What Would Jesus Do?
a song by my friend stuart zobel.

He’s seen fire and he’s seen pain
Art becomes therapy after brain injury
By MARGO HORNER
November 01 2006

His lips are turned up in a slight smile as Bruce salamandir-Feyrecilde swings the chained balls of fire.

He stares blankly at a tree. It’s unclear whether his expression is one of inner peace or deep focus.

“I don’t know either,” said salamandir of Federal Way. “I’m looking at that tree because if I look at the fire, I freak out.”

Salamandir has been swinging poi since he suffered a brain injury in 2003.

“Everybody told me it would be good therapy,” he said.

Poi is similar to juggling with balls on ropes. The balls are swung in various circular, fluid motions.

The art originated in New Zealand and was used to increase flexibility, strength and coordination.

Poi can be practiced with socks, bean bags, tennis balls or any small object on a string.

Performers often use various glowing items or fire.

Salamandir uses two metal chains with balls of kevlar wicking at the ends. He lights the fire with classic lighter fluid, although several Web sites suggest paraffin or kerosene, noting that alcohol and lighter fluid or dangerous due to their low flash point.

He keeps a fire extinguisher nearby every time he performs.

Besides performing in his yard for practice, salamandir performs publicly with the Seattle-based group Cirque de Flambe.

The Cirque de Flambe performs a circus-inspired act using pyrotechnics.

Salamandir mostly plays musical instruments for the group. When he does perform with fire, he’s part of the Big Boys with Pois act. Salamandir said he rarely performs for a crowd because although it’s an art he loves, he just isn’t very talented.

“I hesitate to call myself a fire dancer because that requires a lot more grace and dexterity than I have,” he said. “The fact that I have a brain injury and I’m still able to do this stuff at all is really amazing.”

In July 2003, salamandir and his wife were getting ready for bed on a Sunday night when he suddenly fell over and started drooling, he said.

“I remember being carried out of the room by the guys from the ambulance,” he said.

He was in a coma for 10 days, he said.

“It’s amazing that I’m alive,” he added.

An arteriovenous malformation had ruptured in salamandir’s brain, causing a cerebral hemorrhage.

The effect was similar to an aneurysm.

“It’s a fancy way of saying my brain exploded,” he said.

According to an article on Webmd.com, some types of cerebral hemorrhages kill 50 percent of people who suffer them. Of those who survive, 50 percent are left with a permanent major neurological deficit.

Salamandir points to the scar that spreads across the left side of his head and the screw that sticks out slightly from beneath his scalp.

“I have a three-inch hole in my head where they removed a blood clot the size of an egg,” he said.

Salamandir said that today, he struggles with language, and his right hand is numb and doesn’t work as well as it used to.

“A lot of times I’ll forget, for example, that I have a right arm at all. It just sort of hangs there,” he said.

Poi is therapeutic because salamandir is forced to use his right arm.

“Not only does it engage both my hands, but it engages both my hands on both sides of my body,” he said.

Besides swinging poi, salamandir plays a variety of woodwind, brass and keyboard instruments for the Fremont Philharmonic, the Ballard Sedentary Sousa Band, the Banda Gozona and The Really Big Production Company.

Currently, salamandir is working on perfecting a flaming tuba act. He was inspired by a video of a man performing with a flaming sousaphone.

He hopes to perform with his flaming tuba next year.

happy Troll-O-Ween

Is Google Evil?
By Adam L. Penenberg
October 10, 2006

Google Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the two former Stanford geeks who founded the company that has become synonymous with Internet searching, and you’ll find more than a million entries each. But amid the inevitable dump of press clippings, corporate bios, and conference appearances, there’s very little about Page’s and Brin’s personal lives; it’s as if the pair had known all along that Google would change the way we acquire information, and had carefully insulated their lives—putting their homes under other people’s names, choosing unlisted numbers, abstaining from posting anything personal on web pages.

That obsession with privacy may explain Google’s puzzling reaction last year, when Elinor Mills, a reporter with the tech news service cnet, ran a search on Google ceo Eric Schmidt and published the results: Schmidt lived with his wife in Atherton, California, was worth about $1.5 billion, had dumped about $140 million in Google shares that year, was an amateur pilot, and had been to the Burning Man festival. Google threw a fit, claimed that the information was a security threat, and announced it was blacklisting cnet’s reporters for a year. (The company eventually backed down.) It was a peculiar response, especially given that the information Mills published was far less intimate than the details easily found online on every one of us. But then, this is something of a pattern with Google: When it comes to information, it knows what’s best.

From the start, Google’s informal motto has been “Don’t Be Evil,” and the company earned cred early on by going toe-to-toe with Microsoft over desktop software and other issues. But make no mistake. Faced with doing the right thing or doing what is in its best interests, Google has almost always chosen expediency. In 2002, it removed links to an anti-Scientology site after the Church of Scientology claimed copyright infringement. Scores of website operators have complained that Google pulls ads if it discovers words on a page that it apparently has flagged, although it will not say what those words are. In September, Google handed over the records of some users of its social-networking service, Orkut, to the Brazilian government, which was investigating alleged racist, homophobic, and pornographic content.

Google’s stated mission may be to provide “unbiased, accurate, and free access to information,” but that didn’t stop it from censoring its Chinese search engine to gain access to a lucrative market (prompting Bill Gates to crack that perhaps the motto should be “Do Less Evil”). Now that the company is publicly traded, it has a legal responsibility to its shareholders and bottom line that overrides any higher calling.

So the question is not whether Google will always do the right thing—it hasn’t, and it won’t. It’s whether Google, with its insatiable thirst for your personal data, has become the greatest threat to privacy ever known, a vast informational honey pot that attracts hackers, crackers, online thieves, and—perhaps most worrisome of all—a government intent on finding convenient ways to spy on its own citizenry.

It doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to worry about such a threat. “I always thought it was fertile ground for the government to snoop,” ceo Schmidt told a search engine conference in San Jose, California, in August. While Google earned praise from civil libertarians earlier this year when it resisted a Justice Department subpoena for millions of search queries in connection with a child pornography case, don’t expect it will stand up to the government every time: On its website, Google asserts that it “does comply with valid legal process, such as search warrants, court orders, or subpoenas seeking personal information.”

What’s at stake? Over the years, Google has collected a staggering amount of data, and the company cheerfully admits that in nine years of operation, it has never knowingly erased a single search query. It’s the biggest data pack rat west of the nsa, and for good reason: 99 percent of its revenue comes from selling ads that are specifically targeted to a user’s interests. “Google’s entire value proposition is to figure out what people want,” says Eric Goldman, a professor at Silicon Valley’s Santa Clara School of Law and director of the High Tech Law Institute. “But to read our minds, they need to know a lot about us.”

Every search engine gathers information about its users—primarily by sending us “cookies,” or text files that track our online movements. Most cookies expire within a few months or years. Google’s, though, don’t expire until 2038. Until then, when you use the company’s search engine or visit any of myriad affiliated sites, it will record what you search for and when, which links you click on, which ads you access. Google’s cookies can’t identify you by name, but they log your computer’s IP address; by way of metaphor, Google doesn’t have your driver’s license number, but it knows the license plate number of the car you are driving. And search queries are windows into our souls, as 658,000 aol users learned when their search profiles were mistakenly posted on the Internet: Would user 1997374 have searched for information on better erections or cunnilingus if he’d known that aol was recording every keystroke? Would user 22155378 have keyed in “marijuana detox” over and over knowing someone could play it all back for the world to see? If you’ve ever been seized by a morbid curiosity after a night of hard drinking, a search engine knows—and chances are it’s Google, which owns roughly half of the entire search market and processes more than 3 billion queries a month.

And Google knows far more than that. If you are a Gmail user, Google stashes copies of every email you send and receive. If you use any of its other products—Google Maps, Froogle, Google Book Search, Google Earth, Google Scholar, Talk, Images, Video, and News—it will keep track of which directions you seek, which products you shop for, which phrases you research in a book, which satellite photos and news stories you view, and on and on. Served up à la carte, this is probably no big deal. Many websites stow snippets of your data. The problem is that there’s nothing to prevent Google from combining all of this information to create detailed dossiers on its customers, something the company admits is possible in principle. Soon Google may even be able to keep track of users in the real world: Its latest move is into free wifi, which will require it to know your whereabouts (i.e., which router you are closest to).

Google insists that it uses individual data only to provide targeted advertising. But history shows that information seldom remains limited to the purpose for which it was collected. Accordingly, some privacy advocates suggest that Google and other search companies should stop hoarding user queries altogether: Internet searches, argues Lillie Coney of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, are part of your protected personal space just like your physical home. In February, Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) introduced legislation to this effect, but Republicans have kept it stalled in committee. Google, which only recently retained a lobbying firm in Washington, is among the tech companies fighting the measure.

When I first contacted Google for this story, a company publicist insisted I provide a list of detailed questions, in writing; when I said that I had a problem with a source dictating the terms for an interview, he claimed that everyone who covers Google—including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal—submits advance questions. (A Times spokeswoman told me the paper sees no ethical problems with such a procedure, though individual reporters’ decisions may vary; an editor in charge of editorial standards at the Journal said the same thing.) The Google flack assured me that this was so he could find the best person for me to talk to—more information for Google, so that Google could better serve me.

Eventually he agreed to put me in touch, sans scripted questions, with Nicole Wong, Google’s associate corporate counsel. I asked her if the company had ever been subpoenaed for user records, and whether it had complied. She said yes, but wouldn’t comment on how many times. Google’s website says that as a matter of policy the company does “not publicly discuss the nature, number or specifics of law enforcement requests.”

So can you trust Google only as far as you can trust the Bush administration? “I don’t know,” Wong replied. “I’ve never been asked that question before.”

Laptops give up their secrets to U.S. customs agents
By Joe Sharkey
October 24, 2006

NEW YORK A lot of business travelers are walking around with laptops that contain private corporate information that their employers really do not want outsiders to see.

Until recently, their biggest concern was that someone might steal the laptop. But now there’s a new worry – that the laptop will be seized or its contents scrutinized at U.S. customs and immigration checkpoints upon entering the United States from abroad.

Although much of the evidence for the confiscations remains anecdotal, it’s a hot topic this week among more than a thousand corporate travel managers and travel industry officials meeting in Barcelona at a conference of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives.

Last week, an informal survey by the association, which has about 2,500 members worldwide, indicated that almost 90 percent of its members were not aware that customs officials have the authority to scrutinize the contents of travelers’ laptops and even confiscate laptops for a period of time, without giving a reason.

“One member who responded to our survey said she has been waiting for a year to get her laptop and its contents back,” said Susan Gurley, the group’s executive director. “She said it was randomly seized. And since she hasn’t been arrested, I assume she was just a regular business traveler, not a criminal.”

Appeals are under way in some cases, but the law is clear. “They don’t need probable cause to perform these searches under the current law,” said Tim Kane, a Washington lawyer who is researching the matter for corporate clients. “They can do it without suspicion or without really revealing their motivations.”

In some cases, random inspections of laptops have yielded evidence of possession of child pornography. Laptops may be scrutinized and subject to a “forensic analysis” under the so-called border search exemption, which allows searches of people entering the United States and their possessions “without probable cause, reasonable suspicion or a warrant,” a federal court ruled in July. In that case, the hard drive of a man’s laptop was found to contain images of child pornography.

No one is defending criminal possession of child pornography, or even suggesting that the government has nefarious intent in conducting random searches of a traveler’s laptop, Gurley said.

“But it appears, from information we have, that agents have a lot of discretion in doing these searches, and that there’s a whole spectrum of reasons for doing them,” she added.

The association is asking the government for better guidelines so corporate policies on traveling with proprietary information can be re-evaluated. It is also asking whether corporations need to reduce the proprietary data that travelers carry.

“We need to be able to better inform our business travelers what the processes are if their laptops and data are seized – what happens to it, how do you get it back,” Gurley said.

She added: “The issue is what happens to the proprietary business information that might be on a laptop. Is information copied? Is it returned? We understand that the U.S. government needs to protect its borders. But we want to have transparent information so business travelers know what to do. Should they leave business proprietary information at home?”

Besides the possibility for misuse of proprietary information, travel executives are also concerned that a seized computer, and the information it holds, becomes unavailable to its user for a time. One remedy some companies are considering is telling travelers returning to the United States with critical information on their laptop hard drives to encrypt the data and e-mail it to themselves, which at least preserves access to the information, although it does not guard its privacy.

In one recent case in California, a federal court went against the trend, ruling that laptop searches were a serious invasion of privacy.

“People keep all sorts of personal information on computers,” the court ruling said, citing diaries, personal letters, financial records, lawyers’ confidential client information and reporters’ notes on confidential sources.

That court ruled, in that specific case, that “the correct standard requires that any border search of the information stored on a person’s electronic storage device be based, at a minimum, on a reasonable suspicion.”

In its informal survey last week, the association also found that 87 percent of its members would be less likely to carry confidential business or personal information on international trips now that they were aware of how easily laptop contents could be searched.

“We are telling our members that they should prepare for the eventuality that this could happen, and they have to think more about how they handle proprietary information,” Gurley said. “Potentially, this is going to have a real effect on how international business is conducted.”

Glitches cited in early voting
Early voters are urged to cast their ballots with care following scattered reports of problems with heavily used machines.
BY CHARLES RABIN AND DARRAN SIMON
October 28, 2006

After a week of early voting, a handful of glitches with electronic voting machines have drawn the ire of voters, reassurances from elections supervisors — and a caution against the careless casting of ballots.

Several South Florida voters say the choices they touched on the electronic screens were not the ones that appeared on the review screen — the final voting step.

Election officials say they aren’t aware of any serious voting issues. But in Broward County, for example, they don’t know how widespread the machine problems are because there’s no process for poll workers to quickly report minor issues and no central database of machine problems.

In Miami-Dade, incidents are logged and reported daily and recorded in a central database. Problem machines are shut down.

“In the past, Miami-Dade County would send someone to correct the machine on site,” said Lester Sola, county supervisor of elections. Now, he said, “We close the machine down and put a seal on it.”

Debra A. Reed voted with her boss on Wednesday at African-American Research Library and Cultural Center near Fort Lauderdale. Her vote went smoothly, but boss Gary Rudolf called her over to look at what was happening on his machine. He touched the screen for gubernatorial candidate Jim Davis, a Democrat, but the review screen repeatedly registered the Republican, Charlie Crist.

That’s exactly the kind of problem that sends conspiracy theorists into high gear — especially in South Florida, where a history of problems at the polls have made voters particularly skittish.

A poll worker then helped Rudolf, but it took three tries to get it right, Reed said.

“I’m shocked because I really want . . . to trust that the issues with irregularities with voting machines have been resolved,” said Reed, a paralegal. “It worries me because the races are so close.”

Broward Supervisor of Elections spokeswoman Mary Cooney said it’s not uncommon for screens on heavily used machines to slip out of sync, making votes register incorrectly. Poll workers are trained to recalibrate them on the spot — essentially, to realign the video screen with the electronics inside. The 15-step process is outlined in the poll-workers manual.

“It is resolved right there at the early-voting site,” Cooney said.

Broward poll workers keep a log of all maintenance done on machines at each site. But the Supervisor of Elections office doesn’t see that log until the early voting period ends. And a machine isn’t taken out of service unless the poll clerk decides it’s a chronic poor performer that can’t be fixed.

Cooney said no machines have been removed during early voting, and she is not aware of any serious problems.

In Miami-Dade, two machines have been taken out of service during early voting. No votes were lost, Sola said.

Joan Marek, 60, a Democrat from Hollywood, was also stunned to see Charlie Crist on her ballot review page after voting on Thursday. “Am I on the voting screen again?” she wondered. “Well, this is too weird.”

Marek corrected her ballot and alerted poll workers at the Hollywood satellite courthouse, who she said told her they’d had previous problems with the same machine.

Poll workers did some work on her machine when she finished voting, Marek said. But no report was made to the Supervisor of Elections office and the machine was not removed, Cooney said.

Workers at the Hollywood poll said there had been no voting problems on Friday.

Mauricio Raponi wanted to vote for Democrats across the board at the Lemon City Library in Miami on Thursday. But each time he hit the button next to the candidate, the Republican choice showed up. Raponi, 53, persevered until the machine worked. Then he alerted a poll worker.

Are we the Mongols of the Information Age?
The future of U.S. power rests in its Industrial Age military adapting to decentralized adversaries.
By Max Boot
October 29, 2006

GREAT POWERS cease to be great for many reasons. In addition to the causes frequently debated — economics, culture, disease, geography — there is an overarching trend. Over the last 500 years, the fate of nations has been increasingly tied to their success, or lack thereof, in harnessing revolutions in military affairs.

These are periods of momentous change when new technologies combine with new doctrines and new forms of organization to transform not only the face of battle but also the nature of the state and of the international system. Because we are in the middle of the fourth major revolution since 1500 — the Information Revolution — it is important to grasp the nature and consequences of these upheavals.

Until the 15th century, the mightiest military forces belonged to the Mongols. But strong as they were in the days of bows and arrows, the Mongols could not keep pace with the spread of gunpowder weapons and the rise of centralized governments that used them. They fell behind, and Europe surged to the forefront. In 1450, Europeans controlled just 15% of the world’s surface. By 1914 — following not only the Gunpowder Revolution but also the first Industrial Revolution — their domain had swollen to an astounding 84% of the globe.

Not all European states were equal, of course. Some early leaders in gunpowder technology — for instance, Spain and Portugal — were also-rans when industrialization began in the 18th century. At least Spain and Portugal managed to maintain their independence. Numerous others — from Poland to the Italian city-states — were not so lucky. They endured prolonged occupation by foreigners more skilled than they were at new forms of warfare.

The big winners of the Gunpowder Revolution (from roughly 1500 to 1700) were the northern European states, from Britain to Russia. But the Romanovs, Habsburgs and Ottomans did not survive the cataclysmic conflict of the first Industrial Age — World War I — and their empires collapsed, even as Germany and Japan were catapulting themselves into the upper rank of nation-states largely through their growing military expertise. World War II — the major conflict of the second Industrial Revolution, defined by the internal combustion engine, airplane and radio — further shook up the international balance of power.

The conventional assumption is that the outcome of World War II was virtually foreordained: The Allies won because they were bigger and richer than the Axis. There is some truth to this. But by 1942, Germany, Italy and Japan controlled most of the natural resources of East Asia and Europe. This would have allowed them to match the Allies if they had been more adept at marshaling their military and economic power. The Soviet Union and the United States — the biggest beneficiaries of the second Industrial Revolution — did a better job not just in managing wartime production. They also grabbed the lead in the use of such key weapons as the tank (the Soviet Union) and the long-range bomber and aircraft carrier (the U.S.). There are many reasons why once-dominant powers such as France and Britain had become second-tier ones by 1945, but central among them was their failure to exploit advances in weaponry during the inter-war years.

The Information Revolution of the late 20th century upset the seemingly stable postwar order. The Soviet Union had no Silicon Valley and could not compete with the United States in incorporating the computer into its economic or military spheres. U.S. prowess at waging war in the Information Age was showcased in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, which, along with the collapse of the Soviet empire, left the United States standing alone as a global hegemon.

But if history teaches any lesson, it is that no military lead is ever safe. Challengers will always find a way to copy or buy the best weapons systems or develop tactics that will offset their effect. Our most formidable enemies, Al Qaeda and its ilk, have done both. They are using relatively simple information technology — the Internet, satellite television, cellphones — to organize a global insurgency. By using such weapons as hijacked airliners and bombs detonated by garage-door openers, they are finding cracks in our defenses.

We have an insurmountable advantage in high-end military hardware. No other state is building nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, stealth fighters or unmanned aerial vehicles. In fact, we spend more on the development and testing of new weapons — $71 billion this year — than any other country spends on its entire defense. But all that spending produces weapons systems that aren’t much good for pacifying Baghdad or Kandahar.

Technology isn’t irrelevant to the global war on terror. We can use powerful surveillance systems to break up terrorist plots. And “smart bombs” can be invaluable for dealing with the perpetrators. But our enemies can stymie multibillion-dollar spy platforms by using couriers instead of satellite phones, which helps explain why Osama bin Laden remains on the loose.

New revolutions in military affairs, possibly centered on biotechnology and cyber-war, promise to give smaller states or sub-state actors more destructive capacity. Imagine the havoc that could be caused by a genetically engineered contagion combining the worst properties of, say, smallpox and the Ebola virus. Or imagine how much damage our enemies could inflict by using computer viruses — or directed-energy weapons — to immobilize critical bits of our civilian or military computer networks. In theory, it’s possible to crash stock markets, send airliners plowing into the ground and blind our most advanced weapons systems.

The most threatening weapon of all harks back to an earlier military revolution. Nuclear bombs haven’t been used since 1945, but given their proliferation around the world, it will only be a matter of time. Our scientific sophistication gives us a reasonable chance of shooting down a nuclear-tipped missile, but a nuclear suitcase smuggled into the U.S. would be much harder to detect.

To stop such stealthy threats, we need to get much better at human intelligence, counterinsurgency, information operations and related disciplines. We need more speakers of Arabic and Pashto, more experts who understand tribal relations in Iraq’s Anbar province and Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier province, more diplomats who can win over audiences on Al Jazeera. And we need to set them loose without having to worry about a burdensome bureaucracy micromanaging their every move.

It may sound melodramatic, but the future of U.S. power rests on our ability to remake a government still structured for Industrial Age warfare to do battle with decentralized adversaries in the Information Age. After all, aren’t we the mightiest, richest nation in history? How could our hegemony possibly be endangered? That’s what previous superpowers thought too. But their dominance lasted only until they missed a revolutionary turn in military technology and tactics.

Depleted Uranium Death Toll among US War Veterans Tops 11,000
Nationwide Media Blackout Keeps U.S. Public Ignorant About This Important Story
by James P. Tucker Jr.
October 29, 2006

The death toll from the highly toxic weapons component known as depleted uranium (DU) has reached 11,000 soldiers and the growing scandal may be the reason behind Anthony Principi’s departure as secretary of the Veterans Affairs Department.

This view was expressed by Arthur Bernklau, executive director of Veterans for Constitutional Law in New York, writing in Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter.

“The real reason for Mr. Principi’s departure was really never given,” Bernklau said. “However, a special report published by eminent scientist Leuren Moret naming depleted uranium as the definitive cause of ‘Gulf War Syndrome’ has fed a growing scandal about the continued use of uranium munitions by the U.S. military.”

The “malady [from DU] that thousands of our military have suffered and died from has finally been identified as the cause of this sickness, eliminating the guessing. . . . The terrible truth is now being revealed,” Bernklau said.

Of the 580,400 soldiers who served in Gulf War I, 11,000 are now dead, he said. By the year 2000, there were 325,000 on permanent medical disability. More than a decade later, more than half (56 percent) who served in Gulf War I have permanent medical problems. The disability rate for veterans of the world wars of the last century was 5 percent, rising to 10 percent in Vietnam.

“The VA secretary was aware of this fact as far back as 2000,” Bernklau said. “He and the Bush administration have been hiding these facts, but now, thanks to Moret’s report, it is far too big to hide or to cover up.”

Terry Johnson, public affairs specialist at the VA, recently reported that veterans of both Persian Gulf wars now on disability total 518,739, Bernklau said.

“The long-term effect of DU is a virtual death sentence,” Bernklau said. “Marion Fulk, a nuclear chemist, who retired from the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab, and was also involved in the Manhattan Project, interprets the new and rapid malignancies in the soldiers [from the second war] as ‘spectacular’—and a matter of concern.’ ”

While this important story appeared in a Washington newspaper and the wire services, it did not receive national exposure—a compelling sign that the American public is being kept in the dark about the terrible effects of this toxic weapon. (Veterans for Constitutional Law can be reached at (516) 474-4261.)

i just got home from “Dempster Diving”. it was stuart dempster’s 70th birthday and “they” (whoever that is) gave him a birthday party at town hall. in spite of the fact that i took lessons from dennis smith (who i had originally heard about when i was 10 years old), and not stuart, and only attended one of stuart’s master classes (i was somewhat of a trombone snob back then, and stuart’s style of teaching was too “bizarre” for me), he’s been a mentor of sorts for me for a long time. it was stuart who first got “legal” access to the fort worden cistern – i had been in there several times on a “less-than-legal” basis before then and i’ve played in all of the other underground bunkers at fort worden. i was part of a trombone choir that played happy birthday at the beginning, and four pieces in the middle. it was really interesting because there were a whole lot of people who knew me 25-30 years ago, and a few people i know from places like the moisture festival and drunk puppet night. greg powers was the motivating force behind the trombone choir, which turned out to be 25 trombones. he’s a friend of mine who played in the seattle youth symphony and the floating world circus band with me way back when, who got a fulbright fellowship to go to india and study hindustani music played on the trombone while i was pulling weeds at a community farm in bellingham, about the time ezra was born… which has always made me think that i could probably have gotten a fulbright fellowship as well, if i knew how to do it. also part of the degenerate art ensemble performed, as well as the didgeri-dudes, the seattle harmonic choir, pauline oliveros, and wiliam o. smith.

what the fuck? every time i click “Update Journal”, it logs me out before taking me to the update page… screwy!

the only way i have to change my avatar is to post while logged out, entering my username and password at the same time as the posting, and then going back and editing the post… 8/

Iraqis Were Better Off Under Saddam, Says Former Weapons Inspector
October 25, 2006

COPENHAGEN, Denmark – Former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix on Wednesday described the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq as a “pure failure” that had left the country worse off than under the dictatorial rule of Saddam Hussein.

In unusually harsh comments to Danish newspaper Politiken, the diplomatic Swede said the U.S. government had ended up in a situation in which neither staying nor leaving Iraq were good options.

“Iraq is a pure failure,” Blix was quoted as saying. “If the Americans pull out, there is a risk that they will leave a country in civil war. At the same time it doesn’t seem that the United States can help to stabilize the situation by staying there.”

War-related violence in Iraq has grown worse with dozens of civilians, government officials and police and security forces being killed every day. At least 83 American soldiers have been killed in October – the highest monthly toll this year.

Blix said the situation would have been better if the war had not taken place.

“Saddam would still have been sitting in office. OK, that is negative and it would not have been joyful for the Iraqi people. But what we have gotten is undoubtedly worse,” he was quoted as saying.

Blix led the UN inspectors that searched for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. He came under heavy fire from Washington when he urged U.S. President George W. Bush to allow the weapons inspectors and the IAEA to continue their work as a way to stave off a war.

Ultimately a U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq and no weapons of mass destruction were found.

the interview went fine, and even though i hit myself in the head with a flaming poi, i didn’t do any significant damage apart from what is already there, and the fact that i was swinging fire around my head impressed them no end, whether i had a brain injury or not. the lady reporter asked me if i could teach her how to do it, but as soon as i lit up she withdrew her application. it will get published either on saturday or next wednesday.

about a year ago, i was contacted by a guy in california about becoming a distributor for the Rudra Centre in india. he said the rudra centre doesn’t have any distributors in this area, so would hybrid elephant be interested in taking on the role. of course, i was, and i immediately added a page of rudraksha malas and other jewelry to the hybrid elephant pages, and bought 20 8mm malas with the expressed understanding that i would be ordering more product as i got orders.

earlier this month, i actually got my first order for something other than a rudraksha mala. i sent it in, and there was the previously reported SNAFU concerning it, which got worse before it got better, but was finally resolved last week. as a part of the afore mentioned SNAFU, i called the guy in california again, and he said that the problem was because i had ordered from the web site, and next time i should call him before ordering from the web site, because he can fill my orders much more quickly, and then i won’t have to pay the surcharge for ordering from india.

so, a few days ago, i decided that i would consider adding more of the rudra centre’s product, so i called the guy in california again. this time he said that i would have to order from the web site, and go through the home office in india, because he couldn’t fulfill my orders (!?!?!?). when i asked him why he told me that he could – last week – he said that he hadn’t said that, that he would never say that, and ms. neeta in the home office in india was the only person who could fill orders. so i wrote to ms. neeta. she didn’t respond (and yes, i know that they’re on the other side of the world, and 9:00 am my time is 4:00 pm tomorrow, or something like that, their time), so i called the guy in california again and he said that he would send ms. neeta a message as well. then he called me back, and said that ms. neeta had not received any email from me at all, and dictated exactly what i should send her, so that she would recognise it. that did the trick, and so i sent her a message that said that i had been a distributor for almost a year and i still wasn’t listed on their web site. she wrote back and said that i hadn’t ordered anything in over a year and my distributorship needed to be “reexamined”.

so i went to their web site again, and discovered that they actually have a distributorship agreement, which i have never seen. so i called the guy in california again, and he said that he doesn’t know anything about a “distributorship agreement”, he doesn’t have a “distributorship agreement”, and he’s the american representative for the company, and that ms. neeta would know everything about it, because she’s the president of the company. so i wrote to ms. neeta again, and asked her about this “distributorship agreement”, and she said that to be a distributor, i would have to generate orders of $500 or more per month, and i had only generated orders for less than $100 in the past year…

fortunately, i didn’t do what my brain-injured, massively-depressed first inclination was, which was to write back and say something along the lines of “well, in that case, i’ll find someone who does want to do business with me, like that guy who wrote to me, asking if i wanted to be a distributor for his (bogus) rudraksha business, which is right down the street from you in mumbai” (even though i’m fairly sure, from independent research, that this other guy probably sells fake rudrakshas, i’m sure he must be major competition for the rudra centre), but at the same time, now i don’t know whether i am a distributor or not, and i’m not sure if i’m “allowed” to list their products on my web site, and even if i am, i’m not sure whether i really want to or not any longer. naturally, i haven’t heard anything from the guy in california, who i found out (once again, from my own research) is “a ‘sidha^®‘ trained in TM meditation”, which i know to be the worst kind of bogus – and the fact that he is a “trained sidha^®” means that he must be at least partially aware of how bogus it really is, especially if “he has deep knowledge on Hindu religion and has read various scriptures” as the web page says he does…

a while ago, someone wrote to cirquechat asking for a person who lives in or near federal way to interview for the federal way mirror, and, as i live “in or near” federal way, i volunteered. they’re coming by today at 5:30. i’ve gone out and bought a quart of lighter fluid and a fire extinguisher, so that they can take pictures of me being a BBWP, i’ve gotten rid of the wasp nest that was in the rhododendron bush, and mowed the dandelions in the front yard, so that they have a place to take the pictures that won’t cause a riot when i light up. i don’t plan on inviting them into the house, and if they want to go somewhere, there’s a park up the street that we can go to, or there’s a coffee shop which is actually in federal way, which is not too far from here. they wanted a demonstration of my flaming tuba, but, unfortunately, the flaming tuba is still in the planning stages, and doesn’t actually exist in reality yet. they also wanted an invite to trolloween, and i didn’t give them one at first, but then i talked to macque and he said that it was okay if they come as long as they don’t actually publish the story until after trolloween is over, so i’ll probably be inviting them tonight, as long as they promise to stick to macque’s request.

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.

this is from australia, but even so, it probably won’t be long before it starts taking hold here as well… 8/

Criminal link holds back fingerprint acceptance
By Munir Kotadia
20 October 2006

Fingerprinting technology is the most reliable and cost effective biometric authentication technology but it’s not being deployed on a wide scale because people still imagine that criminals are the only ones that have to surrender their fingerprints, according to Sagem.

Users are resisting the switch to fingerprint authentication technologies because they still see the process of giving a fingerprint as somehow related to being caught by the police, according to Gilles Novel, manager for secure terminals and transactions at Sagem Australasia.

“We have to shift mentality away from where people are scared [of giving their fingerprints],” Novel told ZDNet Australia. “The problem we have faced is that people think ‘if I enrol my fingerprint there has to be, one way or the other, a link to the police’. They think criminal activity instead of their own privacy.”

Novel argues that attitudes are slowly changing — especially as people slowly realise that fingerprints are more reliable than passwords and can help increase, not erode, privacy.

“If you are an employer and someone does the wrong thing on your network, that person can say ‘it wasn’t me — someone has used my password’. But in the case of biometrics, how can you say ‘it wasn’t my finger?’.”

He claimed that fingerprinting is a way of improving privacy because it creates a stronger bond between the person’s body and their identity, which is something that is not possible with EFTPOS-style smartcards and PIN numbers.

“Smartcards are a weak link to your body because they can be loaned, borrowed, given or stolen. There is nothing stopping you going to get some cash from an ATM if you have my card and my PIN. It is a bit more difficult with biometrics,” he said.

He gave an example of a Swiss bank, which does not require the account holder’s identity but needs another way of identifying who is authorised to access the account.

“If you want a secure account in a Swiss bank, they don’t want to know your identity but you might authorise yourself with biometrics. This is because they know it’s secure but they don’t know who you are — that is a concept that reinforces privacy.

“If you interviewed 100 people five or 10 years ago and asked them if they would give their fingerprints for a secure system they would say no. I am sure it has completely changed by now,” added Novel.

In Australia, fingerprinting technology was being adopted by Centrelink, the government’s nationwide human services agency. Last year, the organisation decided to ditch passwords in favour of a fingerprint authentication system that would require it to purchase and deploy 31,000 finger scanners. However, the plan was scrapped earlier this year.

Bush: ‘We’ve Never Been Stay The Course’
October 22, 2006

During an interview today on ABC’s This Week, President Bush tried to distance himself from what has been his core strategy in Iraq for the last three years. George Stephanopoulos asked about James Baker’s plan to develop a strategy for Iraq that is “between ’stay the course’ and ‘cut and run.’”

Bush responded, ‘We’ve never been stay the course, George!’ Watch it:

Bush is wrong:

BUSH: We will stay the course. [8/30/06]

BUSH: We will stay the course, we will complete the job in Iraq. [8/4/05]

BUSH: We will stay the course until the job is done, Steve. And the temptation is to try to get the President or somebody to put a timetable on the definition of getting the job done. We’re just going to stay the course. [12/15/03]

BUSH: And my message today to those in Iraq is: We’ll stay the course. [4/13/04]

BUSH: And that’s why we’re going to stay the course in Iraq. And that’s why when we say something in Iraq, we’re going to do it. [4/16/04]

BUSH: And so we’ve got tough action in Iraq. But we will stay the course. [4/5/04]

also check out this press briefing by scott mclelland, where he outlined the white house policy on “staying the course”…

Bush uses gay rights flag as backdrop for ABC interview

As some of our commenters have noted, everything this White House does is scripted. There is simply no way that Bush did this interview without his people intentionally choosing to have a rainbow flag right behind his head, framing the entire shot. Look at these photos, that flag was clearly meant to be where it is in the frame. The question is why?

Here’s Bush with the rainbow flag behind him:

Here’s a close-up of Bush and the flag:

And here’s the gay rights flag:

In all fairness to Bush, it’s possible this isn’t the gay rights flag at all. It may simply be the PACE flag (“Peace” in Italian) used by opponents of the war in Iraq.

They’re simply too similar to be anything else. Yes, there is one more row of color in the gay flag vs. Bush’s rainbow flag, but I’ve never seen flags like this other than the gay flag. Normally I’d say this is just a hysterical coincidence. But after the White House defending Secretary of State Condi Rice’s description of a gay couple as married last week – mind you, not only did the White House defend what Rice said, but Rice made the announcement in front of Mrs. Bush – I’m smelling a subliminal rat here.

It’s very difficult to conclude other than someone in the White House has clearly decided to send out the silent code that “gay is okay” right before the election. It is very difficult to believe that all of this is just coincidence.

Then again, it’s not like the Bush administration, including the White House, isn’t full of gays – so perhaps the pink mafia strikes again. (Anyone see George Allen’s staff, or the RNC, doing any last minute decorating on the set before Bush spoke?).

Terrorist Profiling, Version 2.0
By Shane Harris
Oct. 20, 2006

The government’s top intelligence agency is building a computerized system to search very large stores of information for patterns of activity that look like terrorist planning. The system, which is run by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is in the early research phases and is being tested, in part, with government intelligence that may contain information on U.S. citizens and other people inside the country.

It encompasses existing profiling and detection systems, including those that create “suspicion scores” for suspected terrorists by analyzing very large databases of government intelligence, as well as records of individuals’ private communications, financial transactions, and other everyday activities.

The details of the program, called Tangram, are contained in an unclassified document that National Journal obtained from a government contracting Web site. The document, called a “proposer’s information packet,” is a technical description of Tangram written for potential contractors who would help design and test the system. The document was written by officials in the research-and-development section of the national intelligence office. A tangram is an old Chinese puzzle that takes seven geometric shapes — five triangles, a square, and a parallelogram — and rearranges them into different pictures.

In addition to descriptions of Tangram, the document offers a rare and surprisingly candid analysis of intelligence agencies’ fits and starts — and failures — in other efforts to profile terrorists through data mining: Researchers, for example, haven’t moved beyond “guilt-by-association models” that link suspected terrorists to other, potentially innocent people, and then rank the suspects by level of suspicion.

“To date, the predominant approaches have used a guilt-by-association model to derive suspicion scores,” the Tangram document states. “In the cases where we have knowledge of a seed entity [a known person] in an unknown group, we have been very successful at detecting the entire group. However, in the absence of a known seed entity, how do we score a person if nothing is known about their associates? In such an instance, guilt-by-association fails.”

Intelligence and privacy experts who reviewed the document said that it reaffirms their long-held belief that many computerized terrorist-profiling methods are largely ineffective. It also raises significant privacy concerns, because to distinguish terrorists from innocent people, a system that’s as broad as Tangram purports to be would require access to many databases that contain private information about Americans, the experts said, including credit card transactions, communications records, and even Internet purchases.

“There is no other way that they could do this,” said David Holtzman, former chief technology officer of Network Solutions, the company that runs the Internet’s domain-naming system, and author of the book Privacy Lost. “They want to investigate real-time ways of spotting patterns” that might indicate terrorist activity, he said. “Telephone calls, for instance, would be an obvious thing you’d feed into this.”

The Tangram document doesn’t mention privacy protections or a process for monitoring the system’s use to guard against abuse. In an interview, Tim Edgar, the deputy civil-liberties protection officer for the national intelligence director, said that Tangram “is a research-and-development program. We have been assured that it’s not deployed for operational use.”

Asked whether the intelligence used to test Tangram contains information about U.S. persons, defined as U.S. citizens and permanent resident aliens, Edgar said, “It’s not being tested with any data that has unminimized information about U.S. persons in it.” Minimization procedures are used by intelligence agencies to expunge people’s names from official reports and replace them with an anonymous designation, such as U.S. Person No. 1. Tangram is being tested “only with synthetic data or foreign-intelligence data already being used by analysts that meet Defense Department guidelines for handling of U.S. person information,” Edgar said. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence “has not funded and is not planning to fund any contracts for the Tangram program using unminimized data with U.S. persons in it,” he said.

Tangram drew skeptical reviews from technology and privacy experts because of its links to Total Information Awareness, a controversial research program started by the Pentagon in 2002. TIA also aimed to detect patterns of terrorist behavior. Congress ended all public funding for the program in 2003, but allowed research to continue through the classified intelligence budget. In February, National Journal revealed that names of component TIA programs were simply changed and transferred to a research-and-development unit principally overseen by the National Security Agency. The unit, now under the control of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, also runs Tangram.

The Tangram document cites several TIA programs — by their new names — as forming the latest phase of research upon which Tangram will build. In a prepared statement, the intelligence director’s office said, “Tangram is addressing the problem that the intelligence community receives vast amounts of data a day and there are a wide variety of algorithms — mathematical procedures — for figuring out what is relevant. Different algorithms serve different purposes, but we believe that combining them will provide us new insights in detecting terrorist plans and activities. The project will allow analysts to mix and match various methods to connect the dots.”

TIA was similarly envisioned as a vast combination of detection methods. In Tangram, “I see the system of systems that is essentially TIA about to be born,” said Tim Sparapani, the legislative counsel on privacy issues for the American Civil Liberties Union. “TIA was designed to be one unified system,” he said. “This is the vision, I think, made practical.”

Robert Popp, who was the TIA program’s deputy director, also saw parallels to Tangram. “They seem to be doing something very similar in concept,” Popp said. “Taking data, doing all the sense-making and path-finding, and turning it into a form which a decision maker can act upon.”

According to the document, Tangram “takes a systematic view of the [terrorist-detection] process, applying what is now a set of disjointed, cumbersome-to-configure technologies that are difficult for nontechnical users to apply, into a self-configuring, continuously operating intelligence analysis support system.” Tangram will be “aware” of the various patterns, relationships, and contexts expressed in data, and will automatically configure itself to choose the best algorithm for exploiting that data, the document explains. As envisioned, the system “can reason about how best to produce an answer” on its own.

“Conceptually, the approach would be to perform a succession of automated ‘what if’ scenarios that compute the expected value of acquiring additional information,” the document states. The system would, effectively, suggest other questions for the analyst to ask, and perhaps where to look for answers.

Last month, the government awarded three contracts for Tangram research and design totaling almost $12 million. Total funding for the program is approximately $49 million. Two of the firms receiving awards — Booz Allen Hamilton and 21st Century Technologies — were principal contractors on the TIA program. The third company, SRI International, worked on one of TIA’s predecessors, the Genoa program. Spokeswomen for Booz Allen Hamilton and SRI declined to comment for this article. Repeated calls and e-mails to the Austin offices of 21st Century Technologies went unanswered.

The apparent lack of privacy protections in Tangram dismayed some experts. “Given the history of TIA and other programs, one would expect the proponents of a system like this would at least pay lip service to privacy issues,” said David Sobel, senior counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy watchdog. “The absence of that is a bit surprising.”

The TIA program devoted more than $4 million to research aimed at ways to protect privacy while it was sifting databases, and former officials have said that although it was admittedly controversial, TIA was being designed all along with privacy protection and auditable logs to track those who used it. The privacy research, however, was abandoned when the program moved into the classified budget in the NSA.

Administration officials have singled out the importance of new technologies in the war on terrorism. President Bush said that the NSA’s warrantless surveillance and analysis of phone calls and e-mails protects Americans from attack. Gen. Michael Hayden, the former NSA director, said that were such a system in place before the September 11 attacks, “we would have detected some of the 9/11 Al Qaeda operatives in the United States, and we would have identified them as such.”

But the Tangram document presents a more pessimistic assessment of the state of terrorist detection. For instance, researchers want to find ways to distinguish individuals’ innocuous activity from that which might appear normal but is really indicative of terrorist plotting. However, the document states that, in large measure, terrorism researchers “cannot readily distinguish the absolute scale of normal behaviors” either for innocent people or for terrorists.

The ACLU’s Sparapani called that admission “a bombshell,” because the government is acknowledging that current detection systems aren’t sophisticated enough to separate terrorists from everyday people. Other outside experts were troubled that such shortcomings also mean that individuals intent on doing harm could be mistaken for innocent people.

Popp said that attempts to separate terrorists’ activities from those of normal people are perilous. “When you try to capture what is normal behavior, and then determine non-normal, that’s highly intractable,” he said.

Several times, Popp said, TIA researchers discussed how to characterize nonterrorist behavior. “We avoided it. It was too hard. We had no idea how on God’s earth you would characterize and capture normal behavior. We wouldn’t know where to start.” Instead, TIA researchers proposed looking for specific indicators of terrorist planning — people purchasing airline tickets at the last minute with cash, for instance, or other transactions that fit the narrative of an attack.

Current detection techniques have raised the specter of what the Tangram document calls “runaway false detections.” If analysts tie a terrorist suspect to five other individuals, say through phone calls, how can they be certain that these five people constitute a terrorist network and aren’t simply people with whom the suspect has had innocuous, everyday interactions? The document says that research has been conducted on “the sensitivities of guilt-by-association models to runaway false detections.”

Researchers have made other attempts to move beyond the guilt-by-association model, the document states. One technique, an obscure methodology known as “collective inferencing,” in which the suspicion score of an entire network of people is computed at once, has apparently garnered some interest. But “existing techniques are far too simple” for real-world problems, the document acknowledges.

The Tangram document states that gaps in current detection techniques also owe to the difficulty of tracking terrorist behaviors, which are constantly changing. “The underlying assumption of existing approaches is that behaviors are constant,” the authors write. “Yet, behaviors are not constant…. How can we profile dynamic behavior well enough to be able to identify, with more-or-less confidence, entities who want to remain anonymous?” The answer to that question apparently eludes the researchers, who hope that Tangram might provide it.

GOP terrorism ad sparks Democratic furor
October 20, 2006

Republicans took a page from President Johnson’s Cold War-era presidential campaign with an advertisement set to air this weekend called “The Stakes,” which prominently features al Qaeda leaders threatening to kill Americans.

“Just like in the Cold War, the reality is that our nation is at war with an ideology and not a country,” said Republican National Committee spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt.

Democrats, however, have called the commercial, which is reminiscent of Johnson’s 1964 “Daisy” ad, a “desperate ploy to once again try to scare voters.”

The advertisement, which is available on the Republican National Committee Web site, is scheduled to run on national news networks Sunday. Republicans are emphasizing national security and terrorism issues in their bid to maintain control of Congress with about two weeks before the November midterms.

The ad features al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, speaking, but the only sound is a ticking clock in the background. The terror leaders’ quotes are posted on the screen and key phrases in the quotes stand alone as the rest of the quote fades out.

In one instance, bin Laden is quoted as saying, “With God’s permission we call on everyone who believes in God … to comply with His will to kill the Americans.” As the text of the quote fades out, “kill the Americans” remains on the screen.

Another bin Laden quote: “They will not come to their senses unless the attacks fall on their heads and … until the battle has moved inside America” — fades out, leaving only “inside America” on the screen.

Meanwhile, footage of terrorists engaged in martial arts and weapons training rolls in the background. One scene shows terrorists traversing monkey bars over fire.

The ticking clock morphs into a heartbeat as the ad comes to a close, and the only spoken words on the commercial announce, "The Republican National Committee is responsible for the content of this advertising." (View "The Stakes" at the RNC Web site)

The ad plays off of Johnson’s powerful “Daisy” ad, which CNN senior political analyst Bill Schneider called “the most famous political ad in American history.” Johnson used the ad in his successful re-election bid against Barry Goldwater.

In the “Daisy” ad, a small girl counts to 10 as she picks petals from a flower. When she reaches 10, the camera zooms in on her eye and an ominous voice counts backward from 10 to zero.

When the countdown reaches zero, a nuclear bomb explodes, followed by Johnson speaking.

“These are the stakes to make a world in which all God’s children can live or to go into the dark,” Johnson says on the ad. “We must either love each other or we must die.”

A voice follows Johnson’s, urging viewers to re-elect the Texas Democrat and says, “The stakes are too high for you to stay home.”

The Democratic National Committee issued a statement saying the new Republican ad was an attempt to distract voters from GOP failures.

“Once again we see that the GOP will truly do and say anything regardless of whether or not it’s true, they are so desperate to hold onto power,” Democratic National Committee Communications Director Karen Finney said in a statement. “Clearly Republicans are so afraid of their abysmal record they can’t offer one example of what they’ve done to keep America safe.”

Republicans contend otherwise and say the ad “underscores the high stakes America faces in the global war on terror by using the words of the terrorists themselves as they describe their intention towards the United States,” according to a statement.

happy deepavali

Troops With Stress Disorders Being Redeployed
Oct 19, 2006

Army Staff Sgt. Bryce Syverson spent 15 months in Iraq before he was diagnosed by military doctors with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and sent to the psychiatric unit at Walter Reed Medical Center, CBS News correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi reports.

“It ended up they just took his weapon away from him and said he was non-deployable and couldn’t have a weapon,” says his father, Larry Syverson. “He was on suicide watch in a lockdown.”

That was last August. This August, he was deployed to Ramadi, in the heart of the Sunni triangle — and he had a weapon.

He’s still there. Under pressure to maintain troop levels, military doctors tell CBS News it’s become a “common practice” to recycle soldiers with mental disorders back into combat.

“It’s flat-out not a good idea,” says Dr. John Wilson, an expert in combat trauma.

One study estimates that about 16 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq have PTSD. But military officials say they don’t keep tabs on how many troops still fighting have been diagnosed. Most soldiers are never screened, a GAO report finds.

Wilson says the danger of having someone with PTSD at the front lines is that they are at risk themselves and put their units at risk and could break down under the stresses of combat.

“Basically, it’s like your worst day is every day. It gets worse every day,” says Army Specialist Jason Gunn, a decorated soldier.

Gunn was critically injured in Baghdad when the Humvee he was driving hit an IED. His friend was killed in the explosion.

“I blame myself,” Gunn says.

Gunn became depressed and paranoid. Doctors said he was sick, suffering from PTSD. But just four months after the deadly explosion, he was sent back to Iraq.

“The Army sent us an e-mail saying they recognized Jason was suffering from PTSD, but was ‘in his best interest’ if he ‘faced his fears’ and went back to the front,” says Pat Gunn, his mother.

Wilson says this does not make sense “at all.”

“To put someone in that situation and say ‘face your fears’ is contrary to all current medical and scientific knowledge about PTSD,” Wilson says.

Jason Gunn says he thinks he was re-deployed so the military could keep up numbers in the ranks.

Meanwhile, Bryce Syverson is still in Iraq. He sent this e-mail home:

“Head about to explode from the blood swelling inside, the lightning storm that happened inside my head.”

He wrote that it was the anti-depressants that were making him feel bad, so he told his father he may stop taking them.

“Who knows what could happen? There are soldiers depending on him, and other soldiers are expecting Bryce to react,” his father says. “Who knows how he will react under live combat fire.”

After Pat’s Birthday
By Kevin Tillman
Oct 19, 2006

It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we get out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military.

Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet. It’s interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.

Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.

Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.

Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.

Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.

Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.

Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.

Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.

Somehow torture is tolerated.

Somehow lying is tolerated.

Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.

Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.

Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.

Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.

Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.

Somehow this is tolerated.

Somehow nobody is accountable for this.

In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people. So don’t be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity. Most likely, they will come to know that “somehow” was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.

Luckily this country is still a democracy. People still have a voice. People still can take action. It can start after Pat’s birthday.

Brother and Friend of Pat Tillman,

Kevin Tillman

this evening i’ve got the first rehearsal for a live gig i got from mark nichols, who is someone i know from the moisture festival. i went to mark’s studio back in july and recorded the tuba tracks for an album of harry nilsson songs that is being recorded by a friend of mark’s, and we’re coming up to the release of the CD and they want to put on a live performance of the CD for the release, which is going to be 8 december. i’m only playing for 4 songs, but because of the fact that i’m playing tuba, the parts are essential, and it’s more important than usual that i at least come close to playing all the right notes at something close to the right time, and do it consistently enough that they can rely on at least one live performance from me, so i’ve been practicing with the CD that he sent me. surprisingly, i am more prepared to do this than i expected i would be, and i’ll probably do okay. it’s only 4 out of 15 songs… but now, listening to the CD, i realise that there might be 5 songs that he wants tuba for, but he only sent me the music for 4 of them, so i’ve got something new to worry about. one of the tunes, “Miss Butter’s Lament”, has weird time signature changes and isn’t straight forward enough that i’m not sure i’m going to be able to keep track of the changes in real time, in spite of the fact that i’ve got the music in front of me and have kept track for at least 3 times, going through it with the CD. one of the tunes, “Daddy’s Song”, has music that only vaguely resembles what is on the CD, and, as he told us to “go through the songs with the CD”, i’m not sure whether he wants me to play what’s on the CD or what the music says. hopefully i’ll find out tonight…

Your words are lies, Sir.
By John Amato
October 18th, 2006

Keith Olbermann has been calling it like it is. His “Special Comments” are indeed special because no other talking head outside of Cafferty is willing to step up to the plate and say what needs to be said on 24/7. “Your words are lies, Sir.” They are lies, that imperil us all.’ Sounds about right to me.Olbermann: And lastly, as promised, a Special Comment tonight on the signing of the Military Commissions Act and the loss of Habeas Corpus.

We have lived as if in a trance. We have lived… as people in fear.

And now — our rights and our freedoms in peril — we slowly awake to learn that we have been afraid… of the wrong thing.

Therefore, tonight, have we truly become, the inheritors of our American legacy. For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering:

And lastly, as promised, a Special Comment tonight on the signing of the Military Commissions Act and the loss of Habeas Corpus.

We have lived as if in a trance.

We have lived… as people in fear.

And now — our rights and our freedoms in peril — we slowly awake to learn that we have been afraid… of the wrong thing.

Therefore, tonight, have we truly become, the inheritors of our American legacy.

For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering:

A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.

We have been here before — and we have been here before led here — by men better and wiser and nobler than George W. Bush.

We have been here when President John Adams insisted that the Alien and Sedition Acts were necessary to save American lives — only to watch him use those Acts to jail newspaper editors.

American newspaper editors, in American jails, for things they wrote, about America.

We have been here, when President Woodrow Wilson insisted that the Espionage Act was necessary to save American lives — only to watch him use that Act to prosecute 2,000 Americans, especially those he disparaged as “Hyphenated Americans,” most of whom were guilty only of advocating peace in a time of war.

American public speakers, in American jails, for things they said, about America.

And we have been here when President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that Executive Order 9-0-6-6 was necessary to save American lives — only to watch him use that Order to imprison and pauperize 110-thousand Americans…

While his man-in-charge…

General DeWitt, told Congress: “It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen — he is still a Japanese.”

American citizens, in American camps, for something they neither wrote nor said nor did — but for the choices they or their ancestors had made, about coming to America.

Each of these actions was undertaken for the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

And each, was a betrayal of that for which the President who advocated them, claimed to be fighting.

Adams and his party were swept from office, and the Alien and Sedition Acts erased.

Many of the very people Wilson silenced, survived him, and…

…one of them even ran to succeed him, and got 900-thousand votes… though his Presidential campaign was conducted entirely… from his jail cell.

And Roosevelt’s internment of the Japanese was not merely the worst blight on his record, but it would necessitate a formal apology from the government of the United States, to the citizens of the United States, whose lives it ruined.

The most vital… the most urgent… the most inescapable of reasons.

In times of fright, we have been, only human.

We have let Roosevelt’s “fear of fear itself” overtake us.

We have listened to the little voice inside that has said “the wolf is at the door; this will be temporary; this will be precise; this too shall pass.”

We have accepted, that the only way to stop the terrorists, is to let the government become just a little bit like the terrorists.

Just the way we once accepted that the only way to stop the Soviets, was to let the government become just a little bit like the Soviets.

Or substitute… the Japanese.

Or the Germans.

Or the Socialists.

Or the Anarchists.

Or the Immigrants.

Or the British.

Or the Aliens.

The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

And, always, always… wrong.

“With the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few: Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously, and did we do what it takes to defeat that threat?”

Wise words.

And ironic ones, Mr. Bush.

Your own, of course, yesterday, in signing the Military Commissions Act.

You spoke so much more than you know, Sir.

Sadly — of course — the distance of history will recognize that the threat this generation of Americans needed to take seriously… was you.

We have a long and painful history of ignoring the prophecy attributed to Benjamin Franklin that “those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

But even within this history, we have not before codified, the poisoning of Habeas Corpus, that wellspring of protection from which all essential liberties flow.

You, sir, have now befouled that spring.

You, sir, have now given us chaos and called it order.

You, sir, have now imposed subjugation and called it freedom.

For the most vital… the most urgent… the most inescapable of reasons.

And — again, Mr. Bush — all of them, wrong.

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has said it is unacceptable to compare anything this country has ever done, to anything the terrorists have ever done.

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has insisted again that “the United States does not torture. It’s against our laws and it’s against our values” and who has said it with a straight face while the pictures from Abu Ghraib Prison and the stories of Waterboarding figuratively fade in and out, around him.

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not merely any non-American citizens “Unlawful Enemy Combatants” and ship them somewhere — anywhere — but may now, if he so decides, declare you an “Unlawful Enemy Combatant” and ship you somewhere – anywhere.

And if you think this, hyperbole or hysteria… ask the newspaper editors when John Adams was President, or the pacifists when Woodrow Wilson was President, or the Japanese at Manzanar when Franklin Roosevelt was President.

And if you somehow think Habeas Corpus has not been suspended for American citizens but only for everybody else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off the street tomorrow, and they call you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or an “unlawful enemy combatant” — exactly how are you going to convince them to give you a court hearing to prove you are not? Do you think this Attorney General is going to help you?

This President now has his blank check.

He lied to get it.

He lied as he received it.

Is there any reason to even hope, he has not lied about how he intends to use it, nor who he intends to use it against?

“These military commissions will provide a fair trial,” you told us yesterday, Mr. Bush. “In which the accused are presumed innocent, have access to an attorney, and can hear all the evidence against them.”

‘Presumed innocent,’ Mr. Bush?

The very piece of paper you signed as you said that, allows for the detainees to be abused up to the point just before they sustain “serious mental and physical trauma” in the hope of getting them to incriminate themselves, and may no longer even invoke The Geneva Conventions in their own defense.

‘Access to an attorney,’ Mr. Bush?

Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift said on this program, Sir, and to the Supreme Court, that he was only granted access to his detainee defendant, on the promise that the detainee would plead guilty.

‘Hearing all the evidence,’ Mr. Bush?

The Military Commissions act specifically permits the introduction of classified evidence not made available to the defense.

Your words are lies, Sir.

They are lies, that imperil us all.

“One of the terrorists believed to have planned the 9/11 attacks,” …you told us yesterday… “said he hoped the attacks would be the beginning of the end of America.”

That terrorist, sir, could only hope.

Not his actions, nor the actions of a ceaseless line of terrorists (real or imagined), could measure up to what you have wrought.

Habeas Corpus? Gone.

The Geneva Conventions? Optional.

The Moral Force we shined outwards to the world as an eternal beacon, and inwards at ourselves as an eternal protection? Snuffed out.

These things you have done, Mr. Bush… they would be “the beginning of the end of America.”

And did it even occur to you once sir — somewhere in amidst those eight separate, gruesome, intentional, terroristic invocations of the horrors of 9/11 — that with only a little further shift in this world we now know — just a touch more repudiation of all of that for which our patriots died —

Did it ever occur to you once, that in just 27 months and two days from now when you leave office, some irresponsible future President and a “competent tribunal” of lackeys would be entitled, by the actions of your own hand, to declare the status of “Unlawful Enemy Combatant” for… and convene a Military Commission to try… not John Walker Lindh, but George Walker Bush?

For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

And doubtless, sir, all of them — as always — wrong.

Joe Scarborough is next.

Good night, and good luck.

House Report 109-333 – USA PATRIOT IMPROVEMENT AND REAUTHORIZATION ACT OF 2005

SEC. 605. THE UNIFORMED DIVISION, UNITED STATES SECRET SERVICE.

1. In General- Chapter 203 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by inserting after section 3056 the following:

   Sec. 3056A. Powers, authorities, and duties of United States Secret Service Uniformed Division

   1. There is hereby created and established a permanent police force, to be known as the `United States Secret Service Uniformed Division’. Subject to the supervision of the Secretary of Homeland Security, the United States Secret Service Uniformed Division shall perform such duties as the Director, United States Secret Service, may prescribe in connection with the protection of the following:
      1. The White House in the District of Columbia.
      2. Any building in which Presidential offices are located.
      3. The Treasury Building and grounds.
      4. The President, the Vice President (or other officer next in the order of succession to the Office of President), the President-elect, the Vice President-elect, and their immediate families.
      5. Foreign diplomatic missions located in the metropolitan area of the District of Columbia.
      6. The temporary official residence of the Vice President and grounds in the District of Columbia.
      7. Foreign diplomatic missions located in metropolitan areas (other than the District of Columbia) in the United States where there are located twenty or more such missions headed by full-time officers, except that such protection shall be provided only–
         1. on the basis of extraordinary protective need;
         2. upon request of an affected metropolitan area; and
         3. when the extraordinary protective need arises at or in association with a visit to–
            1. a permanent mission to, or an observer mission invited to participate in the work of, an international organization of which the United States is a member; or
            2. an international organization of which the United States is a member;

            except that such protection may also be provided for motorcades and at other places associated with any such visit and may be extended at places of temporary domicile in connection with any such visit.

      8. Foreign consular and diplomatic missions located in such areas in the United States, its territories and possessions, as the President, on a case-by-case basis, may direct.
      9. Visits of foreign government officials to metropolitan areas (other than the District of Columbia) where there are located twenty or more consular or diplomatic missions staffed by accredited personnel, including protection for motorcades and at other places associated with such visits when such officials are in the United States to conduct official business with the United States Government.
      10. Former Presidents and their spouses, as provided in section 3056(a)(3) of title 18.
      11. An event designated under section 3056(e) of title 18 as a special event of national significance.
      12. Major Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates and, within 120 days of the general Presidential election, the spouses of such candidates, as provided in section 3056(a)(7) of title 18.
      13. Visiting heads of foreign states or foreign governments.
   2. 1. Under the direction of the Director of the Secret Service, members of the United States Secret Service Uniformed Division are authorized to–
         1. carry firearms;
         2. make arrests without warrant for any offense against the United States committed in their presence, or for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States if they have reasonable grounds to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing such felony; and
         3. perform such other functions and duties as are authorized by law.
      2. Members of the United States Secret Service Uniformed Division shall possess privileges and powers similar to those of the members of the Metropolitan Police of the District of Columbia.
   3. Members of the United States Secret Service Uniformed Division shall be furnished with uniforms and other necessary equipment.
   4. In carrying out the functions pursuant to paragraphs (7) and (9) of subsection (a), the Secretary of Homeland Security may utilize, with their consent, on a reimbursable basis, the services, personnel, equipment, and facilities of State and local governments, and is authorized to reimburse such State and local governments for the utilization of such services, personnel, equipment, and facilities. The Secretary of Homeland Security may carry out the functions pursuant to paragraphs (7) and (9) of subsection (a) by contract. The authority of this subsection may be transferred by the President to the Secretary of State. In carrying out any duty under paragraphs (7) and (9) of subsection (a), the Secretary of State is authorized to utilize any authority available to the Secretary under title II of the State Department Basic Authorities Act of 1956.’.

Watch Out Wal-Mart!
Mexican Progressives Target Wal-Mart After Its Involvement in the Presidential Election
by Ruben Garcia and Andrea Buffa
October 16, 2006

As we enter the final weeks leading up to the US mid-term elections, interested parties are pulling out all the stops to make sure their candidates win. One such interested party is the corporation Wal-Mart, which newspapers just revealed plans to hand out election materials about certain candidates to its more than one million US employees.

But judging from what happened when Wal-Mart got involved in the recent presidential election in Mexico, the company may want to think twice. Since it was revealed that Wal-Mart’s top shareholder illegally made campaign contributions that supported the right-wing candidate Felipe Calderon of the PAN, Wal-Mart has become the number one corporate target of progressive Mexican activists. In the last month alone, thousands of activists in Mexico City, Puebla, Guadalajara, Queretaro, and Xalapa have staged rowdy protests inside Wal-Mart super centers. Every weekend sees another city hop on the anti-Wal-Mart bandwagon.

It’s not that there wasn’t anti-Wal-Mart organizing in Mexico before. Local activists, business people, and academics tried and failed to prevent Wal-Mart from opening a store within site of Teotihuacan, the oldest archeological site in Mexico. They succeeded in stopping Wal-Mart from opening in the towns of Patzcuaro and Atizapan de Zaragoza, a suburb of Mexico City. Despite this, Wal-Mart has become the largest employer in Mexico, with 140,000 employees and some 850 “retail units.”

Mexican progressives are concerned about the low wages that Wal-Mart pays its employees, the low prices it pays to its suppliers (for both agricultural and manufactured products), and the disregard Wal-Mart has for the cities and communities where it establishes its stores. But even worse, Mexicans have realized that just as it does in the US, Wal-Mart supports the politicians and policies that not only don’t bring Mexican working people prosperity, but make the people poorer than they were before.

The recent escalation of anti-Wal-Mart activism was caused by Wal-Mart top stockholder Manuel Arango’s financial contributions to a smear campaign against left-wing presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the PDR. Under Mexican electoral law, corporations are not supposed to fund campaigns supporting or opposing candidates, but this didn’t stop a number of corporations from doing just that, through their corporate officers and shareholders. Lopez Obrador of the PDR, who ended up losing to Calderon in the hotly contested election, called for a boycott of corporations that illegally supported PAN’s campaign. These included Coca Cola, Pepsi, Kimberly Clark, Televisa, and, of course, Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is accused of not only giving money to the pro-PAN forces, but also distributing campaign literature to Wal-Mart of Mexico employees.

Because Wal-Mart is everywhere, it has become the main target of these anti-corporate protests. Every weekend in a different city, the PRD has organized thousands of people to enter Wal-Marts, fill up shopping carts, take them up to the registers as a group, and then begin chanting and raising a ruckus. The goal is to hurt the corporation in its pocketbook, because it has hurt Mexican progressives by supporting neo-liberal economic policies and the politicians who promote them.

These actions should give hope to anti-corporate globalization activists everywhere. Wal-Mart represents the worst face of corporate globalization, and the company is expanding throughout the world, especially in developing countries. But if Wal-Mart planned to use the model it developed in Mexico when it enters other markets, the recent protests may have thrown a monkey wrench into that plan. Now anti-Wal-Mart organizers in the United States have an ally on the other side of the border. The recent mobilization opens the possibility of a bi-national, if not international, campaign against Wal-Mart.

there are now pictures of my latest rampage in the not-a-workshop with a bundy clarinet that belongs to my acupuncturist’s father-in-law.

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.

heil hitler bush… 8b

A "Clear Message"
By Dan Froomkin
October 17, 2006

President Bush this morning proudly signed into law a bill that critics consider one of the most un-American in the nation’s long history.

The new law vaguely bans torture — but makes the administration the arbiter of what is torture and what isn’t. It allows the president to imprison indefinitely anyone he decides falls under a wide-ranging new definition of unlawful combatant. It suspends the Great Writ of habeas corpus for detainees. It allows coerced testimony at trial. It immunizes retroactively interrogators who may have engaged in torture.

Here’s what Bush had to say at his signing ceremony in the East Room: “The bill I sign today helps secure this country, and it sends a clear message: This nation is patient and decent and fair, and we will never back down from the threats to our freedom.”

But that may not be the “clear message” the new law sends most people.

Here’s the clear message the law sends to the world: America makes its own rules. The law would apparently subject terror suspects to some of the same sorts of brutal interrogation tactics that have historically been prosecuted as war crimes when committed against Americans.

Here’s the clear message to the voters: This Congress is willing to rubberstamp pretty much any White House initiative it sees as being in its short-term political interests. (And I don’t just mean the Republicans; 12 Senate Democrats and 32 House Democrats voted for the bill as well.)

Here’s the clear message to the Supreme Court: Review me.

I could go on and on. (And maybe I will, tomorrow. E-mail your “clear messages” to [email protected] )

More Unanswered Questions
Bush seems to think history will be kind to him.

“Over the past few months the debate over this bill has been heated, and the questions raised can seem complex,” he said. “Yet, with the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few: Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously, and did we do what it takes to defeat that threat?”

But history’s questions may in fact be quite different: How far did we allow fear to drive us from our core values? How did a terror attack lead our country to abandon its commitment to fairness and the rule of law? How mercilessly were we willing to treat those we suspected to be our enemies? How much raw, unchecked power were we willing to hand over to the executive?

Bush’s repeated but unsubstantiated claims about the great intelligence successes reaped through harsh interrogations will hopefully oblige the press to review what we know and what we don’t know about his assertions.

For instance, was any of the information actually valuable? How much of it emerged only after the application of what many would call torture? How much of it emerged in standard interrogations?

And one of Bush’s statement in particular should raise an obvious question. Said the president: “With the bill I’m about to sign, the men our intelligence officials believe orchestrated the murder of nearly 3,000 innocent people will face justice.”

That question, of course: What about Osama?

Initial Coverage
Nedra Pickler writes for the Associated Press: “Bush signed the bill in the White House East Room, at a table with a sign positioned on the front that said ‘Protecting America.’ He said he signed it in memory of the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks. . . .

“A coalition of religious groups staged a protest against the bill outside the White House, shouting ‘Bush is the terrorist’ and ‘Torture is a crime.’ About 15 of the protesters, standing in a light rain, refused orders to move. Police arrested them one by one.”

Steve Holland writes for Reuters: “Shortly after Bush signed the law, the Republican National Committee issued a press release headlined, ‘Democrats would let terrorists free’ and listed the names of many House and Senate Democrats who opposed it.”

Here’s a statement from the ACLU : “The president can now – with the approval of Congress – indefinitely hold people without charge, take away protections against horrific abuse, put people on trial based on hearsay evidence, authorize trials that can sentence people to death based on testimony literally beaten out of witnesses, and slam shut the courthouse door for habeas petitions. Nothing could be further from the American values we all hold in our hearts than the Military Commissions Act.”

Stephen Rickard writes in an op-ed in The Washington Post that CIA interrogators have not gotten the clarity they wanted. He writes that “if they yield to White House pressure to renew brutal interrogations, they will be at greater risk than they were last fall. . . .

“The bill’s language on torture is far from perfect, and it has many other objectionable provisions. It should have been rejected. But on its face it criminalizes cruel treatment. An interrogator can go to prison if a court finds that the techniques used caused ‘serious’ mental or physical ‘suffering,’ which need not be ‘prolonged.’ . . .

“[I]f a CIA interrogator is indicted after this administration leaves office, it will not matter whether keeping a naked prisoner standing for 40 straight hours shocks Dick Cheney. It will matter whether it shocks the court.

“U.S. courts know cruelty when they see it, even if the Bush Justice Department doesn’t.”

Promises
At yesterday’s briefing , White House press secretary Tony Snow promised some more details today.

“Q I wanted to talk about the bill the President will sign tomorrow.

“MR. SNOW: Yes.

“Q It makes him a final arbiter on torture.

“MR. SNOW: Right.

“Q Does he have any guidelines, does he have any advisory group? And how will he know?

“MR. SNOW: What I’ve actually — Helen, in response to your question, I called White House legal counsel —

“Q Can you repeat the question?

“MR. SNOW: Yes, how will the President know when it’s torture and when it’s not, and avoid having torture.

“Q And how will he approach these cases?

“MR. SNOW: And how will he approach the cases.

“The White House Office of Legal Counsel is actually putting together a paper so that — I knew that this would come up. What they will do is help me describe to you, as accurately as possible. It’s a very complex series of issues, but there are definitions that outline what constitutes torture, and I will be happy to share those. And I’ll get them for you tomorrow.

“Q When are you going to release those?

“MR. SNOW: I’m not going to release it. I’ll share it with you tomorrow. It’s not like a formal release, it’s just me trying to do my homework, and I don’t have it done yet.”

Breaking the Faith
A rare, critical book from a former White House insider continues to make waves in Washington.

E. J. Dionne Jr. writes in his Washington Post opinion column: “The very fact that it took David Kuo’s book, ‘Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction,’ to put President Bush’s faith-based initiative back into the news proves that the author’s thesis is right.

“His argument — Kuo went on the record with it long before this book appeared — is that the White House never put much money or muscle behind Bush’s ‘compassionate conservatism.’ It used the faith-based agenda for political purposes and always made tax cuts for the wealthy a much higher priority than any assistance to those ‘armies of compassion’ that Bush evoked so eloquently.”

Richard Wolffe interviews Kuo for Newsweek:

Wolffe: “Are Christian leaders being naïve in their dealings with the White House or do they understand the nature of the exchange?”

Kuo: “It’s a little bit of both. In some ways White House power is like [J.R.R.] Tolkien’s ring of power. When you put it on, it feels good and it’s dazzling. But after a while it begins to consume you in ways you don’t realize. That’s the nature of White House power. I have no doubt that Christian political leaders have gotten involved for all the right reasons. I just think over time it becomes harder and harder to stand up against that ring of power and the White House, to say no and walk away.

“The Christian political leaders have been seduced.”

Wolffe: “You don’t question the president’s faith. So why do you think he didn’t deliver on his faith-based agenda? Was he being cynical or didn’t he know what was going on?”

Kuo: “I’ve struggled with this for a long time. George W. Bush is a really good, caring person — a caring, compassionate man. He’s unbelievably empathetic for the people around him who are hurting. But President Bush is the head of the GOP. He’s leader of the government. He’s either the perpetrator or the victim of the modern presidency.”

Alex Koppelman interviews Kuo for Salon.

Says Kuo: “There’s been this image perpetuated of President Bush as ‘pastor in chief,’ and I think Christians have fallen into that. What they need to understand is that President Bush is a politician, a very good politician. He’s the head of the GOP, he’s the head of government, but he’s not a pastor.

“I think that this pastoral sense of him that has been perpetuated is preventing Christians from being more critical, objectively critical — in Jesus’ words, ‘wise as a serpent.’ And I also think that it contributes to this sense of political seduction by Christians. When you get to the point where when I mention Jesus people think they know my politics, that I’m pro-life and anti-gay and pro-Iraq war, as opposed to identifying Jesus as someone who will bring life and has good news, I think that’s troubling.”

Remember John DiIulio?
What is it about the office of faith-based initiatives that makes some former staffers violate the White House code of silence? Could it be . . . their faith?

John DiIulio, the first director of the office, famously spilled his guts to Ron Suskind for an Esquire story back in January 2003.

Said DiIulio at the time: “There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. . . . What you’ve got is everything — and I mean everything — being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”

In fact, Kuo told Newsweek’s Wolffe that DiIulio was very much a role model.

Kuo: “I wanted to write it because I felt like there’s a seduction that goes on of Christians in politics. It’s hardly new, but it’s right now extremely troubling. Frankly, the other reason is that in my experience at the White House, the single greatest progress we ever made on the compassion front was after John DiIulio did a controversial Esquire article. After that occurred — and I go into this in great detail in the book — the White House paid more attention to the compassion agenda in the 48 or 72 hours after that than they ever paid in the 2-and-a-half years that followed. I’m an optimist and a big believer in the president’s agenda, especially on poverty.”

Reassuring Maliki
Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes in the New York Times: “President Bush reassured Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq on Monday that he would not set a timetable for withdrawal of American troops and would continue to support the prime minister, despite recent reports that military officials and some Republican lawmakers were dissatisfied with the Iraqi government’s performance.

“The White House also suggested that it would not necessarily accept the recommendations of an independent commission reviewing Iraq policy. ‘We’re not going to outsource the business of handling the war in Iraq,’ said Mr. Bush’s press secretary, Tony Snow.”

Paul Richter and Borzou Daragahi write in the Los Angeles Times: “Snow said that Bush, who initiated the phone call, encouraged the prime minister ‘to ignore rumors that the United States government was seeking to impose a timeline on the Maliki government.’

“But when asked whether Bush had ‘total confidence’ in Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government, Snow said the president ‘believes the prime minister is doing everything in his power’ to stem the country’s raging violence, adding, ‘There has to be more to be done. The violence levels are absolutely unacceptable.'”

Whenever writing about Bush’s strategy to empower a strong central government it’s important to note how unrealistic that seems on the ground in Iraq. Richter and Daragahi do just that.

They write: “Iraqi officials acknowledge that Maliki heads a government divided along sectarian lines that is fundamentally weak and unable to exert its authority.”

And, they note: “In Iraq’s conspiracy-obsessed political culture, U.S. efforts to pressure Maliki sparked whispers of a possible American-backed coup d’etat against his government.”

The Baker Commission
That independent commission reviewing Iraq policy is co-chaired by James A. Baker III, who was secretary of state to Bush’s father.

Gary Kamiya writes in Salon: “In perhaps the strangest vindication of that old ’60s chestnut ‘The personal is the political,’ the fate of America’s Iraq adventure may hinge on whether George W. Bush can handle being taken to the woodshed by an emissary of his old man.

“For Bush, the day of reckoning is at hand. After years of talking tough, smearing war opponents as appeasers and demanding ‘total victory,’ he must confront the fact that his Iraq war has been a catastrophic failure. . . .

“The Republican Party brain trust, such as it is, desperately needs to find a way to talk Bush off the ledge, pry him away from his neocon delusions and Darth Cheney, and persuade him to cut his losses.”

Peter S. Canellos writes in the Boston Globe: “The commission is widely seen as a face-saving way for the current President Bush to shift strategies in Iraq. With Democrats looking likely to take over the House of Representatives, Baker’s commission takes on extra importance, since it would seem to offer a compromise between either pulling out (favored by liberals in Congress) or staying the course (favored by neoconservatives in the administration). . . .

“If Baker can buy Bush two more years to pursue ‘peace with honor,’ and give Republican presidential candidates a way to express misgivings about the war while continuing to fight for an honorable peace, he will have performed the ultimate service to the Bushes and the Republicans.

“He will have enabled them to evade responsibility for a devastating war.”

Celebration of Ignorance
Tony Snow continues to get good press, in spite of some serious flaws.

For instance, while it may be refreshing and even disarming for him to openly admit he doesn’t know the answer to an obscure question, it’s less so when he cheerfully pleads ignorance about the most important questions of the day.

From yesterday’s briefing :

“Q Going back to Iraq, Tony. You said a couple of times that more needs to be done to deal with the violence. What, and by whom?

“MR. SNOW: Well, obviously, I don’t know what, because I’m not a general. But it is pretty clear that it’s going to be important to continue going after terror elements, especially those who are dug in, and that’s in various parts around the country. And right now it’s joint operations but, eventually, the ones who are going to have to finish the job are the Iraqis themselves. But certainly they’re going to be doing it in concert with coalition forces. . . .

“Q One on Iraq again. Sorry. Just the simple question: Are we winning?

“MR. SNOW: We’re making progress. I don’t know. How do you define ‘winning’? The fact is, in taking on the war on terror — let me put it this way, the President has made it obvious, we’re going to win.”

I’ve written many times about Snow’s tendency to duck questions by trying to put reporters on the spot with questions of his own.

But: “How do you define winning?”

That’s not a question for the press; that’s a crucially important question for the White House that gamely insists victory is still possible, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.

The O’Reilly Factor
It’s a good bet that Bush is trying to stoke his base when sits down with Fox News’s bombastic conservative talker, Bill O’Reilly. But at least in part one of the interview, shown last night, O’Reilly actually expressed some skepticism about Bush’s Iraq policy.

At one point, Bush was talking about the importance of Sunnis and Shiites participating in the political process, and O’Reilly jumped in.

O’Reilly: “But why should we be, after three and a half years, encouraged that that will happen?”

Bush: “Well, because it was about six months ago that we had elections where 12 million people said they want it to happen.”

O’Reilly: “Just because they want it to happen, doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.”

Bush: “Well, it’s going to happen if we continue to — Look, the alternative is to say it’s not worth it, let’s leave. . . . Well, that’s not going to work. . . . ”

O’Reilly: “Sixty percent of American are now against the Iraq war. Why?”

Bush: “Because they want us to win. They believe — they’re wondering whether or not we have the plan in place to win. . . . And I can understand why there’s frustration. Because the enemy knows that killing innocent people will create a sense of frustration.”

But push comes to shove, and O’Reilly is still . . . O’Reilly.

O’Reilly: “Is one of the reasons they’ve turned against the war in Iraq is that the anti-Bush press pounds, day in and day out, in the newspapers, on the network news, in books like Bob Woodward’s, that you don’t know what you’re doing there? That you have no strategy, that you don’t listen to dissent, that you’ve got this thing in your mind and you’re stubborn and you just can’t win it?”

Bush: “Well, I, I’m uh, you know, I’m, uh, disappointed that people would, uh, propagandize to that effect because the stakes are too high for that kind of illogical behavior.

“We, we, we have got a plan, we’ve got to stick to our stated goal.”

Here’s O’Reilly describing his approach to the interview:

“Now interviewing a president is not like interviewing anyone else on the planet. You cannot be confrontational with the president of the United States. You can be direct, but you can’t be disrespectful. . . .

“Because every presidential interview is finite — that is time is always a concern — I decided to concentrate on the conflicts — Iraq, Iran, North Korea and terror — rather than on domestic issues. Also, I think it is important to look ahead rather than to look back. What good does it do to rehash WMDs? Does that do you any good? So the question is about what is happening now and whether we are winning or losing the high stakes battles we are fighting.

“Tonight, we’ll talk about Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Tomorrow: terrorism, torture and all the controversy surrounding the detainees — also Afghanistan. Finally on Wednesday, the personal attacks against President Bush, how he sees them and how they affect his job.”

North Korea Watch
Graham Allison , the former dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and the author of a recent book on nuclear terrorism, has a chilling new piece on NiemanWatchdog.org:

“North Korea is the single most dangerous actor on Earth. It is the only nuclear weapons state whose leader could rationally imagine advancing his interests by selling a nuclear bomb to Osama bin Laden. . . .

“The key challenge for thinking citizens today is to understand the significance of the North Korean test, and most importantly, to move the Bush administration to adopt a principle of nuclear accountability that can prevent nuclear weapons ending up in terrorist hands.”

And Allison turns one of Bush’s favorite words against him:

“As I argue in Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe , success in preventing a nuclear 9/11 requires effective implementation of a doctrine of Three No’s: No loose nukes, No new nascent nukes, and No new nuclear weapons states. On all three fronts, the administration’s first-term performance can be summed up by one word: unacceptable.”

That’s right: Unacceptable.

Cheney Love
These days, pretty much the only events Vice President Cheney attends are Republican fundraisers or rallies at military bases.

Mark Leibovich of the New York Times trails along Cheney on a recent trip — and marvels at the warm welcome.

Reaching Out to Talk Radio
Jim Rutenberg writes in the New York Times: “Conservative radio hosts are breaking with the Republican leadership in ways not seen in at least a decade, and certainly not since Rush Limbaugh’s forceful advocacy of the party in 1994 spawned a new generation of stars, said Michael Harrison, publisher of the industry’s lead trade publication, Talkers.”

The result is “an intensive Republican Party campaign to reclaim and re-energize a crucial army of supporters that is not as likely to walk in lockstep with the White House as it has in the past. . . .

“The effort will peak on Oct. 24, when the administration will hold something of a talk-radio summit meeting, inviting dozens of hosts to set up booths on the White House grounds, where top cabinet officials are expected to sit for interviews. . . .

“But, several hosts said, the most telling development so far this year was the White House decision to invite some of the most popular hosts to the Oval Office for off-the-record time with the president.”

Deconstructing the Stump Speech
David Jackson writes in USA Today: “President Bush’s political pitch boils down to two words and one argument.

“The words are taxes and terrorism. The argument: Democrats are wrong on both.”

Here’s Jackson’s accompanying chart.

Poll Watch
A new CNN poll finds Bush’s approval rating down three points in a week, to 36 — and his disapproval up five points to an all-time high for that poll of 61.

CNN also reports that the poll “suggests support among Americans for the war in Iraq is dwindling to an all-time low. Just 34 percent of those polled say they support the war, while 64 percent say they oppose it.”

Bush’s Failed Democracies
Brendan Murray writes for Bloomberg: “The governments of Iraq and Afghanistan for a third straight year received failing grades in key measures of democratic rule on a score-card of poor nations compiled by the Bush administration.

“The Millennium Challenge Corp., an agency President George W. Bush established in 2004 to distribute aid, said in reports released today that Iraq and Afghanistan failed their 2007 assessments in six categories of ‘ruling justly:’ political rights, civil liberties, control of corruption, government effectiveness, rule of law and accountability.”

okay, this MADE MY DAY!

somebody has apparently been collecting my "modified" political signs, and re-posting them on what is presumably their own, private property! this sign and (i think) this sign now have a new home at military and s. 344th. i took two pictures, front and back, of each of them, here:

on the other hand, there’s apparently someone named “priest” who is running for some poolitical offace or another, who must be really desperate to get people to vote for him. i have had a number of my “modified” signs removed and replaced with “priest” signs. despite their size, which is too big to put “The Horned One” on (i’m going to have to come up with a new stencil for larger signs), i collected 12 of them this evening, and that’s just on my “regular” 10-mile route around my neighbourhood.

hey, secret service department of clownland security goons, look over here… KILL BUSH!

grumble, mutter, gripe, complain…

Secret Service grills MySpace teen
Now she’s fighting back
By Ashlee Vance
16th October 2006

Not satisfied with creating militants abroad, the US has decided to nurture homegrown government haters.

California teenager Julia Wilson has dedicated herself to organising student protests against the Iraq war in an act of retaliation against a firm visit from the Secret Service.

US investigators last week pulled the student out of her classroom for questioning about a MySpace page that showed President Bush being stabbed in the hand with the words “Kill Bush” scribbled above the photo. Both Wilson and her parents thought the Secret Service’s tactics inappropriate.

“I wasn’t dangerous,” honours student Wilson told the AP. “I mean, look at what’s (stenciled) on my backpack — it’s a heart. I’m a very peace-loving person. I’m against the war in Iraq. I’m not going to kill the president.”

According to reports, the Secret Service agents – apparently huge MySpace fans – first stopped by the 14-year-old’s house (naturally, they would assume that she was a delinquent). The agents contacted Wilson’s mother and then promised to return later when they could interview the lass along with her parents.

Instead, the agents stormed Wilson’s school in Northern California and grilled her for 15 minutes.

“They yelled at me a lot,” she told the newswire. “They were unnecessarily mean.”

The agents also threatened to haul Wilson off to juvenile hall.

Class acts.

Both Wilson and her parents conceded that the Secret Service agents were right to look into the matter, as threatening the President is illegal. They, however, thought the deception and verbal rough-up to be over the line.

Wilson now plans to create a new MySpace page to help students organise protests against the Iraq war.

proof that our troops are using white phosphorus in afganistan!

Taliban takes high cover
Can’t smoke ’em out? Troops struggle with 10-foot Afghan marijuana plants
Oct 12, 2006

OTTAWA – Canadian troops fighting Taliban militants in Afghanistan have stumbled across an unexpected and potent enemy — almost impenetrable forests of 10-foot-tall marijuana plants.

Gen. Rick Hillier, chief of the Canadian defense staff, said Thursday that Taliban fighters were using the forests as cover. In response, the crew of at least one armored car had camouflaged their vehicle with marijuana.

“The challenge is that marijuana plants absorb energy, heat very readily. It’s very difficult to penetrate with thermal devices … and as a result you really have to be careful that the Taliban don’t dodge in and out of those marijuana forests,” he said in a speech in Ottawa.

“We tried burning them with white phosphorus — it didn’t work. We tried burning them with diesel — it didn’t work. The plants are so full of water right now … that we simply couldn’t burn them,” he said.

Even successful incineration had its drawbacks.

“A couple of brown plants on the edges of some of those (forests) did catch on fire. But a section of soldiers that was downwind from that had some ill effects and decided that was probably not the right course of action,” Hillier said dryly.

One soldier told him later: “Sir, three years ago before I joined the army, I never thought I’d say ‘That damn marijuana.'”

Terrorism Act 2006 – website owners beware
April 14th, 2006

The newly introduced Terrorism Act 2006 has some alarming clauses relating to websites – particularly likely to affect sites where members of the public can contribute content. Unwary bloggers and forum owners could find themselves held liable (with maximum 7-year sentence) for unwitting “endorsement” of materials deemed to be terrorist in nature.

Organisations that provide web sites or other opportunities for individuals to publish on the Internet should be aware of a new notice-and-take-down requirement contained within the Terrorism Act 2006, which came into force yesterday, and ensure that they have procedures to handle any notices served on them under the Act.

Sections 3 and 4 of the Act enable a police constable to give written notice to an organisation that a particular statement they publish electronically is unlawful, because it relates to Terrorism. If the organisation does not remove or amend the statement within two working days (only Saturdays, Sundays, Bank Holidays, Christmas Day and Good Friday are excluded) then it will be considered to have endorsed the statement and thereafter be liable to prosecution for encouraging Terrorism or disseminating terrorist publications.

An organisation served with a notice is also required to take all reasonable steps to prevent future re-publication of the same or similar statements. Since the law is brand new, it is not clear how “all reasonable steps” will be interpreted, but it seems likely to require at least an investigation into who published the statement and removing that person’s ability to publish in future.

The Act can be found at:
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2006/20060011.htm

The relevant part of the Act is at:
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2006/60011–b.htm#3

Parliamentary debate from February relating to this section of the Act:
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2006-02-15a.1471.2

Why does habeas corpus hate America?
By Jamie Holly
October 10th, 2006

Keith did a great report tonight on what the recently passed Military Commissions Act of 2006 means to America and our Constitution.

This story has been buried by Foleygate, which is a crime in itself. I had the honor of hearing Daniel Ellsberg and John Siegenthaler Sr. speak last night and the key subject was journalism in today’s political environment. We are one of the only countries in the world without an official secrets act, due in a large part to the uniqueness of our first amendment. Sadly this very bill puts us even closer to enacting such legislation and putting a muzzle on the media that would have prevented the extraordinary act of patriotism that Ellsberg exhibited, as well as those that followed in the entire Watergate scandal.

Because the Mark Foley story began to break the night of September 28th, exploding the following day, many people may not have noticed a bill passed by the Senate that night.

Our third story on the Countdown tonight, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and what it does to something called “habeas corpus.”

And before we reduce the very term “habeas corpus” to something vaguely recalled as sounding kinda like the cornerstone of freedom, or maybe kinda like a character from “Harry Potter,” we thought a Countdown Special Investigation was in order.

Congress passed The Military Commissions Act to give Mr. Bush the power to deal effectively with America’s enemies — those who seek to harm this country.

And he has been very clear about who that is:

“…for people to leak that program, and for a newspaper to publish it does great harm to the United States of America.”

So the president said it was urgent that Congress send him this bill as quickly as possible, not for the politics of next month’s elections, but for America.

“The fact that we’re discussing this program is helping the enemy.”

Because time was of the essence–and to ensure that the 9/11 families would wait no longer–as soon as he got the bill, President Bush whipped out his pen and immediately signed a statement saying he looks forward to signing the actual law…eventually.

He hasn’t signed it yet, almost two weeks later, because he has been swamped by a series of campaign swings at which he has made up quotes from unnamed Democratic leaders, and because when he is actually at work, he’s been signing so many other important bills, such as:

The Credit Rating Agency Reform Act;

the Third Higher Education Extension Act;

ratification requests for extradition treaties with Malta, Estonia and Latvia;

his proclamation of German-American Day;

the Partners for Fish and Wildlife Act;

and his proclamation of Leif Erikson Day.

Still, getting the Military Commissions Act to the President so he could immediately mull it over for two weeks was so important, some members of Congress didn’t even read the bill before voting on it. Thus, has some of its minutiae, escaped scrutiny.

One bit of trivia that caught our eye was the elimination of habeas corpus. which apparently used to be the right of anyone who’s tossed in prison, to appear in court and say, “Hey, why am I in prison?”

Why does habeas corpus hate America… and how is it so bad for us?

Mr. Bush says it gets in the way of him doing his job.

Bush: “…we cannot be able to tell the American people we’re doing our full job unless we have the tools necessary to do so. And this legislation passed in the House yesterday is a part of making sure that we do have the capacity to protect you. Our most solemn job is the security of this country.”

It may be solemn…

Bush: “I do solemnly swear…”

But is that really his job? In this rarely seen footage, Mr. Bush is clearly heard describing a different job.

… to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Countdown has obtained a copy of this “Constitution of the United States.”

And sources tell us it was originally snuck through the Constitutional Convention and state ratification in order to establish America’s fundamental legal principles.

But this so-called Constitution is frustratingly vague about the right to trial. In fact, there’s only one reference to habeas corpus at all. Quote: “The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

But even Democrats who voted against the Military Commissions Act concede that it doesn’t actually suspend habeas corpus.

Leahy: The bill before the Senate would not merely suspend the great writ, the great writ of habeas corpus, it would eliminate it permanently.

And there is considerable debate whether the conditions for suspending habeas corpus, rebellion or invasion, have been met.

Leahy: conditions for suspending habeas corpus have not been met.

Kerry: We’re not in a rebellion, nor are we being invaded.

Specter: We do not have a rebellion or an invasion.

Biden: The United States is neither in a state of rebellion nor invasion.

Byrd: We are not in the midst of a rebellion, and there is no invasion.

Countdown has learned that habeas corpus actually predates the “Constitution,” meaning it’s not just pre-September 11th thinking, it’s also pre-July 4th thinking.

In those days, no one imagined that enemy combatants might one day attack Americans on native soil.

In fact, Countdown has obtained a partially redacted copy of a colonial “declaration” indicating that back then, “depriving us of Trial by Jury” was actually considered sufficient cause to start a War of Independence, based on the then-fashionable idea that “liberty” was an unalienable right.

Today, thanks to modern, post-9/11 thinking, those rights are now fully alienable.

The reality is, without habeas corpus, a lot of other rights lose their meaning.

But if you look at the actual Bill of Rights — the first ten amendments to that pesky Constitution — you’ll see just how many remain.

Well, ok, Number One’s gone.

If you’re detained without trial, you lose your freedom of religion, speech, the press and assembly. And you can’t petition the government for anything.

Number Two? While you’re in prison, your right to keep and bear arms just may be infringed upon.

Even if you’re in the NRA.

Three?

No forced sleepovers by soldiers at your house. OK. Three is unchanged.

Four?

You’re definitely not secure against searches and seizures, with or without probable cause – and this isn’t even limited to the guards.

Five… Grand juries and due process are obviously out.

Six. So are trials, let alone the right to counsel. Speedy trials? You want it when?

Seven. Hmmmm. I thought we covered “trials” and “juries” earlier.

Eight — So bail’s kind of a moot point…

Nine: “Other” rights retained by the people. Well, if you can name them during your water-boarding, we’ll consider them.

And Ten — powers not delegated to the United States federal government seem to have ended up there, anyway.

So as you can see, even without habeas corpus, at least one tenth of the Bill of Rights, I guess that’s the Bill of “Right” now… remains virtually intact.

And we can rest easy knowing we will never, ever have to quarter soldiers in our homes… as long as the Third Amendment still stands strong.

The President can take care of that with a Signing Statement.

Why the Frogs Are Dying
By Mac Margolis
Oct. 16, 2006

Draped like a verdant shawl over Costa Rica’s Tilarán Mountains, the Monteverde cloud forest has long been a nature lover’s idyll. Hidden birds flirt to the whisper of rushing streams and epiphytes tumble from the mist, while delicate flowers bloom impossibly from the jungle’s maw. With luck you might even catch the iridescent flash of the resplendent quetzal, the elegant symbol of the Central American rain forest.

There’s one member of this pageant that won’t be turning up, however: the Monteverde harlequin frog. Named after its palette of yellow, red and black, this miniature amphibian—a member of the genus Atelopus—had thrived in these Costa Rican mountains for perhaps a million years. Yet the last time

J. Alan Pounds, an ecologist who has studied the cloud forest’s wildlife for 25 years, spotted one in Monteverde was in 1988. Its cousin, the golden toad, went missing about the same time. Indeed, the more scientists search, the grimmer the situation looks. A study by 75 scientists published earlier this year in the journal Nature estimated that two thirds of the 110 known species of harlequins throughout Central and South America have vanished. And that may be just the beginning.

The loss of a species is sad enough, not least a jewel like the harlequin, which one researcher described as a tropical Easter egg. What has puzzled scientists is why. For millennia, this denizen of tropical America survived by adapting to whatever changes nature threw its way. Suckers lining the underbelly of tadpoles allow them to cling to rocks without being flushed downstream. The adult’s carnival-like costume warns potential predators to stand clear or risk a deadly dose of tetrodotoxin. But apparently there’s one peril the harlequin couldn’t trump: climate change.

Monteverde gets its lifeblood from the trade winds, which blow moisture uphill where the air cools and condenses into clouds. An ark of plants, insects and animals flourishes in the cool misty mountains. Gradually, though, a warming trend has raised nighttime temperatures and increased cloud cover, which makes for cooler days by blocking solar radiation. The subtle change, which might go unnoticed by us bipeds, is thought to have been ideal for chytridomycosis, a disease caused by a waterborne fungus that has flared up throughout tropical Central and South America. Scientists believe the chytrid disease kills the frogs by blocking their natural ability to absorb water through their porous skin (and perhaps also by releasing a toxin), essentially causing them to die of dehydration. What really frightens researchers, however, is the potential implications of the die-off. “There’s basically a mass extinction in the making,” says Pounds. “I think amphibians are just the first wave.”

For years now, eminent researchers have been warning of a gathering climate disaster. The findings at Monteverde, and scores of other research stations around the globe, have shaken people’s complacency. This was not just another computer model spitting out mathematical warnings but a whole living genus on the brink. Alarmed at the portents, a network of conservationists is trying to evacuate the remaining harlequin frogs to fungus-free zones and frog farms. But such heroics may be futile. Scientists monitoring wildlife around the world are echoing Pounds’s research. Their conclusion: many more species will perish.

A global temperature rise of a mere 0.6 degrees Celsius over the last century has sent shock waves through the animal kingdom. From the desiccating rain forests of Australia to the thawing Arctic, the warmer weather is expelling animals from age-old homelands, scrambling mating and nesting habits, and putting competitors on a prickly collision course. As habitable spaces get smaller, competition for food grows fierce. Meanwhile, insects and pests, which flourish in the heat, abound. So may the diseases they carry, like dengue fever, avian pox or cholera. Scholars are asking whether the loss of individual species could have a knock-on effect all through the food chain. “We are seeing problems from pole to pole; we see them in the oceans and we see them on land,” says Lara Hansen, chief climate-change scientist at the World Wildlife Fund. “There are very few systems that I can think of that are untouched by climate change.”

Not all the science points to disaster. Some species can adapt to the changing climate. But to what extent? “Climate change is happening a lot faster than the process of evolution can,” says biologist Camille Parmesan, at the University of Texas. “The fact that species are going extinct is telling you that they didn’t adapt.”

Still others parry that the havoc credited to climate change owes more to deforestation or diseases spread by humans. Yet to many experts, that misses the point. “We already know that all kinds of diseases respond to climate conditions. We also know that the interaction of species, especially predators and parasites, can also complicate the equation—which is something the computer climate models don’t take into account,” says Pounds. “That makes the impact of climate change difficult to predict, but probably even more severe than you’d imagine.”

The trouble at Monteverde only heightened a mystery that had scientists stumped for years: why do whole species of wildlife disappear in apparently pristine parks and nature preserves? There had been no shortage of theories to explain the demise of the harlequins, from acid rain to an overdose of ultraviolet rays. By the late nineties, attention shifted to the chytrid fungus outbreaks, which many amphibian experts concluded were the smoking gun. But Pounds wasn’t satisfied. After all, it wasn’t just harlequins, but all kinds of amphibians that were dying. And if the chytrid disease was killing the frogs, what was behind the deadly outbreak?

In time, Pounds learned that the fungus flourished in the wet season and turned lethal in warm (17 to 25 degrees Celsius) weather—exactly the conditions that climate change was bringing to the cloud forest. More important, he found that 80 percent of the extinctions followed unusually warm years. “The disease was the bullet killing the frogs, but climate was pulling the trigger,” says Pounds. “Alter the climate and you alter the disease dynamic.”

In a broad survey of scientific literature, Parmesan and Wesleyan University economist Gary Yohe recently concluded that hundreds of animals and plants had responded to climate change by jumping their biological clocks. Yellow-bellied marmots stir from hibernation 23 days later than they did in the mid-1970s, when temperatures in the Rocky Mountains were 1.4 degrees cooler. Some 65 bird species in the U.K. are laying eggs nearly nine days earlier than they did in 1971. Others have literally fled, pushing north to cooler climes or to higher altitudes. Nearly two dozen species of dragonflies and damselflies are now wandering nearly 90 kilometers north of their habitual range in the U.K. of four decades ago, while in Spain a steady warming trend has reduced the habitat of 16 species of highland butterflies by a third in just 30 years.

On a boundless planet such artful dodging would not be a problem. But climate change is beginning to crowd animals together. Canada’s red fox has moved 900 kilometers north into Baffin Island, where it is trespassing on the grounds of the Arctic fox. Scientists are reporting a complex ripple effect at Monteverde. The same warming trend that makes for hotter nights in the wet season also provokes prolonged dry spells in summer, attracting all sorts of fair-weather strangers. One is the aggressive keel-billed toucan, which has climbed from the foothills to the cloud forests, competing for food and nesting spots with the quetzal.

On the ground, Pounds’s team has noticed a dramatic decline in the population of lizards, and some snakes like the cloud-forest racer and the firebellied snake, which once fed on the harlequin frogs. The loser, again, looks to be the quetzal, which is already capturing fewer frogs and lizards—a key protein and calcium source for its nestlings. “When interactions between species are disrupted, the outcome can sometimes be devastating,” says Pounds.

Pests are the big winners in a warming world. A parasite called the nemotode, which dies off in the heat, has compensated by breeding faster, which causes fertility to plunge, or even death, among infected wild musk oxen. A kidney disease has flourished in the warming streams of Switzerland, ravaging trout stocks. Meanwhile, the oyster parasite, a scourge to shell fishermen in Chesapeake Bay, has crept all the way to Maine because of milder winters. Though there’s little hard science linking climate change to farm pests, most agricultural experts say it’s a matter of connecting the dots. “There is good evidence that warmer conditions favor more invasive species,” says David Pimentel, who studies invasive plants and pests at Cornell University. “Invasive plants can compete with native varieties and cause extinctions.”

Global warming is taking an especially heavy toll on specialists, species whose biology tailors them to specific geographic areas and narrow climate and temperature ranges. A recent casualty is the honeycreeper, a tiny songbird found only in the mountains of Hawaii. It has been decimated by a plague of avian pox carried by mosquitoes that have moved steadily farther into the highlands.

An even bleaker example is the pika, a small, mountain-dwelling lagomorph related to the rabbit, with a low threshold for heat; it starts to die as soon as the mercury tops 24 degrees, which is exactly what is happening in its native habitat. Nine of 25 pika communities known in the western United States in the 1930s have now vanished, while fully half of those that once roamed the Tian Shan Mountains of northwest China are gone.

One of the most besieged of all the specialists is the polar bear, which hunts seal from floating chunks of sea ice. Warmer currents in the Arctic Ocean have hastened the breakup of ice floes and forced the bears to swim greater distances for their meals, putting them at risk of drowning or starving. Already bear watchers say the average weight of polars in Hudson Bay has dropped from 295kg to 230kg—near the threshold below which they stop reproducing. Polar bears now top most green groups’ endangered lists.

More than polar bears will be in trouble if atmospheric temperatures rise two more degrees—far from the worst-case climate forecasts. The Greenland ice shelf would melt, posing a threat to a whole web of life that depends on ice, including plankton, which feed fish, which are eaten by seals, which are meals for both polar bears and Inuk hunters. In the Southern Hemisphere, many researchers have already linked sharp declines in penguins like the rock hopper, Galápagos, blackfoot, Adélie and the regal emperor to warmer ocean currents, which have flushed away staple food supplies like krill, a coldwater crustacean.

The loss of creatures is alarming enough. What about losing an entire ecosystem? For most of the last two decades, Stephen Williams, a tropical ecologist at James Cook University in Australia, has been studying the evolutionary biology of the Australian rain forests. The sprawling experiment was meant to plot how wildlife evolved in the mountainous cloud forests along the coast of northeast Queensland, where thousands of unique animal and plant species have thrived for 5 million years. But when Williams ran his data through a computer model, testing for a modest rise in world temperatures (3.5 degrees Celsius over a century), he was floored. By 2100, his team concluded, up to 50 percent of all species would be gone. “I expected to see an impact, but this was shocking,” says Williams.

Perhaps what is most alarming about Williams’s study is that even if not another tree ever falls to the chainsaw or bulldozer, one of the planet’s most heralded World Heritage sites will still be under silent siege. “We’re looking at losing most of the things that the protected areas were put in place to preserve,” he warns. Already the populations of the gray-headed robin and a small frog belonging to the species Cophixalusneglectus are beginning to thin, while marsupials, reptiles and a host of forest birds are fleeing the heat ever higher up the mountainside, to where the life-giving clouds have retreated. “Soon,” says Williams, “there will be nowhere to go.” Nowhere, perhaps, but heaven.

today is would be Aleister Crowley‘s birthday, if he were still alive. happy crowleymas.

there’s a new batch of pictures, and some updated text.

they’re rewriting history again. whoopee.

Lost city ‘could rewrite history’
By Tom Housden
19 January, 2002

The remains of what has been described as a huge lost city may force historians and archaeologists to radically reconsider their view of ancient human history.

Marine scientists say archaeological remains discovered 36 metres (120 feet) underwater in the Gulf of Cambay off the western coast of India could be over 9,000 years old.

The vast city – which is five miles long and two miles wide – is believed to predate the oldest known remains in the subcontinent by more than 5,000 years.

The site was discovered by chance last year by oceanographers from India’s National Institute of Ocean Technology conducting a survey of pollution.

Using sidescan sonar – which sends a beam of sound waves down to the bottom of the ocean they identified huge geometrical structures at a depth of 120ft.

Debris recovered from the site – including construction material, pottery, sections of walls, beads, sculpture and human bones and teeth has been carbon dated and found to be nearly 9,500 years old.

Lost civilisation
The city is believed to be even older than the ancient Harappan civilisation, which dates back around 4,000 years.

Marine archaeologists have used a technique known as sub-bottom profiling to show that the buildings remains stand on enormous foundations.

Author and film-maker Graham Hancock – who has written extensively on the uncovering of ancient civilisations – told BBC News Online that the evidence was compelling:

“The [oceanographers] found that they were dealing with two large blocks of apparently man made structures.

“Cities on this scale are not known in the archaeological record until roughly 4,500 years ago when the first big cities begin to appear in Mesopotamia.

“Nothing else on the scale of the underwater cities of Cambay is known. The first cities of the historical period are as far away from these cities as we are today from the pyramids of Egypt,” he said.

Chronological problem
This, Mr Hancock told BBC News Online, could have massive repercussions for our view of the ancient world.

“There’s a huge chronological problem in this discovery. It means that the whole model of the origins of civilisation with which archaeologists have been working will have to be remade from scratch,” he said.

However, archaeologist Justin Morris from the British Museum said more work would need to be undertaken before the site could be categorically said to belong to a 9,000 year old civilisation.

“Culturally speaking, in that part of the world there were no civilisations prior to about 2,500 BC. What’s happening before then mainly consisted of small, village settlements,” he told BBC News Online.

Dr Morris added that artefacts from the site would need to be very carefully analysed, and pointed out that the C14 carbon dating process is not without its error margins.

It is believed that the area was submerged as ice caps melted at the end of the last ice age 9-10,000 years ago

Although the first signs of a significant find came eight months ago, exploring the area has been extremely difficult because the remains lie in highly treacherous waters, with strong currents and rip tides.

The Indian Minister for Human Resources and ocean development said a group had been formed to oversee further studies in the area.

“We have to find out what happened then … where and how this civilisation vanished,” he said.

hmmmmm…

The Rules Of Spam

Rule #0: Spam is theft.

• Angel’s Commentary: Spammers believe it’s okay to steal a little bit from each person on the Internet at once.

Rule #1: Spammers lie.

• Russel’s Admonition: Always assume that there is a measurable chance that the entity you are dealing with is a spammer.
• Lexical Contradiction: Spammers will redefine any term in order to disguise their abuse of Internet resources.
• Sharp’s Corollary: Spammers attempt to re-define “spamming” as that which they do not do.
• Finnell’s Corollary: Spammers define “remove” as “validate.”

Rule #2: If a spammer seems to be telling the truth, see Rule #1.

• Crissman’s Corollary: A spammer, when caught, blames his victims.
• Moore’s Corollary: Spammer’s lies are seldom questioned by mainstream media.

Rule #3: Spammers are stupid.

• Krueger’s Corollary: Spammer lies are really stupid.
• Pickett’s Commentary: Spammer lies are boring.
  • Salamandir’s Rant: If I didn’t want to hear about it from the spammer, regardless of how amusing, profound, ironic, or whatever you find it, what makes you think I want to hear about it in regular email, on your blog, or verbally?
• Russell’s Corollary: Never underestimate the stupidity of spammers.
• Spinosa’s Corollary: Spammers assume everybody is more stupid than themselves.
• Spammer’s Standard of Discourse: Threats and intimidation trump facts and logic.
• James’ Axioms of Spammers’ Beliefs:
  • Bandwidth is infinite. It possible for infinite messages to occupy the same box at the same time.
  • The less value a message has, the more people want to see it.
  • The more someone is offended, the more likely they are to buy.
  • Reward is inversely proportional to the work done to earn it.

Rule #4: The natural course of a spamming business is to go bankrupt.

• Rules-Keeper Shaffer’s Refrain: Spammers routinely prove the Rules of spam are valid.

i got an order for more than $100 worth of incense and jewelry from a jewish doctor in charlotte, north carolina a couple of days ago. i haven’t sent it out yet, because i’m still waiting for part of the jewelry he ordered to be delivered, which should be tomorrow or the next day. it’s kind of bizarre, though, because the last time i ordered product from the rudraksha-ratna centre of india, it took three weeks for them to acknowledge my payment, and then it took another week for them to deliver to me, but this time, i made the payment a couple of days ago, and it went through yesterday, so either ganesha is looking out for my business and removed whatever obstacles were in the way last time, or i’m hallucinating… again…

i’ve recently located an incense supplier that has almost the same lines of incense that i get from sughanda prabhu, but they’re a lot more reliable than sughanda prabhu – meaning that when i call and/or email them, there’s somebody there and i can order right away, as compared to sugandha prabhu, who i email and there’s no response for a week, or i call and leave a message and don’t get any response. i’ve got a bunch of shroff and 8 boxes of ambica hare rama incense that i paid for over a month ago that still haven’t been delivered. don’t get me wrong, sughanda prabhu is a great person, who i have known for more than 20 years, and done business with for more than 10 years, but recently he’s gotten really flaky, and customers don’t understand flaky suppliers.

the new supplier, however, has almost all of the stock i get from sughanda prabhu, and all of the stock i currently get from om imports, and has a lower minimum order than om imports. they have aparajita and 999 lord krishna puja, which is carried by nobody else that i’m aware of, plus they also carry 999 lord krishna puja original lobhan sambrani and sandesh benzoin in the 20 stick tube, and they’ve said that they will inquire about things that they don’t have, like pradhan’s royal life. i’m hoping that The Remover of Obstacles has been active in this area of my business as well.

ezra called me yesterday with some questions… apparently he is applying for a passport, because he has plans on going to europe and england for new years this year. how come he gets to go, and i haven’t been able to go much further than to the next state my entire life?

anyway, then i read ‘s feed () which pointed me towards the following, which didn’t make things any easier on me…

A shameful retreat from American values
by Garrison Keillor
Oct. 04, 2006

I would not send my college kid off for a semester abroad if I were you. This week, we have suspended human rights in America, and what goes around comes around. Ixnay habeas corpus.

The U.S. Senate, in all its splendor and majesty, has decided that an “enemy combatant” is any non-citizen whom the president says is an enemy combatant, including your Korean greengrocer or your Swedish grandmother or your Czech au pair, and can be arrested and held for as long as authorities wish without any right of appeal to a court of law to examine the matter.

If your college kid were to be arrested in Bangkok or Cairo, suspected of “crimes against the state,” and held in prison, you’d assume that an American foreign service officer would be able to speak to your kid and arrange for a lawyer, but this may not be true anymore. Be forewarned.

The Senate also decided it’s up to the president to decide whether it’s OK to make these enemies stand naked in cold rooms for a couple days in blinding light and be beaten by interrogators. This is now purely a bureaucratic matter: The plenipotentiary stamps the file “enemy combatants” and throws the poor schnooks into prison, and at his leisure he tries them by any sort of kangaroo court he wishes to assemble, and they have no right to see the evidence against them, and there is no appeal.

This was passed by 65 senators and will now be signed by Mr. Bush, put into effect, and in due course be thrown out by the courts.

It’s good that Barry Goldwater is dead because this would have killed him. Go back to the Senate of 1964 — Goldwater, Dirksen, Russell, McCarthy, Javits, Morse, Fulbright — and you won’t find more than 10 votes for it.

None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Idea. Mark their names. Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor. Alexander, Allard, Allen, Bennett, Bond, Brownback, Bunning, Burns, Burr, Carper, Chambliss, Coburn, Cochran, Coleman, Collins, Cornyn, Craig, Crapo, DeMint, DeWine, Dole, Domenici, Ensign, Enzi, Frist, Graham, Grassley, Gregg, Hagel, Hatch, Hutchison, Inhofe, Isakson, Johnson, Kyl, Landrieu, Lautenberg, Lieberman, Lott, Lugar, Martinez, McCain, McConnell, Menendez, Murkowski, Nelson of Florida, Nelson of Nebraska, Pryor, Roberts, Rockefeller, Salazar, Santorum, Sessions, Shelby, Smith, Specter, Stabenow, Stevens, Sununu, Talent, Thomas, Thune, Vitter, Voinovich, Warner.

To paraphrase Sir Walter Scott: Mark their names and mark them well. For them, no minstrel raptures swell. High though their titles, proud their name, boundless their wealth as wish can claim, these wretched figures shall go down to the vile dust from whence they sprung, unwept, unhonored and unsung.

Three Republican senators made a show of opposing the bill and after they’d collected all the praise they could get, they quickly folded. Why be a hero when you can be fairly sure that the Supreme Court will dispose of this piece of garbage?

If, however, the Supreme Court does not, then our country has taken a step toward totalitarianism. If the government can round up someone and never be required to explain why, then it’s no longer the United States of America as you and I always understood it. Our enemies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They have made us become like them.

I got some insight last week into who supports torture when I went down to Dallas to speak at Highland Park Methodist Church. It was spooky. I walked in, was met by two burly security men with walkie-talkies, and within 10 minutes was told by three people that this was the Bushes’ church and that it would be better if I didn’t talk about politics. I was there on a book tour for “Homegrown Democrat,” but they thought it better if I didn’t mention it. So I tried to make light of it: I told the audience, “I don’t need to talk politics. I have no need even to be interested in politics — I’m a citizen, I have plenty of money and my grandsons are at least 12 years away from being eligible for military service.” And the audience applauded. Those were their sentiments exactly. We’ve got ours, and who cares?

The Methodists of Dallas can be fairly sure that none of them will be snatched off the streets, flown to Guantanamo, stripped naked, forced to stand for 48 hours in a freezing room with deafening noise, so why should they worry? It’s only the Jews who are in danger, and the homosexuals and gypsies. The Christians are doing just fine. If you can’t trust a Methodist with absolute power to arrest people and not have to say why, then whom can you trust?

January 5th, 2005
May 3rd, 2003

Cheney is back with doom speech casting Democrats as danger to security
By Peter Baker
Oct 8, 2006

MILWAUKEE – Vice President Cheney sometimes starts speeches with a Ronald Reagan quotation about a “happy” nation needing “hope and faith.” But not much happy talk follows. Not a lot of hope, either. He does, though, talk about the prospect of “mass death in the United States.”

The not-so-happy warrior of the past two campaign cycles is back on the road delivering a grim message about danger, defeatism and the stakes of the coming election. If it is not a joyful exercise, it is at least a relentless one. Even with poll ratings lower than President Bush’s, Cheney has become a more ubiquitous presence on the campaign trail than in the last midterm election.

He takes on not only the traditional vice presidential assignment of slicing up the opposition but also the Cassandra role of warning about dire threats to the nation’s security. While others get distracted by Capitol Hill scandal, Cheney remains focused on the terrorists, who are, as he says in his stump speech, “still lethal, still desperately trying to hit us again.” Bush, he says, is “protecting America” while the Democrats advocate “reckless” policies that add up to a “strategy of resignation and defeatism in the face of determined enemies.”

But the message is carefully targeted. More than half of Cheney’s fundraisers in this two-year cycle have been behind closed doors. Even at a lunchtime speech to Wisconsin Republican donors that was open to reporters, gubernatorial candidate Rep. Mark Green did not stand on stage, ensuring no pictures of the two together on the news, and some other Republican candidates did not attend at all.

Rallying the party faithful
That is okay with the White House, which at a perilous moment is counting on Cheney’s under-the-radar campaign to rally the base, not the broader public. “The fact that he’s willing to go after Democrats as harshly as the Democrats are going after the White House gets the party faithful going,” said GOP strategist Glen Bolger.

It happens to inflame the Democratic faithful as well, and party strategists consider him a prime target for their own pitch to voters. “When he threatens Democrats and calls them names, it’s something that really fires up our base,” said John Lapp, executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s independent expenditure program.

Cheney’s fundraising visits often end up as fodder for opponents of those he tries to help. “Dick Cheney, Big Oil and Big Drug Companies Threw Curt Weldon a secret Washington thank you party,” reads a Democratic brochure targeting the Republican Pennsylvania congressman. “And we got stuck with the bill.”

The campaign comes at a pivotal moment for Cheney. His influence within the administration is widely perceived to be waning as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s star rises. The president in his second term has adopted a more diplomatic approach to problems such as Iran and North Korea than insiders believe would be to Cheney’s liking. And as the 2008 presidential sweepstakes heat up, he will be the first vice president in a generation not to be seeking a promotion, leaving him on the sidelines of the most important national discussion.

Champion of conservatives
But White House aides said it would be a mistake to underestimate Cheney even now. Although he is viewed favorably by just 34 percent of the public in the most recent Wall Street Journal-NBC poll, he remains a champion of conservatives at a time when the right has been angry at Bush over issues such as deficit spending and immigration. So Cheney’s mission is to bring home core Republican voters when they are needed most.

“He’s a good carrier of the Republican message,” said Michigan GOP Chairman Saul Anuzis, noting that a Cheney visit to Grand Rapids last month raised between $750,000 and $1 million, a record for western Michigan. “He exudes a confidence. He makes you feel good and comfortable that he’s vice president of the country.”

Cheney’s job is “a lot of volume, a lot of what we call McFundraisers,” GOP lobbyist Ed Rogers said. Cheney has headlined 111 fundraisers so far in this two-year cycle, bringing in more than $39 million and already surpassing his total of 106 events for the entire 2002 cycle. Cheney is also regularly dispatched to conservative radio shows hosted by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. He takes the shots the White House does not want Bush to take or wants to test out first. When Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) was defeated by antiwar challenger Ned Lamont in a primary, Cheney called reporters to say the result would encourage “al-Qaeda types” who want “to break the will of the American people.”

Out here on the hustings, Cheney does not come across as the most natural campaigner. A Cheney speech does not draw its audience to its feet. It plods through an argument that is more sobering than inspiring. He delivers even red-meat lines in a flat monotone, sounding more like a chief executive reporting to shareholders than a politician issuing a call to action.

The vice president, though, goes after Democrats by name in a way Bush rarely does, including Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.), Rep. John P. Murtha (Pa.) and party Chairman Howard Dean. At a fundraiser in Sarasota, Fla., last week, he also singled out Sens. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.), John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.) and Reps. John Conyers (Mich.), Henry A. Waxman (Calif.) and Barney Frank (Mass.).

He talks mainly about terrorism and Iraq, arguing that U.S. withdrawals from Lebanon after the Marine barracks bombing in 1983 and from Somalia after the “Black Hawk Down” ambush in 1993 emboldened terrorists. “If we follow Congressman Murtha’s advice and withdraw from Iraq the same way we withdrew from Beirut in 1983 and Somalia in 1993, all we will do is validate the al-Qaeda strategy and invite even more terrorist attacks,” Cheney said in Milwaukee. In Houston last week, he accused Democrats of “apparently having lost their perspective concerning the nature of the enemy.”

‘Danger to civilization’
The crux of his pitch is what he calls the continuing “danger to civilization.” Cheney, who warned in 2004 that the United States would be hit by terrorists if Democrat John F. Kerry was elected president, has not gone that far this time but does say that it “is not an accident” that the country has not suffered another attack since Sept. 11, 2001, giving Bush credit.

Democrats regularly punch back, suggesting Cheney is out of touch and desperate. “At a time when the Bush Administration finds itself increasingly isolated on Iraq, Vice President Cheney today went on the attack,” Senate Democrats said in a statement last week. “Instead of ranting and raving on the campaign trail, Bush and Cheney should spend their time on the trail of Osama bin Laden.”

Five years after Sept. 11, Cheney’s message may be wearing. Some find it too limited. “To tell you the truth, I was a little disappointed,” David Huibregtse, head of Wisconsin’s Log Cabin Republicans, a group of gay party members, said after a speech. “Too much on how great President Bush is doing and very little on why we should vote for the Republicans.”

Yet it still resonates in certain quarters. Between fundraisers, Cheney addressed a Michigan National Guard rally, an ostensibly nonpartisan event that nonetheless provided helpful photos of him surrounded by soldiers in uniform.

Dick Szymanski, a manufacturing executive whose son serves in the Marines, applauded the vice president’s message. “We respect him,” Szymanski said. “It’s a very, very hard job that he and the president have, that they’ve had handed to them. You can belittle people for the things they should or should not have done. But they’re there trying to take care of the public.”

BUGGER!

Image Was Not Accepted

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so, not only have they rejected my photo (which contains none of the things for which photos are usually rejected, but does contain things for which photos usually are accepted), but their "censors" are private, cannot be questioned, and if i call to complain, their "help desk" deliberately knows nothing about it and couldn’t give me an answer, even if they wanted to.

if i read the above correctly, the only thing for which i can guess they might have rejected it would be that it is "objectionable in some way (e.g. it was obscene, offensive, pornographic, too sexually suggestive, violent, threatening, harmful, abusive, defamatory, libelous, etc.)", but, as it is a photo of me, i certainly wouldn’t think it is abusive, defamatory or libelous. but even if it were that, apparently there is no way for me to tell their "censors", which means that i guess i don’t get to be on a stamp… 8/

BUGGER!

ATTENTION US MILITARY PERSONNEL
by Jim Macdonald
October 2, 2006

You are not required to obey an unlawful order.

You are required to disobey an unlawful order.

You swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

The Constitution states (Article VI):

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

Here is article 3, the common article, to the Geneva Conventions, a duly ratified treaty made under the authority of the United States:

Article 3

In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions:

1. Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.

To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:

(a) Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;

(b) Taking of hostages;

(c) Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;

(d) The passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.

2. The wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for.

An impartial humanitarian body, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, may offer its services to the Parties to the conflict.

The Parties to the conflict should further endeavour to bring into force, by means of special agreements, all or part of the other provisions of the present Convention.

The application of the preceding provisions shall not affect the legal status of the Parties to the conflict.

Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions is straightforward and clear. Under Article VI of the Constitution, it forms part of the supreme law of the land.

You personally will be held responsible for all of your actions, in all countries, at all times and places, for the rest of your life. “I was only following orders” is not a defense.

What all this is leading to:

If you are ordered to violate Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, it is your duty to disobey that order. No “clarification,” whether passed by Congress or signed by the president, relieves you of that duty.

If you are ordered to violate Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, this is what to do:

1. Request that your superior put the order in writing.

2. If your superior puts the order in writing, inform your superior that you intend to disobey that order.

3. Request trial by courtmartial.

You will almost certainly face disciplinary action, harassment of various kinds, loss of pay, loss of liberty, discomfort and indignity. America relies on you and your courage to face those challenges.

We, the people, need you to support and defend the Constitution. I am certain that your honor and patriotism are equal to the task.

Bush says he can edit security reports
By LESLIE MILLER
Oct 5, 2006

WASHINGTON – President Bush, again defying Congress, says he has the power to edit the Homeland Security Department’s reports about whether it obeys privacy rules while handling background checks, ID cards and watchlists.

In the law Bush signed Wednesday, Congress stated no one but the privacy officer could alter, delay or prohibit the mandatory annual report on Homeland Security department activities that affect privacy, including complaints.

But Bush, in a signing statement attached to the agency’s 2007 spending bill, said he will interpret that section “in a manner consistent with the President’s constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch.”

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said it’s appropriate for the administration to know what reports go to Congress and to review them beforehand.

“There can be a discussion on whether to accept a change or a nuance,” she said. “It could be any number of things.”

The American Bar Association and members of Congress have said Bush uses signing statements excessively as a way to expand his power.

The Senate held hearings on the issue in June. At the time, 110 statements challenged about 750 statutes passed by Congress, according to numbers combined from the White House and the Senate committee. They include documents revising or disregarding parts of legislation to ban torture of detainees and to renew the Patriot Act.

Privacy advocate Marc Rotenberg said Bush is trying to subvert lawmakers’ ability to accurately monitor activities of the executive branch of government.

“The Homeland Security Department has been setting up watch lists to determine who gets on planes, who gets government jobs, who gets employed,” said Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

He said the Homeland Security Department has the most significant impact on citizens’ privacy of any agency in the federal government.

Homeland Security agencies check airline passengers’ names against terrorist watch lists and detain them if there’s a match. They make sure transportation workers’ backgrounds are investigated. They are working on several kinds of biometric ID cards that millions of people would have to carry.

The department’s privacy office has put the brakes on some initiatives, such as using insecure radio-frequency identification technology, or RFID, in travel documents. It also developed privacy policies after an uproar over the disclosure that airlines turned over their passengers’ personal information to the government.

The last privacy report was submitted in February 2005.

Bush’s signing statement Wednesday challenges several other provisions in the Homeland Security spending bill.

Bush, for example, said he’d disregard a requirement that the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency must have at least five years experience and “demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management and homeland security.”

His rationale was that it “rules out a large portion of those persons best qualified by experience and knowledge to fill the office.”

the second week of performances started last night. i tryed to play the solo tuba part for “Pyros On Parade” (otherwise known as the “siren song”) last night, but the first valve on my sousaphone was slow on the uptake, and so i succeeded in completely massacering it instead. i HAVE to get my workshop set up so that i can do things like hone the valves on my sousaphone and tuba, solder the braces on my sousaphone, and generally do all the other things that people who have a workshop would do.

the cirque de flambé is officially 9 years old, and i have been playing with them for 6 years. during that time, we have been banned from ballard, and various portions of the crew have been arrested at various times, for violating fire codes and suchlike. but sunday is going to be our last official performance in seattle, because seattle has raised the price of permits and insurance to preposterous levels (previously it has been $800 dollars for insurance for 3 weeks worth of shows, now it’s $800 dollars per show), and put so many restrictions on what we can and cannot perform (like the fire cyclone, pyrochaotica, etc.) and put restrictions on how we perform what we can perform (like the meteors, petard, comets, etc.) that it’s not worth the trouble any longer. macque (our head clown in charge of blowing things up) has decided that he’s going to be arrested sunday night, and he’s said that we’re going to do pyrochaotica pretty much regardless of what the fire marshall says, so tomorrow night should be the night to come see the show.

after that, we’re planning on moving to a place that wants us, like burien, or a place that doesn’t have any fire regulations, like algona. take that, seattle.

Criticizing Cheney to His Face Is Assault?
By Matthew Rothschild
October 4, 2006

Steve Howards says he used to fantasize about what he’d say to President Bush or Vice President Cheney if he ever got the chance.

That opportunity arrived on June 16, the same day he says he read about U.S. fatalities in Iraq reaching 2,500.

Howards says he was taking two of his kids to their Suzuki piano camp in Beaver Creek, Colorado. They were walking across the outdoor public mall area when all of a sudden he saw Cheney there.

“I didn’t even know he was in town,” Howards says. “He was walking through the area shaking hands. Initially, I walked past him. Then I said to myself, ‘I can’t in good conscience let this opportunity pass by.’ So I approached him, I got about two feet away, and I said in a very calm tone of voice, ‘Your policies in Iraq are reprehensible.’ And then I walked away.”

Howards says he knew the Administration has a “history of making problems” for people who protest its policies, so he wanted to leave off at that.

But the Secret Service did not take kindly to his comment.“About ten minutes later, I came back through the mall with my eight-year-old son in tow,” Howards recalls, “and this Secret Service man came out of the shadows, and his exact words were, ‘Did you assault the Vice President?’ ”

Here’s how Howards says he responded: “No, but I did tell Mr. Cheney the way I felt about the war in Iraq, and if Mr. Cheney wants to be shielded from public criticism, he should avoid public places. If exercising my constitutional rights to free speech is against the law, then you should arrest me.”

Which is just what the agent, Virgil D. “Gus” Reichle Jr, proceeded to do.

“He grabbed me and cuffed my hands behind my back in the presence of my eight-year-old son and told me I was being charged with assault of the Vice President,”Howards recalls.

He says he told the agent, “I can’t abandon my eight-year-old son in a public mall.”

According to Howards, Reichle responded: “We’ll call Social Services.” Before that could happen, however, “my son ran away and found my wife,” who was nearby, Howards says.

“First of all, I was scared,” Howard recalls. “They wouldn’t tell my wife where they were taking me. Second of all, I was incredulous this could be happening in the United States of America. This is what I read about happening in Tiananmen Square. They hauled me away to Eagle County jail and kept me with my hands cuffed behind my back for three hours.”

At the jail, the charge against him was reduced to harassment, he says, and he was released on $500 bond. The Eagle County DA’s office eventually dropped that charge.

On October 3, Howards sued Reichle for depriving him of his First Amendment right of free speech and his Fourth Amendment right to be protected from illegal seizure.

Howards and his attorney, David Lane, have not demanded a specific dollar amount.

“We will go to trial and let a Colorado jury decide what type of damages are appropriate,” says Howards. “This isn’t about anything I did. This about what I said. There is a frontal assault occurring on our constitutional right to free speech. We brought this suit because of our belief that this Administration’s attempt to suppress free speech is a greater threat to the long-term integrity of this nation than ten Osama bin Ladens.”

Reichle did not return my call for comment. Nor did he respond to The New York Times in its article on this incident.

Lon Garner, special agent in charge at the Secret Service’s Denver office, says he has “no reaction” to the lawsuit. “It’s in litigation,” he says. “We have no comment.”

Before his encounter with Cheney, Howards says he had a clean record.

“I was never arrested before,” he says. “I don’t have so much as a speeding ticket.”

sex scandal in the clinton white house = immediate impeachment

sex scandal in the bush white house = presidential backing and reassurance that it won’t mean anybody’s job.

Foley scandal investigations heating up
By ANDREW TAYLOR
06 October, 2006

WASHINGTON – House Speaker Dennis Hastert is getting backup from President Bush and other Republican Party luminaries after vowing not to resign over his handling of the unfolding page cybersex scandal.

“He really ought not be a sacrificial lamb,” former Secretary of State James Baker III said Friday.

President Bush called Hastert late Thursday to reassure him amid allegations that the House speaker did not do enough to protect the teenage House pages from former Rep. Mark Foley’s advances.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., issued a statement supporting Hastert Thursday night. And Bush’s father, the former President Bush, spoke up for him during an ABC News interview.

The boost comes after a week of wavering support from House Republicans in the wake of revelations that Foley, R-Fla., had been sending inappropriate e-mails to teenage pages for years.

Hastert had blamed Democrats for the election-season revelations, but on Thursday abruptly changed course and took responsibility for the matter.

Hastert vowed not to resign over his office’s handling of the scandal — “I haven’t done anything wrong,” he said — but it has cost Republicans in public opinion polls.

“I’m deeply sorry this has happened and the bottom line is we’re taking responsibility,” Hastert said at a news conference outside his district office in Batavia, Ill.

That seemed to quiet rumblings about Hastert’s resignation as the week drew to a close and House and Justice Department officials launched separate investigations.

On CBS’ “The Early Show,” Baker said Hastert deserves credit for urging a probe of a sex scandal in the shadow of the midterm elections. And he offered a pragmatic reason for the party to stand by him.

“If they throw Denny Hastert off the sled to slow down the wolves, it won’t be long before you’ll be crying, ‘Hey, you’ve got to throw somebody else over because they knew about it too,'” Baker said.

The bipartisan ethics panel met Thursday for the first time, approving nearly four dozen subpoenas for witnesses and documents regarding improper conduct between lawmakers and current and former pages and who may have known about it.

Ethics committee chairman Doc Hastings, R-Wash., would not say whether Hastert was among those subpoenaed.

The ethics committee’s senior Democrat, Rep. Howard Berman of California, said the investigation should take “weeks, not months.”

Hastings and Berman will conduct the investigation along with Reps. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, D-Ohio, and Judith Biggert, R-Ill., whose district is next to Hastert’s.

Federal Election Commission records show that Biggert has received $7,000 in campaign cash from Hastert’s campaign committees while Hastings has received $2,500. They vow their relationship to Hastert won’t affect the way they handle the case.

While the committee — officially the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct — is investigating potential violations of House rules, the Justice Department appeared to be moving with dispatch in its criminal investigation.

There’s plenty to investigate.

ABC News reported that three more pages, one each from 1998, 2000 and 2002, have come forward detailing sexual approaches from Foley over the Internet.

The FBI has contacted a former congressional page from Kentucky as part of the burgeoning investigation, said Daniel London, chief of staff to Rep. Ron Lewis, R-Ky., who sponsored the teen.

Attorneys for the Justice Department and the House negotiated on how to give investigators access to Foley’s files without inciting a legal battle like the one after the FBI raided the office of Rep. William Jefferson (news, bio, voting record), D-La., earlier this year.

Ex-Foley chief of staff Kirk Fordham met with the FBI. Fordham emerged as a key figure Wednesday when he told reporters that he had talked three years ago with top aides to Hastert about Foley’s conduct with pages.

Fordham’s version directly contradicts an account issued by Hastert’s office on Saturday, saying the speaker’s staff only learned of an “over-friendly” e-mail exchange between Foley and a single page. Hastert’s top aide, Scott Palmer, denies that Fordham warned top GOP aides of Foley and inappropriate conduct with other pages.

Foley, 52, stepped down Friday after he was confronted with sexually explicit electronic messages he had sent teenage male pages and promptly checked into an alcohol rehabilitation clinic. Through his lawyer, he has said he is gay but denied any sexual contact with minors.

Hastert, meanwhile, is holding to his assertion that he did not know about messages sent by Foley to a former House page until the scandal broke last week.

He issued a less than ringing endorsement of his staff and Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., chairman of the board that overseas the page program.

Shimkus admonished Foley to cease contact with the former page, a Louisiana teen. The matter ended there instead of being pursued in a way that might have led to the far more lurid messages sent to other former pages.

“Could we have done it better? Could the page board have handled it better? In retrospect, probably yes,” Hastert said. “But at the time what we knew and what we acted upon was what we had.”

Added Hastert: “I don’t know who knew what when. … If it’s members of my staff that didn’t do the job, we will act appropriately.”

can we impeach him NOW???

somebody (actually, it was , whoever that is) left spam on my journal! for some unknowable reason, they commented a post that i had made a few weeks ago, and posted a fairly long spam message that had to do with gambling. i deleted it immediately, of course, but i have also changed the settings for comments so that only people who are my friends can comment.

if i haven’t made it clear before,

is now banned from commenting in my journal, i have reported your spamming activities to six apart, spamcop, your ISP, and the washington state attorney general.

Pick 5 favorite books. Post the first line of each book (obscuring names if need be). Challenge your friends list to guess the books.

1. _________ spoke: When in the field of virtue, in the field of ____, assembled together, desiring to fight, what did my army and that of the Sons of _____ do, _______?

2. ___ can be talked about, but not the ______ ___. Names can be named, but not the eternal name. As the origin of heaven and earth, it is nameless: as “the Mother” of all things, it is nameable. “Dao De Jing” by Lao Tzu

3. I have begotten thee, O my son, and that strangely,as thou knowest, upon the ______ _____ called _______, as it was mysteriously fortold unto me in ___ ____ __ ___ ___. “Liber ALEPH vel CXI” by Aleister Crowley

4. Now ____ is explained. ____ is the restraining of the mind-stuff from taking various forms.

5. Some 794 letters make up the words for the numbers from one through to ninety-nine. Among them all, I notice, there are only two l‘s.

i left out The Bible, because anybody would probably recognise that, even with the names obscured.

the first week of performances is over. in spite of all the chaos and disorganisation, the performances are going very well. we aren’t performing “The Ride Of The Valkyries” because Pa-Ooh-Lah and her flaming brassiere couldn’t be found, in spite of the fact that we’ve gone for 2 months of rehearsals with the assurance that pa-ooh-lah will be there “next time”, but we’ve made up for it by having Hacki and Moepi as “special guests”. rebecca, one of the long-time cirquies and half of our “tap-dancing, flaming-baton-twirling clown duo”, is pregnant with moepi’s child (yes, she’s playing up the “pregnant clown” aspect), so it’s not really like they’re “special” guests any more, but they are from germany, and they did make a special trip just for our shows, so that’s why they’re being billed as “special” guests. Big Bois With Poise is also performing in the show, to uproarious noise and appreciation.

i’m getting really frustrated because i keep on breaking braces on my sousaphone, and the only way i have to repair them at this point is with zip-ties. i’ve got one soldered brace and four zip-ties holding the valve cluster on the instrument, and i’m afraid that if the last brace breaks, the whole instrument will be down for the count until i can actually solder them back into place, which would not be particularly good for the show, as i’ve been playing the sousaphone and not playing my E-flat tuba, and if i have to switch, there’s a whole bunch of the music for the show that i will have to transpose and (presumably) learn before friday.

saturday, 23 september, i was at gasworks for the celebration of ted (trumpet for the fremont phil, among other things) and kathrine’s wedding (which actually happened a few months ago) and i sat in with “Banda Gonzona”, which is a latin-american-style wind band, and i found out last night that they’re interested in having me on a more permanent basis. ted is also in banda gonzona, which also contains the fremont phil’s new, substitute clarinet player, ben, our new, substitute (hopefully permanent) tenor sax player, joseph, and one of the tuba players from the BSSB, clayton. apparently clayton is in enough other groups that he can’t make all the banda gonzona performances, and they figured that twice the tuba players doubles the possibility that they will be able to play with a tuba for all their shows… of course, i’m also in the fremont phil, and the BSSB, so the probability that i’m not going to be able to make all of banda gonzona’s performances is increased, but what the hell. if nothing else, it was fun playing with them on saturday, and it’ll give me one more thing to do, so i won’t have that much more time to be depressed.

Legislating Violations of the Constitution
By Erwin Chemerinsky
September 30, 2006

With little public attention or even notice, the House of Representatives has passed a bill that undermines enforcement of the First Amendment’s separation of church and state. The Public Expression of Religion Act – H.R. 2679 – provides that attorneys who successfully challenge government actions as violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment shall not be entitled to recover attorneys fees. The bill has only one purpose: to prevent suits challenging unconstitutional government actions advancing religion.

A federal statute, 42 United States Code section 1988, provides that attorneys are entitled to recover compensation for their fees if they successfully represent a plaintiff asserting a violation of his or her constitutional or civil rights. For example, a lawyer who successfully sues on behalf of a victim of racial discrimination or police abuse is entitled to recover attorney’s fees from the defendant who acted wrongfully. Any plaintiff who successfully sues to remedy a violation of the Constitution or a federal civil rights statute is entitled to have his or her attorney’s fees paid.

Congress adopted this statute for a simple reason: to encourage attorneys to bring cases on behalf of those whose rights have been violated. Congress was concerned that such individuals often cannot afford an attorney and vindicating constitutional rights rarely generates enough in damages to pay a lawyer on a contingency fee basis.

Without this statute, there is no way to compensate attorneys who successfully sue for injunctions to stop unconstitutional government behavior. Congress rightly recognized that attorneys who bring such actions are serving society’s interests by stopping the government from violating the Constitution. Indeed, the potential for such suits deters government wrong-doing and increases the likelihood that the Constitution will be followed.

The attorneys’ fees statute has worked well for almost 30 years. Lawyers receive attorneys’ fees under the law only if their claim is meritorious and they win in court. Unsuccessful lawyers get nothing under the law. This creates a strong disincentive to frivolous suits and encourages lawyers to bring only clearly meritorious ones.

Despite the effectiveness of this statute, conservatives in the House of Representatives have now passed an insidious bill to try and limit enforcement of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, by denying attorneys fees to lawyers who successfully challenge government actions as violating this key constitutional provision. For instance, a lawyer who successfully challenged unconstitutional prayers in schools or unconstitutional symbols on religious property or impermissible aid to religious groups would — under the bill — not be entitled to recover attorneys’ fees. The bill, if enacted, would treat suits to enforce the Establishment Clause different from litigation to enforce all of the other provisions of the Constitution and federal civil rights statutes.

Such a bill could have only one motive: to protect unconstitutional government actions advancing religion. The religious right, which has been trying for years to use government to advance their religious views, wants to reduce the likelihood that their efforts will be declared unconstitutional. Since they cannot change the law of the Establishment Clause by statute, they have turned their attention to trying to prevent its enforcement by eliminating the possibility for recovery of attorneys’ fees.

Those who successfully prove the government has violated their constitutional rights would, under the bill, be required to pay their own legal fees. Few people can afford to do so. Without the possibility of attorneys’ fees, individuals who suffer unconstitutional religious persecution often will be unable to sue. The bill applies even to cases involving illegal religious coercion of public school children or blatant discrimination against particular religions.

The passage of this bill by the House is a disturbing achievement by those who seek to undermine our nation’s commitment to fundamental freedoms laid out in the Constitution. Should it come up for a vote, it is imperative that the Senate reject this nefarious proposal. The religious right is looking for a way to get away with violating the Establishment Clause and is now one step closer to this goal. The Establishment Clause is no less important than any other part of the Bill of Rights and suits to enforce it should be treated no differently than any other litigation to enforce civil liberties and civil rights.

Habeas Corpus, R.I.P. (1215 – 2006)
By Molly Ivins
Sep 27, 2006

With a smug stroke of his pen, President Bush is set to wipe out a safeguard against illegal imprisonment that has endured as a cornerstone of legal justice since the Magna Carta.

AUSTIN, Texas — Oh dear. I’m sure he didn’t mean it. In Illinois’ Sixth Congressional District, long represented by Henry Hyde, Republican candidate Peter Roskam accused his Democratic opponent, Tammy Duckworth, of planning to “cut and run” on Iraq.

Duckworth is a former Army major and chopper pilot who lost both legs in Iraq after her helicopter got hit by an RPG. “I just could not believe he would say that to me,” said Duckworth, who walks on artificial legs and uses a cane. Every election cycle produces some wincers, but how do you apologize for that one?

The legislative equivalent of that remark is the detainee bill now being passed by Congress. Beloveds, this is so much worse than even that pathetic deal reached last Thursday between the White House and Republican Sens. John Warner, John McCain and Lindsey Graham. The White House has since reinserted a number of “technical fixes” that were the point of the putative “compromise.” It leaves the president with the power to decide who is an enemy combatant.

This bill is not a national security issue — this is about torturing helpless human beings without any proof they are our enemies. Perhaps this could be considered if we knew the administration would use the power with enormous care and thoughtfulness. But of the over 700 prisoners sent to Gitmo, only 10 have ever been formally charged with anything. Among other things, this bill is a CYA for torture of the innocent that has already taken place.

Death by torture by Americans was first reported in 2003 in a New York Times article by Carlotta Gall. The military had announced the prisoner died of a heart attack, but when Gall saw the death certificate, written in English and issued by the military, it said the cause of death was homicide. The “heart attack” came after he had been beaten so often on this legs that they had “basically been pulpified,” according to the coroner.

The story of why and how it took the Times so long to print this information is in the current edition of the Columbia Journalism Review. The press in general has been late and slow in reporting torture, so very few Americans have any idea how far it has spread. As is often true in hierarchical, top-down institutions, the orders get passed on in what I call the downward communications exaggeration spiral.

For example, on a newspaper, a top editor may remark casually, “Let’s give the new mayor a chance to see what he can do before we start attacking him.”

This gets passed on as “Don’t touch the mayor unless he really screws up.”

And it ultimately arrives at the reporter level as “We can’t say anything negative about the mayor.”

The version of the detainee bill now in the Senate not only undoes much of the McCain-Warner-Graham work, but it is actually much worse than the administration’s first proposal. In one change, the original compromise language said a suspect had the right to “examine and respond to” all evidence used against him. The three senators said the clause was necessary to avoid secret trials. The bill has now dropped the word “examine” and left only “respond to.”

In another change, a clause said that evidence obtained outside the United States could be admitted in court even if it had been gathered without a search warrant. But the bill now drops the words “outside the United States,” which means prosecutors can ignore American legal standards on warrants.

The bill also expands the definition of an unlawful enemy combatant to cover anyone who has “has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.” Quick, define “purposefully and materially.” One person has already been charged with aiding terrorists because he sold a satellite TV package that includes the Hezbollah network.

The bill simply removes a suspect’s right to challenge his detention in court. This is a rule of law that goes back to the Magna Carta in 1215. That pretty much leaves the barn door open.

As Vladimir Bukovsky, the Soviet dissident, wrote, an intelligence service free to torture soon “degenerates into a playground for sadists.” But not unbridled sadism—you will be relieved that the compromise took out the words permitting interrogation involving “severe pain” and substituted “serious pain,” which is defined as “bodily injury that involves extreme physical pain.”

In July 2003, George Bush said in a speech: “The United States is committed to worldwide elimination of torture, and we are leading this fight by example. Freedom from torture is an inalienable human right. Yet torture continues to be practiced around the world by rogue regimes, whose cruel methods match their determination to crush the human spirit.”

Fellow citizens, this bill throws out legal and moral restraints as the president deems it necessary — these are fundamental principles of basic decency, as well as law.

I’d like those supporting this evil bill to spare me one affliction: Do not, please, pretend to be shocked by the consequences of this legislation. And do not pretend to be shocked when the world begins comparing us to the Nazis.

The U.S. Constitution: Fourth Amendment
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Senate Intelligence Committee approves new FBI powers in Patriot Act
6/7/2005

WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI would get expanded powers to subpoena records without the approval of a judge or grand jury in terrorism investigations under Patriot Act revisions approved Tuesday by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Some senators who voted 11-4 to move the bill forward said they would push for limits on the new powers the measure would grant to law enforcement agencies.

“This bill must be amended on the floor to protect national security while protecting Constitutional rights,” said Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md.

Ranking Democrat Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., supported the bill overall but said he would push for limits that would allow such administrative subpoenas “only if immediacy dictates.”

Rockefeller and other committee members, such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., also are concerned that the bill would grant powers to federal law enforcement agencies that could be used in criminal inquiries rather than intelligence-gathering ones.

Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said the bill places new checks and balances on the powers it would grant, such as new procedures that would allow people to challenge such administrative orders. He called the Patriot Act “a vital tool in the war on terror” and lauded the Democrats who voted for it in spite of misgivings.

Portions of the Patriot Act — signed into law six weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks — are set to expire at the end of 2005. The bill would renew and expand the act.

The bill also must be considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Feinstein and other Democrats planned to again offer amendments.

Overall, Rockefeller said, the committee gave a nod to most of the Patriot Act in its first few years fighting the nation’s new enemies.

“We concluded that these tools have helped keep America safe … and should be made permanent,” Rockefeller said in a statement.

Still, civil libertarians panned the bill and the closed-door meetings in which it was written.

“When lawmakers seek to rewrite our Fourth Amendment rights, they should at least have the gumption to do so in public,” said Lisa Graves, the ACLU’s senior counsel for legislative strategy. “Americans have a reasonable expectation that their federal government will not gather records about their health, their wealth and the transactions of their daily life without probable cause of a crime and without a court order.”

i haven’t been posting much recently. this (among other things) is the reason why:

Bush Seeks Retroactive Immunity for Violating War Crimes Act
By Elizabeth Holtzman
23 September 2006

Thirty-two years ago, President Gerald Ford created a political firestorm by pardoning former President Richard Nixon of all crimes he may have committed in Watergate – and lost his election as a result. Now, President Bush, to avoid a similar public outcry, is quietly trying to pardon himself of any crimes connected with the torture and mistreatment of U.S. detainees.

The “pardon” is buried in Bush’s proposed legislation to create a new kind of military tribunal for cases involving top al-Qaida operatives. The “pardon” provision has nothing to do with the tribunals. Instead, it guts the War Crimes Act of 1996, a federal law that makes it a crime, in some cases punishable by death, to mistreat detainees in violation of the Geneva Conventions and makes the new, weaker terms of the War Crimes Act retroactive to 9/11.

Press accounts of the provision have described it as providing immunity for CIA interrogators. But its terms cover the president and other top officials because the act applies to any U.S. national.

Avoiding prosecution under the War Crimes Act has been an obsession of this administration since shortly after 9/11. In a January 2002 memorandum to the president, then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales pointed out the problem of prosecution for detainee mistreatment under the War Crimes Act. He notes that given the vague language of the statute, no one could predict what future “prosecutors and independent counsels” might do if they decided to bring charges under the act. As an author of the 1978 special prosecutor statute, I know that independent counsels (who used to be called “special prosecutors” prior to the statute’s reauthorization in 1994) aren’t for low-level government officials such as CIA interrogators, but for the president and his Cabinet. It is clear that Gonzales was concerned about top administration officials.

Gonzales also understood that the specter of prosecution could hang over top administration officials involved in detainee mistreatment throughout their lives. Because there is no statute of limitations in cases where death resulted from the mistreatment, prosecutors far into the future, not appointed by Bush or beholden to him, would be making the decisions whether to prosecute.

To “reduce the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act,” Gonzales recommended that Bush not apply the Geneva Conventions to al-Qaida and the Taliban. Since the War Crimes Act carried out the Geneva Conventions, Gonzales reasoned that if the Conventions didn’t apply, neither did the War Crimes Act. Bush implemented the recommendation on Feb. 7, 2002.

When the Supreme Court recently decided that the Conventions did apply to al-Qaida and Taliban detainees, the possibility of criminal liability for high-level administration officials reared its ugly head again.

What to do? The administration has apparently decided to secure immunity from prosecution through legislation. Under cover of the controversy involving the military tribunals and whether they could use hearsay or coerced evidence, the administration is trying to pardon itself, hoping that no one will notice. The urgent timetable has to do more than anything with the possibility that the next Congress may be controlled by Democrats, who will not permit such a provision to be adopted.

Creating immunity retroactively for violating the law sets a terrible precedent. The president takes an oath of office to uphold the Constitution; that document requires him to obey the laws, not violate them. A president who knowingly and deliberately violates U.S. criminal laws should not be able to use stealth tactics to immunize himself from liability, and Congress should not go along.

Congress gives Bush the right to torture and detain people forever
By Glenn Greenwald
September 28th, 2006

Following in the footsteps of the House, the Senate this afternoon approved the bill which vests in the President the power of indefinite, unreviewable detention (even of U.S. citizens) and which also legalizes various torture techniques. It is not hyperbole to say that this is one of the most tyrannical and dangerous bills to be enacted in our nation’s history.

The final Senate vote was 65-34. The Democrats lacked the votes for a filibuster and therefore did not attempt one. Twelve (out of 44) Senate Democrats voted in favor of this bill, while only one Republican (Chafee) voted against it. The dishonorable list of Democrats voting for the bill: Carper (Del.), Johnson (S.D.), Landrieu (La.), Lautenberg (N.J.), Lieberman (Conn.), Menendez (N.J), Nelson (Fla.), Nelson (Neb.), Pryor (Ark.), Rockefeller (W. Va.), Salazar (Co.), Stabenow (Mich).

One can look at the Democrats’ conduct here in one of two ways. On the one hand, it is true that the Democrats disappeared from the debate until today, all but hiding behind John McCain in the futile hope that he would remain steadfast in his opposition to the White House. Once the Democrats designated McCain as the Noble and Wise Torture Expert who spoke on their behalf, it became very difficult for them to oppose the “compromise” bill whereby McCain predictably capitulated and gave the Bush administration virtually everything it wanted. Democrats painted themselves into this corner by failing forcefully to advocate their own position against torture and indefinite detention.

Nonetheless, it is simply a fact that virtually every Republican in the House and the Senate (with one sole exception in the Senate and only 7 in the House) voted in favor of this tyrannical bill, while Democrats overwhelmingly opposed it (in the House, 160 Democrats voted “no,” while 34 voted “yes”). With those facts assembled, it is fair to say that the Republicans are the party of torture, indefinite and unreviewable detention powers, and limitless presidential power, even over U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. By contrast, Democrats have largely opposed these tyrannical, un-American and truly dangerous measures. Even if Democrats didn’t oppose them as vociferously as they could have and should have — and that is plainly the case – this is still a meaningful and, at this point in our country’s history, a critically important contrast.

Senate backs Bush over terror suspects
September 29, 2006

The US Senate has voted for legislation endorsing President George Bush’s plan for tough measures to interrogate and prosecute terrorism suspects.

The new laws will grant the president permission to authorise interrogation techniques viewed as illegal under international conventions and allow the setting up of “military commissions” to prosecute terror suspects.

The 65-34 vote gives final approval for a bill seen by Republicans as a chance to highlight their tough stance against terrorism in the run-up to congressional elections on November 7.

Senators voted predominantly along party lines, though 12 Democrats voted for the bill and one Republican against it.

President Bush welcomed the news last night, saying in a statement: “The Senate sent out a strong signal to the terrorists that we will continue using every element of national power to pursue our enemies and to prevent attacks on America.”

Apparently referring to the once-secret American intelligence programme of detention and aggressive interrogations of suspects, he added: “The Military Commissions Act of 2006 will allow the continuation of a CIA programme that has been one of America’s most potent tools in fighting the war on terror.”

The House of Representatives passed almost identical legislation by 253-168 on Wednesday. It must make a technical change to bring it in line with the Senate’s measure and Bush is expected to sign the bill soon afterwards.

The bill would prohibit severe abuses such as rape and torture but allow the president to “interpret the meaning and application” of the Geneva conventions governing the treatment of war prisoners.

This measure could allow Mr Bush to authorise aggressive interrogation methods that might otherwise be viewed as illegal by international courts.

Human rights groups fear it could allow harsh techniques that border on torture such as sleep deprivation and induced hypothermia.

The bill expands the definition of “enemy combatants” – mostly held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba – to include those who provide weapons, money and other support to terrorist groups.

Under the new legislation, a terrorist suspect held there could be tried by a military commission that would allow the use of evidence obtained by coercion but would give defendants access to classified evidence being used to convict them.

Those subject to commission trials would be people who have “engaged in hostilities or who [have] purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its co-belligerents”.

Proponents say this definition would not apply to US citizens.

The bill would also remove some rights present in military and civilian courts. Hearsay evidence, for example – currently barred from civilian courts – would be allowed as long as a judge considered it reliable.

The administration failed in its efforts to push through the terrorism surveillance programmes championed by Bush, which would include wiretapping without the need for a warrant.

Agreement between the Senate and the House on this is now unlikely before the elections.

Most Iraqis Favor Immediate U.S. Pullout, Polls Show
By Amit R. Paley
September 27, 2006

BAGHDAD, Sept. 26 — A strong majority of Iraqis want U.S.-led military forces to immediately withdraw from the country, saying their swift departure would make Iraq more secure and decrease sectarian violence, according to new polls by the State Department and independent researchers.

In Baghdad, for example, nearly three-quarters of residents polled said they would feel safer if U.S. and other foreign forces left Iraq, with 65 percent of those asked favoring an immediate pullout, according to State Department polling results obtained by The Washington Post.

Another new poll, scheduled to be released on Wednesday by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, found that 71 percent of Iraqis questioned want the Iraqi government to ask foreign forces to depart within a year. By large margins, though, Iraqis believed that the U.S. government would refuse the request, with 77 percent of those polled saying the United States intends keep permanent military bases in the country.

The stark assessments, among the most negative attitudes toward U.S.-led forces since they invaded Iraq in 2003, contrast sharply with views expressed by the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Last week at the United Nations, President Jalal Talabani said coalition troops should remain in the country until Iraqi security forces are “capable of putting an end to terrorism and maintaining stability and security.”

“Only then will it be possible to talk about a timetable for the withdrawal of the multinational forces from Iraq,” he said.

Recent polls show many Iraqis in nearly every part of the country disagree.

“Majorities in all regions except Kurdish areas state that the Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I) should withdraw immediately, adding that the MNF-I’s departure would make them feel safer and decrease violence,” concludes the 20-page State Department report, titled “Iraq Civil War Fears Remain High in Sunni and Mixed Areas.” The report was based on 1,870 face-to-face interviews conducted from late June to early July.

The Program on International Policy Attitudes poll, which was conducted over the first three days of September for WorldPublicOpinion.org, found that support among Sunni Muslims for a withdrawal of all U.S.-led forces within six months dropped to 57 percent in September from 83 percent in January.

“There is a kind of softening of Sunni attitudes toward the U.S.,” said Steven Kull, director of PIPA and editor of WorldPublicOpinion.org. “But you can’t go so far as to say the majority of Sunnis don’t want the U.S. out. They do. They’re just not quite in the same hurry as they were before.”

The PIPA poll, which has a margin of error of 3 percent, was carried out by Iraqis in all 18 provinces who conducted interviews with more than 1,000 randomly selected Iraqis in their homes.

Using complex sampling methods based on data from Iraq’s Planning Ministry, the pollsters selected streets on which to conduct interviews. They then contacted every third house on the left side of the road. When they selected a home, the interviewers then collected the names and birth dates of everyone who lived there and polled the person with the most recent birthday.

Matthew Warshaw, a senior research manager at D3 Systems, which helped conduct the poll, said he didn’t think Iraqis were any less likely to share their true opinions with pollsters than Americans. “It’s a concern you run up against in Iowa or in Iraq,” he said. “But for the most part we’re asking questions that people want to give answers to. People want to have their voice heard.”

The greatest risk, he said, was the safety of the interviewers. Two pollsters for another Iraqi firm were recently killed because of their work.

The State Department report did not give a detailed methodology for its poll, which it said was carried out by an unnamed Iraqi polling firm. Lou Fintor, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, said he could not comment on the public opinion surveys.

The director of another Iraqi polling firm, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared being killed, said public opinion surveys he conducted last month showed that 80 percent of Iraqis who were questioned favored an immediate withdrawal. Eight-five percent of Sunnis in that poll supported an immediate withdrawal, a number virtually unchanged in the past two years, except for the two months after the Samarra bombing, when the number fell to about 70 percent, the poll director said.

“The very fact that there is such a low support for American forces has to do with the American failure to do basically anything for Iraqis,” said Mansoor Moaddel, a professor of sociology at Eastern Michigan University, who commissioned a poll earlier this year that also found widespread support for a withdrawal. “It’s part of human nature. People respect authority and power. But the U.S. so far has been unable to establish any real authority.”

Interviews with two dozen Baghdad residents in recent weeks suggest one central cause for Iraqi distrust of the Americans: They believe the U.S. government has deliberately thrown the country into chaos.

The most common theory heard on the streets of Baghdad is that the American military is creating a civil war to create an excuse to keep its forces here.

“Do you really think it’s possible that America — the greatest country in the world — cannot manage a small country like this?” Mohammad Ali, 42, an unemployed construction worker, said as he sat in his friend’s electronics shop on a recent afternoon. “No! They have not made any mistakes. They brought people here to destroy Iraq, not to build Iraq.”

As he drew on a cigarette and two other men in the store nodded in agreement, Ali said the U.S. government was purposely depriving the Iraqi people of electricity, water, gasoline and security, to name just some of the things that most people in this country often lack.

“They could fix everything in one hour if they wanted!” he said, jabbing his finger in the air for emphasis.

Mohammed Kadhem al-Dulaimi, 54, a Sunni Arab who used to be a professional soccer player, said he thought the United States was creating chaos in the country as a pretext to stay in Iraq as long as it has stayed in Germany.

“All bad things that are happening in Iraq are just because of the Americans,” he said, sipping a tiny cup of sweet tea in a cafe. “When should they leave? As soon as possible. Every Iraqi will tell you this.”

Many Iraqi political leaders, on the other hand, have been begging the Americans to stay, especially since the February bombing of a Shiite Muslim shrine in Samarra, which touched off the current round of sectarian reprisal killings between Sunnis and Shiites.

The most dramatic about-face came from Sunni leaders, initially some of the staunchest opponents to the U.S. occupation, who said coalition forces were the only buffer preventing Shiite militias from slaughtering Sunnis.

Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, the outspoken Sunni speaker of parliament who this summer said that “the U.S. occupation is the work of butchers,” now supports the U.S. military staying in Iraq for as long as a decade.

“Don’t let them go before they have corrected what they have done,” he said in an interview this month. “They should stay for four years. This is the minimum. Maybe 10 years.”

Particularly in mixed neighborhoods here in the capital, some Sunnis say the departure of U.S. forces could trigger a genocide. Hameed al-Kassi, 24, a recent college graduate who lives in the Yarmouk district of Baghdad, worried that rampages by Shiite militias could cause “maybe 60 to 70 percent of the Sunnis to be killed, even the women, old and the young.”

“There will be lakes of blood,” Kassi said. “Of course we want the Americans to leave, but if they do, it will be a great disaster for us.”

In a barbershop in the capital’s Karrada district Tuesday afternoon, a group of men discussed some of the paradoxical Iraqi opinions of coalition troops. They recognized that the departure of U.S.-led forces could trigger more violence, and yet they harbored deep-rooted anger toward the Americans.

“I really don’t like the Americans who patrol on the street. They should all go away,” said a young boy as he swept up hair on the shop’s floor. “But I do like the one who guards my church. He should stay!”

Sitting in a neon-orange chair as he waited for a haircut, Firas Adnan, a 27-year-old music student, said: “I really don’t know what I want. If the Americans leave right now, there is going to be a massacre in Iraq. But if they don’t leave, there will be more problems. From my point of view, though, it would be better for them to go out today than tomorrow.”

He paused for a moment, then said, “We just want to go back and live like we did before.”

dude, where’s my country?

A "War on Terror" can’t be won, because it can’t be fought
by Vin Suprynowicz

It’s widely asserted the United States is fighting a “war on terror.” But that’s absurd.

Terror is a tactic – an attempt to undermine the morale of a much stronger foe, whom the “terrorists” know they cannot defeat in traditional battle.

When our ancestors sent John Paul Jones in a fast frigate to burn some English coastal towns and harass their shipping during the American Revolution, that was an attempt at terrorism – engaging English non-combatants (who had little if any say in their King’s colonial wars) on the home front in an attempt to convince the British Parliament this seemingly remote and distant war was not a good idea, when we knew darned well our fledgling Navy wouldn’t have stood a chance in a fleet action against the Royal Navy. (The Royal Navy even beat the French – though fortunately shortly AFTER that military genius Cornwallis found the French Admiral DeGrasse at his back at Yorktown.)

Terror is a tactic. Imagine the New York Yankees taking the field against the Baltimore Orioles, and announcing their opponent this night is not the Orioles themselves, but that instead they are waging a “battle against the bunt.” They could bring all seven of their defensive players well inside the base paths, and pretty successfully stop the bunt. Of course, the Orioles would circle the bases like merry-go-round ponies after hitting what would otherwise be easily-caught flies to the outfield. But darn it, the bunt would be defeated!

Terrorism is a tactic. It makes no sense to launch a war against a tactic.

Imagine Franklin Roosevelt announcing on Dec. 8, 1941, that we were declaring war not on Japan, but on the evil tactic of the sneak attack via aircraft carrier.

Wising up, the Japanese could easily have agreed to scuttle all their aircraft carriers, and instead stationed battlewagons just off Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sydney and Seattle, shelling those cities to smithereens.

Imagine Roosevelt, Marshall, and McArthur responding, “Well, that’s OK then. We have no objection to the shelling of our major west coast cities, so long as it’s done by conventional battleships and not those darned, sneaky aircraft carriers. This was a war against sneak attack by aircraft carriers, after all, and with Admiral Yamamoto’s gracious scuttling of the Japanese carrier fleet, we consider that we’ve brought our war to a successful conclusion, even though the Japanese still occupy all of East Asia as far south as Australia. The residents of our West Coast cities will just have to move further inland, that’s all.”

Hunh?

What tactic will we make war on next, the artillery barrage?

Terrorism is a tactic. It makes no sense to launch a war against a tactic, no matter how nasty, because it ignores the fact that we or our friends may well choose to adopt tactics in which someone else might see similarities to the enemy tactics we condemn, and that meantime the enemy can simply choose another tactic. What tactic will we make war on next, the artillery barrage? The amphibious landing? Chess players resorting to the devilish fianchetto?

The other problem with declaring “war” against a tactic, of course, is that there’s no reasonable point at which the subjects of the war-making government can expect that “war” to end. There are always going to be a few more goofballs out there, yearning for a way to extract revenge on “The Great Satan” for some perceived slight to them or their ancestors … right? They don’t and won’t ever have fleets of aircraft carriers or armored divisions to invade us through Mexico or Canada. So their only option is what we choose to call “terrorism.”

Americans gladly put up with the draft, margarine rationing, wage controls, and all kinds of other hardships (many unnecessary, harmful, and counterproductive, as could be expected from a loose cannon like Franklin Roosevelt, though that’s another story) to defeat Hitler and Tojo. But the deal always was that once the thugs in question were dead and their armies defeated, it would all be over and we could turn on the lights again.

When is it we can reasonably expect a “victory” in this war on terror, whereupon we can sell off the airport metal detectors for scrap, fire all these TSA body-gropers, start carrying our hunting rifles onto the planes again, and tell the banks it’s once again none of their business why we want to withdraw or deposit $50,000 in cash, since we’re no longer looking for sneaky Arab terrorist money-launderers, and surely that stuff never had anything to do with red-blooded Americans dodging the income tax … did it?

Besides, if we’re engaged in a “War on Terror,” how are we going to decide whether our enemy in the Caucasus is the Russians or the Chechens? Which side initiated the use of terror, there? (Hint: The Chechens never tried to conquer Russia, leveling whole cities and kidnapping the children to be hauled home and raised in a foreign culture and religion.) After all, we can’t make war on some terrors, and ignore others, and claim to be fighting a “War on Terror” … can we? Wouldn’t that be like fighting the 1940s Nazis in North Africa, but not in France, since France was harder to get to?

No one knows what the heck a “War on Terror” really means except the permanent institutionalization of the predictable paranoia of tyrants afraid their oppressed peasant classes will eventually wise up and shoot back.

Since no one knows what the heck a “War on Terror” really means except the permanent institutionalization of the predictable paranoia of tyrants afraid their oppressed peasant classes will eventually wise up and shoot back, making the absurd claim that we’re fighting a “War on Terror” easily justifies anything that makes our rulers “feel safer,” starting with the random search and disarming of domestic airplane passengers, subway passengers, and down-on-their luck residents being expelled at gunpoint from waterlogged New Orleans (by guardsmen bringing home the skill and habit of disarming civilians learned in their deployments to Bosnia and elsewhere, just as I’ve long predicted.)

What ever happened to fighting a war against – oh, I don’t know … the people who attacked us, regardless of their tactics?

And this may get us to the heart of the matter: Is all this nonsense merely so we can avoid confronting the simple but Politically Incorrect act of naming our real enemy?

What ever happened to fighting a war against the people who attacked us, regardless of their tactics?

Since Sept. 11, 2001 – if not earlier – we’ve been at war with a considerable bunch of radical, fundamentalist Middle Eastern Islamic men, men who shoot popes and behead Christian schoolgirls in Indonesia and lady missionaries in Iraq and otherwise behave in a manner which would get them put outside in the cold till they learn to stop soiling the carpets in any civilized home even at Christmastime, and who unfortunately draw comfort and support from a much larger mass of mewling Muslims (even here in the West) who may not be actively taking up arms (though they do seem to be out to burn every automobile in France, as this is written in early November, 2005), but who are willing to lend them both moral and financial support, whining, “Well, what do you expect when there is no justice for the Palestinian people who were kicked out of Jordan by the son-of-a-dog Jews after the regrettable events of September, 1970?” – at war with a bunch of wild-eyed Middle Eastern Mohammedans who hope to expel any remainder of post-15th-century cultural progress from their homelands, the better to lead their people back to a vicious 14th century religious tyranny, complete with the stoning to death of rape victims, Christian missionaries, and any woman who goes out in public with her forearms exposed.

Now, do such folks have a right to live under Sharia law? The answer is pretty much yes – pluralism, self-determination and all – though of course we commiserate with any minority who find themselves stranded in regions where such gibbering loonies hold sway, and who wish they could live in conditions we’re more likely to describe as “freedom.” The solution, however, is to allow those who wish to live in freedom to emigrate (while concentrating on restoring our previous freedoms right here at home), so long as they comply with a few reasonable requirements, like: They should learn English if they want to vote, they have no right to demand our women dress up like bag ladies at the public swimming pool, and they have to offer some convincing evidence that they understand and embrace quaint notions like “religious tolerance and the separation of church and state.”

Then we could and should have a sensible, open debate in Congress about whether this struggle properly fits any standard definition of a “war,” and how best to prosecute it – starting with how we locate and identify our enemy.

For instance, the Constitution allows the equipping of private warships under “letters of marque” to make war on selected foreign enemies. Might not the retention of such mercenaries, giving them a “license to kill” those designated enemies and seize their stuff anywhere away from our shores, make more sense than undertaking, oh – I don’t want to be TOO ridiculous here – the task of rebuilding the entire infrastructure of the cobbled-together and decrepit state of Iraq, while taking fire from every disgruntled towelhead who can lay hands on a Kalashnikov and scrape up bus fare to Baghdad?

Torture’s Long Shadow
By Vladimir Bukovsky
December 18, 2005

CAMBRIDGE, England

One nasty morning Comrade Stalin discovered that his favorite pipe was missing. Naturally, he called in his henchman, Lavrenti Beria, and instructed him to find the pipe. A few hours later, Stalin found it in his desk and called off the search. “But, Comrade Stalin,” stammered Beria, “five suspects have already confessed to stealing it.”

This joke, whispered among those who trusted each other when I was a kid in Moscow in the 1950s, is perhaps the best contribution I can make to the current argument in Washington about legislation banning torture and inhumane treatment of suspected terrorists captured abroad. Now that President Bush has made a public show of endorsing Sen. John McCain’s amendment, it would seem that the debate is ending. But that the debate occurred at all, and that prominent figures are willing to entertain the idea, is perplexing and alarming to me. I have seen what happens to a society that becomes enamored of such methods in its quest for greater security; it takes more than words and political compromise to beat back the impulse.

This is a new debate for Americans, but there is no need for you to reinvent the wheel. Most nations can provide you with volumes on the subject. Indeed, with the exception of the Black Death, torture is the oldest scourge on our planet (hence there are so many conventions against it). Every Russian czar after Peter the Great solemnly abolished torture upon being enthroned, and every time his successor had to abolish it all over again. These czars were hardly bleeding-heart liberals, but long experience in the use of these “interrogation” practices in Russia had taught them that once condoned, torture will destroy their security apparatus. They understood that torture is the professional disease of any investigative machinery.

Apart from sheer frustration and other adrenaline-related emotions, investigators and detectives in hot pursuit have enormous temptation to use force to break the will of their prey because they believe that, metaphorically speaking, they have a “ticking bomb” case on their hands. But, much as a good hunter trains his hounds to bring the game to him rather than eating it, a good ruler has to restrain his henchmen from devouring the prey lest he be left empty-handed. Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one’s sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists. Thus, in its heyday, Joseph Stalin’s notorious NKVD (the Soviet secret police) became nothing more than an army of butchers terrorizing the whole country but incapable of solving the simplest of crimes. And once the NKVD went into high gear, not even Stalin could stop it at will. He finally succeeded only by turning the fury of the NKVD against itself; he ordered his chief NKVD henchman, Nikolai Yezhov (Beria’s predecessor), to be arrested together with his closest aides.

So, why would democratically elected leaders of the United States ever want to legalize what a succession of Russian monarchs strove to abolish? Why run the risk of unleashing a fury that even Stalin had problems controlling? Why would anyone try to “improve intelligence-gathering capability” by destroying what was left of it? Frustration? Ineptitude? Ignorance? Or, has their friendship with a certain former KGB lieutenant colonel, V. Putin, rubbed off on the American leaders? I have no answer to these questions, but I do know that if Vice President Cheney is right and that some “cruel, inhumane or degrading” (CID) treatment of captives is a necessary tool for winning the war on terrorism, then the war is lost already.

Even talking about the possibility of using CID treatment sends wrong signals and encourages base instincts in those who should be consistently delivered from temptation by their superiors. As someone who has been on the receiving end of the “treatment” under discussion, let me tell you that trying to make a distinction between torture and CID techniques is ridiculous. Long gone are the days when a torturer needed the nasty-looking tools displayed in the Tower of London. A simple prison bed is deadly if you remove the mattress and force a prisoner to sleep on the iron frame night after night after night. Or how about the “Chekist’s handshake” so widely practiced under Stalin — a firm squeeze of the victim’s palm with a simple pencil inserted between his fingers? Very convenient, very simple. And how would you define leaving 2,000 inmates of a labor camp without dental service for months on end? Is it CID not to treat an excruciatingly painful toothache, or is it torture?

Now it appears that sleep deprivation is “only” CID and used on Guantanamo Bay captives. Well, congratulations, comrades! It was exactly this method that the NKVD used to produce those spectacular confessions in Stalin’s “show trials” of the 1930s. The henchmen called it “conveyer,” when a prisoner was interrogated nonstop for a week or 10 days without a wink of sleep. At the end, the victim would sign any confession without even understanding what he had signed.

I know from my own experience that interrogation is an intensely personal confrontation, a duel of wills. It is not about revealing some secrets or making confessions, it is about self-respect and human dignity. If I break, I will not be able to look into a mirror. But if I don’t, my interrogator will suffer equally. Just try to control your emotions in the heat of that battle. This is precisely why torture occurs even when it is explicitly forbidden. Now, who is going to guarantee that even the most exact definition of CID is observed under such circumstances?

But if we cannot guarantee this, then how can you force your officers and your young people in the CIA to commit acts that will scar them forever? For scarred they will be, take my word for it.

In 1971, while in Lefortovo prison in Moscow (the central KGB interrogation jail), I went on a hunger strike demanding a defense lawyer of my choice (the KGB wanted its trusted lawyer to be assigned instead). The moment was most inconvenient for my captors because my case was due in court, and they had no time to spare. So, to break me down, they started force-feeding me in a very unusual manner — through my nostrils. About a dozen guards led me from my cell to the medical unit. There they straitjacketed me, tied me to a bed, and sat on my legs so that I would not jerk. The others held my shoulders and my head while a doctor was pushing the feeding tube into my nostril.

The feeding pipe was thick, thicker than my nostril, and would not go in. Blood came gushing out of my nose and tears down my cheeks, but they kept pushing until the cartilages cracked. I guess I would have screamed if I could, but I could not with the pipe in my throat. I could breathe neither in nor out at first; I wheezed like a drowning man — my lungs felt ready to burst. The doctor also seemed ready to burst into tears, but she kept shoving the pipe farther and farther down. Only when it reached my stomach could I resume breathing, carefully. Then she poured some slop through a funnel into the pipe that would choke me if it came back up. They held me down for another half-hour so that the liquid was absorbed by my stomach and could not be vomited back, and then began to pull the pipe out bit by bit. . . . Grrrr. There had just been time for everything to start healing during the night when they came back in the morning and did it all over again, for 10 days, when the guards could stand it no longer. As it happened, it was a Sunday and no bosses were around. They surrounded the doctor: “Hey, listen, let him drink it straight from the bowl, let him sip it. It’ll be quicker for you, too, you silly old fool.” The doctor was in tears: “Do you think I want to go to jail because of you lot? No, I can’t do that. . . . ” And so they stood over my body, cursing each other, with bloody bubbles coming out of my nose. On the 12th day, the authorities surrendered; they had run out of time. I had gotten my lawyer, but neither the doctor nor those guards could ever look me in the eye again.

Today, when the White House lawyers seem preoccupied with contriving a way to stem the flow of possible lawsuits from former detainees, I strongly recommend that they think about another flood of suits, from the men and women in your armed services or the CIA agents who have been or will be engaged in CID practices. Our rich experience in Russia has shown that many will become alcoholics or drug addicts, violent criminals or, at the very least, despotic and abusive fathers and mothers.

If America’s leaders want to hunt terrorists while transforming dictatorships into democracies, they must recognize that torture, which includes CID, has historically been an instrument of oppression — not an instrument of investigation or of intelligence gathering. No country needs to invent how to “legalize” torture; the problem is rather how to stop it from happening. If it isn’t stopped, torture will destroy your nation’s important strategy to develop democracy in the Middle East. And if you cynically outsource torture to contractors and foreign agents, how can you possibly be surprised if an 18-year-old in the Middle East casts a jaundiced eye toward your reform efforts there?

Finally, think what effect your attitude has on the rest of the world, particularly in the countries where torture is still common, such as Russia, and where its citizens are still trying to combat it. Mr. Putin will be the first to say: “You see, even your vaunted American democracy cannot defend itself without resorting to torture. . . . ”

Off we go, back to the caves.

Vladimir Bukovsky, who spent nearly 12 years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and psychiatric hospitals for nonviolent human rights activities, is the author of several books, including “To Build a Castle” and “Judgment in Moscow.” Now 63, he has lived primarily in Cambridge, England, since 1976.

Iraq torture ‘worse after Saddam’
21 September 2006

Torture may be worse now in Iraq than under former leader Saddam Hussein, the UN’s chief anti-torture expert says.

Manfred Nowak said the situation in Iraq was “out of control”, with abuses being committed by security forces, militia groups and anti-US insurgents.

Bodies found in the Baghdad morgue “often bear signs of severe torture”, said the human rights office of the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq in a report.

The wounds confirmed reports given by refugees from Iraq, Mr Nowak said.

He told journalists at a briefing in Geneva that he had yet to visit Iraq, but he was able to base his information on autopsies and interviews with Iraqis in neighbouring Jordan.

“What most people tell you is that the situation as far as torture is concerned now in Iraq is totally out of hand,” the Austrian law professor said.

“The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein,” he added.

Brutal methods
The UN report says detainees’ bodies often show signs of beating using electrical cables, wounds in heads and genitals, broken legs and hands, electric and cigarette burns.

Bodies found at the Baghdad mortuary “often bear signs of severe torture including acid-induced injuries and burns caused by chemical substances”.

Many bodies have missing skin, broken bones, back, hands and legs, missing eyes, missing teeth and wounds caused by power drills or nails, the UN report says.

Victims come from prisons run by US-led multinational forces as well as by the ministries of interior and defence and private militias, the report said.

The most brutal torture methods were employed by private militias, Mr Nowak told journalists.

The report also says the frequency of sectarian bloodletting means bodies are often found which “bear signs indicating that the victims have been brutally tortured before their extra-judicial execution”.

It concludes that torture threatens “the very fabric of the country” as victims exact their own revenge and fuel further violence.

Mr Nowak said he would like to visit Iraq in person, but the current situation would not allow him to prepare an accurate report, because it would not be safe to leave Baghdad’s heavily guarded Green Zone where the Iraqi government and US leadership are situated.

House Approves Strip Search Bill
September 20, 2006

A bill approved by the U.S. House yesterday would require school districts around the country to establish policies making it easier for teachers and school officials to conduct wide scale searches of students. These searches could take the form of pat-downs, bag searches, or strip searches depending on how administrators interpret the law.

The Student Teacher Safety Act of 2006 (HR 5295) would require any school receiving federal funding — essentially every public school — to adopt policies allowing teachers and school officials to conduct random, warrantless searches of every student, at any time, on the flimsiest of pretexts. Saying they suspect that one student might have drugs could give officials the authority to search every student in the building.

DPA supporters and others who opposed this outrageous bill called their members of Congress this week to express their disapproval. However, House leaders circumvented the usual legislative procedure to bring the bill to a quick vote. It did not pass through the committee process, but went straight to the House floor. There, it was passed by a simple voice vote, so constituents cannot even find out how their Representative voted.

The bill moves next to the Senate, but it is unlikely to be considered there this session.

Bill Piper, DPA’s director of national affairs, said, “It looks like this bill was rushed to the House floor to help out the sponsor, Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY/4th), who is in a tight re-election race. This vote lets him say he’s getting things done in Washington. But I would be surprised to see a similar push in the Senate.”

HR 5295 is opposed in its current form by several groups, including the Drug Policy Alliance, Students for Sensible Drug Policy, the ACLU, the American Federation of Teachers, the National Parent Teacher Association, the American Association of School Administrators, and the National School Boards Association.

DPA will be watching the bill so that if and when it does come up again, this wide array of opponents can mobilize to stop it.

THE HORNED ONE!

my rationale for doing this (search for “political signs” and “location”, chapter 21A.20.120.C.1 and 2). more information can be found here.

basically, everybody else puts “garbage” political advertisements on public property with impunity, even though it’s illegal, and at least 50% of the political advertisement signs that are posted legally don’t follow the guidelines (“shall be removed within ten days following the election”), so, ultimately, they’re illegal as well. what i’m doing is obeying the law by removing that illegal advertisement. as a side effort, i am replacing it (when it appears on public property, as putting a sign on private property without the owner’s permission is also illegal) with a sign that is not an adverisement, therefore legal. if someone else wants to take it down, that’s their right, and i can’t stop them from excersising that right, but that doesn’t make what i’m doing illegal.

that’s my story and i’m sticking to it.

H.R. 4752: Universal National Service Act of 2006

109TH CONGRESS
                         H. R. 4752
   2D SESSION


To provide for the common defense by requiring all persons in the United
    States, including women, between the ages of 18 and 42 to perform
    a period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance
    of the national defense and homeland security, and for other purposes.




        IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
                          FEBRUARY 14, 2006
     Mr. RANGEL introduced the following bill; which was referred to the
                      Committee on Armed Services




                            A BILL
To provide for the common defense by requiring all persons
   in the United States, including women, between the ages
   of 18 and 42 to perform a period of military service
   or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the na-
   tional defense and homeland security, and for other pur-
   poses.

 1         Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representa-
 2 tives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
 3   SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE; TABLE OF CONTENTS.

 4         (a) SHORT TITLE.--This Act may be cited as the
 5 ``Universal National Service Act of 2006''.
                                         2
 1          (b) TABLE           CONTENTS.--The table of contents for
                           OF

 2 this Act is as follows:
     Sec. 1. Short title; table of contents.
     Sec. 2. National service obligation.
     Sec. 3. Two-year period of national service.
     Sec. 4. Implementation by the President.
     Sec. 5. Induction.
     Sec. 6. Deferments and postponements.
     Sec. 7. Induction exemptions.
     Sec. 8. Conscientious objection.
     Sec. 9. Discharge following national service.
     Sec. 10. Registration of females under the Military Selective Service Act.
     Sec. 11. Relation of Act to registration and induction authority of military se-
                       lective service Act.
     Sec. 12. Definitions.

 3   SEC. 2. NATIONAL SERVICE OBLIGATION.

 4          (a) OBLIGATION                SERVICE.--It is the obligation
                                   FOR

 5 of every citizen of the United States, and every other per-
 6 son residing in the United States, who is between the ages
 7 of 18 and 42 to perform a period of national service as
 8 prescribed in this Act unless exempted under the provi-
 9 sions of this Act.
10          (b) FORM            NATIONAL SERVICE.--National service
                          OF

11 under this Act shall be performed either--
12                (1) as a member of an active or reserve compo-
13          nent of the uniformed services; or
14                (2) in a civilian capacity that, as determined by
15          the President, promotes the national defense, includ-
16          ing national or community service and homeland se-
17          curity.




       HR 4752 IH
                               3
 1       (c) INDUCTION REQUIREMENTS.--The President
 2 shall provide for the induction of persons covered by sub-
 3 section (a) to perform national service under this Act.
 4       (d) SELECTION             MILITARY SERVICE.--Based
                           FOR

 5 upon the needs of the uniformed services, the President
 6 shall--
 7            (1) determine the number of persons covered by
 8       subsection (a) whose service is to be performed as a
 9       member of an active or reserve component of the
10       uniformed services; and
11            (2) select the individuals among those persons
12       who are to be inducted for military service under
13       this Act.
14       (e) CIVILIAN SERVICE.--Persons covered by sub-
15 section (a) who are not selected for military service under
16 subsection (d) shall perform their national service obliga-
17 tion under this Act in a civilian capacity pursuant to sub-
18 section (b)(2).
19   SEC. 3. TWO-YEAR PERIOD OF NATIONAL SERVICE.

20       (a) GENERAL RULE.--Except as otherwise provided
21 in this section, the period of national service performed
22 by a person under this Act shall be two years.
23       (b) GROUNDS         EXTENSION.--At the discretion of
                       FOR

24 the President, the period of military service for a member




      HR 4752 IH
                              4
 1 of the uniformed services under this Act may be ex-
 2 tended--
 3            (1) with the consent of the member, for the
 4      purpose of furnishing hospitalization, medical, or
 5      surgical care for injury or illness incurred in line of
 6      duty; or
 7            (2) for the purpose of requiring the member to
 8      compensate for any time lost to training for any
 9      cause.
10      (c) EARLY TERMINATION.--The period of national
11 service for a person under this Act shall be terminated
12 before the end of such period under the following cir-
13 cumstances:
14            (1) The voluntary enlistment and active service
15      of the person in an active or reserve component of
16      the uniformed services for a period of at least two
17      years, in which case the period of basic military
18      training and education actually served by the person
19      shall be counted toward the term of enlistment.
20            (2) The admission and service of the person as
21      a cadet or midshipman at the United States Military
22      Academy, the United States Naval Academy, the
23      United States Air Force Academy, the Coast Guard
24      Academy, or the United States Merchant Marine
25      Academy.


     HR 4752 IH
                                5
 1            (3) The enrollment and service of the person in
 2       an officer candidate program, if the person has
 3       signed an agreement to accept a Reserve commission
 4       in the appropriate service with an obligation to serve
 5       on active duty if such a commission is offered upon
 6       completion of the program.
 7            (4) Such other grounds as the President may
 8       establish.
 9   SEC. 4. IMPLEMENTATION BY THE PRESIDENT.

10       (a) IN GENERAL.--The President shall prescribe
11 such regulations as are necessary to carry out this Act.
12       (b) MATTER         BE COVERED           REGULATIONS.--
                       TO                  BY

13 Such regulations shall include specification of the fol-
14 lowing:
15            (1) The types of civilian service that may be
16       performed for a person's national service obligation
17       under this Act.
18            (2) Standards for satisfactory performance of
19       civilian service and of penalties for failure to per-
20       form civilian service satisfactorily.
21            (3) The manner in which persons shall be se-
22       lected for induction under this Act, including the
23       manner in which those selected will be notified of
24       such selection.




      HR 4752 IH
                                 6
 1              (4) All other administrative matters in connec-
 2         tion with the induction of persons under this Act
 3         and the registration, examination, and classification
 4         of such persons.
 5              (5) A means to determine questions or claims
 6         with respect to inclusion for, or exemption or
 7         deferment from induction under this Act, including
 8         questions of conscientious objection.
 9              (6) Standards for compensation and benefits
10         for persons performing their national service obliga-
11         tion under this Act through civilian service.
12              (7) Such other matters as the President deter-
13         mines necessary to carry out this Act.
14         (c) USE        PRIOR ACT.--To the extent determined
                     OF

15 appropriate by the President, the President may use for
16 purposes of this Act the procedures provided in the Mili-
17 tary Selective Service Act (50 U.S.C. App. 451 et seq.),
18 including procedures for registration, selection, and induc-
19 tion.
20   SEC. 5. INDUCTION.

21         (a) IN GENERAL.--Every person subject to induction
22 for national service under this Act, except those whose
23 training is deferred or postponed in accordance with this
24 Act, shall be called and inducted by the President for such
25 service at the time and place specified by the President.


      HR 4752 IH
                                 7
 1       (b) AGE LIMITS.--A person may be inducted under
 2 this Act only if the person has attained the age of 18 and
 3 has not attained the age of 42.
 4       (c) VOLUNTARY INDUCTION.--A person subject to in-
 5 duction under this Act may volunteer for induction at a
 6 time other than the time at which the person is otherwise
 7 called for induction.
 8       (d) EXAMINATION; CLASSIFICATION.--Every person
 9 subject to induction under this Act shall, before induction,
10 be physically and mentally examined and shall be classified
11 as to fitness to perform national service. The President
12 may apply different classification standards for fitness for
13 military service and fitness for civilian service.
14   SEC. 6. DEFERMENTS AND POSTPONEMENTS.

15       (a) HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS.--A person who is pur-
16 suing a standard course of study, on a full-time basis, in
17 a secondary school or similar institution of learning shall
18 be entitled to have induction under this Act postponed
19 until the person--
20            (1) obtains a high school diploma;
21            (2) ceases to pursue satisfactorily such course
22       of study; or
23            (3) attains the age of 20.
24       (b) HARDSHIP            DISABILITY.--Deferments from
                           AND

25 national service under this Act may be made for--


      HR 4752 IH
                               8
 1            (1) extreme hardship; or
 2            (2) physical or mental disability.
 3       (c) TRAINING CAPACITY.--The President may post-
 4 pone or suspend the induction of persons for military serv-
 5 ice under this Act as necessary to limit the number of per-
 6 sons receiving basic military training and education to the
 7 maximum number that can be adequately trained.
 8       (d) TERMINATION.--No deferment or postponement
 9 of induction under this Act shall continue after the cause
10 of such deferment or postponement ceases.
11   SEC. 7. INDUCTION EXEMPTIONS.

12       (a) QUALIFICATIONS.--No person may be inducted
13 for military service under this Act unless the person is
14 acceptable to the Secretary concerned for training and
15 meets the same health and physical qualifications applica-
16 ble under section 505 of title 10, United States Code, to
17 persons seeking original enlistment in a regular compo-
18 nent of the Armed Forces.
19       (b) OTHER MILITARY SERVICE.--No person shall be
20 liable for induction under this Act who--
21            (1) is serving, or has served honorably for at
22       least six months, in any component of the uniformed
23       services on active duty; or
24            (2) is or becomes a cadet or midshipman at the
25       United States Military Academy, the United States


      HR 4752 IH
                               9
 1       Naval Academy, the United States Air Force Acad-
 2       emy, the Coast Guard Academy, the United States
 3       Merchant Marine Academy, a midshipman of a Navy
 4       accredited State maritime academy, a member of the
 5       Senior Reserve Officers' Training Corps, or the
 6       naval aviation college program, so long as that per-
 7       son satisfactorily continues in and completes at least
 8       two years training therein.
 9   SEC. 8. CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTION.

10       (a) CLAIMS        CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR.--Noth-
                      AS

11 ing in this Act shall be construed to require a person to
12 be subject to combatant training and service in the uni-
13 formed services, if that person, by reason of sincerely held
14 moral, ethical, or religious beliefs, is conscientiously op-
15 posed to participation in war in any form.
16       (b) ALTERNATIVE NONCOMBATANT                   CIVILIAN
                                                   OR

17 SERVICE.--A person who claims exemption from combat-
18 ant training and service under subsection (a) and whose
19 claim is sustained by the local board shall--
20            (1) be assigned to noncombatant service (as de-
21       fined by the President), if the person is inducted
22       into the uniformed services; or
23            (2) be ordered by the local board, if found to
24       be conscientiously opposed to participation in such
25       noncombatant service, to perform national civilian


      HR 4752 IH
                               10
 1       service for the period specified in section 3(a) and
 2       subject to such regulations as the President may
 3       prescribe.
 4   SEC. 9. DISCHARGE FOLLOWING NATIONAL SERVICE.

 5       (a) DISCHARGE.--Upon completion or termination of
 6 the obligation to perform national service under this Act,
 7 a person shall be discharged from the uniformed services
 8 or from civilian service, as the case may be, and shall not
 9 be subject to any further service under this Act.
10       (b) COORDINATION WITH OTHER AUTHORITIES.--
11 Nothing in this section shall limit or prohibit the call to
12 active service in the uniformed services of any person who
13 is a member of a regular or reserve component of the uni-
14 formed services.
15   SEC. 10. REGISTRATION OF FEMALES UNDER THE MILI-

16                  TARY SELECTIVE SERVICE ACT.

17       (a) REGISTRATION REQUIRED.--Section 3(a) of the
18 Military Selective Service Act (50 U.S.C. 453(a)) is
19 amended--
20             (1) by striking ``male'' both places it appears;
21             (2) by inserting ``or herself'' after ``himself'';
22       and
23             (3) by striking ``he'' and inserting ``the per-
24       son''.




      HR 4752 IH
                                11
 1        (b) CONFORMING AMENDMENT.--Section 16(a) of
 2 the Military Selective Service Act (50 U.S.C. App. 466(a))
 3 is amended by striking ``men'' and inserting ``persons''.
 4   SEC. 11. RELATION OF ACT TO REGISTRATION AND INDUC-

 5                   TION AUTHORITY OF MILITARY SELECTIVE

 6                   SERVICE ACT.

 7        (a) REGISTRATION.--Section 4 of the Military Selec-
 8 tive Service Act (50 U.S.C. App. 454) is amended by in-
 9 serting after subsection (g) the following new subsection:
10        ``(h) This section does not apply with respect to the
11 induction of persons into the Armed Forces pursuant to
12 the Universal National Service Act of 2006.''.
13        (b) INDUCTION.--Section 17(c) of the Military Selec-
14 tive Service Act (50 U.S.C. App. 467(c)) is amended by
15 striking ``now or hereafter'' and all that follows through
16 the period at the end and inserting ``inducted pursuant
17 to the Universal National Service Act of 2006.''.
18   SEC. 12. DEFINITIONS.

19        In this Act:
20             (1) The term ``military service'' means service
21        performed as a member of an active or reserve com-
22        ponent of the uniformed services.
23             (2) The term ``Secretary concerned'' means the
24        Secretary of Defense with respect to the Army,
25        Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps, the Secretary


       HR 4752 IH
                            12
 1      of Homeland Security with respect to the Coast
 2      Guard, the Secretary of Commerce, with respect to
 3      matters concerning the National Oceanic and At-
 4      mospheric Administration, and the Secretary of
 5      Health and Human Services, with respect to matters
 6      concerning the Public Health Service.
 7           (3) The term ``United States'', when used in a
 8      geographical sense, means the several States, the
 9      District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Is-
10      lands, and Guam.
11           (4) The term ``uniformed services'' means the
12      Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard,
13      commissioned corps of the National Oceanic and At-
14      mospheric Administration, and commissioned corps
15      of the Public Health Service.
                             




     HR 4752 IH

Next Attack Imminent: Muslims ordered to leave the United States
By Paul L. Williams & David Dastych
September 16, 2006

Urgent news from Abu Dawood, one of the newly appointed commanders of the al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan:

Final preparations have been made for the American Hiroshima, a major attack on the U. S. Muslims living in the United States should leave the country without further warning.

The attack will be commandeered by Adnan el Shukrijumah (“Jaffer Tayyer” or “Jafer the Pilot”), a naturalized American citizen, who was raised in Brooklyn and educated in southern Florida.

The al Qaeda operatives who will launch this attack are awaiting final orders. They remain in place in cities throughout the country. Many are masquerading as Christians and have adopted Christian names.

Al Qaeda and the Taliban will also launch a major strike (known as the “Badar Operation” against the coalition forces in Afghanistan during the holy month of Ramadan.

The American people probably will be treated to a final audio message from Osama bin Laden which will be aired some time later.

The announcements from Abu Dawood were obtained by Hamid Mir, the only journalist to interview Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Taliban leader Mullah Omar in the wake of 9/11. Mir earlier reports regarding the resurgence of the Taliban with support from Iran and Russia and an unofficial truce (reported by some Western sources) between President Pervez Musharraf and al Qaeda have been panned out by the press in recent months.

Mr. Mir interviewed Dawood (no specific date indicated) at the tomb of Sultan Mehmud Ghaznawi, on the outskirts of Kabul. Dawood and the al Qaeda leaders who accompanied him sported short beards and were dressed casually, for disguise. The al Qaeda commander had contacted Mir by cell-phone to arrange the meeting. The contents of the encounter are as follows:

Q: How did you have my local mobile number?

A: We watched you on Geo TV walking in the mountains near Kabul with British troops. You were embedded with our enemies. We were sure that you are staying in one of the few hotels or guest houses in Kabul. We were looking for you in Serena and Intercontinental hotels, but then some Taliban friends informed us that they had your phone number and you might visit them in Zabul [an Afghani province]. We got your number from Commander [Muhsen] Khayber. [Khayber was responsible for a homicide bombing in Casablanca that killed 32 people]. Don’t worry about that. We will not make any harm to you. We just want to warn you that you better don’t take any rides in the tanks and humvis of the Western Forces; they are not safe for any journalist in Afghanistan.

Q: Thanks for your concern; can I know your name?

A: Yes my name is Abu Dawood, if you remember, we have already met in Kunar two years ago, but at that time I had a long beard, now I have a small one. You were there in the mountains, close to Asadabad [a small village in the Kunar province of eastern Afghanistan] and you met some Al Qaeda fighters. I was among them.

Q: OK. I just want to say that I am a journalist, I have to speak to both sides of a conflict, for getting an objective view and that is why I was traveling with the British troops; now I am sitting with you and that is my real job. I have interviewed Osama bin Laden as well as Condoleezza Rice, General Pervez Musharraf and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan. I hope you will appreciate my objective approach?

A: You have claimed to be objective, but you and your TV channel have always given much time to the propaganda of our enemies. Anyhow, it was our moral responsibility to warn you that you better try to avoid traveling with the British, American, Canadian, French, Spanish and Italian troops in Afghanistan, we will target all of them, we don’t want that people like you suffer by our attacks, it is not good for you, and at least you should not be killed with the enemies of Islam. I am sure, brother Khayber have informed you that the Taliban will launch a big operation against the Crusader Forces, in the holy month of Ramadan; don’t come to Afghanistan in Ramadan. You will see a lot of fadaee amalyat [“suicide bombings”] in the coming days, Kabul will become a graveyard of NATO and ISAF.

Q: Yes Khayber told me about the “Badar Operation” in Ramadan. I think you are an Afghani but you are not a Talib, are you a member of Al Qaeda?

A: You are right. But we are with the Taliban, just helping them, fighting under their command. Every Al Qaeda fighter can become a Talib, but every Talib cannot become Al Qaeda.

Q: So where is Sheikh Osama bin Laden?

A: I don’t know exactly, but he is still in command of Al Qaeda, and he is in contact with his Mujaheddin all over the world.

Q: Why there was no new video statement from him, in last two years?

A: Because the CIA can feed his fresh picture to the computers fitted on their Predator planes, and these planes can get him, like Nek Muhammad or Akbar Bugti. But he has released many audio messages this year. Listen to him carefully. Don’t underestimate his warnings. America is playing with the security of Muslims all over the world, now it is our turn again. Our brothers are ready to attack inside America. We will breach their security again. There is no timeframe for our attack inside America; we can do it any time.

Q: What do you mean by another attack in America?

A: Yes a bigger attack than September 11th 2001. Brother Adnan [el Shukrijumah] will lead that attack, Inshallah.

Q:Who is Adnan?

A: He is our old friend. The last time, I met him in early 2004, in Khost. He came to Khost from the North Waziristan. He met his leaders and friends in Khost. He is very well known in Al Qaeda. He is an American and a friend of Muhammad Atta, who led 9/11 attacks five years ago. We call him “Jaffer al Tayyar” [“Jafer the Pilot”]; he is very brave and intelligent. Bush is aware that brother Adnan has smuggled deadly materials inside America from the Mexican border. Bush is silent about him, because he doesn’t want to panic his people. Sheikh Osama bin Laden has completed his cycle of warnings. You know, he is man of his words, he is not a politician; he always does what he says. If he said it many times that Americans will see new attacks, they will definitely see new attacks. He is a real Mujahid. Americans will not win this war, which they have started against Muslims. Americans are the biggest supporters of the biggest terrorist in the world, which is Israel. You have witnessed the brutality of the Israelis in the recent 34-day war against Lebanese civilians. 9/11 was a revenge of Palestinian children, killed by the US-made weapons, supplied to Israel. The next attack on America would be a revenge of Lebanese children killed by US-made cluster bombs. Bush and Blair are the Crusaders, and Muslim leaders, like Musharraf and [Afghani President Hamid] Karzai are their collaborators, we will teach a lesson to all of them. We are also not happy with some religious parties in Pakistan and Egypt, they got votes in the name of Mujaheddin, and then, they collaborated with Musharraf and [Egyptian President] Hosni Mubarak. Now look at all of them, Musharraf and Karzai don’t trust each other, the CIA and ISI don’t trust each other, all the hypocrites and enemies of Mujaheddin are suspecting each other; this help to us is coming from Heavens. Allah is with us.

Q: But if you attack inside America again, then Muslims living in America will face lot of problems, why would you like to create new problems for your brothers and sisters?

A: Muslims should leave America. We cannot stop our attack just because of the American Muslims; they must realize that American forces are killing innocent Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq; we have the right to respond back, in the same manner, in the enemy’s homeland. The American Muslims are like a human shield for our enemy; they must leave New York and Washington.

Q: But your fighters are also using the American Muslims as their shield, if there are no Muslims in America, then there would be no Al Qaeda, may be the Americans would feel safer?

A: No, not at all. We have a different plan for the next attack. You will see. Americans will hardly find out any Muslim names, after the next attack. Most of our brothers are living in Western countries, with Jewish and Christian names, with passports of Western countries. This time, someone with the name of Muhammad Atta will not attack inside America, it would be some David, Richard or Peter.

Q: So you will not attack America, until Muslims are there?

A: I am not saying that, I am saying that Muslims must leave America, but we can attack America anytime. Our cycle of warnings has been completed, now we have fresh edicts from some prominent Muslim scholars to destroy our enemy, this is our defending of Jihad; the enemy has entered in our homes and we have the right to enter in their homes, they are killing us, we will kill them.

U.S. Holds AP Photographer in Iraq
Sep 18, 2006
By ROBERT TANNER

The U.S. military in Iraq has imprisoned an Associated Press photographer for five months, accusing him of being a security threat but never filing charges or permitting a public hearing.

Military officials said that Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi citizen, was being held for “imperative reasons of security” under United Nations resolutions, and a Pentagon spokesman reiterated that stance on Monday. AP executives said the news cooperative’s review of Hussein’s work did not find anything to indicate inappropriate contact with insurgents, and any evidence against him should be brought to the Iraqi criminal justice system.

Hussein, 35, is a native of Fallujah who began work for the AP in September 2004. He photographed events in Fallujah and Ramadi until he was detained on April 12 of this year.

“We want the rule of law to prevail. He either needs to be charged or released. Indefinite detention is not acceptable,” said Tom Curley, AP’s president and chief executive officer. “We’ve come to the conclusion that this is unacceptable under Iraqi law, or Geneva Conventions, or any military procedure.”

Hussein is one of an estimated 14,000 people detained by the U.S. military worldwide – 13,000 of them in Iraq. They are held in limbo where few are ever charged with a specific crime or given a chance before any court or tribunal to argue for their freedom.

In Hussein’s case, the military has not provided any concrete evidence to back up the vague allegations they have raised about him, Curley and other AP executives said.

The military said Hussein was captured with two insurgents, including Hamid Hamad Motib, an alleged leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. “He has close relationships with persons known to be responsible for kidnappings, smuggling, improvised explosive device (IED) attacks and other attacks on coalition forces,” according to a May 7 e-mail from U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Jack Gardner, who oversees all coalition detainees in Iraq.

“The information available establishes that he has relationships with insurgents and is afforded access to insurgent activities outside the normal scope afforded to journalists conducting legitimate activities,” Gardner wrote to AP International Editor John Daniszewski.

Hussein proclaims his innocence, according to his Iraqi lawyer, Badie Arief Izzat, and believes he has been unfairly targeted because his photos from Ramadi and Fallujah were deemed unwelcome by the coalition forces.

That Hussein was captured at the same time as insurgents doesn’t make him one of them, said Kathleen Carroll, AP’s executive editor.

“Journalists have always had relationships with people that others might find unsavory,” she said. “We’re not in this to choose sides, we’re to report what’s going on from all sides.”

AP executives in New York and Baghdad have sought to persuade U.S. officials to provide additional information about allegations against Hussein and to have his case transferred to the Iraqi criminal justice system. The AP contacted military leaders in Iraq and the Pentagon, and later the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad.

The AP has worked quietly until now, believing that would be the best approach. But with the U.S. military giving no indication it would change its stance, the news cooperative has decided to make public Hussein’s imprisonment, hoping the spotlight will bring attention to his case and that of thousands of others now held in Iraq, Curley said.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said on Monday that military authorities have reviewed Hussein’s case and recommended his continued detention. Whitman said it would be up to Iraq’s criminal court to charge Hussein.

But Whitman is being “disingenuous,” said Dave Tomlin, AP’s associate general counsel, because the military’s decision to detain him indefinitely means that the Iraqi court system can’t charge him. The AP has specifically asked that his case be turned over to Iraqi courts, so he gets a public hearing.

One of Hussein’s photos was part of a package of 20 photographs that won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography last year. His contribution was an image of four insurgents in Fallujah firing a mortar and small arms during the U.S.-led offensive in the city in November 2004.

In what several AP editors described as a typical path for locally hired staff in the midst of a conflict, Hussein, a shopkeeper who sold cell phones and computers in Fallujah, was hired in the city as a general helper because of his local knowledge.

As the situation in Fallujah eroded in 2004, he expressed a desire to become a photographer. Hussein was given training and camera equipment and hired in September of that year as a freelancer, paid on a per-picture basis, according to Santiago Lyon, AP’s director of photography. A month later, he was put on a monthly retainer.

During the U.S.-led offensive in Fallujah in November 2004, he stayed on after his family fled. “He had good access. He was able to photograph not only the results of the attacks on Fallujah, he was also able to photograph members of the insurgency on occasion,” Lyon said. “That was very difficult to achieve at that time.”

After fleeing later in the offensive, leaving his camera behind in the rush to escape, Hussein arrived in Baghdad, where the AP gave him a new camera. He then went to work in Ramadi which, like Fallujah, has been a center of insurgent violence.

In its own effort to determine whether Hussein had gotten too close to the insurgency, the AP has reviewed his work record, interviewed senior photo editors who worked on his images and examined all 420 photographs in the news cooperative’s archives that were taken by Hussein, Lyon said.

The military in Iraq has frequently detained journalists who arrive quickly at scenes of violence, accusing them of getting advance notice from insurgents, Lyon said. But “that’s just good journalism. Getting to the event quickly is something that characterizes good journalism anywhere in the world. It does not indicate prior knowledge,” he said.

Out of Hussein’s body of work, only 37 photos show insurgents or people who could be insurgents, Lyon said. “The vast majority of the 420 images show the aftermath or the results of the conflict – blown up houses, wounded people, dead people, street scenes,” he said.

Only four photos show the wreckage of still-burning U.S. military vehicles.

“Do we know absolutely everything about him, and what he did before he joined us? No. Are we satisfied that what he did since he joined us was appropriate for the level of work we expected from him? Yes,” Lyon said. “When we reviewed the work he submitted to us, we found it appropriate to what we’d asked him to do.”

The AP does not knowingly hire combatants or anyone who is part of a story, company executives said. But hiring competent local staff in combat areas is vital to the news service, because often only local people can pick their way around the streets with a reasonable degree of safety.

“We want people who are not part of a story. Sometimes it is a judgment call. If someone seems to be thuggish, or like a fighter, you certainly wouldn’t hire them,” Daniszewski said. After they are hired, their work is checked carefully for signs of bias.

Lyon said every image from local photographers is always “thoroughly checked and vetted” by experienced editors. “In every case where there have been images of insurgents, questions have been asked about circumstances under which the image was taken, and what the image shows,” he said.

Executives said it’s not uncommon for AP news people to be picked up by coalition forces and detained for hours, days or occasionally weeks, but never this long. Several hundred journalists in Iraq have been detained, some briefly and some for several weeks, according to Scott Horton, a New York-based lawyer hired by the AP to work on Hussein’s case.

Horton also worked on behalf of an Iraqi cameraman employed by CBS, Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein, who was detained for one year before his case was sent to an Iraqi court on charges of insurgent activity. He was acquitted for lack of evidence.

AP officials emphasized the military has not provided the company concrete evidence of its claims against Bilal Hussein, or provided him a chance to offer a defense.

“He’s a Sunni Arab from a tribe in that area. I’m sure he does know some nasty people. But is he a participant in the insurgency? I don’t think that’s been proven,” Daniszewski said.

Information provided to the AP by the military to support the continued detention hasn’t withstood scrutiny, when it could be checked, Daniszewski said.

For example, he said, the AP had been told that Hussein was involved with the kidnapping of two Arab journalists in Ramadi.

But those journalists, tracked down by the AP, said Hussein had helped them after they were released by their captors without money or a vehicle in a dangerous part of Ramadi. After a journalist acquaintance put them in touch with Hussein, the photographer picked them up, gave them shelter and helped get them out of town, they said.

The journalists said they had never been contacted by multinational forces for their account.

Horton said the military has provided contradictory accounts of whether Hussein himself was a U.S. target last April or if he was caught up in a broader sweep.

The military said bomb-making materials were found in the apartment where Hussein was captured but it never detailed what those materials were. The military said he tested positive for traces of explosives. Horton said that was virtually guaranteed for anyone on the streets of Ramadi at that time.

Hussein has been a frequent target of conservative critics on the Internet, who raised questions about his images months before the military detained him. One blogger and author, Michelle Malkin, wrote about Hussein’s detention on the day of his arrest, saying she’d been tipped by a military source.

Carroll said the role of journalists can be misconstrued and make them a target of critics. But that criticism is misplaced, she said.

“How can you know what a conflict is like if you’re only with one side of the combatants?” she said. “Journalism doesn’t work if we don’t report and photograph all sides.”

THE HORNED ONE!

so i made a couple of signs and decided that they didn’t look the way i wanted them to with the sign as the background, so i made another stencil (the signs are good for that, and there are plenty of them, heh heh heh… 8) ), which is just the background, and i must say that they look substantially better with both of them in place.

livejournal has arbitrarily changed my style again, and this time, even though i have a customised theme layer with my name on it when i view “my layers”, it doesn’t show up on the dropdown menu when i choose “look and feel” from the customise style page. 8P

EDIT: however, when i select the right style and click “save”, suddenly my style does show up on the dropdown menu, and i can select it and click “save” again and everything is back to normal. now i don’t have to wait a month before some drone at LJ says they’re thinking about working on the problem eventually! whee!

THE HORNED ONE!

also, i went by the location from which my signs in response to the jeezis signs have been regularly being removed this morning, on my way to home depot, and there were no signs posted, but when i came back from home depot, there were jeezis signs posted there… so i removed them. i must have missed them by no more than 30 minutes, because there were no signs when i was going, but there were when i was coming back… which means that the signs themselves were not there for more than 15 minutes or so… heh heh heh… 8)

oh yeah… the fremont philharmonic played at the great wallingford wurst festival for the third year in a row today.

my sousaphone is already broken… well, more broken… and because of the fact that i have absolutely no room, even to simply turn around, much less actually manhandle something as large as a sousaphone, this is all the repair work i can do to it. i’ve already taken it completely apart once, so i could hone the valves (i had to store most of the parts on the living room couch and chair when i had the valve cluster off), because otherwise the first valve was sticking pretty badly. please note: i am not showing this repair because i am proud of it, i am showing it as a way of showing what my tiny, cramped space has reduced me to. yes, you’re seeing right, here: those are zip-ties holding the horn together. i had to reinforce it with something, and i don’t have room to do stuff like solder, in spite of the fact that, if i did have room, soldering it would be the repair of choice, and would only take about 10 minutes.

needless to say, i’m depressed, in spite of the fact that i sold a beaded sivalingam necklace. a good deal of my depression is because things like this, and things like it, and other political things closer to home, are still leaking in to my realm of consciousness, in spite of the fact that i’ve been making a concerted effort to keep them out. it’s gonna take a lot more than one sivalingam necklace to make up for that.

i was thinking about simply not posting today, because everybody else will be posting 9.11 stuff and i am totally not interested in buying into remembering an atrocity perpetrated by criminals, both foreign and domestic, and even moreso because i don’t buy into the whole “fear of terrorists” and giving up basic rights in the name of “homeland security” thing (there’s a whole other rant floating around out there about how the only people to use the word “homeland” do so to evoke fear into the hearts of their fellow human beings in order to manipulate them – like the nazis), to say the least… but then i saw a post by my friend howlin’ hobbit about the 11th of september being the 100th anniversary of satyagraha, and that’s a cause i can get firmly behind…

and besides, i’ve got a list of interesting links about brain injury, starting with the wikipedia article on cerebral arteriovenous malformation and taking off from there into craniotomy and trephanation, and, from there into the WHO surgical instructions on burr holes, and finally an interview with a trephanee who underwent the operation in 2000 and recommends against it.

sillyville is now officially open at the puyallup fair. it was really cool. we got there at 9:30 and the gates were supposed to open to the general public at 10:00. we parked, literaly, no more than 100 yards from the purple gate, which is right next to sillyville, and because of the fact that it was supposed to rain today, which it didn’t, by the time we were done performing at 12:30, there were still no where near the crowds of people that are usually at the fair, which meant that we didn’t have to wait in line for anything. the only problem was that we performed for 2 hours, which was about an hour and a half longer than my embrochure was there for, even with the “correct” mouthpiece… which means that when we perform at the puyallup fair next year (three separate concerts, all on one day!) i’d better have practiced enough that my lip doesn’t completely die. but, you know, i originally auditioned for the BSSB because i wanted to play my trombone more frequently, and that’s precisely what i got, so i should be at least part of the way there by next year, if not completely there.

moe bought a flame-coloured pimp hat…

hee hee… 8)

Pakistan signs pact with pro-Taleban militants
By Haji Mujtaba
September 6, 2006

MIRANSHAH, Pakistan – Pro-Taleban militants and the Pakistani government reached a peace deal overnight under which the militants agreed to stop attacks in both Pakistan and across the border in Afghanistan, negotiators said.

Hundreds of Pakistani troops and militants have been killed in the Waziristan region as the government has attempted to push its authority into semi-autonomous tribal lands on the Afghan border as part of efforts in the US-led war on terrorism.

“The agreement will pave the way for permanent peace in the region,” said Malik Shahzada, a member of a tribal council that has been overseeing the negotiations with the rebels.

The agreement was signed on a dusty football ground at a college in Miranshah, the main town of the North Waziristan region.

Scores of members of the tribal council, most in turbans and with long beards, watched as a Pakistani army commander, Major General Azhar Ali Shah, embraced representatives of the militants after the pact was signed.

Many members of the al Qaeda network and the Taleban fled to Waziristan after US-led forces overthrew the Taleban in Afghanistan in late 2001.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who is due to visit Afghanistan on Wednesday for security talks with President Hamid Karzai, has said no group could use Pakistan as a springboard for attacks on other countries.

But Afghanistan and its allies have long complained the Taleban are able to benefit from havens on the Pakistani side of the long, rugged border.

Musharraf has also vowed to clear foreign militants from the Pakistani side of the border but Tuesday’s agreement said foreigners could stay in Waziristan, as long as they kept the peace.

According to a copy of the agreement obtained by Reuters, the militants agreed that all foreigners would have to leave but those unable to do so would have to respect the peace deal.

Osama bin Laden is believed to be hiding out somewhere along the Afghan-Pakistani border but security analysts doubt he is in Waziristan, given the security forces’ focus on the area.

Several of bin Laden’s Arab lieutenants have been killed in North Waziristan and US drone aircraft have carried out missile strikes on al Qaeda targets from across the border in Afghanistan.

Security officials say some central Asian militants are also in the area.

The fiercely independent ethnic Pashtun tribes that inhabit both sides of the porous border have never been brought under the control of any government, including British colonial rulers.

The Waziristan-based militants had been demanding free movement into Afghanistan, which the tribes have always enjoyed, to support the Taleban in their jihad, or holy war, there.

But that had been ruled out under the deal, an official said.

“Except for trade, people will not be allowed to go to Afghanistan to launch attacks,” said Nek Zaman, a member of the tribal council who is also a member of the Pakistani parliament.

Under the agreement, the government will stop air and ground operations in Waziristan and dismantle newly built checkposts.

People arrested during military operations would be released and confiscated property, including weapons, would be returned, according to the agreement.

Pakistan Gives Bin Laden Free Pass
By Brian Ross
September 06, 2006

Osama bin Laden, America’s most wanted man, will not face capture in Pakistan if he agrees to lead a “peaceful life,” Pakistani officials tell ABC News.

The surprising announcement comes as Pakistani army officials announced they were pulling their troops out of the North Waziristan region as part of a “peace deal” with the Taliban.

If he is in Pakistan, bin Laden “would not be taken into custody,” Major General Shaukat Sultan Khan told ABC News in a telephone interview, “as long as one is being like a peaceful citizen.”

Bin Laden is believed to be hiding somewhere in the tribal areas of Pakistan, near the Afghanistan border, but U.S. officials say his precise location is unknown.

In addition to the pullout of Pakistani troops, the “peace agreement” between Pakistan and the Taliban also provides for the Pakistani army to return captured Taliban weapons and prisoners.

“What this means is that the Taliban and al Qaeda leadership have effectively carved out a sanctuary inside Pakistan,” said ABC News consultant Richard Clarke, the former White House counter-terrorism director.

The agreement was signed on the same day President Bush said the United States was working with its allies “to deny terrorists the enclaves they seek to establish in ungoverned areas across the world.”

The Pakistani Army had gone into Waziristan, under heavy pressure from the United States, but faced a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of the Taliban and al Qaeda fighters.

“They’re throwing the towel,” said Alexis Debat, who is a Senior Fellow at the Nixon Center and an ABC News consultant. “They’re giving al Qaeda and the Taliban a blank check and saying essentially make yourselves at home in the tribal areas,” Debat said.

Pakistan Denies Bin Laden Gets a Pass
By Brian Ross
September 06, 2006

The government of Pakistan today denied it would allow Osama bin Laden to avoid capture under terms of a peace agreement it signed with Taliban leaders in the country’s North Waziristan area.

“If he is in Pakistan, today or any time later, he will be taken into custody and brought to justice,” the Pakistani ambassador to the United States, Mahmud Ali Durrani, said in a statement.

The ambassador said a Pakistani military spokesman, Major General Shaukat Sultan, had been “grossly misquoted” when he told ABC News Tuesday that bin Laden would not be taken into custody “as long as one is being like a peaceful citizen.” The comments were recorded in a telephone interview with ABC News.

Q. ABC News: If bin Laden or Zawahiri were there, they could stay?

A. Gen. Sultan: No one of that kind can stay. If someone is there he will have to surrender, he will have to live like a good citizen, his whereabouts, exit travel would be known to the authorities.

Q. ABC News: So, he wouldn’t be taken into custody? He would stay there?

A. Gen. Sultan: No, as long as one is staying like a peaceful citizen, one would not be taken into custody. One has to stay like a peaceful citizen and not allowed to participate in any kind of terrorist activity.

General Sultan said today it was “hair splitting” to speculate whether troops would be sent in if bin Laden was found in North Waziristan.

“If someone is found there, we will see what is to be done,” General Sultan said today. “Pakistan is committed to the war on terror, and of course we will go after any terrorist found to be operating here,” he said.

Under the terms of the peace agreement, the Pakistani Army promised to cease action in the area and to return captured Taliban weapons and soldiers.

Former White House counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke, an ABC News consultant, said “What this means is that the Taliban and al Queida leadership have effectively carved out a sanctuary inside Pakistan.”

General Sultan said today he “rejected” the idea that Pakistan had created a safe haven for terrorists.

the gamelan x concert was incredible. they had all of the traditional instruments of the balaganjur, plus they had a clarinet, flute, trombone, trumpet, sousaphone(!!) and a trap-set, plus a whole bunch of oil-can drums, with which they did an interesting taiko-like piece with four drummers and six drums and movements so fast and complex that if one of them had put their foot down in the wrong place, the whole piece would have fallen apart. they did a piece with the bass gongs and the sousaphone that was EXCELLENT, but i could just be saying that because i like the low end of any piece of music, and this featured the low end. they also did a brief demonstration of Kecak with audience participation. now it’s time to sleep.

i have an acupuncture appointment at noon. later i’m going to see a Gamelan X concert, which is a group i mentioned on the 10th of july. tomorrow the ballard sedentary sousa band has a performance at the puyallup fair, where we are playing for the grand opening of sillyville. the next day we’re playing at the phinney ridge neighborhood association for the greenwood senior center. woo.

from , by way of everyone else…

My Personality

thanks to

WTF?????

whether you like it or not, bush is a dictator on the same level as adolph hitler, pol pot or saddam hussain. something must be done to stop him… NOW!!

Bush Aims to Kill War Crimes Act
By Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith
05 September 2006

The US War Crimes Act of 1996 makes it a felony to commit grave violations of the Geneva Conventions. The Washington Post recently reported that the Bush administration is quietly circulating draft legislation to eliminate crucial parts of the War Crimes Act. Observers on The Hill say the Administration plans to slip it through Congress this fall while there still is a guaranteed Republican majority-perhaps as part of the military appropriations bill, the proposals for Guantánamo tribunals or a new catch-all “anti-terrorism” package. Why are they doing it, and how can they be stopped?

American prohibitions on abuse of prisoners go back to the Lieber Code promulgated by Abraham Lincoln in 1863. The first international Geneva Convention dates from the following year.

After World War II, international law protecting prisoners of war and all noncombatants was codified in the Geneva Conventions. They were ratified by the US Senate and, under Article II of the Constitution, they thereby became the law of the land.

Wishing to rebuke the unpunished war crimes of dictators like Saddam Hussein, in 1996 a Republican-dominated Congress passed the War Crimes Act without a dissenting vote. It defined a “war crime” as any “grave breach” of the Geneva Conventions. It thereby advanced a global trend of mutual reinforcement between national and international law.

The War Crimes Act was little noticed until the disclosure of Alberto Gonzales’s infamous 2002 “torture memo.” Gonzales, then serving as presidential counsel, advised President Bush to declare that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to people the United States captured in Afghanistan. That, Gonzales wrote, “substantially reduced the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act.”

Noting that the statute “prohibits the commission of a ‘war crime’ by or against a US person, including US officials,” he warned that “it is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges.” The President’s determination that the Geneva Conventions did not apply “would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution.”

Unfortunately for top Bush officials, that “solid defense” was demolished this summer when the Supreme Court in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld ruled that the Geneva Conventions were indeed the law of the land.

The Court singled out Geneva’s Common Article 3, which provides a minimum standard for the treatment of all noncombatants under all circumstances. They must be “treated humanely” and must not be subjected to “cruel treatment,” “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment,” or “the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.”

As David Cole of the Georgetown University Law Center pointed out in the August 10 issue of The New York Review of Books, the Supreme Court’s decision in Hamdan v. Rusmfeld “suggests that President Bush has already committed a war crime, simply by establishing the [Guantánamo] military tribunals and subjecting detainees to them” because “the Court found that the tribunals violate Common Article 3-and under the War Crimes Act, any violation of Common Article 3 is a war crime.” A similar argument would indicate that top US officials have also committed war crimes by justifying interrogation methods that, according to the testimony of US military lawyers, also violate Common Article 3.

Lo and behold, the legislation the Administration has circulated on Capitol Hill would decriminalize such acts retroactively. Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, told the Associated Press on August 10, “I think what this bill can do is in effect immunize past crimes. That’s why it’s so dangerous.” Human rights attorney Scott Horton told Democracy Now! on August 16 that one of the purposes of the proposed legislation is “to grant immunity or impunity to certain individuals. And these are mostly decision-makers within the government.”

The Coming Debate
Bush officials have not acknowledged that one of their real motives for gutting the War Crimes Act is to protect themselves from being prosecuted for their own crimes. But so far they have apparently offered only one other reason for tampering with the law: The existing law, especially the Geneva language prohibiting “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment,” is too vague to enforce. (Perhaps the Bush Administration should declare the US Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” as too vague to enforce as well.)

Fidell noted in an August 9 Washington Post article that military law includes many terms like “dereliction of duty,” “maltreatment” and “conduct unbecoming an officer” that may appear vague but that are nonetheless enforceable. The Army Field Manual bars cruel and degrading treatment. When Attorney General Gonzales recently testified at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that “outrages upon personal dignity” was too ambiguous, Senator John McCain stated that top military lawyers see no problem in complying with Common Article 3.

The arguments for preserving the War Crimes Act and rejecting the Bush amendments, in contrast, are multiple and overwhelming:

1. Commitment to the Geneva Conventions protects US service people from future retaliation.

   As former Secretary of State Colin Powell has argued, abandoning the Geneva Conventions would put US soldiers at greater risk, would “reverse over a century of US policy and practice in supporting the Geneva Conventions” and would “undermine the protections of the law of war for our troops, both in this specific conflict [Afghanistan] and in general.”

2. The War Crimes Act will prohibit “torture-lite” in the future.

   According to Scott Horton, the proposed legislation is “designed to provide an OK to certain techniques which fall just short of torture that are being used by the CIA,” including “waterboarding, longtime standing and hypothermia,” techniques that have been “linked to severe injuries and fatalities.”

3. The War Crimes Act will prohibit future Abu Ghraib-type outrages.

   The Bush Administration’s legislation would remove the prohibition on “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” Repealing the War Crimes Act, the Washington Post’s R. Jeffrey Smith reported, is decriminalizing the forced nakedness, use of dog leashes and wearing of women’s underwear that shocked the world at Abu Ghraib prison.

   Derek P. Jinks an assistant law professor at the University of Texas, author of a forthcoming book on the Geneva Conventions, said in an August 9 Washington Post article that the “entire family of techniques” used to degrade, humiliate and coerce prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo “is not addressed in any way, shape or form” in the Bush Administration’s proposal. Retired Army Lieut. Col. Geoffrey Corn, until recently chief of the war law branch of the Army’s Office of the Judge Advocate General, said in the same article, “This removal of [any] reference to humiliating and degrading treatment will be perceived by experts and probably allies as ‘rewriting'” the Geneva Conventions.

   This “rewriting” could have very concrete ramifications in practice. The international tribunal prosecuting war crimes in the former Yugoslavia deemed acts like placing prisoners in “inappropriate conditions of confinement,” forcing them to urinate or defecate in their clothes, and threatening them with “physical, mental, or sexual violence” to be humiliations, degrading treatment and outrages. The proposed changes to the War Crimes Act would indicate that it is not a crime for Americans to conduct such acts.

4. Gutting the War Crimes Act will promote the perception of the United States as an outlaw country.

   As a letter signed by sixteen members of Congress recently said, such legislation “would harm the reputation of the United States as a leader promoting and protecting human rights.” What would be more deserving of scorn than a country that lets potential war-crime defendants repeal the very law under which they might be prosecuted?

5. The Bush legislation unfairly exempts high government officials from the very war crimes charges they are leveling against lowly “grunts.”

   Since the start of the Iraq War there have been more than thirty prosecutions under the military law that prohibits war crimes, with many more pending. But they have all prosecuted low-level military personnel. Gutting the War Crimes Act would leave the military “bad apples” at the bottom subject to prosecution but would let the civilian “bad apples” at the top evade all responsibility.

   As Horton points out, the Uniform Code of Military Justice already incorporates the Geneva Convention rules, but it does not apply “to Donald Rumsfeld or Stephen Cambone or to people in the White House.” The point of the War Crimes Act is that it “spreads the application of the Geneva Conventions the next level up to civilians, and particularly to civilian policymakers.” From the beginning, the “prosecutorial focus” of the War Crimes Act “was intended to provide deterrence at that level.” Repealing it undermines the fundamental principle of equal justice under law.

6. Preserving the War Crimes Act is part of reasserting the rule of law in America.

   The War Crimes Act has been a central focus of the Bush Administration’s scorn for all Constitutional limits on the power of the President and the executive branch. It was the idea that the President could by fiat declare US and international law null and void that animated the Gonzales torture memo. It was this denial of constitutional limits that the Supreme Court resoundingly rebuked in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. A rebuff to the Bush Administration’s attack on the War Crimes Act is a reassertion of those constitutional limits.

The War Crimes Act can be a bridge to a more just and peaceful world. The incorporation of the Geneva Conventions’ prohibitions on war crimes into national law affirms America’s commitment to international law. It embodies an implementation of the global heritage of the Nuremberg trials, the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions. It embeds that tradition within our own national law.

In the wake of World War II, Justice Robert Jackson, chief American prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal, observed that “the ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars, which are inevitable in a system of international lawlessness, is to make statesmen responsible to law.” Making statesmen responsible to law is what the War Crimes Act is all about.

Defending the Law
The arguments for preserving the War Crimes Act are conclusive (except perhaps to those who might face criminal prosecution under them). Indeed, the Administration’s decision to gut the War Crimes Act is a gift to those who want to see American statesmen held accountable to national and international law. It suggests that the Bush Administration itself recognizes the criminality of many of its actions. And it shows in the sharpest relief why the War Crimes Act is needed.

But, at least for the moment, Bush’s Republican allies still control both houses of Congress; they are in a position to slip a repeal of the War Crimes Act into any piece of legislation they choose. Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey, senior member of the House Committee for Homeland Security, told The Nation, “The Bush Administration and the GOP leadership in Congress is trying to quietly excuse and even codify cruel and inhuman treatment of prisoners in US custody, at secret CIA prisons abroad and even the abhorrent practice of extraordinary rendition [the outsourcing of torture and other cruel treatment to other countries].”

While the Administration has been lining up its ducks, the campaign to save the War Crimes Act has just begun. The advocacy group Just Foreign Policy has started an online campaign to save the War Crimes Act. “This is not an obscure point in the law. What’s at stake here is whether, for example, the abuses of prisoners by sexual humiliation that shocked us at Abu Ghraib are clearly illegal under US law,” national coordinator Robert Naiman observes. “If we found these actions outrageous, we are obligated to tell our members of Congress to protect the law that bans them.”

Markey adds, “Every American citizen should call the White House and their members of Congress because these changes being made in the dead of night could be the green light for other countries that capture American troops to treat them cruelly or torture them.”

Bush admits to CIA secret prisons
6 September 2006

President Bush has acknowledged the existence of secret CIA prisons and said 14 key terrorist suspects have now been sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The suspects, who include the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, have now been moved out of CIA custody and will face trial.

Mr Bush said the CIA’s interrogation programme had been “vital” in saving lives, but denied the use of torture.

He said all suspects will be afforded protection under the Geneva Convention.

In a televised address alongside families of those killed in the 11 September 2001 attacks, Mr Bush said there were now no terrorist suspects under the CIA programme.

Mr Bush said he was making a limited disclosure of the CIA programme because interrogation of the men it held was now complete and because a US Supreme Court decision had stopped the use of military commissions for trials.

He said the CIA programme had interrogated a small number of key figures suspected of involvement in 9/11, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000 in Yemen and the 1998 attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Mr Bush spelled out how the questioning of detainee Abu Zubaydah had led to the capture of Ramzi Binalshibh, which in turn led to the detention of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Mr Bush said the CIA had used an “alternative set of procedures”, agreed with the justice department, once suspects had stopped talking.

But he said: “The US does not torture. I have not authorised it and I will not.”

He said the questioning methods had prevented attacks inside the US and saved US lives.

“This programme has helped us to take potential mass murderers off the streets before they have a chance to kill,” the president said.

The CIA programme had caused some friction with European allies. Some EU lawmakers said the CIA carried out clandestine flights to transport terror suspects.

Revised guidelines
Mr Bush said he was asking Congress to authorise military commissions and once that was done “the men our intelligence officials believe orchestrated the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11 2001 can face justice”.

All suspects will now be treated under new guidelines issued by the Pentagon on Wednesday, which bring all military detainees under the protection of the Geneva Convention.

The move marks a reversal in policy for the Pentagon, which previously argued that many detainees were unlawful combatants who did not qualify for such protections.

The new guidelines forbid all torture, the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners, water boarding – the practice of submerging prisoners in water – any kind of sexual humiliation, and many other interrogation techniques.

The BBC’s Adam Brookes in Washington says that in one stroke the Pentagon is moving to defuse all criticism of the way it treats the people it has captured in its war against terrorism.

The US administration has faced criticism from legal experts and human rights activists over the policy on detentions of terrorism suspects.

Mr Bush also said he was asking Congress to pass urgent legislation to clarify the terms under which those fighting the war on terror could operate.

He said the laws must make it explicit that US personnel were fulfilling their obligations under the Geneva Convention.

Mr Bush said those questioning suspected terrorists must be able to use everything under the law to save US lives.

Steve Irwin dead

The Crocodile Man, Steve Irwin, is dead. He was killed in a freak accident in Cairns, police sources said. It appeared that he was killed by a sting-ray barb that went through his chest, Queensland Police Inspector Russell Rhodes said. He was swimming off the Low Isles at Port Douglas where he had been filming an underwater documentary when it occurred.

Ambulance officers confirmed they attended a reef fatality this morning at Batt Reef off Port Douglas.

Mr Irwin, 44, was killed just after 11am, Eastern Australian time.

His American wife Terri learned for the tragedy from police in Tasmania, where she had been trekking in Cradle Mountain National Park.

His friend and manager John Stainton said Mr Irwin was filming some segment for daughter Bindi’s show on the reef between sessions filiming the main documentary.

It is understood Mr Irwin was killed instantly.

A source said Mr Irwin was already dead when his body was brought onto the Isle.

A source said Mr Irwin’s body was being airlifted to Cairns Hospital in North Queensland for formal identification.

An Emergency Services Response Management spokeswoman said they received a call about the tragedy at 11.11 am, Australian Eastern Standard Time.

The response unit left in a helicopter for the Batt Reef at 11.18am and arrived shortly after.

Mr Irwin was pronounced dead at the scene immediately, the spokeswoman said.

Steve Irwin’s activities went far beyond his universally-known roles as an international TV star and owner of Australia Zoo, north of Brisbane.

They includes assisting Australian Quarantine Inspection service with advertising campaigns warning travellers not to bring foreign matter into the country, and he was becoming a vocal critic of the slaughter of Australian wildlife.

The federal government recently dropped plans to allow crocodile safaris for wealty tourists in the Northern Territority after Irwin intervened, taking Environment Minister Ian Campbell on a tour of croc infested Cape York.

At the time, Irwin told Australian TV program A Current Affair that: “Killing one of our beautiful animals in the name of trophy hunting will have a very negative impact on tourism, which scares the living daylights out of me.”

The Prime Minister John Howard considered Irwin a friend, inviting him to a barbecue at The Lodge for US President George W. Bush in 2003.

Irwin was a devoted father to his two children Bindi, 8, and Bob, 3.

“Bindi is the reason I was put on this earth. All I want to do is be with her and all she wants to do is be with me. We have such a great time together and it’s not just a father and daughter relationship, it’s also like I’m a big brother and she’s my little sister,” he told New Idea magazine in 2005.

However the previous year Irwin had created a furore when he took ‘Baby Bob’ into Australia Zoo’s crocodile enclosure while feeding a four-metre salt water crocodile.

Irwin burst onto the media scene with his documentary The Crocodile Hunter in 1992, and his over-the-top persona soon made him a star. In 2002 he burst on to the big screen on Crocodile Hunter: The Collision Course, soon achieving A-list fame.

His celebrity friends include Russell Crowe.

Despite his worldwide popularity, closer to home Irwin got bad press after he was controversially paid $175,000 for a quarantine ad.

Irwin was named Queenslander of the Year in 2003.

it’s done!

i put in 10 hours on the roof yantra today, and got it almost finished. between the first and second picture i got some timely advise and a demonstration from moe(!) on how to do the blending the way i want it, using sponges rather than brushes. i didn’t think it would work, but i was wrong. if i had done it my way, i wouldn’t be anywhere as close to being finished with it as i am currently, and the blending would be adequate, but not what i had in mind originally. that’s one of the reasons i married her: along with everything else, she’s an artist in her own right.

now i’m a lot more tired than i should be, considering that i didn’t go anywhere except out the front door and up our little two-step stepstool thinger. time to eat, and go to bed. tomorrow i’ll finish it, and likely post more pictures.

What the Terrorists Want
By Bruce Schneier
August 24, 2006

On Aug. 16, two men were escorted off a plane headed for Manchester, England, because some passengers thought they looked either Asian or Middle Eastern, might have been talking Arabic, wore leather jackets, and looked at their watches — and the passengers refused to fly with them on board. The men were questioned for several hours and then released.

On Aug. 15, an entire airport terminal was evacuated because someone’s cosmetics triggered a false positive for explosives. The same day, a Muslim man was removed from an airplane in Denver for reciting prayers. The Transportation Security Administration decided that the flight crew overreacted, but he still had to spend the night in Denver before flying home the next day. The next day, a Port of Seattle terminal was evacuated because a couple of dogs gave a false alarm for explosives.

On Aug. 19, a plane made an emergency landing in Tampa, Florida, after the crew became suspicious because two of the lavatory doors were locked. The plane was searched, but nothing was found. Meanwhile, a man who tampered with a bathroom smoke detector on a flight to San Antonio was cleared of terrorism, but only after having his house searched.

On Aug. 16, a woman suffered a panic attack and became violent on a flight from London to Washington, so the plane was escorted to the Boston airport by fighter jets. “The woman was carrying hand cream and matches but was not a terrorist threat,” said the TSA spokesman after the incident.

All 12 passengers arrested after a US airliner returned to Amsterdam will be released, Dutch prosecutors say. Northwest Airlines flight 42, bound for Mumbai (Bombay) in India, changed course over Germany and flew back to Schiphol airport on Wednesday. The 12 men, said to be of Asian appearance, reportedly aroused suspicion by fiddling with mobile phones and plastic bags. US air marshals apprehended them before the pilot diverted the flight. Two Dutch F-16 fighter jets escorted it back to Schiphol.

And on Aug. 18, a plane flying from London to Egypt made an emergency landing in Italy when someone found a bomb threat scrawled on an air sickness bag. Nothing was found on the plane, and no one knows how long the note was on board.

I’d like everyone to take a deep breath and listen for a minute.

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.

We’re all a little jumpy after the recent arrest of 23 terror suspects in Great Britain. The men were reportedly plotting a liquid-explosive attack on airplanes, and both the press and politicians have been trumpeting the story ever since.

In truth, it’s doubtful that their plan would have succeeded; chemists have been debunking the idea since it became public. Certainly the suspects were a long way off from trying: None had bought airline tickets, and some didn’t even have passports.

Regardless of the threat, from the would-be bombers’ perspective, the explosives and planes were merely tactics. Their goal was to cause terror, and in that they’ve succeeded.

Imagine for a moment what would have happened if they had blown up 10 planes. There would be canceled flights, chaos at airports, bans on carry-on luggage, world leaders talking tough new security measures, political posturing and all sorts of false alarms as jittery people panicked. To a lesser degree, that’s basically what’s happening right now.

Our politicians help the terrorists every time they use fear as a campaign tactic. The press helps every time it writes scare stories about the plot and the threat. And if we’re terrified, and we share that fear, we help. All of these actions intensify and repeat the terrorists’ actions, and increase the effects of their terror.

(I am not saying that the politicians and press are terrorists, or that they share any of the blame for terrorist attacks. I’m not that stupid. But the subject of terrorism is more complex than it appears, and understanding its various causes and effects are vital for understanding how to best deal with it.)

The implausible plots and false alarms actually hurt us in two ways. Not only do they increase the level of fear, but they also waste time and resources that could be better spent fighting the real threats and increasing actual security. I’ll bet the terrorists are laughing at us.

Another thought experiment: Imagine for a moment that the British government arrested the 23 suspects without fanfare. Imagine that the TSA and its European counterparts didn’t engage in pointless airline-security measures like banning liquids. And imagine that the press didn’t write about it endlessly, and that the politicians didn’t use the event to remind us all how scared we should be. If we’d reacted that way, then the terrorists would have truly failed.

It’s time we calm down and fight terror with antiterror. This does not mean that we simply roll over and accept terrorism. There are things our government can and should do to fight terrorism, most of them involving intelligence and investigation — and not focusing on specific plots.

But our job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches. There are approximately 1 billion Muslims in the world, a large percentage of them not Arab, and about 320 million Arabs in the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of them not terrorists. Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance political careers or increase a television show’s viewership.

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn’t make us any safer.

What the Iraqi people want
By Abu Aardvark

In yesterday’s press conference, President Bush insisted that there would be no withdrawal of American troops from Iraq as long as he was president. He gave a long, scattered list of reasons. Among them was a claim put forward in a number of different ways that boiled down to this: “it’s what the Iraqi people want.”

Really?

Mark Tessler and Mansoor Moaddel recently released some of the data from their latest survey of Iraqi public opinion. As reported in US News, this survey revealed that

The growing sense of insecurity affected all three of Iraq’s major ethnic and religious groups. The number of Iraqis who “strongly agreed” that life is “unpredictable and dangerous” jumped from 41% to 48% of Shiites, from 67% to 79% of Sunnis, and from 16% to 50% of Kurds. The most recent survey, done in April this year, also asked for “the three main reasons for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.” Less than 2% chose “to bring democracy to Iraq” as their first choice. The list was topped by “to control Iraqi oil” (76%), followed by “to build military bases” (41%) and “to help Israel” (32%).

The survey also asked a direct question about the presence of American troops in Iraq (which for some reason was not included either in Kaplan’s story or in the University of Michigan press release).

Tessler kindly provided me with a short write-up of the data, forthcoming in the TAARI Newsletter. Here is Table 3, responses to the question “Do you support or oppose the presence of coalition forces in Iraq?”

The bottom line: 91.7% of Iraqis oppose the presence of coalition troops in the country, up from 74.4% in 2004. 84.5% are “strongly opposed”. Among Sunnis, opposition to the US presence went from 94.5% to 97.9% (97.2% “strongly opposed”). Among Shia, opposition to the US presence went from 81.2% to 94.6%, with “strongly opposed” going from 63.5% to 89.7%. Even among the Kurds, opposition went from 19.6% to 63.3%. In other words, it isn’t just that Iraqis oppose the American presence – it’s that their feelings are intense: only 7.2% “somewhat oppose” and 4.7% “somewhat support.”

Maybe there are reasons for keeping American troops in Iraq, but “it’s what the Iraqi people want” really doesn’t seem to be one of them.

Is There Still a Terrorist Threat?
By John Mueller

THE MYTH OF THE OMNIPRESENT ENEMY
For the past five years, Americans have been regularly regaled with dire predictions of another major al Qaeda attack in the United States. In 2003, a group of 200 senior government officials and business executives, many of them specialists in security and terrorism, pronounced it likely that a terrorist strike more devastating than 9/11 — possibly involving weapons of mass destruction — would occur before the end of 2004. In May 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft warned that al Qaeda could “hit hard” in the next few months and said that 90 percent of the arrangements for an attack on U.S. soil were complete. That fall, Newsweek reported that it was “practically an article of faith among counterterrorism officials” that al Qaeda would strike in the run-up to the November 2004 election. When that “October surprise” failed to materialize, the focus shifted: a taped encyclical from Osama bin Laden, it was said, demonstrated that he was too weak to attack before the election but was marshalling his resources to do so months after it.

On the first page of its founding manifesto, the massively funded Department of Homeland Security intones, “Today’s terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon.”

But if it is so easy to pull off an attack and if terrorists are so demonically competent, why have they not done it? Why have they not been sniping at people in shopping centers, collapsing tunnels, poisoning the food supply, cutting electrical lines, derailing trains, blowing up oil pipelines, causing massive traffic jams, or exploiting the countless other vulnerabilities that, according to security experts, could so easily be exploited?

One reasonable explanation is that almost no terrorists exist in the United States and few have the means or the inclination to strike from abroad. But this explanation is rarely offered.

HUFFING AND PUFFING
Instead, Americans are told — often by the same people who had once predicted imminent attacks — that the absence of international terrorist strikes in the United States is owed to the protective measures so hastily and expensively put in place after 9/11. But there is a problem with this argument. True, there have been no terrorist incidents in the United States in the last five years. But nor were there any in the five years before the 9/11 attacks, at a time when the United States was doing much less to protect itself. It would take only one or two guys with a gun or an explosive to terrorize vast numbers of people, as the sniper attacks around Washington, D.C., demonstrated in 2002. Accordingly, the government’s protective measures would have to be nearly perfect to thwart all such plans. Given the monumental imperfection of the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, and the debacle of FBI and National Security Agency programs to upgrade their computers to better coordinate intelligence information, that explanation seems far-fetched. Moreover, Israel still experiences terrorism even with a far more extensive security apparatus.

It may well have become more difficult for terrorists to get into the country, but, as thousands demonstrate each day, it is far from impossible. Immigration procedures have been substantially tightened (at considerable cost), and suspicious U.S. border guards have turned away a few likely bad apples. But visitors and immigrants continue to flood the country. There are over 300 million legal entries by foreigners each year, and illegal crossings number between 1,000 and 4,000 a day — to say nothing of the generous quantities of forbidden substances that the government has been unable to intercept or even detect despite decades of a strenuous and well-funded “war on drugs.” Every year, a number of people from Muslim countries — perhaps hundreds — are apprehended among the illegal flow from Mexico, and many more probably make it through. Terrorism does not require a large force. And the 9/11 planners, assuming Middle Eastern males would have problems entering the United States legally after the attack, put into motion plans to rely thereafter on non-Arabs with passports from Europe and Southeast Asia.

If al Qaeda operatives are as determined and inventive as assumed, they should be here by now. If they are not yet here, they must not be trying very hard or must be far less dedicated, diabolical, and competent than the common image would suggest.

Another popular explanation for the fact that there have been no more attacks asserts that the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, although it never managed to snag bin Laden, severely disrupted al Qaeda and its operations. But this claim is similarly unconvincing. The 2004 train bombings in Madrid were carried out by a tiny group of men who had never been to Afghanistan, much less to any of al Qaeda’s training camps. They pulled off a coordinated nonsuicidal attack with 13 remote-controlled bombs, ten of which went off on schedule, killing 191 and injuring more than 1,800. The experience with that attack, as well as with the London bombings of 2005, suggests that, as the former U.S. counterterrorism officials Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon have noted, for a terrorist attack to succeed, “all that is necessary are the most portable, least detectable tools of the terrorist trade: ideas.”

It is also sometimes suggested that the terrorists are now too busy killing Americans and others in Iraq to devote the time, manpower, or energy necessary to pull off similar deeds in the United States. But terrorists with al Qaeda sympathies or sensibilities have managed to carry out attacks in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere in the past three years; not every single potential bomb thrower has joined the fray in Iraq.

Perhaps, some argue, terrorists are unable to mount attacks in the United States because the Muslim community there, unlike in many countries in Europe, has been well integrated into society. But the same could be said about the United Kingdom, which experienced a significant terrorist attack in 2005. And European countries with less well-integrated Muslim communities, such as Germany, France, and Norway, have yet to experience al Qaeda terrorism. Indeed, if terrorists are smart, they will avoid Muslim communities because that is the lamppost under which policing agencies are most intensely searching for them. The perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks were ordered generally to stay away from mosques and American Muslims. That and the Madrid plot show that tiny terrorist conspiracies hardly need a wider support network to carry out their schemes.

Another common explanation is that al Qaeda is craftily biding its time. But what for? The 9/11 attacks took only about two years to prepare. The carefully coordinated, very destructive, and politically productive terrorist attacks in Madrid in 2004 were conceived, planned from scratch, and then executed all within six months; the bombs were set off less than two months after the conspirators purchased their first supplies of dynamite, paid for with hashish. (Similarly, Timothy McVeigh’s attack in Oklahoma City in 1995 took less than a year to plan.) Given the extreme provocation of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, one would think that terrorists might be inclined to shift their timetable into higher gear. And if they are so patient, why do they continually claim that another attack is just around the corner? It was in 2003 that al Qaeda’s top leaders promised attacks in Australia, Bahrain, Egypt, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Yemen. Three years later, some bombs had gone off in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Yemen, and Jordan (as well as in the unlisted Turkey) but not in any other of the explicitly threatened countries. Those attacks were tragic, but their sparseness could be taken as evidence that it is not only American alarmists who are given to extravagant huffing and puffing.

TERRORISTS UNDER THE BED
A fully credible explanation for the fact that the United States has suffered no terrorist attacks since 9/11 is that the threat posed by homegrown or imported terrorists — like that presented by Japanese Americans during World War II or by American Communists after it — has been massively exaggerated. Is it possible that the haystack is essentially free of needles?

The FBI embraces a spooky I-think-therefore-they-are line of reasoning when assessing the purported terrorist menace. In 2003, its director, Robert Mueller, proclaimed, “The greatest threat is from al Qaeda cells in the U.S. that we have not yet identified.” He rather mysteriously deemed the threat from those unidentified entities to be “increasing in part because of the heightened publicity” surrounding such episodes as the 2002 Washington sniper shootings and the 2001 anthrax attacks (which had nothing to do with al Qaeda). But in 2001, the 9/11 hijackers received no aid from U.S.-based al Qaeda operatives for the simple reason that no such operatives appear to have existed. It is not at all clear that that condition has changed.

Mueller also claimed to know that “al Qaeda maintains the ability and the intent to inflict significant casualties in the U.S. with little warning.” If this was true — if the terrorists had both the ability and the intent in 2003, and if the threat they presented was somehow increasing — they had remained remarkably quiet by the time the unflappable Mueller repeated his alarmist mantra in 2005: “I remain very concerned about what we are not seeing.”

Intelligence estimates in 2002 held that there were as many as 5,000 al Qaeda terrorists and supporters in the United States. However, a secret FBI report in 2005 wistfully noted that although the bureau had managed to arrest a few bad guys here and there after more than three years of intense and well-funded hunting, it had been unable to identify a single true al Qaeda sleeper cell anywhere in the country. Thousands of people in the United States have had their overseas communications monitored under a controversial warrantless surveillance program. Of these, fewer than ten U.S. citizens or residents per year have aroused enough suspicion to impel the agencies spying on them to seek warrants authorizing surveillance of their domestic communications as well; none of this activity, it appears, has led to an indictment on any charge whatever.

In addition to massive eavesdropping and detention programs, every year some 30,000 “national security letters” are issued without judicial review, forcing businesses and other institutions to disclose confidential information about their customers without telling anyone they have done so. That process has generated thousands of leads that, when pursued, have led nowhere. Some 80,000 Arab and Muslim immigrants have been subjected to fingerprinting and registration, another 8,000 have been called in for interviews with the FBI, and over 5,000 foreign nationals have been imprisoned in initiatives designed to prevent terrorism. This activity, notes the Georgetown University law professor David Cole, has not resulted in a single conviction for a terrorist crime. In fact, only a small number of people picked up on terrorism charges — always to great official fanfare — have been convicted at all, and almost all of these convictions have been for other infractions, particularly immigration violations. Some of those convicted have clearly been mental cases or simply flaunting jihadist bravado — rattling on about taking down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch, blowing up the Sears Tower if only they could get to Chicago, beheading the prime minister of Canada, or flooding lower Manhattan by somehow doing something terrible to one of those tunnels.

APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION?
One reason al Qaeda and “al Qaeda types” seem not to be trying very hard to repeat 9/11 may be that that dramatic act of destruction itself proved counterproductive by massively heightening concerns about terrorism around the world. No matter how much they might disagree on other issues (most notably on the war in Iraq), there is a compelling incentive for states — even ones such as Iran, Libya, Sudan, and Syria — to cooperate in cracking down on al Qaeda, because they know that they could easily be among its victims. The FBI may not have uncovered much of anything within the United States since 9/11, but thousands of apparent terrorists have been rounded, or rolled, up overseas with U.S. aid and encouragement.

Although some Arabs and Muslims took pleasure in the suffering inflicted on 9/11 — Schadenfreude in German, shamateh in Arabic — the most common response among jihadists and religious nationalists was a vehement rejection of al Qaeda’s strategy and methods. When Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in 1979, there were calls for jihad everywhere in Arab and Muslim lands, and tens of thousands flocked to the country to fight the invaders. In stark contrast, when the U.S. military invaded in 2001 to topple an Islamist regime, there was, as the political scientist Fawaz Gerges points out, a “deafening silence” from the Muslim world, and only a trickle of jihadists went to fight the Americans. Other jihadists publicly blamed al Qaeda for their post-9/11 problems and held the attacks to be shortsighted and hugely miscalculated.

The post-9/11 willingness of governments around the world to take on international terrorists has been much reinforced and amplified by subsequent, if scattered, terrorist activity outside the United States. Thus, a terrorist bombing in Bali in 2002 galvanized the Indonesian government into action. Extensive arrests and convictions — including of leaders who had previously enjoyed some degree of local fame and political popularity — seem to have severely degraded the capacity of the chief jihadist group in Indonesia, Jemaah Islamiyah. After terrorists attacked Saudis in Saudi Arabia in 2003, that country, very much for self-interested reasons, became considerably more serious about dealing with domestic terrorism; it soon clamped down on radical clerics and preachers. Some rather inept terrorist bombings in Casablanca in 2003 inspired a similarly determined crackdown by Moroccan authorities. And the 2005 bombing in Jordan of a wedding at a hotel (an unbelievably stupid target for the terrorists) succeeded mainly in outraging the Jordanians: according to a Pew poll, the percentage of the population expressing a lot of confidence in bin Laden to “do the right thing” dropped from 25 percent to less than one percent after the attack.

THREAT PERCEPTIONS
The results of policing activity overseas suggest that the absence of results in the United States has less to do with terrorists’ cleverness or with investigative incompetence than with the possibility that few, if any, terrorists exist in the country. It also suggests that al Qaeda’s ubiquity and capacity to do damage may have, as with so many perceived threats, been exaggerated. Just because some terrorists may wish to do great harm does not mean that they are able to.

Gerges argues that mainstream Islamists — who make up the vast majority of the Islamist political movement — gave up on the use of force before 9/11, except perhaps against Israel, and that the jihadists still committed to violence constitute a tiny minority. Even this small group primarily focuses on various “infidel” Muslim regimes and considers jihadists who carry out violence against the “far enemy” — mainly Europe and the United States — to be irresponsible, reckless adventurers who endanger the survival of the whole movement. In this view, 9/11 was a sign of al Qaeda’s desperation, isolation, fragmentation, and decline, not of its strength.

Those attacks demonstrated, of course, that al Qaeda — or at least 19 of its members — still possessed some fight. And none of this is to deny that more terrorist attacks on the United States are still possible. Nor is it to suggest that al Qaeda is anything other than a murderous movement. Moreover, after the ill-considered U.S. venture in Iraq is over, freelance jihadists trained there may seek to continue their operations elsewhere — although they are more likely to focus on places such as Chechnya than on the United States. A unilateral American military attack against Iran could cause that country to retaliate, probably with very wide support within the Muslim world, by aiding anti-American insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq and inflicting damage on Israel and on American interests worldwide.

But while keeping such potential dangers in mind, it is worth remembering that the total number of people killed since 9/11 by al Qaeda or al Qaeda­like operatives outside of Afghanistan and Iraq is not much higher than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States in a single year, and that the lifetime chance of an American being killed by international terrorism is about one in 80,000 — about the same chance of being killed by a comet or a meteor. Even if there were a 9/11-scale attack every three months for the next five years, the likelihood that an individual American would number among the dead would be two hundredths of a percent (or one in 5,000).

Although it remains heretical to say so, the evidence so far suggests that fears of the omnipotent terrorist — reminiscent of those inspired by images of the 20-foot-tall Japanese after Pearl Harbor or the 20-foot-tall Communists at various points in the Cold War (particularly after Sputnik) — may have been overblown, the threat presented within the United States by al Qaeda greatly exaggerated. The massive and expensive homeland security apparatus erected since 9/11 may be persecuting some, spying on many, inconveniencing most, and taxing all to defend the United States against an enemy that scarcely exists.

i have seen the s, and i was not eaten!

i’ve got the entire yantra roughed in. sorry for the quality of the photo, the digital camera does weird things when it is confronted by extremely bright lights… like the sun…

much as i really, really, really, really, REALLY want to, it’s entirely likely that i won’t actually get around to painting this until next weekend: today i’ve been invited to FredCon by Fred himself (so i have to go), tomorrow i’ve got a BSSB performance, monday i have an appointment, i have rehearsals tuesday, wednesday and thursday which are also supposed to be weather that isn’t good for painting a car, so it will be at least friday before i have two or three days in a row to mess around with my car and not have to move it… bugger…

but if that’s what it’s gonna take to do an outstanding job of it, then that’s what’s gonna be done, whether i like it or not.

i figured out how to improvise a compass large enough to draw a circle 24″ in diametre, and i got the interior of the yantra roughed in. now i’ve got to make a template for half of one of the petals, and rough them in, and then rough in the outer border and i’ll be ready to start painting around noon or so tomorrow.

i also found a cat in the sink. hmmm…

the community paint pot is a wonder… it’s two well-made and obviously well-used wooden(!) tool boxes full of old time sign painters’ tools – which means a lot of string, gold and silver leaf (which is actually bronze and aluminium) and various different kinds of sizing, resin and varnish, but there are also very many different sized lettering brushes (which i have never had, but always lusted after), including some interesting home-made brushes that give me a really good idea of what to do with the ends of the violin bows that i have been schlepping around with me for the past 20 years, and the following paints: lettering white, lettering black, fire red, bright red, orange, chrome yellow, lemon yellow, process green, emerald green, dark green, peacock blue, light blue, brilliant blue, dark blue and maroon enamel, plus bright red, dark green, dark blue, black and white flat paint (which i probably won’t be using). my contribution to the community paint pot will be black, red, green and blue paint, and a quart can of one-shot thinner.

now, how to improvise a compass big enough for the roof of my car?

i made an arrangement with kelly to pick up the community paint pot today, and now i’m so anxious to get it over here so that i can start on my ganesha yantra that i have been awake for 2 hours that i ordinarily would have slept through… now i’ve got all the things that i normally do by noon finished already, and it’s only 9:00… and i don’t get to pick up the community paint pot until 2:30 this afternoon… aargh!

not only are "they" not doing a very good job of “capturing terrorists” and “foiling terrorist plots”, but "they" also aren’t doing very much to make us believe that this whole “war on terrorism” is nothing more than thinly disguised racism and desire for oil… 8/

12 arrested on U.S. plane to be released
By TOBY STERLING
August 24, 2006

HAARLEM, Netherlands – Prosecutors said Thursday they found no evidence of a terrorist threat aboard a Northwest Airlines flight to India that returned to Amsterdam, and they are releasing all 12 passengers arrested after the emergency landing.

The men, all Indian nationals, had aroused suspicions on Flight NW0042 to Bombay because they had a large number of cell phones, lap tops and hard drives, and refused to follow the crew’s instructions, prosecutors said.

Because of those actions by the passengers, the pilot of the DC-10 radioed for help shortly after takeoff Wednesday and the plane was escorted back to Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport by two Dutch fighter jets. The 12 were arrested after the plane landed.

U.S. air marshals on the flight also were suspicious of the men, U.S. officials and passengers said.

“A thorough investigation of the cell phones in the plane found that the phones were not manipulated and no explosives were found on board the plane,” said a statement from the prosecutor’s office in Haarlem, which has jurisdiction over the airport.

“From the statements of the suspects and the witnesses, no evidence could be brought forward that these men were about to commit an act of violence,” the statement said.

The men were to be released later Thursday from a dention center at the airport and free to leave the Netherlands, prosecution spokesman Ed Hartjes said.

The incident reflected the jitters that persist in the airline industry in the two weeks since British police revealed an alleged plot to blow up several U.S.-bound airliners simultaneously using bombs crafted from ordinary consumer goods.

Hartjes said the electronic equipment the suspects possessed could have been enough to trigger an explosion, and he defended the flight crew’s response. “This was a correct reaction under the circumstances,” he said.

In New Delhi, Indian External Affairs Ministry spokesman Navtej Sarna said he had no comment.

Hartjes said 11 of the men had been traveling together, catching a connecting flight in Amsterdam from a South American country that he refused to identify. The 12th aroused suspicion for other unspecified reasons, he said. He refused to give personal details about any of them.

Passengers described the men as between 25 and 35 years old and speaking Urdu, the language commonly spoken in Pakistan and by many of India’s Muslims. Some had beards, and some wore a shalwar kameez, a long shirt and baggy pants commonly worn by South Asian Muslims.

The Algemeen Dagblad newspaper quoted an unidentified 31-year-old Dutch businessman as saying the suspects were walking up and down the isle after takeoff.

“I saw the air marshals walking, and then you know something’s wrong,” it quoted him as saying.

Nitin Patel of Boston, who sat behind the men, told the paper: “I don’t know how close we were, but my gut tells me these people wanted to hijack the airplane.”

The mass-circulation De Telegraaf reported that passenger Sarat Menon quoted the men as saying they were returning from a vacation in Tobago.

“It wasn’t immediately clear what was going on. There was no panic. A flight attendant told us to remain seated and to follow the air marshals’ orders,” Menon said.

The Northwest captain radioed Amsterdam seeking permission to return with a military escort, and jet fighters were scrambled from a northern military air field.

The national anti-terrorism office said it saw no reason to raise the country’s threat level.

In a recording of air control communications, the pilot declined an offer to put fire engines on standby for the unscheduled landing at Schiphol.

The security alert was the latest of several incidents reported since the alleged terrorism plot was revealed in London. On Friday, a British plane made an emergency landing in southern Italy after a bomb scare, and the U.S. Air Force scrambled jets to escort a United Airlines flight from London to Washington as it was diverted to Boston.

On Tuesday, a flight to New York from Atlanta was diverted to Charlotte, N.C., after a flight attendant found a bottle of water and then smelled something suspicious on the plane. Officials found nothing hazardous.

BACK FROM THE MIDEAST
By Raed Jarrar
August 10, 2006

I just came back from a short trip to Jordan and Syria. The trip to Syria was so fast, but I managed to visit some Lebanese refugee camps. I am so impressed by the Syrian people’s generosity in receiving Lebanese refugees. The Syrian government didn’t even have to send food or supplies to the refugees because of the overwhelming grassroots support. When I was in the school/refugee camp, many neighbors were walking in with food and clothes. Neighbors donated mattresses, TVs, satellites, money, and other aid.

The other thing you can’t miss in Jordan and Syria is people’s anger against the US. On more than occasion, I got shouted at because I live in the US. The most interesting incident was during a visit to a Lebanese refugee camp. I was called by two young Lebanese people, and they asked me whether me and the rest of the delegation visiting their shelter where coming from the US. I said yes. They said: “you better get the hell out of here unless you want us to make a scene”. I tried to explain that we are the “good” Americans who are against the war, so they said go back home and change your government. “you can’t come here visit us in a shelter that we were sent to because of your tax money and your bombs, and expect us to be nice to you”. So me and the other Americans got the hell out of there.

The trip to Jordan was more productive and organized. I managed to put together a couple of meetings with Iraqi parliamentarians representing the major groups in the parliament. One meeting was with two MPs, one representing the biggest Sunni Group, and the other representing the biggest Shia group in the parliament. They gave the US delegation that accompanied me a strong and united message against the US presence in Iraq. It was a clear Sunni/Shia demand to end the occupation and set a timetable for withdrawing the US troops. Another meeting was with MPs and some other NGO representatives of mainly secular and liberal Iraqis. We had some other meetings with Human rights organizations as well. Read Tom Hayden’s piece in The Nation for more details about our meeting in Amman.

That week in Jordan and Syria was so intense. I came back to DC for a day, then I took the bus to New York to watch Fear Up: Stories from Baghdad and Guantanamo, and participate in some discussions.

The next day, I went to JFK in the morning to catch my Jet Blue plane to California. I reached Terminal 6 at around 7:15 am, issued a boarding pass, and checked all my bags in, and then walked to the security checkpoint. For the first time in my life, I was taken to a secondary search . My shoes were searched, and I was asked for my boarding pass and ID. After passing the security, I walked to check where gate 16 was, then I went to get something to eat. I got some cheese and grapes with some orange juice and I went back to Gate 16 and sat down in the boarding area enjoying my breakfast and some sunshine.

At around 8:30, two men approached me while I was checking my phone. One of them asked me if I had a minute and he showed me his badge, I said: “sure”. We walked some few steps and stood in front of the boarding counter where I found out that they were accompanied by another person, a woman from Jet Blue.

One of the two men who approached me first, Inspector Harris, asked for my id card and boarding pass. I gave him my boarding pass and driver’s license. He said “people are feeling offended because of your t-shirt”. I looked at my t-shirt: I was wearing my shirt which states in both Arabic and English “we will not be silent”. You can take a look at it in this picture taken during our Jordan meetings with Iraqi MPs. I said “I am very sorry if I offended anyone, I didnt know that this t-shirt will be offensive”. He asked me if I had any other T-shirts to put on, and I told him that I had checked in all of my bags and I asked him “why do you want me to take off my t-shirt? Isn’t it my constitutional right to express myself in this way?” The second man in a greenish suit interfered and said “people here in the US don’t understand these things about constitutional rights”. So I answered him “I live in the US, and I understand it is my right to wear this t-shirt”.

Then I once again asked the three of them : “How come you are asking me to change my t-shirt? Isn’t this my constitutional right to wear it? I am ready to change it if you tell me why I should. Do you have an order against Arabic t-shirts? Is there such a law against Arabic script?” so inspector Harris answered “you can’t wear a t-shirt with Arabic script and come to an airport. It is like wearing a t-shirt that reads “I am a robber” and going to a bank”. I said “but the message on my t-shirt is not offensive, it just says “we will not be silent”. I got this t-shirt from Washington DC. There are more than a 1000 t-shirts printed with the same slogan, you can google them or email them at [email protected] . It is printed in many other languages: Arabic, Farsi, Spanish, English, etc.” Inspector Harris said: “We cant make sure that your t-shirt means we will not be silent, we don’t have a translator. Maybe it means something else”. I said: “But as you can see, the statement is in both Arabic and English”. He said “maybe it is not the same message”. So based on the fact that Jet Blue doesn’t have a translator, anything in Arabic is suspicious because maybe it’ll mean something bad!

Meanwhile, a third man walked in our direction. He stood with us without introducing himself, and he looked at inspector Harris’s notes and asks him: “is that his information?”, inspector Harris answered “yes”. The third man, Mr. Harmon, asks inspector Harris : “can I copy this information?”, and inspector Harris says “yes, sure”.

inspector Harris said: “You don’t have to take of your t-shirt, just put it on inside-out”. I refused to put on my shirt inside-out. So the woman interfered and said “let’s reach a compromise. I will buy you a new t-shirt and you can put it on on top of this one”. I said “I want to keep this t-shirt on”. Both inspector Harris and Mr. Harmon said “No, we can’t let you get on that airplane with your t-shirt”. I said “I am ready to put on another t-shirt if you tell me what is the law that requires such a thing. I want to talk to your supervisor”. Inspector Harris said “You don’t have to talk to anyone. Many people called and complained about your t-shirt. Jetblue customers were calling before you reached the checkpoint, and costumers called when you were waiting here in the boarding area”.

it was then that I realized that my t-shirt was the reason why I had been taken to the secondary checking.

I asked the four people again to let me talk to any supervisor, and they refused.

The Jet Blue woman was asking me again to end this problem by just putting on a new t-shirt, and I felt threatened by Mr. Harmon’s remarks as in “Let’s end this the nice way”. Taking in consideration what happens to other Arabs and Muslims in US airports, and realizing that I will miss my flight unless I covered the Arabic script on my t-shirt as I was told by the four agents, I asked the Jet Blue woman to buy me a t-shirt and I said “I don’t want to miss my flight.”

She asked, what kind of t-shirts do you like. Should I get you an “I heart new york t-shirt?”. So Mr. Harmon said “No, we shouldn’t ask him to go from one extreme to another”. I asked mr. harmon why does he assume I hate new york if I had some Arabic script on my t-shirt, but he didn’t answer.

The woman went away for 3 minutes, and she came back with a gray t-shirt reading “new york”. I put the t-shirt on and removed the price tag. I told the four people who were involved in the conversation: “I feel very sad that my personal freedom was taken away like this. I grew up under authoritarian governments in the Middle East, and one of the reasons I chose to move to the US was that I don’t want an officer to make me change my t-shirt. I will pursue this incident today through a Constitutional rights organization, and I am sure we will meet soon”. Everyone said okay and left, and I went back to my seat.

At 8:50 I was called again by a fourth young man, standing with the same jetblue woman. He asked for my boarding pass, so I gave it to him, and stood in front of the boarding counter. I asked the woman: “is everything okay?”, she responded: “Yes, sure. We just have to change your seat”. I said: “but I want this seat, that’s why I chose it online 4 weeks ago”, the fourth man said ” there is a lady with a toddler sitting there. We need the seat.”

Then they re-issued me a small boarding pass for seat 24a, instead of seat 3a. They said that I can go to the airplane now. I was the first person who entered the airplane, and I was really annoyed about being assigned this seat in the back of the airplane too. It smelled like the bathrooms, which is why I had originally chosen a seat which would be far from that area.

It sucks to be an Arab/Muslim living in the US these days. When you go to the middle east, you are a US tax-payer destroying people’s houses with your money, and when you come back to the US, you are a suspected terrorist and plane hijacker.

If you want to call Jet Blue and ask about their regulations against Arabic script, you can use the following numbers:

* If calling within the U.S., Bahamas or Puerto Rico: 1-800-JETBLUE (538-2583)
* If calling from the Dominican Republic: 1-200-9898
* If calling from outside the U.S. or Dominican Republic: 001-801-365-2525
* Customers who are deaf or heard of hearing (TTY/TDD): 1-800-336-5530

or you can leave them some comments here. Help make the US a better place by stopping such unconstitutional violations of our rights.

Nuremberg Principles

Principle I
Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefore and liable to punishment.

Principle II
The fact that internal law does not impose a penalty for an act which constitutes a crime under international law does not relieve the person who committed the act from responsibility under international law.

Principle III
The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.

Principle IV
The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

Principle V
Any person charged with a crime under international law has the right to a fair trial on the facts and law.

Principle VI
The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:

1. Crimes against peace:
1. Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;
2. Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).
2. War Crimes:
   Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation of slave labor or for any other purpose of the civilian population of or in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the Seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.
3. Crimes against humanity:
   Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds, when such acts are done or such persecutions are carried on in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.

Principle VII
Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity as set forth in Principle VI is a crime under international law.

Maynard Ferguson 5/4/28 – 8/23/06

yesterday, on my way to the ballard sedentary sousa band rehearsal, i was struck with the inspiration for what to do to my art-car… and it seems perfectly obvious once i think about it, which makes me wonder why i didn’t think of it before. it’s “Ganesha the car”, so what it needs is a Ganesha Yantra on the roof.

this is the text from a bunch of different web sites about Ganesha Yantra:

Ganesh, the elephant-headed god, is invoked at the beginning of every undertaking to seek his help in removing obstacles and assure success. Ganesh is known as the ’Remover of Obstacles’ from our paths. The worship of Ganesh may be peformed through a Yantra. The Yantra is composed of six triangles which are closed on all sides, with a central triangle and ’bindu’ inside. The Swastik is the sign of Lord Ganesh.

The Ganesha Yantra
The basic form of the Yantra is always a six pointed star in the center surrounded by Lotus petals which vary in multiples of eight. The central six-pointed star represents the harmonious combination of masculine and feminine energies in dynamic equilibrium, it is India’s symbolic version of the Yin-yang. The Ganesha Yantra for instance has sixteen petals instead of the normal eight, and they are inscribed with sacred syllables and mantras, which vary from the Mahaganapati Yantra, which have only eight petals.

Design and Significance
The outer boundary wall of the smaller size Yantras may have large liminal gaps, [they are thresholds of potential, of awareness, or transformations].In large Yantras however there is enough space to draw a convoluted outer wall with multiple layers. This keeps the liminal gaps active but also filters the energy generated by the Yantra from rushing outwards in an uncontrolled and promiscuous manner. Within each lotus-petal is a bija mantra, that contains in ‘sound-seed-form’ the power of a god or attribute that influences the manifestation of desirable qualities. These are highly intricate and not all well understood, but they undeniably work. Sufficient to say that almost every god with any stature in India is represented in most Yantras so worshipping or meditating with a Yantra is to worship all the gods at once. The Yantra is a micro-cosmos and it is always directly in contact with, and influencing, the macro-cosmos or larger universe outside. Hence any worship or meditation or affirmation directed towards it finds the desired outcome being easily manifested in the larger physical reality. The Yantra is a machine too, apart from being the symbolic energy body of the god, a machine to bring about transformation by focusing your intent. The Yantra should always be treated with great respect, kept in a place of honor and moved as little as possible (well, i’ll have to forgo that one, since it’s gonna be on my car… oh well). Ideally only one person should handle it at all times. It is recommended that some daily meditation upon the Yantra be practiced as the patterns subtly influence and transform the thought-forms of the mind gently guiding them into habits of prosperity thinking which after all is more important than merely hoping for prosperity.

Panch Dhatu Shri Yantra Literally ’ Loom” or later, meaning “Instrument” or even ” Machine”

In actual practice a yantra is a symbolic representation of aspects of divinity usually the Mother Goddess. It is an interlocking matrix of geometric figures, typically circles, triangles and floral patterns that form fractal patterns of great elegance and beauty. Though drawn in two dimensions a yantra is supposed to represent a three dimensional object. Three-dimensional yantras are now becoming increasingly common. The Yantra is primarily a meditation tool both for serious spiritual seekers as well as sculptors in the classical tradition. Before creating their artifact in wood stone or metal, they draw up a yantra that represents the attributes of the god they wish to sculpt. Intense meditation upon it causes the fully formed image to leap into the mind’s eye with an intensity that is remarkable for its imprinting ability for then they do not need to use a sketch till the completion of the image.

The yantra is mistakenly thought to be a symbol purely of the manifold aspects of the Mother Goddess. This is an understandable error as most yantras are indeed connected to the Goddess the most famous one being the Shri Yantra, an abstract representation of Laxmi, Goddess of Fortune. However, there are yantras for Ganesha and Kubera too, male deities, though they share a common Yaksha origin with Laxmi. The Yaksha were the original chthonic deities of India and the yantra system seems to have been incorporated into the Vedic worldview at a later stage.

Within the body of the more complex yantras are inscribed the monosyllabic mantras, the bija or seed mantras, that are supposed to constitute the spiritual body of the goddess or god. The design always focuses the attention onto the center of the yantra usually a dot or bindu, which is the Locus Mundi, the center of all things and represents the Unmanifested Potential of all creation. The other figures usually symbolize the various stages within the unfolding of creation. Thus every yantra is a symbolic representation of both the deity as well as the universe, as the mother goddess not only permeates the substance of the universe she is, literally, the Universe itself. Abstract geometric representations of the universe are called mandalas however. Thus every yantra is a mandala, though not all mandalas are yantras.

Ganesh is the foremost God. He is worshipped first on all auspicious occasions, whether it is a marriage or a religious function. Ganeshji is also invoked and worshipped before any festival, or a new project or venture that a Hindu undertakes. He is the remover of all sankat (obstacles) and is an extremely benevolent god, fulfilling the wishes of those whom pray to him sincerely. The worshiper of this Yantra is blessed with success in work & business, good luck & new opportunities in career, fulfillment of wishes & desires and achievement of goals & objectives.

The one who does Pooja of Ganesh Yantra is blessed with success in his work, business, undertaking & desires. Ganesh Pooja is must before starting any work. It is most auspicious. He is worshipped for siddhi, success in undertakings, and buddhi, intelligence. He is worshipped before any venture is started. He is also the God of education, knowledge and wisdom, literature, and the fine arts.

Guru Adi Shankaracharya has recommended that every home shall establish Ganesh Yantra on its outer door or wall to get protection from all evils.

Ganesh, the benement and design God of wisdom & remove all obstacles Ganesh puja is must before starting any work. It is most asupicious Ganesh is always invoked before any important work is undertaken be it the starting of a business, the building of a house of a house or the writing of a book or even undertaking a jounery.

The one who do upasane & puja of Ganesh Yantra is blessed with success in his work, business, undertaking & desires. Ganesh puja is must before starting any work.It is most auspicious. The sadhaka is blessed with success in his work, business, undertaking and desires. Ganesh puja can be performed through idol or through Ganesh yantra. Ganapati or Ganesha, the Lord of Ganas, the elephant faced God, represents the power of the Supreme Being that removes obstacles and ensures success in human endeavors. Ganesha is revered as the son of the Shiva and Parvati, and is always honored first in most worship services and rituals. Ganesha is also known as Ganapati, Vigneswara, Vinayaka, Gajamukha and Ainkaran. He is worshipped for siddhi, success in undertakings, and buddhi, intelligence. He is worshipped before any venture is started. He is also the God of education, knowledge and wisdom, literature, and the fine arts.

Ganesh yantra is written in accordance to canons in auspicious lagna & mahurta and tantras be recited and yantra is purified. This yantra is composed of six triangles, closed on all the sides with a central triangle and binds inside. The Beej word (Gang) is recited for purifying the yantra. Guru Adi Shankaracharya has recommended that every home shall establish Ganesh Yantra on its outer door or wall to get protection from all evils.

aum ekadantaye vidmahe vakratundaye dhimahi tanno buddhih prachodayat
aum vanishwaraye vidmahe hayagrivaye dhimahi tanno hayagriv prachodayat

as i feared would happen, maria l. daggett, of south nyack, NY, failed to ship my sousaphone mouthpiece on the 20th, as she said she was going to… 8/ now i have to go through the whole process of getting my money back, but i also have to find another sousaphone mouthpiece. damn!

i’ve been feeling tremendously artistic recently, which has culminated in my purchasing a folding easel, but i haven’t been producing much artwork, because everything takes about 4 times as long as it did before my injury, and i keep getting distracted… but that’s partially what the easel is for, because i can work on a drawing for a while, and then leave it and come back to it later and it will be in exactly the same position i left it, which makes it a lot easier to pick up where i left off.

okay, i don’t usually do this, but this is worth it.

Patrick Stewart playing the voice of Deputy Director Bullock, singing Oingo Boingo’s "I Love Little Girls" on the TV show "American Dad"

and a note to , it was “American Dad”… all of the “Family Guy” episodes that feature Patrick Stewart feature him playing himself.

see, it remembers me when it is less than 12 hours, but not if it has been more than 12 hours, even though i’ve checked the “remember me” box… now all i gotta do is figure out why.

this is a post to see if livejournal will log me out in less than 12 hours, like it’s been doing recently, in spite of the fact that i have supposedly checked the “remember me” check box… we’ll see

judging by how congress has supported bush with his war, to the detriment of low income people, and generally stomped on our civil rights in every way possible, i’m guessing that, despite the furor about net neutrality that’s been being thrown around, that "they’re" going to go ahead and do this anyway, despite whatever complaints us "regular citizens" "consumers" and "subscribers" have to say about it, but i wanted to post this anyway. yet another reason to seriously consider leaving the country and not coming back, ever! 8(

Congress Poised to Unravel the Internet
By Jeffrey Chester
August 18, 2006

Lured by huge checks handed out by the country’s top lobbyists, members of Congress could soon strike a blow against Internet freedom as they seek to resolve the hot-button controversy over preserving “network neutrality.” The telecommunications reform bill now moving through Congress threatens to be a major setback for those who hope that digital media can foster a more democratic society. The bill not only precludes net neutrality safeguards but also eliminates local community oversight of digital communications provided by cable and phone giants. It sets the stage for the privatized, consolidated and unregulated communications system that is at the core of the phone and cable lobbies’ political agenda.

In both the House and Senate versions of the bill, Americans are described as “consumers” and “subscribers,” not citizens deserving substantial rights when it comes to the creation and distribution of digital media. A handful of companies stand to gain incredible monopoly power from such legislation, especially AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon. They have already used their political clout in Washington to secure for the phone and cable industries a stunning 98 percent control of the US residential market for high-speed Internet.

Alaska Republican Senator Ted Stevens, the powerful Commerce Committee chair, is trying to line up votes for his “Advanced Telecommunications and Opportunities Reform Act.” It was Stevens who called the Internet a “series of tubes” as he tried to explain his bill. Now the subject of well-honed satirical jabs from The Daily Show, as well as dozens of independently made videos, Stevens is hunkering down to get his bill passed by the Senate when it reconvenes in September.

But thanks to the work of groups like Save the Internet, many Senate Democrats now oppose the bill because of its failure to address net neutrality. (Disclosure: The Center for Digital Democracy, where I work, is a member of that coalition.) Oregon Democrat Senator Ron Wyden, Maine Republican Olympia Snowe and South Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan have joined forces to protect the US Internet. Wyden has placed a “hold” on the bill, requiring Stevens (and the phone and cable lobbies) to strong-arm sixty colleagues to prevent a filibuster. But with a number of GOP senators in tight races now fearful of opposing net neutrality, the bill’s chances for passage before the midterm election are slim. Stevens, however, may be able to gain enough support for passage when Congress returns for a lame-duck session.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
Thus far, the strategy of the phone and cable lobbies has been to dismiss concerns about net neutrality as either paranoid fantasies or political discontent from progressives. “It’s a made-up issue,” AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre said in early August at a meeting of state regulators. New Hampshire Republican Senator John Sununu claims that net neutrality is “what the liberal left have hung their hat on,” suggesting that the outcry over Internet freedom is more partisan than substantive. Other critics of net neutrality, including many front groups, have tried to frame the debate around unsubstantiated fears about users finding access to websites blocked, pointing to a 2005 FCC policy statement that “consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice.” But the issue of blocking has been purposefully raised to shift the focus from what should be the real concerns about why the phone and cable giants are challenging federal rules requiring nondiscriminatory treatment of digital content.

Verizon, Comcast and the others are terrified of the Internet as we know it today. Net neutrality rules would jeopardize their far-reaching plans to transform our digital communications system. Both the cable and phone industries recognize that if their broadband pipes (now a monopoly) must be operated in an open and neutral fashion, they will face real competition–and drastically reduced revenues–from an ever-growing number of lower-cost phone and video providers. Alcatel, a major technology company helping Verizon and AT&T build their broadband networks, notes in one business white paper that cable and phone companies are “really competing with the Internet as a business model, which is even more formidable than just competing with a few innovative service aggregators such as Google, Yahoo and Skype.” (Skype is a telephone service provider using the Internet.)

Policy Racket
The goal of dominating the nation’s principal broadband pipeline serving all of our everyday (and ever-growing) communications needs is also a major motivation behind opposition to net neutrality. Alcatel and other broadband equipment firms are helping the phone and cable industries build what will be a reconfigured Internet–one optimized to generate what they call “triple play” profits from “high revenue services such as video, voice and multimedia communications.” Triple play means generating revenues from a single customer who is using a bundle of services for phone, TV and PC–at home, at work or via wireless devices. The corporate system emerging for the United States (and elsewhere in the world) is being designed to boost how much we spend on services, so phone and cable providers can increase what they call our “ARPU” (average revenue per user). This is the “next generation” Internet system being created for us, one purposefully designed to facilitate the needs of a mass consumerist culture.

Absent net neutrality and other safeguards, the phone/cable plan seeks to impose what is called a “policy-based” broadband system that creates “rules” of service for every user and online content provider. How much one can afford to spend would determine the range and quality of digital media access. Broadband connections would be governed by ever-vigilant network software engaged in “traffic policing” to insure each user couldn’t exceed the “granted resources” supervised by “admission control” technologies. Mechanisms are being put in place so our monopoly providers can “differentiate charging in real time for a wide range of applications and events.” Among the services that can form the basis of new revenues, notes Alcatel, is online content related to “community, forums, Internet access, information, news, find your way (navigation), marketing push, and health monitoring.”

Missing from the current legislative debate on communications is how the plans of cable and phone companies threaten civic participation, the free flow of information and meaningful competition. Nor do the House or Senate versions of the bill insure that the public will receive high-speed Internet service at a reasonable price. According to market analysts, the costs US users pay for broadband service is more than eight times higher than what subscribers pay in Japan and South Korea. (Japanese consumers pay a mere 75 cents per megabit. South Koreans are charged only 73 cents. But US users are paying $6.10 per megabit. Internet service abroad is also much faster than it is here.)

Why are US online users being held hostage to higher rates at slower speeds? Blame the business plans of the phone and cable companies. As technology pioneer Bob Frankston and PBS tech columnist Robert Cringely recently explained , the phone and cable companies see our broadband future as merely a “billable event.” Frankston and Cringely urge us to be part of a movement where we–and our communities–are not just passive generators of corporate profit but proactive creators of our own digital futures. That means we would become owners of the “last mile” of fiber wire, the key link to the emerging broadband world. For about $17 a month, over ten years, the high-speed connections coming to our homes would be ours–not in perpetual hock to phone or cable monopolists. Under such a scenario, notes Cringely, we would just pay around $2 a month for super-speed Internet access.

Regardless of whether Congress passes legislation in the fall, progressives need to create a forward-looking telecom policy agenda. They should seek to insure online access for low-income Americans, provide public oversight of broadband services, foster the development of digital communities and make it clear that the public’s free speech rights online are paramount. It’s now time to help kill the Stevens “tube” bill and work toward a digital future where Internet access is a right–and not dependent on how much we can pay to “admission control.”

i’ve been thinking that there was something extremely suspicious about the timing of the alleged foiling of the alleged terrorist plot to allegedly smuggle alleged precursors to alleged explosives on to alleged airplanes from the time they first announced it, and even moreso after it was discovered that "they" were pulling some real poolitical hi-jinks behind our backs while they were dangling this alleged fiasco in front of our eyes to distract us, and now somebody is saying the same thing… coincidence?

The timing is political
We should be sceptical about this alleged plot, and wary of politicians who seek to benefit
By Craig Murray
18 August, 2006

Nine days on, nobody has been charged with any crime. For there to be no clear evidence yet on something that was “imminent” and would bring “mass murder on an unbelievable scale” is, to say the least, peculiar. A 24th person, arrested amid much fanfare on Tuesday, was quietly released without charge the following day.

Media analysis has been full of information from police and security sources. By and large journalists are honourable in this kind of reporting. Their sources, unfortunately, are not – viz the non-existent ricin, the Forest Gate “chemical weapons vest”, or Jean Charles de Menezes leaping the barriers. Unlike the herd of security experts, I have had the highest security clearance; I have done a huge amount of professional intelligence analysis; and I have been inside the spin machine. And I am very sceptical about the story that has been spun.

None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not have passports. It could be pretty difficult to convince a jury that these individuals were about to go through with suicide bombings, whatever they bragged about on the net.

What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for more than a year – like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.

Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information from people desperate to stop or avert torture. What you don’t get is the truth.

We also have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing arrests the weekend before they were made. Why? Both in domestic trouble, they longed for a chance to change the story. The intelligence from Pakistan, however dodgy, gave them a chance. Comparisons with 9/11 were all over front pages.

And we have the appalling political propaganda of John Reid, the home secretary, warning us all in advance of the evil that threatens us and complaining that some people “don’t get” why we have to abandon traditional liberties.

We will now never know if any of those arrested would have gone on to make a bomb or buy a plane ticket. Most do not fit the “loner” profile you would expect. As they were all under surveillance, and on airport watch lists, there could have been little danger in letting them proceed closer to maturity: that is what we would have done with the IRA.

In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. More than 1,000 British Muslims have been arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, but only 12% have been charged. That is harassment on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% were acquitted. Most of the few convictions – just over 2% of arrests – are nothing to do with terrorism, but some minor offence the police happened upon while trawling through the lives they have wrecked.

Plainly, Islamist terrorism does exist. But its growth is encouraged by our adherence to neocon foreign policy, by our support for appalling regimes abroad, and by our trampling on the rights of Muslims in the UK. Now David Cameron has joined Blair and Reid in the rush to benefit politically from the fear thus engendered. Be very wary of politicians who seek to benefit from terror.

Be sceptical. Be very, very sceptical.

On the implausibility of the explosives plot.
By Perry E. Metzger
August 11, 2006

First, a note of introduction. Until recently, I was a computer security guy, and as with many in my profession, the application of computer security analysis to non-computer security problems was increasingly interesting to me. Now, for reasons that don’t need exploring at this juncture, I’m back at school, studying chemistry, and I’m spending this summer in a lab doing organic synthesis work. Strangely, today I find my interests colliding.

So, I’m doing a bunch of reading, and I find the claimed method the “highly sophisticated” attackers came up with for bringing down airliners kind of implausible. I wonder if it could ever work in reality.

A disclaimer, I’m working entirely off of news reported by people who don’t know the difference between soft drinks and nail polish remover, but the information I’ve seen has the taste of being real. As near as I can tell, it is claimed that the terrorists planned to make organic peroxides in situ on board an airplane and use them to destroy the plane.

This seems, at least given my initial examination of the idea, implausible.

Based on the claims in the media, it sounds like the idea was to mix H2O2 (hydrogen peroxide, but not the low test kind you get at the pharmacy), H2SO4 (sulfuric acid, of necessity very concentrated for it to work at all), and acetone (known to people worldwide as nail polish remover), to make acetone peroxides. You first have to mix the H2O2 and H2SO4 to get a powerful oxidizer, and then you use it on acetone to get the peroxides, which are indeed explosive.

A mix of H2O2 and H2SO4, commonly called “piranha bath”, is used in orgo labs around the world for cleaning the last traces out of organic material out of glassware when you need it *really* clean — thus, many people who work around organic labs are familiar with it. When you mix it, it heats like mad, which is a common thing when you mix concentrated sulfuric acid with anything. It is very easy to end up with a spattering mess. You don’t want to be around the stuff in general. Here, have a look at a typical warning list from a lab about the stuff:

http://www.mne.umd.edu/LAMP/Sop/Piranha_SOP.htm

Now you may protest “but terrorists who are willing to commit suicide aren’t going to be deterred by being injured while mixing their precursor chemicals!” — but of course, determination isn’t the issue here, getting the thing done well enough to make the plane go boom is the issue. There is also the small matter of explaining to the guy next to you what you’re doing, or doing it in a tiny airplane bathroom while the plane jitters about.

Now, they could of course mix up their oxidizer in advance, but then finding a container to keep the stuff in that isn’t going to melt is a bit of an issue. The stuff reacts violently with *everything*. You’re not going to keep piranha bath in a shampoo bottle — not unless the shampoo bottle was engineered by James Bond’s Q. Glass would be most appropriate, assuming that you could find a way to seal it that wouldn’t be eaten.

So, lets say you have your oxidizer mixture and now you are going to mix it with acetone. In a proper lab environment, that’s not going to be *too* awful — your risk of dying horribly is significant but you could probably keep the whole thing reasonably under control — you can use dry ice to cool a bath to -78C, say, and do the reaction really slowly by adding the last reactant dropwise with an addition funnel. If you’re mixing the stuff up in someone’s bathtub, like the guys who bombed the London subways a year ago did, you can take some reasonable precautions to make sure that your reaction doesn’t go wildly out of control, like using a lot of normal ice and being very, very, very careful and slow. You need to keep the stuff cool, and you need to be insanely meticulous, or you’re going to be in a world of hurt.

So, we’ve covered in the lab and in the bathtub. On an airplane? On an airplane, the whole thing is ridiculous. You have nothing to cool the mixture with. You have nothing to control your mixing with. You can’t take a day doing the work, either. You are probably locked in the tiny, shaking bathroom with very limited ventilation, and that isn’t going to bode well for you living long enough to get your explosives manufactured. In short, it sounds, well, not like a very good idea.

If you choke from fumes, or if your explosives go off before you’ve got enough made to take out the airplane — say if you only have enough to shatter the mirror in the bathroom and spray yourself with one of the most evil oxidizers around — you aren’t going to be famous as the martyr who killed hundreds of westerners. Your determination and willingness to die doesn’t matter — you still need to get the job done.

You also need quite a bit of organic peroxides made by this route in order to be sure of taking down a plane. I doubt that just a few grams is going to do it — though of course the first couple of grams you are likely to go off before you make any more. The possibility of doing all this in an airplane lav or by some miracle at your seat seems really unlikely. Perhaps I’m just ignorant here — it is possible that a clever person could do it. I can’t see an easy way though.

So far as I can tell, for the pragmatic terrorist, the whole thing sounds really impractical. Why not just smuggle pre-made explosives on board? What advantage is this “binary system” idea in the first place? There are also all sorts of ideas a smart person could come up with in a few minutes of thinking — see below.

The news this morning was full of stuff about “ordinary looking devices being used as detonators”. Well, if you’re using nasty unstable peroxides as your explosive material, you don’t really need any — the stuff goes off if you give it a dirty look. I suspect a good hard rap with a hard heavy object would be more than sufficient. No need to worry about those cell phones secretly being high tech “detonators” if you’re going this route.

Anyway, from all of this, I conclude that either

1. The terrorists had a brilliant idea for how to combine oxidizer and a ketone or ether to make some sort of nasty organic peroxide explosive in situ that has escaped me so far. Perhaps that’s true — I’m not omniscient and I have to confess that I’ve never tried making the stuff at all, let alone in an airplane bathroom.
2. The terrorists were smuggling on board pre-made organic peroxide explosives. Clearly, this is not a new threat at all — organic peroxide explosives have been used by terrorists for decades now. Smuggling them in a bottle is not an interesting new threat either — clearly if you can smuggle cocaine in a bottle you can smuggle acetone peroxide. I would hope we had means of looking for that already, though, see below for a comment on that.
3. The terrorists were phenomenally ill informed, or hadn’t actually tried any of this out yet — perhaps what we are told was a “sophisticated plot” was a bunch of not very sophisticated people who had not gotten very far in testing their ideas out, or perhaps they were really really dumb and hadn’t tried even a small scale experiment before going forward.

There are other open questions I have here as well. Assuming this is really what was planned, why are the airport security making people throw away their shampoo? If you open a shampoo bottle and give it a sniff, I assure you that you’ll notice concentrated sulfuric acid very fast, not that you would want to have your nose near it for long. No high tech means needed for detection there. Acetone is also pretty distinctive — the average airport security person will recognize the smell of nail polish remover if told that is what they’re sniffing for. Oh, and even if they used a cousin of acetone, say methyl ethyl ketone (aka MEK, aka 2-butanone), you’ll still pick up on the smell.

And now, on to the fun part of this note. First they came for the nail clippers, but I did not complain for I do not cut my finger nails. Now they’ve come for the shampoo bottles, but I did not complain for I do not wash my hair. What’s next? What will finally stop people in their tracks and make them realize this is all theater and utterly ridiculous? Lets cut the morons off at the pass, and discuss all the other common things you can destroy your favorite aircraft with. Bruce Schneier makes fun of such exercises as “movie plots”, and with good reason. Hollywood, here I come!

We’re stopping people from bringing on board wet things. What about dry things? Is baby powder safe? Well, perhaps it is if you check carefully that it is, in fact, baby powder. What if, though, it is mostly a container of potassium cyanide and a molar equivalent of a dry carboxylic acid? Just add water in the first class bathroom, and LOTS of hydrogen cyanide gas will evolve. If you’re particularly crazy, you could do things like impregnating material in your luggage with the needed components. Clearly, we can’t let anyone carry on containers of talc, and we have to keep them away from all aqueous liquids.

See the elderly gentleman with the cane? Perhaps it is not really an ordinary cane. The metal parts could be filled with (possibly sintered) aluminum and iron oxide. Thermit! Worse still, nothing in a detector will notice thermit, and trying to make a detector to find thermit is impractical. Maybe it is in the hollowed portions of your luggage handles! Maybe it is cleverly mixed into the metal in someone’s wheelchair! Who knows?

Also, we can never allow people to bring on laptop computers. It is far too easy to fill the interstices of the things with explosives — there is a lot of space inside them — or to rig the lithium ion batteries to start a very hot fire (that’s pretty trivial), or if you’re really clever, you can make a new case for the laptop that’s made of 100% explosive material instead of ordinary plastic. Fun!

No liquor on board any more, of course. You can open lots of little liquor bottles and set the booze on fire, and besides, see the dangers of letting people have fluids. Even if you let them have fluids, no cans of coke — you can make a can of coke into a shiv in a few minutes. No full sized bottles of course, since you can break ’em and use them as a sharp weapon, so no more champagne in first class either, let alone whiskey.

Then, lets consider books and magazines. Sure, they look innocent, but are they? For 150 years, chemists have known that if you take something with high cellulose content — cotton, or paper, or lots of other things — and you nitrate it (usually with a mixture of nitric and sulfuric acids), you get nitrocellulose, which looks vaguely like the original material you nitrated but which goes BOOM nicely. Nitrocellulose is the base of lots of explosives and propellants, including, I believe, modern “smokeless” gunpowder. It is dangerous stuff to work with, but you’re a terrorist, so why not. Make a bunch of nitrocellulose paper, print books on it, and take ’em on board. The irony of taking out an airplane with a Tom Clancy novel should make the effort worthwhile.

So, naturally, we have to get rid of books and magazines on board. That’s probably for the best, as people who read are dangerous.

And now for a small side note. It is, of course, commonly claimed that we have nitro explosive detectors at airports, but so far as I can tell they don’t work — students from labs I work in who make nitro and diazo compounds for perfectly legitimate reasons and have trace residues on their clothes have told me the machines never pick up a thing even though this is just what they’re supposed to find, possibly because they’re tuned all the way down not to scare all the people who take nitroglycerine pills for their angina.

Now, books aren’t the only things you could nitrate. Pants and shirts? Sure. It might take a lot of effort to get things just so or they will look wrong to the eye, but I bet you can do it. Clearly, we can’t allow people on planes wearing clothes. Nudity in the air will doubtless be welcomed by many as an icebreaker, having been deprived of their computers and all reading material for entertainment.

Then of course there is the question of people smuggling explosives on board in their body cavities, so in addition to nudity, you need body cavity searches. That will, I’m sure, provide additional airport entertainment. By the way, if you really don’t think a terrorist could smuggle enough explosives on board in their rectum to make a difference, you haven’t been following how people in prison store their shivs and heroin.

However, it isn’t entirely clear that even body cavity searches are enough. If we’re looking for a movie plot, why not just get a sympathetic surgeon to implant explosives into your abdomen! A small device that looks just like a pace maker could be the detonator, and with modern methods, you could do something like setting it off by rapping “shave and a haircut” on your own chest. You could really do this — and I’d like to see them catch that one.

So can someone tell me where the madness is going to end? My back of the envelope says about as many people die in the US every month in highway accidents than have died in all our domestic terrorist incidents in the last 50 years. Untold numbers of people in the US are eating themselves to death and dying of heart disease, diabetes, etc. — I think that number is something like 750,000 people a year? Even with all the terrorist bombings of planes over the years, it is still safer to travel by plane than it is to drive to the airport, and it is even safer to fly than to walk!

At some point, we’re going to have to accept that there is a difference between real security and Potemkin security (or Security Theater as Bruce Schneier likes to call it), and a difference between realistic threats and uninteresting threats. I’m happy that the police caught these folks even if their plot seems very sketchy, but could we please have some sense of proportion?

Public Stoning: Not Just for the Taliban Anymore
Christian reconstructionists believe democracy is heresy and public school is satanic — and they’ve got more influence than you think.
By John Sugg
August 15, 2006.

Two really devilish guys materialized in Toccoa, Ga., last month to harangue 600 true believers on the gospel of a thoroughly theocratic America. Along with lesser lights of the religious far right who spoke at American Vision’s “Worldview Super Conference 2006,” Herb Titus and Gary North called for nothing short of the overthrow of the United States of America.

Titus and North aren’t household names. But Titus, former dean of TV preacher Pat Robertson’s Regent University law school, has led the legal battle to plant the Ten Commandants in county courthouses across the nation. North, an apostle of the creed called Christian Reconstructionism, is one of the most influential elders of American fundamentalism.

“I don’t want to capture their (mainstream Americans’) system. I want to replace it,” fumed North to a cheering audience. North has called for the stoning of gays and nonbelievers (rocks are cheap and plentiful, he has observed). Both friends and foes label him “Scary Gary.”

Are we in danger of an American Taliban? Probably not today. But Alabama’s “Ten Commandments Judge” Roy Moore is aligned with this congregation, and one-third of Alabama Republicans who voted in the June primary supported him. When you see the South Dakota legislature outlaw abortions, the Reconstructionist agenda is at work. The movement’s greatest success is in Christian home schooling, where many, if not most, of the textbooks are Reconstructionist-authored tomes.

Moreover, the Reconstructionists are the folks behind attacks on science and public education. They’re allied with proselytizers who have tried to convert Air Force cadets — future pilots with fingers on nuclear triggers — into religious zealots. Like the communists of the 1930s, they exert tremendous stealth political gravity, drawing many sympathizers in their wake, and their friends now dominate the Republican Party in many states.

Titus’ and North’s speeches, laced with conspiracy theories about the Rockefellers and the Trilateral Commission, were more Leninist than Christian in the tactics proposed — as in their vision to use freedom to destroy the freedom of others. That’s not surprising — the founder of Christian Reconstruction, the late fringe Calvinist theologian Rousas J. Rushdoony, railed against the “heresy” of democracy.

A Harvard-bred lawyer whose most famous client is Alabama’s Judge Moore, Titus told the Toccoa gathering that the Second Amendment envisions the assassination of “tyrants;” that’s why we have guns. Tyranny, of course, is subjective to these folks. Their imposition of a theocratic state would not, by their standards, be tyranny. Public schools, on the other hand, to them are tyrannical.

North is best known to Internet users for his prolific auguring that a Y2K computer bug would cause the calamitous end of civilization. In the days prior to the advent of this millennium, North urged subscribers to his delusional economic newsletters to go survivalist and prepare for the end. Many did so, dumping investments and life savings, a big oops.

“I lost a million and a half dollars when I sold off real estate,” one of North’s fans, a home-schooling advocate from Florida, told me during a lunch break between lectures touting creationism and damning secular humanism. But my lunch companion still anted more than pocket change to hear North make more prophesies in Toccoa. “I believe Gary North on Bible issues,” he explained. I suggested that false prophets often pocket big profits, but I was talking to deaf ears.

Hosting the “Creation to Revelation… Connecting the Dots” event was a Powder Springs, Ga., publishing house, American Vision, whose pontiff is Gary DeMar. The outfit touts the antebellum South as a righteous society and favors the reintroduction of some forms of slavery (it’s sanctioned in the Bible, Reconstructionists say) — which may explain the blindingly monochrome audience at the gathering.

The setting was the Georgia Baptist Conference Center, a sprawling expanse of woods, hills and a man-made lake in the North Georgia mountains. Four decades ago, the Southern Baptists officially declared, “no ecclesiastical group or denomination should be favored by the state” and “the church should not resort to the civil power to carry on its work.”

Times change. The Baptists lust for power, and they demand the state to do their bidding. I guess that explains the denomination’s hosting of theocrats no less rigid and bloodthirsty than the Taliban’s mullahs.

DeMar christened the gathering with invective against science.

“Evolution is as religious as Christianity,” he said, a claim that certainly must amaze 99.99 percent of the scientific community. Science is irrelevant to these folks.

Everything they need to know about the universe and the origin of man is in the first two chapters of Genesis. They know the answer before any question is asked. DeMar’s spin is what he calls a clash of “worldviews.” According to DeMar and his speakers, God sanctions only their worldview. And that worldview is a hash of enforcing Old Testament Mosaic law (except when it comes to chowing down on pork barbecue), rewriting American history to endorse theocracy and explaining politics by the loopy theories of the John Birch Society. (Christian Reconstructionism evolved, so to speak, from a radical variation of Calvinism, AKA Puritanism, and the Bircher politics of such men as the late Marietta, Ga., congressman, Larry McDonald.) For most of the four-day conference, DeMar turned the Bible over to others to thump. North blamed the Rockefellers and the Trilateral Commission for the success of secularists. Titus told of Jesus making a personal appearance in the rafters of his Oregon home.

At the heart of what was taught by a succession of speakers:

• Six-day, “young earth” creationism is the only acceptable doctrine for Christians. Even “intelligent design” or “old earth” creationism are compromises with evil secularism.
• Public education is satanic and must be destroyed.
• The First Amendment was intended to keep the federal government from imposing a national religion, but states should be free to foster a religious creed. (Several states did that during the colonial period and the nation’s early days, a model the Reconstructionists want to emulate.)
• The Founding Fathers intended to protect only the liberties of the established ultra-conservative denominations of that time. Expanding the list to include “liberal” Protestant denominations, much less Catholics, Jews and (gasp!) atheists, is a corruption of the Founders’ intent.

Education earned the most vitriol at the conference. Effusing that the Religious Right has captured politics and much of the media, North proclaimed: “The only thing they (secularists) have still got a grip on is the university system.” Academic doctorates, he contended, are a conspiracy fomented by the Rockefeller family. All academic programs (except, he said, engineering) are now dominated by secularists and Darwinists.

“Marxists in the English departments!” he ranted. “Close every public school in America!”

Among North’s most quoted writings was this ditty from 1982: “[W]e must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation…which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.” Titus followed that party line when he proclaimed that the First Amendment is limited to guaranteeing “the right to criticize the government,” but “free expression is not in the Constitution.” When I asked him if blasphemy — castigating religion — was protected, he shook his head.

Like North, Titus sees public education as decidedly satanic. Also, welfare. He contended the Founding Fathers — and Americans today — owe their “first duties to God. It’s not just worship. It’s education… welfare to the poor. Welfare belongs exclusively to God. Why do schools fail? They’re trying to do the business of God. Medicaid goes. Education goes. The church gets back to doing what it should do.” And what should the church be doing According to these self-appointed arbiters of God’s will, running our lives. And stoning those who disagree.

At the Toccoa conference, DeMar organized several debates — and he commendably invited articulate opponents of his creed.

One was Ed Buckner, a retired Georgia State University professor, unabashed atheist and a member of the Atlanta Freethought Society. He debated Bill Federer, who makes a living trying to prove America’s founders intended this to be a Christian nation.

Buckner offered to concede the debate if Federer could disprove any one of four points: Americans don’t agree on religion, human judgment is imperfect, religious truth can’t be determined by votes or force and freedom is worth protecting. Federer ran from the challenge, and instead offered a litany of historic quotes showing that most of America’s founders believed in God.

Federer never got the point that if, as he argued, government should endorse his faith today, tomorrow officials might decide to ban his beliefs.

The other debate featured University of Georgia biologist Mark Farmer versus Australian “young earth” creationist Carl Wieland. Farmer, religious himself, tried to explain that no evidence had ever damaged evolutionary theory — at best, creationists point to gaps in knowledge.

“Yes, we don’t know the answers to everything,” Farmer told me. “That’s what science is all about, finding answers.”

It would be easy to dismiss the Reconstructionists as the lunatic fringe, no more worrisome than the remnants of the Prohibition Party. But, in fact, they have rather extraordinary entrée and influence with top-tier Religious Right leaders and institutions.

James Dobson’s Focus on the Family is now selling DeMar’s book, America’s Christian Heritage. Dobson himself has a warm relationship with many in the movement, and he has admitted voting for Reconstructionist presidential candidate Howard Phillips in 1996.

TV preacher Robertson has mentioned reading North’s writings, and he has hired Reconstructionists as professors at Regent University. Jerry Falwell employs Reconstructionists to teach at Liberty University. Roger Schultz, the chair of Liberty’s History Department, writes regularly for Faith for all of Life, the leading Reconstructionist journal.

Southern Baptist Bruce N. Shortt is aggressively pushing his denomination to officially repudiate public education and call on Southern Baptists to withdraw their children from public schools. Shortt’s vicious book, The Harsh Truth about Public Schools, was published by the Reconstructionist Chalcedon Foundation.

There are big theological differences between the Religious Right’s generals and the Reconstructionists. Traditional Christian theology teaches that history will muddle along until Jesus’ Second Coming. That teaching is tough to turn into a political movement. Reconstructionists preach that the nation and the world must come under Christian “dominion” (as they define it) before Christ’s return — a wonderful theology to promote global conquest.

In short, Dobson, Robertson, Falwell and the Southern Baptist Convention (the nation’s largest Protestant denomination) may not agree with everything the Reconstructionists advocate, but they sure don’t seem to mind hanging out with this openly theocratic, anti-democratic crowd.

It’s enough for Americans who believe in personal freedom and religious liberty to get worried about — before the first stones start flying.

Outlawing Unbelief
by Tom Flynn

It’s often forgotten, but seven states of the Union still define atheists, secular humanists, and other freethinkers as second-class citizens. The state constitutions of Arkansas, Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas retain historic provisions that ban unbelievers-and in some cases, minority religionists as well-from holding public office, bearing witness in court, or both. The Pennsylvania and Texas constitutions go further yet, declaring their debt to “Almighty God” in their preambles.

Typical language includes Article IX, Sec. 2, of the Tennessee constitution (engagingly titled “No Atheist shall hold a civil office”): “No person who denies the being of God, or a future state of rewards and punishments shall hold any office in the civil department of this state.”

Article XIX, Sec. 1, of the Arkansas constitution is even more exclusionary: “No person who denies the being of a God shall hold any office in the civil departments of this State, nor be competent to testify as a witness in any court.”

Article 37 of Maryland’s constitution provides that “no religious test ought ever to be required as a qualification for any office of profit or trust in this State, other than a declaration of belief in the existence of God” (emphasis added).

Article I, Sec. 4, of Pennsylvania’s constitution is more insidious: “No person who acknowledges the being of a God and a future state of rewards and punishments shall, on account of his religious sentiments, be disqualified to hold any office or place of trust under this Commonwealth.” This dual requirement of belief in a deity and in a retributive afterlife could block adherents of numerous lifestances, even some Christians. A liberal Protestant who believes in God but not in a literal afterlife, a Buddhist who believes in karma but not in a deity, or an Orthodox Jew who believes in God and an afterlife but not in reward or punishment after death-all could be barred from public office as readily as any secular humanist if this clause were enforced.

Fortunately, clauses establishing second-class citizenship for nonbelievers are seldom enforced. In the eyes of the legal profession, they are unenforceable because they blatantly violate the separation of church and state. Yet that didn’t keep South Carolina from struggling for years to deny atheist Herb Silverman a commission as a notary public. The Arkansas anti-atheist provision survived a federal court challenge as recently as 1982. Only Maryland’s provision has been explicitly overturned by the Supreme Court, in the famous 1961 Torcaso v. Watkins decision.

These clauses continue to linger in state constitutions in part because they are considered unenforceable. Few reformers have felt strong need to press for their removal. Amending state constitutions is difficult and expensive; removing clauses, even unenforceable ones, that penalize unbelievers is bound to be unpopular. Why bother, one might argue, struggling toward a victory that would be at best symbolic?

The first answer is that symbolism matters. Constitutional clauses denying full political privileges to the nonreligious (and others) enshrine bigotry in an unwelcome historical reverence. They provide rhetorical ammunition for ideologues (including many on the religious Right) who wish explicitly to deny full citizenship to those they consider infidels. Perhaps worst of all, the clauses valorize a preference for Protestant Christianity over other religious and nonreligious lifestances that is increasingly odious in a society of rapidly increasing religious diversity.

The second answer is that, while these clauses may be unenforceable today, they may not always remain so. While they survive they are like cast-off weapons-weapons a future, more pious America might choose to recommission. Consider that the next U.S. president will probably appoint at least three Supreme Court justices. If all were strong conservatives, the result could be a high court capable of reconsidering Torcaso-and making open political discrimination against nonbelievers allowable again.

Future religio-political conservatives will find it harder to create new constitutional language sanctioning the civil emasculation of unbelievers than to re-activate existing language long disavowed but never repealed. State constitutional clauses that align the polis with the Christian deity and deny unbelievers full access to public office or the courts are offensive and unacceptable. They must fall. It’s time more secular humanists-and others committed to fair treatment for all-said so.

Even if they are now unenforceable, the bigoted passages in seven state constitutions that shut out unbelievers (and often unorthodox religionists) from the body politic merit repeal. Recently Paul Kurtz has called for formation of a neo-humanist coalition. Such a coalition might take explicit political action to improve the status of unbelievers in American life. Pressing to strike these obnoxious clauses could offer such a coalition a worthwhile initial project.

current body count:

• UN: 4
• Canada: 8
• Lebanon: 1000
• Israel: 163

i agree with … israel must be destroyed.

Non-Christians need not apply
By ROBYN E. BLUMNER
August 13, 2006

Thanks to President Bush and his plan to Christianize the nation’s provision of social services, one’s relationship with Jesus Christ has become a real resume booster. As author Michelle Goldberg reports in her new book, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, Bush has ushered in affirmative action for the born- again.

In 2005 alone, more than $2-billion in federal tax money went to faith-based programs for such services as job placement programs, addiction treatment and child mentoring. Overwhelmingly, this money went to groups affiliated with Christian religions.

This reallocation of social service money from secular agencies to religiously affiliated programs has also resulted in shifting employment opportunities. But some of these new employers have a shocking job requirement – only Christians need apply.

Goldberg cited the publicly funded Firm Foundation of Bradford, Pa., as a blatant example. The group provides prison inmates with job training, something one would think any trained professional could do. Well, think again. According to Goldberg, the group posted an ad for a site manager. It said that the applicant must be “a believer in Christ and Christian Life today, sharing these ideals when the opportunity arises.” Apparently, experience and qualifications are secondary.

Transforming social welfare into conversion therapy was Bush’s design when he made faith-based initiatives the priority of his administration’s domestic agenda. And his success has been astounding.

Before Bush upended things, religious groups had always been enlisted by government as providers of social services. They just had to wholly separate their religious mission from their government-funded services. Under Bush, there has been substantial blurring of the line.

As to hiring, the law always allowed religious groups to discriminate on religious grounds – so that the Catholic Church could hire Catholic priests, for example – but that exemption did not extend to employees hired with public funds to provide social welfare. It was a simple, clear rule. If you took public money, you hired on the basis of merit, not piety.

But Bush wiped away this calibrated distinction by issuing a series of executive orders early in his presidency approving taxpayer financed religious discrimination.

Some of the resulting collateral damage has been tragic. Just talk to Anne Lown. She worked for 24 years for the Salvation Army in New York City before resigning due to the hostility she felt toward her non-Christian beliefs. The office she ran had hundreds of employees with an annual budget of $50-million, almost all of which came from public sources. Lown oversaw foster care placements, day care services, residential services for the developmentally disabled and many other programs.

In Lown’s experience, the Salvation Army had always in the past been meticulous about keeping its evangelical side from mingling with its provision of social services, but all that changed in 2003. She attributes the change directly to Bush’s policies. A lawsuit filed by Lown and another 17 current and former employees of the Salvation Army alleges that religion suddenly pervaded the agency’s personnel decisions.

Lown says she was handed a form that all employees were expected to complete, asking for list of churches she attended over the last 10 years and the name of her present minister. Lown says she was told that indicating “not applicable” was not an option. A lawyer for the Salvation Army says the form was modified after complaints were received.

But Lown said that atmosphere was fear-inducing for the professional staff.

She pointed to a mission statement that all employees were required to support as a condition of employment. It stated that the organization’s mission “is to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Margaret Geissman, who is also part of the lawsuit, claims that she was asked by a supervisor to point out gay and non-Christian employees, with the overt suggestion that there would eventually be a purge of sorts. The Salvation Army denies this.

Despite the Salvation Army’s disclaimers, Goldberg cites an internal Salvation Army document describing a deal struck in 2001 with the White House. In exchange for the administration passing regulations protecting faith-based groups from state and local antidiscrimination regulations relative to gays, the Salvation Army agreed to promote the administration’s faith-based agenda.

Forget the proverbial wall. Here it is, church and state working hand-in-glove, with tax money and the government-sanctioned intolerance as the prize.

Meanwhile, money is flowing into religious coffers without anyone watching. A June report from the Government Accountability Office found that few government agencies that award grants to faith-based organizations bother to monitor whether the recipient is improperly mixing religion into their programs or discriminating against clients on the basis of religion. A few organizations contacted by the GAO even admitted to praying with clients while providing government-funded services. As to kicking out non-Christians on the staff, the Bush Justice Department says that it is perfectly okay.

Just another example of how, under this president, I hardly recognize my country anymore.

this is news?

Religion-related fraud rampant, costs billions, report finds
By Rachel Zoll
14 August, 2006

Randall W. Harding sang in the choir at Crossroads Christian Church in Corona, Calif., and donated part of his conspicuous wealth to its ministries.

In his business dealings, he underscored his faith by naming his investment firm JTL – “Just the Lord.” Pastors and churchgoers alike entrusted their money to him.

By the time Harding was unmasked as a fraud, he and his partners had stolen more than $50 million from their clients, and Crossroads became yet another cautionary tale in what investigators say is a worsening problem for the nation’s churches.

Billions of dollars has been stolen in religion-related fraud in recent years, says the North American Securities Administrators Association, a group of state officials who work to protect investors.

Between 1984 and 1989, about $450 million was stolen in religion-related scams, the association says. In its latest count – from 1998 to 2001 – the toll had risen to $2 billion. And since then, rip-offs have only become more common.

Cases in recent years show just how vulnerable religious communities are.

Lambert Vander Tuig of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest Calif., ran a real estate scam that bilked investors out of $50 million, the Securities and Exchange Commission says.

His salesmen presented themselves as faithful Christians and distributed copies of “The Purpose Driven Life,” by Saddleback pastor Rick Warren, the SEC says. Warren and his church had no knowledge of Vander Tuig’s activities, says the SEC.

At Daystar Assembly of God Church in Prattville, Ala., a congregant persuaded church leaders and others to invest about $3 million in real estate a few years ago, promising that some profits would go toward building a megachurch. The Daystar Assembly was swindled and lost its building.

And in a dramatically broader scam, leaders of Greater Ministries International of Tampa, Fla., defrauded thousands of people of half a billion dollars by promising to double money on investments that ministry officials said were blessed by God. Several of the con men were sentenced in 2001 to more than a decade each in prison.

“Many of these frauds are, on their face, very credible and legitimate-appearing,” said Randall Lee, director of the Pacific regional office of the SEC. “You really have to dig below the surface to understand what’s going on.”

Typically, a con artist will target the pastor first, by making a generous donation and appealing to the minister’s desire to expand the church or its programs, says Joseph Borg of the Alabama Securities Commission, who played a key role in breaking up the Greater Ministries scam.

If the pastor invests, church-goers view it as a tacit endorsement. The con man often promises double-digit returns, chipping away at resistance among church members by suggesting that they can donate part of their earnings to the congregation, Borg says.

Borg says, “Most folks think ‘I’m going to invest in some overseas deal or real estate deal, and part of that money is going to the church, and I get part. I don’t feel like I’m guilty of greed.'”

If a skeptical church member openly questions a deal, that person is often castigated for speaking against a fellow Christian.

Video Leads To Cop Busts
Attorney: Nine People Arrested For No Good Reason
By Scott Weinberger
17 August, 2006

NEW YORK Last April, police targeted a sex-for-money operation at a well-known Brooklyn massage parlor. They sent in an undercover officer to catch them in the act. Instead, the cops involved were the ones who got stung.

Pictures taken from a series of hidden surveillance cameras show the undercover officer entering, standing in the massage parlor lobby and then walking out. He spends a total of 43 seconds inside. Yet the officer claimed that during those 43 seconds he was solicited by all eight women working there.

Moments later the vice squad moved in and the workers and massage parlor owner were arrested for prostitution. Based on the surveillance photos, prosecutors now believe the undercover officer was lying.

John Sims, a former federal prosecutor and assistant in the Queens District Attorney’s office, represents the massage parlor’s owner and workers.

“He had told the police back at the precinct after he had been arrested that he could prove that through the video that existed, he had in fact not committed any crime,” Sims said.

Sources said when the police heard about this videotape, they took matters into their own hands.

On April 13, one day after the prostitution bust, two men broke in through the back door of the massage parlor. Cameras were rolling, capturing footage exclusively obtained by CBS 2.

The men you see on the tape aren’t your average burglars. Rather they’re cops, with guns drawn and badges showing.

On the video, they flip on the lights and begin a search for the tape from the night before, evidence that could prove the prostitution arrests were based on lies.

The break-in escalated into an alleged armed burglary and a cover-up involving ranking members of the NYPD, their desperate actions caught on tape.

“Well, I think clearly the intention of the officers were to come back and either destroy or hide evidence that would demonstrate that at least one of the officers perjured themselves in this case,” Sims said.

The search is led by a lieutenant in a bulletproof vest. He is the same supervisor who led the Brooklyn South Vice Squad on the bust the night before.

A few minutes later the tape reveals the undercover officer carrying a videotape in his left hand. He’s the same officer who stayed just 43 seconds the night before and holds the rank of sergeant

With his lieutenant by his side, the sergeant then notices a small pinhole camera, pulls up a stool, reaches and yanks it off the wall. With the camera now ripped out and videotape in hand, the cops may have believed all is clear, but they were wrong.

A computer hard drive recorded their every action and prosecutors now have this evidence of crimes allegedly committed by police officers.

“This client is technically very savvy which enabled him to maintain his video despite an apparent attempt by the police to destroy it,” Sims said.

Once the District Attorney saw the videotapes, the prostitution charges against the massage parlor were quickly dismissed. The prosecutor’s conclusion: the arrests were based on a lie.

“Certainly I do not think people should always accept the word of a police officer even in a case that may be considered not so serious as evidenced by this particular case,” Sims said. “Why would they lie? I don’t know why they would lie in this case, but they did and nine people got arrested as a result of it.”

i’m screwed, out of luck, and there’s nothing i can do about it.

i called the mac store – the one that’s in tukwila, the “authorised” mac store – the one with the apple on the storefront – and the guy said that they could probably do a data retrieval for me.

so i took my computer to tukwila, which is about halfway to seattle from where i am currently located.

when i was a mac-head, before i got involved with windows, and before i even knew what linux or unix were all about, when a person came to an authorised mac dealer with his computer under his arm, even if they couldn’t help you right away, they made sure that you knew that everything was going to be okay. you rarely had to wait more than 15 minutes or so, and if you weren’t exactly sure of the problem, they took your computer, and made an appointment with you for later on that day, or later on in the week, to go over the problems they had found with your computer, and made sure that they had done what you needed. it was odd for a mac to need service that required you to bring the machine into the shop, and they made sure that you were happy when you left.

now, i walked into the authorised mac dealer, with my G3 under my arm, and i was met by a high-school age “mac genius” (he had a nametag that said so, so i wouldn’t wonder about it… 8/ ) who wanted to know if i was here for service, so i said yes, and started to tell him what i thought was wrong, but he said he couldn’t help me unless i was “checked in”, which you did by finding the computer where you check in, which was on the shelf with all of the other computers they had on display, and giving them your name and email address – you can’t continue until you have entered your email address, even if there is nothing that you want that they can email you about – and then make an appointment to talk with the “mac genius”, which, of course, is a minimum of a two-and-a-half hour wait. so i made my appointment and walked out of the mac store, five minutes later, with my G3 under my arm, without getting any help at all! two-and-a-half hours later, i met with the “mac genius” – who was a kid that couldn’t have been more than a year or two out of high school – who proceded to tell me that they don’t support my machine any longer! – apparently they’re considered “vintage” now… 8/ – and the software he suggested that i buy (for $150) only works with OsX, which requires at least twice as much RAM as the machine has. he said that they could “attempt a data retrieval” for me – for $250 – but there was no guarantee, and regardless of whether they got anything off the disk or not, i would still have to pay the $250. the guy literally said “you’re screwed, out of luck, and there’s nothing you can do about it”.

it’s enough to make me forswear using macs for good. apple authorised customer service has taken a nose dive, and is currently somewhere around the level of the sewers, and nobody seems to notice.

fortunately, there are a couple of “independent” authorised mac dealers in the area, and hopefully they will have better customer service, a “mac genius” who actually knows something, and the possibility of actually helping me get one directory off of my “dead” hard disk.

HINDU “CHRISTMAS” IS IN AUGUST!!!

happy Janmaastami everyone!

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Christian Zionists and false prophets

By Daoud Kuttab, Ramallah, West Bank

As if we don’t have enough problems with Muslim and Jewish fundamentalists, we are now confronted with yet another -ist. Christian Zionists, mostly from the United States, are trying to throw their weight behind one of the parties, in effect calling for the continuation of the war and carnage in Lebanon.

A small minority of evangelical Christians have entered the Middle East political arena with some of the most un-Christian statements I have ever heard. The latest gems come from people like Pat Robertson, the founder and chairman of the Christian Broadcasting Network, and Rev. John Hagee of Christians United for Israel. Hagee, a popular televangelist who leads the 18,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, ratcheted up his rhetoric this year with the publication of his book, “Jerusalem Countdown,” in which he argues that a confrontation with Iran is a necessary precondition for Armageddon (which will mean the death of most Jews, in his eyes) and the Second Coming of Christ.

In the best-selling book, Hagee insists that the United States must join Israel in a preemptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West. Shortly after the book’s publication, he launched Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which, as the Christian version of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee, he said would cause “a political earthquake.” With the outbreak of the war on Lebanon, he and others have called to their followers to pray for Israel, and for the continuation of the war on Lebanon. They have demanded that Israel not relent in what they call the need to destroy Hezbollah and Hamas. They seem to have completely forgotten the very core of the Christian faith.

I have been watching many American evangelicals trying to distance themselves from the calls in the name of the Almighty for the war to continue. As Christian leaders of all persuasions, including leaders of evangelical churches, are calling for Mideast peace and an immediate cease-fire, these Christian Zionists want their followers to pray only for Israel.

One e-mail message that was making the rounds came from a prominent U.S. evangelical Christian totally upset with an interview that Pat Robertson gave to the Jerusalem Post. In it, Robertson appears more pro-Israeli than the Israelis themselves and expresses anger at the notion that Israelis might not completely finish off Hezbollah — a task that he somehow sees as God’s will. The author of the above-mentioned e-mail message, Serge Duss of World Vision, a Christian relief organization, called the Robertson interview “a perversion of the Gospel of Jesus.” Duss writes that he is sure that many evangelicals strongly disagree and would gladly refute Robertson’s distorted theology.

Duss insists that American evangelicals are praying for 1) the people of Israel and Lebanon; 2) for a cease-fire, so that lives will be spared and 3) for peace with justice for all people in the Middle East.

The discussion has reminded me of so many calls I heard as a young Christian boy growing up in Bethlehem and Jerusalem: the false prophets that have predicted the end days and the presence of the anti-Christ are too numerous to list here. But I vividly remember the very same Pat Robertson in 1982 as he spoke on C.B.N.’s “700 Club.” He stood in front of a map of the Middle East, opened up a copy of the Old Testamant and claimed to know what a particular prophecy meant in geopolitical terms. As the Begin-Sharon army at the time was besieging Beirut, he pointed out exactly what he said would happen next. In particular he was keen to repeat that the P.L.O.’s leader at the time, Yasir Arafat, was none other than the anti-Christ himself.

Less than 13 years after that international broadcast, Robertson was filmed visiting Arafat in Gaza, delivering food and milk to Palestinians and applauding the peace agreement that Arafat had signed with Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin.

Christian Zionists who use religious rhetoric to justify political and military actions are no better than Jewish or Islamic fundamentalists who make similar outlandish claims. Peace in the Middle East should be about the liberty, independence and freedoms of all the people of the region, and not about whose promised land the Holy Land is.

For the time being, I, as a Christian Palestinian, prefer to follow the words of Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount. “Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called the sons of God.”

No evidence Iran active in Iraq

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – There is no evidence the Iranian government is stirring trouble in Iraq, a U.S. general said on Monday, playing down suggestions that Tehran will retaliate for U.S. backing of Israel’s war on Hizbollah.

“There is nothing that we definitively have found to say that there are any Iranians operating within the country of Iraq,” Major General William Caldwell, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, told a news conference.

U.S. officials have previously said the war between Israel and Iran-backed Hizbollah might encourage Tehran to make mischief in Iraq to pressure the United States, which has some 130,000 troops in the country.

“Iran has got Hizbollah in Lebanon. Iran has got some forces here. There is the possibility they might encourage those forces to create increased instability here,” U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad told reporters last week.

Caldwell said recently-manufactured Iranian weapons and munitions had been found in Iraq.

“We do believe that some Shi’ite elements have been in Iran receiving training. But the degree to which this is known and endorsed by the government of Iran is uncertain,” he said.

Several powerful Shi’ite militias, including the Badr Organization and the Mehdi Army, supporters of radical Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al Sadr, have long-standing ties with Tehran.

Caldwell said the contacts were via “third elements associated with Iran”.

“We do know that weapons have been provided and IED (improvised explosive device) technology has been made available to these extremist elements,” he said.

If you can’t see that they are traitors in the White House, then you are risking your own lives and the lives of your families.
August 13, 2006

As BuzzFlash has repeatedly editorialized, the Bush Administration is a detriment to America’s national security. Our lives are increasingly at risk every day that they are in office.

They will never seriously battle the sources of terrorism in an effective, strategic fashion. That is because politically they need the terrorists as much as the terrorists need them. And the goals of the Bush Administration are the consolidation of power and the acquisition of natural resources and economic dominance, not the eradication of terror.

Only the naive and the Rush Limbaugh Stepford-Red Staters can possibly draw any other conclusion.

NBC just confirmed — as BuzzFlash editorialized earlier this week about the politics of terrorism — that the White House forced the UK to move up the timing of the alleged terror cell arrests, against the recommendations of the British intelligence agencies. By so doing, the Bush Administration compromised the investigation and kept it from obtaining further evidence and contact names. In short, for purposes of political timing — in order to make partisan points from the election of Ned Lamont — the Bush Administration compromised our national security.

Furthermore, NBC confirms that UK sources indicate that the alleged terrorist plan was not near operational. Indeed, some of the would-be hijackers did not even have passports!

This is an extraordinary betrayal of America’s national security, purely done so that Cheney, Snow and Bush could attack the Democrats as weak on national security, knowing that the arrest announcement was going to be made on Wednesday, because they picked the day of the arrest.

These use of Rovian-timed terrorist announcements — often extremely, extremely exaggerated (as in the case of the Liberty City Insane Clown Posse and the alleged Manhattan Tunnel explosions that would have defied the laws of gravity if they were planned to “flood” lower Manhattan) — are basically treason.

They are meant to frighten Americans into voting Republican. The only viable winning platform of the Busheviks now (and remember that they cannot afford either House of Congress to become Democratic, because it would likely lead to investigations and the impeachment and prosecution of the senior Bush Administration staff) is something like: “You see what the terrorists will do if the Republicans are not here to protect you. The Democrats will just mollycoddle them. Fear for your lives and vote Republican.”

After six years of cynical rule and five years of an alleged “war on terrorism” that has killed tens of thousands more people than the terrorists have, all the White House has to do is invoke premeditated fear into Americans.

And it has worked up to now.

Look at the media this week. The alleged British terror plot dominates the leads in television, radio and newpapers around the nation. Fear is a powerful tool. It goes right from the media into the brain. It appeals to our Reptilian sense of self-protection.

That is why it is the tool of demagogues.

Yes, there are terrorists out there who wish to do citizens of the United States harm. But yes, we also unleashed them in Iraq to do us and each other harm. Bush is breeding new ones every day in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bush hasn’t reduced terrorism; he has increased its threat.

And that is fine with Rove, because Rove has been out front and openly stated through three election cycles that the GOP will win by painting the Democrats as soft on terrorism.

The Bush White House and GOP campaign apparatus will lie, cheat, steal, manipulate our emotions — and even carry out policies that breed terrorists, because they need terrorism in order to win elections. They would lose in a landslide if people were to vote on public policy issues.

So they need fear. It is the only fuel that will help them achieve a one-party dictatorial state for a century, as Grover Norquist and Karl Rove have promised.

Who is creating a new generation of terrorists? Not the Democrats (except for Joe Lieberman, but he has clearly cut a deal with the White House a long time ago to be one of them – and remain a Democrat on foreign policy in name only.)

Now, more than 60% of Americans oppose the war in Iraq. Ned Lamont — a descendant of the robber Baron J.P. Morgan, a fourth-generation Harvard graduate, and a self-made millionaire — is no radical.

It is the Bush Administration that is radical, extremist, and basically treasonous.

At the same time it was politically manipulating the arrests of the alleged British terrorists, it was trying to decrease a Congressional allotment of millions of dollars to increase our ability to detect explosives that could be carried on planes. It has already allowed box cutters, nail clippers, scissors and razors back on airplanes. It has done almost nothing to ensure the security of cargo that is shipped on planes, which the Libyan bombing of a Pan Am plane over Scotland showed how much a threat such cargo could be. (In short, you don’t even need a suicide terrorist to blow up a plane in mid-air.)

Bush blew off the warnings of an impending 9/11 and told the CIA briefer who came to him with them to get out and then used an expletive deleted. Bush then did nothing. He didn’t want his vacation disturbed — and then 9/11 happened. And when it did happen, after Bush failing to take steps to protect us, he read “The Pet Goat” for several minutes before his handlers could write “comments” for him. And then he inexplicably got on Air Force One and flew AWAY from Washington, D.C.

As Americans, all of us have our lives at stake while these cynical, power hungry, demagogues are ruling the nation.

Yes, there are terrorists in the world who wish us harm.

Many of them, have indeed, been drawn to terrorism as a result of Bush Administration action.

The goals of the White House are not to stop terrorism; the goal of the White House is to allow terrorism to fester in order to — as is the basic game plan for dictators goes — use fear to consolidate tyrannical power and do away with our Constitutional checks and balances of government and guarantee of individual liberties.

If you can’t see that they are traitors in the White House, then you are risking your own lives and the lives of your families.

If you value those lives – and your own – we cannot, as a nation, any longer afford a White House and a Republican party that only knows the politics of using terrorism as a political tool, while running only an ineffective “show war” to reduce the threat of terrorists.

9/11 Detainee Released After Nearly Five Years

TORONTO (Aug. 13) – The date was Sept. 12, 2001, but Benemar “Ben” Benatta was clueless about the death and destruction one day earlier.

About a week before, Canadian officials had stopped Benatta as he entered the country from Buffalo to seek political asylum. On that Sept. 11, he was quietly transferred to a U.S. immigration lockup where a day passed before sullen FBI agents told him what the rest of the world already knew: terrorists had attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

It slowly dawned on Benatta that his pedigree – a Muslim man with a military background – made him a target in the frenzied national dragnet that soon followed. The FBI didn’t accuse him of being a terrorist, at least not outright. But agents kept asking if he could fly an airplane.

He told them he couldn’t. It made no difference.

“They gave me a feeling that I was Suspect No. 1,” he said in a recent interview.

The veiled accusations and vehement denials would continue for nearly five years – despite official findings in 2001 that he had no terrorist links and in 2003 that authorities had violated his rights by colluding to keep him in custody.

Of the estimated 1,200 mostly Arab and Muslim men detained nationwide as potential suspects or witnesses in the Sept. 11 investigation, Benatta would earn a dubious distinction: Human rights groups say the former Algerian air force lieutenant was locked up the longest.

His Kafkaesque journey through the American justice system concluded July 20 when a deal was finalized for his return to Canada. In the words of his lawyer, the idea was to “turn back the clock” to when he first crossed the border.

But time did not stand still for Benatta: The clock ran for 1,780 days. The man detained at 27 was now 32.

“I say to myself from time to time, maybe what happened … it was some kind of dream,” he said. “I never believed things like that could happen in the United States.”

In a nation reeling from unthinkable horrors inflicted by an unconventional enemy, it could. And did.

Sporting a gray T-shirt and cargo shorts on a sizzling summer day, Benatta eased his muscular frame into a white plastic chair in the backyard of a Toronto halfway house for immigrant asylum-seekers. He sipped lemonade, then paused to taste freedom.

“You start to look around and take in everything – the wind in your face, the breeze – everything,” he said.

The youngest of 10 children in a middle-class family, Benatta recalled always wanting to be military man like his father. But after he joined the air force, he grew disillusioned. Algerian soldiers, he said, were abusive toward civilians. And militant Muslims were out for blood.

“I was in harm’s way in my country,” he said.

Benatta entered a six-month training program for foreign air force engineers in Virginia in December 2000, plotting from the start to desert and flee to Canada. In June 2001, he stole out of a hotel the night before his scheduled flight back to Algeria. He lived briefly in New York before arriving Sept. 5 on Canada’s doorstep.

A week later, Canadian authorities were escorting him back over the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls, where they turned him over to U.S. immigration officers. On Sept. 16, U.S. marshals took him into custody, put him on a small jet and flew him to a federal jail in Brooklyn that became a clearing house for detainees who were labeled “of interest” to the FBI following the Sept. 11 attacks.

One remark by a marshal stuck in his head: “Where you’re going, you won’t need shoes anymore.”

In Brooklyn, he was locked down – minus his shoes – 24 hours a day between FBI interrogations. When he continued to deny any involvement in the attacks, agents threatened to send him back to Algeria. As a deserter, he was certain he would be tortured.

“That was all my thinking all of the time – they were signing my execution warrant,” he said.

Prison guards, he said, dispensed humiliation in steady doses – rapping on his cell door every half hour to interrupt his sleep, stepping on his leg shackles hard enough to scar his ankles, locking him in an outdoor exercise cage despite freezing temperatures, conducting arbitrary strip searches.

The alleged abuses would have been bad enough.

But as a judge eventually pointed out, something else was amiss: Benatta was never charged with a crime.

The FBI grillings stopped sometime in November 2001, when an internal report was prepared saying he was cleared. On paper, he was no longer a terror suspect.

No one bothered to tell him.

December turned to March with Benatta still under lockdown in Brooklyn, without any contact with the outside world. “Each day, with that kind of conditions, is like a year,” he said.

Finally, in April, he received word that he would be transferred to Buffalo to face federal charges of carrying a phony ID when first detained. Benatta was denied bail while he fought the case. But for the first time he was allowed into the general population of federal defendants housed at an immigration detention center.

He also had access to the news, and was shocked by the images accompanying anniversary stories about the Sept. 11 attacks.

“It was the first time I’d really seen what happened,” he said.

It wasn’t until the second anniversary of the attacks that U.S. Magistrate H. Kenneth Schroeder Jr., in a bluntly worded ruling, found that Benatta’s detainment for a deportation hearing was “a charade.”

Though terrible, the Sept. 11 attacks “do not constitute an acceptable basis for abandoning our constitutional principles and rule of law by adopting an ‘end justifies the means’ philosophy,” Schroeder wrote. Based on that decision, another judge tossed out the case on Oct. 3, 2003.

“That gave me so much hope,” Benatta said. “For me, it’s like (the judge) had so much nerves. He gave me some kind of hope in the judicial system all over again.”

His hopes were dashed by an ensuing standoff: Benatta demanded asylum. Immigration authorities wanted him deported for overstaying his visa.

An immigration court first set bail at $25,000, then ruled he should stay behind bars indefinitely – a situation a United Nations human rights group decried as a “de facto prison sentence.” Most asylum seekers are released pending the outcome of their cases.

It took another two years before a Manhattan attorney, Catherine M. Amirfar, found a solution: She convinced Canadian authorities to let her client apply for asylum there without jailing him.

“Canada was willing to take him back and turn back the clock five years,” she said. “Of course, Benemar will never get those five years back.”

The last detainee was deported in his prison smock without an apology. He remembers cold stares when he ate his first meal at Wendy’s and went to a mall to buy clothes.

Today, there’s no more soul-numbing confinement. But he’s still caught in waiting game, this time to see whether Canada will grant him asylum – a decision at least six months away. He also wonders if he can regain enough spirit to start a new life.

“Now I’m not the same person,” he said. “When I came to the United States, I was optimistic. I had so much energy. That’s not the case now.”

Is an armament sickening U.S. soldiers?
Veterans of Iraq wars battle Pentagon over depleted uranium
Aug 12, 2006

NEW YORK – It takes at least 10 minutes and a large glass of orange juice to wash down all the pills —morphine, methadone, a muscle relaxant, an antidepressant, a stool softener. Viagra for sexual dysfunction. Valium for his nerves.

Four hours later, Herbert Reed will swallow another 15 mg of morphine to cut the pain clenching every part of his body. He will do it twice more before the day is done.

Since he left a bombed-out train depot in Iraq, his gums bleed. There is more blood in his urine, and still more in his stool. Bright light hurts his eyes. A tumor has been removed from his thyroid. Rashes erupt everywhere, itching so badly they seem to live inside his skin. Migraines cleave his skull. His joints ache, grating like door hinges in need of oil.

There is something massively wrong with Herbert Reed, though no one is sure what it is. He believes he knows the cause, but he cannot convince anyone caring for him that the military’s new favorite weapon has made him terrifyingly sick.

In the sprawling bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs, he has many caretakers. An internist, a neurologist, a pain-management specialist, a psychologist, an orthopedic surgeon and a dermatologist. He cannot function without his stupefying arsenal of medications, but they exact a high price.

“I’m just a zombie walking around,” he says.

Billions of pounds of suspect metal
Reed believes depleted uranium has contaminated him and his life. He now walks point in a vitriolic war over the Pentagon’s arsenal of it — thousands of shells and hundreds of tanks coated with the metal that is radioactive, chemically toxic, and nearly twice as dense as lead.

A shell coated with depleted uranium pierces a tank like a hot knife through butter, exploding on impact into a charring inferno. As tank armor, it repels artillery assaults. It also leaves behind a fine radioactive dust with a half-life of 4.5 billion years.

Depleted uranium is the garbage left from producing enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and energy plants. It is 60 percent as radioactive as natural uranium. The U.S. has an estimated 1.5 billion pounds of it, sitting in hazardous waste storage sites across the country. Meaning it is plentiful and cheap as well as highly effective.

Reed says he unknowingly breathed DU dust while living with his unit in Samawah, Iraq. He was med-evaced out in July 2003, nearly unable to walk because of lightning-strike pains from herniated discs in his spine. Then began a strange series of symptoms he’d never experienced in his previously healthy life.

‘We all felt sick’
At Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C, he ran into a buddy from his unit. And another, and another, and in the tedium of hospital life between doctor visits and the dispensing of meds, they began to talk.

“We all had migraines. We all felt sick,” Reed says. “The doctors said, ‘It’s all in your head.’ ”

Then the medic from their unit showed up. He too, was suffering. That made eight sick soldiers from the 442nd Military Police, an Army National Guard unit made up of mostly cops and correctional officers from the New York area.

But the medic knew something the others didn’t.

Dutch marines had taken over the abandoned train depot dubbed Camp Smitty, which was surrounded by tank skeletons, unexploded ordnance and shell casings. They’d brought radiation-detection devices. The readings were so hot, the Dutch set up camp in the middle of the desert rather than live in the station ruins.

“We got on the Internet,” Reed said, “and we started researching depleted uranium.”

Then they contacted The New York Daily News, which paid for sophisticated urine tests available only overseas.

Then they hired a lawyer.

Tests come up positive, but …
Reed, Gerard Matthew, Raymond Ramos, Hector Vega, Augustin Matos, Anthony Yonnone, Jerry Ojeda and Anthony Phillip all have depleted uranium in their urine, according to tests done in December 2003, while they bounced for months between Walter Reed and New Jersey’s Fort Dix medical center, seeking relief that never came.

The analyses were done in Germany, by a Frankfurt professor who developed a depleted uranium test with Randall Parrish, a professor of isotope geology at the University of Leicester in Britain.

The veterans, using their positive results as evidence, have sued the U.S. Army, claiming officials knew the hazards of depleted uranium, but concealed the risks.

The Department of Defense says depleted uranium is powerful and safe, and not that worrisome.

Four of the highest-registering samples from Frankfurt were sent to the VA. Those results were negative, Reed said. “Their test just isn’t as sophisticated,” he said. “And when we first asked to be tested, they told us there wasn’t one. They’ve lied to us all along.”

The VA’s testing methodology is safe and accurate, the agency says. More than 2,100 soldiers from the current war have asked to be tested; only 8 had DU in their urine, the VA said.

A radioactive issue
The term depleted uranium is linguistically radioactive. Simply uttering the words can prompt a reaction akin to preaching atheism at tent revival. Heads shake, eyes roll, opinions are yelled from all sides.

“The Department of Defense takes the position that you can eat it for breakfast and it poses no threat at all,” said Steve Robinson of the National Gulf War Resource Center, which helps veterans with various problems, including navigating the labyrinth of VA health care. “Then you have far-left groups that … declare it a crime against humanity.”

Several countries use it as weaponry, including Britain, which fired it during the 2003 Iraq invasion.

An estimated 286 tons of DU munitions were fired by the U.S. in Iraq and Kuwait in 1991. An estimated 130 tons were shot toppling Saddam Hussein.

Depleted uranium can enter the human body by inhalation, the most dangerous method; by ingesting contaminated food or eating with contaminated hands; by getting dust or debris in an open wound, or by being struck by shrapnel, which often is not removed because doing so would be more dangerous than leaving it.

Inhaled, it can lodge in the lungs. As with imbedded shrapnel, this is doubly dangerous _ not only are the particles themselves physically destructive, they emit radiation.

Weapon in political arsenal
A moderate voice on the divisive DU spectrum belongs to Dan Fahey, a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley, who has studied the issue for years and also served in the Gulf War before leaving the military as a conscientious objector.

“I’ve been working on this since ’93 and I’ve just given up hope,” he said. “I’ve spoken to successive federal committees and elected officials … who then side with the Pentagon. Nothing changes.”

At the other end are a collection of conspiracy-theorists and Internet proselytizers who say using such weapons constitutes genocide. Two of the most vocal opponents recently suggested that a depleted-uranium missile, not a hijacked jetliner, struck the Pentagon in 2001.

“The bottom line is it’s more hazardous than the Pentagon admits,” Fahey said, “but it’s not as hazardous as the hard-line activist groups say it is. And there’s a real dearth of information about how DU affects humans.”

Animal research shows side-effects
There are several studies on how it affects animals, though their results are not, of course, directly applicable to humans. Military research on mice shows that depleted uranium can enter the bloodstream and come to rest in bones, the brain, kidneys and lymph nodes. Other research in rats shows that DU can result in cancerous tumors and genetic mutations, and pass from mother to unborn child, resulting in birth defects.

Iraqi doctors reported significant increases in birth defects and childhood cancers after the 1991 invasion.

Iraqi authorities “found that uranium, which affected the blood cells, had a serious impact on health: The number of cases of leukemia had increased considerably, as had the incidence of fetal deformities,” the U.N. reported.

Depleted uranium can also contaminate soil and water, and coat buildings with radioactive dust, which can by carried by wind and sandstorms.

In 2005, the U.N. Environmental Program identified 311 polluted sites in Iraq. Cleaning them will take at least $40 million and several years, the agency said. Nothing can start until the fighting stops.

Feds rely on tiny sample group
Fifteen years after it was first used in battle, there is only one U.S. government study monitoring veterans exposed to depleted uranium.

Number of soldiers in the survey: 32. Number of soldiers in both Iraq wars: more than 900,000.

The study group’s size is controversial _ far too small, say experts including Fahey _ and so are the findings of the voluntary, Baltimore-based study.

It has found “no clinically significant” health effects from depleted uranium exposure in the study subjects, according to its researchers.

Critics say the VA has downplayed participants’ health problems, including not reporting one soldier who developed cancer, and another who developed a bone tumor.

So for now, depleted uranium falls into the quagmire of Gulf War Syndrome, from which no treatment has emerged despite the government’s spending of at least $300 million.

About 30 percent of the 700,000 men and women who served in the first Gulf War still suffer a baffling array of symptoms very similar to those reported by Reed’s unit.

Invited to check the boxes
Depleted uranium has long been suspected as a possible contributor to Gulf War Syndrome, and in the mid-90s, veterans helped push the military into tracking soldiers exposed to it.

But for all their efforts, what they got in the end was a questionnaire dispensed to homeward-bound soldiers asking about mental health, nightmares, losing control, exposure to dangerous and radioactive chemicals.

But, the veterans persisted, how would soldiers know they’d been exposed? Radiation is invisible, tasteless, and has no smell. And what exhausted, homesick, war-addled soldier would check a box that would only send him or her to a military medical center to be poked and prodded and questioned and tested?

It will take years to determine how depleted uranium affected soldiers from this war. After Vietnam, veterans, in numbers that grew with the passage of time, complained of joint aches, night sweats, bloody feces, migraine headaches, unexplained rashes and violent behavior; some developed cancers.

Echoes of Agent Orange
It took more than 25 years for the Pentagon to acknowledge that Agent Orange — a corrosive defoliant used to melt the jungles of Vietnam and flush out the enemy — was linked to those sufferings.

It took 40 years for the military to compensate sick World War II vets exposed to massive blasts of radiation during tests of the atomic bomb.

In 2002, Congress voted to not let that happen again.

It established the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses — comprised of scientists, physicians and veterans advocates. It reports to the secretary of Veterans Affairs.

Its mandate is to judge all research and all efforts to treat Gulf War Syndrome patients against a single standard: Have sick soldiers been made better?

The answer, according to the committee, is no.

“Regrettably, after four years of operation neither the Committee nor (the) VA can report progress toward this goal,” stated its December 2005 report. “Research has not produced effective treatments for these conditions nor shown that existing treatments are significantly effective.”

And so time marches on, as do soldiers going to, and returning from, the deserts of Iraq.

Struck down by a ghost
Herbert Reed is an imposing man, broad shouldered and tall. He strides into the VA Medical Center in the Bronx with the presence of a cop or a soldier. Since the Vietnam War, he has been both.

His hair is perfect, his shirt spotless, his jeans sharply creased. But there is something wrong, a niggling imperfection made more noticeable by a bearing so disciplined. It is a limp — more like a hitch in his get-along.

It is the only sign, albeit a tiny one, that he is extremely sick.

Even sleep offers no release. He dreams of gunfire and bombs and soldiers who scream for help. No matter how hard he tries, he never gets there in time.

At 54, he is a veteran of two wars and a 20-year veteran of the New York Police Department, where he last served as an assistant warden at the Riker’s Island prison.

He was in perfect health, he says, before being deployed to Iraq.

Fighting a second battle
According to military guidelines, he should have heard the words depleted uranium long before he ended up at Walter Reed. He should have been trained about its dangers, and how to avoid prolonged exposure to its toxicity and radioactivity. He says he didn’t get anything of the kind. Neither did other reservists and National Guard soldiers called up for the current war, according to veterans’ groups.

Reed and the seven brothers from his unit hate what has happened to them, and they speak of it at public seminars and in politicians’ offices. It is something no VA doctor can explain; something that leaves them feeling like so many spent shell rounds, kicked to the side of battle.

But for every outspoken soldier like them, there are silent veterans like Raphael Naboa, an Army artillery scout who served 11 months in the northern Sunni Triangle, only to come home and fall apart.

Some days he feels fine. “Some days I can’t get out of bed,” he said from his home in Colorado.

Now 29, he’s had growths removed from his brain. He has suffered a small stroke — one morning he was shaving, having put down the razor to rinse his face. In that moment, he blacked out and pitched over.

“Just as quickly as I lost consciousness, I regained it,” he said. “Except I couldn’t move the right side of my body.”

After about 15 minutes, the paralysis ebbed.

He has mentioned depleted uranium to his VA doctors, who say he suffers from a series of “non-related conditions.” He knows he was exposed to DU.

“A lot of guys went trophy-hunting, grabbing bayonets, helmets, stuff that was in the vehicles that were destroyed by depleted uranium. My guys were rooting around in it. I was trying to get them out of the vehicles.”

Old before their time
No one in the military talked to him about depleted uranium, he said. His knowledge, like Reed’s, is self-taught from the Internet.

Unlike Reed, he has not gone to war over it. He doesn’t feel up to the fight. There is no known cure for what ails him, and so no possible victory in battle.

He’d really just like to feel normal again. And he knows of others who feel the same.

“I was an artillery scout, these are folks who are in pretty good shape. Your Rangers, your Special Forces guys, they’re in as good as shape as a professional athlete.

“Then we come back and we’re all sick.”

They feel like men who once were warriors and now are old before their time, with no hope for relief from a multitude of miseries that has no name.

WAR RECRUITING IN SCHOOLS
Killing on high school curricula
Canadian high school students can now earn credits (and cash) learning to shoot machine guns.

by Matthew Behrens
April 24, 2006

The federal government of Stephen Harper, along with school boards across the country, is sending teenagers a decidedly mixed message these days. On the one hand, kids are told to stay away from guns in their communities, a warning that’s backed by a law-and-order agenda of prison, prison, and more prison for any kid who screws up.

However, if you DO like guns and want to learn how to kill people in>communities half a world away, you can actually earn not only high school credits, you can also get paid for it. Increasingly, through the auspices of high school co-op placement programs, 16-year-olds can sign up with the Canadian Armed Forces, an outfit whose big boss, General Rick Hillier, makes no bones about goals and benchmarks: “We are the Canadian Forces, and our job is to be able to kill people.”

The Army Reserve Co-op program at one high school pays students $1,400 for two weeks in the field, learning how to fire automatic weapons.

Bored with school in, say, Southern Ontario’s Cayuga Secondary School? Check out the Cooperative Education program, where students can snore through the co-op with Ontario Hydro and learn about some old guy named Adam Beck, or they can live out the fantasies portrayed to them through the fast-action Canadian Forces war propaganda ads they now see on TV and film screens by signing up with “Army Co-op.”

”Army training will teach you basic skills – marching, and saluting; rank structure; military law; how to wear your uniform and conduct yourself; and first aid,” the website for the school program states. “You will then progress to field training. You will learn how to safely operate and maintain your C-7 service rifle, and the C-9 light machine gun. You will fire all these weapons with blank (practice) and live ammunition. You will also learn how to live for extended periods in the field. During the course, you will spend about two weeks on the ranges and in the field, for which you are paid about $1,400.”

Shooting machine guns? Handling grenades? And getting paid for it? How awesome can that sound when you’re a teenager???? Check out any co-op program in high schools across the country and you are likely to find an existing or prospective placement program with the Canadian Armed Forces. The Toronto District School Board, Canada’s largest, has a program with the Canadian military, and it is quite likely wherever you are, a similar program exists.

At a time when the issue of school violence continues to grab headlines, why are schools reaching out to and embracing the very institution which, more than any other, represents the use of violence and killing as a means of conflict resolution? And at a time when Canada’s armed forces are desperate to sign up young people, why are school boards offering up tender 16-year-olds as fresh bait for indoctrination in the ways of war?

The program has drawn some controversy in Windsor, Ontario, where a group called Women in Black has spoken out against it. “We don’t look at this program as an opportunity – we look at it as a death sentence,” spokesperson Marilyn Eves told the Windsor Star April 15. Eves, a retired teacher, asked, “What is the future for these kids? They’re going overseas to fight and some of them are going to die.” She told the paper that students are likely to be seduced away from non-paying cooperative placements by the promise of pay, medical and dental coverage, and four credits toward their diplomas. “It’s a huge enticement. It’s an obvious bribe.”

Grade 10 students in Collingwood recently received a visit from a soldier who went through the military co-op program, calling it one of the best things that ever happened to her. The cutline beneath a picture of the soldier read: “Master Corporal Brienna Ross-Hood recently spoke to the Grade 10 class at Collingwood Collegiate Institute attempting to recruit the youth into the army reserve co-op program.” ”She belongs to the infantry, which is the core of the army and referred to as fighting soldiers,” the story stated. “’We’re sort of the weapons specialists in the military,’ she said. ‘I absolutely love taking all the weapons apart and cleaning them.’” The article noted: “Students who chose to take the co-op program are guaranteed full-time summer employment following completion, and a part-time job while either finishing high school or post-secondary.”

Financial support to militarize young children has always been a priority for federal governments of all stripes. Indeed, the largest federally funded national youth training program for 12-18 year-olds has traditionally been military cadets, funding for which has topped over $1 billion in the past decade. While there are 350,000 Scouts and Guides compared with 56,000 cadets, the former receive nearly no public subsidy. The cost of summer training for five cadets could equal Canada’s entire annual subsidy to Guides.

And the push is on to enlarge this priority of militarizing children. ”I believe that military service is the highest calling of citizenship,” Prime Minister Harper told a group of young soldiers April 13 at a military graduation in Wainwright, Alberta. (But Harper doesn’t plan on reaching that high calling for himself; rather, he stays home while he sends young people overseas to kill and be killed on his behalf).

That same day, CTV reported on a triumphant War Minister Gordon O’Connor who declared a “recent advertising blitz by the military seems to have worked….Ads shown on movie theatre and television screens helped bring in 5,800 applications to Canada’ Armed Forces in the last fiscal year – 300 more than the goal of 5,500.” ”This morning I got a report from National Defence [sic] headquarters that for this year’s target, we’re at 110 per cent,” said O’Connor, who now wants to find and train 23,000 new recruits.

Some of those recruits will likely be coming out of the same place that increasingly is called upon to provide a curriculum of tolerance, respect, and nonviolent conflict resolution. If you do not want your local high school pairing up with an institution whose top general publicly declares he’s all pumped up to go after an “enemy” he describes as “detestable scumbags,” let your guidance departments know, call your school boards, and put an end to this dangerous trend.

Of course, there will be those who say that doing this dishonours veterans, to which you can simply reply, “Balderdash.” Canada’s War Dept. is eager to send young women and men overseas, but does little or nothing to help them when they return physically or emotionally damaged from warfare. They have yet to recognize and compensate those suffering from Gulf War Syndrome, from Agent Orange testing in New Brunswick; veterans from as far back as World War II continue fighting the government for long overdue benefits.

The best way to honour veterans who know the horror of war is to say: make war no more. It’s time to close up the War Department with one exception: we need to keep a department for providing proper compensation to the veterans and families who have made huge sacrifices while the Harpers of this world have stayed home, basking in someone else’s sacrifices.

my mac is finally broken, but it’s pretty good considering that i bought the machine “refurbished” almost 10 years ago… the secondary hard disk has bad blocks, and won’t even mount; instead of loading 2 hard disks when the machine boots, it loads one, and says “this disk is not recognised… do you wish to format it?” the problem is that i’ve got a whole bunch of artwork, and at least 4 years of hybrid elephant records on the disk, so formatting it isn’t really an option. hopefully the mac store can do data retrievals for not very much money…

moe went to olympia yesterday and came home with another temporary dog. she was given to SPDR by a couple of people who “couldn’t take care of her”, which is an understatement… the dog is mostly bald and hadn’t even been touched by a human in at least 8 months, she was limping on uncut, infected toenails and apparently had allergies that were “too expensive” for the owners to pay for. it’s just as well that they gave her up, but i wonder why they waited so long… and i hope they don’t go out and get another dog… 8P people suck!

we gave her a several baths, and cut her toenails, and gave her medications, and moe figured out that she had a yeast infection (we’re calling her “candy” which short for “candida”), so we got some hypoallergenic food for her. we’re probably going to hold on to her until we get her skin condition under control, and then we’re going to farm her out to another foster home… because we really don’t have room for five dogs

Bush links Hezbollah and ‘plot’
US President George W Bush says Hezbollah and alleged UK air plot suspects share a “totalitarian ideology” they are seeking to spread.
12 August 2006

Linking their actions with insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said they all wanted to “establish safe havens from which to attack free nations”.

Mr Bush said the UK terror plot was a “reminder that terrorists are still plotting attacks to kill our people”.

He made the comments in his weekly radio address to the American people.

‘Worst attacks yet’
“The terrorists attempt to bring down airplanes full of innocent men, women, and children,” Mr Bush said.

“They kill civilians and American servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they deliberately hide behind civilians in Lebanon. They are seeking to spread their totalitarian ideology.”

Mr Bush said that the alleged terror plot, which UK intelligence services claim involved a plan to destroy US-bound passenger planes using liquid explosives smuggled in drinks bottles, was “further evidence that the terrorists we face are sophisticated, and constantly changing their tactics”.

US officials say that if the plan had not been foiled, the subsequent attacks would have been the worst since those on Washington and New York on 11 September 2001.

Since the 2001 attacks, Mr Bush has said that the US is engaged in a global war on terror.

He says that as well as intelligence efforts to foil terror plots against US civilians, the ongoing military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq are part of that same battle, as is Israel’s conflict with Lebanon.

US helped plan offensive, says New Yorker magazine
By Abraham Rabinovich
14 August, 2006

THE US Government was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s military operations against Islamic militant group Hezbollah even before the July 12 kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, The New Yorker magazine reported in its latest issue.

The kidnapping triggered a month-long Israeli operation in southern Lebanon that is expected to come to an end today.

But Pulitzer Prize-winning US journalist Seymour Hersh writes that US President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced that a successful Israeli bombing campaign against Hezbollah could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential US pre-emptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations.

Citing an unnamed Middle East expert with knowledge of the thinking of the Israeli and US Governments, Israel had devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah – and shared it with Bush administration officials – well before the July 12 kidnappings.

The expert added that the White House had several reasons for supporting a bombing campaign, the report said.

If there was to be a military option against Iran, it had to get rid of the weapons Hezbollah could use in a potential retaliation against Israel, Hersh writes.

Citing a US government consultant with close ties to Israel, Hersh also reports that before the Hezbollah kidnappings, several Israeli officials visited Washington “to get a green light” for a bombing operation following a Hezbollah provocation, and “to find out how much the United States would bear”.

“The Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many benefits,” the magazine quotes the consultant as saying. “Why oppose it? We’ll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels and bunkers from the air. It would be a demo for Iran.”

US government officials have denied the charges.

Nonetheless, Hersh writes, a former senior intelligence official says some officers serving with the Joint Chiefs of Staff remain deeply concerned that the administration will have a far more positive assessment of the air campaign than they should.

“There is no way that (Defence Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld and Cheney will draw the right conclusion about this,” the report quotes the former official as saying.

“When the smoke clears, they’ll say it was a success, and they’ll draw reinforcement for their plan to attack Iran.”

The report came as Israel – attempting to achieve a decisive victory over Hezbollah before the UN-brokered ceasefire kicks in today – sent 30,000 soldiers north into Lebanon in a bloody crescendo to the month-long war.

The attack included a night-time helicopter airlift of a large paratroop force deep inside Hezbollah territory, the largest airborne operation since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. One helicopter was downed by a missile on its way back to Israeli lines and all five crewmen were killed. Their deaths brought to 24 the number of Israelis killed on Saturday, the highest toll in the war. Israel said that twice as many Hezbollah fighters were killed.

An armoured force linked up with the paratroopers after a day’s battle in which half the tanks were knocked out by missiles.

The fighting was expected to grow more intense before the ceasefire took effect at 3pm (AEST) today.

Israeli military analysts acknowledged that the Israeli Defence Force could not, in the time remaining, deploy its forces along the length of the Litani River, 30km north of the border, as it intended.

The Government approved the broad attack last Wednesday but left it to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to decide when and if it should be launched, in light of the efforts being made at the UN to achieve a ceasefire resolution.

On Friday, after the draft text of the resolution had been revised in Lebanon’s favour, Israeli officials said, Mr Olmert decided to go ahead with the military option.

This decision was apparently what led to revisions in the UN text that satisfied Israel. But the attack order was not called off.

On Friday night, the IDF sent reserve forces massed on the Lebanese border into action, knowing that they were in a race against the clock.

One division on the western front drove towards the ancient coastal city of Tyre, while a division on the east moved north towards the Litani.

The plan called for the army to bypass villages that are Hezbollah strongholds, leaving them to be dealt with after the army had gotten as far north as it could. The army’s assumption appears to be that the ceasefire will not apply to “cleaning up” operations in areas already captured.

In Arabic-language broadcasts, Israel called on residents of southern Lebanon, including Hezbollah members, to surrender to Israeli forces and be spared death. The residents were asked to deposit their arms outside the first house at the eastern entrance to their villages where one representative with a white flag would await the soldiers.

All other men would sit on the ground outside the next house, with their hands behind their necks when the soldiers appeared. It is questionable if Hezbollah, which has fought fiercely until now, will surrender without a fight.

Criticism of the Government’s handling of the war, and of the top brass as well, has begun to be heard even before the shooting stops.

Both Left and Right are critical of the hesitancy of the Government to commit the armed forces to a full-scale war and of relying on the air force to subdue Hezbollah with minimal help from ground forces.

This criticism extends to Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, the first air force commander to be appointed overall commander of the IDF. “And the last,” one newspaper columnist asserted last week.

Leaders of the opposition Likud party called for Mr Olmert’s resignation as soon as the war ends.

In Ha’aretz, columnist Ari Shavit wrote: “You cannot lead an entire nation to war promising victory, produce humiliating defeat and remain in power.”

Some columnists, however, argue that the war has brought significant advantages to Israel by removing Hezbollah as a permanent menace on the border.

Hezbollah claims victory against Israel
By LAUREN FRAYER and KATHY GANNON
August 14, 2006

BEIRUT, Lebanon – Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah said Monday that his guerrillas achieved a “strategic, historic victory” against Israel – a declaration that prompted celebratory gunfire across the Lebanese capital.

Israel’s prime minister, however, maintained the offensive eliminated the “state within a state” run by Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

Lebanese civilians jammed onto roads to stream back to war-ravaged areas Monday after a the cease-fire halted the fighting that claimed more than 900 lives.

For the first time in a month, no rockets were fired into northern Israel, but few Israelis who fled the war were seen returning and Israel’s government advised them to stay away for now.

Nasrallah said Hezbollah “came out victorious in a war in which big Arab armies were defeated (before).”

“We are today before a strategic, historic victory, without exaggeration,” Nasrallah said. He spoke on the day a cease-fire took effect — ending 34 days of deadly fighting between Hezbollah and Israel. Nasrallah called Monday “a great day.”

Now was not the time to debate the disarmament of his guerrilla fighters, Nasrallah asserted.

“Who will defend Lebanon in case of a new Israeli offensive?” he asked. “The Lebanese army and international troops are incapable of protecting Lebanon,” he said, flanked by Lebanese and Hezbollah flags.

But Nasrallah said he was open to dialogue about Hezbollah’s weapons at the appropriate time. And he credited his group’s weapons with proving to Israel that “war with Lebanon will not be a picnic. It will be very costly.”

“The main goal of Israel in this war has been to remove Hezbollah’s weapons. This will not happen through destroying homes… It will come through discussion,” Nasrallah said.

Israeli soldiers reported killing six Hezbollah fighters in four skirmishes in southern Lebanon after the guns fell silent, highlighting the tensions that could unravel the peace plan.

Lebanese, Israeli and U.N. officers met on the border to discuss the withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon and the deployment of the Lebanese army in the region, U.N. spokesman Milos Strugar said.

The meeting, the first involving a Lebanese army officer and a counterpart from Israel since Israeli forces withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, marked the first step in the process of military disengagement as demanded by a U.N. Security Council resolution.

The fighting persisted until the last minutes before the cease-fire took effect Monday morning, with Israel destroying an antenna for Hezbollah’s TV station and Hezbollah guerrillas clashing with Israeli troops near the southern city of Tyre and the border village of Kfar Kila.

Israeli warplanes struck a Hezbollah stronghold in eastern Lebanon and a Palestinian refugee camp in the south, killing two people, and Israeli artillery pounded targets across the border through the night.

After the cease-fire took effect, lines of cars — some loaded with mattresses and luggage — snaked slowly around bomb craters and ruined bridges as residents began heading south to find out what is left of their homes and businesses.

Humanitarian groups also sent convoys of food, water and medical supplies into the south, but the clogged roads slowed the effort. U.N. officials said 24 U.N. trucks took more than five hours to reach the port of Tyre from Sidon, a trip that normally takes 45 minutes.

Israel had not lifted its threat to destroy any vehicle on most southern roads, a ban designed to keep arms from getting to Hezbollah fighters, but there were no signs it was being enforced.

Capt. Jacob Dallal, a military spokesman, said the Israeli army was urging Lebanese civilians to stay out of the south until Lebanese troops and U.N. peacekeepers moved in to oversee the cease-fire.

“There are lots of Israeli troops and Hezbollah fighters. For their own safety, we advise them (civilians) not to go,” Dallal said.

But Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz said at midafternoon that aside from the isolated skirmishes with Hezbollah, the cease-fire was holding and could have implications for future relations with Israel’s neighbors.

In some places in the south, the rubble was still smoldering from a barrage of Israeli airstrikes just before the cease-fire took effect at 8 a.m. (1 a.m. EDT).

“I just want to find my home,” said Ahmad Maana, who went back to Kafra, about five miles from the Israeli border, where whole sections of the town were flattened.

In Beirut’s southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold, people wrapped their faces with scarves as wind kicked up dust from the wreckage left by Israeli bombardments. Ahmed al-Zein poked through the ruins of his shop.

“This was the most beautiful street in the neighborhood,” he said. “Now it’s like an earthquake zone.”

There were no reports of Israeli strikes on cars — a sign Israel did not want to risk rekindling the conflict. But at least one child was killed and 15 people were wounded by ordnance that detonated as they returned to their homes in the south, security officials said.

The rush to return came despite a standoff that threatened to keep the cease-fire from taking root. Israeli forces remain in Lebanon, and Nasrallah said the militia would consider them legitimate targets until they leave.

In his speech, Nasrallah also promised to help the Lebanese rebuild.

Still, the truce ushered in a calm that the border region had not seen for more than a month.

Stores that had been closed for weeks began to reopen in Haifa, Israel’s third largest city and a frequent target of Hezbollah rockets, and a few people returned to the beaches.

In Kiryat Shemona, where more than half the population fled during the war, streets were mostly empty but traffic lights winked on again. The few grocery stores that braved more than 700 rockets on the town were still the only places for food, with restaurants and cafes shut.

Residents stirred from their bomb shelters, but there was no influx of returning refugees.

“People are still scared,” Haim Biton, 42, said, predicting things would not get back to normal soon. “You don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“The city is still in a coma,” said Shoshi Bar-Sheshet, the deputy manager of a mortgage bank. Getting back to normal “doesn’t happen overnight,” she said.

The next step in the peace effort — sending in a peacekeeping mission — appeared days away.

A Lebanese Cabinet minister told Europe-1 radio in France that Lebanese soldiers could move into the southern part of the country as early as Wednesday. In Paris, the French foreign ministry said a U.N. peacekeeping force should be mobilized “as quickly as possible.”

The U.N. plan calls for a joint Lebanese-international force to move south of the Litani River, about 18 miles from the Israeli border, and stand as a buffer between Israel and Hezbollah militiamen.

“The Lebanese army is readying itself along the Litani to cross the river in 48 to 72 hours,” said Lebanese Communications Minister Marwan Hamade.

A United Nations force that now has 2,000 observers in south Lebanon is due to be boosted to 15,000 soldiers, and Lebanon’s army is to send in a 15,000-man contingent.

France and Italy, along with predominantly Muslim Turkey and Malaysia, have signaled willingness to contribute troops to the peacekeeping force, but consultations are needed on the force’s makeup and mandate. Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D’Alema said Italy’s troops could be ready within two weeks.

The French commander of the current U.N. force, Maj. Gen. Alain Pellegrini, said additional troops are needed quickly because the situation remains fragile. The region is “not safe from a provocation, or a stray act, that could undermine everything,” he told The Associated Press.

Officials said Israeli troops would begin pulling out as soon as the Lebanese and international troops start deploying to the area. But it appeared Israeli forces were staying put for now. Some exhausted soldiers left early Monday and were being replaced by fresh troops.

Israel also would maintain its air and sea blockade of Lebanon to prevent arms from reaching Hezbollah guerrillas, Israeli army officials said.

The Israeli army reported scattered skirmishes with Hezbollah militiamen.

Officials said four militia fighters were killed in two clashes near the town of Hadatha when armed men approached Israeli troops three hours after the cease-fire began. Later clashes occurred near the towns of Farun and Shama, with one guerrilla killed in each, officials said.

“They were very close, they were armed, and they did pose a danger to the troops,” said Dallal, the military spokesman. “We’re going to shoot anybody who poses an imminent threat to the troops.”

Both Hezbollah and Israel claimed they came out ahead in the conflict.

Hezbollah distributed leaflets congratulating Lebanon on its “big victory” and thanking citizens for their patience during the fighting, which began July 12 when guerrillas killed three Israeli soldiers and captured two others in a cross-border raid.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Israel’s parliament that the offensive eliminated the “state within a state” run by Hezbollah and restored Lebanon’s sovereignty in the south. Peretz, the defense minister, said the war opened a window for negotiations with Lebanon and renewed talks with Palestinians.

But many Israelis were upset by the high casualties during 34 days of fighting, and Benjamin Netanyahu, head of the opposition Likud Party, told lawmakers there were many failures in the war. Olmert acknowledged there were “deficiencies” in the way the war was conducted.

“We will have to review ourselves in all the battles,” Olmert said. “We won’t sweep things under the carpet.”

Lebanon said nearly 791 people were killed in the fighting. Israel said 116 soldiers and 39 civilians died in combat or from Hezbollah rockets.

Gunmen kidnap Fox News journalists in Gaza

GAZA (Reuters) – Palestinian gunmen kidnapped two foreign journalists working for the Fox News Channel in Gaza on Monday, a witness and the U.S. television network said.

A Fox spokeswoman in New York named the two journalists as correspondent Steve Centanni, an American, and cameraman Olaf Wiig, from New Zealand.

A Fox news report said the network did not know who had seized them but that “negotiations were under way to secure their release.”

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the abduction.

The witness said two vehicles blocked the journalists’ transmission truck in the center of Gaza City and a masked man put a gun to a bodyguard’s head, forcing him to the ground.

The kidnappers then sped away with the two journalists.

Palestinian police stopped and searched cars. A spokesman for Hamas, the Islamic militant group that leads the Palestinian government, condemned the kidnapping.

Similar incidents in the past in Gaza have ended with the release, usually within hours, of kidnapped foreign journalists or aid workers.

Many of the abductions were carried out by Palestinians pressing a grievance against the Palestinian government or its security forces.

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.

Is America a Police State?
Congressman Ron Paul
U.S. House of Representatives
27 June, 2002

Mr. Speaker:

Most Americans believe we live in dangerous times, and I must agree. Today I want to talk about how I see those dangers and what Congress ought to do about them.

Of course, the Monday-morning quarterbacks are now explaining, with political overtones, what we should have done to prevent the 9/11 tragedy. Unfortunately, in doing so, foreign policy changes are never considered.

I have, for more than two decades, been severely critical of our post-World War II foreign policy. I have perceived it to be not in our best interest and have believed that it presented a serious danger to our security.

For the record, in January of 2000 I stated the following on this floor:

Our commercial interests and foreign policy are no longer separate…as bad as it is that average Americans are forced to subsidize such a system, we additionally are placed in greater danger because of our arrogant policy of bombing nations that do not submit to our wishes. This generates hatred directed toward America …and exposes us to a greater threat of terrorism, since this is the only vehicle our victims can use to retaliate against a powerful military state…the cost in terms of lost liberties and unnecessary exposure to terrorism is difficult to assess, but in time, it will become apparent to all of us that foreign interventionism is of no benefit to American citizens, but instead is a threat to our liberties.

Again, let me remind you I made these statements on the House floor in January 2000. Unfortunately, my greatest fears and warnings have been borne out.

I believe my concerns are as relevant today as they were then. We should move with caution in this post-9/11 period so we do not make our problems worse overseas while further undermining our liberties at home.

So far our post-9/11 policies have challenged the rule of law here at home, and our efforts against the al Qaeda have essentially come up empty-handed. The best we can tell now, instead of being in one place, the members of the al Qaeda are scattered around the world, with more of them in allied Pakistan than in Afghanistan. Our efforts to find our enemies have put the CIA in 80 different countries. The question that we must answer some day is whether we can catch enemies faster than we make new ones. So far it appears we are losing.

As evidence mounts that we have achieved little in reducing the terrorist threat, more diversionary tactics will be used. The big one will be to blame Saddam Hussein for everything and initiate a major war against Iraq, which will only generate even more hatred toward America from the Muslim world.

But, Mr. Speaker, my subject today is whether America is a police state. I’m sure the large majority of Americans would answer this in the negative. Most would associate military patrols, martial law and summary executions with a police state, something obviously not present in our everyday activities. However, those with knowledge of Ruby Ridge, Mount Carmel and other such incidents may have a different opinion.

The principal tool for sustaining a police state, even the most militant, is always economic control and punishment by denying disobedient citizens such things as jobs or places to live, and by levying fines and imprisonment. The military is more often used in the transition phase to a totalitarian state. Maintenance for long periods is usually accomplished through economic controls on commercial transactions, the use of all property, and political dissent. Peaceful control through these efforts can be achieved without storm troopers on our street corners.

Terror and fear are used to achieve complacency and obedience, especially when citizens are deluded into believing they are still a free people. The changes, they are assured, will be minimal, short-lived, and necessary, such as those that occur in times of a declared war. Under these conditions, most citizens believe that once the war is won, the restrictions on their liberties will be reversed. For the most part, however, after a declared war is over, the return to normalcy is never complete. In an undeclared war, without a precise enemy and therefore no precise ending, returning to normalcy can prove illusory.

We have just concluded a century of wars, declared and undeclared, while at the same time responding to public outcries for more economic equity. The question, as a result of these policies, is: “Are we already living in a police state?” If we are, what are we going to do about it? If we are not, we need to know if there’s any danger that we’re moving in that direction.

Most police states, surprisingly, come about through the democratic process with majority support. During a crisis, the rights of individuals and the minority are more easily trampled, which is more likely to condition a nation to become a police state than a military coup. Promised benefits initially seem to exceed the cost in dollars or lost freedom. When people face terrorism or great fear- from whatever source- the tendency to demand economic and physical security over liberty and self-reliance proves irresistible. The masses are easily led to believe that security and liberty are mutually exclusive, and demand for security far exceeds that for liberty.

Once it’s discovered that the desire for both economic and physical security that prompted the sacrifice of liberty inevitably led to the loss of prosperity and no real safety, it’s too late. Reversing the trend from authoritarian rule toward a freer society becomes very difficult, takes a long time, and entails much suffering. Although dissolution of the Soviet empire was relatively non-violent at the end, millions suffered from police suppression and economic deprivation in the decades prior to 1989.

But what about here in the United States? With respect to a police state, where are we and where are we going?

Let me make a few observations:

Our government already keeps close tabs on just about everything we do and requires official permission for nearly all of our activities.

One might take a look at our Capitol for any evidence of a police state. We see: barricades, metal detectors, police, military soldiers at times, dogs, ID badges required for every move, vehicles checked at airports and throughout the Capitol. The people are totally disarmed, except for the police and the criminals. But worse yet, surveillance cameras in Washington are everywhere to ensure our safety.

The terrorist attacks only provided the cover for the do-gooders who have been planning for a long time before last September to monitor us “for our own good.” Cameras are used to spy on our drug habits, on our kids at school, on subway travelers, and on visitors to every government building or park. There’s not much evidence of an open society in Washington, DC, yet most folks do not complain- anything goes if it’s for government-provided safety and security.

If this huge amount of information and technology is placed in the hands of the government to catch the bad guys, one naturally asks, What’s the big deal? But it should be a big deal, because it eliminates the enjoyment of privacy that a free society holds dear. The personal information of law-abiding citizens can be used for reasons other than safety- including political reasons. Like gun control, people control hurts law-abiding citizens much more than the law-breakers.

Social Security numbers are used to monitor our daily activities. The numbers are given at birth, and then are needed when we die and for everything in between. This allows government record keeping of monstrous proportions, and accommodates the thugs who would steal others’ identities for criminal purposes. This invasion of privacy has been compounded by the technology now available to those in government who enjoy monitoring and directing the activities of others. Loss of personal privacy was a major problem long before 9/11.

Centralized control and regulations are required in a police state. Community and individual state regulations are not as threatening as the monolith of rules and regulations written by Congress and the federal bureaucracy. Law and order has been federalized in many ways and we are moving inexorably in that direction.

Almost all of our economic activities depend upon receiving the proper permits from the federal government. Transactions involving guns, food, medicine, smoking, drinking, hiring, firing, wages, politically correct speech, land use, fishing, hunting, buying a house, business mergers and acquisitions, selling stocks and bonds, and farming all require approval and strict regulation from our federal government. If this is not done properly and in a timely fashion, economic penalties and even imprisonment are likely consequences.

Because government pays for much of our health care, it’s conveniently argued that any habits or risk-taking that could harm one’s health are the prerogative of the federal government, and are to be regulated by explicit rules to keep medical-care costs down. This same argument is used to require helmets for riding motorcycles and bikes.

Not only do we need a license to drive, but we also need special belts, bags, buzzers, seats and environmentally dictated speed limits- or a policemen will be pulling us over to levy a fine, and he will be toting a gun for sure.

The states do exactly as they’re told by the federal government, because they are threatened with the loss of tax dollars being returned to their state- dollars that should have never been sent to DC in the first place, let alone used to extort obedience to a powerful federal government.

Over 80,000 federal bureaucrats now carry guns to make us toe the line and to enforce the thousands of laws and tens of thousands of regulations that no one can possibly understand. We don’t see the guns, but we all know they’re there, and we all know we can’t fight “City Hall,” especially if it’s “Uncle Sam.”

All 18-year-old males must register to be ready for the next undeclared war. If they don’t, men with guns will appear and enforce this congressional mandate. “Involuntary servitude” was banned by the 13th Amendment, but courts don’t apply this prohibition to the servitude of draftees or those citizens required to follow the dictates of the IRS- especially the employers of the country, who serve as the federal government’s chief tax collectors and information gatherers. Fear is the tool used to intimidate most Americans to comply to the tax code by making examples of celebrities. Leona Helmsley and Willie Nelson know how this process works.

Economic threats against business establishments are notorious. Rules and regulations from the EPA, the ADA, the SEC, the LRB, OSHA, etc. terrorize business owners into submission, and those charged accept their own guilt until they can prove themselves innocent. Of course, it turns out it’s much more practical to admit guilt and pay the fine. This serves the interest of the authoritarians because it firmly establishes just who is in charge.

Information leaked from a government agency like the FDA can make or break a company within minutes. If information is leaked, even inadvertently, a company can be destroyed, and individuals involved in revealing government-monopolized information can be sent to prison. Even though economic crimes are serious offenses in the United States, violent crimes sometimes evoke more sympathy and fewer penalties. Just look at the O.J. Simpson case as an example.

Efforts to convict Bill Gates and others like him of an economic crime are astounding, considering his contribution to economic progress, while sources used to screen out terrorist elements from our midst are tragically useless. If business people are found guilty of even the suggestion of collusion in the marketplace, huge fines and even imprisonment are likely consequences.

Price fixing is impossible to achieve in a free market. Under today’s laws, talking to, or consulting with, competitors can be easily construed as “price fixing” and involve a serious crime, even with proof that the so-called collusion never generated monopoly-controlled prices or was detrimental to consumers.

Lawfully circumventing taxes, even sales taxes, can lead to serious problems if a high-profile person can be made an example.

One of the most onerous controls placed on American citizens is the control of speech through politically correct legislation. Derogatory remarks or off-color jokes are justification for firings, demotions, and the destruction of political careers. The movement toward designating penalties based on the category to which victims belong, rather the nature of the crime itself, has the thought police patrolling the airways and byways. Establishing relative rights and special penalties for subjective motivation is a dangerous trend.

All our financial activities are subject to “legal” searches without warrants and without probable cause. Tax collection, drug usage, and possible terrorist activities “justify” the endless accumulation of information on all Americans.

Government control of medicine has prompted the establishment of the National Medical Data Bank. For efficiency reasons, it is said, the government keeps our medical records for our benefit. This, of course, is done with vague and useless promises that this information will always remain confidential- just like all the FBI information in the past!

Personal privacy, the sine qua non of liberty, no longer exists in the United States. Ruthless and abusive use of all this information accumulated by the government is yet to come. The Patriot Act has given unbelievable power to listen, read, and monitor all our transactions without a search warrant being issued after affirmation of probably cause. “Sneak and peak” and blanket searches are now becoming more frequent every day. What have we allowed to happen to the 4th amendment?

It may be true that the average American does not feel intimidated by the encroachment of the police state. I’m sure our citizens are more tolerant of what they see as mere nuisances because they have been deluded into believing all this government supervision is necessary and helpful- and besides they are living quite comfortably, material wise. However the reaction will be different once all this new legislation we’re passing comes into full force, and the material comforts that soften our concerns for government regulations are decreased. This attitude then will change dramatically, but the trend toward the authoritarian state will be difficult to reverse.

What government gives with one hand- as it attempts to provide safety and security- it must, at the same time, take away with two others. When the majority recognizes that the monetary cost and the results of our war against terrorism and personal freedoms are a lot less than promised, it may be too late.

I’m sure all my concerns are unconvincing to the vast majority of Americans, who not only are seeking but also are demanding they be made safe from any possible attack from anybody, ever. I grant you this is a reasonable request.

The point is, however, there may be a much better way of doing it. We must remember, we don’t sit around and worry that some Canadian citizen is about to walk into New York City and set off a nuclear weapon. We must come to understand the real reason is that there’s a difference between the Canadians and all our many friends and the Islamic radicals. And believe me, we’re not the target because we’re “free and prosperous”.

The argument made for more government controls here at home and expansionism overseas to combat terrorism is simple and goes like this: “If we’re not made safe from potential terrorists, property and freedom have no meaning.” It is argued that first we must have life and physical and economic security, with continued abundance, then we’ll talk about freedom.

It reminds me of the time I was soliciting political support from a voter and was boldly put down: “Ron,” she said, “I wish you would lay off this freedom stuff; it’s all nonsense. We’re looking for a Representative who will know how to bring home the bacon and help our area, and you’re not that person.” Believe me, I understand that argument; it’s just that I don’t agree that is what should be motivating us here in the Congress.

That’s not the way it works. Freedom does not preclude security. Making security the highest priority can deny prosperity and still fail to provide the safety we all want.

The Congress would never agree that we are a police state. Most members, I’m sure, would argue otherwise. But we are all obligated to decide in which direction we are going. If we’re moving toward a system that enhances individual liberty and justice for all, my concerns about a police state should be reduced or totally ignored. Yet, if, by chance, we’re moving toward more authoritarian control than is good for us, and moving toward a major war of which we should have no part, we should not ignore the dangers. If current policies are permitting a serious challenge to our institutions that allow for our great abundance, we ignore them at great risk for future generations.

That’s why the post-9/11 analysis and subsequent legislation are crucial to the survival of those institutions that made America great. We now are considering a major legislative proposal dealing with this dilemma- the new Department of Homeland Security- and we must decide if it truly serves the interests of America.

Since the new department is now a forgone conclusion, why should anyone bother to record a dissent? Because it’s the responsibility of all of us to speak the truth to our best ability, and if there are reservations about what we’re doing, we should sound an alarm and warn the people of what is to come.

In times of crisis, nearly unanimous support for government programs is usual and the effects are instantaneous. Discovering the error of our ways and waiting to see the unintended consequences evolve takes time and careful analysis. Reversing the bad effects is slow and tedious and fraught with danger. People would much prefer to hear platitudes than the pessimism of a flawed policy.

Understanding the real reason why we were attacked is crucial to crafting a proper response. I know of no one who does not condemn the attacks of 9/11. Disagreement as to the cause and the proper course of action should be legitimate in a free society such as ours. If not, we’re not a free society.

Not only do I condemn the vicious acts of 9/11, but also, out of deep philosophic and moral commitment, I have pledged never to use any form of aggression to bring about social or economic changes.

But I am deeply concerned about what has been done and what we are yet to do in the name of security against the threat of terrorism.

Political propagandizing is used to get all of us to toe the line and be good “patriots,” supporting every measure suggested by the administration. We are told that preemptive strikes, torture, military tribunals, suspension of habeas corpus, executive orders to wage war, and sacrificing privacy with a weakened 4th Amendment are the minimum required to save our country from the threat of terrorism.

Who’s winning this war anyway?

To get popular support for these serious violations of our traditional rule of law requires that people be kept in a state of fear. The episode of spreading undue concern about the possibility of a dirty bomb being exploded in Washington without any substantiation of an actual threat is a good example of excessive fear being generated by government officials.

To add insult to injury, when he made this outlandish announcement, our Attorney General was in Moscow. Maybe if our FBI spent more time at home, we would get more for the money we pump into this now- discredited organization. Our FBI should be gathering information here at home, and the thousands of agents overseas should return. We don’t need these agents competing overseas and confusing the intelligence apparatus of the CIA or the military.

I’m concerned that the excess fear, created by the several hundred al Qaeda functionaries willing to sacrifice their lives for their demented goals, is driving us to do to ourselves what the al Qaeda themselves could never do to us by force.

So far the direction is clear: we are legislating bigger and more intrusive government here at home and are allowing our President to pursue much more military adventurism abroad. These pursuits are overwhelmingly supported by Members of Congress, the media, and the so-called intellectual community, and questioned only by a small number of civil libertarians and anti-imperial, anti-war advocates.

The main reason why so many usually levelheaded critics of bad policy accept this massive increase in government power is clear. They, for various reasons, believe the official explanation of “Why us?” The several hundred al Qaeda members, we were told, hate us because: “We’re rich, we’re free, we enjoy materialism, and the purveyors of terror are jealous and envious, creating the hatred that drives their cause. They despise our Christian-Judaic values and this, is the sole reason why they are willing to die for their cause.” For this to be believed, one must also be convinced that the perpetrators lied to the world about why they attacked us.

The al Qaeda leaders say they hate us because:

• We support Western puppet regimes in Arab countries for commercial reasons and against the wishes of the populace of these countries.
• This partnership allows a military occupation, the most confrontational being in Saudi Arabia, that offends their sense of pride and violates their religious convictions by having a foreign military power on their holy land. We refuse to consider how we might feel if China’s navy occupied the Gulf of Mexico for the purpose of protecting “their oil” and had air bases on U.S. territory.We show extreme bias in support of one side in the fifty-plus-year war going on in the Middle East.

What if the al Qaeda is telling the truth and we ignore it? If we believe only the official line from the administration and proceed to change our whole system and undermine our constitutional rights, we may one day wake up to find that the attacks have increased, the numbers of those willing to commit suicide for their cause have grown, our freedoms are diminished, and all this has contributed to making our economic problems worse. The dollar cost of this “war” could turn out to be exorbitant, and the efficiency of our markets can be undermined by the compromises placed on our liberties.

Sometimes it almost seems that our policies inadvertently are actually based on a desire to make ourselves “less free and less prosperous”- those conditions that are supposed to have prompted the attacks. I’m convinced we must pay more attention to the real cause of the attacks of last year and challenge the explanations given us.

The question that one day must be answered is this:

What if we had never placed our troops in Saudi Arabia and had involved ourselves in the Middle East war in an even-handed fashion. Would it have been worth it if this would have prevented the events of 9/11?

If we avoid the truth, we will be far less well off than if we recognize that just maybe there is some truth in the statements made by the leaders of those who perpetrated the atrocities. If they speak the truth about the real cause, changing our foreign policy from foreign military interventionism around the globe supporting an American empire would make a lot of sense. It could reduce tensions, save money, preserve liberty and preserve our economic system.

This, for me, is not a reactive position coming out of 9/11, but rather is an argument I’ve made for decades, claiming that meddling in the affairs of others is dangerous to our security and actually reduces our ability to defend ourselves.

This in no way precludes pursuing those directly responsible for the attacks and dealing with them accordingly- something that we seem to have not yet done. We hear more talk of starting a war in Iraq than in achieving victory against the international outlaws that instigated the attacks on 9/11. Rather than pursuing war against countries that were not directly responsible for the attacks, we should consider the judicious use of Marque and Reprisal.

I’m sure that a more enlightened approach to our foreign policy will prove elusive. Financial interests of our international corporations, oil companies, and banks, along with the military-industrial complex, are sure to remain a deciding influence on our policies.

Besides, even if my assessments prove to be true, any shift away from foreign militarism- like bringing our troops home- would now be construed as yielding to the terrorists. It just won’t happen. This is a powerful point and the concern that we might appear to be capitulating is legitimate.

Yet how long should we deny the truth, especially if this denial only makes us more vulnerable? Shouldn’t we demand the courage and wisdom of our leaders to do the right thing, in spite of the political shortcomings?

President Kennedy faced an even greater threat in October 1962, and from a much more powerful force. The Soviet/Cuban terrorist threat with nuclear missiles only 90 miles off our shores was wisely defused by Kennedy’s capitulating and removing missiles from Turkey on the Soviet border. Kennedy deserved the praise he received for the way he handled the nuclear standoff with the Soviets. This concession most likely prevented a nuclear exchange and proved that taking a step back from a failed policy is beneficial, yet how one does so is crucial. The answer is to do it diplomatically- that’s what diplomats are supposed to do.

Maybe there is no real desire to remove the excuse for our worldwide imperialism, especially our current new expansion into central Asia or the domestic violations of our civil liberties. Today’s conditions may well be exactly what our world commercial interests want. It’s now easy for us to go into the Philippines, Columbia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, or wherever in pursuit of terrorists. No questions are asked by the media or the politicians- only cheers. Put in these terms, who can object? We all despise the tactics of the terrorists, so the nature of the response is not to be questioned!

A growing number of Americans are concluding that the threat we now face comes more as a consequence of our foreign policy than because the bad guys envy our freedoms and prosperity. How many terrorist attacks have been directed toward Switzerland, Australia, Canada, or Sweden? They too are rich and free, and would be easy targets, but the Islamic fundamentalists see no purpose in doing so.

There’s no purpose in targeting us unless there’s a political agenda, which there surely is. To deny that this political agenda exists jeopardizes the security of this country. Pretending something to be true that is not is dangerous.

It’s a definite benefit for so many to recognize that our $40 billion annual investment in intelligence gathering prior to 9/11 was a failure. Now a sincere desire exists to rectify these mistakes. That’s good, unless, instead of changing the role for the CIA and the FBI, all the past mistakes are made worse by spending more money and enlarging the bureaucracies to do the very same thing without improving their efficiency or changing their goals. Unfortunately that is what is likely to happen.

One of the major shortcomings that led to the 9/11 tragedies was that the responsibility for protecting commercial airlines was left to the government, the FAA, the FBI, the CIA, and the INS. And they failed. A greater sense of responsibility for the owners to provide security is what was needed. Guns in the cockpit would have most likely prevented most of the deaths that occurred on that fateful day.

But what does our government do? It firmly denies airline pilots the right to defend their planes, and we federalize the security screeners and rely on F16s to shoot down airliners if they are hijacked.

Security screeners, many barely able to speak English, spend endless hours harassing pilots, confiscating dangerous mustache scissors, mauling grandmothers and children, and pestering Al Gore, while doing nothing about the influx of aliens from Middle-Eastern countries who are on designated watch lists.

We pump up the military in India and Pakistan, ignore all the warnings about Saudi Arabia, and plan a secret war against Iraq to make sure no one starts asking where Osama bin Laden is. We think we know where Saddam Hussein lives, so let’s go get him instead.

Since our government bureaucracy failed, why not get rid of it instead of adding to it? If we had proper respect and understood how private property owners effectively defend themselves, we could apply those rules to the airlines and achieve something worthwhile.

If our immigration policies have failed us, when will we defy the politically correct fanatics and curtail the immigration of those individuals on the highly suspect lists? Instead of these changes, all we hear is that the major solution will come by establishing a huge new federal department- the Department of Homeland Security.

According to all the pundits, we are expected to champion this big-government approach, and if we don’t jolly well like it, we will be tagged “unpatriotic.” The fear that permeates our country cries out for something to be done in response to almost daily warnings of the next attack. If it’s not a real attack, then it’s a theoretical one; one where the bomb could well be only in the mind of a potential terrorist.

Where is all this leading us? Are we moving toward a safer and more secure society? I think not. All the discussions of these proposed plans since 9/11 have been designed to condition the American people to accept major changes in our political system. Some of the changes being made are unnecessary, and others are outright dangerous to our way of life.

There is no need for us to be forced to choose between security and freedom. Giving up freedom does not provide greater security. Preserving and better understanding freedom can. Sadly today, many are anxious to give up freedom in response to real and generated fears..

The plans for a first strike supposedly against a potential foreign government should alarm all Americans. If we do not resist this power the President is assuming, our President, through executive order, can start a war anyplace, anytime, against anyone he chooses, for any reason, without congressional approval. This is a tragic usurpation of the war power by the executive branch from the legislative branch, with Congress being all too accommodating.

Removing the power of the executive branch to wage war, as was done through our revolution and the writing of the Constitution, is now being casually sacrificed on the altar of security. In a free society, and certainly in the constitutional republic we have been given, it should never be assumed that the President alone can take it upon himself to wage war whenever he pleases.

The publicly announced plan to murder Saddam Hussein in the name of our national security draws nary a whimper from Congress. Support is overwhelming, without a thought as to its legality, morality, constitutionality, or its practicality. Murdering Saddam Hussein will surely generate many more fanatics ready to commit their lives to suicide terrorist attacks against us.

Our CIA attempt to assassinate Castro backfired with the subsequent assassination of our president. Killing Saddam Hussein, just for the sake of killing him, obviously will increase the threat against us, not diminish it. It makes no sense. But our warriors argue that someday he may build a bomb, someday he might use it, maybe against us or some yet-unknown target. This policy further radicalizes the Islamic fundamentalists against us, because from their viewpoint, our policy is driven by Israeli, not U.S. security interests.

Planned assassination, a preemptive strike policy without proof of any threat, and a vague definition of terrorism may work for us as long as we’re king of the hill, but one must assume every other nation will naturally use our definition of policy as justification for dealing with their neighbors. India can justify a first strike against Pakistan, China against India or Taiwan, as well as many other such examples. This new policy, if carried through, will make the world much less safe.

This new doctrine is based on proving a negative, which is impossible to do, especially when we’re dealing with a subjective interpretation of plans buried in someone’s head. To those who suggest a more restrained approach on Iraq and killing Saddam Hussein, the war hawks retort, saying: “Prove to me that Saddam Hussein might not do something someday directly harmful to the United States.” Since no one can prove this, the warmongers shout: “Let’s march on Baghdad.”

We all can agree that aggression should be met with force and that providing national security is an ominous responsibility that falls on Congress’ shoulders. But avoiding useless and unjustifiable wars that threaten our whole system of government and security seems to be the more prudent thing to do.

Since September 11th, Congress has responded with a massive barrage of legislation not seen since Roosevelt took over in 1933. Where Roosevelt dealt with trying to provide economic security, today’s legislation deals with personal security from any and all imaginable threats, at any cost- dollar or freedom-wise. These efforts include:

• The Patriot Act, which undermines the 4th Amendment with the establishment of an overly broad and dangerous definition of terrorism.
• The Financial Anti-Terrorism Act, which expands the government’s surveillance of the financial transactions of all American citizens through increased power to FinCen and puts back on track the plans to impose “Know Your Customer” rules on all Americans, which had been sought after for years.
• The airline bailout bill gave $15 billion, rushed through shortly after 9/11.
• The federalization of all airline security employees.
• Military tribunals set up by executive order-undermining the rights of those accused- rights established as far back in history as 1215.
• Unlimited retention of suspects without charges being made, even when a crime has not been committed- a serious precedent that one day may well be abused.
• Relaxation of FBI surveillance guidelines of all political activity.
• Essentially monopolizing vaccines and treatment for infectious diseases, permitting massive quarantines and mandates for vaccinations.

Almost all significant legislation since 9/11 has been rushed through in a tone of urgency with reference to the tragedy, including the $190 billion farm bill as well as fast track.

Guarantees to all insurance companies now are moving quickly through the Congress.
Increasing the billions already flowing into foreign aid is now being planned as our interventions overseas continue to grow and expand.

There’s no reason to believe that the massive increase in spending, both domestic and foreign, along with the massive expansion of the size of the federal government, will slow any time soon. The deficit is exploding as the economy weakens. When the government sector drains the resources needed for capital expansion, it contributes to the loss of confidence needed for growth.

Even without evidence that any good has come from this massive expansion of government power, Congress is in the process of establishing a huge new bureaucracy, the Department of Homeland Security, hoping miraculously through centralization to make all these efforts productive and worthwhile.

There is no evidence, however, that government bureaucracy and huge funding can solve our nation’s problems. The likelihood is that the unintended consequences of this new proposal will diminish our freedoms and do nothing to enhance our security.

Opposing currently proposed and recently passed legislation does not mean one is complacent about terrorism or homeland security. The truth is that there are alternative solutions to these problems we face, without resorting to expanding the size and scope of government at the expense of liberty.

As tempting as it may seem, a government is incapable of preventing crimes. On occasion, with luck it might succeed. But the failure to tip us off about 9/11, after spending $40 billion annually on intelligence gathering, should have surprised no one. Governments, by nature, are very inefficient institutions. We must accept this as fact.

I’m sure that our intelligence agencies had the information available to head off 9/11, but bureaucratic blundering and turf wars prevented the information from being useful. But, the basic principle is wrong. City policeman can’t and should not be expected to try to preempt crimes. That would invite massive intrusions into the everyday activities of every law-abiding citizen.

But that’s exactly what our recent legislation is doing. It’s a wrong-headed goal, no matter how wonderful it may sound. The policemen in the inner cities patrol their beats, but crime is still rampant. In the rural areas of America, literally millions of our citizens are safe and secure in their homes, though miles from any police protection. They are safe because even the advantage of isolation doesn’t entice the burglar to rob a house when he knows a shotgun sits inside the door waiting to be used. But this is a right denied many of our citizens living in the inner cities.

The whole idea of government preventing crime is dangerous. To prevent crimes in our homes or businesses, government would need cameras to spy on our every move; to check for illegal drug use, wife beating, child abuse, or tax evasion. They would need cameras, not only on our streets and in our homes, but our phones, internet, and travels would need to be constantly monitored- just to make sure we are not a terrorist, drug dealer, or tax evader.

This is the assumption now used at our airports, rather than allowing privately owned airlines to profile their passengers to assure the safety for which the airline owners ought to assume responsibility. But, of course, this would mean guns in the cockpit. I am certain that this approach to safety and security would be far superior to the rules that existed prior to 9/11 and now have been made much worse in the past nine months.

This method of providing security emphasizes private-property ownership and responsibility of the owners to protect that property. But the right to bear arms must also be included. The fact that the administration is opposed to guns in the cockpit and the fact that the airline owners are more interested in bailouts and insurance protection mean that we’re just digging a bigger hole for ourselves- ignoring liberty and expecting the government to provide something it’s not capable of doing.

Because of this, in combination with a foreign policy that generates more hatred toward us and multiplies the number of terrorists that seek vengeance, I am deeply concerned that Washington’s efforts so far sadly have only made us more vulnerable. I’m convinced that the newly proposed Department of Homeland Security will do nothing to make us more secure, but it will make us all a lot poorer and less free. If the trend continues, the Department of Homeland Security may well be the vehicle used for a much more ruthless control of the people by some future administration than any of us dreams. Let’s pray that this concern will never materialize.

America is not now a ruthless authoritarian police state. But our concerns ought to be whether we have laid the foundation of a more docile police state. The love of liberty has been so diminished that we tolerate intrusions into our privacies today that would have been abhorred just a few years ago. Tolerance of inconvenience to our liberties is not uncommon when both personal and economic fear persists. The sacrifices being made to our liberties will surely usher in a system of government that will please only those who enjoy being in charge of running other people’s lives.

Mr. Speaker, what, then, is the answer to the question: “Is America a Police State?” My answer is: “Maybe not yet, but it is fast approaching.” The seeds have been sown and many of our basic protections against tyranny have been and are constantly being undermined. The post-9/11 atmosphere here in Congress has provided ample excuse to concentrate on safety at the expense of liberty, failing to recognize that we cannot have one without the other.

When the government keeps detailed records on every move we make and we either need advance permission for everything we do or are penalized for not knowing what the rules are, America will be declared a police state. Personal privacy for law-abiding citizens will be a thing of the past. Enforcement of laws against economic and political crimes will exceed that of violent crimes (just look at what’s coming under the new FEC law). War will be the prerogative of the administration. Civil liberties will be suspended for suspects, and their prosecution will not be carried out by an independent judiciary. In a police state, this becomes common practice rather than a rare incident.

Some argue that we already live in a police state, and Congress doesn’t have the foggiest notion of what they’re dealing with. So forget it and use your energy for your own survival. Some advise that the momentum towards the monolithic state cannot be reversed. Possibly that’s true, but I’m optimistic that if we do the right thing and do not capitulate to popular fancy and the incessant war propaganda, the onslaught of statism can be reversed.

To do so, we as a people will once again have to dedicate ourselves to establishing the proper role a government plays in a free society. That does not involve the redistribution of wealth through force. It does not mean that government dictates the moral and religious standards of the people. It does not allow us to police the world by involving ourselves in every conflict as if it’s our responsibility to manage a world American empire.

But it does mean government has a proper role in guaranteeing free markets, protecting voluntary and religious choices and guaranteeing private property ownership, while punishing those who violate these rules- whether foreign or domestic.

In a free society, the government’s job is simply to protect liberty- the people do the rest. Let’s not give up on a grand experiment that has provided so much for so many. Let’s reject the police state.

Chertoff: U.S. Should Review Terror Laws
By Hope Yen
Aug 13, 2006

WASHINGTON — The nation’s chief of homeland security said Sunday that the U.S. should consider reviewing its laws to allow for more electronic surveillance and detention of possible terror suspects, citing last week’s foiled plot.

Michael Chertoff, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, stopped short of calling for immediate changes, noting there might be constitutional barriers to the type of wide police powers the British had in apprehending suspects in the plot to blow up airliners headed to the U.S.

But Chertoff made clear his belief that wider authority could thwart future attacks at a time when Congress is reviewing the proper scope of the Bush administration’s executive powers for its warrantless eavesdropping program and military tribunals for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“What helped the British in this case is the ability to be nimble, to be fast, to be flexible, to operate based on fast-moving information,” he said. “We have to make sure our legal system allows us to do that. It’s not like the 20th century, where you had time to get warrants.”

In this photo provided by ABC News, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff appears for an interview with George Stephanopolous on ABC’s This Week, in Washington, Sunday, Aug. 13, 2006. Chertoff said he expects the Bush administration to keep the U.S. on its highest threat alert for flights headed to the U.S. from the United Kingdom and at its second-highest level for all other flights. (AP Photo/ABC News, Linda Spillers)

The Bush administration has pushed for greater executive authority in the war on terror, leading it to create a warrantless eavesdropping program, hold suspects who are deemed as “enemy combatants” for long periods and establish a military tribunal system for detainees that affords defendants fewer rights than traditional courts-martial.

Congress is now reviewing some of the programs after lawmakers questioned the legality of the eavesdropping program and the Supreme Court ruled in June that the tribunals defied international law and had not been authorized by Congress.

On Sunday, Chertoff said the U.S. is remaining vigilant for other attacks, citing concerns that terror groups may “think we are distracted” after last week’s foiled plot. Attaining “maximum flexibility” in surveillance of transactions and communications will be critical in preventing future attacks, he said.

“We’ve done a lot in our legal system the last few years, to move in the direction of that kind of efficiency,” Chertoff said. “But we ought to constantly review our legal rules to make sure they’re helping us, not hindering us.”

He said he expects the Bush administration to keep the U.S. on its highest threat alert for flights headed to the U.S. from the United Kingdom and at its second-highest level for all other flights.

“We haven’t fully analyzed the evidence, and therefore, we’re still concerned there may be some plotters who are out there,” Chertoff said. “We also have to be concerned about other groups that may seize the opportunity to carry out attacks because they think we are distracted with this plot.”

Still, Chertoff said he believed that the nation’s airline screeners were well-positioned to catch future terrorists. He did not anticipate greater restrictions beyond the current ban on carrying liquids and gels onto airliners, such as barring all carry-on luggage.

“We don’t want to inconvenience unnecessarily,” he said. “I think we can do the job with our screening, screening training and our technology without banning all carry-on luggage.”

Chertoff made the comments on “Fox News Sunday” and ABC’s “This Week.”

PLUS:
Confiscated Airport Items Bring Cash
The Army Knife You Gave Up In Philly? Good Change You’ll Find It On eBay

(CBS/AP) A man-sized artificial palm tree and a sausage grinder have shared space in a state government warehouse with piles of Swiss Army knives and chain saws — just a few of the things travelers have had to give up at airport security checkpoints.

Pennsylvania turns a small profit by disposing of these castoff items, which it accepts from security contractors at 12 airports in five states, by selling them to the highest bidders at the online auction site eBay.

And what about the abundance of liquids and gels discarded since the alleged British terror plot caused U.S. airports to prohibit them? Edward Myslewicz, a spokesman for the General Services Department told the Seattle Times that state officials are considering selling some of those items too.

Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport has perhaps the most charitable approach. Airport spokeswoman Lexie Van Haren told the Seattle Times it plans to give 11 boxes of surrendered items to the city’s human-services department, which will distribute items to homeless shelters.

Airport officials are still finding their way with these new items. Up to now, most of the contraband merchandise has been knives, nail clippers and cuticle scissors that were forbidden as carry-on items following the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

But at the Pennsylvania collection center, there’s also Wiffle Ball bats, frosting-encrusted wedding cake servers, sex toys and a couple of chain saws.

There’s even a box full of blenders.

“There must be folks who like to mix up their own pina coladas when they get to Puerto Vallarta,” said Ken Hess, head of the Pennsylvania General Services Department’s surplus property program.

The program has brought in more than $307,000 since it began in June 2004, and overhead is low. Students from a truck-driving school pick up the merchandise, and it’s sorted by state workers who can’t do their normal duties because of injury or other reasons.

Ninety-eight percent of it will sell. Knives, auctioned by the lot, sell fastest. Ten pounds of assorted pocket knives, for example, recently attracted nine bids and sold for $42.

Some of the 2½ tons of miscellany that arrives every month consists of weapons, potential weapons and squirt guns.

However, the warehouse’s current inventory also includes two sombreros, a plaque from a fishing contest in Cayuga Lake, N.Y., a jungle machete and about 100 sets of handcuffs, some fur-lined. At one point, the state had a sausage grinder, a man-sized artificial palm tree and a Christmas ornament decorated with the logo of hot dog purveyor Nathan’s Famous.

There are all sorts of auto parts, kitchen implements, gardening tools, jewelry, sporting goods and batteries.

On one wall, sorters have set aside a few stranger items, including a single deer antler.

The Transportation Security Administration said 10 million prohibited items have been seized or voluntarily turned over this year nationwide.

“There are thousands of stories out there on why people either forget or just don’t know the rules,” said TSA spokesman Darrin Kayser.

Federal law gives states the right to get banned or discarded items from the TSA contractor responsible for removing them. Pennsylvania has agreed to accept items from airports in Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Johnstown and Allentown; Kennedy, LaGuardia and two other airports in New York; Newark and Trenton in New Jersey; Nantucket in Massachusetts, and Cleveland.

Pennsylvania has modified its program to maximize profitability. Smaller lots bring in more cash, so it no longer offers bulk sales like the 500 small Swiss Army knives that went for a record $595.

It also tries to package items together as a marketing hook. Hockey sticks, pucks and a goalie’s mask were bundled for sale around the time of the Stanley Cup playoffs; gardening tools are sold in the spring; exercise weights are auctioned in early January to capitalize on New Year’s resolutions; and baseball bats are put up for bid just before the World Series.

Hess said a hunting-season kit that included a buck knife, rope, flashlight and an all-purpose Leatherman tool sold “like hot cakes” before the start of deer season.

Kentucky, one of at least three other states that sells airport surplus on eBay, brings in $3,000 a month and stocks state agencies with surrendered hand tools and other equipment.

Panel Suggests Using Inmates in Drug Trials
By IAN URBINA
August 13, 2006

PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 7 — An influential federal panel of medical advisers has recommended that the government loosen regulations that severely limit the testing of pharmaceuticals on prison inmates, a practice that was all but stopped three decades ago after revelations of abuse.

The proposed change includes provisions intended to prevent problems that plagued earlier programs. Nevertheless, it has dredged up a painful history of medical mistreatment and incited debate among prison rights advocates and researchers about whether prisoners can truly make uncoerced decisions, given the environment they live in.

Supporters of such programs cite the possibility of benefit to prison populations, and the potential for contributing to the greater good.

Until the early 1970’s, about 90 percent of all pharmaceutical products were tested on prison inmates, federal officials say. But such research diminished sharply in 1974 after revelations of abuse at prisons like Holmesburg here, where inmates were paid hundreds of dollars a month to test items as varied as dandruff treatments and dioxin, and where they were exposed to radioactive, hallucinogenic and carcinogenic chemicals.

In addition to addressing the abuses at Holmesburg, the regulations were a reaction to revelations in 1972 surrounding what the government called the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, which was begun in the 1930’s and lasted 40 years. In it, several hundred mostly illiterate men with syphilis in rural Alabama were left untreated, even after a cure was discovered, so that researchers could study the disease.

“What happened at Holmesburg was just as gruesome as Tuskegee, but at Holmesburg it happened smack dab in the middle of a major city, not in some backwoods in Alabama,” said Allen M. Hornblum, an urban studies professor at Temple University and the author of “Acres of Skin,” a 1998 book about the Holmesburg research. “It just goes to show how prisons are truly distinct institutions where the walls don’t just serve to keep inmates in, they also serve to keep public eyes out.”

Critics also doubt the merits of pharmaceutical testing on prisoners who often lack basic health care.

Alvin Bronstein, a Washington lawyer who helped found the National Prison Project, an American Civil Liberties Union program, said he did not believe that altering the regulations risked a return to the days of Holmesburg.

“With the help of external review boards that would include a prisoner advocate,” Mr. Bronstein said, “I do believe that the potential benefits of biomedical research outweigh the potential risks.”

Holmesburg closed in 1995 but was partly reopened in July to help ease overcrowding at other prisons.

Under current regulations, passed in 1978, prisoners can participate in federally financed biomedical research if the experiment poses no more than “minimal” risks to the subjects. But a report formally presented to federal officials on Aug. 1 by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences advised that experiments with greater risks be permitted if they had the potential to benefit prisoners. As an added precaution, the report suggested that all studies be subject to an independent review.

“The current regulations are entirely outdated and restrictive, and prisoners are being arbitrarily excluded from research that can help them,” said Ernest D. Prentice, a University of Nebraska genetics professor and the chairman of a Health and Human Services Department committee that requested the study. Mr. Prentice said the regulation revision process would begin at the committee’s next meeting, on Nov. 2.

The discussion comes as the biomedical industry is facing a shortage of testing subjects. In the last two years, several pain medications, including Vioxx and Bextra, have been pulled off the market because early testing did not include large enough numbers of patients to catch dangerous problems.

And the committee’s report comes against the backdrop of a prison population that has more than quadrupled, to about 2.3 million, over the last 30 years and that disproportionately suffers from H.I.V. and hepatitis C, diseases that some researchers say could be better controlled if new research were permitted in prisons.

For Leodus Jones, a former prisoner, the report has opened old wounds. “This moves us back in a very bad direction,” said Mr. Jones, who participated in the experiments at Holmesburg in 1966 and after his release played a pivotal role in lobbying to get the regulations passed.

In one experiment, Mr. Jones’s skin changed color, and he developed rashes on his back and legs where he said lotions had been tested.

“The doctors told me at the time that something was seriously wrong,” said Mr. Jones, who added that he had never signed a consent form. He reached a $40,000 settlement in 1986 with the City of Philadelphia after he sued.

“I never had these rashes before,” he said, “but I’ve had them ever since.”

The Institute of Medicine report was initiated in 2004 when the Health and Human Services Department asked the institute to look into the issue. The report said prisoners should be allowed to take part in federally financed clinical trials so long as the trials were in the later and less dangerous phase of Food and Drug Administration approval. It also recommended that at least half the subjects in such trials be nonprisoners, making it more difficult to test products that might scare off volunteers.

Dr. A. Bernard Ackerman, a New York dermatologist who worked at Holmesburg during the 1960’s trials as a second-year resident from the University of Pennsylvania, said he remained skeptical. “I saw it firsthand,” Dr. Ackerman said. “What started as scientific research became pure business, and no amount of regulations can prevent that from happening again.”

Others cite similar concerns over the financial stake in such research.

“It strikes me as pretty ridiculous to start talking about prisoners getting access to cutting-edge research and medications when they can’t even get penicillin and high-blood-pressure pills,” said Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News, an independent monthly review. “I have to imagine there are larger financial motivations here.”

The demand for human test subjects has grown so much that the so-called contract research industry has emerged in the past decade to recruit volunteers for pharmaceutical trials. The Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, a Boston policy and economic research group at Tufts University, estimated that contract research revenue grew to $7 billion in 2005, up from $1 billion in 1995.

But researchers at the Institute of Medicine said their sole focus was to see if prisoners could benefit by changing the regulations.

The pharmaceutical industry says it was not involved. Jeff Trewitt, a spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a drug industry trade group, said that his organization had no role in prompting the study and that it had not had a chance to review the findings.

Dr. Albert M. Kligman, who directed the experiments at Holmesburg and is now an emeritus professor of dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, said the regulations should never have been written in the first place.

“My view is that shutting the prison experiments down was a big mistake,” Dr. Kligman said.

While confirming that he used radioactive materials, hallucinogenic drugs and carcinogenic materials on prisoners, Dr. Kligman said that they were always administered in extremely low doses and that the benefits to the public were overwhelming.

He cited breakthroughs like Retin A, a popular anti-acne drug, and ingredients for most of the creams used to treat poison ivy. “I’m on the medical ethics committee at Penn,” he said, “and I still don’t see there having been anything wrong with what we were doing.”

From 1951 to 1974, several federal agencies and more than 30 companies used Holmesburg for experiments, mostly under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania, which had built laboratories at the prison. After the revelations about Holmesburg, it soon became clear that other universities and prisons in other states were involved in similar abuses.

In October 2000, nearly 300 former inmates sued the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Kligman, Dow Chemical and Johnson & Johnson for injuries they said occurred during the experiments at Holmesburg, but the suit was dismissed because the statute of limitations had expired.

“When they put the chemicals on me, my hands swelled up like eight-ounce boxing gloves, and they’ve never gone back to normal,” said Edward Anthony, 62, a former inmate who took part in Holmesburg experiments in 1964. “We’re still pushing the lawsuit because the medical bills are still coming in for a lot of us.”

Daniel S. Murphy, a professor of criminal justice at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., who was imprisoned for five years in the 1990’s for growing marijuana, said that loosening the regulations would be a mistake.

“Free and informed consent becomes pretty questionable when prisoners don’t hold the keys to their own cells,” Professor Murphy said, “and in many cases they can’t read, yet they are signing a document that it practically takes a law degree to understand.”

During the Holmesburg experiments, inmates could earn up to $1,500 a month by participating. The only other jobs were at the commissary or in the shoe and shirt factory, where wages were usually about 15 cents to 25 cents a day, Professor Hornblum of Temple said.

On the issue of compensation for inmates, the report raised concern about “undue inducements to participate in research in order to gain access to medical care or other benefits they would not normally have.” It called for “adequate protections” to avoid “attempts to coerce or manipulate participation.’’

The report also expressed worry about the absence of regulation over experiments that do not receive federal money. Lawrence O. Gostin, the chairman of the panel that conducted the study and a professor of law and public health at Georgetown University, said he hoped to change that.

Even with current regulations, oversight of such research has been difficult. In 2000, several universities were reprimanded for using federal money and conducting several hundred projects on prisoners without fully reporting the projects to the appropriate authorities.

Professor Gostin said the report called for tightening some existing regulations by advising that all research involving prisoners be subject to uniform federal oversight, even if no federal funds are involved. The report also said protections should extend not just to prisoners behind bars but also to those on parole or on probation.

Professor Murphy, who testified to the panel as the report was being written, praised those proposed precautions before adding, “They’re also the parts of the report that faced the strongest resistance from federal officials, and I fear they’re most likely the parts that will end up getting cut as these recommendations become new regulations.”

got back from a BSSB performance. eddie, the older, blind baritone player from the BSSB is going to be filling in with the fremont philharmonic for the fall barbecue shows. i gave him a ride home today, and met his wife who has some sort of neurological problem that causes her hands to curl up to the point where they’re pretty much useless… that could be me….. 8/

briefly, i’ve been thinking about this particular icon: it’s Ronald McDonald, the riveter… or at least that’s what it was supposed to be where i took it from, but the more i look at it, it also looks like a european gesture that is, from what i understand, vaguely obscene… if i recall correctly it’s something along the lines of “horse fucker”, “i’d like to fist you”, “stick this up your ass” or something along those lines… and i think i like it better that way… 8)

from , and , with some inspiration from , and some twists you’ll only find from …

go here and look through random quotes until you find [arbitrary number] that reflect who you are or what you believe. post them in your journal, or in the comments to this journal, or not. then tag [arbitrary number] of your LJ friends to do the same, or not.

The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away.
— Ronald Reagan (1911 – 2004)

Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors
into trouble of all kinds.
— Samuel Butler (1835 – 1902)

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy
you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste
your time voting.
— Charles Bukowski (1920 – 1994)

Part of being creative is learning how to protect your freedom. That includes
freedom from avarice.
— Hugh Macleod, How To Be Creative: 31 Remain Frugal, 08-22-04

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who
reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and
feeble mind.
— Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)

The truth is more important than the facts.
— Frank Lloyd Wright (1869 – 1959)

Do not trust all men, but trust men of worth; the former course is silly,
the latter a mark of prudence.
— Democritus (460 BCE – 370 BCE)

If you believe everything you read, better not read.
— Japanese Proverb

I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.
— Mohandas Karmachand ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi (1869 – 1948)

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought
without accepting it.
— Aristotle (384 BCE – 322 BCE)

As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.
— Dick Cavett (1936 – )

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from
oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will
reach to himself.
— Thomas Paine (1737 – 1809)

The thought of being President frightens me and I do not think I want the job.
— Ronald Reagan in 1973

Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.
— Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826), Notes on the State of Virginia

When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether
to answer ‘Present’ or ‘Not guilty.’
— Theodore Roosevelt (1858 – 1919)

Anger is never without Reason, but seldom with a good One.
— Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1790)

The computer can’t tell you the emotional story. It can give you
the exact mathematical design, but what’s missing is the eyebrows.
— Frank Zappa

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
— Mohandas Karmachand ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi (1869 – 1948)

Who are the brain police?
— Frank Zappa

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.
— Frank Zappa

Don’t get suckered in by the comments — they can be terribly misleading. Debug only code.
— Dave Storer

Cherish that which is within you, and shut off that which is without.
— Chuang Tzu (369 BC – 286 BC), On Tolerance

Declassified archives document ties between CIA and Nazis
By Andre Damon
27 July 2006

On June 6, the US national archives released some 27,000 pages of secret records documenting the CIA’s Cold War relations with former German Nazi Party members and officials.

The files reveal numerous cases of German Nazis, some clearly guilty of war crimes, receiving funds, weapons and employment from the CIA. They also demonstrate that US intelligence agencies deliberately refrained from disclosing information about the whereabouts of Adolf Eichmann in order to protect Washington’s allies in the post-war West German government headed by Christian Democratic leader Konrad Adenauer.

Eichmann, who had sent millions to their deaths while coordinating the Nazis’ “final solution” campaign to exterminate European Jewry, went into hiding in Buenos Aires after the fall of the Third Reich. Utilizing friendly contacts in the Catholic Church and the Peron government in Argentina, Eichmann was able to reside in the South American country for 10 years under the alias of Ricardo Klement. He was abducted in 1960 by Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, put on trial in Israel and executed in 1962.

The documents show that the CIA was in possession of Eichmann’s pseudonym two years before the Mossad raid. The CIA received this information in 1958 from the West German government, which learned of Eichmann’s alias in 1952. Both the CIA and the Bonn government chose not to disclose this information to Israel because they were concerned that Eichmann might reveal the identities of Nazi war criminals holding high office in the West German government, particularly Adenauer’s national security adviser Hans Globke.

When Eichmann was finally brought to trial, the US government used all available means to protect its West German allies from what he might reveal. According to the declassified documents, the CIA pressured Life magazine into deleting references to Globke in portions of Eichmann’s memoirs that it chose to publish.

In addition to the revelations regarding Eichmann, the documents chronicle the CIA’s creation of “stay-behind” intelligence networks in southwestern Germany and Berlin, labeled “Kibitz” and “Pastime,” respectively. The Kibitz ring involved several former SS members. In the early 1950s, the CIA provided these groups with money, communications equipment and ammunition so that they could serve as intelligence assets in the event of a Soviet invasion of West Germany.

The CIA documents were reviewed by Timothy Naftali, a historian with the National Archives Interagency Working Group, the government body that oversaw their declassification and release. According to an article published by Naftali, the stay-behind program was dissolved “in the wake of public concerns in West Germany about the resurgence of Neo-Nazi Groups.” Specifically, the Kibitz-15 group, led by an “unreconstructed Nazi,” became a potential source of public embarrassment for the US, as its members were broadly involved in Neo-Nazi activity. [1]

The CIA terminated the program by 1955 and arranged for many of its contacts to be resettled in Canada and Australia. According to the documents, Australia provided funds for relocation while the CIA provided its ex-assets with a “resettlement bonus.”

The CIA employed Gustav Hilger, a former adviser to Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. As an employee of the German foreign office, Hilger was present at the negotiation of the Stalin-Hitler pact in 1939. The CIA deemed his experience with the USSR sufficiently valuable to free him from incarceration at Fort Meade in Maryland and employ him as an intelligence evaluator in West Germany.

In 1948, Hilger moved to the United States and obtained a position at the CIA’s K Street building in Washington as a researcher and expert on the USSR. Hilger eventually left the CIA to work for the West German foreign office.

According to a paper analyzing the CIA documents published by Robert Wolfe, a former senior archivist at the US National Archives, “it is beyond dispute that Hilger criminally assisted in the genocide of Italy’s Jews…. During the roundup of Italian Jews in late 1943, a note signed ‘Hilger’ recorded Ribbentrop’s concurrence that the Italians be asked to intern the Jews in concentration camps in Northern Italy, in lieu of immediate deportation. The SS intended thereby that the Italian Jews and their potential Italian protectors should believe that internment in Italy was the final destination, rather than eventual deportation to the murder mills in Poland to be immediately murdered or gradually worked to death. The stated purpose of this ruse was to minimize the number of Italian Jews who would go into hiding to avoid deportation to Poland” [2]

In another instance, the CIA employed Tscherim Soobzokov, a former Nazi gendarme and Waffen SS lieutenant, who, according to a paper published by Interagency Working Group Director of Historical Research Richard Breitman, “participated in an execution commando [combat group detailed to executing Jews and Communists en masse] and had searched North Caucasian villages for Jews.”

Soobzokov was employed by the CIA for seven years. Over this period, he repeatedly used his intelligence contacts to avoid investigation by the FBI and the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in regard to his complicity in war crimes.

According to Breitman’s paper, CIA examiners noted that Soobzokov was an “incorrigible fabricator” who repeatedly lied about his past in order to conceal his participation in criminal activity. Nevertheless, the CIA shielded him against investigation, at one point sending the INS a document asserting that Soobzokov had never worked for the Nazis. [3]

Prior to the outbreak of war, a significant section of the American ruling elite had favored cooperation with the Nazis as a European hedge against the spread of Bolshevism. Henry Ford was notorious for his anti-Semitism and his political affinity for German Fascism, and a number of major American companies retained their business ties with the Third Reich. Notably, IBM sold Germany the punch cards that were used to catalog the “final solution.” (See: “How IBM helped the Nazis IBM and the Holocaust”)

However, as one European nation after another fell before Hitler’s onslaught, the threat of German imperialist dominance in Europe spurred the American ruling class to enter the European theater.

US imperialism mobilized popular support in its war against the Nazi regime by appealing to the democratic and anti-fascist sentiments of the American people. After the defeat of Germany, it organized, together with its World War II allies—Britain, the Soviet Union and France—the Nuremburg trials to prosecute top Nazi officials for their complicity in war crimes.

However, with the start of the Cold War, the United States reversed its policy of identifying, trying and executing prominent Nazi war criminals. As is starkly demonstrated in the case of Eichmann, the knowledge possessed by many of these individuals made trying them inconvenient.

Regardless of its limited prosecution of upper-echelon Nazis, the United States had no qualms about recruiting Nazi Party members and war criminals into its military research apparatus. Prominent German military developers such as Werner Von Braun and Bernhard Tessmann were assimilated into the US rocketry program, while Kurt Blome, a Nazi scientist who experimented on concentration camp prisoners, was employed by the US to develop chemical weapons.

Likewise, the early stages of the Cold War saw high-level Nazi cadres drafted into the US intelligence machine and deployed in Europe, the Middle East and the Americas. According to the Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations (OSI), the bureau assigned to investigate German war criminals living within the US, at least 10,000 Nazis entered the US between 1948 and 1952. Of the thousands of German Nazis who fled—or were brought—to the United States, only some 100 have been prosecuted by the OSI.

Notes:
1. Timothy Naftali, “New Information on Cold War CIA Stay-Behind Operations in Germany and on the Adolf Eichmann Case” http://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/naftali.pdf
2. Robert Wolfe, “Gustav Hilger: From Hitler’s Foreign Office to CIA Consultant” http://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/wolfe.pdf
3. Richard Breitman, “Tscherim Soobzokov” http://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/breitman.pdf

Don’t Be Terrorized
You’re more likely to die of a car accident, drowning, fire, or murder
By Ronald Bailey
August 11, 2006

Yesterday, British authorities broke up an alleged terror plot to blow up as many as ten commercial airliners as they flew to the United States. In response, the Department of Homeland Security upped the alert level on commercial flights from Britain to “red” and boosted the alert to “orange” for all other flights. In a completely unscientific poll, AOL asked subscribers: “Are you changing your travel plans because of the raised threat level?” At mid-afternoon about a quarter of the respondents had said yes. Such polls do reflect the kinds of anxieties terrorist attacks, even those that have been stymied, provoke in the public.

But how afraid should Americans be of terrorist attacks? Not very, as some quick comparisons with other risks that we regularly run in our daily lives indicate. Your odds of dying of a specific cause in any year are calculated by dividing that year’s population by the number of deaths by that cause in that year. Your lifetime odds of dying of a particular cause are calculated by dividing the one-year odds by the life expectancy of a person born in that year. For example, in 2003 about 45,000 Americans died in motor accidents out of population of 291,000,000. So, according to the National Safety Council this means your one-year odds of dying in a car accident is about one out of 6500. Therefore your lifetime probability (6500 ÷ 78 years life expectancy) of dying in a motor accident are about one in 83.

What about your chances of dying in an airplane crash? A one-year risk of one in 400,000 and one in 5,000 lifetime risk. What about walking across the street? A one-year risk of one in 48,500 and a lifetime risk of one in 625. Drowning? A one-year risk of one in 88,000 and a one in 1100 lifetime risk. In a fire? About the same risk as drowning. Murder? A one-year risk of one in 16,500 and a lifetime risk of one in 210. What about falling? Essentially the same as being murdered. And the proverbial being struck by lightning? A one-year risk of one in 6.2 million and a lifetime risk of one in 80,000. And what is the risk that you will die of a catastrophic asteroid strike? In 1994, astronomers calculated that the chance was one in 20,000. However, as they’ve gathered more data on the orbits of near earth objects, the lifetime risk has been reduced to one in 200,000 or more.

So how do these common risks compare to your risk of dying in a terrorist attack? To try to calculate those odds realistically, Michael Rothschild, a former business professor at the University of Wisconsin, worked out a couple of plausible scenarios. For example, he figured that if terrorists were to destroy entirely one of America’s 40,000 shopping malls per week, your chances of being there at the wrong time would be about one in one million or more. Rothschild also estimated that if terrorists hijacked and crashed one of America’s 18,000 commercial flights per week that your chance of being on the crashed plane would be one in 135,000.

Even if terrorists were able to pull off one attack per year on the scale of the 9/11 atrocity, that would mean your one-year risk would be one in 100,000 and your lifetime risk would be about one in 1300. (300,000,000 ÷ 3,000 = 100,000 ÷ 78 years = 1282) In other words, your risk of dying in a plausible terrorist attack is much lower than your risk of dying in a car accident, by walking across the street, by drowning, in a fire, by falling, or by being murdered.

So do these numbers comfort you? If not, that’s a problem. Already, security measures—pervasive ID checkpoints, metal detectors, and phalanxes of security guards—increasingly clot the pathways of our public lives. It’s easy to overreact when an atrocity takes place—to heed those who promise safety if only we will give the authorities the “tools” they want by surrendering to them some of our liberty. As President Franklin Roosevelt in his first inaugural speech said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself— nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” However, with risks this low there is no reason for us not to continue to live our lives as though terrorism doesn’t matter—because it doesn’t really matter. We ultimately vanquish terrorism when we refuse to be terrorized.

Iran Proposal to U.S. Offered Peace with Israel
by Gareth Porter
May 25, 2006

WASHINGTON – Iran offered in 2003 to accept peace with Israel and to cut off material assistance to Palestinian armed groups and pressure them to halt terrorist attacks within Israel’s 1967 borders, according to the secret Iranian proposal to the United States. The two-page proposal for a broad Iran-U.S. agreement covering all the issues separating the two countries, a copy of which was obtained by IPS, was conveyed to the United States in late April or early May 2003. Trita Parsi, a specialist on Iranian foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies who provided the document to IPS, says he got it from an Iranian official earlier this year but is not at liberty to reveal the source.

The two-page document contradicts the official line of the George W. Bush administration that Iran is committed to the destruction of Israel and the sponsorship of terrorism in the region.

Parsi says the document is a summary of an even more detailed Iranian negotiating proposal which he learned about in 2003 from the U.S. intermediary who carried it to the State Department on behalf of the Swiss Embassy in late April or early May 2003. The intermediary has not yet agreed to be identified, according to Parsi.

The Iranian negotiating proposal indicated clearly that Iran was prepared to give up its role as a supporter of armed groups in the region in return for a larger bargain with the United States. What the Iranians wanted in return, as suggested by the document itself as well as expert observers of Iranian policy, was an end to U.S. hostility and recognition of Iran as a legitimate power in the region.

Before the 2003 proposal, Iran had attacked Arab governments which had supported the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The negotiating document, however, offered “acceptance of the Arab League Beirut declaration”, which it also referred to as the “Saudi initiative, two-states approach.”

The March 2002 Beirut declaration represented the Arab League’s first official acceptance of the land-for-peace principle as well as a comprehensive peace with Israel in return for Israel’s withdrawal to the territory it had controlled before the 1967 war.. Iran’s proposed concession on the issue would have aligned its policy with that of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, among others with whom the United States enjoyed intimate relations.

Another concession in the document was a “stop of any material support to Palestinian opposition groups (Hamas, Jihad, etc.) from Iranian territory” along with “pressure on these organizations to stop violent actions against civilians within borders of 1967”.

Even more surprising, given the extremely close relationship between Iran and the Lebanon-based Hizbollah Shiite organisation, the proposal offered to take “action on Hizbollah to become a mere political organization within Lebanon”.

The Iranian proposal also offered to accept much tighter controls by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in exchange for “full access to peaceful nuclear technology”. It offered “full cooperation with IAEA based on Iranian adoption of all relevant instruments (93+2 and all further IAEA protocols)”.

That was a reference to protocols which would require Iran to provide IAEA monitors with access to any facility they might request, whether it had been declared by Iran or not. That would have made it much more difficult for Iran to carry out any secret nuclear activities without being detected.

In return for these concessions, which contradicted Iran’s public rhetoric about Israel and anti-Israeli forces, the secret Iranian proposal sought U.S. agreement to a list of Iranian aims. The list included a “Halt in U.S. hostile behavior and rectification of status of Iran in the U.S.”, as well as the “abolishment of all sanctions”.

Also included among Iran’s aims was “recognition of Iran’s legitimate security interests in the region with according defense capacity”. According to a number of Iran specialists, the aim of security and an official acknowledgment of Iran’s status as a regional power were central to the Iranian interest in a broad agreement with the United States.

Negotiation of a deal with the United States that would advance Iran’s security and fundamental geopolitical political interests in the Persian Gulf region in return for accepting the existence of Israel and other Iranian concessions has long been discussed among senior Iranian national security officials, according to Parsi and other analysts of Iranian national security policy.

An Iranian threat to destroy Israel has been a major propaganda theme of the Bush administration for months. On Mar. 10, Bush said, “The Iranian president has stated his desire to destroy our ally, Israel. So when you start listening to what he has said to their desire to develop a nuclear weapon, then you begin to see an issue of grave national security concern.”

But in 2003, Bush refused to allow any response to the Iranian offer to negotiate an agreement that would have accepted the existence of Israel. Flynt Leverett, then the senior specialist on the Middle East on the National Security Council staff, recalled in an interview with IPS that it was “literally a few days” between the receipt of the Iranian proposal and the dispatch of a message to the Swiss ambassador expressing displeasure that he had forwarded it to Washington.

Interest in such a deal is still very much alive in Tehran, despite the U.S. refusal to respond to the 2003 proposal. Turkish international relations professor Mustafa Kibaroglu of Bilkent University writes in the latest issue of Middle East Journal that “senior analysts” from Iran told him in July 2005 that “the formal recognition of Israel by Iran may also be possible if essentially a ‘grand bargain’ can be achieved between the U.S. and Iran”.

The proposal’s offer to dismantle the main thrust of Iran’s Islamic and anti-Israel policy would be strongly opposed by some of the extreme conservatives among the mullahs who engineered the repression of the reformist movement in 2004 and who backed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in last year’s election.

However, many conservative opponents of the reform movement in Iran have also supported a negotiated deal with the United States that would benefit Iran, according to Paul Pillar, the former national intelligence officer on Iran. “Even some of the hardliners accepted the idea that if you could strike a deal with the devil, you would do it,” he said in an interview with IPS last month.

The conservatives were unhappy not with the idea of a deal with the United States but with the fact that it was a supporter of the reform movement of Pres. Mohammad Khatami, who would get the credit for the breakthrough, Pillar said.

Parsi says that the ultimate authority on Iran’s foreign policy, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was “directly involved” in the Iranian proposal, according to the senior Iranian national security officials he interviewed in 2004. Kamenei has aligned himself with the conservatives in opposing the pro-democratic movement.

Wait, Aren’t You Scared?
Governors object to Bush’s Guard plan
Rev. John Hagee’s War
The Pentagon’s "Second 911"
and much more, thanks to American Samizdat…

Muslims bristle at Bush term "Islamic fascists"
By Amanda Beck
Aug 10, 2006

WASHINGTON – U.S. Muslim groups criticized President Bush on Thursday for calling a foiled plot to blow up airplanes part of a “war with Islamic fascists,” saying the term could inflame anti-Muslim tensions.

U.S. officials have said the plot, thwarted by Britain, to blow up several aircraft over the Atlantic bore many of the hallmarks of al Qaeda.

“We believe this is an ill-advised term and we believe that it is counterproductive to associate Islam or Muslims with fascism,” said Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations advocacy group.

“We ought to take advantage of these incidents to make sure that we do not start a religious war against Islam and Muslims,” he told a news conference in Washington.

“We urge him (Bush) and we urge other public officials to restrain themselves.”

Awad said U.S. officials should take the lead from their British counterparts who steered clear of using what he considered inflammatory terms when they announced the arrest of more than 20 suspects in the reported plot.

Hours after the news broke, Bush said it was “a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation.”

Bush and other administration officials have used variations of the term “Islamo-fascism” on several occasions in the past to describe militant groups including al Qaeda, its allies in Iraq and Hizbollah in Lebanon.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told MSNBC television the phrase reflected what he called Osama bin Laden’s own vision of leading a totalitarian empire under the guise of religion.

“It might may not be classic fascism as you had with Mussolini or Hitler. But it is a totalitarian, intolerant imperialism that has a vision that is totally at odds with Western society and our rules of law,” Chertoff said.

MUSLIM CONCERNS
Many American Muslims, who say they have felt singled out for discrimination since the September 11 attacks, reject the term and say it unfairly links their faith to notions of dictatorship, oppression and racism.

“The problem with the phrase is it attaches the religion of Islam to tyranny and fascism, rather than isolating the threat to a specific group of individuals,” said Edina Lekovic, spokeswoman for the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles.

She said the terms cast suspicions on all Muslims, even the vast majority who want to live in safety like other Americans.

Bush upset many Muslims after the September 11 attacks by referring to the global war against terrorism early on as a “crusade,” a term which for many Muslims connotes a Christian battle against Islam. The White House quickly stopped using the word, expressing regrets if it had caused offense.

Mohamed Elibiary, a Texas-based Muslim activist, said he was upset by the president’s latest comments.

“We’ve got Osama bin Laden hijacking the religion in order to define it one way. … We feel the president and anyone who’s using these kinds of terminologies is hijacking it too from a different side,” he said.

What’s the real federal deficit?
By Dennis Cauchon
8/4/2006

The federal government keeps two sets of books.

The set the government promotes to the public has a healthier bottom line: a $318 billion deficit in 2005.

The set the government doesn’t talk about is the audited financial statement produced by the government’s accountants following standard accounting rules. It reports a more ominous financial picture: a $760 billion deficit for 2005. If Social Security and Medicare were included – as the board that sets accounting rules is considering – the federal deficit would have been $3.5 trillion.

Congress has written its own accounting rules – which would be illegal for a corporation to use because they ignore important costs such as the growing expense of retirement benefits for civil servants and military personnel.

Last year, the audited statement produced by the accountants said the government ran a deficit equal to $6,700 for every American household. The number given to the public put the deficit at $2,800 per household.

A growing number of Congress members and accounting experts say it’s time for Congress to start using the audited financial statement when it makes budget decisions. They say accurate accounting would force Congress to show more restraint before approving popular measures to boost spending or cut taxes.

“We’re a bottom-line culture, and we’ve been hiding the bottom line from the American people,” says Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., a former investment banker. “It’s not fair to them, and it’s delusional on our part.”

The House of Representatives supported Cooper’s proposal this year to ask the president to include the audited numbers in his budgets, but the Senate did not consider the measure.

Good accounting is crucial at a time when the government faces long-term challenges in paying benefits to tens of millions of Americans for Medicare, Social Security and government pensions, say advocates of stricter accounting rules in federal budgeting.

“Accounting matters,” says Harvard University law professor Howell Jackson, who specializes in business law. “The deficit number affects how politicians act. We need a good number so politicians can have a target worth looking at.”

The audited financial statement — prepared by the Treasury Department — reveals a federal government in far worse financial shape than official budget reports indicate, a USA TODAY analysis found. The government has run a deficit of $2.9 trillion since 1997, according to the audited number. The official deficit since then is just $729 billion. The difference is equal to an entire year’s worth of federal spending.

Surplus or deficit?
Congress and the president are able to report a lower deficit mostly because they don’t count the growing burden of future pensions and medical care for federal retirees and military personnel. These obligations are so large and are growing so fast that budget surpluses of the late 1990s actually were deficits when the costs are included.

The Clinton administration reported a surplus of $559 billion in its final four budget years. The audited numbers showed a deficit of $484 billion.

In addition, neither of these figures counts the financial deterioration in Social Security or Medicare. Including these retirement programs in the bottom line, as proposed by a board that oversees accounting methods used by the federal government, would show the government running annual deficits of trillions of dollars.

The Bush administration opposes including Social Security and Medicare in the audited deficit. Its reason: Congress can cancel or cut the retirement programs at any time, so they should not be considered a government liability for accounting purposes.

Policing the numbers
The government’s record-keeping was in such disarray 15 years ago that both parties agreed drastic steps were needed. Congress and two presidents took a series of actions from 1990 to 1996 that:

• Created the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board to establish accounting rules, a role similar to what the powerful Financial Accounting Standards Board does for corporations.
• Added chief financial officers to all major government departments and agencies.Required annual audited financial reports of those departments and agencies.Ordered the Treasury Department to publish, for the first time, a comprehensive annual financial report for the federal government — an audited report like those published every year by corporations.

These laws have dramatically improved federal financial reporting. Today, 18 of 24 departments and agencies produce annual reports certified by auditors. (The others, including the Defense Department, still have record-keeping troubles so severe that auditors refuse to certify the reliability of their books, according to the government’s annual report.)

The culmination of improved record-keeping is the “Financial Report of the U.S. Government,” an annual report similar to a corporate annual report. (The 158-page report for 2005 is available online at fms.treas.gov/fr/index.html.)

The House Budget Committee has tried to increase the prominence of the audited financial results. When the House passed its version of a budget this year, it included Cooper’s proposal asking Bush to add the audited numbers to the annual budget he submits to Congress. The request died when the House and Senate couldn’t agree on a budget. Cooper has reintroduced the proposal.

The Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board, established under the first President Bush in 1990 to set federal accounting rules, is considering adding Social Security and Medicare to the government’s audited bottom line.

Recognizing costly programs
Adding those costs would make federal accounting similar to that used by corporations, state and local governments and large non-profit entities such as universities and charities. It would show the government recording enormous losses because the deficit would reflect the growing shortfalls in Social Security and Medicare.

The government would have reported nearly $40 trillion in losses since 1997 if the deterioration of Social Security and Medicare had been included, according to a USA TODAY analysis of the proposed accounting change. That’s because generally accepted accounting principles require reporting financial burdens when they are incurred, not when they come due.

For example: If Microsoft announced today that it would add a drug benefit for its retirees, the company would be required to count the future cost of the program, in today’s dollars, as a business expense. If the benefit cost $1 billion in today’s dollars and retirees were expected to pay $200 million of the cost, Microsoft would be required to report a reduction in net income of $800 million.

This accounting rule is a major reason corporations have reduced and limited retirement benefits over the last 15 years.

The federal government’s audited financial statement now accounts for the retirement costs of civil servants and military personnel – but not the cost of Social Security and Medicare.

The new Medicare prescription-drug benefit alone would have added $8 trillion to the government’s audited deficit. That’s the amount the government would need today, set aside and earning interest, to pay for the tens of trillions of dollars the benefit will cost in future years.

Standard accounting concepts say that $8 trillion should be reported as an expense. Combined with other new liabilities and operating losses, the government would have reported an $11 trillion deficit in 2004 — about the size of the nation’s entire economy.

The federal government also would have had a $12.7 trillion deficit in 2000 because that was the first year that Social Security and Medicare reported broader measures of the programs’ unfunded liabilities. That created a one-time expense.

The proposal to add Social Security and Medicare to the bottom line has deeply divided the federal accounting board, composed of government officials and “public” members, who are accounting experts from outside government.

The six public members support the change. “Our job is to give people a clear picture of the financial condition of the government,” board Chairman David Mosso says. “Whether those numbers are good or bad and what you do about them is up to Congress and the administration.”

The four government members, who represent the president, Congress and the Government Accountability Office, oppose the change. The retirement programs do “not represent a legal obligation because Congress has the authority to increase or reduce social insurance benefits at any time,” wrote Clay Johnson III, then acting director of the president’s Office of Management Budget, in a letter to the board in May.

Ways of accounting
Why the big difference between the official government deficit and the audited one?

The official number is based on “cash accounting,” similar to the way you track what comes into your checking account and what goes out. That works fine for paying today’s bills, but it’s a poor way to measure a financial condition that could include credit card debt, car loans, a mortgage and an overdue electric bill.

The audited number is based on accrual accounting. This method doesn’t care about your checking account. It measures income and expenses when they occur, or accrue. If you buy a velvet Elvis painting online, the cost goes on the books immediately, regardless of when the check clears or your eBay purchase arrives.

Cash accounting lets income and expenses land in different reporting periods. Accrual accounting links them. Under cash accounting, a $25,000 cash advance on a credit card to pay for a vacation makes the books look great. You are $25,000 richer! Repaying the credit card debt? No worries today. That will show up in the future.

Under accrual accounting, the $25,000 cash from your credit card is offset immediately by the $25,000 you now owe. Your bottom line hasn’t changed. An accountant might even make you report a loss on the transaction because of the interest you’re going to pay.

“The problem with cash accounting is that there’s a tremendous opportunity for manipulation,” says University of Texas accounting professor Michael Granof. “It’s not just that you fool others. You end up fooling yourself, too.”

Federal law requires that companies and institutions that have revenue of $1 million or more use accrual accounting. Microsoft used accrual accounting when it reported $12 billion in net income last year. The American Red Cross used accrual accounting when it reported a $445 million net gain.

Congress used cash accounting when it reported the $318 billion deficit last year.

Social Security chief actuary Stephen Goss says it would be a mistake to apply accrual accounting to Social Security and Medicare. These programs are not pensions or legally binding federal obligations, although many people view them that way, he says.

Social Security and Medicare are pay-as-you go programs and should be treated like food stamps and fighter jets, not like a Treasury bond that must be repaid in the future, he adds. “A country doesn’t record a liability every time a kid is born to reflect the cost of providing that baby with a K-12 education one day,” Goss says.

Tom Allen, who will become the chairman of the federal accounting board in December, says sound accounting principles require that financial statements reflect the economic value of an obligation.

“It’s hard to argue that there’s no economic substance to the promises made for Social Security and Medicare,” he says.

Social Security and Medicare should be reflected in the bottom line because that’s the most important number in any financial report, Allen says.

“The point of the number is to tell the public: Did the government’s financial condition improve or deteriorate over the last year?” he says.

If you count Social Security and Medicare, the federal government’s financial health got $3.5 trillion worse last year.

Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Texas, a certified public accountant, says the numbers reported under accrual accounting give an accurate picture of the government’s condition. “An old photographer’s adage says, ‘If you want a prettier picture, bring me a prettier face,’ ” he says.

See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in… to kind of catapult the propaganda.
     — George W. Bush, May 24, 2005

… people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.
     — OSS Report on Adolph Hitler, page 51

All this was inspired by the principle – which is quite true in itself – that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.
     — Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1925

The Big Lie Technique
By Robert Scheer
November 16, 2005

At a time when approximately 57 percent of Americans polled believe that President Bush deceived them on the reasons for the war in Iraq, it does seem a bit redundant to deconstruct the President’s recent speeches on that subject. Yet, to fail to do so would be to passively accept the Big Lie technique–which is how we as a nation got into this horrible mess in the first place.

The basic claim of the President’s desperate and strident attack on the war’s critics this past week is that he was acting as a consensus President when intelligence information left him no choice but to invade Iraq as a preventive action to deter a terrorist attack on America. This is flatly wrong.

His rationalization for attacking Iraq, once accepted uncritically by most in Congress and the media easily intimidated by jingoism, now is known to be false. The bipartisan 9/11 Commission selected by Bush concluded unanimously that there was no link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s secular dictatorship, Al Qaeda’s sworn enemy. And a recently declassified 2002 document proves that Bush’s “evidence” for this, available to top Administration officials, was based on a single discredited witness.

Clearly on the defensive, Bush now sounds increasingly Nixonian as he basically calls the majority of the country traitors for noticing he tricked us.

“Reasonable people can disagree about the conduct of the war, but it is irresponsible for Democrats to now claim that we misled them and the American people,” the President said at an Air Force base in Alaska. “Leaders in my Administration and members of the United States Congress from both political parties looked at the same intelligence on Iraq, and reached the same conclusion: Saddam Hussein was a threat.”

This is a manipulative distortion; saying Hussein was a threat–to somebody, somewhere, in some context–is not the same as endorsing a pre-emptive occupation of his country in a fantastically expensive and blatantly risky nation-building exercise. And the idea that individual senators and members of Congress had the same access to even a fraction of the raw intelligence as the President of the United States is just a lie on its face–it is a simple matter of security clearances, which are not distributed equally.

It was enormously telling, in fact, that the only part of the Senate which did see the un-sanitized National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq–the Republican-led Senate Select Intelligence Committee–shockingly voted in the fall of 2002 against the simple authorization of force demanded by a Republican President. Panicked, the warmongers in the White House and Pentagon pressured CIA Director George Tenet to rush release to the entire Hill a very short “summary” of the careful NIE, which made Hussein seem incalculably more dangerous than the whole report indicated.

The Defense Intelligence Agency finally declassified its investigative report, DITSUM No. 044-02, within recent days. This smoking-gun document proves the Bush Administration’s key evidence for the apocryphal Osama bin Laden-Saddam Hussein alliance–said by Bush to involve training in the use of weapons of mass destruction–was built upon the testimony of a prisoner who, according to the DIA, was probably “intentionally misleading the debriefers.”

Yet, despite the government having been informed of this by the Pentagon’s intelligence agency in February 2002, Bush told the nation eight months later, on the eve of the Senate’s vote to authorize the war, that “we’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and gases.”

The false Al Qaeda-Hussein link was the linchpin to Bush’s argument that he could not delay the invasion until after the United Nations weapons inspectors completed their investigation in a matter of months. Perhaps, he feared not that those weapons would fall into the wrong hands but that they would not be found at all.

Boxed in by international sanctions, weapons inspectors, US fighter jets patrolling two huge no-fly zones and powerful rivals on all his borders, Hussein in 2003 was decidedly not a threat to America. But the Bush White House wanted a war with Iraq, and it pulled out all the stops–references to “a mushroom cloud” and calling Hussein an “ally” of Al Qaeda–to convince the rest of us it was necessary.

The White House believed the ends (occupying Iraq) justified the means (exaggerating the threat). We know now those ends have proved disastrous.

Oblivious to the grim irony, Bush proclaims his war without end in Iraq the central front in a new cold war, never acknowledging that he has handed Al Qaeda terrorists a new home base. Iran, his “Axis of Evil” member, now has its disciples in power in Iraq. Last week, top Bush Administration officials welcomed to Washington Iraq Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi, who previously was denounced for having allegedly passed US secrets to his old supporters in Tehran and was elected to a top post in Iraq by campaigning on anti-US slogans.

Under Bush’s watch, we not only suffered the September 11 terrorist attacks while he snoozed, but he has failed to capture the perpetrator of those attacks and has given Al Qaeda a powerful base in Iraq from which to terrorize. And this is the guy who dares tell his critics they are weakening our country.

to further my rant from earlier, this was apparently an either incredibly conveniently timed “terrorist” event, or it was completely made up to distract us while "they" sneak around behind our backs and propose retroactive protection for anyone who does something that is later determined to be a war crime, which is in violation of the article I section 9 proscription on ex post facto legislation, and the bill which abolishes the bill of rights all together.

if it was a real “terrorist” act that was “foiled” this morning, it was coincidentally well timed, but since we haven’t seen the “terrorists” in custody, and the authorities won’t comment on what kind of bomb they were allegedly trying to smuggle on an airplane, the whole thing sounds quite fishy, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if this were just a ruse to cause us to look the other way while "they" take a few more whacks at our already teetering rights.

wake up folks. it won’t be long until we have no rights and no way of complaining about it. if we don’t do something soon, it will be too late, and we’ll end up just like pre-world-war-two germany, with jack-booted thugs wandering the streets, beating people up who don’t have the proper identity papers… 8(

White House proposes retroactive war crimes protection
Moves to shield policy makers
By Pete Yost
August 10, 2006

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration drafted amendments to the War Crimes Act that would retroactively protect policy makers from possible criminal charges for authorizing any humiliating and degrading treatment of detainees, according to lawyers who have seen the proposal.

The move by the administration is the latest effort to deal with the treatment of those taken into custody in the war on terror.

At issue are interrogations carried out by the CIA and the degree to which harsh tactics such as water-boarding were authorized by administration officials. A separate law, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, applies to the military. When interrogators engage in waterboarding, prisoners are strapped to a plank and dunked in water until nearly drowning.

One section of the draft would outlaw torture and inhuman or cruel treatment, but it does not contain prohibitions from Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions against “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.”

Another section would apply the legislation retroactively, according to two lawyers who have seen the contents of the section and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because their sources did not authorize them to release the information.

One of the two lawyers said that the draft is in the revision stage, but that the administration seems intent on pushing forward the draft’s major points in Congress after Labor Day.

“I think what this bill can do is in effect immunize past crimes. That’s why it’s so dangerous,” said a third lawyer, Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice.

Fidell said the initiative is “not just protection of political appointees, but also CIA personnel who led interrogations.”

Interrogation practices “follow from policies that were formed at the highest levels of the administration,” said a fourth lawyer, Scott Horton, who has followed detainee issues closely. “The administration is trying to insulate policy makers under the War Crimes Act.”

A White House spokesman said Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions includes a number of vague terms that are susceptible to different interpretations.

The administration believes it is very important to bring clarity to the War Crimes Act so that those on the front lines in the war on terror “have clear rules that are defined in law,” said the White House spokesman.

Extreme interrogation practices have been a flash point for criticism of the Bush administration.

okay, i haven’t read the news or anything like that, in a few days, but from what i gather, "they" have apparently thwarted a “terrorist plot” recently, which involved multiple “terrorists” smuggling liquids, which are not explosive by themselves, onto airplanes, and then combining them into an explosive once the plane is underway. while distressing, that’s not what i’m the most alarmed by…

apparently, "their" response to all this has been anywhere from banning all liquids except baby formula from carry-on luggage – which is interesting considering the furor that was created last year when someone was forced, by clownland security goons, to drink a bottle of breastmilk that was in their carry-on luggage – to banning all carry-on luggage, which would effectively prevent just about anybody from travelling anywhere for less than a week unless they were willing to find other modes of transportation – i don’t know, i probably don’t want to know, and i will probably be forced into knowledge of the exact details of this fiasco a lot sooner than i would like. neither of these things will do a single thing from stopping a determined “terrorist” from exerting whatever control they think they can get away with, over an airplane full of passengers who are so scared of people like that, that they will be eating out of the “terrorists” hand at the mere suggestion of a highjacking, but they will make it practically impossible for us “normal” folks to travel pretty much anywhere without some untrained moron pawing through our luggage any time we hit the ground.

now keep in mind that i haven’t seen the news on TV, read a newspaper or listened to the radio in at least a week, and i have only been reading individuals’ journals and doing updates on my own web sites, when i’ve not been at various different rehearsals, for a couple of days, so my initial impressions are probably way off, but this strikes me as precisely the reason why every person associated with the bush administration, especially those stupids that voted for him, and then voted for him again, should be… i’m not even sure what they should be. killed would be nice, but not practical. jailed would also be appropriate, especially considering the criminal activities that lead up to the current mockery of justice being perpetrated in the name of democracy we’re currently suffering with, but also not practical…

i’m seething. i can’t say what i really want to say, because of aphasia, but i’m not sure whether it would have been any better before my injury… i’m not sure that there is anything rational to say about such stupidity at such high levels…

1. Name:
2. Age/Birthday:
3. Single or Taken:
4. Favorite Movie:
5. Favorite Song:
6. Favorite Band/Rapper/Artist:
7. Favorite Book/Comic Book:
8. Tattoos and/or Piercings:
9. Favorite TV Show:
10. Favorite Video Game/Board Game:
11. Do we know each other outside of Livejournal?
12. Would you give me a kidney?
13. Tell me one odd/interesting fact about you:
14. If you could change anything about your current life, would you?
15. Will you post this so I can fill it out for you?

snrk… 8)

NSA risking electrical overload
Officials say outage could leave Md.-based spy agency paralyzed
By Siobhan Gorman
August 6, 2006

WASHINGTON – The National Security Agency is running out of juice.

The demand for electricity to operate its expanding intelligence systems has left the high-tech eavesdropping agency on the verge of exceeding its power supply, the lifeblood of its sprawling 350-acre Fort Meade headquarters, according to current and former intelligence officials.

Agency officials anticipated the problem nearly a decade ago as they looked ahead at the technology needs of the agency, sources said, but it was never made a priority, and now the agency’s ability to keep its operations going is threatened. The NSA is already unable to install some costly and sophisticated new equipment, including two new supercomputers, for fear of blowing out the electrical infrastructure, they said.

At minimum, the problem could produce disruptions leading to outages and power surges at the Fort Meade headquarters, hampering the work of intelligence analysts and damaging equipment, they said. At worst, it could force a virtual shutdown of the agency, paralyzing the intelligence operation, erasing crucial intelligence data and causing irreparable damage to computer systems — all detrimental to the fight against terrorism.

Estimates on how long the agency has to stave off such an overload vary from just two months to less than two years. NSA officials “claim they will not be able to operate more than a month or two longer unless something is done,” said a former senior NSA official familiar with the problem, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Agency leaders, meanwhile, are scrambling for stopgap measures to buy time while they develop a sustainable plan. Limitations of the electrical infrastructure in the main NSA complex and the substation serving the agency, along with growing demand in the region, prevent an immediate fix, according to current and former government officials.

“If there’s a major power failure out there, any backup systems would be inadequate to power the whole facility,” said Michael Jacobs, who headed the NSA’s information assurance division until 2002.

“It’s obviously worrisome, particularly on days like today,” he said in an interview during last week’s barrage of triple-digit temperatures.

William Nolte, a former NSA executive who spent decades with the agency, said power disruptions would severely hamper the agency.

“You’ve got an awfully big computer plant and a lot of precision equipment, and I don’t think they would handle power surges and the like really well,” he said. “Even re-calibrating equipment would be really time consuming — with lost opportunities and lost up-time.”

Power surges can also wipe out analysts’ hard drives, said Matthew Aid, a former NSA analyst who is writing a multivolume history of the agency. The information on those hard drives is so valuable that many NSA employees remove them from their computers and lock them in a safe when they leave each day, he said.

A half-dozen current and former government officials knowledgeable about the energy problem discussed it with The Sun on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

NSA spokesman Don Weber declined to comment on specifics about the NSA’s power needs or what is being done to address them, saying that even private companies consider such information proprietary.

In a statement to The Sun, he said that “as new technologies become available, the demand for power increases and NSA must determine the best and most economical way to use our existing power and bring on additional capacity.”

Biggest BGE customer
The NSA is Baltimore Gas & Electric’s largest customer, using as much electricity as the city of Annapolis, according to James Bamford, an intelligence expert and author of two comprehensive books on the agency.

BGE spokeswoman Linda Foy acknowledged a power company project to deal with the rising energy demand at the NSA, but she referred questions about it to the NSA.

The agency got a taste of the potential for trouble Jan. 24, 2000, when an information overload, rather than a power shortage, caused the NSA’s first-ever network crash. It took the agency 3 1/2 days to resume operations, but with a power outage it could take considerably longer to get the NSA humming again.

The 2000 shutdown rendered the agency’s headquarters “brain-dead,” as then-NSA Director Gen. Michael V. Hayden told CBS’s 60 Minutes in 2002.

“I don’t want to trivialize this. This was really bad,” Hayden said. “We were dark. Our ability to process information was gone.”

As an immediate fallback measure, the NSA sent its incoming data to its counterpart in Great Britain, which stepped up efforts to process the NSA’s information along with its own, said Bamford.

The agency came under intense criticism from members of Congress after the crash, and the incident rapidly accelerated efforts to modernize the agency.

One former NSA official familiar with the electricity problem noted a sense of deja vu six years later.

“To think that this was not a priority probably tells you more about the extent to which NSA has actually transformed,” the former official said. “In the end, if you don’t have power, you can’t do [anything].”

Already some equipment is not being sufficiently cooled, and agency leaders have forgone plugging in some new machinery, current and former government officials said. The power shortage will also delay the installation of two new, multimillion-dollar supercomputers, they said.

To begin to alleviate pressure on the electrical grid, the NSA is considering buying additional generators and shutting down so-called “legacy” computer systems that are decades old and not considered crucial to the agency’s operations, said three current and former government officials familiar with the situation.

“It’s a temporary fix,” one former senior NSA official said.

On Wednesday, the same day that The Sun inquired about the power issue with the NSA’s public affairs office, the agency sent word to Capitol Hill about its energy conservation efforts.

“They have told us they have been shutting down all non-essential uses of power to help out BG&E,” said one congressional aide, adding that the NSA is also raising the temperature in its buildings two degrees to conserve.

The information was presented in the context that the NSA was making these changes “to be a good corporate citizen,” the aide said.

Contractors on at least one high-priority, power-intensive NSA project that is located off the headquarters campus, have upgraded their electrical infrastructure to ensure power for their project, according to two former agency officials. That lone upgrade, a fraction of the agency’s total demand, took four months.

Longer-term solutions being considered would move some operations to off-campus facilities with more electrical capacity, current and former officials said.

Adding more capacity to the substation feeding NSA is an obvious answer, but constraints on that particular facility make an expansion difficult, they said. BGE’s Foy declined to discuss specifics about the substation. She said it takes 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 years to design, procure equipment, obtain permits, and build a new one.

Post-9/11 needs
Since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the NSA has ramped up its operations, and the electricity needed to sustain major projects — such as the warrantless surveillance program and technology modernization programs — has increased sharply.

The computer systems supporting these programs demand far more wattage per square foot than their predecessors and still more energy to cool them.

Area development like the Arundel Mills Mall has contributed to the problem by putting additional strain on the local electrical grid, according to two sources familiar with the issue. Joe Bunch, BGE’s director of strategic customer engineering, said, however, that the mall’s demand “was fairly easily accommodated.”

Demand in the Baltimore-Washington region has been growing, and the regional operator for Maryland and 12 other states has been studying the installation of up to $10 billion in new power lines to deliver more and cheaper electricity to this region.

“We’ve seen a lot of growth in Anne Arundel County as a whole but particularly in the north and northwest area of the county,” said Bunch, who agreed to talk about trends in the area but not the NSA’s specific demand. Much of that growth is because of the surge of high-tech jobs in the area from the NSA and government contractors, he said.

He said BGE is working to meet the demand by building new substations in the area. One was built about a year ago, and another is scheduled to be built in two to three years, he said.

“We have adequate capacity” now, he said, but upgrades like the new substation are being planned to stave off future strains on the electrical grid.

The NSA’s problem was identified in the late 1990s and could have been fixed by now — and for much less money — had keeping the lights on been a priority, current and former officials said.

“It fits into a long, long pattern of crisis-of-the-day management as opposed to investing in the future,” said one former government official familiar with the NSA’s electricity shortfall.

Electrical infrastructure maintenance and upgrades have been a casualty of the fight against terrorism, according to unclassified budget documents.

Upgrades delayed
Even as the NSA’s budget has ballooned after 9/11, the agency has put off basic utility upgrades such as a $4 million computer system to manage the allocation of power at the NSA — a sliver of the NSA’s estimated $8 billion budget.

“Due to budget constraint [sic] and other development [sic] in the fight against terrorism,” a 2007 budget document reads, the system was never fully implemented.

Without this system, the document stated, the NSA “may experience difficulties in meeting its power requirement to support critical war fighting missions.”

Neglect of infrastructure at the NSA has been a chronic problem, often fraught with bureaucratic politics, former agency officials said.

Fort Meade is not the only NSA outpost facing limitations on its ability to upgrade electrical infrastructure. Listening posts around the world, such as Menwith Hill in Britain and Bad Aibling in Germany, are ailing.

The NSA’s largest listening station, Menwith Hill, has an “aging infrastructure that cannot support the people or equipment” there, according to a budget document for 2007.

It is faced with “concrete foundations that are crumbling,” an “electrical infrastructure that is not in compliance with current codes,” and a weakened infrastructure that poses a safety hazard, the document said.

Identical language appeared in the previous year’s budget documents.

With agency operations facing an imminent threat, facilities issues are front and center. “It’s a big deal,” said one former senior NSA official. “They’re all talking about it, anyway. That’s progress.”

Schwinn InStep Model SC760 Bicycle Trailer

$100 (plus shipping if necessary) for livejournal friends, but you’ve got to hurry because i’m putting it on craig’s list tomorrow for $150

Stroller Specs:

• Model #SC760
• MSRP: $249.99
• Max Weight Limit: 100 lbs.
• Folded Dimensions: 35″x 33.6″ x 10″
• Assembled Dimensions: 56″ x 32″ x 34″

Features:

• Aluminum frame – Lightweight and strong
• Sling seat w/ 5-point safety harness – Extra security and comfort for passengers
• Compact fold – Fits in the trunks and storage areas of most vehicles
• Wide-body cabin design – Extra room for passengers
• 2-in-1 weather canopy – Helps protect kids from sun and rain
• Internal water bottle holders and pouches – Convenient for beverages and belongings
• Rear storage area – Extra room for parents to carry items
• 20″ Quick-release aluminum rim wheels – For a smooth light ride
• Sealed bearing hubs – Long-lasting and maintenance-free
• Recessed mesh helmet pockets
• Outer wheel guards
• Age limit- 12 months or older

This does not come with the push bar, but that shouldn’t be too difficult to find. Other than that, this is essentially a new product.

found here. moe sez it’s a feather from a red-shafted northern flicker.

i’ve got a lot of friends who, for one reason or another, continue to use AOL even though it is not the best service provider out there, and i wouldn’t dream of trying to change their minds about this… but at the same time, i’m glad i’m not an A-Oh-Hell user, and this is yet another reason why:

AOL Proudly Releases Massive Amounts of Private Data
AOL: “This was a screw up”

and just because A-Oh-Hell has admitted their mistake and taken the information down, don’t think you’re off the hook, because there are mirrors, and more people are downloading it as you read this…

Welfare Changes A Burden To States
Work Rules Also Threaten Study, Health Programs
By Amy Goldstein
August 7, 2006

Having grown up on welfare, Rochelle Riordan had vowed never to ask for a government handout. That was before her hard-drinking husband kicked her and their young daughter out of their house near Lewiston, Maine, leaving her with a $300 bank account, a bad job market and a 15-year-old car held together in spots with duct tape.

Maine’s welfare agency, she heard, was offering help for poor parents to go to college full time. With the state paying for day care and $513 a month in living expenses, Riordan, 37, has been on the dean’s list every semester at the University of Southern Maine, expecting to graduate and start a social work career next spring. But this summer, her plans — and Maine’s Parents as Scholars program — suddenly are on shaky ground; under new federal rules, studying for a bachelor’s degree no longer counts by itself as an acceptable way for people on welfare to spend their time.

A decade after the government set out to transform the nation’s welfare system, the limits on college are part of a controversial second phase of welfare reform that is beginning to ripple across the country. The new rules, written by Congress and the Bush administration, require states to focus intensely on making more poor people work, while discouraging other activities that might help untangle their lives.

By Oct. 1, state and local welfare offices must figure out how to steer hundreds of thousands of low-income adults into jobs or longer work hours. They also must adjust to limits on the length of time people on welfare can devote to trying to shed drug addictions, recover from mental illnesses or get an education.

This second generation of change reverses a central idea behind the 1996 law that ended six decades of welfare as an unlimited federal entitlement to cash assistance. The law decentralized welfare, handing states a lump sum of money and the freedom to design their own programs of temporary help for poor families. Ten years later, the government is tightening the federal reins.

Many state officials and advocates are furious. “You had fixed block grants in exchange for state flexibility,” said Elaine M. Ryan, deputy executive director of the American Public Human Services Association, which represents welfare directors around the country. “Now you have fixed block grants in exchange for federal micromanagement. . . . That was not the deal.”

Based on interviews with welfare officials in 10 states, including in the Washington area, the new requirements conflict in significant ways with the eclectic approaches to welfare that states have chosen.

States are struggling to decide how to comply. Some are exploring the idea of walling off certain groups of welfare clients into separate, state-funded programs, avoiding large federal penalties by insulating people from the new rules. Some states are scrambling to change how their welfare clients spend their time. Others are frankly unsure what they will do.

“States are kind of in a low-grade panic,” said Ron Haskins, a Brookings Institution senior fellow who helped to write the 1996 law and later worked on welfare in the Bush White House.

In a climate of such flux, most of the nearly 2 million families on welfare nationwide are not yet feeling any change. Many will soon.

Riordan heard about the threat to her last year of college a few weeks ago. “I feel nauseous,” she said. “This is my ticket . . . out of poverty.”

In August 1996, when Congress passed the Welfare Reform Act, neither supporters nor critics predicted its dramatic effects: The number of families on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, as welfare became known, has plummeted by 60 percent.

Despite that unexpected success, when the law came up for renewal in 2002, lawmakers deadlocked in a bitter ideological fight over how it should be changed. Democrats argued that the government should give states more money to subsidize child care while parents were at work. Republicans argued that the work requirements were not strict enough.

The law, the GOP pointed out, had envisioned that half the adults on welfare would get jobs. In reality, fewer than one-third were working — and in some places, many fewer than that — because the law had given states an inducement: The more people a state moved off its welfare rolls, the smaller the share of those who remained had to work.

Last December, buried in a sprawling bill meant mainly to cut federal spending, Republicans finally got the welfare changes they wanted. They compel states to find jobs for fully half their adult clients, and they increase the required work hours from 20 hours per week to 30. Then, in late June, the Department of Health and Human Services issued strict new rules defining what counts as work — and who must be counted.

Wade F. Horn, HHS’s assistant secretary for children and families, said the closer federal regulation is necessary because states have been lax. “Some defined as work bed rest, going to a smoking-cessation program, getting a massage, doing an errand with a friend,” Horn said. He acknowledged that federal officials do not know how often people have done those things, because states have not had to report such information.

The new rules say states may count toward their work-participation rates no more than six weeks per year that a client spends looking for a job, or receiving help such as drug or mental health treatment. And when reporting who is working, states must take into account extra people, including grandparents who are not on welfare but are raising children who get benefits.

“We expected the [rules] to be bad,” said Robin Arnold-Williams, secretary of the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services. “They are worse than that.” In that state, one-fourth of the 25,000 adults on welfare are not working while they try to conquer barriers such as addictions or too little education — a policy in direct conflict with the new rules.

Even states that have emphasized work are facing new hurdles. According to recent federal figures, 50 percent of the adults on welfare in Virginia are employed. But under the expanded definition of who states must take into account in their work-participation rates, the commonwealth needs about 3,000 more people a month to get jobs, costing Virginia about $28 million more a year to help with child care and job searches, said Anthony Conyers Jr., commissioner of the Virginia Department of Social Services.

In the District, about 2,200 more people will need to go to work, said Kate Jesberg, head of the D.C. Department of Human Resources. Most, she said, will need more than the six weeks allotted to find a job, in no small part because two-thirds of the city’s adults on welfare read at the fifth-grade level or less. The rules turn her staff into “extraordinary bean counters,” Jesberg said. “Who cares if it takes six weeks or eight weeks? The point is, it is time well spent if you keep them in a job.”

Maryland began three years ago requiring every adult on welfare to do something productive for 40 hours a week. Most of what they have done, such as getting high school equivalency degrees or counseling for domestic violence, does not meet the federal definition of work. “We are scrounging,” said Marshall Cupe, a case manager in Prince George’s County’s Family Investment Division, who is combing through his 400 cases to try to shift people into subsidized jobs, volunteer work or other activities the government will recognize.

The new rules come with new paperwork. In Utah, temporary-assistance administrator Helen Thatcher said the program has emphasized vocational training to equip people to enter fields, such as health care, with plentiful jobs and opportunities for advancement. The training is still permitted, but her staff now will have to keep track every day of how much time nearly 1,400 clients spend on classes and homework.

A few states have quickly passed laws to adjust. New Hampshire just altered its program to try to navigate people into jobs more swiftly and penalize them more promptly if they miss appointments. Terry R. Smith, director of the Division of Family Assistance, said the state also has decided to move out of welfare 136 two-parent families, a small group for whom the rules say 90 percent must work. They will go into a separate state program that Smith said will cost New Hampshire $880,000 a year — less than a $4 million federal penalty it risks incurring in a year or two if not enough are employed.

Many states cannot adjust as quickly, because some welfare changes will require approval of legislatures that will not convene until months after the federal rules take effect in October. In Maine, welfare administrators are debating whether to ask lawmakers to preserve Parents as Scholars as a separate state program. Since 1996, it has enabled about 1,000 low-income adults a year to go to college. Virtually no one who has graduated, state figures show, has returned to welfare.

If its participants had to work 20 hours a week in addition to college, as the new rules require, “a lot of people wouldn’t even try,” said one of Riordan’s friends, Emily Wood. Wood had a son at 17, married at 18, divorced at 22, and was working at a laundromat for $6.50 an hour before starting college with help from Parents as Scholars. At 28, she was named outstanding senior when she graduated from the University of Southern Maine in May. She is starting a master’s degree and trying to decide between two job offers at social service agencies. They pay $15 an hour.

Half of U.S. still believes Iraq had WMD
By CHARLES J. HANLEY
Aug 6, 2006

Do you believe in Iraqi “WMD”? Did Saddam Hussein’s government have weapons of mass destruction in 2003?

Half of America apparently still thinks so, a new poll finds, and experts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying around a partisan flag, and a growing need for people, in their own minds, to justify the war in Iraq.

People tend to become “independent of reality” in these circumstances, says opinion analyst Steven Kull.

The reality in this case is that after a 16-month, $900-million-plus investigation, the U.S. weapons hunters known as the Iraq Survey Group declared that Iraq had dismantled its chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs in 1991 under U.N. oversight. That finding in 2004 reaffirmed the work of U.N. inspectors who in 2002-03 found no trace of banned arsenals in Iraq.

Despite this, a Harris Poll released July 21 found that a full 50 percent of U.S. respondents — up from 36 percent last year — said they believe Iraq did have the forbidden arms when U.S. troops invaded in March 2003, an attack whose stated purpose was elimination of supposed WMD. Other polls also have found an enduring American faith in the WMD story.

“I’m flabbergasted,” said Michael Massing, a media critic whose writings dissected the largely unquestioning U.S. news reporting on the Bush administration’s shaky WMD claims in 2002-03.

“This finding just has to cause despair among those of us who hope for an informed public able to draw reasonable conclusions based on evidence,” Massing said.

Timing may explain some of the poll result. Two weeks before the survey, two Republican lawmakers, Pennsylvania’s Sen. Rick Santorum and Michigan’s Rep. Peter Hoekstra, released an intelligence report in Washington saying 500 chemical munitions had been collected in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.

“I think the Harris Poll was measuring people’s surprise at hearing this after being told for so long there were no WMD in the country,” said Hoekstra spokesman Jamal Ware.

But the Pentagon and outside experts stressed that these abandoned shells, many found in ones and twos, were 15 years old or more, their chemical contents were degraded, and they were unusable as artillery ordnance. Since the 1990s, such “orphan” munitions, from among 160,000 made by Iraq and destroyed, have turned up on old battlefields and elsewhere in Iraq, ex-inspectors say. In other words, this was no surprise.

“These are not stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction,” said Scott Ritter, the ex-Marine who was a U.N. inspector in the 1990s. “They weren’t deliberately withheld from inspectors by the Iraqis.”

Conservative commentator Deroy Murdock, who trumpeted Hoekstra’s announcement in his syndicated column, complained in an interview that the press “didn’t give the story the play it deserved.” But in some quarters it was headlined.

“Our top story tonight, the nation abuzz today …” was how Fox News led its report on the old, stray shells. Talk-radio hosts and their callers seized on it. Feedback to blogs grew intense. “Americans are waking up from a distorted reality,” read one posting.

Other claims about supposed WMD had preceded this, especially speculation since 2003 that Iraq had secretly shipped WMD abroad. A former Iraqi general’s book — at best uncorroborated hearsay — claimed “56 flights” by jetliners had borne such material to Syria.

But Kull, Massing and others see an influence on opinion that’s more sustained than the odd headline.

“I think the Santorum-Hoekstra thing is the latest ‘factoid,’ but the basic dynamic is the insistent repetition by the Bush administration of the original argument,” said John Prados, author of the 2004 book “Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War.”

Administration statements still describe Saddam’s Iraq as a threat. Despite the official findings, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has allowed only that “perhaps” WMD weren’t in Iraq. And Bush himself, since 2003, has repeatedly insisted on one plainly false point: that Saddam rebuffed the U.N. inspectors in 2002, that “he wouldn’t let them in,” as he said in 2003, and “he chose to deny inspectors,” as he said this March.

The facts are that Iraq — after a four-year hiatus in cooperating with inspections — acceded to the U.N. Security Council’s demand and allowed scores of experts to conduct more than 700 inspections of potential weapons sites from Nov. 27, 2002, to March 16, 2003. The inspectors said they could wrap up their work within months. Instead, the U.S. invasion aborted that work.

As recently as May 27, Bush told West Point graduates, “When the United Nations Security Council gave him one final chance to disclose and disarm, or face serious consequences, he refused to take that final opportunity.”

“Which isn’t true,” observed Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a scholar of presidential rhetoric at the University of Pennsylvania. But “it doesn’t surprise me when presidents reconstruct reality to make their policies defensible.” This president may even have convinced himself it’s true, she said.

Americans have heard it. A poll by Kull’s WorldPublicOpinion.org found that seven in 10 Americans perceive the administration as still saying Iraq had a WMD program. Combine that rhetoric with simplistic headlines about WMD “finds,” and people “assume the issue is still in play,” Kull said.

“For some it almost becomes independent of reality and becomes very partisan.” The WMD believers are heavily Republican, polls show.

Beyond partisanship, however, people may also feel a need to believe in WMD, the analysts say.

“As perception grows of worsening conditions in Iraq, it may be that Americans are just hoping for more of a solid basis for being in Iraq to begin with,” said the Harris Poll’s David Krane.

Charles Duelfer, the lead U.S. inspector who announced the negative WMD findings two years ago, has watched uncertainly as TV sound bites, bloggers and politicians try to chip away at “the best factual account,” his group’s densely detailed, 1,000-page final report.

“It is easy to see what is accepted as truth rapidly morph from one representation to another,” he said in an e-mail. “It would be a shame if one effect of the power of the Internet was to undermine any commonly agreed set of facts.”

The creative “morphing” goes on.

As Israeli troops and Hezbollah guerrillas battled in Lebanon on July 21, a Fox News segment suggested, with no evidence, yet another destination for the supposed doomsday arms.

“ARE SADDAM HUSSEIN’S WMDS NOW IN HEZBOLLAH’S HANDS?” asked the headline, lingering for long minutes on TV screens in a million American homes.

Reuters Doctoring Photos from Beirut?
Reuters admits altering Beirut photo

The Division of Vocational Rehabilitation (DVR) has recently changed the process we use in choosing the priority of service group for each of our customers. DVR changed the process to more fairly serve people with all types of disabilities. Because the process has changed, DVR will re-evaluate all customers not in Priority Group 1.

As you may know, because of limited funding, DVR must prioritize services using the following three Priority Groups:

Priority Group 1: Customers with Most Significant Disabilities
Priority Group 2: Customers with Significant Disabilities
Priority Group 3: Customers with Disabilities

When we are able to serve customers from our waiting list, we start with customers from Priority Group 1 and we serve customers by earliest date of application. Federal regulations require that DVR serve customers in this order.

In the re-evaluation, you will retain your date of application, and be served in the order described above.

On the basis of the re-evaluation of your Priority Group placement, you are now placed in group 2.

wow. i told them that i should probably not be in group 3 more than a year ago. not that it’s going to speed up the process of my actually getting any kind of assistance.

what surprises me the most was that i scored only 72%…

You Are 72% Paranoid Schizophrenic

You definitely have a chance of being a paranoid schizophrenic. Crazy or not, you certainly don’t have a good grip on reality!

Art Car August – Ganesha the car will be appearing there, hopefully with me coming along for the ride, but only if i don’t have to be at marymoor park in redmond for the captain underpants video shoot.

White House Proposal Would Expand Authority of Military Courts
By R. Jeffrey Smith
August 2, 2006

A draft Bush administration plan for special military courts seeks to expand the reach and authority of such “commissions” to include trials, for the first time, of people who are not members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban and are not directly involved in acts of international terrorism, according to officials familiar with the proposal.

The plan, which would replace a military trial system ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in June, would also allow the secretary of defense to add crimes at will to those under the military court’s jurisdiction. The two provisions would be likely to put more individuals than previously expected before military juries, officials and independent experts said.

The draft proposed legislation, set to be discussed at two Senate hearings today, is controversial inside and outside the administration because defendants would be denied many protections guaranteed by the civilian and traditional military criminal justice systems.

Under the proposed procedures, defendants would lack rights to confront accusers, exclude hearsay accusations, or bar evidence obtained through rough or coercive interrogations. They would not be guaranteed a public or speedy trial and would lack the right to choose their military counsel, who in turn would not be guaranteed equal access to evidence held by prosecutors.

Detainees would also not be guaranteed the right to be present at their own trials, if their absence is deemed necessary to protect national security or individuals.

An early draft of the new measure prepared by civilian political appointees and leaked to the media last week has been modified in response to criticism from uniformed military lawyers. But the provisions allowing a future expansion of the courts to cover new crimes and more prisoners were retained, according to government officials familiar with the deliberations.

The military lawyers received the draft after the rest of the government had agreed on it. They have argued in recent days for retaining some routine protections for defendants that the political appointees sought to jettison, an administration official said.

They objected in particular to the provision allowing defendants to be tried in absentia, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to describe the deliberations. Another source in contact with top military lawyers said, “Their initial impression is that the draft was unacceptable and sloppy.” The source added that “it did not have enough due-process rights” and could further tarnish America’s image.

The military lawyers nonetheless supported extending the jurisdiction of the commissions to cover those accused of joining or associating with terrorist groups engaged in anti-U.S. hostilities, and of committing or aiding hostile acts by such groups, whether or not they are part of al-Qaeda, two U.S. officials said.

That language gives the commissions broader reach than anticipated in a November 2001 executive order from President Bush that focused only on members of al-Qaeda, those who commit international terrorist acts and those who harbor such individuals.

Some independent experts say the new procedures diverge inappropriately from existing criminal procedures and provide no more protections than the ones struck down by the Supreme Court as inadequate. John D. Hutson, the Navy’s top uniformed lawyer from 1997 to 2000, said the rules would evidently allow the government to tell a prisoner: “We know you’re guilty. We can’t tell you why, but there’s a guy, we can’t tell you who, who told us something. We can’t tell you what, but you’re guilty.”

Bruce Fein, an associate deputy attorney general during the Reagan administration, said after reviewing the leaked draft that “the theme of the government seems to be ‘They are guilty anyway, and therefore due process can be slighted.’ ” With these procedures, Fein said, “there is a real danger of getting a wrong verdict” that would let a lower-echelon detainee “rot for 30 years” at Guantanamo Bay because of evidence contrived by personal enemies.

But Kris Kobach, a senior Justice Department lawyer in Bush’s first term who now teaches at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, said he believes that the draft strikes an appropriate balance between “a fundamentally fair trial” and “the ability to protect the effectiveness of U.S. military and intelligence assets.”

Administration officials have said that the exceptional trial procedures are warranted because the fight against terrorism requires heavy reliance on classified information or on evidence obtained from a defendant’s collaborators, which cannot be shared with the accused. The draft legislation cites the goal of ensuring fair treatment without unduly diverting military personnel from wartime assignments to present evidence in trials.

The provisions are closely modeled on earlier plans for military commissions, which the Supreme Court ruled illegal two months ago in a case brought by Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni imprisoned in the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. “It is not evident why the danger posed by international terrorism, considerable though it is, should require, in the case of Hamdan, any variance from the courts-martial rules,” the court’s majority decision held.

No one at Guantanamo has been tried to date, though some prisoners have been there since early 2002.

John Yoo, a former Justice Department lawyer who helped draft the earlier plan, said Bush administration officials essentially “took DOD regulations” for the trials “and turned them into a statute for Congress to pass.” He said the drafters were obviously “trying to return the law to where it was before Hamdan ” by writing language into the draft that challenges key aspects of the court’s decision.

“Basically, this is trying to overrule the Hamdan case,” said Neal K. Katyal, a Georgetown University law professor who was Hamdan’s lead attorney.

The plan calls for commissions of five military officers appointed by the defense secretary to try defendants for any of 25 listed crimes. It gives the secretary the unilateral right to “specify other violations of the laws of war that may be tried by military commission.” The secretary would be empowered to prescribe detailed procedures for carrying out the trials, including “modes of proof” and the use of hearsay evidence.

Unlike the international war crimes tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, the commissions could rely on hearsay as the basis for a conviction. Unlike routine military courts-martial, in which prosecutors must overcome several hurdles to use such evidence, the draft legislation would put the burden on the defense team to block its use.

The admission of hearsay is a serious problem, said Tom Malinowski, director of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch, because defendants might not know if it was gained through torture and would have difficulty challenging it on that basis. Nothing in the draft law prohibits using evidence obtained through cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment that falls short of torture, Malinowski said.

The U.S. official countered that a military judge “would look hard” at the origins of such evidence and that defendants would have to count on “the trustworthiness of the system.”

To secure a death penalty under the draft legislation, at least five jurors must agree, two fewer than under the administration’s earlier plan. Courts-martial and federal civilian trials require that 12 jurors agree.

9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes

i got notification that my sousaphone mouthpiece has been shipped, but when i actually went to the web site it said that it hasn’t actually been shipped yet… although it did say that they haven’t got notification of it’s shipping yet, and i know how lackidaisical the postal service is about updating their web sites – twice a day, if we’re lucky – so i’m not panicked yet… but the seller said that they were “going on tour” on august 4th, so it might not actually be shipped until the 20th, which would be a drag, but acceptable if she actually ships it on the 20th.

i made a whole bunch of changes to the Hybrid Elephant web site, the most noticable of which is the change in the navigation bar on the left side. now some of the links actually load new navigation bars instead of going directly to the “index” link in the content frame, like they used to. this is to make navigation easier for people on slow network connections, because now it loads a sub-menu where you can click directly on the page you want, instead of having to go through the index pages. also, according to my web stats, in the past two months i have given away 20 copies of my mac font, and 44 copies of my windoesn’t font, and despite the fact that i have the “READ-ME” in the zip and binhex archives, where i clearly ask them to send me money, i’ve recieved no compensation of any kind for it. so i’ve decided that, now that i actually have a “shopping cart” (which i’ve had for at least a year now 8/ ), i can start selling my font, rather than just trusting people to send money for a font that they probably never open the “READ-ME” for anyway.

my reward for all of this web-based activity is that i got a new order within 5 minutes of my posting the changes, and because of the last round of changes i made, i can fill the order and ship it out right away: i’ve got it sitting next to me on the desk, and i’m going to the post office next.

i just won this:

for $23.50. ebay is a good thing.

thanks to … i like it, even if your response was "Umm, riiiiight"

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/

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!

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:

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!

so i wake up this morning, and i come in here to check my email, and among the piles of spam is a “WWW Form Submission” which usually means that either one of two submit buttons have been clicked upon, or (more rarely, but still happens fairly frequently) somebody has attempted to use my feedback form to send spam (it doesn’t work, the form only sends mail to me, not to other people at all, and i report any abuses, so don’t bother!)

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????

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 officials ban feeding homeless people

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.

House Passes Broad Mandatory Filtering Bill

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.

The Humanitarian Disaster Unfolding In Palestine
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.

Peace Prize Winner ‘could kill’ Bush
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.”

Hopi Prophecy

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.

50th Anniversary of Our National Motto, "In God We Trust," 2006
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?

Denmark ‘happiest place on earth’

Happiness Map

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.”

yay!

i bought a sousaphone!

Israel ‘ignored UN bomb warnings’
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.

see also here…

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. XIII: Death 100% XI: Justice 75% I – Magician 75% VIII – Strength 69% XV: The Devil 69% XVI: The Tower 69% 0 – The Fool 63% IV – The Emperor 56% II – The High Priestess 56% VI: The Lovers 50% X – Wheel of Fortune 44% III – The Empress 44% XIX: The Sun 19% Which Major Arcana Tarot Card Are You? created with QuizFarm.com

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!

Vegas Makes It Crime To Feed Homeless People
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.

‘Zombies’ booked for carrying fake WMDs
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

FEMA muzzling La. trailer-park residents

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.

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.

You Won’t Read It Here First: India Curtails Access to Blogs
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.

http://FromIsraelToLebanon.com/

Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy

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.

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.

Scholars for 9/11 Truth Under Attack
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.

U.S. vetoes U.N. resolution on Mideast
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.

The Occupation of Iraqi Hearts and Minds
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.

It’s WWIII, and U.S. is out of ideas

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.

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…

Justice Department Lawyer To Congress: ‘The President Is Always Right’

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.

Is The Doctrine Behind the Bush Presidency Consistent with a Democratic State?
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.

(Click here to post your own answers for this meme.)

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