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 Republicans in the House for springing this irrational question is wasted, if not counter-productive.

Certainly, the occupation of Iraq by the Americans and their coalition partners, such as they are, needs to be ended, the sooner the better. But, there's a more important issue that has to do with what was originally planned and what is still hoped to be accomplished--a permanent presence for American military assets on the Arabian Penninusla.

Permanent aren't just being built, but were the original impulse for the occupation after Saddam Hussein couldn't be bribed, persuaded or threatened enough to let them in. And it's not just permanent bases, but bases on which nuclear missiles can be planted as part of the "missile defense shield."

It's now pretty clear that whenever Bush/Cheney lodges an accusation, it's usually a signal about what they, themselves were planning. Just so with the WMD that Saddam turned out not to have, as everybody already knew. What was really intended was to have thorough inspections and then have the inspectors go away while the WMD were moved in by the American occupation. And we're not just talking about depleted uranium munitions and phosphorus bombs that were used in the current conflict. No, what was wanted and is still envisioned is missiles with nuclear warheads that can intercept "unfriendly" missiles soon after they are launched--like within 50 seconds.

It's this desire to make Iraq part of missile defense that's leading the US to object to the Central Asian Nuclear Weapons Free Zone, as well as the constant harping on missiles that Iran and Syria don't yet have. The latter is obviously designed to justify installations whose targeting on China and Russia can't be admitted. If nuclear weapons in Syria and Iran were a serious concern, it would seem reasonable for the US to push for the extension of the CANWFZ to include the Arabian Penninsula and all of the Middle East. Surely, if international inspections can keep the polio virus in check, they can make sure that nuclear weapons aren't introduced where we don't want them to be.

Indeed, given the catastrophe the US has created in Iraq, including the contaminationa of the environment with depleted uranium, it only seems fair that the US take the pledge and remove nuclear weapons from all foreign nations, in addition to doing its best to clean up the mess in Iraq. Of course, if it does make such a commitment, the US can't withdraw entirely right away, but it could forswear any longer term military presence and the permanent base construction could be stopped. That would be a good first step.

That an agenda that's been in the making has just gone up in smoke is just too bad.

Dead Tanks in Kansas

Radioactive Tank No. 9 comes limping home

by Bob Nichols

"RADIOACTIVE" is stenciled on Abrams tanks in these pictures taken Oct. 13, 2005, in Topeka, Kansas.
Photo: Chris Bayruh

Across the plains of Kansas, destroyed, radioactive Abrams tanks, perched on railroad flatcars, rolled towards an uncertain future. Only one thing was certain. They would be radioactive forever. This would be their everlasting death mask. The Pentagon deceptively calls it "depleted uranium."

The Abrams tanks are constructed with a layer of radioactive uranium metal plates. The big tanks fire a giant uranium dart at 2,100 mph, much faster than an F-16 fighter aircraft, mach III to airplane pilots and very, very fast to the rest of us.

American taxpayers paid to ship the tanks to Iraq and to return them for disposal or re-building in the United States. The tanks are 12 feet wide and weigh a stout 70 tons, or 140,000 pounds.

The enduring vigorous stupidity of the U.S. military pretends that radiation is one of those things that if you can't see it, it can't hurt you. They are thoroughly delusional, of course. A National Academy of Sciences report released June 30, 2005, finds that there is no safe level of radiation. Any radiation is bad.

This radioactive tank sitting exposed on a flatbed railroad car in Topeka, Kansas, should have been "encapsulated," according to U.S. Army Regulation 700-48, which has the force of law.
Photo: Chris Bayruh

From America to Iraq and back, these giant radioactive hulks can only sicken and kill Americans. On top of the sheer, unrelenting stupidity of playing with radiation with unsuspecting soldiers, now the neo-con government is involving everyday Americans in their radiation madness.

The Pentagon can't even follow simple radiation hazard mitigation instructions. Their own rules and regulations have the force of law throughout the world. Yet they are ignored in the United States.

Dr. Doug Rokke

Dr. Doug Rokke is the Pentagon's former director of the U.S. Army Depleted Uranium Project. When contacted on Oct. 22, he viewed Chris Bayruh's photographs and made this statement about the radioactive tanks in Kansas: "The radioactive damaged Abrams tanks that were left unsecured on a Kansas railroad track are a perfect example of exactly how not to ship damaged radioactive equipment and how not to protect our Army's Abrams tanks from possible sabotage and compromise of classified battle systems."

On Oct. 10, prior to the discovery of the radioactive tanks, Dr. Rokke made the following statement. It is eerily predictive of what would happen in Kansas three days later. "U.S. Department of Defense officials continue to deny that there are any adverse health and environmental effects as a consequence of the manufacture, testing and/or use of uranium munitions to avoid liability for the willful and illegal dispersal of a radioactive toxic material - depleted uranium."

This is another of the destroyed radioactive tanks in Topeka, Kansas. Children were playing around the tanks.
Photo: Chris Bayruh

Dr. Rokke continued, "They [the U.S. military] arrogantly refuse to comply with their own regulations, orders and directives that require United States Department of Defense officials to provide prompt and effective medical care to all exposed individuals." (See Note 1 below.)

"They also refuse to clean up dispersed radioactive contamination of equipment as required by Army regulations." (See Note 2.)

"Specifically, they are required (see Note 3) to accomplish four things:

1) Military personnel must 'identify, segregate, isolate, secure and label all RCE' (radiologically contaminated equipment).

2) 'Procedures to minimize the spread of radioactivity will be implemented as soon as possible.'

3) 'Radioactive material and waste will not be locally disposed of through burial, submersion, incineration, destruction in place, or abandonment' and

4) 'All equipment, to include captured or combat RCE, will be surveyed, packaged, retrograded, decontaminated and released.'

"The past and current use of uranium weapons, the release of radioactive components in destroyed U.S. and foreign military equipment, and releases of industrial, medical and research facility radioactive materials have resulted in unacceptable exposures."

Dr. Rokke added, "Therefore, decontamination must be completed as required by U.S. Army Regulation 700-48 and should include releases of all radioactive materials resulting from military operations.

"The extent of adverse health and environmental effects of uranium weapons contamination is not limited to combat zones but includes facilities and sites where uranium weapons were manufactured or tested, including Vieques, Puerto Rico, Colonie, New York, and Jefferson Proving Grounds, Indiana.

"Therefore, medical care must be provided by the United States Department of Defense officials to all individuals affected by the manufacturing, testing and/or use of uranium munitions. Thorough environmental remediation also must be completed without further delay.

"I am amazed," exclaimed Dr. Rokke, "that 14 years after I was asked to clean up the initial DU mess from Gulf War I and almost 10 years since I finished the depleted uranium project, United States Department of Defense officials and many others still attempt to justify uranium munitions use while ignoring mandatory requirements.

"But beyond the ignored mandatory actions, the willful dispersal of tons of solid radioactive and chemically toxic waste in the form of uranium munitions just does not even pass the common sense test.

"Finally, continued compliance with the infamous March 1991 Los Alamos Memorandum (see Note 5) that was issued to ensure continued use of uranium munitions cannot be justified.

"In conclusion," Dr. Rokke urged, "the president of the United States, George W. Bush, and the prime minister of Great Britain, Tony Blair, must acknowledge and accept responsibility for willful use of illegal uranium munitions - their own "dirty bombs" - resulting in adverse health and environmental effects."

"President Bush and Prime Minister Blair also should order:

1) medical care for all casualties,

2) thorough environmental remediation,

3) immediate cessation of retaliation against all of us who demand compliance with medical care and environmental remediation requirements,

4) and ban the future use of depleted uranium munitions," Dr. Rokke concluded.

A little old lady in tennis shoes

Leuren Moret is a world famous scientist and radiation specialist who formerly worked at the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab, where she became a whistleblower in 1991. She has spoken out about the danger of uranium munitions to humanity in more than 42 countries.

Moret has appeared in four documentaries about uranium munitions (depleted uranium). "Beyond Treason" debuted in August 2005 and won the Grand Festival Award at the Berkeley Film Festival. The newest film, "Blowin' in the Wind," was nominated during its debut the first week of November in Australia for an Academy Award.

Moret was an expert witness at the International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan and serves as an adviser and expert witness in court cases regarding radiation exposure. Her statement, made Oct. 24, about the dead tanks in Kansas follows:

"Sally Devlin, a little old lady in tennis shoes, went to a public meeting several years ago, held by the Air Force in Pahrump, Nevada. Two officers told the citizens of the town that the Air Force would be moving 80 old target practice tanks and tons of old depleted uranium munitions through their town.

"The radioactive bullets had been picked up off the Nellis gunnery ranges by order of the state of Nevada and were being transported to the Nevada Test Site [a nuclear weapons test site] to be buried as radioactive waste.

"When Mrs. Devlin politely asked them how they would prevent the residents of the town from being contaminated by the radioactive dust on the tanks and bullets, the officers said, 'We're wrapping them in Saran Wrap.' She told them that would be unacceptable and stopped the Air Force dead in their tracks," Moret concluded.

Whether it is Saran Wrap in Nevada or nothing at all in Kansas, the Pentagon just doesn't get it when it comes to uranium radiation dispersing weapons. It is way past time to take all their nuclear weapons and uranium munitions away from them and send them home to get real jobs. They are clearly incapable of protecting this country from all dangers, including those created by our own U.S. military.

The U.S. military shows so little regard for Americans in Kansas, one wonders what on earth they have done to Iraq. The U.S. military has distributed an estimated 8 million pounds of weaponized ceramic uranium oxide gas, aerosols and dust on a practically defenseless little country of 26 million people (see Note 6), according to an estimate by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark.

What is this lethal radioactive weapon supposed to do? Why was it used? Ceramic uranium oxide gas is a genocidal weapon, for God's sake. It persists in the environment forever. In Leuren Moret's pithy words, "The Iraqis are uranium meat."

The politicians, Pentagon staff, generals, commanding officers and others responsible for this war crime must be arrested, tried, convicted and appropriately punished for their crimes against humanity.

There is another explanation

Another explanation is that the U.S. Army and other branches of the military are far from stupid. They are, in fact, the most lethal and carefully planned military in the history of the world. The extensive use of weaponized uranium oxide gas, aerosols and dust is not an accident or an oversight. They did it on purpose.

If this is true, they purposely used a genocidal weapon over at least a 15-year period. No, this is not a callous mistake of empire; it is a calculated act of genocide to weaken the oil- and gas-rich countries of Central Asia, including Iraq. Take your choice: they are either stupid or genocidal monsters.

A British group has estimated the weaponized ceramic uranium oxide will account for an additional 25 million cancers in Iraq in the next several years. There are only 26 million Iraqis to start with, minus the nearly 1.7 million killed by war or sanctions since 1991, plus some live births.

A National Academy of Sciences report released June 30, 2005, finds that there is no safe level of radiation. The committee dismissed the idea that any radiation could be harmless or beneficial.

The radioactive tanks in Kansas and Iraq are the same. They are placed there at great expense by the senior American political and military leadership, with premeditated malice. The bottom line purpose of a 140,000-pound radioactive tank is to kill people.

Uranium munitions a war crime

Dennis Kyne, noted speaker and writer, is a former drill instructor (DI) and a 15-year veteran of the Army as well as a Gulf War vet (see www.denniskyne.com). Kyne makes a point of how "hot" or radioactive the tanks in Kansas would be if they were hit by "friendly fire" to get beat up so much. They could be contaminated with as much as 30,000 times background radiation. That is what uranium munitions do to a tank, bunker or building.

Karen Parker, a prominent U.S. international human rights lawyer, says there are four rules derived from humanitarian laws and conventions regarding weapons:

1. Weapons may only be used against legal enemy military targets and must not have an adverse effect elsewhere (the territorial rule).

2. Weapons can only be used for the duration of an armed conflict and must not be used or continue to act afterwards (the temporal rule).

3. Weapons may not be unduly inhumane (the "humaneness" rule). The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 speak of "unnecessary suffering" and "superfluous injury" in this regard

4. Weapons may not have an unduly negative effect on the natural environment (the "environmental" rule).

"DU weaponry fails all four tests," Parker states. "First, DU cannot be limited to legal military targets. Second, it cannot be 'turned off' when the war is over but keeps killing.

"Third, DU can kill through painful conditions such as cancers and organ damage and can also cause birth defects, such as facial deformities and missing limbs. Lastly, DU cannot be used without unduly damaging the natural environment.

"In my view, use of DU weaponry violates the grave breach provisions of the Geneva Conventions," Parker concluded, "and so its use constitutes a war crime, or crime against humanity."

Notes

1. "Medical Management of Unusual Depleted Uranium Casualties," DOD, Pentagon, 10/14/93, "Medical Management of Army Personnel Exposed to Depleted Uranium (DU)," Headquarters, U.S. Army Medical Command, 4/29/04, and section 2-5 of AR 700-48 .

2. AR 700- 48: "Management of Equipment Contaminated With Depleted Uranium or Radioactive Commodities," Headquarters, Department of the Army, Washington, D.C., September 2002, and U.S. Army Technical Bulletin TB 9-1300-278: "Guidelines For Safe Response To Handling, Storage, and Transportation Accidents Involving Army Tank Munitions or Armor Which Contain Depleted Uranium," Headquarters, Department of the Army, Washington, D.C., July 1996, http://traprockpeace.org/du_pam_700-48.pdf.

3. Section 2-4 of United States Army Regulation 700-48 dated Sept. 16, 2002, specifies these requirements.

4. IAW Technical Bulletin 9-1300-278, DA PAM 700-48. Maximum exposure limits are specified in Appendix F.

5. http://www.tv.cbc.ca/national/pgminfo/du/doc1.html

6. Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark's estimate, http://www.covertactionquarterly.org/demonize.html

© Copyright Bob Nichols. Copying permitted if you credit the source and leave everything intact, including notes. Bob Nichols is a Project Censored Award winner and lives in California. He formerly lived in Oklahoma. He is a contributor to OnLineJournal.com, AxisofLogic.com, DissidentVoice.com and other online publications and is a correspondent for the San Francisco Bay View newspaper. Nichols is a former employee of the McAlester Army Ammunition Plant. He can be reached by email at bob.bobnichols@gmail.com.

Bruderly for Congress

The sixth district in Florida is in dire need of real representation in Congress--not a rubber stamp.

Dave Bruderly is a class act, deserving of our support. And he's got a friend in Dean.

I wanted to send all my loyal supporters a letter telling you about the Duval County Democratic Party Jefferson-Jackson Dinner last Friday, the 19th. Thanks to Chairwoman Linda Whipple and her staff, Jacksonville hosted a great event, highlighted by DNC Chairman Howard Dean getting area Democratic supporters ready for the coming election in 2006.

My campaign staff has put together a blog at http://blog.bruderly06.com, where you can find out day-to-day news in our fight to unseat the Republican Rubberstamp who is currently filling the District 6 Congressional seat. Be sure to check it every day for updates. It has all the pictures from the JJ Dinner, but here is one, to whet your interest:

Dr. Dean took the time to meet with me prior to the dinner.

He took some of our campaign literature and let me know how important it was to unseat Cliff Stearns in North Central Florida.

Again, to see the rest of the pictures, including some of our supporters, visit http://blog.bruderly06.com

After meeting Chairman Dean, we were informed that, in order to compete, we must raise AT LEAST $100,000 dollars. We are well on our way to that goal. Millionaire Stearns has thousands in special interest PAC money to play with. Your contribution of $250 or $100 will be a voice in your PAC, the Real People for a better Sixth District.

Along with your financial support, PLEASE support my website by visiting www.bruderly.com. Read our blog. Let me hear your voice, by clicking our ?Real Ideas? button. Tell 10 friends about the site and let them find out for themselves that a New Voice, Representing Real People, is ready to be heard!

Thank you for all your help,

Dave Bruderly

McKinney Makes Sense

The Republicans Have Done a Heinous Thing

By Rep. CYNTHIA McKINNEY

[The following is the text of Rep. McKinney's floor remarks on the November 18 debate over the "Murtha" withdrawal resolution.]

The Republicans in this House have done a heinous thing: they have insulted one of the deans of this House in an unthinkable and unconscionable way.

They took his words and contorted them; they took his heartfelt sentiments and spun them. They took his resolution and deformed it: in a cheap effort to silence dissent in the House of Representatives.

The Republicans should be roundly criticized for this reprehensible act. They have perpetrated a fraud on the House of Representatives just as they have defrauded the American people.

By twisting the issue around, the Republicans are trying to set a trap for the Democrats. A "no" vote for this Resolution will obscure the fact that there is strong support for withdrawal of US forces from Iraq. I am voting "yes" on this Resolution for an orderly withdrawal of US forces from Iraq despite the convoluted motives behind the Republican Resolution. I am voting to support our troops by bringing them home now in an orderly withdrawal.

Sadly, if we call for an end to the occupation, some say that we have no love for the Iraqi people, that we would abandon them to tyrants and thugs.

Let us consider some history. The Republicans make great hay about Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons against the Iranians and the Kurds. But when that attack was made in 1988, it was Democrats who moved a resolution to condemn those attacks, and the Reagan White House quashed the bill in the Senate, because at that time the Republicans considered Saddam one of our own.

So in 1988, who abandoned the Iraqi people to tyrants and a thugs?

In voting for this bill, let me be perfectly clear that I am not saying the United States should exit Iraq without a plan. I agree with Mr. Murtha that security and stability in Iraq should be pursued through diplomacy. I simply want to vote yes to an orderly withdrawal from Iraq. And let me explain why.

Prior to its invasion, Iraq had not one (not one!) instance of suicide attacks in its history. Research shows a 100% correlation between suicide attacks and the presence of foreign combat troops in a host country. And experience also shows that suicide attacks abate when foreign occupation troops are withdrawn. The US invasion and occupation has destabilized Iraq and Iraq will only return to stability once this occupation ends.

We must be willing to face the fact that the presence of US combat troops is itself a major inspiration to the forces attacking our troops. Moreover, we must be willing to acknowledge that the forces attacking our troops are able to recruit suicide attackers because suicide attacks are largely motivated by revenge for the loss of loved ones. And Iraqis have lost so many loved ones as a result of America's two wars against Iraq.

In 1996, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said on CBS that the lives of 500,000 children dead from sanctions were "worth the price" of containing Saddam Hussein. When pressed to defend this reprehensible position she went on to explain that she did not want US Troops to have to fight the Gulf War again. Nor did I. But what happened? We fought a second gulf war. And now over 2,000 American soldiers lie dead. And I expect the voices of concern for Iraqi civilian casualties, whose deaths the Pentagon likes to brush aside as "collateral damage" are too few, indeed. A report from Johns Hopkins suggests that over 100,000 civilians have died in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion, most of them violent deaths and most as "collateral damage" from US forces. The accuracy of the 100,000 can and should be debated. Yet our media, while quick to cover attacks on civilians by insurgent forces in Iraq, have given us a blackout on Iraqi civilian deaths at the hands of US combat forces.

Yet let us remember that the United States and its allies imposed a severe policy of sanctions on the people of Iraq from 1990 to 2003. UNICEF and World Health Organization studies based on infant mortality studies showed a 500,000 increase in mortality of Iraqi children under 5 over trends that existed before sanctions. From this, it was widely assumed that over 1 million Iraqi deaths for all age groups could be attributed to sanctions between 1990 and 1998. And not only were there 5 more years of sanctions before the invasion, but the war since the invasion caused most aid groups to leave Iraq. So for areas not touched by reconstruction efforts, the humanitarian situation has deteriorated further. How many more Iraqi lives have been lost through hunger and deprivation since the occupation?

And what kind of an occupier have we been? We have all seen the photos of victims of US torture in Abu Ghraib prison. That's where Saddam used to send his political enemies to be tortured, and now many Iraqis quietly, cautiously ask: "So what has changed?"

A recent video documentary confirms that US forces used white phosphorous against civilian neighborhoods in the US attack on Fallujah. Civilians and insurgents were burned alive by these weapons. We also now know that US forces have used MK77, a napalm-like incendiary weapon, even though napalm has been outlawed by the United Nations.

With the images of tortured detainees, and the images of Iraqi civilians burned alive by US incendiary weapons now circulating the globe, our reputation on the world stage has been severely damaged.

If America wants to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, we as a people must be willing to face the pain and death and suffering we have brought to the Iraqi people with bombs, sanctions and occupation, even if we believe our actions were driven by the most altruistic of reasons. We must acknowledge our role in enforcing the policy of sanctions for 12 years after the extensive 1991 bombing in which we bombed infrastructure targets in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions.

We must also be ready to face the fact that the United States once provided support for the tyrant we deposed in the name of liberating the Iraqi people. These are events that our soldiers are too young to remember. I believe our young men and women in uniform are very sincere in their belief that their sacrifice is made in the name of helping the Iraqi people. But it is not they who set the policy. They take orders from the Commander-in-Chief and the Congress. It is we who bear the responsibility of weighing our decisions in a historical context, and it is we who must consider the gravest decision of whether or not to go to war based upon the history, the facts, and the truth.

Sadly, however, our country is at war in Iraq based on a lie told to the American people. The entire war was based premised on a sales pitch-that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction menacing the United States-that turned out to be a lie.

I have too many dead soldiers in my district; too many from my home state. Too many homeless veterans on our streets and in our neighborhoods.

America has sacrificed too many young soldiers' lives, too many young soldiers' mangled bodies, to the Bush war machine.

I will not vote to give one more soldier to the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney war machine. I will not give one more dollar for a war riddled with conspicuous profiteering.

Tonight I speak as one who has at times been the only Member of this Body at antiwar demonstrations calling for withdrawal. And I won't stop calling for withdrawal.

I was opposed to this war before there was a war; I was opposed to the war during the war; and I am opposed to this war now--even though it's supposed to be over.

A vote on war is the single most important vote we can make in this House. I understand the feelings of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle who might be severely conflicted by the decision we have to make here tonight. But the facts of US occupation of Iraq are also very clear. The occupation is headed down a dead end because so long as US combat forces patrol Iraq, there will be an Iraqi insurgency against it

I urge that we pursue an orderly withdrawal from Iraq and pursue, along with our allies, a diplomatic solution to the situation in Iraq, supporting the aspirations of the Iraqi people through support for democratic processes.

Deception, Deception Everywhere

What's a body to think?

Several interesting reports in the press today. Looks like some government agents are getting religion. Or setting the record straight before everything blows up in their faces.

There are at least two lies being perpetuated by Rendon's recitation. The first is that the Iraqi incursion into Kuwait came as a surprise. Certainly such a well-connected person knew Saddam's intent. The second is that "everything changed after 9/11." It's almost as if there were no connection between the US and Iraq during the eighties.

So, the question is why is that important?

First the mild stuff:

Fake News: It's the PR Industry Against the Rest of Us
By Bob Burton
Created 11/15/2005 - 14:42

Be careful what you ask for. That may be the take home lesson for the Public Relations Society of America [1] (PRSA).

Last Thursday, the PRSA released the results of its poll [2] of U.S. Congressional staffers, corporate executives and members of the general public. All three groups overwhelmingly supported mandating disclosure when broadcasters air video news releases [3] (VNRs) ? segments produced by public relations firms [4] for their clients and frequently aired, without disclosure, by television news shows. PRSA's results are similar to those of the Center for Media and Democracy's poll [5] on fake news [6], in which nearly 90 percent of respondents supported full disclosure, "in all cases," when VNRs or their radio cousins, audio news releases [7], are aired.
[...]

http://www.prwatch.org/node/4174

Now, the big story on how the Crawford Diddle was managed, sort of. Since it's all coming apart, the people who perpetrated it aren't as clever as they thought. From where I sit, this is yet another disinformation campaign which counts on small revelations making the big story go away.
The strategy now seems to be that by throwing a few bones to the hounds, the public will be thrown off the scent of real perpetrators of the crime.

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

The Man Who Sold the War

Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war
By JAMES BAMFORD

The road to war in Iraq led through many unlikely places. One of them was a chic hotel nestled among the strip bars and brothels that cater to foreigners in the town of Pattaya, on the Gulf of Thailand.

On December 17th, 2001, in a small room within the sound of the crashing tide, a CIA officer attached metal electrodes to the ring and index fingers of a man sitting pensively in a padded chair. The officer then stretched a black rubber tube, pleated like an accordion, around the man's chest and another across his abdomen. Finally, he slipped a thick cuff over the man's brachial artery, on the inside of his upper arm.

Strapped to the polygraph machine was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan and was now determined to bring down Saddam Hussein. For hours, as thin mechanical styluses traced black lines on rolling graph paper, al-Haideri laid out an explosive tale. Answering yes and no to a series of questions, he insisted repeatedly that he was a civil engineer who had helped Saddam's men to secretly bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The illegal arms, according to al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells, hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital, the largest medical facility in Baghdad.

It was damning stuff -- just the kind of evidence the Bush administration was looking for. If the charges were true, they would offer the White House a compelling reason to invade Iraq and depose Saddam. That's why the Pentagon had flown a CIA polygraph expert to Pattaya: to question al-Haideri and confirm, once and for all, that Saddam was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

There was only one problem: It was all a lie. After a review of the sharp peaks and deep valleys on the polygraph chart, the intelligence officer concluded that al-Haideri had made up the entire story, apparently in the hopes of securing a visa.

The fabrication might have ended there, the tale of another political refugee trying to scheme his way to a better life. But just because the story wasn't true didn't mean it couldn't be put to good use. Al-Haideri, in fact, was the product of a clandestine operation -- part espionage, part PR campaign -- that had been set up and funded by the CIA and the Pentagon for the express purpose of selling the world a war. And the man who had long been in charge of the marketing was a secretive and mysterious creature of the Washington establishment named John Rendon.

Rendon is a man who fills a need that few people even know exists. Two months before al-Haideri took the lie-detector test, the Pentagon had secretly awarded him a $16 million contract to target Iraq and other adversaries with propaganda. One of the most powerful people in Washington, Rendon is a leader in the strategic field known as "perception management," manipulating information -- and, by extension, the news media -- to achieve the desired result. His firm, the Rendon Group, has made millions off government contracts since 1991, when it was hired by the CIA to help "create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power." Working under this extraordinary transfer of secret authority, Rendon assembled a group of anti-Saddam militants, personally gave them their name -- the Iraqi National Congress -- and served as their media guru and "senior adviser" as they set out to engineer an uprising against Saddam. It was as if President John F. Kennedy had outsourced the Bay of Pigs operation to the advertising and public-relations firm of J. Walter Thompson.

"They're very closemouthed about what they do," says Kevin McCauley, an editor of the industry trade publication O'Dwyer's PR Daily. "It's all cloak-and-dagger stuff."

Although Rendon denies any direct involvement with al-Haideri, the defector was the latest salvo in a secret media war set in motion by Rendon. In an operation directed by Ahmad Chalabi -- the man Rendon helped install as leader of the INC -- the defector had been brought to Thailand, where he huddled in a hotel room for days with the group's spokesman, Zaab Sethna. The INC routinely coached defectors on their stories, prepping them for polygraph exams, and Sethna was certainly up to the task -- he got his training in the art of propaganda on the payroll of the Rendon Group. According to Francis Brooke, the INC's man in Washington and himself a former Rendon employee, the goal of the al-Haideri operation was simple: pressure the United States to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein.

As the CIA official flew back to Washington with failed lie-detector charts in his briefcase, Chalabi and Sethna didn't hesitate. They picked up the phone, called two journalists who had a long history of helping the INC promote its cause and offered them an exclusive on Saddam's terrifying cache of WMDs.

For the worldwide broadcast rights, Sethna contacted Paul Moran, an Australian freelancer who frequently worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corp. "I think I've got something that you would be interested in," he told Moran, who was living in Bahrain. Sethna knew he could count on the trim, thirty-eight-year-old journalist: A former INC employee in the Middle East, Moran had also been on Rendon's payroll for years in "information operations," working with Sethna at the company's London office on Catherine Place, near Buckingham Palace.

"We were trying to help the Kurds and the Iraqis opposed to Saddam set up a television station," Sethna recalled in a rare interview broadcast on Australian television. "The Rendon Group came to us and said, 'We have a contract to kind of do anti-Saddam propaganda on behalf of the Iraqi opposition.' What we didn't know -- what the Rendon Group didn't tell us -- was in fact it was the CIA that had hired them to do this work."

The INC's choice for the worldwide print exclusive was equally easy: Chalabi contacted Judith Miller of The New York Times. Miller, who was close to I. Lewis Libby and other neoconservatives in the Bush administration, had been a trusted outlet for the INC's anti-Saddam propaganda for years. Not long after the CIA polygraph expert slipped the straps and electrodes off al-Haideri and declared him a liar, Miller flew to Bangkok to interview him under the watchful supervision of his INC handlers. Miller later made perfunctory calls to the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, but despite her vaunted intelligence sources, she claimed not to know about the results of al-Haideri's lie-detector test. Instead, she reported that unnamed "government experts" called his information "reliable and significant" -- thus adding a veneer of truth to the lies.

Her front-page story, which hit the stands on December 20th, 2001, was exactly the kind of exposure Rendon had been hired to provide. AN IRAQI DEFECTOR TELLS OF WORK ON AT LEAST 20 HIDDEN WEAPONS SITES, declared the headline. "An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer," Miller wrote, "said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas and under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago." If verified, she noted, "his allegations would provide ammunition to officials within the Bush administration who have been arguing that Mr. Hussein should be driven from power partly because of his unwillingness to stop making weapons of mass destruction, despite his pledges to do so."

For months, hawks inside and outside the administration had been pressing for a pre-emptive attack on Iraq. Now, thanks to Miller's story, they could point to "proof" of Saddam's "nuclear threat." The story, reinforced by Moran's on-camera interview with al-Haideri on the giant Australian Broadcasting Corp., was soon being trumpeted by the White House and repeated by newspapers and television networks around the world. It was the first in a long line of hyped and fraudulent stories that would eventually propel the U.S. into a war with Iraq -- the first war based almost entirely on a covert propaganda campaign targeting the media.

By law, the Bush administration is expressly prohibited from disseminating government propaganda at home. But in an age of global communications, there is nothing to stop it from planting a phony pro-war story overseas -- knowing with certainty that it will reach American citizens almost instantly. A recent congressional report suggests that the Pentagon may be relying on "covert psychological operations affecting audiences within friendly nations." In a "secret amendment" to Pentagon policy, the report warns, "psyops funds might be used to publish stories favorable to American policies, or hire outside contractors without obvious ties to the Pentagon to organize rallies in support of administration policies." The report also concludes that military planners are shifting away from the Cold War view that power comes from superior weapons systems. Instead, the Pentagon now believes that "combat power can be enhanced by communications networks and technologies that control access to, and directly manipulate, information. As a result, information itself is now both a tool and a target of warfare."

It is a belief John Rendon encapsulated in a speech to cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1996. "I am not a national-security strategist or a military tactician," he declared. "I am a politician, a person who uses communication to meet public-policy or corporate-policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager." To explain his philosophy, Rendon paraphrased a journalist he knew from his days as a staffer on the presidential campaigns of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter: "This is probably best described in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, when he wrote, 'When things turn weird, the weird turn pro.'"

John Walter Rendon Jr. rises at 3 a.m. each morning after six hours of sleep, turns on his Apple computer and begins ingesting information -- overnight news reports, e-mail messages, foreign and domestic newspapers, and an assortment of government documents, many of them available only to those with the highest security clearance. According to Pentagon documents obtained by Rolling Stone, the Rendon Group is authorized "to research and analyze information classified up to Top Secret/SCI/SI/TK/G/HCS" -- an extraordinarily high level of clearance granted to only a handful of defense contractors. "SCI" stands for Sensitive Compartmented Information, data classified higher than Top Secret. "SI" is Special Intelligence, very secret communications intercepted by the National Security Agency. "TK" refers to Talent/Keyhole, code names for imagery from reconnaissance aircraft and spy satellites. "G" stands for Gamma (communications intercepts from extremely sensitive sources) and "HCS" means Humint Control System (information from a very sensitive human source). Taken together, the acronyms indicate that Rendon enjoys access to the most secret information from all three forms of intelligence collection: eavesdropping, imaging satellites and human spies.

Rendon lives in a multimillion-dollar home in Washington's exclusive Kalorama neighborhood. A few doors down from Rendon is the home of former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara; just around the corner lives current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. At fifty-six, Rendon wears owlish glasses and combs his thick mane of silver-gray hair to the side, Kennedy-style. He heads to work each morning clad in a custom-made shirt with his monogram on the right cuff and a sharply tailored blue blazer that hangs loose around his bulky frame. By the time he pulls up to the Rendon Group's headquarters near Dupont Circle, he has already racked up a handsome fee for the morning's work: According to federal records, Rendon charges the CIA and the Pentagon $311.26 an hour for his services.

Rendon is one of the most influential of the private contractors in Washington who are increasingly taking over jobs long reserved for highly trained CIA employees. In recent years, spies-for-hire have begun to replace regional desk officers, who control clandestine operations around the world; watch officers at the agency's twenty-four-hour crisis center; analysts, who sift through reams of intelligence data; and even counterintelligence officers in the field, who oversee meetings between agents and their recruited spies. According to one senior administration official involved in intelligence-budget decisions, half of the CIA's work is now performed by private contractors -- people completely unaccountable to Congress. Another senior budget official acknowledges privately that lawmakers have no idea how many rent-a-spies the CIA currently employs -- or how much unchecked power they enjoy.

Unlike many newcomers to the field, however, Rendon is a battle-tested veteran who has been secretly involved in nearly every American shooting conflict in the past two decades. In the first interview he has granted in decades, Rendon offered a peek through the keyhole of this seldom-seen world of corporate spooks -- a rarefied but growing profession. Over a dinner of lamb chops and a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape at a private Washington club, Rendon was guarded about the details of his clandestine work -- but he boasted openly of the sweep and importance of his firm's efforts as a for-profit spy. "We've worked in ninety-one countries," he said. "Going all the way back to Panama, we've been involved in every war, with the exception of Somalia."

It is an unusual career twist for someone who entered politics as an opponent of the Vietnam War. The son of a stockbroker, Rendon grew up in New Jersey and stumped for McGovern before graduating from Northeastern University. "I was the youngest state coordinator," he recalls. "I had Maine. They told me that I understood politics -- which was a stretch, being so young." Rendon, who went on to serve as executive director of the Democratic National Committee, quickly mastered the combination of political skulduggery and media manipulation that would become his hallmark. In 1980, as the manager of Jimmy Carter's troops at the national convention in New York, he was sitting alone in the bleachers at Madison Square Garden when a reporter for ABC News approached him. "They actually did a little piece about the man behind the curtain," Rendon says. "A Wizard of Oz thing." It was a role he would end up playing for the rest of his life.

After Carter lost the election and the hard-right Reagan revolutionaries came to power in 1981, Rendon went into business with his younger brother Rick. "Everybody started consulting," he recalls. "We started consulting." They helped elect John Kerry to the Senate in 1984 and worked for the AFL-CIO to mobilize the union vote for Walter Mondale's presidential campaign. Among the items Rendon produced was a training manual for union organizers to operate as political activists on behalf of Mondale. To keep the operation quiet, Rendon stamped CONFIDENTIAL on the cover of each of the blue plastic notebooks. It was a penchant for secrecy that would soon pervade all of his consulting deals.

To a large degree, the Rendon Group is a family affair. Rendon's wife, Sandra Libby, handles the books as chief financial officer and "senior communications strategist." Rendon's brother Rick serves as senior partner and runs the company's Boston office, producing public-service announcements for the Whale Conservation Institute and coordinating Empower Peace, a campaign that brings young people in the Middle East in contact with American kids through video-conferencing technology. But the bulk of the company's business is decidedly less liberal and peace oriented. Rendon's first experience in the intelligence world, in fact, came courtesy of the Republicans. "Panama," he says, "brought us into the national-security environment."

In 1989, shortly after his election, President George H.W. Bush signed a highly secret "finding" authorizing the CIA to funnel $10 million to opposition forces in Panama to overthrow Gen. Manuel Noriega. Reluctant to involve agency personnel directly, the CIA turned to the Rendon Group. Rendon's job was to work behind the scenes, using a variety of campaign and psychological techniques to put the CIA's choice, Guillermo Endara, into the presidential palace. Cash from the agency, laundered through various bank accounts and front organizations, would end up in Endara's hands, who would then pay Rendon.

A heavyset, fifty-three-year-old corporate attorney with little political experience, Endara was running against Noriega's handpicked choice, Carlos Duque. With Rendon's help, Endara beat Duque decisively at the polls -- but Noriega simply named himself "Maximum Leader" and declared the election null and void. The Bush administration then decided to remove Noriega by force -- and Rendon's job shifted from generating local support for a national election to building international support for regime change. Within days he had found the ultimate propaganda tool.

At the end of a rally in support of Endara, a band of Noriega's Dignity Battalion -- nicknamed "Dig Bats" and called "Doberman thugs" by Bush -- attacked the crowd with wooden planks, metal pipes and guns. Gang members grabbed the bodyguard of Guillermo Ford, one of Endara's vice-presidential candidates, pushed him against a car, shoved a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. With cameras snapping, the Dig Bats turned on Ford, batting his head with a spike-tipped metal rod and pounding him with heavy clubs, turning his white guayabera bright red with blood -- his own, and that of his dead bodyguard.

Within hours, Rendon made sure the photos reached every newsroom in the world. The next week an image of the violence made the cover of Time magazine with the caption POLITICS PANAMA STYLE: NORIEGA BLUDGEONS HIS OPPOSITION, AND THE U.S. TURNS UP THE HEAT. To further boost international support for Endara, Rendon escorted Ford on a tour of Europe to meet British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Italian prime minister and even the pope. In December 1989, when Bush decided to invade Panama, Rendon and several of his employees were on one of the first military jets headed to Panama City.

"I arrived fifteen minutes before it started," Rendon recalls. "My first impression is having the pilot in the plane turn around and say, 'Excuse me, sir, but if you look off to the left you'll see the attack aircraft circling before they land.' Then I remember this major saying, 'Excuse me, sir, but do you know what the air-defense capability of Panama is at the moment?' I leaned into the cockpit and said, 'Look, major, I hope by now that's no longer an issue.'"

Moments later, Rendon's plane landed at Howard Air Force Base in Panama. "I needed to get to Fort Clayton, which was where the president was," he says. "I was choppered over -- and we took some rounds on the way." There, on a U.S. military base surrounded by 24,000 U.S. troops, heavy tanks and Combat Talon AC-130 gunships, Rendon's client, Endara, was at last sworn in as president of Panama.

Rendon's involvement in the campaign to oust Saddam Hussein began seven months later, in July 1990. Rendon had taken time out for a vacation -- a long train ride across Scotland -- when he received an urgent call. "Soldiers are massing at the border outside of Kuwait," he was told. At the airport, he watched the beginning of the Iraqi invasion on television. Winging toward Washington in the first-class cabin of a Pan Am 747, Rendon spent the entire flight scratching an outline of his ideas in longhand on a yellow legal pad.

"I wrote a memo about what the Kuwaitis were going to face, and I based it on our experience in Panama and the experience of the Free French operation in World War II," Rendon says. "This was something that they needed to see and hear, and that was my whole intent. Go over, tell the Kuwaitis, 'Here's what you've got -- here's some observations, here's some recommendations, live long and prosper.'"

Back in Washington, Rendon immediately called Hamilton Jordan, the former chief of staff to President Carter and an old friend from his Democratic Party days. "He put me in touch with the Saudis, the Saudis put me in touch with the Kuwaitis and then I went over and had a meeting with the Kuwaitis," Rendon recalls. "And by the time I landed back in the United States, I got a phone call saying, 'Can you come back? We want you to do what's in the memo.'"

What the Kuwaitis wanted was help in selling a war of liberation to the American government -- and the American public. Rendon proposed a massive "perception management" campaign designed to convince the world of the need to join forces to rescue Kuwait. Working through an organization called Citizens for a Free Kuwait, the Kuwaiti government in exile agreed to pay Rendon $100,000 a month for his assistance.

To coordinate the operation, Rendon opened an office in London. Once the Gulf War began, he remained extremely busy trying to prevent the American press from reporting on the dark side of the Kuwaiti government, an autocratic oil-tocracy ruled by a family of wealthy sheiks. When newspapers began reporting that many Kuwaitis were actually living it up in nightclubs in Cairo as Americans were dying in the Kuwaiti sand, the Rendon Group quickly counterattacked. Almost instantly, a wave of articles began appearing telling the story of grateful Kuwaitis mailing 20,000 personally signed valentines to American troops on the front lines, all arranged by Rendon.

Rendon also set up an elaborate television and radio network, and developed programming that was beamed into Kuwait from Taif, Saudi Arabia. "It was important that the Kuwaitis in occupied Kuwait understood that the rest of the world was doing something," he says. Each night, Rendon's troops in London produced a script and sent it via microwave to Taif, ensuring that the "news" beamed into Kuwait reflected a sufficiently pro-American line.

When it comes to staging a war, few things are left to chance. After Iraq withdrew from Kuwait, it was Rendon's responsibility to make the victory march look like the flag-waving liberation of France after World War II. "Did you ever stop to wonder," he later remarked, "how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American -- and, for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries?" After a pause, he added, "Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs then."

Although his work is highly secret, Rendon insists he deals only in "timely, truthful and accurate information." His job, he says, is to counter false perceptions that the news media perpetuate because they consider it "more important to be first than to be right." In modern warfare, he believes, the outcome depends largely on the public's perception of the war -- whether it is winnable, whether it is worth the cost. "We are being haunted and stalked by the difference between perception and reality," he says. "Because the lines are divergent, this difference between perception and reality is one of the greatest strategic communications challenges of war."

By the time the Gulf War came to a close in 1991, the Rendon Group was firmly established as Washington's leading salesman for regime change. But Rendon's new assignment went beyond simply manipulating the media. After the war ended, the Top Secret order signed by President Bush to oust Hussein included a rare "lethal finding" -- meaning deadly action could be taken if necessary. Under contract to the CIA, Rendon was charged with helping to create a dissident force with the avowed purpose of violently overthrowing the entire Iraqi government. It is an undertaking that Rendon still considers too classified to discuss. "That's where we're wandering into places I'm not going to talk about," he says. "If you take an oath, it should mean something."

Thomas Twetten, the CIA's former deputy of operations, credits Rendon with virtually creating the INC. "The INC was clueless," he once observed. "They needed a lot of help and didn't know where to start. That is why Rendon was brought in." Acting as the group's senior adviser and aided by truckloads of CIA dollars, Rendon pulled together a wide spectrum of Iraqi dissidents and sponsored a conference in Vienna to organize them into an umbrella organization, which he dubbed the Iraqi National Congress. Then, as in Panama, his assignment was to help oust a brutal dictator and replace him with someone chosen by the CIA. "The reason they got the contract was because of what they had done in Panama -- so they were known," recalls Whitley Bruner, former chief of the CIA's station in Baghdad. This time the target was Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the agency's successor of choice was Ahmad Chalabi, a crafty, avuncular Iraqi exile beloved by Washington's neoconservatives.

Chalabi was a curious choice to lead a rebellion. In 1992, he was convicted in Jordan of making false statements and embezzling $230 million from his own bank, for which he was sentenced in absentia to twenty-two years of hard labor. But the only credential that mattered was his politics. "From day one," Rendon says, "Chalabi was very clear that his biggest interest was to rid Iraq of Saddam." Bruner, who dealt with Chalabi and Rendon in London in 1991, puts it even more bluntly. "Chalabi's primary focus," he said later, "was to drag us into a war."

The key element of Rendon's INC operation was a worldwide media blitz designed to turn Hussein, a once dangerous but now contained regional leader, into the greatest threat to world peace. Each month, $326,000 was passed from the CIA to the Rendon Group and the INC via various front organizations. Rendon profited handsomely, receiving a "management fee" of ten percent above what it spent on the project. According to some reports, the company made nearly $100 million on the contract during the five years following the Gulf War.

Rendon made considerable headway with the INC, but following the group's failed coup attempt against Saddam in 1996, the CIA lost confidence in Chalabi and cut off his monthly paycheck. But Chalabi and Rendon simply switched sides, moving over to the Pentagon, and the money continued to flow. "The Rendon Group is not in great odor in Langley these days," notes Bruner. "Their contracts are much more with the Defense Department."

Rendon's influence rose considerably in Washington after the terrorist attacks of September 11th. In a single stroke, Osama bin Laden altered the world's perception of reality -- and in an age of nonstop information, whoever controls perception wins. What Bush needed to fight the War on Terror was a skilled information warrior -- and Rendon was widely acknowledged as the best. "The events of 11 September 2001 changed everything, not least of which was the administration's outlook concerning strategic influence," notes one Army report. "Faced with direct evidence that many people around the world actively hated the United States, Bush began taking action to more effectively explain U.S. policy overseas. Initially the White House and DoD turned to the Rendon Group."

Three weeks after the September 11th attacks, according to documents obtained from defense sources, the Pentagon awarded a large contract to the Rendon Group. Around the same time, Pentagon officials also set up a highly secret organization called the Office of Strategic Influence. Part of the OSI's mission was to conduct covert disinformation and deception operations -- planting false news items in the media and hiding their origins. "It's sometimes valuable from a military standpoint to be able to engage in deception with respect to future anticipated plans," Vice President Dick Cheney said in explaining the operation. Even the military's top brass found the clandestine unit unnerving. "When I get their briefings, it's scary," a senior official said at the time.

In February 2002, The New York Times reported that the Pentagon had hired Rendon "to help the new office," a charge Rendon denies. "We had nothing to do with that," he says. "We were not in their reporting chain. We were reporting directly to the J-3" -- the head of operations at the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Following the leak, Rumsfeld was forced to shut down the organization. But much of the office's operations were apparently shifted to another unit, deeper in the Pentagon's bureaucracy, called the Information Operations Task Force, and Rendon was closely connected to this group. "Greg Newbold was the J-3 at the time, and we reported to him through the IOTF," Rendon says.

According to the Pentagon documents, the Rendon Group played a major role in the IOTF. The company was charged with creating an "Information War Room" to monitor worldwide news reports at lightning speed and respond almost instantly with counterpropaganda. A key weapon, according to the documents, was Rendon's "proprietary state-of-the-art news-wire collection system called 'Livewire,' which takes real-time news-wire reports, as they are filed, before they are on the Internet, before CNN can read them on the air and twenty-four hours before they appear in the morning newspapers, and sorts them by keyword. The system provides the most current real-time access to news and information available to private or public organizations."

The top target that the pentagon assigned to Rendon was the Al-Jazeera television network. The contract called for the Rendon Group to undertake a massive "media mapping" campaign against the news organization, which the Pentagon considered "critical to U.S. objectives in the War on Terrorism." According to the contract, Rendon would provide a "detailed content analysis of the station's daily broadcast . . . [and] identify the biases of specific journalists and potentially obtain an understanding of their allegiances, including the possibility of specific relationships and sponsorships."

The secret targeting of foreign journalists may have had a sinister purpose. Among the missions proposed for the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence was one to "coerce" foreign journalists and plant false information overseas. Secret briefing papers also said the office should find ways to "punish" those who convey the "wrong message." One senior officer told CNN that the plan would "formalize government deception, dishonesty and misinformation."

According to the Pentagon documents, Rendon would use his media analysis to conduct a worldwide propaganda campaign, deploying teams of information warriors to allied nations to assist them "in developing and delivering specific messages to the local population, combatants, front-line states, the media and the international community." Among the places Rendon's info-war teams would be sent were Jakarta, Indonesia; Islamabad, Pakistan; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Cairo; Ankara, Turkey; and Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The teams would produce and script television news segments "built around themes and story lines supportive of U.S. policy objectives."

Rendon was also charged with engaging in "military deception" online -- an activity once assigned to the OSI. The company was contracted to monitor Internet chat rooms in both English and Arabic -- and "participate in these chat rooms when/if tasked." Rendon would also create a Web site "with regular news summaries and feature articles. Targeted at the global public, in English and at least four (4) additional languages, this activity also will include an extensive e-mail push operation." These techniques are commonly used to plant a variety of propaganda, including false information.

Still another newly formed propaganda operation in which Rendon played a major part was the Office of Global Communications, which operated out of the White House and was charged with spreading the administration's message on the War in Iraq. Every morning at 9:30, Rendon took part in the White House OGC conference call, where officials would discuss the theme of the day and who would deliver it. The office also worked closely with the White House Iraq Group, whose high-level members, including recently indicted Cheney chief of staff Lewis Libby, were responsible for selling the war to the American public.

Never before in history had such an extensive secret network been established to shape the entire world's perception of a war. "It was not just bad intelligence -- it was an orchestrated effort," says Sam Gardner, a retired Air Force colonel who has taught strategy and military operations at the National War College. "It began before the war, was a major effort during the war and continues as post-conflict distortions."

In the first weeks following the September 11th attacks, Rendon operated at a frantic pitch. "In the early stages it was fielding every ground ball that was coming, because nobody was sure if we were ever going to be attacked again," he says. "It was 'What do you know about this, what do you know about that, what else can you get, can you talk to somebody over here?' We functioned twenty-four hours a day. We maintained situational awareness, in military terms, on all things related to terrorism. We were doing 195 newspapers and 43 countries in fourteen or fifteen languages. If you do this correctly, I can tell you what's on the evening news tonight in a country before it happens. I can give you, as a policymaker, a six-hour break on how you can affect what's going to be on the news. They'll take that in a heartbeat."

The Bush administration took everything Rendon had to offer. Between 2000 and 2004, Pentagon documents show, the Rendon Group received at least thirty-five contracts with the Defense Department, worth a total of $50 million to $100 million.

The mourners genuflected, made the sign of the cross and took their seats along the hard, shiny pews of Our Lady of Victories Catholic Church. It was April 2nd, 2003 -- the start of fall in the small Australian town of Glenelg, an aging beach resort of white Victorian homes and soft, blond sand on Holdback Bay. Rendon had flown halfway around the world to join nearly 600 friends and family who were gathered to say farewell to a local son and amateur football champ, Paul Moran. Three days into the invasion of Iraq, the freelance journalist and Rendon employee had become the first member of the media to be killed in the war -- a war he had covertly helped to start.

Moran had lived a double life, filing reports for the Australian Broadcasting Corp. and other news organizations, while at other times operating as a clandestine agent for Rendon, enjoying what his family calls his "James Bond lifestyle." Moran had trained Iraqi opposition forces in photographic espionage, showing them how to covertly document Iraqi military activities, and had produced pro-war announcements for the Pentagon. "He worked for the Rendon Group in London," says his mother, Kathleen. "They just send people all over the world -- where there are wars."

Moran was covering the Iraq invasion for ABC, filming at a Kurdish-controlled checkpoint in the city of Sulaymaniyah, when a car driven by a suicide bomber blew up next to him. "I saw the car in a kind of slow-motion disintegrate," recalls Eric Campbell, a correspondent who was filming with Moran. "A soldier handed me a passport, which was charred. That's when I knew Paul was dead."

As the Mass ended and Moran's Australian-flag-draped coffin passed by the mourners, Rendon lifted his right arm and saluted. He refused to discuss Moran's role in the company, saying only that "Paul worked for us on a number of projects." But on the long flight back to Washington, across more than a dozen time zones, Rendon outlined his feelings in an e-mail: "The day did begin with dark and ominous clouds much befitting the emotions we all felt -- sadness and anger at the senseless violence that claimed our comrade Paul Moran ten short days ago and many decades of emotion ago."

The Rendon Group also organized a memorial service in London, where Moran first went to work for the company in 1990. Held at Home House, a private club in Portman Square where Moran often stayed while visiting the city, the event was set among photographs of Moran in various locations around the Middle East. Zaab Sethna, who organized the al-Haideri media exclusive in Thailand for Moran and Judith Miller, gave a touching tribute to his former colleague. "I think that on both a personal and professional level Paul was deeply admired and loved by the people at the Rendon Group," Sethna later said.

Although Moran was gone, the falsified story about weapons of mass destruction that he and Sethna had broadcast around the world lived on. Seven months earlier, as President Bush was about to argue his case for war before the U.N., the White House had given prominent billing to al-Haideri's fabricated charges. In a report ironically titled "Iraq: Denial and Deception," the administration referred to al-Haideri by name and detailed his allegations -- even though the CIA had already determined them to be lies. The report was placed on the White House Web site on September 12th, 2002, and remains there today. One version of the report even credits Miller's article for the information.

Miller also continued to promote al-Haideri's tale of Saddam's villainy. In January 2003, more than a year after her first article appeared, Miller again reported that Pentagon "intelligence officials" were telling her that "some of the most valuable information has come from Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri." His interviews with the Defense Intelligence Agency, Miller added, "ultimately resulted in dozens of highly credible reports on Iraqi weapons-related activity and purchases, officials said."

Finally, in early 2004, more than two years after he made the dramatic allegations to Miller and Moran about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, al-Haideri was taken back to Iraq by the CIA's Iraq Survey Group. On a wide-ranging trip through Baghdad and other key locations, al-Haideri was given the opportunity to point out exactly where Saddam's stockpiles were hidden, confirming the charges that had helped to start a war.

In the end, he could not identify a single site where illegal weapons were buried.

As the war in Iraq has spiraled out of control, the Bush administration's covert propaganda campaign has intensified. According to a secret Pentagon report personally approved by Rumsfeld in October 2003 and obtained by Rolling Stone, the Strategic Command is authorized to engage in "military deception" -- defined as "presenting false information, images or statements." The seventy-four-page document, titled "Information Operations Roadmap," also calls for psychological operations to be launched over radio, television, cell phones and "emerging technologies" such as the Internet. In addition to being classified secret, the road map is also stamped noforn, meaning it cannot be shared even with our allies.

As the acknowledged general of such propaganda warfare, Rendon insists that the work he does is for the good of all Americans. "For us, it's a question of patriotism," he says. "It's not a question of politics, and that's an important distinction. I feel very strongly about that personally. If brave men and women are going to be put in harm's way, they deserve support." But in Iraq, American troops and Iraqi civilians were put in harm's way, in large part, by the false information spread by Rendon and the men he trained in information warfare. And given the rapid growth of what is known as the "security-intelligence complex" in Washington, covert perception managers are likely to play an increasingly influential role in the wars of the future.

Indeed, Rendon is already thinking ahead. Last year, he attended a conference on information operations in London, where he offered an assessment on the Pentagon's efforts to manipulate the media. According to those present, Rendon applauded the practice of embedding journalists with American forces. "He said the embedded idea was great," says an Air Force colonel who attended the talk. "It worked as they had found in the test. It was the war version of reality television, and for the most part they did not lose control of the story." But Rendon also cautioned that individual news organizations were often able to "take control of the story," shaping the news before the Pentagon asserted its spin on the day's events.

"We lost control of the context," Rendon warned. "That has to be fixed for the next war."

James Bamford is the best-selling author of "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies" (2004) and "Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency" (2001). This is his first article for Rolling Stone.
(Posted Nov 17, 2005)

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/8798997?pageid

S.O.S. from Iraq

S.O.S TO THE FRIENDLY AMERICAN PEOPLE ASSOCIATION OF VICTIMS OF AMERICAN OCCUPATION PRISONS IN IRAQ
From HAJ ALI - OrbStandard

November 17, 2005

I START MY LINES WITH A BIG HELLO TO THE FRIENDLY AMERICAN PEOPLE TELLING THEM THAT WE IN THE ASSOCIATION OF VICTIMS OF THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION PRISONS WRITING TO YOU. I AM HAJ ALI, THE MAN OF THE BLACK CAP ON HIS HEAD AND WIRES OF ELECTRICITY CONNECTED TO HIS HAND IN ABU GRAIB PRISON WHO FOUND THIS ASSOCIATION WRITING TO YOU, TO YOUR FREE WILL, YOUR HEARTS AND YOUR MINDS TO ASK YOU TO PARTICIPATE IN STOPING THE BLOOD BATH THAT'S GOING ON IN IRAQ DONE BY THE DIRTY HANDS OF THE MELITIAS THAT WORK IN THE MINISTRY OF INTERIOR IN IRAQ AND BY THE MINISTRY OF INTERIOR ITSELF WHICH HAS BECOME A PROFFESSIONAL IN TORTURING AND KILLING INNOCENT PEOPLE UNDER THE BASIC OF SECTARIANISM AND ETHNICITY THEY BROUGHT TO IRAQ.

YOU HEARD IN THE NEWS ABOUT THE 176 DETAINEES OF THE IRAQI PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN TORTURED IN A SAVAGE WAY. WE NEED YOU TO KNOW THAT THERE ARE MORE THAN 200 PRISONS LIKE THE ONE WHERE THE 176 HAVE BEEN FOUND IN FEW DAYS AGO.

IT'S A SHAME THAT THE ARMY WHO DID THE NORMANDI OPERATION TO LIBERATE EUROPE FROM THE NAZISM, IS SUPPORTING AND COVER THE KILLERS IN THOSE PRISONS.

WHAT YOU HEAR OF SPEECHES TO TELL ABOUT THE EXISTANCE THOUSANDS OF THE IRAQI SOLDIER AND POLICE MEN ARE BIG LYING! THOSE PEOPLE WHO WORK IN THE IRAQI ARMY AND THE POLICE SYSTEM HAVE BEEN TRAINED BY THE AMERICAN ARMY AND POLICE MEN. THEY STARTED HAVING THE KILLING AS A PROFESSION UNDER THE SUPPORT AND COVER OF THE AMERICAN TANKS AND AIR FORCE. WE ENSURE TO YOU AND TO THE WORLD THAT THOSE PRISONS HAVE BECOME A BIG BASE TO GRADUATE PEOPLE WHO BECAME READY TO HAVE THE GUN ON SHOULDERS BECAUSE OF THE SAVAGE TORTURE AND HUMILIATION THEY HAVE IN THOSE PRISONS.

PLEASE, HELP YOUR CHILDREN, MOTHERS, FATHERS, SISTERS AND BROTHERS IN IRAQ TO STOP HAVING A CONTINEOUS PAIN AND SUFFERING AND DEATH EVERY DAY. WE ARE SURE THAT A FREE WILL WITH A FREE WORD WILL BE MORE NEEDED THAN A GUN, AND LOVE MUST BE THE LANGUAGE WE NEED TO TALK TO EACH OTHER WITH. OUR BIG HOPE IS THAT HONOR WILL BE SHINING ON YOUR HEADS IN THE DAY YOU WILL BE ABLE TO DO SOMETHING TO HUMANITY, YOUR HISTORY AND TO IRAQ .

YOU MAY HAVE OUR BEST GREETINGS, APPRECIATION AND RESPECT.

ASSOCIATION OF VICTIMS OF AMERICAN OCCUPATION PRISONS IN IRAQ

HAJ ALI

18 / NOVEMBER / 2005

NO--Lawnchair Party

New Orleans Democratic Lawn Chair Rendezvous by thom K in CA

This truly is accidental activism. Little did I know that one of the organizers of this Democratic meeting on Canal Street here in New Orleans would be speaking on the DNC national telephone conference prior to Chairman Dean. Alan and Deborah Langhoff hosted the event that I signed up to attend through the Democratic Party events page.

It's overwhelming listening to people's stories. An outsider cannot fully comprehend what is happening here. It's not just losing your family, your friends, your home, your possessions, your job. It's losing an entire way of life. Losing the place where your grandparents, your parents, you, and your children grew up. I think many feel that they haven't just lost their houses, but that they are losing their home town.

Here's more of what happened tonight.

I'm not going to touch on everything that was discussed at the meeting, but I'll make a few comments and some thoughts of my own.
What's really going on?
One reason why I wanted to make the trip through New Orleans was to find out what is really going on here. I know many people feel that there is no such thing as journalism anymore. In my mind all the news channels and the network news has been reduced to infotainment. Young people seem to know this and they're at least smart enough to get their news from an infotainment show that's actually entertaining, The Daily Show. I asked Deborah Langhoff how do we find out what's really going on here in New Orleans. Deborah said that The Times-Picayune newspaper is doing a very good job of reporting what's going on down here. In particular she said this is a good source of information about the levees. It really is time to end this culture of corruption at all levels of government in our country. Americans are dying because of it in Iraq and here at home.
Levees

Levees appear to be on everyone's mind here. When I arrived at the hotel I struck up a conversation with the doorman and he said his top concern was the Corps of Engineers. He said the Corps isn't what it was in the 1950's. Now the best and the brightest are going into the private sector and we're short changing our nation's safety by not investing in the people and the infrastructure we need. Concern about the levees was strong at the DNC New Orleans Lawn Chair Rendezvous (because all their furniture was lost to Katrina). Democrats from around the country can help by contacting your legislators and urging them to fully fund safe levees.

After the meeting, my own thoughts turned to how can we make sure all Americans are safe from gutting of the Corps of Engineers? If there is one political thing you do today, please contact your senators and congressional representative and ask them to make the Corps of Engineers a top budget priority. We need to fully fund scholarships for any engineering student who pledges to serve in the Corps for 3 years as long as they maintain a high grade point average. We need to insure that salaries in the Corps are equivalent to salaries in the private sector. And we need to make sure that the Corps has the money it needs to protect Americans. You can find your congressional contact information here. You better believe Boxer, Feinstein and Pete Stark are going to hear from me today!
Democrats in Blue Jeans

It's not just levees that people affected by Katrina need. The amount of physical strength needed to clean up is immense. But also the mental strength needed to get through the red tape is also immense. Democrats can help out by canvassing their neighborhoods to find out what the people in the area need. While neighbrhoods may have electric and gas, that doesn't mean it's turned on at the residences. Residents need to have their homes inspected, and then call the utility company, before service is restored. There is a shortage of inspectors and telephones, especially amongst the elderly. One woman recounted a story about how her two elderly neighbors couldn't get gas to their homes because they didn't have a working telephone and had never used a cell phone before she helped them out with her phone. I'm guessing that there could be a lot of South Florida Democrats who are very familiar with getting through all the paperwork needed to try to put your life back together after a disaster. If your here in Louisiana, or around the country and would like to help as a Democrat in Blue Jeans, please contact Deborah Langhoff.

deborahlanghoff at cox.net

The Crawford Diddle

Got up this morning to work up the Crawford Diddle. I mean, we're still missing a handy moniker for this sorry affair the nation is in and one of the reasons is that there's a natural reluctance to hang the shameful episode on any of the honorable players.
Also, some of the miscreants really don't deserve to have a national scandal named after them. Which probably accounts for historical, impersonal titles like Tea Pot Dome and Silverado and Watergate.

So, to satisfy myself, I'm going to refer to it as the Crawford Diddle. After all, Crawford is where the first Brit, Tony Blair, got diddled and it's where Steven Hadley tried to pull the wool over Cindy Sheehan's eyes. No doubt, it's also where other parts of this nasty shell game were hatched.

I'm a little sorry for the people of Crawford that the name of their town has been besmirched. But their embarassment (and the nation's, for that matter) is really small stuff, compared to the thousands of dead Iraqis, the children whose skin has melted off them and, neither last nor least, our troops, used like so many disposable props.

Seems like my perception that the antidote to the lust for power is to make fun isn't unique. Mark Fiore has a new cartoon out this morning on a couple of themes:
http://www.markfiore.com/animation/hide.html

Would any of this have happened if Georgie had been better at playing manly games as a boy? Would it have taught him the true meaning of honor and valour and playing by the rules?

* * * * * * *

Thomas Jefferson's observation, which seems so apt today, was used by Gary Lindberg in his book, "The Confidence Man in American Literature," to introduce a chapter he entitled "Diddling on a Large Scale: Robber Barons, Snopeses, and V. K. Ratliff"

Alternative Energy

What I'm thinking today is that the energy situation is maybe a little more complicated than we think. While it's true that alternative energy facilities are resisted by those with an interest in making money from the existing system, energy diversity is not just a challenge to the revenue stream of the energy industry, it's a challenge to energy as a mechanism of population control.

I'm using that phrase on purpose because its mis-application to reproductive issues has blinded us to the fact that the major struggle of the 21st Century is how the world's people are going to be controlled to serve the desires and needs of their self-appointed rulers.

The reason the autonomy of the internet is being challenged and government regulation is rearing its ugly head is because the control of public information is slipping out of the hands of rulers. So, energy deregulation or regulation is really an effort to recapture the information transmission infra-structure. Energy deregulation is actually an effort to wrest control of the energy production and distribution system away from local (often politically or stock-holder controlled entities) and hand them over to corporations which, because they operate on a national and international scale, are easier to control via government regulations.
If de-regulation were a sincere effort to diversify the energy industry, then there would be all sorts of incentives to make that feasible on the household level.
Since that isn't happening, I think it's fair to conclude that the goal of de-regulation is actually the concentration of energy production and distribution--"the better to eat you with, my dear."

Soldier's Story

I have come to realize that, despite my will to hold on to my former self, this war has forever altered my personality to the core. Of course, how could it not, but then again I was naive enough to believe no matter what happened in my military service I would remain steady. But it is not so. Loud noises will forever startle me, I have a heightened paranoia, and I will have an amazing tolerance to live in the most miserable conditions imaginable. Things will never be the same .

I dread hearing explosions. It isn't the bang or the boom that batman comics depict. It all depends on how close you are to it. If you are right there close enough to have to check yourself over to make sure all your pieces are in place and there are no blood spots to indicate even the tiniest BB sized shrapnel hadn't punctured through your body. Because, when severely wounded pain sometimes sets in long after the wound occurs. If you are that close you can almost here a ping of splitting metal and then just a deafening roar. You feel it more than hear it. The concussion reaches right up your puckered ass and gets a firm grip on your stomach and pulls with all its weight. A blast that doesn't knock you down leaves you breathless and shaken. Then silence. It is a confusing silence while your brain tries to register what had just happened and the concussion leaves you staggering. It could last all day or seconds and when the worlds noises return as an accelerated barrage of information that attracts your attention all at once in all directions. The near miss is sometimes better than the far away explosion. That is the deep bass thump that has a swosh and a rumble... You hope that the rising smoke on the horizon isn't a signal that a close friend has been killed. Since we learned that most explosive devices explode upwards in a cone it is safest at ground level. I will mostly likely embarrassingly dive to the ground every time a car backfires or a door slams.

I have learned from my short leave back to the States that my paranoia takes heavy effect in crowded public areas. I end up trying to spin around and around and I dislike having strangers close to me. I can't stand sitting with my back to a room or having a person stand over me while I am sitting down. I tend to size up people and try sensing their motives. I fit them into a profile. I keep a look out when I am in new buildings for possible exits and red zones that I can not see. Or stay alert for possible intersection danger areas that would make a likely kill sac if a fire fight was to brake out at a downtown restaurant, movie theater of shopping store. It will be hard to make true friends and I will hold grudges for a long time if ever betrayed. It isn't that I don't like people, but the fact that I don't know who I can trust. I battle an enemy outside the gate that wears the same clothes as the people I am supposed to be liberating. I have subversive views and peaceful progressive ideals that are under a microscope of conformity with checks and standards in place to weed out discipline cases like witch hunts. I can no longer even trust my own government.

I have learned to live in an eight foot by twenty four foot metal box with three other soldiers in a gravel lot with fifty other boxes and only two cold showers and six porta johns for bathrooms. When I leave my lot I have to wear a twenty pound vest of ceramic plates and a heavy kevlar helmet because mortar rounds, rockets and rocket propelled grenades are shot at us at all hours of the day. I have adapted to sand storms that cut flesh and heat waves that bleach sand white. I can now function for days with out food and sleep. I can sit motionless and quiet in a bush while bugs, spiders and scorpions crawl up and down inside my pant legs. I have learned to accept the fact that I might not see tomorrow and handle seeing good friends loss limbs and lives. I put on the same clothes every day that I have for the last nine months and have no concrete idea how much longer I will be forced to live in this barbed wired disgusting manner.

I miss lazy sundays where the biggest worry was getting to work on time. I miss snow flakes floating past the window while I was warm inside by the fire. I miss the sounds of household chores in the background while I watched pointless television. I miss midnight snacks. I miss seeing movies with girls. I miss having a few beers with friends while watching the ball game. I miss backyard barbeques. I miss the anticipation in the air as Christmas nears. I miss the trees changing into Autumn colors. I miss wearing clothes of my choosing. I miss long road trips. I miss my dog. I miss summer dips in the pool. I miss staying awake all night just to watch the sun go down. I miss live music. I miss freedom. I miss my mother. I miss the smile on my daughter's face.

I guess sometimes I just feel like a drop of water in a tidal wave that is crushing everyone I love. I can't stop it. I can only take part and watch innocent people drown. The worst thing is I signed up for the job and I'm getting something out of it in the end. But as I look behind me I can see the many miles of death and destruction. I will ride my wave into shore and the man in the red white and blue top hat will hand me my check and thank me for a wonderful job. I might as well choke on the check and join the people I hurt so they can have their revenge.

rEPp

"Not Indefinitely"

Senators Reid, Levin and Durbin offered an amendment to the defense authorization bill, calling for a definite plan on Iraq, and the Republicans did their best to quickly amend that and claim it as their own.

"The Democratic call for a timetable for withdrawal was excised from the GOP version, a statement that 'United States military forces should not stay in Iraq indefinitely' was changed to say that they should not be there 'any longer than necessary,' and the first report, required in 30 days by the Democratic amendment, would be required 90 days after enactment of the defense authorization measure under the GOP plan."

As Harry Reid pointed out in the news conference, the change from "not stay in Iraq indefinitely" to "any longer than necessary" is substantive and unacceptable. Why? Well, not only is the Republican version open-ended, it doesn't address whose "necessity" is going to be served. Since the majority of Iraqis don't think the American military presence is necessary in the first place, it seems rather obvious that this is a ploy to hang on to the notion that the national interest of the United States is going to make the deployment of military assets necessary for several decades.

The double negative in the Democratic verbiage, "not indefinitely," in effect calls for a definite withdrawal, and not just as Chalabi suggested the other day, to the permanent missile bases the U.S. is busily constructing. Attaching this verbiage to the authorization measure (a bill that tells the accounting departments that it's OK to spend the money for the things outlined in the budget) is also significant. Because, if the U.S. is going to withdraw all its military in a relatively short period of time, then those bases won't have to be built and the money won't have to be spent. Indeed, it might even be possible to re-program the money that was secretly spent on the base at al-Udeid and take care of domestic needs, like the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast.

Well done, Sentors Reid, Levin and Durbin.

Alito's Judgement

Alito's Judgement was Wrong.

Where to begin with Cathy Young's defense of Judge Samuel Alito? Since there is no provision in the Constitution giving the government the right to interfere in the doctor/patient relationship, his finding a Pennsylvania law mandating notice to the spouse about an imprending medical procedure seems unsound ("Alito's jurisprudence," op ed, Nov.9).

But if Judge Alito understood that what was at issue was a medical procedure, and he did not recognize that is should not be interfered with because that interference would result in an undue burden, then his judgement was doubly wrong.

The argument that the Pennsylvania law was unenforceable anyway and therefore insignificant is even more distressing. If there's one thing that undermines the validity of our laws, it's frivolous legislation. If Judge Alito did not recognize that, so much the worse.

The suggestion that half the code in a single cell should have a controlling interest in the millions of cells that define a whole human being is ludicrous. Women reproduce. That's the reality. Men want to have control. That's not surprising. But this irrational desire should not be enshrined in the law.

as published in the Boston Sunday Globe, November 13, 2005

ICBM in Iraq

Our friend Chalabi has been visiting in Washington, renewing old acquaintances and providing reassurance. In particular, he is reported to have assured the American Enterprise Institute that when things settle down the Americans will be able to withdraw to their permanent bases in Iraq.

Was he supposed to let that cat out of the bag? Are the permanent bases for ICBM missile installations so far along that everyone who needs to know (Russia, China, Iran, Mongolia) knows and it's time to let the American people in on why their children have been dying in the Persian Gulf?

Or has Chalabi, who's got little credibility anyway, been sent to test the waters with this little bomb-shell--that the plan is to keep American troops in Iraq for the forseeable future--which, if it's not well received, can be denied on the basis that Chalabi doesn't know what he's talking about?

Anyway, it's been increasingly clear to me, even though the permanent bases (which Rumsfeld has defined as not permanent in the traditional sense) have been scaled back from the original fourteen to four, that the invasion of Iraq was intended to achieve by force what two decades of negotiating with Saddam Hussein hadn't been able to achieve--a staging area for the American military from which an aray of ICBM (Intercontinental Balistic Missiles) would be able to intercept the boost phase (when the missile is going up, rather than coming down) of anything unfriendlies might want to send our way. The unilateral abrogation of the ABM Treaty by the United States, soon after Bush took office, set the stage.

Perhaps, considering that China hasn't raised any objections yet and has merely supported the designation of Central Asia as a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone, they're OK with the missiles as long as they aren't carrying nuclear warheads. But, how are they going to tell? How will they tell that these WMD aren't being snuck in as I write? There aren't any international monitors snooping around Iraq since the country was given a clean bill of health. "No weapons of mass destruction there."

Does that phrase ring a bell? It's what Bush said as he was "searching" around the Oval Office in that hilarious skit, looking for weapons of mass destruction under his desk. Some people thought it was a joke that was in very bad taste. But, in fact, if you consider that the President of the U.S. has an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction like nobody else, able to be dispatched at the push of a button, then the skit was yet another example of something being hidden in plain sight. And the joke was that Saddam Hussein, whose country was being destroyed in the hunt, didn't have what Bush, in his pristine office, was planning to take in. What a grand diddle that was.

Is it going to work? Are the American people going to be satisfied that their children died to plant weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? I doubt it. Because Americans, though they prefer their heros to be alive, are willing have some dead heros, if the living can be satisfied that their deaths were worth-while--that the people they died for are going to be grateful. And that's something that's not going to happen in Iraq, any more than it did in Vietnam.

The argument that "Acquiring long-range ballistic missiles armed with weapons of mass destruction will increase the possibility that weaker countries could deter, constrain, and harm the United States" (1) just isn't going to carry much weight when the leadership of the United States has just demonstrated to the nations of the world that, like the Soviet Union before it, it's a lot weaker already than anybody thought.

(1) http://www.cia.gov/nic/testimony_WMDthreat.html

For a historical perspective:
http://www.fas.org/rlg/991117.htm

NO report

This war abroad, as some sections of the U.S. anti-war movement have argued, cannot be seen in isolation from the war at home. The brutal colonial war in Iraq is but the flip slide of the war at home against workers, immigrants, and other oppressed people. Indeed, New Orleans, and the whole Gulf coast, has become the latest front in this domestic conflict.

The War At Home:
New Orleans, Public Housing, and the "Chilean Option"
by Jay Arena
November 12, 2005

The U.S. military, in its' desperate attempt to crush the growing armed Iraqi resistance, is employing what Pentagon strategists call the "Salvador option". To terrorize the Iraqi people into submission the U.S. is funding, training, directing, and sometimes staffing, death squads--as was done during the brutal counter-insurgency campaign in Central America in the 1980s. The U.S. imperialist state is betting that this strategy of terror will effectively beat the Iraqis into submission, thus guaranteeing control of the oil and allowing U.S. forces to be unleashed in new wars of pillage from Damascus, to Tehran, to Caracas.

This war abroad, as some sections of the U.S. anti-war movement have argued, cannot be seen in isolation from the war at home. The brutal colonial war in Iraq is but the flip slide of the war at home against workers, immigrants, and other oppressed people. Indeed, New Orleans, and the whole Gulf coast, has become the latest front in this domestic conflict. Grass Roots activists in the region argue that the Bush-led regime, with support from the Democrats, are using hurricane Katrina to deepen and expand the racist and anti-working class neoliberal offensive of privatization, austerity, and attacks on civil liberties. In short, the U.S. government is coupling its' Salvador option abroad with a "Chilean option" at home. Just as the U.S. and Latin American ruling classes used Pinochet's Chile as a template for the rest of Latin America, the Bush regime wants to "shock and awe" the U.S. working class by rapidly creating a neoliberal wonderland in New Orleans to be exported across the country. This article documents the neoliberal offensive in New Orleans, with a particular emphasis on public housing, both before Katrina and during its' post-disaster intensification. I conclude by highlighting how grass roots movements are challenging this agenda and showing that another anti-racist, pro-working class world, is possible.

The Bi-Partisan Neoliberal Assault on Public Housing

In the early 1980s New Orleans had over 14,000 public housing apartments that was home to over 60,000 people, almost all African Americans. The response of the local and national authorities to tenant demands for improved public housing and services was to destroy it and displace families. Local Democratic Party elected officials, such as former Mayors Sidney Barthelemy (now director of governmental affairs for the New Orleans-based real estate outfit HRI) and Marc Morial (now head of the National Urban League), helped lead the charge. Working closely with the Republican and Democratic Bush (I), Clinton, and Bush (II), administrations, and acceding to the demands of white controlled real estate and tourist interests, these Black Democrats cut the public housing stock by over half, from 14,000 to approximately 6,000 apartments during the 1990's and early 00's.

Ethnic and Class Cleansing: The Case of the St. Thomas Housing Development

The location of the pre-hurricane demolished housing developments is important for understanding the destruction Katrina heaped on poor families. For example, the now-destroyed St. Thomas development, which at one time had been home to over 1,500 Black, and some white, working class families, was located along the riverfront, where flooding did not occur or quickly receded. In the late 1990s, after a decade long effort, local and federal officials demolished the St. Thomas development. The political leaders, along with bought-off community activists, dutifully responded to the demands of real estate and tourist interests who saw this working class Black community as being "in the way" of "growing" tourism. Due to the gentrification that followed in the neighborhoods surrounding the St. Thomas, even more working class families were driven from the area. Many of the displaced residents were pushed out to New Orleans East or the Lower 9th ward, where flooding was extensive.

In contrast to the misery faced by most of the former Black working class residents removed from the area, influential white businessmen prospered. For example, real estate tycoons like Pres Kabacoff and Joe Canizaro--both of whom Mayor Ray Nagin has appointed to the Rebuild New Orleans Commission--made millions through the ethnic and class cleansing of the area. In addition, community activist Barbara Major, a close associate of Joseph Canizaro who helped facilitate and legitimate St. Thomas's destruction, has been awarded for her services my being named co-chair of the Commission by Nagin.

In contrast to the "winners," only a handful of residents have been able to return to the renamed, privatized, "River Gardens" development, which is being built on the 60-acre site of the old St. Thomas. In fact, the new development, partly financed through the Clinton administration's so-called HOPE VI grant designed to "reform" public housing, has now become a subsidized housing development for, mainly, the upwardly mobile. In addition to the HOPE VI funding, sales and property tax proceeds from a nearby, newly constructed Wal-Mart--another beneficiary of the project--are being used to subsidize the developer and the wealthy residents.

The "public-private partnership" that oversaw the St Thomas "redevelopment" was clearly a disaster for the poorest segments of New Orleans Black working class. Nonetheless, federal, state and local governments are using the St. Thomas as a "role model" for "redoing" the remaining public housing developments. In fact Housing and Urban Development (HUD) secretary Alphonse Jackson, who infamously stated, in the wake of the hurricane that New Orleans is "not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again", unveiled this plan during a visit in early November to the city. Surrounded by supportive local elected officials, he exclaimed: "St. Thomas [will] be the model" for further reconstruction of the remaining development in New Orleans. The result will be, if Jackson has his way, the further gutting of the remaining 6,000 to 7,000 public housing apartments in the name of "reinventing" public housing and "de-concentrating poverty". It seems that Alphonse Jackson shares the same sentiments expressed by Baton Rouge congressmen Richard Baker, who crowed following Katrina: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."

What will happen to the residents at these former developments, you might ask? Well, HUD secretary Jackson reassured people that "We will be involved?If they want to go back home, we will do everything in our power to make sure they are comfortable." Yet, he added that most people, after staying away for over six months, will not want to come back. Adonis Expose, communications director of the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) concurred, having concluded earlier "the reality is, if they're doing better where they are, they're probably not coming back." HUD and HANO are helping make that "reality", that is helping guarantee people will stay away, by refusing to provide alternative housing in the city in the interim while developments are reconstructed, albeit in vastly reduced numbers. In fact, in a further attempt to keep Black public housing residents away, HANO awarded a no-bid contract to Vacant Property Security, Inc. to place steel doors on apartments so residents cannot even return to retrieve their belongings. The message being sent by government officials to public housing tenants, as well as the Lower 9th ward homeowners not able to even view their homes, is clear: you are not welcome in the city of New Orleans.

Iberville Housing Development: Katrina as Pretext for Seizing Prime Real Estate

The policy of refusing re-entry to homes is particularly criminal in the case of the Iberville housing development, where floodwaters did not enter apartments. HANO is not allowing the over 600 Black working class families that resided at Iberville, which sits next to the French Quarter, from moving back into their homes. The official explanation is that soil and other environmental tests must first be undertaken to guarantee safety--yet this "concern" is only raised with regard to public housing residents. No timetable is given for when tests will be completed.

Timothy Ryan, a pro-business economist and University of New Orleans chancellor, in another brief instance of public candidness by local elites, pointed to the real motives behind blocking re-entry of Black working class families to the development: "[Iberville] has retarded French Quarter development for 30 years", he bemoaned [NB: Housing authority officials began desegregation of the-then all white development beginning only in 1965]. The good professor proffered "taking Iberville and mak[ing] it a retirement community" as a "solution" to the (Black working class) "problem."

More Neoliberal Air Strikes Launched Against Education, Health, Civil Liberties

The over 60,000 students that attended New Orleans public schools before Katrina came primarily from Black working class families. As with public housing, public education had faced a barrage of attacks from business and government officials. For example, over the last several years the New Orleans school board have instituted rules--such as not posting important agenda items until just before meetings start-- to make it much more difficult for parents and other members of the public to give input at school board meetings. To further stifle debate, the local press and school board members, such as James Fahrenholz, have vilified courageous local activists, such as Assata Olugbala, who consistently speak out at board meetings. In addition, semi-privatized charter schools, often with pressure from the state department of education, have been imposed. Finally, this summer the State legislature and Board of Education, along with local school board "reformers", hired a private management "turnaround" firm, Alvarez & Marsal, to manage the district. This outfit was previously used in St. Louis to carry out draconian cuts and privatize services.

Under cover of the disaster, Alvarez and Marsal, with full support from local and state officials, are systematically dismantling the school system. First to go were teachers and support staff, who were all laid-off indefinitely, and their union contracts ripped up. Next, local and state school officials announced that schools opened on the non-flooded west bank of New Orleans would re-emerge as semi-privatized charter schools. The federal department of education helped the effort by providing $20 million to open 13 west bank New Orleans schools, but only if they were opened as charters. To speed up the charter conversion, State officials intervened and "waived" democratic procedures, such as the requirement that parents and staff must approve a school becoming a charter. Like Geneva conventions rules in another context, democratic rights get in the way of "reform" and "progress."

On the east bank of New Orleans most of the schools are not even opening for the school year--a further way to keep working class families away from the city. The handful of schools to open on the east bank will also be converted to charters and these disproportionally serve white and middle class students, such as Lusher, located next to Tulane University, and Ben Franklin, located on the University of New Orleans campus. In a final coup de grace to public schools and local (Black) control over them, Governor Kathleen Blanco is pushing a plan, which the legislature is expected to support, to allow the State to take over 104--out of a total of 117-- city schools designated as "failing." The State will then have the power to turn them over to private foundations or businesses, or, as may be the case for many schools, refuse to reopen them at all.

The same pattern of using the hurricane to deepen the neoliberal agenda is evident in the health care arena. Since taking office two years ago Governor Blanco has decimated the public Charity hospital system budget, partly by allowing private nursing homes and hospitals to raid the state's Medicaid allotment. As a result, the state closed or reduced vital services, such as the walk-in clinics, over the last several years. Now, State officials plan to permanently close New Orleans Charity Hospital, built by Huey Long in the 1930s and the main provider of health care to the uninsured. The pretext is the damage it received during the hurricane. Just as with schools and public housing, working class people, with Black workers being the most immediately affected, are rapidly seeing the neoliberal agenda intensify from simply cutbacks, to privatization and elimination of vital public services.

To manage the discontent these cuts inevitably generate the government is beefing up its repressive forces. Wherever working class people go for help in the New Orleans area--from the offices of FEMA, to unemployment insurance, to food stamps-- they are greeted by intimidating, heavily armed National Guard troops and the ever-present private, Blackwater security forces. As Mike Howells, a New Orleans "hold out" and activist explained, "the message to working class people is clear when you enter these facilities: don't dare challenge authorities or we will be in your face." In addition, the Blackwater forces have also joined National Guard troops in patrolling streets and intimidating local residents. In sum, like the "reforms" instituted in the social service sector, the Bush regime, with either open support or acquiescence from Democrats, is using the hurricane to undermine Posse Comitatus, and other controls on the use of the military domestically.

Join the Working Class Fightback!: New Orleans Convergence, MLK Day 2006

The racist, anti-working class agenda being pursed by the ruling class is not going unchallenged. Local social justice activists, some of whom have the spent decades on the front lines in New Orleans fighting for economic justice and social equality are currently involved in ongoing struggles in the Greater New Orleans area to stop unfair evictions, reopen public housing, schools, and secure alternative housing for storm victims. They recognize that it will take a national movement to stop the post-Katrina offensive against affordable housing, public healthcare, public education and police repression now besieging the community. Yet, they also realize that this struggle must incorporate the people of New Orleans here and currently in exile.

In contrast to the neoliberal agenda, activists in New Orleans-based grassroots groups, such as the anti-war, pro-public housing group C3/ Hands Off Iberville, are proposing a pro-working class, anti-racist reconstruction plan that demands:

" No to ethnic and class cleansing-a pro-worker and African-American friendly environment, affordable public and private housing, universal healthcare, a mass public works rebuilding program that pays a living wage, an end to police brutality in our community.
" We call for financing this through, one, taxing the oil companies---$1 tax for every $1 price increase since the run up the Iraq war. Two, immediate withdrawal from Iraq-money to rebuild the U.S,, no money to destroy Iraq.

These activists, argue that "the utter failure of all levels of government to look after the most basic needs of the working class and the African-Americans of the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina demonstrates that we must organize ourselves in a mass movement to defend our interests." To fight for this agenda local activists are inviting supporters from across country and world to converge on New Orleans for the "Martin Luther King Day March To Rebuild The Gulf Coast And The World! On January 16, 2005."

For more information on how you an support this effort call C3/Hands Off Iberville representative Mike Howells at 504-587-0080 or the author, Jay Arena at 504-520-9521 or email him at jarena@tulane.edu.

Jay Arena is PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Tulane University. He is also a long time community and labor activist in New Orleans, and an active member of the anti-war, pro-public housing group C3/Hands Off Iberville.

Elephants and Rats

A thousand DOCK parties----

Well, it's probably not quite a thousand. Howard Dean is going to be interviewed on Meet the Press today, along with his Republican counterpart. He'll be asked to interpret the election results from last Tuesday, but he'll probably not be given time to get into any specifics, so I thought I'd lay out a couple of things that happened and are planned.

The latter category first because that's real simple. This coming Tuesday, there are going to be almost a thousand Democratic Organizing Campaign Kickoff parties all around the country to inaugurate the 2006 election season. If you haven't planned one yourself, you can find one near you at
http://www.democrats.org/event

Even if you can't attend in person, you can sign in as a virtual guest. Unlike the annual NPR Membership Drive, which is mainly designed to collect money, these house parties are designed to increase the membership--warm bodies who will be available to sign up as candidates or campaign workers for the next round of elections. Oh, and go to
http://tools.democracyforamerica.com/petition/iraqpledge/ and take the pledge to support only candidates who:
1. Acknowledge that the U.S. was misled into the war in Iraq
2. Advocate for a responsible exit plan with a timeline
3. Support our troops at home and abroad

The most recent elections had some Democratic successes which were widely covered by the corporate press. Less attention has been paid to such things as that 50% of the candidates supported by DFA were elected all around the country, many as first time candidates and many challenging long-neglected Republicans. Here in New Hampshire, DFNH did even better in that 9 of 11 Democrats were chosen by the electorate for a range of local positions. We're building a farm-team.

That the Republicans are dropping like lead balloons in the popularity polls isn't really surprising to anyone who's been aware of the lies and misinformation the party leadership has been spewing. It may be surprising that it's taken so long for the American public to catch on, but that's mainly because we assume, falsely, that in the electronic age information should be broadcast and received more quickly. The reason that doesn't happen is mainly a consequence of the fact that our brains still run at their usual speed and more information arriving more quickly just overwhelms the capacity to absorb it--sort of like trying to take a drink from a pressure hose.
I was really shocked to come across a quote from Thomas Jefferson that's totally applicable to what we are witnessing today. Gary Lindberg used it to introduce a chapter: "Diddling on a large scale" in one of my favorite books, THE CONFIDENCE MAN IN AMERICAN LITERATURE
"We are now taught to believe that legerdemain tricks upon paper can produce as solid wealth as hard labor in the earth."

And that's really what we've been seeing the evidence of--tricks and diddling of various segments of the public by the likes of Abramoff (Native Americans), Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed (evangelical Christians), and Tom Delay (gullible Texans). Tom Delay's diddle is, of course, the most destructive because in engineering the composition of Congress to pack all the committees with Republican Chairmen who won't investigate or check on any mis-administration, he's made it possible for the U.S. Treasury to be looted just as surely as if he'd left the door to the bank vault open.

Finally, I've also come to another surprising realization--sort of. The fact that American corporations seem unable to compete in the vaunted "free market" without a lot of special interest legislation giving them monopolies and without the backing of our military might, wherever other nations prove disinclined to be diddled. Gun-boat diplomacy is alive and well in the twenty-first Century. So,it's not surprising "Swiftboat Veterans," who managed to throw John Kerry off his stride, are now targeting Bernie Sanders, the Congressman from Vermont, who's offered to serve in the Senate. The Swifties will no doubt attack Sanders' "liberal" positions. But what they're really fronting for are the corporations angling to make a killing in the electronic information age. Which is also why we need to be alert to any efforts to restrict or limit what we're creating here--a civic media, controlled by the people, rather than corporate interests.

Way to Go!!!!!

Andrew White?s quest to reestablish the Democratic Party in Stephentown, begun about a year and a half ago, appears to have borne some fruit. Former Elections Commissioner Tom Wade said then that he had worked with White before he became the new Chairman of the Town Democratic Committee and knew him to be a person who sets goals and accomplishes them.

Democrat Party Rises From Ashes In Stephentown
11/11/05
By David Flint
Upset winners in Tuesday?s election for Town Council in Stephentown are Democrats Chris Demick (left) and P.J. Roder. (David Flint photo)

Andrew White?s quest to reestablish the Democratic Party in Stephentown, begun about a year and a half ago, appears to have borne some fruit. Former Elections Commissioner Tom Wade said then that he had worked with White before he became the new Chairman of the Town Democratic Committee and knew him to be a person who sets goals and accomplishes them.
In Tuesday?s election the two Democratic candidates for Town Council, Chris Demick and P.J. Roder, were far and away the top two vote getters, Demick with 473 votes and Roder with 439. Incumbent Craig Chittenden followed with 274 votes and Brad Humphrey trailed with 243. The two will join Cyril Grant, re-elected without opposition to a third term as Town Justice, as the only elected Democrats among Town officials.
Demick said he was overwhelmed by the results of the election. ?I believe the town residents feel it?s time for a change and the incredible turnout was proof enough for me,? he said. ?The road ahead will be a great challenge, one that I look forward to with excitement and optimism. I?ll do my best for all the residents of Stephentown. Thank you all.?
Roder was also encouraged to see the large turnout of some 700 voters. ?It doesn?t stop with the election, though,? he said. ?I hope to see the same enthusiasm at upcoming Town Board meetings. The residents? insights will be most valuable and we hope to hear their concerns on various issues facing the town.? He expressed thanks to all those who supported them. Roder felt that the time they spent getting out and seeing the townspeople, talking face to face, was what influenced the voter turnout and led to their success in the election. ?And the nice weather didn?t hurt,? he added.

Bloody Tongues

It's hunting season in New Hampshire. We have to be careful not to go walking in the woods and keep the dog inside. She doesn't like the sound of gunshots and hides under my desk when they go off. But, she wouldn't associate gun-shots with people carrying guns, so it's best to keep her inside.

Late afternoon yesterday, we heard shots and the dog, when she wasn't hiding under my desk, was intent on barking when she saw movement in the woods. About dark there was a knock at the back door and a hunter asking for permission to drive across the field to retrieve the doe he'd shot on university land and then tracked to ours. He'd dragged it about a hundred feet and found it heavy and wanted to drive down to get it with his truck.

The spouse demurred. We don't permit vehicles in the field when it's soft and wet and especially not when the grass hasn't been cut. He suggested to them that they could use a wheel-barrow and bring the doe out that way.
So, the hunters and the spouse and the dog trecked across the field and retrieved the deer. The dog was excited by the blood still trickling out of the animal's mouth, started to lick it up and then got hold of the tongue and bit down. The hunters were impressed by our half-wild mut. She followed the barrow across the field, accompanied the hunters with their flash-lights and had to be dragged back to the house as the hunters proceeded toward the road and their trucks. For the rest of the evening she begged to be let out at the back door. She doesn't understand that she needs to be on a leash when she's outside.

Meanwhile, it turns out, the grandson in Florida was taking a bath, stomping around in the water as usual, slipped and fell and bit his tongue by accident. There was a lot of blood. His dad couldn't catch the tongue to stop the bleeding; couldn't get him to accept some ice to stop it either; couldn't get him to calm down. That required the return of mom and then the tongue stopped bleeding on its own, as tongues usually do.

Two bloody tongues.

Straight but not Narrow

Melting the skin off of children

I think we need to take a step back from the newest Fallujah revelations. There's been a lot of confusion over what is or isn't a "chemical weapon" vs. an "incendiary"; what aspects of the Geneva conventions the United States is or is not signatory to; and whether or not the United States is still bound by rules of warfare that they are not direct signatories to.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/11/9/174518/797

First, I think it should be a stated goal of United States policy to not melt the skin off of children.

Download file

As a natural corollary to this goal, I think the United States should avoid dropping munitions on civilian neighborhoods which, as a side effect, melt the skin off of children. You can call them "chemical weapons" if you must, or far more preferably by the more proper name of "incendiaries". The munitions may or may not precisely melt the skin off of children by setting them on fire; they do melt the skin off of children, however, through robust oxidation of said skin on said children, which is indeed colloquially known as "burning". But let's try to avoid, for now, the debate over the scientific phenomenon of exactly how the skin is melted, burned, or caramelized off of the aforementioned children. I feel quite confident that others have put more thought into the matter of how to melt the skin off of children than I have, and will trust their judgment on the matter.

Now, I know that we may be melting the skin off of children in order to give them freedom, or to prevent Saddam Hussein from possibly melting the skins off of those children at some future date. These are good and noble things to bring children, especially the ones who have not been killed by melting their skin.

I know, as well, that we do not drop "chemical weapons" on Iraq. We may, in the course of fighting insurgents in civilian neighborhoods, drop "incendiaries" or other airborne weaponry which may melt the skins off of children as an accidental side effect of illuminating their neighborhoods or melting the skins off their neighbors. In that this still can be classified as melting the skins off of children, I feel comfortable in stating that the United States should not condone the practice. (This may mean, when fighting in civilian neighborhoods, we take nuanced steps to avoid melting the skin off of children, such as not dropping munitions that melt the skin off of children.)

And I know it is true, there is some confusion over whether the United States was a signatory to the Do Not Melt The Skin Off Of Children part of the Geneva conventions, and whether or not that means we are permitted to melt the skin off of children, or merely are silent on the whole issue of melting the skin off of children.

But all that aside, there are very good reasons, even in a time of war, not to melt the skin off of children.

First, because the insurgency will inevitably be hardened by tales of American forces melting the skin off of children.

Second, because the civilian population will harbor considerable resentment towards Americans for melting the skin off of their children.

Third, BECAUSE IT FUCKING MELTS THE SKIN OFF OF CHILDREN.

And, unless Saddam Hussein had a brigade or two consisting of six year olds, we can presume that children, like perhaps nine tenths or more of their immediate families, are civilians.

These are, admittedly, nuanced points. "But Hunter", I can hear many Americans say, "isn't it a natural byproduct of a war of preemption, er, I mean liberation, to melt the skin off of children?"

Why yes, yes it is. Melting the skin off of children is an inevitable part of urban warfare, which is one of the reasons that most military planners and foreign policy leaders prefer to avoid putting themselves in positions where melting the skin off of children comes into play. George Herbert Walker Bush, when contemplating whether or not to engage in the urban warfare that would, in all likelihood, melt the skin off of children by exposing United States forces to a situation where city defenders would be interspersed with those said civilians, choose the course of not putting his forces in a position where melting the skin off of children would prove necessary.

In any event, street fighting in neighborhoods where there are, indeed, children -- as is evidenced by their skin, lying over there -- may or may not be a wise military decision. But it is certainly true that the whole child-melting decision, pro or con, should be treated with some gravity, and perhaps methods of combat which do not melt the skin off of children should be considered.

Because melting the skin off of children, as it turns out, is a very good way to turn the opinion of the American population against a war in general:

So in conclusion, I am going to come out, to the continuing consternation of Rush Limbaugh and pro-war supporters everywhere, as being anti-children-melting, as a matter of general policy.

Furthermore, I would suggest to the President of the United States that if you find yourself in the position where your on-the-ground forces find melting the skin off of children to be the preferable of all available options, your military outlook is well and truly fucked, and you might perhaps start considering alternative means of stabilizing the country.

Thank you for your time.

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

Confirmation of the use of white phospherous by/from the military here:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/11/9/164137/436

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In the interest of fairness, it should be noted that the civilian residents of Fallujah had been told to get out of town.

Evidence of War Crime

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=17582&hd=0&size=1&l=x

Fallujah Evidence--finally

After its revelations on the subterfuge behind the Nigergate forgeries, documentary evidence of the use by US troops of phosphorus and a new formulaton of napalm [MK77] on the Sunni civilian population will be broadcast tomorrow on international satellite TV

ROME. In soldier slang they call it Willy Pete. The technical name is white phosphorus. In theory its purpose is to illumine enemy positions in the dark. In practice, it was used as a chemical weapon in the rebel stronghold of Fallujah. And it was used not only against enemy combatants and guerrillas, but again innocent civilians. The Americans are responsible for a massacre using unconventional weapons, the identical charge for which Saddam Hussein stands accused. An investigation by RAI News 24, the all-news Italian satellite television channel, has pulled the veil from one of the most carefully concealed mysteries from the front in the entire US military campaign in Iraq.

A US veteran of the Iraq war told RAI New correspondent Sigfrido Ranucci this: I received the order use caution because we had used white phosphorus on Fallujah. In military slag it is called 'Willy Pete'. Phosphorus burns the human body on contact--it even melts it right down to the bone.

RAI News 24's investigative story, Fallujah, The Concealed Massacre, will be broadcast tomorrow on RAI-3 and will contain not only eye-witness accounts by US military personnel but those from Fallujah residents. A rain of fire descended on the city. People who were exposed to those multicolored substance began to burn. We found people with bizarre wounds-their bodies burned but their clothes intact, relates Mohamad Tareq al-Deraji, a biologist and Fallujah resident.

I gathered accounts of the use of phosphorus and napalm from a few Fallujah refugees whom I met before being kidnapped, says Manifesto reporter Giuliana Sgrena, who was kidnapped in Fallujah last February, in a recorded interview. I wanted to get the story out, but my kidnappers would not permit it.

RAI News 24 will broadcast video and photographs taken in the Iraqi city during and after the November 2004 bombardment which prove that the US military, contrary to statements in a December 9 communiqué from the US Department of State, did not use phosphorus to illuminate enemy positions (which would have been legitimate) but instend dropped white phosphorus indiscriminately and in massive quantities on the city's neighborhoods.

In the investigative story, produced by Maurizio Torrealta, dramatic footage is shown revealing the effects of the bombardment on civilians, women and children, some of whom were surprised in their sleep.

The investigation will also broadcast documentary proof of the use in Iraq of a new napalm formula called MK77. The use of the incendiary substance on civilians is forbidden by a 1980 UN treaty. The use of chemical weapons is forbidden by a treaty which the US signed in 1997

Fallujah. La strage nascosta [Fallujah, The Concealed Massacre] will be shown on RAI News tomorrow November 8th at 07:35 (via HOT BIRDTM statellite, Sky Channel 506 and RAI-3), and rebroadcast by HOT BIRDTM satellite and Sky Channel 506 at 17:00 [5 pm] and over the next two days.

Extreme Variability--Not

The last few days in the saga of the Omi have been uneventful. Saturday she refused to leave her bed but was quite active in it, sitting up and observing the kitchen from where she lay. The great-grand children were not too much of a nuissance.

Sunday featured brunch. That is, she didn't have breakfast until late in the morning. But then in the afternoon she got up to sit in her easy chair and eventually allowed herself to be rolled into the living room and kitchen to watch what everyone was doing.

The night passed without disturbance. We all had a good sleep.

*********

Yesterday, Monday, the Omi finally got up in the afternoon and spent a couple of hours in her easy chair. Used the commode and walked without too much unsteadiness.

This morning breakfast was accepted soon after I woke her up. Then, for the first time in many weeks, she expressed a desire, all on her own, to get up and sit in her easy chair. Walked across the room almost without assistance and seated herself without falling into it.

Tea was ordered and the paper is being read. Meanwhile, there's a crazy little grey bird, about the size of a phoebe, that's diving to the surface of the pond even though there's water all around--its raining. Perhaps there are some little flies near the surface of the pond or this bird has discovered a taste for little fishies.

***********

Thursday--Nurse Nancy from Hospice came a day early this week. The Omi, like yesterday had breakfast around 7:00, spent a couple of hours napping and when I went in about 10:30 announced that she had "forgotten" to get up today. So, she did. She sat up in her easy chair and when nurse Nancy came was quite pleased to have the visit, to have her blood pressure measured (119 over 70) and her heart listened to. Pulse is a bit erratic but that's nothing new. We went over the medications I'm no longer giving the Omi. Nurse Nancy did observe that once doctors prescribe something, they rarely rescind the prescription. So, I'm thinking we're doing something novel here.
The Omi is back to signalling with her brass bell when she wants service and when she's tired of sitting up and wants to go back to bed. Which she just did. So, she was up about four and a half hours. Walking back to her bed across the room was very steady and I suggested that tomorrow she should walk farther around the house for exercise. That seemed agreeable.
At the moment she seems to be enjoying the specialness of her advanced age.

*****

Friday--Good breakfast followed by nap and then up and out of bed in time for lunch, a scrambled egg.

Three more hours sitting up and then a little stroll around the kitchen. The Omi is somewhat hesitant walking but actually better than just before her
set-back a month ago.

Light supper of Hawaian fruit and chocolate pudding and a cup of tea. Shall we say unexceptional?

*********

Well, for the record, we're now a week later, just about, and things continue to get better. Day before yesterday, the Omi de-boned the chicken for the dog and then retired to her bed before supper. Yesterday, she had breakfast early and then got up about noon and enjoyed an afternoon visit from Nurse Fran. Had chicken pate on thin bread for dinner, and a jar of fruit. Conversation normal. Oh, yes, and she's back to using the bathroom during the day.

This morning, she got up to eat her breakfast and fed herself--the first time since this non-passage to eternity started. Now I'm waiting to see if she gets to the point of dressing in street clothes. She hasn't been out of her pajamas in about a month. Strange to say, after a life-time of being cold, she's suddenly too warm and the winter sun streaming in the window was too strong. Will wonders never cease?

*******
Friday, October 28 (Fitzmas Day)

Up and waiting for her breakfast at the moment. 7:30 AM

She did say yesterday that she'd been ready to die. Seems to have decided now that getting better and going to the bath-room first thing in the morning is progress. Funny. When one smiles at her she smiles back. Never did that before either.

Saturday--

The Omi wasn't able to sustain the high energy and had to get back to bed after a couple of hours. Complained of feeling nauseous and that her eyes hurt. Later, there was a headache.

This morning she wasn't as quick to get up. Said she felt bad in her stomach, or heart, and did seem to have a bit of gas. But she ate all her breakfast cereal and then, mid-morning, announced that she needed to get up. Read the paper some, took a trip the to bathroom and called out for help at one point because she was sitting on the end of her bed and couldn't get back to the easy chair--though she'd made it to the bed by herself.
She explained that she'd gone to lie down but couldn't sleep. In answer to why she wanted to sleep in the middle of the day, she said she thought that would help her die.

This afternoon she got bored. Wanted to take a walk around the kitchen to see what was going on. We sat her down to watch a movie with Julian for a while, but she still can't understand what she sees. Said one had to make up one's own story. She's always hated the TV. Probably because she can't read pictures. Jim brought by some photos Clif had taken this summer, including a super one of her. Julian showed her and she asked if that was me. She never recognizes herself in pictures. Strange. It's not a recent disability. The article in the New Yorker on aphasia does seem relevant. It's hard to get her to comprehend conversation unless one speaks right in her face.

Well, now she's back to have some more tea, with a little cognac. Will have to get a new bottle soon.

***

Sunday--daylight savings time is over and the sun is streaming in on the Omi at seven in the morning. It is blinding her, she complains. Also, she's got pains all over and is near to tears because she's "a wreck."

It isn't just little children about whom you know they are OK when they scream and holler over a little scratch. So, I've given her a spoon of her pain elyxir. She's had nothing but two or three aspirin since this drama began soon after Labor Day. Now that's she's increasingly more active, the pains have mysteriously returned. Interesting.

Later in the morning she was suddenly up for a sponge bath in the little downstairs bathroom. Took care of everything but her feet which are always hard to reach.
As usual, this amount of exertion left her feeling weak and tired and she went back to bed for a rest. Indeed, she spent most of the day in and out of bed. Where before she needed to make frequent trips to the toilet, now she likes to shift back and forth between wing-chair and bed and the little brass bell has fallen back into favor. She likes ringing for service. If the bell isn't handy, she calls out "Is there anyone here to help me?" Sometimes it seems she's hopeful that somebody new will respond.

Monday--Halloween
No pains at all this morning and breakfast went down well. She obviously woke according to the old time when it was still dark and turned her light on. No inclination to get out of bed first thing however. Not a wreck this morning. LOL

******

The rest of Monday and Tuesday were essentially uneventful. Supper on Tuesday was taken at the dining room table. Then, after supper, she wanted a sleeping pill, justified in part by the fact that's what they give people in hospital. I gave her half the normal dose of an over-the-counter sleep-aid that Julian takes from time to time.

This morning she was chipper. Ready to get out of bed and go to the toiled at seven and then have breakfast, which she ate by herself. Mid-morning she was suddenly under-way to the bathroom by herself, but did call out to let me know what she was doing.

A normal lunch, followed by the announcement that she's decided to go back to playing bridge, as if this would be a daily option. When I reminded her that they only play one day a week, she seemed disappointed. Mainly she's looking for someone to be an audience for her disquisitions. When the nurse comes (this week on Tuesday) she's visibly upset when we have conversation which she doesn't understand and, after the nurse leaves, she's suddenly "feeling bad." There's this constant desire to be the center of attention, which is never satisfied.

*****
November 3

For some reason the dog was coughing about 4:00 AM and that eventually woke the Omi so she sat up in bed and called for help. She didn't know how she could be helped. Suspect she may have had a bad dream. Gave her a little tonic with some hydrocodone.

It was almost ten before she was ready for some breakfast. Then she admitted that she'd not gone to sleep until after I got home from my meeting about 9:30. She wanted to know how it went and thought that seventeen people was a good number. If the conversation responds to her questions she understands.

Then, just before noon she was getting up out of bed and called for assistance to walk to her chair. The sun was shining and she didn't want her robe. Later, when the sun had moved away, she got her robe from the back of the door but needed some help putting it on.

Made her some coffee with a cookie which she drank down and then, all of a sudden she headed for her bed to lie down and rest, complaining of a head-ache. An aspirin took a while to work. She rolled back and forth to help be get the covers from under her to put them on top without her having to get back up. Her aching back seemed to disappear as quickly as it came. So, I'm thinking her reports are even more unreliable as before.

She had some mashed potatoes and deviled ham for supper, a half cup of tea and then the headache came back. Also, the pulse is somewhat rapid. She's not been as consistently cold as she's been most of her life. Had the nurse take her temperature the other day when the pulse was also rapid, but the temp was normal (on the low side).

I guess the variability is less intense, but the changes occur more often.

*****

Friday

At bed-time she asked for a sleeping pill, so I fetched a sleep-aid (one pill instead of the 2 suggested) and it seems to have produced a good night.
She woke cheerful, ready for breakfast and got up to eat it herself. The whole bowl-full went down lickety-split and then she was ready for tea and to read the paper.
Julian says he takes them from time to time, not to put him to sleep, but so he sleeps more soundly.

8888

Sunday, November 6

Activity level keeps increasing. Today was a red-letter day. Or rather, a red blouse day --the first time in many weeks that she got into street clothes. We also had a shampoo and two meals at the dining table. And she read quite a bit of the Sunday paper.

Late in the morning, while I was intent on listening to C-SPAN, I suddenly realized that the bathroom door was being opened. By the time, I got up, she was in and closing it. Must have really snuck, because usually I hear the foot-steps. She really hates having to ask for assistance.

Really tired by the time dinner was over. But not too tired for tea.

Fallujah Truth

IRAQ: Fallujah: the truth at last

Dr Salam Ismael took aid to Fallujah in January.

It was the smell that first hit me, a smell that is difficult to describe, and one that will never leave me. It was the smell of death. Hundreds of corpses were decomposing in the houses, gardens and streets of Fallujah. Bodies were rotting where they had fallen ? bodies of men, women and children, many half-eaten by wild dogs.

A wave of hate had wiped out two-thirds of the town, destroying houses and mosques, schools and clinics. This was the terrible and frightening power of the US military assault.

The accounts I heard over the next few days will live with me forever. You may think you know what happened in Fallujah. But the truth is worse than you could possibly have imagined.

In Saqlawiya, one of the makeshift refugee camps that surround Fallujah, we found a 17-year-old woman. ?I am Hudda Fawzi Salam Issawi from the Jolan district of Fallujah?, she told me. ?On November 9, American marines came to our house. My father and the neighbour went to the door to meet them. We were not fighters. We thought we had nothing to fear. I ran into the kitchen to put on my veil, since men were going to enter our house and it would be wrong for them to see me with my hair uncovered.

?This saved my life. As my father and neighbour approached the door, the Americans opened fire on them. They died instantly.

?Me and my 13-year-old brother hid in the kitchen behind the fridge. The soldiers came into the house and caught my older sister. They beat her. Then they shot her. But they did not see me. Soon they left, but not before they had destroyed our furniture and stolen the money from my father?s pocket.?

Hudda told me how she comforted her dying sister by reading verses from the Koran. After four hours her sister died. For three days, Hudda and her brother stayed with their murdered relatives. But they were thirsty and had only a few dates to eat. They feared the troops would return and decided to try to flee the city. But they were spotted by a US sniper.

Hudda was shot in the leg, her brother ran but was shot in the back and died instantly. ?I prepared myself to die?, she told me. ?But I was found by an American woman soldier, and she took me to hospital.? She was eventually reunited with the surviving members of her family.

I also found survivors of another family from the Jolan district. They told me that at the end of the second week of the siege the US troops swept through the Jolan. The Iraqi National Guard used loudspeakers to call on people to get out of the houses carrying white flags, bringing all their belongings with them. They were ordered to gather outside near the Jamah al Furkan mosque in the centre of town.

On November 12, Eyad Naji Latif and eight members of his family ? one of them a six-month-old child ? gathered their belongings and walked in single file, as instructed, to the mosque.

When they reached the main road outside the mosque they heard a shout, but they could not understand what was being shouted. Eyad told me it could have been ?now? in English. Then the firing began.

US soldiers appeared on the roofs of surrounding houses and opened fire. Eyad?s father was shot in the heart and his mother in the chest.

They died instantly. Two of Eyad?s brothers were also hit, one in the chest and one in the neck. Two of the women were hit, one in the hand and one in the leg.

Then the snipers killed the wife of one of Eyad?s brothers. When she fell her five year old son ran to her and stood over her body. They shot him dead too.

Survivors made desperate appeals to the troops to stop firing.

But Eyad told me that whenever one of them tried to raise a white flag they were shot. After several hours he tried to raise his arm with the flag. But they shot him in the arm. Finally he tried to raise his hand. So they shot him in the hand.

The five survivors, including the six-month-old child, lay in the street for seven hours. Then four of them crawled to the nearest home to find shelter.

The next morning, the brother who was shot in the neck also managed to crawl to safety. They all stayed in the house for eight days, surviving on roots and one cup of water, which they saved for the baby.

On the eighth day they were discovered by some members of the Iraqi National Guard and taken to hospital in Fallujah. They heard the US soldiers were arresting any young men, so the family fled the hospital and finally obtained treatment in a nearby town.

They do not know in detail what happened to the other families who had gone to the mosque as instructed. But they told me the street was awash with blood.

I had come to Fallujah in January as part of a humanitarian aid convoy funded by donations from Britain.

Our small convoy of trucks and vans brought 15 tonnes of flour, eight tonnes of rice, medical aid and 900 pieces of clothing for the orphans. We knew that thousands of refugees were camped in terrible conditions in four camps on the outskirts of town.

There we heard the accounts of families killed in their houses, of wounded people dragged into the streets and run over by tanks, of a container with the bodies of 481 civilians inside, of premeditated murder, looting and acts of savagery and cruelty that beggar belief.
Through the ruins

That is why we decided to go into Fallujah and investigate. When we entered the town I almost did not recognise the place where I had worked as a doctor in April 2004, during the first siege.

We found people wandering like ghosts through the ruins. Some were looking for the bodies of relatives. Others were trying to recover some of their possessions from destroyed homes.

Here and there, small knots of people were queuing for fuel or food. In one queue some of the survivors were fighting over a blanket.

I remember being approached by an elderly woman, her eyes raw with tears. She grabbed my arm and told me how her house had been hit by a US bomb during an air raid. The ceiling collapsed on her 19-year-old son, cutting off both his legs.

She could not get help. She could not go into the streets because the Us military had posted snipers on the roofs and were killing anyone who ventured out, even at night.

She tried her best to stop the bleeding, but it was to no avail. She stayed with him, her only son, until he died. He took four hours to die.

Fallujah?s main hospital was seized by the US troops in the first days of the siege. The only other clinic, the Hey Nazzal, was hit twice by US missiles. Its medicines and medical equipment were all destroyed.

There were no ambulances ? the two ambulances that came to help the wounded were shot up and destroyed by US troops.

We visited houses in the Jolan district, a poor working-class area in the north-western part of the city that had been the centre of resistance during the April siege.

This quarter seemed to have been singled out for punishment during the second siege. We moved from house to house, discovering families dead in their beds, or cut down in living rooms or in the kitchen. House after house had furniture smashed and possessions scattered.

In some places we found bodies of fighters, dressed in black and with ammunition belts.

But in most of the houses, the bodies were of civilians. Many were dressed in housecoats, many of the women were not veiled ? meaning there were no men other than family members in the house. There were no weapons, no spent cartridges.

It became clear to us that we were witnessing the aftermath of a massacre, the cold-blooded butchery of helpless and defenceless civilians.

Nobody knows how many died. The occupation forces are now bulldozing the neighbourhoods to cover up their crime. What happened in Fallujah was an act of barbarity. The whole world must be told the truth.

*****************************************************
March 2006 Update

65,000 people still displaced out of Fallujah: It has been 14 months since US forces fought insurgents in the city of Fallujah, but there is still slow progress on humanitarian issues, according to local officials. Nearly 600 people died in the conflict, according to the government, but local doctors believe the number could be as high as 1,800 victims.

As much as 80 percent of the population fled Fallujah, 60 km west of Baghdad, when US forces launched an offensive to oust insurgents from the area. More than two thirds have now returned and 15 percent remain displaced on the outskirts of the city. They are living in abandoned schools and government buildings, according to aid officials.

The entire population of the city was estimated to be 300,000 and today it stands at roughly 230,000. "Approximately 65,000 people are still displaced out of Fallujah," said Bassel Mahmoud, director of Fallujah's reconstruction project. "The government has forgotten them because most are living with relatives in other cities or under deteriorating conditions in abandoned buildings on the outskirts of Fallujah".

Despite Baghdad allocating US $100 million for the city's reconstruction and US $180 million for housing compensation, very little can be seen visibly on the streets of Fallujah in terms of reconstruction. There are destroyed buildings on almost every street.

Local authorities say about 60 percent of all houses in the city were totally destroyed or seriously damaged and less than 20 percent of them have been repaired so far. In addition, 6,000 shops, 43 mosques and nine government offices still require extensive repair work. Power, water treatment and sewage systems are still not functioning properly and many districts of the city are without potable water.

Fallujah officials say 30 percent of the allocated funds have been switched to maintaining extra checkpoints and security patrols to ensure that insurgents don't return – this has left a hole in the budget needed for reconstruction. Of the 81 reconstruction projects slated for the city, only 24 have been completed and many others will be cancelled due to a lack of funding, the Fallujah official said.

Baghdad residents voice anger and dismay when asked about their lives as invasion in Iraq enters fourth year: Salah Hashim, a 49-year-old businessman, said he yearned for the return of Saddam Hussein, the country's ousted dictator, given the violence that now envelops the country.

"Despite all he did that was bad, we did not suffer as we are now," Hashim said. "Now we have lost everything, even a sense of living. The Americans promised us, especially (President) George Bush, prosperity. And we thank them all because we got it — but we got a prosperity of car bombs, kidnappings and killings."

Ahmen Najeeb, a 33-year-old supermarket owner, said he originally "waved his hands" at American forces as they entered the country in March 2003, but that his outlook has since changed. "Day after day the Americans proved that they are here to steal our oil and protect their homes by keeping the their war against terror in another country," he said.

One man who said three of his daughters were killed by a bombing last year sounded despondent. "I got nothing from this so-called liberation, just this cell phone and my satellite receiver. But I lost my three daughters," said Nawar Maarof, a 34-year-old taxi driver who said he had dreamed of becoming an accountant. "I have a feeling that my destiny is the same. Anyway, we're all dead."

Salam Nassir, a 25-year-old college student, also longed for Saddam. "We deserve all this because we didn't fight the Americans," he said. "We had to know from the start they would not help us and were lying about liberating Iraq."

Funny numbers

Just a few days ago the U.S. Department of Defense corrected the published number of U.S. soldiers injured in Iraq, without comment, lowering it by 638. A similar mistake occurred in a report released by the American Forces Press Service, last Thursday, on the web site of the DoD.

In its original version, archived by Gobal Security, it was reported that bombs had killed “over half of all those killed in Iraq--more than 8,100 soldiers--according to Pentagon statistics.”

Then, just a day later, on Friday, this report was also ammended, without comment. But the applicable sentence was significantly changed. Now it says that bombs killed “more than half of all those killed in Iraq and injured more than 8,100 soldiers, according to Pentagon statistics. The change is evident in a notice of both versions in one screenshot from Google News:

So, the dashes were replaced by “and injured”--a small change with a weighty consequence. Of course, the first version of the report could really have been a simple mistake of composition. However, if the original version of the report is the truth, it would indicate that until now 16,000 U.S. soldiers had been killed in Iraq, while the official report at the time stood at 2,045.

This difference of about 14,000 dead U.S. soldiers--eight times the official report--seems hardly convincing at first glance. On the other hand, there was already credible evidence in September of 2003 that the number of soldiers killed at that time was close to 5,000.
In addition, the numbers of those killed in the Vietnam War was significantly underestimated by the military establishment.

Master-Slave Mentality

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2005/10/28/iraqgallery.DTL

It's probably not surprising that after seeing yet another line of bound and blind-folded Iraqi men being led off by men with guns and then reading yesterday of the testimony in a Scottish court that our troops were ordered to consider every Iraqi a "potential terrorist" and to "shoot first and ask questions later," that the brain would conclude over night that it had witnessed the master-slave mentality before its very eyes.

Most people of conscience have probably wondered at some point in their lives how it was possible for our god-fearing European ancestors to take million of Africans captive, load them like cargo and transport them half way around the globe and secure them in enclaves where they would be held captive for the rest of their lives.

Well, we no longer have to wonder. It's happening every day. People identified by their outward appearance are rounded up, their houses are destroyed, their relatives are forced to relocate so no-one knows any longer who's where and it's all being done under the guise of removing "potential terrorists."

That's the master-slave mentality at work. It's the American version of original sin. Depending on which side you are on, it's the urge to dominate or the failure to comply. Moreover, it is a way of thinking that is sanctioned by our dominant religion--those who fail to comply deserve to die and suffer the pains of eternal damnation.

Of course, from the point of view of the individual enforcer of an order to "shoot first and ask questions later," being taken captive looks like a lesser evil for the victim. Indeed, the enforcer may well perceive himself as doing the "potential terrorist" or "potential runaway" a favor by simply putting him in hand-cuffs and blind-folds and taking him off to prison (read plantation) instead of killing him on the spot.

That's how the master-slave mentality works.

Military Industries

President Eisenhower's warnings about the military-industrial complex perhaps didn't sink in as they should have because for a long time our enemies seemed real and the marriage between the military and industry seemed to produce technological innovations from which peaceful enterprise could and did benefit.

Besides, military-industrial complex had the ring of a mall-like place with a cineplex--really a non-threatening entity, on the whole. Then, even though there were relatively minor skirmishes (no World War III), whatever these partners were doing seemed to be keeping the peace for the globe.

Then came Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. I considered it a major miscalculation and when G.H.W. Bush called for a new world order, I found myself in agreement, concluding, as it now turns out, falsely that Hussein had somehow missed that it is no longer acceptable for countries to simply invade and take what they want from those who claim it as their own. That somehow Hussein hadn't gotten the message that when we want something we buy it and pay for it.

I was wrong. That's not what G.H.W. Bush meant at all. What he meant was that, instead of playing by Old World rules, the rules set up in Old Europe, the globe would now be ruled by the New World. Moreover, if the nations of the globe weren't willing to follow those rules, regardless of how exploitive the "free market" regime turned out to be, the rules would be enforced, as of old, by the American military establishment. In the very olden days that used to be called "gunboat diplomacy."

Now, with the invasion of Iraq for the second time, it's rather obvious that the modern version of "gunboat diplomacy" is being maintained in the service of American industry. In other words, the significant issue isn't the percentage of military production as part of our economy, but that non-military industries seem to need to rely on the military for back up because, in fact, they cannot compete in the "free market."

In part, I would suggest, that's because industrial profits have increasingly relied on wheeling and dealing, instead of producing valuable products. But, the major failure would seem to lie in the fact that the social underpinnings of industrial production (health coverage for workers being just one example) have not been sustained. Instead of investing in the infra-structure that industrial production requires, American policy has shifted towards the use of threats to provide our industrial sector with advantage in the market that our products do not earn. Instead of quality, the American focus is increasingly on the use of force either to reduce the challenge from competitors or to prompt unnecessary purchases, quite often in the form of useless arms.

One has to wonder, for example, why in all the years that Pakistan has been a customer for military hardware, it never acquired a fleet of helicopters that could facilitate access and rescue from its remote areas. And that's just one example. Even our so-called allies have been forced to purchase arms that, for the most part, they can't use. Or, if they do use them, as Hussein used the poison gas against the Iranians and/or Kurds, their use becomes an excuse for economic sanctions.

And the President has ordered a course in ethics for his White House staff.

News in a Nutshell

It's not been widely noticed (at least not to the extent of having been named) that the internet is evolving as a new media. Some do call themselves "alternative." But I've settled on "civic media" for the moment, including both the internet and community access cable.

The format information clearing house is using strikes me as clear and direct. See what you think.

Source of Forged Niger-Iraq Uranium Documents Identified

By ELAINE SCIOLINO and ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

Italy's spymaster identified an Italian occasional spy named Rocco Martino
on Thursday as the disseminator of forged documents that described efforts
by Iraq to buy uranium ore from Niger for a nuclear weapons program, three
lawmakers said Thursday.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10875.htm

===
First casualty of war

By Eric Alterman

We know now, thanks to one brave and dogged historian at the National
Security Agency, that after the famed Gulf of Tonkin "incident" on Aug. 4,
1964 ? in which North Vietnam allegedly attacked two American destroyers ?
National Security Council officials doctored the evidence to support
President Johnson's false charge in a speech to the nation that night of
"open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America."
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10877.htm

===
Former Powell aide links Cheney's office to abuse directives

By Agence France-Presse

Vice President Dick Cheney's office was responsible for directives that led
to U.S. soldiers' abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, a former top
State Department official said Thursday.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10879.htm

===
All Problems Bleed from America¹s Wound

By Brian Bogart

Making and selling weapons has been America¹s top industry since 1950, that
we have sustained this weapons-based economy by supplying more than 200 wars
in 55 years, and that some 310,000 companies and 400 colleges are on the
Pentagon¹s ever expanding payroll.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10882.htm

===
11 Members Of Iraq's Security Forces Among 18 Killed In Continuing Violence:

Gunmen armed with assault rifles and heavier weaponry killed at least six
Iraqi policemen and wounded 10 in an attack on a checkpoint near Buhriz,
north of Baghdad, police said. One officer put the toll at nine dead and 12
wounded
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L04773653.htm

===
Gunmen kill former colonel in the Iraqi air force:
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/world/3438383

===
General calls use of 152nd 'inexcusable' :

"Three years in . . . it's inexcusable to have brought a maintenance
company over there to do anything but maintenance," Libby said. "It's
particularly galling to me when I strip myself of full-time mechanics and
they get there and they're in a tower."
http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/news/state/051104general.shtml

===
Marine tells of 'carte blanche' to kill:

A former US marine has told a jury that he was given "carte blanche" to kill
and was told to "shoot first and ask questions later" while serving in Iraq
following the outbreak of war in 2003.
http://www.eecho.ie/news/bstory.asp?j=186151705&p=y86y5z5zx&n=186152591

===
Should the U.S. Withdraw? Let the Iraqi People Decide :

Polls, so far, show Iraqis want the US out
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_abigail__051013_should_the_u_s__with
.htm

===
Why Britain should withdraw from Iraq:

British troops face the real possibility of being embroiled in a dangerous
counter-insurgency war which they cannot win and which could overturn the
real achievements the British can claim up to now.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10874.htm

===
Why the US will lose:

People around the world who care for justice and hope for a more human and
humane world, should support the Iraqis in their struggle to recover their
sovereignty, and ask for the complete and unconditional withdrawal of all
foreign troops from Iraqi soil along with compensation paid for all the
material and human losses Iraq has experienced since the illegal invasion
began.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10876.htm

===
New Poll: Majority of Americans Support Impeachment:

By a margin of 53% to 42%, Americans want Congress to impeach President Bush
if he lied about the war in Iraq, according to a new poll
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/4421

===
Breaking tradition, Carter rips Bush's policies:

He said Bush has made such significant changes to U.S. foreign policy and
human rights doctrine, resulting in precipitous declines in the country's
standing abroad, that he felt compelled to write "Our Endangered Values." It
is Carter's 20th book since he was defeated for re-election by Ronald Reagan
in 1980.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-11-03-carter-bush_x.htm

===
House blocks Democrats' resolution on Iraq war:

''I think it brings shame to the House for this Congress to be engaged in a
coverup when it comes to revealing what's happening in Iraq," Pelosi said.
http://tinyurl.com/b8caw

===
Italians say spy chief disputes role in Iraq uranium document:

Commission member Sen. Massimo Brutti told reporters after the closed-door
session that the commission was told that the Italian secret services warned
the United States in January 2003 that the dossier was fake. But later, the
senator called The Associated Press to retract that statement.
http://www.dailybreeze.com/news/nationworld/articles/1834421.html

===
Israeli / AIPAC spy trial could expose ways information is gathered in D.C.:

It¹s a classified leak case that could rattle U.S. foreign policy and
fundamentally alter how Washington does business. But while the world
watches the implosion in the vice president¹s office, this case is
proceeding quietly across the Potomac. Motions filed in recent weeks in the
case against two former senior staffers of the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee have gone virtually unnoticed in the mainstream media
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10878.htm

===
Israel and the Neocons: The Libby Affair and the Internal War:

Libby was a student, protégé, and collaborator with Paul Wolfowitz for over
25 years. Libby along with Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, Douglas Feith, Kagan,
Cohen, Rubin, Pollack, Chertoff, Fleisher, Kristol, Marc Grossman, Shumsky
and a host of other political
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10884.htm

====
Smearing Fitzgerald

The neocons' defense: it isn't perjury, it's a pogrom
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7908

===
John W. Dean: A Cheney-Libby Conspiracy, Or Worse?:

Having read the indictment against Libby, I am inclined to believe more will
be issued. In fact, I will be stunned if no one else is indicted.
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20051104.html

===
Lib Dems and Galloway defend absences :

Two Lib Dem MPs missed the vote, which the government won with a majority of
just one, but the party insisted a government defeat would only have been a
"technical knockout".
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,15935,1614944,00.html

===
Varieties of Imperial Aggression: Recently, two foreign courts issued
warrants for the arrest of US government personnel protected, in common with
terrorists like Luis Posada Carriles, by the US authorities.

In case you missed it:

Brian Bogart : History of the U.S. War Machine:

>From NSC 68 to 2005: NSC68 was not a document specifically written to take
or keep power from America's common people; the people have been isolated
from power throughout our history. But NSC68 was the blueprint for shifting
from social concerns to military-industrial profit, further elevating
corporations to -- and further distancing the people from -- power.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10883.htm

===
Palestinians hit by sonic boom air raids :

Israel is deploying a terrifying new tactic against Palestinian civilians in
the Gaza Strip by letting loose deafening "sound bombs" that cause
widespread fear, induce miscarriages and traumatise children.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1607450,00.html

===
The night our hope for peace died :

Ten years ago today, Israel's prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was shot dead as
he sought to bring peace to the Middle East. The acclaimed novelist David
Grossman - who was among the crowds that witnessed the assassination -
recalls a time of chaos, confusion and despair
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1627453,00.html

===
Pressure on allies over CIA's 'al-Qaida camps' :

Pressure was growing on the US and its new allies in eastern Europe last
night amid allegations that the CIA has been interrogating al-Qaida suspects
at former Soviet camps in Poland and Romania.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1627414,00.html

===
Irish leader¹s arrest provokes outcry :

Critics say that this amounts to kidnapping, and is a violation of Garland¹s
rights as an Irish citizen and a violation of Ireland¹s right to
self-determination.
http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/8052/1/293

===
Britain isolated over role in Afghanistan :

Britain is locked in an intense dispute with its European allies in Nato
over a plan, fraught with political and security problems, to take control
of peacekeeping in Afghanistan.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,1627502,00.html

===
U.S. Has Plan For Military Conflict With Venezuela:

Venezuela possesses everything that makes it "strategically" important: it
has oil; it is leftist; it is critical of the United States
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10881.htm

===
Bush Pushes Free Trade at Summit as Protesters, Chavez Object :

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Bush's chief antagonist in Latin America,
told reporters the U.S.-sponsored Free Trade Area of the Americas is
``dead.'' Chavez said he came ``to bury'' the trade pact.
http://tinyurl.com/8qmc5

===
Thousands Protest Bush in Argentina, People's Summit Counters Free Trade
Talks:

Protests began in Argentina three days before Bush¹s arrival and a massive
security clampdown is in place for the talks. More than 7,500 police
officers erected a security ring around summit hotels and patrolled the
streets and beaches. Coast guard boats watched the shoreline and air space
was restricted. Most schools canceled classes
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/04/1532200

===
Hunger In America Rises By 43 Percent Over Last Five Years:

The analysis, completed by the Center on Hunger and Poverty at Brandeis
University, shows that more than 7 million people have joined the ranks of
the hungry since 1999.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/10/051029093925.htm

===
America's Poor are Under Siege

? $9.5 billion in Medicaid ­ CUT. ? $5 Billion in Child Support Enforcement
­ GONE. ? $844 Million in food stamps ­ ELIMINATED. Do we even need to
explain the implications here?
http://tinyurl.com/d3xaf

===
Fox News Paid for DeLay's Travel: Rep.

Tom DeLay (R-TX) "filed a report with the Clerk of the House of
Representatives indicating he received free travel valued at $13,998.55 from
Fox News Sunday for 'officially connected travel' on October 1-2, 2005
http://tinyurl.com/a3ot7

===
DeLay Asked Abramoff for Funds Through Foundation, E-mails Show

U.S. Representative Tom DeLay asked Jack Abramoff to raise money for him
through an Abramoff foundation, the latest evidence of the ties between
DeLay and the indicted lobbyist, e-mails released by a Senate committee
show.
http://tinyurl.com/b4k6w

===
Report says 2 million may die in U.S. flu pandemic:

The report projects that a global outbreak would kill 209,000 to 1.9 million
people in the U.S. Such a crisis could overwhelm hospitals with patients,
forcing communities to set up overflow sites in school gymnasiums, armories
or convention centers, according to the plan.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10880.htm

===
Power source that turns physics on its head :

It seems too good to be true: a new source of near-limitless power that
costs virtually nothing, uses tiny amounts of water as its fuel and produces
next to no waste. If that does not sound radical enough, how about this: the
principle behind the source turns modern physics on its head.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,3605,1627424,00.html

===
GOP mulls ending birthright citizenship:

House Republicans are looking closely at ending birthright citizenship and
building a barrier along the entire U.S.-Mexico border as they search for
solutions to illegal immigration.
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20051103-115741-1048r.htm

===
Information Clearing House is an independent, reader funded news and
information service.

We need your help to offset the costs associated with site hosting and
bandwidth usage. If you find this site informative please help by clicking
here
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/support.htm

Equal Opportunity

More and more it seems that the only thing the majority of ordinary,god-fearing and hard-working Americans can expect from the crew that has hijacked out government is an equal opportunity to be abused, scammed and otherwise deceived.

It isn't just Tom DeLay's fundraiser and lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, who tricked religious evangelicals into opposing one tribe of Native Americans' gambling enterprise so another would be advantaged. And it isn't just that the direct-mail gurus, who extract donations from organizations like the Parents' Television Council, people concerned about smut being broadcast to their children, sell the lists of names and addresses they collect from religious publications and web sites and then use that information to define where pornographic programming on cable is least likely to encounter community opposition.

No, the pattern of deception is much more widespread. While support for pornographic programming on cable TV is expressed as honoring the First Ammendment to the Constitution, the commitment to religious freedom is disguised as the "faith-based initiatives," designed to fill the pockets of religious charlatans. Not only are they unlikely to be held to account for how the money is actually spent, but once the religious "leaders" deliver the vote on election day, issues like education, health care, public safety and economic security are forgotten.

Even more abusive is the pattern of hiding the pervasive mismanagement of our nation's resources and assets with divisive assaults on one or another social group. One week it's women who's access to medical care is under attack. Another it's the children of immigrants who aren't going to be fed. Then there's always the people whose sexual interests are presumed to make them unfit for full participation in community affairs, who can be targeted as an example of why the majority should be glad to have what little they've got. Everybody's got an equal opportunity to be abused.

Cheney's Blue Dress

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/11/4/61718/9121

Jeremy Scahill on NO

http://www.batemania.com/bateman365/day079.html

What's to conserve?

Conservationists, people who think that the natural environment ought not to be despoiled by man, have a hard time reconciling their position with people who adhere to the conservative political position. In part, I suspect, that's because they are inclined to assume that the two should be synonymous and yet they obviously have nothing in common.

The problem arises from the fact that conservatives are concerned with the control of other human beings and have, for the most part, no consideration for the natural environment what-so-ever. Indeed, their total disregard for the interests of individuals naturally leads to a dismissal of concerns about the environment.

The conservative focus of attention is the group. Whatever a group, regardless of how big or small, determines to be in its interest is what conservatives support because group behavior--i.e. the social structure--is what makes humans human. In other words, a person that doesn't belong to and doesn't conform his/her behavior to a group is less than human.

Consequently, to the exent that individual rights have had to be recognized, they are an unwelcome compromise designed to promote individual subservience and, as such, are properly marginalized, if not totally disregarded, whenever possible. From the perspective of the group individual rights are not a good thing. That's because, under ideal conditions, the individual would have NO rights that aren't earned by his/her participation in the group.

That this negative perspective of individual interest conflicts with reality doesn't matter. The assumption that individuals are by nature anti-social and have to be forced to participate, either with threats or actual coercion, serves to justify the imposition of authority and control. In other words, individuals have to be subjugated because they don't want to do what they are supposed to--be part of a group.

If social organization were a natural component of human existence, then there would be no way to justify or satisfy the impulse to dominate. Humans have to be by nature anti-social in order to rationalize that their domination is good. It's akin to the abusive personality asserting that "I have to punish you because you are bad." The Catholic Church has promulgated this position as the doctrine of "original sin." Man's sinful nature is the justification for his subordination.

What the consequence of a majority on the Supreme Court of the United States who adhere to this position will be is anybody's guess. Though, there's a good possibility that, like the Catholic Church in the U.S., the Supreme Court will become increasingly irrelevant, as the realization spreads that domination, not free will, is what's evil.

Reid to the Rescue

The Senate's Democratic leader Harry Reid (D-NV) unexpectedly pulled the Senate into secret session Tuesday afternoon in order to have closed discussion of Iraq intelligence, RAW STORY has learned. Specifically, the senator sought to discuss a Senate Select Committee on Inteligence report on the failure of Iraqi WMD intelligence.

Reid to the Rescue
Reid takes Senate into closed session over Iraq intelligence

RAW STORY

The Senate's Democratic leader Harry Reid (D-NV) unexpectedly pulled the Senate into secret session Tuesday afternoon in order to have closed discussion of Iraq intelligence, RAW STORY has learned. Specifically, the senator sought to discuss a Senate Select Committee on Inteligence report on the failure of Iraqi WMD intelligence.

The maneuver immediately shuttered the doors of the Senate and cleared the Senate press galleries. It has been invoked just 53 times in the history of the body. It was last used during the Clinton impeachment hearings.

Closed sessions were also employed in 1997 for the Chemical Weapons Convention, and in 1992 during debate over China's "Most Favored Nation" trade status.
Advertisement

The Senate can vote to end closed session by a simple majority. It is unknown how long the Senate will remain closed, Reid's office told RAW STORY.

Reid's statement follows.
#

This past weekend, we witnessed the indictment of the I. Lewis Libby, the Vice President?s Chief of Staff and a senior Advisor to President Bush. Libby is the first sitting White House staffer to be indicted in 135 years. This indictment raises very serious charges. It asserts this Administration engaged in actions that both harmed our national security and are morally repugnant.

The decision to place U.S. soldiers in harm?s way is the most significant responsibility the Constitution invests in the Congress. The Libby indictment provides a window into what this is really about: how the Administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq and attempted to destroy those who dared to challenge its actions.

As a result of its improper conduct, a cloud now hangs over this Administration. This cloud is further darkened by the Administration?s mistakes in prisoner abuse scandal, Hurricane Katrina, and the cronyism and corruption in numerous agencies.

And, unfortunately, it must be said that a cloud also hangs over this Republican-controlled Congress for its unwillingness to hold this Republican Administration accountable for its misdeeds on all of these issues.

Let?s take a look back at how we got here with respect to Iraq Mr. President. The record will show that within hours of the terrorist attacks on 9/11, senior officials in this Administration recognized these attacks could be used as a pretext to invade Iraq.

The record will also show that in the months and years after 9/11, the Administration engaged in a pattern of manipulation of the facts and retribution against anyone who got in its way as it made the case for attacking Iraq.

There are numerous examples of how the Administration misstated and manipulated the facts as it made the case for war. Administration statements on Saddam?s alleged nuclear weapons capabilities and ties with Al Qaeda represent the best examples of how it consistently and repeatedly manipulated the facts.

The American people were warned time and again by the President, the Vice President, and the current Secretary of State about Saddam?s nuclear weapons capabilities. The Vice President said Iraq ?has reconstituted its nuclear weapons.? Playing upon the fears of Americans after September 11, these officials and others raised the specter that, left unchecked, Saddam could soon attack America with nuclear weapons.

Obviously we know now their nuclear claims were wholly inaccurate. But more troubling is the fact that a lot of intelligence experts were telling the Administration then that its claims about Saddam?s nuclear capabilities were false.
The situation was very similar with respect to Saddam?s links to Al Qaeda. The Vice President told the American people, ?We know he?s out trying once again to produce nuclear weapons and we know he has a longstanding relationship with various terrorist groups including the Al Qaeda organization.?

The Administration?s assertions on this score have been totally discredited. But again, the Administration went ahead with these assertions in spite of the fact that the government?s top experts did not agree with these claims.

What has been the response of this Republican-controlled Congress to the Administration?s manipulation of intelligence that led to this protracted war in Iraq? Basically nothing. Did the Republican-controlled Congress carry out its constitutional obligations to conduct oversight? No. Did it support our troops and their families by providing them the answers to many important questions? No. Did it even attempt to force this Administration to answer the most basic questions about its behavior? No.

Unfortunately the unwillingness of the Republican-controlled Congress to exercise its oversight responsibilities is not limited to just Iraq. We see it with respect to the prisoner abuse scandal. We see it with respect to Katrina. And we see it with respect to the cronyism and corruption that permeates this Administration.

Time and time again, this Republican-controlled Congress has consistently chosen to put its political interests ahead of our national security. They have repeatedly chosen to protect the Republican Administration rather than get to the bottom of what happened and why.

There is also another disturbing pattern here, namely about how the Administration responded to those who challenged its assertions. Time and again this Administration has actively sought to attack and undercut those who dared to raise questions about its preferred course.

For example, when General Shinseki indicated several hundred thousand troops would be needed in Iraq, his military career came to an end. When then OMB Director Larry Lindsay suggested the cost of this war would approach $200 billion, his career in the Administration came to an end. When U.N. Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix challenged conclusions about Saddam?s WMD capabilities, the Administration pulled out his inspectors. When Nobel Prize winner and IAEA head Mohammed el-Baridei raised questions about the Administration?s claims of Saddam?s nuclear capabilities, the Administration attempted to remove him from his post. When Joe Wilson stated that there was no attempt by Saddam to acquire uranium from Niger, the Administration launched a vicious and coordinated campaign to demean and discredit him, going so far as to expose the fact that his wife worked as a CIA agent.

Given this Administration?s pattern of squashing those who challenge its misstatements, what has been the response of this Republican-controlled Congress? Again, absolutely nothing. And with their inactions, they provide political cover for this Administration at the same time they keep the truth from our troops who continue to make large sacrifices in Iraq.

This behavior is unacceptable. The toll in Iraq is as staggering as it is solemn. More than 2,000 Americans have lost their lives. Over 90 Americans have paid the ultimate sacrifice this month alone ? the fourth deadliest month since the war began. More than 15,000 have been wounded. More than 150,000 remain in harm?s way. Enormous sacrifices have been and continue to be made.

The troops and the American people have a right to expect answers and accountability worthy of that sacrifice. For example, 40 Senate Democrats wrote a substantive and detailed letter to the President asking four basic questions about the Administration?s Iraq policy and received a four sentence answer in response. These Senators and the American people deserve better.

They also deserve a searching and comprehensive investigation about how the Bush Administration brought this country to war. Key questions that need to be answered include:

o How did the Bush Administration assemble its case for war against Iraq? o Who did Bush Administration officials listen to and who did they ignore? o How did senior Administration officials manipulate or manufacture intelligence presented to the Congress and the American people? o What was the role of the White House Iraq Group or WHIG, a group of senior White House officials tasked with marketing the war and taking down its critics? o How did the Administration coordinate its efforts to attack individuals who dared to challenge the Administration?s assertions? o Why has the Administration failed to provide Congress with the documents that will shed light on their misconduct and misstatements?

Unfortunately the Senate committee that should be taking the lead in providing these answers is not. Despite the fact that the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee publicly committed to examine many of these questions more than 1 and ? years ago, he has chosen not to keep this commitment. Despite the fact that he restated that commitment earlier this year on national television, he has still done nothing.

At this point, we can only conclude he will continue to put politics ahead of our national security. If he does anything at this point, I suspect he will play political games by producing an analysis that fails to answer any of these important questions. Instead, if history is any guide, this analysis will attempt to disperse and deflect blame away from the Administration.

We demand that the Intelligence Committee and other committees in this body with jurisdiction over these matters carry out a full and complete investigation immediately as called for by Democrats in the committee?s annual intelligence authorization report. Our troops and the American people have sacrificed too much. It is time this Republican-controlled Congress put the interests of the American people ahead of their own political interests.

Wilson Speaks

On the Monday after the Vice President's Chief of Staff was indicted for five counts of perjury, lying and obstruction of justice, Ambassador Joseph Wilson addressed the National Press Club and was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer for CNN.

BLITZER: Do you have confidence in Patrick Fitzgerald?

WILSON: Absolutely. In fact, I think the one thing that the indictment showed the other day is that our system of justice works; that in a nation that is based upon the rule of law, no man is above the law. And that's what Pat Fitzgerald said and made very clear.

BLITZER: Are you, though, disappointed that he didn't charge anyone with outing your wife as an undercover CIA operative?

WILSON: Well, I think it's important to remember two things.

One, he was unable to indict on anything other than the charges because, as he said, his investigation into this was impeded by the obstruction of justice and perjury.

And two, as he said, the state's interests were vindicated by the indictments that were handed down.

And three, finally, this is not a crime against Joe Wilson or Valerie Wilson, it's a crime against the country, against the national security of the country.

So we have no vote in whether or not we're disappointed or not disappointed.

BLITZER: But you were hoping that someone would actually -- that you'd get to the bottom of this: Who decided to out your wife as a CIA operative?

WILSON: Well, I think we pretty much are at the bottom. We now know, both from Mr. [Matthew] Cooper's testimony, the Time reporter testimony, that Mr. Rove gave him Valerie's name; and we know from the indictment that Mr. Libby was going around giving ...

BLITZER: But you understand why that's not a crime -- that wasn't deemed a crime by Patrick Fitzgerald?

WILSON: Well, again, it has not been indicted as a crime yet because, as Mr. Fitzgerald said, his investigation into the bottom of this was impeded by the obstruction of justice -- and the investigation is ongoing.

BLITZER: So you're still looking toward that.

On August 21, 2003, at a forum, you were quoted as saying this -- and I believe you did say this because we've talked about it: "At the end of the day, it's of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs."

He's still working at the White House. He's the deputy White House chief of staff.

WILSON: And I think that Karl Rove should be fired. I think that this idea that you can, with impunity, call journalists and leak national security information is repugnant.

It is not fitting for a senior White House official. It is below any standard of ethical comportment, even if it is not technically illegal, because of the high standard of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

But nonetheless, there's now clear evidence that Mr. Rove was leaking classified information. Mr. Fitzgerald made it very clear.

My wife was a covert officer at the time that these people were leaking her name.

I believe it's an abuse of the public trust. And even if he can't be convicted of it, I see no reason why somebody like that, why the president would want to have somebody like that working on his staff.

BLITZER: Well, forget about conviction. He hasn't even been charged with a crime.

WILSON: Again, it's now very clear that he leaked it. Mr. Cooper's sworn testimony indicates that. The e-mails indicate that.

BLITZER: Let's go through some of the criticism that's been leveled at you, afresh over these past several days since this whole leak investigation was coming to a boil last Friday.

A lot of your critics blame you for the eventual disclosure of your wife as a CIA operative, and they go back to that early May 2003 column by The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof who first reported about an unnamed U.S. ambassador making this trip to Africa.

Were you the source, Nicholas Kristof's source, for that column?

WILSON: Well, I was a source for that column.

But let me just say two things. One, this has never been about Valerie or me. This has always been about the 16 words in the [2003] State of the Union address, first and foremost -- and then, second, about who leaked Valerie's name.

And I would point out to you that the indictment does not name Joe Wilson as somebody who leaked Valerie's name.

BLITZER: Well, the indictment doesn't name anyone necessarily as a crime in terms of leaking ...

WILSON: The testimony that has been made public indicates that Mr. Libby and Mr. Rove leaked Valerie's name to the members of the press. There's nothing in any of the testimony to suggest that Joe Wilson did -- unlike what Mr. [Joseph] diGenova [a former U.S. attorney who was a special prosecutor during the Clinton administration] said on this program last week.

BLITZER: Why you tell Nicholas Kristof about your trip to Africa?

WILSON: I had attempted to talk directly to the State Department and to a number of Democratic senators and to get the record corrected. I felt that after it was clear that what the president was referring to in the State of the Union address was Niger, and that the trip that I went on was based upon a transcription of these documents that later were shown to be forgeries.

It was important for the administration to correct the record.

BLITZER: Because, as you know, this was two months before the Robert Novak column appeared.

WILSON: It is an act of civic duty, it is what citizens across this country do every day in our democracy -- you hold your government to account for what your government says and does in the name of the American people.

This happened to be an area where I had certain expertise and experience.

BLITZER: Former CIA officer Robert Behr was quoted in Saturday's Washington Post as saying this: "The fact is, once your husband writes an op-ed piece and goes political, you have no immunity and that's the way Washington works."

In other words, he's one of those suggesting that by your going public in various ways, your wife's identity was eventually going to be made known.

WILSON: Again, my name didn't appear in the indictment. There are instances of -- and you go to the Spy Museum here, you can see a number of high-profile people who served their country even though they had high-profile positions in different professions.

BLITZER: Even though some of your supporters were on this program last week -- Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer; Pat Lang, a former DIA intelligence analyst. They say your decision and your wife's decision to let her be photographed represented a major mistake because, if there were people out there who may have been endangered by her name, certainly when people might have seen her picture, they could have been further endangered.

WILSON: Her contacts and her network was endangered the minute that Bob Novak wrote the article. The photograph of her did not identify her in any way anybody could identify.

Now you asked me this question -- you've asked me this question three or four times ...

BLITZER: About the photograph?

WILSON: About the photograph.

Now, I have never heard you ask the president about the layout in the Oval Office when they did the war layout. I've never heard you ask Mr. Wolfowitz about the layout in Vanity Fair. But you ask me all the time.

So let me just get this very clear: When one is faced with adversity, one of the ways one acts in the face of adversity is to try and bring a certain amount of humor to the situation. It's called irony.

And if people have no sense of humor or no sense of perspective on that, my response is: It's about time to get a life.

But in no way did that picture endanger anybody. What endangered people was the outing of her name -- her maiden name -- and, subsequently, the outing of the corporation that she worked for.

BLITZER: So you don't have any regrets about the Vanity Fair picture?

WILSON: I think it's a great picture. I think someday you will, too.

BLITZER: It's a great picture. But I mean the fact that ...

WILSON: I think someday it, too, will be in the International Spy Museum.

BLITZER: But you don't think it was a mistake to do that?

WILSON: No.

BLITZER: OK.

Let's talk about Joe diGenova, a former U.S. attorney, Republican. He was on this program, as you well know -- he among others suggesting: Well, she had a desk job, she was an analyst in the Counterproliferation Division at the CIA. She was no longer really what they call a NOC, someone working nonofficial cover overseas, and that it was really no big deal.

WILSON: Well, I don't think Mr. diGenova knows what he's talking about in this particular matter. I would go back to the indictment and Mr. Fitzgerald's preamble in which he's made it clear: She was a classified officer. She was covered by the various statutes related to the handling of classified information.

It's as simple as that.

BLITZER: Did you ever go around in cocktail parties -- because this has been alleged against you as well -- before the Robert Novak column and boast "my wife, the CIA agent," "my wife works for the CIA"?

WILSON: Of course not.

First of all, [we have] 5-year-old twins and so we don't go to very many cocktail parties. You've seen me at precisely one in the many years that we've been in Washington together. And that was actually a book party. And you did not see my wife there and you didn't hear me say anything about my wife at that.

BLITZER: How well known was it that she worked for the CIA before the Novak column?

WILSON: It was not known outside the intelligence community.

The day after the Novak article appeared, my sister-in-law, my brother's wife, turned to him and asked him: "Do you think Joe knows this?"

BLITZER: Your trip to Niger -- there's been some suggestion that she came up with the idea of sending you to Niger. And the Senate -- we've gone through this, but I'll let you respond since it keeps coming up over and over again -- the Select Committee on Intelligence that came out July 7, 2004, last year said this:

"Interviews and documents provided to the committee" -- the Senate committee -- "indicated that his wife, a CPD" -- Counterproliferation Division -- "employee suggested his name for the trip."

Did she come up with the idea?

WILSON: No, that is not accurate. It doesn't reflect what happened. I was invited to a meeting. She conveyed that invitation from her superiors.

She also, at the request of superiors, provided them with sort of a list of my bona fides because they were doing contingency planning as to what they might want to do as a consequence of the outcome of the meeting, which was two days later after she wrote the report.

The reports officer, who apparently was quoted as saying that she offered up my name -- that's a quote -- came into her office subsequently and said that that was a misquote and he wanted to be re-interviewed by them.

That was contained in my letter back to Senator [Pat] Roberts and Senator [Orrin] Hatch and Senator [Kit] Bond after their additional views were published.

BLITZER: Larry Johnson, on this program last week, the former CIA officer, said your wife has been threatened by al Qaeda. Is that true?

WILSON: I won't go into specific threats. I'll tell you that there have been threats. And as a consequence, we've been working closely with the appropriate law enforcement agencies. We've changed our phone number and taken other security measures.

BLITZER: You don't want to go into details on that?

WILSON: Absolutely not.

BLITZER: If you had to do it all over again, looking backward, any changes you would have done?

WILSON: I would have written the article as I did because I believe -- I believe firmly -- that it is a civic responsibility to hold your government to account in a strong democracy.

And I can't think of much I would have changed. I suspect that, given the two-year character assassination campaign which was really designed to divert attention from the two key issues -- the 16 words in the State of the Union address and who leaked Valerie's name -- that there may have been some things I might have done differently, such as perhaps not getting engaged in a political campaign.

Although I will say this about that, and that is that I resent deeply the idea that others would try and deny me my right to participate fully in the selection of this country's leaders.

BLITZER: Because your wife is a CIA operative.

But let me ask a final question: Are you going to file any civil lawsuits against Libby, Cheney, anyone else?

WILSON: We're keeping all of our options open. There's a very complicated procedure for this, even though the case itself is relatively simple. And we have not come to any decision yet.

Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/10/31/wilson.interview/index.html

Republican Party=Waste of Time

The Republican party has turned into a gigantic waste of time, yours and mine.

In some of my comments so far, I've already alluded to the Republican practice of making promises that somebody else is expected to deliver.

But let me back up and start with the observation that the Republican party has turned into a gigantic waste of time, yours and mine.

Every time one of their leaders lies, they're wasting our time--not just the time it takes to get at the truth (Fitzgerald took two years to uncover one lie), but the all the time we have to listen to their canned repetitions.

Every time one of their leaders makes a promise that he must know he can't deliver, he's wasting the time of those who trust that, if they are just patient enough, he'll come through for them. If they weren't waiting on the promise, they could take care of whatever needs doing themselves.

Take for example the promise to make air travel safer. All that's been accomplished so far is that people have wasted millions of hours arriving at airports early, standing in multiple lines, having their belongings ransacked and their clothing removed in public and, in some cases, prohibited from going anywhere at all.
Yes, three thousand lives were cut short and those people have lost whatever time they had left to live. But every minute that goes by is gone for ever and when someone takes that time, it can never be replaced. How many more years have been taken away from the living.

For that matter, how many years have been stolen because of the lies that sent our war-fighters to Iraq on a fool's errand? I'm not just thinking of the lives cut off prematurely. I'm thinking of the decades that mothers and fathers and teachers and coaches and, yes, even the farmers, invested in those young men and women and all that investment is being wasted because some people lied.

True, some of those lives would have been wasted anyway in car accidents and drunken capers and accidental shootings, but that's not really the same is it? Those lives wouldn't be being wasted as a result of the Republican party's stupidity.

The Republican party used to be the organization that people who weren't too keen on keeping track of their neighbors or meddling in other people's business, could rely on to "take care of business." No longer. Now the Republican party has become an organization that's run by and for the cronies of self-important people who are good at only one thing--making promises they can't deliver, and don't even want to.

What promises? Let's count them for the remainder of the day.