Be INFORMED

Monday, March 05, 2007

United States Heading to Dictatorship

    The following article has been posted on the Net many times since it first appeared in 2000. This appears to be an updated version as the author states at the top.  I have no idea who that author is.

  I post this as a reminder to what is slowly and surely happening to us in the United States especially under dictator Bush and his crime family members.

   The photo's which the article refers to can be found by clicking the link below.

                    * * * *

Original Article

 

Note: This article first appeared as a post written by myself at Free Republic in late 2000. I was surprised to learn that it was copied re-posted at dozens of sites around the world. So, it seems only fitting that the article (with some updating) should re-appear here on my own web site.

FAKE TERROR -
THE ROAD TO WAR AND DICTATORSHIP

It's the oldest trick in the book, dating back to Roman times; creating the enemies you need.

In 70 BC, an ambitious minor politician and extremely wealthy man, Marcus Licinius Crassus, wanted to rule Rome. Just to give you an idea of what sort of man Crassus really was, he is credited with invention of the fire brigade. But in Crassus' version, his fire-fighting slaves would race to the scene of a burning building whereupon Crassus would offer to buy it on the spot for a tiny fraction of it's worth. If the owner sold, Crassus' slaves would put out the fire. If the owner refused to sell, Crassus allowed the building to burn to the ground. By means of this device, Crassus eventually came to be the largest single private land holder in Rome, and used some of his wealth to help back Julius Caesar against Cicero.
In 70 BC Rome was still a Republic, which placed very strict limits on what Rulers could do, and more importantly NOT do. But Crassus had no intentions of enduring such limits to his personal power, and contrived a plan.

Crassus seized upon the slave revolt led by Spartacus in order to strike terror into the hearts of Rome, whose garrison Spartacus had already defeated in battle. But Spartacus had no intention of marching on Rome itself, a move he knew to be suicidal. Spartacus and his band wanted nothing to do with the Roman empire and had planned from the start merely to loot enough money from their former owners in the Italian countryside to hire a mercenary fleet in which to sail to freedom.

Sailing away was the last thing Crassus wanted Spartacus to do. He needed a convenient enemy with which to terrorize Rome itself for his personal political gain. So Crassus bribed the mercenary fleet to sail without Spartacus, then positioned two Roman legions in such a way that Spartacus had no choice but to march on Rome.

Terrified of the impending arrival of the much-feared army of gladiators, Rome declared Crassus Praetor. Crassus then crushed Spartacus' army and even though Pompey took the credit, Crassus was elected Consul of Rome the following year.

With this maneuver, the Romans surrendered their Republican form of government. Soon would follow the first Triumvirate, consisting of Crassus, Pompeii, and Julius Caesar, followed by the reign of the god-like Emperors of Rome.

The Romans were hoaxed into surrendering their Republic, and accepting the rule of Emperors.

Julius Caesar's political opponent, Cicero, for all his literary accomplishments, played the same games in his campaign against Julius Caesar, claiming that Rome was falling victim to an internal "vast right wing" conspiracy in which any expressed desire for legislative limits on government was treated as suspicious behavior. Cicero, in order to demonstrate to the Romans just how unsafe Rome has become hired thugs to cause as much disturbance as possible, and campaigned on a promise to end the internal strife if elected and granted extraordinary powers.

What Cicero only dreamed of, Adolph Hitler succeeded in doing. Elected Chancellor of Germany, Hitler, like Crassus, had no intention of living with the strict limits to his power imposed by German law. Unlike Cicero, Hitler's thugs were easy to recognize; they all wore the same brown shirts. But their actions were no different than those of their Roman predecessors. They staged beatings, set fires, caused as much trouble as they could, while Hitler made speeches promising that he could end the crime wave of subversives and terrorism if he was granted extraordinary powers.

Then the Reichstag burned down; a staged terrorist attack.

The Germans were hoaxed into surrendering their Republic, and accepting the total rule of Der Fuehrer. Hitler had German troops dressed in Polish uniforms attack the radio station at Gliewitz, then lied to the Germans, telling them Poland had invaded, and marched Germany off into World War Two

The state-sponsored schools will never tell you this, but governments routinely rely on hoaxes to sell their agendas to an otherwise reluctant public. The Romans accepted the Emperors and the Germans accepted Hitler not because they wanted to, but because the carefully crafted illusions of threat appeared to leave no other choice.

Our government too uses hoaxes to create the illusion that We The People have no choice but the direction the government wishes us to go in.

In 1898, Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal were arguing for American intervention in Cuba. Hearst is reported to have dispatched a photographer to Cuba to photograph the coming war with Spain. When the photographer asked just what war that might be, Hearst is reported to have replied, "You take the photographs, and I will provide the war". Hearst was true to his word, as his newspaper published stories of great atrocities being committed against the Cuban people, most of which turned out to be complete fabrications.

On the night of February 15, 1898, the USS Maine, lying in Havana harbor in a show of US resolve to protect her interests, exploded violently. Captain Sigsbee, the commander of the Maine, urged that no assumptions of enemy attack be made until there was a full investigation of the cause of the explosion. For this, Captain Sigsbee was excoriated in the press for "refusing to see the obvious". The Atlantic Monthly declared flat out that to suppose the explosion to be anything other than a deliberate act by Spain was "completely at defiance of the laws of probability".

Under the slogan "Remember the Maine", Americans went to war with Spain, eventually winning the Philippines (and annexing Hawaii along the way).

In 1975, an investigation led by Admiral Hyman Rickover examined the data recovered from a 1911 examination of the wreck and concluded that there had been no evidence of an external explosion. The most likely cause of the sinking was a coal dust explosion in a coal bunker imprudently located next to the ship's magazines. Captain Sigsbee's caution had been well founded.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt needed a war. He needed the fever of a major war to mask the symptoms of a still deathly ill economy struggling back from the Great Depression (and mutating towards Socialism at the same time). Roosevelt wanted a war with Germany to stop Hitler, but despite several provocations in the Atlantic, the American people, still struggling with that troublesome economy, were opposed to any wars. Roosevelt violated neutrality with lend lease, and even ordered the sinking of several German ships in the Atlantic, but Hitler refused to be provoked.

Roosevelt needed an enemy, and if America would not willingly attack that enemy, then one would have to be maneuvered into attacking America, much as Marcus Licinius Crassus has maneuvered Spartacus into attacking Rome.

The way open to war was created when Japan signed the tripartite agreement with Italy and Germany, with all parties pledging mutual defense to each other. Whereas Hitler would never declare war on the United States no matter the provocation, the means to force Japan to do so were readily at hand.

The first step was to place oil and steel embargoes on Japan, using Japan's wars on the Asian mainland as a reason. This forced Japan to consider seizing the oil and mineral rich regions in Indonesia. With the European powers militarily exhausted by the war in Europe, the United States was the only power in the Pacific able to stop Japan from invading the Dutch East Indies, and by moving the Pacific fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Roosevelt made a pre-emptive strike on that fleet the mandatory first step in any Japanese plan to extend it's empire into the "southern resource area".

Roosevelt boxed in Japan just as completely as Crassus had boxed in Spartacus. Japan needed oil. They had to invade Indonesia to get it, and to do that they first had to remove the threat of the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. There never really was any other course open to them.

To enrage the American people as much as possible, Roosevelt needed the first overt attack by Japan to be as bloody as possible, appearing as a sneak attack much as the Japanese had done to the Russians. From that moment up until the attack on Pearl Harbor itself, Roosevelt and his associates made sure that the commanders in Hawaii, General Short and Admiral Kimmel, were kept in the dark as much as possible about the location of the Japanese fleet and it's intentions, then later scapegoated for the attack. (Congress recently exonerated both Short and Kimmel, posthumously restoring them to their former ranks).
  But as the Army board had concluded at the time, and subsequent de-classified documents confirmed, Washington DC knew the attack was coming, knew exactly where the Japanese fleet was, and knew where it was headed.

On November 29th, Secretary of State Hull showed United Press reporter Joe Leib a message with the time and place of the attack, and the New York Times in it's special 12/8/41 Pearl Harbor edition, on page 13, reported that the time and place of the attack had been known in advance!

The much repeated claim that the Japanese fleet maintained radio silence on it's way to Hawaii was a lie. Among other intercepts still held in the Archives of the NSA is the UNCODED message sent by the Japanese tanker Shirya stating, "proceeding to a position 30.00 N, 154.20 E. Expect to arrive at that point on 3 December." (near HI)
  President Lyndon Johnson wanted a war in Vietnam. He wanted it to help his friends who owned defense companies to do a little business. He needed it to get the Pentagon and CIA to quit trying to invade Cuba. And most of all, he needed a provocation to convince the American people that there was really "no other choice".

On August 5, 1964, newspapers across America reported "renewed attacks" against American destroyers operating in Vietnamese waters, specifically the Gulf of Tonkin. The official story was that North Vietnamese torpedo boats launched an "unprovoked attack" on the USS Maddox while it was on "routine patrol".

The truth is that USS Maddox was involved in aggressive intelligence gathering in coordination with actual attacks by South Vietnam and the Laotian Air Force against targets in North Vietnam. The truth is also that there was no attack by torpedo boats against the USS Maddox. Captain John J. Herrick, the task force commander in the Gulf, cabled Washington DC that the report was the result of an "over-eager" sonar man who had picked up the sounds of his own ship's screws and panicked. But even with this knowledge that the report was false, Lyndon Johnson went on national TV that night to announce the commencement of air strikes against North Vietnam, "retaliation" for an attack that had never occurred.

  President George H. W. Bush wanted a war in Iraq. Like Crassus, George Bush is motivated by money. Specifically oil money. But with the OPEC alliance failing to keep limits on oil production in the Mideast, the market was being glutted with oil pumped from underneath Iraq, which sat over roughly 1/3 of the oil reserves of the entire region.

George wanted a war to stop that flow of oil, to keep prices (and profits) from falling any further than they already had. But like Roosevelt, he needed the "other side" to make the first move.

Iraq had long been trying to acquire greater access to the Persian Gulf, and felt limited confined a narrow strip of land along Kuwait's northern border, which placed Iraqi interests in close proximity with hostile Iran. George Bush, who had been covertly arming Iraq during its war with Iran, sent word via April Glaspie that the United States would not intervene if Saddam Hussein grabbed a larger part of Kuwait. Saddam fell for the bait and invaded.

Of course, Americans were not about to send their sons and daughters to risk their lives for petroleum products. So George Bush arranged a hoax, using a public relations firm which has grown rich on taxpayer money by being most industrious and creative liars! The PR firm concocted a monumental fraud in which the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United States, went on TV pretending to be a nurse, and related a horror story in which Iraqi troops looted the incubators from a Kuwaiti hospital, leaving the premature babies on the cold floor to die. The media, part of the swindle from the start, never bothered asking why the "nurse" didn't just pick the babies up and wrap them in blankets or something.

Enraged by the incubator story, Americans supported operation Desert Storm, which never removed Saddam Hussein from power but which did take Kuwait's oil off of the market for almost 2 years and limited Iraq's oil exports to this very day. That our sons and daughters came home with serious and lingering medical illnesses was apparently not too great a price to pay for increased oil profits.

Following the victory in Iraq, yet another war appeared to be in the offering in the mineral rich regions of Bosnia. Yet again, a hoax was used to create support for military action.

The photo (right) of Fikret Alic staring through a barbed wire fence, was used to "prove" the existence of modern day "Concentration Camps". As the headline of "Belsen 92" indicates, all possible associations with the Nazi horrors were made to sell the necessity of sending yet more American troops into someone else's nation.

But when German Journalists went to Trnopolje, the site of the supposed Concentration Camp. to film a documentary, they discovered that the photo was a fake! The camp at Trnopolje was not a concentration camp but a refugee center. Nor was it surrounded by barbed wire. Careful examination of the original photo revealed that the photographer had shot the photo through a broken section of fence surrounding a tool shed. It was the photographer who was on the inside, shooting out at the refugees.

Once again, Americans had been hoaxed into support of actions they might otherwise not have agreed with.

While several American Presidents have willingly started wars for personal purposes, perhaps no President has ever carried it to the extreme that Bill Clinton has.

Coincident with the expected public statement of Monica Lewinsky following her testimony, Bill Clinton ordered a cruise missile attack on Sudan and Afghanistan, claiming to have had irrefutable proof that bogeyman extraordinaire (and former Afghani ally) Osama Bin Ladin was creating terrorist chemical weapons there.

Examination of the photos of the debris revealed none of the expected structures one would find in a laboratory that handled lethal weapons-grade materials. Assurances from the CIA that they had a positive soil test for biological weapons fell on their face when it was revealed that there had been no open soil anywhere near the pre-bombed facility. Sudan requested that international observers come test the remains of the factory for any signs of the nerve gas Clinton had insisted was there. None was found. The Sudanese plant was a harmless aspirin factory, and the owner has sued for damages.

Later examination of the site hit in Afghanistan revealed it to be a mosque.

Meanwhile, back in Kosovo, stories about genocide and atrocities were flooding the media (in time to distract from the Sudanese embarrassments), just as lurid and sensational and as it turns out often just as fictional as most of William Randolph Hearst's stories of atrocities against the Cubans.

Again, the government and the media were hoaxing Americans. The above photo was shown on all the American networks, claiming to be one of Slobodan Milosovic's Migs, shot down while attacking civilians. Closer examination (click on the photo) shows it to be stenciled in English!

Like Germany under Chancellor Hitler, there have been events in our nation which strike fear into the hearts of the citizens, such as the New York World Trade Tower bombing, the OK City Federal Building, and the Olympic Park bomb (nicely timed to divert the media from witnesses to the TWA 800 shoot down). The media has been very quick to blame such events on "radicals", "subversives", "vast right wing conspiracies", and other "enemies in our midst", no different than the lies used by Cicero and Hitler.

But on closer examination, such "domestic terrorist" events do not appear to be what they are made out to be. The FBI had an informant inside the World Trade Tower bombers, Emad Salam, who offered to sabotage the bomb. The FBI told him "no". The so-called "hot bed" of white separatism at Elohim City, occasional home to Tim McVeigh in the weeks prior to the OK City bombing, was founded and is being run by an FBI informant!

And nobody has ever really explained what this second Ryder truck was doing in a secret camp half way from Elohim City to Oklahoma City two weeks before the bombing.

So, here we are today. Like the Romans of Crassus' and Cicero's time, or the Germans under a newly elected Hitler, we are being warned that a dangerous enemy threatens us, implacable, invisible, omnipresent, and invulnerable as long as our government is hamstrung by that silly old Bill of Rights. Already there have appeared articles debating whether or not "extraordinary measures" (i.e. torture) are not fully justified under certain circumstances such as those we are purported to face.

As was the case in Rome and Germany, the government continues to plead with the public for an expansion of its power and authority, to "deal with the crisis".

However, as Casio watch timers are paraded before the cameras, to the stentorian tones of the talking heads' constant dire warnings, it is legitimate to question just how real the crises is, and how much is the result of political machinations by our own leaders.

Are the terrorists really a threat, or just hired actors with bombs and Casio watches, paid for by Cicero and given brown shirts to wear by Hitler?

Is terrorism inside the United States really from outside, or is it a stage managed production, designed to cause Americans to believe they have no choice but to surrender the Republic and accept the totalitarian rule of a new emperor, or a new Fuhrer?

Once lost, the Romans never got their Republic back. Once lost, the Germans never got their Republic back. In both cases, the nation had to totally collapse before freedom was restored to the people.

Remember that when Crassus tells you that Spartacus approaches.

Remember that when thugs in the streets act in a manner clearly designed to provoke the public fear.

Remember that when the Reichstag burns down.

Remember that when the President lies to you about weapons of mass destruction.

 


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Bring Back The Politics of Personal Destruction

Crossposted from TruthOut

Go to Original

    By Frank Rich
    The New York Times

    Sunday 04 March 2007

    If you had to put a date on when the Iraq war did in the Bush administration, it would be late summer 2005. That's when the bungled federal response to Hurricane Katrina re-enacted the White House bungling of the war, this time with Americans as the principal victims. The stuff happening on Brownie's watch in New Orleans was recognizably the same stuff that had happened on Donald Rumsfeld's watch in Baghdad. Television viewers connected the dots and the president's poll numbers fell into the 30s. There they have largely remained - at least until Friday, when the latest New York Times-CBS News Poll put him at 29.

    Now this pattern is repeating itself: a searing re-enactment of the Iraq war's lethal mismanagement is playing out on the home front, again with potentially grave political consequences. The Washington Post's exposé of the squalor at Walter Reed Army Medical Center - where some of our most grievously wounded troops were treated less like patients than detainees - has kicked off the same spiral of high-level lying and blame-shifting that followed FEMA's Katrina disasters.

    Just as the debacle on the gulf was a call to arms for NBC's Brian Williams and CNN's Anderson Cooper, so the former ABC anchor Bob Woodruff has returned from his own near-death experience in Iraq to champion wounded troops let down by their government. And not just at Walter Reed. His powerful ABC News special last week unearthed both a systemic national breakdown in veterans' medical care and a cover-up. The Veterans Affairs Department keeps "two sets of books" - one telling the public that the official count of nonfatal battlefield casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan stands at 23,000, the other showing an actual patient count of 205,000. Why the discrepancy? A new Brownie - Jim Nicholson, the former Republican National Committee hack whom President Bush installed as veterans affairs secretary - tells Mr. Woodruff "a lot of them come in for dental problems."

    Yet 2007 is not 2005, and little more damage can be inflicted on the lame-duck Bush White House. The long-running Iraq catastrophe is now poised to mow down a second generation of political prey: presidential hopefuls who might have strongly challenged Bush war policy when it counted and didn't. That list starts with the candidates long regarded as their parties' 2008 favorites, John McCain and Hillary Clinton.

    Senator McCain, who, unlike Senator Clinton, fervently supports the war and the surge, is morbidly aware of his predicament. This once-ebullient politician has been off his game since a conspicuously listless January "Meet the Press" appearance; on Thursday, he had to publicly apologize after telling David Letterman, in an unguarded moment of genuine straight talk, that American lives were being "wasted" in Iraq. (Barack Obama had already spoken the same truth and given the same pro forma apology.) Last week a Washington Post-ABC News Poll confirmed Mr. McCain's worst political fears. Rudy Giuliani now leads him two to one among Republicans, a tripling of Mr. Giuliani's lead in a single month.

    Mr. Giuliani is also a war supporter and even contributed a Brownie of his own to the fiasco, the now disgraced Bernard Kerik, who helped botch the training of the Iraqi police. But, unlike Mr. McCain, Mr. Giuliani isn't dogged by questions about Iraq. To voters, his war history begins and ends with the war against the enemy that actually attacked America on 9/11. He wasn't a cheerleader for the subsequent detour into Iraq, wasn't in office once the war started, and actively avoids speaking about it in any detail.

    What makes Mr. Giuliani's rise particularly startling is that his liberal views and messy personal history are thought to make him a nonstarter with his own party faithful. These handicaps haven't kicked in, the Beltway explanation has it, because benighted Republican voters don't yet really know that "America's mayor" once married a cousin or that he describes himself as "pro-choice." But perhaps these voters aren't as ignorant as Washington thinks. After the flameouts of Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, Rick Santorum, Ralph Reed and other Bible-thumping politicos who threw themselves on the altars of Terri Schiavo or Jack Abramoff, maybe most Republicans could use a rest from the moral brigade. Maybe these voters, too, care more about the right to life of troops thrust into an Iraqi civil war than that of discarded embryos used in stem-cell research.

    The same cultural dynamic is playing out among Democrats, though Mrs. Clinton doesn't seem to know it. Her poll numbers, too, are showing erosion - some of it because of Mr. Obama's growing profile among African-Americans, but some of it (in a Time survey) after her dust-up with the Hollywood tycoon David Geffen. Most Washington hands declared Mrs. Clinton the winner in that spat because she had forced Mr. Obama off his high horse of "hope." But there's no evidence to support this theory. In the real world, most Americans don't know who Mr. Geffen is. There wasn't even any video of him to run on "Hardball," where the Clinton campaign spokesman's Jim Cramer-esque hyperbole made him look threatened by Mr. Obama's rising popularity.

    The most revealing aspect of the incident was not in any case the who's-up-who's-down prognostications for a primary process some 10 months away. Rather, it was the fervor with which the Clinton campaign accused Mr. Geffen and Mr. Obama of practicing "the politics of personal destruction." This over-the-top reaction seemed detached from reality, almost as if the Clinton camp were nostalgically wishing it could refight the last political war - and once again clobber repellent old impeachment nemeses. But that battle may not be in the offing. Anti-Clinton rage has cooled, and the Clinton hating industry ain't what it used to be. As The Times reported last month, even Richard Mellon Scaife, who bankrolled much of the vast right-wing conspiracy, has moved on. As with Mr. Giuliani's marital history, any scandalous new revelation about the Clintons' private lives might play out less momentously in post-9/11 America than it did in the last century.

    You can't blame the Clinton campaign for praying it had Kenneth Starr and The American Spectator to kick around again. It would be easier to fight that war than confront the one in Iraq. Far easier. Senator Clinton's words about the war still don't parse. When I made this point previously, a Clinton ally phoned to say that whatever the senator's Iraq statements, she is an exceptionally smart and capable leader by any presidential standard. I agree, and besides, Iraq isn't the only issue in 2008. But Iraq will overshadow every candidate and every other subject as long as the war grinds gruesomely on, whether in Baghdad or at a V.A. hospital.

    The issue is not that Mrs. Clinton voted for the war authorization in 2002 or that she refuses to call it a mistake in 2007. Those are footnotes. The larger issue is judgment, then and now. Take her most persistent current formulation on Iraq: "Obviously, if we knew then what we know now, there wouldn't have been a vote and I certainly wouldn't have voted that way." It's fair to ask: Knew what then? Not everyone was so easily misled by the White House's manipulated intelligence and propaganda campaign. Some of her fellow leaders in Washington - not just Mr. Obama out in Illinois, not just Al Gore out of power - knew plenty in the fall of 2002. Why didn't she?

    Bob Graham, then Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, was publicly and privately questioning the W.M.D. intelligence. So was Nancy Pelosi. Chuck Hagel warned that the war was understaffed, that an Iraq distraction might cause Afghanistan "to go down again" and that the toppling of Saddam could be followed by chaos. Joe Biden convened hearings to warn of the perils of an ill-planned post-Saddam Iraq.

    Some of these politicians ended up voting to authorize war exactly as Mrs. Clinton did (Senators Hagel and Biden). Some didn't. But all of them - and there were others as well - asked tougher questions and exerted more leadership. John Edwards, by the way, did not: he was as trigger-happy about speeding up the war authorization then ("The time has come for decisive action") as he is gung-ho about withdrawal now, despite being an Intelligence Committee member when Mr. Graham sounded alarms about the Bush administration's W.M.D. claims.

    Another fair question is what Mrs. Clinton learned once the war began. Even in the summer of 2003 - after the insurgency had started, after the W.M.D. had failed to materialize, after the White House had retracted the president's 16 words about "uranium from Africa," more than two months after "Mission Accomplished" had failed to end major combat operations - she phoned a reporter at The Daily News, James Gordon Meek, to reiterate that she still had no second thoughts about the war. (Mr. Meek first wrote about this July 14, 2003, conversation in December 2005.) Was that what this smart woman really believed then, or political calculation?

    Either way, she made a judgment, and she will not be able to spend month after month explaining it away to voters with glib, lawyerly statements. The politics of personal destruction, should they actually visit the Clintons once more, will not take America's mind off the politics of mass destruction in Iraq.

 

News In The Mid East

AP

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A suicide car bomber shattered a relative lull in Baghdad's violence Monday, killing at least 26 people in a blast that touched off raging fires and a blizzard of bloodstained paper from a popular book market.

It was the largest bombing in the capital in three days, and came on the heels of a major push by nearly 1,200 U.S. and Iraqi troops into Sadr City, a Shiite militia stronghold and base for fighters loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

* * * *

  One again over in Afghanistan it would seem that NATO forces have killed even more civilians in an air attack in which a home was hit. Nine were killed in this attack of which two were children.   Source

  If the US  keeps dropping bombs and shooting the Afghani civilians, the Taliban and al-Qaeda will be the least of America's worries.

        * * * *

UPI

Iranian general's disappearance a mystery

JERUSALEM, March 5 (UPI) -- The disappearance of Iranian Gen. Ali Reza Askari in Istanbul has Arabic media suggesting the CIA or Israel abducted him, the Jerusalem Post reported.

 

Sunday, March 04, 2007

Washington Post Reporter Anne Hull on The Walter Reed Investigation

   Some comments from Anne Hull of the Washington Post while discussing how  she and her partner (  Dana Priest ) put the story together on the Walter Reed  mess with our veterans/troops.

    It is fair to say that our troops have pretty much been treated as dirt by the higher ups!

   Hull was interviewed by Bob Schieffer on "CBS NEWS' FACE THE NATION."      Sunday, March 4,2007

SCHIEFFER: When you found these stories and you checked them out, did
you--did you go to the Army immediately about this, or how did you go about putting this story together?
Ms. HULL: We worked under the radar for four months. We didn't want to go to the Army. We didn't go to Walter Reed's public affairs office. We just wanted to hear the unvarnished and truthful stories of the soldiers and Marines living there. We didn't want any spin. We wanted to hear what they had to say. And normally, they might not have been as frank talking to us, but no one was listening to them for years about their problems. And so they were ready to talk.

SCHIEFFER: The thing that got everybody's attention at first were these
rat-infested, moldy rooms. But the problem, the real problem was the way these people are being treated, wasn't it? Not--not the housing.
Ms. HULL: That's right. We--we looked at Building 18 as sort of the
symbolic heart of darkness, but the real problem is the bureaucracy that these guys have to deal with. They're literally languishing for a year or two there. They have to prove they were in Iraq. The Army is in disarray. They had four years of casualties. We had one soldier who had to bring his Purple Heart to prove that he even served in Iraq. We had a medic who served three tours and had to bring in pictures of herself in Iraq to prove she served.
And every day these small insults added up to just a very hard experience for people living there.

SCHIEFFER: And it also extends beyond the military hospitals into the VA, as we have seen from this remarkable reporting that Bob Woodruff and ABC did about how these people with these serious brain injuries, they're being shuttled off to hospitals where there's no treatment for them. I mean, it's just the more you think about it, the more inexcusable it all becomes.
Ms. HULL: Right. I mean, the big surge is going to be the traumatic brain
injury, and the PTSD folks looking for services for the VA. What we found at Walter Reed is that the Army would tell these soldiers, `The VA will take care of you,' and the Army was giving them zero disability ratings quite often.
They were very eager to hand these soldiers off to the VA system.

Ms. HULL: We heard of one instance where there was a captain from the 101st Airborne, he was being discharged from the hospital. He had just hit his morphine pump for pain, and the VA woman came in to explain his disability package. They are heavily medicated there while they're getting very important messages given to them, and they are not in the right frame, often, to make these crucial decisions. And they don't have enough advocates and caseworkers to help them through the system.

 

Ex Walter Reed Major General Weightman Subpoenaed by Oversight Committee

    Its seems that part of the problem with Walter Reed may be that the place was well on its way to being privatized so far are services are concerned.

    The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform had invited Maj. Gen. George Weightman to come over to the committee and testify on some of the committee's concerns about the problem at the hospital but it turns out the Army would not let him testify.

 Chairman Henry Waxman and subcommittee Chairman John Tierney  wanted to ask George Weightman about a memo which said that privatization of Walter Reed services may put “patient care services… at risk of mission failure.”

    The Army brass would give the Oversight committee a good reason on why Weightman shouldn't testify before them so the committee subpoenaed him to speak to them.     Source

Army times

By Kelly Kennedy - Staff writer
Posted : Saturday Mar 3, 2007

The committee wants to learn more about a letter written in September by Garrison Commander Peter Garibaldi to Weightman.

The memorandum “describes how the Army’s decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was causing an exodus of ‘highly skilled and experienced personnel,’” the committee’s letter states. “According to multiple sources, the decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed led to a precipitous drop in support personnel at Walter Reed.”

The letter said Walter Reed also awarded a five-year, $120-million contract to IAP Worldwide Services, which is run by Al Neffgen, a former senior Halliburton official.

They also found that more than 300 federal employees providing facilities management services at Walter Reed had drooped to fewer than 60 by Feb. 3, 2007, the day before IAP took over facilities management. IAP replaced the remaining 60 employees with only 50 private workers.   Entire Article

 

Ann Coulter Still Getting Fried, Conservative's In Washington Are A Dead Breed

Reuters

"Ann Coulter not only once again went out of her way to use a nasty epithet, she pushed her offensiveness up a notch," Amy Ridenour, president of the National Center for Public Policy Research, said on Sunday.

Coulter made the comments on Friday during a speech at the influential American Conservative Union's Political Action Conference, calling Edwards a "faggot."

"We conservatives have enough trouble overcoming the false things that are said about us without paying for a platform upon which we shoot ourselves annually in the foot," Ridenour, whose group helped sponsor the conference, said in a statement on the center's Web site.

    First I am taking aim at the comments from Amy Ridenour stating that the conservatives have enough trouble dealing with the false things that are said about them.

   Amy dear, I would say that just about everything that has been said about conservatives over the past six years or so have been correct. I speak of the current group which call themselves conservative and who really have no clue as to what a conservative is.

   Your conservatives are a group of hate filled, war-mongering, lying , corrupt individuals who are concerned with nothing but enriching themselves ahead of anything  and above everything no matter who this group has to trample on.

    They care about nothing but corporate profits, lining their own pockets and stealing everything that they can get their hands on.

   This is not the kind of conservatives that I grew up with. The group that I used to remember was not so full of hate speech and calling people " faggots " and "ragheads ".  They did not call someone who disagreed with them " traitors " or " un- American ".

    True conservatives as a group no longer exist in this country. They dies awhile ago but were just finally buried when George Bush and the rest of this administration came into office.   R.I.P.

 

Lawmakers Promise Quick Response On Walter Reed Situation

  The lawmakers here in the good old USA are now seeking their own independent commission to look into the Walter Reed mess on top of the group that Bush is having look into the fiasco.

    Defense Secretary Robert Gates created a panel last week to look at the conditions in another hospital in addition to Walter Reed, this one being the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda, Md.   Source

"I'm worried about if it's this bad at the outpatient facilities at Walter Reed, how is it in the rest of the country? Because Walter Reed is our crown jewel," said Sen. Charles Schumer ( voting record), D-N.Y.

"To think that men and women are serving their country in the most honorable and courageous way possible and all we give them is a dilapidated, rat-infested, run-down building to recover is a disgrace," Schumer wrote. "My fear is that Walter Reed is just the tip of the iceberg, and merely highlights the pervasive and systemic mistreatment of our service members."    Yahoo News

      The next thing that should happen is the termination of Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley since his sorry ass was once the commander of Walter Reed. It has been said that Kiley knew of these lousy conditions for at least the past three years.

   The military's claim of being under staffed and over burdened with patients is no excuse for this crap to have taken place. With all of the funding that has been given to the military since the Bush war club has been in office, no body thought about maybe training more professionals and then maybe up-grading the facilities? This is the equivalent of trying to say that no body thought there would be many casualties in this war so we never thought of it.

 

 

 

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John Edwards and Wife Speak Out On Coulter's Comments

   In the New York Times is a piece on the continuing Ann Coulter slur towards John Edwards at the CPAC get together.

   It is noted that  John McCain , Rudolph W. Giuliani , and Mitt Romney have denounced the comments by the " Vixen of Venom " but that was only after the Democrats, gay rights groups and many blogger's raised hell about the comments.

Ms. Coulter, asked for a reaction to the Republican criticism, said in an e-mail message: “C’mon, it was a joke. I would never insult gays by suggesting that they are like John Edwards. That would be mean.”      NYT

3/03/2007

John Edwards released the following statement today:

Ann Coulter's use of an anti-gay slur yesterday was un-American and indefensible. In America, we strive for equality and embrace diversity. The kind of hateful language she used has no place in political debate or our society at large.

I believe it is our moral responsibility to speak out against that kind of bigotry and prejudice every time we encounter it.         Source

 

user icon Elizabeth Edwards   Source
3/03/2007

When Miss Coulter spoke about John at the conservative convention in Washington yesterday, she used a word that she intended as a nasty and derogatory suggestion. John and I have long ago shrugged off the vile words of this person. When she made a joke about the exact moment of death of Charlie Dean (Howard's brother and a schoolmate of mine), and when she attacked the courageous 9-11 widows, she told you all you need to know about what she is made of: her compassion -- or lack thereof.  Now we need to find out about you.  

Although her words did not hurt us, they may have hurt some in the gay community. We are all sick and tired of anyone supporting or applauding or introducing hate words into the national dialogue, tired of people thinking that words that cause others pain are fair game. And we are sick and tired of people like Miss Coulter thinking that her use of loaded words about the homosexual community in this country is remotely humorous or appropriate.     The Article

 

What Congress Must Do To Restore Civil Liberties

    An editorial in the Sunday edition of the New York Times takes a look at some of the things that our Congress needs to tackle in order to undo some of the illegal attacks on the United States citizens civil liberties which the  Bush Department of Constitutional Shredding,Inc. has undertaken over the past six years not just against it's own people, but prisoner's of war also.

   Three of the major tasks to be looked at would be the restoration of Habeas Corpus, stopping the illegal spying on the citizens and actually banning torture, for real this time.      

NYT

Many of the tasks facing Congress involve the way the United States takes prisoners, and how it treats them. There are two sets of prisons in the war on terror. The military runs one set in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. The other is even more shadowy, run by the C.I.A. at secret places.

Close the C.I.A. Prisons                                                           When the Military Commissions Act passed, Mr. Bush triumphantly announced that he now had the power to keep the secret prisons open. He cast this as a great victory for national security. It was a defeat for America’s image around the world. The prisons should be closed.

Ban Extraordinary Rendition

This is the odious practice of abducting foreign citizens and secretly flying them to countries where everyone knows they will be tortured. It is already illegal to send a prisoner to a country if there is reason to believe he will be tortured. The administration’s claim that it got “diplomatic assurances” that prisoners would not be abused is laughable.

   Maybe after Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the group of fools are indicted they can be subjected to some of the same which they have subjected prisoners to.

   If they want to get Christian about things how about, " An eye for an eye"?

 

Ammar Al-Hakim Detained On Bush Orders, Teens Charged With Giving Pot to Young Boys

     Suburban Fort Worth Texas police have filed third-degree felony charges against two teens for talking a 2 year old and a 5 year old ( brothers ) into smoking some pot. The episode was found on a videotape.       Source


By ZEYAD
The decision to detain the son of a leading Iraqi cleric by U.S. troops was made last January in Washington as a result of intelligence that he was the link between his father and Iranian authorities, an employee of the American Enterprise Institute told the Sadrist Nahrain Net website. The unnamed source said that President George Bush personally approved the decision to detain Ammar Al-Hakim following meetings with Pentagon and State Department officials to discuss measures against Shi’ite political parties and militias in Iraq. Other recommendations were made, according to the source, including the detention or “elimination” of certain figures and suspected militia leaders.    Iraq Slogger

 

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Vermont Placing Impeachment Up To The Citizens

    Here is another look at the grassroots effort to get the ball rolling on the impeachment of both President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

    Crossposted from Common Dreams

Published on Saturday, March 3, 2007 by The Nation

Vermont Puts Impeachment on the Table

by John Nichols

NEWFANE, Vermont -- Cindy Sheehan and I are traveling Vermont this weekend, stopping in close to a dozen towns from Burlington to Brattleboro, to talk about why we think the president and vice president should be impeached -- and the essential role that Vermonters are playing in the process. We come not to tell the people of Vermont how to vote on impeachment resolutions at two dozen town meetings next week. That would be not just presumptuous but foolish. Frankly, the Vermont voters who have given America George Aiken, Ralph Flanders, Jim Jeffords, Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders do not need any advice from us about how to make political choices.

Rather, we come to celebrate the wisdom of local activists Dan DeWalt, Ellen Tenney and the thousands of others who have chosen to embrace a Jeffersonian vision of how Americans relate to their federal government, and to take a little of that wisdom back to the rest of the country.

It was Thomas Jefferson who observed more than two hundred years ago that, "Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic."

It was Jefferson, as well, who asked of those who would inherit that republic: "But will they keep it?"

The answer to that question, for this particular moment in history, will come from the Vermont town meetings that debate calls for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney next Tuesday. Last year, seven towns voted to impeach. This year, the numbers will multiply dramatically -- and town meetings in the neighboring states of New Hampshire and Massachusetts are taking it up, as well, this spring.

No, decisions made in town meetings across the Green Mountain State will not, in and of themselves, restore the republic -- which, rather than the punishment of individual men, is the purpose of impeachment. But, as Americans in towns and cities across this great country despair at the determination of their president to surge the country deeper into the quagmire that is Iraq and react with horror at courtroom revelations about the manner in which their vice president has used his office to manage attacks on the reputations and livelihoods of an administration critic and his spouse, Vermont can signal to the nation that there is an appropriate response to the crisis.

More importantly, Vermont can put that response -- impeachment -- back on the table for use by the American people and their Congress. The attention to the votes cast by Vermonters will remind Americans that the founders did not intend for the people or their representatives to allow any president or vice president to act as "a king for four years."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was wrong to suggest, as she did during the heat of last fall's election campaign, that impeachment was "off the table."

No section of the Constitution can or should be rendered inoperable by any politician -- even a well-intentioned one.

The Constitution does not belong to the politicians. It belongs to all of us. And the medicines it prescribes for the ailments of the body politic are ours to administer.

Jefferson argued that all power must ultimately rest with the people, believing that citizens at the grassroots would always be better suited than politicians in Washington to recognize the point at which friends of the republic must defend its democratic aspirations and the rule of law that underpins them. "It behooves our citizens to be on their guard, to be firm in their principles, and full of confidence in themselves," the author of the Declaration of Independence explained. "We are able to preserve our self-government if we will but think so."

Jefferson believed that the process of impeachment would at times begin outside of Washington, with petitions from the states. His manual for the conduct of Congress, written in 1800 and adhered to this day, mandates that Congress must accept such petitions and give them due consideration. Hence, the votes cast at town meetings across Vermont Tuesday can extend beyond symbolism. If the Vermont legislature responds to the message from the voters by conveying to Congress articles of impeachment, as several legislators have suggested it should, the struggle to hold the president and vice president to account will have been advanced. If Vermont's representative in the U.S. House, Peter Welch, chooses to so respond, he can introduce articles of impeachment incorporating language from the resolutions adopted at Vermont's town meetings.

As the mother of a slain soldier who has proven that one person can confront the most powerful man in the world and be heard, and as an author who has spent a lifetime examining the interplay between people and power, we come to Vermont to say that the impeachment process really can begin in the town halls and community centers of this state.

And, we are arguing, this is exactly as the founders intended.

The authors of the American experiment had a deep and healthy distrust of concentrated power, especially when that power was held by a regal figure, be he identified as king or president. They crafted a Constitution that made no mention of God, corporations or political parties. They made no effort to establish a process for nominating candidates for the presidency, and gave only the barest outlines for the selection of the commander-in-chief -- an electoral college was established, but little preparation was made for how or when the electors would be chosen, let alone who would do the choosing.

The founders figured that the American people would figure out how to choose their leaders.

They feared, however, that after the selection process was done, Americans would forget that they have the power -- and, indeed, the responsibility -- to remove executives who transgress against not just the law but the rule of law. The oath that the president and vice president take binds them to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." A failure to do so, as identified by the people and acted upon by their elected representatives, forms the basis for sound articles of impeachment.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney have, with their manipulation of intelligence in a scheme to launch an unnecessary preemptive war, with their repeated refusals to cooperate with a Congress that is supposed to serve as a coequal branch of government, with their assaults on scientific inquiry in order to prevent a fact-based discussion of global warming by that Congress and the American people, with their violations of laws that prevent presidents from ordering secret spying on the American people, and with their abuses of positions of public trust to punish critics of the administration's policies have failed to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States."

They have created a Constitutional crisis.

Now, it is suggested that those who would address the crisis with the tools afforded them by the founders are doing harm to the political process and perhaps the nation. The claim that impeachment represents a dangerous diversion from the work of nations is at odds with everything we know and love about our country.

No less an American than James Madison said, after assuring that the Constitution would include a broad authority to sanction members of the executive branch, observed that "... it may, perhaps, on some occasion, be found necessary to impeach the President himself..." The occasion has arrived. The necessary arguments for the impeachment of the president -- and the vice president -- have been identified. That Vermonters are among the first to recognize the circumstance does not surprise us. Rather, it inspires us. This is why we have come: to share in a great democratic moment, and to carry the faith forward to other Americans in other states. It is the faith of the founders, a faith that is being restored by the people of Vermont.

John Nichols, The Nation's Washington correspondent, has covered progressive politics and activism in the United States and abroad for more than a decade. John Nichols' new book is The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism.

© 2007 The Nation

 

Religious War Between The Culture's?

    Most of you out there know how I feel about the so-called " religious right " who wouldn't know right if it slapped them up beside their heads.

  I made the comment once before and I will say it again. The religious right is no more Christian than Satan is. With that in mind, I leave you with this from Daily Kos with a look at the culture war.

The Original

Maybe it is a War after all

by james richardson
Fri Mar 02, 2007

Perhaps Bill O'Reilly is right.  There is a war on Christmas.  Or maybe it's a war on Christians, or a war on Christianity.  The lines have been drawn in the sand.  Where exactly that line falls however is difficult to pin down.  A vast majority of Americans believe in some kind of God, a number conservatives echo to no end.  That vast majority does not consider itself specifically religious however.  They simply are something to the right of Atheism and to the left of Fundamentalist (anyone know the breakdown of politics among atheists by the way?).

A significant portion of the religious right is more than a little militant about their beliefs.  Attempting to portray themselves as humble followers of God seeking nothing more than to worship in peace and privacy, they are in actuality nothing of the sort.  Not content to allow followers of other religions to practice under the same protections they themselves demand, they instead insist their God, their religious beliefs and their methods of worship are not only superior but necessary to mend all of society's wounds, either real or imagined.

These are not the goals of a passive, live-and-let-live movement.  This is a movement that hates a strong national government, if that government is liberal.  Strong, national moral conservative governments are just dandy.  A movement that despises liberal communities attempting to nationalize their views and 'telling the people of Texas how to live and what to believe' see it as nothing less than a moral imperative to force their views upon the rest of the nation as a whole.  So convinced are they of their own moral clarity that inflection or second-guessing rarely enter the picture.  

This movement has succeeded in conquering two of the three branches of the Federal Government and positions in their local communities.  Thomas Franks documented one example of this in his wildy popular book "What's the Matter with Kansas?".  The third branch however has always eluded them.  The far Right has yet to understand that Judges get to interpret the Law and the Constitution.  You can't vote them in or out, and no amount of passion over a particular dispute will override it's legality of lack thereof, at least not for very long (see Prohibition and the 18th Amendment).

The truth is, people in this country have a right to Sin.  They have a right to be immoral, to be promiscuous, and to do things that are bad for them.  In a Democracy you need a reason to make something illegal, not to make it legal.  The Religious Right however has set itself on a path that requires a lifetime of refusing their most primal and fundamental urges and they in no way enjoy seeing those around them indulge in such urges with seeming careless frivolity.  They will damn well ensure their offspring do no such thing as well, and will use any means necessary to do so.

Laws must be passed.  It must be made illegal to be immoral.  Far beyond the immorality of, say murder, which is illegal in large part for interfering with the victim's right to be alive, laws must be passed to outlaw all morality in society as well as the behaviours that lead to temptation.  Human beings are week creatures after all, easily swayed, especially the females.  They require extra protection to keep them pure and virtuous for as long as possible.

It is a war.  It is a culture war; a war of ideas.  The religious right is not demanding simply a live-and-let-live society.  They are insisting that their God is the right God, their means of worship alone are correct, and their vision for the future of society is without fault.  They are barely tolerable of other forms and off-shoots of Christianity; insisting that alien religions like Islam and their Holy Book, the Koran, are inherently militant, they make the jump to declaring every simgle muslim follows the Koran to the letter of the law while conveniently ignoring the relatively small amount of Christians who follow the Bible in such a manner.

This combination of self-delcared moral authority and authoritarianistic tendencies is not easily contained, but certain tactics have proven themselves effective time and again when the pendulum between Church and State swings a little too close to one pole for confort.  Mainly, the tactic of shining a national spotlight on the beliefs and actions of the hardline religious-right.  Very few on the Right are able to actually live up to the high standards they so often fault others for, and human beings have an innate dislike of hypocrisy.  I have come to call it Haggard's Law:  that which a conservative is speaking against most strongly is that which the conservative will inevitably be found to be guilty of.

Sunlight is indeed the best disinfectant.  If those criticising the immorality of others cannot live up to their own standards they will again be marginalized, back to where they were before Karl Rove and the GOP realized they needed a new voting block to get George W. Bush elected, and found it in the churches.

 

Saturday, March 03, 2007

Two Views On The Coulter Episode

A) Anyone who is a graduate of lawschool and can pass the bar is far from "ignorant".
B) What Republican pundits are you speaking of? I was at CPAC and have yet to find anyone who supports her comments and is happy about what she said.
Do tell.

          * * * *

    A reader left the above as a comment regarding the bit on Ann Coulter and the pundits who thought that she was great with her name calling and such.

 1) I know many people who have graduated from law school and quite a few doctors and other high end professionals who can be quite ignorant at times. All of us suffer from that at times.

 2) The Nation -- Just returned from CPAC, where I caught Ann Coulter call John Edwards a "faggot" (Crooks and Liars has video). The crowd roared their approval, of course. Then Coulter endorsed Mitt Romney. Another gem from Coultergeist: Discussing black Republicans, she declared, "Our blacks are better than their blacks."      Source

 

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US Military Tried Blocking Reports Of Detainee Deaths and Torture

     I have been reading an article online which will not come out in print until March of this year.

   This story deals with two reporters ,Kevin Sack and Craig Pyes, who have been investigating the abuse and deaths of detainees at Gardez just south of Kabul at the facility in Afghanistan and the cover-up of these actions by the United States military and the United States government.

    After you read this story, you will no doubt understand why the " Bush Department of Constitutional Shredding,Inc. " put in place the new rules of war concerning the rights of prisoners, which you know they no longer have.

   The story speaks of the reporters being blocked from attempts to gather information which was not classified and from being lied to not only by the service members at the prison, but by almost the entire chain of command.

            Nieman Watchdog

But an even greater obstacle was how we would report on Special Forces activities at remote firebases, where most of the prisoners sent from Afghanistan to the prison facility at Guantanamo were first captured and held. The bases are highly classified and have not only avoided scrutiny from journalists and the public, but are opaque to congressional staffers with security clearances, to the military’s own investigators and, sometimes, even to the Special Forces Command itself. The Red Cross does not have access to these outposts, and even the names of the soldiers are treated like state secrets. Several times, irate Green Berets responded to our inquiries with: “How did you get my name? It’s classified.

   Click here to read the entire article.

 

Ann " Vixen of Venom " Coulter and The Republican Show Of Ignorance

    We all know by now about the Ann Coulter speech in which she referred to John Edwards as a 'faggot' more or less proving that Ann Coulter is as ignorant as she looks.

   Yet Coulter and the rest of the Republican pundits still insist that this group is loaded up with Christians and that they hold dear to the " right " values as God would have them to do.

   If this is going to be the doctrine of the religious right and the rest of their supporters ( Bush Department of Constitutional Shredding,Inc. ) then I would rather become an atheist. At least the atheist group are straight up on where they stand and they aren't out trying to pass themselves off as something that they are not.

   It seems that Mr. A. Coulter now backs Mitt Romney as the next presidential candidate for the Repugnican party because, as Coulter put it," He tricked liberals into voting for him. I like a guy who hoodwinks the voters so easily."

   Ann Coulter is basically saying that the voters in this country are somewhat stupid and gullible.

   John McCain and Romney himself attacked the speech but Romney is still being nice with the " Vixen of Venom "  instead of putting her in a locked closet.

   But this is all show for their poor, confused, uneducated followers in order to get a spark out of them as the Repugnicans have nothing else to talk about that would have any truth to it.

 

Saudi Arabia and Iran Forge Friendship Over Iraq

     Saudi's King Abdullah and Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have forged a friendship to deal with the strife in Iraq between the Sunnis and Shias.      Source

   This could be an interesting mix what with Saudi Arabia being a US ally and Iran being the perceived foe of the US. It just keeps getting better and better over in the middle east. Saudi Arabia has said that the nuclear issue with Iran was discussed but that is all the info that was given.

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  Al Jazeera

Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shi'ite Iran are among the most influential nations of their respective branches of Islam.  "The two parties have agreed to stop any attempt aimed at spreading sectarian strife in the region," Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal told reporters without elaborating.

Department of Justice Wants Website's To Perform "Data Retention"

     In another effort to keep up with the citizen's activities in the United States, the Bush Department of Constitutional Shredding is having the U.S. Department of Justice officials seek web site's  co-operation in keeping records of who uploads photographs or videos to their sites. This is just in case the long arm of the law decides that the content is illegal and they wish to investigate the matter.    Source

      The Bush Department of Constitutional Shredding just doesn't know how to stop their bullshit! Of course, they are also using the terrorist threat along with the child porn tactic. I'm all for keeping those pervs off line and locked up but let's get real here. This entire scam is still about keeping track of everything that we look at either in picture form or text or whatever and it's about knowing where we live and what we do when we are online, whether legal or not.   

 

 

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al-Maliki To Reshuffle His Cabinet, US Stuck In Iraq For Long Term

Iraqi P.M. Nouri al-Maliki has said that he will reshuffle his cabinet in the near future as he is under alot of pressure to take more of the responsibility for the security issues in Iraq.

    al-Maliki told the associated Press that the reshuffling would take place "either this week or next week."       Source

    He also threatened to order the arrest of parliament members and other political leaders suspected of supporting extremists.     AP

    You know that al-Maliki would be half way decent if he was not so afraid of some of the other groups in Iraq that do not care for the United States and it's Iraq policy. Sometime I think that those groups have a valid reason for raising hell as I would not want another country in my own as an occupying power either. Let's face it, the United States is an occupier and not a liberator in Iraq.

    As much as most of us would like to see our troops out of Iraq and back home in the states, this is not going to happen for a long time, if ever. George Bush and his new world order group have made sure that we cannot leave Iraq or anywhere else in the middle east. It is going to get much worse for this country before ( if ) it gets any better because our president and his hoods have led us down the road of no return. I would say that the real construction on the road to nowhere started with George's daddy and it is not going to stop anytime soon mainly because the people of the United States have grown complacent and many have kept themselves purposefully ignorant and have buried their heads in the sand.


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E .coli Found In Ground Beef

   First it was ConAgra with their Peter Pan peanut butter getting tainted with Salmonella and now we have Tyson Fresh Meats  doing a recall of some 7.6 tons on ground beef which could be contaminated with E.coli.

   The beef was processed on February 16, 2007 and shipped to four states, those being Washington, Idaho, Oregon and Utah.  Source

    Thus far it seems that no one has gotten sick from the beef which is a good thing but the outbreaks that the United States has had in the past few years is getting kind of nutty. Do we not have enough inspectors at the USDA to cover the areas that they need to take care of? The last that I heard, this sort of thing is supposed to be caught before the food that we eat is shipped from these processing plants.

 

 

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Study Says Marijuana Could Be Wonder Drug

   There is a new study out which pretty much says that pot is pretty much a "valuable" medicine. It would seem that the weed is a very decent pain reliever according to the study in the Neurology journal.

 

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  Marijuana As Wonder Drug

By Lester Grinspoon, Boston Globe. Posted March 3, 2007.

A new study reveals that pot relieves pain that narcotics like morphine and OxyContin have hardly any effect on, and could help ease suffering from illnesses such as multiple sclerosis and diabetes.

    A new study in the journal Neurology is being hailed as unassailable proof that marijuana is a valuable medicine. It is a sad commentary on the state of modern medicine -- and US drug policy -- that we still need "proof" of something that medicine has known for 5,000 years.

The study, from the University of California at San Francisco, found smoked marijuana to be effective at relieving the extreme pain of a debilitating condition known as peripheral neuropathy. It was a study of HIV patients, but a similar type of pain caused by damage to nerves afflicts people with many other illnesses including diabetes and multiple sclerosis. Neuropathic pain is notoriously resistant to treatment with conventional pain drugs. Even powerful and addictive narcotics like morphine and OxyContin often provide little relief. This study leaves no doubt that marijuana can safely ease this type of pain.

As all marijuana research in the United States must be, the new study was conducted with government-supplied marijuana of notoriously poor quality. So it probably underestimated the potential benefit.

This is all good news, but it should not be news at all. In the 40-odd years I have been studying the medicinal uses of marijuana, I have learned that the recorded history of this medicine goes back to ancient times and that in the 19th century it became a well-established Western medicine whose versatility and safety were unquestioned. From 1840 to 1900, American and European medical journals published over 100 papers on the therapeutic uses of marijuana, also known as cannabis.

Of course, our knowledge has advanced greatly over the years. Scientists have identified over 60 unique constituents in marijuana, called cannabinoids, and we have learned much about how they work. We have also learned that our own bodies produce similar chemicals, called endocannabinoids.

The mountain of accumulated anecdotal evidence that pointed the way to the present and other clinical studies also strongly suggests there are a number of other devastating disorders and symptoms for which marijuana has been used for centuries; they deserve the same kind of careful, methodologically sound research. While few such studies have so far been completed, all have lent weight to what medicine already knew but had largely forgotten or ignored: Marijuana is effective at relieving nausea and vomiting, spasticity, appetite loss, certain types of pain, and other debilitating symptoms. And it is extraordinarily safe -- safer than most medicines prescribed every day. If marijuana were a new discovery rather than a well-known substance carrying cultural and political baggage, it would be hailed as a wonder drug.

The pharmaceutical industry is scrambling to isolate cannabinoids and synthesize analogs, and to package them in non-smokable forms. In time, companies will almost certainly come up with products and delivery systems that are more useful and less expensive than herbal marijuana. However, the analogs they have produced so far are more expensive than herbal marijuana, and none has shown any improvement over the plant nature gave us to take orally or to smoke.

We live in an antismoking environment. But as a method of delivering certain medicinal compounds, smoking marijuana has some real advantages: The effect is almost instantaneous, allowing the patient, who after all is the best judge, to fine-tune his or her dose to get the needed relief without intoxication. Smoked marijuana has never been demonstrated to have serious pulmonary consequences, but in any case the technology to inhale these cannabinoids without smoking marijuana already exists as vaporizers that allow for smoke-free inhalation.

Hopefully the UCSF study will add to the pressure on the US government to rethink its irrational ban on the medicinal use of marijuana -- and its destructive attacks on patients and caregivers in states that have chosen to allow such use. Rather than admit they have been mistaken all these years, federal officials can cite "important new data" and start revamping outdated and destructive policies. The new Congress could go far in establishing its bona fides as both reasonable and compassionate by immediately moving on this issue.

Such legislation would bring much-needed relief to millions of Americans suffering from cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, and other debilitating illnesses.

 

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A.G. Gonzales to Busy For Democrats

    Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has pretty much told the Democrats to get lost when it comes to them wanting information about his sorry ass firing several US Attorney's that were investigating corruption.

   I guess that the White House plan is to get rid of anyone who gets to close to the truth and then to hire replacements who are to incompetent to try a traffic case much less a corruption case.

   This clan of characters gets more ridiculously stupid by the minute.

  

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From Robert Novak in his column today.

March 3,2007

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has indicated he is too busy to answer letters from Democratic congressional leaders about his firing seven U.S. attorneys involved in probes of public corruption, though a lower-level Justice Department official rejected their proposals.

Rep. Rahm Emanuel, House Democratic Caucus chairman, had written Gonzales two letters suggesting that he name Carol Lam, fired as U.S. attorney in San Diego, as an outside counsel to continue her pursuit of the Duke Cunningham case. Asked by Melissa Charbonneau of the Christian Broadcasting Network about this column’s report that Gonzales did not respond, Gonzales said: “I think that the American people lose if I spend all my time worrying about congressional requests for information, if I spend all my time responding to subpoenas.”

Richard A. Hertling, the acting Justice Department lobbyist, responded Wednesday, 22 days after Emanuel’s letter. He contended “the Justice Department would not ever seek the resignation of a U.S. attorney if doing so would jeopardize a public corruption case” and rejected naming Lam as a special prosecutor.

 

" You Choose '08 " From YouTube, Site For Candidates

   For those of you who did not know it, YouTube has launched a new website for the candidates who are trying to get the presidential nomination. these are not the general videos that you can find all over the Net which criticize the candidate or have some of the things that they have actually said compared to what they really have said in the past.  These are the official vid's which the candidates want you to see. Basically, their campaign stumps and ads.

    The website page is called You Choose ' 08 and you may want to check it out, or not. This is plenty of free publicity for all of those in the running.

 

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Sunni's Killed For Speaking To Shiites and Former Gitmo Residents Acquitted In Kuwaiti Court

   I'm still on my first cup of coffee so I am just going to tell you what is up in the world on this Saturday morning.

   First off, we've got more killing in Iraq but what's new there? Six men were killed execution- -style just south of Baghdad today for supposedly talking to Shiites. The six were all Sunni.  Source

    What a lovely country Bush has turned Iraq into since the US started vacationing in it.

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    A Kuwaiti criminal court acquitted two past residents of Gitmo on charges of joining the Taliban or al-Qaeda.

    Omar Rajab Amin and Abdullah Kamel al-Kundari spent five years at camp Gitmo before being released this past September. What really sucked is that upon their return to Kuwait they were detained by the authorities there.      Source

Six other Kuwaitis formerly held in Guantanamo have been acquitted here of terror charges. Another four are still imprisoned there.

 

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