Hannah's Blog

Is That Right?

Let's see if I've got this straight. When the US invaded Iraq, there were no more weapons of mass destruction (which they acquired in the '80s from our friends in Germany)and there were no terrorists because Saddam wouldn't put up with them. The Iraqi army was composed of 300,000 trained troops, augmented by an ineffective national guard. They had tanks and planes and a command and control communications system and modern highways, which we saw for ourselves through the eyes of embedded photographers.

Despite their training and hardware, the Iraqi military was obviously incapable to protect the Iraqi people from the invading US forces since they more or less capitulated in short order. Consequently, it is now incumbent on the US to raise up a competent Iraqi military. To do what? What's the goal? Are they to be "stood up" so that, if the US attacks again, their defense will be more successful?

There's a logic gap here that my feeble brain cannot leap. Why on earth would one want to build up an army that one has just defeated to a point where it would be able to defeat us? The usual pattern is for the victor in a conflict to prohibit the reconstitution of the vanquished military, at least for a period of time. And, indeed, that's what seems to have been the case after the conflict of 1991. Iraq was inhibited from rebuilding its defenses, which made them easy to attack, but now we want to change that. No matter how many different ways I try to say it, it still doesn't make any sense.

Could it be because this whole scenario is a lie? Could it be because the real agenda was for the US was to acquire some real estate in the Middle East from which it could monitor and control the powers in the Indian Ocean basin--a strategic location which would insure that not only would the US be able to "project power" in the region, but from which it would be easy to penalize any country that might decide to "deny access" to the US, denying access being defined as an offensive act.

Dem Talk

Over the weekend, Senator Feingold used the phrase "for all" and, for some reason, it had come to my mind as well as part of a do-able program for the Democrats. What can we actually accomplish?

Education for all
Social Security for all
Medicare for all
Clean environment for all
Fair elections
Fair wages
Fair taxes
Fair legislation

Of course, Howard Dean started off with the notion of extending Medicare to all by incorporating the children. But, though it seems to have slipped off the radar, Medicare for all people is even more worth-while and doable. (I much prefer the term to "health care" because healthy people don't need care and I'm not at all keen on providing the likes of cosmetic surgery or lippo-suction at the public's expense).
"For all" is a better phrase than "universal" or "national" because the universe is too large and the nation is an artificial construct. Besides, especially in the case of a clean environment, our goal has to incorporate behavior far beyond the boundaries of our continent. The creatures of the oceans also deserve a "clean environment."
I'm sure you'll be able to add other issues. But this is a start and I think it's DOABLE--something to be for, not just against.

The other side of the coin is well put by this post from BFA:

Greetings, from apuuli

Today I received a copy of the Bill Clinton fundraising drive letter asking for my support. I will gladly support the democratic party, WHEN the democrats start "to boldly stand up for what we believe in".

I do not see democrats boldly standing up to the GOP to press for accountability in the wars in Iraq AND Afghanistan. Where are these billions of dollars going, and why haven't we restored the water and electricity that our military leaders destroyed at the start of the occupation, almost 3 years ago?

Why haven't you stood up to the avalanche of injustices surrounding hurricane Katrina, starting with the evacuation (lack of) effort and continuing with the harassment of the surviving citizens of New Orleans?

Why haven't you stood up to speak out against the corporatization of the US health care system, education system, prison system, security systems, news and media agencies and even the voting system of this country? And don't even get me started on the military industrial complex!

Where were the democrats in investigating voting irregularities in Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin and other states during the 2004 election where exit polls showed Kerry with a clear margin of victory, but Diebold voting machines provided different results, in favor of Republicans?

Why aren't Democrats taking a stand against the clear inequality of the justicial system, which makes being poor and Black illegal in this country? Further, why are more Black men going to jail than to college? And, in the very least, call for a moratorium on all death penalty executions, until we are 100% certain we are not murdering innocent people, and that the ultimate punishment is being handed out equitably. I know once this process begins, America will be starting down the road to permanently ending this most heinous of punishments.

Why aren't the Dems taking a stand on immigration? A country of immigrants should not be jailing and deporting people who are pursuing the same things we call the American Dream.

Why aren't the Dems boldly standing up to the Republicans, allowing them to use gays, immigrants, Muslims and crime (which has been declining since the late 70s) as means to scapegoat and distract voters away from the real issues: skyrocketing health care costs (to the benefit of the health care and pharmaceutical industries), skyrocketing fuel prices (to the benefit of the oil industry), skyrocketing corporate profits (to the benefit of the CEOs and wealthy shareholders), and a skyrocketing gap between the rich and poor. I can see why the labor unions have decided not to automatically support the democratic candidates, since the democrats are no longer automatically supporting their interests (same goes for Blacks and the South).

I am waiting for the democrats to push for ratification of the Kyoto Treaty, to live up to pledges for international develoment aid; fully fund the UN and the UN initiative to fight HIV, Malaria and TB; get some backbone and say what you feel, not what you think will get you elected. And do so Boldly! Convince the American population, the poor, the middle class, the Democratic Base that prohibiting gay marriage will not save them money on health care and energy costs, that public education is a fundamental right and all Americans must have the best possible education this country, with all its riches, can afford, the best in the world!

I have had enough of the finger pointing, we need ACTION, we need the same courage the Texas legislators showed when they fled the state to prevent a vote on redistricting. We need to see the backbone that Congressman Murtha showed when he called for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq. We need to stop teaching our children that problems can only be solved through violence, rather than through negotiations and compromise, which is what the rush to war in Iraq did. We need to recognize that the US presence in Iraq, from day one, has served only to increase terrorism in the world and make us less safe. We need leaders who will fight for those who do not have the financial resources, skills, or ability to stand up for themselves.

When you, The Democratic Party, have done this, I will send you a check.

Thank you

MongolBush

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2005/11/23/fiorestay.DTL

Lesson of Katrina

My musings on the lesson of Katrina are a bit more philosophical. For an up to date, on the ground report, peruse Jere's description towards the end.

Actually, the question that popped into my head today is what's the relationship between the aftermath of Katrina, and her sister Rita, and the Roe v. Wade decision?

It may seem strange that the failure to provide an adequate response to a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina and the effort to regulate the termination of a pregnancy via regulation are connected, but in my mind they are. And it's not just a matter of the government not doing what it ought and doing what it oughtn't; though that's the result.

The failure to respond appropriately to a natural disaster and the effort to interfere in the medical response to a naturally inevitable, but dangerous, situation is rooted in an assumption about human nature and the purpose of government. To wit, the persons who have taken charge of our government (they call themselves conservatives) base their behavior on a false assumption. So, of course, the consequences are bound to be disasterous.

What is that false assumption? Quite simply it's the conviction that human beings are by nature evil (born in a state of sin, according to the Catholic Church) and because of that condition, the purpose of government is to make man "fly right" or, at least, behave himself and do better.

Now, you might think in the back of your mind that it's the function of religious establishment to "improve" mankind. And you'd be correct. But what you have to understand is that religion is simply a handmaiden of government, a kinder and gentler way of getting humans to do what they ought--and probably more effective in the long run than the use of force because force tends to generate a lot of resentment. And it costs more.
Which is why a "faith-based government" is presumably a lot more effective and cheaper. (Unless the faith happens to be Islam).

One inevitable consequence of the assumption that man is naturally evil is the perception that he's definitely not entitled to exist and has to demonstrate through appropriate subservient behavior that he deserves to live. Civil rights--i.e. active participation in the political direction of the society--aren't an entitlement either. People who haven't consented to submit (the captives in Guantanamo, for example), don't have any rights.
In other words, the government reserves the right to terminate any life at any time and any other claim to make that determination needs to be rejected. Which suggests, doesn't it, that the government's assertion of the sole right to interfere in the process of procreation has far wider ramifications than most people think. Individual autonomy at the end of life is also a challenge to the assumption that any decision about who lives and who dies is a government prerogative. And it all come back to the initial assumption that humans are basically worthless unless they prove their value.

Of course, if government's role is perceived as simply countering human falibility, then it's not logical to expect any behavior other than exhorations to do better (an evacuation is nothing more than an order to get out) and punish those who don't follow orders. Which is exactly what we have been witness to in Iraq and more intimately in the region devastated by Katrina.

The assumption that humans are basically evil has all kinds of "beneficial" consequences. It absolves those who have taken on the responsibility of dealing effectively with natural disasters of actually taking any action; it makes it possible to rationalize any adverse consequence as the fault of those who, for whatever reason, were incapable of following orders; and it makes it possible to ignore that there is a basic difference between "giving an order" and "making order." And that's more than apparent in both Iraq and the American Gulf Coast.

Can we conclude that the conservative (or neocon) assumptions have been proven to be bankrupt? I do. The only question now is how to explain what's happened to people who never even considered that the purpose of government was to make them better people.

*********
Jere and Ted's further adventures in the aftermath of Katrina------

Ted and I were able to get lodging for a night, and so we drove into New Orleans yesterday morning from Mississippi and spent the day touring town and had dinner with friends who live a block from Bayou St. John, and another block from where Julian and I lived during the war. The area is near City Park and like most of the city had water, but not as long or deep as other areas. Also most of the houses are raised with basement apartments.

Basement level is at ground, nothing is under ground, not even graves in the city. They had water in the basement and have recently completed repairs. Mary and Clyde separated some years ago, and have a better relationship for it. Mary?s house is in Gentilly and substained six feet of water for several weeks. She was one block from the good side of the Industrial Canal so that tells you what the ninth ward suffered witch was on the wrong side. She is living with Clyde again and works as a nurse at the East Jefferson Parish Hospital where she lived for two months during and following the storm. City Park is very badly injured and the trees that survive are questionable I would guess.

We drove out Canal street to the Lake and the whole of Lake View, which is an area from the Cemeteries to the Lake is shocking. It is dead. No vegetation, except a few palmetto palms. Ted?s family is buried in several of the Cemeteries at the end of Canal, and they all suffered damage. Giant tombs that collapsed, from age or surge, not clear. Ted?s father?s home is abandoned and the street is lined with parked cars that have turned white from the mold and toxic whatever. Piles of stuff on all the streets as people try to clear out sheet rock and carpet and furniture. We sold the house in 93, and will check to see if we can reclaim it for back taxes. Probably a lost cause, but this was a working class neighborhood, a block from Canal and we are not able to wrap our minds around what we saw.

We stayed at a B&B at Constance and Constantinople. The couple have run it since 1983. he is the maitre di at Arnauld?s, which plans to re-open this week, with a staff or five waiters instead of its usual 50. Uptown from the River to St. Charles looks great. House are damaged from the wind and torn roofs but did not suffer rising water. Once you cross Canal it is devastation once more. The French quarter looks clean and as usual, Sunday afternoon crowds, but as one vendor told me at the French Market which doesn?t even have food at this point, just a few of the vendors, ?New Orleans is putting on a show, but it is going to be years to come back if even then.? Magazine Street was open for business but for who. The hotels are still not open for the most part, windows still out. Maybe when the schools reopen, in January some people will return, but only the rich. It is a slippery slope still.

I have never felt safer, even with the lack of street lights for much of the drive home last night. No one out on the streets, cops every where, and it is a white city except for a few black families who are obviously well healed. The pollution problems seem under control for now, no smells or muck in the streets. Or no more than usual.

The other guests at breakfast were very interesting. The news service Rueters, sic, has made it their home since September 12. this was the most incredible guest house we could have possibly found. So many stories.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thoughts on Roe v. Wade that don't really fit here, but I'm disinclined to set up another post for---

Toobin on Roe v. Wade
I'm a reluctant commentator on this case, irked by the ephemisms, mis-characterization and failure to address the legitimacy of the state regulating medical procedures to begin with.
The premature ejection of fetal tissues is an unpleasant, malodorous and often painful event. Extraction very likely does not make it much better, but having medical assistance is probably better than not. Also, when you come right down to it, the ejection or extaction of the mature fetus is not a pleasant experience, but it's better than the alternative (which I will leave the reader to imagine). In any event, the reproductive process, wether it aborts (most implantations do not stick) or results in a "normal" live birth, is a burdensome and sometimes deadly process. Being forced to undergo it by the laws of man is inherently unfair--a potential sentence of death that cannot be justified.
Unless, that is, one assumes that the state is empowered to determine who lives and who dies, at all times.
It is obviously this assumption which underlies the conservative determination that medical procedures of all kinds are properly interfered with by the state. (Roe v. Wade isn't just important because of its effect on women).
Whence comes this assumption that the state is entitled to make life and death decisions? Well, from another assumption. To wit, that humans are naturally evil and governments are set up to make them better, whence it naturally follows that, when this expectation is satisfied, humans are to be rewarded with certain rights, beginning with the right to life. In other words, humans aren't entitled to exist; they have to "earn" that right by demonstrating their obedience and subservience to the state.
The assumption is the basis of a social construct (not a compact) where there are no social obligations or responsibilities (or governmental ones, naturally), only individual ones. And the individual's choice is a simple one--do as you're told, or die.
Which is not what most Americans have been taught. Most have been taught and accept that government is the result of a social contract (not a one-time event like losing one's virginity), one which exists in a state of constant change and renewal to adjust communal needs to the environmental change that government is supposed to address. In other words, a free people assume that government is supposed to enhance their freedoms, not curtail them. Moreover, other social systems, created to address particular problems, such as illness and disease, should be able to count on government support, not interference in the pursuit of their profession to make things better.
Which leads me to the question: Where in the Constitution is government granted the right to interfere in medical matters, as long as they are handled according to the standards of the profession?

What Did.......When Did?

What did the President know about plans to plant WMD in Iraq and when did he know it?

That's the question. And I'm not asking it about the recent report that Brewster Jennings foiled a plan to import WMD and "salt" Iraq to make the Bush/Cheney claims valid. Although, it did occur to me that the assumption, that Mrs. Wilson was targeted in retaliation for something her husband had done, however consistent with the modus operandi of organized crime, was an 'easy' cover for the real reason which, in the interest of national security, couldn't be revealed, the question of what Iraq did or did not have is just a diversion from the real issue.

The WMD I'm asking about are the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles with nuclear warheads that the United States Air Force has been wanting to stash on the southern flank of the Eurasian Continent for the last four decades.

Clearly, President Kennedy knew about them before he got elected, no doubt from his service in the Senate, because he ordered them not to be deployed in Turkey and, after they were deployed anyway and the Soviet Union objected by sending missiles to Cuba, he had to order them removed as part of a secret deal with Krushchev. But that wasn't revealed to the American public for forty years. And, btw, the missiles are back in Turkey. Who knows how long they've been there and which President approved the importation?

Presumably every President since Kennedy has been informed about the introduction of American WMD into Germany, Belgium, Britain and Italy. Perhaps there's an inventory that comes with the nuclear suitcase that's handed over after he's sworn in. What obviously isn't passed along is any awareness that the public support of non-proliferation of nuclear weapons conflicts with the long-standing practice of letting the Department of Defense introduce WMD into whichever country wants them and, it now appears, even into some that don't. If we don't call it proliferation, it's not.

We do know that Japan, for very good historical reasons, has been reluctant to even see the American nuclear fleet and the Philippines have uninvited the US Air Force and the Navy so the military presence on Guam has gradually increased. Otherwise, the eastern flank of Asia doesn't have nearly the "coverage" the DoD would like. Vietnam, of course, was supposed to help fill that gap, but President Nixon pulled the assets out instead of making sure that communist China was properly "contained."

Iraq, on the other side of the Indian Ocean basin probably looked like a good location to establish a permanent presence for our ICBM "shield" and the availability of oil provided an added incentive to strike a deal with Saddam Hussein. But, despite all kinds of bribes throughout the nineteen eighties (including a significant amount of chemical WMD), the dictator of Iraq just wouldn't agree to turn over some of that "useless" desert to permanent plantations of missiles, satellite tracking stations and a whole array of communications monitoring equipment that would need to be protected by patriots.

But when did the President know what it was that Iraq was supposed to do? When did George Bush the first find out? Was he "in the loop" while Reagan was President and Rumsfeld was dangling WMD as an incentive or did he not find out, like Bill Clinton, until he took possession of the Oval Office? And when was it brought to George the second's attention that patience and time had run out and what Saddam Hussein wouldn't agree to would have to be taken by force. Was he in on the scam before he got elected? Was he, indeed, selected because of his known attraction to deception, to telling lies just for the fun of it? Or was it just assumed that the father's son would go along with whatever he was told?

Surely, if Poppy could make him President, then a plan that had been worked on for three decades could easily be achieved. Perhaps George Bush the second didn't have to know anything more than that. Perhaps treason is just that easy.

Variability redux

Today, November 7th, the Omi got up a little after six, ready to go to the toilet and then have her breakfast. She read the paper and then decided to get dressed before deboning the chicken for the dog. That took care of most of the morning. Scrambled egg for lunch, plus a cup of coffee and a cookie. Obviously, her appetite has returned.

Later in the afternoon she wanted to make adjustments to her skirt. She has lost weight and the waist is too big. Will work on it some more tomorrow.

Supper was taken at the table too. We had pizza. She had red cabbage, deviled ham and mashed potatoes. Our not finishing the pizza and Julian going off was interpreted as a reaction to her being at the table. Though I explained that Julian had to get ready for the City Council meeting, that didn't seem satisfactory. Better that things be negative as long as she's the cause.
*******

November 9

Nurse came yesterday and found her patient very voluble but not dressed in street clothes like the previous two days. Heart rate is still a little fast, but the blood pressure is good.

Woke up very early today and was ready to get up at seven and have breakfast. The paper got read and then, after she got dressed, she did a little sewing on a skirt that's gotten too loose.

There's lots of conversation but it's as if she's talking with a stranger--making small talk about whether sleep was refreshing. She had lunch at the table in the kitchen, including coffee and a cookie and then she and the dog waited impatiently for her dinner. The new time is confusing for both.

There were hunters in the woods today and the dog went into hiding at the sound of gun shots. Gypsy was eager to go outside, begging to be let out for a run, but I had to explain to the Omi that it really isn't safe with the hunters in the woods.

Late in the afternoon I had set up the new pictures of Milo in a slide-show on the computer and brought the Omi out to have a look. She wanted to go through the series at least three times and then she picked some for me to print and watched while I did that. Mostly she wanted pictures of father and son. The father looks so happy to have a son.

After we were done printing out four pictures, I took her to the table to wait for dinner. Then she suddenly said she was ready to go home and I had to explain about how we are at home and that she's been here for over two years. Somehow, it seems to me, that looking at photographs is really disorienting for her. It's as if the pictures transport her to another place.
This isn't the first time that's happened. The first time was on St. Simons when she decided that she needed to go next door to go home. Another time, after looking at pictures of her cousin, Elfriede, and her family, she was certain they'd all visited for a couple of days. It's almost as if she can't differentiate between a picture and her actual surroundings. She is where she's looking.

The other strange thing is that she never looks where she's going or even where she's going to sit. Which probably accounts for why she had so many falls and so many broken bones over the years. And why she was always getting lost.

Lots of pains this evening that seemed to be wandering around. She wanted a hot water bottle, after all, and then put it on her chest. And all the while she jabbered as if to a stranger.
****

Another strange day today. Partly, the change in the time seems to be to blame. Was wide awake at seven this morning, had breakfast, read the paper, went to the bathrooms a couple of times. Then, about eleven there was a plaintive complaint about this being her last day and nobody paying any attention. So, we went in and chatted her up and asked what she meant and told her it wasn't her last day on earth by any stretch. Then she agreed to get dressed in her pretty blouse and she put on the black and white skirt and hung her bathrobe up on the back of the door.

For lunch I gave her some crackers and cheddar cheese and a jar of baby fruit desert and a mug of coffee. Then she spent a couple of hours worrying about the dog, who's not used to the new time yet either and starts looking for her dinner about 1:30. I try to make her wait until 2:30, if only because after she's eaten she expects a walk and we're trying to cut down the number of times she get taken out. I'd like to let her run--there aren't any birds in the field. But now the problem is hunters in the woods shooting at anything that moves. There's not supposed to be hunting within the town limits, but the Univesity does not monitor its lands.

Anyway, by four in the afternoon, the Omi was just about wasted. Everything was hurting so I gave her some hydrocodone and helped her get into bed with a hot water bottle. She had been trying to do some exercises, stretching up the wall. Somehow, there's some desperation setting in. She keeps saying she doesn't mind if it happens quick--referring to her death. But, she's afraid. The nurse has mentioned increasing agitation. Perhaps that's what I'm seeing. But, it's not anything I haven't seen before.
******

November 16

The last few days getting ready for our DNC Kickoff party last night kept me sort of distracted from the Omi saga. Sunday was a good day on which she got dressed and then spent some hours sewing on a skirt to adjust the waist. In the evening she asked for a sleep aid because that lets her sleep through.

Monday was a barely get out of bed day. Had to get up during the night to interrupt the removal of the depends and secure it with duct tape. Although she seemed wide awake, with the light on, there was no recognition in her eyes. It was as if another person was there.

Yesterday, in preparation for the party, I told her she'd have to get dressed, if she wanted to participate. So, she did but complained about pain on a regular basis and even asked for medicine. I'm still not administering the hydrocodone unless she indicates a need for it.

The party went off well. The Omi didn't eat much--most of the dishes people brought not being to her liking--but she did enjoy some hand-made chocolates provided by one of the guests. Most were impressed by her advanced age and her ability to share in the conversation for about two hours. Then she more or less collapsed and I helped her to bed. Gyspy too was tired and asked to be let into the room to get into her bed. The dog had been made much of and petted most generously. Finally had enough.

***********
Well, it is the eve of the Omi's 98th Birthday and I am beset by critters. All week, just about, she's been predicting that she's about to die. Didn't want breakfast a couple of mornings because, if she's going to die, she doesn't have to eat. Right? Well, negate the premise and breakfast gets consumed.

In fact, today I suggested that it was really time for a wash. So we warmed up the bathroom (it was 19 degrees outside this morning) and she had a sponge bath, all by herself, and then she decided that she was just "skin and bone" and I had to tell her that's what happens when you don't eat. So then she wanted lunch early but after half a piece of bread announced she couldn't eat any more. That it was too hard to swallow. So, I suggested that the problem was in taking too big bites, which she can't chew. Duh.
Smaller bites made it possible to get down two slices of bread with lots of butter and jam.

Meanwhile, the dog is running back and forth. I figure the Omi's up to something, but it seems that I've merely forgotten the dog's treat when the Omi got her bread. So, I try to make amends. But it's not enough. The dog bone is refused and the dog heads for the living room door. OK, I forgot. Mid-morning the dog likes to sit on a big cushion by the window in the living room, enjoy the sun streaming in and watch the world to by and she likes to consume her treats on the dais. Should have remembered that.

Next, I look out the window and there's a cardinal sitting forlornly on the branch where the empty bird-feeder hangs. Sometimes its a squirrel that sits there until the feeder gets filled. Do they know to take turns till I'm reminded to actually put the seed I bought into the feeder? Critters.

********

Today we are celebrating a 98th. It is rather startling. I've never known anyone that old. There was an old uncle, named Peter Pontzen, who was ninety six when I met him. And it was reported that our doctor, Alfred Haas, lived to be ninety six. He got his medical degree in the US after fleeing Germany when he was sixty-nine and lived to his ripe old age by going to Switzerland every year and getting special shots.

Had to get up at 2:00 AM, again, to remonstrate with the Omi who was trying to removed her depends. We're back to using duct tape and it was unlikely that the thing would actually come off, but the sound over the inter-com had to be attended.

In the morning, when I commented cheerfully that the thing was still intact, she said that I'd told her not to take it off. So, despite appearances, she does know what's going on in the middle of the night. Usuall, when I arrive, there's a blank stare and no recognition in the eyes.

*****
Madam just called for some of the cheese-cake she ordered, "while she can still eat it." Today, she is dying in pieces. The other day she told the nurse her hands were going to fall off. Then she asked if there is a doctor available because she was wanting some sleeping pills, which she was going to hoard and then take all at once. But, it's no longer relevant because she's decided to get the crematorium to take her away. The nurse laughed and I joined her. It's been absolutely impossible to explain that the crematorium people only come after she's dead. She wants so much to be an active observer of her demise.

Anyway, we've had three phone calls today and she's made sense on each one, even though sometimes she didn't seem to know whom she was talking to. But, that's nothing new either. There's a telephone script that's quite servicable--a whole series of stock phrases. Amazing how much of what we do is automatic.

Well, I will make her a goulash. She'll like the idea of that, even if she doesn't actually want to eat it. Potato dumplings will go down well. I took the Winnie to the big super market in Exeter. After I'd got everything on the list, including the meds, I just had to get out of there. But they carry things like imported dumpling mix.

*********

Well, the 98th went off without a hitch. The Omi sat in the kitchen while I fixed the goulash and the dumplings. Since I've run out of gin, I poured her a small glass of triple sec of which she took too big a swallow and it made her cough. After that she refused it. So, I told her it would kill her and isn't that what she wants. She said, "yes, but not like that."

I mention that because the Omi is really intent on being an active participant in her demise. Every couple of days she wants to know when the people from the crematory are going to arrive; does she have enough money to pay them; where's the check-book so she can write a check.
Now she is looking forward to her grandson arriving with a box he's made for her cremation. They're coming Wednesday and she told him when he called that she hoped she'd still be here. I told her she would be able to try it out and see if it fits.

That's always been important to her--trying things on to see if they fit. As long as she was making clothes for individual customers, they hardly ever did, at least not the first time. I think she really enjoyed the fitting process, making people stand still while she pinned and nipped and tucked. It drove me crazy and to making my own clothes when I was about fourteen. Also, there was the fact that nothing she made ever fit so that one could move with comfort. She liked the clothes to be sort of "poured on" at the same time they were supposed to disguise a person's physical "abnormalities." I've since learned that there are other people who like their clothes to be confining. Must be, for so many to have put up with corsets in centuries past.

Craming things in is also characteristic of how she eats. Now that she has no teeth left for chewing, her habit of taking in ravenous fork-fulls ends up making it hard for her to eat because she keeps choking. The dumplings, being very soft, slid easily down the gullet. The cake annoyed her because, the slice being thin (she said she was already full), the pieces she cut kept falling off the fork. She's really got no patience for anything. Seems ironic that she's having to be patient about when she dies.

*****
News has arrived that an old "friend" (actually, the sister of an old friend) has died at the age of 99--on her birthday, it would seem. Whether that's what energized the Omi or just the realization that she's actually feeling pretty fine, today has been relatively cheerful, so far.

She taken interest in her shrivelled hands and decided she needs to tak in more liquids (true) and rubbing them with vaseline wont hurt either. Also, she seems to have agreed that she needs to eat more. Asked for an egg of lunch and then coffee with some cake--"a small piece" of course.

One of the reasons I'm recording all this stuff is because I don't think it's unique to the Omi. For his own reasons, the spouse has always taken an interest in the well-being of Marjorie Milne, now a widdow for several years and in her early nineties. Every now and then Marjorie has a rough spell--like when she fell and broke her leg a couple of years ago. After the hospital and then the nursing home, she relied on neighbors and friends to provide support. She knows about meal-on-wheels but one gets the sense that she doesn't like what they bring her and she doesn't like not knowing the volunteers.

The last few days Marjorie has been under the weather and quite happy to have deliveries of chicken soup for lunch and whatever breakfasts neighbors drop off (someone brought oatmeal today). She didn't want soup today but feels too weak to fix anything, so the spouse offered to come and make a sandwich. Marjorie agreed to that as long as he fixes it "like I tell you."

See, that's the bottom line. Old people have to be able to give directions. The Omi always says when I offer to fix a gin and tonic, "yes, but a small one." Perhaps people who give orders live longer, or perhaps people who live longer thrive on giving orders. Anyway, when I went to help with Essie Mae Clark, who'd lost both legs to diabetes, what she needed most from me was to do her bidding, including eating the stuff brought by the meals-on-wheels which she really hated. It was pretty tasteless and since I'd already fixed her breakfast of sausages and grits, I knew she wasn't starving. (She taught me to start the sausages in a pan with a little water to make sure they were cooked through and didn't burn).

How many people resist getting proper care until they're to a point where the care is going to have to be really intense and expensive because they're afraid that their interests and directions aren't going to be taken into account? If we're going to have a rational national health care program, then there's going to have to be lot more respect for what people really want.

*********

November 21--The coming change in the weather was signalled by an
increase in aches and pains. Time for hydrocodone a couple of times a day.
The Omi complains about her "heart" hurting, but it's just her chest in the area where the heart is. Muscles, both front and back, get stressed by the continuing dislocation caused by the curvature of her back. The elixyr works fine, but takes a few minutes.

A nap in the middle of the day was refreshing and she took some interest in the paper.

An ordinary day and night.

*****
Tuesday--After getting up a little later than usual (she said she hadn't slept all night, but I hadn't heard any evidence), breakfast was followed by a rather slow process getting dressed because the elastic in her pj's was too loose and needed to be adjusted--meaning she took the waistband apart and took the old elastic out. Since it seemed too complicated to get il sewn up again, she thought she'd need to go shopping for new pajamas. I set up the sewing machine and and sewed them up and the Omi pulled throught the elastic and sewed up the ends. So, that was fixed. Then, in the process of locating thread and needles and scissors, the doors on her sewing box came off and that had to be fixed. Did that too.

I'd hardly gotten her settled with her evening tea, then she was off to the bathroom. Lots of energy, but every time she got up, she ended up breathing rather hard and experienced chest pains, which the hydrocodone seems to alleviate. The hard/rapid breathing is something new. Also, she's got a runny nose--may have caught a cold.

The Omi had two pieces of her cake today. Does like those sweets. And the spouse took some over to Marjorie Milne, who had decided she wasn't getting out of bed today and needed someone to come fix lunch. Old ladies like to have someone look after them.

******
November 23

Today was an early day with breakfast soon afte 7:00 AM. There was no pain but I gave her the elixyr anyway and soon after there were pains all over. Another dose mid-morning didn't seem to help appreciably either, but her mobility and frequent use of the bell to summon assistance led me to conclude that the pains were largely illusory. She had a new script about how her bones had made her a dancer and now their deterioration signalled her end.

For lunch she asked for a scrambled egg. Soon after, nurse Fran arrived and got to hear about her aches, the death of her friend, the fact that she wasn't going to send anything to the funeral because those people had enough money of their own, as well as the desire to have it all end soon without too much pain. Nurse Fran is a patient listener and didn't detect any significant change in either the blood pressure, heart rate or lungs. I thought for a while yesterday that she might have caught a cold, but the runny nose disappeared over-night.

She had a jar of baby fruit desert and then a cup of coffee. Cake later on didn't get eaten since the pains flared up. My thinking is that she's got quite a bit of gas that's making her feel uncomfortable but she's not very good at identifying the source of her discomfort.

A gin and tonic in the late afternoon went down well and she welcomed another (half a glass). Goulash at dinner was not a great success, probably because this time the dumplings were missing. Anyway, I persuaded her to accept a hot water bottle for her feet and go to bed. When she was all settled, she launched into a little speech thanking me for my concern and telling me that it's the end. We'll see.

*****
Thanksgiving 2005

First grandson made a box. So, when the crematorium people finally come they'll have something to carry the Omi away. I think it's too pretty a box to burn up, but that's what the Omi wants and grandson has been able to provide. Grand-daughter in law and great grandsons tried it on and it fits them too. And, it makes a convenient seat for sharing stories and games.

We had turkey, of course, and stuffing and rice and broccoli and cranberries and then a humongous cake with number candles that the Omi blew out in one breath. Though she died last night, today was a fun day. Even some snow for the boys to play in. And it sure was pretty when the sun came out.

***********

Friday after Thanksgiving was uneventful. Everyone helped to finish off the cake and we took care of the turkey. Charlotte had bought some stuffing mix we cooked up to go with dinner. It probably was the lavender among the other spices that made it not delectible to anyone but Josh. Live and learn.

Thomas takes special care of his Omi. Walks with her to her room and shares his picture books. She tells him he's going to make a good doctor.

This morning started early with a serious complaint about the crematorium people still having not shown up. She wanted to know if we couldn't hire another company that would be more likely to come. We had our usual discussion about live people not being cremated. Even went so far as to explain that what the Nazis did, collecting people and taking them to the crematorium, was a bad thing. So, she decided, I would have to kill her. She does, however, understand that I won't do that because I don't want to go to jail.

Breakfast went down well enough. Then she decided to get dressed, but, after getting her clothes out of the dresser, needed help to get back to her chair.
After a while. it was obvious that she wasn't getting dressed, after all. Decided that it was too much trouble. Instead, she wanted to eat some meat to help her bones. I brought her some sliced ham cut into small pieces. For lunch she had a scrambled egg and then opted for a cup of coffee, but no cookie. Regular hydrocodone every four hours seems to keep most of the pains away.

She just asked for a hot water bottle. Lots of demands today. So, I guess she's doing pretty good.

******

Guess it's about time to start a new thread. But first, the Omi woke relatively early and had scooted so far over to the wall that she couldn't find the light--ended up with a book off the book-case in bed with her instead.
After a trip to the commode and a drink of tonic, she went back to sleep untill well after seven and then when I woke her she volunteered that she'd had a good night.

I'm not so sure, since I was awakened at midnight, at two and then again at 3:30 by noises that didn't persist long enough to prompt me to get up and check. It wasn't the dog jingling her tags either.

Now, after having read about the old pope having movies made about him, she's going to sew up the waist-band on her pajamas. The elastic keeps having to be taken out and put back. This time it's just a matter of the machine having missed a few inches along the way. Either that or the thread is just wearing out.

Rich on Lying

Just four points in response to Frank Rich's column in today's New York Times about the lying Bush and Cheney.

1) There is no reason to believe that the Rendon group is spreading any less disinformation now than it did before. So, I wouldn't believe them. It is interesting though how many people (scowcroft,laird, rendon, haig) are coming out of the woodwork to rewrite history. Never mind the shill Woodward.
2) The reason Rumsfeld and then Bush went to Mongolia was to see if that would be a more attractive venue for the installation of ICBM intercept missiles to counteract China, Russia and North Korea, since it's increasingly unlikely that Iraq will ever be "secure" enough to welcome them. Wouldn't surprise me if the high-tech equipment on their planes didn't run a few tests on the defensive systems of their antagonists.
3) The reason Vietnam documentation is off-limits is because the real goal then was the same as now--a permanent military presence for the US in the Eastern Hemisphere from which China and Russia and India could be "contained." Rumsfeld has now redefined the goal by making any effort "to deny access" to the US an offensive move by other nations, but the fact is that, for some inexplicable reason, the proponents of the "free market" don't seem to be able to function without a military back-up. What used to be referred to as "gun-boat diplomacy" in our history books survives in the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned about and, believe it or not, Nixon took to heart.
4) These fellows lie for the fun of it and when something is fun, there's no reason to stop. The more outrageous the lie, the greater the fun and the more likely they are to repeat it. Maybe lying is addictive.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
http://www.markfiore.com/animation/while.html **NOT TO BE MISSED**

The New York Times
November 27, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Dishonest, Reprehensible, Corrupt ...
By FRANK RICH

GEORGE W. BUSH is so desperate for allies that his hapless Asian tour took him to Ulan Bator, a first for an American president, so he could mingle with the yaks and give personal thanks for Mongolia's contribution of some 160 soldiers to "the coalition of the willing." Dick Cheney, whose honest-and-ethical poll number hit 29 percent in Newsweek's latest survey, is so radioactive that he vanished into his bunker for weeks at a time during the storms Katrina and Scootergate.

The whole world can see that both men are on the run. Just how much so became clear in the brace of nasty broadsides each delivered this month about Iraq. Neither man engaged the national debate ignited by John Murtha about how our troops might be best redeployed in a recalibrated battle against Islamic radicalism. Neither offered a plan for "victory." Instead, both impugned their critics' patriotism and retreated into the past to defend the origins of the war. In a seasonally appropriate impersonation of the misanthropic Mr. Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life," the vice president went so far as to label critics of the administration's prewar smoke screen both "dishonest and reprehensible" and "corrupt and shameless." He sounded but one epithet away from a defibrillator.

The Washington line has it that the motivation for the Bush-Cheney rage is the need to push back against opponents who have bloodied the White House in the polls. But, Mr. Murtha notwithstanding, the Democrats are too feeble to merit that strong a response. There is more going on here than politics.

Much more: each day brings slam-dunk evidence that the doomsday threats marshaled by the administration to sell the war weren't, in Cheney-speak, just dishonest and reprehensible but also corrupt and shameless. The more the president and vice president tell us that their mistakes were merely innocent byproducts of the same bad intelligence seen by everyone else in the world, the more we learn that this was not so. The web of half-truths and falsehoods used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven by design and then foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in the White House. The real point of the Bush-Cheney verbal fisticuffs this month, like the earlier campaign to take down Joseph Wilson, is less to smite Democrats than to cover up wrongdoing in the executive branch between 9/11 and shock and awe.

The cover-up is failing, however. No matter how much the president and vice president raise their decibel levels, the truth keeps roaring out. A nearly 7,000-word investigation in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times found that Mr. Bush and his aides had "issued increasingly dire warnings" about Iraq's mobile biological weapons labs long after U.S. intelligence authorities were told by Germany's Federal Intelligence Service that the principal source for these warnings, an Iraqi defector in German custody code-named Curveball, "never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so." The five senior German intelligence officials who spoke to The Times said they were aghast that such long-discredited misinformation from a suspected fabricator turned up in Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations and in the president's 2003 State of the Union address (where it shared billing with the equally bogus 16 words about Saddam's fictitious African uranium).

Right after the L.A. Times scoop, Murray Waas filled in another piece of the prewar propaganda puzzle. He reported in the nonpartisan National Journal that 10 days after 9/11, "President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda."

The information was delivered in the President's Daily Brief, a C.I.A. assessment also given to the vice president and other top administration officials. Nonetheless Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney repeatedly pounded in an implicit (and at times specific) link between Saddam and Al Qaeda until Americans even started to believe that the 9/11 attacks had been carried out by Iraqis. More damning still, Mr. Waas finds that the "few credible reports" of Iraq-Al Qaeda contacts actually involved efforts by Saddam to monitor or infiltrate Islamic terrorist groups, which he regarded as adversaries of his secular regime. Thus Saddam's antipathy to Islamic radicals was the same in 2001 as it had been in 1983, when Donald Rumsfeld, then a Reagan administration emissary, embraced the dictator as a secular fascist ally in the American struggle against the theocratic fascist rulers in Iran.

What these revelations also tell us is that Mr. Bush was wrong when he said in his Veterans Day speech that more than 100 Congressional Democrats who voted for the Iraqi war resolution "had access to the same intelligence" he did. They didn't have access to the President's Daily Brief that Mr. Waas uncovered. They didn't have access to the information that German intelligence officials spoke about to The Los Angeles Times. Nor did they have access to material from a Defense Intelligence Agency report, released by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan this month, which as early as February 2002 demolished the reliability of another major source that the administration had persistently used for its false claims about Iraqi-Al Qaeda collaboration.

The more we learn about the road to Iraq, the more we realize that it's a losing game to ask what lies the White House told along the way. A simpler question might be: What was not a lie? The situation recalls Mary McCarthy's explanation to Dick Cavett about why she thought Lillian Hellman was a dishonest writer: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' "

If Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney believe they were truthful in the run-up to the war, it's easy for them to make their case. Instead of falsely claiming that they've been exonerated by two commissions that looked into prewar intelligence - neither of which addressed possible White House misuse and mischaracterization of that intelligence - they should just release the rest of the President's Daily Briefs and other prewar documents that are now trickling out. Instead, incriminatingly enough, they are fighting the release of any such information, including unclassified documents found in post-invasion Iraq requested from the Pentagon by the pro-war, neocon Weekly Standard. As Scott Shane reported in The New York Times last month, Vietnam documents are now off limits, too: the National Security Agency won't make public a 2001 historical report on how American officials distorted intelligence in 1964 about the Gulf of Tonkin incident for fear it might "prompt uncomfortable comparisons" between the games White Houses played then and now to gin up wars.

SOONER or later - probably sooner, given the accelerating pace of recent revelations - this embarrassing information will leak out anyway. But the administration's deliberate efforts to suppress or ignore intelligence that contradicted its Iraq crusade are only part of the prewar story. There were other shadowy stations on the disinformation assembly line. Among them were the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, a two-man Pentagon operation specifically created to cherry-pick intelligence for Mr. Cheney's apocalyptic Iraqi scenarios, and the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), in which Karl Rove, Karen Hughes and the Cheney hands Lewis Libby and Mary Matalin, among others, plotted to mainline this propaganda into the veins of the press and public. These murky aspects of the narrative - like the role played by a private P.R. contractor, the Rendon Group, examined by James Bamford in the current Rolling Stone - have yet to be recounted in full.

No debate about the past, of course, can undo the mess that the administration made in Iraq. But the past remains important because it is a road map to both the present and the future. Leaders who dissembled then are still doing so. Indeed, they do so even in the same speeches in which they vehemently deny having misled us then - witness Mr. Bush's false claims about what prewar intelligence was seen by Congress and Mr. Cheney's effort last Monday to again conflate the terrorists of 9/11 with those "making a stand in Iraq." (Maj. Gen. Douglas Lute, director of operations for Centcom, says the Iraqi insurgency is 90 percent homegrown.) These days Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney routinely exaggerate the readiness of Iraqi troops, much as they once inflated Saddam's W.M.D.'s.

"We're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history," the vice president said of his critics. "We're going to continue throwing their own words back at them." But according to a Harris poll released by The Wall Street Journal last Wednesday, 64 percent of Americans now believe that the Bush administration "generally misleads the American public on current issues to achieve its own ends." That's why it's Mr. Cheney's and the president's own words that are being thrown back now - not to rewrite history but to reveal it for the first time to an angry country that has learned the hard way that it can no longer afford to be without the truth.

No Free Lunch ...or water, either

Foster's Daily Democrat published my letter on November 25, 2005

About twenty years ago, when I expressed my concern to a county engineer that the landfill site he was promoting would almost certainly end up contaminating people's private wells and should either be lined or located somewhere else, he assured me that if that happened, they would simply hook the affected households to the central water distribution system. And, he went on to explain, that it "wouldn't be economic(al)" to prevent the pollution.

This clued me in to the fact that "not economic(al)" simply means that somebody's getting something (clean drinkable water in that case) that they don't have to pay for; which is a bad thing from the economists' perspective.

So, what we are seeing in proposals to sell off the ground water by the caseload is the realization of the economist's dream. The problem isn't that keeping all freshwater sources free from pollutants is expensive; it's that free goods are inherently bad.

Everybody's supposed to pay to survive. There is to be no free lunch, or water.

Watergate to 9/11

Let's begin with the assumption that there are two major categories of deception: the self-protective and the ego-inflating.

The self-protective lie tends to surface after an act that one doesn't want others to know about. In other words, it's an effort to cover something up for the purpose of avoiding detection and the possibility of punishment or revenge. It's a behavior that we can actually observe in other creatures. Some birds go even further and use deception to protect their off-spring by luring a potential predator in another direction. So, an element of distraction is also quite commonly associated with deception.

Deception that's designed to inflate the ego is an entirely different event. While we are all familiar with "boasting"--lies designed to make an individual appear more important than he is--and soon learn to discount whatever such a person habitually presents about himself, ego-inflating deception is actually entirely disconnected from the effect on its audience. One might even characterize such deception as "pure" in the sense that there is no ulterior motive. The deceiver glories in the act of deception, of "putting one over on other people," regardless of the eventual discovery and/or reaction. The deceiver derives self-importance in direct proportion to the success of the deception and the number of people deceived. When "all the people" are "fooled all the time" that's the epitomy of success. But, since there are no limits to how far the ego can be inflated, no number or extent of the deception is ever enough. If anything, like a serial killer, the ego-inflating deceiver is driven to do it over and over.

One of the recorded reactions by various members of the public to the deception practiced by the White House in the run-up to the war in Iraq, that caught my eye the other day, was the assessment by a long-time law enforcer that the changing story or justification for an action is a clear sign of deception in his experience. Of course, we all expect crooks to lie in an effort to escape detection, but it seems to me that the changing story, whose inconsistencies are easy to see, must be movitated something else--the desire to maintain the deception at any cost.

By "any cost" I mean that no matter how flimsy the new story seems and how ridiculous the deceiver is perceived, the deception is more important than that it be believed. Which would seem to suggest that regardless of how long it lasts, eventually the deception will be so tattered and porous that it will no longer be believed by anyone. And that's our only salvation.
That and the probability that lies are in fact limited, even if the inflation of the ego is not, and that, being limited, the pattern of lies tends to be repeated, making it possible for the observant person to recognize what's going on and arrest it before it goes too far.

Which, oddly enough, brings me back to my topic--the relationship between Watergate and 9/11. Obviously, the similarity doesn't lie in the perpetrators being speedily arrested. While the individual's charged with perpetrating a third-rate burglary in a large apartment and office complex were arrested on the spot, the third-rate high-jackers of four jets on 9/11 will, presumably, never even be charged because they all died on the spot. Or so the story goes.

So what's got me thinking about Watergate in connection with 9/11? Well, first there's the fact that the perpetrators were under contract, hired on by someone who considered their ethnicity to be an advantage. Why was that?
Consider if you wanted an office in a posh Washington complex burgled, would you be likely to hire on a handful of characters who would stand out like a sore thumb, if spotted? Would you hire on individuals who need to keep your phone number handy, on a slip of paper in a coat pocket, in case they encounter a problem? Would you hire on individuals who don't realize they've been sent on a fool's errand until long after they are apprehended?
Would you do these things if you meant for the men to be caught and if wanted to be certain that the natural suspicion of law enforcement towards "aliens" would virtually guarantee their lengthy detention and a thorough investigation of how they came to have all that money in their pockets?

Of course, if the hirelings aren't likely to survive the caper for which they've been signed up, there will have to be other ways to identify them as the culprits. Like, for example, uncollected rental cars with pertinent maps, credit card slips and airline ticket receipts. Or maybe even a passport found at the site of their demise, miraculously unsinged and untattered by the spectacular fire-ball and explosion of jet fuel and the collapse of the no-longer tallest buildings in the world.

Why, with all the available evidence, was it necessary to have a shill in the press to unravel the story of Watergate--to lay down a trail to the Oval Office and implicate a sitting President? Not in the planning of the bungled burglary, but in a ham-handed effort to cover up for a bunch of subordinates who obviously weren't worth it? Is it because Richard Nixon, the Vice President of the man who warned the nation against the military-industrial complex, was set up to be removed from office?

Why would someone have wanted to do that? And why would someone want to deceive the American public about 9/11?

********

The lies of Dick Cheney--in no particular order

That Bush had transfered the authority to order the shoot down of planes to him on 9/11.

That there was a direct threat to Air Force One on 9/11.

Whopper No. 1: On Oct. 10, 2003, Cheney told neocons at the Heritage Foundation that Saddam Hussein "had an established relationship with al-Qaeda," a charge contradicted by U.S. intelligence briefings Cheney has received.

Whopper No. 2: In the same speech, Cheney, doing his best impression of Baghdad Bob, still maintained Iraq was a weapons-of-mass-destruction powerhouse.

"If Saddam Hussein were in power today," he said, "this ally of terrorists would still have a hidden biological weapons program capable of producing deadly agents on short notice."

Whopper No. 3: A month earlier, Cheney claimed they had found conclusive proof of an illicit Iraqi bioweapons program in the form of two old trailers rusting in the desert.

Whopper No. 4: Cheney in the same NBC interview claimed the pair of trailers discovered in Iraq could have been used to make smallpox.

"We've, since the war, found two mobile biological facilities that can be used to produce anthrax or smallpox or whatever else you wanted to use during the course of developing the capacity for an attack," he told Russert.

Whopper No. 5: Further trying to justify the Iraq war, the vice president brazenly tried in the same interview to resuscitate the fable that hijacking ringleader Mohamed Atta met in Prague with Iraqi intelligence before 9-11.

Whopper No. 6: Cheney has suggested Iraq sponsored 9-11, or at least harbored and supported the terrorists who attacked America.

"If we're successful in Iraq," he told Russert last September, "we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9-11."

Whopper No. 7: "I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven't had now for over three years," Cheney also told Russert last fall.

Whopper No. 8: Russert asked Cheney if he had any role in the secret $7 billion contract the Pentagon gave Halliburton before the war to rebuild and run Iraq's oil system and even distribute its energy products outside Iraq. "Were you involved in any way in the awarding of those contracts?"

"Of course not, Tim," Cheney indignantly replied. "And as vice president, I have absolutely no influence of, involvement of, knowledge of ? in any way, shape or form ? of contracts led by the [Army] Corps of Engineers or anybody else in the federal government."

Whopper No. 9: Russert: "Why is there no bidding?"

Cheney: "I have no idea."

But if his office was read in on the Pentagon deal as the e-mail indicates, then he had to have known why competitors were muscled out. There's no less than a 10-page Pentagon document justifying the secret Halliburton deal, declassified last week thanks to a Judicial Watch lawsuit.

In effect, it says Cheney's old firm was favored because it was the only one that could hit the ground running in Iraq ? but the only reason it could do that was because the Pentagon gave it a head start. Halliburton got to study its secret contingency plan in November 2002. And the month before the final contract was inked, Halliburton was allowed to "pre-position equipment and personnel" for the Iraq oil project ? an advantage Bechtel, Fluor and other competitors never got.

Iraqi Neighborhood

Continue for a list of American camps, forward operating bases and other Amrican facilities in Iraq.

Camp Adder [Tallil AB]
Camp Al Asad [al-Asad AB]
Camp Anaconda [Balad AB]
Camp Balad [Balad AB]
Camp Banzai has been renamed Justice in english and Al-Adala in arabic
Camp Basilone [Qalat Sukar AB]
Camp Cedar [Tallil AB]
Camp Cedar II [Tallil AB]
Camp Chesty [Kut AB]
Camp Claiborne [Mosul AB]
Camp Condor [Amarah AB]
Camp Cooke [Taji AB] has been renamed Taji in english
Camp Cropper [Baghdad IAP]
Camp Cuervo [Rasheed AB] has been renamed Rustamiyah in english &arab
Camp Diamondback [Mosul AB]
Camp Dogwood [al-Iskandaryah AB]
Camp Eagle has been renamed Al-Amal and Hope in english
Camp Falcon [Rasheed AB]
Camp Ferrin-Huggins [Rasheed AB] has been renamed Al-Saqr and Falcon
Camp Graceland [Rasheed AB]
Camp Griffin [Baghdad IAP]
Camp Greywolf has been renamed Al-Tawheed Al-Awal and Union I
Camp Gunslinger has been renamed Al-Tadamun and Solidarity
Camp Headhunter has been renamed Al-Istiqulal and Independer
Camp Highlander has been renamed Al-Isdehar and Prosperity
Camp Iron Horse has been renamed Al-Watani and Patriot
Camp Lancer [K-2 AB]
Camp Manhattan [Habbaniyah AB]
Camp Marez [Mosul AB]
Camp Muleskinner [Rasheed AB]
Camp North Victory has been renamed Al-Tahreer and Liberty
Camp Outlaw has been renamed Al-Hurya Al-Thani and Freedom II
Camp Pacesetter [Samarra East AB]
Camp Qayyarah [Quyarrah AB]
Camp Redcatcher [Rasheed AB]
Camp Renegade [Kirkuk AB]
Camp Sather [Baghdad IAP]
Camp Speicher [al-Sahra AB]
Camp Steel Dragon has been renamed Al-Sharaf and Honor
Camp Sycamore [al-Sahra AB]
Camp Taqaddum [Al Taqaddum AB]
Camp Trojan Horse has been renamed Al-Tawheed Al-Thalith and Union III
Camp Victory has been renamed Al-Nasr and Victory
Camp Viper [Jalibah AB]
Camp War Horse [Baquba AF] has been renamed Al-Hurya Al-Awal, Freedom I
Camp Warrior has been renamed Al-Tawheed Al-Thani and Union II
Camp Whitford [Tallil AB]
FOB al-Asad [al-Asad AB]
FOB Bernstein [Tuz Khurmatu AB]
FOB Chosin [Al Iskandariyah AB]
FOB Cooke [Taji AB]
FOB Ferrin-Huggins [Rasheed AB]
FOB Glory [Mosul AB]
FOB Grant [Tal Ashtah AB]
FOB Guardian City [Al Taqaddum AB]
FOB Gunner [Taji AB]
FOB Headhunter [Baghdad AB]
FOB Manhattan [Habbaniyah AB]
FOB McKenzie [Samarra East AB]
FOB Muleskinner [Rasheed AB]
FOB Pacesetter [Samarra East AB]
FOB Q-West [Quyarrah AB]
FOB Ridgeway [Al Taqaddum AB]
FOB Speicher [al-Sahra AB]
FOB Warhorse [Baquba AF]
FOB Webster [Al Asad AB]
FOB Wyatt [Balad AB] Engineer Base Anvil [Rasheed AB]
Fire Base Glory [Mosul AB]

FLB Sycamore [al-Sahra AB]

LSA Adder [Tallil AB]
LSA Anaconda [Balad AB]
LSA Diamondback [Mosul AB]
LSA Viper [Jalibah AB]

OBJ Jaguar [Quyarrah AB]
OBJ Redskins [Al Taqaddum AB]
OBJ Weber [al-Asad AB]

TSP Whitford [Tallil AB]

Bashur AB
H-1 Airstrip
Kirkuk AB
Kut AB
Redcatcher Field [Rasheed AB]
Tall ?Afar AB
Former Presidential Palaces
Camp Arkansas [Al Salam]
Camp Blackjack [Abu Ghurayb]
Camp Blue Diamond [Ar Ramadi]
Camp Cobra [Abu Ghurayb]
Camp Dragoon [Baghdad]
Camp Freedom [Mosul]
Camp Hurricane Point [Ar Ramadi]
Camp Ironhorse [Tikrit]
Camp Junction City [Ar Ramadi]
Camp Raider [Tikrit]
Camp Slayer [Radwaniyah]
Camp Steel Falcon [Dora Farms]
Camp Victory [Abu Ghurayb]
Camp Victory (51 Papa) [Abu Ghurayb]
Camp Victory North [Abu Ghurayb]
FOB Blue Diamond [Ar Ramadi]
FOB Champion Base [Ar Ramadi]
FOB Cobra [Abu Ghurayb]
FOB Danger [Tikrit]
FOB Eden [Hit]
FOB Hurricane [Ar Ramadi]
FOB Ironhorse [Tikrit]
FOB Junction City [Ar Ramadi]
FOB Paliden Base [Ar Ramadi]
FOB Raider [Tikrit]
FOB Sabre [Ar Ramadi]
FOB Trojan Horse Champion Main [Ar Ramadi]
Champion Base [Ar Ramadi]
Essayons Base [Republican Palace]
Hurricane Base [Ar Ramadi]
Loyalty Base [Ar Ramadi]
Rifles Base (3 ACR) [Ar Ramadi]
Victory Base [Abu Ghurayb]

Firebase Shoemaker [Ar Ramadi]

Green Zone [Baghdad]

Post Freedom [Mosul]

Al Azimiyah Palace
Saddamiat Al-Tharthar
Other Locations
Camp ? ? ? ? ? ? [Dahuk]
Camp Abu Naji [Al Amarah]
Camp Andaluz [Kufa]
Camp Anderson [Diwaniyeh]
Camp Arrow [Ad Dawr]
Camp Avalanche [Abu Ghurayb]
Camp Ashraf
Camp Babylon
Camp Black Jack [1 CD]
Camp Boom [Baquba]
Camp Brassfield-Mora [Samarra]
Camp Bucca [Umm Qasr]
Camp Bushmaster [Najaf]
Camp Caldwell [Kirkush]
Camp Cold Steel
Camp Eagle III [Najaf]
Camp Duke [Najaf]
Camp Edson [Diwaniyeh]
Camp Fallujah [I MEF]
Camp Fenway [Qalat Sukar]
Camp Ganci [Abu Ghurayb]
Camp Golf [Najaf] [1 AD]
Camp Hope [Diwaniyeh]
Camp Jennings [Al Amarah]
Camp Leader [Mosul]
Camp Libeccio [Nasiriyah]
Camp Lima [Baghdad] [1 AD]
Camp Marlboro [Sadr City]
Camp Mercury
Camp Normandy [Muqdadiyah]
Camp Nakamura [Nippur]
Camp Paliwoda [Balad]
Camp Performance [Mosul]
Camp Scania [Nippur]
Camp St. Mere [Fallujah]
Camp Strike [Mosul]
Camp Top Gun [Mosul]
Camp Ultimo [Baghdad]
Camp Vigilant [Abu Ghurayb]
Camp War Eagle [Baghdad]
Camp Whitehorse
Camp Zadan [Zadan] [2/2 Mar]
FOB ? ? ? ? ? ? [Daquq]
FOB Arrow [Ad Dawr]
FOB Buzz
FOB Brassfield-Mora [Samarra]
FOB Caldwell [Kirkush]
FOB Duke [Najaf]
FOB Eagle [Balad]
FOB Gabe [Baquba]
FOB Kalsu [Iskandariyah]
FOB Laurie [Fallujah]
FOB Lion [Balad AB]
FOB Melody [Sadr City]
FOB Mercury [Fallujah]
FOB Normandy [Muqdadiyah]
FOB Packhorse [Tikrit]
FOB Rough Rider [Mandali]
FOB St. Mere [Fallujah]
FOB St. Michael [Mahmudiyah]
FOB Tiger [Al Qaim]
FOB Volturno [Fallujah]
FOB War Eagle [Baghdad]
FOB Wilson [Ad Dawr] Firebase Melody [Sadr City]
Log Base Seitz
Tiger Base [Al Qaim]

Butler Range Complex
Hard Site [Abu Ghurayb]

CMOC Ar Ramadi
CMOC Baghdad
CMOC Diwaniyah
CMOC Mosul
CMOC Samarra

CSC Scania [Nippur]

CJTF Babylon
Baghdad Convention Center

Haditha Dam
Hillah
al-Kûfah []
MFK Compound
Sinjar
Taji Military Camp
Un-Identified
Camp Bushwacker
Camp Red Knight
Camp Thunder FOB Bandit Island [1 AD]
FOB Broomhead (3 ACR)
FOB Byers (3 ACR)
FOB Givens (3 ACR)
FOB Latham (3 ACR)
FOB Miller (3 ACR)
FOB O'Ryan (TF 2-108)
FOB Quinn (3 ACR)

FOB Delta
FOB Morgan

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/iraq.htm

updated from
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/iraq-intro.htm

**********
Rumsfeld on truth and bases:

Now in the current war we're in, there are plenty of countries that don't want their people or the world to know how they're helping us. They're helping us with intelligence. There may be even some cases where we have people on their bases, and they don't want it known in their country that American aircraft or American pilots or people are physically in their country. All we do is, we just don't discuss it. We don't go out and say they're not there. We just simply go about our business and ask the press if they come in to not mention that -- what's going on in that country. And that's part of the understanding. Seems to me a perfectly acceptable way to do it. The reality is, however, that countries that do that may have very good reason. But it -- over time, the truth comes out. (Chuckles.) So it's kind of a short-term policy, I think.

++++++++++
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in a 21 April 2003 press conference said that any suggestion that the United States is planning a permanent military presence in Iraq is "inaccurate and unfortunate." Rumsfeld said "I have never, that I can recall, heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq discussed in any meeting. ... The likelihood of it seems to me to be so low that it does not surprise me that it's never been discussed in my presence, to my knowledge. Why do I say it's low? Well, we've got all kinds of options and opportunities in that part of the world to locate forces, it's not like we need a new place. We have plenty of friends and plenty of ability to work with them and have locations for things that help to contribute to stability in the region. ... Rumsfeld: I think there is a down side. I think any impression that is left, which that article left, that the United States plans some sort of a permanent presence in that country, I think is a signal to the people of that country that's inaccurate and unfortunate, because we don't plan to function as an occupier, we don't plan to prescribe to any new government how we ought to be arranged in their country."

Camp Bond-steel in Kosovo

Is this another Guantanamo in the pristine mountains of Kosovo? What's the 21st Century term for "gunboat diplomacy?"

Camp Bondsteel and America?s plans to control Caspian oil
By Paul Stuart
29 April 2002

Camp Bondsteel, the biggest ?from scratch? foreign US military base since the Vietnam War is near completion in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo. It is located close to vital oil pipelines and energy corridors presently under construction, such as the US sponsored Trans-Balkan oil pipeline. As a result defence contractors?in particular Halliburton Oil subsidiary Brown & Root Services?are making a fortune.

In June 1999, in the immediate aftermath of the bombing of Yugoslavia, US forces seized 1,000 acres of farmland in southeast Kosovo at Uresevic, near the Macedonian border, and began the construction of a camp.

Camp Bondsteel is known as the ?grand dame? in a network of US bases running both sides of the border between Kosovo and Macedonia. In less than three years it has been transformed from an encampment of tents to a self sufficient, high tech base-camp housing nearly 7,000 troops?three quarters of all the US troops stationed in Kosovo.

There are 25 kilometres of roads and over 300 buildings at Camp Bondsteel, surrounded by 14 kilometres of earth and concrete barriers, 84 kilometres of concertina wire and 11 watch towers. It is so big that it has downtown, midtown and uptown districts, retail outlets, 24-hour sports halls, a chapel, library and the best-equipped hospital anywhere in Europe. At present there are 55 Black Hawk and Apache helicopters based at Bondsteel and although it has no aircraft landing strip the location was chosen for its capacity to expand. There are suggestions that it could replace the US airforce base at Aviano in Italy.

According to Colonel Robert L. McClure, writing in the engineers professional Bulletin, ?Engineer planning for operations in Kosovo began months before the first bomb was dropped. At the outset, planners wanted to use the lessons learned in Bosnia and convinced decision makers to reach base-camp ?end state? as quickly as possible.?

Initially US military engineers took control of 320 kilometres of roads and 75 bridges in the surrounding area for military use and laid out a base camp template involving soldiers living quarters, helicopter flight paths, ammunition holding areas and so on.

McClure explains how the Engineer Brigade were instructed ?to merge construction assets and integrate them with the contractor, Brown & Root Services Corporation, to build not one but two base camps [the other is Camp Monteith] for a total of 7,000 troops.?

According to McClure, ?At the height of the effort, about 1,000 former US military personnel, hired by Brown & Root, along with more than 7,000 Albanian local nationals, joined the 1,700 military engineers. From early July and into October [1999], construction at both camps continued 24 hours a day, seven days a week.?

Brown & Root Services provides all the support services to Camp Bondsteel. This includes 600,000 gallons of water per-day, enough electricity to supply a city of 25,000 and a supply centre with 14,000 product lines. It washes 1,200 bags of laundry, supplies 18,000 meals per day and operates 95 percent of the rail and airfield facilities. It also provides the camps firefighting service. Brown & Root are now the largest employers in Kosovo, with more than 5,000 local Kosovan Albanians and another 15,000 on its books.

Staff at Camp Bondsteel rarely venture outside the compound and their activities are secretive. Whilst other KFOR patrols are small and mobile with soldiers wearing soft caps and instructed to integrate with the local population, US military personnel leave Bondsteel in either helicopters or as part of infrequent but large heavily armed convoys.

In unnamed interviews US troops complain that hostility to their presence is growing as local inhabitants compare the investment in Camp Bondsteel with the continuing decline in their own living standards.

Those visiting Camp Bondsteel describe it as a journey through 100 years in time. The area surrounding the camp is extremely poor with an unemployment rate of 80 percent. Then Bondsteel appears on the horizon with its mass of communication satellites, antennae and menacing attack helicopters circling above. Brown & Root pay Kosova workers between $1 and $3 per hour. The local manager said wages were so low because, ?We can?t inflate the wages because we don?t want to over inflate the local economy.?

The escalating US presence at Bondsteel was accompanied by increased activity by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Since its appearance most Serbs, Roma and Albanians opposed to the KLA have been murdered or driven out. Those remaining dare not leave their houses to buy food at the local stores and the need for military escorts stretch from children?s swimming pools to tractors taken away for repair. According to observers the KLA continue to act with virtual impunity in the US sector despite the high tech military intelligence facilities at Bondsteel.

When US troops arrive at Camp Bondsteel, they are more likely to be met by a Brown & Root employee directing them to their accommodation and equipment areas. According to G. Cahlink in Government Executive Magazine (February 2002), ?Army peace keepers joke that they?re missing a patch on their camouflage fatigues. ?We need one that says Sponsored by Brown & Root,? says a staff sergeant, who, like more than nearly 10,000 soldiers in the region, has come to rely on Brown and Root Services, a Houston based contractor, for everything from breakfast to spare parts for armoured Humvees.?

The contract to service Camp Bondsteel is the latest in a string of military contracts awarded to Brown & Root Services. Its fortunes have grown as US militarism has escalated. The company is part of the Halliburton Corporation, the largest supplier of products and services to the oil industry.

In 1992 Dick Cheney, as Secretary of Defence in the senior Bush administration, awarded the company a contract providing support for the US army?s global operations. Cheney left politics and joined Halliburton as CEO between 1995 and 2000. He is now US vice president in the junior Bush administration. In 1992 Brown & Root built and maintained US army bases in Somalia earning $62 million. In 1994 Brown & Root built bases and support systems for 18,000 troops in Haiti doubling its earnings to $133 million. The company received a five-year support contract in 1999 worth $180 million per-year to build military facilities in Hungary, Croatia and Bosnia. It was Camp Bondsteel, however, that was dubbed ?the mother of all contracts? by the Washington based Contract Services Association of America. There, ?We do everything that does not require us to carry a gun,? said Brown & Roots director David Capouya.

The aim of outsourcing military support and services to private contractors has been to free up more soldiers for combat duties. A US Department of Defence (DoD) review in 2001 insisted that the use of contractors would escalate: ?Only those functions that must be done at DoD should be kept at DoD.?

In sectors controlled by other Western powers, KFOR soldiers who are living in bombed out apartment blocks and old factories joke, ?What are the two things that can be seen from space? One is the Great Wall of China, the other is Camp Bondsteel.?

More seriously a senior British military officer told the Washington Post, ?It is an obvious sign that the Americans are making a major commitment to the Balkan region and plan to stay.? One analyst described the US as having taken advantage of favourable circumstances to create a base that would be large enough to accommodate future military plans.

Camp Bondsteel has become a key venue for important policy speeches by leading officials of the Bush administration.

On June 5, 2001 US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld explained to troops at Camp Bondsteel what role they played in the new administration?s economic strategy. He declared, ?How much should we spend on the armed services? ...My view is we don?t spend on you, we invest in you. The men and women in the armed services are not a drain on our economic strength. Indeed you safeguard it. You?re not a burden on our economy, you are the critical foundation for growth.?

One month later, President George W. Bush made his first trip abroad to see US troops at the camp. He traveled directly from the Rome G8 summit, where tensions with European governments had come to the fore. In a speech described as a ?retrenching? of the US in Europe, he insisted that US troops were in Kosovo to stay, had gone in together and would ?leave together?. In a break from normal procedure, in front of cheering troops, Bush signed into law a Congress-approved increase in military spending of $1.9 billion.

Since then Camp Bondsteel has continued to grow, as it spearheads the first phase in a realignment of US military bases in Europe and eastward. The Bondsteel template is now being applied in Afghanistan and the new bases in the former Soviet Republics.

According to leaked comments to the press, European politicians now believe that the US used the bombing of Yugoslavia specifically in order to establish Camp Bondsteel. Before the start of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the Washington Post insisted, ?With the Middle-East increasingly fragile, we will need bases and fly over rights in the Balkans to protect Caspian Sea oil.?

The scale of US oil corporations investment in the exploitation of Caspian oil fields and the US government demand for the economy to be less dependent on imported oil, particularly from the Middle-East, demands a long term solution to the transportation of oil to European and US markets. The US Trade & Development Agency (TDA) has financed initial feasibility studies, with large grants, and more recently advanced technical studies for the New York based AMBO (Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria Oil) Trans-Balkan pipeline.

Announcing a grant for an advanced technical study in 1999 for the AMBO oil pipeline through Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania, TDA director J. Joseph Grandmaison declared, ?The competition is fierce to tap energy resources in the Caspian region....Over the last year [1999], TDA has been actively promoting the development of multiple pipelines to connect these vast resources with Western markets. This grant represents a significant step forward for this policy and for US business interests in the Caspian region.?

The $1.3 billion trans-Balkan AMBO pipeline is one of the most important of these multiple pipelines. It will pump oil from the tankers that bring it across the Black Sea to the Bulgarian oil terminus at Burgas, through Macedonia to the Albanian Adriatic port of Vlore. From there it will be pumped on to huge 300,000 ton tankers and sent on to Europe and the US, bypassing the Bosphorus Straits?the congested and only route out of the Black Sea where tankers are restricted to 150,000 tons.

The initial feasibility study for AMBO was conducted in 1995 by none other than Brown & Root, as was an updated feasibility study in 1999. In another twist, the former director of Oil & Gas Development for Europe and Africa for Brown & Root Energy Services, Ted Ferguson, was appointed as the new president of AMBO [1997] after the death of former president and founder of AMBO, Macedonian born Mr Vuko Tashkovikj.

According to a recent Reuters article, Ferguson declared that Exxon-Mobil and Chevron, two of the worlds largest oil corporations, are preparing to finance the AMBO project.

The building of AMBO risks antagonising Turkey, the US?s main ally in the region. According to the Reagan Information Interchange, ?While the United States is making an advantageous economic decision, it is overlooking its crucial strategic relationship with Turkey.?

The US is also antagonising its European allies and Russia with Camp Bondsteel and other smaller military bases run alongside the proposed AMBO pipeline route. It has been built near the mouth of the Presevo valley and energy Corridor 8, which the European Union has sponsored since 1994 and regards as a strategic route east-west for global trade.

In April 1999, British General Michael Jackson, the commander in Macedonia during the NATO bombing of Serbia, explained to the Italian paper Sole 24 Ore ?Today, the circumstances which we have created here have changed. Today, it is absolutely necessary to guarantee the stability of Macedonia and its entry into NATO. But we will certainly remain here a long time so that we can also guarantee the security of the energy corridors which traverse this country.?

The newspaper added, ?It is clear that Jackson is referring to the 8th corridor, the East-West axis which ought to be combined to the pipeline bringing energy resources from Central Asia to terminals in the Black Sea and in the Adriatic, connecting Europe with Central Asia. That explains why the great and medium sized powers, and first of all Russia, don?t want to be excluded from the settling of scores that will take place over the next few months in the Balkans.?

******

Diego Garcia: Paradise Isle or Britain's shame?

Gordon Thomas, investigative journalist and author of Gideon's Spies: the Secret History of the Mossad asserts that "high level leaders and operatives of Al Qaida and the Taliban are held there (on Diego Garcia)" and "none are being protected by the Geneva Conventions".

Thomas claims: "the interrogation techniques used on Diego Garcia are contained in a secret CIA manual on coercive questioning. It contains sections headed 'Threats and Fear', 'Pain', 'Narcosis' and 'Heightened Suggestibility and Hypnosis'."

He further suggests "the presence of the prisoners on Diego Garcia is so secret that a counter-terrorism official in Washington said President Bush 'had informed the CIA he did not want to know where they were'."

A recent report by Human Rights First entitled "Ending Secret Detentions" cites Diego Garcia as a suspected site for the detention of individuals, including the leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah, Hambali, otherwise known as Riduan Isamuddin.

Thomas suggests that private Lear jets regularly fly into the island with a new batch of prisoners, which, he says, have included Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Bin Al Shibh and Abu Zubaydah, kidnapped from Pakistan. He says this is done with the knowledge of US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld and often with the approval of the White House.

It seems that the US administration realizes the Guantanamo experiment has failed. Rumsfeld has already admitted to "ghost" detainees who don't show up in any official documents and who have no name. How many of these are being tortured on Paradise Isle, I wonder. According to various reports, others are being held on two US prison ships - the USS Bataan and the USS Peleliu.

Ibrahim Habaci and Arif Ulusam, both Turkish; Saudi citizen Faha al Bahli; Mahmud Sardar Issa from Sudan; and Kenyan national Khalifa Abdi

Thanksgiving

John in Flagstaff wrote on November 24, 2005 08:56 PM:
So, what about the things I feel most thankful for this holiday season?

I'm thankful I?m not being tortured in Guantanamo or any other branch of the US ?anti-terror? Gulag.

I'm thankful my home, my water supply and my electricity have not been blown to sh*t by US bombs.

I'm thankful that there is virtually no chance that any member of my family will be dragged out of my apartment in the middle of the night and interrogated.

I'm thankful than neither I nor any member of my family will be hit by white phosphorous shells that will liquefy our flesh.

I'm thankful that when on the street outside of my apartment building I don't see foreign soldiers with automatic weapons, any of whom might mistake my hurrying home to use the toilet as a sign that I?m up to no good and fill me with 300 rounds of high caliber bullets.

I'm thankful that my entire country hasn't been coated with depleted uranium dust.

I'm thankful that all of my friends and family are gathered around the table, and that none of them has been murdered by foreign soldiers or people trying to drive those soldiers out of the country.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-pikser/thanks-givin_b_11163.html

***************************************

Abramoff and Atta?

What is the connection between Mohammed Atta, Jack Abramoff, Jeb Bush, unregulated gambling, and the mob? Well, according to a hot story, they are inter-connected in the never-ending saga that involves unregulated gambling boats, money laundering, the heroin trade, high-profile and well-heeled Republicans including Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris, terrorist-training flight schools, Jack Abromoff, some gangsters, a gangland-hit, gambling boats visited by 9/11 terrorists and FBI protection of these less than savory characters.

An excerpt from this interesting story:

So as the scandal embroiling House Major Domo Tom Delay and Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff grows hotter, there may be new revelations about the 9.11 attack.

One of the most amazing thing about this most amazing scandal?hundreds of millions in slush funds beats Oval Office blowjobs by a mile?is that some of the same names in the Abramoff scandal also surface in connection with Mohamed Atta?s.

Less than a week before the 9.11 attack, for example, Atta and several other hijackers made a still-unexplained visit onboard one of Abramoff?s casino boats.

What were they doing there? No one knows.

(snip)

There remains a strong suspicion that Atta?s terrorist cadre?supposedly unknown and friendless and burrowing into the woodwork?was able to call on the assistance, when necessary, of a friendly global network.

Could it be that this network is the same one being probed so gingerly today by investigators looking into Jack Abramoff?

What could a scandal involving Indian casinos and gambling boat ?cruises to nowhere? & pay-for-play government officials have to do with the story of 19 hijackers planning a mass murder in supposed isolation in Florida?

Let?s take a look.

While Abramoff?s Indian gaming troubles may be getting the most publicity, his other major 'area of concern? is where the real scandal resides. Involvement with Mob-run casino boats may turn out to be a faux pas, even for Republicans.

(snip)

Vegas without rules

What the Abramoff scandal is about at the core can be simply stated as: Vegas without rules. And what the politicians are arguing over is the biggest slush fund in the history of the world. Democrats don?t want to eliminate it. They just want in on the action.

Who owns Florida's gambling boats? No one is certain. There is virtually no state or federal oversight. No one licenses the operators. No one ensures that the games aren?t rigged. No one ensures that the boats aren't used to launder money. No one investigates whether organized crime is involved.

And while ex-felons can?t vote in Florida?as many became aware during the memorable presidential election in 2000?this disadvantage is more than offset, for some, by the fact that an ex-felon can run a gambling boat in the state with no fear at all of flunking the background check.

The reason? There is none.

This situation clearly suits some people just fine?. While Governor Jeb Bush may be minutely concerned with what happened to Terry Schiavo fifteen years ago, on this issue of real interest?massive corruption?he phones in his regrets.

Just why might that be?

Florida's cruises-to-nowhere represent "the largest unregulated gambling industry in the United States," said Bill Thompson, a professor of gambling at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and nationally recognized expert on the industry, in an interview in the Miami Herald.

They gross at least $170 million a year. And that?s just the number they report voluntarily. No one knows the true ?take.? Everyone assumes there?s a ?skim.?

The Miami Herald cited the example of Joseph Polidore, who listed himself as the sole owner of Boca Casinos in Pompano Beach but said he received money for his investment from a "personal friend." Polidore admitted he had silent partners, but insisted they were ?nobody illegal.?

What would happen if an applicant gave such vague information to the Nevada Gaming Control Board? The lack of regulation, officials elsewhere say, should concern Florida authorities.

"A casino is a cash business. You could have money laundering and skimming," Keith Copher, chief of enforcement for the Nevada Gaming Control Board, told the Miami Herald. ?When you obtain money illegally through drug sales and other methods. You need to find a way to launder it, to make it look like a legal source. Regulation is needed to prevent this."

While ?Florida authorities? piously oppose gambling, their inaction speaks for itself, and may even have been exploited by the 9.11 hijackers.

Betting Red All the Way

?There is a weird report just a day or two after 9/11 that someone reported to the FBI that three or four of the hijackers were seen gambling on a SunCruz boat,? wrote a source in Miami. ?The FBI interviewed everyone who might have seen them, that very day by all reports.?

Sure enough. We found an Associated Press story on Sept 26, 2001 headlined ?SunCruz Casinos turns over documents in terrorist probe.?

?SunCruz Casinos has turned over photographs and other documents to FBI investigators after employees said they recognized some of the men suspected in the terrorist attacks as customers.? Names on the passenger list from a Sept. 5 cruise matched those of some of the hijackers... Two or three men linked to the Sept. 11 hijackings may have been customers on a ship that sailed from Madeira Beach on Florida's gulf coast.?

Less than a week before the 9.11 attack, Atta and several other hijackers were aboard one of Abramoff?s casino boats. What no one seems able to answer is this:

What possible thrill could gambling offer men getting ready to die in less than a week? To this date, their Sept 5 visit to a gambling vessel overrun with retirees remains unexplained.

The gambling motif in the terrorist?s timeline doesn?t end there. The hijackers had no apparent reason to visit Las Vegas... so why did they?

On June 28 at Boston?s Logan Airport, Mohamed Atta boarded a United Airlines flight and flew first class nonstop to San Francisco. He bypassed the bohemian North Beach district, and didn?t take the cruise to Alcatraz?

Atta headed for Vegas.

On Aug. 10, Hani Hanjour and Nawaf Alhazmi used first-class tickets for a United flight from Dulles Airport near Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles International Airport, then on to Las Vegas. The story of the terrorists Las Vegas connection may never be known, admitted the Las Vegas FBI.

Murder will out

?Islamic fundamentalist? Atta may have felt right at home in the world of fast cash and unlicensed gambling boat ?cruises to nowhere? of Republican lobbyist (and observant Jew) Jack Abramoff. He would almost certainly have been comfortable with the ?gangland-style hit straight out of ?Goodfellas? that cemented Abramoff?s prominent position in that industry.

At the time of the Sept 11 attack one of Abramoff?s chief claims to fame was as the proud owner of the SunCruz line: a dozen unlicensed gambling boats plying the waters off the Florida coast in a fashion which in any other state would have been considered criminal.

How did Jack Abramoff get lucky enough to be the guy passing out all that long green? Where did Jack Abramoff get his ?juice??

Short answer: Not everyone is savvy to opportunities presented by riders in obscure legislation. Not so the connected, the covert, the?dare we say ?blessed??

?Elite deviance? is a sociological term for a condition in a society in which the elite in the society come to believe that the rules no longer apply to them.

Casino boats turned out to be a elite deviant?s dream.

One time-honored way to get rich is to marry money. Another is to kill someone that has it? In Abramoff?s case, it appears that Gus Boulis, the owner of the lion?s share of the casino boats in Florida, had to die first.

Three men formed an ownership group that apparently made Boulis the proverbial offer he couldn?t refuse. They bought SunCruz from him, even though it wasn't for sale.

When Greek tycoon Gus Boulis was gunned down in his BMW on February 6, 2001 Fort Lauderdale police investigators immediately began scrutinizing SunCruz Casinos. Suspicion focused on the recent sale of the fleet. Boulis and one of the three men had been carrying on a very public feud.

?We certainly aren't lacking in suspects,? said a homicide detective drolly.

Less than two months later, Sun Cruz announced plans to move a 150-foot, $10-million floating casino to the Northern Marianas.

Almost every article we'd read cites Abramoff & Delay's interest in the Marianas being sweat-shop related. Meaning they're in favor of them. Their primary focus wasn't sweatshops. It was gambling.

A Bebe Rebozo Memorial Hit

?Read about SunCruz and it sounds like a South Florida version of "The Sopranos,? reported the South Florida Business Journal. ? Feds go after owner Gus Boulis. Former Miami Subs kingpin forced to sell. New SunCruz chairman says Boulis threatened him. Boulis whacked.?

As if to confirm the account, other newspaper reports mentioned a climate of fear after the Boulis murder.

?The shooting death? cast a pall of fear over the people who knew him, with some of his closest associates admitting concern at being connected with a man targeted by hit men,? the local Sun-Sentinel reported the day after the hit.

?There are a lot of people who aren't talking for reasons of personal safety," said Fort Lauderdale Police Detective Mike Reed.

Another associate declined to discuss anything about Boulis with the paper?

"I've got my family to worry about," he said, on condition of anonymity.

Even a cursory look at the executive management of the cruise-to-nowhere company that Boulis founded turns up violent thugs and organized crime figures. But that?s pretty typical of South Florida...What is unusual are that in with Sun Cruz?s mobbed-up crew are prominent Republican Party members with long-standing, deep ties to the religious right.

Two SunCruz executives, Jack Abramoff and Ben Waldman, are walking examples of the strange alliance between the family-values party and the gambling industry. Both men have strong ties to Pat Robertson?s Christian Coalition, which is adamantly opposed to gambling; Waldman was Robertson top aide in the televangelist's run for the presidency.

Abramoff, who perhaps wisely only took the title of vice president (less heat) has been connected to the Christian right since a student at Brandeis University, where as head of the College Republicans he enlisted Top Christian Ralph Reed as his top deputy. The two have remained close friends ever since.

A man named Adam Kidan became Sun Cruz?s new chairman. Kidan?s mother had been murdered in a gangland-style hit in New York. Madonna?s one-time boyfriend and South Beach restaurateur Chris Paciello, was eventually convicted in the case.

Today he is in Federal Witness Protection, and word is there are several movies about him in development.

Just another American success story.

The Seminal Seminoles

The Seminole Tribe of Florida led the way in parlaying mom-and-pop bingo parlors into today?s $19 billion a year Indian casino industry. Along with legendary Chief James Billie (Wrestles with Alligators) Rob Tiller was a seminal figure in this growth.

Tiller is also a South Florida aviation insider and former business partner of terror flight school owner and secretive financier Wally Hilliard. He even met Atta and Marwan one day after a meeting with Hilliard, he says, with whom he was working on an airline start-up called Havana Air.

Small world.

A week before Gus Boulis was murdered, Tiller was called to take a meeting with him. Tiller says Boulis was scared. Boulis hadn?t wanted to sell.

Now he was worried he?d be whacked.

?He called me to a meeting at the Ocean Reef Club. Very snooty. You cant even land there without permission. I flew my airplane down to meet him,? Tiller recalled.

?He said, ?I want out. People think I make a lot more money than I really do. I don?t need the headache anymore. I want to sell my casino boats to the Seminoles.??

What was Tiller?s response? ?I said, ?Gus you?re sure rocking a lot of people?s boats here.??

?A couple days later, I hear he?s been blown apart dead. See, Gus wanted to muscle his way into the casino business in a real bad way. His Miami subs were everywhere. He was using them to launder money, big-time, for somebody.?

Who might that be? Even asking the question brings a shiver.

(snip)
?Boulis was murdered in the exact same way as Don Aronow, Bush?s other partner,? he stated.

Bush?s other partner? The question hung in the air.

?Something is really going down bad here,? Tiller stated. ?Don Aronow. Gus. Jim Shore?All tied in to Bush.?
(snip)
When NBC's Dateline did a story recently about sources of terrorist funding right here in the U.S., they made bold to announce ?the emerging threat of a new alliance between al Qaeda and common criminals.?

Over three years ago?within a month of the 9.11 attack?British Prime Minister Tony Blair had presented the case against Bin Laden. He sketched out the Cliff Notes version of the evidence. It wasn?t much, but it was the only explanation we ever received.

?Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization with ties to a global network,? Blair said.

In truth, the idea that Mohamed Atta and his henchmen needed help from an outside organization while they were in the U.S. was easy to understand... Logistical support is difficult to arrange from caves.

Still, the FBI stepped in and quickly put a kibosh on that kind of talk? ?Government sources now say that the investigation so far suggests the 19 had ?no major help? in the United States," said a story in the Washington Post which came out soon after Blair?s alarming faux pas.

"The 19 hijackers who carried out the worst act of terror ever to occur on U.S. soil worked with little outside help as a single, integrated group,? the Post reported.

PBS?s Frontline documentary on 9.11 supported this ?lone cadre theory.? Correspondent Hedrick Smith, to his everlasting discredit, opened the show with this lie: ?19 hijackers slipped through Europe and America unnoticed.?

Like lone gunmen, lone cadres are easier to explain.

(snip)

http://www.madcowprod.com/06202005.html

Eagerness

The Diddled

Looks like we're going to have to make a list of all those who are brave enough to admit they were diddled.

Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, was identified by his lawyer, Mark Tuohey late Friday as Representative No. 1.

``I've talked to the Department of Justice on this and he's not part of this conspiracy,'' Tuohey said. ``Yes, he did perform certain acts - his office did - and there was certain other wining and dining situations like other people do, but he's the victim. He was misled.''

(In this case, the perpetrators were DeLay Associates, Abramoff and Scanlon)

*******

I actually think that fake exit was planned. If you see in the available video how he comes to attention after the doors don't yield and then follows the voice to the exit just in back of where he stood, it's part of the gig. It's not unlike that comic turn in the oval office looking for weapons of mass destruction which, considering the largest cache is controlled by a stroke of his pen, were indeed right there in the office with him.
His advance team had to be sure that nobody was coming through those doors to take him out while he was speaking.
Another chapter in the Crawford Diddle.

The Crawdad of Crawford loves playing the fool.

MHRI--Brussells Tribunal

Records are being kept; names are being taken. The abuses in Iraq will not be forgotten. A report presented by the MHRI to Kofi Annan and the United Nations.

excerpts from:

First Periodical Report of Monitoring Net of Human Rights in Iraq
MHRI - BRussells Tribunal

November 11, 2005

First Periodical Report of Monitoring Net of Human Rights in Iraq
MHRI - 2005 Baghdad

The Monitoring Network for Human Rights (MHRI), which consists of more than 20 Iraqi organizations for Human Rights, made this report about the crimes and continuous violations of human rights in Iraq.
[..]
1. Crimes of War and Crimes Against Humanity

- First crime:

Some of the ugliest crimes committed by the occupation forces and by Iraqi military units are the ones committed in the city of Fallujah in the battles of November 2004, and which we summarize in the following:

1. The plundering of health care centers and their destruction by bombing as has taken place in the "Taleb Al-Janabi" hospital and in the Central Clinic. Further the Central Hospital was occupied; the staff and everyone in the hospital at that time were arrested. Ambulances in the city have been bombed and the rescue teams were hindered from entering the city, among them the convoy of the Ministry of Health, despite of the fact that more than 50,000 civilians still remained in the city.

2. Internationally prohibited weapons were used in the bombing of the city, such as phosphoric weapons, Napalm, bombs containing unknown gases, causing the blood to explode out of bodies. 24 carbonized bodies have been found in the area of the military neighbourhood. Surviving civilian eyewitnesses stated that the soldiers of the occupation forces entered the area wearing gas masks. Furthermore, cases of deformed newly born increased as a consequence of the use of such weapons. In a press conference, which took place during the battle, Mr. Khaled Al-Sheikhali, official of the Ministry of Health, confirmed the use of such weapons. [...]

5. The existence of a mass grave with approximately 400 bodies in the "Sajar" area, an area protected by the US Forces, shooting anyone approaching it. The US Officials responsible for burying the dead in the city, admitted to one rescue team, that they had buried 380 bodies in this area after the end of the battle, and that these bodies had previously been stored in a refrigerator originally used for the storage of potatoes.
[...]

8. Information on the whereabouts of some of prisoners, who were transferred to the "Buka" prison in Basra, is lost although they had been seen by other prisoners who were released later. One case is that of Sheikh Shaker Hamdan Abdullah Fayyad Al-Kabeesi, who was arrested on the 11th October 2004 in Fallujah, carrying "Buka" prisoner's number 165251, and who was supposed to be released on the 22nd of December 2004 but still remains missing.

[...]
12. Despite the fact that more than 30,000 houses and buildings were destroyed in the battle, the US Forces continued to destroy empty houses before their inhabitants could return. US Forces destroyed in one day 20 houses in the "Shurta" neighborhood. These houses connected 2 schools, which were taken as military bases. The inhabitants of these houses confirm that they had seen their houses in good conditions only a few days before. The reason for the demolition was to secure clear vision on the surrounding areas.

[...]

- Second crime:

On the night from the 4th to the 5th of March 2005, when a group of farmers came to sell their goods in the area of "Oulwa Jameela", a police car and a civilian car (Opel) stopped and arrested these farmers, as eyewitnesses from "Oulwa" affirm. These farmers were:

1) Nayef Majoul Saleh

2) Taha Abbas Salman

3) Lu'ay Mahmoud Majoul

4) Abdallah Manhmoud Saleh

5) Jabbar Matlek Saleh

6) Saleh Mohammad Saleh

7) Sabah Kareem Sa'eed

8) Qasem Mohammad Sa'eed

9) Ziyad Majoul Sa'eed

10) Qasem Ne'mah Saleh

11) Mohammad Saleem Jameel

12) Wahhab Mahmoud Salman

13) Mohammad Wahhab Mahmoud

14) Ammar Kareem Najem

After 2 days of this incident, the above mentioned were found dead, their bodies disfigured, full of bullets, their skulls smashed. They were found in a garbage dump in the areas of "Kisra" and "Atash", in the outskirts of Baghdad. Their relatives state, that 2 of the above mentioned survived and were brought to a hospital, where their pursuers executed them at the hospital's entrance.

[...]

* There are repeated cases, where women are taken hostages by the occupation forces, in order to find and to arrest their male relatives, who are being searched for by the U.S. Forces. In addition, the U.S. Army has lately enacted a Law, permitting the infantry of the naval forces in Al-Mosul to arrest the mothers, sisters and wives of Iraqi fighters, for the duration of the search, so that the suspects will turn themselves in. This information was confirmed by a Colonel of the Iraqi Army, who prefers to stay in anonymous.

These procedures were forbidden by the U.S. Army after complaints by the Ministry of Human Rights in Iraq, but are now in effect again. In one case, 4 girls less than 20 years old were arrested in their house in the "Somer" area.
[...]
It has to be mentioned, that the most dangerous violation of the rights of Iraqi prisoners in U.S. detention camps in Iraq, is their transfer into U.S. prison camps outside of Iraq, such as the camp at Guantanamo, prisons on board of U.S. warships located in the Arabic Gulf and in the Pacific Ocean, and to prisons within Kuwaiti territories. The International Red Cross affirmed the presence of 8500 Iraqi prisoners of war in Kuwait.

[...]
* The U.S. forces have turned some vital public facilities into head quarters and prisons, as they have done at the Al-Maseeb Electricity Station and at Al-Karkh Water Clarification Station at Al-Taremiyah, thereby hindering these facilities to serve the Iraqi citizens.

[...]
On the night of 28th May 2005, a group of the National Guards was patrolling in the city, when one of the soldiers mistakenly shot himself after their car stumbled on something on the road. His colleagues thought that their patrol was under fire, so they started shooting on everyone around. This resulted in injuring 17 civilians, mainly women and children. One of the injured children died 2 days after. On the next day, an officer in the National Guards gathered the citizens of that area and apologizes to them. Nevertheless, the soldiers responsible for this incident were not punished. Official Iraqi and American sources later claimed that a joint patrol came under attack and that the victims of the incident were a consequence of retaliation.

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m17727&date=12-nov-2005_03:20_ECT

For Want of a Stop Sign

Good morning, stop signs

For several months now I've been using this greeting, mainly to remind us that we are about sending the message to those in charge that we want to yell, "stop, we want to get off this madness of the war."

Last night on the News Hour, as part of the pro-forma Iraq report of the day's mayhem, there was mention, yet again, of a vehicle with three civilians being shot up at a road-block because it didn't stop. The occupants were, as usual, killed.

Now, what irked me first about this report was that it was presented as if that was an isolated incident, not something that's been going on since the occupation arrived. There was no mention of the fact that there are discharged Marines wandering around the country describing for everyone they meet the horror they still feel for what they've done in "lighting" up car after car of civilians, usually filled with children.

Then, for some reason, I started thinking about how this mayhem came to be. After all, the video of the occupation arriving in Baghdad showed lots of modern highways with overpasses and ramps and road-signs suspended to give directions. And, these road signs are in Arabic and English. So, I wondered, did the troops just assume that because the road-signs are in English, all the residents speak it? And is that why they keep yelling at people to stop and then wave their weapons in the air and sometimes shoot them off when they don't?

But then it occurred to me that waving weapons is a really peculiar way to try to stop traffic, regardless of what language people speak. I'm sure it wouldn't go over real well in this country. Indeed, in this country whenever there's a reason to stop the flow of traffic for an accident or a construction project or some other temporary incident, we have people specifically assigned to step out into the road with a sign that says SLOW and STOP, and that's what people do. In fact, I'd bet that hand held stop signs are part of the normal inventory of a lot of police car trunks.

Obviously, though we've sent a lot of police cars over to Iraq, somebody forgot to include the stop signs. Indeed, we already know that somebody forgot the body armour and the armour for the jeeps. But, just maybe if they'd remembered to bring stop signs and if they'd received instructions to drive slow in Iraq, to make sure that their multi-ton vehicles didn't chew up the roadways and the medians and run over people, they wouldn't have needed the armour to begin with.

Could it be that for lack of a stop sign Iraq was lost?

*********

Out Now?

The question being asked around the country is whether the American troops should come out of Iraq now. That's an unrealistic question. 160,000 people can not be removed from anywhere immediately, even if they leave all their gear behind. And they certainly can't be moved across an ocean and half way around the world without a lot of co-ordination and planning. So, all the attention lavished by the corporate media on the Republic