturday April 15, 2006
During an interview on CNN Friday night, retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner claimed that U.S. military operations are already ‘underway’ inside Iran, RAW STORY has found.
“I would say — and this may shock some — I think the decision has been made and military operations are under way,” Col. Gardiner told CNN International anchor Jim Clancy (as noted by Digby at the blog Hullabaloo).
Gardiner, who designed a war game in November of 2004 for Atlantic Magazine (“Will Iran be next?”) which simulated “preparations for a U.S. assault on Iran,” also claimed that Aliasghar Soltaniyeh, the Iranian ambassador to the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told him a few weeks ago that units who had attacked the Revolutionary Guard had been captured and confessed to working with Americans.
“The secretary point is, the Iranians have been saying American military troops are in there, have been saying it for almost a year,” Gardiner said. “I was in Berlin two weeks ago, sat next to the ambassador, the Iranian ambassador to the IAEA. And I said, ‘Hey, I hear you’re accusing Americans of being in there operating with some of the units that have shot up revolution guard units.'”
“He said, quite frankly, ‘Yes, we know they are. We’ve captured some of the units, and they’ve confessed to working with the Americans,'” said the retired Air Force colonel.
Last Thursday, Raw Story’s Larisa Alexandrovna reported (On Cheney, Rumsfeld order, US outsourcing special ops, intelligence to Iraq terror group, intelligence officials say) that, according to former and current intelligence officials, the Pentagon has been using a right-wing terrorist organization known as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) as an operational asset “to create strife in Iran in preparation for any possible attack.”
“[I]nstead of securing a known terrorist organization, which has been responsible for acts of terror against Iranian targets and individuals all over the world – including US civilian and military casualties – Rumsfeld under instructions from Cheney, began using the group on special ops missions into Iran to pave the way for a potential Iran strike,” Larisa reported.
“They are doing whatever they want, no oversight at all,” an intelligence source told Larisa.
Larisa reported that the MEK soldiers were told to “quit” their organization and were “renamed” in accordance with a plan conceived by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld so that they could be “converted” into a military special ops team.
According to a UN official close to the Security Council whom Larisa interviewed, the “newly renamed MEK soldiers” were being employed in the place of U.S. military advance teams to commit “acts of violence in hopes of staging an insurgency of the Iranian Sunni population.”
“We are already at war,” the UN official told RAW STORY.
One of America’s leading historians assesses George W. Bush
SEAN WILENTZ
George W. Bush’s presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.
From time to time, after hours, I kick back with my colleagues at Princeton to argue idly about which president really was the worst of them all. For years, these perennial debates have largely focused on the same handful of chief executives whom national polls of historians, from across the ideological and political spectrum, routinely cite as the bottom of the presidential barrel. Was the lousiest James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in 1860, dithered to a degree that, as his most recent biographer has said, probably amounted to disloyalty — and who handed to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation already torn asunder? Was it Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, who actively sided with former Confederates and undermined Reconstruction? What about the amiably incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose administration was fabulously corrupt? Or, though he has his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but remained imprisoned in his own outmoded individualist ethic and collapsed under the weight of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression’s onset? The younger historians always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only American president forced to resign from office.
Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a “failure.” Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration’s “pursuit of disastrous policies.” In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton — a category in which Bush is the only contestant.
The lopsided decision of historians should give everyone pause. Contrary to popular stereotypes, historians are generally a cautious bunch. We assess the past from widely divergent points of view and are deeply concerned about being viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues. When we make historical judgments, we are acting not as voters or even pundits, but as scholars who must evaluate all the evidence, good, bad or indifferent. Separate surveys, conducted by those perceived as conservatives as well as liberals, show remarkable unanimity about who the best and worst presidents have been.
Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the citizenry as a whole — a fact the president’s admirers have seized on to dismiss the poll results as transparently biased. One pro-Bush historian said the survey revealed more about “the current crop of history professors” than about Bush or about Bush’s eventual standing. But if historians were simply motivated by a strong collective liberal bias, they might be expected to call Bush the worst president since his father, or Ronald Reagan, or Nixon. Instead, more than half of those polled — and nearly three-fourths of those who gave Bush a negative rating — reached back before Nixon to find a president they considered as miserable as Bush. The presidents most commonly linked with Bush included Hoover, Andrew Johnson and Buchanan. Twelve percent of the historians polled — nearly as many as those who rated Bush a success — flatly called Bush the worst president in American history. And these figures were gathered before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina, Bush’s role in the Valerie Plame leak affair and the deterioration of the situation in Iraq. Were the historians polled today, that figure would certainly be higher.
Even worse for the president, the general public, having once given Bush the highest approval ratings ever recorded, now appears to be coming around to the dismal view held by most historians. To be sure, the president retains a considerable base of supporters who believe in and adore him, and who reject all criticism with a mixture of disbelief and fierce contempt — about one-third of the electorate. (When the columnist Richard Reeves publicized the historians’ poll last year and suggested it might have merit, he drew thousands of abusive replies that called him an idiot and that praised Bush as, in one writer’s words, “a Christian who actually acts on his deeply held beliefs.”) Yet the ranks of the true believers have thinned dramatically. A majority of voters in forty-three states now disapprove of Bush’s handling of his job. Since the commencement of reliable polling in the 1940s, only one twice-elected president has seen his ratings fall as low as Bush’s in his second term: Richard Nixon, during the months preceding his resignation in 1974. No two-term president since polling began has fallen from such a height of popularity as Bush’s (in the neighborhood of ninety percent, during the patriotic upswell following the 2001 attacks) to such a low (now in the midthirties). No president, including Harry Truman (whose ratings sometimes dipped below Nixonian levels), has experienced such a virtually unrelieved decline as Bush has since his high point. Apart from sharp but temporary upticks that followed the commencement of the Iraq war and the capture of Saddam Hussein, and a recovery during the weeks just before and after his re-election, the Bush trend has been a profile in fairly steady disillusionment.
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How does any president’s reputation sink so low? The reasons are best understood as the reverse of those that produce presidential greatness. In almost every survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three presidents have emerged as supreme successes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered office.
Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties — Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush — have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures — an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.
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THE CREDIBILITY GAP
No previous president appears to have squandered the public’s trust more than Bush has. In the 1840s, President James Polk gained a reputation for deviousness over his alleged manufacturing of the war with Mexico and his supposedly covert pro-slavery views. Abraham Lincoln, then an Illinois congressman, virtually labeled Polk a liar when he called him, from the floor of the House, “a bewildered, confounded and miserably perplexed man” and denounced the war as “from beginning to end, the sheerest deception.” But the swift American victory in the war, Polk’s decision to stick by his pledge to serve only one term and his sudden death shortly after leaving office spared him the ignominy over slavery that befell his successors in the 1850s. With more than two years to go in Bush’s second term and no swift victory in sight, Bush’s reputation will probably have no such reprieve.
The problems besetting Bush are of a more modern kind than Polk’s, suited to the television age — a crisis both in confidence and credibility. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam travails gave birth to the phrase “credibility gap,” meaning the distance between a president’s professions and the public’s perceptions of reality. It took more than two years for Johnson’s disapproval rating in the Gallup Poll to reach fifty-two percent in March 1968 — a figure Bush long ago surpassed, but that was sufficient to persuade the proud LBJ not to seek re-election. Yet recently, just short of three years after Bush buoyantly declared “mission accomplished” in Iraq, his disapproval ratings have been running considerably higher than Johnson’s, at about sixty percent. More than half the country now considers Bush dishonest and untrustworthy, and a decisive plurality consider him less trustworthy than his predecessor, Bill Clinton — a figure still attacked by conservative zealots as “Slick Willie.”
Previous modern presidents, including Truman, Reagan and Clinton, managed to reverse plummeting ratings and regain the public’s trust by shifting attention away from political and policy setbacks, and by overhauling the White House’s inner circles. But Bush’s publicly expressed view that he has made no major mistakes, coupled with what even the conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. calls his “high-flown pronouncements” about failed policies, seems to foreclose the first option. Upping the ante in the Middle East and bombing Iranian nuclear sites, a strategy reportedly favored by some in the White House, could distract the public and gain Bush immediate political capital in advance of the 2006 midterm elections — but in the long term might severely worsen the already dire situation in Iraq, especially among Shiite Muslims linked to the Iranians. And given Bush’s ardent attachment to loyal aides, no matter how discredited, a major personnel shake-up is improbable, short of indictments. Replacing Andrew Card with Joshua Bolten as chief of staff — a move announced by the president in March in a tone that sounded more like defiance than contrition — represents a rededication to current policies and personnel, not a serious change. (Card, an old Bush family retainer, was widely considered more moderate than most of the men around the president and had little involvement in policy-making.) The power of Vice President Dick Cheney, meanwhile, remains uncurbed. Were Cheney to announce he is stepping down due to health problems, normally a polite pretext for a political removal, one can be reasonably certain it would be because Cheney actually did have grave health problems.
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BUSH AT WAR
Until the twentieth century, American presidents managed foreign wars well — including those presidents who prosecuted unpopular wars. James Madison had no support from Federalist New England at the outset of the War of 1812, and the discontent grew amid mounting military setbacks in 1813. But Federalist political overreaching, combined with a reversal of America’s military fortunes and the negotiation of a peace with Britain, made Madison something of a hero again and ushered in a brief so-called Era of Good Feelings in which his Jeffersonian Republican Party coalition ruled virtually unopposed. The Mexican War under Polk was even more unpopular, but its quick and victorious conclusion redounded to Polk’s favor — much as the rapid American victory in the Spanish-American War helped William McKinley overcome anti-imperialist dissent.
The twentieth century was crueler to wartime presidents. After winning re-election in 1916 with the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War,” Woodrow Wilson oversaw American entry into the First World War. Yet while the doughboys returned home triumphant, Wilson’s idealistic and politically disastrous campaign for American entry into the League of Nations presaged a resurgence of the opposition Republican Party along with a redoubling of American isolationism that lasted until Pearl Harbor.
Bush has more in common with post-1945 Democratic presidents Truman and Johnson, who both became bogged down in overseas military conflicts with no end, let alone victory, in sight. But Bush has become bogged down in a singularly crippling way. On September 10th, 2001, he held among the lowest ratings of any modern president for that point in a first term. (Only Gerald Ford, his popularity reeling after his pardon of Nixon, had comparable numbers.) The attacks the following day transformed Bush’s presidency, giving him an extraordinary opportunity to achieve greatness. Some of the early signs were encouraging. Bush’s simple, unflinching eloquence and his quick toppling of the Taliban government in Afghanistan rallied the nation. Yet even then, Bush wasted his chance by quickly choosing partisanship over leadership.
No other president — Lincoln in the Civil War, FDR in World War II, John F. Kennedy at critical moments of the Cold War — faced with such a monumental set of military and political circumstances failed to embrace the opposing political party to help wage a truly national struggle. But Bush shut out and even demonized the Democrats. Top military advisers and even members of the president’s own Cabinet who expressed any reservations or criticisms of his policies — including retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill — suffered either dismissal, smear attacks from the president’s supporters or investigations into their alleged breaches of national security. The wise men who counseled Bush’s father, including James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, found their entreaties brusquely ignored by his son. When asked if he ever sought advice from the elder Bush, the president responded, “There is a higher Father that I appeal to.”
All the while, Bush and the most powerful figures in the administration, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were planting the seeds for the crises to come by diverting the struggle against Al Qaeda toward an all-out effort to topple their pre-existing target, Saddam Hussein. In a deliberate political decision, the administration stampeded the Congress and a traumatized citizenry into the Iraq invasion on the basis of what has now been demonstrated to be tendentious and perhaps fabricated evidence of an imminent Iraqi threat to American security, one that the White House suggested included nuclear weapons. Instead of emphasizing any political, diplomatic or humanitarian aspects of a war on Iraq — an appeal that would have sounded too “sensitive,” as Cheney once sneered — the administration built a “Bush Doctrine” of unprovoked, preventive warfare, based on speculative threats and embracing principles previously abjured by every previous generation of U.S. foreign policy-makers, even at the height of the Cold War. The president did so with premises founded, in the case of Iraq, on wishful thinking. He did so while proclaiming an expansive Wilsonian rhetoric of making the world safe for democracy — yet discarding the multilateralism and systems of international law (including the Geneva Conventions) that emanated from Wilson’s idealism. He did so while dismissing intelligence that an American invasion could spark a long and bloody civil war among Iraq’s fierce religious and ethnic rivals, reports that have since proved true. And he did so after repeated warnings by military officials such as Gen. Eric Shinseki that pacifying postwar Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of American troops — accurate estimates that Paul Wolfowitz and other Bush policy gurus ridiculed as “wildly off the mark.”
When William F. Buckley, the man whom many credit as the founder of the modern conservative movement, writes categorically, as he did in February, that “one can’t doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed,” then something terrible has happened. Even as a brash young iconoclast, Buckley always took the long view. The Bush White House seems incapable of doing so, except insofar as a tiny trusted circle around the president constantly reassures him that he is a messianic liberator and profound freedom fighter, on a par with FDR and Lincoln, and that history will vindicate his every act and utterance.
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BUSH AT HOME
Bush came to office in 2001 pledging to govern as a “compassionate conservative,” more moderate on domestic policy than the dominant right wing of his party. The pledge proved hollow, as Bush tacked immediately to the hard right. Previous presidents and their parties have suffered when their actions have belied their campaign promises. Lyndon Johnson is the most conspicuous recent example, having declared in his 1964 run against the hawkish Republican Barry Goldwater that “we are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” But no president has surpassed Bush in departing so thoroughly from his original campaign persona.
The heart of Bush’s domestic policy has turned out to be nothing more than a series of massively regressive tax cuts — a return, with a vengeance, to the discredited Reagan-era supply-side faith that Bush’s father once ridiculed as “voodoo economics.” Bush crowed in triumph in February 2004, “We cut taxes, which basically meant people had more money in their pocket.” The claim is bogus for the majority of Americans, as are claims that tax cuts have led to impressive new private investment and job growth. While wiping out the solid Clinton-era federal surplus and raising federal deficits to staggering record levels, Bush’s tax policies have necessitated hikes in federal fees, state and local taxes, and co-payment charges to needy veterans and families who rely on Medicaid, along with cuts in loan programs to small businesses and college students, and in a wide range of state services. The lion’s share of benefits from the tax cuts has gone to the very richest Americans, while new business investment has increased at a historically sluggish rate since the peak of the last business cycle five years ago. Private-sector job growth since 2001 has been anemic compared to the Bush administration’s original forecasts and is chiefly attributable not to the tax cuts but to increased federal spending, especially on defense. Real wages for middle-income Americans have been dropping since the end of 2003: Last year, on average, nominal wages grew by only 2.4 percent, a meager gain that was completely erased by an average inflation rate of 3.4 percent.
The monster deficits, caused by increased federal spending combined with the reduction of revenue resulting from the tax cuts, have also placed Bush’s administration in a historic class of its own with respect to government borrowing. According to the Treasury Department, the forty-two presidents who held office between 1789 and 2000 borrowed a combined total of $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions. But between 2001 and 2005 alone, the Bush White House borrowed $1.05 trillion, more than all of the previous presidencies combined. Having inherited the largest federal surplus in American history in 2001, he has turned it into the largest deficit ever — with an even higher deficit, $423 billion, forecast for fiscal year 2006. Yet Bush — sounding much like Herbert Hoover in 1930 predicting that “prosperity is just around the corner” — insists that he will cut federal deficits in half by 2009, and that the best way to guarantee this would be to make permanent his tax cuts, which helped cause the deficit in the first place!
The rest of what remains of Bush’s skimpy domestic agenda is either failed or failing — a record unmatched since the presidency of Herbert Hoover. The No Child Left Behind educational-reform act has proved so unwieldy, draconian and poorly funded that several states — including Utah, one of Bush’s last remaining political strongholds — have fought to opt out of it entirely. White House proposals for immigration reform and a guest-worker program have succeeded mainly in dividing pro-business Republicans (who want more low-wage immigrant workers) from paleo-conservatives fearful that hordes of Spanish-speaking newcomers will destroy American culture. The paleos’ call for tougher anti-immigrant laws — a return to the punitive spirit of exclusion that led to the notorious Immigration Act of 1924 that shut the door to immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe — has in turn deeply alienated Hispanic voters from the Republican Party, badly undermining the GOP’s hopes of using them to build a permanent national electoral majority. The recent pro-immigrant demonstrations, which drew millions of marchers nationwide, indicate how costly the Republican divide may prove.
The one noncorporate constituency to which Bush has consistently deferred is the Christian right, both in his selections for the federal bench and in his implications that he bases his policies on premillennialist, prophetic Christian doctrine. Previous presidents have regularly invoked the Almighty. McKinley is supposed to have fallen to his knees, seeking divine guidance about whether to take control of the Philippines in 1898, although the story may be apocryphal. But no president before Bush has allowed the press to disclose, through a close friend, his startling belief that he was ordained by God to lead the country. The White House’s sectarian positions — over stem-cell research, the teaching of pseudoscientific “intelligent design,” global population control, the Terri Schiavo spectacle and more — have led some to conclude that Bush has promoted the transformation of the GOP into what former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips calls “the first religious party in U.S. history.”
Bush’s faith-based conception of his mission, which stands above and beyond reasoned inquiry, jibes well with his administration’s pro-business dogma on global warming and other urgent environmental issues. While forcing federally funded agencies to remove from their Web sites scientific information about reproductive health and the effectiveness of condoms in combating HIV/AIDS, and while peremptorily overruling staff scientists at the Food and Drug Administration on making emergency contraception available over the counter, Bush officials have censored and suppressed research findings they don’t like by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Agriculture. Far from being the conservative he said he was, Bush has blazed a radical new path as the first American president in history who is outwardly hostile to science — dedicated, as a distinguished, bipartisan panel of educators and scientists (including forty-nine Nobel laureates) has declared, to “the distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends.”
The Bush White House’s indifference to domestic problems and science alike culminated in the catastrophic responses to Hurricane Katrina. Scientists had long warned that global warming was intensifying hurricanes, but Bush ignored them — much as he and his administration sloughed off warnings from the director of the National Hurricane Center before Katrina hit. Reorganized under the Department of Homeland Security, the once efficient Federal Emergency Management Agency turned out, under Bush, to have become a nest of cronyism and incompetence. During the months immediately after the storm, Bush traveled to New Orleans eight times to promise massive rebuilding aid from the federal government. On March 30th, however, Bush’s Gulf Coast recovery coordinator admitted that it could take as long as twenty-five years for the city to recover.
Karl Rove has sometimes likened Bush to the imposing, no-nonsense President Andrew Jackson. Yet Jackson took measures to prevent those he called “the rich and powerful” from bending “the acts of government to their selfish purposes.” Jackson also gained eternal renown by saving New Orleans from British invasion against terrible odds. Generations of Americans sang of Jackson’s famous victory. In 1959, Johnny Horton’s version of “The Battle of New Orleans” won the Grammy for best country & western performance. If anyone sings about George W. Bush and New Orleans, it will be a blues number.
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PRESIDENTIAL MISCONDUCT
Virtually every presidential administration dating back to George Washington’s has faced charges of misconduct and threats of impeachment against the president or his civil officers. The alleged offenses have usually involved matters of personal misbehavior and corruption, notably the payoff scandals that plagued Cabinet officials who served presidents Harding and Ulysses S. Grant. But the charges have also included alleged usurpation of power by the president and serious criminal conduct that threatens constitutional government and the rule of law — most notoriously, the charges that led to the impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, and to Richard Nixon’s resignation.
Historians remain divided over the actual grievousness of many of these allegations and crimes. Scholars reasonably describe the graft and corruption around the Grant administration, for example, as gargantuan, including a kickback scandal that led to the resignation of Grant’s secretary of war under the shadow of impeachment. Yet the scandals produced no indictments of Cabinet secretaries and only one of a White House aide, who was acquitted. By contrast, the most scandal-ridden administration in the modern era, apart from Nixon’s, was Ronald Reagan’s, now widely remembered through a haze of nostalgia as a paragon of virtue. A total of twenty-nine Reagan officials, including White House national security adviser Robert McFarlane and deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver, were convicted on charges stemming from the Iran-Contra affair, illegal lobbying and a looting scandal inside the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Three Cabinet officers — HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce, Attorney General Edwin Meese and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger — left their posts under clouds of scandal. In contrast, not a single official in the Clinton administration was even indicted over his or her White House duties, despite repeated high-profile investigations and a successful, highly partisan impeachment drive.
The full report, of course, has yet to come on the Bush administration. Because Bush, unlike Reagan or Clinton, enjoys a fiercely partisan and loyal majority in Congress, his administration has been spared scrutiny. Yet that mighty advantage has not prevented the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, on charges stemming from an alleged major security breach in the Valerie Plame matter. (The last White House official of comparable standing to be indicted while still in office was Grant’s personal secretary, in 1875.) It has not headed off the unprecedented scandal involving Larry Franklin, a high-ranking Defense Department official, who has pleaded guilty to divulging classified information to a foreign power while working at the Pentagon — a crime against national security. It has not forestalled the arrest and indictment of Bush’s top federal procurement official, David Safavian, and the continuing investigations into Safavian’s intrigues with the disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, recently sentenced to nearly six years in prison — investigations in which some prominent Republicans, including former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed (and current GOP aspirant for lieutenant governor of Georgia) have already been implicated, and could well produce the largest congressional corruption scandal in American history. It has not dispelled the cloud of possible indictment that hangs over others of Bush’s closest advisers.
History may ultimately hold Bush in the greatest contempt for expanding the powers of the presidency beyond the limits laid down by the U.S. Constitution. There has always been a tension over the constitutional roles of the three branches of the federal government. The Framers intended as much, as part of the system of checks and balances they expected would minimize tyranny. When Andrew Jackson took drastic measures against the nation’s banking system, the Whig Senate censured him for conduct “dangerous to the liberties of the people.” During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s emergency decisions to suspend habeas corpus while Congress was out of session in 1861 and 1862 has led some Americans, to this day, to regard him as a despot. Richard Nixon’s conduct of the war in Southeast Asia and his covert domestic-surveillance programs prompted Congress to pass new statutes regulating executive power.
By contrast, the Bush administration — in seeking to restore what Cheney, a Nixon administration veteran, has called “the legitimate authority of the presidency” — threatens to overturn the Framers’ healthy tension in favor of presidential absolutism. Armed with legal findings by his attorney general (and personal lawyer) Alberto Gonzales, the Bush White House has declared that the president’s powers as commander in chief in wartime are limitless. No previous wartime president has come close to making so grandiose a claim. More specifically, this administration has asserted that the president is perfectly free to violate federal laws on such matters as domestic surveillance and the torture of detainees. When Congress has passed legislation to limit those assertions, Bush has resorted to issuing constitutionally dubious “signing statements,” which declare, by fiat, how he will interpret and execute the law in question, even when that interpretation flagrantly violates the will of Congress. Earlier presidents, including Jackson, raised hackles by offering their own view of the Constitution in order to justify vetoing congressional acts. Bush doesn’t bother with that: He signs the legislation (eliminating any risk that Congress will overturn a veto), and then governs how he pleases — using the signing statements as if they were line-item vetoes. In those instances when Bush’s violations of federal law have come to light, as over domestic surveillance, the White House has devised a novel solution: Stonewall any investigation into the violations and bid a compliant Congress simply to rewrite the laws.
Bush’s alarmingly aberrant take on the Constitution is ironic. One need go back in the record less than a decade to find prominent Republicans railing against far more minor presidential legal infractions as precursors to all-out totalitarianism. “I will have no part in the creation of a constitutional double-standard to benefit the president,” Sen. Bill Frist declared of Bill Clinton’s efforts to conceal an illicit sexual liaison. “No man is above the law, and no man is below the law — that’s the principle that we all hold very dear in this country,” Rep. Tom DeLay asserted. “The rule of law protects you and it protects me from the midnight fire on our roof or the 3 a.m. knock on our door,” warned Rep. Henry Hyde, one of Clinton’s chief accusers. In the face of Bush’s more definitive dismissal of federal law, the silence from these quarters is deafening.
The president’s defenders stoutly contend that war-time conditions fully justify Bush’s actions. And as Lincoln showed during the Civil War, there may be times of military emergency where the executive believes it imperative to take immediate, highly irregular, even unconstitutional steps. “I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful,” Lincoln wrote in 1864, “by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the preservation of the nation.” Bush seems to think that, since 9/11, he has been placed, by the grace of God, in the same kind of situation Lincoln faced. But Lincoln, under pressure of daily combat on American soil against fellow Americans, did not operate in secret, as Bush has. He did not claim, as Bush has, that his emergency actions were wholly regular and constitutional as well as necessary; Lincoln sought and received Congressional authorization for his suspension of habeas corpus in 1863. Nor did Lincoln act under the amorphous cover of a “war on terror” — a war against a tactic, not a specific nation or political entity, which could last as long as any president deems the tactic a threat to national security. Lincoln’s exceptional measures were intended to survive only as long as the Confederacy was in rebellion. Bush’s could be extended indefinitely, as the president sees fit, permanently endangering rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution to the citizenry.
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Much as Bush still enjoys support from those who believe he can do no wrong, he now suffers opposition from liberals who believe he can do no right. Many of these liberals are in the awkward position of having supported Bush in the past, while offering little coherent as an alternative to Bush’s policies now. Yet it is difficult to see how this will benefit Bush’s reputation in history.
The president came to office calling himself “a uniter, not a divider” and promising to soften the acrimonious tone in Washington. He has had two enormous opportunities to fulfill those pledges: first, in the noisy aftermath of his controversial election in 2000, and, even more, after the attacks of September 11th, when the nation pulled behind him as it has supported no other president in living memory. Yet under both sets of historically unprecedented circumstances, Bush has chosen to act in ways that have left the country less united and more divided, less conciliatory and more acrimonious — much like James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Herbert Hoover before him. And, like those three predecessors, Bush has done so in the service of a rigid ideology that permits no deviation and refuses to adjust to changing realities. Buchanan failed the test of Southern secession, Johnson failed in the face of Reconstruction, and Hoover failed in the face of the Great Depression. Bush has failed to confront his own failures in both domestic and international affairs, above all in his ill-conceived responses to radical Islamic terrorism. Having confused steely resolve with what Ralph Waldo Emerson called “a foolish consistency . . . adored by little statesmen,” Bush has become entangled in tragedies of his own making, compounding those visited upon the country by outside forces.
No historian can responsibly predict the future with absolute certainty. There are too many imponderables still to come in the two and a half years left in Bush’s presidency to know exactly how it will look in 2009, let alone in 2059. There have been presidents — Harry Truman was one — who have left office in seeming disgrace, only to rebound in the estimates of later scholars. But so far the facts are not shaping up propitiously for George W. Bush. He still does his best to deny it. Having waved away the lessons of history in the making of his decisions, the present-minded Bush doesn’t seem to be concerned about his place in history. “History. We won’t know,” he told the journalist Bob Woodward in 2003. “We’ll all be dead.”
Another president once explained that the judgments of history cannot be defied or dismissed, even by a president. “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history,” said Abraham Lincoln. “We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.”
also:
The Past is Over – Can you imagine a speech given by president Bush that would convince you that he has had a change of heart and could actually be the president of your dreams? A group of five students, ages 7-10, from Rooftop Elementary in San Francisco accepted the challenge, and have written speeches, which were then recorded by Jim Meskimen, a professional impersonator.
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there has been a whole bunch of things that have been causing a bit of distress, but there have also been a lot of good things happening that have been offsetting the distress to the point where it’s more like a minor irritation. scott mcclellan is resigning, the “president” of china, hu jintao visited seattle with the requisite protests by tibetans, taiwanese, and chinese falun gong, and was here at the same time cheney was, which caused much uproar and confusion in seattle for two or three days. and other things that are precisely why i don’t read the newspaper that often…
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F.D.A. Dismisses Medical Benefit From Marijuana
By GARDINER HARRIS
April 21, 2006
WASHINGTON, April 20 – The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday that “no sound scientific studies” supported the medical use of marijuana, contradicting a 1999 review by a panel of highly regarded scientists.The announcement inserts the health agency into yet another fierce political fight.
Susan Bro, an agency spokeswoman, said Thursday’s statement resulted from a past combined review by federal drug enforcement, regulatory and research agencies that concluded “smoked marijuana has no currently accepted or proven medical use in the United States and is not an approved medical treatment.”
Ms. Bro said the agency issued the statement in response to numerous inquiries from Capitol Hill but would probably do nothing to enforce it.
“Any enforcement based on this finding would need to be by D.E.A. since this falls outside of F.D.A.’s regulatory authority,” she said.
Eleven states have legalized medicinal use of marijuana, but the Drug Enforcement Administration and the director of national drug control policy, John P. Walters, have opposed those laws.
A Supreme Court decision last year allowed the federal government to arrest anyone using marijuana, even for medical purposes and even in states that have legalized its use.
Congressional opponents and supporters of medical marijuana use have each tried to enlist the F.D.A. to support their views. Representative Mark Souder, Republican of Indiana and a fierce opponent of medical marijuana initiatives, proposed legislation two years ago that would have required the food and drug agency to issue an opinion on the medicinal properties of marijuana.
Mr. Souder believes that efforts to legalize medicinal uses of marijuana are a front for efforts to legalize all uses of it, said Martin Green, a spokesman for Mr. Souder.
Tom Riley, a spokesman for Mr. Walters, hailed the food and drug agency’s statement, saying it would put to rest what he called “the bizarre public discussion” that has led to some legalization of medical marijuana.
The Food and Drug Administration statement directly contradicts a 1999 review by the Institute of Medicine, a part of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation’s most prestigious scientific advisory agency. That review found marijuana to be “moderately well suited for particular conditions, such as chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting and AIDS wasting.”
Dr. John Benson, co-chairman of the Institute of Medicine committee that examined the research into marijuana’s effects, said in an interview that the statement on Thursday and the combined review by other agencies were wrong.
The federal government “loves to ignore our report,” said Dr. Benson, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. “They would rather it never happened.”
Some scientists and legislators said the agency’s statement about marijuana demonstrated that politics had trumped science.
“Unfortunately, this is yet another example of the F.D.A. making pronouncements that seem to be driven more by ideology than by science,” said Dr. Jerry Avorn, a medical professor at Harvard Medical School.
Representative Maurice D. Hinchey, a New York Democrat who has sponsored legislation to allow medicinal uses of marijuana, said the statement reflected the influence of the Drug Enforcement Administration, which he said had long pressured the F.D.A. to help in its fight against marijuana.
A spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Administration referred questions to Mr. Walters’s office.
The Food and Drug Administration’s statement said state initiatives that legalize marijuana use were “inconsistent with efforts to ensure that medications undergo the rigorous scientific scrutiny of the F.D.A. approval process.”
But scientists who study the medical use of marijuana said in interviews that the federal government had actively discouraged research. Lyle E. Craker, a professor in the division of plant and soil sciences at the University of Massachusetts, said he submitted an application to the D.E.A. in 2001 to grow a small patch of marijuana to be used for research because government-approved marijuana, grown in Mississippi, was of poor quality.
In 2004, the drug enforcement agency turned Dr. Craker down. He appealed and is awaiting a judge’s ruling. “The reason there’s no good evidence is that they don’t want an honest trial,” Dr. Craker said.
Dr. Donald Abrams, a professor of clinical medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said he had studied marijuana’s medicinal effects for years but had been frustrated because the National Institutes of Health, the leading government medical research agency, had refused to finance such work.
With financing from the State of California, Dr. Abrams undertook what he said was a rigorous, placebo-controlled trial of marijuana smoking in H.I.V. patients who suffered from nerve pain. Smoking marijuana proved effective in ameliorating pain, Dr. Abrams said, but he said he was having trouble getting the study published.
“One wonders how anyone” could fulfill the Food and Drug Administration request for well-controlled trials to prove marijuana’s benefits, he said.
Marinol, a synthetic version of a marijuana component, is approved to treat anorexia associated with AIDS and the nausea and vomiting associated with cancer drug therapy.
GW Pharmaceutical, a British company, has received F.D.A. approval to test a sprayed extract of marijuana in humans. Called Sativex, the drug is made from marijuana and is approved for sale in Canada. Opponents of efforts to legalize marijuana for medicinal uses suggest that marijuana is a so-called gateway drug that often leads users to try more dangerous drugs and to addiction.
But the Institute of Medicine report concluded there was no evidence that marijuana acted as a gateway to harder drugs. And it said there was no evidence that medical use of marijuana would increase its use among the general population.
Dr. Daniele Piomelli, a professor of pharmacology at the University of California, Irvine, said he had “never met a scientist who would say that marijuana is either dangerous or useless.”
Studies clearly show that marijuana has some benefits for some patients, Dr. Piomelli said.
“We all agree on that,” he said.
but at the same time, i’ve got my keyboards set up over at
also, i’m now a member of the Ballard Sedentary Sousa Band, which is something for which i’ve been looking, for longer than i have been a member of the fremont philharmonic, which is 5 years, more or less.
Phony doctor gives free breast exams
Apr 20
MIAMI (Reuters) – A 76-year-old man claiming to be a doctor went door-to-door in a Florida neighborhood offering free breast exams, and was charged with sexually assaulting two women who accepted the offer, police said on Thursday.
One woman became suspicious after the man asked her to remove all her clothes and began conducting a purported genital exam without donning rubber gloves, investigators said.
The woman then phoned the Broward County Sheriff’s Office and the suspect fled. He was arrested at another woman’s apartment in the same Lauderdale Lakes neighborhood on Wednesday, a sheriff’s spokesman said.
The white-haired suspect, Philip Winikoff, carried a black bag and claimed to be visiting on behalf of a local hospital.
“He told the woman that he was in the neighborhood offering free breast exams,” sheriff’s spokesman Hugh Graf said in a statement.
At least two women, both in their 30s, let him into their homes and he fondled and sexually assaulted them, the investigators said.
Winikoff was not a doctor, Graf said. He worked as a shuttle driver for an auto dealership.
| You Passed the US Citizenship Test |
 Congratulations – you got 8 out of 10 correct! |
453
i got a chance to play my keyboards for the first time in almost a year. i need to do that more often… like tomorrow.
452
April 14, 2006
LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — In a move decried by some as state-sponsored segregation, the Legislature voted Thursday to divide the Omaha school system into three districts — one mostly black, one predominantly white and one largely Hispanic.
Supporters said the plan would give minorities control over their own school board and ensure that their children are not shortchanged in favor of white youngsters.
Republican Gov. Dave Heineman signed the measure into law.
Omaha Sen. Pat Bourne decried the bill, saying, “We will go down in history as one of the first states in 20 years to set race relations back.”
“History will not, and should not, judge us kindly,” said Sen. Gwen Howard of Omaha.
Attorney General Jon Bruning sent a letter to one of the measure’s opponents saying that the bill could be in violation of the Constitution’s equal-protection clause and that lawsuits almost certainly will be filed.
But its backers said that at the very least, its passage will force policymakers to negotiate seriously about the future of schools in the Omaha area.
The breakup would not occur until July 2008, leaving time for lawmakers to come up with another idea.
“There is no intent to create segregation,” said Omaha Sen. Ernie Chambers, the Legislature’s only black senator and a longtime critic of the school system.
He argued that the district is already segregated, because it no longer buses students for integration and instead requires them to attend their neighborhood school.
Chambers said the schools attended largely by minorities lack the resources and quality teachers provided others in the district. He said the black students he represents in north Omaha would receive a better education if they had more control over their district.
Coming from Chambers, the argument was especially persuasive to the rest of the Legislature, which voted three times this week in favor of the bill before it won final passage on the last day of the session.
Omaha Public Schools Superintendent John Mackiel said the law is unconstitutional and will not stand.
“There simply has never been an anti-city school victory anywhere in this nation,” Mackiel said. “This law will be no exception.”
The 45,000-student Omaha school system is 46 percent white, 31 percent black, 20 percent Hispanic, and 3 percent Asian or American Indian.
Boundaries for the newly created districts would be drawn using current high school attendance areas. That would result in four possible scenarios; in every scenario, two districts would end up with a majority of students who are racial minorities.
Apr 17
NGLEWOOD, Calif. – A principal trying to prevent walkouts during immigration rallies inadvertently introduced a lockdown so strict that children weren’t allowed to go to the bathroom, and instead had to use buckets in the classroom, an official said.
Worthington Elementary School Principal Angie Marquez imposed the lockdown March 27 as nearly 40,000 students across Southern California left classes that morning to attend immigrants’ rights demonstrations. The lockdown continued into the following morning.
Marquez apparently misread the district handbook and ordered a lockdown designed for nuclear attacks.
Tim Brown, the district’s director of operations, confirmed some students used buckets but said the principal’s order to impose the most severe type of lockdown was an “honest mistake.”
“When there’s a nuclear attack, that’s when buckets are used,” Brown told the Los Angeles Times. The principal “followed procedure. She made a decision to follow the handbook. She just misread it.”
In some cases teachers escorted classmates to regular restroom facilities, students said.
Telephones rang unanswered Monday at Worthington Elementary School because of spring break and messages left for Marquez and Brown at school district headquarters were not returned.
Appalled parents have complained to the school board. Brown said the school district planned to update its emergency preparedness instructions to give more explicit directions.
Parents and community activists asked the school board at its April 5 meeting to explain the principal’s decision. They also sought promises that the lockdown wouldn’t be repeated.
“There was no violence at the protests, so this was based on what?” activist Diane Sambrano asked. “It was unsanitary, unnecessary and absolutely unacceptable.”
ALSO:
Guidelines for Abstinence Curricula from the Administration for Children & Families – scroll down until you find the heading “Additional Guidance Regarding Curriculum Content” and peruse that section… “choosing not to engage in sexual activity until marriage” and “marriage” being defined as “only a legal union between one man and one woman” stick out in my mind as aggravating and contentious terms…
and, for my “friend”
By Jeff Minerd
April 14, 2006
GLASGOW, Scotland, April 14 – The rate of suicide attempts and self-mutilation-is high among those in the Goth youth subculture, researchers here reported.
More than half of 19-year-olds who self-identified as Goth reported self-harming behavior, and nearly half reported a suicide attempt, said Robert Young, a research associate at the University of Glasgow.
But whether participation in Goth culture leads to self-destructive behavior or whether adolescents with those tendencies gravitate to Goth is not clear, Young and colleagues said online today in BMJ, formerly the British Medical Journal.
Goth is a subgenre of punk culture characterized by “a dark and sinister aesthetic, with aficionados conspicuous by their range of distinctive clothing and makeup and tastes in music,” the investigators said. There is a Goth subculture in the U.S., reportedly inspired by fantasy games such as Dungeons and Dragon.
Self-harming behavior is “a maladaptive coping strategy intended to relieve negative emotions such as anger, anxiety, frustration, or guilt,” the investigators said. “It is usually unrelated to an immediate suicide attempt.”
The researchers surveyed 1,258 young people during their final year of primary school (age 11) and again at ages 13, 15, and 19. The study participants were asked about self-harm and identification with a variety of youth subcultures.
The study found that belonging to the Goth subculture was strongly associated with a lifetime prevalence of self harm (53%) and attempted suicide (47%). For comparison, the rate of self-harming behavior among the general youth population in the United Kingdom is 7% to 14%, and the rate of suicide attempts is about 6%, the authors said.
Furthermore, identifying oneself as Goth was associated with a 14-fold increase in risk for self harming behavior (odds ratio=14.16; 95% confidence interval=4.42-45.39) and a 16-fold increase in risk for suicide attempt (OR=16.37; 95% CI=4.93-54.35) compared with non-Goth youth, the study found.
Even after adjusting for other known predictors such as being female, having divorced or separated parents, smoking, drug use, and depression, Goth identification remained the single strongest predictor of self-harm or suicide attempt, the study found.
Some other youth subcultures, such as Punk and Mosher, were also associated with self-harm, but the association was strongest for Goth.
“Although only fairly small numbers of young people identify as belonging to the Goth subculture, rates of self-harm and attempted suicide are very high among this group,” Young said.
“One common suggestion is they may be copying subcultural icons or peers,” he said. “But since our study found that more reported self-harm before, rather than after, becoming a Goth, this suggests that young people with a tendency to self-harm are attracted to the Goth subculture.”
“Rather than posing a risk, it’s also possible that by belonging to this subculture young people are gaining valuable social and emotional support from their peers,” he suggested. “However, the study was based on small numbers and replication is needed to confirm our results.”
451
Take the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society SaniTest.
now that i’ve gotten that out of the way and there should be no doubt left about who you’re actually dealing with here…
Anatomy of a Revolt
What made a chorus of ex-generals call for the SecDef’s head? The war over the war—and how Rumsfeld is reacting.
By Evan Thomas and John Barry
April 24, 2006
Gen. Eric Shinseki, former chief of staff of the Army, says he is “at peace.” But reached last week, he didn’t sound all that peaceful. In the winter of 2003, alone among the top brass, Shinseki had warned Congress that occupying Iraq would require “several hundred thousand troops.” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, had rewarded Shinseki for his honesty by publicly castigating and shunning him.
Last fall, Shinseki went to the 40th reunion of the class of ’65 at West Point. It has been reported that his classmates were wearing caps emblazoned RIC WAS RIGHT. Last week NEWSWEEK e-mailed Shinseki to ask about the reports. Shinseki called back to say he had heard “rumors” about the caps. But, NEWSWEEK asked, wasn’t he there? “Well,” he replied, “I saw a cap.”
Shinseki, who has retired to Hawaii, was clearly uncomfortable with the role of martyr. He had no desire to join the chorus of retired generals calling for Rumsfeld’s resignation. He was circumspect about criticizing Rumsfeld at all, but he seemed to be struggling to disguise his feelings. He pointedly said that the “person who should decide on the number of troops [to invade Iraq] is the combatant commander”—Gen. Tommy Franks, and not Rumsfeld.
Some critics have argued that Shinseki should have banged on the table, pushed harder to stop Rumsfeld from going into Iraq with too few troops. How does Shinseki respond? “Probably that’s fair. Not my style,” said the old soldier, who nearly lost a foot in combat in Vietnam. There was, he added cryptically, “a lot of turmoil” at the Pentagon in the lead-up to the war. Was that Rumsfeld’s fault? “Partly,” said Shinseki. Did Rumsfeld bully General Franks, the overall invasion commander? “You’ll have to ask Franks,” said Shinseki, who indicated that he had talked long enough. “I walked away from all this two and a half years ago,” he said.
The former four-star general appeared to be torn between his strong sense of duty and an uneasy conscience. The moral dilemma is as old as the republic. When does a military officer stand up to—and push back against—his civilian masters? And when does he just salute and say, “Can do, sir”?
It’s a question of enormous consequence for a democracy with the world’s most powerful military. The balance between the civilian and military is precarious. The model may be Lincoln, firing his commanders until he found one (Ulysses S. Grant) who would fight. But the modern reality is messier. It is generally forgotten that Franklin Roosevelt rejected the recommendation of his sainted Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall to invade Europe in 1942—which would have been a fiasco. Harry Truman was widely vilified for—wisely—recalling the great Gen. Douglas A. MacArthur when MacArthur wanted to widen the Korean War by attacking China. On the other hand, Lyndon Johnson overreached when he stayed up at night picking bombing targets during the Vietnam War. In 1997, Army Gen. Hugh Shelton, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assigned the top brass to read “Dereliction of Duty,” a classic study accusing Vietnam-era generals of failing to stand up to their civilian bosses.
Somehow, the lesson did not sink in. Before the Iraq invasion, the senior military did not force a discussion of what to do after the war was won. Rumsfeld was obsessed with the plan of attack, but not the aftermath. The consequences are by now a familiar litany: Rumsfeld demanded a swift, lean force that worked superbly to depose Saddam Hussein—but was woefully inadequate to take over the more onerous task of securing and rebuilding Iraq. Only now are the retired generals coming forth to complain of Rumsfeld’s bullying and demanding his resignation.
The Revolt of the Retired Generals has created considerable discomfort in the E-Ring of the Pentagon and at the White House. President George W. Bush felt compelled last week to issue a written statement expressing his “full support” for the SecDef. For now, Bush has no intention of firing Rumsfeld. “He likes him,” says a close friend of the president’s, who requested anonymity in discussing such a sensitive matter. “He’s not blind. He knows Rumsfeld sticks his foot in it.” Adds a senior Bush aide, who declined to be named discussing the president’s sentiments: “I haven’t seen any evidence that their personal rapport is at all diminishing. They see each other often and talk often.” Rumsfeld says he has twice offered his resignation to Bush, who has declined it.
The old generals can be quite biting about Rumsfeld; retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni wrote an op-ed calling the secretary of Defense “incompetent strategically, operationally, and tactically.” But their criticisms are probably best understood as “the first salvos in the war over ‘Who Lost Iraq’,” says Douglas Macgregor, a retired U.S. Army colonel whose book “Breaking the Phalanx” was influential in inspiring the military’s blitzkrieg assault on Baghdad. “Yes, Rumsfeld should go,” says Macgregor. “But a lot of the generals should be fired, too. They share the blame for the mess we are in.”
Rumsfeld is the chief villain of a very influential new book, “Cobra II,” by retired Marine Corps Gen. Bernard Trainor and New York Times reporter Michael Gordon. In their detailed, thorough accounting of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Rumsfeld is shown badgering the reluctant but mostly quiescent generals into attacking with as few troops as possible. Despite all the talk of the war’s being hatched by a neoconservative cabal, Rumsfeld himself appears indifferent to ideology; he was profoundly suspicious of the notion that America could bring democracy to Iraq. Rather, he focused on forcing a transformation of the hidebound, heavy-laden, slow-moving Army. Rumsfeld disdains “nation-building” and blithely counts on the Iraqis to rebuild their own country. But right after the invasion he signed off on orders by the American proconsul, Paul Bremer, to disband the Iraqi Army and fire most of the top civil servants—leaving the country vulnerable to chaos and a growing insurgency.
The publication of “Cobra II,” plus talk-show comments from Zinni, the former chief of CENTCOM who was promoting his own book, “The Battle for Peace,” appear to have encouraged retired generals to attack Rumsfeld in public. “There was a lot of pent-up agony,” says Trainor. “The dam broke.”
One of the most powerful indictments came from Marine Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, who was chief of operations for the Joint Staff during the early planning of the Iraq invasion. Writing in Time magazine, Newbold declared, “I now regret that I did not more openly challenge those who were determined to invade a country whose actions were peripheral to the real threat—Al Qaeda.” Actually, it was not the job of a uniformed officer, even a high-ranking one like Newbold, to challenge the president’s decision to invade Iraq. That’s a political judgment: it’s up to the president and Congress to decide whom to fight. The military’s job is to win the fight.
Still, Newbold has a point when he writes that the decision “was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions—or bury the results.” The real responsibility for Iraq, of course, lies with President Bush. Together with Vice President Dick Cheney (draft-deferred in Vietnam) and Rumsfeld (Navy jet pilot who did not see combat), Bush (Texas National Guard pilot) seemed determined to brush past or roll over the cautious national-security bureaucracy. Bush made little or no effort to prod his national-security staff to ask tough questions, such as how the Sunnis and Shiites would bury centuries of resentment when Saddam was gone. (Bush has said he listens to the generals, but it does not appear he heard any words of caution.) The get-tough trio essentially cut out Gen. Colin Powell, the secretary of State and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was regarded as too squishy, too much a creature of the go-slow bureaucracy.
Powell has come in for some criticism for not trying harder to slow the Bush juggernaut into Iraq. And the various generals have taken talk-show grief for not speaking out until their pensions were safely vested in retirement. But it is important to understand the military culture to appreciate why more soldiers do not cross their civilian bosses. It is true enough that “political generals” get ahead by never rocking the boat. And it is fair to say that Rumsfeld’s shabby treatment of Shinseki—the secretary did not bother to attend the retirement ceremony of the Army chief of staff, whose replacement was leaked 14 months before his term was up—had a chilling effect on other officers.
But it is unlikely that senior military officers go to sleep at night thinking that if only they kowtow a little more they will win that next star on their shoulder. They are far more likely to believe that their duty is to do the best they can with what they’ve got: the military culture breeds a “can do” attitude in its most successful officers. They are acutely conscious that squabbling at the top can be a morale-crusher for troops who must risk their lives in battle.
Rumsfeld’s persona and management style are grating to many buttoned-up, by-the-book officers. He constantly asks questions, often with sarcasm and in-your-face one-upmanship. Briefing the secretary can be an intimidating exercise. Rumsfeld has been known to get so hung up on a single slide, peppering some hapless colonel or general with antagonistic queries, that the briefer never gets a chance to finish his tidy, orderly presentation. Some soldiers like the macho give-and-take, or at least get used to it. “When you walk in to him, you’ve got to be prepared, you’ve got to know what you’re talking about,” says Marine Gen. Mike DeLong, deputy CENTCOM commander from 2000 to 2003. “If you don’t, you are summarily dismissed. But that’s the way it is, and he’s effective.”
Other officers, particularly those with less exposure, just find Rumsfeld to be an impatient meddler who jumps around, nosing into subjects he knows nothing about and should leave to the professionals. Rumsfeld himself seems impervious to criticism. Last week, at a Pentagon news conference, confronted by reporters quoting from embittered retired generals, he dismissively shot back, “There’s nothing wrong with people having opinions … you ought to expect that. It’s historic. It’s always been the case, and I see nothing really very new or surprising about it.”
But in fact, Rumsfeld is bothered by the furor. “He’s concerned about the impact on the institution,” says Lawrence DiRita, Rumsfeld’s counselor. The controversy, DiRita says, can “make generals clam up around civilians, and civilians wonder, ‘Is this the next general who is going to leak to The New York Times?’ ” Rumsfeld worries that the whole concept of civilian control is “turned on its head” by the revolt of the generals. “Conceptually, institutionally, that a handful of disgruntled generals could determine who will lead the Department of Defense—that’s not the way it’s supposed to work,” says DiRita.
As a practical matter, the rebellion may secure Rumsfeld’s job. “No president is going to be bullied by a bunch of retired general officers into firing a secretary of Defense,” says Thomas Donnelly, the editor of Armed Forces Journal. Of course, by defending Rumsfeld, the president has “moved into the target area,” notes General Trainor. “Now the Democrats can say, ‘Look, the president’s defending an incompetent’.”
Rumsfeld is not the sort to fall on his sword, at least willingly. He liked being teased as “Matinee Idol” by President Bush after he held forth so confidently (and, to many Americans, reassuringly) about “killing the enemy” in the traumatic months after 9/11. He has only retirement to look forward to, a boring prospect for a vigorous 73-year-old. His advisers do not expect him to quit any time soon. For many months, on a shelf behind DiRita’s desk in his old Pentagon office, stood a Rumsfeld doll that was sold in PXes on military bases after the war in Afghanistan. Pull a string on the backside and a mechanical version of Rumsfeld’s rich voice intones, “I don’t do diplomacy.” DiRita attached a slip of paper near the doll’s mouth with his boss’s mantra. It reads faster. DiRita’s not sure what happened to the doll. But his boss, he says, is still charging forward, trying to change an institution that sometimes resists change. In the weeks ahead, he is sure to meet more resistance from old soldiers who think he is not so much a change agent as a wrecking ball.
He is country rock’s biggest icon, and he is angry. Recorded in secret, his forthcoming album savages the war in Iraq. One track says it all: ‘Impeach the President’
By Andrew Buncombe
17 April 2006
It started as a rumour – gossip shared by fans on internet chat sites. Could it true, they asked? Could Neil Young, a cultural lodestone for a generation of country rock fans, really be turning his attention to President George Bush and the war in Iraq? Now Young himself has confirmed it. Not only has he recorded an entire album about the conflict, but in one of the songs he spells out who he thinks is to blame for the ongoing chaos and violence and what the consequences for that person should be. That track is called “Impeach the President”.
“I just finished a new record – a power trio with trumpet and 100 voices,” the 60-year-old says in a ticker-tape message posted at the bottom of his official website. “Metal folk protest? It’s called Living with the War.”
Further details about the album came from Jonathan Demme, the film maker who produced the recently released documentary Heart of Gold about the singer-songwriter. “Neil just finished writing and recording – with no warning – a new album called Living With War,” he told the music magazine Harp by e-mail. “It all happened in three days … It is a brilliant electric assault, accompanied by a 100-voice choir, on Bush and the war in Iraq … Truly mind blowing. Will be in stores soon.”
Those who have followed Young’s twisting career, stretching over more than four decades – from the psychedelia-tinged rock of the folk-rock band Buffalo Springfield in the Sixties, his joining up with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, his huge solo success in 1972 with Harvest, as well as the experimentation of the Eighties and finally his return to country rock – may be a little surprised by Young’s decision to launch such a blunt political assault against the Bush administration.
Indeed, in the aftermath of the al-Qa’ida attacks on the US of 11 September 2001, it seemed that Young had taken the side with the President and supported the steps he was taking in the so-called “war on terror”. Having written a song, “Let’s Roll”, to honour the passengers on board United Airlines’ Flight 93 who apparently fought with the hijackers and forced the plane to crash-land in rural Pennsylvania rather than letting them use it to target the White House, he announced his support for the Patriot Act. The Act, which gave law-enforcement bodies a whole range of new powers, was condemned by many campaigners as an assault on civil liberties. Young said at the time he thought the legislation was necessary.
Speaking at an awards banquet in Hollywood where he had received the Spirit of Liberty award by the liberal campaign group People for the American Way, Young announced: “To protect our freedoms it seems we’re going to have to relinquish some of our freedoms for a short period of time.” But now it appears that for whatever reason, the Canadian-born singer’s support for President Bush has run it’s course and that his latest incarnation is as a protest singer. He has joined list of musicians such as the Dixie Chicks, Lou Reed, Dave Matthews, Steve Earle and REM who have used their platforms to speak out against the war or the administration in general. His song urging that Mr Bush be impeached reportedly accuses him of “lying” and features a rap with the President’s voice set against the choir singing “flip-flop” – an accusation Mr Bush and other Republicans aimed at John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, during the 2004 election campaign.
Meanwhile the lyrics to the new album’s title track include the words: “I’m living with war right now, And when the dawn breaks I see my fellow man, And on the flat screen we kill and we’re being killed again, And when the night falls I pray for peace, Try to remember peace.”
Whilst details of the 10-song recording are still incomplete – it is known that he is accompanied by Chad Cromwell on drums, Rick Rosas on bass and Tommy Bray on trumpet – a further insight into what to expect has come from the California-based musician Alicia Morgan, who was recruited to be part of the 100-strong choir. In an entry on her blog on Friday she wrote: “Have you, like me, been recalling the great protest songs of the Sixties, and wondered where the new protest songs are? Yesterday, I found out.” She said she and the other singers read off the lyrics as they flashed onto a giant screen, with cheers of approval coming up from the choir. With the main tracks having been previously recorded, Young himself directed the backing singers. “Turns out the whole thing is a classic beautiful protest record. The session was like being at a 12-hour peace rally,” she said.
“Every time new lyrics would come up on the screen, there were cheers, tears and applause. It was a spiritual experience … We finished the session by singing an a cappella version of “America the Beautiful” and there was not a dry eye in the house.” She added: “I’ve never been at a recording session that was more like being at church. Heck, I’ve never been to a church that was more like a church than that session.” Speaking from Sherman Oaks, California, yesterday Morgan told The Independent that many people liked Neil Young because he “pisses everybody off”.
She said: “I have always enjoyed his music and respected him. People have told me he used to be a Reagan supporter but I don’t think he is bound by any ideology other than his own. He writes and sings about whatever is going on in his life. Sometimes it’s political – sometimes it’s not.”
Asked if she thought Young had enjoyed the 12-hour session, at which they completed the 10 tracks, she added: “Very much so.” Young, who has served on the board of Farm Aid, fellow singer Willie Nelson’s project to help rural Americans, for more than 20 years, is not the first person to have suggested the impeachment of Mr Bush. With his approval ratings in the low 30s, Democratic Senator Russ Feingold has sought to have Congress pass a motion to censure the President, though the effort has received only limited support from Mr Feingold’s Democratic colleagues.
Meanwhile Mr Bush can apparently do nothing to shift his ratings, the worst for a president in second term since the days of Richard Nixon, for whom, incidentally, Young also wrote a song. Young, who has said he has previously voted for the Republicans, was apparently inspired to write the words for the song “Campaigner” – originally called “Requiem for a President” – after watching television news about Nixon’s wife suffering a stroke and seeing the broken president arrive at the hospital. In the song he wrote: “I am a lonely visitor, I came too late to cause a stir, Though I campaigned all my life towards that goal.”
Songs of shame
By Geneviève Roberts
* ROLLING STONES
Despite being famously apolitical, the band launched an attack on George Bush in their latest album, A Bigger Bang. The track “Sweet Neo Con” contains the lyrics: “You call yourself a Christian, I call you a hypocrite/You call yourself a patriot, Well I think you’re full of shit.”
Despite Jagger saying: “It’s not aimed personally at President Bush. It wouldn’t be called ‘Sweet Neo Con’ if it was,” Stones fans were not convinced, especially as Jagger had previously said of the tune: “It is direct. Keith said: ‘It is not really metaphorical. I think he’s a bit worried because he lives in the US. But I don’t.”
* EMINEM
In 2004, rap artist Eminem urged fans to vote against George Bush in the US election by issuing a music video specifically to criticise the Iraq war. The lyrics for “Mosh”: “Let the President answer on high anarchy, strap him with an AK-47, let him go fight his own war,” accompanied a video depicting a US soldier arriving home from Baghdad, to be told he must return.
* DIXIE CHICKS
“Not Ready to Make Nice”, to be released in the US in May, is an attack on people who sent the Texan band death threats after they criticised Mr Bush. Singer Nathalie Maines, performing in London on the eve of the Iraq war, said: “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.” Many US radio stations dropped the band and their CDs were smashed.
* GEORGE MICHAEL
In 2002, he released the single “Shoot the Dog”, which featured a cartoon video of Tony Blair and Mr Bush’s poodle on the White House lawn. The backlash was so forceful – the New York Post called him a “past-his-prime pop pervert” – that Michael feared he would not be able to return to the US.
Apr 17
By TOM HAYS
NEW YORK – Along a gritty stretch of street in Brooklyn, police this month quietly launched an ambitious plan to combat street crime and terrorism. But instead of cops on the beat, wireless video cameras peer down from lamp posts about 30 feet above the sidewalk.
They were the first installment of a program to place 500 cameras throughout the city at a cost of $9 million. Hundreds of additional cameras could follow if the city receives $81.5 million in federal grants it has requested to safeguard Lower Manhattan and parts of midtown with a surveillance “ring of steel” modeled after security measures in London’s financial district.
Officials of the New York Police Department _ which considers itself at the forefront of counterterrorism since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks _ claim the money would be well-spent, especially since the revelations that al-Qaida members once cased the New York Stock Exchange and other financial institutions.
“We have every reason to believe New York remains in the cross-hairs, so we have to do what it takes to protect the city,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said last week at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
The city already has about 1,000 cameras in the subways, with 2,100 scheduled to be in place by 2008. An additional 3,100 cameras monitor city housing projects.
New York’s approach isn’t unique. Chicago spent roughly $5 million on a 2,000-camera system. Homeland Security officials in Washington plan to spend $9.8 million for surveillance cameras and sensors on a rail line near the Capitol. And Philadelphia has increasingly relied on video surveillance.
Privacy advocates say the NYPD’s camera plan needs more study and safeguards to preserve privacy and guard against abuses like racial profiling and voyeurism.
The department “is installing cameras first and asking questions later,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Police officials insist that law-abiding New Yorkers have nothing to fear because the cameras will be restricted to public areas. The police commissioner recently established a panel of four corporate defense lawyers to advise the department on surveillance policies.
“The police department must be flexible to meet an ever changing threat,” Kelly said. “We also have to ensure whatever measures we take are reasonable as the Constitution requires. That’s the only way to retain public support and preserve individual freedoms.”
Lieberman concedes cameras can help investigators identify suspects once a crime has been committed, but argues they can’t prevent crime. She cited a 2002 study which concluded that surveillance cameras used in 14 British cities had little or no impact on crime rates _ just as they didn’t keep terrorists from bombing the London subway system last year.
“The London experience shouldn’t be misconstrued that the ‘ring of steel’ prevents terrorism,” she said. “But that’s how it’s being pitched.”
Still, New York police were impressed that their British counterparts drew on 80,000 videotapes to identify and retrace the routes of the subway system suicide bombers and the suspects in a failed follow-up attack.
Timothy Horner, a specialist with the Kroll security firm and a former NYPD captain, said the measures make sense.
“It’s not a cure-all, and the department is not thinking that way,” he said. “But we really want law enforcement to use whatever tools they can to keep us safe.”
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moe and i took the dogs here yesterday, as the weather was nice, we both had the day off, and we haven’t gone anywhere like this for a long time. on our way back, we went past the south end of paine field and there were about half a ton of state patrol and king county sheriffs on motorcycles, hanging around looking official and trying to guard the perimeter… i guess this is at least part of the reason why…
i ordered replacement poles for the tent, so that this year i won’t have to make do with rope and duct-tape at OCF.
449
wurf.
i took my keyboards over to
also i have to get my workshop set up. i got email yesterday from the National "Tobacco" Alliance who “are looking for new suppliers for churchwarden style tobacco pipes.” and also i got email from Pakataş Pipes who are looking for someone to sell their pipes…
Based on the lj interests lists of those who share my more unusual interests, the interests suggestion meme thinks I might be interested in
1. krishna score: 82
2. ayurveda score: 44
3. hare krishna score: 44
4. bhakti score: 43
5. krsna score: 42
6. iskcon score: 39
7. radharani score: 39
8. krishna consciousness score: 36
9. japa score: 35
10. a.c. bhaktivedanta swami prabhupada score: 34
11. bhajans score: 33
12. srila prabhupada score: 32
13. kirtan score: 31
14. om score: 30
15. prema score: 30
16. mantras score: 30
17. hermeticism score: 30
18. tulasi score: 29
19. hindu score: 28
20. durga score: 28
changed by
it seems to think that i have no clue who the founder of the vaisnava cult in the united states is, because two of them actually are the founder of the vaisnava cult in the united states, five of them are directly related to the vaisnava cult, and ten of them are indirectly related to the vaisnava cult… for a total of 17 out of 20. if i didn’t know who that person was, i might be tempted to find out more about him, but since i already know who he is and what the cult he founded is all about, i think i’ll ignore them instead.
besides which, i already have 150 interests anyway, and can’t put up more without deleting some of the ones i have, and considering that i’m already listing interests in the bio section of my profile, i think i’ll pass for now.
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448
13 April 2006
By Peter Aldhous
SITTING in a culture dish, a layer of chicken heart cells beats in synchrony. But this muscle layer was not sliced from an intact heart, nor even grown laboriously in the lab. Instead, it was “printed”, using a technology that could be the future of tissue engineering.
Gabor Forgacs, a biophysicist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, described his “bioprinting” technique last week at the Experimental Biology 2006 meeting in San Francisco. It relies on droplets of “bioink”, clumps of cells a few hundred micrometres in diameter, which Forgacs has found behave just like a liquid.
This means that droplets placed next to one another will flow together and fuse, forming layers, rings or other shapes, depending on how they were deposited. To print 3D structures, Forgacs and his colleagues alternate layers of supporting gel, dubbed “biopaper”, with the bioink droplets. To build tubes that could serve as blood vessels, for instance, they lay down successive rings containing muscle and endothelial cells, which line our arteries and veins. “We can print any desired structure, in principle,” Forgacs told the meeting.
Other tissue engineers have tried printing 3D structures, using modified ink-jet printers which spray cells suspended in liquid (New Scientist, 25 January 2003, p 16). Now Forgacs and a company called Sciperio have developed a device with printing heads that extrude clumps of cells mechanically so that they emerge one by one from a micropipette. This results in a higher density of cells in the final printed structure, meaning that an authentic tissue structure can be created faster.
Cells seem to survive the printing process well. When layers of chicken heart cells were printed they quickly begin behaving as they would in a real organ. “After 19 hours or so, the whole structure starts to beat in a synchronous manner,” says Forgacs.
Most tissue engineers trying to build 3D structures start with a scaffold of the desired shape, which they seed with cells and grow for weeks in the lab. This is how Anthony Atala of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and his colleagues grew the bladders which he successfully implanted into seven people (New Scientist, 8 April 2006, p 10). But if tissue engineering goes mainstream, faster and cheaper methods will be a boon. “Bioprinting is the way to go,” says Vladimir Mironov, a tissue engineer at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston.
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Guys With Pies… sort of like Big Bois With Poise, but with a web site.
Condom Education for the Bored
ProTools Free for Os9
other Os9 audio tools
- http://www.kvraudio.com/get.php?mode=results&st=q&s=12
- http://www.audibleoddities.com/twerk/software/drool_string_ukelele_v1.5.sit
- http://www.audibleoddities.com/twerk/software/CamelToe_v1.1-Twerk.sit
- http://www.audibleoddities.com/twerk/software/BurntToast1.2ns.sit
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By Ryan Singel
Apr, 12, 2006
AT&T is seeking the return of technical documents presented in a lawsuit that allegedly detail how the telecom giant helped the government set up a massive internet wiretap operation in its San Francisco facilities.
In papers filed late Monday, AT&T argued that confidential technical documents provided by an ex-AT&T technician to the Electronic Frontier Foundation shouldn’t be used as evidence in the case and should be returned.
The documents, which the EFF filed under a temporary seal last Wednesday, purportedly detail how AT&T diverts internet traffic to the National Security Agency via a secret room in San Francisco and allege that such rooms exist in other AT&T switching centers.
The EFF filed the class-action lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Northern California in January, seeking damages from AT&T on behalf of AT&T customers for alleged violation of state and federal laws.
Mark Klein, a former technician who worked for AT&T for 22 years, provided three technical documents, totaling 140 pages, to the EFF and to The New York Times, which first reported last December that the Bush administration was eavesdropping on citizens’ phone calls without obtaining warrants.
Klein issued a detailed public statement last week, saying he came forward because he believes the government’s extrajudicial spying extended beyond wiretapping of phone calls between Americans and a party with suspected ties to terrorists, and included wholesale monitoring of the nation’s internet communications.
AT&T built a secret room in its San Francisco switching station that funnels internet traffic data from AT&T Worldnet dialup customers and traffic from AT&T’s massive internet backbone to the NSA, according to a statement from Klein.
Klein’s duties included connecting new fiber-optic circuits to that room, which housed data-mining equipment built by a company called Narus, according to his statement.
Narus’ promotional materials boast that its equipment can scan billions of bits of internet traffic per second, including analyzing the contents of e-mails and e-mail attachments and even allowing playback of internet phone calls.
While AT&T’s open filings did not confirm the details of Klein’s statement, they did not dispute the legitimacy of his claims, and the company’s filing included a sealed affidavit attesting to the sensitivity of the documents.
The company asked for a hearing Thursday to determine whether the documents could be used in the class-action lawsuit, whether they would be unsealed or whether the EFF would have to return them. The EFF filed a rebuttal, calling that time frame unworkable and accusing AT&T of not following normal court rules.
AT&T’s lawyers also told the court that intense press coverage surrounding the case, including Wired News’ publication of Klein’s statement, was revealing the company’s trade secrets, “causing grave injury to AT&T.” The lawyers argued that unsealing the documents “would cause AT&T great harm and potentially jeopardize AT&T’s network, making it vulnerable to hackers, and worse.”
The EFF filed the documents last week under a temporary seal when it asked the judge to force AT&T to stop the alleged internet spying until the case goes to trial.
Klein’s statement and documents are the only direct evidence filed so far by the EFF, and without them its case could be weakened.
It is not clear whether AT&T has served legal papers to Klein.
As of last week, Klein was represented by Miles Ehrlich, who until January served as a U.S. attorney in San Francisco, prosecuting white-collar crime. Klein is now also represented by two lawyers from the powerhouse law firm Morrison & Foerster, including James J. Brosnahan, who is best known for representing John Walker Lindh, the Marin County, California, man found fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The EFF declined to comment on the filing, while AT&T did not return a call seeking comment. The case is Hepting v. AT&T.
By CAROLINE ERVIN
April 12, 2006
ATF agents are always on alert for anything suspicious — including ninjas.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearm agents, on campus Tuesday for Project Safe Neighborhoods training, detained a “suspicious individual” near the Georgia Center, University Police Chief Jimmy Williamson said.
Jeremiah Ransom, a sophomore from Macon, was leaving a Wesley Foundation pirate vs. ninja event when he was detained.
After being held in investigative detention, he was found to have violated no criminal laws and was not arrested.
“It was surreal,” Ransom said. “I was jogging from Wesley to Snelling when I heard someone yell ‘freeze.’”
Ransom said he thought a friend was playing a joke before he realized officers had guns drawn and pointed at him.
ATF agents had noticed Ransom’s suspicious behavior and clothing and gave chase, apprehending him, Williamson said.
“Agents noticed someone wearing a bandanna across the face and acting in a somewhat suspicious manner, peeping around the corner,” said ATF special agent in charge Vanessa McLemore.
Ransom was wearing black sweatpants and an athletic T-shirt with one red bandanna covering the bottom half of his face and another covering the top of his head, Williamson said.
“Seeing someone with something across the face, from a federal standpoint — that’s not right,” McLemore said, explaining why agents believed something to be amiss.
Agents noticed Ransom peering around a corner and said when police sirens sounded, he took off running.
After chasing Ransom and identifying themselves, ATF agents detained him, turning him over once University Police arrived, McLemore said.
Ransom said Williamson told him the incident should not have been handled in such a manner and he would file a complaint with the ATF.
“I was in shock, to say the least,” Ransom said.
and, from a spurrious news source,
I was going to post this in the “Expose the big lie” thread but after I wrote it I thought it was interesting enough to merit a thread of its own. This is all good information, personally verified or witnessed by none other than me, but I will not answer any questions about it or go into any detail other than what I’ve already typed out. I may reply with more information or anecdotes if I see fit, but I’ve pretty much already scraped the barrel of my experiences.
These are some facts I have witnessed and learned through my employment. Take it at face value, believe it or don’t believe it, because I’m not providing corroborating pictures, details, or evidence beyond my own testimony.
Homeland security buys in bulk and at great premium millions of dollars of useless personal appliances from China, such as rice cookers, nose hair trimmers, massage wands, and heating pads, boxes them up, and buries them in railroad shipping containers in the Arizona desert for no reason whatsoever other than to spend its budget and prevent sub-agencies from getting the funds. I suspect that the money goes to a middleman in order to secretly siphon funds into foreign organizations which we can’t support over the table, but this is just me trying to find a justification for this massive and intentional government waste.
Donald Rumsfeld needs to wear iced underwear because of some medical condition, and he has his secret service detail hold his spares. He was recently getting uncontrollable long-term erections and had to change up his medical treatments. The underwear and the erections is why he uses a standing desk, not because he is some super-man. He also wears nylon stockings, not because he’s gay, but to control some vascular problem with his legs which causes him intense pain.
President Bush uses anti-depressant medication, a lot of it, at a stupendous dosage, and he is hiding it from the American public. This is the real reason he stopped drinking. Because of the dosage, he is also impotent.
Tom Ridge carries 20 credit cards with him at all times, each one with a very low limit. I have never heard of him using one, ever, but he has them. He also wears his socks inside-out, and will flip the fuck out and walk strangely if he is forced to wear them properly, because it drives him crazy. All of his socks must be laundered right side in and then turned inside out before they are returned to him. He gave specific instructions about handling his food, and not allowing his vegetables to touch any other food item on the plate. His utensils must be steamed over boiling water. He will not eat soup which hasn’t been boiled within the past 20 minutes or which he has not prepared himself. If any of these rules are violated, he flies into a rage, turns beet red, and will not eat a single thing. He has his personal attendants confirm over and over that the food is as he likes it. He also shaves his forearms and hands because he can’t stand the idea of body hair on his arms. He demands that his bedsheets are bleach white and changed fresh every night and he sleeps in a separate bed in a big, tight, body-length nylon sleeve, with a fan blowing over him at full power. He is terrified of animals which have fur or hair longer than one inch, and will not go near curly hair of any kind, even on people. At one time he ran from his office and demanded that someone look under everything for a rodent which did not and could not exist, then he had the entire place wiped down with disinfectant and vacuumed twice. While this was done he couldn’t even bear to look at the door, or come within 20 feet of his office. He was in hysterics.
President Bush, when dining at the white-house, does not eat any item of food which has not been first sniffed by a trained dog before being prepared. Think about that.
Word among the staff is that Cheney was drunk when he shot that lawyer, and secluded himself for a day to sober up and avoid felony firearms charges. I don’t have any direct information on this because the guys with him at the time are not talking. This is totally unconfirmed, but I think it is plausible.
Dick Cheney has chronic gum problems and his breath smells like shit as a result. He is also a CLOSE TALKER. He keeps a small bottle of diluted hydrogen peroxide which he rinses with every hour on the hour, and he swallows it instead of spitting. He also picks his nose vigorously (violently) and hums loudly and tunelessly to himself while taking shits.
There is a sealed room in the whitehouse which once held a half-ton block of cheese for about 30 years.
The White house is planting its own men among the press agents at press conferences.
The white house lawn is mowed every other day by the same man humming the same tune.
Despite all of this craziness, there is nothing strange whatsoever about Condoleeza Rice. She is completely balanced and normal, if slightly robotic in her personal demeanor. She smells very nice at all times. She does, however, constantly check her investments online from her office when she thinks that nobody is looking, and she has slept at her desk on multiple occasions.
There is an administrative law judge who sits in an office in a building near the white-house, earns around 200k per year and has a secretary, and he does nothing except sit, read, and listen to classical music all day. His secretary likewise does nothing. He gets meals taken to him from the White-house kitchen, and is so lonely that he latches on to whoever gets sent and talks to them for hours about the korean war. His family is all dead and his secretary hates him. In a drawer in his desk he has an old revolver, which he got in there somehow despite that he shouldn’t have been able to bring it in. I think he will shoot himself one day.
The “undisclosed location” is usually a local police officer training ground or state trooper college. Shh.
445
Many codes intended to protect gays from harassment are illegal, conservatives argue.
By Stephanie Simon
April 10, 2006
ATLANTA — Ruth Malhotra went to court last month for the right to be intolerant.
Malhotra says her Christian faith compels her to speak out against homosexuality. But the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she’s a senior, bans speech that puts down others because of their sexual orientation.
Malhotra sees that as an unacceptable infringement on her right to religious expression. So she’s demanding that Georgia Tech revoke its tolerance policy.
| FOR THE RECORD: Religious expression: An article in Monday’s Section A said Gregory S. Baylor of the Christian Legal Society viewed homosexuality as a lifestyle choice. In fact, he does not have a stance on that issue. As the article noted, he supports policies that protect people from discrimination based on race, gender and other inborn traits. He asserts that antidiscrimination policies regarding homosexuality are different because they protect people based on conduct. Baylor’s organization seeks to exempt religious groups from those policies. |
With her lawsuit, the 22-year-old student joins a growing campaign to force public schools, state colleges and private workplaces to eliminate policies protecting gays and lesbians from harassment. The religious right aims to overturn a broad range of common tolerance programs: diversity training that promotes acceptance of gays and lesbians, speech codes that ban harsh words against homosexuality, anti-discrimination policies that require college clubs to open their membership to all.
The Rev. Rick Scarborough, a leading evangelical, frames the movement as the civil rights struggle of the 21st century. “Christians,” he said, “are going to have to take a stand for the right to be Christian.”
In that spirit, the Christian Legal Society, an association of judges and lawyers, has formed a national group to challenge tolerance policies in federal court. Several nonprofit law firms — backed by major ministries such as Focus on the Family and Campus Crusade for Christ — already take on such cases for free.
The legal argument is straightforward: Policies intended to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination end up discriminating against conservative Christians. Evangelicals have been suspended for wearing anti-gay T-shirts to high school, fired for denouncing Gay Pride Month at work, reprimanded for refusing to attend diversity training. When they protest tolerance codes, they’re labeled intolerant.
A recent survey by the Anti-Defamation League found that 64% of American adults — including 80% of evangelical Christians — agreed with the statement “Religion is under attack in this country.”
“The message is, you’re free to worship as you like, but don’t you dare talk about it outside the four walls of your church,” said Stephen Crampton, chief counsel for the American Family Assn. Center for Law and Policy, which represents Christians who feel harassed.
Critics dismiss such talk as a right-wing fundraising ploy. “They’re trying to develop a persecution complex,” said Jeremy Gunn, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief.
Others fear the banner of religious liberty could be used to justify all manner of harassment.
“What if a person felt their religious view was that African Americans shouldn’t mingle with Caucasians, or that women shouldn’t work?” asked Jon Davidson, legal director of the gay rights group Lambda Legal.
Christian activist Gregory S. Baylor responds to such criticism angrily. He says he supports policies that protect people from discrimination based on race and gender. But he draws a distinction that infuriates gay rights activists when he argues that sexual orientation is different — a lifestyle choice, not an inborn trait.
By equating homosexuality with race, Baylor said, tolerance policies put conservative evangelicals in the same category as racists. He predicts the government will one day revoke the tax-exempt status of churches that preach homosexuality is sinful or that refuse to hire gays and lesbians.
“Think how marginalized racists are,” said Baylor, who directs the Christian Legal Society’s Center for Law and Religious Freedom. “If we don’t address this now, it will only get worse.”
Christians are fighting back in a case involving Every Nation Campus Ministries at California State University. Student members of the ministry on the Long Beach and San Diego campuses say their mission is to model a virtuous lifestyle for their peers. They will not accept as members gays, lesbians or anyone who considers homosexuality “a natural part of God’s created order.”
Legal analysts agree that the ministry, as a private organization, has every right to exclude gays; the Supreme Court affirmed that principle in a case involving the Boy Scouts in 2000. At issue is whether the university must grant official recognition to a student group that discriminates.
The students say denying them recognition — and its attendant benefits, such as funding — violates their free-speech rights and discriminates against their conservative theology. Christian groups at public colleges in other states have sued using similar arguments. Several of those lawsuits were settled out of court, with the groups prevailing.
‘We just found the chain of evolution, the continuity through time’
By Seth Borenstein
April 12, 2006
WASHINGTON – The latest fossil unearthed from a human ancestral hot spot in Africa allows scientists to link together the most complete chain of human evolution so far.
The 4.2 million-year-old fossil discovered in northeastern Ethiopia helps scientists fill in the gaps of how human ancestors made the giant leap from one species to another. That’s because the newest fossil, the species Australopithecus anamensis, was found in the region of the Middle Awash — where seven other human-like species spanning nearly 6 million years and three major phases of human development were previously discovered.
“We just found the chain of evolution, the continuity through time,” study co-author and Ethiopian anthropologist Berhane Asfaw said in a phone interview from Addis Ababa. “One form evolved to another. This is evidence of evolution in one place through time.”
The findings were reported Thursday in the scientific journal Nature.
The species anamensis is not new, but its location is what helps explain the shift from one early phase of human-like development to the next, scientists say. All eight species were within an easy day’s walk of each other.
Until now, what scientists had were snapshots of human evolution scattered around the world. Finding everything all in one general area makes those snapshots more of a mini home movie of evolution.
“It’s like 12 frames of a home movie, but a home movie covering 6 million years,” said study lead author Tim White, co-director of Human Evolution Research Center at University of California at Berkeley.
“The key here is the sequences,” White said. “It’s about a mile thickness of rocks in the Middle Awash and in it we can see all three phases of human evolution.”
Modern man belongs to the genus Homo, which is a subgroup in the family of hominids. What evolved into Homo was likely the genus Australopithecus (once called “man-ape”), which includes the famed 3.2 million-year-old “Lucy” fossil found three decades ago. A key candidate for the genus that evolved into Australopithecus is called Ardipithecus. And Thursday’s finding is important in bridging — but not completely — the gap between Australopithecus and Ardipithecus.
In 1994, a 4.4 million-year-old partial skeleton of the species Ardipithecus ramidus — the most recent Ardipithecus species — was found about six miles from the latest discovery.
“This appears to be the link between Australopithecus and Ardipithecus as two different species,” White said. The major noticeable difference between the phases of man can be seen in Australopithecus’ bigger chewing teeth to eat harder food, he said.
While it’s looking more likely, it is not a sure thing that Ardipithecus evolved into Australopithecus, he said. The finding does not completely rule out Ardipithecus dying off as a genus and Australopithecus developing independently.
The connections between Ardipithecus and Australopithecus have been theorized since an anamensis fossil was first found in Kenya 11 years ago. This draws the lines better, said Alan Walker of Penn State University, who found the first anamensis and is not part of White’s team.
Rick Potts, director of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program, agreed: “For those people who are tied up in doing the whole human family tree, being able to connect the branches is a very important thing to do.”
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By David E. Sanger and David Johnston
WASHINGTON – From the beginning days of the CIA leak investigation in 2003, the Bush White House has insisted there was never an effort to discredit Joseph C. Wilson, the man who emerged as the most damaging critic of the administration’s case that Saddam Hussein was seeking to build nuclear weapons.
But now the White House – and specifically President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney – have been pitched back into the center of the nearly three-year controversy, this time because of a prosecutor’s court filing in the case that asserts there was “a strong desire by many, including multiple people in the White House,” to undermine Wilson.
The new assertions by the special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has put White House officials on the spot in a way they have not been for months, as attention in the leak case seems to be shifting away from the White House to the pretrial procedural skirmishing in the perjury and obstruction charge against Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr.
Fitzgerald’s court filing talks not of an effort to level with Americans but of “a plan to discredit, punish or seek revenge against Mr. Wilson.” It concludes, “It is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to ‘punish Wilson.'”
With more filings expected from Fitzgerald, the prosecutor’s work has the potential to keep the focus on Bush and Cheney at a time when the president is struggling with his lowest approval ratings since he came to office.
Even on Monday, Bush found himself in an uncomfortable spot during an appearance at a Johns Hopkins University campus in Washington, when a student asked him to address Fitzgerald’s assertion that the White House was seeking to retaliate against Wilson.
Bush stumbled for a moment as he began his response before settling on an answer that sidestepped the question. He said he had ordered the formal declassification of the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq July 2003 because “it was important for people to get a better sense for why I was saying what I was saying in my speeches” about Iraq’s efforts to reconstitute its weapons program.
Bush said nothing about the earlier, informal authorization that Fitzgerald’s court filing revealed for the first time. The prosecutor described testimony from Libby, who said that Bush told Cheney that it was permissible to reveal some of the information in the intelligence estimate, which described Saddam’s efforts to acquire uranium.
But on Monday, Bush was not talking about that. “You’re just going to have to let Mr. Fitzgerald complete his case, and I hope you understand that,” Bush said. “It’s a serious legal matter that we’ve got to be careful in making public statements about it.”
Every prosecutor strives not just to prove a case, but to tell a compelling story. It is now clear that Fitzgerald’s account of what was happening in the White House that summer of 2003 is very different from the Bush administration’s narrative, which suggested that Wilson was regarded as a minor figure whose criticisms could be answered perfectly well by simply disclosing the underlying intelligence upon which Bush relied.
It turned out that much of the information about Saddam’s search for uranium was questionable at best, and it became the subject of dispute almost as soon as it was included in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq.
The answer to the question of whose recounting of events is correct – Bush’s or Fitzgerald’s – may not be known for months or years, if ever.
January 9 2006
John Yoo publicly argued there is no law that could prevent the President from ordering the torture of a child of a suspect in custody – including by crushing that child’s testicles.
This came out in response to a question in a December 1st debate in Chicago with Notre Dame professor and international human rights scholar Doug Cassel.
What is particularly chilling and revealing about this is that John Yoo was a key architect post-9/11 Bush Administration legal policy. As a deputy assistant to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, John Yoo authored a number of legal memos arguing for unlimited presidential powers to order torture of captive suspects, and to declare war anytime, any where, and on anyone the President deemed a threat.
It has now come out Yoo also had a hand in providing legal reasoning for the President to conduct unauthorized wiretaps of U.S. citizens. Georgetown Law Professor David Cole wrote, “Few lawyers have had more influence on President Bush’s legal policies in the ‘war on terror’ than John Yoo.”
This part of the exchange during the debate with Doug Cassel, reveals the logic of Yoo’s theories, adopted by the Administration as bedrock principles, in the real world.
Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.
Yoo argues presidential powers on Constitutional grounds, but where in the Constitution does it say the President can order the torture of children ? As David Cole puts it, “Yoo reasoned that because the Constitution makes the President the ‘Commander-in-Chief,’ no law can restrict the actions he may take in pursuit of war. On this reasoning, the President would be entitled by the Constitution to resort to genocide if he wished.”
What is the position of the Bush Administration on the torture of children, since one of its most influential legal architects is advocating the President’s right to order the crushing of a child’s testicles?
This fascist logic has nothing to do with “getting information” as Yoo has argued. The legal theory developed by Yoo and a few others and adopted by the Administration has resulted in thousands being abducted from their homes in Afghanistan, Iraq or other parts of the world, mostly at random. People have been raped, electrocuted, nearly drowned and tortured literally to death in U.S.-run torture centers in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantánamo Bay. And there is much still to come out. What about the secret centers in Europe or the many still-suppressed photos from Abu Ghraib? What can explain this sadistic, indiscriminate, barbaric brutality except a need to instill widespread fear among people all over the world?
It is ironic that just prior to arguing the President’s legal right to torture children, John Yoo was defensive about the Bush administration policies, based on his legal memo’s, being equated to those during Nazi Germany.
Yoo said, “If you are trying to draw a moral equivalence between the Nazis and what the United States is trying to do in defending themselves against Al Qaieda and the 9/11 attacks, I fully reject that. Second, if you’re trying to equate the Bush Administration to Nazi officials who committed atrocities in the holocaust, I completely reject that too… I think to equate Nazi Germany to the Bush Administration is irresponsible.”
If open promotion of unmitigated executive power, including the right to order the torture of innocent children, isn’t sufficient basis for drawing such a “moral equivalence,” then I don’t know what is. What would be irresponsible is to sit by and allow the Bush regime to radically remake society in a fascist way, with repercussions for generations to come. We must act now because the future is in the balance. The world cannot wait. While Bush gives his State of the Union on January 31st, I’ll find myself along with many thousands across the country declaring “Bush Step Down And take your program with you.”
White House pushed Iraq bioweapons claim despite evidence to contrary
By Joby Warrick
April 12, 2006
On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile “biological laboratories.” He declared, “We have found the weapons of mass destruction.”
The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.
A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq — not made public until now — had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president’s statement.
Report shelved while claim went forth
The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped “secret” and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories.
The authors of the reports were nine U.S. and British civilian experts — scientists and engineers with extensive experience in all the technical fields involved in making bioweapons — who were dispatched to Baghdad by the Defense Intelligence Agency for an analysis of the trailers. Their actions and findings were described to a Washington Post reporter in interviews with six government officials and weapons experts who participated in the mission or had direct knowledge of it.
None would consent to being identified by name because of fear that their jobs would be jeopardized. Their accounts were verified by other current and former government officials knowledgeable about the mission. The contents of the final report, “Final Technical Engineering Exploitation Report on Iraqi Suspected Biological Weapons-Associated Trailers,” remains classified. But interviews reveal that the technical team was unequivocal in its conclusion that the trailers were not intended to manufacture biological weapons. Those interviewed took care not to discuss the classified portions of their work.
“There was no connection to anything biological,” said one expert who studied the trailers. Another recalled an epithet that came to be associated with the trailers: “the biggest sand toilets in the world.”
Primary piece of evidence
The story of the technical team and its reports adds a new dimension to the debate over the U.S. government’s handling of intelligence related to banned Iraqi weapons programs. The trailers — along with aluminum tubes acquired by Iraq for what was believed to be a nuclear weapons program — were primary pieces of evidence offered by the Bush administration before the war to support its contention that Iraq was making weapons of mass destruction.
Intelligence officials and the White House have repeatedly denied allegations that intelligence was hyped or manipulated in the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. But officials familiar with the technical team’s reports are questioning anew whether intelligence agencies played down or dismissed postwar evidence that contradicted the administration’s public views about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Last year, a presidential commission on intelligence failures criticized U.S. spy agencies for discounting evidence that contradicted the official line about banned weapons in Iraq, both before and after the invasion.
Spokesmen for the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency both declined to comment on the specific findings of the technical report because it remains classified. A spokesman for the DIA asserted that the team’s findings were neither ignored nor suppressed, but were incorporated in the work of the Iraqi Survey Group, which led the official search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The survey group’s final report in September 2004 — 15 months after the technical report was written — said the trailers were “impractical” for biological weapons production and were “almost certainly intended” for manufacturing hydrogen for weather balloons.
“Whether the information was offered to others in the political realm I cannot say,” said the DIA official, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.
Others thought trailers had weapons use
Intelligence analysts involved in high-level discussions about the trailers noted that the technical team was among several groups that analyzed the suspected mobile labs throughout the spring and summer of 2003. Two teams of military experts who viewed the trailers soon after their discovery concluded that the facilities were weapons labs, a finding that strongly influenced views of intelligence officials in Washington, the analysts said. “It was hotly debated, and there were experts making arguments on both sides,” said one former senior official who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.
The technical team’s findings had no apparent impact on the intelligence agencies’ public statements on the trailers. A day after the team’s report was transmitted to Washington — May 28, 2003 — the CIA publicly released its first formal assessment of the trailers, reflecting the views of its Washington analysts. That white paper, which also bore the DIA seal, contended that U.S. officials were “confident” that the trailers were used for “mobile biological weapons production.”
Throughout the summer and fall of 2003, the trailers became simply “mobile biological laboratories” in speeches and press statements by administration officials. In late June, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell declared that the “confidence level is increasing” that the trailers were intended for biowarfare. In September, Vice President Cheney pronounced the trailers to be “mobile biological facilities,” and said they could have been used to produce anthrax or smallpox.
Doubts creep in
By autumn, leaders of the Iraqi Survey Group were publicly expressing doubts about the trailers in news reports. David Kay, the group’s first leader, told Congress on Oct. 2 that he had found no banned weapons in Iraq and was unable to verify the claim that the disputed trailers were weapons labs. Still, as late as February 2004, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet continued to assert that the mobile-labs theory remained plausible. Although there was “no consensus” among intelligence officials, the trailers “could be made to work” as weapons labs, he said in a speech Feb. 5.
Tenet, now a faculty member at Georgetown’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, declined to comment for this story.
Kay, in an interview, said senior CIA officials had advised him upon accepting the survey group’s leadership in June 2003 that some experts in the DIA were “backsliding” on whether the trailers were weapons labs. But Kay said he was not apprised of the technical team’s findings until late 2003, near the end of his time as the group’s leader.
“If I had known that we had such a team in Iraq,” Kay said, “I would certainly have given their findings more weight.”
A defector’s tales
Even before the trailers were seized in spring 2003, the mobile labs had achieved mythic stature. As early as the mid-1990s, weapons inspectors from the United Nations chased phantom mobile labs that were said to be mounted on trucks or rail cars, churning out tons of anthrax by night and moving to new locations each day. No such labs were found, but many officials believed the stories, thanks in large part to elaborate tales told by Iraqi defectors.
The CIA’s star informant, an Iraqi with the code name Curveball, was a self-proclaimed chemical engineer who defected to Germany in 1999 and requested asylum. For four years, the Baghdad native passed secrets about alleged Iraqi banned weapons to the CIA indirectly, through Germany’s intelligence service. Curveball provided descriptions of mobile labs and said he had supervised work in one of them. He even described a catastrophic 1998 accident in one lab that left 12 Iraqis dead.
Curveball’s detailed descriptions — which were officially discredited in 2004 — helped CIA artists create color diagrams of the labs, which Powell later used to argue the case for military intervention in Iraq before the U.N. Security Council.
“We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails,” Powell said in the Feb. 5, 2003, speech. Thanks to those descriptions, he said, “We know what the fermenters look like. We know what the tanks, pumps, compressors and other parts look like.”
The trailers discovered in the Iraqi desert resembled the drawings well enough, at least from a distance. One of them, a flat-bed trailer covered by tarps, was found in April by Kurdish fighters near the northern city of Irbil. The second was captured by U.S. forces near Mosul. Both were painted military green and outfitted with a suspicious array of gear: large metal tanks, motors, compressors, pipes and valves.
Photos of the trailers were quickly circulated, and many weapons experts were convinced that the long-sought mobile labs had been found.
Yet reaction from Iraqi sources was troublingly inconsistent. Curveball, shown photos of the trailers, confirmed they were mobile labs and even pointed out key features. But other Iraqi informants in internal reports disputed Curveball’s story and claimed the trailers had a benign purpose: producing hydrogen for weather balloons.
Crack team dispatched to Iraq
Back at the Pentagon, DIA officials attempted a quick resolution of the dispute. The task fell to the “Jefferson Project,” a DIA-led initiative made up of government and civilian technical experts who specialize in analyzing and countering biological threats. Project leaders put together a team of volunteers, eight Americans and a Briton, each with at least a decade of experience in one of the essential technical skills needed for bioweapons production. All were nongovernment employees working for defense contractors or the Energy Department’s national labs.
The technical team was assembled in Kuwait and then flown to Baghdad to begin their work early on May 25, 2003. By that date, the two trailers had been moved to a military base on the grounds of one of deposed president Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad palaces. When members of the technical team arrived, they found the trailers parked in an open lot, covered with camouflage netting.
The technical team went to work under a blistering sun in 110-degree temperatures. Using tools from home, they peered into vats, turned valves, tapped gauges and measured pipes. They reconstructed a flow-path through feed tanks and reactor vessels, past cooling chambers and drain valves, and into discharge tanks and exhaust pipes. They took hundreds of photographs.
By the end of their first day, team members still had differing views about what the trailers were. But they agreed about what the trailers were not.
“Within the first four hours,” said one team member, who like the others spoke on the condition he not be named, “it was clear to everyone that these were not biological labs.”
News of the team’s early impressions leaped across the Atlantic well ahead of the technical report. Over the next two days, a stream of anxious e-mails and phone calls from Washington pressed for details and clarifications.
The reason for the nervousness was soon obvious: In Washington, a CIA analyst had written a draft white paper on the trailers, an official assessment that would also reflect the views of the DIA. The white paper described the trailers as “the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program.” It also explicitly rejected an explanation by Iraqi officials, described in a New York Times article a few days earlier, that the trailers might be mobile units for producing hydrogen.
But the technical team’s preliminary report, written in a tent in Baghdad and approved by each team member, reached a conclusion opposite from that of the white paper.
Crucial components lacking
Team members and other sources intimately familiar with the mission declined to discuss technical details of the team’s findings because the report remains classified. But they cited the Iraqi Survey Group’s nonclassified, final report to Congress in September 2004 as reflecting the same conclusions.
That report said the trailers were “impractical for biological agent production,” lacking 11 components that would be crucial for making bioweapons. Instead, the trailers were “almost certainly designed and built for the generation of hydrogen,” the survey group reported.
The group’s report and members of the technical team also dismissed the notion that the trailers could be easily modified to produce weapons.
“It would be easier to start all over with just a bucket,” said Rod Barton, an Australian biological weapons expert and former member of the survey group.
The technical team’s preliminary report was transmitted in the early hours of May 27, just before its members began boarding planes to return home. Within 24 hours, the CIA published its white paper, “Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants,” on its Web site.
After team members returned to Washington, they began work on a final report. At several points, members were questioned about revising their conclusions, according to sources knowledgeable about the conversations. The questioners generally wanted to know the same thing: Could the report’s conclusions be softened, to leave open a possibility that the trailers might have been intended for weapons?
In the end, the final report — 19 pages plus a 103-page appendix — remained unequivocal in declaring the trailers unsuitable for weapons production.
“It was very assertive,” said one weapons expert familiar with the report’s contents.
Then, their mission completed, the team members returned to their jobs and watched as their work appeared to vanish.
“I went home and fully expected that our findings would be publicly stated,” one member recalled. “It never happened. And I just had to live with it.”
also…
i went over to
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i’ve made a decision, which, for me, is pretty monumental, and it’s been brought about by spending the past month doing gigs 5 days a week. the fact is, i enjoy doing gigs. i don’t enjoy going to “work” five days a week as a tester, and i can tolerate doing 5 days a week as a graphic artist and typesetter, but i’d rather be playing. the problem previously has been that i don’t get paid (as much, if at all) for playing, and i do get paid for being a tester or a typesetter, but at this point, i don’t care any more. beau bonds as “the naked puppet” (“i’ve got nothing to hide, i’m naked!”) said, “sometimes you don’t need a job, sometimes you need a life.” i remember when i was in the tech school i couldn’t imagine getting paid for playing (which includes doing the things that i was trained to do at the tech school), but that’s what i wanted, and now, finally, i’ve figured out that playing is what i want to do, regardless of whether i get paid or not. i had a near-death experience and survived, so i’ve been given a second chance at life, and i don’t want to screw it up again. fuck work. i’m through with working.
it’s kind of a scary decision, but it’s also kind of an exciting one.
441
the 3rd annual fremont moisture festival, the largest comedie/varieté festival in the world(!), ended yesterday. the time to beat for next year’s marathon is 4 hours and 46 minutes (last year’s record was 4’20”, heh heh heh). the last show was supposed to have an encore performance by johnny jetpack, but it got censored at the last moment because “there were kids in the audience”, which i think is a lame excuse – it was only johnny jetpack getting a blow job from a 12,000 gallon per minute milking machine, and it didn’t even show anything truly obscene, although i can understand why a guy like mike hale (the notorious “christian” who is the reason why the burlesque nights were held at a different venue) would see it that way. Big Bois With Poise opened the 3rd half of the show, but instead of fire poi, we had water balloons. it was really funny, because there were two people directly in front of where i was spinning who were obviously not particularly interested in getting wet at all, and were shying away from my spinning poi, and one of my water-balloons had sprung a leak, so that every time i spun it, they got showered with water. and then, after we were done chanting, we broke the water balloons on our heads, but for some reason mine wouldn’t break (who ever heard of a sturdy water balloon?), so i ended up biting them. and in spite of how well it went, i sure hope that they have a new person organising music next year, because the person that was doing it this year (RB?) couldn’t organise his way out of a wet paper sack (which is an obscure reference to rhys thomas’ act).
the fremont phil has an unexpected in with the folklife festival this year. apparently the lady who is also the leader of the Ballard Sedentary Sousa Band is on the selection committee for folklife, and she came to fred with an offer of getting us a stage without having to go through the normal application procedures. i just heard about the BSSB during the moisture festival, from the tuba player for the Fighting Instruments of Karma, and it turns out tha they need a new trombone player, so i’m now more or less officially playing for the sedentary sousa band. i figure that it will be perfect for me, because i don’t like marching anyway.
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In the Beginning was the Command Line – in particular, the story about the OS wars is about as accurate a description as i’ve found anywhere.
Oh my god! There’s an axe in my head
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Sat Apr 8
WASHINGTON (AFP) – The administration of President George W. Bush is planning a massive bombing campaign against Iran, including use of bunker-buster nuclear bombs to destroy a key Iranian suspected nuclear weapons facility, The New Yorker magazine has reported in its April 17 issue.
The article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said that Bush and others in the White House have come to view Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a potential Adolf Hitler.
“That’s the name they’re using,” the report quoted a former senior intelligence official as saying.
A senior unnamed Pentagon adviser is quoted in the article as saying that “this White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war.”
The former intelligence officials depicts planning as “enormous,” “hectic” and “operational,” Hersh writes.
One former defense official said the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government,” The New Yorker pointed out.
In recent weeks, the president has quietly initiated a series of talks on plans for Iran with a few key senators and members of the House of Representatives, including at least one Democrat, the report said.
One of the options under consideration involves the possible use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, to insure the destruction of Iran’s main centrifuge plant at Natanz, Hersh writes.
But the former senior intelligence official said the attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the military, and some officers have talked about resigning after an attempt to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans in Iran failed, according to the report.
“There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries,” the magazine quotes the Pentagon adviser as saying.
The adviser warned that bombing Iran could provoke “a chain reaction” of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the world and might also reignite Hezbollah.
“If we go, the southern half of Iraq will light up like a candle,” the adviser is quoted as telling The New Yorker.
president bush views president mahmoud ahmadinejad as a potential adolph hitler, i view president bush as a potential adolph hitler. i wonder which one of us will have our views proved right in the long term…
TRANSCRIPT
BLITZER: And you’re saying that some senior military officers are prepared to resign?
HERSH: I’m saying that, if this isn’t walked back and if the president isn’t told that you cannot do it — and once the chairman of the joint chiefs or some senior members of the military say to the president, let’s get this nuclear option off the table, it will be taken off. He will not defy the military in a formal report. Unless something specific is told to the White House that you’ve got to drop this dream of a nuclear option — and that’s exactly the issue I’m talking about — people have said to me that they would resign.
Hersh: …And then, of course, nobody in their right mind would want to use a nuclear weapon in the Middle East, because it would be, my God, totally chaotic. When the JCS, the joint chiefs, and the planners wanted to walk back that option, what happened is about three or four weeks ago, the White House, people in the White House, in the Oval Office, the vice president’s office, said, no, let’s keep it in the plan. They refuse to take it out. And what I’m writing here is that if this isn’t removed — and I say this very seriously. I’ve been around this town for 40 years — some senior officers are prepared to resign. They’re that upset about the fact that this plan is kept in. Again, let me make the point, you’re giving a range of options early in the planning. To be sure of getting rid of it, you give that option.
JACK STRAW, BRITISH FOREIGN SECRETARY: The idea of a nuclear strike on Iran is completely nuts.
BLITZER: He didn’t mince any words: “completely nuts” in his words. You want to react to that?
HERSH: Well, what he didn’t say — he didn’t deny that there’s serious planning about the military strike is the point. I mean, he’s absolutely right about a nuclear option, but there is serious planning for a conventional war.
Monday, April 10, 2006
By LARRY MARGASAK
WASHINGTON — Key figures in a phone-jamming scheme designed to keep New Hampshire Democrats from voting in 2002 had regular contact with the White House and Republican Party as the plan was unfolding, phone records introduced in criminal court show.
The records show that Bush campaign operative James Tobin, who recently was convicted in the case, made two dozen calls to the White House within a three-day period around Election Day 2002 – as the phone jamming operation was finalized, carried out and then abruptly shut down.
The national Republican Party, which paid millions in legal bills to defend Tobin, says the contacts involved routine election business and that it was “preposterous” to suggest the calls involved phone jamming.
The Justice Department has secured three convictions in the case but hasn’t accused any White House or national Republican officials of wrongdoing, nor made any allegations suggesting party officials outside New Hampshire were involved. The phone records of calls to the White House were exhibits in Tobin’s trial but prosecutors did not make them part of their case.
Democrats plan to ask a federal judge Tuesday to order GOP and White House officials to answer questions about the phone jamming in a civil lawsuit alleging voter fraud.
Repeated hang-up calls that jammed telephone lines at a Democratic get-out-the-vote center occurred in a Senate race in which Republican John Sununu defeated Democrat Jeanne Shaheen, 51 percent to 46 percent, on Nov. 5, 2002.
Besides the conviction of Tobin, the Republicans’ New England regional director, prosecutors negotiated two plea bargains: one with a New Hampshire Republican Party official and another with the owner of a telemarketing firm involved in the scheme. The owner of the subcontractor firm whose employees made the hang-up calls is under indictment.
The phone records show that most calls to the White House were from Tobin, who became President Bush’s presidential campaign chairman for the New England region in 2004. Other calls from New Hampshire senatorial campaign offices to the White House could have been made by a number of people.
A GOP campaign consultant in 2002, Jayne Millerick, made a 17-minute call to the White House on Election Day, but said in an interview she did not recall the subject. Millerick, who later became the New Hampshire GOP chairwoman, said in an interview she did not learn of the jamming until after the election.
A Democratic analysis of phone records introduced at Tobin’s criminal trial show he made 115 outgoing calls – mostly to the same number in the White House political affairs office – between Sept. 17 and Nov. 22, 2002. Two dozen of the calls were made from 9:28 a.m. the day before the election through 2:17 a.m. the night after the voting.
There also were other calls between Republican officials during the period that the scheme was hatched and canceled.
Prosecutors did not need the White House calls to convict Tobin and negotiate the two guilty pleas.
Whatever the reason for not using the White House records, prosecutors “tried a very narrow case,” said Paul Twomey, who represented the Democratic Party in the criminal and civil cases. The Justice Department did not say why the White House records were not used.
The Democrats said in their civil case motion that they were entitled to know the purpose of the calls to government offices “at the time of the planning and implementation of the phone-jamming conspiracy … and the timing of the phone calls made by Mr. Tobin on Election Day.”
While national Republican officials have said they deplore such operations, the Republican National Committee said it paid for Tobin’s defense because he is a longtime supporter and told officials he had committed no crime.
By Nov. 4, 2002, the Monday before the election, an Idaho firm was hired to make the hang-up calls. The Republican state chairman at the time, John Dowd, said in an interview he learned of the scheme that day and tried to stop it.
Dowd, who blamed an aide for devising the scheme without his knowledge, contended that the jamming began on Election Day despite his efforts. A police report confirmed the Manchester Professional Fire Fighters Association reported the hang-up calls began about 7:15 a.m. and continued for about two hours. The association was offering rides to the polls.
Virtually all the calls to the White House went to the same number, which currently rings inside the political affairs office. In 2002, White House political affairs was led by now-RNC chairman Ken Mehlman. The White House declined to say which staffer was assigned that phone number in 2002.
“As policy, we don’t discuss ongoing legal proceedings within the courts,” White House spokesman Ken Lisaius said.
Robert Kelner, a Washington lawyer representing the Republican National Committee in the civil litigation, said there was no connection between the phone jamming operation and the calls to the White House and party officials.
“On Election Day, as anybody involved in politics knows, there’s a tremendous volume of calls between political operatives in the field and political operatives in Washington,” Kelner said.
“If all you’re pointing out is calls between Republican National Committee regional political officials and the White House political office on Election Day, you’re pointing out nothing that hasn’t been true on every Election Day,” he said.
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LAW CHIEF GAGS THE MIRROR ON BUSH LEAK
23 November 2005
By Kevin Maguire
THE Daily Mirror was yesterday told not to publish further details from a top secret memo, which revealed that President Bush wanted to bomb an Arab TV station.
The gag by the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith came nearly 24 hours after the Mirror informed Downing Street of its intention to reveal how Tony Blair talked Bush out of attacking satellite station al-Jazeera’s HQ in friendly Qatar.
No 10 did nothing to stop us publishing our front page exclusive yesterday.
But the Attorney General warned that publication of any further details from the document would be a breach of the Official Secrets Act.
He threatened an immediate High Court injunction unless the Mirror confirmed it would not publish further details. We have essentially agreed to comply.
The five-page memo – stamped “Top Secret” – records a threat by Bush to unleash “military action” against the TV station, which America accuses of being a mouthpiece for anti-US sentiments.
Following the Mirror’s revelations, there were calls for the transcript of the memo to be released.
Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman Sir Menzies Campbell said: “If true, then this underlines the desperation of the Bush administration.
“On this occasion, the Prime Minister may have been successful in averting political disaster, but it shows how dangerous his relationship with President Bush has been.”
The White House yesterday said of the Mirror’s report: “We are not going to dignify something so outlandish with a response.”
Downing Street said: “We don’t comment on leaked documents.”
The memo turned up last year at the Northampton office of then-Labour MP Tony Clarke.
Civil servant David Keogh, 49, is now accused of passing the memo to Leo O’Connor, who once worked for Mr Clarke.
Both Mr Keogh and Mr O’Connor are due to appear in court next week on charges under the Official Secrets Act.
Mr Clarke returned the memo to Downing Street.
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| Disorder | Your Score |
|---|---|
| Major Depression: | Very High |
| Dysthymia: | High-Moderate |
| Bipolar Disorder: | Slight |
| Cyclothymia: | Slight |
| Seasonal Affective Disorder: | Very Slight |
| Postpartum Depression: | N/A |
| Take the Depression Test | |
this is interesting, because i’ve actually been in treatment for bipolar disorder, and, in fact, a PhD psychiatrist "diagnosed" me with bipolar II a few years ago… now admittedly, she based her "diagnosis" on nothing more than an hour’s conversation with me (which is why i put "diagnosis" in quotation marks), but still…
|
Your personality type is RLUAI
|
| You are moderately reserved, moody, unstructured, accommodating, and intellectual, and may prefer a city which matches those traits. |
|
The largest representation of your personality type can be found in the these U.S. cities: Washington DC, Portland/Salem, Richmond, New Orleans, Norfolk, Denver, Albuquerque/Santa Fe, Kansas City, St. Louis, New York City, Indianapolis, San Antonio and these international countries/regions Slovenia, Croatia, Caribbean, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Belgium, Guam, Ukraine, Argentina, Greece, Brazil, Israel, Wales, Finland, Germany, Poland |
What Places In The World Match Your Personality?
City Reviews at CityCulture.org
now why would i want to live in a city or region of the world where a majority of other people are all like me? while it may be okay politically, my impression is that such a place would be extremely depressing…
| You Belong in Amsterdam |
 A little old fashioned, a little modern – you’re the best of both worlds. And so is Amsterdam. Whether you want to be a squatter graffiti artist or a great novelist, Amsterdam has all that you want in Europe (in one small city). |
now amsterdam is an actual possibility. i’ve thought a lot about emigrating recently, and i’ve pretty much decided that it’s going to be either the netherlands or new zealand… but it’s all just a fantasy until something financial happens. 8/
also…
Clone-A-Willy
Penis Moulding – the story of Cynthia Plaster-Caster comes full circle…
and finally, from The Simplified Spelling Society we have Poems showing the absurdities of English spelling… just what i always wanted!
436
President Defends Warrantless Spying Program After Criticism at Open-Forum Event
By Peter Baker
April 7, 2006
CHARLOTTE, April 6 — Harry Taylor got the chance Thursday to do what frustrated liberals across the country have wanted to do for a long time: He stood up and told off the president.
And in its own way, that’s just what the White House wanted.
President Bush flew here for the latest of his open-forum events, an innovation for a leader who until recently stuck to scripted meetings with screened audiences. At a time of dwindling public support and of charges of Bush’s being isolated, the idea was to put him in front of crowds for spontaneous exchanges to show he is not afraid of criticism.
By the time Bush landed in Charlotte, these audience-participation sessions had produced some skeptical questions, some interesting back-and-forth, and even a few off-script comments by a famously disciplined president.
But until Taylor came along, no one had really gotten in Bush’s face. No one had really confronted him so directly on the issues of war and liberty that are at the heart of both his presidency and his political troubles. And no one had given him the opportunity to look unbothered by dissent.
“I would hope, from time to time, that you have the humility and the grace to be ashamed of yourself,” Taylor told Bush after rattling off a litany of grievances.
Bush responded only to Taylor’s complaint about warrantless eavesdropping. “You said, would I apologize for that?” he said. “The answer is absolutely not.”
The dialogue interrupted a love fest here in a state Bush carried in both elections. Microphone in hand, Bush dispensed with the podium and text to wander the stage like a talk-show host. He presented himself as a reluctant warrior struggling with sending young men and women into harm’s way.
“It’s a decision I wish I did not have to make,” he said. In a nod to public frustration, he added: “If I didn’t think we could win, I’d pull them out. You just got to know that.”
The president boasted of building democracy and rebuilding infrastructure in Iraq, without mentioning that his administration is scaling back funding for both goals. And he seemed eager to re-litigate the original reasons for the invasion.
“I fully understand that the intelligence was wrong, and I’m just as disappointed as everybody else is,” he said. But he added: “Removing Saddam Hussein was the right thing for world peace and the security of our country.”
The audience cheered boisterously as he slipped off his coat to take questions. The forum was sponsored by the nonpartisan World Affairs Council of Charlotte at Central Piedmont Community College, and the two institutions invited nearly 1,000 people.
Most of those who stood had only polite inquiries or statements of support. One man told Bush he prayed for him. A woman asked to have her picture taken with him and predicted “you will be vindicated.” Asked by another man what he would do differently, Bush mentioned the detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib. “I wish that could be done over,” he said. “It was a disgraceful experience.”
Then came Taylor, 61, a commercial real estate broker, who got Bush’s attention from the balcony.
“You never stop talking about freedom, and I appreciate that,” Taylor told him. “But while I listen to you talk about freedom, I see you assert your right to tap my telephone, to arrest me and hold me without charges, to try to preclude me from breathing clean air and drinking clean water and eating safe food.”
Bush interrupted with a smile. “I’m not your favorite guy,” he joked, provoking laughter.
“What I want to say to you,” Taylor continued, “is that I, in my lifetime, I have never felt more ashamed of, nor more frightened by, my leadership in Washington.”
Many in the audience booed.
“Let him speak,” Bush said.
“I feel like, despite your rhetoric, that compassion and common sense have been left far behind during your administration,” Taylor added.
Bush took it in stride but offered no regrets. In response, he dealt only with the National Security Agency program to eavesdrop without court approval on telephone calls and e-mails between people inside the United States and people overseas when one person is suspected of terrorist ties.
“I’m not going to apologize for what I did on the terrorist surveillance program, and I’ll tell you why,” Bush said, launching into his explanation of how he approved the program to avoid another Sept. 11. “If we’re at war,” he said, “we ought to be using tools necessary within the Constitution on a very limited basis, a program that’s reviewed constantly, to protect us.”
What made the exchange intriguing was its rarity. Bush is almost never confronted with strong, polite criticism. Hecklers sometimes make it into a speech, but when they stand up to shout, security agents remove them. Three Bush critics sued after they were ejected from an event in Denver.
In an interview afterward, Taylor said he had become an activist in recent years out of discontent with Bush and was pleasantly surprised he was allowed to challenge the president. “I didn’t think I’d be let in the room,” he said.
Bush hardly won him over, though. “I didn’t care about his response,” Taylor said. “I wanted to say what I wanted to say and I wanted him to know that despite being in a room with a thousand people who love him . . . there are plenty of people out there who don’t agree with him in any way, shape or form.”
what alarms me the most is that, in spite of bush repeatedly lying to the american public about everything from 9/11 to weapons of mass destruction, to sweetheart deals with corporate cronies to torturing prisoners to spying on american citizens to outing valerie plame, there are still people who would boo when a guy gets up and tells the president how he feels…
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from
Go to Wikipedia and look up your birth day (excluding the year). List three neat facts, two births and one death in your journal, including the year.
FACTS
- 1405 – Chinese fleet commander Zheng He sets sail to explore the world for the first time.
- 1893 – The first cultured pearl is obtained by Kokichi Mikimoto.
- 1960 – To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is first published.
BIRTHS
- 1274 – Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland (d. 1329) – my namesake!
- 1899 – E. B. White, American writer (d. 1985)
DEATH
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i’m a geek, what can i say?
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Apr 6, 2006
WASHINGTON – President George W. Bush authorized the leak to the media of classified material about Iraq, a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney said according to court papers filed by prosecutors and made public on Thursday.
The aide, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, also testified that he was specifically directed by Cheney to speak to the media about the intelligence information and about Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador who had criticized Bush’s Iraq policy, according to the papers.
Libby has been charged with perjury and obstruction of justice after an investigation into the leaking to the media of the fact that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent, which Wilson says was done to pay him back for his criticisms.
The court documents made public on Thursday emerged from that investigation.
The reported authorization by Bush of disclosure of secret material in 2003 came at a time when the March 2003 Iraq invasion was being challenged after U.S. forces failed to find weapons of mass destruction, cited by Bush as the main reason for the action.
Bush had the authority to declassify and allow publication of the material. But the court papers said Libby noted “it was unique in his recollection” to get approval from the president, via the vice president, to discuss material with a reporter that would be classified if it were not for this approval.
The documents showed that Libby, testifying before a federal grand jury before his indictment, said that he got approval from Bush through Cheney to discuss the classified Iraq material with then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller.
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The former head of the Star Wars missile defense program under Presidents Ford and Carter has gone public to say that the official version of 9/11 is a conspiracy theory and his main suspect for the architect of the attack is Vice President Dick Cheney.
Dr. Robert M. Bowman, Lt. Col., USAF, ret. flew 101 combat missions in Vietnam. He is the recipient of the Eisenhower Medal, the George F. Kennan Peace Prize, the President’s Medal of Veterans for Peace, the Society of Military Engineers Gold Medal (twice), six Air Medals, and dozens of other awards and honors. His Ph.D. is in Aeronautics and Nuclear Engineering from Caltech. He chaired 8 major international conferences, and is one of the country’s foremost experts on National Security.
Bowman worked secretly for the US government on the Star Wars project and was the first to coin the very term in a 1977 secret memo. After Bowman realized that the program was only ever intended to be used as an aggressive and not defensive tool, as part of a plan to initiate a nuclear war with the Soviets, he left the program and campaigned against it.
In an interview with The Alex Jones Show aired nationally on the GCN Radio Network, Bowman stated that at the bare minimum if Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda were involved in 9/11 then the government stood down and allowed the attacks to happen. He said it is plausible that the entire chain of military command were unaware of what was taking place and were used as tools by the people pulling the strings behind the attack.
Bowman outlined how the drills on the morning of 9/11 that simulated planes crashing into buildings on the east coast were used as a cover to dupe unwitting air defense personnel into not responding quickly enough to stop the attack.
“The exercises that went on that morning simulating the exact kind of thing that was happening so confused the people in the FAA and NORAD….that they didn’t they didn’t know what was real and what was part of the exercise,” said Bowman
“I think the people who planned and carried out those exercises, they’re the ones that should be the object of investigation.”
Asked if he could name a prime suspect who was the likely architect behind the attacks, Bowman stated, “If I had to narrow it down to one person….I think my prime suspect would be Dick Cheney.”
Bowman said that privately his military fighter pilot peers and colleagues did not disagree with his sentiments about the real story behind 9/11.
Bowman agreed that the US was in danger of slipping into a dictatorship and stated, “I think there’s been nothing closer to fascism than what we’ve seen lately from this government.”
Bowman slammed the Patriot Act as having, “Done more to destroy the rights of Americans than all of our enemies combined.”
Bowman trashed the 9/11 Commission as a politically motivated cover-up with abounding conflicts of interest, charging, “The 9/11 Commission omitted anything that might be the least bit suspicious or embarrassing or in any way detract from the official conspiracy so it was a total whitewash.”
“There needs to be a true investigation, not the kind of sham investigations we have had with the 9/11 omission and all the rest of that junk,” said Bowman.
Asked if the perpetrators of 9/11 were preparing to stage another false-flag attack to reinvigorate their agenda Bowman agreed that, “I can see that and I hope they can’t pull it off, I hope they are prevented from pulling it off but I know darn good and well they’d like to have another one.”
A mainstay of the attack pieces against Charlie Sheen have been that he is not credible enough to speak on the topic of 9/11. These charges are ridiculed by the fact that Sheen is an expert on 9/11 who spends hours a day meticulously researching the topic, something that the attack dogs have failed to do, aiming their comments solely at Sheen’s personal life and ignoring his invitation to challenge him on the facts.
In addition, from the very start we have put forth eminently credible individuals only for them to be ignored by the establishment media. Physics Professors, former White House advisors and CIA analysts, the father of Reaganomics, German Defense Ministers and Bush’s former Secretary of the Treasury, have all gone public on 9/11 but have been uniformly ignored by the majority of the establishment press.
Will Robert Bowman also be blackballed as the mainstream continue to misrepresent the 9/11 truth movement as an occupation of the fringe minority?
Bowman is currently running for Congress in Florida’s 15th District.
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By DAVID ESPO
WASHINGTON – Succumbing to scandal, former Majority Leader Tom DeLay said Tuesday he will resign from Congress in the face of a tough re-election race, closing out a career that blended unflinching conservatism with a bare-knuckled political style.
“I have no fear whatsoever about any investigation into me or my personal or professional activities,” DeLay said in a statement to constituents. At the same time, he said, “I refuse to allow liberal Democrats an opportunity to steal this seat with a negative, personal campaign.”
He said the voters of his Houston-area district “deserve a campaign about the vital national issues that they care most about … and not a campaign focused solely as a referendum on me.”
DeLay relinquished the post as House majority leader last fall after his indictment in Texas as part of an investigation into the allegedly illegal use of funds for state legislative races. He decided in January against trying to get the leadership post back as an election-year corruption scandal staggered Republicans and emboldened minority Democrats.
Last week, former DeLay aide Tony Rudy pleaded guilty to conspiring with lobbyist Jack Abramoff and others to corrupt public officials, and he promised to help the broad federal investigation of bribery and lobbying fraud that already has resulted in three convictions.
Neither Rudy, Abramoff nor anyone else connected with the investigation has publicly accused DeLay of breaking the law, but Rudy confessed that he had taken actions while working in the majority leader’s office that were illegal. DeLay has consistently denied any wrongdoing.
Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record), R-Ariz., a major player in congressional investigations of Abramoff and the lobbyist’s involvement with Indian tribes, said Tuesday that he respects DeLay’s decision to step down, and added, “I think there are other aspects of the Abramoff scandal that will be unfolding in the weeks ahead.”
McCain spoke to reporters following a speech to a Hispanic conference. President Bush said Tuesday that DeLay had informed him of his decision Monday afternoon.
“I wish him all the best,” Bush told reporters during a brief White House session, adding, “It had to have been a very difficult decision for someone who loved representing his district in the state of Texas.”
Bush said the Republican Party won’t suffer from DeLay’s decision to resign from Congress. “My own judgment is that our party will continue to succeed because we are the party of ideas.”
DeLay, an 11-term Texas lawmaker who turns 59 on Saturday, said he would make his resignation effective sometime before mid-June but contingent on the congressional calendar.
“He has served our nation with integrity and honor,” said Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, who succeeded DeLay in his leadership post earlier this year.
But Democrats said the developments marked more than the end to one man’s career in Congress.
“Tom Delay’s announcement is just the beginning of the reckoning of the Republican culture of corruption that has gripped Washington for too long,” said Karen Finney, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee. “From DeLay to Scooter Libby to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, to Duke Cunningham, to Bob Ney, to David Safavian, the list of goes on and on.”
DeLay portrayed his decision to resign as a fatal blow for the fortunes of his opponent, Democrat Nick Lampson, who has garnered national attention – and financial support.
“As difficult as this decision has been for me, it’s not going to be a great day for liberal Democrats, either,” DeLay said. “My loyalty to the Republican Party, indeed my love for the Republican Party, has played no small part in this decision.”
Last month, DeLay capped a triumph in a contested GOP primary with a vow to win re-election.
It was not clear whether Texas Gov. Rick Perry would call a special election to fill out the unexpired portion of DeLay’s term, or whether the seat would remain vacant until it is filled in November.
Either way, DeLay’s concern about the potential loss of a Houston-area seat long in Republican hands reflected a deeper worry among GOP strategists. After a dozen years in the majority, they face a strong challenge from Democrats this fall, at a time when President Bush’s public support is sagging, and when the Abramoff scandal has helped send congressional approval ratings tumbling.
Until scandal sent him to the sidelines, DeLay had held leadership posts since the Republicans won control of the House in a 1994 landslide. DeLay quickly established himself as a forceful presence – earning a nickname as “The Hammer” – and he easily became majority leader when the spot opened up.
DeLay was the driving force behind President Clinton’s impeachment in 1999, weeks after Republicans lost seats at the polls in a campaign in which they tried to make an issue of Clinton’s personal behavior.
His trademark aggressiveness helped trigger his downfall, when he led a drive to redraw Texas’ congressional district boundaries to increase the number of seats in GOP hands. DeLay was soon caught up in an investigation involving the use of corporate funds in the campaigns of legislators who had participated in the redistricting.
Brian J. Doyle faces 23 charges
Wednesday, April 5, 2006
WASHINGTON (CNN) — A deputy press secretary for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was arrested Tuesday at his Maryland home on charges he used his computer in an attempt to seduce a child and transmitted harmful materials to a minor, according to the Polk County, Florida, Sheriff’s Office.
Brian J. Doyle, 55, is charged with seven counts of use of a computer to seduce a child and 16 counts of transmission of harmful material to a minor, according to a sheriff’s office statement.
In interviews with police, Doyle confessed and has agreed to waive extradition to Florida, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said.
On March 12, according to a police statement, Doyle contacted a Polk County computer crimes detective posing online as a 14-year-old girl “and initiated a sexually explicit conversation with her … Doyle knew that the ‘girl’ was 14 years old, and he told her who he was and that he worked for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.”
Judd said that Doyle, in the first conversation, told the detective his position with DHS and “started immediately into pretty vulgar language. He explained in graphic detail the sexual acts he wanted to perform with this 14-year-old.”
As the two continued chatting online, police said, Doyle gave her his home and office phone numbers, and the number to his government-issue cell phone. He also had explicit telephone conversations with a detective posing as the girl, authorities said.
In addition, he used the Internet to send “hard-core pornographic movie clips” to her, and also used an America Online instant-messaging service to have explicit online conversations with her.
“The investigation revealed that the phone numbers given to the detective were in fact Doyle’s, and that the AOL account was registered to him,” police said.
Doyle also sent photos of himself that were not sexually explicit, but said he would send nude photos if the “girl” would buy a Web camera and send him nude photos of herself. In one photo, Judd said, Doyle’s DHS security tag is clearly visible.
“Many of the conversations he initiated … are too extraordinary and graphic for public release,” a statement from the sheriff’s office said.
“I read the transcripts,” Judd said. “I wanted to see if this was just as outrageous as the detectives depicted it … It shocked all of us who have worked vice, narcotics, organized crime, homicides.”
A DHS spokesman said the agency would cooperate in the probe.
“We take these allegations very seriously,” Russ Knocke said, “and we will cooperate fully with the ongoing investigation.”
Doyle, Judd said, is divorced and has children. Authorities believe he could have held similar conversations online with others, Judd said, because at some points during online chats he would address the detective by the wrong name.
Doyle never attempted to arrange a visit, Judd said, but did mention knowing someone in the region.
Before Doyle was arrested Tuesday night at his home in Silver Spring, Judd said, the detective had told him that she had access to a Web camera and that her mother would be away, so “he was eager to rush home from work.”
As he was online, detectives from agencies including the U.S. Secret Service and the Montgomery County, Maryland, Police Department knocked on his door and served the arrest warrant, Judd said. They also executed a search warrant for his residence.
“We found his communication still on his computer with our undercover detective,” he said. “Had we not been posing as a 14-year-old, Brian Doyle would have been grooming someone, some young lady, for a sexual encounter.”
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i’m still half asleep from yester two-days-ago performance (that ended yesterday), and i was hoping for a couple of days off, but apparently one of the zebra kings has requested a rehearsal for the burlesque nights today, so i’m going to haul my ass back to seattle for that. hopefully i will have caught up on sleep before wednesday, because it starts all over again (although my understanding is that the thursday and friday performances are only circus contraption shows, and won’t require us).
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from Bunger Mulkin! we have the ultimate accessory for the computer, and computer-geek who has absolutely everything else…
… what?
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some of these are probably april fools jokes, but some probably aren’t…
CHAIRBOY! – a freak show act from the late 19th century? an act from the moisture festival? a web design company? we may never know…
Mar 30th 2006
With luck, you may soon be able to buy a mythological pet
PAOLO FRIL, chairman and chief scientific officer of GeneDupe, based in San Melito, California, is a man with a dream. That dream is a dragon in every home.
GeneDupe’s business is biotech pets. Not for Dr Fril, though, the mundane cloning of dead moggies and pooches. He plans a range of entirely new animals—or, rather, of really quite old animals, with the twist that even when they did exist, it was only in the imagination.
Making a mythical creature real is not easy. But GeneDupe’s team of biologists and computer scientists reckon they are equal to the task. Their secret is a new field, which they call “virtual cell biology”.
Biology and computing have a lot in common, since both are about processing information—in one case electronic; in the other, biochemical. Virtual cell biology aspires to make a software model of a cell that is accurate in every biochemical detail. That is possible because all animal cells use the same parts list—mitochondria for energy processing, the endoplasmic reticulum for making proteins, Golgi body for protein assembly, and so on.
Armed with their virtual cell, GeneDupe’s scientists can customise the result so that it belongs to a particular species, by loading it with a virtual copy of that animal’s genome. Then, if the cell is also loaded with the right virtual molecules, it will behave like a fertilised egg, and start dividing and developing—first into an embryo, and ultimately into an adult.
Because this “growth” is going on in a computer, it happens fast. Passing from egg to adult in one of GeneDupe’s enormous Mythmaker computers takes less than a minute. And it is here that Charles Darwin gets a look in. With such a short generation time, GeneDupe’s scientists can add a little evolution to their products.
Each computer starts with a search image (dragon, unicorn, gryphon, etc), and the genome of the real animal most closely resembling it (a lizard for the dragon, a horse for the unicorn and, most taxingly, the spliced genomes of a lion and an eagle for the gryphon). The virtual genomes of these real animals are then tweaked by random electronic mutations. When they have matured, the virtual adults most closely resembling the targets are picked and cross-bred, while the others are culled.
Using this rapid evolutionary process, GeneDupe’s scientists have arrived at genomes for a range of mythological creatures—in a computer, at least. The next stage, on which they are just embarking, is to do it for real.
This involves synthesising, with actual DNA, the genetic material that the computer models predict will produce the mythical creatures. The synthetic DNA is then inserted into a cell that has had its natural nucleus removed. The result, Dr Fril and his commercial backers hope, will be a real live dragon, unicorn or what have you.
Readers with long memories may recall GeneDupe’s previous attempt to break into the pet market, the Real Goldfish (see article). This animal was genetically engineered to deposit gold in its skin cells, for that truly million-dollar look. Unfortunately Dr Fril, a biologist, neglected to think about the physics involved. The fish, weighed down by one of the heaviest metals in existence, sank like a stone, as did the project. He is more confident about his new idea, though. Indeed, if he can get the dragons’ respiration correct, he thinks they will set the world on fire.
For an undisclosed sum reputed to be in the billions, Microsoft’s Bill Gates has personally bought the leading open-source desktop project. Saying he “was sick and tired of open-source eating away at his profits,” the world’s richest man decided to put an end to the nuisance and simply buy OpenOffice.org. It will form part of a growing list of Microsoft acquisitions, including several erstwhile competitors, a considerable number of prominent politicians, and a few small governments.
The initially stunned OpenOffice.org community–a happy-go-lucky international band numbering in the hundreds of thousands–later turned to champagne to celebrate their newfound wealth. “Bless Bill!” one happy Torontonian exclaimed, bubbly in hand. “With all this money, I can beat Mark’s time in orbit!”
Gates has assured all current OpenOffice.org users that their future migration path to Microsoft Office is guaranteed thanks to OpenOffice.org’s faultless support of MS Office files formats. Users can further rest assured that the full functionality currently provided by OpenOffice.org 2.0 will be available in MS-Office 2020 – or possibly 2030.
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hurray, hurray, it’s the first of may,
outdoor fornication starts today.
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it’s 9:00 10:00 and moe still isn’t home from work. she called me at 7:00 to say that she was working late because they had an emergency dog-ate-two-foreign-bodies-connected-by-a-ton-of-string… sort of like what happened to ziggy when he ate the needle and 5 feet of thread, only worse. at least i know she’s not stranded somewhere or worse.
EDIT: she called at 10:15 to say that she’s on her way home, and her emergency dog survived.
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another, more recent acid trip.
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| Disorder | Rating |
| Paranoid Disorder: | Very High |
| Schizoid Disorder: | Very High |
| Schizotypal Disorder: | Very High |
| Antisocial Disorder: | High |
| Borderline Disorder: | Moderate |
| Histrionic Disorder: | Moderate |
| Narcissistic Disorder: | Moderate |
| Avoidant Disorder: | High |
| Dependent Disorder: | Moderate |
| Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: | High |
— Personality Disorder Test – Take It! — — Personality Disorders — |
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bleh…
okay, now that internet works again – need i say it? QWEST SUCKS RANCID DONKEY DICKS!!! because they disconnected our DSL service without warning or provocation on saturday. they said that we hadn’t paid our bill, in spite of the fact that we have the confirmation numbers that say we did. when we told them so, the IMBECILES took 48 hours to do nothing… and when i finally called again this morning, suddenly, we had internet service again within 15 minutes, which indicates to me that we could have had internet service within 15 minutes, TWO DAYS AGO but they couldn’t be bothered to fix their own mistake… grumble, mutter…
an interesting update to the stuff that’s going on here, apparently bill breeze, otherwise known as hymenaeus beta, erstwhile OHO of the caliphate OTO, and the complainant in the DMCA notification that was filed against me and my ISP, is apparently no longer a member of the caliphate OTO. he is now head of a “splinter group” and the caliphate OTO is, apparently, without an outer head, at least for the moment. i don’t expect the caliphate people can confirm any of this, and even if they can, i’m not sure they’d want to, but the whole thing is terrifically amusing, as the caliphate OTO have maintained that they are the only “real” OTO and all the others are “fakes” for a long time, while i have maintained that they’re all fighting like children over who is more important, and who was authorised by whom to do what, and ignoring The Great Work. here is an excellent example of what i am talking about.
the first weekend of drunk puppet night went more or less without a hitch, although whether i am going to be able to run lights and sound for them in the future is sort of questionable, as the current fixed lights in the theater are all on one two-position switch, and the guy who runs the columbia city theater is a snob and won’t let me touch the sound equipment. the good news is that the meat play impressed josh enough, and was well enough received that he’s going to include it as part of the show, so even if i don’t get to run lights and sound, i’ll still get paid for two more weeks of performances. also my understanding is that we have sold approximately 15 buttons, which isn’t a lot, but every little bit helps.
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i’m going to an acupuncture appointment, then i’m going over to mercer island to pick up a business card from the vet clinic (they need two or three new cards, and i don’t have the original in a place where i can find it easily), then i’m going to opening night of drunk puppet night, where, at the last minute, i got 3 other people together and we’re going to do the meat play.
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we got the car back from the body shop on monday. it was all shiny and new-looking, which is pretty dramatically different from what it looked like the last time i saw it… hopefully it will stay like this for a while… i expect it to collect road dirt, but not a deer.
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this is weird. i’m sitting here waiting for an autosave, so that i can switch platforms and get the updated version of this post on a different platform… and it worked. very strange indeed.
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thanks to
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i haven’t heard anything from christian hartman (the owner of tokerlounge dot com), but i heard from his host provider, which requests me to file a “formal DCMA notification” before they will do anything… typical bureaucracy… 8/ so i changed the graphic, and i got a link to the Comprehensive guide to .htaccess, which should give me some ideas about how i can deal with this without having to pay a lawyer to write me a “formal DCMA notification”.
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this goes in the “who couldn’t see that coming?” department…
WASHINGTON, Feb. 21 — The Supreme Court, at full strength with Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. on the bench for the first time, opened the next chapter in its long-running confrontation with abortion today by agreeing to decide whether the first federal ban on a method of abortion is constitutional.
The court accepted, for argument next fall, the Bush administration’s appeal of a decision invalidating the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. The law makes it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion during which a portion of the fetus, either the “entire fetal head” or “any part of the fetal trunk past the navel,” is outside the woman’s uterus at the time the fetus is killed.
While the law’s supporters maintain that this technique is used only late in pregnancy, and that the law therefore does not present an obstacle to most abortions, abortion-rights advocates say the statute’s description applies to procedures used to terminate pregnancies as early as 12 or 13 weeks.
The law makes an exception for instances in which the banned technique is necessary to save a pregnant woman’s life, but not for preservation of her health, as the Supreme Court found necessary six years ago when it overturned a similar law from Nebraska.
In omitting a health exception, the federal law presents a direct threat to that precedent. In the federal statute, Congress included a “finding” that “partial-birth abortion is never medically indicated to preserve the health of the mother” and that “there is no credible medical evidence that partial-birth abortions are safe or are safer than other abortion procedures.”
The four doctors who went to Federal District Court in Lincoln, Neb., to challenge the federal law, including Dr. Leroy Carhart, who had brought the earlier challenge to the Nebraska state law, disputed the Congressional findings. They said the method was safer under some conditions and could preserve some women’s fertility by avoiding such complications as punctures from bone fragments inside the uterus.
The trial judge, Richard G. Kopf, who had earlier found the Nebraska law unconstitutional, said the plaintiffs had demonstrated that the Congressional findings were “unreasonable.” He declared the federal law unconstitutional in a 269-page opinion, issued in September 2004. The United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in St. Louis, upheld that decision last July, leading to the administration’s Supreme Court appeal, Gonzales v. Carhart, No. 05-380.
Last month, two other federal appeals courts, the Second Circuit in New York and the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, declared the statute unconstitutional in separate lawsuits. All three courts issued injunctions barring enforcement of the law.
Ever since Roe v. Wade and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton, in 1973, the court has required exceptions for health as well as life in any regulation of abortion. But the vote in the Nebraska case, Stenberg v. Carhart, was 5 to 4, with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in the majority. It is highly likely, therefore, that her successor, Justice Alito, will be in the position to cast the deciding vote. The dissenters in the Nebraska case were Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Anthony M. Kennedy, along with Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who has since been replaced by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
After the court’s announcement this morning, groups on both sides of the abortion debate tried to attach some significance to the decision to accept the case. In fact, it would have been highly unusual for the court to turn down the appeal. A lower court’s invalidation of a federal statute has an almost automatic claim on the justices’ attention, even those justices who may view the decision as correct or those who may not necessarily agree in this instance with the Bush administration’s description of the case as “extraordinarily important” and requiring immediate review.
The court had the administration’s appeal under review since early January. It may have deferred action as a courtesy to Justice Alito, who participated in his first closed-door conference with the other justices last Friday.
Or, equally likely, the justices set the case aside while they finished work on a New Hampshire abortion case that also raised a question about a medical exception to an abortion regulation, in that instance a requirement that a teenage girl notify a parent and then wait 48 hours before obtaining an abortion.
In what proved to be Justice O’Connor’s final opinion before retirement, that case, Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, was decided on Jan. 18. The unanimous opinion restated the court’s longstanding insistence on an exception for medical emergencies but, in its list of precedents, pointedly omitted reference to the Nebraska case from six years ago, its most recent treatment of the subject.
In the Bush administration’s brief in the new case, Solicitor General Paul D. Clement said the appeals court should have given “substantial deference” to the Congressional findings on the lack of need for a health exception. Such deference was not at issue in the Supreme Court’s earlier case, he said, because that case concerned a state rather than federal law.
Representing the plaintiffs, who include Drs. William G. Fitzhugh, William H. Knorr, and Jill L. Vibhakar, in addition to Dr. Carhart, the Center for Reproductive Rights told the justices in its brief that the Congressional findings were not entitled to the deference that courts usually apply when evaluating legislation.
“The facts at issue here involve the current state of medicine, physicians’ testimony about patients they have cared for, medical conditions they have treated and the impact of abortion techniques on the health of these patients,” the brief said, adding that Congress does not have “a particular expertise in the area of medicine, as it does in the area of nationwide economic regulatory schemes.”
The organization, based in Manhattan, was known as the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy when it represented Dr. Carhart in the earlier case.
and this one goes in the “if alito had been presiding over this case, it would have come out entirely differently” department… 8/
Justices unanimously rule that N.M. congregation can drink illegal drug
Feb. 21, 2006
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Tuesday that a small congregation in New Mexico may use hallucinogenic tea as part of a four-hour ritual intended to connect with God.
Justices, in their first religious freedom decision under Chief Justice John Roberts, moved decisively to keep the government out of a church’s religious practice. Federal drug agents should have been barred from confiscating the hoasca tea of the Brazil-based church, Roberts wrote in the decision.
The tea, which contains an illegal drug known as DMT, is considered sacred to members of O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal, which has a blend of Christian beliefs and South American traditions. Members believe they can understand God only by drinking the tea, which is consumed twice a month at four-hour ceremonies.
New Justice Samuel Alito did not take part in the case, which was argued last fall before Justice Sandra Day O’Connor before her retirement. Alito was on the bench for the first time on Tuesday.
Roberts said that the Bush administration had not met its burden under a federal religious freedom law to show that it could ban “the sect’s sincere religious practice.”
The chief justice had also been skeptical of the government’s position in the case last fall, suggesting that the administration was demanding too much, a “zero tolerance approach.”
The Bush administration had argued that the drug in the tea not only violates a federal narcotics law, but a treaty in which the United States promised to block the importation of drugs including dimethyltryptamine, also known as DMT.
“The government did not even submit evidence addressing the international consequences of granting an exemption for the (church),” Roberts wrote.
The justices sent the case back to a federal appeals court, which could consider more evidence.
Roberts, writing his second opinion since joining the court, said that religious freedom cases can be difficult “but Congress has determined that courts should strike sensible balances.”
The case is Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao Do Vegetal, 04-1084.
By Joanna Glasner
Feb, 21, 2006
The planet’s population is projected to reach 6.5 billion at 7:16 p.m. EST Saturday, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and its World Population Clock.
Thomas Malthus, the 18th-century thinker who famously predicted the human population would outrun its food supply, would be astounded.
Back in 1798, when Malthus penned his classic An Essay on the Principle of Population, barely a billion Homo sapiens roamed the planet. Today, Earth’s population teeters on the brink of a new milestone: 6.5 billion living, breathing humans.
“Malthus would be astonished not only at the numbers of people, but at the real prosperity of about a fifth of them and the average prosperity of most of them,” said demographer Joel Cohen, a professor of populations at Rockefeller and Columbia universities. “He wouldn’t be surprised at the abject poverty of the lowest quarter or third.”
The clock, which operates continuously, estimates that each second 4.1 people are born and 1.8 people die. The clock figures are estimates, subject to error, given the difficulties of maintaining an accurate global population count.
However, the key concept — that population levels are growing, but at a slower rate than in the past few decades — reflects the consensus view of demographers. The current growth of world population, estimated by Cohen at 1.1 percent a year, has slowed significantly from its peak of 2.1 percent annual growth between 1965 and 1970.
“That’s a phenomenal decline,” said Cohen, who probed the question of whether population growth is sustainable in his book, How Many People Can Earth Support?. (The short answer: It depends.)
Today, a large portion of the world’s population lives in nations that are at sub-replacement fertility, meaning the average woman has fewer than two children in her lifetime. Countries in this camp include former members of the Soviet Union, Japan and most of Europe.
Demographers attribute the slowing rate of global population growth in part to more-widespread availability of birth control and to people in developed nations choosing to have fewer children. But low-birthrate countries are counterbalanced by nations like Yemen, where the average woman has seven children in her lifetime.
The highest population growth rates emanate disproportionately from the poorest regions of Africa, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent.
U.S. population is also growing at a steady clip, augmented by high numbers of immigrants. It is projected to hit 300 million later this year. Earth’s population is expected to reach 7 billion in 2012, according to the Census Bureau.
Carl Haub, a demographer with the Population Reference Bureau, sees urbanization contributing to slowing growth, because urban areas typically have lower birthrates than rural areas. In 1950, less than 30 percent of people lived in areas defined as urban. Next year, the United Nations projects that more than half the world’s population will be urban.
As population growth marches forward, debate continues in academia — as it has since Malthus’ time — over how many people the Earth can realistically support.
Certainly individual countries, such as Bangladesh or Rwanda, can be characterized as overpopulated, said Haub. But in other places, such as India, it’s harder to determine the extent to which overpopulation — rather than other social and economic factors — contributes to poverty.
Some turn to mathematical models for estimating maximum sustainable population levels.
One metric modeled on the Census Bureau’s population clock compares world population to the finite supply of arable land.
For his part, Cohen estimates that if we want to support individuals indefinitely — allotting each person 3,500 calories per day from wheat and 247,000 gallons per year of fresh water — the planet has room for only about 5 billion people.
But such formulas are subject to tinkering. Changes in agricultural practices, more efficient water-desalination technologies and a host of other factors can increase the number of people the planet can support. Shifts in behavior — such as acceptance of new food sources that are cheap to produce — can have a similar effect, noted Cohen.
“What most of this commentary neglects is the role of culture in defining wheat as food but not, let’s say, cultured single-cell algae,” he said.
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22% Combativeness, 60% Sneakiness, 64% Intellect, 72% Spirituality Sneaky, cunning, and spiritual: You are a Druid Druids work with nature to cast their spells and favor balance over extremes. They’re shapeshifters, capable of taking the forms of natural creatures. While they don’t always deal well with people, they do have animal companions to come to their aid. You are probably intelligent, spiritual, and more than a little deceptive. Fortunately, your lack of violent tendencies means you are also likely to be level-headed. |
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My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
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| Link: The RPG Class Test written by MFlowers on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test |
| the Romantic Test finished! |
you chose BY – your Enneagram type is FOUR.
“I am unique”Romantics have sensitive feelings and are warm and perceptive. How to Get Along with Me
What I Like About Being a Four
What’s Hard About Being a Four
Fours as Children Often
Fours as Parents
Renee Baron & Elizabeth Wagele The Enneagram Made Easy You are not completely happy with the result?! Would you rather have chosen: |
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My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
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| Link: The Quick and Painless ENNEAGRAM Test written by felk on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test |
and, courtesy of
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i’m not sure whether to be annoyed or amused or what, but i discovered that one of my pipe graphics is being used, without my permission, by tokerlounge dot com. i was going through my web stats and i noticed that the objects directory was consistently higher hit rate than the incense directory, despite the fact that i’ve essentially taken the pipes offline since i don’t have a worshop… i’m inclined to be annoyed, since they used the graphic from my web page on their web page, without providing a link or any clue that the graphic wasn’t theirs, and then had the balls to post “dont copy or redistribute any content on this site, without giving proper credit to tokerlounge” at the bottom of the page. i wrote to the administrative contact for the domain, and i also wrote to the host service for the web site… and i just got an email back from the web host service… now we’ll see what happens next.
it’s obvious that other people probably will end up writing to this guy as well. there’s another graphic that is not resident on tokerlounge dot com on the same page with my pipe, and i’m going to bet that, judging by the skillz of the guy who coded the HTML, there are a few other graphics that he stole from other web sites on other pages of his web site as well. if he would link to my site, and copy the graphic on to his web host, i wouldn’t have anywhere near as much of a problem with this, but as it is currently, i’m pretty pissed off at this guy.
also, if you’re ever looking for sound effects, a good place to avoid is soundrangers dot com, in spite of the fact that they are located here in seattle. i ordered some sound effects from them recently, and without giving me an option not to recieve spam from them, they sent me spam. it is my understanding that such behaviour is illegal in the state of washington, and it may well be illegal under federal statute as well, but one way or the other, i don’t do business with spammers, so i’m no longer a customer of theirs.
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okay, now that i’m done venting about that asshat majid, i have finally calmed down enough to write about the opening weekend of drunk puppet night.
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the opening was in the winningstad theatre, where it was last year… unfortunately there are no actual pictures of the puppet shows because i was too busy running sound. i stayed with lance, who is the guy whose job is to run the technical aspects of this theatre… which means from top to bottom if you want some kind of theatre magic, lance is the guy to ask. they have 300 hanging lights, and another 100-200 in a room backstage in case that wasn’t enough, that are all controlled by a board in the booth, which also houses all the audio gear and a separate board for that. josh needed a piece of gel for one of his shadow puppet sets and lance took us into a back room where they have every colour gel imaginable, all classified according to the catalogue number. we decided that the winningstad is where we want to do all of our performances, but lance says that “menopause: the musical” has bought the theatre for the next year, with options to extend another year, so next year we’re probably going to have drunk puppet night in portland in a different theatre. i got there with no clue where i was going to stay, so i was grouped with a couple of other folks from seattle who were supposed to stay at the emcee’s house, but there was only enough room for two, so i actually got to stay with lance. he and his wife both work for tears of joy puppet theatre, which was our sponsor, and they have a futon in their basement. they also have huge quantities of a wide variety of geckos and skinks in their basement, apparently lance also breeds them – for what… i didn’t ask… just the fact that they were there was cool enough for me – and, thus, they have crickets in their basement as well, which are gecko food. they also have a parrot and an iguana and a dog named dozer who was apparently starved for attention.
the first night was kind of sparse, but al franken was appearing in the theatre next door, and everybody apparently went to see him instead (slobs), but the second night there was actually a full house, which was a lot better than we expected, considering that (or because of, we weren’t able to determine which) the emcee, a guy named rale sidebottom, was smoking and drinking on stage during the performance, and was actually “fired” from his job as emcee by someone in the audience.
i got up sunday morning and left portland by 9:30 and drove straight to port townsend for the lantern festival. i arrived in port townsend at around 1:00 and spent a couple hours wandering around and re-acquainting myself with fort worden. there have been some changes at the cistern which lead me to believe that somebody official has gained access for some official purposes, but has restricted all other access. the whole area has been mowed, and the two tanks full of concrete that used to be over the access hole have been moved to the side, and a new access hole, with a steel door and a lock, has been added. because of the fact that the area was mowed, i actually discovered a second, and, potentially, a third and a fourth access point that leads to the cistern which i didn’t know about previously. one of them has a similar door and lock, and the other two can probably be accessed with a pry bar and some muscle. it’s good that someone has been looking after the space, in spite of the fact that i couldn’t get in myself. i did some harmonic singing in one of the mortar batteries, underground in the powder room, to make up for, once again, not being able to access the cistern.
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around 3:30 or so i went down to the jefferson county municipal field, which is where the lantern festival was being held. it was fairly sunny in port townsend yesterday, but when the sun went down (which, coincidentally, was when we started to play) it was suddenly evident that it was the pacific northwest in the middle of february. fortunately i had my burnoose, and my tuba was as good as a camel, as long as i was playing. unfortunately there were a lot of breaks at first, and when i stopped playing, and especially when i (frequently) had to put my horn down to get a piece of music that fred came up with on the spur of the moment, but wasn’t in the line up, it got really cold, really fast. the performance itself went surprisingly well considering that only 6 of the 25 people in the show were at the dress rehearsal last weekend. nobody caught fire that wasn’t supposed to.
it was all over, finally, around 8:30, and i drove through tacoma and got home by 10:30… whereas if i had gone through bremerton, it would have meant a 3 hour wait for the ferry to seattle, and then another 45 minutes from seattle. and i did it all without a map, despite the fact that i haven’t driven up the olympic peninsula since before my injury. i shouldn’t have worried about it… the roads tell me where to go… 8)
then, when i came home, our blindingly cute little doggie was in the bedroom, with her nose under the door, and i had to share the blinding cuteness with all of you…
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ergh… i got back from portland drunk puppet night, and the port townsend lantern festival last night, but before i write about that, i’ve got to vent about majid again… in spite of the fact that he fired me in october!!!
i was working on the photos for the afore mentioned show when i got email from majid. he needs my help… apparently his server went down, and when it came up again there was no font directory on the macs. i know exactly what happened, and could probably fix it without any difficulty whatsoever, within about 10 minutes, but i don’t know if i want to… after all, he fired me in october!!!
what i would like to do is two different things, which are, unfortunately, mutually exclusive. the first thing i want to do is delete the email and ignore any further requests from him. the other thing is that i want to tell him that i can fix it for $125 an hour, with an hour minimum, and then go in, fix it, and leave again without saying anything to anyone, including majid. actually there’s a third thing, which is also mutually exclusive of the other two, which is ream majid a new asshole via email.
unfortunately, i’ll probably end up doing the “professional” thing and doing the 2nd option, but it really gets to me that i can’t do either the first or the third options without seeming like i am the one who is an asshole… 8/
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for those of you with appropriate technology, there is a 1963 video of frank zappa on the steve allen show which i’ve heard the audio for, but never actually seen…
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Find Your Warped Personality
this quiz was made by mysti
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the washington quarter is due to be minted next year. there are currently 3 candidates, of which i, personally, feel that #3 is the preferable one. if you’re a resident of the state of washington, maybe you’ll get a vote in the final decision. if not… stay away, ’cause we’ve already got far too many people from other states here, and they’re clogging traffic and contributing to smog.
the latest in a long, involved and complicated string of lies,
Cheney says he has power to declassify information
Vice president stays mum on case involving aide Libby
Thursday, February 16, 2006
WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Dick Cheney said Wednesday that an executive order gives him the authority to declassify secret documents, but he would not say whether he authorized an indicted former aide to release classified information.
Cheney’s former chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, told a grand jury he was “authorized by his superiors” to disclose classified information from an intelligence estimate on Iraq to reporters, the special prosecutor investigating the 2003 leak of a CIA agent’s identity told Libby’s attorneys. The prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, did not identify who those “superiors” are.
In an interview Wednesday with Fox News, Cheney said the case was “nothing I can talk about.” But he said he had the authority to declassify material under an executive order that “focuses first and foremost on the president, but also includes the vice president.”
He would not disclose whether he had exercised that authority, however.
Libby was indicted in October on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements to investigators probing the July 2003 exposure of CIA agent Valerie Plame. Plame’s husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had just emerged as a critic of the pre-war intelligence underpinning the invasion of Iraq when her identity was disclosed.
According to Fitzgerald, Libby met on July 8, 2003, with New York Times reporter Judith Miller to give her information regarding the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. The document included much of the information used to justify the invasion of Iraq earlier that year.
But a legal source involved in the case tells CNN that Libby has never suggested and did not testify that anyone in the administration — including Cheney — authorized outing Plame.
Cheney declined to discuss the investigation but said he had “cooperated fully” with the special prosecutor. And he suggested he may have to testify in Libby’s trial, now tentatively set for January 2007.
“Scooter is entitled to the presumption of innocence,” the vice president said. “He’s a great guy. I’ve worked with him for a long time, have enormous regard for him. I may well be called as a witness at some point in the case and it’s, therefore, inappropriate for me to comment on any facet of the case.”
Cheney’s remarks came during an interview in which he accepted responsibility for the weekend shooting of a companion during a south Texas quail hunt.
The wounded man, 78-year-old Harry Whittington, remained in intensive care in a Corpus Christi hospital on Wednesday.
The incident’s belated disclosure left the White House fending off questions for three days and fueled renewed criticism of the vice president, with Democrats calling it symbolic of an administration obsessed with secrecy.
now let me get this straight… in an investigation to discover who outed plame, i seem to recall cheney vowing that whoever was responsible would face extreme and dire consequences… but when it turns out that he is the one who was actually responsible, suddenly he has the power to declassify information and nothing was done wrong… including his shooting “his friend”, harry whittington…
does that make sense to you, or does it sound like more back-pedalling and ass-covering?
Happy St. Valentines Day… 8P
By Denise Royal
February 14, 2006 10:23 a.m. EST
Chicago, IL (AHN) – The American Bar Association objects to President Bush’s domestic spying program. The lawyers’ group accuses the White House of exceeding his power, and is calling for special court warrants for similar spying in the future.
The Bush Administration says warrant-less eavesdropping is legal under the President’s constitutional powers as commander-in-chief and congressional authorization for the use of military force adopted days after the September 11 attacks. The program bypassed secret courts created under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (or FISA) that grant warrants.
The ABA’s resolution calls on Mr. Bush “to abide by the limitations which the Constitution imposes on a President” to make sure national security is protected in a way that is consistent with constitutional guarantees. It opposes “any future electronic surveillance inside the United States by any U.S. government agency for foreign intelligence.”
Tuesday 14 February 2006, 4:37 Makka Time, 1:37 GMT
An investigation into the prison at Guantanamo Bay says the US committed acts amounting to torture, including force-feeding and prolonged periods of solitary confinement.
The report by five human rights experts from the UN accused the US of violating the detainees’ rights to a fair trial, to freedom of religion and to health.
It recommended that the US close the detention centre and revoke all special interrogation techniques authorised by the US Department of Defence.
The draft report said: “The apparent attempts by the US administration to reinterpret certain interrogation techniques as not reaching the threshold of torture in the framework of the struggle against terrorism are of utmost concern.”
US officials rejected the report, saying it was riddled with errors and treated statements from detainees’ lawyers as fact.
Its most significant flaw, officials said, was that it judged US treatment of detainees according to peace-time human rights laws.
US position
The US contends that it is in a state of conflict and should be judged according to the laws of war.
An official from the US State Department said: “Once you fail to even acknowledge that as the legal basis for what we’re doing, much of the legal analysis that follows just doesn’t hold.”
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the US has not formulated an official public response.
The draft report was delivered to the US on 16 January. It was first disclosed late on Sunday by the Los Angeles Times, and a copy was obtained by journalists.
The five experts have mandates that cover torture, freedom of religion, health, independent judiciary and arbitrary detention. They started working together in June 2004 to monitor conditions at Guantanamo Bay.
Important UN group
They were appointed to their three-year terms by the 53-nation UN Human Rights Commission, the global body’s rights watchdog.
The US holds about 500 people on suspicion of links to al-Qaida or Afghanistan’s ousted Taliban government at the base in Guantanamo. It has filed charges against 10 detainees.
The draft report, which will be presented to the next session of the commission, dismissed the US claim that the “war on terror” constitutes an armed conflict.
It also said the detainees at Guantanamo Bay had a right to challenge their detention, and that right was being violated.
Criticism
The report said: “In the case of the Guantanamo Bay detainees, the US executive operates as judge, as prosecutor, and as defence counsel. This constitutes serious violations of various guarantees of the right to a fair trial.”
The five experts had sought invitations from the United States to visit Guantanamo Bay since 2002. When it was offered last year, they turned it down because they were told they would not be allowed to interview detainees.
On Monday, US officials faulted the experts for rejecting the invitation, saying it undermined the accuracy of their findings.
Uighur case
Meanwhile, lawyers for two Chinese Muslims held at Guantanamo Bay want a federal appeals court to order their release inside the US.
In court papers filed on Monday, lawyers for Abu Bakker Qassim and A’Del Abdu al-Hakim, captured in Pakistan in 2001, said they should be released because the US military found that they are not “enemy combatants”.
The lawyers want the appellate court to overturn a ruling by U.S. District Judge James Robertson, who ruled in December that the men are being detained illegally but said he could not force the U.S. government to release them.
The two men, along with several other Uighurs, have been held at Guantanamo Bay since 2002 because the US government has been unable to find a country willing to accept them. US officials cannot send them back to China because of the possibility they would be tortured or killed.
Treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay constitutes torture in some cases and violates international law, a leaked UN draft report says.
The document, seen by the Los Angeles Times, suggests that investigators will recommend the prison camp is shut down.
It also questions the legal status of the camp and the classification of detainees as enemy combatants.
The US State Department has criticised the draft report as “hearsay”.
‘Force-fed’
The Los Angeles Times published the draft report in its paper on Monday and spoke to one of the authors, the UN special raporteur on torture, Manfred Novak.
“We very, very carefully considered all of the arguments posed by the US government. There are no conclusions that are easily drawn. But we concluded that the situation in several areas violates international law and conventions on human rights and torture,” Mr Nowak told the LA Times.
The report suggests some of the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay meets the definition of torture under the UN Convention Against Torture.
This includes the force-feeding of hunger strikers through nasal tubes and the simultaneous use of several interrogation techniques such as prolonged solitary confinement and exposure to extreme temperatures, noise and light.
The UN team also questions the legal status of the Guantanamo camp.
It says insufficient effort has been made to prove that the inmates really are enemy combatants.
It also recommends the prison camp is shut down.
“The US government should close Guantanamo Bay detention facilities without further delay,” the report says. “The US government should either expeditiously bring all Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial … or release them without further delay.”
‘Spurious claims’
Mr Nowak was one of five UN envoys who interviewed former prisoners, detainees’ lawyers and families during the past 18 months.
nvestigators rejected an invitation to tour the base in Cuba because they would not have been allowed to interview the prisoners directly.
The US State Department has criticised the findings.
“Just because they decided not to take up the US government on the offer to go to Guantanamo Bay does not automatically give [them] the right to publish a report that is merely hearsay and not based on fact,” spokesman Sean McCormack said.
UN officials will include responses from the US government before the report is officially released at the end of the week.
Mr Nowak says that nothing of substance will be altered when the final report is issued.
The investigation was ordered by the UN Commission on Human Rights.
The camp at Guantanamo Bay was set up in 2002 to hold foreign terror suspects, many of them captured in Afghanistan.
It currently houses around 500 suspects.
By Larisa Alexandrovna
February 13, 2006
The unmasking of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson by White House officials in 2003 caused significant damage to U.S. national security and its ability to counter nuclear proliferation abroad, RAW STORY has learned.
According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of the CIA in the Directorate of Operations as a non-official cover (NOC) officer, was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran.
Speaking under strict confidentiality, intelligence officials revealed heretofore unreported elements of Plame’s work. Their accounts suggest that Plame’s outing was more serious than has previously been reported and carries grave implications for U.S. national security and its ability to monitor Iran’s burgeoning nuclear program.
While many have speculated that Plame was involved in monitoring the nuclear proliferation black market, specifically the proliferation activities of Pakistan’s nuclear “father,” A.Q. Khan, intelligence sources say that her team provided only minimal support in that area, focusing almost entirely on Iran.
Plame declined to comment through her husband, Joseph Wilson.
Valerie Plame first became a household name when her identity was disclosed by conservative columnist Robert Novak on July 14, 2003. The column came only a week after her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, had written an op-ed for the New York Times asserting that White House officials twisted pre-war intelligence on Iraq. Her outing was seen as political retaliation for Wilson’s criticism of the Administration’s claim that Iraq sought uranium from Niger for a nuclear weapons program.
Her case has drawn international attention and resulted in the indictment of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements. Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who is leading the probe, is still pursuing Deputy Chief of Staff and Special Advisor to President Bush, Karl Rove. His investigation remains open.
The damages
Intelligence sources would not identify the specifics of Plame’s work. They did, however, tell RAW STORY that her outing resulted in “severe” damage to her team and significantly hampered the CIA’s ability to monitor nuclear proliferation.
Plame’s team, they added, would have come in contact with A.Q. Khan’s network in the course of her work on Iran.
While Director of Central Intelligence Porter Goss has not submitted a formal damage assessment to Congressional oversight committees, the CIA’s Directorate of Operations did conduct a serious and aggressive investigation, sources say.
Intelligence sources familiar with the damage assessment say that what is called a “counter intelligence assessment to agency operations” was conducted on the orders of the CIA’s then-Deputy Director of the Directorate of Operations, James Pavitt.
Former CIA counterintelligence officer Larry Johnson believes that such an assessment would have had to be done for the CIA to have referred the case to the Justice Department.
“An exposure like that required an immediate operational and counter intelligence damage assessment,” Johnson said. “That was done. The results were written up but not in a form for submission to anyone outside of CIA.”
One former counterintelligence official described the CIA’s reasons for not seeking Congressional assistance on the matter as follows: “[The CIA Leadership] made a conscious decision not to do a formal inquiry because they knew it might become public,” the source said. “They referred it [to the Justice Department] instead because they believed a criminal investigation was needed.”
The source described the findings of the assessment as showing “significant damage to operational equities.”
Another counterintelligence official, also wishing to remain anonymous due to the nature of the subject matter, described “operational equities” as including both people and agency operations that involve the “cover mechanism,” “front companies,” and other CIA officers and assets.
Three intelligence officers confirmed that other CIA non-official cover officers were compromised, but did not indicate the number of people operating under non-official cover that were affected or the way in which these individuals were impaired. None of the sources would say whether there were American or foreign casualties as a result of the leak.
Several intelligence officials described the damage in terms of how long it would take for the agency to recover. According to their own assessment, the CIA would be impaired for up to “ten years” in its capacity to adequately monitor nuclear proliferation on the level of efficiency and accuracy it had prior to the White House leak of Plame Wilson’s identity.
A.Q. Khan
While Plame’s work did not specifically focus on the A.Q. Khan ring, named after Pakistani scientist Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the network and its impact on nuclear proliferation and the region should not be minimized, primarily because the Khan network was the major supplier of WMD technology for Iran.
Dr. Khan instituted the proliferation market during the 1980s and supplied many countries in the Middle East and elsewhere with uranium enrichment technology, including Libya, Iran and North Korea. Enriched uranium is used to make weaponized nuclear devices.
The United States forced the Pakistan government to dismiss Khan for his proliferation activities in March of 2001, but he remains largely free and acts as an adviser to the Pakistani government.
According to intelligence expert John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, U.S. officials were not aware of the extent of the proliferation until around the time of Khan’s dismissal.
“It slowly dawned on them that the collaboration between Pakistan, North Korea and Iran was an ongoing and serious problem,” Pike said. “It was starting to sink in on them that it was one program doing business in three locations and that anything one of these countries had they all had.”
After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Pakistan became the United States’ chief regional ally in the war on terror.
The revelation that Iran was the focal point of Plame’s work raises new questions as to possible other motivating factors in the White House’s decision to reveal the identity of a CIA officer working on tracking a WMD supply network to Iran, particularly when the very topic of Iran’s possible WMD capability is of such concern to the Administration.
By Allan Sloan
Wednesday, February 8, 2006
If you read enough numbers, you never know what you’ll find. Take President Bush and private Social Security accounts.
Last year, even though Bush talked endlessly about the supposed joys of private accounts, he never proposed a specific plan to Congress and never put privatization costs in the budget. But this year, with no fanfare whatsoever, Bush stuck a big Social Security privatization plan in the federal budget proposal, which he sent to Congress on Monday.
His plan would let people set up private accounts starting in 2010 and would divert more than $700 billion of Social Security tax revenues to pay for them over the first seven years.
If this comes as a surprise to you, have no fear. You’re not alone. Bush didn’t pitch private Social Security accounts in his State of the Union message last week.
First, he drew a mocking standing ovation from Democrats by saying that “Congress did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security,” even though, as I said, he’d never submitted specific legislation.
Then he seemed to be kicking the Social Security problem a few years down the road in typical Washington fashion when he asked Congress “to join me in creating a commission to examine the full impact of baby boom retirements on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid,” adding that the commission would be bipartisan “and offer bipartisan solutions.”
But anyone who thought that Bush would wait for bipartisanship to deal with Social Security was wrong. Instead, he stuck his own privatization proposals into his proposed budget.
“The Democrats were laughing all the way to the funeral of Social Security modernization,” White House spokesman Trent Duffy told me in an interview Tuesday, but “the president still cares deeply about this. ” Duffy asserted that Bush would have been remiss not to include in the budget the cost of something that he feels so strongly about, and he seemed surprised at my surprise that Social Security privatization had been written into the budget without any advance fanfare.
Duffy said privatization costs were included in the midyear budget update that the Office of Management and Budget released last July 30, so it was logical for them to be in the 2007 budget proposals. But I sure didn’t see this coming – and I wonder how many people outside of the White House did.
Nevertheless, it’s here. Unlike Bush’s generalized privatization talk of last year, we’re now talking detailed numbers. On page 321 of the budget proposal, you see the privatization costs: $24.182 billion in fiscal 2010, $57.429 billion in fiscal 2011 and another $630.533 billion for the five years after that, for a seven-year total of $712.144 billion.
In the first year of private accounts, people would be allowed to divert up to 4 percent of their wages covered by Social Security into what Bush called “voluntary private accounts.” The maximum contribution to such accounts would start at $1,100 annually and rise by $100 a year through 2016.
It’s not clear how big a reduction in the basic benefit Social Security recipients would have to take in return for being able to set up these accounts, or precisely how the accounts would work.
Bush also wants to change the way Social Security benefits are calculated for most people by adopting so-called progressive indexing. Lower-income people would continue to have their Social Security benefits tied to wages, but the benefits paid to higher-paid people would be tied to inflation.
Wages have typically risen 1.1 percent a year more than inflation, so over time, that disparity would give lower-paid and higher-paid people essentially the same benefit. However, higher-paid workers would be paying substantially more into the system than lower-paid people would.
This means that although progressive indexing is an attractive idea from a social-justice point of view, it would reduce Social Security’s political support by making it seem more like welfare than an earned benefit.
Bush is right, of course, when he says in his budget proposal that Social Security in its current form is unsustainable. But there are plenty of ways to fix it besides offering private accounts as a substitute for part of the basic benefit.
Bush’s 2001 Social Security commission had members of both parties, but they had to agree in advance to support private accounts. Their report, which had some interesting ideas, went essentially nowhere.
What remains to be seen is whether this time around Bush follows through on forming a bipartisan commission and whether he can get credible Democrats to join it. Dropping numbers onto your opponents is a great way to stick your finger in their eye. But will it get the Social Security job done? That, my friends, is a whole other story.
Sat Feb 11, 10:08 AM ET
CAMBRIDGE, Md. – The eavesdropping tables were turned on President Bush on Friday. The president apparently believed he was speaking privately when he talked about listening in without a warrant on domestic communications with suspected al-Qaida terrorists overseas. But reporters were the ones doing the listening in this time.
The incident happened at a House Republican retreat. After six minutes of public remarks by the president, reporters were ushered out. “I support the free press, let’s just get them out of the room,” Bush said, intending to speak behind closed doors with fellow Republicans and take lawmakers’ questions.
When reporters left, Bush spoke about the National Security Agency program that he authorized four years ago and which has drawn criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike.
However, the microphones stayed on for a few minutes. That allowed journalists back at the White House to eavesdrop on Bush’s defense of the eavesdropping. His private statements were basically no different from what he’s said in public.
“I want to share some thoughts with you before I answer your questions,” Bush began. “First of all, I expect this conversation we’re about to have to stay in the room. I know that’s impossible in Washington.”
He was right.
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this is a stereogram. to view it, let your eyes cross, so that there appears to be three images, and focus your gaze on the image in the middle… something interesting will happen in the center of the middle image. if you need a hint, take a look here and try again… if you still can’t see it, the answer is here.
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more updates to various picture galleries. more to come as time goes on.
went to a “rehearsal” for sunday’s performance last night. of the 25 people that have confirmed that they are going to be in the performance, only six showed up for what looks like it’s going to be the only rehearsal that we’re going to have before then, which isn’t too encouraging, particularly since we’re going to be performing in the dark with fire… this morning i got up, took moe to work, shipped stuff out, and came home before 9:00. we bought a collapsible dog crate from costco, that broke over the weekend, so i called and made arrangements to take it back, but i don’t know if i’ll get another one or if they don’t have any more in stock… and i probably won’t know until i actually get there.
Religious Discrimination
For the second time in as many months, Starbucks management has kicked SWU member Suley Ayala out of the workplace for wearing her modest Pentagram necklace. Ms. Ayala is a practicing Wiccan and as a religious observance never takes off the necklace. She wore the necklace at Starbucks without interruption for three years until the company started harassing her after she and a group of her co-workers went public as members of the Starbucks Workers Union on November 18, 2005. Since then various management officials have badgered her and sent her home for refusing to take off the necklace. Ms. Ayala is extremely distraught and understandably angry.
Management can’t even get its story straight, sometimes saying no religious symbols are allowed and other times saying the necklace is too distracting. All the while, baristas wearing crosses of the same modest size have never been disciplined. Our opinion is that Starbucks is exploiting Suley’s non-traditional religion to retaliate against her for union activity.
The Fight Back
As a mother of four working hard to make ends meet, being disrespected by the company and losing a day’s earnings are the last things Ms. Ayala needs. We’re asking people of good will from all religions or no religion at all to join our fight. An indigenous Ecuadorian, Suley has struggled hard to win material gains on the job for her family and she’s not about to back down on her right to freely practice her religion.
Last Tuesday after Suley was sent home following a lull in the harassment, a co-worker and fellow union member asked her for the necklace. Tomer Malchi, a
Jew, put the necklace on and he too was confronted by management. In a moving act, Mr. Malchi refused to take off the Pentagram in solidarity with his sister worker. He was ousted from the workplace. Since then SWU members and supporters have been leafleting in front of the store to get the word out about Starbucks’ reprehensible conduct. Suley Ayala has filed a religious discrimination complaint against Starbucks with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. However, the government won’t win this fight for us, grassroots action will. In response to the union’s outrage, Starbucks has backed down a bit. Management now says that Ms. Ayala can wear a miniature version of the Pentagram. But that’s not enough. Suley wore her Pentagram without incident for three years. Why should she be arbitrarily disciplined now that she is a union member? We demand that she be allowed to wear her original Pentagram and receive compensation for the days she was sent home early.
Take Action
Before we formed the Starbucks Workers Union, the tyrants at the company could treat us like servants and we had no recourse to fight back. No longer. We will not tolerate religious discrimination against any of our members whether Wiccan, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist or atheist, or any other world view. Please take a stand with us for religious liberty in the workplace. Together we can create a truly global labor movement.
Call Starbucks District Manager Kim Vetrano NOW and demand that Suley be allowed to freely observe her religion while at work and that she be compensated for the work hours she missed:
Phone: (646) 256-9929
E-Mail: [email protected]
Fax: (917)591-8599
Seattle, 24 – 25 February, 3 – 4, 10 – 11 March, 2006
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here’s my johari window, which is really more of a “meme” than the other things that people call memes. let’s see what it does…
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Welcome to the Community of Dildo.
Our community of Dildo is situated in a deep narrow cove at the entrance point of Dildo Arm, Dildo and South Dildo. It is at the South side of Trinity Bay, some 96 km. from St. John’s. This community is close to good fishing grounds and the cod fishery was always the basis for this community. Later in the twentieth century, this community became a flourishing whaling community. A museum in the nearby town of South Dildo shows the history of whaling. Our school is in Dildo. There is another school called Woodland Junior High located here, too. However, we have other buildings here. There is the Interpretation Centre for our town, which has fishery-related artifacts from the past. Outside this museum there is a large giant squid, of actual size, made from fiberglass. There is also a tepee made with sticks and covered with seal skin.
Our commmunity also has a Lion’s Center, which has a large playground where boys and girls can go to play safely. We can play field hockey, soccer, tennis, and volleyball. The Lions Club also sponsors many activities for our community such as parities, dances, and suppers. This building is used by many groups throughout the community.
Dildo, today with a population of about 700 people is a very interesting community to visit.
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1. (left) a gallery of black and white pictures that were taken during an acid trip in approximately 1983. these photos are on fading negatives that have never been printed, so the quality is a little poor, but it definitely catches the feelings that i was having at the time. location is downtown seattle, and the sea tac airport (this was a long time before 11 september, 2001…
2. (right) a gallery of various pictures of ezra from 1984 to 1989 or thereabouts.
3. (below) a gallery of photos from the past, including one that may be NSFW, so beware. also includes at least one that won’t be of any meaning to you unless you were there.
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4. (left, small) a gallery of some of the more interesting musical instruments and some of the more difficult jobs that have been repaired by Nataraja Music Service, and some of it’s different locations since 1986.
most of these galleries will expand as time goes on. i just discovered that i have the ability to process regular negatives into reasonably acceptible digital photos, and i have a huge quantity of negatives of a variety of subjects that have never been printed before, and plenty of time to scan them.
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huge photo update coming… wait for it.
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took moe to work so that i can have the car today. shipped stuff out. bought some screens. did some grocery shopping, but didn’t find what i wanted. i suspect that i won’t find it out here in the boonies, in spite of the fact that safeway is supposed to be more or less the same store regardless of where you find it. they had what i was looking for when we lived in renton, which is a lot closer to seattle, but far enough out that they could be pretty well assured of some indians coming in to the store, but out here in “unincorporated” king/pierce county, they’re not as likely to get people who want indian food, and i doubt they will carry an item that only one of their customers wants… it’s time to start making the rounds of the numerous small asian markets along highway 99, which i’ve been avoiding because the signs are in chinese or korean and i suspect that their knowledge of english is minimal at best… ’cause they’re bound to have something similar, and potentially a lot better…
we still haven’t heard anything new about the van, which is making me nervous since i have to use the car on wednesday during the time when i know moe will be wanting to use it, and even if that works out, i’m going to portland next friday and saturday, and then going directly to port townsend on sunday, so i’m going to need my car, more-or-less with no strings attached, and i’ve gotten no indication that those strings are going to be adequately attached to someone else’s car for that period of time. moe said that she was going to call them today, so i won’t start worrying about it just yet.
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it’s things like this that make me wonder how long it’s going to have to be before we, the people, take action to preserve this democracy against those who would take it from us, whether those people are our leaders or not.
Rove counting heads on the Senate Judiciary Committee
2/6/2006
The White House has been twisting arms to ensure that no Republican member votes against President Bush in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s investigation of the administration’s unauthorized wiretapping.
Congressional sources said Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove has threatened to blacklist any Republican who votes against the president. The sources said the blacklist would mean a halt in any White House political or financial support of senators running for re-election in November.
“It’s hardball all the way,” a senior GOP congressional aide said.
The sources said the administration has been alarmed over the damage that could result from the Senate hearings, which began on Monday, Feb. 6. They said the defection of even a handful of Republican committee members could result in a determination that the president violated the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Such a determination could lead to impeachment proceedings.
Over the last few weeks, Mr. Rove has been calling in virtually every Republican on the Senate committee as well as the leadership in Congress. The sources said Mr. Rove’s message has been that a vote against Mr. Bush would destroy GOP prospects in congressional elections.
“He’s [Rove] lining them up one by one,” another congressional source said.
Mr. Rove is leading the White House campaign to help the GOP in November’s congressional elections. The sources said the White House has offered to help loyalists with money and free publicity, such as appearances and photo-ops with the president.
Those deemed disloyal to Mr. Rove would appear on his blacklist. The sources said dozens of GOP members in the House and Senate are on that list.
So far, only a handful of GOP senators have questioned Mr. Rove’s tactics.
Some have raised doubts about Mr. Rove’s strategy of painting the Democrats, who have opposed unwarranted surveillance, as being dismissive of the threat posed by al Qaeda terrorists.
“Well, I didn’t like what Mr. Rove said, because it frames terrorism and the issue of terrorism and everything that goes with it, whether it’s the renewal of the Patriot Act or the NSA wiretapping, in a political context,” said Sen. Chuck Hagel, Nebraska Republican.
Q: Does the president think he should obey the law? He put his hand on the Bible twice to uphold the Constitution. Wiretapping is not legal under the circumstances without a warrant.
MR. MCCLELLAN: Well, I guess you didn’t pay attention to the attorney general’s hearing earlier today, because he walked through very clearly the rationale behind this program.
Q: There is no rationale —
MR. MCCLELLAN: And Helen, I think you have to ask —
Q: — (inaudible) — the law.
MR. MCCLELLAN: I think you have ask are we — well, he’s not — are we a nation at war.
Q: That’s not the question.
MR. MCCLELLAN: No, that is the issue here.
Q: The question is, the point is, there are means for him to go to — get a warrant to spy on people.
MR. MCCLELLAN: Enemy surveillance is critical to waging and winning war. It’s one of the traditional tools of war.
Q: But he says he doesn’t have running room —
MR. MCCLELLAN: The attorney general outlined very clearly today how previous administrations have used the same authority —
Q: That doesn’t make it legal.
MR. MCCLELLAN: — and cited the same — and cited the very same authority.
Q: (Inaudible) — they broke the law, that’s too bad.
MR. MCCLELLAN: And we’re going to continue doing everything we can —
Q: You know what happened to Nixon when he broke the law.
MR. MCCLELLAN: — within our power to protect the American people. This is a very different circumstance, and you know that.
Q: No, I don’t.
By Andrew Gumbel
08 February 2006
President George Bush led a crowd of 10,000 mourners at yesterday’s funeral for Coretta Scott King, one of the icons of the civil rights movement, only to squirm in his seat as one speaker after another invoked Mrs King’s spirit to lambast his administration on everything from the Iraq war to the response to last year’s Hurricane Katrina.
The lavish occasion, bringing together civil rights veterans, three former presidents, more than a dozen senators, musicians and poets at a megachurch in the suburbs of Atlanta, was both a tribute to the woman who carried on the campaigning legacy of her assassinated husband, Martin Luther King Jr, for almost 40 years and also an opportunity to invoke some of the Kings’ passionately outspoken rhetoric.
President Bush called Mrs King, who died 10 days ago at the age of 78, “one of the most admired Americans of our time”.
Her nearest and dearest pointedly did not return the compliment. “We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there,” said Joseph Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr King more than 40 years ago, “but Coretta knew and we knew that there are weapons of misdirection right down here.”
The Rev Lowery issued a searing indictment of the Bush administration’s economic priorities. “For war billions more,” he said, “but no more for the poor.”
Far better received than President Bush was Bill Clinton, who won an enthusiastic ovation as he described how Mrs King might easily have given up the civil rights struggle after her husband’s assassination in 1968. Instead, he said, she asked herself “What am I going to do with the rest of my life?”
U.S. policy appears to be "we don’t torture unless it serves our purpose, and then we don’t admit it, or, preferably, let our ‘allies’ take care of it so that we can say it doesn’t reflect negatively on us"… 8/
By MARK SHERMAN
WASHINGTON – The U.S. government wants an Iraqi court to handle criminal charges against a naturalized American citizen who is being held in Iraq on suspicion that he is a senior operative of insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The man’s lawyers said he is innocent and likely to be tortured if he is handed over to the Iraqis.
The case is the first known instance in which the government has decided to allow an American to be tried in the new Iraqi legal system. At least four other U.S. citizens suspected of aiding the insurgency had been held in Iraq, the Pentagon has said.
Shawqi Omar, 44, who once served in the Minnesota National Guard, has been held since late 2004 in U.S.-run military prisons as an enemy combatant. He has not been charged with a crime or been given access to a lawyer, said Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer representing Omar’s family in the United States.
The government said Omar, who also holds Jordanian citizenship, was harboring an Iraqi insurgent and four Jordanian fighters at the time of his arrest and also had bomb-making materials. He is described in court papers as a relative of Zarqawi who was plotting to kidnap foreigners from Baghdad hotels.
Separately, Omar, Zarqawi and 11 others have been indicted by a Jordanian court on charges they plotted a chemical attack against Jordan’s intelligence agency.
Omar’s family said he is a businessman who was seeking reconstruction contracts in Iraq.
The family is asking a U.S. judge to step in and force the government to charge Omar with a crime and put him on trial in the United States, or release him. They also are seeking to prevent Omar’s transfer to Iraqi custody, which they said would subject the Sunni Muslim to torture by Shiite-dominated authorities.
U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina last week issued an order in Washington temporarily blocking Omar’s transfer to Iraqi custody. The order is set to expire on Monday, but the judge could extend it.
The Justice Department weighed in on Tuesday, arguing that Urbina has no business intervening on Omar’s behalf and denying that Omar is even in U.S. custody.
Instead, the department said in court papers, Omar was captured by the U.S.-led multinational force in Iraq and remains in its custody, the department said in court papers. The multinational force is independent of the U.S. government, the department said.
In any event, Omar would not be handed over to the Iraqis unless he is convicted in an Iraqi court, the government said.
Hafetz, a lawyer at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, said the government is resorting to a legal gimmick to keep Omar’s case out of American courts. “It’s legally incorrect and factually incorrect to say the U.S. does not have control of him,” Hafetz said.
In July, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said five unnamed Americans, including one who also had Jordanian citizenship, were in U.S. military custody in Iraq. Whitman said then that the government had not decided whether their cases would be turned over to the Justice Department or to the new Iraqi legal system, which has handled the prosecution of other foreign fighters who came to Iraq to fight the U.S.-led occupation and Iraqi government.
In March, Matthew Waxman, the Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, said a panel of three U.S. officers determined the Jordanian-American was an enemy combatant and not entitled to prisoner-of-war status under the Geneva Convention. The description provided by Waxman and other officials matches Omar’s biography as contained in the government’s court papers.
In its filing Tuesday, the Justice Department said the officers were part of the multinational force.
Omar became a U.S. citizen in 1986, two years after he served in the National Guard. Omar spent about 11 months in the Guard before being discharged in November 1984 without completing his training, said Shannon Purvis, a spokesperson for the Minnesota National Guard. Omar received an “uncharacterized discharge,” meaning he was discharged for such things as health problems or poor performance, Purvis said.
Non-citizens can serve in the Guard as long as they obtain citizenship within eight years of joining, Purvis said.
also:
U.S. Navy constructs permanent bases in Iraq
Top 10 ‘Conspiracy Theories’ about George W. Bush Part I & Part II
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more updates for Seattle Agility Center including a new EAT page, and pictures for another, plus a surreptitious update to two more EAT pages in an attempt to start organising their web site a little more logically. more updates for Capitol Hill Neighborhood Acupuncture, including changing the message, link and order on a javascript rollover that i didn’t create, which is pretty good considering that i never really learned javascript. all in all, they came out pretty well, in that you can’t tell that they’re not original unless you really look, but the fact that his site doesn’t validate really bugs me and i want to change it… unfortunately that means totally replacing the whole site, and not just chris’ part of it, so for now i’m keeping my hands to myself. got an order for bhutanese temple incense today that i was able to prepare for shipping within 5 minutes of receiving the order. i like it when that happens.
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when i had my injury, i lost consciousness on the way to the hospital, and regained consciousness 10 days later. during that period of time i was apparently conscious and responding to commands, but i don’t remember any of it. instead
opening my skull and performing surgery is like opening the hood and performing maintenance. the surgeon and the auto mechanic perform the same services, only on a different level.
a big show-piece with a large chorus of men and women dressed in 50’s-style, white uniforms. this also features a young, eager person of indetermite sex, all in a white 50’s-syle uniform, although different from the rest of them, buying an alchohol-powered tow-truck from a somewhat-sleazy car dealer in a white, pin-striped suit.
open with the imression that it’s going to be a musical about cars, then morph into psychedelic brain-surgery with oversized, flashing backgroud of angiogram graphics, then finish with explanation of how brain surgery and auto mechanics are the same thing.
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introduction: about cars and trucks, how they are used every day, how they break down and who the people are who fix them. music is ragtime/dixieland/marching band style.
the chorus is in white tuxedos with hats and canes and are doing complicated dance steps in a grid pattern, on multiple levels
introduction of the young, eager, idealistic person of indeterminate sex: how s/he wants to be one of these people.
the person should be clean-shaven, with a blonde pageboy bob, and slightly chubby, in a white uniform with a tie, and a floppy uniform hat with a bill. throughout the performance, it should not be made obvious whether the person is male or female.
the song of the somewhat-sleazy used-truck salesman.
the somewhat-sleazy used-truck salesman should be a short, skinny person with a pencil-thin moustache and greased back hair in a grey pinstriped suit that’s slightly too big, and shoes that would match if they weren’t clown-sized.
duet between the person of indeterminate sex and the somewhat-sleazy used-truck salesman: combining his/her interest with becoming a tow-truck driver, lack of skill and desire to learn with the somewhat-sleazy used-truck salesman’s desire to sell something, anything to anyone at all.
an alcohol-powered truck appears: alcohol versus gasoline – the differences and similarities, whether gas or alcohol has more power.
the truck is sold, much to the amazement of everyone. the person of indeterminate sex is seen driving down a dirt road lined with trees.
we are left with an image of the truck lumbering off into rolling hills in the distance, on a dirt farm road, lined with trees, with the person of indeterminate sex waving their uniform hat out the window.
we need some repair: the truck is put to use, much to the amazement and delight of everyone… or could it be that the tow-truck itself needs repair? we may never know, because:
psychedelic morph: the music changes, the uniform and tuxedos change from white to red and everything is overlayed with movies of angiograms.
the music changes gradually from ragtime/dixieland/marching band style music to heavy rock with screaming guitars
introduction of the two repair men: one is a doctor, with bag, mask, occulus and stethescope, the other is a car mechanic in a grease stained, pin-striped coverall (the return of the somewhat-sleazy used truck salesman?) and cap, with a wrench and hand rag, but for the most part they move and act as one person.
the repair: the hood goes up and we tinker with the engine. the skull opens up and we tinker with the brain. the movies change to stills of angiograms but there is still an overall red cast to everything.
the repairmen: auto-mechanics and brain-surgeons are the same thing; both make things go.
the repairmen part 2: auto-mechanics perform brain-surgery on a car while brain-surgeons perform engine maintenance on a human. complex, indian-style pas-de-deux with repairmen.
finale: has this performance been about auto maintenance or brain surgery?
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Army demanded $700 from man who was wounded
By Eric Eyre
February 07, 2006
The last time 1st Lt. William "Eddie" Rebrook IV saw his body armor, he was lying on a stretcher in Iraq, his arm shattered and covered in blood.
A field medic tied a tourniquet around Rebrook’s right arm to stanch the bleeding from shrapnel wounds. Soldiers yanked off his blood-soaked body armor. He never saw it again.
But last week, Rebrook was forced to pay $700 for that body armor, blown up by a roadside bomb more than a year ago.
He was leaving the Army for good because of his injuries. He turned in his gear at his base in Fort Hood, Texas. He was informed there was no record that the body armor had been stripped from him in battle.
He was told to pay nearly $700 or face not being discharged for weeks, perhaps months.
Rebrook, 25, scrounged up the cash from his Army buddies and returned home to Charleston last Friday.
"I last saw the [body armor] when it was pulled off my bleeding body while I was being evacuated in a helicopter," Rebrook said. "They took it off me and burned it."
But no one documented that he lost his Kevlar body armor during battle, he said. No one wrote down that armor had apparently been incinerated as a biohazard.
Rebrook’s mother, Beckie Drumheler, said she was saddened – and angry – when she learned that the Army discharged her son with a $700 bill. Soldiers who serve their country, those who put their lives on the line, deserve better, she said.
"It’s outrageous, ridiculous and unconscionable," Drumheler said. "I wanted to stand on a street corner and yell through a megaphone about this."
Rebrook was standing in the turret of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle when the roadside bomb exploded Jan. 11, 2005. The explosion fractured his arm and severed an artery. A Black Hawk helicopter airlifted him to a combat support hospital in Baghdad.
He was later flown to a hospital in Germany for surgery, then on to Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital in Washington, D.C., for more surgeries. Doctors operated on his arm seven times in all.
But Rebrook’s right arm never recovered completely. He still has range of motion problems. He still has pain when he turns over to sleep at night.
Even with the injury, Rebrook said he didn’t want to leave the Army. He said the "medical separation" discharge was the Army’s decision, not his.
So after eight months at Fort Hood, he gathered up his gear and started the "long process "to leave the Army for good.
Things went smoothly until officers asked him for his "OTV," his "outer tactical vest," or body armor, which was missing. A battalion supply officer had failed to document the loss of the vest in Iraq.
"They said that I owed them $700," Rebrook said. "It was like ‘thank you for your service, now here’s the bill for $700.’ I had to pay for it if I wanted to get on with my life."
In the past, the Army allowed to soldiers to write memos, explaining the loss and destruction of gear, Rebrook said.
But a new policy required a "report of survey" from the field that documented the loss.
Rebrook said he knows other soldiers who also have been forced to pay for equipment destroyed in battle.
"It’s a combat loss," he said. "It shouldn’t be a cost passed on to the soldier. If a soldier’s stuff is hit by enemy fire, he shouldn’t have to pay for it."
Rebrook said he tried to get a battalion commander to sign a waiver on the battle armor, but the officer declined. Rebrook was told he’d have to supply statements from witnesses to verify the body armor was taken from him and burned.
"There’s a complete lack of empathy from senior officers who don’t know what it’s like to be a combat soldier on the ground," Rebrook said. "There’s a whole lot of people who don’t want to help you. They’re more concerned with process than product."
Rebrook, who graduated with honors from the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., spent more than four years on active duty. He served six months in Iraq.
Now, Rebrook is sending out resumes, trying to find a job. He plans to return to college to take a couple of pre-med classes and apply to medical school. He wants to be a doctor someday.
"From being an infantryman, I know what it’s like to hurt people," Rebrook said. "But now I’d like to help people."
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If there is someone on your friends list who makes your world a better place just because they exist and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the internet, then post this same sentence in your journal.
you know who you are… 😉
oh, by the way… i have an interview today. i was feeling really discouraged the other day, so i went to the martin luther king center web site and found a volunteer position at a local center, helping people who lack computer skills gain them. i don’t know whether this will be in the form of teaching classes, or just being overseer for a computer lab somewhere, and i’m not sure how long i will last before i go nuts, but it’s better than doing nothing.
EDIT: barring anything negative on my background check (which i can’t imagine, but anything is possible, especially these days) i will have a five-hour-per-week volunteer position on or about the 20th. whee.
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Hybrid Elephant report: i shipped out two orders on saturday, got one ready to ship out today, and, if fedex gets here before i have to leave, i’ll have one to ship out tomorrow. average successful requests per day is 988, and has been going up steadily during the past few weeks, but average successful requests for pages per day is only 347, which is fewer than it was last week or the week before, which tells me that i’ve been getting a ton of hits from robots, but fewer actual people… which is good in a way, i suppose, but i’d rather have paying customers than lookie-loo robots, especially when the robots have been looking places that they shouldn’t recently anyway… 8/ i got a big order from aroma harbor of franklin, georgia, which i had to refund because they need the fragrance right away and i am completely out of stock of almost everything they ordered. i’m probably still going to order it, but now it can wait until i actually have need of it.
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Grandpa Al Lewis, actor/politician/restaurant owner, dies at 95
Larry Mcshane, Canadian Press
Saturday, February 04, 2006
NEW YORK (AP) – Al Lewis, the cigar-chomping patriarch of The Munsters whose work as a basketball scout, restaurateur and political candidate never eclipsed his role as Grandpa from the television sitcom, died after years of failing health. He was 95.
Lewis, with his wife at his bedside, passed away Friday night, said Bernard White, program director at WBAI-FM, where the actor hosted a weekly radio program. White made the announcement on the air during the Saturday slot where Lewis usually appeared.
“To say that we will miss his generous, cantankerous, engaging spirit is a profound understatement,” White said.
Lewis, sporting a somewhat cheesy Dracula outfit, became a pop culture icon playing the irascible father-in-law to Fred Gwynne’s ever-bumbling Herman Munster on the 1964-66 television show. He was also one of the stars of another classic TV comedy, playing Officer Leo Schnauzer on Car 54, Where Are You?
But Lewis’ life off the small screen ranged far beyond his acting antics. A former ballplayer at Thomas Jefferson High School, he achieved notoriety as a basketball talent scout familiar to coaching greats like Jerry Tarkanian and Red Auerbach.
He operated a successful Greenwich Village restaurant, Grandpa’s, where he was a regular presence – chatting with customers, posing for pictures, signing autographs.
Just two years short of his 90th birthday, a ponytailed Lewis ran as the Green party candidate against incumbent Governor George Pataki. Lewis campaigned against draconian drug laws and the death penalty, while going to court in a losing battle to have his name appear on the ballot as Grandpa Al Lewis.
He didn’t defeat Pataki, but managed to collect more 52,000 votes.
Lewis was born Albert Meister in upstate New York before his family moved to Brooklyn, where the 6-foot-1 teen began a lifelong love affair with basketball. He later became a vaudeville and circus performer, but his career didn’t take off until television did the same.
Lewis, as Officer Schnauzer, played opposite Gwynne’s Officer Francis Muldoon in Car 54, Where Are You? – a comedy about a Bronx police precinct that aired from 1961-63. One year later, the duo appeared together in The Munsters, taking up residence at the fictional 1313 Mockingbird Lane.
The series, about a family of clueless creatures plunked down in middle America, was a success and ran through 1966. It forever locked Lewis in as the memorably twisted character; decades later, strangers would greet him on the street with shouts of Grandpa!
Unlike some television stars, Lewis never complained about getting typecast and made appearances in character for decades.
“Why would I mind?” he asked in a 1997 interview. “It pays my mortgage.”
Lewis rarely slowed down, opening his restaurant and hosting his WBAI radio program. At one point during the ’90s, he was a frequent guest on the Howard Stern radio show, once sending the shock jock diving for the delay button by leading an undeniably obscene chant against the Federal Communications Commission.
He also popped up in a number of movies, including the acclaimed They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Married to the Mob. Lewis reprised his role of Schnauzer in the movie remake of Car 54, and appeared as a guest star on television shows such as Taxi, Green Acres and Lost in Space.
But in 2003, Lewis was hospitalized for an angioplasty. Complications during surgery led to an emergency bypass and the amputation of his right leg below the knee and all the toes on his left foot. Lewis spent the next month in a coma.
A year later, he was back offering his recollections of a seminal punk band on the DVD Ramones Raw.
He is survived by his wife, Karen Ingenthron-Lewis, three sons and four grandchildren.
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| You Are Gonzo the |
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“almost” any stunt?
although i get the impression that it was a close race between gonzo and animal.
we just lost the super bowl…
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the electricity was out yesterday… it’s what we get, i suppose, for living at the end of a rural gravel road that you have to drive down another gravel road to get to. i suppose the idea of a generator wouldn’t be too out of the question, but not until i can afford a workshop.
the weather was fairly nice today, so i put up the tarp over the holes in the roof, and put roofing goo on the leaky spots near the chimney. woo hoo.
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hrmph!
i was forced to take down a section of the web that has been there for at least 5 years that i can recall, and probably a lot longer than that, because the Caliphate O.T.O.’s web crawler finally figured out where i had stashed Liber CDXIV. in spite of all their bluster, they haven’t been able to prove that they actually own the copyright to a piece that should be in the public domain by now anyway, but i’ve had to take it down because i can’t afford to defend myself against a group who thinks it’s okay to violate uncle al’s specific request that people involved in the great work not file lawsuits against one another… feh!
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here it is, three days after the SOTU, and already bush has broken two of his promises already… so bush lied. who is surprised? what surprises me is that we’re not in the middle of an impeachment already. don’t any of you remember NIXON? what is so different about bush?
Feb, 02, 2006
By Ryan Singel
President Bush has moved slowly to fill top civil liberty and privacy posts.
The powerful Office of the Director of National Intelligence, created by the Intelligence Reform Act, must have a civil liberties protection officer who is charged with ensuring that the "use of technologies sustain, and do not erode, privacy protections," according to the law. But it took the Bush administration a full year after passage of the bill to fill the position last Dec. 7.
The current DNI is former U.S. ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte. His deputy is ex-National Security Agency chief Gen. Michael Hayden, who, for the last month, has been vigorously defending the NSA eavesdropping program that circumvented federal wiretapping laws. Alexander W. Joel was appointed to the civil liberties post days before The New York Times revealed that the NSA was spying on Americans’ overseas communications.
Bush mentioned the spy plan in his State of the Union address Tuesday, calling it a "terrorist surveillance program to aggressively pursue the international communications of suspected al-Qaida operatives and affiliates to and from America."
The White House has also failed to nominate a replacement chief privacy officer for the Department of Homeland Security, a post that’s been vacant since September when Nuala O’Connor Kelly left the administration to become General Electric’s privacy officer. The office is currently being run by O’Connor Kelly’s former deputy, Maureen Cooney.
Congress, too, has been slacking in the privacy arena. A five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board mandated by law in 2004 remains in limbo as board members await congressional confirmation. The board is supposed to report to Congress yearly and oversee antiterrorism policies.
The privacy board was also created by the Reform Act, which translated the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations into law. According to the 9/11 Commission report, the board should make sure that antiterrorism powers "actually materially enhance security and that there is adequate supervision of the executive’s use of the powers."
"The civil liberties board is supposed to be the first contact for the president to talk about privacy and intelligence matters," says Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology. "We didn’t know about the NSA piece when the intelligence-reform bill was put forward, but it would have been helpful to have the experts at the civil liberties board involved at the beginning."
Bush named the board’s members in June, but did not forward the nominations to the Senate until late September.
Carol E. Dinkins, a former deputy attorney general under President Reagan and a partner at Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ former law firm, is slated to head the commission, while Alan Charles Raul, who served under President George H.W. Bush, will be the vice chairman.
Both had confirmation hearings in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Nov. 8, but the committee will not likely vote on their nominations until at least early February, according to a commission staffer.
The Senate should move quickly, according to Peter Swire, an Ohio State University law professor and former chief counselor for privacy in the Clinton administration.
"Recent revelations show even more clearly why the board is needed," Swire said. "The White House has had no privacy officials, and having privacy expertise in the White House will reduce the chance of mistakes going forward."
The White House did not return a call for comment.
hmmm… this is odd… why do you suppose that nobody noticed this when it was happening back in july and august of last year!!
and while we’re at it, somebody needs to remind those people in china and iran that…
There is no such thing as a dirty word, nor is there a word so powerful that it’s going to send the listener to the lake of fire upon hearing it.
–Frank ZappaInformation doesn’t kill you.
–Frank Zappa
August 01, 2005
By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
WASHINGTON – The Department of Defense has developed a new strategy in counterterrorism that would increase military activities on American soil, particularly in the area of intelligence gathering.
The move is sparking concern among civil liberties advocates and those who fear an encroaching military role in domestic law enforcement.
In an argument that eerily foreshadowed the July London terror attacks, the Pentagon in late June announced its "Strategy for Homeland Defense and Support," which would expand its reach domestically to prevent "enemy attacks aimed at Americans here at home."
The strategy, approved by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England on June 24, argues that the government needs a multi-layered, preventive approach to national defense in order to combat an unconventional enemy that will attack from anywhere, anytime and by any conceivable means.
"Transnational terrorist groups view the world as an integrated, global battlespace in which to exploit perceived U.S vulnerabilities, wherever they may be," reads the 40-page document that outlines the new plans.
"Terrorists seek to attack the United States and its centers of gravity at home and abroad and will use asymmetric means to achieve their ends, such as simultaneous mass casualty attacks," it said.
Critics say the fears raised by the Pentagon are being used as a justification for the military to conduct wider, more intrusive surveillance on American citizens.
"Do we want, as a free people, with the notion of privacy enshrined in the Constitution and based on the very clear limits and defined role of government, to be in a society where not just the police, but the military are on the street corners gathering intelligence on citizens, sharing that data, manipulating that data?" asked former Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., a constitutional law expert and civil libertarian.
"This document provides a blueprint for doing just that."
Barr said the new strategy is a back-door means of following through with a 2002 plan to create a massive, centralized information database using public and private records of individuals, called "Total Information Awareness." Congress killed TIA in 2003 because of civil liberties and privacy concerns.
Critics say they believe much of TIA lives on in some form through smaller, undisclosed military contracts. This latest plan, they say, is one way of jump-starting TIA’s initial goals.
"This is TIA back with a vengeance," said Barr. "What they have come up with here is a much vaguer and much broader concept that sounds more innocuous. [The Pentagon] is getting much smarter in how to sell these things."
The Defense Department report says its increased surveillance capabilities at home will adhere to constitutional and privacy protections, even though it emphasizes enhancing current "data mining" capabilities.
"Specifically, the department will develop automated tools to improve data fusion, analysis, and management, to track systematically large amounts of data and to detect, fuse and analyze aberrant patterns of activity, consistent with U.S. privacy protections," the report reads.
It will also develop "a cadre of specialized terrorism intelligence analysts within the defense intelligence community and deploy a number of these analysts to interagency centers for homeland defense and counter-terrorism analysis and operations," states the report.
Some national security experts agree that emboldened surveillance on domestic soil is necessary in the global War on Terror, and that such intelligence could prevent the kind of attacks perpetuated by homegrown terrorists in England on July 7 and 21.
"The Defense Department has always done intelligence operations in the United States. They have the legal right to do that. There is nothing new here," James Carafano, a homeland security analyst with The Heritage Foundation, told FOXNews.com. "There are no new threats to privacy or constitutionality. I just think it’s about doing [intelligence] more efficiently and effectively."
But John Pike, founder of GlobalSecurity.org , a clearinghouse of available intelligence and national security information, says it’s not so clear how much data the Pentagon will be collecting on citizens and whether it will be retaining, sharing and building individual dossiers. So far, the lack of detail leaves as many question as answers, he said.
"The bad news is there is certainly the possibility of a return to the sort of domestic surveillance that we saw in the 1950s and 1960s," Pike said.
Pentagon officials declined to comment on the variety of data it would gather and share, or how long it would retain files on individuals under the new homeland defense plan.
The Washington Post reported recently that among the databases being built by the Pentagon is a military recruitment list of individual high school and college students culled from commercial data brokers and other sources. The military is planning to share the database with federal and state law enforcement agencies if necessary, the Post reports.
A Defense Department spokesman said the military’s domestic role in homeland security will remain a supportive one, and the Pentagon will only provide resources when local, state and federal resources and capabilities "have been exceeded or do not exist."
"We have expanded activities in order to better execute support missions, but we are extremely sensitive to the historically restricted, limited role of the Defense Department," the spokesman told FOXNews.com in an e-mailed response to questions.
The Pentagon’s new strategy appears to dovetail with a recent report by The New York Times, that said the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review, which outlines the future vision of the military and is due to Congress in February, will reflect a new approach in which the Defense Department will prepare to fight in one war theater at a time while putting the bulk of its resources into homeland defense.
The strategy approved by military officials in June also increases joint training exercises with first responders and other agencies as well as the creation of National Guard-staffed teams in case of a catastrophic attack.
The president would have to authorize the actual use of troops on military soil in order to adhere to the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits military involvement in domestic law enforcement. Pentagon officials say the new strategy won’t require that authorization.
But the strategy does includes more collaboration with law enforcement in "support" roles on all levels of counter-terrorism efforts as well as the monitoring of terrorist threats along the borders, in the air and on water.
"If they find information in the course of their business that might help other agencies, then they can share it. If other agencies in their own intelligence gathering find information that can help the Defense Department, they can share that," said Carafano. "I really don’t see any legal or constitutional issues here."
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
WASHINGTON – Free speech advocates are frustrated with a host of American companies they say have been collaborating with oppressive regimes in countries like China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, to help them filter and monitor the Internet activity of their citizens.
Big technology names like Microsoft, Yahoo! and Cisco Systems have been criticized roundly in recent years for providing foreign governments with the tools they need to crack down on Internet use, but critics say they have not been able to do much more than complain.
"These companies’ lack of ethics is extremely worrisome," said Lucie Morillon, the Washington representative of Reporters Without Borders, an international advocacy group for journalists that monitors government repression of the Internet worldwide, documenting dissidents charged with breaking their country’s Internet laws. For instance, the organization reports that an estimated 60 "cyber-dissidents" are in Chinese jails today.
"It’s the role of watchdog organizations like ours — and any citizen who is willing — to let these companies know that this is a matter of human rights," Morillon said. "Write to these companies and make them feel bad."
Critics last month blasted Microsoft, the largest software company in the world, when it acknowledged that it was working with the Chinese government to censor its new Chinese-language Web portal and new free Web log tool, MSN Spaces.
In addition to the vigilant filtering of content transmitted through Web sites, e-mail, message boards, chat rooms and blogs, the Communist government in Beijing announced in June that everyone in China publishing a blog would have to register it with the government by the end of the month.
Already, anyone who opens a Web account in China must register it with police, according to the Open Net Initiative, a collaborative effort by the University of Toronto, Harvard University and the University of Cambridge.
"China’s Internet filtering regime is the most sophisticated effort of its kind in the world," ONI authors declared in a recent report on China. "The implications of this distorted online information environment for China’s users are profound, and disturbing."
According to the ONI, about 15 to 20 nations across the globe are actively filtering their citizens’ Internet access. In June, the group announced that Iran’s filtering efforts are reaching the sophisticated status of China.
"Iran is also one of a growing number of countries, particularly in the Middle East region, that rely upon commercial software developed by for-profit United States companies to carry out the core of its filtering regime," ONI’s report on Iran reads. "In effect, Iran outsources many of the decisions for what its citizens can access on the Internet to a United States company, which in turn profits from its complicity in such a regime."
ONI reported that Iran relies on filtering software designed by U.S.-based Secure Computing, called "SmartFilter." It helps block a range of banned words, topics and images — most of which Tehran says contradict the country’s strict Muslim beliefs.
Unlike China, selling technology to Iran is illegal because of U.S. sanctions. David Burt, spokesman for Secure Computing, said that the big Iranian Internet service providers, which are controlled by the government, are using SmartFilter illegally.
"We have no contracts with any ISPs in Iran. A couple of the biggest ones are illegally using our software," said Burt. "I think our options of going after these foreign companies are limited."
But Secure Computing legally provides its software to other countries that filter Internet content, including Saudi Arabia. "We sell to ISPs all over the world," acknowledged Burt. "It’s really up to the customer on how they use the product."
Representatives from Nortel and Cisco said they do not specifically design their technology for regimes like China to repress Internet access. They say they cannot control the use of the technology once it is enabled. For instance, the firewall that Cisco designed to combat viruses can also be used to block political content that the government does not like.
"Cisco has been and will continue to be a key driver of Internet growth worldwide," said spokesman John Earnhardt. "Cisco Systems has not specially designed any products for any government, or any regional market, to block or filter content. The products that Cisco Systems sells in the U.S., China, India, Pakistan, France, Mexico, etc. are the same products that we sell worldwide."
The fact that U.S. companies like Nortel Networks and Cisco Systems have been silent on what they consider the misuse of their technology by governments creating back doors into monitoring Internet use and filtering capabilities, has angered many.
"I think that companies chartered in free countries ought to ask the question, ‘What is our technology being used for in authoritarian [countries], and is it a purpose that we want to be behind?’" said Jonathan Zittrain, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and assistant professor of law at Harvard University.
Dick D’Amato, chairman of the U.S-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which has held hearings on the Chinese Internet filtering issue, called the companies’ explanations a "copout."
"They know what’s being done with [the technology]," he said. "They need to be held accountable for what they are doing."
Western companies providing technology to authoritarian governments say that playing by the rules of the host country is the price they pay for doing business there.
"MSN (Microsoft Network) abides by the laws and regulations of each country in which it operates," an MSN spokesperson told FOXNews.com.
Yahoo! made a similar argument two years ago, and continues to do so as critics complain that the regime censors its Yahoo! China portal.
"Just like any other global company, Yahoo! must ensure that its local country sites must operate within the laws, regulations and customs of the country in which they are based," Yahoo! said in a statement to FOXNews.com.
But the watchdogs don’t buy it — especially, they say, when the Chinese government prohibits any political dissent, even to the point of blocking out searches that include words like "democracy," as well as international news sites of which the government does not approve.
D’Amato said the commission, which reports to Congress, hopes to put pressure on these companies by bringing them in for hearings, soon.
"I’m not so sure they’ll come," he said. "They’re running for cover."
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 |
You scored as Discordian. You are a Discordian! That makes you a real oddball, and this is a fact in which you take great pride! Everything is funny, and really, who cares anyway? Synchronicity is the Great Cosmic Comedy, and meaning is where you find it! Have you hugged your paradigm today?
What Subversive Alternative Paradigm Are You? |
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i put a favicon on The Seattle Agility Center, but i’m not gonna tell anyone about it and see how long it takes until somebody associated with the center (other than moe, who reads this journal occasionally) notices and says something about it.
the shipment of murtis came in on monday and i shipped out murtis on tuesday. another shipment of incense is supposed to be here tomorrow, and i’ve got another shipment of incense that i don’t know when it’s supposed to get here, and the suppliers haven’t called me back, so i’m getting a little worried. steven has been flaky – as usual – but he’s apparently back in reality for the moment, so i’m probably going to order some stuff from him within a week or so. i’m considering putting some more “hippie-type” stuff (meaning “less spiritual-type stuff”) on Hybrid Elephant, but i have been hesitating because i don’t have a very clear idea of what the market is, whether it is more hippy-type people that are looking for spiritual-type stuff, or whether it is more spiritual-type people. i wouldn’t want to drive away what customers i have…
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thanks to
i didn’t watch the SOTU because i believed it was all going to be lies, and i wasn’t wrong. they’re already starting to backpedal…
By Kevin G. Hall
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON – One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America’s dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn’t mean it literally.
What the president meant, they said in a conference call with reporters, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equivalent to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025.
But America still would import oil from the Middle East, because that’s where the greatest oil supplies are.
The president’s State of the Union reference to Mideast oil made headlines nationwide Wednesday because of his assertion that “America is addicted to oil” and his call to “break this addiction.”
Bush vowed to fund research into better batteries for hybrid vehicles and more production of the alternative fuel ethanol, setting a lofty goal of replacing “more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.”
He pledged to “move beyond a petroleum-based economy and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past.”
Not exactly, though, it turns out.
“This was purely an example,” Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said.
He said the broad goal was to displace foreign oil imports, from anywhere, with domestic alternatives. He acknowledged that oil is a freely traded commodity bought and sold globally by private firms. Consequently, it would be very difficult to reduce imports from any single region, especially the most oil-rich region on Earth.
Asked why the president used the words “the Middle East” when he didn’t really mean them, one administration official said Bush wanted to dramatize the issue in a way that “every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands.” The official spoke only on condition of anonymity because he feared that his remarks might get him in trouble.
Presidential adviser Dan Bartlett made a similar point in a briefing before the speech. “I think one of the biggest concerns the American people have is oil coming from the Middle East. It is a very volatile region,” he said.
Through the first 11 months of 2005, the United States imported nearly 2.2 million barrels per day of oil from the Middle East nations of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq. That’s less than 20 percent of the total U.S. daily imports of 10.062 million barrels.
Imports account for about 60 percent of U.S. oil consumption.
Alan Hubbard, the director of the president’s National Economic Council, projects that America will import 6 million barrels of oil per day from the Middle East in 2025 without major technological changes in energy consumption.
The Bush administration believes that new technologies could reduce the total daily U.S. oil demand by about 5.26 million barrels through alternatives such as plug-in hybrids with rechargeable batteries, hydrogen-powered cars and new ethanol products.
That means the new technologies could reduce America’s oil appetite by the equivalent of what we’re expected to import from the Middle East by 2025, Hubbard said.
But we’ll still be importing plenty of oil, according to the Energy Department’s latest projection.
“In 2025, net petroleum imports, including both crude oil and refined products, are expected to account for 60 percent of demand … up from 58 percent in 2004,” according to the Energy Information Administration’s 2006 Annual Energy Outlook.
Some experts think Bush needs to do more to achieve his stated goal.
“We can achieve energy independence from the Middle East, but not with what the president is proposing,” said Craig Wolfe, the president of Americans for Energy Independence in Studio City, Calif. “We need to slow the growth in consumption. Our organization believes we need to do something about conservation” and higher auto fuel-efficiency standards.
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
WASHINGTON — A new provision tucked into the Patriot Act bill now before Congress would allow authorities to haul demonstrators at any “special event of national significance” away to jail on felony charges if they are caught breaching a security perimeter.
Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sponsored the measure, which would extend the authority of the Secret Service to allow agents to arrest people who willingly or knowingly enter a restricted area at an event, even if the president or other official normally protected by the Secret Service isn’t in attendance at the time.
The measure has civil libertarians protesting what they say is yet another power grab for the executive branch and one more loss for free speech.
“It’s definitely problematic and chilling,” said Lisa Graves, senior counsel for legislative strategy at the American Civil Liberties Union , which has written letters to the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, pointing out that the provision wasn’t subject to hearings or open debate.
Some conservatives say they too are troubled by the measure.
“It concerns me greatly,” said Bob Barr, former U.S. prosecutor and Republican representative from Georgia. “It clearly raises serious concerns about First Amendment rights.”
But not everyone agrees that rights are being trampled on by the additional provision. In fact, some say the ACLU is the problem when it comes to protecting national security.
Rocco DiPippo, a freelance writer for the conservative FrontPageMagazine.com and editor of The Autonomist Web log , said the ACLU has fought the government every step of the way over security measures following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
“Its opposition to Specter’s reasonable proposal is simply more of the same,” he said. “I can understand the concern that we should be suspicious of government, but we shouldn’t adopt this mindset: ‘government is evil.’ This is just more hatred of (President) Bush.”
Under current law, the Secret Service can arrest anyone for breaching restricted areas where the president or a protected official is or will be visiting, but the new provision would allow such arrests even after those VIPs have left the premises of any designated “special event of national significance.” The provision would increase the maximum penalty for such an infraction from six months to one year in jail.
In a post-Sept. 11 world many non-political events have been designated National Special Security Events and would rise to the higher status. Examples of possible NSSEs are the Olympics or the Super Bowl. In 2004, the presidential inaugural balls and President Ronald Reagan’s June funeral procession in Washington, D.C., were designated NSSEs.
According to government sources with knowledge of the legislation, Secret Service protection and law enforcement authority would extend beyond protecting a specific person, rather the event itself would become the “protectee.”
Currently, non-violent demonstrators who enter restricted areas at such events previously would be arrested and charged by local law enforcement with simple trespassing, said Graves. Under the provision included in the new law, they will be charged with felonies by the Secret Service.
“It’s a different consequence to people,” she said.
“You are talking about giving the executive branch broader authority to create these exclusion zones which could cover broad areas and last for days [during an event],” David Kopel, a constitutional expert with the Cato Institute, told FOXNews.com.
A spokesman at Specter’s office said the senator was surprised by the clamor over the provision, which merely makes a technical change to clear up legal confusion over who has arresting authority at NSSEs. His office had no further comment on the provision. Committee Ranking Member Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., also declined comment. Republican and Democratic House Judiciary Committee leaders did not return calls for comment.
White House sources say the measure was not instigated by the administration and pointed out that it was a stand-alone bill that was rolled into the Patriot Act by Specter’s office during House-Senate conference negotiations. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told FOXNews.com that the White House would not comment on the intent of the measure, but that the president is concerned with preserving individual rights.
“President Bush is committed to protecting the American people’s national security as well as their civil liberties,” she said.
Secret Service representatives said the agency does not comment on pending legislation.
The Bush administration has been criticized in the past for what many say are tactics that keep protesters far away from official events and by employing stringent policies to ensure favorable audiences for the president.
Last year, three ticket-holding audience members at one of the president’s Social Security events in Denver, Colo., were apprehended by a man who they said identified himself as Secret Service. The three were forced away from the event because of an anti-war sticker on the driver’s car.
“[The administration] has certainly demonstrated a desire to have carefully-controlled events,” said Graves.
John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an Alexandria, Va.-based clearinghouse for domestic and international security information, said he “could certainly understand why the Secret Service would want that legal authority,” given the enormous burden of making venues safe for VIPs today.
“However, I think many people have concluded that the way it is being used has nothing to do with protecting the president from Usama bin Laden and everything to do with suppressing dissent and making sure the protesters don’t get on TV,” Pike said.
Bush is not the first president to flex his authority in this area, said Kopel, who pointed out that beginning with Reagan, presidents have created a larger security bubble and greater distance between themselves and dissenters at public events. The 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States just intensified the situation, he said.
“I think the concerns about free speech in areas where the president is speaking long pre-date Bush. They were an issue in the Clinton administration, the first Bush administration and began as an issue during Reagan,” Kopel said. “I do think the ACLU has legitimate concerns about the breadth of the new language and how it could be applied.”
Graves points out that conservative “pro-life” groups will be the target of the new provisions, too, a scenario that could raise the concerns for those who are typically critical of the ACLU, which she said is necessarily concerned about other provisions in the bill that impinge on civil liberties.
House and Senate leaders, who return to Capitol Hill this week, are trying to renew the Patriot Act by Friday. Democrats and four Republicans in the Senate who filibustered a final vote in December after raising concerns about preserving civil liberties instituted a short-term extension of the previous bill, which was set to expire on Dec. 31.
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about three and a half years ago i saw a protestor by the side of the road with a handmade sign that said “IRAQ IS A WEAPON OF MASS DISTRACTION”… it seems that only now are our “leaders” starting to get the same idea…
Wednesday February 1, 2006
The Honorable George W. Bush
President of the United States of America
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
This March will mark the beginning of the 4th year of the war in Iraq. In contrast, U.S. involvement in WWI came to an end after 19 months. Victory in Europe was declared in WWII after 3 years 5 months. In the Korean War, a cease-fire was signed after 3 years and 1 month. But after more than three and a half years into the war in Iraq, your administration finally produced what is called a “Plan for Victory” in Iraq.
Iraq is not the center for the global war on terrorism. I believe Iraq has diverted our attention away from the fight against global terrorism and has depleted the required resources needed to wage an effective war. It is estimated that there are only about 750 to 1,000 al-Qaeda in Iraq. I believe the Iraqis will force them out or kill them after U.S. troops are gone. In fact, there is now evidence that Iraqi insurgent groups are increasingly turning against al-Qaeda and other foreign terrorists.
Our country needs a vigorous and comprehensive strategy for victory against global terrorism. The architect of 9/11 is still out there but now has an international microphone. We must get back to the real issue at hand – we have to root out and destroy al-Qaeda’s worldwide network.
There are 4 key elements that I recommend to reinvigorate our global anti-terrorism effort: Redeploy, Replace, Reallocate, and Reconstitute.
Redeploy
The war in Iraq is fueling terrorism, not eliminating it. Our continued military presence feeds the strong anti-foreigner fervor that has existed in this part of the world for centuries. A vast majority of the Iraqi people now view American troops as occupiers, not liberators. Over 80% of Iraqis want U.S. forces to leave Iraq and 47% think it is justified to attack Americans. 70% of Iraqis favor a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. forces, with half favoring a withdrawal in the next six months. In fact, 67% of Iraqis expect day-to-day security for Iraqi citizens will improve if U.S. forces withdraw in six months and over 60% believe violent attacks, including those that are ethnically motivated, will decrease. Our military presence is the single most important reason why the Iraqis have tolerated the foreign terrorists, who account for less than 7 percent of the insurgency. 93% of the insurgency is made up of Iraqis. Once our troops are re-deployed, the Iraqis will reject the terrorists and deny them a safe haven in Iraq. The Iraqis are against a foreign presence in Iraq of any kind.
The steadfast and valiant efforts of the United States military and coalition partners have provided the Iraqi people with the framework needed to self govern. The Iraqis held elections that have been touted as highly successful, based primarily on the accounts of Iraqis who went to the polls. But our continued military presence in Iraq, regardless of the motives behind it, is seen by Iraqis as interfering in Iraq’s democratic process and undercuts the chances for the newly elected government to be successful. Recently, Iraq’s National Security Adviser accused U.S. negotiators of going behind the back of the Iraqi government on talks with insurgents, saying the process could encourage more violence. He said, “Americans are making a huge and fatal mistake in their policy for appeasement and they should not do this. They should leave the Iraqi government to deal with it… The United States should allow the new Iraqi government to decide on how to quell the insurgency.”
In December 2005, an ABC News poll in Iraq produced some noteworthy results. 57% of Iraqis identified national security as the country’s top priority. When asked to rate the confidence in public institutions, they gave Iraqi police a 68% confidence level, the Iraqi army 67%, religious leaders 67%. But the U.S./U.K. forces scored the lowest, a mere 18%.
The longer our military stays in Iraq, the more unwelcome we will be. We will be increasingly entangled in an open-ended nation building mission, one that our military can not accomplish amidst a civil war. Our troops will continue to be the targets of Iraqis who see them as interfering occupiers.
Redeploying our forces from Iraq and stationing a mobile force outside of the country removes a major antagonizing factor. I believe we will see a swift demise of foreign terrorist groups in Iraq if we redeploy outside of the country. Further, our troops will no longer be the targets of bloody attacks.
Replace
The ever-changing justifications of the war in Iraq, combined with tragic missteps, have resulted in a worldwide collapse of support for U.S. policies in Iraq.
The credibility of the United States of America will not be restored if we continue down the path of saying one thing and doing another. We must not lower our standards and tactics to those of the terrorists. In order to keep our homeland secure, we must hold true to the values that molded our American democracy, even in the face of adversity. Former Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, said it best during a speech in March 2004 to the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies: “America knows we cannot seek a double standard. And, America knows we get what we give. And so we must and will always be careful to respect people’s privacy, civil liberties and reputations. To suggest that there is a tradeoff between security and individual freedoms — that we must discard one protection for the other — is a false choice. You do not defend liberty to forsake it.”
Restoring the world’s confidence in America as a competent and morally superior world leader is essential to winning the war on global terrorism.
A recent pubic opinion poll, conducted jointly with Zogby International and taken in Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, found that 81% said the war in Iraq had brought less peace to the Middle East. A majority of the respondents said they view the United States as the biggest threat to their nations.
Mr. President, I believe in order to restore our credibility, you must hold accountable those responsible for so many missteps and install a fresh team that demonstrates true diplomatic skill, knowledge of cultural differences and a willingness to earnestly engage other leaders in a respectful and constructive way. This would do much to reinvigorate international participation in a truly effective war on global terrorism.
Reallocate
The Department of Defense has been allocated $238 billion for the war in Iraq, with average monthly costs growing significantly since the beginning of the war. In 2003 the average monthly war cost was $4.4 billion; by 2005 the average monthly cost had reached $6.1 billion.
Despite the urgent homeland security needs of our country, the bipartisan 9/11 Commission issued a dismal report card on the efforts to improve our counter-terrorist defenses. Even the most basic of recommendations, such as the coordination of fire and police communication lines, still have not been accomplished.
In the face of threats from international terrorists, we need to reallocate funds from the war in Iraq to protecting the United States against attack. A safe and swift redeployment from Iraq will allow us to do just that.
Reconstitute
The U.S. army is the smallest it’s been since 1941. It is highly capable. But this drawn out conflict has put tremendous stress on our military, particularly on our Army and Marine Corps, whose operations tempo has increased substantially since 9/11.
The Government Accountability Office issued a report in November 2005 addressing the challenges of military personnel recruitment and retention and noted that the Department of Defense had been unable to fill over 112,000 positions in critical occupational specialties. This shortfall includes intelligence analysts, special forces, interpreters, and demolition experts– those on whom we rely so heavily in today’s asymmetric battlefield.
Some of our troops have been deployed four times over the last three years. Enlistment for the regular forces as well as the guard and reserves are well below recruitment goals. In 2005, the Army missed its recruitment goal for the first time since 1999, even after offering enlistment bonuses and incentives, lowering its monthly goals, and lowering its recruitment standards. As Retired Army officer Andrew Krepinevich recently warned in a report to the Pentagon, the Army is “in a race against time” to adjust to the demands of war “or risk ‘breaking’ the force in the form of a catastrophic decline” in recruitment and re-enlistment.
The harsh environment in which we are operating our equipment in Iraq, combined with the equipment usage rate (ten times greater than peacetime levels) is taking a heavy toll on our ground equipment. It is currently estimated that $50 billion will be required to refurbish this equipment.
Further, in its response to Hurricane Katrina, the National Guard realized that it had over $1.3 billion in equipment shortfalls. This has created a tremendous burden on non-deployed guard units, on whom this country depends so heavily to respond to domestic disasters and possible terrorist attacks. Without relief, Army Guard units will face growing equipment shortages and challenges in regaining operational readiness for future missions at home and overseas.
Since 9/11, Congress has appropriated about $334 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, while the insurgents have spent hundreds of thousands. We have seen reports estimating that the total cost of the wars may reach as high as $1 trillion. These estimates are said to include such costs as providing long-term disability benefits and care for injured service members. It is estimated today that over 16,000 U.S. troops have been wounded in Iraq, 10,481 of whom have been wounded by “weaponry explosive devices.”
But while war costs continue to climb, cuts are being made to the defense budget. As soon as the war is over there will be pressure to cut even more. This year, even while we are at war, 8 billion dollars was cut from the base defense spending bill. You ordered another $32 billion in cuts to the defense budget over the next five years, with $11.6 billion coming from the Army. The Pentagon told Congress only last year that it needed 77 combat brigades to fulfill its missions, but now insists it only needs 70. In fact, 6 of the 7 combat brigades will be cut from the National Guard, reducing its combat units from 34 to 28. Even though all of the National Guard combat brigades have been deployed overseas since 9/11, your Administration has determined that, because of funding shortfalls, our combat ground forces can be reduced. Not only will these cuts diminish our combat power, but our ability to respond to natural disasters and terrorist threats to our homeland will be adversely affected. It is obvious that the cost of the war, in conjunction with the Army’s inability to meet recruitment goals, has impacted this estimate. My concern is that instead of our force structure being based on the future threat, it is now being based on the number of troops and level of funding available.
I am concerned that costly program cuts will lead to costly mistakes and we will be unable to sustain another deployment even if there is a real threat. The future of our military and the future of our country could very well be at stake. The high dollar forecasts of our future military weapons systems and military health care add pressure to cut costs on the backs of these programs. As our weapons systems age, the concern becomes even greater.
During a time of war, we are cutting our combat force, we have not mobilized industry, and have never fully mobilized our military. On our current path, I believe that we are not only in danger of breaking our military, but that we are increasing the chances of a major miscalculation by our future enemies, who may perceive us as vulnerable.
Sincerely,
JOHN P. MURTHA
Member of Congress
343
This piece is called “Your Television Will Not Be Revolutionized” because despite what our so-called leaders of technology and communications may tell you, the chances are slim that your quality of life will be enhanced by further dependence on a device which has throughout its history been referred to as the “idiot box” or “boob tube.” After Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”
—–
Your Television Will Not Be Revolutionized
by
You will not be able to site back in your recliner and experience
the sights and smells of an actual African safari with Marlon Perkins
because your television will not be revolutionized.
You will not have the option to view programming that reflects
actual facts, opinions and situations of real people in real jobs doing real work
because your television will not be revolutionized.
You will not have more information at your disposal,
but a great deal more disposable information;
you will not experience a reduction in the amount of subliminal messaging
or an increased exposure to the fully explored viewpoints
of persons with alternative outlooks on the world and ways of life;
nor will you have the ability to selectively choose shows and entertainment
that will best equip you to face other human beings
who may have differing and conflicting methods of dealing with everyday existence
because, despite your ability to earn a Ph.D.
by absorbing the litany of T&A, S&M, B&D and R&R
on CBS, NBC, ABC and CNN,
people who have important things to say
regarding the fragility of relying on modern convenience
will not be able to set up independent broadcast towers
because the FCC, FBI and CIA will make sure
that you do not find these programs included as part of “Must See TV,”
and they will certainly not be sponsored
by Mobil Oil Corporation and the Fortune 500.
You will not be able to immediately gain access
to the viewing public without waiting nine months
on a list for new programs, waiting only to be passed over
by a Committee for Fairness in Television
because your views are not deemed interesting enough
to command a favorable Nielson share.
Nor will you be able to select features for your viewing pleasure
that have not been hand-picked by the owners of the airwaves
and their supporting advertisers.
Your television will not be revolutionized.
Your television will not be revolutionized.
Your television will not be revolutionized.
You will continue to experience a decrease in rapid eye movement,
increasing cases of attention deficit disorder among your babies and children,
and on-going, invasive modifications to your DNA
caused by the barrage of an electron machine gun
you have invited into your home to expose “viewers like you”
to a thousand points of artificial light.
You will continue to form images subconsciously inside your physical brain
without the benefit of seeing them outside your head,
and without the ability to blink and shut them out or slow them down
so as to maintain the facility to selectively choose
the sound bytes and sound tracks and sound effects and
hypnotic waves of electricity that will influence
your spending patterns, your methods of recreation, your opinions on procreation,
your impression of reality and
your overall sense of physical health and well-being.
Your television will not be revolutionized.
Your retention of information will continue to decrease,
while the available percentage of brain cells at your disposal
will continued to be used up by phrases from sitcom theme songs,
by deductive meanderings on who shot J.R., and
by images of politicians wrapped in flags and kissing babies,
eating chitterlings, slicing pizza and
spreading lox on bagels.
You will not be able to take your message to the streets
or distribute pamphlets questioning the party line
at union meetings or city council sessions,
because your fellow citizens will be safe at home,
unified only in the respect that they are all watching re-runs
of the same shows so it can be assured there will be a topic of conversation
when we are all turned loose to exercise
our First Amendment rights
assisted by a new and improved level of communication
brought to you by the Association for the Preservation of Technological Megalomaniacs.
You will not be able to tell the difference between an embrace
offered by a virtual reality image of your dead father
and the gentle purring of a live kitten grasping your shoulder;
but you will continue to be able to anesthetize your sense of boredom
vicariously, whether through the war game simulation of professional sports,
or candid interviews with starvation victims
in a country of which you were not even aware “prior to this newscast,”
and may be convinced exists
only thanks to the believability score of the on-the-scene commentator,
or by gripping the edge of your seat while watching
carnage and bloodshed and laying on of hands
resulting in cures for leprosy, AIDS, infantile paralysis,
sickle cell anemia, and that awful bloated feeling,
all of which may or not be created using special effects.
Your television will not be revolutionized.
You will continue to trust in a world that has been edited for television,
in situations that will be re-enacted based on circumstantial evidence
and the imagination of financial advisors to the producers during “sweeps” week,
and in actors who are paid to tell you their headache disappeared in minutes
or that they actually spent time at their last dinner party discussing yeast infections
or wash-and-go shampoos.
You will be able to see inside the minds and hear the thoughts
of Richard Nixon, of Jeffrey Dahmer, of Charles Manson and Mother Theresa,
but you will see them being asked the same questions, things like,
“When did you first realize that you were different from other children?”
and you will see the same one-liners being used to promote their causes
in between paid advertisement programs
showcasing the efficiency and pleasure provided by shopping at home,
and they will be given equal air-time,
and each will be gently disclaimed:
“The opinions expressed by guests on this program
do not necessarily reflect the views of this network,
do not support the philosophy or political leanings of the majority of our viewers,
and are not intended to stimulate, educate or otherwise affect anyone at all.”
You will continue to find yourself in a world
that has an increasing number of methods for communication,
and alarmingly less and less to say.
You will find it true, as Marshall McLuhan once said, that
“the medium is the message,”
and that its sweet velvet voice is crooning,
“Learn to consume as you have taught me to consume,”
and reminding us in the words of Jello Biafra
that the conveniences we have requested are now mandatory.
Your television will not be revolutionized.
342
as you are probably aware at this point, i am a terrorist in the same way Cindy Sheehan is a terrorist, which is why i didn’t watch shrubby junior’s state of the republican "christian" radical-right-wing part of the country that he currently calls "the union", although i can pretty much guarantee that whatever he said, with the exception of mentioning that coretta scott king died, was 100% lies. this is a pretty good characterisation of how i feel about the whole thing:
January 31, 2006
WASHINGTON, D.C. – President Bush set energy self-sufficiency goals Tuesday night that would still leave the country vulnerable to unstable oil sources. He also declared he is helping more people get health care, despite a rising number of uninsured.
Whether promoting a plan to "save Social Security" or describing Iraqi security forces as "increasingly capable of defeating the enemy," Bush skipped over some complex realities in his State of the Union speech.
ENERGY:
By identifying only Mideast oil imports for reductions, Bush was ignoring some of the largest sources of U.S. petroleum, among them Canada, Mexico, Nigeria and Venezuela. The U.S. considers Venezuela a source of political instability in the region; relations with Mexico have been strained over immigration; and violence has curbed nearly 10 percent of Nigeria’s oil output.
Imports of oil and refined product from the Persian Gulf make up less than a fifth of all imports, according to the government.
Bush has spoken of reducing reliance on foreign oil in every State of the Union speech, if not as explicitly as in this one, and presidents back to Richard Nixon outlined similar goals, to little or no effect.
Nixon announced Project Independence in 1973, setting a goal of energy self-sufficiency in seven years. Then, the U.S. imported 35 percent of its oil; now it’s close to 60 percent. This, despite substantive steps taken by Nixon and Jimmy Carter to spur both supply and conservation, including construction of the Alaskan oil pipeline and reduction in the highway speed limit to 55 mph for many years.
HEALTH CARE:
Noting that the government must help provide health care for the poor and elderly, Bush asserted, "We are meeting that responsibility."
It is true that a new prescription drug benefit took effect this year, a new entitlement for up to 42 million disabled and older people. But implementation has been rocky: Mark McClellan, the administration’s top Medicare official, recently acknowledged that tens of thousands of recipients probably didn’t get medicine due to confusion and computer glitches, prompting some lawmakers to seek an extension of the May 15 signup deadline to work out the snafus.
An incomplete picture also emerges on health care for the poor.
The number of uninsured has increased nearly 5 million since Bush took office in 2001, to 45.5 million in 2004, two-thirds of the total from low-income families, according to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.
And while total federal spending on the health care "safety net" for the uninsured edged up from 2001 to 2004 – adjusted for inflation, slightly more than 1 percent – spending actually decreased from $546 to $498 per uninsured person due to the jump in uninsured, the Kaiser group said.
Bush actually is expected to propose curbing the growth of benefit programs such as Medicare and Medicaid in his 2007 budget request next week.
SOCIAL SECURITY:
Bush said Congress did not act last year on his "proposal to save Social Security." In fact, his plan does not take care of Social Security’s future solvency; instead, he wants to let younger workers divert some of their Social Security payroll taxes into private investment accounts to take advantage of the possibilities for a better return.
IRAQ:
Bush’s upbeat account of progress in Iraq, coupled with an acknowledgment that "our enemy is brutal," left unstated a variety of setbacks in turning control over to Iraqi forces, including Iraqi Army desertions in the volatile west.
KATRINA:
Addressing Hurricane Katrina aid, Bush said a hopeful society "comes to the aid of fellow citizens in times of suffering and emergency" and the government is meeting New Orleans’ "immediate needs."
Federal money is indeed being used to build stronger levees and provide business loans and housing assistance. But the government has declined to rebuild levees strong enough to sustain a Category 5 hurricane, and it recently rejected as unnecessary a $30 billion redevelopment plan for Louisiana that state officials considered the cornerstone of their hopes for rebuilding.
HOMELAND SECURITY:
Bush urged Americans to back his secretive domestic spy program, saying he was using his "authority given to me by the Constitution and by statute" and noting that "appropriate members of Congress have been kept informed."
Bush did not address the counterarguments that he failed to heed a separate 1978 law that specifically calls for court approval to conduct the surveillance. Some lawmakers have also questioned why Bush did not brief more than eight members of Congress about the program, which has been in effect since 2001.
EDUCATION:
On the theme of improving math and science education, Bush boasted, "We have made a good start in the early grades with the No Child Left Behind Act, which is raising standards and lifting test scores across our country."
In 2005, fourth-graders and eighth-graders posted their highest-ever math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and black and Hispanic children narrowed their achievement gap with whites in both math and reading. But the fourth-grade reading performance was essentially flat, and in eighth grade, reading scores dropped.
SPENDING:
The president said that "every year of my presidency, we have reduced the growth of non-security discretionary spending." That doesn’t tell the full story because the category he cited omits big-ticket spending items like Iraq, natural disasters such as Katrina and homeland security.
He spoke of saving taxpayers $14 billion next year if his budget proposals are adopted, not mentioning some of those savings would come from health care programs such as Medicaid.
meanwhile, once again this is appropriate, and although i’ve said it before, it bears repeating again, as those who do not learn from history are CONDEMNED to repeat it…
When they took the fourth amendment,
I was quiet because I didn’t deal drugs.
When they took the sixth amendment,
I was quiet because I was innocent.
When they took the second amendment,
I was quiet because I didn’t own a gun.
Now they’ve taken the first amendment,
and I can say nothing about it.
… and there go our first amendment rights… 8(
By Cindy Sheehan
Wednesday 01 February 2006
As most of you have probably heard, I was arrested before the State of the Union address last night.
I am speechless with fury at what happened and with grief over what we have lost in our country.
There have been lies from the police and distortions by the press (shocker). So this is what really happened:
This afternoon at the People’s State of the Union Address in DC, where I was joined by Congresspersons Lynn Woolsey and John Conyers, Ann Wright, Malik Rahim and John Cavanagh, Lynn brought me a ticket to the State of the Union address. At that time, I was wearing the shirt that said: 2245 Dead. How many more?
After the PSOTU press conference, I was having second thoughts about going to the SOTU at the Capitol. I didn’t feel comfortable going. I knew George Bush would say things that would hurt me and anger me, and I knew that I couldn’t disrupt the address because Lynn had given me the ticket, and I didn’t want to be disruptive out of respect for her. I, in fact, had given the ticket to John Bruhns, who is in Iraq Veterans Against the War. However, Lynn’s office had already called the media, and everyone knew I was going to be there, so I sucked it up and went.
I got the ticket back from John, and I met one of Congresswoman Barbara Lee’s staffers in the Longworth Congressional Office building and we went to the Capitol via the underground tunnel. I went through security once, then had to use the rest room and went through security again.
My ticket was in the 5th gallery, front row, fourth seat in. The person who in a few minutes was to arrest me, helped me to my seat.
I had just sat down and I was warm from climbing 3 flights of stairs back up from the bathroom so I unzipped my jacket. I turned to the right to take my left arm out, when the same officer saw my shirt and yelled, "Protester." He then ran over to me, hauled me out of my seat, and roughly (with my hands behind my back) shoved me up the stairs. I said something like "I’m going, do you have to be so rough?" By the way, his name is Mike Weight.
The officer ran with me to the elevators, yelling at everyone to move out of the way. When we got to the elevators, he cuffed me and took me outside to await a squad car. On the way out, someone behind me said, "That’s Cindy Sheehan." At which point the officer who arrested me said, "Take these steps slowly." I said, "You didn’t care about being careful when you were dragging me up the other steps." He said, "That’s because you were protesting." Wow, I got hauled out of the People’s House because I was "Protesting."
I was never told that I couldn’t wear that shirt into the Congress. I was never asked to take it off or zip my jacket back up. If I had been asked to do any of those things … I would have, and written about the suppression of my freedom of speech later. I was immediately and roughly (I have the bruises and muscle spasms to prove it) hauled off and arrested for "unlawful conduct."
After I had my personal items inventoried and my fingers printed, a nice Sgt. came in and looked at my shirt and said, "2245, huh? I just got back from there."
I told him that my son died there. That’s when the enormity of my loss hit me. I have lost my son. I have lost my First Amendment rights. I have lost the country that I love. Where did America go? I started crying in pain.
What did Casey die for? What did the 2244 other brave young Americans die for? What are tens of thousands of them over there in harm’s way for still? For this? I can’t even wear a shirt that has the number of troops on it that George Bush and his arrogant and ignorant policies are responsible for killing.
I wore the shirt to make a statement. The press knew I was going to be there, and I thought every once in awhile they would show me, and I would have the shirt on. I did not wear it to be disruptive, or I would have unzipped my jacket during George’s speech. If I had any idea what happens to people who wear shirts that make the neocons uncomfortable, that I would be arrested … maybe I would have, but I didn’t.
There have already been many wild stories out there.
I have some lawyers looking into filing a First Amendment lawsuit against the government for what happened tonight. I will file it. It is time to take our freedoms and our country back.
I don’t want to live in a country that prohibits any person, whether or not he/she has paid the ultimate price for that country, from wearing, saying, writing, or telephoning any negative statements about the government. That’s why I am going to take my freedoms and liberties back. That’s why I am not going to let BushCo take anything else away from me … or you.
I am so appreciative of the couple of hundred of protesters who came to the jail while I was locked up to show their support. We have so much potential for good. There is so much good in so many people.
Four hours and 2 jails after I was arrested, I was let out. Again, I am so upset and sore it is hard to think straight.
Keep up the struggle … I promise you, I will too.
late breaking word is that they’re dropping the charges against sheehan, but i think she should go ahead with her first amendment lawsuit in spite of this… she doesn’t have to be arrested to have her civil rights trampled upon.
GOP congressman says his wife was also ordered to leave
Wednesday, February 1, 2006; Posted: 12:32 p.m. EST (17:32 GMT)
WASHINGTON — Peace activist Cindy Sheehan was arrested Tuesday in the House gallery after refusing to cover up a T-shirt bearing an anti-war slogan before President Bush’s State of the Union address.
According to a blog post on Michael Moore’s Web site attributed to Sheehan, the T-shirt said, "2,245 Dead. How many more?" — a reference to the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq.
"She was asked to cover it up. She did not," said Sgt. Kimberly Schneider, U.S. Capitol Police spokeswoman.
On Wednesday, U.S. Rep. Bill Young, R-Florida, spoke on the House floor saying his wife, Beverly, had been "ordered to leave" the gallery during the speech for wearing a shirt that said, "Support Our Troops."
Young, an 18-term congressman, held up his wife’s shirt during his remarks, speaking with anger and emotion about her treatment.
"She has a real passion for our troops, and she shows it in many, many ways," Young said.
"And most members in this House know that, but because she had on a shirt, that someone didn’t like, that said, ‘Support Our Troops,’ she was kicked out of this gallery while the president was speaking and encouraging Americans to support our troops. Shame. Shame."
Sheehan held 4 hours
Sheehan was arrested around 8:30 p.m. ET Tuesday on charges of unlawful conduct, a misdemeanor that carries a maximum penalty of a year in jail, Capitol Police said.
She was handcuffed and held in the Capitol building until she was driven to the Capitol Police headquarters for booking. According to her blog, she was released about four hours after her arrest.
Sheehan, who became a vocal war opponent after her son was killed in Iraq, was an invited guest of Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-California. Woolsey has called for a withdrawal of troops in Iraq and supports legislation for the creation of a Department of Peace.
Sheehan gained national attention in August when she and hundreds of other protesters camped outside Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, and demanded an audience with the president.
She also recently penned a book, "Not One More Mother’s Child."
In April 2004, Sheehan and other relatives of troops killed in Iraq met with Bush during a visit to Fort Lewis, Washington, shortly after the death of her son, Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, 24.
Sheehan later said that the president wouldn’t look at pictures of her son and "didn’t even know Casey’s name."
The Vacaville, California, resident has said she’d like to meet with Bush again to discuss her opposition to the war.
The president has declined another meeting and has taken issue with Sheehan’s calls for a withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
"She expressed her opinion; I disagree with it," Bush said in August. "I think immediate withdrawal from Iraq would be a mistake."
Republican congressman’s wife also removed for ‘Support the Troops’ shirt
WASHINGTON – Cindy Sheehan, mother of a fallen soldier in Iraq, wasn’t the only one ejected from the House gallery during the State of the Union address for wearing a T-shirt with a war-related slogan that violated the rules. The wife of a powerful Republican congressman was also asked to leave.
Beverly Young, wife of Rep. C.W. Bill Young of Florida — chairman of the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee — was removed from the gallery because she was wearing a T-shirt that read, "Support the Troops — Defending Our Freedom."
"Because she had on a shirt that someone didn’t like that said support our troops, she was kicked out of this gallery," Young said on the House floor Wednesday morning, holding up the gray shirt.
"Shame, shame," he scolded.
Mrs. Young was sitting about six rows from first lady Laura Bush and asked to leave. She argued with police in the hallway outside the House chamber.
"They said I was protesting," she told the St. Petersburg Times. “I said, ‘Read my shirt, it is not a protest.’ They said, ‘We consider that a protest.’ I said, ‘Then you are an idiot.’"
They told her she was being treated the same as Sheehan, a protester ejected before the speech Tuesday night for wearing a T-shirt with an antiwar slogan. Sheehan wrote in her blog Wednesday that she intends to file a First Amendment lawsuit.
"I don’t want to live in a country that prohibits any person, whether he/she has paid the ultimate price for that country, from wearing, saying, writing, or telephoning any negative statements about the government," Sheehan wrote.
Capitol Police took Sheehan, invited as a guest of Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., away in handcuffs and charged her with unlawful conduct, a misdemeanor. She later was released on her own recognizance.
Capitol Police Sgt. Kimberly Schneider said police warned her that such displays were not allowed in the House chamber, but Sheehan did not respond.
Woolsey gave Sheehan her only ticket earlier in the day — Gallery 5, seat 7, row A — while Sheehan was attending an "alternative state of the union" news conference by CODEPINK, a group pushing for an end to the Iraq war.
In her blog, Sheehan wrote that her T-shirt said, "2245 Dead. How many more?" — a reference to the number of soldiers killed in Iraq.
She said she felt uncomfortable about attending the speech.
"I knew George Bush would say things that would hurt me and anger me and I knew that I couldn’t disrupt the address because Lynn had given me the ticket," Sheehan wrote. "I didn’t want to be disruptive out of respect for her."
She said she had one arm out of her coat when an officer yelled, “Protestor.”
"He then ran over to me, hauled me out of my seat and roughly (with my hands behind my back) shoved me up the stairs," she wrote. She was then cuffed and driven to police headquarters a few blocks away.
"I was never told that I couldn’t wear that shirt into the Congress," Sheehan wrote. "I was never asked to take it off or zip my jacket back up. If I had been asked to do any of those things… I would have, and written about the suppression of my freedom of speech later."
Sheehan was arrested in September with about 300 other anti-war activists in front of the White House after a weekend of protests against the war in Iraq. In August, she spent 26 days camped near Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, where he was spending a working vacation.
a "working vacation"… riiiiiiight… how many of us "real people" have ever had a "working" vacation?
341
You are Rule 8, the most laid back of all the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. While your forefather in the Federal Rules may have been a stickler for details and particularity, you have clearly rebelled by being pleasant and easy-going. Rule 8 only requires that a plaintiff provide a short and plain statement of a claim on which a court can grant relief. While there is much to be lauded in your approach, your good nature sometimes gets you in trouble, and you often have to rely on your good friend, Rule 56, to bail you out.
Which Federal Rule of Civil Procedure Are You?
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