And, of course, after "packing" the place with his supporters ....

Well, you know ...

"Big BILL" Frist WON ....

Yes ...

That is right ...

"Big BILL" Frist won the "straw poll" ...

Which means that he is the one all the REPUBLICANS want to replace George W. Bush come 2008 .....

"Frist leads informal GOP poll for '08"

By RON FOURNIER, Associated Press
Last updated: 6:55 a.m., Sunday, March 12, 2006

MEMPHIS, Tenn. -- With home-field advantage, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist placed first in an informal poll of 2008 presidential hopefuls at a Republican conference Saturday night.

The two-term Tennessee senator received 526 first-place votes, or 36.9 percent, in the Southern Republican Leadership Conference's "straw poll" sponsored by Hotline, a political digest.

Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney finished second with 14.4 percent and Sen. George Allen of Virginia finished third, tied with President Bush -- who cannot seek a third term.

The results were not a surprise and were unlikely to impact the still-evolving 2008 presidential field.

Frist was the only potential candidate who aggressively recruited delegates.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona, among the most popular Republicans in national surveys, threw a wrench in the polling Friday night by asking delegates to vote for Bush as a show of support.

He finished a distant fifth.

In OUR America ...

As I see it ...

When it comes to "GOVERNMENT" .....

There is no "public" ......

So there is really no "public" access to OUR governmental records .....

In OUR America ...

There are CITIZENS ....

And WE are the "government" ......

SO ....

Let's get off this kick of "the public" ....

As though we were somehow "separate" or "separated" from OUR GOVERNMENT ...

By those of us who just happen to be working for that government at the time ....

"Polls: Public Worried About Gov't Secrecy"

By The Associated Press

36 minutes ago

Two new polls gauging Americans' views on government openness found a majority believe the federal government leans more toward secrecy than openness, while eight in 10 are convinced that an open government is necessary for an effective democracy.

The polls released Sunday also found, however, that the public believed government should keep some information private, particularly if it was necessary to combat terrorism.

One poll, by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University, found that 64 percent of respondents thought the federal government is somewhat or very secretive, while more than a third think their local and state governments lean more toward secrecy.

Fifty-five percent said state and local governments were somewhat or very open.

But Americans were more closely divided on when government information should be made public, according to the telephone poll of 1,007 adults.

Forty-six percent said government records should be considered public and their release should only be blocked when it "would do harm"; 42 percent said the government should protect its information and only release it if there is a "sound legal case" for it to be public.

A separate poll released Sunday found respondents were supportive of open government and access to public records — though solid majorities also said that government officials should keep records secret if "necessary", or to help in the war on terrorism.

The poll by the AccessNorthwest research and outreach project at the Edward R. Murrow School of Communication at Washington State University in Pullman found that 81 percent said democracy requires government to operate openly.

Nearly seven in 10, or 69 percent, told researchers that open public records and meetings keep government honest.

Nearly as many, 63 percent, said it was OK for government officials to keep records secret if they deem it necessary, and almost three-quarters, 73 percent, believe the president should "make some public records secret if it might help with the war on terrorism."

The Scripps poll was conducted from Feb. 19 to March 3.

There is a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

The Washington State University poll, conducted from Feb. 19 through March 4, surveyed 403 adults nationwide.

It has an error margin of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

___

On the Net:

http://www.sunshineweek.org/

New York Times
March 3, 2006

"The Big Question"

By Thomas L. Friedman

Since the start of the Iraq war, it's been clear that "victory" rested on the answer to one Big Question:

Was Iraq the way Iraq was because Saddam was the way Saddam was, or was Saddam the way Saddam was because Iraq was the way Iraq was — a country congenitally divided among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds that can be held together only by an iron fist.

Unfortunately, to answer this big question — even Iraqis didn't know — the U.S. had to provide a minimum degree of security for all Iraqis, so people could feel relaxed enough to think beyond their most narrow tribal or religious identities.

We didn't do that, because of President Bush's decision to approach the Iraq invasion with the Rumsfeld Doctrine, which calls for just enough troops to fail, rather than the proven Powell Doctrine, which calls for overwhelming force to win.

What happened in the absence of an overwhelming U.S. force was the looting of government buildings and ammo dumps, open borders for infiltrators, and then widespread insecurity, which naturally prompted Iraqis to fall back on tribal loyalties and militias, rather than trusting the Iraqi Army or the police.

People are very good at figuring out who will protect them in a crisis, and too many Iraqis opted for local militias.

Yes, we are now better at training an Iraqi Army and have held national elections.

But the failure to provide security after the invasion means we are trying to build these national institutions in competition with the insurgents, Qaeda terrorists, Shiite death squads and sectarian Iraqi militias that sprouted in the security vacuum.

One thing that covering the Lebanese civil war taught me was this: once sectarian militias take root, they develop their own interests and are very hard to uproot.

"Militias are the infrastructure of civil war, and the basis of warlordism," the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, told The Washington Post.

This did not have to be.

The Bush team repeatedly declared that it had enough troops in Iraq and that no one on the ground was asking for more.

Totally untrue.

As Paul Bremer, who led the U.S. civilian administration in Iraq, reveals in his new book, "My Year in Iraq," he repeatedly asked for more troops, but was ignored.

Mr. Bremer confesses in his book:

"Coalition forces were spread too thin on the ground."

"During my morning intelligence briefings, I would sometimes picture an understrength fire crew racing from one blaze to another."

He writes that he told Condoleezza Rice in 2003, "The coalition's got about half the number of soldiers we need here, and we run a real risk of having this thing go south on us."

Mr. Bremer describes this in 2004: "On May 18, I gave Rice a heads-up that I intended to send Secretary Rumsfeld a very private message suggesting that the coalition needed more troops."

"... That afternoon I sent my message."

"... I noted that the deterioration of the security situation since April had made it clear, to me at least, that we were trying to cover too many fronts with too few resources."

But, Mr. Bremer writes of Mr. Rumsfeld, "I did not hear back from him."

Because the U.S. never deployed enough troops, America alone cannot establish order in Iraq today.

We don't have a way to do that.

And Iraq's Army, no matter how well trained, will never have enough will — without a broad political consensus.

So we're down to the last hope, and it's a mighty thin reed.

The only people who can produce a decent outcome now are Iraq's new leaders — by coming together, burying their hatchets, forging a real national unity government and getting their followers to follow.

This is the season of decision.

We have an Iraqi government elected on the basis of an Iraqi-written constitution.

Either the elected Iraqi leaders will heroically come together and forge a national unity government — and save Iraq — or they will divide Iraq.

Our job was to help them decide in a reasonably secure environment, not in a shooting gallery.

We failed in that task, but they will have to decide nevertheless.

It is Iraqis who will now tell Americans whether they should stay or go.

A majority of Americans, in a gut way, always understood the value of trying to produce a democratizing government in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world.

That is why there has been no big antiwar movement.

Americans should, and will, stick with Iraq if they sense that Iraqis are on a pathway to building a decent, stable government.

But Americans will not, and should not, baby-sit an Iraqi civil war.

The minute they sense that's what's happening, you will see the bottom fall out of U.S. public support for this war.

"Government subverts its own ideals"

By ALLAN M. JALON
First published: Saturday, March 11, 2006

Thirty-five years ago Wednesday, a group of anonymous activists broke into the small, two-person office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Media, Pa., and stole more than 1,000 FBI documents that revealed years of systematic wiretapping, infiltration and media manipulation designed to suppress dissent.

The Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI, as the group called itself, forced its way in at night with a crowbar while much of the country was watching the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight.

When agents arrived for work the next morning, they found the file cabinets virtually emptied.

Within a few weeks, the documents began to show up -- mailed anonymously in manila envelopes with no return address -- in the newsrooms of major American newspapers.

When The Washington Post received copies, Attorney General John N. Mitchell asked executive editor Ben Bradlee not to publish them because disclosure, he said, could "endanger the lives" of people involved in investigations on behalf of the United States.

Nevertheless, The Washington Post broke the first story on March 24, 1971, after receiving an envelope with 14 FBI documents detailing how the bureau had enlisted a local police chief, letter carriers and a switchboard operator at Swarthmore College to spy on campus and black activist groups in the Philadelphia area.

More documents went to other reporters -- Tom Wicker received copies at his New York Times office; so did reporters at The Los Angeles Times -- and to politicians including Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota and Rep. Parren J. Mitchell of Maryland.

To this day, no individual has claimed responsibility for the break-in.

The FBI, after building up a six-year, 33,000-page file on the case, couldn't solve it.

But it remains one of the most lasting consequential (although underemphasized) watersheds of political awareness in recent American history, one that poses tough questions even today for our national leaders who argue that fighting foreign enemies requires the government to spy on its citizens.

The break-in is far less well-known than Daniel Ellsberg's leak of the Pentagon Papers three months later, but in my opinion it deserves equal stature.

Found among the Media documents was a new word, "COINTELPRO," short for the FBI's "secret counterintelligence program," created to investigate and disrupt dissident political groups in the United States.

Under these programs, beginning in 1956, the bureau worked to "enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles," as one COINTELPRO memo put it, "to get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox."

The Media documents -- along with further revelations about COINTELPRO in the months and years that followed -- made it clear that the bureau had gone beyond mere intelligence-gathering to discredit, destabilize and demoralize groups -- many of them peaceful, legal civil rights organizations and anti-war groups -- that the FBI and Director J. Edgar Hoover found offensive or threatening.

For instance, agents sought to persuade Martin Luther King Jr. to kill himself just before he received the Nobel Prize.

They sent him a composite tape made from bugs planted illegally in his hotel rooms when he was entertaining women other than his wife -- and threatened to make it public.

"King, there is one thing left for you to do."

"You know what it is," FBI operatives wrote in their anonymous letter.

Under COINTELPRO, the bureau also targeted actress Jean Seberg for having made a donation to the Black Panther Party.

The fragile actress ultimately committed suicide after a gossip nugget based on a FBI wiretap was leaked to The Los Angeles Times and published.

The item, suggesting that the father of the baby she was carrying was a Black Panther rather than her French writer-husband, turned out to be wrong.

The sheer reach of a completely politicized FBI was one of the most frightening revelations of the Media documents.

Underground newspapers were targeted.

Students (and their professors) were targeted.

Celebrities were targeted.

The Communist Party of the USA, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Non-Violent Organizing Committee, the Black Panther Party, the Women's Strike for Peace -- all were targeted.

"Neutralize them in the same manner they are trying to destroy and neutralize the U.S.," one memo said.

Eventually, the COINTELPRO memos -- some from Media and some unearthed later -- prompted hearings led by Rep. Don Edwards of California and by Sen. Frank Church of Idaho on intelligence agency abuses.

In the mid-1970s, the wayward agency began finally to be reined in.

It is tragic when people lose faith in their government to the extent that they feel they must break laws to expose corruption.

But a war that had been started and sustained by lies had gone on for years.

And a government had betrayed its citizens, manipulating their fear to strengthen its grip on power.

Today, again, many people worry that their government may be on the road to subverting its own ideals.

I hope that the commemoration of those unknown activists that was to be held Wednesday in Media, Pa., will serve as a reminder that fighting for democracy abroad must remain more than merely an excuse to weaken civil liberties at home.

Allan M. Jalon is a contributing writer for The Los Angeles Times, where this article first appeared.

"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear ......"

- Mark Twain

Belate Happy Birthday Liv - assuming it is your birthday and I apologize that I didn't know - I also believe that birthdays should be celebrated as national events even it becomes "their America."

Enjoy your day. You deserve it.

The Snuff

Thanks, Snuf ....

But you're out ahead of the "curve" ....

The actual day will be just as summer begins its wane towards fall ...

And the "cold" comes once again .....

Boy, we "northrons" are a dour lot, aren't we?

Winter isn't yet over ...

And already, I am preparing myself for it to come ...

Once again ...

And so ....

Only in New York, jeffmoskin .....

"Cops accused of mafia ties head to trial"

By LARRY McSHANE, Associated Press
Last updated: 5:55 p.m., Sunday, March 12, 2006

NEW YORK -- It's a crime story that begs for a best seller: A pair of oft-decorated NYPD detectives are accused of leading double lives, joining the mob's payroll.

They allegedly go on a crime spree, leave a trail of dead bodies, and retire to a life as Las Vegas high rollers.

But who could write such a bizarre tale?

There's plenty of talent right at the defense table.

Ex-detective turned defendant Louis Eppolito wrote an autobiography titled "Mafia Cop" and even appeared in a mob movie.

His attorney, Bruce Cutler, wrote "Closing Argument," covering a career that includes defending mob boss John Gotti.

Cutler's co-counsel, Edward Hayes, has a memoir titled "Mouthpiece" that just hit stores, and he was a model for a character in a Tom Wolfe novel.

All this media know-how will assemble in court Monday when the so-called "Mafia Cops" -- Eppolito and former partner Stephen Caracappa -- arrive for opening statements in their racketeering and murder trial.

Expect a few plot twists.

"I think there will be some surprises," Hayes predicted.

"And I certainly have a few."

According to prosecutors, the two ex-detectives engaged in a cornucopia of criminal activity between 1979 and last year.

Their indictment lists eight murders, allegedly at the bidding of Luchese family underboss Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso.

Authorities said Casso paid $75,000 for one of the hits, regularly paid the pair $4,000 a month, and referred to them as his "crystal ball."

In one case, however, thinking they were turning a mobster named Jimmy Hydell over to Casso for execution, the pair allegedly supplied an inaccurate tip that led to an innocent man with the same name, who died in a hail of gunfire on Christmas Day 1986.

There are charges of racketeering, kidnapping, murder, obstruction of justice, and money laundering, and after the pair retired to Nevada they were distributing methamphetamine, according to the indictment.

The list could have been longer; in January, prosecutors opted to drop two additional murder counts.

Eppolito, 57, and Caracappa, 64, are both insistent about their innocence.

Caracappa went on "60 Minutes" in January to express his indignation.

"Totally ridiculous," he said of the charges.

"It's ludicrous."

"Anybody that knows me knows I love the police department."

Caracappa spent 23 years with the NYPD, working his way up to detective first grade and helping to establish the department's nerve center for Mafia murder investigations before retiring in 1992.

Eppolito actually grew up in a mob family: His father, grandfather and an uncle were all members of the Gambino family.

The contrast between his police work and his family life was detailed in his autobiography, "Mafia Cop: The Story of An Honest Cop Whose Family Was the Mob."

He joined the department in 1969, and also made detective first-grade.

Before his 1990 retirement, Eppolito was known among fellow cops as a tough guy with plenty of street smarts.

The partners settled in Las Vegas to enjoy their golden years.

They were arrested on March 9, 2005, at a Las Vegas restaurant, and released on $5 million bail each.

Their trial promises to be one of the year's great legal spectacles.

The bombastic Cutler is best known for his work with Gotti.

In one memorable opening statement, he dramatically spiked the indictment against Gotti in a courtroom trash can.

"Garbage!" he thundered.

Hayes, a former prosecutor, brings his impeccable attire and a glittering client list that includes Robert De Niro and Sean "Diddy" Combs.

He was the model for take-no-prisoners defense attorney Tommy Killian in Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities."

Hayes said he's willing to let somebody else write about this case:

"I already wrote a book."

If someone else takes up the challenge, there's always the chance of a movie -- and Eppolito could play himself.

He had a bit part in the Martin Scorsese mob classic "GoodFellas."

And from there ...

We wing our way over to the economy .....

"Banks Fear Minimum Credit Card Payments"

By JOE BEL BRUNO, AP Business Writer

38 minutes ago

NEW YORK - Making the minimum payment on your credit card bill might not be as easy as it used to be — and two of the nation's largest banks say their own finances might suffer as a result.

Both Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. said in recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission that delinquencies and charge-offs might spike in the second half of the year.

That's when the banks believe new federal guidelines that require significantly increased monthly minimum payments will begin to hurt customers already struggling to pay bills.

The new requirements imposed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — which regulates banks and some credit card companies — are designed to help customers avoid getting deeper into debt.

However, a new spate of defaults as customers adjust to the new minimums could hurt profit at the nation's card issuers — especially those that cater to borrowers with weaker credit.

"Banks will not only have increased losses, but reduced revenue as well," said Lehman Brothers analyst Jason Goldberg.

"For some customers, the banks will have to reduce interest payments in order to keep them from defaulting."

"There's a bit of uncertainty because it's hard to predict human behavior."

Banks have instituted the new minimum balances at a time when American families continue to reel from credit card debt.

The Federal Reserve said last month in its survey of consumer finances that 46.2 percent of all families now carry a credit card balance — up from 44.4 percent in 2001.

Meanwhile, consumers are also carrying higher balances — with the mean balance growing to $5,100 from $4,400 in 2001, according to the report.

The median income is currently $43,200 and the typical family's credit card balance is now almost 5 percent of their annual income, according to the Fed.

The new guidelines require credit card issuers to charge an amount that includes not just the outstanding fees and finance charges, but at least 1 percent of the principal owed.

This could cost JPMorgan and Citigroup each about $500 million of losses and lost revenue this year, Goldberg said.

Citigroup, the nation's largest financial institution with about $120.32 billion in revenue last year, has more than 130 million credit card accounts.

The majority of its card holders pay more than the minimum due, but the bank didn't have a specific breakdown available, according to Citigroup spokesman Samuel Wang.

At JPMorgan, which has more than 110 million credit card accounts and posted about $80 billion of revenue last year, customers were required to make the new minimum requirements at the end of 2005.

Prior to the change, about 10 percent of its overall customers were making only the minimum payment, said JPMorgan spokesman Paul Hartwick.

Bill Hardekopf, chief executive of credit card Web site Lowcards.com, said many of the credit card companies will be affected as consumers move to consolidate their cards.

He believes most consumers will get over the "sticker shock" of being forced to make higher payments, and the amount of defaults will lessen as months go by.

"The new minimums could be very beneficial to credit card companies because they'll get their money quicker, but it could become very expensive if it has the effect of driving more consumers into bankruptcy," he said.

"It's too early to tell, but this won't hurt the big boys as much as it will hurt the subprime lenders."

Subprime lenders have a higher incidence of charge-offs and delinquencies, and charge customers higher interest rates because they are deemed less credit worthy.

Some of the bigger public companies that have large subprime businesses include issuers such as Capital One Corp. and Providian Financial Corp.

The actual impact of the new minimum payments won't be known for a few quarters, analysts said.

In fact, JPMorgan said in its filing with the SEC that it expects the first six months of the year to see sharply fewer bankruptcies as a result of new laws that went into effect.

Credit card companies were besieged by losses stemming from a surge in consumer bankruptcies in the fourth quarter.

Banks reported a sharp increase in loan charge-offs amid a rush of consumer bankruptcy filings prior to the Oct. 17 change in the nation's bankruptcy law, which made it more difficult for consumers to discharge their debts.

And then ...

There is OUR America ...

Circa 2006 ......

"Military shuns many of recruiting age"

By PAULINE JELINEK, Associated Press
Last updated: 5:15 p.m., Sunday, March 12, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Uncle Sam wants YOU, that famous Army recruiting poster says.

But does he really?

Not if you're a Ritalin-taking, overweight, Generation Y couch potato -- or some combination of the above.

As for that fashionable "body art" that the military still calls a tattoo, having one is grounds for rejection, too.

With U.S. casualties rising in wars overseas and more opportunities in the civilian work force from an improved U.S. economy, many young people are shunning a career in the armed forces.

But recruiting is still a two-way street -- and the military, too, doesn't want most people in this prime recruiting age group of 17 to 24.

Of some 32 million Americans now in this group, the Army deems the vast majority too obese, too uneducated, too flawed in some way, according to its estimates for the current budget year.

"As you look at overall population and you start factoring out people, many are not eligible in the first place to apply," said Doug Smith, spokesman for the Army Recruiting Command.

Some experts are skeptical.

Previous Defense Department studies have found that 75 percent of young people are ineligible for military service, noted Charles Moskos of Northwestern University.

While the professor emeritus who specializes in military sociology says it is "a baloney number," he acknowledges he has no figures to counter it.

"Recruiters are looking for reasons other than themselves," said David R. Segal, director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland.

"So they blame the pool."

The military's figures are estimates, based partly on census numbers.

They are part of an elaborate analysis the military does as it struggles each year to compete with colleges and companies for the nation's best and brightest, plan for future needs and maintain diversity.

The Census Bureau estimates that the overall pool of people who would be in the military's prime target age has shrunk as American society ages.

There were 1 million fewer 18- to 24-year olds in 2004 than in 2000, the agency says.

The pool shrinks to 13.6 million when only high school graduates and those who score in the upper half on a military service aptitude test are considered.

The 30 percent who are high school dropouts are not the top choice of today's professional, all-volunteer and increasingly high-tech military force.

Other factors include:

--the rising rate of obesity; some 30 percent of U.S. adults are now considered obese.

--a decline in physical fitness; one-third of teenagers are now believed to be incapable of passing a treadmill test.

--a near-epidemic rise in the use of Ritalin and other stimulants to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Potential recruits are ineligible for military service if they have taken such a drug in the previous year.

Doctors prescribe these drugs to about 2 million children and 1 million adults a month, according to a federal survey.

Many more are believed to be using such stimulants recreationally and to stay awake longer to boost academic and physical performance.

Other potential recruits are rejected because they have criminal histories and too many dependents.

Subtract 4.4 million from the pool for these people and for the overweight.

Others can be rejected for medical problems, from blindness to asthma.

The Army estimate has subtracted 2.6 million for this group.

That leaves 4.3 million fully qualified potential recruits and an estimated 2.3 million more who might qualify if given waivers on some of their problems.

The bottom line: a total 6.6 million potential recruits from all men and women in the 32 million-person age group.

In the budget year that ended last September, 15 percent of recruits required a waiver in order to be accepted for active duty services -- or about 11,000 people of some 73,000 recruited.

Most waivers were for medical problems.

Some were for misdemeanors such as public drunkenness, resisting arrest or misdemeanor assault -- prompting criticism that the Army is lowering its standards.

This year the Army is trying to recruit 80,000 people; all the services are recruiting about 180,000.

And about the tattoos: They are not supposed to be on your neck, refer to gang membership, be offensive, or in any way conflict with military standards on integrity, respect and team work.

The military is increasingly giving waivers for some types of tattoos, officials said.

------

On the Net:

Defense Department career and aptitude exploration site: http://www.asvabprogram.com

And then, of course ....

There is GUMMINT SECRECY here in OUR America .....

Where pretty soon ....

We won't know nothing at all ...

Because it's a secret ...

So don't tell anyone ...

And they won't know either .....

EVEN IF THEY ARE A DEFENDANT IN A CRIMINAL TRIAL ...

Here in THEIR America ......

Which is to say ...

George W. Bush's warped and twisted version of OUR America ....

Which is no longer a NATION OF LAWS .....

But a nation of the whims and foibles and outright follies of George, instead .....

"Judge upholds terror counts - Federal jurist's sealed order denies mosque case defendants' request to dismiss indictment based on national spy program"

By BRENDAN LYONS, Staff writer, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Sunday, March 12, 2006

ALBANY - The secrecy enveloping an FBI counterterrorism case against two members of an Albany mosque continues, as a federal judge has issued a sealed order refusing to dismiss the indictment.

U.S. District Judge Thomas J. McAvoy handed down the order, which cannot be viewed by the public or defense attorneys, after reviewing a sealed motion filed by the Justice Department.

Defense attorneys Terence L. Kindlon and Kevin Luibrand, who hoped to win dismissal of the suit on the grounds it may have originated from a controversial national spying program, both said they were stunned at how the process unfolded.

Essentially, McAvoy based his decision Friday on a government motion that may never become public, although it's possible the decision will be appealed to the Second Circuit.

The attorneys had hoped their challenge of the government's case against Yassin Aref and Mohammed Hossain, who allegedly took part in a plot to sell missile launchers to terrorists, would force federal prosecutors, and the judge, to address a national debate unfolding about whether the National Security Agency violated any laws by eavesdropping on U.S. residents.

Kindlon, Aref's attorney, filed a nine-page motion in January asking for all evidence in the case to be thrown out, and for a dismissal of the indictment.

While defense lawyers have requested access to classified evidence for more than a year, the motion specifically targeted the NSA program.

Kindlon said the secrecy surrounding the government's motion and McAvoy's decision leads him to believe the program was used in this case.

In his motion, he argued:

"The government engaged in illegal electronic surveillance of thousands of U.S. persons, including Yassin Aref, then instigated a sting operation to attempt to entrap Mr. Aref into supporting a nonexistent terrorist plot, then dared to claim that the illegal NSA operation was justified because it was the only way to catch Mr. Aref."

The New York Civil Liberties Union has filed a motion trying to intervene in the case on the NSA issue, but it's not clear now whether the effort will be moot.

Kindlon filed his motion several days after The New York Times, citing anonymous sources, reported that the NSA spying program may have prompted the FBI to zero in on Aref and Hossain.

An analysis of the spying program by Harvard Law School Professor Laurence H. Tribe, a noted constitutional law scholar, called the NSA eavesdropping program "as grave an abuse of executive authority as I can recall ever having studied."

Through its sealed motion, Kindlon said, the government appeared to tacitly confirm Aref was targeted through information gleaned in the controversial spy program.

Federal authorities have acknowledged Aref was the "ultimate target" of their investigation, although they have not said why.

Two months before the sting was launched, Aref's name, phone number and Albany address were found in a notebook recovered from a bombed-out Iraqi encampment that the government contends was occupied by terrorists.

Prosecutors have laid out allegations tying Aref to top Middle East terrorist groups.

Aref has admitted he met people who the U.S. government has labeled terrorist figures, but he has denied being involved with their causes.

Officials have not made any similar charges against Hossain.

The NSA's surveillance program has relied on a secret directive President Bush issued more than three years ago, after the Sept. 11 attacks.

It allowed the agency to circumvent court-authorized wiretaps as it eavesdropped on phone calls and e-mails exchanged between U.S. residents and people abroad.

The Bush administration has defended the practice, contending it was a matter of national security, and legal, to sift through thousands of phone calls and e-mails without a warrant or court order.

The Albany-based sting began in July 2003 when an undercover FBI informant, a Pakistani Muslim immigrant, went to Hossain's pizza shop to lure the men into a plot to sell missile launchers to terrorists.

No trial date has been set.

Hossain is free on bond while Aref remains jailed without bond.

Brendan Lyons can be reached at 454-5547 or by e-mail at blyons@timesunion.com.

Feingold Proposes Bush Censure Over Spying
By DOUGLASS K. DANIEL, Associated Press Writer

A liberal Democrat and potential White House contender is proposing censuring President Bush for authorizing domestic eavesdropping, saying the White House misled Americans about its legality.

"The president has broken the law and, in some way, he must be held accountable," Sen. Russ Feingold (news, bio, voting record), D-Wis., told The Associated Press in an interview.

A censure resolution, which simply would scold the president, has been used just once in U.S. history — against Andrew Jackson in 1834.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., called the proposal "a crazy political move" that would weaken the U.S. during wartime.

The five-page resolution to be introduced on Monday contends that Bush violated the law when, on his own, he set up the eavesdropping program within the National Security Agency in the months following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Bush claims that his authority as commander in chief as well as a September 2001 congressional authorization to use force in the fight against terrorism gave him the power to authorize the surveillance.

The White House had no immediate response on Sunday.

The resolution says the president "repeatedly misled the public" before the disclosure of the NSA program last December when he indicated the administration was relying on court orders to wiretap terror suspects inside the U.S.

"Congress has to reassert our system of government, and the cleanest and the most efficient way to do that is to censure the president," Feingold said. "And, hopefully, he will acknowledge that he did something wrong."

The Wisconsin Democrat, considered a presidential contender for 2008, said he had not discussed censure with other senators but that, based on criticism leveled at Bush by both Democrats and Republicans, the resolution makes sense.

The president's action were "in the strike zone" in terms of being an impeachable offense, Feingold said. The senator questioned whether impeaching Bush and removing him from office would be good for the country.

In the House, Rep. John Conyers (news, bio, voting record) of Michigan, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, is pushing legislation that would call on the Republican-controlled Congress to determine whether there are grounds for impeachment.

The program granted intelligence officers the power to monitor — without court approval — the international calls and e-mails of U.S. residents, when those officers suspect terrorism may be involved.

Frist, appearing on ABC's "This Week," said that he hoped al-Qaida and other enemies of the U.S. were not listening to the infighting.

"The signal that it sends, that there is in any way a lack of support for our commander in chief who is leading us with a bold vision in a way that is making our homeland safer, is wrong," Frist said.

Sen. John Warner (news, bio, voting record), R-Va., said on CNN's "Late Edition" that Feingold's announcement on a Sunday talk show was "political grandstanding. And it tends to weaken our president."

A longtime critic of the administration, Feingold was the first senator to urge a withdrawal timetable for U.S. troops in Iraq and was the only senator to vote in 2001 against the USA Patriot Act, the post-Sept. 11 law that expanded the government's surveillance and prosecutorial powers. He also voted against the 2002 resolution authorizing Bush to use force in Iraq.

Jackson was censured by the Senate in 1834 after he removed the nation's money from a private bank in defiance of the Whig Party, which controlled the Senate.

On Feb. 12, 1999, the Senate failed to gain enough votes to bring a censure resolution against President Clinton. The Senate had just acquitted Clinton after the House impeached him in December 1998, accusing him of committing perjury and obstructing justice in the Monica Lewinsky affair.

Impeachment is the only punishment outlined in the Constitution for a president. But the Constitution says the House and Senate can punish their own members through censure.



Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.


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"Big BILL" Frist ....

A whole ton of real hot air wrapped up in the form and guise of a United States Senator .....

STOP SIMPERING AND WHINING, BIG BILL .....

There is no war ....

Nothing is going to come and hurt you .....

Your DELUSIONS that you have tried to FOIST OFF on OUR America are simply coming back home to haunt you in your own mind, is all ....

You REPUBLICANS have been telling so many lies that they have become a sort of sick truth with you boys and girls down there in CORRUPT Washington, D.C. ......

And Big Bill .....

And Senator Warner, too ....

HOW CAN ANYONE WEAKEN GEORGE W. BUSH?

I mean ...

Well ...

According to the both of you ...

BIG GEORGE is the WORLD'S MOST POWERFUL MAN ...

Besides being omniscient, of course ....

And so ...

If this were really true, which it never was, WHO CAN WEAKEN GEORGE W. BUSH?

What twaddle ...

What absolute crap ...

But the newspapers will still print it .....

And ABC's "This week" likely does not even know where its own head is stuck at any given instant in time ...

And so ...

They suck this PABLUM OF PURE BULL **** AND IGNORANCE up like thin gruel through a soda straw, believing in their own arrogance that they have just fed us AMERICANS with some PEARL OF WISDOM, instead ...

When all it really was .....

Was BIG BILL Frist posturing, playing politics, and mewling and crying and whining ...

Because he has been listening to his own lies for so long now ...

That he has got himself scared half to death .....

How very embarrasing it is to be an American in the world these days with this pack of cravens and outright corrupt fools that someone stuck down there in that place called Washington, D.C. ......

That call themselves the United States Congress ......

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/13/politics...GZYottYaeUY0rOg

March 13, 2006
News Analysis
A Bush Alarm: Urging U.S. to Shun Isolationism
By DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON, March 12 — The president who made pre-emption and going it alone the watchwords of his first term is quietly turning in a new direction, warning at every opportunity of the dangers of turning the nation inward and isolationist, and making the case for international engagement on issues from national security to global economics.

President Bush's cautions on the dangers of pulling back behind American borders — in trade and investment, in immigration and in his effort to make the spread of democracy the signature of his second term — first cropped up in his State of the Union address six weeks ago.

But it accelerated even before the Dubai ports deal was derailed by members of his own party, and before an unexpected uprising began among some neo-conservatives, who are now arguing that Iraq, while a noble effort, has turned into a failed mission that must be abandoned.

In interviews over the past week, Mr. Bush's aides, insisting on anonymity, they say, because they do not want to worsen the fissures, say they fear that the new mood threatens to undermine the international agenda for the rest of Mr. Bush's presidency.

"We're seeing it in everything," said one of Mr. Bush's closest aides last week. "Iraq. The ferocity of an irrational argument over the ports. Guest workers. China and India."

So starting on Monday, just a few days shy of the third anniversary of Mr. Bush's order to topple Saddam Hussein, the president will begin an effort to explain his Iraq strategy anew in the changed environment of increased sectarian killings.

He acknowledged on Saturday that "many of our fellow citizens" are "now wondering if the entire mission is worth it."

But rather than simply delve into the familiar talk about the need to root out terrorists abroad so they cannot strike Americans here, the White House plans to have Mr. Bush expand his discussion of the need for the United States to embrace a new role in the world, even if that means explaining the benefits of globalization to a nation that does not appear to be in a mood to hear that message.

It is yet another change for a man who came to office talking of a "humble foreign policy," and after Sept. 11 used the hammer of the world's sole superpower around the globe.

To his critics, the internationalist approach is too little too late — the price Mr. Bush has paid for a foreign policy that seemed relentlessly focused on building defensive walls and hunting enemies. A search of the White House Web site confirms that Mr. Bush, who in the days before he took office kept the take-no-prisoners speeches of Teddy Roosevelt on a table at his ranch, made little mention of "globalization" for much of his first five years in office, even when European leaders brought it up.

Asked once, several years ago, about his aversion to the topic, one of his senior aides said Mr. Bush associated the word with "mushy Clintonianism."

"It ranks up there with 'nation-building,' " he added.

No longer. Now Mr. Bush is moving into a new phase of his presidency, not by choice or natural inclination, it seems, but by necessity. Mr. Bush changed his tone on nation-building several years ago.

As the invasion turned to occupation, he emphasized the spread of democracy. But even that talk, especially during his re-election campaign, had a unilateralist subtext: the schools and polling places were open because the hammer of the American military made it possible.

His new theme is different, because it is all about interdependence. Two of his aides say the near defeat of the Central American Free Trade Agreement in Congress last summer — it passed by one vote, after arm-twisting by the president brought just enough Republicans back into the fold — jolted Mr. Bush into recognizing a new retreat from the world by his own party.

For the State of the Union address, Mr. Bush instructed his speechwriters to make global engagement a major theme, a big change for a man who ran in 2000 under the banner of a "humble foreign policy." In the speech, he warned that "the road of isolationism and protectionism may seem broad and inviting — yet it ends in danger and decline."

By the time he visited India earlier this month, he argued that while American jobs were often lost to outsourcing, "you don't retrench and pull back."

He said he had to convince Americans that "a 300-million-person market of middle-class citizens here in India" would soon be buying American goods.

"If we can make a product they want, then it becomes — at a reasonable price — and then all of a sudden, people will be able to have a market here," he said.

Mr. Bush's remarks may signal a halting emergence from a mind-set that, by his own acknowledgment, was set by 9/11. "There is a lot of on-the-job training in the modern presidency," said David J .Rothkopf, the author of "Running the World," a history of the National Security Council, and a Commerce Department official under President Clinton.

"Clinton ran on taking a tough line with China, and decided we needed China," Mr. Rothkopf said. "Bush came in with a philosophy that was almost neo-isolationist. When they dealt with Iraq, they did it alone — outside the context of what globalization implies. That's why the second term is the un-first term."

In the next few weeks, Mr. Bush will try to outmaneuver the next Dubai. On immigration, he is fighting in Congress to retain his guest-worker program rather than just strengthen the borders. When President Hu Jintao of China arrives here next month, Mr. Bush must once again do a delicate balancing act, convincing Congress that he is pressing China to close the $201 billion trade gap, while courting Beijing to help disarm North Korea and Iran.

But Iraq is the elephant on the White House lawn. Mr. Bush's speeches on Iraq are intended to shore up fast-ebbing public support, made worse by talk of civil war.

When Mr. Bush gave a set of speeches on Iraq in December, the calls to pull out were mostly from the left. Now, a rising chorus of neo-conservatives, who urged Mr. Bush to topple Mr. Hussein, say that, having liberated Iraq, the rest is up to the Iraqis.

"The administration has, now, to cope with failure," William F. Buckley Jr. wrote in February. "The kernel here is the acknowledgment of defeat."

Briefing reporters on Friday about Mr. Bush's coming speeches, a senior White House official, speaking anonymously because he was describing speeches still being drafted, said Mr. Bush would answer those criticisms and "explain why we and the Iraqis must finish the job together." A year ago, Mr. Bush's allies took such statements as a given. Today, that is no longer the case.

You know, Snuf ....

I don't consider myself to be an expert at anything ...

And actually ...

I think that is a real over-rated term ...

"Expert" ...

As if somehow specially endowed .......

Notwithstanding my views on that word ...

It is indeed possible ...

And desirable ...

To be informed ...

And here is where I give myself a tad of creidt ...

For I believe in citizenship responsibilities ....

Along with whatever else I have to do in my day .....

And so ...

I am continually studying ...

Reading books ...

Reading the news ...

And so ...

I am very UNIMPRESSED with George W. Bush ...

Who has to be one of the laziest American presidents that I think we ever had .....

And here I mean mentally lazy .....

For it is said that George W. Bush is a good bicycle rider ....

I wonder if George W. Bush has ever read a book about America ...

Or the history of the world ...

Or the psychology of people .....

I wonder especially if George has ever read the Declaration of Independence of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA in July 1776 .....

Because if he had .....

He might be looking at HIS OWN actions a little more closely ...

For by the clear and unequivocal language in OUR UNITED STATES DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE .....

George the Bush appears to be just as much a TYRANT as George the Third .....

And so ...

WHO IS GEORGE W. BUSH TO BE TELLING US HOW WE SHOULD THINK AND FEEL ABOUT ANYTHING?

More to the point, since it is my premise in here that George W. Bush is IGNORANT, and thus, unfit himself to be the head of a CIVILIZED NATION ...

WHAT EVIDENCE DOES GEORGE W. BUSH HAVE TO SUPPORT HIS CONTENTIONS THAT THE ROAD OF ISOLATIONISM AND PROTECTIONISM ENDS IN DANGER AND DECLINE?

From whence comes that alleged PEARL OF WISDOM?

Other than from the tip of the pen of one of George's propagandists .....

WHO BELIEVES, LIKE GEORGE, THAT WE ARE ALL BIGGER FOOLS THAN THEY ARE .....

So that they can CON and GULL us like slick-talking CARNIVAL BARKERS con and gull the yokels and bumpkins at a rural county fair .....

HUCKSTERISM ....

That is what this "presidency" of George W. Bush's has been to date ...

PURE BULL **** AND HUCKSTERISM .....

And now ......

We are to take the word of George W. Bush ...

On the role OUR America should play in the world ...

After George W. Bush has degraded the name of America .....

Down to a level that I never in my life thought could be possible ...

And one of the ways that this FORUM empowers us, the PEOPLE OF OUR AMERICA, is with respect to the massive "storage memory" that it provides us with ...

COUPLED WITH A TERRIFIC SEARCH ENGINE .....

That allows people like me ...

An older America who dates back to a time when there were no computers ...

Which meant that we had to develop our own memories ....

To remember that back in Volume I of Life in OUR America ...

I had posted an article that made mention of "Big BILL" Frist wanting to USE George W. Bush's ARCHITECT, Karl Rove, as his own ARCHITECT in his presidential bid for 2008 .....

And so ...

It is not at all surprising to hear "Big BILL" simpering on NATIONAL TV that he hoped al-Qaida and other enemies of the U.S. were not listening to the infighting .....

OF COURSE AL QAIDA IS LISTENING .....

And what I want them to hear from me ...

IS TO NOT MISTAKE ALL AMERICANS AS BEING LIKE BILL FRIST AND GEORGE W. BUSH .....

Which is to say ...

There are many of us out here in the country ...

Who are not weak .....

Not scared ...

Not afraid ...

And so ....

washingtonpost.com Highlights

"Bush may face more aggressive Congress - Republican lawmakers want a voice in domestic policy"

By Jim VandeHei and Charles Babington

Updated: 12:14 a.m. ET Dec. 20, 2004

President Bush's second-term plans to reshape Social Security, immigration laws and other domestic programs are facing a stiff challenge from a group that was reliably accommodating in the president's first four years: congressional Republicans.

After essentially rubber-stamping much of Bush's first-term agenda, many House and Senate Republicans plan to assert themselves more forcefully to put their mark on domestic policy in the new year, according to several lawmakers.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) has privately criticized White House handling of the recent intelligence bill and Bush's plan to postpone tax reform until 2006 or later.

Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) and others have publicly complained about the political and fiscal hazards of overhauling Social Security.

Several senators, including a few 2008 presidential contenders, are rushing to promote their own Social Security plans to compete with Bush's.

And a number of conservative Republicans such as Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), who are concerned about states' rights, are threatening to derail the White House plan to impose federal limits on medical lawsuits.

"It's one of the worst bills going," Graham said.

But the president's most nettlesome intra-party issue in early 2005 may be immigration, lawmakers said.

Bush's goal of granting guest-worker status to large numbers of undocumented immigrants is about to collide head-on with House Republicans' push to crack down on illegal immigrants, in part by denying them driver's licenses.

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (Ill.) salvaged the intelligence legislation this month only by telling GOP colleagues that the White House has vowed to allow tough immigration restrictions, including the driver's license proposal, that were removed from the measure to accompany the first "must-pass" legislation of 2005.

Immigration reform

"If the president wants to maintain credibility with House Republicans, he has to be engaged and willing to pass immigration reform that conservatives want," said Rep. Ray LaHood (Ill.), one of 57 House Republicans who voted against the intelligence bill Bush just signed into law.

"If he does that, he will build a bridge" that could open the way to far-reaching changes to Social Security, the tax code and other policies, LaHood said.

"If he's missing in action on that issue, he's going to have big problems."

Bush's ability to navigate these concerns will go a long way toward determining whether he can do what few previous presidents have done: enact broad domestic policy changes in a second term.

To be sure, Bush has shown a knack for bending Congress to his will.

He overcame Republican complaints to enact three tax-cut packages, impose accountability standards on educators and add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare.

He did so with smaller Republican congressional majorities than he will enjoy at the start of a second term.

But the stiff resistance he faced from GOP House members in pushing through a massive restructuring of U.S. intelligence operations hinted at the challenges ahead.

Bush will face a new, and in some ways less predictable, congressional environment in his second term.

There will be 55 Republican senators, four more than during most of the first term, which should strengthen Bush's hand.

But the new crop includes a few such as former representative Tom Coburn (Okla.) who are more conservative than Bush and have reputations for independence.

There will be 232 House Republicans, three more than this term.

But House Republicans such as DeLay are telling colleagues that they, too, have accumulated considerable political capital by holding the House majority for a decade and picking up seats in back-to-back elections.

The bigger a party's majority, often the harder it is to impose party discipline, several GOP observers said.

At a recent GOP leadership retreat, two participants said DeLay appeared to irritate White House political chief Karl Rove by signaling a more aggressive role in the new Congress.

Some Republicans no longer feel tethered to the president politically, as they did in the 2002 midterm elections and this year.

Other senators, including Majority Leader Bill Frist (Tenn.), Chuck Hagel (Neb.), John McCain (Ariz.) and George Allen (Va.), will be animated by White House ambitions of their own.

Some GOP lawmakers contend that they allowed the White House to usurp too much of Congress's institutional power and that they need to reestablish the House's and Senate's role in writing laws.

The White House is aware of frustration among Hill Republicans and is moving to address it, senior White House officials said.

They are including top lawmakers in early talks about key issues, such as Social Security, and making staff changes to improve relations.

Graham says White House officials are acting unusually "gracious" of late.

Powerful allies

Bush certainly has powerful allies on the Hill.

Frist in many ways owes his leadership job to the president and Rove, who helped orchestrate the Tennessee physician's rise to power.

Some Republicans say Frist would like Rove to run his 2008 White House bid, which would provide the party leader even more incentive to please the White House in the 109th Congress.

The president also has forged a close relationship with Hastert, who like Bush is conservative and comfortable working outside the public eye.

Rep. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) continues to serve as a respected middle man between Bush and House Republicans.

But several lawmakers said the president needs to rub elbows with more rank-and-file Republicans to build support for politically tough issues such as adding private accounts to Social Security.

"There's got to be lots more opportunities for schmoozing, one-on-one talks in small groups at the White House," LaHood said.

"That goes a long, long way to building the kind of relationships he needs to pass Social Security reform."

Addressing that issue, the president recently sent Rove and White House congressional liaison David Hobbs to a private retreat with GOP leaders, as part of a broader effort to develop a plan to create private retirement accounts using a portion of payroll taxes.

Participants discussed, among other things, whether Bush or Congress should take the lead in writing the legislation.

Several sources said the president is leaning toward offering a detailed plan around the State of the Union speech next month and spending the next few months promoting it, election-style, at public meetings.

Congressional Republicans are willing to help, but they expect solid White House support for other measures they favor, said Rep. Jack Kingston (Ga.), a member of the House GOP leadership who voted against the Bush-backed intelligence bill.

"We know the financial woes of Social Security, and we've got to explain that over and over again," he said.

In return, he said, Bush must rein in moderate Senate Republicans such as Arlen Specter (Pa.) who are accustomed to more political leeway than most House members enjoy.

"If Specter starts getting horsy on medical malpractice reform" and on proposed limits to same-sex marriage and stem cell research, Kingston said, "House members are going to be upset" if the White House stands idly by.

House GOP leaders also have warned the White House not to repeat what they considered to be the big mistake of the 2003 Medicare prescription drug debate: not spending enough time explaining the bill's virtues to voters, before and after Congress enacted it.

Davis and as many as two dozen House Republicans have let it be known they consider major Social Security changes a potential political loser because many senior citizens fear the consequences.

At the same time, conservatives such as Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.) are calling for larger private accounts than Bush is likely to endorse.

The Senate may be even more problematic.

Graham is pushing a different Social Security plan and challenging Bush's refusal to tinker with the payroll tax to finance the changes.

Bush has ruled out raising taxes to fund the plan, while Graham says the amount of income subject to the payroll tax, which is capped at $87,900, should be lifted to $200,000.

Hagel plans to unveil his own plan early next year.

It takes 60 votes to pass controversial measures in the 100-member Senate, so Bush can ill afford Republican defectors.

And the craven cowardly Democrats ...

Like RABBITS ...

Ran .....

Russ ...

Take a lesson from Jack Abramoff ...

If you want your colleagues down there in Washington, D.C. to do something ...

Well, Russ ...

YOU HAVE TO BUY THEM .....

How else are you going to get them to move?

"Feingold draws little support for censure"

By LAURIE KELLMAN, Associated Press
Last updated: 6:06 p.m., Monday, March 13, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Democrats distanced themselves Monday from Wisconsin Sen. Russell Feingold's effort to censure President Bush over domestic spying, maneuvering to prevent a vote that could alienate swing voters.

Republicans dared Democrats to vote for the proposal.

"Some Democrats in Congress have decided the president is the enemy," Vice President Dick Cheney told a Republican audience in Feingold's home state.

Feingold, a potential presidential candidate, said on the Senate floor, "The president has violated the law and Congress must respond."

"A formal censure by Congress is an appropriate and responsible first step to assure the public that when the president thinks he can violate the law without consequences, Congress has the will to hold him accountable," Feingold said.

Even as he spoke, Democratic leaders held off the immediate vote that Majority Leader Bill Frist requested.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said he didn't know if there ever would be one.

Throughout the day, Feingold's fellow Democrats said they understood his frustration but they held back overt support for the resolution.

Several said they wanted first to see the Senate Intelligence Committee finish an investigation of the warrantless wiretapping program that Bush authorized as part of his war on terrorism.

Asked at a news conference whether he would vote for the censure resolution, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada declined to endorse it and said he hadn't read it.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., said he had not read it either and wasn't inclined simply to scold the president.

"I'd prefer to see us solve the problem," Lieberman told reporters.

Across the Capitol, reaction was similar.

Feingold's censure resolution drew empathy but no outright support from Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Pelosi "understands Sen. Feingold's frustration that the facts about the NSA domestic surveillance program have not been disclosed appropriately to Congress," her office said in a statement.

"Both the House and the Senate must fully investigate the program and assign responsibility for any laws that may have been broken."

Feingold's resolution accuses Bush of violating the Constitution and the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

It reads in part:

"Resolved that the United States Senate does hereby censure George W. Bush, president of the United States, and does condemn his unlawful authorization of wiretaps of Americans within the United States without obtaining the court orders required."

The resolution says censuring Bush also is warranted by "his failure to inform the full congressional intelligence committees as required by law, and his efforts to mislead the American people about the authorities relied upon by his administration to conduct wiretaps and about the legality of the program."

The only president ever censured by the Senate was Andrew Jackson, in 1834, for removing the nation's money from a private bank in defiance of the Whig-controlled Senate.

In 1999, a censure resolution failed against President Clinton after he was acquitted by the Senate on House impeachment charges that he committed perjury and obstructed justice in the Monica Lewinsky affair.

"This is clearly more serious than what President Clinton was accused of doing," Feingold reporters after his floor speech.

Cheney said Monday, "The outrageous proposition that we ought to protect our enemies' ability to communicate as it plots against America poses a key test of our Democratic leaders."

"The American people already made their decision," Cheney added.

"They agree with the president."

One amazing thing about this BUSHCO REGIME .....

Is the total depth of incompetence that permeates it .....

From the OVAL OFFICE ...

Through the Office of the Vice President .....

And .....

"Prosecutor used transcript to aid witness"

By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN, Associated Press
Last updated: 6:36 p.m., Monday, March 13, 2006

ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- The government lawyer who has jeopardized the prosecution of al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui used a transcript of the first day of the trial to try to shape future testimony to meet or deflect possible defense attacks, court documents indicate.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema suspended Moussaoui's sentencing trial Monday when she learned from prosecutors of e-mails sent to upcoming witnesses by Carla J. Martin, an attorney in the Transportation Security Administration.

Arguing that Martin's e-mails tainted three government and four defense witnesses beyond repair, the defense has asked the judge to dismiss the government's bid to execute Moussaoui, the only person charged in this country in connection with al-Qaida's Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Martin could not be reached for comment.

The judge sent the jury home until Wednesday and called a hearing Tuesday with Martin and the witnesses to decide what to do.

Meantime, she ordered Martin's e-mails released to the public because "if the death penalty winds up being dismissed, the public has a right to know how and why it happened."

Prosecutors had asked that the full text of the e-mails be kept from the public and the defense.

In the 16 pages of e-mails, Martin criticizes the government's opening statement about how the Federal Aviation Administration would have responded to prevent the 9/11 attacks if Moussaoui hadn't lied about his terrorist connections when arrested at a Minnesota flight school Aug. 16, 2001.

She told upcoming government witness Lynne Osmus the prosecutors' opening statement left gaps "the defense can drive a truck through."

Martin concluded the government was going to mistakenly argue that if Moussaoui had told agents about buying short-bladed knives, like those used by the 9/11 hijackers, the FAA could have kept all of them off airplanes by airport screening with X-ray and magnetometer machines.

"There is no way anyone could say that the (airline) carriers could have prevented all short-bladed knives from going through," she e-mailed Osmus.

"Dave MUST elicit that from you and the airline witnesses on direct, and not allow the defense to cut your credibility on cross, (just as they did yesterday with the FBI witness). ..."

Prosecutor David Novak told Brinkema on Monday that this was a harmless e-mail because the government never intended to claim airport screening was 100 percent effective.

In an e-mail to government witness Claudio Manno, Martin notes that FAA did not know that FBI agents had found radical Middle Easterners taking flying lessons in Phoenix before 9/11 or that CIA Director George Tenet was briefed on Aug. 23 that an Islamic extremist named Moussaoui was taking pilot lessons.

"The defense will exploit the fact that the FAA was not clued in to what was going on," Martin e-mailed Manno.

"You need to assert that we did not necessarily need to wait until we got all available information, that we acted independently, indeed, we had a statutory mandate, to follow up on any issue that we thought was a threat to civil aviation."

In several e-mails, Martin said, "Today, the FBI agent on the stand got tripped up" by defense lawyer Edward MacMahon.

FBI agent Michael Anticev first asserted "I don't think anybody was looking at using aircraft as weapons."

But MacMahon got him to acknowledge that the FBI knew before 9/11 that al-Qaida operative Abdul Hakim Murad arrested in the Philippines in 1995 told investigators of plans to fly a plane into CIA headquarters.

She e-mailed Manno: "I've asked Matt to pull any unclass. Information on Murad -- as I know we ran down this issue, deemed it not to be credible ... ."

"Dave will need to go over that with you."

Prosecutor Novak told the court he first learned of the coaching, which he called "horrendously wrong," in a voicemail from Martin last Friday evening.

He told the judge he spent the weekend investigating what Martin did and gathering her e-mails.

He said that six of the seven upcoming witnesses had read her e-mails and two of them had read the attached trial transcript.

He was unable to locate one of the defense witnesses.

Martin was admitted to the bar in 1990.

She graduated from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and got a law degree from the Washington College of Law.

She worked in the FAA chief counsel's office but now works as a lawyer for TSA.

After 9/11, Congress transferred responsibility for aviation security from FAA to the newly created TSA, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, and a number of FAA employees transferred to TSA.

------

On the Net:

E-mails released by the court:

http://notablecases.vaed.uscourts.gov/1:01...ocs/71821/0.pdf

But you know Liv - I think the prosecutorial misconduct is worse than what's portrayed here. They are trying to make the case that but for the lies M told, the plot would have been discocvered and 9/11 prevented. The irony is they knew all about 9/11 through Able Danger and failed to act. I don't believe M should be sentenced to die for the federal govt's inexcusable bureaucratic failure to act. In that sense, his mother is correct when she says she believes her son is being scapegoated. That is not to say that M's hands aren't clean. They aren't. If he had been capable, he would have flown a plane into the WH - that was his dream. But Mohammad Atta flew the plane into the Towers - and the govt. knew about him.

And that "failure to act" was itself an ACTION .....

Which leads to the question of whether or not it was an intentional "failure to act" .....

And there is where my money still lies ...

THAT 9-11 HAD TO GO DOWN ...

For political purposes here in OUR America ...

And so it did .....

And when I say this, people ask me, "DO YOU THINK THAT OUR GOVERNMENT WOULD KILL AMERICANS, OR STAND BACK AND ALLOW THEM TO BE KILLED IN THIS MANNER?"

And my answer is YES ...

Of course they would .....

FOR POWER ...

Which is the DIVIDEND that the REPUBLICANS alone reaped from 9-11 .....

And if it had been prevented ...

Well ...

Let us say that HISTORY would have been a much different thing ...

And the REPUBLICANS would not now have the leverage that they have ...

And so .....

"Bush Expresses Confidence in Iraq's Future"

By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press Writer

2 hours, 23 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Despite the gruesome violence in Iraq last weekend, President Bush continues to emphasize the positive, saying, "Iraqis have shown the world they want a future of freedom and peace."

Democrats say it's the same old rhetoric, not a real strategy for victory in Iraq.

"Rather than leading a White House public relations blitz, the president should lead by pulling the factions together right away in a summit to develop a unified plan for Iraq's future," Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., said Monday.

In the first of a series of speeches to mark the third anniversary of the start of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, Bush warned of more "chaos and carnage in the days and months to come."

He highlighted improvements in the Iraqi security forces and repeated his promise that U.S. troops will stand down as Iraqi forces are able to defend the country.

"As more capable Iraqi police and soldiers come on line, they will assume responsibility for more territory — with the goal of having the Iraqis control more territory than the coalition by the end of 2006," the president said.

Police have found at least 65 bodies in Baghdad, including 15 men bound and shot in an abandoned minibus, in a 24-hour period after car bomb and mortar attacks in the Shiite slum of Sadr City in east Baghdad on Sunday in which 58 people died and more than 200 were wounded.

Bush urged patience from Americans and coalition allies as Iraqis work to form a new government.

He said the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra "was a clear attempt to ignite a civil war."

"I wish I could tell you that the violence is waning and that the road ahead will be smooth," Bush said.

"It will not."

"There will be more tough fighting and more days of struggle."

He said the terrorists are using violence in hopes that they can "shake our resolve and force us to retreat."

"They're not going to succeed."

The president, speaking to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies at George Washington University, said the Iraqi military is taking on more responsibility.

He said it was Iraqis, not coalition forces, who restored order after the attack in Samarra.

Bush said Iraqi forces have taken primary responsibility for more than 30,000 of the country's 170,000 square miles.

That's far higher than the Pentagon's Feb. 24 report to Congress, which said Iraqi forces "have assumed ownership of" slightly more than 12,000 square miles of Iraq."

Bush's goal is to have Iraqis in control of most of Iraq by the end of the year.

More than 130 Iraqi battalions are fighting the enemy, Bush said, with more than 60 taking the lead.

That's up from 120 battalions and 40 in the lead last year.

Iraqi forces have planned, conducted and led more than 200 independent operations in the past two weeks, more than those being conducted by coalition forces, Bush said.

"Not all Iraqi units performed as well as others," he said.

"And there were some reports of Iraqi units in eastern Baghdad allowing militia members to pass through checkpoints."

"But American commanders are closely watching the situation, and they report these incidents appear to be the exception, not the rule."

The president said the upheaval in the country is being perpetrated by a violent minority.

He said most Iraqis want to live in peace and freedom, and they will get it with U.S. help.

Bush also touted efforts to fight the enemy's use of improvised explosive devices, which are bombs that can be hidden and detonated remotely.

Leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee met Monday with the head of the military's task force studying the bombs, Ret. Gen. Montgomery Meigs, who said there is "no silver bullet" to stopping the devices.

"I'd say the enemy is coming up with more lethal combinations and we're being able to hold his effectiveness down to an unacceptably low level, but we're making progress in that area," Meigs told reporters after the meeting.
___

On the Net:

White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov

And not to disparage the people of IRAQINAM ....

BUT ...

George, they have shown us nothing of the kind .....

THEY DID NOT REVOLT AGAINST SADDAM HUSSEIN ......

They did not revolt back when your pap invaded Kuwait ...

And encouraged the Shiites in Iraq to revolt .....

And they did not revolt when you made your ill-thought-out BLTZKREIG invasion of IRAQINAM in 2003 ....

To seize the oilfields ......

And when they did start shooting .....

IT WAS AT YOU ...

Although the actual shots were directed at your STAND-INS .....

Or SURROGATES ......

Which is to say ...

At OUR American military .....

As for me, I study these words above from OUR United States of America DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE from the tyranny of another TYRANT named George .....

The words of wise and educated men back in 1776 which stated that "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes, and accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves, by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed .....

And I have to wonder, George .....

WHAT EXPERIENCE DO YOU HAVE THAT CONTRADICTS ANY OF THIS?

WHAT EVIDENCE?

ANYTHING, GEORGE?

And since it might be a hard question for you, involving as it does not only some knowledge of the history of the world, but of human nature, as well .....

Please ...

Lest you be further embarrassed out there on the world stage as a "MENTAL LIGHT-WEIGHT" and dilletante .....

Take your time answering, George ...

Since you have been doing that anyway .....

From the first day of your adminstration ....

Or should I say ...

YOUR GOVERNMENT .....

Back in 2000 ....

And so ...

And of course, George, since this is all probably TOP SECRET ....

Well ...

In that case .....

And as America's George the Tyrannical Bush continues his deadly rampage across OUR world ...

Dealing death and destruction to women and children ......

Along with numerous and assorted "unnatural acts" committed against men ....

To show all the candid world exactly how MANLY a man America's George really isn't .....

"11 Killed in U.S. Raid North of Baghdad"

By ZIAD KHALAF, Associated Press Writer

45 minutes ago

ISAHAQI, Iraq - Eleven people — most women and children — were killed when a house was bombed during a U.S. raid north of Baghdad early Wednesday, police and relatives said.

The U.S. military acknowledged four deaths — a man, two women and a child —in the raid that they said netted an insurgent suspect in the rural Isahaqi area, about 50 miles north of the capital.

The victims, some wrapped in blankets, were driven in the back of three pickup trucks to the Tikrit General Hospital, about 45 miles to the north, relatives said.

Associated Press photographs showed the bodies of two men, five children and four other covered figures arriving at the hospital accompanied by grief-stricken relatives.

A suicide bomber on a bicycle missed a police patrol and killed at least two civilians Wednesday in Bagouba north of Baghdad, police said.

Six others were wounded in the attack in downtown Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, police said.

The provincial police command said the bomber's explosives appeared to have detonated prematurely as he was peddling toward the patrol.

Riyadh Majid, who identified himself as the nephew of the killed head of the family — Faez Khalaf — told AP at the hospital that U.S. forces landed in helicopters and raided the home early Wednesday.

Khalaf's brother, Ahmed, said nine of the victims were family members who lived at the house and two were unidentified visitors.

"The killed family was not part of the resistance; they were women and children," Ahmed Khalaf said.

"The Americans have promised us a better life, but we get only death."

The U.S. military said it was targeting and captured an individual suspected of supporting foreign fighters for al-Qaida in Iraq.

"Troops were engaged by enemy fire as they approached the building," said Tech. Sgt. Stacy Simon, a military spokeswoman.

"Coalition forces returned fire utilizing both air and ground assets."

"The targeted individual was detained during this raid."

The building and a vehicle were destroyed, the military said.

Police Capt. Laith Mohammed, in nearby Samarra, said American warplanes and armor were used in the strike, which destroyed the house.

The 11 people inside were killed, he said.

An AP reporter at the scene said the roof of the house collapsed, three cars were destroyed and two cows were killed.

Ah, yes ...

GLOBALIZATION .....

Which is what America's George is killing all these women and children for ...

George the Bush is the MAN IN CHARGE OF THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD .....

IT IS HIS OYSTER ALONE .....

And while he makes IRAQINAM unsafe for even the cows over there .....

He sure has made AFGHANISTAN "safe" for some BID-NESS MEN ...

Which is what GLOBALIZATION PER BUSHIANISM is really all about, don't you know ..

FREE TRADE ...

ALL BARRIERS TO FREE TRADE COME DOWN ....

Nudge, nudge, wink, wink .....

SO ....

America ....

Just think about how the American ECONOMY is going to be doing when all this FOREIGN INVESTMENT that George W. Bush is promoting comes HOME TO HERE ....

"Afghans to Drug Lords: Keep Profits Home"

By DANIEL COONEY, Associated Press Writer

Tue Mar 14, 2:53 PM ET

LASHKARGAH, Afghanistan - Afghanistan will encourage its powerful drug lords to invest their illegally earned profits in the war-shattered country, according to the governor of the nation's top opium-growing region.

The offer comes amid warnings of another bumper poppy crop that will fuel a booming narcotics trade, which already accounts for 35 percent of the impoverished country's income.

"We as a government will provide them the opportunity to use their money for the national benefit," Helmand Gov. Mohammed Daud said during a trip to the region this week by U.S. Ambassador Ronald Neumann.

"They must invest in industries."

"They must invest in construction companies," he said.

But he said that so far the government has had no success in attracting the drug traffickers to open new businesses and that most of the money is being sent overseas.

The drug trade employs about one in 10 Afghans and brought in $2.8 billion last year, Afghan and U.S. officials say.

The vast majority of that goes to traffickers and only a small fraction to farmers.

About 345,000 acres of poppies are believed to have been planted this year — an increase of up to 40 percent from 2005.

The opium is refined into heroin before being smuggled out of the country to meet 90 percent of the world's supply.

A U.S. diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said the drug trade was so entrenched that it was difficult to confront the narco bosses head on.

He said the government could grant them an "informal amnesty" if they end their involvement in drugs, swear allegiance to President Hamid Karzai's government, invest their money at home and pay taxes.

The diplomat said one or two major traffickers have approached the government for talks, but no deals have been reached.

Most of their money is stashed in banks in the United Arab Emirates, he said.

Asked about the offer in an interview Monday at the main U.S.-led coalition base in Helmand, Ambassador Neumann compared it to a broad national reconciliation program with Taliban militants and others that aims to bring peace after a quarter century of war.

"It's part of a larger problem, you have militia commanders, you have drug lords, you have all kinds of people that at the end of the day, some of them need to be arrested and put in prison, but basically Afghanistan has to come back together," he said.

But Neumann said he was unaware of a formal program specifically targeting drug traffickers to get them to invest in Afghanistan.

"There is a lot of effort to get Afghans as a whole to invest ... (but) I don't know of any easy way that we are going to distinguish where the money comes from," he said.

Afghanistan would not be the first nation with a vast drug industry to let barons launder their ill-gotten money.

The U.S. government has accused military-run Myanmar — once the world's top producer of opium and still treated as a pariah for its poor rights record — of allowing drug kingpins and ethnic armies that reached cease-fires with the government to invest in commercial banks and other businesses.

Afghanistan's drug traffickers have acted with virtual impunity since U.S.-led forces in 2001 ousted the Taliban, which in its last two years in power enforced a virtual ban on opium cultivation.

The new judiciary system is weak and has never prosecuted senior traffickers.

Afghan and Western officials say the police force is corrupt with officers suspected of involvement in the narcotics trade.

The government's approach until now in dealing with drugs has been to eradicate poppy fields forcibly as part of a U.S. and British-backed program, while also providing farmers with the means to grow legal crops.

Although last year saw a notable decline in opium cultivation, only a tiny percentage of the opium fields that were planted were destroyed.

That prompted farmers to plant more this year because of the apparent likelihood that they will be able to get away with it, the U.S. diplomat said.

The government has vowed to eradicate more this year, and lines of tractors have already ground up some 12,000 acres of the plants before the milky white, oozing opium gum could be harvested, according to U.S. officials.

Drug agents in recent years have considered using airplanes to spray herbicides on the poppies, but strong opposition from Karzai halted the idea, the diplomat said.

The ground eradication campaign has also met with resistance.

Taliban rebels have vowed to defend the opium farmers.

In some small towns in southern Helmand and Kandahar provinces, posters purportedly by the insurgents have been pasted on walls, promising to prevent widespread destruction of the poppies.

Eradication started last month in Kandahar and last week in Helmand, but there have been only small skirmishes in both provinces so far.

end quotes

"The new judiciary system is weak and has never prosecuted senior traffickers."

How very George .....

"A U.S. diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said the drug trade was so entrenched that it was difficult to confront the narco bosses head on."

Most of their money is stashed in banks in the United Arab Emirates, he said.

HOW VERY GEORGE, INDEED ....

"Judge in Moussaoui Case Imposes Sanctions"

By MATTHEW BARAKAT, Associated Press Writer

58 minutes ago

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - Faced with a major setback in their death penalty case against a confessed al-Qaida conspirator, prosecutors are considering whether to appeal a judge's decision to bar witnesses who were improperly coached by a government lawyer.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema delayed the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui until Monday to give prosecutors a chance to sort out their options.

Brinkema on Tuesday excluded roughly half of the government's key witnesses from taking the stand after determining their testimony may have been tainted.

Justice Department spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos called the decision disappointing.

Without addressing the likelihood of overturning Brinkema's ruling, she stressed that prosecutors have already obtained a guilty plea from Moussaoui and at a minimum he will be imprisoned for life without possibility of release.

Brinkema's ruling rejected a defense request for more serious sanctions — dismissal of the government's entire death-penalty case.

The judge penalized prosecutors after learning Transportation Security Administration lawyer Carla Martin had violated trial rules.

Martin had improperly prepared seven witnesses from the Federal Aviation Administration for questions on cross-examination by sending them trial transcripts.

Federal rules of evidence prohibit witnesses from exposure to trial testimony because of the possibility they will alter their testimony based on what they learn.

"I don't think in the annals of criminal law there has ever been a case with this many significant problems," Brinkema said after Tuesday's hearing uncovered even more government misconduct.

Moussaoui is the only person charged in this country with the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

He pleaded guilty in April to conspiring with al-Qaida to hijack aircraft and other crimes, but he denies any involvement in 9/11, saying he was training for a possible future attack.

The sentencing trial that began last week will determine Moussaoui's punishment: death or life in prison.

Six witnesses who testified outside the jury's presence Tuesday — all present or former FAA employees — said Martin's exhortations would not have affected their testimony.

But Brinkema said that wasn't clear.

"Whether the witnesses have actually been tainted or not is almost impossible to tell," Brinkema said.

"There are a number of errors so serious that that portion of the government's case has been seriously eroded."

Martin had been expected to testify Tuesday, but she invoked her right to an attorney.

That attorney, Roscoe Howard, later advised her not to testify.

E-mails written by Martin reveal she believed prosecutors had overstated the FAA's ability to prevent the 9/11 attacks in their opening statement to the jury, and the FAA witnesses had to be prepared for aggressive cross-examination as a result.

Tuesday's hearing revealed even more missteps by Martin.

In one instance, defense lawyers sought to meet with two TSA employees who might be called as defense witnesses, but Martin falsely told the defense that the two were unwilling to meet with them.

The aviation witnesses are key to prosecutors' efforts to obtain the death penalty, which they must prove by showing Moussaoui's actions resulted in at least one death on Sept. 11.

The witnesses were expected to testify that they would have issued alerts and implemented security measures at the airports if Moussaoui had revealed his al-Qaida membership and the true intent of his flight training when he was arrested and interrogated by federal agents in August 2001.

Prosecutors can appeal Brinkema's ruling to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond.

They filed a pretrial appeal in 2003 when Brinkema struck the death penalty as punishment for the government's refusal to allow defense questioning of al-Qaida witnesses in U.S. custody.

The appellate court overruled Brinkema in 2004 and reinstated the death-penalty option.

Outside the courthouse, Abraham Scott of Springfield, Va., whose wife Janice Marie died at the Pentagon on 9/11, called Brinkema's ruling "a fair decision," though he was disappointed that the stricken testimony will not expose some of the FAA's failings prior to the attacks.
___

Associated Press Writer Michael J. Sniffen contributed to this report.

end quotes

"I don't think in the annals of criminal law there has ever been a case with this many significant problems," Brinkema said after Tuesday's hearing uncovered even more government misconduct.

George W. Bush's "VISION OF JUSTICE" in OUR America is revealed .....

MISCONDUCT by GUMMINT LAWYERS ....

Because the "law" belongs to George and HIS, of course ...

So that they are free to do anything that they want with it ...

Despite some puny words written in some books called the LAWS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ....

Which of course, don't apply to the GEORGISTS .....

Because George the TRYANNICAL BUSH has his own set of laws that he and HIS go by ....

And those laws are TOP-SECRET ....

And so ....

As any good swordsman knows .....

Or even a "grunt" infantryman like me, for that matter .....

When dueling with an enemy who would take your life in a heartbeat ...

But for your superior awareness of the developing situation .....

It can be fatal to lose control of the momentum ....

And it is fatal ignorance in the extreme ...

To not know ....

That such a thing exists in the first place .....

As is the case with America's George .....

And so ....

"Saddam Urges Iraqis to Unite Against GIs"

By BASSEM MROUE, Associated Press Writer

2 hours, 1 minute ago

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Saddam Hussein, testifying Wednesday for the first time in his trial, called on Iraqis to stop killing each other and instead fight U.S. troops.

The judge reprimanded him for making a rambling, political speech and ordered the TV cameras switched off.

Saddam began his speech by declaring he was the elected president, touching off a shouting match with chief judge Raouf Abdel-Rahman.

"You used to be a head of state."

"You are a defendant now," Abdel-Rahman told him.

Saddam, dressed in a black suit and wearing large reading glasses, repeatedly brushed off the judge's demands that he address the charges against him — the killing of 148 Shiites and the imprisonment and torture of others during a crackdown in the 1980s.

Instead, he read from a prepared text, addressing the "great Iraqi people" — a phrase he often used in his presidential speeches — and said he was "pained" by the recent wave of Sunni-Shiite violence.

"Let the people unite and resist the invaders and their backers."

"Don't fight among yourselves," he said, praising the insurgency.

"In your resistance to the invasion by the Americans and Zionists and their allies, you were great."

"You were great in my eyes and you remain so."

"... It's only a matter of time until the sun rises and you'll be victorious," he said.

Abdel-Rahman shouted at him again and closed the session for 90 minutes, ordering journalists out of the room and the delayed broadcast cut while Saddam finished reading his speech.

The stormy exchanges were a stark contrast to the past few sessions, when each of Saddam's seven co-defendants took the stand, one by one, and were questioned by the judge and prosecutor about the crackdown in the Shiite town of Dujail after a 1982 assassination attempt on the then-Iraqi president.

Even Saddam's half-brother, former intelligence chief Barzan Ibrahim — who has frequently caused an uproar in the court in the past — submitted to more than three hours of questioning earlier Wednesday.

He denied any role in the crackdown, and as prosecutors presented a series of intelligence memos on the arrests allegedly with his signatures, he insisted each was a forgery.

Prosecutors will have another chance to try to question Saddam on the charges when the trial reconvenes April 5.

But in Wednesday's session, Saddam sought to project the image of a man still in power addressing his people in troubled times, even as Abdel-Rahman repeatedly stabbed a button on his desk to shut off Saddam's microphone.

At one point, the judge screamed, "Respect yourself!"

Saddam shouted back: "You respect yourself!"

"You are a defendant in a major criminal case, concerning the killing of innocents."

"You have to respond to this charge," Abdel-Rahman told him.

"What about those who are dying in Baghdad?

"Are they not innocents?" Saddam replied.

"I am talking to the Iraqi people."

In his speech, Saddam told Iraqis that "of all religions and sects ... I do not discriminate among you."

"What pains me most is what I heard recently about something that aims to harm our people," he said, referring to Shiite-Sunni violence that has rocked the country since the bombing of a major Shiite shrine in Samarra last month.

He blamed "criminals" for the shrine bombing and the attacks on Sunni mosques that followed, and urged Iraqis to unite.

"What happened in the last days is bad," he said.

"You will live in darkness and rivers of blood for no reason."

"The bloodshed that they (the Americans) have caused to the Iraqi people only made them more intent and strong to evict the foreigners from their land and liberate their country," he said.

After Abdel-Rahman closed the session, Saddam finished reading his speech.

Former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark, who is a member of Saddam's defense team, told CNN the speech explained the context of the time period in which the Dujail events took place, arguing the legality of the government actions while Iraq was at war with Iran.

But Clark said the judge "threatened us with prosecution if we release what (Saddam) said."

Saddam argued further with Abdel-Rahman, complaining about the closing of the session and insisting he wanted to help stop the violence.

"I am trying to extinguish the fire with few drops of water," he said, according to a person close to the trial, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the judge's gag order.

When journalists returned to the court, Saddam was sitting alone in the defendants' pen.

The chief prosecutor tried to question him, but he refused, demanding first to see a copy of an affidavit he made to investigators before the trial.

Abdel-Rahman ordered that he be given a copy and adjourned the trial until April 5.

Saddam and the seven former members of his regime face possible execution by hanging if they are convicted in connection with the crackdown launched in Dujail following a July 8, 1982 shooting attack on Saddam's motorcade in the town.

In a March 1 session, Saddam stood up in court and boldly acknowledged that he ordered the 148 Shiites put on trial before his Revolutionary Court, which eventually sentenced them all to death.

But Saddam insisted it was his right to do so since they were suspected in the attempt to kill him.

The defense has argued that Saddam's government acted within its rights to respond after the assassination attempt.

The prosecutor has sought to show that the crackdown went well beyond the planners of the attack to punish Dujail's civilian population, saying entire families were arrested and tortured and that the 148 who were killed were sentenced to death without a proper trial.

end quotes

And of course ...

If they can convict Saddam of killing Iraqis without proper trials .....

Then that would apply to George W. Bush as well ..

And so ....

And if INCOMPETENCE alone were an impeachable offense ....

As it ought to be in the case of this present seemingly dim-witted incumbent .....

"Government: Moussaoui Case May Be Lost"

By MATTHEW BARAKAT and MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN, Associated Press Writers

1 hour, 17 minutes ago

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - Prosecutors acknowledge their only hope of salvaging the death-penalty case against confessed terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui is to reverse a judge's ruling barring key witnesses from testifying.

But the government's avenues of appeal may be limited.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Rob Spencer told U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema it would be a waste of time for the government to proceed if her ruling, which tossed out half of the government's case, is allowed to stand.

"We don't know whether it is worth us proceeding at all, candidly, under the ruling you made today," Spencer said in an unusually blunt assessment of the government's prospects during a conference call Tuesday.

Transcripts of the call were made public Wednesday.

"Because without some relief, frankly, I think that there's no point for us to go forward."

Spencer went on to say that resuming the trial under the current conditions would "waste the jury's time and the court's time, and we're all mindful of the expense of this proceeding."

"... We ought just to weigh our rights for reconsideration or our appellate rights."

It's not clear, though, what appeal avenues are open to the government.

Defense attorney Edward MacMahon said during the call that the government can't appeal Brinkema's ruling to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond now that the trial is under way

"We don't think the government has any appellate rights under" federal law, MacMahon said during the call.

But there appears to be no dispute that prosecutors can ask Brinkema to reconsider her order.

And she told them her schedule would permit that on Thursday.

The government's case is teetering following the disclosure that a federal lawyer, Carla Martin, violated trial rules by coaching witnesses on their testimony, sending them trial transcripts that she urged them to read, and warning them to be prepared for certain topics on cross-examination.

She also misrepresented to defense lawyers that witnesses they wanted to call weren't willing to talk with them before trial.

Federal rules of evidence prohibit witnesses from exposure to trial testimony because of the possibility they will alter their testimony based on what they learn.

Moussaoui is the only person charged in this country with the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

He pleaded guilty in April to conspiring with al-Qaida to hijack aircraft and other crimes, but he denies any involvement in 9/11, saying he was training for a possible future attack.

The sentencing trial that began last week will determine Moussaoui's punishment: death or life in prison.

Brinkema delayed the trial until Monday while prosecutors consider an appeal.

The three government witnesses struck from the case were all current or former employees of the Federal Aviation Administration.

They were expected to testify that they would have issued alerts and implemented security measures at airports if Moussaoui had revealed his al-Qaida membership and the true intent of his flight training when he was arrested and interrogated by federal agents in August 2001.

Moussaoui lied to federal agents after his arrest and led them on what one FBI agent called "wild goose chases."

The aviation witnesses are key because, to obtain the death penalty, the government must prove that Moussaoui's actions directly resulted in at least one death on Sept. 11.

Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, said that on its face, the federal statute governing prosecutorial appeals does not allow the government to appeal midtrial because it would violate a defendant's constitutional protections against being tried twice for the same crime.

But he said the issue is not clear cut.

As a practical matter, he thought prosecutors might have more luck asking Brinkema to reconsider her ruling rather than appealing to the 4th Circuit, which could prompt another long delay of a trial that has been more than four years in the making.

But Eric Holder, a former deputy attorney general, thought the appellate court in Richmond could act swiftly in a case of this significance.

"Given ... what is at stake both in terms of defendant's life and what this trial means to this nation, I think an appellate court could and should move a lot faster than they are used to," Holder said in a telephone interview Wednesday.

He expected prosecutors would exhaust all options in pursuing the case.

"Agree or disagree with the decision to seek death, once you have committed to that course of action, you have to do all that you can to obtain that ultimate punishment," he said.

Prosecutors successfully overturned an unfavorable ruling from Brinkema in 2004.

The 4th Circuit overruled her decision to exclude the death penalty then as a sanction for the government's refusal to allow defense access to key al-Qaida witnesses in U.S. custody.
___

On the Net:

Court's Moussaoui site: http://www.vaed.uscourts.gov/notablecases/...aoui/index.html

And then ...

There is OUR CORRUPT CONGRESS .....

Who seem bent on trying to put another one over on us ...

As if they were a bunch of slick talking carnival barkers out hustling the yokels and bumpkins ....

At a west Texas county fair .....

And we were too stupid to see a mere facade

When it is right in front of our faces ....

"Travel ban proposed in scandal-rocked House"

By Thomas Ferraro

1 hour, 36 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. lawmakers would have to give up one of the perks of office -- free trips -- for the rest of the year under a proposed ethics overhaul prompted by a lobbying scandal that has roiled the Republican-led Congress.

Drafted largely in response to the wide-ranging investigation involving lobbyist Jack Abramoff, the proposed ban drew quick fire on Wednesday both on and off Capitol Hill.

A public watchdog group accused Republican leaders of merely seeking to get past the November election without any more reports of congressional junkets arranged by lobbyists seeking to influence legislation and paid for by corporations, unions or nonprofits.

And some Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives complained that the moratorium proposed for them would restrict their ability to attend educational conferences and give university commencement addresses.

Leaders were questioned at a closed-door meeting on Wednesday about the proposal, and others expected to be put in draft legislation later this week.

"Muddled and confused," Rep. Ray LaHood, an Illinois Republican, said of the session.

"A lot more work has to be done."

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, another Illinois Republican, said the proposals that would also require greater disclosure by lobbyists could still be changed.

They must go through more committees before being sent to the full House for a vote.

"What we're going to do is move with our members," said Hastert, who described the proposals as designed to protect "the integrity of this Congress."

While lawmakers in both parties have said they are committed to sweeping reform, Public Citizen and other public advocacy groups complain they are not going far enough.

Craig Holman of Public Citizen called the proposed temporary travel ban "a facade."

"They are trying to defer the issue until after the elections, and then hope it goes away," Holman said.

Abramoff pleaded guilty to fraud charges in January and is cooperating with prosecutors in a corruption probe that could reach a number of lawmakers.

In his plea, Abramoff admitted he showered golf trips, meals, sports tickets and other gifts on lawmakers in return for actions that would help his clients.

Lobbyists are prohibited from funding trips by members of Congress, but can help arrange those financed by outside groups.

Under the proposed ban, House members would be unable to accept trips funded by outside groups for the rest of the year.

The House ethics committee also would make recommendations on possible travel and gift restrictions by December 15.

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8718

American Megalomania
Our 'national security strategy' is crazed nonsense
by Justin Raimondo
The rituals of Empire have their own meaning and structure, and, as we morph from a republic to an imperial hegemon, these are becoming more formalized. Note the proliferation of grandiosely named agencies and other offices, staffed by a multitude of officials with sonorously self-important titles. For example, how many people know that a "Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor" has been created within the State Department, charged with "promoting freedom and democracy and protecting human rights around the world," because, after all, this ideological mumbo-jumbo is "central to U.S. foreign policy"? As Pat Nixon’s plain Republican cloth coat gives way to the imperial purple, a rococo extravagance replaces the unpretentious modesty of the Old Republic as the Washington style.

Another mark of Empire is the codification of its rituals in our laws, and that has given the Boy Emperor a pretext for yet another provocation, this one presumably aimed at Iran, in the form of a new "national security strategy" that reiterates an old Bushian trope: the necessity and morality of preemptive war. Every year, the national security bureaucracy is legally charged with issuing such a document, and, although this has been ignored for the past two years or so, suddenly the Bushies have remembered their legal responsibilities. In the process of slapping it together, however, the State Department’s wordsmiths appear to have plagiarized … George W. Bush. Or, at least, his speechwriters, who can fairly claim credit for the opening line:

"It is the policy of the United States to seek and support democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. In the world today, the fundamental character of regimes matters as much as the distribution of power among them. The goal of our statecraft is to help create a world of democratic, well-governed states that can meet the needs of their citizens and conduct themselves responsibly in the international system. This is the best way to provide enduring security for the American people."

The opener is, of course, the most appalling statement uttered in Bush’s second inaugural speech, the Doestoyevskian one in which he invoked "a fire in the mind" – a phrase directly lifted from The Possessed, intended by the author to characterize the nihilist mindset – as a metaphor for the revolutionary fervor this inside-out Bizarro World Trotskyism is supposed to inspire. However, if even the most pro-American resident of, say, Iran, or perhaps Belarus, gets past the grandiloquent phrases, and down to the specific goals and tasks of U.S. foreign policy as announced in this document, what is likely to be inspired is fear rather than hope. Fear of war, invasion, occupation, and all they entail. Fear, that is, of a rogue nation on the loose.

What the U.S. government is saying, here, is that it has abandoned the traditional behavior of ordinary nation-states throughout history. This is generally understood to be the preservation and protection its own national interests, somewhat narrowly defined as the defense of its territory and such ancillary overseas interests as are directly related to its continued survival as a nation. But the Americans have now abandoned that paradigm, and are seemingly intent on adopting the old Soviet model, at least the one that predominated in the immediate aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik coup, in which the Communist International was proclaimed from the rooftops and the leaders of the Russian state routinely referred to their intention to overthrow world capitalism.

In the minds of its leaders, the Soviet state apparatus was not merely concerned with governing Russia and the captive nations, but was a kind of General Command of the world proletariat, tasked just as much with spreading Commie rule over the rest of the globe as it was in filling the potholes in the streets of Leningrad. In this sense, the Russian commissars were carriers of an ideological cancer, one that insisted on metastasizing until it – finally – collapsed, exhausted by its exertions and inner contradictions. The USSR was, in principle if not always in effect, a "rogue" state, one explicitly committed to fomenting conflict.

Similarly, the Bush administration, in reserving to itself the right to effect "regime change" anywhere and everywhere on earth, by any means necessary, has transformed itself into a "revolutionary" state, one that seeks to spread its own system over the entire earth – by consent of the "liberated," if possible, by force of arms if necessary. In any case, the rulers of the American empire, like their Soviet predecessors, fully realize that their final victory won’t be won overnight:

"Achieving this goal is the work of generations. The United States is in the early years of a long struggle, similar to what our country faced in the early years of the Cold War. The 20th century witnessed the triumph of freedom over the threats of fascism and communism. Yet a new totalitarian ideology now threatens, an ideology grounded not in secular philosophy but in the perversion of a proud religion. Its content may be different from the ideologies of the last century, but its means are similar: intolerance, murder, terror, enslavement, and repression."

The conceptual framework of the new American revolutionary ideology is neatly set out, cast in the context of history and given a dualistic frisson that recalls the old Communist doctrine of "class struggle." In the Bushian version, however, the inevitable conflict between the classes is replaced by a purely ideological war between the United States and various forms of totalitarianism – the latest of which is "the perversion of a proud religion" against the purely "secular philosophy" presumably represented by the U.S. and the West.

I’m not sure, at this point, whose ears the above statement is meant for: if any Iraqis are listening, perhaps the words "intolerance, murder, terror, enslavement, and repression" recall major aspects of their own "liberated" state – all of which can be traced back to the American invasion and occupation. Surely the religious theocracy now being imposed on the Iraqi people is as intolerant a government as one is likely to find anywhere on earth, at least when it comes to manners and morals. We know that murder and terror – in the form of Shi’ite party "militias" – are the instruments of this odious regime. As the Americans tilt toward putting the bloodstained Ba’athist thugs back into power, as a hedge against a Khomeini-ite takeover, it is the Iraqi people who are forced to somehow choose between full-fledged enslavement and mere repression.

The practical implementation of America’s worldwide revolutionary strategy is left largely to the imagination – and to the concrete example of Iraq – but seven current targets in the sights of our American neo-Leninists are singled out as "despotic systems": North Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Belarus, Burma and Zimbabwe, against whom "all necessary measures" are justified. "We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran," the document declares, taking up a theme constantly reiterated by U.S. officials in recent weeks. There is mention of a "confrontation" that can only be "avoided" if the Europeans succeed in persuading Tehran to back off its insistence on acquiring nuclear power.

Russia is slapped around a bit, reflecting the hectoring tone and increasingly hostile stance toward Vladimir Putin taken by the administration in recent years:

"Recent trends regrettably point toward a diminishing commitment to democratic freedoms and institutions. We will work to try to persuade the Russian Government to move forward, not backward, along freedom's path."

If "freedom’s path" means going the way of Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, and other regime-changed American satellites veering toward some form of "democratic" authoritarianism, then one can forgive the Russian people if they answer: Thanks, but no thanks. China is also warned to know, and keep, her place, and is lectured to about the wonders of "democracy." There is no recognition or acknowledgement, naturally, that China’s sclerotic Leninist caste system seems to be withering away of its own accord – quite without outside assistance or intervention, except for the all but invincible socio-cultural influence of the West.

There is, indeed, hardly a corner of the world that doesn’t come under the all-seeing, all-encompassing eye of America’s imperial mandarins. Like the Dark Lord keeping track of events in every shire of Middle Earth, the American hegemon keeps a close watch on what it considers its rightful domain – and woe unto those who even think of resistance! The very thought is bound to provoke a military strike – because defiance must be preempted and crushed before it spreads.

And so we are faced with the irony that the one nation formally committed to universal rights is almost universally hated. This kind of arrogance – the Greeks called it hubris – is simply asking to be smacked down. If the Bush Doctrine doesn’t bankrupt us, first, then it will certainly provoke a worldwide reaction, a wave of violent anti-Americanism that endangers us at home and abroad.

This is what happens when foreign policy, instead of attending to the narrowly-defined national interest, becomes the instrument of ideologues, dreamers, con men, and foreign lobbyists. When "ending tyranny in our world," instead of ending attacks on America and American interests, becomes the central motivating factor in formulating U.S. policy, then the consequences are more than likely to be dangerous and quite possibly lethal.

We have never had a greater need for leadership in the foreign policy arena, and yet politicians in both parties routinely regurgitate the megalomaniacal rhetoric and style that suffuses our 2006 national security strategy. When oh when will we see a return, on the part of American policymakers, to simple common sense? When will America give up the Soviet model, as having demonstrably failed, and return to the time-honored constraints and safeguards imposed by a more traditionally American foreign policy?

Not, I fear, before the blowback becomes pretty intense – and we are forced to pay a high price for the lesson.

Happy Saint Patty's Day.

Everybody should be green.

Unless they are blue.

Can I be of use here?

Michael?

Anybody?

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/lazarus/20060316.html

The Moussaoui Trial: It's High Time The Death Penalty Is Taken Off the Table
By EDWARD LAZARUS
elazarus@findlaw.com
----
Thursday, Mar. 16, 2006

This week, Leonie Brinkema, the judge presiding over the sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, declared, "I don't think in the annals of criminal law there has ever been a case with this many significant problems."

The occasion for Brinkema's despair was the revelation that government attorneys had engaged in a panoply of misconduct in trying to obtain the death penalty. Moussaoui is the only person so far convicted of a crime even tenuously connected to the 9/11 attacks; the government wants the death penalty badly in this case, and has gone to extremes to get it.



In this column, I'll argue that the government's conduct has so tainted this case, that, at a minimum, the death penalty option should be withdrawn.

It is hard to imagine a more noble endeavor than bringing a terrorist before the bar of justice and exacting punishment and revenge and, perhaps for a few people, deterrence.

There was a solemn and searing beauty to the trial, conviction, and sentencing of Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing, the worst act of home-grown terrorism this country has ever seen. It was not a process without flaws. But it was fundamentally fair; it channeled the nation's retributive impulse on the man most deserving of that ire; and it provided all of us, but especially the victim's families, a true measure of catharsis.

The Moussaoui trial is a farce by comparison, and has taken place with not just the nation but the whole world watching.

The Misconduct: Transforming Fact Witnesses Into Government Lackeys

Here are a few more details of the misconduct in which the government engaged: First and foremost, a government lawyer had improperly coached Transportation Safety Administration witnesses about how best to advance the government's case. This same lawyer also improperly instructed witnesses not to talk to the defense, while falsely telling the court that the witness were unwilling to do so. Government counsel also repeatedly violated a court order barring lawyers from telling witnesses about trial strategy or prior testimony in the case.

This misconduct is especially serious because it violates our core ideal as to what a witness should be: A person who provides, under oath, a recounting of relevant factual events. When factual accounts are mixed with government arguments, the line between witness testimony and lawyers' statements - openings and summations - can be fatally blurred. The chance of a conviction based not on facts, but on rhetoric, looms.

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Judges specifically tell juries that lawyers' statements are not statements of fact, so that juries can rely on the fact that witness testimony, by contrast, is factual. When witnesses are prepped to advance one side's arguments, and withheld on false pretenses from contact with the other side, judges' admonitions, too, become unwitting lies.

What Moussaoui Did, and What He Didn't Do

Here is the most that can be said with any degree of confidence about Zacarias Moussaoui: He is an unstable, fervent, and dangerous adherent of Al Qaeda who appears to have been tapped to carry out a post-9/11 assault on the White House, but who was arrested on immigration charges before he could effectuate the plan.

What charges would these facts support? They would support charges of conspiracy to commit terrorist acts - but not the acts of 9/11; Moussaoui had heard about them, but did not even know their operational details. On 9/11, he was sitting in jail. He had not planned to be part of the 9/11 attacks; early references to him as a possible "twentieth hijacker" have turned out to be inaccurate. Nor did Moussaoui help plan the attacks.

Nevertheless, the government has somehow made the case against Moussaoui, a case about 9/11. It is easy to sympathize with the impulse to hold someone accountable to the full measure of the law for the 3000 lives mercilessly extinguished on 9/11. But Moussaoui has always been a troubling choice - one that serves mainly to underscore the failures plaguing our investigation and prosecution of terrorists.

The Shaky Case for The Death Penalty, and the Nonexistent 9/11 Link

From the beginning, the government's push to obtain the death penalty against Zacarias Moussaoui has been a strained and problematic enterprise - for it rests directly on the gaping flaw in the government's case: its attempt to link Moussaoui to 9/11.

Moussaoui was charged with and, after several false starts, pled guilty to conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism. But his admission to being a part of Al Qaeda's overall plot against the United States is not sufficient on its own to make Moussaoui eligible for the death penalty.

To open that door, the government must show that Moussaoui's conduct had a direct connection to the terrorist acts of 9/11, and actually helped cause those murderous acts. And the only way the government has figured out to try and make this showing is to argue that, if Moussaoui had only told the truth to government agents when he was arrested in August 2001, then the information he would have provided would have permitted the FBI to connect the dots to foil the 9/11 attacks.

The perversity of all this is uncomfortable to confront. It was bad enough that the government had to use as its showcase the prosecution of an apparently schizophrenic peripheral player because its other much-touted terrorism arrests have badly misfired. Now it has compounded its mistake with misconduct designed to bolster a shaky case. The government could have made a simple, accurate case that put Moussaoui away for life. Instead, it has made a misguided bid for death, based on inaccuracy and misconduct.

The latest turn of events - with the judge appalled at government misconduct -- only underscores the tragedy of an ill-advised choice based on an ill-advised theory that, under the intense pressure of the moment, almost inevitably was going to produce a cascade of governmental overreaching.

By breaking elementary rules regarding communication with witnesses while also violating a court order, the government has let slip the moral high ground in a case that, in a fundamental sense, is about the comparative morality of our way of life and of governance against those the terrorists seek to impose.

It is too soon to know what effect the government's misconduct will have on the outcome of Moussaoui's trial.

The judge is prohibiting testimony from six witnesses from the Transportation Safety Administration, who were to have testified about what measures the government could have taken to thwart the 9/11 attacks if only Moussaoui had been forthright when federal agents questioned him in August 2001. Again, the issue with respect to these witnesses is that they were improper coached not to recount the facts they knew, but rather to advance the government's case as best they could.

Still, the judge is not prohibiting the government from seeking the death penalty, even though it appears that several of the now-excluded witnesses were to testify for the defense.

All of which means that the trial is likely to be burdened with a government appeal now -- and a very substantial defense appeal down the road if the jury imposes the death penalty.

It's Time to Get Rid of the Death Penalty Option in This Irrevocably Tainted Trial

Reportedly, the Department of Justice is considering putting a stop to all this by foregoing the death penalty. It should. Let Moussaoui rot in jail.

This was never the right case through which to seek emotional release for the families victimized by the 9/11 terrorists. And now it has become a disastrous case, sure to be counterproductive when it comes to achieving any conceivable polity objectives it might once have imperfectly served.

There is nobility in having the courage to abandon a death penalty fight that the government probably should never undertaken, and now has tainted irremediably by striking a series of low blows. Such courage would far better reflect the American values we seek to project, than a stubborn insistence on obtaining a death sentence that has lost the moral weight that is its only justification.

How Long Do We Have?


About the time our original 13 states adopted their new constitution,
Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of
Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic
some 2,000 years prior:

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist
as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to
exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves
generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the
majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most
benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every
democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is
always followed by a dictatorship."


"The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the
beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200
years, these nations always progressed through the following
sequence:

1. -From bondage to spiritual faith;
2. -From spiritual faith to great courage;
3. -From courage to liberty;
4. -From liberty to abundance;
5. -From abundance to complacency;
6. -From complacency to apathy;
7. -From apathy to dependence;
8. -From dependence back into bondage ."

Sad, but true.

Where is the outrage?

Where are the demonstrators?

People in the streets, like in Ukraine?

We are no longer citizens; we are now consumers, content to have all the stuff we can buy at Wal Mart, but what a price we have paid.

Well ....

I'm finally back ......

And that was a traumatic experience .....

Being suddenly cut off like that .....

Of course, in the end, it is my own fault .....

For making an assumption ....

That a computer-based forum as sophisticated as this ....

That can let you know you have a new message from someone ....

Would have an automatic "subscription about to expire" message go out to the subscribers .....

So that we would know in advance that we needed to get a remittance in by a certain date ....

Rather than come on one day and simply be locked out because of an oversight .....

But again ...

In the end, it was my fault ...

And so ....

But enough of that ...

I am back ...

And to me ...

That is what matters ...

And so ...

Glad to see you are back.

Had us worried for a while.

Here in BushWorld, which is only a bad dream.

And I will awake and it will be all gone.

Soon, please.

My wish, too, jeffmoskin .....

But fat chance of that, say I ...

The LONG HARD RIDE for OUR America has begun ...

And all we can do is to hang on ...

Or get bucked off in the dust .....

And while we are on that subject of the sick and twisted world inside the head of America's TYRANT KING, George the MALIGNANT BUSH ......

As that sick and twisted world is "expressed" for all the candid world to see by the apparently perverted Donald "Saddam's best buddy" Rumsfeld ....

And his crowd .....

Which seem to do nothing but sully the image and reputation of the American "fighting man" .....

While seemingly restoring the "GLORY" of the Waffen SS of Nazi Germany in WWII .....

Which nation was supported financially by George W. Bush's grandfather Prescott "Cottie" Bush ....

And his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker ....

Until FDR slapped their hands for it, anyway, as being an un-American activity ....

"Abuse beyond Abu Ghraib - Elite U.S. military unit routinely mistreated detainees, rebutting assertions that conduct was confined to a few rogue soldiers at infamous Iraq prison"

By ERIC SCHMITT and CAROLYN MARSHALL, New York Times
First published: Sunday, March 19, 2006

As the Iraqi insurgency intensified in early 2004, an elite Special Operations forces unit converted one of Saddam Hussein's former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret detention center.

There, American soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government's torture chambers into own interrogation cell.

They named it the Black Room.

In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball.

Their intention was to extract information to help hunt down Iraq's most-wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to Defense Department personnel who served with the unit or were briefed on its operations.

The Black Room was part of a temporary detention site at Camp Nama, the secret headquarters of a shadowy military unit known as Task Force 6-26.

Located at Baghdad International Airport, the camp was the first stop for many insurgents on their way to the Abu Ghraib prison a few miles away.

Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, "NO BLOOD, NO FOUL."

The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage adopted by Task Force 6-26: "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it."

According to Pentagon specialists who worked with the unit, prisoners at Camp Nama often disappeared into a detention black hole, barred from access to lawyers or relatives, and confined for weeks without charges.

"The reality is, there were no rules there," another Pentagon official said.

The story of detainee abuse in Iraq is a familiar one.

But the following account of Task Force 6-26, based on documents and interviews with more than a dozen people, offers the first detailed description of how the military's most highly trained counterterrorism unit committed serious abuses.

It adds to the picture of harsh interrogation practices at American military prisons in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as well as at secret CIA detention centers around the world.

The new account reveals the extent to which the unit members mistreated prisoners months before and after the photographs of abuse from Abu Ghraib were made public in April 2004, and it helps belie the original Pentagon assertions that abuse was confined to a small number of rogue reservists at Abu Ghraib.

The abuses at Camp Nama continued despite warnings beginning in August 2003 from an Army investigator and U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials in Iraq.

The CIA was concerned enough to bar its personnel from Camp Nama that August.

American generals were also alerted to the problem.

In December 2003, Col. Stuart A. Herrington, a retired Army intelligence officer, warned in a confidential memo that medical personnel reported that prisoners seized by the unit, then known as Task Force 121, had injuries consistent with beatings.

"It seems clear that TF 121 needs to be reined in with respect to its treatment of detainees," Herrington concluded.

It is difficult to compare the conditions at the camp with those at Abu Ghraib because so little is known about the secret compound, which was off limits even to the Red Cross.

The abuses appeared to have been unsanctioned, but some of them seemed to have been well known throughout the camp.

For an elite unit with roughly 1,000 people at any given time, Task Force 6-26 seems to have had a large number of troops punished for detainee abuse.

Since 2003, 34 task force members have been disciplined in some form for mistreating prisoners, and at least 11 members have been removed from the unit, according to new figures the Special Operations Command provided in response to questions from The New York Times.

Five Army Rangers in the unit were convicted three months ago of kicking and punching three detainees in September 2005.

Declassified documents and interviews with more than a dozen military and civilian Defense Department and other federal personnel reflect a culture clash between the free-wheeling military commandos and the more cautious Pentagon civilians working with them that escalated to a tense confrontation.

At one point, one of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's top aides, Stephen A. Cambone, ordered a subordinate to "get to the bottom" of any misconduct.

Most of the people interviewed for this article were midlevel civilian and military Defense Department personnel who worked with Task Force 6-26 and said they witnessed abuses, or who were briefed on its operations over the past three years.

Many were initially reluctant to discuss Task Force 6-26 because its missions are classified.

But when pressed repeatedly by reporters who contacted them, they agreed to speak about their experiences and observations out of what they said was anger and disgust over the unit's treatment of detainees and the failure of task force commanders to punish misconduct more aggressively.

The critics said the harsh interrogations yielded little information to help capture insurgents or save American lives.

Cases of detainee abuse attributed to Task Force 6-26 demonstrate both confusion over and, in some cases, disregard for approved interrogation practices and standards for detainee treatment, according to Defense Department specialists who have worked with the unit.

Some complaints were ignored or played down in a unit where a conspiracy of silence contributed to the overall secretiveness.

"It's under control," one unit commander told a Defense Department official who complained about mistreatment at Camp Nama in the spring of 2004.

The task force also used small field outposts for interrogations.

At the outposts, some detainees were stripped naked and had cold water thrown on them to cause the sensation of drowning, said Defense Department personnel who served with the unit.

In January 2004, the task force captured the son of one of Saddam's bodyguards in Tikrit.

The man told Army investigators that he was forced to strip and that he was punched in the spine until he fainted, put in front of an air conditioner while cold water was poured on him and kicked in the stomach until he vomited.

Army investigators were forced to close their inquiry in June 2005 after they said task force members used battlefield pseudonyms that made it impossible to identify the soldiers involved.

The unit also asserted that 70 percent of its computer files had been lost.

Senior military commanders insist that the elite warriors, who will be relied on more than ever in the campaign against terrorism, are now treating detainees more humanely and can police themselves.

The CIA has resumed conducting debriefings with the task force, but does not permit harsh questioning, said a CIA official.

Human rights advocates and leading members of Congress say the Pentagon must still do more to hold senior-level commanders and civilian officials accountable for the misconduct.

The Justice Department inspector general is investigating complaints of detainee abuse by Task Force 6-26, a senior law enforcement official said.

The only wide-ranging military inquiry into prisoner abuse by Special Operations forces was completed nearly a year ago by Brig. Gen. Richard P. Formica, and was sent to Congress.

But the U.S. Central Command has refused repeated requests from The New York Times over the past several months to provide an unclassified copy of Formica's findings despite Rumsfeld's instructions that such a version of all 12 major reports into detainee abuse be made public.

end quotes

It takes a REAL HERO to slap around unarmed prisoners, eh, what, Donald ...

REAL HEROS in your mold ....

But not in the real America's at all .....

ZEIG F***** HEIL, Herr Donald ....

ZEIG HEIL ....

This morning, on FOX NEWS FAIR AND BALANCED YOU DECIDE .....

I heard some nabob of something or other over there in George W. Bush's MOTHER COUNTRY of GREAT BRITAIN saying that GREAT BRITAIN was .....

NOT GOING TO ALLOW IRAQINAM TO DESCEND INTO CIVIL WAR ......

And as usual .....

FOX NEWS FAIR AND BALANCED YOU DECIDE simply let that statement stand ...

Without any comment at all as to JUST HOW RIDICULOUS a statement it was ...

Especially coming from a Brit .....

Which nation is probably as responsible for much if not most of the turmoil on this earth of OURS in the last 300 or so years ....

And which nation was itself unable to do anything of real lasting positive consequence in IRAQINAM the last time it tried ....

Just as it, along with "HALF-BAKED" Rumsfeld and "EVEN LESS BAKED THAN THAT" Bush are unable to prevent that slide now ....

At least according to the MAIN-STREAM NEWS that I read every day .....

And that brings up this article from the past ...

On that exact subject .....

Which is an indication of just how long this BARRAGE OF PURE BULL **** by not only OUR government, but George W. Bush's OVERLORDS in Britain, has been going on now ......

To nobody's benefit .....

But the propagandists, or as they are now called, BROADCAST SPECIALISTS .....

They make good bucks for telling a lot of lies ...

And that is what the American economy is based on ...

And so ....

NY Times

May 24, 2005

"Cowboys and Indians"

By NIALL FERGUSON, London

"I think that this could still fail."

Those words - uttered by a senior American officer in Baghdad last week - probably gave opponents of the war in Iraq, particularly those clamoring for a hasty exit, a bit of a kick.

They should be careful what they wish for.

For history strongly suggests that a hasty American withdrawal from Iraq would be a disaster.

"If we let go of the insurgency," said another of the officers quoted anonymously last week, "then this country could fail and go back into civil war and chaos."

As many of the war's opponents seem to have forgotten, civil war and chaos tend to break out when American military interventions have been aborted.

Think not only of Vietnam and Cambodia, but also of Lebanon in 1983 and Haiti in 1996.

To talk glibly of "finding a way out of Iraq," as if it were just a matter of hailing a cab and heading for the Baghdad airport, is to underestimate the danger of a bloody internecine conflict among Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shiites.

Instead of throwing up our hands in an irresponsible fit of despair, we need to learn not just from past disasters but also from historical victories over insurgencies.

Indeed, of all the attempts in the past century by irregular indigenous forces to expel regular foreign forces, around a third have failed.

In 1917 British forces invaded Mesopotamia, got to Baghdad, overthrew its Ottoman rulers and sought - in the words of the general who led them, Sir Stanley Maude - to be its people's "liberators."

The British presence in Iraq was legitimized by international law (it was designated a League of Nations mandate) and by a modicum of democracy (a referendum was held among local sheiks to confirm the creation of a British-style constitutional monarchy).

Despite all this, in 1920 there was a full-scale insurgency against the continuing British military presence.

Some may object that warfare today is a very different matter from warfare 85 years ago.

Yet the striking thing about the events of 1920 is how very like the events of our own time they were.

The reality of what is sometimes called "asymmetric warfare" is how very symmetrical it really is: an insurgency is about leveling the military playing field, and exploiting the advantages of local knowledge to stage hit-and-run attacks against the occupiers, as well as anybody thought to be collaborating with them.

Indeed, if there is asymmetry it lies in the advantages enjoyed by the insurgents.

The cost of training and equipping an American soldier is high; by contrast, life is tragically cheap among the young men of Baghdad and Falluja.

Even if the insurgents lose 10 men for every 1 they kill, they are still winning, not least because the American side takes its losses so much harder.

How, then, did the British crush the insurgency of 1920?

Three lessons stand out.

The first is that, unlike the American enterprise in Iraq today, they had enough men.

In 1920, total British forces in Iraq numbered around 120,000, of whom around 34,000 were trained for actual fighting.

During the insurgency, a further 15,000 men arrived as reinforcements.

Coincidentally, that is very close to the number of American military personnel now in Iraq (around 138,000).

The trouble is that the population of Iraq was just over three million in 1920, whereas today it is around 24 million.

Thus, back then the ratio of Iraqis to foreign forces was, at most, 23 to 1.

Today it is around 174 to 1.

To arrive at a ratio of 23 to 1 today, about one million American troops would be needed.

The United States also faces two other problems that the United Kingdom did not 85 years ago.

The British were able to be ruthless:

They used air raids and punitive expeditions to inflict harsh collective punishments on villages that supported the insurgents.

The United States has not been above brutal methods on occasion in Iraq, yet humiliation and torture of prisoners have not yielded any significant benefits compared with what it has cost the country's reputation.

The Americans' other problem has to do with timing and expectations.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said that American forces should aim to work to a "10-30-30" timetable: 10 days should suffice to topple a rogue regime, 30 days to establish order in its wake, and 30 more days to prepare for the next military undertaking.

I am all in favor of a 10-30-30 timetable - provided the measurement is years, not days.

For it may well take around 10 years to establish order in Iraq, 30 more to establish the rule of law, and quite possibly another 30 to create a stable democracy.

Those American officers who say that it could take years to succeed in Iraq are therefore right.

But the Bush administration has just three and a half years left.

Is it credible that American troops will still be in Iraq for even another four years after that?

The insurgents don't think so.

They know that American democracy puts time on their side.

Once again, the contrast with the British experience is instructive.

Although Iraq was formally granted its independence in 1932, there was still some form of British presence in the country until the late 1950's.

So, if we acknowledge that the United States simply does not have the luxury of time that the British enjoyed and cannot be similarly ruthless, can it at least increase the manpower at its disposal in Iraq?

The official answer from Washington is that Iraqi security forces will soon be ready to play an effective role in policing.

Few who have seen those forces on the ground find this strategy realistic.

Some fear that the training that Iraqi soldiers are receiving may prove useful only when they fight one another in an Iraqi civil war.

What, then, of America's own resources?

Almost no one (least of all the Pentagon) wants to go back to the draft.

So could today's all-volunteer force somehow be expanded to double (at least) the troops available?

That too seems unlikely.

Indeed, the current system is already showing alarming signs of stress and strain as more and more is asked of the "weekend warriors" of the reserves and National Guard, who account for roughly two-fifths of the force in Iraq.

In December, the Army National Guard acknowledged that it had fallen 30 percent below its recruiting goals in the preceding two months.

Many members of the Individual Ready Reserve have been contesting the Army's right to call them up.

How did the British address the manpower problem in 1920?

By bringing in soldiers from India who accounted for more than 87 percent of troops in the counter-insurgency campaign.

Perhaps, then, the greatest problem faced by the Anglophone empire of our own time is very simple: the United Kingdom had the Indian Army; the United States does not.

Indeed, by a rich irony, the only significant auxiliary forces available to the Pentagon today are none other than ... the British Army.

But those troops are far too few to be analogous to the Sikhs, Mahrattas and Baluchis who fought so effectively in 1920.

No one should wish for an overhasty American withdrawal from Iraq.

It would be the prelude to a bloodbath of ethnic cleansing and sectarian violence, with inevitable spillovers into and interventions from neighboring countries.

Rather, it is time to acknowledge just how thinly stretched American forces in Iraq are and to address the problem: whether by finding new allies (send Condoleezza Rice to New Delhi?); radically expanding the accelerated citizenship program for immigrants who join the army; or lowering the (historically high) educational requirements demanded by military recruiters.

YES, as that anonymous officer said, the Bush administration's policy in Iraq could indeed still fail.

But too few American liberals seem to grasp how high the price will be if it does.

That is a point, unfortunately, that also eludes most of this country's allies.

Does it also elude the secretary of defense?

If "10-30-30" are the numbers that concern him, I begin to fear that it does.

The numbers that matter right now are 174 to 1.

That is not only the ratio of Iraqis to American troops.

It is starting to look alarmingly like the odds against American success.

Niall Ferguson, a history professor at Harvard and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, is the author of "Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire."

And jumping ahead to today ....

"War in Iraq costing U.S. more than lives - After three years, price of invasion continues to mount amid uncertainty"

By BOB DEANS, Cox News
First published: Sunday, March 19, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Three years after President Bush launched the invasion of Iraq, the war grinds on amid escalating costs -- in lives, money and U.S. influence abroad.

Saddam Hussein and his repressive regime are no longer in power and democracy has taken some important, if shaky, first steps.

Iraq has a "hopeful future," Bush said, despite the problems there.

"We will finish what we started in Iraq," the president said in a speech.

"We will complete the mission."

But sectarian violence verges on civil war.

More than 130,000 troops remain in Iraq.
'
And the toll on Iraq and the United States is far beyond anything the administration prepared Americans for in the leadup to the March 19, 2003, invasion.

The war has divided the United States, set it at odds with friends and rivals alike abroad and dominated an often-ugly national political debate.

Three years on, the costs continue to mount.

U.S. casualties

According to Pentagon figures (as of March 15), 2,310 U.S. military members have died in Iraq since the launch of the invasion three years ago.

Of those, 1,808 were killed in combat and 502 died there from accidents, illnesses or other causes.

An unofficial count by The Associated Press puts the death toll at 2,314 (as of March 18).

Another 17,124 American troops have been wounded.

Of those, 9,212 were returned to duty within 72 hours.

The rest had more serious wounds, including about 400 who have lost a limb.

The figures do not include American civilians killed or wounded in Iraq while working for the U.S. government, private businesses and non-governmental aid organizations.

Iraqi casualties

There are no independently verifiable estimates of the number of Iraqi soldiers killed during the first several weeks of the war, and no official estimates of civilian casualties.

Bush recently estimated the Iraqi dead at somewhere near 30,000.

A London-based human rights group called Iraq Body Count estimates that at least 33,638 Iraqi civilians have been killed as a result of the war and up to 37,754 may have died in the conflict, based on the group's independent tabulation of deaths confirmed in media reports.

The number includes civilians killed by insurgent attacks as well as operations by U.S. and coalition forces, on the premise that the shootings, roadside bombs and suicide attacks employed by insurgents and criminals were not taking place on any systematic basis before the war and are, therefore, a consequence of the war.

The group posts its findings on its Web site -- http://www.iraqbodycount.org.

Taxpayers' tab

Americans have spent $250 billion on military operations and reconstruction efforts in Iraq, a war that is currently costing the Pentagon roughly $6 billion a month, according to the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, an arm of Congress.

This spending does not include so-called fixed costs that are part of Pentagon spending -- such as pay for the troops -- but accounts for only the direct war costs, such as bonus pay for combat operations, as well as fuel, munitions and other war-related expenses.

The war's true price tag will include expenses not included in this reckoning, particularly the long-term costs of providing lifetime health care to soldiers wounded in the war or suffering from mental health issues related to the conflict, recurring expenses certain to range in the billions per year.

Nor do these costs include the interest on the additional debt incurred to finance the war.

Donald Rumsfeld seems to be re-living, IN HIS HEAD, of course, the GLORY of Adolf Hitler's PANZERS, as they swept across Europe in what were at that time "lightning strikes", or BLITZKREIGS ......

And apparently, "backwards-looking" Donald and his NEW CON MEN don't seem to recall or remember what fate ultimately befell Adolf .....

And that is because, like Adolf before them ....

Donald and the rest of this BUSHIANISTIC CROWD seem to think that they are immune from the lessons of history .....

BECAUSE THEY, LIKE ADOLF, THINK THAT THEY ARE THE WRITERS OF HISTORY, INSTEAD .....

Which was true in Adolf's case ...

He wrote some history alright .....

And so ....

"Ethnic strife spreads after fall of Saddam - U.S. invasion prompts rise of militancy, threats beyond Iraq's borders"

By WARREN P. STROBEL and HANNAH ALLAM, Knight-Ridder
First published: Sunday, March 19, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Three years after the United States invaded Iraq in pursuit of a freer, more stable Middle East, the country's deepening ethnic conflict is spreading tension across Iraq's borders, fueling terrorism and nurturing gloom about the future.

President Bush cited Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and ties to international terrorism -- neither of which turned out to exist -- when he ordered a pre-emptive war that began March 19, 2003.

He predicted payoffs for the wider Middle East: spreading democracy, deterred enemies, more secure oil flows, a less hostile environment for Israel.

None of that has happened.

Instead, said officials and analysts in the United States, Arab countries, Israel and Europe, the invasion has produced a vortex of unintended consequences.

Militancy is on the rise.

Terrorists are using Iraq as a training base and potential launch pad for attacks elsewhere, according to U.S. officials and documents.

Democratic reform remains largely stymied.

The U.S. Army and Marine Corps, and especially the Reserves and National Guard, are feeling the strain of repeated deployments.

Public support for the war is declining in America and almost nonexistent elsewhere.

The war has cost more than 2,300 American lives, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates that its total financial cost may exceed $500 billion.

"The region is pushed further toward extremism," said Mohamed el Sayed Said, the deputy director of the Cairo-based Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.

"The Bush administration was warned that it's moving into an area of shifting sand."

"... This is a very complex region with legacies of sectarian violence and religious strife."

In Jordan to the west, Saudi Arabia to the south and Turkey to the north -- even in Israel -- U.S. allies are voicing growing concern that Iraq's chaos could seep across their borders and infect them.

The President has said the Middle East was anything but stable before the invasion.

Success in Iraq will leave the region better off and America safer, Bush said Monday in the first of three speeches to mark the anniversary.

"By helping Iraqis build a democracy, we will inspire reformers across the Middle East."

"And by helping Iraqis build a democracy, we'll bring hope to a troubled region, and this will make America more secure in the long term," he said.

Yet, so far at least, the reality in the Middle East is much different:

Regional stability

Shortly after last month's bombing of a sacred Shiite Muslim mosque in Samarra, Iraq, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with Persian Gulf leaders in the United Arab Emirates.

Afterward, she said they'd told her they were worried that those who are provoking sectarian tension in Iraq "might try and stoke sectarian tensions in other parts of the region."

Last September, the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al Faisal, warned that civil war in Iraq could drag in Iran, Turkey, the Kurds and Arabs.

Iraq's Arab neighbors, dominated by Sunni Muslims, have watched in horror as Shiites gain political ascendancy in Iraq.

So far they've supported Iraq's unity, fearing that the country's breakup could set off a regionwide scramble.

But a report last month by the private International Crisis Group warned that that could change if religious and ethnic tensions or Shiite power continues to grow.

"Increased sectarian polarization in Iraq will be viewed menacingly by neighboring states, and could draw them into Iraq and hasten its break-up, a development in which, ironically, they have no interest," the report said.

Terrorism

Counterterrorism experts and U.S. government documents seen by Knight Ridder say there are signs that terrorist-recruitment networks created to funnel foreign insurgents into Iraq are being "reversed," with battle-trained militants flowing out of the country to try to destabilize other nations.

In November, suicide bombers apparently under orders from Iraq-based terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi killed at least 60 people in coordinated attacks on luxury hotels in Jordan's capital, Amman.

Last month, would-be bombers were stopped during an attack on the world's largest oil-processing plant, in Saudi Arabia.

How much regional terrorism is due to the invasion itself is open to debate.

Some experts say Iraq is beginning to resemble Afghanistan in the 1980s -- a place for jihadists to rally and confront a superpower.

Liberalization

Few of Iraq's neighbors see a model in its bloodshed and chaos.

"Who could possibly look at anything in Iraq and think, 'I want some of that'?" said Yusuf Kanli, the editor of the Turkish Daily News.

The Bush administration has pushed Middle East dictators to open up, leading to small signs of political liberalization.

Yet authoritarian regimes continue to hoard power, brutally quashing opponents and claiming that the only alternatives are an Islamic takeover or the kind of chaos seen in Iraq.

In the Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Egypt, voters have turned out in large numbers to support the militant group Hamas, Hezbollah guerrillas and the conservative Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood, respectively.

"War has increased the wave of Islamism," said Essam el Erian, a spokesman for the influential Muslim Brotherhood.

The United States' moral authority to condemn human rights abuses has been damaged by revelations of abuse in American-run detention centers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Iran

Iran has tried to use the war to extend its influence.

"Iran so far clearly is benefiting from events in Iraq, where friendly parties have come to power, and the U.S. finds itself embroiled," the International Crisis Group report said.

Iran appears to be banking that the United States is too tied up in Iraq to confront it militarily over its suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Still, others are worried.

"There is this overwhelming gloom about a possible strike against Iran," said Prince Hassan of Jordan.

Oil

Iraq has the world's second-largest known oil reserves.

Securing energy supplies was an implicit goal of the invasion, and top U.S. officials predicted that Iraq could pay for its own reconstruction.

Instead, due to insurgent attacks and the dislocations of war, Iraq's 2005 oil production was below prewar levels, according to Energy Department figures.

Iraq's instability is a "fiasco" that has transformed the country "from being an important exporter of crude oil and refined products to being an importer of refined products," said Labib Kamhawi, the president of the Jordanian petrochemical, oil and gas consulting firm Cessco.

NY Times, March 19, 2006

Op-Ed Contributor

"A Top-Down Review for the Pentagon"

By PAUL D. EATON, Fox Island, Wash.

DURING World War II, American soldiers en route to Britain before D-Day were given a pamphlet on how to behave while awaiting the invasion.

most important quote in it was this:

"It is impolite to criticize your host; it is militarily stupid to criticize your allies."

By that rule, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is not competent to lead our armed forces.

First, his failure to build coalitions with our allies from what he dismissively called "old Europe" has imposed far greater demands and risks on our soldiers in Iraq than necessary.

Second, he alienated his allies in our own military, ignoring the advice of seasoned officers and denying subordinates any chance for input.

In sum, he has shown himself incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically, and is far more than anyone else responsible for what has happened to our important mission in Iraq.

Mr. Rumsfeld must step down.

In the five years Mr. Rumsfeld has presided over the Pentagon, I have seen a climate of groupthink become dominant and a growing reluctance by experienced military men and civilians to challenge the notions of the senior leadership.

I thought we had a glimmer of hope last November when Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, faced off with Mr. Rumsfeld on the question of how our soldiers should react if they witnessed illegal treatment of prisoners by Iraqi authorities.

(General Pace's view was that our soldiers should intervene, while Mr. Rumsfeld's position was that they should simply report the incident to superiors.)

Unfortunately, the general subsequently backed down and supported the secretary's call to have the rules clarified, giving the impression that our senior man in uniform is just as intimidated by Secretary Rumsfeld as was his predecessor, Gen. Richard Myers.

Mr. Rumsfeld has put the Pentagon at the mercy of his ego, his cold warrior's view of the world and his unrealistic confidence in technology to replace manpower.

As a result, the Army finds itself severely undermanned — cut to 10 active divisions but asked by the administration to support a foreign policy that requires at least 12 or 14.

Only Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff when President Bush was elected, had the courage to challenge the downsizing plans.

So Mr. Rumsfeld retaliated by naming General Shinseki's successor more than a year before his scheduled retirement, effectively undercutting his authority.

The rest of the senior brass got the message, and nobody has complained since.

Now the Pentagon's new Quadrennial Defense Review shows that Mr. Rumsfeld also fails to understand the nature of protracted counterinsurgency warfare in Iraq and the demands it places on ground forces.

The document, amazingly, does not call for enlarging the Army; rather, it increases only our Special Operations forces, by a token 15 percent, maybe 1,500 troops.

Mr. Rumsfeld has also failed in terms of operations in Iraq.

He rejected the so-called Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force and sent just enough tech-enhanced troops to complete what we called Phase III of the war — ground combat against the uniformed Iraqis.

He ignored competent advisers like Gen. Anthony Zinni and others who predicted that the Iraqi Army and security forces might melt away after the state apparatus self-destructed, leading to chaos.

It is all too clear that General Shinseki was right: several hundred thousand men would have made a big difference then, as we began Phase IV, or country reconstruction.

There was never a question that we would make quick work of the Iraqi Army.

The true professional always looks to the "What's next?" phase.

Unfortunately, the supreme commander, Gen. Tommy Franks, either didn't heed that rule or succumbed to Secretary Rumsfeld's bullying.

We won't know which until some bright historian writes the true story of Mr. Rumsfeld and the generals he took to war, an Iraq version of the Vietnam War classic "Dereliction of Duty" by H. R. McMaster.

Last, you don't expect a secretary of defense to be criticized for tactical ineptness.

Normally, tactics are the domain of the soldier on the ground.

But in this case we all felt what L. Paul Bremer, the former viceroy in Iraq, has called the "8,000-mile screwdriver" reaching from the Pentagon.

Commanders in the field had their discretionary financing for things like rebuilding hospitals and providing police uniforms randomly cut; money to pay Iraqi construction firms to build barracks was withheld; contracts we made for purchasing military equipment for the new Iraqi Army were rewritten back in Washington.

Donald Rumsfeld demands more than loyalty.

He wants fealty.

And he has hired men who give it.

Consider the new secretary of the Army, Francis Harvey, who when faced with the compelling need to increase the service's size has refused to do so.

He is instead relying on the shell game of hiring civilians to do jobs that had previously been done by soldiers, and thus keeping the force strength static on paper.

This tactic may help for a bit, but it will likely fall apart in the next budget cycle, with those positions swiftly eliminated.

So, what to do?

First, President Bush should accept the offer to resign that Mr. Rumsfeld says he has tendered more than once, and hire a man who will listen to and support the magnificent soldiers on the ground.

Perhaps a proven Democrat like Senator Joseph Lieberman could repair fissures that have arisen both between parties and between uniformed men and the Pentagon big shots.

More vital in the longer term, Congress must assert itself.

Too much power has shifted to the executive branch, not just in terms of waging war but also in planning the military of the future.

Congress should remember it still has the power of the purse; it should call our generals, colonels, captains and sergeants to testify frequently, so that their opinions and needs are known to the men they lead.

Then when they are asked if they have enough troops — and no soldier has ever had enough of anything, more is always better — the reply is public.

Our most important, and sometimes most severe, judges are our subordinates.

That is a fact I discovered early in my military career.

It is, unfortunately, a lesson Donald Rumsfeld seems incapable of learning.

Paul D. Eaton, a retired Army major general, was in charge of training the Iraqi military from 2003 to 2004.

"Rumsfeld: Leaving Iraq like giving Nazis Germany"

47 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Leaving Iraq now would be the same as handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in a column published on Sunday, as retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton called Rumsfeld incompetent and urged him to resign.

"Turning our backs on postwar Iraq today would be the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis," Rumsfeld wrote in an essay published in The Washington Post on the third anniversary of the start of the Iraq war.

He said "the terrorists" in Iraq were attempting to stoke sectarian tension and spark civil war, but that they must be "watching with fear" the progress in the country over the past three years.

"The terrorists seem to recognize that they are losing in Iraq."

"I believe that history will show that to be the case," Rumsfeld said.

But in an opinion piece published on Sunday in the New York Times, Eaton said Rumsfeld had proven himself "not competent to lead our armed forces" and therefore "must step down."

"First, his failure to build coalitions with our allies from what he dismissively called 'old Europe' has imposed far greater demands and risks on our soldiers in Iraq than necessary."

"Second, he alienated his allies in our own military, ignoring the advice of seasoned officers and denying subordinates any chance for input," Eaton said.

"In sum, he has shown himself incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically, and is far more than anyone else responsible for what has happened to our important mission in Iraq," Eaton said.

Eaton, who was in charge of training Iraqi military forces from 2003 to 2004, said President George W. Bush should replace Rumsfeld with someone like Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat, who could "repair fissures that have arisen both between parties and between uniformed men and the Pentagon big shots."

DEMOCRATS STEP UP PRESSURE

The top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee backed Eaton's call, telling CNN's "Late Edition" Rumsfeld's departure would "energize American forces" and help the United States to accomplish its goals in Iraq.

"Imagine what would happen if it were announced tomorrow in the headlines of the papers of in America and throughout the world that Rumsfeld was fired," said Sen. Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat.

"It would energize, energize the rest of the world."

"They'd be willing to help us."

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, told CNN he would only give any advice he has on the issue privately to Bush -- and only if asked.

Rumsfeld has said he twice offered to resign during the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, but Bush did not accept it.

Deep doubts about the Iraq war have helped drive Bush's approval ratings to their lowest level ever.

In a new Newsweek poll released on Saturday, only 36 percent of Americans said they approved of his performance as president.

Sixty-five percent disapprove of his handling of the situation in Iraq, once one of his strongest suits.

Bush used his weekly radio address on Saturday to urge Americans to resist a temptation to retreat from Iraq, but Democrats pressed him to offer a plan for drawing down U.S. troops and said Iraq was moving closer to a civil war.

Rumsfeld wrote that if U.S. forces leave Iraq now, "there is every reason to believe Saddamists and terrorists will fill the vacuum -- and the free world might not have the will to face them again."

(additional reporting by Doug Palmer)

Well said.

Glad to see ya here Livyjr.
CGCS without Livyjr is like a day without sunshine.
Most the time I just read your prolific postings, but
you are a column in the building. Again, glad to see ya.

And leaving off with our incompetent Secretary of Defense .....

Who should be called America's MINISTER OF WAR AND OTHER PERVERTED PRACTICES ......

Which would be a much more accurate description for what America's Donald Rumsfeld does than Secretary of Defense ....

What a joke that title is when applied to Donald Rumsfeld .....

We jump over to OUR CORRUPT Congress .....

Where the LOBBYISTS are laughing right in OUR faces .....

As they continue to buy and sell OUR representatives and senators ...

Like so many trinkets .....

At a cheap flea market .....

Out in a parking lot somewhere ....

In Podunk, America .....

"Lobbyists Foresee Business As Usual - Post-Abramoff Rules Expected to Be Merely a Nuisance"

By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 19, 2006; Page A01

Some of Washington's top lobbyists say that they expect to find ways around congressional efforts to impose new restrictions on lobbyists' dealings with lawmakers in the wake of the Jack Abramoff corruption scandal, and that any limits will barely put a dent in the billions of dollars spent to influence legislation.

Though Congress may ultimately vote to eliminate a few of the more visible trappings of special pleading, such as gifts, free meals and luxurious trips, lobbyists say they have already found scores of new ways to buy the attention of lawmakers through fundraising, charitable activities and industry-sponsored seminars.

An estimated $10 billion is spent annually to influence legislation and regulations, and that spending is not likely to be diminished by the proposed lobbying changes, these lobbyists contend.

"I wouldn't classify those changes as major," said Dan Danner, executive vice president of the National Federation of Independent Business.

"Between charitable events and fundraising events, there will still be lots of ways to get in front of members [of Congress]."

Abramoff's guilty plea in January -- to charges of fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to bribe public officials with lavish trips, luxury skybox fundraisers, meals and campaign contributions -- triggered a new push in Congress to rewrite the rules governing lobbying.

An emerging Senate bill, which has yet to be completed, would bar lawmakers from accepting meals and gifts such as sports tickets from registered lobbyists.

The leading House measure, which has been proposed by GOP leaders, would rely more heavily on additional disclosures but would also impose a temporary ban on privately paid travel.

But many lobbyists said they consider these bills more of a nuisance than an impediment to their ability to work their will.

"Even if all lunches and sporting tickets are banned, legislation and regulations are so complex that the need for professional lobbyists will not diminish," said Frederick H. Graefe, a Washington lawyer and lobbyist.

"If meals are heavily restricted, we're likely to see executives from the home office picking up checks because they're not lobbyists," added J. Steven Hart of Williams & Jensen, a major lobbying firm.

"And there are lots of other ways we can still get our cases before members of Congress."

Besides, experts said, industries and interest groups have turned to more sophisticated tactics in recent years, and such tactics are generally not addressed in the new bills on Capitol Hill.

Lobbyists are increasing their campaign contributions, widening their use of the Internet to stir voter activism, and donating large sums to think tanks and charities affiliated with such big names as Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio).

The Business Roundtable, which represents big-business chieftains, has embraced a new technique of advertising on Web sites for grass-roots advocates.

And organizations from the left and the right are increasingly offering meetings with top government officials in exchange for hefty dues.

Americans for Tax Reform, which is headed by conservative strategist Grover G. Norquist, invites contributors who give more than $15,000 a year to receptions and dinners, often at Norquist's home.

Featured speakers have included Republicans such as Sens. George Allen (Va.), Chuck Hagel (Neb.) and Bill Frist (Tenn.), the majority leader.

Third Way, a group that devises policies for moderate Democrats, invites its $25,000-a-year donors (many of whom are lobbyists) to regular discussions around Washington that have spotlighted Democratic Sens. Thomas R. Carper (Del.), Evan Bayh (Ind.), Blanche Lincoln (Ark.) and Ken Salazar (Colo.).

The most important framework for lobbying clout -- campaign finance laws -- would not be altered in the Senate approach, while House GOP leaders have proposed putting limits on the contributions made to big-money independent groups known as 527s.

But without Senate support, the effort to clamp down on the independent groups will fail.

As a result, lobbyists would still be able to contribute to lawmakers' coffers, host and organize major fundraising events, and arrange trips subsidized by their clients to encourage electoral giving -- just as they do now.

Total federal giving in this election cycle is expected to rise by at least 20 percent, to more than $3 billion, compared with the 2002 midterm-election cycle, according to Michael J. Malbin, executive director of the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute.

Such campaign-related activities are "the most significant benefits lobbyists use to influence members of Congress," said Larry Noble, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

The proposed ethics changes would not restrain the fastest growing part of lobbying: grass-roots activities.

This ginning up of letters, telephone calls and, increasingly, e-mails from back home has become a $1 billion-a-year business, said Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), an activist for lobbying law changes.

Congress might require that such lobbying costs be disclosed but is not likely to limit them.

In fact, lobbying in its many forms would continue unabated under the coming legislation.

In 2004, the most recent full year about which data are available, lobbying was a $10 billion industry, according to estimates by James A. Thurber, a political science scholar at American University.

Of the total, $2.1 billion was used to pay the salaries of registered lobbyists, while the rest was spent on more subtle forms of persuasion.

Lobbying is done even at charity events.

Lobbyists say privately that they are all but required to contribute to an annual dinner that helps low-income Roman Catholic schools in the District.

The dinner is co-hosted each September by Boehner and Kennedy.

Boehner has solicited contributions for the $10,000 tables, a request that lobbyists say they are loath to ignore.

"Some lobbyists might consider this a lobbying opportunity," said Michael L. Smith, the dinner's director.

"But we see it as a very worthy charitable event."

The communications industry has its own lobbying-and-charity gala.

Every December, the Federal Communications Bar Association fills the Washington Hilton's grand ballroom for a fancy dinner that raises money for D.C. schoolchildren and honors the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the interests of the dinner's patrons.

At the 2004 Chairman's Dinner, FCC commissioners dined at an elaborately set table while then-Chairman Michael K. Powell gave a lengthy speech and showed a video about himself.

Interest groups also pay to participate in social activities, which double as lobbying venues.

State societies, for example, offer lawmakers, congressional aides and lobbyists numerous opportunities for informal encounters.

The California State Society's fall 2005 newsletter featured a photograph of Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.) and former congressman Bill Lowery (R-Calif.), who is a lobbyist for an electric utility and a defense contractor.

Both are active members.

According to its Web site, the society's Platinum ($10,000) corporate sponsors in 2005 included Fleishman-Hillard, a lobbying and public relations company, and Sallie Mae, a Virginia-based provider of student loans that lobbies in Washington.

Lawmakers and their staffers have lately reduced their social interactions, especially meals, with lobbyists in anticipation of a possible crackdown under a new law.

But interests will always find a way to be heard, lobbyists say.

One is through think tanks.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute, which widely publicizes its belief that the earth is not warming cataclysmically because of the burning of coal and oil, says Exxon Mobil Corp. is a "major donor" largely as a result of its effort to push that position.

"I think what attracted them to us was our position on global warming," said Sam Kazman, CEI's general counsel.

"And we hope to get support from other industries that agree with us."

Hello back, Indianhead ....

Good to see you over in here .....

And I trust that with you ....

All is well ...

And the wind is at your back .....

And the road rises upwards to meet your feet ....

And so ....

Peace, Indianhead ....

For us old vets ....

Let there be peace ...

If just for an instant ...

Before we must go ...

And so ....

"Look at the past ....."

"Empire succeeding empire ..."

"And from that ...."

"Extrapolate the future ..."

"THE SAME THING ..."

"No escape from the rhythm of events ..."

"Which is why ...."

"Observing life for forty years ..."

"Is as good as a thousand!"

"Would you really see anything new?"

- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

And talk about "taking cold comfort" from something .....

"Millions of Britons struggle to pay sizzling fuel bills"

Sun Mar 19, 5:24 PM ET

LONDON (AFP) - Around two million households in Britain will struggle this year to pay domestic gas and electricity bills, which have surged in line with soaring wholesale energy costs, according to a recent study.

By the end of 2006, the number of households facing fuel poverty -- spending over 10.0 percent of their total income on fuel -- will have doubled since 2003, according to the Fuel Poverty Advisory Group (FPAG).

Domestic energy prices in Britain will have rocketed by some 35.0-percent over the same three-year period, government advisory body FPAG said last week.

FPAG has called for an extra 1.0 billion pounds (1.44 billion euros, 1.76 billion dollars) in funding from the British government, over the next four years, to help eliminate fuel poverty by 2010.

"The price increases are causing great hardship to vulnerable people," said FPAG chairman Peter Lehmann.

The most vulnerable homes include those with children, disabled residents or pensioners.

The Fuel Poverty Advisory Group has appealed to British Prime Minister Tony Blair's ruling Labour administration and industry regulator Ofgem, to ensure that fewer people struggle to keep warm.

"The prices of gas and electricity in the wholesale markets have been driven way above costs to the detriment of customers, and this needs to be resolved," Lehmann said.

In the wake of the report, charities also called for fresh government assistance for families on low incomes.

"Both the energy industry and the government need to ensure that customers on low incomes can counter the recent increases," Child Poverty Action Group boss Kate Green said.

And a spokesman for the Help the Aged charity added: "Pensioners demand and deserve more help to meet increased cost of keeping warm this winter."

Since the start of the year, Britain-based energy suppliers including Powergen, nPower and British Gas have announced significant hikes in the prices of domestic electricity and gas.

Last Tuesday saw the wholesale price of gas -- a key cost for domestic utility companies -- reach a historic record 255 pence per therm, as freezing weather across Britain boosted demand for winter fuel.

National Grid, the biggest British supplier of gas, issued an unprecedented warning last week that gas demand was outpacing supply, and advised major industrial customers to cut back their usage.

Consumer body EnergyWatch added that it was "inevitable" that the higher prices currently being paid by suppliers would translate into higher fuel bills for consumers at some stage.

There are several reasons behind the rising cost of wholesale gas.

Britain's depleted North Sea gas fields are no longer as productive as they once were and the country is frequently classed as a net importer of gas.

Supplies are also tight owing to the closure of a key gas storage facility in the North Sea, production concerns in Norway and a strike by gas workers in France.

Colder-than-usual weather across Europe has placed also severe constraints on supplies.

And the key "Interconnector" pipeline -- which brings gas from Europe to Britain via Belgium -- is not operating at full capacity, according to industry analysts.

The European Commission recently said the lack of open access across continental energy markets had been a key factor behind the shortfall in gas supplies coming into Britain.

The six main domestic energy providers in Britain are Powergen, which is a subsidiary of German giant E.ON, the British arm of Electricite de France, Centrica's British Gas unit, nPower, Scottish Power, and Scottish and Southern Energy.

And the "environment" .....

The "environment" ....

The "bug-a-boo" ......

We, of course, are supposed to have "mastery" over the earth ...

And all things upon it ...

And the damned environment ...

Well .....

What I really think ...

Is that the environment is just against George W. Bush and his people ...

Like all these TAY-RISTS are, of course ...

And so ...

What that environment needs is just a real good ***-whupping .....

Like the one that George W. Bush is throwing on to those INSURGENTS over there in IRAQINAM .....

Or the women and children and old folks, anyway ....

Who, for OUR George, will suffice ...

After all ...

Nits breed lice, what, what ....

And so ......

"Cyclone Larry Lashes Northeast Australia"

By MERAIAH FOLEY, Associated Press Writer

1 hour, 21 minutes ago

CAIRNS, Australia - The most powerful storm to hit Australia in decades laid waste to its northeastern coast on Monday, mowing down sugar and banana plantations and leaving possibly thousands of people homeless.

But there were no reports of serious injuries, reflecting the preparedness of residents in the storm-prone region.

About 30 people were treated at hospitals for minor cuts and abrasions, said Ben Creagh, a spokesman for Queensland state Department of Emergency Services.

Many people had fled their homes to shelter in evacuation centers ahead of the storm, while some hunkered down in their homes.

"This is far north Queensland and most people live with cyclones year in, year out."

"They do take precautions," said spokesman Jim Guthrie of Queensland's health department.

"We've come out of it extremely well."

Cyclone Larry crashed ashore about 60 miles south of Cairns as a Category 5 storm, packing winds of up to 180 mph.

Cairns is a popular jumping-off point for visits to the Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest coral system which runs parallel to the coast for more than 1,400 miles.

Authorities said it was too early to assess possible damage to the reef, visited by nearly two million tourists each year.

In Innisfail, a farming town of 8,500 that was hardest hit, Mayor Neil Clarke estimated that thousands were left homeless.

He told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. the airport was being cleared to house people in tents.

More than 100,000 people were without power, authorities said.

"It looks like an atomic bomb hit the place," he said.

The storm was so bad at its height overnight that police were unable to venture out and help terrified residents who called to say the winds had ripped roofs off buildings and destroyed their homes.

As emergency services fanned out across the region later to assess the damage, they encountered scenes of devastation.

"The damage to dwellings is very extensive," Prime Minister John Howard told the Nine Network from Melbourne.

"Thank heavens it does not appear as though there have been any very serious injuries."

Howard said he would visit the stricken region in coming days and the government would provide aid to homeless families.

He said he was confident the cyclone would not cause the kind of chaos seen in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina last year.

"Australians are very good at responding to these things because everybody pitches in without restraint," he told reporters.

The main street of Innisfail was littered with the mangled remains of corrugated tin and iron roofs and shredded fronds from beach side palm trees.

Queensland state leader Peter Beattie said more than half the homes in the town were damaged.

"Some have been flattened, roofs have been taken off," he told Macquarie Radio.

"The property damage has been immense."

Creagh said many people evacuated voluntarily over the weekend and would likely return to their homes Tuesday.

Some who did not flee the town sheltered in a local college, he added.

"Tomorrow is going to be a big day" with residents returning to their homes, he said.

"There will be some devastated people."

The storm also devastated banana and sugar cane plantations, the region's economic mainstay.

Officials said damage would run into hundreds of millions of dollars.

Des Hensler, an Innisfail resident, took shelter by himself in a church, with water up to his ankles.

"I don't get scared much, but this is something to make any man tremble in his boots," he told the Seven television network.

Australia's military said it would send a medical team to the region.

Helicopters would conduct low-level damage assessment flights.

State Disaster Coordination Center spokesman Peter Rekers warned residents to stay on their guard for deadly animals stirred up by the storm.

"Most of the casualties and deaths resulting from cyclones happen after the storm has passed," he warned.

"Keep your kids away from flooded drains, be aware of snakes and crocodiles."

"Those guys will have had a bad night too."

The storm was the most powerful to hit Australia since Christmas Eve in 1974, when Cyclone Tracy destroyed the northern city of Darwin, killing 65 people.
___

On the Net:

Brisbane Tropical Cyclone Warning Center: http://www.bom.gov.au/weather/qld/cyclone/

Kew, 1st July, 1775

"I am of his opinion that when once these rebels have felt a smart blow, they will submit; and no situation can ever change my fixed resolution, either to bring the colonies to a due obedience to the legislature of the mother country or to cast them off!"

Letter from King George III to Lord Sandwich concerning his thoughts on what the fate of his American colonies was going to be .....

Once he had old Billy Howe and "Jackie Brag" Burgoyne put the TEXICAN STOMP on them rebels in OUR America who were OUR forefathers in Liberty ....

Here in OUR America .....

Just as George W. Bush is doing to those rebels over there in IRAQINAM .....

"Bush Asks U.S. to Look Past Iraq Bloodshed"

By TOM RAUM, Associated Press Writer

26 minutes ago

CLEVELAND - Beginning the fourth year of an unpopular war, President Bush defended his Iraq record on Monday against skeptical questioning.

He said he could "understand people being disheartened" but appealed to Americans to look beyond the bloodshed and see signs of progress.

Bush fielded questions for nearly an hour at the City Club, a forum known for its tough interrogations of world leaders.

Not only was he grilled on Iraq, but he was also asked to justify his warrantless wiretapping program, U.S. relations with Pakistan and his domestic priorities.

The president was asked why he deemed Iraq — which turned out not to have weapons of mass destruction — as enough of a threat three years ago to launch an invasion, in contrast to nuclear-ambitious Iran today.

"One difference was that, in Iraq, there was a series of unanimous (U.N. Security Council) resolutions that basically held the Iraqi government to account, which Saddam Hussein ignored," Bush said.

Still, he said Iran was a concern, on the question of nuclear weapons and on its role in Iraq.

The White House has accused Iran of meddling in Iraqi politics and of supporting armed militias in Iraq by sending men and weapons, including components for increasingly lethal roadside bombs.

Iran and the United States have agreed to talk about Iraq, but Bush said, "It's very important, however, for the Iranians to understand that the discussion is limited to Iraq."

"We feel like they need to know our position."

As the president delivered the latest installment in an upbeat defense of his Iraq policy, opponents used the day after the third anniversary of the invasion to step up their criticism.

Three potential 2008 presidential candidates — Democratic Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska — offered critical assessments in separate speeches to the International Association of Firefighters' legislative conference in Washington.

Biden said it was time for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to "be told to go home" and for Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff "be given his walking papers."

Richardson said U.S. involvement in Iraq had been "badly mismanaged by the administration."

Hagel said many of the predictions and promises made by the administration have fallen short, such as that oil revenues would pay for the war and the conflict would be short.

He also pointed to Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion last May that the insurgency was in its "last throes."

"There's been a credibility erosion for three years," Hagel said.

On Capitol Hill, some Democrats said there had been progress in Iraq, as Bush asserted, but they said it was clouded by problems across the country.

They said Bush had gone to war without enough troops.

"Some positive signs do not mitigate this administration's gross miscalculations and stunning incompetence in Iraq," said Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat in the House.

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the "policies of the Bush administration and the civilian leadership of our military have made America less safe and left Iraq on the precipice of all-out civil war."

Bush pointed to success in stabilizing an insurgent stronghold in Tal Afar, a northern Iraqi city of 200,000 near the Syrian border.

"The strategy that worked so well in Tal Afar did not emerge overnight," Bush said.

"It took time to understand and adjust to the brutality of the enemy in Iraq."

"The example of Tal Afar gives me confidence in our strategy," the president said.

One woman asked Bush whether he saw terrorism as a sign of the biblical Apocalypse, and a man followed up with how he could restore confidence in U.S. leadership after several reasons for going to war with Iraq later proved false.

"Like you, I mean, I asked that very same question: Where'd we go wrong on intelligence?" Bush said.

He said he was working to improve intelligence gathering because "the credibility of our country is essential."

As for the Apocalypse, Bush said, "I haven't really thought of it that way."

"... I guess I'm more of a practical fellow."

Bush bantered with the audience at times.

And despite the probing questions, he received several rounds of enthusiastic applause.

"Anybody work here in this town?" Bush joked to laughter as he responded to question after question.

The White House made no attempt to screen either the audience or the questions, said spokesman Scott McClellan.

However, much of downtown near the hotel where Bush spoke was barricaded off.

About 100 anti-war protesters chanted for the Republican president to leave the heavily Democratic city, held signs with peace messages and banged on drums.

Inside, not all the questions challenged Bush's war rationale.

One member of the audience invited him back for the Cleveland Hungarian Revolution 50th Anniversary next October.

Others complimented him on his vision for a nuclear treaty with India and for his "very enlightening" comments about Iraq.

Vice President Dick Cheney, attending a political fundraiser in Hanoverton, in northeast Ohio, also defended U.S. involvement in Iraq and said decisions on troop levels would be made without political consideration.

"Our coalition is also helping to build an Iraqi security force that is well trained and well equipped," Cheney said.

end quotes

"One difference was that, in Iraq, there was a series of unanimous (U.N. Security Council) resolutions that basically held the Iraqi government to account, which Saddam Hussein ignored," Bush said?

What kind of double-talking hogwash is that now, for OUR George to be spewing?

George got those resolutions based on a pack of lies ...

And because they were based on a pack of lies ...

Saddam couldn't comply with them ....

Unless he wanted to pretend that he really did have weapons of mass destruction ....

Just to appease George W. Bush ...

Who had previously lied to the world, and the U.N., through his surrogates ....

That Saddam had weapons of mass destruction ......

What a crock of pure BULL **** OUR George can spew .....

And that is a fact ......

Fertilize a forty acre field in five seconds flat .....

And that is something .....

A record that only Dick Cheney could likely meet ...

Or exceed ...

And so ....

And speaking of the BIG GRIZ himself ....

And fertilizing forty acre fields .....

With the pureness of the output of his mouth .....

We have .....

"White House Shake-Up Isn't Needed, Says Cheney"

By DOUGLASS K. DANIEL, AP

03-19-06 1330EST

WASHINGTON (March 19) -- Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday dismissed suggestions that the Bush White House, hampered by a weak response to Hurricane Katrina and stumbles on policy questions, needs a shake-up.

"I don't think we can pay any attention to that kind of thing," Cheney said on CBS "Face the Nation."

"The president has got a job to do."

"... He ignores the background noise that's out there in the polls that are taken on a daily basis."

Bush's job approval in March was at 37 percent, which tied for his lowest rating in the AP-Ipsos poll.

Senior Republicans and others have said the Bush team may need an infusion of fresh blood and ideas.

Cheney, in a rare Sunday morning television interview, told CBS that he heard similar grumbling 30 years ago when he was chief of staff for President Ford.

"Administrations go through peaks and valleys," he said.

"When you're down in the polls you're going to take shots that you don't deserve, and when you're up in the polls you're probably going to get praise you don't deserve."

Asked if he and Bush had a "good cop, bad cop" partnership in which Cheney took the heat for controversial policies, the vice president said:

"It may look that way."

"It's not conscious."

Added Cheney, who has said he will not seek the presidency:

"My job is to do what I can to support him and to support the administration."

"My advice to him is untainted by any concern I might have on how the folks in Iowa look at me in connection with the 2008 Iowa caucuses."

Cheney chuckled when asked if he himself had ever considered resigning amid low poll numbers and suggestions by commentators that he was a liability for the administration.

"It's been a highlight of my career to be a part of this administration," he said.

"I've now been elected to a second term, and I'll serve out my term."

To political strategists who say that he should step aside with a year or so remaining in his term to give someone a jump on gaining the Republican nomination for president, Cheney said such a move would not make sense to him.

"Nobody has suggested it to me," he said.

Cheney and the White House were criticized for not immediately notifying the national press corps after he accidentally shot a companion while hunting in Texas last month.

On Sunday, the vice president said he still thought the situation had been handled appropriately.

Calling the circumstances unusual, the vice president quipped, "It's probably the first time the Secret Service ever had to worry about a protectee shooting somebody else instead of being shot at."