1,400 Miles Across Generations

By Chuck Raasch
August 18, 2006


WASHINGTON — It started as a well-planned college tour with a sleepy 17-year-old. It ended with a determined quest for a Jimi Hendrix CD. And that, fellow boomers, is the difference between our generation and that of our Generation Y children.

Four days, four universities, four states and 1,400 miles later, several conclusions became obvious. Not that any 17-year-old boy is typical these days — indeed, that's the point. More than anything, theirs is the a la carte generation. For American kids born after 1980, multiple choice is existence.

The things their parents were raised on — benevolent father figures on TV, the early struggles over gender roles, a few dominant channels of entertainment — are distant history. Girls and boys are as likely to be best friends as girlfriend and boyfriend. Father Knows Best has morphed into Homer Simpson. The idea of three network TV channels with Walter Cronkite as the dominant anchor of news is laughable. And a lot of that rebellious rock-and-roll that drove our parents crazy is tame and hokey to our kids.

If you doubt that, listen to rap on commercial radio while driving through the back roads of southern Virginia. After that, Hendrix sounds like Pat Boone.

At 17, my biggest worries had been about the draft. Boys a couple of years older were in Vietnam and the war had dragged beyond understanding. The draft wound down my senior year in high school and officially ended 45 days after my 18th birthday. Then, I could not envision any 18-year-old volunteering during a war.

But 18-year-olds are signing up for Iraq, Afghanistan and other fronts in the war on terrorism. In North Carolina, news came that 21-year-old Marine Enrique Henry Sanchez of Garner, N.C., had died in Iraq. His grandmother told The Associated Press that the boy had so much wanted to be a Marine he had lost 150 pounds by dieting and running with an 80-pound backpack. Stories like that make you realize that commitment and sacrifice are the province of no generation, not even the "Greatest Generation" made famous in the World War II nostalgia literature.

Some call those born after 1980 the 9/11 generation. Sept. 11 is a fixture but not a fixation. It has been a fact of childhood that terrorists threaten civilization, and may always, but that life goes on.

The 9/11 generation is both traditional and iconoclastic. Talking heads often depict it as selfish and disengaged, often symbolized by the empty pursuits of Paris Hilton. In fact, according to social scientists, Generation Y has a respect for community and authority that makes it more akin to the 18-year-olds on the beaches of Normandy than the Y Generation's baby boomer parents

"This generation, the baby boomlet, is a very odd generation," said Rachel Kleinfeld, 30, the founding director of the Truman National Security Project, a Democrat think tank. "They are much more sexually conservative than the generation before them. They are much more religious than the generation before them. They are very community oriented. Their numbers on community orientation are like those of the greatest generation, the World War II generation. They are extremely loving of their parents. Many of them call their parents their best friends. And they are also very respecting of authority, but not all types of authority."

For instance, the 9/11 generation respects the military but not the traditional news media or government institutions. If you were born after 1980, you are likely to gather your impressions of the world as much through MySpace as any front page.

"The spin is absolutely mistrusted by this generation," Kleinfeld told a recent gathering of the Democratic Leadership Council. "And they need a politics of conviction."

Maybe that's why there were certain things, surprising things, upon which my son and I agreed over those 1,400 miles. We listened to my CD's and agreed the music of my generation was idealistic beyond reason. We listened to rap and agreed the music of his generation is fatalistic, but that doesn't mean the generation is. Most of all, there is much we can learn from one another.

Which brings us back to Hendrix. My two boys' iPods contain rap, rock and roll, oldies and country. They personalize the best of what they like most, and today Hendrix has become hot among teenagers because of his guitar-playing gifts. When I was 17, Hendrix was an expression of rebellion; today, he is a musical bridge between generations.

Just outside the University of Virginia, we found a store with a best of Hendrix CD. Its final cut is the "Star-Spangled Banner."

Contact GNS Political Writer Chuck Raasch at craasch@gns.gannett.com.

Sorry ...

But I do not listen to rap ...

At all ...

Period ....

Period ....

Thanks .....

But no ....

A big murder trial up here in Albany, New York just finished up ....

The person was convicted of murdering his father, a lawyer, and law clerk .....

With an axe ....

And like Lizzy Borden before him .....

He gave his mother a few whacks too ....

Although he did not end up killing her .....

This kid that did this is in college ....

Or was, anyway .....

Nice home ....

A nice yellow Jeep he had to drive .....

A strange case people up here say ....

But whoever does know .....

Maybe this kid with the axe liked rap .....

Or maybe rock-and-roll .....

Or maybe he was just tone-deaf .....

And didn't care .....

Strange ....

Personally ....

I am glad that trial is over .....

So I don't have to have it staring me in the face everyday .....

Making me wonder ....

About what it is ...

With this particular generation ...

That has them so violent up here .....

That the son of a lawyer kills him with an axe .....

And the son of a Congressman up here ....

And the son of the State University Chancellor .....

Both were arrested for stomping people in fights .....

With their jackboots ....

Like they were common goons ....

So ...

It's nice to hear .....

That somewhere out there ...

This Rachel Kleinfeld, 30, the founding director of the Truman National Security Project, a Democrat think .....

Was able to find some nice kids ....

That's cause for hope ....

And so ....

I was in the United States Army getting ready to go to Viet Nam .....

When I first heard Jimi Hendrix ....

And the rebellion was already there .....

Ahead of him ....

Coming on like a tidal wave .....

But that was in 1968 .....

And by the time this GNS Political Writer .....

Was getting out of high school .....

All of that by then ....

Was long gone .....

And the times ...

They were tame once again ....

And so ...

Jimi Hendrix .....

Was a reflection of the times that he was in ...

Not at all a cause of them ...

And so .....

In the United States Army at that time .....

Blacks and whites were getting it on with each other .....

In brawls .....

Right on Army bases .....

With entrenching tools .....

Which were handy weapons ...

Since everyone had been issued one .....

As part of our gear .....

And so ....

If you wanted to get to VEET NAM back then .....

To get yourself killed over there .....

Doing something that you just loved to do .....

You had to first survive training over here .....

Keeping your head ....

From being split open ...

By the pick on an entrenching tool .....

In a race riot .....

On an Army base ...

Right here in OUR own America .....

And so .....

Violence is ....

As violence does ....

And so ....

And speaking of armies ....

And who won the war ....

"Israeli troops criticize army, equipment"

By BENJAMIN HARVEY, Associated Press
Last updated: 4:45 p.m., Friday, August 18, 2006

METULLA, Israel -- Israeli soldiers returning from the war in Lebanon say the army was slow to rescue wounded comrades and suffered from a lack of supplies so dire that they had to drink water from the canteens of dead Hezbollah guerrillas.

"We fought for nothing."

"We cleared houses that will be reoccupied in no time," said Ilia Marshak, a 22-year-old infantryman who spent a week in Lebanon.

Marshak said his unit was hindered by a lack of information, poor training and untested equipment.

In one instance, Israeli troops occupying two houses inadvertently fired at each other because of poor communication between their commanders.

"We almost killed each other," he said.

"We shot like blind people."

"... We shot sheep and goats."

In a nation mythologized for decisive military victories over Arab foes, the stalemate after a 34-day war in Lebanon has surprised many.

The war was widely seen in Israel as a just response to a July 12 cross-border attack in which Hezbollah gunmen killed three Israeli soldiers and captured two.

But the wartime solidarity crumbled after Israel agreed to pull its army from south Lebanon without crushing Hezbollah or rescuing the captured soldiers.

A total of 118 Israeli soldiers were killed in the fighting, and the army was often caught off guard by a well-trained guerrilla force backed by Iran and Syria that used sophisticated weapons and tactics.

Soldiers, for instance, complained that Hezbollah fighters sometimes disguised themselves in Israeli uniforms.

Military experts and commentators have criticized the army for relying too heavily on air power and delaying the start of ground action for too long.

They say the army underestimated Hezbollah, and that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert set an unrealistic goal by pledging to destroy the guerrilla group.

This week, Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz appointed a former army chief to investigate the military's handling of the war.

Some of the harshest criticism has come from reservists, who form the backbone of the army.

Israeli men do three years of mandatory service beginning at age 18, but continue to do reserve duty several weeks a year into their 40s.

Israeli newspapers quoted disgruntled reservists as saying they had no provisions in Lebanon, were sent into battle with outdated or faulty equipment and insufficient supplies, and received little or no training.

"I personally haven't thrown a grenade in 15 years, and I thought I'd get a chance to do so before going north," an unidentified reservist in an elite infantry brigade was quoted as telling the Maariv daily.

Israel's largest paper, Yediot Ahronot, quoted one soldier as saying thirsty troops threw chlorine tablets into filthy water in sheep and cow troughs.

Another said his unit took canteens from dead guerrillas.

"When you're thirsty and have to keep fighting, you don't think a lot, and there is no time to feel disgusted," the unidentified soldier was quoted as saying.

The newspaper said helicopters were hindered from delivering food supplies or carrying out rescue operations because commanders feared the aircraft would be shot down.

In some cases, soldiers bled to death because they were not rescued in time, Yediot Ahronot said.

The Israeli military said it was aware of the complaints, had tried to address them in the course of the fighting and was still looking into them.

It had no comment on specific complaints.

Comrades of the two soldiers captured by Hezbollah sent a petition to the prime minister Thursday accusing the government of abandoning the men.

"We went to reserve duty with the certainty that all of Israel's citizens, and the Israeli government, believe in the same value that every combatant learns from his first day in basic training -- you don't leave friends behind," the soldiers wrote.

"This is a moral low point."

"The Israeli government has abandoned two IDF (Israeli Defense Force) combatants that it sent on a mission."

The petition was being circulated Friday; it was unclear how many soldiers had signed it.

While such sentiments aren't shared by all soldiers, even some senior commanders acknowledge the army came up short in Lebanon.

When soldier Gil Ovadia returned home, his commander made no mention of victory in an address to their battalion.

Instead, the commander told them the war was over, said they did a good job, and advised that they be prepared to come back soon and fight again.

"We'll be back in Lebanon in a few months, maybe years," Ovadia said.

end quotes

If George W. Bush .....

Would act as a president of the United States of America .....

Instead of as a cheerleader for Isreal ....

And if he would take some time ....

To get his facts straight ....

Before running his mouth ....

And speaking drivel ....

On the world stage .....

Which everyone but him knows is drivel ...

Such as Isreal beat Hezbollah in this most recent war ....

Maybe people would respect him more ....

But he has been doing this same mindless crap now ...

Since he got into office ....

Blustering like a mindless fool ...

And causing more and more misfortune for the world .....

With his mouth ....

To the point ...

Of where up here ...

No one wants to even hear his name spoken ....

And if they do ...

They make warding signs with their fingers .....

As if the devil himself were near ....

And so ....

If these Isrealis .....

Are going to try and make Hezbollah wear women's underwear .....

The way George W. Bush ...

Made the Iraqis wear women's underwear .....

Maybe they ought to bring a lunch with them next time ....

And some water as well ....

Because it sure sounds like they might need one ...

Next time around ....

And so .....

And speaking of attacks ....

Here comes George .....

"Bush blasts court ruling on surveillance"

By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press
Last updated: 6:17 p.m., Friday, August 18, 2006

CAMP DAVID, Md. -- President Bush on Friday criticized a federal court ruling that said his warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional, declaring that opponents "do not understand the nature of the world in which we live."

"I strongly disagree with that decision, strongly disagree," Bush said, striking his finger on a podium to underscore his point.

"That's why I instructed the Justice Department to appeal immediately, and I believe our appeals will be upheld."

U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit on Thursday was the first to find the National Security Agency surveillance program unconstitutional.

The program involves monitoring international phone calls and e-mails to and from the United States involving people with suspected ties to terrorists.

"If al-Qaida is calling in to the United States, we want to know why they're calling," Bush said.

Critics say the surveillance program skirts the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court warrants for domestic eavesdropping.

The administration has argued that obtaining warrants from a secret court set up under FISA is a time-consuming process unsuited for the government's fast-moving war on terror.

The judge said the government, in defending the program, appeared to be saying the president had the "inherent power" to violate laws of Congress.

"It was never the intent of the framers to give the president such unfettered control," Taylor wrote in a 43-page opinion.

"... There are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution."

"So all 'inherent powers' must derive from that Constitution."

On other issues, Bush said it would take the world time to view the war between Israel and Hezbollah as a loss for the Islamic militant group.

"The first reaction, of course, of Hezbollah and its supporters is, declare victory," Bush said.

"I guess I would have done the same thing if I were them, but sometimes it takes people a while to come to the sober realization of what forces create stability and which don't."

"Hezbollah is a force of instability."

Bush also expressed some disappointment with France's contribution to an expanded peacekeeping force in Lebanon.

France had been expected to make a significant new contribution that would form the backbone of the expanded force.

But French President Jacques Chirac disappointed the United Nations and other countries by announcing France would contribute just 200 combat engineers to its current 200-member contingent in Lebanon.

"France has said they will send some troops," the president said.

"We hope they'll send more."

Members of Bush's economic team stood alongside the president as he spoke under bright sunshine at the Camp David helipad.

Among attendees were Vice President Dick Cheney, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, National Economic Council Director Allan Hubbard and White House budget chief Rob Portman.

The meeting came at a time when only 37 percent of Americans support Bush's handling of the economy, according to AP-Ipsos polling in early August.

It's also just weeks before congressional midterm elections that will determine whether Republicans continue to control the House and the Senate.

Bush declared the economy solid and strong because of tax cuts his administration pushed through Congress.

He rattled off a series of economic indicators, including the nation's 4.8 percent jobless rate in July and 4 percent annual economic growth rate through the first half of the year.

But House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi took issue with Bush's upbeat comments on the economy, saying, "President Bush may think the economy is moving forward, but many hard working Americans are stuck living paycheck to paycheck."

"Under President Bush and the Republican Congress, the economic situation for too many Americans is going in the wrong direction," said the California Democrat.

Since Bush took office, she said, "real median family income has dropped by $1,700 while families are paying $3,200 more in household costs."

Bush did not mention that the July unemployment rate had inched up from 4.6 percent in June, reflecting a slowdown in job creation that reflects weaker economic growth.

And while the gross domestic product expanded at an annual rate of 5.6 percent in the first quarter, it slowed to just 2.5 percent in the April-June quarter.

On Friday, a University of Michigan survey showed consumer confidence fell sharply in early August to the lowest level in 10 months as Americans were rattled by new terrorism concerns and gasoline prices above $3 per gallon.

Bush did not mention the jump in gasoline prices, although he did discuss the need to invest in new energy technologies.

Paulson, speaking to reporters later, said the team spent much time talking about long-term challenges such as changing Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in view of the pending retirement of 78 million baby boomers.

"We think it is quite possible to come up with a fix that is quite doable," Paulson said of reforming the government programs.

"The question is whether we can get the support of Congress to get something done."

------

AP Economics Writer Martin Crutsinger contributed to this report.

end quotes

George W. Bush of all people, telling us, the American people, that opponents "do not understand the nature of the world in which we live" ......

Is quite insulting, actually ....

George W. Bush ...

VIOLATING ....

OUR LAWS ...

AND OUR CONSTITUTION ....

And then having the gall .....

To tell us ....

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE .....

That we are stupid ...

And uniformed .....

Because we won't let him do this .....

TO US, THE PEOPLE OF AMERICA ....

Well ....

What I say ...

Is that George W. Bush ....

Was wrong to try ...

And so .....

Shame on him ....

For trying .....

AND NOT US ....

FOR HAVING HIM STOPPED ....

But it is typical mindless George .....

TO CALL US IGNORANT .....

When he is at fault ....

Caught out breaking OUR LAWS ....

And so .....

George was never really one of us ....

Having lived his life ...

So far above us ....

That he doesn't even know what OUR values are .....

Nor does he really care .....

And so ....

It is George who is quite a bit out of touch ....

With the world that we all must live in every day .....

And it is George W. Bush .....

Who is stuck in Lotus-Eater Land somewhere ......

Where life is quite a bit different than it is here, obviously .....

And each time that George W. Bush insults OUR intelligence, again ....

His own stature as an alleged leader OF A FREE PEOPLE ....

Is just diminshed further and further ....

To the point of where he has no credibility now ....

And he is heading over into negative numbers in that score column ...

And so ...

May 03, 2005

Lyrics to the song Bright Eyes played on Leno

"When The President Talks To God"

When the president talks to God ..

Are the conversations brief or long?

Does he ask to rape our women's' rights ...

And send poor farm kids off to die?

Does God suggest an oil hike ...

When the president talks to God?

When the president talks to God ...

Are the consonants all hard or soft?

Is he resolute all down the line?

Is every issue black or white?

Does what God say ever change his mind ...

When the president talks to God?

When the president talks to God ...

Does he fake that drawl or merely nod?

Agree which convicts should be killed?

Where prisons should be built and filled?

Which voter fraud must be concealed ...

When the president talks to God?

When the president talks to God ...

I wonder which one plays the better cop ...

We should find some jobs ...

The ghetto's broke ...

No, they're lazy, George, I say we don't ..

Just give 'em more liquor stores and dirty coke ..

That's what God recommends ..

When the president talks to God ...

Do they drink near beer and go play golf ...

While they pick which countries to invade ...

Which Muslim souls still can be saved?

I guess god just calls a spade a spade ...

When the president talks to God ...

When the president talks to God ...

Does he ever think that maybe he's not?

That that voice is just inside his head ...

When he kneels next to the presidential bed ...

Does he ever smell his own bull**** ...

When the president talks to God?

I doubt it ...

I doubt it ...

http://www.freewilliamsburg.com/archives/2...s_to_the_s.html

The resident has never said he talked to God. He said that God talked to him.

Of course God talks to him ....

George W. Bush is the leader of the free world ...

And God sure is not ....

And so .....

And besides that ...

George W. Bush is the decider ......

And again ...

God sure is not ....

Which kind of puts God in the "second seat" .....

In that relationship ....

As I see it ....

And so ...

George listens ...

While God beseeches ....

And so ....

And while George W. Bush is debating whether to hear God out ...

On what God's plans for the planet might be ...

Versus the plans that George has for it ....

Which involve a lot of exploitation .....

And destruction ....

And not much else .....

Perhaps the planet has decided .....

To tell George W. Bush .....

THE LEADER OF THE FREE WORLD .....

As well as being THE DECIDER ....

To go to hell ....

Or Connaught ....

Or mayber Moreton Bay, Austrailia ....

It don't matter ....

To the earth, anyway ....

And so ...

"Seas turning to primeval soup - Industrialization gives the most primitive life in the ocean an edge"

By KENNETH R. WEISS, Los Angeles Times
First published: Friday, August 18, 2006

MORETON BAY, Australia -- The fireweed began each spring as tufts of hairy growth and spread across the seafloor fast enough to cover a football field in an hour.

When fishermen touched it, their skin broke out in searing welts.

Their lips blistered and peeled.

Their eyes burned and swelled shut.

Water that splashed from their nets spread the inflammation to their legs and torsos.

"It comes up like little boils," said Randolph Van Dyk, a fisherman whose powerful legs are pocked with scars.

"At nighttime, you can feel them burning."

"I tried everything to get rid of them."

"Nothing worked."

At first, authorities dismissed their complaints -- until a bucket of the hairy weed made it to the University of Queensland's marine botany lab.

Samples placed in a drying oven gave off fumes so strong that professors and students ran out of the building and into the street, choking and coughing.

Scientist Judith O'Neil put a tiny sample under a microscope and peered at the long black filaments.

Consulting a botanical reference, she identified the weed as a strain of cyanobacteria, an ancestor of modern-day bacteria and algae that flourished 2.7 billion years ago.

O'Neil, a biological oceanographer, was familiar with these ancient life forms, but had never seen this particular kind before.

What was it doing in Moreton Bay?

Why was it so toxic?

Why was it growing so fast?

The venomous weed, known to scientists as "Lyngbya majuscula," has appeared in at least a dozen other places around the globe.

It is one of many symptoms of a virulent pox on the world's oceans.

In many places -- the atolls of the Pacific, the shrimp beds of the Eastern Seaboard, the fjords of Norway -- some of the most advanced forms of ocean life are struggling to survive while the most primitive are thriving and spreading.

Fish, corals and marine mammals are dying while algae, bacteria and jellyfish are growing unchecked.

Where this pattern is most pronounced, scientists evoke a scenario of evolution running in reverse, returning to the primeval seas of hundreds of millions of years ago.

Jeremy B.C. Jackson, a marine ecologist and paleontologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, says we are witnessing "the rise of slime."

For many years, it was assumed that the oceans were too vast for humanity to damage in any lasting way.

Even in modern times, when oil spills, chemical discharges and other industrial accidents heightened awareness of man's capacity to injure sea life, the damage was often regarded as temporary.

But over time, the accumulation of environmental pressures has altered the basic chemistry of the seas.

Industrial society is overdosing the oceans with basic nutrients -- the nitrogen, carbon, iron and phosphorous compounds that curl out of smokestacks and tailpipes, wash into the sea from fertilized lawns and cropland, seep out of septic tanks and gush from sewer pipes.

These pollutants feed excessive growth of harmful algae and bacteria.

At the same time, overfishing and destruction of wetlands have diminished the competing sea life and natural buffers that once held the microbes and weeds in check.

The oceans are also sucking up excessive carbon dioxide like a sponge.

Evidence is surfacing around the globe.

Off the coast of Sweden each summer, blooms of cyanobacteria turn the Baltic Sea into a stinking, yellow-brown slush that locals call "rhubarb soup."

Dead fish bob in the surf.

On the southern coast of the Hawaiian island of Maui, high tide leaves piles of green-brown algae that smell so foul condominium owners have hired a tractor driver to scrape them off the beach every morning.

On Florida's Gulf Coast, residents complain that harmful algae blooms have become bigger, more frequent and longer-lasting.

Toxins from these red tides have killed hundreds of sea mammals and caused emergency rooms to fill up with coastal residents suffering respiratory distress.

Organisms such as the fireweed that torments the fishermen of Moreton Bay have been around for aeons.

They emerged from the primordial ooze and came to dominate ancient oceans that were mostly lifeless.

Over time, higher forms of life gained supremacy.

Jackson, 63, who has spent a good part of his professional life underwater, uses a homespun analogy to illustrate what is happening.

The world's 6 billion inhabitants, he says, have failed to follow a homeowner's rule of thumb: Be careful what you dump in the swimming pool, and make sure the filter is working.

"We're pushing the oceans back to the dawn of evolution," Jackson said, "a half-billion years ago when the oceans were ruled by jellyfish and bacteria."

At the same time, as industrial activity pumps massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the environment, more of the gas is being absorbed by the oceans.

As a result, seawater is becoming more acidic, threatening a variety of sea creatures.

The greenhouse gas, best known for accumulating in the atmosphere and heating the planet, is entering the ocean at a rate of nearly 1 million tons per hour -- 10 times the natural rate.

Scientists report that the seas are more acidic today than they have been in at least 650,000 years.

At the current rate of increase, ocean acidity is expected, by the end of this century, to be 2 times what it was before the Industrial Revolution began 200 years ago.

Such a change would devastate many species of fish and other animals that have thrived in chemically stable seawater for millions of years.

Less likely to be harmed are algae, sea grasses and other primitive forms of life that are already proliferating at the expense of fish, marine mammals and corals.

In a matter of decades, the world's remaining coral reefs could be too brittle to withstand pounding waves.

Shells could become too fragile to protect their occupants.

By the end of the century, much of the polar ocean is expected to be as acidified as the water that wrought such damage on the pteropods aboard the Discoverer.

Some marine biologists predict that altered acid levels will disrupt fisheries by melting away the bottom rungs of the food chain -- tiny planktonic plants and animals that provide the basic nutrition for all living things in the sea.

end quotes

And okay .....

Okay ....

Just disregard all of this .....

I am told to say ....

By the CLUB OF REPUBLICAN LAWYERS ......

None of this above is true .....

Not at all ....

It's just LIBERAL SCARE TACTICS .....

Intended to make George W. Bush bad .....

So the Democrats ....

Can sieze control of the United States Congress this November .....

So as to be able to turn over America to al-Qaida .....

Lock, stock and barrel .....

Along with all our freedoms .....

And liberties .....

And well ...

Everything ....

Before we have achieved ....

Total victory .....

In Iraq ....

And Afghanistan ....

And Mexico too ....

And everywhere else as well ....

And so ...

And while we are on the subject of TOTAL VICTORY .....

Over something, anyway .....

Which is TOP SECRET, of course ....

So that we can't tell al-Qaida .....

Or Hezbollah ....

NATIONAL SECRETS .....

That only George W. bush ....

And God ...

Can know ....

We have ....

And so ....

"Bush: Iraq War keystone in terror fight"

By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer

2 hours, 18 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - President Bush said Saturday that his administration's determination to remain in Iraq and its efforts to end violence in Lebanon are key to protecting the U.S. from future terrorist attacks.

Democrats countered that Americans will be safer if the nation begins a phased pullout of U.S. forces from Iraq.

"It is no coincidence that two nations that are building free societies in the heart of the Middle East — Lebanon and Iraq — are also the scenes of the most violent terrorist activity," Bush said in his weekly radio address.

"We will defeat the terrorists by strengthening young democracies across the broader Middle East."

He acknowledged that "the way forward will be difficult."

But, the president said, "America's security depends on liberty's advance in this troubled region."

Democrats chose Joe Sestak, a former Navy vice admiral who is challenging Republican Rep. Curt Weldon in a competitive race outside Philadelphia, to deliver their party's response to the president.

Sestak argued for "a new direction for America's security."

He said it is time for the U.S. mission in Iraq to end.

"We must begin a phased redeployment of our forces so that we are prepared to face the security challenges we have worldwide," he said.

The nation's safety looms as a major issue in the midterm elections Nov. 7, particularly after last week's news of a foiled plot in Britain to blow up jetliners over the Atlantic.

Both Republicans and Democrats are maneuvering for the political advantage in an election in which control of Congress is at stake.

Democrats have been accusing the Bush administration of trying to ignite fear among Americans and gain political points by claiming they alone can keep them safe.

Republicans argue that Democrats are weak on national security.

With American deaths in Iraq over 2,600, the U.S. public growing more weary of the war, and even some troops frustrated with the pace of progress, Democrats have been increasingly vocal about what they say is the lack of a plan for success in Iraq and the need for a timetable for bringing U.S. forces home.

Sestak said ending the U.S. presence in Iraq would free up money and energy to concentrate on other dangers, such as nuclear programs in North Korea and Iran and bolstering homeland security protections.

Two days of spending in Iraq would pay for screening all air cargo on passenger planes, while five days of Iraq costs would fund the screening of all cargo coming into the nation's ports, he said.

"We are fostering a culture of dependence in Iraq," Sestak said.

"Iraqi leaders must be responsible for their own country."

"They must make the difficult political compromises that will stop the civil war and bring about stability."

"Completing our mission in Iraq will also make America safer everywhere."

Bush argued that his approach is working.

"We will defeat the terrorists and expand freedom across the world, we'll protect the American homeland and work tirelessly to prevent attacks on our country," he said.

"The terrorists remain determined to destroy innocent life on a massive scale, and we must be equally determined to stop them."

end quotes

IF THAT MESS IN IRAQ ....

IS YOUR KEYSTONE, GEORGE ...

I SURE WOULD NOT BE BRAGGING ON IT ...

IN PUBLIC, ANYWAY ....

I WOULD BE HANGING MY HEAD IN SHAME ...

IF THAT MESS WERE ATTRIBUTABLE TO ME ....

LIKE IT IS ATTRIBUTABLE TO YOU ....

And so ...

SOOOOooooooo .....

HHHHHhhhmmmmm ......

Okay, George ......

Who exactly is it ...

That is threatening DEMOCRACY in Lebanon?

With terror tactics?

"Lebanon gives warning after Israeli raid"

By SAM F. GHATTAS, Associated Press Writer

2 hours, 4 minutes ago

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Israeli commandos raided a Hezbollah stronghold deep inside Lebanon Saturday, sparking a fierce clash with militants that killed one Israeli.

Lebanon called the raid a "flagrant violation" of the U.N.-brokered cease-fire, while Israel said it was aimed at disrupting arms shipments from Iran and Syria.

Witnesses said Israeli missiles also destroyed a bridge during the raid in what would be the first such airstrike since the cease-fire took effect Monday, ending 34 days of warfare between the two sides.

The fighting did not appear to be escalating, but it highlighted the fragility of the truce as the United Nations pleaded for nations to contribute to an international peacekeeping force due to patrol southern Lebanon.

Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr threatened to halt the army's deployment in south Lebanon if the United Nations does not take up the issue of the raid.

A stop to the deployment would deeply damage efforts to move in the U.N. force to strengthen the cease-fire.

"If there are no clear answers forthcoming on this issue, I might be forced to recommend to the Cabinet early next week the halt of the army deployment in the south," Murr told reporters after a meeting with U.N. representatives.

In Jerusalem, Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev defended the raid as a response to "a violation of the cease-fire."

"The U.N. Security Council resolution on Lebanon is very explicit: It says that Hezbollah cannot use the cease-fire to rearm, to receive more missiles and more rockets from Syria and Iran."

"That was happening, and Israel acted to prevent that from happening," he said.

Regev indicated Israel could conduct further raids until Lebanese and international troops take up positions to prevent Hezbollah from rebuilding its arsenal — a goal that the U.N. resolution sets as part of a long-term end to the conflict but does not immediately require.

"If the Syrians and Iran continue to arm Hezbollah in violation of the resolution, Israel is entitled to act to defend the principle of the arms embargo," Regev said.

"Once the Lebanese army and the international forces are active ... then such Israeli activity will become superfluous."

The first small contingent of reinforcements for the peacekeeping force — 49 French soldiers — landed Saturday in inflatable dinghies at the southern Lebanese coastal town of Naqoura, with 200 more expected next week.

But Deputy U.N. Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown said more countries need to step forward to fill out a vanguard of 3,500 soldiers that the U.N. wants on the ground by Aug. 28 to help ensure the truce holds.

Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora called Saturday's commando raid a "flagrant violation" of the cease-fire, and said he would take the issue up with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

Murr said the raid could spark Hezbollah retaliation, which in turn could lead to Israeli reprisals.

He suggested Israel might be trying to provoke a response, so it could have an excuse to attack the Lebanese army.

"We will not send the army to be prey in an Israeli trap," he said.

Under the cease-fire terms, Israel has said it will conduct defensive operations if its troops are threatened.

But the raid took place far from positions of Israeli troops in southern Lebanon.

Such a bold operation suggested Israel was going after a major target — perhaps to rescue two Israeli soldiers snatched by Hezbollah on July 12, or to try to capture a senior guerrilla official to trade for the soldiers.

Hezbollah has said it wants to exchange the two soldiers for Arab prisoners, but the cease-fire resolution demands Hezbollah unconditionally release the soldiers.

The Israeli commandos were dropped by helicopter on a hill outside the village of Boudai west of Baalbek and apparently were seeking a guerrilla target in a nearby school, Lebanese security officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to release information to the media.

Local media said Sheik Mohammed Yazbeck, a senior Hezbollah official in the Bekaa Valley and a member of the group's Shura council, may have been the target.

Yazbeck is a native of Boudai.

Hezbollah TV said the guerrillas foiled the raid.

Israel said the force completed its mission, with one officer killed and two soldiers wounded.

Lebanese security officials said three guerrillas were killed and three were wounded.

A Hezbollah spokesman said none of his fighters died.

Hezbollah officials at the scene said the Israeli commandos brought two vehicles with them that they used to drive into Boudai.

They identified themselves as the Lebanese army when intercepted by Hezbollah fighters in a field, but the guerrillas grew suspicious and gunfire erupted, according to the officials.

Israeli helicopters fired missiles as the commandos withdrew and flew out of the area an hour later, they said.

Witnesses saw bandages and syringes at the landing site outside Boudai, about 10 miles west of Baalbek and 15 miles west of the Syrian border.

A bridge was destroyed about 500 yards from the area in what witnesses said was an Israeli airstrike.

The ancient town of Baalbek is the birthplace of the Iranian- and Syrian-backed Hezbollah.

The area in the eastern Bekaa Valley, 60 miles north of the Israeli border, is a major guerrilla stronghold.

On Aug. 2, Israeli commandos targeted the Iranian-funded, Hezbollah-run Dar al-Hikma Hospital in Baalbek, killing 16 people, according to Lebanese police.

Israel said that the building was a Hezbollah base, not a hospital, and that its soldiers captured five guerrilla fighters and killed 10 more before withdrawing.

Under the cease-fire, some 15,000 Lebanese soldiers are to move into the south, backed by the beefed-up U.N. peacekeeping force, as Israeli forces withdraw.

Once there, the troops are to enforce the cease-fire.

Lebanon has said Hezbollah will not be allowed to show its weapons in public, but has not said whether it will try the more controversial step of disarming the guerrillas.

The Lebanese army has deployed more than 1,500 soldiers in three sectors that Israeli forces have left, and the U.N. force — currently numbering 2,000 — has set up checkpoints and started patrolling the areas.

So far, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Italy, France and Finland have promised troops.

In an effort to encourage more countries to sign on, Annan said the peacekeeping force would not "wage war" on Israel, Lebanon or Hezbollah militants, addressing a key concern of many countries.

Turkey's government said this week that during the Lebanon war it forced Syria-bound Iranian planes to land and be searched for rockets and other military equipment.

The newspaper Hurriyet reported that two Iranian planes were forced to land at Diyarbakir airport on July 27 and Aug. 8 but that no military equipment was found.

Foreign Ministry deputy spokesman Murat Ozcelik said those were not the only planes forced to land.

"We inspect Iranian planes upon any suspicion that they may be carrying any weapons," he said, but declined to give details.

end quotes

We are told .....

Here in OUR America ....

That in some undefined way ....

Isreal is one of OUR greatest allies .....

In something, anyway .....

Although I have never really been able to figure that out myself ....

What it is exactly ....

That America is supposed to be allied with Isreal in doing ....

Here in OUR America .....

IT IS OUR BASIC RIGHT ....

As citizens ....

TO HAVE SEPARATION ....

OF CHURCH AND STATE ....

But not so in Isreal ....

There ...

The CHURCH ...

Is the STATE ....

And so .....

Discrimination against other religions .....

Is STATE POLICY in Isreal .....

Whereas over here .....

At least before George W. Bush came into power .....

We were supposed to have a Constitutional guarantee ....

Of LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE ....

Where we are supposedly free ....

To view God ....

As we will ....

Or not ....

Without interference in that relationship ....

FROM THE "STATE" ...

Unlike Isreal ....

Where the "STATE" ....

Is simply an extension ....

Of the CHURCH .....

And its STATE RELIGION ....

Which breeds intolerance ....

And so ...

We have a Constitution ....

And even Iraq has a Constitution ...

But Isreal does not ...

And so ....

To me ...

Isreal is like the CHURCH OF ENGLAND was ....

Over here ....

Before we gained OUR independence from Great Britain ....

And finally were able to throw off the yoke .....

Of Great Britain's state-sponsored church ....

WHICH WAS FOREIGN TO US ....

And now ...

Here we are ....

YOKED UP ....

To another foreign church ....

That we don't all belong to ....

Or believe in ....

But are being forced to have to support ....

Regardless ....

And so ...

And as George W. Bush "ADVANCES LIBERTY" .....

Over there in Iraq .....

This is what George's so-called "ADVANCE OF LIBERTY" looks like .....

From over here ....

Which is just more of the lawlessness ....

And blatant disregard ....

For basic human rights ....

That George has been giving the candid world ....

All along ....

And so ....

"Evidence at issue in Haditha inquiry"

By DAVID S. CLOUD, New York Times
First published: Friday, August 18, 2006

WASHINGTON -- A high-level military investigation into the killings of 24 Iraqis in Haditha last November has uncovered instances in which U.S. Marines involved in the episode appear to have destroyed or withheld evidence, according to two Defense Department officials briefed on the case.

The investigation found that an official company logbook of the unit involved had been tampered with and that an incriminating video taken by an aerial drone the day of the killings was not given to investigators until Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the second-ranking commander in Iraq, intervened, the officials said.

Those findings, contained in a long report that was completed last month but not made public, go beyond what has been previously reported about the case.

It has been known that Marines who carried out the killings made false statements to investigators and that senior officers were criticized for not being more aggressive in investigating the case, in which most or all of the Iraqis who were killed were civilians.

But this is the first time details about possible concealment or destruction of evidence have been disclosed.

The report's findings have been sent to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which is investigating members of the unit involved in the killings, as well higher-ranking officers in the 2nd Marine Division.

No charges have been brought yet.

The report, based on an investigation by Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell of the Army, does not directly accuse Marines of attempting a cover-up, but it does describe several suspicious incidents, according to the Defense Department officials.

It says that the logbook, which was meant to be a daily record of major incidents the Marines' company encountered, had all the pages missing for Nov. 19, the day of the killings, and that the those portions had not been found, the officials said.

No conclusions are drawn about who may have tampered with the log.

But the report says that Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, the leader of the squad involved in the killings, was on duty at the unit's operations center, where the logbook was kept, shortly after the killings occurred, the officials said.

Investigators also were initially told by Marine officers that videotape taken by the drone was not available, one of the officials said.

The officials added that the Marines produced the videotape only after Bargewell had completed his inquiry and they had been asked again to produce it by Chiarelli.

Bombs rock Baghdad

Car bombs killed 10 people in Baghdad on Thursday as violence persisted in the capital despite the U.S.-led security crackdown.

Two more American soldiers were killed in combat, the U.S. command said.

According to The Associated Press, the two American fatalities included one soldier killed Thursday when a roadside bomb exploded near a foot patrol south of Baghdad, the U.S. military said.

The other was a soldier from the 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division who died Wednesday of wounds suffered in Anbar province, stronghold of the Sunni Arab insurgency west of Baghdad.

Marine charged

In San Diego, a Marine officer, 2nd Lt. Nathan P. Phan, was charged Wednesday with assaulting three civilians in the Iraqi town of Hamdania April 10.

Phan, 26, denies the charges, said defense attorney David Sheldon.

end quotes

Like Commander-IN-Chief ....

Like subordinates ...

And as George W. Bush ....

"ADVANCES LIBERTY" ....

Over there in Iraq .....

This is what it looks like ....

To them ....

"For Iraq civilians, July's toll deadliest"

By EDWARD WONG and DAMIEN CAVE, New York Times
First published: Wednesday, August 16, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- July appears to have been the deadliest month of the war for Iraqi civilians, according to figures from the Health Ministry and the Baghdad morgue.

An average of more than 110 Iraqis were killed each day in July, according to the figures.

The total number of civilian deaths that month, 3,438, is a 9 percent increase over the tally in June and nearly double the toll of January.

The numbers provide the most definitive evidence yet that the Baghdad security plan started by Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki on June 14 has not quelled the violence.

The plan relied on setting up more Iraqi-run checkpoints to stymie insurgent movement.

The Baghdad morgue reported receiving 1,855 bodies in July, more than half of the total deaths recorded in the country.

The morgue tally for July was an 18 percent increase over June.

The U.S. military in recent weeks has been especially eager to prove that Baghdad can be tamed if American troops are added to the streets and take a more active role -- in effect, a repudiation of earlier efforts to turn over security more quickly to Iraqis.

The American command has added nearly 4,000 American soldiers to Baghdad by extending the tour of a combat brigade.

Under a new security plan aimed at overhauling al-Maliki's efforts, some of the city's most violent southern and western areas are now virtually occupied block-to-block by American and Iraqi forces.

When the tally for civilian deaths in July is added to the Iraqi government numbers for earlier months obtained by the United Nations, the total indicates that at least 17,776 Iraqi civilians died violently in the first seven months of this year, or an average of 2,539 per month.

The health ministry did not provide figures for people wounded by attacks in Baghdad but said that at least 3,597 Iraqis were injured outside the city in July, a 25 percent increase over June.

According to The Los Angeles Times, President Bush flatly told Middle East experts at a private meeting this week that a three-way division of Iraq would only worsen sectarian violence in the country and is "really not an option" for solving the country's problems.

Rejecting a policy alternative that has been gaining support in the U.S. and abroad, Bush told the experts that dividing the country would be "like pouring oil on fire," recounted Eric M. Davis, a Rutgers University professor and one of the experts who met with Bush Monday at the Pentagon.

Bush also made clear in the private meeting that he was concerned about the lack of progress in Iraq and frustrated that the new Iraqi government -- and the Iraqi people -- had not shown greater public support for the American mission, participants in the meeting said Tuesday.

Bombs, battles claim lives

A suicide bombing in the north and street battles hundreds of miles away in a Shiite holy city in the south claimed 16 lives Tuesday, according to The Associated Press.

Nine people died in the suicide attack outside the regional party headquarters of Iraq's president in the northern city of Mosul; seven were killed in the fighting between Iraqi forces and followers of an anti-American cleric in Karbala.

In Baghdad, meanwhile, the U.S. military said car bombs triggered deadly explosions in a Shiite neighborhood Sunday, contradicting its report the blasts were caused by an accidental gas leak.

The suicide driver detonated his vehicle at the Mosul office of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party of President Jalal Talabani, killing five civilians and four security guards.

Forty-one people were wounded by the blast.

In Karbala, a Shiite holy city 270 miles south of Mosul, gunbattles broke out after police raided the office of Mahmoud al-Hassani, a Shiite cleric known for anti-American and anti-Iranian views.

Al-Hassani's followers attacked police stations and checkpoints.

end quotes

If George W. Bush .....

ADVANCES LIBERTY ....

Over there in Iraq .....

Long enough .....

There won't be any Iraqis left ....

To need any of it, any more .....

And so ....

THEN ...

WE WILL FINALLY HAVE ACHIEVED .....

TOTAL VICTORY ...

At least over there ....

So that will be one less war that we will be involved in ...

While George W. Bush .....

Is ADVANCING LIBERTY ......

Elsewhere on the globe ....

Where there is also oil to steal ....

To keep America's economy .....

KICKING RIGHT ALONG ....

Or Dick Cheney's anyway ....

And so ....

"'Shock and awe' failed in Lebanon, too"

By TRUDY RUBIN
First published: Saturday, August 19, 2006

Condoleezza Rice has rescued Israel from the depths of the Hezbollah trap into which it was heading, egged on by some in the Bush administration.

Israel apparently believed a massive "shock-and-awe" bombing campaign that smashed Lebanon's civilian infrastructure as well as Hezbollah targets would destroy the guerrillas and turn the Lebanese public against them.

The White House gave this strategy the green light.

A new piece by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker alleges that Vice President Cheney saw the bombing in Lebanon as a trial run for a possible U.S. strike on Hezbollah's patrons in Iran.

But shock and awe did not destroy Hezbollah.

The terrorist/political group emerged stronger in the region and at home, where the bombing generated fury toward Israel even among Lebanese who detest Hezbollah.

(Things would have been even worse had Israel continued its ground invasion; Israeli troops would have become mired in another Lebanon occupation guaranteed to chew them up.)

There's still a chance that Hezbollah's power in Lebanon will be diminished as a result of this conflict.

But this would require the White House -- and Israel -- to grasp the truth that Rice belatedly forced on the administration: You can't defeat terrorist groups with one knockout blow.

Reliance on shock-and-awe or massive military strikes to defeat terrorists is a loser.

Their defeat requires a more sophisticated strategy, linking force to diplomacy, better intelligence-gathering and support for Arab moderates.

Three decades after Vietnam, five years after 9/11 and three years into the wretched Iraq war, you'd think the administration would have learned that fighting terrorism is a long slog unaffected by righteous rhetoric.

After all, the British terror cell that planned to blow up airliners was bested by strong police work and the ability to infiltrate the group.

Hasn't anyone at the White House noticed that the U.S. Army is changing its doctrine on guerrilla warfare?

Instead of all-out military assault, the new doctrine calls for waging a political battle for "hearts and minds" while exercising military restraint so as not to drive civilians into the arms of the terrorists.

One key army text is "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife" by Lt. Col. John Nagl, which focuses on counterinsurgency lessons from the 1950s war in Malaya and from the Vietnam War.

The title phrase was used by Lawrence of Arabia in describing the messy and time-consuming nature of defeating insurgents.

Nagl focuses on the ability of armies to learn from mistakes and adapt their strategy and tactics -- skills in which he finds U.S. forces lacking.

He shows how the British in Malaya were nimble enough to defeat a communist insurgency, while the U.S. military in Vietnam clung to a failing doctrine of force.

Sadly, the Pentagon had not absorbed such insights before invading Iraq.

Nagl himself says he learned a lot more during a one-year tour in Iraq.

His ideas, if applied back in mid-2003, might have checked the growth of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq and prevented Sunni Islamists from provoking a civil war with Iraqi Shiites.

It may be too late for the Army's new doctrine to stop Iraq from falling apart.

Had the White House paid any attention to its own Army's doctrine, it would have given Israel very different advice on how to confront Hezbollah.

It would have stressed the need for Israel to pursue a political as well as a military strategy.

Lebanon's government, while weak, was the poster child for President Bush's campaign to advance democracy in the region.

Its gutsy Prime Minister Fuad Saniora, and several of its political parties, want a democratic state, and might have faced Hezbollah down had Bush and Israel given them some backing.

Sources in Prime Minister Saniora's party tell me that, had Israel confined a strong air and ground attack to the south, Hezbollah's base, his government would have pressured Hezbollah to pull back from the border and disarm.

They would have needed help from Israel: a pledge to settle territorial disputes with them, and the return of Lebanese prisoners to them, not Hezbollah -- in exchange for two kidnapped Israeli soldiers.

Indeed, Saniora got Hezbollah's agreement to pull back from Lebanon's south weeks ago.

But the White House ignored Saniora in seeking a knockout blow against the guerrillas.

It backed a continued Israeli bombing campaign that destroyed Lebanese infrastructure and undercut Saniora while failing to destroy Hezbollah.

Now the Lebanese economy is destroyed, its government broke; Hezbollah has pledged to rebuild 15,000 bombed apartments in Shiite suburbs.

The cease-fire agreement finally negotiated at the United Nations calls for Hezbollah to disarm and pull back from the south, to be replaced by the Lebanese army and an international force.

If the cease-fire is to survive, Israel and the United States must belatedly strengthen Saniora's hand.

This will be far more difficult to do, now that Hezbollah is proclaiming its "victory."

But it is the best, slim hope for curbing Hezbollah after the mistakes of recent weeks.

It's past time to make "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife" required reading at the White House.

Trudy Rubin writes for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her e-mail address is trubin@phillynews.com.

end quotes

The trouble with CONSERVATIVES ....

Always is ....

That they are very limited in their views ....

As they spend gobs of effort ....

Trying to keep things as they were ....

With them in eternal power ...

And everybody else subservient to them ....

As if that were at all possible .....

To make people do ....

And so .....

George W. Bush ...

Trying to beat democracy ....

Into the Middle East ....

With a club ....

Is just about as futile ....

As trying to beat kindness ....

Into a dog .....

With a club .....

But a CONSERVATIVE won't cut-and-run ....

No matter how many times that dog bites them ...

Each time that it is hit ....

A CONSERVATIVE ...

Can be guaranteed ....

To stay the course .....

Beating and beating and beating on that dog ....

Until it is too dead ...

To bite anymore ....

At which point ...

TOTAL VICTORY will have been achieved ....

At least as a TRUE CONSERVATIVE tallies it up to be ....

And so ...

And as the FRINGE ....

Er ...

BASE ....

Come out in mindless support ....

For the KINGSHIP ....

Of George W. Bush, THE MAGIFICENT ....

Here in OUR America ...

We have ....

From their collective minds ....

As follows ....

FROM REDSTATE

The NSA Decision: Judging Without Facts or Law
Like A Parody of Bad Judging, But With Potentially Tragic Consequences.

By Crank

Posted in Featured Stories | National Security

Today, at the instigation of the ACLU, CAIR, Greenpeace, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and a number of individual plaintiffs (including, most dishearteningly, Christopher Hitchens), Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan - a Jimmy Carter appointee - issued a permanent injunction halting the use of the NSA's Al Qaeda surveillance program that was disclosed to the public by the New York Times in December.

Judge Taylor's opinion reads like a parody of bad judicial reasoning.

The self-appointed legal solons of the Left will have to work long and hard to compose the straight face to dress up this opinion as anything but a travesty of the judicial process.

In the meantime, Judge Taylor's decision unambiguously does two things: it reinforces the importance of appointing good conservative judges, and it demonstrates the damage already done to our security by the Times's unauthorized disclosure of the NSA program.

http://www.redstate.com/stories/featured_s..._judging_with...

FROM THE POLITICAL PIT BULL

Judge Rules NSA Wiretapping Of Enemies In "the War On Terror of this administration" Unconstitutional

By Greg Tinti on August 18, 2006 at 12:36 AM

Not being a lawyer myself, I figured fisking Judge Anna Diggs Taylor's opinion while pretending to know legalese might be a waste of your time.

Luckily, there are plenty of smart legal minds in blogosphere that have already weighed-in and put their thoughts together.

But if you're only going to read one post about Judge Taylor's decision, I'd suggest Dan McLaughlin's.

And while McLaughlin points out numerous problems in Judge Taylor's opinion, there are two things--from a layman's perspective anyway--that are particularly troublesome.

The first is that Judge Taylor seemingly rejects the notion that we are involved in any conflict whatsoever, dismissively referring to it as "the War on Terror of this administration" (Or, as Andrew Sullivan might say, the "alleged" War on Terror).

This alone seems like proof that Judge Taylor has an extraordinary bias towards the policies of current government which, as a matter of practicality, happens to also be the Defedant in this case.

http://www.thepoliticalpitbull.com/2006/08...etapping_of.php

FROM BOOKWORM ROOM

I knew without reading it that Anna Diggs-Taylor’s decision striking down the surveillance program would be a poorly written, poorly reasoned, legally and factually unsupported bit of garbage.

Did I know this because I’m intimately familiar with the legal issues involved?

No.

Because I know all (or even any) of the facts?

No.

Because I’ve been following developments in this case with incredible care and knew we had to win, and that a loss could only be because of fallacious reasoning?

No.

I knew that the decision was a bad bit of work the moment I read that Diggs-Taylor was a Carter appointee and a die-hard liberal.

http://www.wordpress.com/tag/anti-war

FROM TOWN HALL.COM

Friday, August 18, 2006

Any Vote For Any Democrat Is A Vote Against Victory And A Vote For Vulnerability

Posted by: Hugh Hewitt at 5:50 PM

Not a single Democrat of any stature or visibility has stepped forward to criticize much less reject the opinion from Judge Anna Diggs Taylor declaring NSA surveillance of our enemies contacting their operatives inside our country to be unconstitutional.

Their collective silence has grown more and more revealing as the chorus of legal commentary mocking the absurd opinion has grown throughout the day.

The Democrats cannot be seen to say anything against the opinion because of Kosputin and his minions.

The party of Lamont is unhinged, and Judge Taylor's opinion is now a new icon of the movement.

It is clear that the Democrats are invested in her conclusion and her reasoning, a position on national security that will bind the party if it reaches a majority in either the House or the Senate, and paralyze at least some of the intelligence collection activities already underway.

We have to assume that their zeal for ignorance will extend to every presidential directive not explicitly backed by Congressional mandate, and thus an understanding of the Article II war powers more circumscribed than ever in our history.

Expect a major retreat in the war on Islamic fascism across many fronts if the Dems frenzy their way to a majority in either body, and hearings upon hearings.

The Church Committee will look like child's play compared to a John Conyers or Patrick Leahy-led assault on the conduct of the war, a conduct that has prevented attacks on the homeland from abroad since 9/11.

Thus it is simply true: Any vote for any Democrat is a vote against victory and a vote for vulnerability.

http://www.townhall.com/blogs/nailyale

FROM TAILRANK

NSA Decision: Lots Of Emotion, Little Reasoning

captainsquartersblog.com

The ruling yesterday to forbid the President to continue his warrantless surveillance of international communications involving one party within the US seems likely to find resistance in the appellate court, not so much for its conclusion but for its emotional and mostly weightless reasoning.

The Washington Post notes that legal scholars found themselves underwhelmed by the legal justifications of Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, and after reading the decision myself a couple of times, I'm glad to see that my reaction matched theirs:

http://www.tailrank.com/posts/.../NSA_Deci...ittle_Reasoning

USA Today

"Wiretap ruling affirms that presidents aren't monarchs"

Updated 8/17/2006 8:39 PM

For the past five years, the Bush administration has operated as if the horrific events of 9/11 not only changed fundamental aspects of national security and public safety, but also changed the very nature of government.

President Bush has unilaterally declared what parts of new laws he wishes to enforce.

He has created military tribunals unauthorized by Congress.

And, perhaps most ominously, he has authorized eavesdropping on phone calls to and from the USA without court orders.

Bush has done these things by simply asserting that the powers of the presidency enumerated in Article II of the Constitution — particularly the clause making him the "Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy" — are much more sweeping than previously imagined.

In short, he has acted like a king.

Fortunately, the courts have begun to rein in his royal ambitions.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the military tribunals.

And on Thursday, federal Judge Anna Diggs Taylor struck down the warrantless surveillance program, finding it to be a violation of the First and Fourth Amendments and the principle of separation of powers.

"There are no hereditary Kings in America," she wrote.

The ruling by Taylor, who was appointed by President Carter, is far from the final word.

The wiretapping program will continue while the administration appeals.

It is not hard to see other courts ruling differently by saying that the plaintiffs, led by the American Civil Liberties Union, should not have been given standing to bring the case because they could not show they were harmed by the eavesdropping.

But the ruling does undermine Bush's main argument — that the program is constitutional because the administration says it is constitutional.

Taylor gives little credence to this argument, as one might expect from a representative of the judicial branch, the place where questions of constitutionality are properly resolved.

Since the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was adopted in 1978, presidents have had an effective and constitutional way to speedy court approval for surveillance.

FISA even allows for retroactive approval in urgent investigations.

If this law is overly restrictive or somehow unequal to the task of combating today's global terror threat, the president can and should go to Congress to make the case for new legislation.

Given the mood of the country and the continuing threat exemplified by the alleged airline bombing plot in Britain last week, Congress would surely make addressing the problem a priority.

By ignoring the law, and making specious arguments that powers contained in Article II make the president virtually unaccountable to either the courts or Congress, the president shows contempt for the other branches and exposes his determination to concentrate power within his own — with no particular gain for the war on terrorism.

Much has changed since terrorists rammed planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

But one thing that has not is that America is a constitutional democracy with checks and balances.

A ruling such as Thursday's is a useful and forceful affirmation of that.

Posted 8/17/2006 8:34 PM ET

But of course ...

George W. Bush ...

Really is a king ...

Or an emporer ....

Regardless of what some federal judge appointed by Jimmy Carter might have to say about it .....

Since Jimmy Carter is a Democrat .....

And everybody knows ....

That the Democrats ....

Want to CUT-AND-RUN ....

Over there in IRAQINAM ....

Before we achieve TOTAL VICTORY ....

And the Democrats want to win the November Congressional elections ....

So that they can surrender OUR America to al-Qaida ....

While the CONSERVATIVES ...

Want to stay the course ....

And achieve TOTAL VICTORY ....

Over something, anyway ...

By making ARAB men wear women's underwear ....

Which is some kind of CONSERVATIVE SECRET WEAPON .....

In George W. Bush's WAR OF TERROR ....

And so ...

"Military calling out-of-uniform troops"

By REBECCA SANTANA, Associated Press
Last updated: 5:06 p.m., Saturday, August 19, 2006

CAMP ANACONDA, Iraq -- Spc. Chris Carlson had been out of the U.S. Army for two years and was working at Costco in California when he received notice that he was being called back into service.

The 24-year-old is one of thousands of soldiers and Marines who have been deployed to Iraq under a policy that allows military leaders to recall troops who have left the service but still have time left on their contract.

"I thought it was crazy," said Carlson, who has found himself protecting convoys on Iraq's dangerous roads as part of a New Jersey National Guard unit.

"Never in a million years did I think they would call me back."

Although troops are allowed to leave active duty after a few years of service, they generally still have time left on their contract with the military that is known as "inactive ready reserve" status, or IRR.

During that time, they have to let their service know their current address, but they don't train, draw a paycheck or associate in any other way with the military.

But with active duty units already completing multiple tours in Iraq, the Pentagon has employed the rarely used tactic of calling people back from IRR status, a policy sometimes referred to as a "backdoor draft."

According to the U.S. Army Reserve, approximately 14,000 soldiers on IRR status have been called to active duty since March 2003 and about 7,300 have been deployed to Iraq.

The Marine Corps has mobilized 4,717 Marines who were classified as inactive ready reserve since Sept. 11, and 1,094 have been deployed to Iraq, according to the Marine Forces Reserve.

The 1st Squadron of the 167th Cavalry RSTA, which is based in Lincoln, Neb. and oversees the New Jersey guard unit here in Iraq, has about 40 IRR soldiers within its ranks of roughly 1,000 soldiers, and officers in the squadron say the troops have merged into the unit without any problems.

Jason Mulligan, 28, of Ridgefield, Conn., left the army back in 2002 after two years in the infantry.

He was working as a painting contractor while studying wildlife conservation when he received his letter last fall alerting him that he'd been mobilized.

The letter was followed up by another warning to Mulligan that if he didn't comply, the government would prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law.

"My family and my fiancee were telling me 'Don't' report."

"'Don't show up,' said Mulligan, who also serves with a New Jersey National Guard unit as a gunner on a Humvee helping patrol the territory around Camp Anaconda, a base about 50 miles north of Baghdad.

"And I thought, 'Well I got that nasty letter saying they were going to put me in jail if I don't show up.'"

Anthony Breaux, 24, from La Place, La., said he had a feeling that eventually he would be recalled to service after hearing of so many other soldiers who were pulled from IRR status.

Breaux, who left active duty in September 2002, said he knew it was part of the bargain when he joined the army.

"Well, I signed up."

"I signed the papers."

"So you know what?"

"I got to do what I got to do," Breaux said, before getting ready for a reconnaissance patrol around Camp Anaconda.

Loren Thompson, a defense analyst with the Arlington, Va.-based Lexington Institute, said part of the reason that the military has called up so many people who were on reserve status is that certain skill sets such as military police or civil affairs were concentrated in the reserves after the Cold War ended.

But he said the sheer numbers of IRR soldiers being mobilized also are a sign that the military doesn't have enough people to fight this war, now in its fourth year.

"It seems clear in retrospect that the active-duty force wasn't big enough to sustain a 'long war' against global terrorism, and also lacked the proper mix of skills to wage that war with maximum effectiveness," Thompson said.

That thought is echoed by many of the IRR soldiers.

Mulligan said the military's reliance on IRR soldiers shows how "desperate" the services are for troops.

"Maybe it says something for maybe the way the military is treating the people that are over here, because they're just not wanting to stay on," said Mulligan.

Some of the IRR soldiers, such as Carlson, still will have time on their military contracts when they return from this deployment, meaning they could possibly be called back another time.

But others will end their IRR status around the same time their deployment in Iraq ends next spring or will have so little time left that they would not be deployed again.

Spc. Mark Wiles, 27, of Phoenix, said his 6 1/2 years of active duty and the time he'll have served on this deployment mean that his reserve status will be over when the unit gets home.

The only way that the military could keep him is if they extended the unit's stay in Iraq.

"Those of us who are IRR are seriously hoping they don't do that," Wiles said.

end quotes

The nice thing about being a CONSERVATIVE .....

Is that it is easy to be one ...

You don't have to think ....

You don't have to read nothing ...

You don't even have to know anything to be one ...

And the other ones will welcome you into their ranks because of that ....

And you don't have to worry about having an opinion of your own ...

All you have to do ....

Is have the COLLECTIVE OPINION OF THE MOMENT ....

As your own ....

And you don't have to be troubled by LIBERTY ...

Because you surrender yours at the door ....

TO THE KING OF AMERICA ....

Who knows just how much LIBERTY anyone in OUR America should have .....

At any given moment in time ...

And so ...

And speaking of Democrats who can't wait to surrender OUR America to al-Qaida ....

So that they will make her the first female president of OUR America in return ....

"How low can you go? - Republican Senate candidate John Spencer has taken to associating Hillary Clinton and Osama bin Laden"

Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Friday, August 18, 2006

We're not supposed to be in the business of advising political candidates.

Only in the case of John Spencer and his torturously uphill campaign for the U.S. Senate seat held by Hillary Rodham Clinton, we can't resist.

Mr. Spencer, bite your tongue.

Stop embarrassing yourself.

New York's 3.2 million enrolled Republicans are entitled to have a serious candidate on the party's ticket this fall.

How can any candidate expect to be taken seriously, at least by anyone beyond like-minded zealots, when he puts an ad on TV that tries to make a connection between Mrs. Clinton and Osama bin Laden?

This is even worse than last week's debacle of a debate with his Republican rival, Kathleen Troia McFarland.

The finished product is so offensive that it's tempting to overlook how faulty Mr. Spencer's reasoning is in coming to such a conclusion.

Try to follow along.

"Senator Hillary Clinton opposed the Patriot Act and the NSA program that helped stop another 9/11."

"She'd leave us vulnerable," the ad's narrator says.

Say what?

Oh, and with images of newspaper headlines about a now-foiled terrorist plot against U.S.-bound passenger flights on the screen, bin Laden's photo pops up next to Mrs. Clinton's.

How wrong could one man be?

Mrs. Clinton has actually supported the Patriot Act and its enormous expansion of government powers, at the expense of civil liberties, in the fight against terrorism.

She voted for the original law, which was rushed into passage after the Sept. 11 attacks.

She voted for it again last year, too, after insisting upon some modest restrictions on the government's otherwise increased powers to investigate potential terrorism suspects.

It is true that Mrs. Clinton has been quite critical of the Bush administration using the National Security Agency to engage in domestic spying without warrants from judges.

She's hardly alone.

A federal judge ruled Thursday that wiretaps without warrants are unconstitutional.

Earlier this summer, though, Mrs. Clinton spoke out in favor of giving any president the available technology to legally keep tabs on potential terrorists.

She's a moderate, in other words, and quite a politically deft one.

It's not that Mrs. Clinton has no positions on national security issues, as Mr. Spencer charges in a fundraising letter he sent out this week.

They're simply more nuanced positions than his.

And that's apparently very frustrating for Mr. Spencer -- to the point where he'll ambush not only his opponent but the truth as well.

It would be so much easier to run against Mrs. Clinton if she were genuinely as far to the left as Mr. Spencer is to the right.

"I'm John Spencer, and I approved this message because I won't play politics with our security," his ad concludes.

Mr. Spencer, how can you say that with a straight face.

"Iraq's 'year of transition' a cruel failure"

By MARIE COCCO, Washington Post
First published: Friday, August 18, 2006

WASHINGTON -- With due respect to T.S. Eliot, August is a cruel, cruel month.

In this August as the summer withers, optimism dies that in the eighth month of the third year since the American invasion of Iraq we will begin to see the hopeful "year of transition" that the U.S. Senate has called for overwhelmingly.

It was a lopsided, yet forgettable vote.

After all, the "year of transition in Iraq" has thus far been a year of transition to more violence and death, to fresh evidence of the fragility of the new Iraqi government, to grim accounts of the security crisis by U.S. generals.

This year of transition has meant a transition to more -- not fewer -- American troops in Baghdad, with homeward-bound soldiers literally called back to the war zone while they were en route out of it.

The Baghdad morgue and Iraq's health ministry report a record number of killings last month, with 3,438 civilians having turned up dead -- about double the toll in January, according to The New York Times.

Before the newest count, the United Nations already had estimated that Iraqi civilian deaths were running at more than 100 a day.

The U.N. said the count was necessarily low, due to the difficulties of record-keeping in a war zone and tallying deaths outside Baghdad.

The speaker of the Iraqi parliament, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, a Sunni distrusted by rival Kurdish and Shiite politicians, is openly toying with relinquishing his post -- a rumination that drew acrimony even from his fellow Sunnis.

The Iraqi government, formation of which was heralded by President Bush last spring as a "milestone," a "turning point" and a "watershed event," is perilously ineffectual.

"What has been clear is that the new government is very weak."

"It cannot really extend its writ anywhere," says Joost Hiltermann, Middle East project director of the nonpartisan International Crisis Group.

"The government is not doing any governing."

"It's not providing services to anyone."

"The place is really adrift."

This was neither the hope nor the political calculation behind the Senate vote last November.

Under pressure to respond to the Iraq crisis with something other than endorsement of the administration's incompetence, Republican leaders offered their own, tepid version of a response to public dissatisfaction with the war.

Their resolution called for 2006 to be "a year of transition" to "full Iraqi sovereignty, with Iraqi security forces taking the lead for the security of a free and sovereign Iraq" and creating conditions for the "phased redeployment" of U.S. forces.

Among those supporting the lofty language were Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner of Virginia, Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts of Kansas and National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairwoman Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina.

The 79-19 vote in favor was bipartisan.

But now a sober Warner, questioning Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his top generals earlier this month, dares to ask if the original congressional resolution that authorized the President to invade Iraq still applies now that U.S. troops appear to be caught in the drift toward civil war.

"What is the mission of the United States today ... if that situation erupts into a civil war?"

"What is the mission of our forces?"

The question gets to the truth of where we are in Iraq -- caught with no immediate or obvious way out.

The Bush administration seems incapable of seeing reality and is disdainful, always, of diplomacy.

Yet Hiltermann and others warn that a full-blown civil war in Iraq could not be contained within its existing borders, and would instead engulf the whole region -- with Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and other states instigating strife, or threatened by it.

One way to head this off is with a regional peace summit of all parties whose fate is tied to Iraq's.

It is the sort of talkfest Bush abhors; he must be forced to it.

For Republican senators weary of Bush's unrestrained militarism, of the President's petulant refusal to talk with foreign leaders he finds objectionable, of the crushing burden the Iraq war has placed on the armed forces, of the unconscionable sums spent on a war with unclear purpose, it is past time to show they are leaders and not just politicians.

However many seats Democrats win in the House and Senate elections this fall, there will be no new plan for Iraq without the Republicans.

Anyone can pass a resolution.

It takes courage to resolve a crisis.

Marie Cocco's e-mail address is mariecocco@washpost.com.

end quotes

"The government is not doing any governing."

"It's not providing services to anyone."

"The place is really adrift."

WOW ....

George W. Bush's government over there in IRAQINAM .....

Sounds just like his government over here .....

And so ...

At least you cannot say ....

That George W. Bush is inconsistent ....

And he will stay the course ....

Until he has destroyed both nations ....

With his incredible incompetence ....

And his belligerence ....

And his lack of a grasp on reality ....

And lucidity ...

And so ....

TO KEEP THAT LOSING STREAK GOING ...

VOTE REPUBLICAN THIS FALL ....

And you will help George W. Bush ...

Achieve that TOTAL VICTORY ...

And so ...

Boy ...

It seems each time ...

That you think this crap going on with OUR American military .....

In this day and age of Donald "GASBAG" Rumsfeld hand's on the tiller ....

Has finally hit the bottom ....

Surprise, surprise .....

For it seems that under his leadership .....

There isn't any way .....

To go ....

But even further down ....

And so ....

"Military recruiters cited for misconduct"

By MARTHA MENDOZA, Associated Press
Last updated: 3:21 a.m., Sunday, August 20, 2006

More than 100 young women who expressed interest in joining the military in the past year were preyed upon sexually by their recruiters.

Women were raped on recruiting office couches, assaulted in government cars and groped en route to entrance exams.

A six-month Associated Press investigation found that more than 80 military recruiters were disciplined last year for sexual misconduct with potential enlistees.

The cases occurred across all branches of the military and in all regions of the country.

"This should never be allowed to happen," said one 18-year-old victim.

"The recruiter had all the power."

"He had the uniform."

"He had my future."

"I trusted him."

At least 35 Army recruiters, 18 Marine Corps recruiters, 18 Navy recruiters and 12 Air Force recruiters were disciplined for sexual misconduct or other inappropriate behavior with potential enlistees in 2005, according to records obtained by the AP under dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests.

That's significantly more than the handful of cases disclosed in the past decade.

The AP also found:

--The Army, which accounts for almost half of the military, has had 722 recruiters accused of rape and sexual misconduct since 1996.

--Across all services, one out of 200 frontline recruiters -- the ones who deal directly with young people -- was disciplined for sexual misconduct last year.

--Some cases of improper behavior involved romantic relationships, and sometimes those relationships were initiated by the women.

--Most recruiters found guilty of sexual misconduct are disciplined administratively, facing a reduction in rank or forfeiture of pay; military and civilian prosecutions are rare.

--The increase in sexual misconduct incidents is consistent with overall recruiter wrongdoing, which has increased from just over 400 cases in 2004 to 630 cases in 2005, according to a General Accounting Office report released this week.

The Pentagon has committed more than $1.5 billion to recruiting efforts this year.

Defense Department spokeswoman Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke insisted that each of the services takes the issue of sexual misconduct by recruiters "very seriously and has processes in place to identify and deal with those members who act inappropriately."

In the Army, 53 recruiters were charged with misconduct last year.

Recruiting spokesman S. Douglas Smith said the Army has put much energy into training its staff to avoid these problems.

"To have 53 allegations in a year, while it is 53 more than we would want, is not indicative of the entire command of 8,000 recruiters," he said.

"We take this very seriously and we take appropriate action as necessary to discipline these people."

------

The Associated Press generally does not name victims in sexual assault cases.

For this story, the AP interviewed victims in their homes and perpetrators in jail, read police and court accounts of assaults and in one case portions of a victim's journal.

A pattern emerged.

The sexual misconduct almost always takes place in recruiting stations, recruiters apartments or government vehicles.

The victims are typically between 16 and 18 years old, and they usually are thinking about enlisting.

They usually meet the recruiters at their high schools, but sometimes at malls or recruiting offices.

"We had been drinking, yes."

"And we went to the recruiting station at about midnight," begins one girl's story.

Tall and slim, her long hair sweeping down her back, this 18-year-old from Ukiah, Calif., hides her face in her hands as she describes the night when Marine Corps recruiter Sgt. Brian Fukushima climbed into her sleeping bag on the floor of the station and took off her pants.

Two other recruiters were having sex with two of her friends in the same room.

"I don't like to talk about it."

"I don't like to think about it," she says, her voice muffled and breaking.

"He got into my sleeping bag, unbuttoned my pants, and he started, well ..."

Her voice trails off, and she is quiet for a moment.

"I had a freak-out session and just passed out."

"When I woke up I was sick and ashamed."

"My clothes were all over the floor."

Fukushima was convicted of misconduct in a military court after other young women reported similar assaults.

He left the service with a less than honorable discharge last fall.

His military attorney, Capt. James Weirick, said Fukushima is "sorry that he let his family down and the Marine Corps down."

"It was a lapse in judgment."

Shedrick Hamilton uses the same phrase to describe his own actions that landed him in Oneida Correctional Facility in upstate New York for 15 months for having sex with a 16-year-old high school student he met while working as a Marine Corps recruiter.

Hamilton said the victim had dropped her pants in his office as a prank a few weeks earlier, and that on this day she reached over and caressed his groin while he was driving her to a recruiting event.

"I pulled over and asked her to climb into the back seat," he said.

"I should have pushed her away."

"I was the adult in the situation."

"I should have put my foot down, called her parents."

As a result, he was convicted of third-degree rape, and left the service with an other-than-honorable discharge.

He wipes the collar of his prison jumpsuit across his cheek, smearing tears that won't stop.

"I literally kick myself ... every day."

"It hurts."

"It hurts a lot."

"As much as I pray, as much as I work on it in counseling, I still can't repair the pain that I caused a girl, her family, my family, my kids."

"It's very hard to deal with," he says, dropping his head.

"It's very, very hard to deal with."

In Gainesville, Fla., a 20-year-old woman told this story: Walking into an Army recruiting station last summer, she was greeted by Sgt. George Kirkman, a 6-foot-4, 220-pound soldier.

Kirkman is 41.

He was friendly and encouraging, but told her she might be a bit too heavy.

He asked if she wanted to go to the gym with him.

She agreed, and he drove her to his apartment complex.

There, he walked her to his apartment, pulled out a laptop, and suggested she take a basic recruiting aptitude test.

Afterward, Kirkman said he needed to measure her.

Twice.

He said she had to take her pants off.

And he attacked her.

Kirkman, who did not respond to repeated requests for an interview, pleaded no contest to sexual battery in January and is on probation and a registered sexual offender.

He's still in the military, working now as a clerk in the Jacksonville, Fla., Army recruiting office.

Not all of the victims are young women.

Former Navy recruiter Joseph Sampy, 27, of Jeanerette, La., is serving a 12-year sentence for molesting three male recruits.

"He did something wrong, something terrible to people who were the most vulnerable," State District Judge Lori Landry said before handing down the sentence in July, 2005.

"He took advantage of his authority."

One of Sampy's victims is suing him and the Navy for $1.25 million.

The trial is scheduled for next spring.

------

Sometimes these incidents are indisputable, forcible rapes.

"He did whatever he pleased," said one victim who was 17 at the time.

"... People in uniform used to make me feel safe."

"Now they make me feel nervous."

Other sexual misconduct is more nuanced.

Recruiters insist the victims were interested in them, and sometimes the victims agree.

Sometimes they even dated.

"I was persuaded into doing something that I didn't necessarily want to do, but I did it willingly," said Kelly Chase, now a Marine Corps combat photographer, whose testimony helped convict a recruiter of sexual misconduct last year.

Former Navy recruiter Paul Sistrunk, a plant supervisor in Conehatta, Miss., who had an affair with a potential recruit in 1995, says their relationship was entirely consensual.

She was 18, an adult; he was 26 and married.

"Things happen, you know?" says Sistrunk, who opted for an other-than-honorable discharge rather than face court-martial.

"Morally, what I did was wrong, but legally, I don't think so."

A nine-year veteran of the Navy, Sistrunk lost his pension and health benefits.

His victim, who discovered during a medical exam at boot camp that she had contracted herpes, unsuccessfully tried to sue the federal government.

"In my case," said Sistrunk,

"I was flirted with, and flirting, well, that's something I hadn't seen a lot of until I became a recruiter."

"I had no power over her."

"I really didn't."

Kimberly Lonsway, an expert in sexual assault and workplace discrimination in San Luis Obispo, Calif., said "even if there isn't overt violence, the reality is that these recruiters really do hold the keys to the future for these women, and a 17-year-old girl often has a very different understanding of the situation than a 23-year-old recruiter."

"There's a power dynamic here that's obviously very sensitive," agreed Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, a group that studies military policy.

"Let's face it, these guys are handsome in their uniform, they're mature, they give a lot of attention to these girls, and as recruiters they do a lot of the same things that guys do when they want to appeal to girls."

"There's a very fine line there, and it can be very hard to maintain a professional approach."

Weirick, the Marine Corps defense attorney who has represented several recruiters on rape and sexual misconduct charges, said it's a problem that will probably never entirely go away.

"It's difficult because of the nature of nature," he said.

"It's hard to put it in another way, you know?"

"It's usually a consensual relationship or dating type of thing."

When asked if victims feel this way, he said, "It's really a victimless crime other than the institution of the Marine Corps."

"It's institutional integrity we're protecting, by not allowing this to happen."

Anita Sanchez, director of communications at the Miles Foundation, a national advocacy group for victims of violence in the military, bristles at the idea that the enlistees, even if they flirt or ask to date recruiters, are willingly having sex with them.

"You have a recruiter who can enable you to join the service or not join the service."

"That has life-changing implications for you as a high school student or college student," she said.

"If she does not do this her life will be seriously impacted."

"Instead of getting training and an education, she might end up a dishwasher."

Ethan Walker, who spent eight years in the Marine Corps including a stint as a recruiter from 1998 to 2000, said he was warned.

"They told us at recruiter school that girls, 15, 16, are going to come up to you, they're going to flirt with you, they're going to do everything in their power to get you in bed."

"But if you do it you're breaking the law," he said.

Even so, he said he was initially taken aback when he set up a table at a high school and had girls telling him he looked sexy and handing him their telephone numbers.

"All that is, you have to remind yourself, is that there's jail bait, a quick way to get in trouble, a quick way to dishonor the service," he said.

All of the recruiters the AP spoke with, including Walker, said they were routinely alone in their offices and cars with girls.

Walker said he heard about sleepovers at other recruiting stations, and there was no rule against it.

There didn't need to be a rule, he said.

The lines were clear: Recruiters do not sleep with enlistees.

"Any recruiter that would try to claim that, 'Oh, it's consensual,' they are lying, they are lying through their teeth," he said.

"The recruiter has all the power in these situations."

------

Although the Uniform Code of Military Justice bars recruiters from having sex with potential recruits, it also states that age 16 is the legal age of consent.

This means that if a recruiter is caught having sex with a 16-year-old, and he can prove it was consensual, he will likely only face an administrative reprimand.

But not under new rules set by the Indiana Army National Guard.

There, a much stricter policy, apparently the first of its kind in the country, was instituted last year after seven victims came forward to charge National Guard recruiter Sgt. Eric Vetesy with rape and assault.

"We didn't just sit on our hands and say, 'Well, these things happen, they're wrong, and we'll try to prevent it.'"

"That's a bunch of bull," said Lt. Col. Ivan Denton, commander of the Indiana Guard's recruiting battalion.

Now, the 164 Army National Guard recruiters in Indiana follow a "No One Alone" policy.

Male recruiters cannot be alone in offices, cars, or anywhere else with a female enlistee.

If they are, they risk immediate disciplinary action.

Recruiters also face discipline if they hear of another recruiter's misconduct and don't report it.

At their first meeting, National Guard applicants, their parents and school officials are given wallet-sized "Guard Cards" advising them of the rules.

It includes a telephone number to call if they experience anything unsafe or improper.

Denton said the policy does more than protect enlistees.

"It's protecting our recruiters as well," he said.

The result?

"We've had a lot fewer problems," said Denton.

"It's almost like we're changing the culture in our recruiting."

end quotes

LAPSES IN JUDGMENT ....

LIKE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF ....

LIKE SUBORDINATES ....

VOTE REPUBLICAN .....

TO KEEP "GASBAG" RUMSFELD .....

IN CHARGE OF OUR AMERICAN MILITARY .....

IF YOU ARE FOR THIS KIND OF STUFF ....

THESE LAPSES IN JUDGMENT ....

WHICH COME FROM THE TOP ON DOWN ...

As George W. Bush says .....

If it makes you feel good ....

Deep down there in your gut ....

Which is where George makes his decisions ...

And you are the decider .....

Then go ahead and do it ...

Because when you are the decider .....

Who can really stop you?

And so ...

EXCEPT MAYBE WE, THE PEOPLE ....

"Poll finds moms bolting the GOP - Mothers concerned about security inclined to vote for Democrats"

By JIM VAN DE HEI, Washington Post
First published: Sunday, August 20, 2006

CLINTONVILLE, Ohio -- Married women with children, the "security moms" whose concerns about terrorism made them an essential part of Republican victories in 2002 and 2004, this year are taking flight from GOP politicians in ways that look likely to provide a major boost for Democrats in the midterm elections, according to polls and voter interviews.

This critical group of swing voters -- who are an especially significant factor in many of the most competitive suburban districts in which control of Congress will hinge -- is more inclined to vote Democratic than at any point since Sept. 11, 2001, according to data compiled by the Pew Research Center for The Washington Post.

Married mothers said in interviews here that they remain concerned about national security and the ability of Democrats to keep them safe from terrorist strikes.

But surveys indicate Republicans are not benefiting from this phenomenon as they have before.

Disaffection with President Bush, the Iraq war and other concerns such as rising gasoline prices and economic anxiety are proving more powerful in shaping voter attitudes.

The study, which examined the views of married women with children from April through last week, found married mothers support Democrats for Congress by a 12-point margin, 50 percent to 38 percent.

That is nearly a mirror-image reversal from a similar period in 2002, when this group backed Republicans 53 percent to 38 percent.

In 2004, exit polls showed Bush won a second term in part because 56 percent of married women with children supported him.

Significantly, Pew and other polls in recent days have found little or no advantage for Republicans in the aftermath of the recent foiled terror plot in London, even as Vice President Dick Cheney and GOP leaders have warned that the event showed the risk of voting for a Democratic Party they claimed is dominated by security doves.

end quotes

To keep their hold on power here in OUR America ....

It sounds like the REPUBLICANS need to have another "terror attack" .....

Not just one of the many "scares" that they have been doling out ....

But an actual attack this time ....

Right before the national elections ....

So that they can capitalize on that .....

In the elections ...

Like they did off the hokey one on 9-11 ....

With all of its still unexplained questions ....

And if anyone could pull that off .....

My money would be on the REPUBLICANS to do just that ....

After all ...

What are a few American lives ...

Of common people ...

When the reward ....

Is control of the world ....

And so .....

If al-Qaida really wanted to take over the United States .....

As the REPUBLICANS would have us believe ....

They wouldn't be messing with the Democrats .....

So far as I can see, anyway ...

Or this TAY-RIST BULL CRAP, either ....

Because the Democrats .....

Could never deliver OUR America to al-Qaida ....

Not in a million years ....

And the REPUBLICANS have to know that ....

As well as I do ...

The Democrats are just too unorganized ...

And too democratical for that ....

And not regimented enough ....

Like the REPUBLICANS are ....

As I see it ...

If al-Qaida wanted to take over OUR America ....

They would simply infiltrate the REPUBLICAN party ....

Buy their way in ....

With all that money they are said to control ...

And with that money in their hand ....

The REPUBLICANS would welcome them right on in ...

Because that is what the REPUBLICANS are really all about .....

Class ....

And privilege ....

And money ....

And who has that ....

A lot of money ....

And is willing to give some to the REPUBLICANS ....

Becomes under their protection ...

And once in ....

They would inherit ....

An organization ...

That is already conditioned ....

To simply take orders ...

And to not think for themselves ...

Or to question anything that they are told to think ....

And so ....

"Sen. Hagel says GOP has lost its way"

By WILL LESTER, Associated Press Writer

31 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Republicans have lost their way when it comes to many core GOP principles and may be in jeopardy heading into the fall elections, Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb. says.

Hagel, a possible presidential candidate in 2008, said Sunday that the GOP today is very different party from the one when he first voted Republican.

"First time I voted was in 1968 on top of a tank in the Mekong Delta," said Hagel, a Vietnam veteran.

"I voted a straight Republican ticket."

"The reason I did is because I believe in the Republican philosophy of governance."

"It's not what it used to be."

"I don't think it's the same today."

Hagel asked: "Where is the fiscal responsibility of the party I joined in '68?"

"Where is the international engagement of the party I joined — fair, free trade, individual responsibility, not building a bigger government, but building a smaller government?"

His frustration does not lead him to think Democrats offer a better alternative.

But Hagel wants to see the GOP return to its basic beliefs.

"I think we've lost our way," Hagel said.

"And I think the Republicans are going to be in some jeopardy for that and will be held accountable."

Hagel has not decided whether he will run for president in 2008.

But he respects his wife's reservations about being first lady — cited in a book about Hagel.

"I think it just shows the immense good judgment of my wife and how sane she is."

"I don't know of any spouse who would wish the job of president on their husband or wife," Hagel said on Fox News Sunday.

"It's a big job."

"It's a tough job."
___

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said that in some parts of the country, the fall elections may turn out to be a referendum on the war in Iraq.

"Most of time we know these elections are local, but it's beginning to look more like some of them may be global as far as they are impacted by Iraq," he said.

"We've got to fight hard."

"We've got to win."

"We need to keep both houses of Congress."

McCain predicted Republicans will retain control of the Senate but said it is too early to tell if they can keep the House.

"This is a very tough election coming up," he said.

"The war is difficult."

"The president is not getting enough credit for a good economy which we have today," he said.

McCain, a potential presidential candidate for 2008, appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press."
___

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton matches up well against Sen. John McCain in early polling about a possible presidential contest in 2008.

A Time magazine poll released Sunday found McCain, R-Ariz., at 49 percent and Clinton, D-N.Y., at 47 percent among registered voters when people were asked which candidate they would support for president if they had to decide now.

McCain had a 10-point lead over the Democratic nominee from 2004, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, and a 9-point lead over 2000 Democratic nominee Al Gore in similar matchups.

Fifty-six percent of those surveyed said they have a favorable opinion of McCain and 53 percent said they have a favorable view of Clinton.

While Clinton is an early favorite to win the Democratic nomination for president, some have voiced concerns whether she be competitive with the Republican candidate in the general election.

The poll of 1,003 adults was taken July 13-17 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
___

Associated Press Writer Michael Sniffen contributed to this story.

And by DECREE .....

Of his ROYAL HIGHNESS ....

George the VERY, VERY MAGNIFICENT .....

Any talk .....

Of climate change ....

In America .....

Is in aid and abetting .....

Of al-Qaida TAY-RIZM ....

And will not be tolerated .....

By the REPUBLICAN PARTY ....

Of which GEORGE THE VERY, VERY ....

IS COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF ....

And so ....

Don't say that I posted this following ....

Which implies that up here ...

Where I am ...

The climate has gone quite screwy .....

From what it used to be before ...

I don't want to be stuck in some REPUBLICAN CONCENTRATION CAMP somewhere .....

Having to wear women's underwaer ....

For the rest of my life ....

With big dogs trying to tear my face off ....

I'm a LIBERAL, after all ...

And I don't think I could stand that for the long haul ....

I think I'm going to cut-and-run ....

Oh, WAH, WAH, WAH ....

"Storms disrupt power to 20,000 - 3 inches of rain fall in an hour in southern Saratoga County"

By KEN THURMAN, Staff writer, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Monday, August 21, 2006

COLONIE -- A narrow band of thunderstorms knocked out power early Sunday to about 20,000 National Grid customers in the Capital Region.

Full service was expected to be restored before today.

The storm, which moved into the area about 1 p.m., brought with it high winds and strong flashes of lightning which brought down power lines primarily in parts of Rensselaer, Schenectady and Saratoga counties.

There were no reports of injuries, but one person in Schenectady had to be rescued from the flooded intersection of Foster and Lang streets around 3 p.m.

A National Weather Service official in Albany estimated that as much as 3 inches of rain fell in little more than an hour in some parts of southern Saratoga County.

"There was a fairly narrow area of activity ... at least in terms of rainfall," said Weather Service meteorologist Ray O'Keefe, who said the heaviest downpours were primarily confined to central Schenectady and southern Saratoga counties.

The northern parts of Albany County and Rensselaer counties also were affected, he said.

O'Keefe said the strong storms were fueled by a highly charged atmosphere laden with moisture and set off by a low-level jet stream and wind gusts of 50 to 60 miles per hour.

"They were moving relatively rapidly ... one line would come through followed by another," O'Keefe said.

National Grid spokeswoman Debbie Emmert said most of the service outages were caused by tree limbs falling onto power lines.

"At the height of the storm, we had approximately 20,000 customers without power," she said.

Emmert said most of the outages were concentrated in the city of Schenectady, southern Saratoga County, including Clifton Park and Ballston Lake, and Cobleskill.

Emmert said power to all customers would be restored before today.

Early Sunday evening, a few less intense storms moved though the area, but the worst is over and clearing skies and cooler temperatures are expected for this morning.

Today's forecast calls for partly cloudy conditions with a high around 80, and clouds again Tuesday with the high near 80.

And while we are on the subject of the LORD GOD EMPORER GEORGE THE MOST HANDSOME AND KNOWLEDGEABLE AND BUSINESS-LIKE OF THEM ALL .....

We have another IMPERIAL DECREE .....

From his VERY, VERY ....

This one being that .....

If you know something in America .....

If you have any knowledge at all .....

Of anything ...

Like the median of the average number of raisins .....

In a box of Raisin Bran ....

Or the total number of uses of Crisco ....

Or how much a cubic foot of water weighs .....

On the equator ....

That is also in aid and abetting .....

Of al-Qiada TAY-RIZM .....

Here in OUR America ....

Where the Democrats want to cut-and-run .....

Before GEORGE THE STRONG .....

Achieves TOTAL VICTORY ...

FOR THE FORCES OF SHEER IGNORANCE ....

AND MINDLESSNESS ....

Over those with the ability to think .....

THE FEARED AND DANGEROUS INTELLECTUALS ....

Not only here in OUR America ....

But in all the world, as well ...

And so .....

GUARD YOUR MINDS WELL, AMERICA ....

GEORGE W. BUSH IS COMING ....

TO TAKE THEM AWAY ....

TO CRUSH THEM .....

LIKE GRAPES .....

INTO THE VINTAGE OF TOTAL IGNORANCE ....

And so ....

"Use of 'secret' label grows - Government extends designation to information previously included in public documents, report says"

By CHRISTOPHER LEE, Washington Post
First published: Monday, August 21, 2006

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration has begun designating as secret some information the government long provided even to its enemy, the former Soviet Union: the numbers of strategic weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War.

The Pentagon and the Department of Energy have treated as national security secrets the historical totals of Minuteman, Titan II and other missiles, blacking out the information on previously public documents, according to a new report by the National Security Archive.

The archive is a nonprofit research library housed at George Washington University.

"It would be difficult to find more dramatic examples of unjustifiable secrecy than these decisions to classify the numbers of U.S. strategic weapons," wrote William Burr, a senior analyst at the archive who compiled the report.

"The Pentagon is now trying to keep secret numbers of strategic weapons that have never been classified before."

The report, released Friday, comes at a time when the Bush administration's penchant for government secrecy has troubled researchers and bred controversy over agency efforts to withhold even seemingly innocuous information.

The National Archives was embroiled in scandal during the spring when it was disclosed that the agency for years kept secret a reclassification program by the CIA, Air Force and other agencies to withdraw thousands of records from public shelves.

One month after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft instructed federal agencies to be more mindful of national security when deciding whether to publicly release documents under the Freedom of Information Act.

Last year, in a study of FOIA requests at 22 agencies from 2000 to 2004, the nonpartisan Coalition of Journalists for Open Government found agencies cited reasons to withhold unclassified information 22 percent more often than before Ashcroft's directive.

Maj. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, said officials strive to properly apply rules governing what should be classified and are researching why the missile information cited in the archive report was blacked out.

"The Department of Defense takes the responsibility of classifying information seriously," Ryder said.

"This includes classifying information at the lowest level possible."

Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, a part of the Energy Department, said the Pentagon excised the missile numbers.

Under a 1998 law, Wilkes's agency focuses on scrubbing declassified documents for sensitive U.S. nuclear weapons information that, in the wrong hands, could be used to harm Americans, he said.

"It's not our call to do missile data," Wilkes said.

"There's no question that current classified nuclear weapons data was out there that we had to take back."

"And in today's environment, where there is a great deal of concern about rogue nations or terrorist groups getting access to nuclear weapons, this makes a lot of sense."

Archive officials say the Pentagon was using guidelines developed by the Energy Department in blacking out the missile data.

During the Cold War, the United States devoted substantial manpower and money to counting Soviet missiles, experts said.

At the same time, U.S. officials sometimes were quite open about the number of American missiles, using the data to illustrate the deterrent power of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and to make the case for more defense spending.

Such numbers were routinely disclosed in annual reports to Capitol Hill by secretaries of defense dating from at least the 1960s, according to Burr.

In a 1971 appearance before the House Armed Services Committee, for instance, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird offered a chart showing, among other things, that the United States had 40 strategic bomber squadrons, 54 Titan intercontinental ballistic missiles and 1,000 Minuteman missiles.

Those numbers, made public March 9, 1971, are redacted in a copy of the chart obtained by the archive's researchers in January as part of a declassified government history of the U.S. air and missile defense, according to archive officials.

"It's yet another example of silly secrecy," said Thomas Blanton, the archive's director.

In another case, Burr cited two declassified copies of a 75-page memo on military policy issues that Defense Secretary Robert McNamara sent to President Johnson in 1964, one obtained from the National Archives in 1999 and the other from the Pentagon this year.

In the 2006 copy, Pentagon reviewers blacked out numbers that were left untouched in the earlier version, including the number of ballistic missile launchers and the number of heavy bombers the United States expected to have in 1965, 1967 and 1970. (Comparative numbers for the Soviet Union were left alone.)

Burr also compared two copies of a memo Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote for President Ford for a 1974 National Security Council meeting on arms control negotiations.

One copy, obtained from the NSC through a Freedom of Information Act request in 1999, has visible references to "200 older B-52 bombers" and 240 Trident missiles, among other weapons data.

In the second copy, released by the Gerald R. Ford Library in May 2006, such information is blacked out -- as is similar data for the Soviet Union.

Experts say there is no national security reason for the administration to keep such historical information under wraps -- especially when it has been publicly available for years.

end quotes

A NATION THAT KNOWS NOTHING .....

IS EASY TO MANIPULATE .....

And so ...

"Political fallout of Schiavo case continues"

By JAY BOOKMAN
First published: Monday, August 21, 2006

The Terri Schiavo case was the most bizarre debacle of an already strange political era, and it's only natural that 18 months later, its repercussions are still being felt across the country.

In Florida, where Schiavo lived and died, the case is an issue in the governor's race.

Both Democratic candidates are boasting about having opposed government intervention in the case.

On the GOP side, Schiavo's father recently attacked the leading Republican candidate for governor, claiming that Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist "let my daughter die."

"He had it within his authority to save her life, but he turned a blind eye to her suffering."

In Connecticut, U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman's support for federal intervention in the Schiavo tragedy has come back to haunt him -- his Democratic opponent, Ned Lamont, cites Lieberman's stance as evidence that the incumbent's alliance with the GOP's right wing extends well beyond the singular issue of Iraq.

Michael Schiavo, Terri's husband, has even traveled to Connecticut to campaign for Lamont, part of a conscious effort on Schiavo's part to remind voters of the madness that once swirled around him and his wife, and of the part that certain political figures played in creating and appealing to that madness.

For the most part, U.S. Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., President Bush, Lieberman and other politicians now treat the Schiavo case as a momentary and embarrassing lapse in judgment that would be better forgotten.

Lieberman, for example, tried to brush aside Lamont's criticism by saying it's time that politicians let Terri Schiavo rest in peace.

Of course, politicians weren't the only ones to learn lessons from the Schiavo case.

Thousands of Americans drafted living wills for the first time and had intimate conversations with their loved ones about end-of-life issues.

Political experts predicted the case might be the high-water mark for the power of social conservatives, which time suggests may be true.

But looking back, the case suggests other lessons that weren't fully appreciated at the time, lessons about the vulnerability of the American people and their leaders to what amounts to irrational mass hysteria.

Think back to how weird it all was.

Politicians who had spent careers attacking federal judges for activism and defending state government against federal encroachment were suddenly demanding that federal judges ride to the rescue by overriding Florida laws, even using Congress to enforce that demand.

People who called themselves Christians and believed themselves defenders of morality stooped without conscience to spreading the most vicious and uncharitable of unfounded lies about Michael Schiavo, calling him everything from wife abuser to a murderer who killed his wife for the money.

Facts didn't matter.

In fact, useful "facts" were invented out of thin air and injected into the national debate far more quickly than they could be rebutted.

Amplified on the Internet, cable TV and elsewhere, those "facts" quickly generated a rolling tide of anger among a relatively small and concentrated group of people -- polls at the time found that only 20 percent of Americans approved of intervention by Congress.

Yet somehow that anger washed over our system of government, drowning rational thought and overwhelming traditional safeguards against hasty action.

The bill authorizing federal intervention in the case passed by voice vote in the Senate and passed overwhelmingly in the House as well.

Bush even flew to Washington to sign the bill when he could easily have signed it at his ranch.

While powerful, sudden surges of public opinion have always been a danger of democratic government, the Schiavo case suggests that risk has been compounded by the speed and power of modern communications technologies.

In fact, experts in modern information warfare have a word for that new phenomenon.

They call it a "swarm," likening it to an attack by a mindless hive of bees that suddenly focuses its venom on a single target.

Some swarms form on their own accord, a natural phenomenon, so to speak.

The blogger swarm that exposed the shoddy reporting by CBS News regarding Bush's National Guard service -- and brought down Dan Rather in the process -- was a natural swarm.

But as the Schiavo case illustrates, swarms can also be created and directed, and in the next few years such phenomenon may well become a familiar if unwelcome feature of our modern political system.

Jay Bookman writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. His e-mail address is jbookman@ajc.com.

AND SPEAKING ABOUT IRRATIONAL MASS HYSTERIA .....

AND THE FACTS NOT MATTERING .....

AND FACTS BEING INVENTED OUT OF THIN AIR .....

BY THE BUSH WHITE HOUSE .....

AND THEN BEING INJECTED ....

BY GEORGE W. BUSH .....

AND DICK CHENEY ...

AND "CON-JOB CONNIE" (KILLER) Rice .....

AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY .....

INTO THE NATIONAL DEBATE ...

FAR MORE QUICKLY THAN THEY COULD BE REBUTTED ...

"Bush says Iraq straining nation's psyche"

By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent

48 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - President Bush said Monday the Iraq war is "straining the psyche of our country" but leaving now would be a disaster.

Bush served notice at a news conference that he would not change course or flinch from debate about the unpopular war as he campaigns for Republicans in the fall congressional elections.

In fact, he suggested that national security and the economy should be the top political issues, and criticized the Democrats' approach on both.

Many Democrats want to leave Iraq "before the job is done," the president said.

"I can't tell you exactly when it's going to be done," he said, but "if we ever give up the desire to help people who live in freedom, we will have lost our soul as a nation, as far as I'm concerned."

Now in its fourth year, the war has taken a heavy toll — more than 2,600 Americans have died and many more Iraqis have been killed.

Last month alone, about 3,500 Iraqis died violently, the highest monthly civilian toll so far.

Bush's approval rating has slumped to the lowest point of his presidency, and Republicans are concerned that they could lose control of Congress because of voters' unhappiness.

Bush said he was frustrated by the war at times.

"War is not a time of joy," he said.

"These are challenging times, and they're difficult times, and they're straining the psyche of our country."

"I understand that."

"You know, nobody likes to see innocent people die."

"Nobody wants to turn on their TV on a daily basis and see havoc wrought by terrorists."

But Bush said he agreed with Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, that if "we leave before the mission is done, the terrorists will follow us here."

A failed Iraq would provide a safe haven for terrorists and extremists and give them revenue from oil sales, Bush said.

In response, Democrats said it was time for a new direction and Bush should begin redeploying troops this year.

"Our soldiers in Iraq should transition to a more limited mission focused on counterterrorism, force protection of U.S. personnel and training and logistical support of Iraqi security forces," House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said.

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said, "Far from spreading freedom and democracy in the Middle East, the Bush administration has watched while extremists grow stronger, Iran goes nuclear, Iraq falls into civil war and oil and gas prices skyrocket."

"Simply staying the course is unacceptable."

Bush said differences over Iraq provide "an interesting debate."

"There's a lot of people — good, decent people — saying `withdraw now.'"

"They're absolutely wrong."

"... We're not leaving, so long as I'm the president."

"That would be a huge mistake."

"Leaving before the job is done would be a disaster."

Bush said he would not question the patriotism of someone who disagreed with him — although Vice President Dick Cheney said recently the Democratic primary election victory of anti-war candidate Ned Lamont over incumbent Sen. Joe Lieberman, a defender of the war, might encourage "the al-Qaida types."

Bush opened his nearly hour-long news conference by calling for quick deployment of an international force to help uphold the fragile cease-fire in southern Lebanon.

"The need is urgent," Bush said.

He said the United States was increasing humanitarian and reconstruction aid to more than $230 million.

European countries expected to provide the bulk of peacekeepers have delayed committing troops.

France disappointed allies by merely doubling its contingent of 200.

The president also said the United States would seek a new U.N. resolution on disarming Hezbollah in southern Lebanon but he sounded doubtful about achieving results soon on the ground.

"Hopefully, over time, Hezbollah will disarm," the president said.

Bush also urged patience about the rebuilding of New Orleans and other gulf communities ravaged by Hurricane Katrina a year ago.

The federal government has committed $110 billion to help.

"I also want the people down there to understand that it's going to take awhile to recover," the president said.

"This was a huge storm."

He suggested the federal government had done its part and state and local officials should move faster.

On other points, Bush said:

• He talked Monday with Chinese President Hu Jintao about trying to revive six-party negotiations aimed getting North Korea to give up its nuclear ambitions.

The White House said the two leaders, in a 21-minute call, also discussed economic issues that have caused friction.

• There is no quick fix for soaring gasoline prices.

He said the answer was to diversify away from crude oil.

• A morning-after contraceptive pill, known as Plan B, should require a prescription for minors.

Anti-abortion groups want Bush to withdraw Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach, his nominee to head the Food and Drug Administration, because they think he will approve over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill.

Democrats, meanwhile, are upset that the FDA has long delayed settling the debate over whether at least some women could buy the contraceptive without a doctor's note.

end quotes

"If we ever give up the desire to help people who live in freedom, we will have lost our soul as a nation, as far as I'm concerned?"

GENERALLY, GEORGE .....

AS I SEE IT ....

IF PEOPLE ARE ALREADY LIVING IN FREEDOM ...

WELL, GEORGE ...

TO BE POLITE ...

AND RESPECTFUL TO THOSE PEOPLE ....

YOU STAY OUT OF THEIR FACES .....

YOU DON'T INTERFERE WITH THEM ....

YOU DON'T FORCE YOURSELF ...

OR YOUR WAYS ....

ON THEM .....

AS YOU ....

AND DICK CHENEY .....

AND "CON-JOB CONNIE" (KILLER) RICE ....

ARE DOING .....

OVER THERE IN THE MIDDLE EAST ....

WHERE YOU WERE THE INVADER, GEORGE ...

THE AGGRESSOR .....

IF YOU WOULD BUT RECALL ....

IF PEOPLE ARE LIVING IN FREEDOM, GEORGE ...

AS WE WERE OVER HERE ...

BEFORE YOU AND YOUR PARANOIA AND SPYING ON US CAME ALONG ....

YOU LEAVE THEM THE HELL ALONE .....

WHICH IS WHAT PEOPLE LIVING IN FREEDOM .....

IS REALLY ALL ABOUT ......

AND THE REASON ....

AS I SEE IT .....

THAT AMERICA HAS LOST ITS SOUL .....

IS BECAUSE IT IS WITHOUT A REAL LEADER ....

AND IT IS RULED ....

BY A CROWD ...

CALLED THE REPUBLICAN PARTY ...

WHOSE MANTRA .....

IS NOT ABOUT FREEDOM FOR ANYONE ....

BUT IS ALL ABOUT UNBRIDLED GREED .....

AND CORRUPTION .....

FOR THEM ....

AND FOR THESE REPUBLICANS TO FEED THEIR GREED ....

THEY HAVE TO TAKE .....

TAKE FROM PEOPLE WHO ARE LIVING IN FREEDOM .....

WHICH IS WHY AMERICA HAS LOST ITS SOUL, GEORGE ....

AND AMERICA HAS LOST ITS SOUL, GEORGE ...

BECAUSE YOU HAVE AN ARMY OUT THERE ....

AMONG PEOPLE LIVING IN FREEDOM .......

AND YOU ARE NOT HELPING THOSE PEOPLE, GEORGE ...

WHO SIMPLY WANT YOU AND YOUR ARMY TO GO AWAY ...

SO THAT THEY REALLY CAN LIVE ...

IN THE FREEDOM ...

WHICH YOU AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY ....

ARE DENYING TO THEM ....

WHAT YOU ARE DOING, GEORGE ...

IS UNILATERALLY STRIPPING THOSE PEOPLES' FREEDOM AWAY FROM THEM .....

EACH TIME YOU HAVE ANOTHER ONE OF THEM KILLED ...

IN THE NAME OF OUR AMERICA .....

AND, George ...

But why waste wind ...

We've already been around this block ....

A time or two before .....

AND YOU NEVER LISTEN, GEORGE ....

BECAUSE YOU ARE INCAPABLE OF HEARING .....

THE SCREAMS .....

OF THE WOMEN .....

AND CHILDREN ....

LIVING IN FREEDOM ...

THAT YOU ARE HAVING KILLED ....

And so ...

Ahhh.

But he DOES listen.

To the voice of GOD.

August 21, 2006

Op-Ed Contributor

"Killing Won’t Win This War"

By TERENCE J. DALY, San Francisco

THREE years into the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, everyone from slicksleeved privates fighting for survival in Ramadi to the echelons above reality at the Pentagon still believes that eliminating insurgents will eliminate the insurgency.

They are wrong.

There is a difference between killing insurgents and fighting an insurgency.

In three years, the Sunni insurgency has grown from nothing into a force that threatens our national objective of establishing and maintaining a free, independent and united Iraq.

During that time, we have fought insurgents with airstrikes, artillery, the courage and tactical excellence of our forces, and new technology worth billions of dollars.

We are further from our goal than we were when we started.

Counterinsurgency is about gaining control of the population, not killing or detaining enemy fighters.

A properly planned counterinsurgency campaign moves the population, by stages, from reluctant acceptance of the counterinsurgent force to, ideally, full support.

American soldiers deride “winning hearts and minds” as the equivalent of sitting around a campfire singing “Kumbaya.”

But in fact it is a sophisticated, multifaceted, even ruthless struggle to wrest control of a population from cunning and often brutal foes.

The counterinsurgent must be ready and able to kill insurgents — lots of them — but as a means, not an end.

Counterinsurgency is work better suited to a police force than a military one.

Military forces — by tradition, organization, equipment and training — are best at killing people and breaking things.

Police organizations, on the other hand, operate with minimum force.

They know their job can’t be done from miles away by technology.

They are accustomed to face-to-face contact with their adversaries, and they know how to draw street-level information and support from the populace.

The police don’t threaten the governments they work under, because they don’t have the firepower to stage coups.

The United States needs a professional police organization specifically for creating and keeping public order in cooperation with American or foreign troops during international peacekeeping operations.

It must be able to help the military control indigenous populations in failing states like Haiti or during insurgencies like the one in Falluja.

The force should include light armored cavalry and air cavalry paramilitary patrol units to deal with armed guerillas, as well as linguistically trained and culturally attuned experts for developing and running informants.

It should be skilled and professional at screening and debriefing detainees, and at conducting public information and psychological operations.

It must be completely transportable by air and accustomed to working effectively with American and local military forces.

Bureaucratic ownership of this force will doubtless be controversial.

Because the mission of international peacekeeping entails dealing mostly with civilians, the force would ideally be a civilian organization.

But no civilian department is currently structured in a way that seems suitable.

At least initially, the force would most likely fall under the Department of Defense.

The establishing legislation should include a fire wall, however, to guard against the tendency of paramilitary units to evolve into pure warriors with berets, boots and bangles.

Crucial to the success of this force is that the American people thoroughly discuss and understand the organization and its mission.

Only by having this discussion can we avoid the example of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, which combined the Vietnamese National Police with American advisers to root the Viet Cong shadow government out of rural villages.

The Phoenix Program was highly effective; because it was supposed to be secret, however, the program was not explained to the American people, and it became impossible to refute charges of torture and assassination.

Without the support of the American people, the program lost momentum and died.

The legislation establishing the police force should firmly anchor it in respect for human rights.

Its mission will be to advance American ideals of justice and freedom under the law, and it must do so by example as well as word.

That will be both difficult and critical in a place like Iraq, where it would have to wrest control of the population from insurgents who regard beheading hostages with chain saws as acceptable.

Stringent population control measures like curfews, random searches, mandatory presentation of identity documents, searches of businesses and residences without warrants and preventive detention would be standing operating procedure.

For such measures to be acceptable to the public, they must be based on solid legal ground and enforced fairly, transparently and impartially.

The police are used to functioning within legal restraints.

Our armed forces, however, are used to obeying only the laws of war and the United States Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Soldiers and marines are trained to respond to force with massive force.

To expect them to switch overnight to using force only as permitted by a foreign legal code, enforced and reviewed by foreign magistrates and judges, is quite unrealistic.

It could also threaten their survival the next time they have to fight a conventional enemy.

Forcing the round peg of our military, which has no equal in speed, firepower, maneuver and shock action, into the square hole of international law enforcement and population control isn’t working.

We need a peacekeeping force to complement our war-fighters, and we need to start building it now.

Terence J. Daly is a retired military intelligence officer and counterinsurgency specialist who served in Vietnam as a province-level adviser.

And there is the problem, jeffmoskin .....

As I see it anyway .....

And it is one of perception .....

I must admit ....

For to me .....

As I see it ...

The "GOD" that George W. Bush listens to .....

Is the DEVIL to me .....

And OUR America ....

Is losing its soul .....

Because George W. Bush ....

Is ready ....

And willing ......

To sell OUR national soul .....

To that DEVIL of his .....

TO GET MORE .....

AND MORE ....

AND YET MORE ....

ON TOP OF THAT ...

To feed ....

THE INSATIABLE GREED ....

OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY .....

WHICH HAS NO SOUL ....

HAVING GIVEN UP ITS VALUES LONG AGO ...

IN THIS PACT WITH GEORGE W. BUSH'S DEVIL .....

WHO HE AND HIS CALL "GOD" .....

And so ....

And as George W. Bush busily sells OUR America's soul to his GOD ....

"Olmert tries to defuse public anger"

By JOSEF FEDERMAN, Associated Press Writer

22 minutes ago

JERUSALEM - Prime Minister Ehud Olmert tried to defuse growing public anger Monday over his handling of the war against Hezbollah, promising to rebuild rocket-scarred border areas but rejecting peace talks with Syria, a key supporter of the Lebanese guerrillas.

With efforts to recruit troops for an international peacekeeping force facing resistance from Europe, the week-old truce appeared increasingly fragile.

The Israeli army, which is waiting for the U.N. force to arrive before fully withdrawing from southern Lebanon, said its soldiers shot two Hezbollah guerrillas who approached in a "threatening manner" late Monday.

A Hezbollah official called the report "untrue and entirely baseless."

Italy has indicated it would be prepared to send 3,000 soldiers and offered Monday to command the enhanced international force.

France, which currently leads the force, has pledged only 400.

If Rome follows through, other European countries might be more willing to commit troops.

But Europe has been hesitant to get involved because of questions about whether the force will be called on to disarm Hezbollah fighters, who have largely melted back into the civilian population.

Indonesia, Malaysia and Bangladesh have offered front-line troops but Israel does not want them because those Muslim nations have not recognized the Jewish state.

Since the U.N.-brokered cease-fire took effect, ending 34 days of war, the Israeli public's frustration with the performance of the government and the military has grown steadily.

On Monday, hundreds of reservists signed a petition calling for an official inquiry, some marching outside Olmert's office to demand his resignation.

Olmert's government, a coalition headed by his centrist Kadima party and the moderate Labor party, is in no immediate danger of collapse.

It could be brought down only by parliament, which is in recess until October, and it is not clear whether the public storm will last until then.

"I think Olmert will simply allow the anger to pass and get on with his business," said Gadi Wolfsfeld, a professor of political science at Hebrew University.

He said none of the parties in the ruling coalition are eager to hold new elections, and there is no leader in Kadima with the clout to replace him.

The war, launched in response to a Hezbollah raid in which two soldiers were captured and three killed, initially enjoyed broad public support that withered as the fighting dragged on and the Israeli death toll grew.

Critics said Israel's political and military leaders were indecisive, set unrealistic goals and settled for an insufficient truce.

The harshest criticism has come from reserve soldiers, who form an integral part of the military.

Reservists returning from Lebanon complained about poor command and a lack of food, water and equipment.

"No goal was achieved."

"... Nothing was done in this war," Roni Elmakyes, whose son Omri was killed in the fighting, told Israel Radio.

Even the army's leadership began to show signs of dissent.

Brig. Gen. Yossi Hyman, the outgoing head of infantry, said this week that "we all feel a certain sense of failure."

Olmert has said he is ready for an investigation, but did not say what kind.

An independent commission could call for the resignation of government and military officials.

During a tour of the north Monday, Olmert appeared cool toward such an inquiry, saying the second-guessing would undermine the army.

"I won't play this game, the game of beating ourselves up," he said.

The defense ministry has already established a team to look into the war, but the panel of retired generals has been derided as toothless.

Olmert's tour stops included Kiryat Shemona, one of the hardest-hit border towns, and the Arab village of Maghar, which also came under Hezbollah rocket fire during the fighting.

Facing local officials, Olmert pledged speedy reconstruction and defended his government's performance.

He also appeared to pin some of the blame on his predecessors, saying his government had been in power for just two months when the war broke out.

"We knew for years that there was a great danger, but for some reason, we didn't translate that understanding into action, like we just did," he said.

"We knew what Iran was doing, what Syria was doing, arming Hezbollah."

"We acted as if we didn't know."

Olmert also rejected a proposal by some members of his Cabinet to resume peace talks with Syria, a key Hezbollah supporter.

He said talks could resume only if Syria stops supporting militant groups.

"Syria is a committed, aggressive member of the axis of evil, which starts in Iran," Olmert said.

"Before we negotiate with (President) Bashar Assad, let him stop launching missiles, by means of Hezbollah, onto the heads of innocent Israelis."

The three main U.S. allies in the Arab world — Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia — have been pushing for a revival of negotiations between Israel and Syria because they are worried the Lebanon war has given a boost to Iran, an ally of Syria.

In other developments:

• Nearly all of the 180,000 Lebanese who took refuge in Syria during the war had returned by Sunday, leaving only 2,500 to 5,000 refugees there, said U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees spokesman Jack Redden.

• Lebanon needs about $3.5 billion to repair buildings and infrastructure damaged during the war, and the rebuilding effort was being hampered by lack of government leadership, the Lebanese official in charge of reconstruction, Fadel al-Shalaq, told CNN.

• The deputy leader of Hezbollah, Sheik Naim Kassem, said in a television interview that one of his sons was badly wounded during fighting against Israeli troops.

• Israel handed over to U.N. peacekeepers five Lebanese men who were captured during an Israeli commando raid on Aug. 1 in Baalbek.

At least 16 Lebanese were killed in the raid on what authorities in the Bekaa Valley city said was in Iranian-built hospital.

Israel said the building was a Hezbollah base.

end quotes

What Isreal wants .....

Is really immaterial .....

What the people of the world want .....

Is for all that BULL **** over there to finally end ....

As it appeared to be doing some time ago ...

When Sharon came on the throne over there .....

And repudiated all the efforts at peace that had been made up to that time ....

And he got this BULL **** all stoked up again ....

Which brings us to where we are now ....

And one of the best ways to get that peace process going again ......

Is to blocakde Isreal ....

And totally fence it in .....

So it can't keep bothering its neighbors .....

And taking their land .....

Which would mean that they could finally live in freedom ...

And peace ....

Without all that constant agression over there ....

By Isreal ...

And so ...

And as the REPUBLICANS up here become more and more desperate ....

To hold on to "HEY, JACKIE BOY, HEY JOHNNIE" Sweeney's congressional seat ...

"'Push poll' calls on voters in 20th District"

Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Friday, August 18, 2006

Residents in the 20th Congressional District have reported receiving a call early this week that some have described as a "push poll," which included negative, misleading and false information about Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand.

Several call recipients said it started out with fairly innocuous questions about whether the country is headed in the right direction and if President Bush is doing a good job.

Next they were asked about who they planned to vote for: Gillibrand or U.S. Rep. John Sweeney, R-Clifton Park.

Bob Hudak, a Corinth resident who isn't enrolled in a political party, picked Gillibrand.

He said he was then asked whether his choice would change if he knew she doesn't live in the district, that her law firm represented an Enron crook, or she had used the death of American soldiers in Iraq for political gain.

Gillibrand does now live in the district.

Her firm, Boies Schiller & Flexner, briefly represented former Enron finance chief Andrew Fastow, but she was not involved in the case.

She has never, to Inside Politics' knowledge, used soldiers' deaths for political gain.

Last month, an anti-GOP/pro-Democratic Party ad on the Web site of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is backing Gillibrand, featured a brief shot of flag-draped coffins in the back of a plane returning from Iraq.

Hudak said he found the death question so offensive he hung up on the pollster, only to have a different person call back the next night to finish answering the questions.

"I just couldn't believe it," Hudak said.

"I follow politics enough to know there's not anybody out there running for Congress who is using the deaths of soldiers for political gain."

When pushed by respondents to identify who had ordered up the poll, the callers provided a phone number that led to Western Wats, a Utah-based research group that does data collection.

A Western Wats worker said the poll was commissioned by The Tarrance Group, a national Republican polling firm that does a lot of work for the National Republican Congressional Committee.

She would not reveal on whose behalf The Tarrance Group is polling.

So far in this election cycle, the NRCC has paid The Tarrance Group $391,087 for various polls and travel reimbursements.

According to a DCCC source, the NRCC recently paid The Tarrance Group $16,275 to do a poll for Sweeney in the 20th.

Neither the NRCC nor The Tarrance Group returned calls for comment.

Sweeney's campaign insisted it had nothing to do with the poll.

Gillibrand spokeswoman Allison Price refused to accept that.

"Sweeney's record doesn't warrant re-election so he is forced to use dirty push polls to taint the opinion of voters," Price said.

"Sweeney doesn't have to poll on his own record -- it is a rubber stamp for President Bush -- and we all know where Bush's approval ratings stand."

A Zogby International poll released Monday showed Bush's approval rating has dipped two points in the last three weeks to 34 percent, despite the Middle East cease-fire agreement and the foiling of an airline terror plot.

Inside Politics is compiled by staff writer Elizabeth Benjamin. Staff writer Jordan Carelo-Evangelist contributed to this column.

end quotes

IF THERE IS ANYONE UP HERE ....

WHO HAS USED THE DEATHS OF OUR SOLDIERS IN IRAQ .....

OVER ...

AND OVER ....

AND OVER .....

ON AND ON AND ON ....

TO THEIR POLITICAL ADVANTAGE ....

IT IS THESE REPUBLICANS UP HERE ....

INCLUDING "HEY, JACKIE BOY, HEY JOHNNIE" SWEENEY, HIMSELF ....

WHO NEVER SERVED A DAY IN UNIFORM .....

ALTHOUGH HE COULD HAVE ...

AND FOR THEM TO ACCUSE ANYONE ELSE OF DOING THAT...

USING THE DEATHS OF OUR SOLDIERS TO THEIR POLITCAL ADVANTAGE ...

IS A JOKE ...

A MOCKERY ....

OF OUR INTELLIGENCE ....

AND OUR MEMORIES ....

And so ...

NeoCons Are Busy Covering Their Asse(t)s

By Shelter from the Storm

If the Vice-President's relentless push for a new war against Iran succeeds, and oil prices skyrocket to two or three times the previous record, with a resulting collapse of the dollar, it won't be the Cheneys who suffer.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14644.htm

Good to see you back, Snuf .....

And no .....

It won't be the Cheney's who suffer .....

Which is what getting yourself into politics here in OUR America is all about .....

Witness Randy "HEY, BIG DUKE, MY MAN IN THE SLAM" Cunningham ....

You get yourself into politics over here .....

So you can put that suffering .....

Over onto as many other people as you can ...

And then you use their suffering .....

Like Dick Cheney is doing .....

To line your own pocket .....

And so ....

A simple equation, really .....

POLITICS IS GREED PERSONIFIED .....

And real service to the public ....

Is for fools ....

And so ....

And speaking of politics ...

Yesterday ....

According to CLEAR CHANNELS WORLD WIDE ....

Rudolph Giuliani ....

"THE REPUBLICAN MOUTH THAT ROARED" ......

From down in New York City ....

Was up here near my part of the country ....

With "HEY, JACKIE BOY, HEY, JOHNNIE" Sweeney .....

The REPUBLICAN "BUSH CHEERLEADER" Congress Boy ....

Who represents my Congressional District ....

Here in the CORRUPT REPUBLICAN EMPIRE of New York ....

And they were up at Saratoga .....

The horse-racing track .....

Where "HEY, JACKIE BOY, HEY, JOHNNIE" hangs with the "FAST CROWD" ....

And the "PLAYAHS" .....

And "FAST MOVERS" ....

And such like ...

And CLEAR CHANNELS WORLD WIDE interviewed Rudolph .....

And what Rudolph was growling about in that interview .....

Was OUR America ....

PAST ....

And PRESENT .....

According to Rudolph ....

Who is "THE REPUBLICAN MOUTH THAT ROARED" ....

At least here in the CORRUPT REPUBLICAN EMPIRE of New York ....

In the past .....

I.e., before George W. Bush .....

OUR AMERICA HAD A PROBLEM ....

WITH FINISHING WHAT IT STARTED .....

And though he did not elaborate further .....

I presumed he meant Viet Nam .....

BUT NOW THAT GEORGE W. BUSH IS HERE .....

OUR AMERICA DOESN'T HAVE THAT PROBLEM ANY MORE .....

That the DEBACLE .....

The MESS ....

That George W. Bush ....

And the REPUBLICANS .....

Have going on over there in Iraq ....

IS A CENTRAL FRONT .....

ON GEORGE W. BUSH'S REPUBLICAN WAR OF TERROR ....

And George won't cut and run .....

No sir, no way, no how .....

THE REPUBLICAN GEORGE .....

Is going to finish what he started ....

WHATEVER ON GOD'S GREEN EARTH THAT MIGHT BE .....

OTHER THAN ONE GREAT BIG MESS .....

Like you get out in a field .....

Where you have a lot of cows .....

Or pigs .....

Corraled up .....

And confined ....

In a small area ....

And the beauty of being here in OUR America .....

FOR PEOPLE LIKE RUDOLPH GIULIANI ....

Is that people like Rudolph Giuliani ......

Can talk like this ......

TO CLEAR CHANNELS WORLD WIDE .....

Make inane statements ....

Without substance ....

In what are called "SOUND BITES" ....

That will be aired to the whole world, I guess .....

Since CLEAR CHANNELS WORLD WIDE ....

Is world-wide .....

And they can do this .....

Make these inane statements ....

WITHOUT ANY FEAR ....

OR TREPIDATION WHATSOEVER .....

OF BEING CHALLENGED ......

BY CLEAR CHANNELS WORLD WIDE .....

Which is the best PROPAGANDA ORGAN .....

A politician like Rudolph could ever hope for ....

And so .....

God bless America .....

And CLEAR CHANNELS WORLD WIDE, eh, Rudolph?

And so .....

And speaking of "HEY, JACKIE, BOY, HEY, JOHNNIE" .....

And Rudolph ....

And the "PLAYAHS" .....

At Saratoga .....

"Sweeney campaign draws Giuliani's support - Former NYC mayor downplays own political aspirations on visit to Saratoga Springs"

By ELIZABETH BENJAMIN, Capitol bureau, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Tuesday, August 22, 2006

SARATOGA SPRINGS -- U.S. Rep. John Sweeney, facing the toughest election of his political career, got a boost Monday from former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, whose leadership after 9/11 made him a household name and a presidential contender.

Giuliani endorsed the Clifton Park Republican during a day of campaigning in Saratoga Springs that included a visit to a fire house, a stop at the racetrack and a rally with more than 100 residents.

Giuliani focused on his signature topics since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the twin towers: security and fighting terrorism.

He said he was traveling the country stumping for Republican members of Congress whom Democrats have "singled out" in their quest to win back control of the House.

The man known as "America's Mayor" praised Sweeney for backing the Bush administration's efforts to combat terrorism, which the congressman's Democratic challenger, Kirsten Gillibrand, has tried to use against him as Bush's approval ratings and national support for the Iraq war have dropped.

Giuliani called Sweeney a friend and said the congressman helped him get elected to his first term as mayor of Democrat-dominated New York City in 1993, when Sweeney was executive director of the state Republican Party.

He also touted Sweeney to residents of the 20th Congressional District as "one of you" -- a reference to the Sweeney campaign's efforts to paint Gillibrand as a rich Manhattan carpetbagger.

The former mayor received far more attention than Sweeney.

Cheers of "Rudy! Rudy!" were heard at the track, where he, Sweeney and their wives sat in the New York Racing Association chairman's box.

At the rally, Sweeney introduced Giuliani as the man "who's going to change the landscape of the United States of America."

But Giuliani downplayed his own political aspirations, saying, "We've got to get through 2006 before we get to 2008."

He applauded President Bush's declaration Monday that troops will remain in Iraq to "finish the job," calling him "a determined leader who is absolutely right to say the troops will be there until we achieve our objective."

Sweeney called those seeking an immediate withdrawal from Iraq "obtuse."

He acknowledged "mistakes certainly have happened" in Iraq.

"That doesn't mean, though, that you ought to give up on the commitment to bring stability to the region," he added.

"We cannot have Iraq in a destabilized place that can turn into Afghanistan II," Sweeney said.

Gillibrand spokeswoman Allison Price criticized Sweeney for refusing to debate on Iraq.

Gillibrand has said the country needs to set a deadline of six to 12 months for troop redeployment.

"(Sweeney) has backed Bush 100 percent on Iraq, and once again declines to commit to a solution besides stay-the-course," Price said.

Elizabeth Benjamin can be reached at 454-5081 or by e-mail at ebenjamin@timesunion.com.

end quotes

9-11 ......

9-11 ......

9-11 .......

9-11 .......

If you are a REPUBLICAN ......

Like Rudolph ....

You just got to love that 9-11 .......

It is something that is still politically exploitable .....

And so .....

It is .....

And it is something .....

A testimonial, I guess .....

To the ability ....

Of the REPUBLICANS ....

To take a MAJOR SCREW-UP .....

A MAJOR LAPSE .....

That cost American lives .....

ON THEIR WATCH .....

AND TO TURN THAT MAJOR LAPSE ....

ON THEIR PART ...

INTO SOMETHING .....

THAT THEY CAN KEEP EXPLOITING .....

As Rudolph does .....

OVER ...

AND OVER ...

AND OVER ...

AND OVER ....

FOR POLITICAL GAIN .....

And so ...

Myths of a 9/11 hero, debunked

Few reporters who covered New York City government during Rudolph
W. Giuliani's reign would dispute that the mayor saw himself as a
powerful leader destined for greatness. After the terrorist
attacks, Mayor Giuliani was the man. Now his leadership comes
under fire in the book "Grand Illusion." By Kit R. Roane.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/e7M...Io30G2B0Hntq0Eo

Good to have you back in the saddle again, over here, Snuf .....

And thanks for the heads-up .....

On that book about Rudolph .....

It probably doesn't come across ....

To anyone not from up here ......

But up at Saratoga .....

In the summertime .....

When the running track is open .....

Most of the people in Saratoga .....

And especially the ones Rudolph Giuliani would be hanging with .....

Are from somewhere else .....

And they have the leisure time .....

And the money ....

To hang out at the track .....

With the likes of New York State Attorney General .....

And GUBERNATORIAL HOPEFUL ....

Eliot "Big EL" Spitzer .....

And "HEY, JACKIE BOY, HEY, JOHNNIE" Sweeney .....

And of course .....

Rudolph Giuliani .....

Who himself is a man of leisure these days .....

So when Rudolph Giuliani .....

Is addressing a crowd of people at Saratoga .....

This time of year .....

TO TELL THEM ....

That "HEY, JACKIE BOY, HEY, JOHNNIE" Sweeney .....

IS ONE OF THEM .....

That crowd of people is not people like me .....

Who live here .....

That crowd likely included rich Arab oil sheiks .....

And other assorted rich types .....

From the Carolinas ....

And Canada ....

And South America .....

All of whom are here .....

For the SARATOGA SCENE ....

Which common people like us up here .....

Are not a part of ....

Not being numbered among the idle rich ...

Like Rudolph Giuliani .....

And his fast crowd ....

And so ....

And speaking about the world of politics ....

Here in OUR America ....

And George W. Bush's incredible fiasco ......

In Iraq .....

WHICH IS THE CENTERPIECE .....

OF THE REPUBLICAN WAR OF TERROR .....

We have ....

"McCain faults administration on Iraq"

By JOHN McCARTHY, Associated Press
Last updated: 4:55 p.m., Tuesday, August 22, 2006

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Republican Sen. John McCain, a staunch defender of the Iraq war, on Tuesday faulted the Bush administration for misleading Americans into believing the conflict would be "some kind of day at the beach."

The potential 2008 presidential candidate, who a day earlier had rejected calls for withdrawing U.S. forces, said the administration had failed to make clear the challenges facing the military.

"I think one of the biggest mistakes we made was underestimating the size of the task and the sacrifices that would be required," McCain said.

"Stuff happens, mission accomplished, last throes, a few dead-enders."

"I'm just more familiar with those statements than anyone else because it grieves me so much that we had not told the American people how tough and difficult this task would be."

Those phrases are closely associated with top members of the Bush administration, including the president.

Bush stood below a banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished" on May 1, 2003 after the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime.

The war has continued since then, with the death of more than 2,600 members of the U.S. military.

Vice President Dick Cheney said last year that the Iraqi insurgency was "in its final throes."

The Arizona senator said that talk "has contributed enormously to the frustration that Americans feel today because they were led to believe this could be some kind of day at the beach, which many of us fully understood from the beginning would be a very, very difficult undertaking."

McCain was campaigning for Republican Sen. Mike DeWine, who faces a tough fight in his re-election bid against Democratic challenger Rep. Sherrod Brown.

Ohio was decisive in the 2004 presidential election, ensuring Bush's win, and is certain to be critical in 2008.

On Monday, McCain said at an appearance in suburban Cleveland that if U.S. troops announce a specific date to leave Iraq, insurgents will bide their time until they have an opportunity to act without interference.

"The chaos that would ensue would have direct implications for our national security," McCain said.

DeWine said Congress would not have had the chance to authorize the war if the intelligence on Iraq's military capability and intentions were accurate.

"It would never have come up for a vote so it would have been an entirely different situation," he said.

------

McCain campaign site: http://www.straighttalkamerica.com/

DeWine campaign site: http://www.mikedewine.com

And speaking about the continued adverse impacts .....

To OUR America ....

And its military ......

As a direct result .....

Of the lack of thought ....

The BUSHCOS gave .....

To the ramifications .....

Of invading a foreign country .....

On the other side of an ocean from here .....

WITH NO PLANS ...

WITH INADEQUATE TROOPS .....

AND WITH A REAL GLIB ATTITUDE .....

THAT THE PEOPLE OF IRAQ .....

WOULD WELCOME GEORGE W. BUSH .....

AS THEIR NEXT CONQUEROR .....

We have ....

"Corps can recall Marines to active duty"

By LOLITA C. BALDOR, Associated Press Writer

2 hours, 10 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Marine Corps said Tuesday it has been authorized to recall thousands of Marines to active duty, primarily because of a shortage of volunteers for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Up to 2,500 Marines will be brought back at any one time, but there is no cap on the total number of Marines who may be forced back into service in the coming years as the military battles the war on terror.

The call-ups will begin in the next several months.

This is the first time the Marines have had to use the involuntary recall since the early days of the Iraq combat.

The Army has ordered back about 14,000 soldiers since the start of the war.

Marine Col. Guy A. Stratton, head of the manpower mobilization section, estimated that there is a current shortfall of about 1,200 Marines needed to fill positions in upcoming unit deployments.

The call-up affects Marines in the Individual Ready Reserve, a segment of the reserves that consists mainly of those who left active duty but still have time remaining on their eight-year military obligation.

Generally, Marines enlist for four years, then serve the other four years either in the regular Reserves, where they are paid and train periodically, or they may elect to go into the IRR.

Marines in the IRR are only obligated to report one day a year but can be involuntarily recalled to active duty.
___

On the Net:

Defense Department: http://www.defenselink.mil

end quotes

BUT NEVER FEAR, AMERICA ......

THIS IS NOT A DRAFT .....

IT'S MORE LIKE FORCED CONSCRIPTION ......

BUT SINCE THAT IS NOT THE SAME AS A DRAFT .....

Well ......

Something or other, anyway .....

And I'll be damned if I know what it is ......

Other than a part of the mess ....

That George W. Bush .....

And Dick Cheney ....

And Donald "GASBAG" Rumsfeld .....

Have made for OUR American military .....

And so ...

The Missing Links

By Dan Froomkin

It's ironic that at the same press conference where President Bush flatly acknowledged that there was no link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, he was putting forth -- largely unchallenged -- a new and equally specious linkage between Iraq and terror. The part of the press conference... Just when...

To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle

Its about time!


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/22/us/22cnd...059&partner=AOL
51% in Poll See No Link Between Iraq and Terror Fight

By CARL HULSE and MARJORIE CONNELLY
Published: August 22, 2006
WASHINGTON, Aug. 22 — Americans increasingly see the war in Iraq as distinct from the fight against terrorism, and nearly half believe President Bush has focused too much on Iraq to the exclusion of other threats, according to the latest

The finding that 51 percent of those surveyed see no link between the war in Iraq and the broader antiterror effort was a jump of 10 percentage points since June. It came despite the regular insistence of Mr. Bush and Congressional Republicans that the two are intertwined and should be seen as complementary elements of an overall strategy to prevent domestic terror attacks.

Should the trend hold, the increased skepticism could present a political obstacle for Mr. Bush and his allies on Capitol Hill, who are making their record on terrorism a central element of the midterm election campaign. The Republicans hope the public’s desire for forceful action against terrorists will offset unease with the Iraq war and blunt the political appeal of Democratic calls to establish a timeline to withdraw American troops.

Public sentiment about the war remains negative, threatening to erode a Republican advantage on national security. Fifty-three percent of those polled said that going to war in the first place was a mistake, up from 48 percent in July; 62 percent said events were going “somewhat or very badly” in the attempt to bring order and stability to Iraq.

Mr. Bush recorded a gain of 4 percentage points in how the public views his handling of terrorism, rising to 55 percent approval from 51 percent a week earlier. The figure was his highest on the issue since last summer and followed the arrests in Britain in a suspected plot to blow up airliners.

Mr. Bush’s overall standing was nevertheless unchanged from the previous week, resting at 36 percent approval to 57 percent disapproval — far below the level his fellow Republicans in Congress would like to see as they face the voters in November. Compounding the political problems of majority Republicans, the survey reflected significant dissatisfaction with the way Congress was doing its job. Voters in the poll indicated a strong preference for Democratic candidates this fall.

The Times/CBS News poll differed somewhat with other recent surveys that showed higher approval ratings for the president. In surveys for USA Today and CNN, which were conducted Friday through Sunday, 42 percent approved of how Mr. Bush was handling his job and gave Democratic Congressional candidates less of an edge. The Times/CBS News poll was conducted Thursday through Monday by telephone with 1,206 adults nationwide and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

According to the poll, terrorism and the war in Iraq hold about equal importance in the minds of Americans. Forty-six percent said the Bush administration had concentrated too heavily on Iraq and not enough on terrorists elsewhere, while 42 percent considered the balance just about right.

The opinion of 51 percent that the war in Iraq was separate from the war on terror was a considerable shift from polls taken in 2002 and the first half of 2003, when a majority regarded the fighting in Iraq as a major antiterror front. As recently as June, opinion was split: 41 percent said the war in Iraq was a major part of the fight against terror and 41 percent said it was not a part at all. Now only 32 percent considered it a major part of the terror fight, while 12 percent rated it a minor part.

“I’m just not sure there’s a connection between terrorism and the war in Iraq,” said Ann Davis, a Republican homemaker in Lima, Ohio, interviewed in a follow-up to the initial survey. She said she was fully supportive of American troops in Iraq but, “I feel we should not be over there, they should be able to figure it out on their own.”

However, another Republican, Marty Woll, 56, a retired accountant from Los Angeles, said he saw a clear link between the war and attempts to combat terrorism. “Iraq was obviously not the precipitating location for the 9/11 attacks, but if you look at the Middle East as a whole, you see it has been spawning the most violent and the most desperate of the attacks,’’ Mr. Woll said. “Saddam Hussein killed almost a million of his own people. That magnitude indicated that someone had to do something about it.”

Mr. Bush’s inability to improve his overall standing despite gains on the terror issue could be traced to people like Lucia Figueroa, 23, an independent from Fort Drum, N.Y., who backs the president on terrorism but faults him elsewhere. “Even though I approve of the way Bush is handling terrorism, he isn’t putting enough focus on other issues, like health care and Katrina, and those things need more attention,” she said

As recently as Monday, Mr. Bush, at a news conference, defended the invasion of Iraq as essential to preventing more domestic terror attacks and said he expected troops to stay there through the remainder of his presidency.

“If you believe that the job of the federal government is to secure this country, it’s really important for you to understand that success in Iraq is part of securing the country,” said Mr. Bush.

But Democrats in recent weeks have made a concerted effort to portray the war in Iraq as a distraction from essential antiterror initiatives, and the poll indicates that message may be effective. Democrats contend that the war in Iraq has sapped resources and attention from tracking terrorists and bolstering domestic security. “We took our eye off the real war, the war on terror,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, in a conference call with reporters today.

The public’s judgment on the job that Congress is doing remains largely negative, with 60 percent registering disapproval. Forty-seven percent of the registered voters surveyed in the poll said they expected to vote for a Democrat for the House this November; 32 percent said they would vote for a Republican. The national poll cannot measure the races in individual Congressional districts, but the findings are indicative of the two parties’ relative strength.

After terrorism and the war in Iraq, those surveyed considered the economy the third most crucial issue for political leaders to concentrate on followed by health care costs and gas prices. The White House has sought to get more credit for Mr. Bush for what the administration considers a strong economy and there has been an improvement in how the public views him on this issue. But the overall impression remains negative.

Thirty-five percent approve of how Mr. Bush is dealing with the economy, up 5 percentage points from a CBS News poll conducted last week, while 58 percent disapprove. Over all, 52 percent of those surveyed consider the national economy to be in good condition and 47 percent said it was in bad condition.

In the wake of the fighting in Lebanon, the public is increasingly pessimistic about the possibility of peace between Israel and its neighbors. Only 26 percent could foresee Israel and the Arab countries settling their differences while 70 percent could not — a figure up from 64 percent last month. And most Americans — 56 percent — said they do not believe that the country has a responsibility to try to resolve the conflicts between Israel and other Middle Eastern countries, while 39 percent said it was a proper role.

Carl Hulse reported from Washington for this article, and Marjorie Connelly from New York. Megan Thee and Marina Stefan contributed reporting from New York.

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/20...t_subpoena.html

Sweet Subpoena
: Nine Tough Questions for Congress

News: Capitol Hill is way overdue for a blockbuster investigation. Here are 
nine questions to get Congress rolling—if it has the guts.

By James Ridgeway

September 1, 2006

The stately Russell Senate Office Building stands at one corner of a domestic Green Zone, just northeast of the Capitol building at the intersection of Delaware and Constitution avenues. In the past few years a maze of blockades has sprouted along the shaded avenues and curving drives of the Capitol complex. Checkpoints are patrolled by heavily armed police; guards watch for suspicious characters and prohibited items (which now include food and beverages; cans, bottles, and sprays; and bags larger than 13 by 14 inches). At the Russell Building, visitors encounter another set of barriers and metal detectors before being granted admittance to the elegant structure, its ring of Corinthian columns and soaring rotunda recalling a more worldly and optimistic past. Then, at the top of a sweeping staircase, they'll find a room walled in white marble, draped in deep red, overhung by a gilded ceiling, and fronted, altarlike, with a raised dais.

Depending on how much faith in American democracy still resides in the visitor's soul, the site's history may seem to justify its grandeur. Here in the humbly named Caucus Room, the U.S. Congress has held some of its most famous public hearings, beginning with a 1912 investigation into the fate of the Titanic. The Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s was broached here, in what would become a watershed investigation of executive branch corruption. Thirty years later, people around the country got their first glimpse of the Caucus Room in the nationally televised Army-McCarthy hearings, witnessing the famous exhortation by Army Special Counsel Joseph Welch: "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

The Watergate hearings unfolded here in the early '70s, beneath the ever-watchful gaze of Senator Sam Ervin (D-N.C.). It was here that Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-Texas), the first Southern black woman elected to Congress, declared: "My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution." Here, too, the erect figure of Oliver North, straight from the basement of the Reagan White House, first hinted at the existence of a secret government to be deployed in times of crisis.

But in the past six years, congressional investigations of such bold, searching nature have disappeared. In a post-9/11 environment of silence and fear, the mood inside Congress has mirrored the bunkers and barriers outside: No one dares question the military or the intelligence services too closely, or to push the president too far. The Caucus Room continues to be used for party meetings and social events, and every so often there is a potted inquiry, as in the case of the 2003 hearings on the space shuttle. But on issues of war and peace, of corruption and graft, of civil rights, civil liberties, and constitutional breaches, meek questions are the rule, answered by dull assurances from the White House.

If the Democrats win back control of Congress (or even one of its chambers), if they can come up with the requisite moxie, and if they can muster the political will to reach out to their own base as well as to disaffected Republicans, they will have an opportunity to begin to change all that. They will need to overcome the myriad obstacles the Bush administration has created to keep lawmakers from obtaining and releasing critical information, such as its resistance to briefing congressional committees on intelligence issues, or its heavy hand in redacting congressional reports. When explosive information has leaked out—the fact that documents offering "proof" of Saddam Hussein's intent to buy uranium from Niger had been forged, or that the United States is operating a network of secret prisons in other countries—the administration's response has focused on condemning critics for politicizing national security—a charge before which the Democrats usually crumble.

Still, there is a chance that some of the gutsier Dems, with the support of an increasingly fed-up public, could make progress toward exposing the truth. A Democratic majority in the Senate could, for example, place the chairmanship of the intelligence committee in the hands of Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who has largely been stymied in his efforts to spur a thorough investigation of the Niger forgeries and what he suspects may be a broader campaign of deception. Among other things, such an inquiry could lead straight to the Pentagon's shadowy Office of Special Plans; under gop leadership, no one is too eager to learn much about this office, which led the prewar intelligence cherry-picking, and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chair Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) is holding up an inquiry.

Regardless of the election result in November, a few independent-minded Republicans in key positions offer hope that important investigations may gain traction. Under Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), the national security subcommittee of the powerful House Committee on Government Reform has actually summoned the mettle to subpoena Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in its investigation of the chain of command in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse case.

But if lawmakers of either party do not begin to reclaim their constitutional powers—by asking questions such as those listed below—it's not hard to envision a time when visitors may come to the venerable Caucus Room as if to a museum, to learn about a bygone era when congressional investigations still served as a check on the imperial presidency.

1.Who lost Iraq?
It goes without saying that a congressional investigation—a joint inquiry by both houses, given the gravity of the matter—should address the causes, conduct, and effects of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, going back to the days immediately after Bush's election when the plans for invading Iraq were laid (see "A War Foretold," Page 61). But beyond that, the conduct of the war on terror has raised myriad vital questions that, at another time, would have been subjects of full-fledged inquiries on their own: the Pentagon's failure to adequately equip troops with armor, ammunition, radios, and the like; the use of mercenary forces; the contracting process; and the government's efforts to manipulate the press through outside PR agencies. Also worthy of scrutiny is the role of oil and gas, including the work of the secret Cheney energy task force, which points to prewar discussions with the ceos of major companies about Iraqi oil.

A congressional investigation into the Iraq war must make full use of subpoena power and must be prepared to forward findings of illegal acts to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution. Just as important, public hearings could provide an opportunity—and protection—for would-be whistleblowers: Recall that Daniel Ellsberg didn't take his trove of documents, showing the Defense Department's true assessment of the war in Vietnam, to the New York Times until after he had been rebuffed by congressional Democrats. Somewhere inside the Defense Department and the intelligence agencies today's Pentagon Papers are waiting.

2. Did Rumsfeld order torture (and if not, who did)?
Last year, Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) sought to clear up any confusion over the legality of torture with an amendment to the Defense Appropriations Bill. As McCain explained on the Senate floor, the measure was designed to "restore clarity on a simple and fundamental question: Does America treat people inhumanely?" This set off a bitter behind-the-scenes battle between the senator and Vice President Dick Cheney, who even as the White House was negotiating with McCain over the exact wording of the bill was privately cornering senators, arguing that the legislation would harm the CIA's operations. The result was a bill that bans torture at U.S. facilities but leaves open the question of foreign governments mistreating prisoners at the United States' behest. President Bush then wrote his own interpretation of the legislation, after it passed, in the form of a signing statement that said the White House was free to ignore the measure in the interests of national security. In the end, McCain's ban may have accomplished nothing except to give the administration an occasion to reaffirm its policy of permitting torture—so long as it involves foreigners being held in prisons that are not on U.S. soil.

Congress should demand a no-holds-barred public accounting of "inhumane treatment" since 9/11 by U.S. intelligence services and by third-country surrogates. Did Bush know about these practices? Did Rumsfeld order torture or supervise the chain of command? How far up the chain did knowledge of, and assent for, the horror at Abu Ghraib go? To which countries were prisoners sent for interrogation? When and how were these prisoners tortured? What are the CIA's policies on "unorthodox" interrogation techniques? Such hearings would go a long way toward halting the creeping normalization of torture—and they would almost certainly produce prosecutable evidence about the abuses that have already happened.

3. Who blew 9/11?
It's high time to follow up on the startling discoveries of the Senate and House's joint inquiry, back in December 2002, on pre-9/11 intelligence. In reconstructing the hijackers' trail, the inquiry's staff discovered that the FBI had failed to report, and had later balked at making public, information showing that it knew that a bureau informant in the San Diego Muslim community had socialized with two of the hijackers, and that another man who had been investigated by the FBI had rented an apartment to one of them. Both of the future hijackers had been closely followed by the CIA as they made their way from the Middle East to Malaysia; the agents lost track of the men before they boarded a plane to California, where they then lived openly, with driver's licenses and a phone book listing in their own names. So far, no one has been able to discover how they escaped detection by the FBI—and why the bureau refused to let Congress find out what happened.

The joint inquiry also discovered a Saudi spy operating in California—the same man who had rented an apartment to one of the hijackers—along with suggestions of a larger network, according to former Senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.). The spy nominally worked for a Saudi government contractor, and the committee followed a money trail going back to the royal family and the Saudi government, according to Graham. This was a tantalizing find. Congressional sources have suggested that Saudi spooks may have been sent to California to keep tabs on Saudi students who might be tempted by democratic ideas; it has also been speculated that some of these undercover agents could have become enmeshed with Al Qaeda. In any event, the White House has adamantly refused to declassify 28 pages of the final committee report that dealt with Saudi Arabia. When Congress later set up an independent commission to look into 9/11, it pointedly ordered the panel to "build upon the investigations of other entities" such as the joint inquiry. Yet the commission's report glossed over many questions involving Saudi Arabia. A new select committee could pick up where other probes left off.

4. What did the airlines know, and when did they know it?
The bombing of PanAm Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 ought to have been a wake-up call to aviation across the world. But 13 years later, the FAA was still ignoring warnings from its own staff about security holes at every airport that inspectors checked out. With airlines lobbying against tighter standards and Congress sitting by, the nation's airline security system was caught flat-footed on 9/11.

As far back as 1993, FAA inspectors showed that people with no authorization made it through San Francisco's airport security system 60 percent of the time. At Frankfurt in 1996, the FAA's undercover team broke through security every time it tried—a 100 percent failure rate. By way of addressing the problem, the FAA began telling the airlines when tests were going to be held, and negotiated fines for violations down to a pittance. There was idle talk of hardening the cockpit doors, but the airlines resisted additional security measures because they cost too much. The airlines ran wild in Washington, hiring top lobbyists such as Linda Daschle, the wife of then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, threatening that their industry would face wholesale bankruptcy unless they got their way. (Most of them, of course, have since gone Chapter 11 anyway—but not before their ceos socked away millions more in salaries and bonuses.)

In the months before 9/11, the FAA warned that hijackers could turn a commercial airliner into a suicide missile and conducted classified briefings at 19 of the nation's largest airports, including Logan, Dulles, and Newark—the points of departure for the hijacked flights—warning of an imminent terrorist attack. Osama bin Laden's name was repeatedly mentioned. During the same period, FAA officials received 52 different intelligence briefings concerning threats from Al Qaeda.

The moment of truth ought to have come a little after 8 a.m. on September 11, 2001, when Betty Ong, a flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11 out of Logan, called AA headquarters and calmly began to describe the hijacking going on aboard that plane. She provided a detailed account of what she saw and heard and stayed on the line until the moment the plane crashed into the first tower.

Did AA officials, as family members later reported based on tapes and transcripts they were shown by the FBI in closed briefings, respond by saying, "Don't spread this around," "Keep it close," and "Let's keep this among ourselves"? Did that attitude prevent warnings to other pilots—warnings that could have kept Flight 93 on the ground, and could have helped bring Flight 77 down safely before it crashed into the Pentagon? Some member of Congress must have the decency and the guts to ask those questions—not in some backroom closed session, but in the full glare of the TV lights.


5. How wide is the domestic surveillance net?
In the mid-1970s, the Church Committee, named after Idaho Democratic senator Frank Church, put out 14 separate reports that exposed the intelligence agencies' abuses of law. The Pike Committee, named after Rep. Otis Pike (D-N.Y.), conducted a parallel inquiry in the House, focusing mostly on the CIA. Among other things, the investigations discovered the notorious COINTELPRO operation to spy on and disrupt left-wing groups. Thirty years later urgent questions are once again piling up: Just what is the extent of the agencies' spying inside the United States? What are the true motivations and outcomes of this surveillance? How much money is going into spying programs? There is much evidence that domestic intelligence gathering is not limited to the infamous NSA surveillance project. The ACLU, for one, has obtained numerous files describing FBI cooperation with local police in joint terrorism task forces that have targeted groups such as Greenpeace, United for Peace and Justice, Code Pink, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

6. Is Big Oil pulling an Enron?
The last serious investigation of the oil industry concluded in 1952 with the Federal Trade Commission's staff report on the International Petroleum Cartel, published by the monopoly subcommittee of the Senate. That study laid out a now-familiar pattern: A major concern of the oil industry has always been the threat of surpluses driving down prices. To prevent surpluses, oil and gas companies have employed means such as instituting quota systems, closing off reserves from market, and setting up cartels, or agreements among producers.

Today, while many experts believe oil will soon run out, there is no actual shortage that could be blamed for driving up gas prices. The hurricanes of 2005 did not put the supply in any serious jeopardy, nor was lack of refinery capacity a real factor. (According to the U.S. Department of Energy, refineries along the Gulf Coast and elsewhere frequently run below capacity, meaning that there was some slack in the system.)

There is, however, evidence to suggest practices reminiscent of Enron's market rigging: Last year, the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, a California-based consumer group, released a series of internal memos from Chevron, Texaco, and Mobil that laid out the industry's thinking. A Texaco memo, for example, warned that "supply significantly exceeds demand year-round. This results in very poor refinery margins and very poor refinery financial results. Significant events need to occur to assist in reducing supplies and/or increasing the demand for gasoline." An investigation would subpoena internal company documents and take testimony from oil executives under oath—not just in an "unsworn" chitchat like the sideshow put on by the Senate commerce and energy committees last year—to discover whether the companies conspired to rig prices or manipulate supply.

7. Who's making money off your retirement?
It's been predicted that at least 1 in 10 retirees in 2020 will teeter on the edge of financial collapse or plunge into outright poverty. Social Security is just a small bit of the problem. The potentially much bigger challenge is the disappearance of pensions, most of which have been replaced with 401(k)-type accounts dependent wholly on the securities market. This is an enormous shift: Corporations have succeeded, with amazingly little protest from labor, in transferring the cost—and the risk—of retirement from employer to employee. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. provides some backup when a company with a standard pension plan goes under (think United Airlines). With 401(k)s, there is no insurance. The Securities and Exchange Commission is supposed to regulate mutual funds, which handle most 401(k) money; the sec has nowhere near the resources to keep tabs on the $9 trillion business, so policing is largely left up to the funds themselves.

Before this crisis grows greater, Congress ought to launch a serious investigation into the retirement system. We've got to know all the ways companies are bailing on their pension plans—by converting them into 401(k)s, by filing for bankruptcy, or simply by quietly not paying into (or "underfunding") them for years at a time. We need to understand who controls the money in 401(k)s, what the hidden costs are, and to what extent these accounts are threatened by Wall Street conflicts of interest. For example, thanks to deregulation laws passed during the Clinton administration, commercial banks can now sell the mutual funds that their investment-banking arms manage, but investors have no recourse if their 401(k)s lose value because of bad management. With Social Security privatization refusing to die, and Wall Street eager to get its hands on that money, Congress should do some due diligence.

8. Why is the morning-after pill not at your 7-Eleven?
After numerous clinical trials, thousands of pages of reports, and supportive resolutions from major medical groups including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, two Food and Drug Administration advisory committees in 2003 recommended that the FDA allow the emergency contraception pill Plan B to be sold over the counter. Conservative groups threw a fit, and House Republican leaders, including then-Majority Leader Tom DeLay, urged the FDA to reconsider. When Democrats fought back, challenging the nomination of Lester Crawford to head the FDA until they got answers on Plan B, Crawford assured them that "the science part is generally done. We're just now down to what the label will look [like]. This is going to be a very unusual sort of approval." After promising a decision on Plan B by September 1, 2005, Crawford instead launched a public comment period. Not much later, he left the agency amid unrelated conflict-of-interest allegations. Now Congress deserves some answers: Why did Crawford overrule his own scientists? On what grounds? And was anyone outside the FDA involved? What about, for example, the calendar entry for then-FDA head Mark McClellan on April 21, 2003—just a few days after the agency got the application for over-the-counter Plan B—for "Conference call w/Jay Lefkowitz re: Plan B submis"? Lefkowitz, a White House go-to guy for conservatives, was at the time the deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy.

9. Grounds for impeachment?
Congressional investigators digging into the aforementioned questions cannot ignore the possibility of impeachment proceedings against Vice President Cheney, who figures prominently in almost every one of the scandals engulfing the administration. It was Cheney who ran the government's response to the 9/11 attacks without constitutional authority, at one point ordering shoot-downs of commercial planes and what would turn out to be a medevac helicopter; who led the secret meetings of administration officials and oilmen to set energy policy; who allowed Ahmed Chalabi to play the U.S. government like a violin; who very well may be the origin of the whisper campaign that culminated in the Plame leak; and, of course, it was Cheney's former employer (and source of continuing deferred compeNSAtion paychecks) that benefited enormously from no-bid contracts in Iraq. Judicial Watch, the conservative legal outfit in Washington, has unearthed an email dated March 5, 2003, sent by an Army Corps of Engineers official whose name had been blacked out, that said of a pending deal under which Halliburton would rebuild the Iraqi oil industry, "We anticipate no issue since the action has been coordinated w VP's office." There's plenty more where that came from; whether any of Cheney's actions constitute "high crimes and misdemeanors" is for Congress, and the nation, to debate.



This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.

© 2006 The Foundation for National Progress

And as REPUBLO-FASCISM continues to spread its tentacles ......

Throughout .....

The "fabric of life" .....

Here in OUR America ......

Replacing OUR former "AMERICAN" system of justice .....

With open courts .....

And the right to confront witnesses .....

With a "STAR CHAMBER" type of "KING'S JUSTICE" .....

Where everything is "SECRET" .....

And "unknowable" ......

To either the accused .....

OR THE AMERICAN PUBLIC ......

WHO NO LONGER HAVE A "RIGHT TO KNOW" .....

OR CONSTITUTIONAL SAFEGUARDS .....

IN A REPUBLO-FASCIST WORLD .....

Such as OUR America is rapidly becoming ....

And so ....

We have ....

"Sting case prosecutors ask to shield witnesses - Anonymity for translators will prejudice jury, argue attorneys for mosque leader, pizza shop owner"

By MICHELE MORGAN BOLTON, Staff writer, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Wednesday, August 23, 2006

ALBANY -- Federal prosecutors want FBI language specialists to be allowed to hide their identities -- using pseudonyms and physical disguises -- when they testify next month against two Albany men caught in a counterterrorism sting.

The translators are expected to speak about Urdu, Kurdish, Arabic and Bengali audiotape translations and written documents during the trial of Yassin Aref, a city mosque leader and Kurdish refugee, and Central Avenue pizza shop owner Mohammed Hossain.

Prosecutors say in court papers that the actual names of the translators are essentially irrelevant to their expert opinions:

"The mere name of a witness provides no insight into his or her translation abilities."

Prosecutors also say the protections will help ensure the safety of the translators, some of whom either live or work overseas.

Defense lawyers, though, contend the request is an Orwellian insult that will encourage a jury to assume that Aref and Hossain, a Bangladeshi immigrant who has lived here for decades, are dangerous.

"The prejudice to Mr. Aref and Mr. Hossain inherent in such measures cannot be underestimated," defense lawyer Terence L. Kindlon argued in court documents.

"And this is especially unjust when ... the defendants ... have done nothing whatsoever to threaten the translators."

Attorneys on both sides of the money-laundering case Tuesday were in Binghamton for a pretrial hearing.

The trial begins Sept. 6.

Hossain and Aref were arrested in an FBI sting that began in August 2003 in which they allegedly took part in a fake plot to sell missile launchers to terrorists.

A superseding indictment in September also charged Aref, an Iraqi refugee, with having documented connections to key terrorist figures in the Middle East.

He has been held in 22-hour-a-day protective confinement in the Rensselaer County jail since Sept. 30, when U.S. Magistrate Judge David Homer revoked his bail after 13 months of electronically monitored house arrest.

Hossain is free on bail.

Historically, requests for witness anonymity or disguises have surfaced in organized crime trials or congressional hearings, said Albany Law School professor Dan Moriarty.

"It's not rocket science to see that it's not normal," Moriarty said.

"It's really, really unusual."

Should a judge approve the prosecution request, defense lawyers would be at an immediate disadvantage during cross-examination, Moriarty said.

He said it would be impossible, without benefit of any underlying information, to try to impeach the witnesses' credibility or test their stories.

Court papers filed by assistant U.S. attorneys William Pericak and Elizabeth Coombe offer few details about their proposed witnesses.

They include the translators' basic academic expertise and language capabilities.

Kindlon also has renewed his call for U.S. District Judge Thomas J. McAvoy to suppress evidence, including 14 phone calls Aref allegedly made from Albany to the Damascus office of the IMK, or the Islamic Movement for Kurdistan.

Kindlon has said he believes the conversations were illegally taped by the National Security Agency in the post-9/11 fight against terror.

Published reports also have linked Aref and Hossain's alleged activities to that program.

The Justice Department claims the calls made to a Syrian number between 1999 and 2001 were a means of gathering intelligence for Osama bin Laden.

In court papers, Kindlon also acknowledged that McAvoy previously ruled, "in a secret order, that any such information regarding the transcripts of said phone conversations was classified."

Last week a federal judge in Detroit ruled that the NSA's warrantless surveillance program, approved in 2001 by President Bush, is unconstitutional.

Based on that, Kindlon said this week he planned to submit another request to have the case thrown out.

While the Detroit ruling was encouraging to the defense, national legal experts aren't so sure it will stand the test of time -- or appeal.

Howard J. Bashman, a nationally known appellate lawyer who appears regularly before the U.S Court of Appeals, said it's likely McAvoy will consider the Detroit decision.

But because it was rendered by a fellow trial court judge, McAvoy isn't bound by it, he said.

"This federal judge will have the opportunity to decide whether the evidence was legally gathered, independent of the Detroit judge's ruling," Bashman said.

"But he would be bound by it only if it was a higher level judge."

"He can rely upon it, however, if he finds it persuasive."

Bashman said he was surprised by the request for anonymity.

"If someone's appearance is greatly altered during testimony, the ability to tell how they're reacting, using normal human skills, is impeded," he said.

Morgan Bolton can be reached at 434-2403 or by e-mail at mbolton@timesunion.com.

http://www.alternet.org/story/40678/

Where Bush's Arrogance Has Taken Us

By Jim Hightower, Hightower Lowdown. Posted August 23, 2006.


An illegal war, a long list of eroded rights, and a country run by and for the benefit of corporate campaign donors -- all courtesy of the imperial presidency. Tools

[Editor's Note: The August issue of The Hightower Lowdown contains a poster-sized chart detailing the many grievances, lies and miscues of the Bush Administration. Below is the story in text form, you can also download the full poster from The Hightower Lowdown.]

During his gubernatorial days in Texas, George W let slip a one-sentence thought that unintentionally gave us a peek into his political soul. In hindsight, it should've been loudly broadcast all across our land so people could've absorbed it, contemplated its portent?and roundly rejected the guy's bid for the presidency. On May 21, 1999, reacting to some satirical criticism of him, Bush snapped: "There ought to be limits to freedom."

Gosh, so many freedoms to limit, so little time! But in five short years, the BushCheneyRummy regime has made remarkable strides toward dismembering the genius of the Founders, going at our Constitution and Bill of Rights like famished alligators chasing a couple of poodles.

Forget about such niceties as separation of powers, checks and balances (crucial to the practice of democracy), the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, and open government-these guys are on an autocratic tear. Whenever they've been challenged (all too rarely), they simply shout "war on terror," "commander-in-chief," "support our troops," "executive privilege," "I'm the decider," or some other slam-the-door political phrase designed to silence any opposition. Indeed, opponents are branded "enemies" who must be demonized, personally attacked, and, if possible, destroyed. Bush's find-the-loopholes lawyers assert that a president has the right to lie (even about going to war), to imprison people indefinitely (without charges, lawyers, hearings, courts, or hope), to torture people, to spy on Americans without court or congressional review, to prosecute reporters who dare to report, to rewrite laws on executive whim?and on and on.

Here, we are pleased to give you a sense of the enormity of what Bush & Company are doing under the cloak of war and executive privilege in a handy-dandy poster format.

The War President


"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
-George W., August 2004


Number of Americans killed in Bush's Iraq war as of August 2006: 2577

What Bush press flack Tony Snow said the day the total number of American dead reached 2,500: "It's a number"

Number of Americans killed since Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" on May 1, 2003: 2,438

Number of Americans wounded (a vague term that includes such horrors as brain damage, limb blasted off, eyes blown out, psyche shattered, etc.) in Bush's war:
Official count: 18,777
Independent count: up to 48,000


Estimated number of Iraqi civilians (men, women, and children) killed in Bush's war since Saddam Hussein was ousted: 38,960

For Iraqis, the bloodiest month of the war so far: June 2006 (more than 100 civilians killed per day)

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmit's advice to Iraqis who see TV reports of innocent civilians being killed by occupying troops: "Change the channel."

Percent of Iraqis who want American troops to leave: 82

Stockpiles of Weapons of Mass Destruction found in Iraq since Bush committed Americans to war in 2003 on the basis that Saddam had and was about to use WMDs: 0

Number of nations in the world: 192

Number that joined Bush's "Coalition of the Willing" (COW) to invade Iraq: 48
(The list includes such military powers as Angola, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Latvia, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Romania, Solomon Islands, and Uganda.)

Number of COW nations that actually sent any troops to Iraq: 39
(Of these, 32 sent fewer than 1,000 troops. Many sent no fighting units, deploying only engineers, trainers, humanitarian units, and other noncombat personnel.)


Number of the 39 COW nations contributing troops that have since withdrawn them: 17
(An additional 7 have announced plans to withdraw all or part of their contingents this year.)

Number of COW troops in Iraq: 150,000

Number of these that are U.S. troops: 139,000

Number of White House officials and cabinet members who have any of their immediate family in Bush's war: 0

Follow the Money


We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."
-"Howling Paul" Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary, in testimony to Congress, March 2003


The official White House claim before the invasion of what the war and occupation would cost U.S. taxpayers: $50 billion

As of July 2006, the total amount appropriated by Congress for Bush's ongoing war and occupation: $295,634,921,248

Current Pentagon spending per month in Iraq: $8 billion (or $185,185.19 per minute)

Assuming all troops return home by 2010, the projected "real costs" for the war: More than $1 trillion
(includes veterans' pay and medical costs, interest on the billions Bush has borrowed to pay for his war, etc.)

Bonus Stat!


Annual salary of Stuart Baker, hired by the Bushites to be the White House "Director for Lessons Learned": $106,641

Number of lessons that Bush appears to have learned: 0

The Imperial Presidency


"I'm the commander -- see, I don't need to explain -- I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."
George W., August, 2002.




Signing Statements

When signing a particular congressional act into law, a few presidents have occasionally issued a "signing statement" to clarify their understanding of what Congress intended. These have not had the force of law and have been used discreetly in the past.

Very quietly, however, Bush has radically increased both the number and reach of these statements, essentially asserting that the president can arbitrarily decide which laws he will obey.


Number of signing statements issued by Bush as of July 2006: more than 800
(This is more than the combined total of all 42 previous presidents.)
A few examples of congressionally passed laws he has effectively annulled through these extralegal signing statements:


a ban against torture of prisoners by the U.S. military

a requirement that the FBI periodically report to Congress on how it is using the Patriot Act to search our homes and secretly seize people's private papers

a ban against storage in military databases of intelligence about Americans that was obtained illegally

a directive for the executive branch to transmit scientific information to Congress "uncensored and without delay" when requested


Provision of the Constitution clearly stating that Congress alone has the power "to make all laws": Article 1, Section 8

Provision of the Constitution clearly stating that the president "shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed": Article 2, Section 3

Name of the young lawyer in the Reagan administration who wrote a 1986 strategy memo on how to pervert the use of signing statements in order to concentrate more power in the executive branch, as Bush is now doing: Samuel Alito, named to the U.S. Supreme Court by Bush this year

National Security Letters

These are secret executive writs that the infamous 2001 Patriot Act authorizes the FBI to issue to public libraries, internet firms, banks, and others. Upon receiving an NSL, the institution or firm is required to turn over any private records it holds on you, me, or whomever the agents have chosen to search.

Who authorizes the FBI to issue these secret writs? The FBI itself.


Surely the agents have to get a search warrant, a grand jury subpoena, or a court's approval? No


But to issue an NSL, an agent must show probable cause that the person being searched has committed some crime, right? No

Well, don't officials have to inform citizens that their records are being seized so they can defend themselves or protest? No

Number of NSLs issued by various FBI offices last year alone: 9,254

NSA Eavesdropping

In 2001, Bush issued a secret order for the National Security Agency to begin vacuuming up massive numbers of telephone and internet exchanges by U.S. citizens, illegally seizing this material without any judicial approval or informing Congress, as required by law.


Number of Americans who have had their phone and internet communications taken by NSA: Just about everyone!
(NSA is tapping into the entire database of long-distance calls and internet messages run through AT&T and probably other companies as well.)

In May of this year, the Justice Department abruptly halted an internal investigation that was trying to uncover the name of the top officials who had authorized NSA's warrantless, unconstitutional program. Who killed this probe, which was requested by Congress? George W himself! (He directed NSA simply to refuse security clearances for the department's legal investigators.)

What happened to NSA Director Michael Hayden, who was the key architect of Bush's illegal eavesdropping program and the one who would've formally denied clearances to Justice Department investigators? In May, Bush promoted him to head the CIA.

This past May, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales warned that journalists who report on NSA's spy program could be prosecuted under the antiquated Espionage Act of 1917.


Times in U.S. history this act has been used to go after the press: 0

Margin by which the U.S. House in 1917 voted down an amendment to make the Espionage Act apply to journalists: 184-144

Interesting Fact

The New York Times reported this June that Bush was running another spy program. This one was snooping through international banking records, including millions of bank transactions done by innocent Americans. George reacted angrily to the exposure, branding the Times report "disgraceful" and declaring that revelation of his spy program "does great harm to the United States." The White House and its right-wing acolytes promptly launched a "Hate-the-Times" political campaign.

Name the guy who was the first to reveal that such a bank-spying program was in the works: George W. Bush! At a September 2001 press conference, he announced that he'd just signed an executive order to monitor all international bank transactions.

Watch Lists

From the Bushites' ill-fated Total Information Awareness program (meant to monitor all of our computerized transactions) to the robust efforts by Rumsfeld's Pentagon to barge into the domestic surveillance game, America under Bush has fast become "The Watched Society."


Number of data-mining programs being run secretly on us by the federal government: Nearly 200 separate programs at 52 agencies

Number of "local activity reports" submitted to the Pentagon in 2004 under the "Threat and Local Observation Notice" program (TALON), which directed military officers throughout our country to keep an eye on suspicious activities by civilians: More than 5,000
(They included such "threats" as peace demonstrators and 10 activists protesting outside Halliburton's headquarters.)

Number of official "watch lists" maintained by the feds: More than a dozen run by 9 different agencies

Number of Americans on the Transportation Security Administration's "No- Fly" list: That's a secret.
(TSA concedes that it's in the tens of thousands. In 2005 alone, some 30,000 people called TSA to complain that their names were mistakenly on the list.)

Most famous citizen who is on the No-Fly list and has been repeatedly pulled aside by TSA for additional screenings at airports: Sen. Ted Kennedy


How can you get your name removed from TSA list? That's a secret.

Name That Guy!

In 1966, a young Republican congressman stood against his party's elders to cosponsor the original Freedom of Information Act, valiantly declaring that public records "are public property." He said that FOIA "will make it considerably more difficult for secrecy-minded bureaucrats to decide arbitrarily that the people should be denied access to information on the conduct of government."

Who was that virtuous lawmaker? Donald Rumsfeld!

Only eight years later, Gerald Ford's chief of staff strongly urged him to veto the continuation of FOIA. Who was that dastardly staffer? Donald Rumsfeld!

Who is now one of the chief "secrecy-minded bureaucrats" who routinely violates OIA's principles? Right, him again!

Regime of Secrecy


"Democracies die behind closed doors."
-- Appeals court judge Damon Keith, ruling in a 2002 case that the Bushites cannot hold deportation hearings in secret


Increase in the number of government documents marked "secret" between 2001 and 2004: 81 percent


Number of government documents stamped "secret" in 2001: 8.6 million

Number of government documents stamped "secret" in 2004: 15.6 million (a new record)

Cost to taxpayers of classifying and securing documents in 2004: $7.2 billion ($460 per document)

Number of previously declassified documents that the CIA tried to reclassify as "secret" under a 2001 secret agreement with the National Archives, even though many had already been published and some date back to the Korean War: 25,315


Number of different "official designations" the government now has to classify nonsecret information so it still is kept out of the public's reach: Between 50 and 60
(They include such stamps as CBU: Controlled But Unclassified, SBU: Sensitive But Unclassified, and LOU: Limited Official Use Only.)

The only vice-president in history who has claimed that he, like the president, has the inherent authority to mark "secret" on any document he chooses: "Buckshot" Cheney

Number of documents Cheney has classified: That's a secret.
(He claims he does not have to report this to anyone -- not even the president.)

Of the 7,045 advisory committee meetings held by the Bushites in 2004, percentage that were completely closed to the public, contrary to the clear intent of the Federal Advisory Committee Act: 64 percent (a new record)

Number of times from 1953 to1975 (the peak of the Cold War) that presidents invoked the "state secrets" privilege, which grants them unilateral power in extraordinary instances literally to shut down court cases on the grounds they could reveal secrets that the president doesn't want disclosed: 4

Number of times the same privilege was invoked between 2001 and 2006: At least 24

Under Clinton, Attorney General Janet Reno issued an official memo instructing agencies to release as much information as possible to the public. In October 2001, AG John Ashcroft issued a memo canceling Reno's approach, expressly instructing agencies to look for reasons to deny the public access to information and pledging to support the denials if the agencies were sued.

2005 FOIA requests still awaiting a response at year's end: 31 percent
(a one-third increase over the 2004 backlog)

Median waiting time to get an answer on FOIA request from Bush's justice department: 863 days

Halliburton


"Halliburton is a unique kind of company."
-- Dick Cheney, September 2003


Total value of contracts given to Halliburton for work in the Bush-Cheney "War on Terror" since 2001: More than $15 billion

Amount that Halliburton pays to the Third World laborers it imports into Iraq to do the work in its dining facilities, laundries, etc.: $6 per 12-hour day (50 cents an hour)

Amount that Halliburton bills us taxpayers for each of these workers: $50 a day

Amount that Halliburton bills U.S. taxpayers for:
A case of sodas: $45

Washing a bag of laundry: $100
Halliburton's campaign contributions in Bush-Cheney election years:
In 2000: $285,252 (96 percent to Republicans)
In 2004: $145,500 (89 percent to Republicans)
Plus $365,065 from members of its board of directors (99 percent to Republicans)
Increase in Halliburton's profits since Bush-Cheney took office in 2000: 379 percent

Halliburton's 2005 profit: $1.1 billion
(highest in the corporation's 86-year history


"Since leaving Halliburton to become George Bush's vice-president, I've severed all of my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interest. I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind."
Former CEO Dick Cheney, Meet the Press, September 2003


Annual payments that Cheney has received from Halliburton since he's been vice-president:
2001: $205,298
2002: $162,392
2003: $178,437
2004: $194,852
2005: $211,465
Cash bonus paid to Cheney by Halliburton just before he took office: $1.4 million


Retirement package he was given in 2000 after only 5 years as CEO: $20 million
Number of times in the past two years that Republicans have killed Sen. Byron Dorgan's amendment to set up a Truman-style committee on war profiteering to investigate Halliburton: 3
Naughty word Cheney used during a Senate photo session in 2004 to assail Sen. Patrick Leahy, who had criticized Cheney's ongoing ties to Halliburton: "Go #@! percent yourself.

Jim Hightower is the author of "Let's Stop Beating Around the Bush" (Viking Press). He publishes the monthly Hightower Lowdown.

I still remember 9-11 .....

And I am curious about my memories .....

The timing of statements, actually .....

Statements that were being made by the media ......

About what had happened ....

BEFORE THE TOWERS WERE STRUCK ....

On that day .....

I was down in Troy, New York ....

And when I walked into a coffee shop down there .....

A little after nine a.m., I believe .....

The owner ......

A young man .....

Came up to me and said, "Livyjr, did'ja hear about the hijackings ..."

And here is where I try to recall just what it was he said to me .....

As to who it was who had hijacked these planes .....

In my mind, I keep hearing him say "terrorists" .....

As if there was a script being read from by the news media ....

As if they knew details that you would think that they wouldn't know ....

And yet they did .....

BUT HOW DID THEY KNOW?

What went through my mind .....

When this young man told about these multiple hijackings .....

Was .....

THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE .....

WITH THE AIRLINE SECURITY THAT WE HAVE OVER HERE ......

THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE .....

And when the impossible is happening .....

Well .....

That's when I get real curious ....

Because for the impossible to happen .....

Somehow ......

Someone .....

Had to make it possible .....

And that is what I remain curious about .....

To this day .....

WHO OVER HERE AIDED AND ASSISTED THOSE HIJACKERS SO THAT THEY COULD GET POSSESSION OF ALL THOSE PLANES?

WHO OVER HERE HAD THAT KIND OF CLOUT?

And after the planes hit the two towers .....

Another impossibility ....

It all became anti-climax for me .....

It was all just too pat ....

TOO controlled ....

TOO MADE FOR TV .....

With those towers going down like clockwork ....

I had things to do that day .....

And places that I had to be ....

So after the towers came down .....

I finished up my coffee .....

And went on my way .....

And so ....

It was nice of them ....

Whoever put on that show for us .....

And if someone said that Dick Cheney's hand was in it up to his elbow .....

I wouldn't be surprised .....

It was nice of them .....

To fit that whole show .....

Into a short enough period of time .....

Where you could watch the whole thing go down .....

In the space of time .....

It took to drink some coffee .....

And so ......

A "MADE-FOR-TV" DISASTER .....

WAS THIS 9-11 ......

AND WHEN I FOLLOW THE BENEFITS THAT ACCRUED FROM IT .....

I KEEP COMING BACK TO THE REPUBLICAN PARTY .....

AND THE OIL COMPANIES .....

AND DICK CHENEY ....

And so .....

REPUBLO-FASCISM .....

When I hear talk of "tax farmers" ......

I think of the EMPIRE OF ROME ......

And all the hapless peoples .....

Of the "ROMAN WORLD" ....

Who were victimized .....

By Roman "tax farmers" .....

And now ......

It appears that they are back .....

Here in the REPUBLO-FASCIST EMPIRE OF AMERICA ......

OR MURKA ....

As George W. Bush calls it .....

And so ....

Paul Krugman Column From NY Times - Some More Thoughts On Private Tax Collectors

"Tax Farmers, Mercenaries and Viceroys"

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 21, 2006

Yesterday The New York Times reported that the Internal Revenue Service would outsource collection of unpaid back taxes to private debt collectors, who would receive a share of the proceeds.

It’s an awful idea.

Privatizing tax collection will cost far more than hiring additional I.R.S. agents, raise less revenue and pose obvious risks of abuse.

But what’s really amazing is the extent to which this plan is a retreat from modern principles of government.

I used to say that conservatives want to take us back to the 1920’s, but the Bush administration seemingly wants to go back to the 16th century.

And privatized tax collection is only part of the great march backward.

In the bad old days, government was a haphazard affair.

There was no bureaucracy to collect taxes, so the king subcontracted the job to private “tax farmers,” who often engaged in extortion.

There was no regular army, so the king hired mercenaries, who tended to wander off and pillage the nearest village.

There was no regular system of administration, so the king assigned the task to favored courtiers, who tended to be corrupt, incompetent or both.

Modern governments solved these problems by creating a professional revenue department to collect taxes, a professional officer corps to enforce military discipline, and a professional civil service.

But President Bush apparently doesn’t like these innovations, preferring to govern as if he were King Louis XII.

So the tax farmers are coming back, and the mercenaries already have.

There are about 20,000 armed “security contractors” in Iraq, and they have been assigned critical tasks, from guarding top officials to training the Iraqi Army.

Like the mercenaries of old, today’s corporate mercenaries have discipline problems.

“They shoot people, and someone else has to deal with the aftermath,” declared a U.S. officer last year.

And armed men operating outside the military chain of command have caused at least one catastrophe.

Remember the four Americans hung from a bridge?

They were security contractors from Blackwater USA who blundered into Falluja — bypassing a Marine checkpoint — while the Marines were trying to pursue a methodical strategy of pacifying the city.

The killing of the four, and the knee-jerk reaction of the White House — which ordered an all-out assault, then called it off as casualties mounted — may have ended the last chance of containing the insurgency.

Yet Blackwater, whose chief executive is a major contributor to the Republican Party, continues to thrive.

The Department of Homeland Security sent heavily armed Blackwater employees into New Orleans immediately after Katrina.

To whom are such contractors accountable?

Last week a judge threw out a jury’s $10 million verdict against Custer Battles, a private contractor that was hired, among other things, to provide security at Baghdad’s airport.

Custer Battles has become a symbol of the mix of cronyism, corruption and sheer amateurishness that doomed the Iraq adventure — and the judge didn’t challenge the jury’s finding that the company engaged in blatant fraud.

But he ruled that the civil fraud suit against the company lacked a legal basis, because as far as he could tell, the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq’s government from April 2003 to June 2004, wasn’t “an instrumentality of the U.S. government.”

It wasn’t created by an act of Congress; it wasn’t a branch of the State Department or any other established agency.

So what was it?

Any premodern monarch would have recognized the arrangement: in effect, the authority was a personal fief run by a viceroy answering only to the ruler.

And since the fief operated outside all the usual rules of government, the viceroy was free to hire a staff of political loyalists lacking any relevant qualifications for their jobs, and to hand out duffel bags filled with $100 bills to contractors with the right connections.

Tax farmers, mercenaries and viceroys: why does the Bush administration want to run a modern superpower as if it were a 16th-century monarchy?

Maybe people who’ve spent their political careers denouncing government as the root of all evil can’t grasp the idea of governing well.

Or maybe it’s cynical politics: privatization provides both an opportunity to evade accountability and a vast source of patronage.

But the price is enormous.

This administration has thrown away centuries of lessons about how to make government work.

No wonder it has failed at everything except fearmongering.

Taxes in the Roman Empire

In the early days of the Roman Republic, public taxes consisted of modest assessments on owned wealth and property.

The tax rate under normal circumstances was 1% and sometimes would climb as high as 3% in situations such as war.

These modest taxes were levied against land, homes and other real estate, slaves, animals, personal items and monetary wealth.

Taxes were collected from individuals and, at times, payments could be refunded by the treasury for excess collections.

With limited census accuracy, tax collection on individuals was a difficult task at best.

By 167 B.C. the Republic had enriched itself greatly through a series of conquests.

Gains such as the silver and gold mines in Spain created an excellent source of revenue for the state, and a much larger tax base through its provincial residents.

By this time, Rome no longer needed to levy a tax against its citizens in Italy and looked only to the provinces for collections.

With expansion, Roman censors found that accurate census taking in the provinces was a difficult task at best.

To ease the strain, taxes were assessed as a tithe on entire communities rather than on individuals.

Tax assessments in these communities fell under the jurisdiction of Provincial governors and various local magistrates, using rules similar to the old system.

Tax farmers (Publicani) were used to collect these taxes from the provincials.

Rome, in eliminating its own burden for this process, would put the collection of taxes up for auction every few years.

The Publicani would bid for the right to collect in particular regions, and pay the state in advance of this collection.

These payments were, in effect, loans to the state and Rome was required to pay interest back to the Publicani.

As an offset, the Publicani had the individual responsibility of converting properties and goods collected into coinage, alleviating this hardship from the treasury.

In the end, the collectors would keep anything in excess of what they bid plus the interest due from the treasury; with the risk being that they might not collect as much as they originally bid.

Tax farming proved to be an incredibly profitable enterprise and served to increase the treasury, as well as line the pockets of the Publicani.

However, the process was ripe with corruption and scheming.

For example, with the profits collected, tax farmers could collude with local magistrates or farmers to buy large quantities of grain at low rates and hold it in reserve until times of shortage.

These Publicani were also money lenders, or the bankers of the ancient world, and would lend cash to hard-pressed provincials at the exorbitant rates of 4% per month or more.

In the late 1st century BC, and after considerably more Roman expansion, Augustus essentially put an end to tax farming.

Complaints from provincials for excessive assessments and large, un-payable debts ushered in the final days of this lucrative business.

The Publicani continued to exist as money lenders and entrepreneurs, but easy access to wealth through taxes was gone.

Tax farming was replaced by direct taxation early in the Empire and each province was required to pay a wealth tax of about 1% and a flat poll tax on each adult.

This new procedure, of course, required regular census taking to evaluate the taxable number of people and their income/wealth status.

Taxation in this environment switched mainly from one of owned property and wealth to that of an income tax.

As a result, the taxable yield varied greatly based on economic conditions, but theoretically, the process was fairer and less open to corruption.

In contrast, the Publicani had to focus their efforts on collecting revenues where it was most easily available due to limited time and capacity.

Their efforts were mainly directed at the cash wealthy because converting properties into cash could be a difficult process.

Additionally, growth of a provincial tax base went straight to the coffers of the Publicani.

They had the luxury of bidding against previous tax collections and the Treasury's knowledge of increased wealth would take several collections before auction prices were raised.

In this way, the Publicani increased their own wealth, but eventually the state would reap the benefit of increased collections down the line.

The imperial system of flat levies instituted by Augustus shifted the system into being far less progressive, however.

Growth in the provincial taxable basis under the Publicani led to higher collections in time, while under Augustus, fixed payments reduced this potential.

Tax paying citizens were aware of the exact amounts they needed to pay and any excess income remained with the communities.

While there could obviously be reassessments that would adjust the taxable base it was a slow process that left a lot of room for the earning of untaxed incomes.

While seemingly less effective to the state than that of the Publicani system, the new practice allowed for considerable economic growth and expansion.

As time passed each successive emperor was challenged with meeting the soaring costs of administration and financing the legions, both for national defense and to maintain loyalty.

New schemes to revise the tax structure came and went throughout the Empire's history.

Large inflation rates and debased coinage values, by the reign of Diocletion, led to one of the more drastic changes in the system.

In the late 3rd century AD, he imposed a universal price freeze, capping maximum prices, while at the same time he reinstated the land tax on Italian landowners.

Special tolls on money traders and companies were also imposed to help increase the tax collections.

Diocletion's program, in theory, should have helped ease the burden on various classes of taxpayers, but it didn't work that way in practice.

As an example, additional taxes were levied on land owners after the land tax had been paid because this was now a separate tax, instead of taking into account that taxes had already been collected.

The burden of paying the expected amounts was shifted from communities and individuals within them, to the local senatorial class.

The Senators would then be subject to complete ruin in the case of economic shortfall in a particular region.

Following Diocletion, Constantine compounded these burdens by making the senatorial class hereditary.

By so doing, all debts and economic ramifications were passed from one senatorial generation to the next, ruining entire families and never allowing for a recovery that could benefit an entire community.

Taxes in the Roman Empire, in comparison with modern times, were certainly no more excessive.

In many cases they are far less per capita than anything we can compare to today.

However, the strain of tax revenues was heavily placed on those who could most influence the economy and it would have dire consequences.

The economic struggles that plagued the late Imperial system coupled with the tax laws certainly played a part in the demise of the world's greatest empire.

"...in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes"--Benjamin Franklin

http://www.unrv.com/economy/roman-taxes.php

August 3, 2006

"New Tapes Disclose Confusion Within the Military on Sept. 11"

By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON, Aug. 2 — Newly disclosed tapes offer evidence of the widespread confusion within the military as the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were being carried out, further undermining claims by the Pentagon that it moved quickly to try to intercept and shoot down one or more of the hijacked jets.

When matched with the timeline of the attacks, the tapes make clear that information about the hijackings was slow to reach the military on Sept. 11 and that much of the information that did reach Air Force commanders was faulty.

The tapes were provided under subpoena to the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks, and parts of them had previously been made public by that commission.

But the full collection of nearly 30 hours of tapes from the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad, were released by the Pentagon last year to Michael Bronner, a producer on the recent film “United 93,” who described them in detail in an article posted this week on the Web site of Vanity Fair magazine ( http://www.vanityfair.com ).

The Web site includes links to excerpts from the actual tapes.

The tapes demonstrate that for most of the morning of Sept. 11, the airspace over New York and Washington was essentially undefended, and that jet fighters scrambled to intercept the hijacked planes were involved in a fruitless chase for planes that had already crashed.

Although much of the conversation in the tapes is heavy with military jargon, it makes clear the terror of the morning, with military air controllers trying to monitor the whereabouts of hijacked planes bearing down on lower Manhattan and Washington.

“I got an aircraft six miles east of the White House!” one military commander is quoted as barking to a colleague.

The tapes also document a conversation among officers about how best to shoot down passenger planes, if the order came from the White House.

“My recommendation, if we have to take anybody out, large aircraft, we use AIM-9’s in the face,” an Air Force commander is quoted as saying, a reference to a type of missile that would be fired into the nose of the plane.

The Sept. 11 commission subpoenaed the tapes and other evidence after the panel’s investigators determined that material had been improperly withheld by Norad, which is responsible for air defense.

Members of the commission said the tapes demonstrated that the Pentagon’s initial account of its actions on Sept. 11 was wrong and that some military officers might have intentionally provided false statements to the commission.

The officers had testified that Norad had been tracking Flight 93, the plane that crashed into a Pennsylvania field after a cockpit struggle between passengers and the hijackers, and were prepared to shoot it down if it approached Washington.

But the tapes show that the military was not even alerted to the hijacking of the United flight until four minutes after it had crashed.