Everyone wants to dye their hair blond, wax their cooch and let it hang out, fuck every guy who seems either "hot" or rich in a twenty mile

radius - in other words be Paris Hilton without the billions or Britney Spears when she still had some semblance of congnitive ability.

Here's my question... is this behavior still HOT?

I mean wasn't Anna Nicole the poster child for this behavior when Paris was still, I don't know a child?

Look what happened to her.

Look what's happening to Paris... public sentiment is fickle and usually, as we're seeing now, if you act like dirt, people will soon

realize that you are dirt...

Letting it all hang out may seem very liberating to the young... but isn't it just another way of being oppressed.

Isn't a genius approach to oppression?

Following pop culture's lead seems almost like an easy way to have you demean and control yourself.

Is it backwards to say that men don't respect you when you give it up?

Is it a "fifties mentality" to state that women who fall into bed with men they don't know, don't respect and have no intention of being with are idiotic and setting themselves up for a fall....?

Is it more idiotic to want a guy to respect you and still somehow play the Paris part?

Because I don't know about you out there, but where I come from (Pakistan) and where I grew up (Harlem) if you act like a ho,

then men treat you like one...

It may seem fabulous on tv and it may look really good to a guy to be with a woman like that, but that's only because they're not actually

with a woman like that...

I guarantee you, any guy, if he had to watch his girlfriend have anal sex with some other guy on a hundred internet sites and all his friends

had DVD's of his girl fucking some other guy... he wouldn't be happy...

It isn't a reality...

so don't make it your reality either, all it's gonna get you is dirt on your face...

and if your hair wasn't dyed so badly and your clothes weren't so tight and your self-esteem wasn't so low maybe you could get away with having a little dirt on your face, but baby girl, if you already look like a train wreck...

it's time to figure some things out, no?

 

So...

President Bush is gonna pull off another Cirque de Soleil performance with this "Iranian Involvement" bullshit and we're gonna let him.

It's funny, America seems from the outside like a population of lazy, over-eating, TV addicted complainers. 

But if that's true... how is the Administration gonna get away with this Donkey Show Part Deux??

If we're all watching TV, then why don't we all know that NOBODY has ANY evidence linking Iran to the violence in Iraq?
Why can the president come out and say these outrageous, war-mongering statements whenever he wants?
There seems to be NO POWER in the American people.

Which, I absolutely am sure, is something Americans DO NOT want to hear... they're more than happy to be OUTRAGED over

Kobe beef on Montana menus but ANOTHER WAR??? Yeah, that's okay.  We're okay with that. The beef thing though, that's BIG!

I would like to believe that the reason there is no outrage is because the public is just too drowned in it's own consumerism to care.

But, I don't know, that may be too kind.

What if it's not just about Americans having so much that they don't care about anything else? What if it isn't that everyone thinks that

they are (or should be) a diva, princess, prince, celebrity... ?

What if it's much closer to the truth that AMERICANS ARE TOO STUPID TO KNOW BETTER?

That stings.

Ugh.

But realistically, can you imagine this sort of tyranny going unchecked in any other civilized nation (Stalin's Russia does NOT count)?

Can you honestly think of another democratic nation that would allow their leaders to continue at this speed into another war, while

floundering miserably in an already ongoing war?

The English wouldn't stand for it, the Spanish put so much pressure on their government that they had to withdraw, the Japanese are out

and many other nations have made it clear that they will not engage in ANY combat and will be there in a peace-keeping role ONLY.

And what have Americans done?

Where has the national debate about this war taken place?

Well, I remember Dixie Chicks CD's being burned, I know Cindy Sheehan went camping for a while...

WHAT ELSE???
Are there people yelling and screaming that this cannot slyly be slipped under our noses, that we will not quietly acquiesce to another

bloody unending conflict with a nation who has done nothing to harm us???
And if they are screaming... who's listening?

Is the media there covering our concerns? (And I don't mean Lou Dobbs and his polls of how many people hate George Bush and Mexicans).

Is there anyone out there that will give a voice to that 70% majority of Americans who want out of war NOW?
Makes you wonder, as frightening as it is, are we really living in a democracy?

Is this really a nation of free people?

If we were free, would there still be an Iraq war going on?

If we were really free, would Bush be setting us up for ANOTHER WAR?
If we want to remain free, will we LET IT HAPPEN?

Is it even up to us anymore?
Is this a tyranny?

Do you feel free?

I sure as hell don't.
-A

p.s. I'm six months as of today :)

 

 

Israeli Map Says West Bank Posts Sit on Arab Land

By STEVEN ERLANGER

JERUSALEM -  An Israeli advocacy group, using maps and figures leaked from inside the government, says that 39 percent of the land held by Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank is privately owned by Palestinians.

Israel has long asserted that it fully respects Palestinian private property in the West Bank and only takes land there legally or, for security reasons, temporarily.

If big sections of those settlements are indeed privately held Palestinian land, that is bound to create embarrassment for Israel and further complicate the already distant prospect of a negotiated peace. The data indicate that 40 percent of the land that Israel plans to keep in any future deal with the Palestinians is private.

The new claims regarding Palestinian property are said to come from the 2004 database of the Civil Administration, which controls the civilian aspects of Israel’s presence in the West Bank. Peace Now, an Israeli group that advocates Palestinian self-determination in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, plans to publish the information on Tuesday. An advance copy was made available to The New York Times.

The data — maps that show the government’s registry of the land by category — was given to Peace Now by someone who obtained it from an official inside the Civil Administration. The Times spoke to the person who received it from the Civil Administration official and agreed not to identify him because of the delicate nature of the material.

That person, who has frequent contact with the Civil Administration, said he and the official wanted to expose what they consider to be wide-scale violations of private Palestinian property rights by the government and settlers. The government has refused to give the material directly to Peace Now, which requested it under Israel’s freedom of information law.

Shlomo Dror, a spokesman for the Civil Administration, said he could not comment on the data without studying it.

He said there was a committee, called the blue line committee, that had been investigating these issues of land ownership for three years. “We haven’t finished checking everything,” he said.

Mr. Dror also said that sometimes Palestinians would sell land to Israelis but be unwilling to admit to the sale publicly because they feared retribution as collaborators.

Within prominent settlements that Israel has said it plans to keep in any final border agreement, the data show, for example, that some 86.4 percent of Maale Adumim, a large Jerusalem suburb, is private; and 35.1 percent of Ariel is.

The maps indicate that beyond the private land, 5.8 percent is so-called survey land, meaning of unclear ownership, and 1.3 percent private Jewish land. The rest, about 54 percent, is considered “state land” or has no designation, though Palestinians say that at least some of it represents agricultural land expropriated by the state.

The figures, together with detailed maps of the land distribution in every Israeli settlement in the West Bank, were put together by the Settlement Watch Project of Peace Now, led by Dror Etkes and Hagit Ofran, and has a record of careful and accurate reporting on settlement growth.

The report does not include Jerusalem, which Israel has annexed and does not consider part of the West Bank, although much of the world regards East Jerusalem as occupied. Much of the world also considers Israeli settlements on occupied land to be illegal under international law. International law requires an occupying power to protect private property, and Israel has always asserted that it does not take land without legal justification.

One case in a settlement Israel intends to keep is in Givat Zeev, barely five miles north of Jerusalem. At the southern edge is the Ayelet Hashachar synagogue. Rabah Abdellatif, a Palestinian who lives in the nearby village of Al Jib, says the land belongs to him.

Papers he has filed with the Israeli military court, which runs the West Bank, seem to favor Mr. Abdellatif. In 1999, Israeli officials confirmed, he was even granted a judgment ordering the demolition of the synagogue because it had been built without permits. But for the last seven years, the Israeli system has done little to enforce its legal judgments. The synagogue stands, and Mr. Abdellatif has no access to his land.

Ram Kovarsky, the town council secretary, said the synagogue was outside the boundaries of Givat Zeev, although there is no obvious separation. Israeli officials confirm that the land is privately owned, though they refuse to say by whom.

Mr. Abdellatif, 65, said: “I feel stuck, angry. Why would they do that? I don’t know who to go to anymore.”

He pointed to his corduroy trousers and said, in the English he learned in Paterson, N.J., where his son is a police detective: “These are my pants. And those are your pants. And you should not take my pants. This is mine, and that is yours! I never took anyone’s land.”

According to the Peace Now figures, 44.3 percent of Givat Zeev is on private Palestinian land.

Miri Eisin, a spokesperson for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said that Israeli officials would have to see the data and the maps and added that ownership is complicated and delicate. Baruch Spiegel, a reserve general who just left the Ministry of Defense and dealt with the separation barrier being built near the boundary with the West Bank, also said he would have to see the data in detail in order to judge it.

The definitions of private and state land are complicated, given different administrations of the West Bank going back to the Ottoman Empire, the British mandate, Jordan and now Israel. During the Ottoman Empire, only small areas of the West Bank were registered to specific owners, and often villagers would hold land in common to avoid taxes. The British began a more formal land registry based on land use, taxation or house ownership that continued through the Jordanian period.

Large areas of agricultural land are registered as state land; other areas were requisitioned or seized by the Israeli military after 1967 for security purposes, but such requisitions are meant to be temporary and must be renewed, and do not change the legal ownership of the land, Mr. Dror, the Civil Administration spokesman, said.

But the issue of property is one that Israeli officials are familiar with, even if the percentages here may come as a surprise and may be challenged after the publication of the report.

Asked about Israeli seizure of private Palestinian land in an interview with The Times last summer, before these figures were available, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said: “Now I don’t deny anything, I don’t ignore anything. I’m just ready to sit down and talk. And resolve it. And resolve it in a generous manner for all sides.”

He said the 1967 war was a one of self-defense. Later, he said: “Many things happened. Life is not frozen. Things occur. So many things happened, and as a result of this many innocent individuals on both sides suffered, were killed, lost their lives, became crippled for life, lost their family members, their loved ones, thousands of them. And also private property suffered. By the way, on all sides.”

Mr. Olmert says Israel will keep some 10 percent of the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, possibly in a swap for land elsewhere. The area Israel intends to keep is roughly marked by the route of the unfinished separation barrier, which cuts through the West Bank and is intended, Israel says, to stop suicide bombers. Mr. Olmert, however, describes it as a putative border. Nearly 80,000 Jews live in settlements beyond the route of the barrier, but some 180,000 live in settlements within the barrier, while another 200,000 live in East Jerusalem.

But these land-ownership figures show that even in the settlements that Israel intends to keep, there will be a considerable problem of restitution that goes beyond the issue of refugee return.

Mr. Olmert was elected on a pledge to withdraw Israeli settlers living east of the barrier. But after the war with Hezbollah and with fighting ongoing in Gaza, from which Israel withdrew its settlers in the summer of 2005, his withdrawal plan has been suspended.

In March 2005, a report requested by the government found a number of illegal Israeli outposts built on private Palestinian land, and officials promised to destroy them. But only nine houses of only one outpost, Amona, were dismantled after a court case brought by Peace Now.

There is a court case pending over Migron, which began as a group of trailers on a windy hilltop around a set of cellphone antennas in May 1999 and is now a flourishing community of 50 families, said Avi Teksler, an official of the Migron council. But Migron, too, according to the data, is built on private Palestinian land.

Mr. Teksler said that the land was deserted, and that its ownership would be settled in court. Migron, where some children of noted settlement leaders live, has had “the support of every Israeli government,” he said. “The government has been a partner to every single move we’ve made.”

Mr. Teksler added: “This is how the state of Israel was created. And this is all the land of Israel. We’re like the kibbutzim. The only real difference is that we’re after 1967, not before.”

But in the Palestinian village of Burqa, Youssef Moussa Abdel Raziq Nabboud, 85, says that some of the land of Migron, and the land on which Israel built a road for settlers, belongs to him and his family, who once grew wheat and beans there. He said he had tax documents from the pre-1967 authorities.

“They have the power to put the settlement there and we can do nothing,” he said. “They have a fence around the settlement and dogs there.”

Mr. Nabboud went to the Israeli authorities with the mayor, Abu Maher, but they were told he needed an Israeli lawyer and surveyor. “I have no money for that,” he said. What began as an outpost taking 5 acres has now taken 125, the mayor said.

Mr. Nabboud wears a traditional head covering; his grandson, Khaled, 27, wears a Yankees cap. “The land is my inheritance,” he said. “I feel sad I can’t go there. And angry. The army protects them.”

 

 

Restricting Calories Boosts the Immune System By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter 
 

FRIDAY, Dec. 8 (HealthDay News) -- New research with rhesus monkeys appears to shed some light on why restricting calories may extend life spans.

Limiting consumption of calories seems to boost key infection-fighting cells in the immune system, the researchers say.

"The key finding is that in a primate species, which is very similar to ourselves, there is a very remarkable effect on the maintenance of the immune system with caloric restriction," said lead researcher Dr. Janko Nikolich-Zugich, a senior scientist at Oregon Health & Science University's Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute.

As people age, changes in the immune system dramatically increase susceptibility to infectious diseases. So-called T cells, which make up an important component of the immune response, appear to be the part of the immune system most affected by aging, the researchers said.

In other studies, calorie restriction has been shown to reduce the aging of the immune system in rats. And calorie restriction has also been shown to increase the life span of yeast, worms, flies, zebrafish, and spiders. This same benefit may also hold true for monkeys, the researchers said.

"Under long-term caloric restriction, that was started in young adult monkeys, there is a very remarkable way of preserving both the form and the function of the immune system, which will result in much better resistance to infectious disease," Nikolich-Zugich said.

The study results are published in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the        National Academy of Sciences.

In the 42-month study, Nikolich-Zugich and his colleagues found that calorie restriction improved the maintenance and production of T cells in 13 rhesus monkeys, 18 to 23 years of age, whose calories were restricted, compared with 28 monkeys who ate a normal diet.

The researchers found that calorie restriction improved T cell function and reduced the production of inflammatory compounds. These findings suggest that limiting calories can delay immunological aging, and, in turn, life span maybe increased by providing longer-term resistance to infectious diseases.

The estimated life span of rhesus monkeys is 25 years, so the monkeys in the study were the human equivalent of 60 to 70 years old. Those on a calorie-restricted diet were fed 30 percent less than the control animals.

Nikolich-Zugich said that people who restrict the number of calories they take in may also live longer because their immune system is "better and stronger." He also said it may be possible to find a drug that mimics calorie restriction that could improve the immune system. "Then, you would not fear viruses," he added.

Nikolich-Zugich is careful to note that improvement in the immune system is only one aspect of calorie restriction that extends life. "I don't think that it is solely the effect on the immune system," he said. "It is likely it is one of the important contributors. Calorie restriction has a beneficial effect on many different cells and tissues."

One expert thinks that strengthening the immune system is an important key to extending life.

"These results support the growing body of evidence that the beneficial effects of calorie restriction may be mediated through an anti-inflammatory mechanism," said Todd E. Morgan, a research associate professor at the University of Southern California's School of Gerontology.

The crucial next step will be to determine the molecular mechanism underlying calorie restriction's anti-inflammatory actions, Morgan said.

The monkeys in the project were part of an ongoing study of aging and calorie restriction in rhesus monkeys, conducted by the U.S. National Institute on Aging at the Primate Unit of the U.S.       

 

 National Institutes of Health Veterinary Research Program.

 

 

 

WHAT KIND OF BULLSHIT IS THIS NOW????????????????????????????????????????????????

They keep killing kids over there and things are gonna get really ugly... as if they could get any worse you ask?

Yes, it can get a lot worse.

Alot worse.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi and U.S. officials disputed each others' accounts of an overnight raid and air strike on Friday that killed up to 20 people in a new sign of friction over allegations of American troops killing civilians.

The U.S. military said ground forces with air support killed 20 suspected al Qaeda militants, including two women, in an area where the Sunni Arab insurgency is strong.

Police and officials in Ishaqi, 90 km (50 miles) north of Baghdad, said the bodies of 17 civilians, including six women and five children, were found in the rubble of two homes.

"The Americans have done this before but they always deny it," Ishaqi Mayor Amer Alwan told Reuters by telephone. "I want the world to know what's happening here."

Complaints that unjustified killings by U.S. troops are common have soured Iraqis' sentiment toward the U.S. presence in

Iraq and prompted Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki earlier this year to say he was losing patience over such reports.

This week an elite panel in Washington, exploring alternatives for U.S.

President George W. Bush's Iraq strategy, recommended the primary mission of U.S. forces evolve to one of training to let Iraqi forces take over combat responsibility.

Former Secretary of State James Baker, co-chair of the panel, urged Congress and the White House to accept most of the report's recommendations.

"I hope we don't treat this as a fruit salad, and say, 'I like this but I don't like that'," Baker said on Thursday.

But the White House on Friday dismissed his appeal.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said the Iraq report would be considered along with internal reviews being conducted by the

Pentagon, State Department and National Security Council.

Terje Roed-Larsen, U.N. Secretary-General

Kofi Annan's special envoy on

Syria-Lebanon issues, said the report was flawed as it assumes there is a common interest among states in the Middle East to stop a slide into chaos in Iraq.

Bush, who has meetings next week with Pentagon and State Department officials, is due to outline his new Iraq policy before Christmas, but has already rejected direct talks with

Iran and Syria, a central recommendation of the panel.

More than 2,900 U.S. troops have died and tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that ousted

Saddam Hussein

CHILDREN'S BODIES

Iraqiya state television on Friday said Iraq would hold a national reconciliation conference on December 16. It gave no details and it was not clear if Sunni Arab militant groups who oppose the political process would take part.

In Ishaqi, grieving relatives showed the bodies of five children wrapped in blankets to journalists.

In a statement, the U.S. military said the operation in Salahaddin province followed intelligence reports that al Qaeda militants operated in the area. It said rocket-propelled grenades and explosive suicide vests were found.

Only a handful of complaints involving civilian deaths in Iraq have led to criminal investigations by the U.S. military. "I can promise you that, in every one of these incidents, they will be fully investigated," Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli, the second-ranking U.S. general in the country, told Pentagon journalists by video-link. Annan warned on Friday that the worsening conflict in Iraq is increasing the odds of a regional war in the Middle East. "It is increasingly clear that soaring violence in Iraq affects not only that country but also threatens to "aggravate a range of underlying tensions in neighboring countries," he said. As a result, "the prospects of all-out civil war and even a regional conflict have become much more real" since his last report, issued three months ago, said Annan. Outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pleaded for patience, and said in his farewell speech on Friday that it would be a "terrible mistake" for America to leave Iraq now. In the largest operation of its kind since the U.S. invasion, British and Danish troops backed by tanks seized five suspects accused of attacks on coalition forces in the southern city of Basra, the British military said. Some 1,000 troops launched raids on five homes in the northern al-Hartha district of Basra, where rival Shi'ite militias are battling for control of the city's oil wealth and coalition troops are sometimes attacked.

(Additional reporting by Ghazwan al-Jibouri in Ishaqi and Mariam Karouny and Ross Colvin in Baghdad, Steve Holland and Andrew Gray in Washington, David Clarke in London)

 

 

What's up?

Not much...

Yeah, me neither.

Today sucked.

Yeah, what the fuck, right??

Yeah.

So whatta we do now?

I guess we watch Art School Confidential, listen to that Brian Ferry song a few more times, and...

Move on.

Right.

Eh...

Yeah, totally, I know.

Man...

What?

Sometimes it's hard being a Gemini.

Yeah, totally I know.

 

-A

 

 

In some cultures they say that the woman is sacred.  The mother, like mother earth, is to be revered, served, protected, and worshipped - not for her frailty - but for her strength.  The strength that keeps this world turning and keeps children on the land. 
But this is antiquated thinking now, isn't it?  Do we see this earth-mother-woman-goddess philosophy practiced anywhere anymore?

And what cost do we pay for this abandoning of the truly scared, the truly divine?

How does our planet look now as the supreme male gods look down on us all?  Everywhere there seems to be the unforgettable wail of misery.

The women in Iraq cry into their veils as their children die.  The women on Maury cry as man after man rejects their offspring.  The women in China lay still with clenched jaws as forced sterilization advances the cause of the great nation. The women in the videos shake their money makers, flesh for sale. 

 

Where are the soft hearts for the providers of life? 

Where are the men that will melt at the sight of a woman's tear? 

 Where are the men that can see past their own supremacy, their own divine right to be rulers and destroyers of this beautiful little miracle of a planet.

Where is the respect that was once the basis of all life and society?

Has it really been too long ago to remember that goddesses once walked this earth?

Is it all downhill now that Johnny's gone? Is there a man alive who understands that kind of love?

 

I have no idea.

 

But what I do know is that not all men can sit coldly by while a weeping woman's heart bleeds.

There must be some in the world that feel the pain of another.  There must be. 

 

Again, I have no idea. Maybe there are men that actually care.

 

Maybe.

What's for sure is there are many, many millions of the trash variety.  The dogshit that you can't seem to get out from between the grooves in your boots.

The kind that revel in their own disgusting behavior and feel somehow entitled to involve every man around them in their miserable, little, pathetic existence.

 

But fine.

 

Because the cure is so simple it almost hurts, well, it hurts a lot.  But so what, women are designed to withstand a great amount of pain.

(How many children do you think there would be in the world if men had to give birth, pussies, ironically enough)

 

The cure being - kick the motherfucker out.  And that doesn't just mean kick out your piece of shit boyfriend, husband, whatever...

But all of 'em - the sleaze that calls himself a friend, the bitch that infects everything around him with his filth, the lustful cohort that has to prove to every man and woman on the planet that his dick is bigger than yours....

All of 'em.

 

Then what , then what Amber???

 

Then you wait. 

Wait???? What the fuck do you mean, wait?  What about sex? What about love? What about companionship? What about being lonely?

 

Yes, there it is, isn't it? 

 Loneliness. 

This is what we fear. 

But isn't everyone alone? 

When you get down to it, isn't every person on the planet alone?

And it's not like being with someone makes you any less lonely...

 

In my experience, sometimes the lonliest that you can feel is when there's someone sitting right next to you whose heart is so cold and so unconcerned with you that you begin to wither from the frost.

 

And boys, this isn't just me. 

This isn't just the girl that you've been fucking and fucking around on mercilessly for the past two years, this isn't just the girl that you fuck when you can't get ass at the club one night, and it's not just the poor girl you know is in love with you but you couldn't give a shit about EXCEPT that she's very good at certain, ahem, things. 

 

No, this isn't just the women that you turn into meaningless playthings.  This feeling, this pain, this coldness that you inflict is inflicted on other women as well, your mothers, your sisters, your friends, your cousins, your daughters...

(Keep in mind there is the truly fallen type that don't even give a shit about their own sisters or mothers being treated like sex toys)

 

This damn spot is not that easy to get out. Believe me. Sooner or later, you pay a dear, dear price.

 

Can you hear the wail of a broken heart? Can you hear the women of the world cry?

 

No, no one ever does.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let's take a break and be happy...

 everyone knows how much Jakob makes me laugh...

Now, we have proof...

Aviance party at Duvet...

 

Okay, so this one is short... but here's the thing, so little to say...

The crooks used to be called Republicans and now they'll be called Democrats...

Pedophiles with power will still remain unconvicted... untried.

Corporations will still rape and plunder, and the poor man will still die in the struggle between good and evil.

Peace,

A

 

Key Evangelical quits amid gay sex claim

 

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - The president of the National Association of Evangelicals, an outspoken opponent of gay marriage, has given up his post while a church panel investigates allegations he paid a man for sex.

The Rev. Ted Haggard resigned as president of the 30 million-member association Thursday after being accused of paying the man for monthly trysts over the past three years.

Haggard, a married father of five, denied the allegations, but also stepped aside as head of his 14,000-member New Life Church pending an investigation.

"I am voluntarily stepping aside from leadership so that the overseer process can be allowed to proceed with integrity," he said in a statement. "I hope to be able to discuss this matter in more detail at a later date. In the interim, I will seek both spiritual advice and guidance."

Carolyn Haggard, spokeswoman for the New Life Church and the pastor's niece, said a four-member church panel will investigate the allegations. The board has the authority to discipline Haggard, including removing him from ministry work.

The acting senior pastor at New Life, Ross Parsley, told KKTV-TV of Colorado Springs that Haggard admitted that some of the accusations were true.

"I just know that there has been some admission of indiscretion, not admission to all of the material that has been discussed but there is an admission of some guilt," Parsley told the station.

He did not elaborate, and a telephone number for Parsley could not be found late Thursday.

The allegations come as voters in Colorado and seven other states get ready to decide Tuesday on amendments banning gay marriage. Besides the proposed ban on the Colorado ballot, a separate measure would establish the legality of domestic partnerships providing same-sex couples with many of the rights of married couples.

The allegations stunned church members.

"It's political, right before the elections," said Brian Boals, a New Life member for 17 years.

Church member E.J. Cox, 25, called the claims "ridiculous."

"People are always saying stuff about Pastor Ted," she said. "You just sort of blow it off. He's just like anyone else in the public eye."

The accusations were made by Mike Jones, 49, of Denver, who said he decided to go public because of the political fight over the amendments.

"I just want people to step back and take a look and say, 'Look, we're all sinners, we all have faults, but if two people want to get married, just let them, and let them have a happy life,'" said Jones, who added that he isn't working for any political group.

Jones, who said he is gay, said he was also upset when he discovered Haggard and the New Life Church had publicly opposed same-sex marriage.

"It made me angry that here's someone preaching about gay marriage and going behind the scenes having gay sex," he said.

Jones claimed Haggard paid him to have sex nearly every month over three years. He said he advertised himself as an escort on the Internet and was contacted by a man who called himself Art, who snorted methamphetamine before their sexual encounters to heighten his experience. Jones said he later saw the man on television identified as Haggard and that the two last had sex in August. He said he has voice mail messages from Haggard, as well as an envelope he said Haggard used to mail him cash. He declined to make the voice mails available to the AP, but KUSA-TV reported what it said were excerpts late Thursday that referred to methamphetamine. "Hi Mike, this is Art," one call began, according to the station. "Hey, I was just calling to see if we could get any more. Either $100 or $200 supply." A second message, left a few hours later, began: "Hi Mike, this is Art, I am here in Denver and sorry that I missed you. But as I said, if you want to go ahead and get the stuff, then that would be great. And I'll get it sometime next week or the week after or whenever." Haggard, 50, was appointed president of the evangelicals association in March 2003. He has participated in conservative Christian leaders' conference calls with White House staffers and lobbied members of Congress last year on

 Sandra Day O'Connor announced her retirement. After Massachusetts legalized gay marriage in 2004, Haggard and others began organizing state-by-state opposition. Last year, Haggard and officials from the nearby Christian ministry Focus on the Family announced plans to push Colorado's gay marriage ban for the 2006 ballot. At the time, Haggard said that he believed marriage is a union between a man and woman rooted in centuries of tradition, and that research shows it's the best family unit for children. ___

Associated Press Writer Dan Elliott contributed to this report from Denver.

 

hmmmmmm... video game playin, totrture-happy, war mongering, NRA supportin', American males, with LOW Testisterine????? what? -A
Testosterone Tumbling in American Males  

 

FRIDAY, Oct. 27 (HealthDay News) -- The testosterone-fueled American male may be losing his punch.

Over the past two decades, levels of the sex hormone in U.S. men have been falling steadily, a new study finds.

For example, average total testosterone levels in men aged 65 to 69 fell from 503 nanograms/decileter (ng/dL) in 1988 to 423 ng/dL in 2003.

The reasons for this trend are unclear, said researchers at the New England Research Institutes in Waterdown, Mass. They noted that neither aging nor certain other health factors, such as smoking or obesity, can fully explain the decline.

"Male serum testosterone levels appear to vary by generation, even after age is taken into account," study lead author Thomas G. Travison said in a prepared statement.

Testosterone is the primary male sex hormone and plays an important role in maintaining bone and muscle mass. Low testosterone levels have been linked to health problems, including lowered libido and diabetes.

It's normal for men's testosterone levels to peak in their late 20s and then start to gradually decline, experts say. But this study found that overall testosterone levels are lower than they were 20 years ago.

"In 1988, men who were 50 years and older had higher serum testosterone concentrations than did comparable 50-year-old men in 1996. This suggests that some factor other than age may be contributing to the observed declines in testosterone over time," Travison said.

He and his colleagues analyzed blood samples -- along with health and other information -- from about 1,500 men in the greater Boston area who took part in the Massachusetts Male Aging Study. That study collected data in 1987-89, 1995-97, and 2002-04.

"This analysis deals with men who were born between 1915 and 1945, but our baseline data were not obtained until the late 1980s, when the elder subjects were about 70 years old, and the youngest about 45," Travison said.

"Events occurring in earlier decades could certainly help explain our results, if their effects persisted into recent years," he noted.

The findings were published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.

 

 

So - an employee of the White House office of Faith Based Initiatives has a new book out.

(I'm really trying to respect my water crystals right now and stay positive... so bear with me)

In the book Mr. Kuo speaks about this administration's open hostility and mockery of the religious right.

He states plainly that many Christian Evangelical leaders (especially the big ones, Fallwell, Buchanan, etc..)

were spoken of with eye-rolling and demeaning tones.

Okay - so this author, a devout Evangelical Christian himself - has written this book stating that the Evangelical

Born again movement has been manipulated and used by the Bush administration to gain a solid voting base.

He also goes on to state that divisive issues like abortion and gay rights have been touted as major policy concentrations simply to pacify the Christians and that really there is no real abhorrence for either abortion or gays in this administration.  Simply put, the ideals and values of the Christian Born Again movement were used as selling points to bring a large majority of voters on board with the Republicans.

Okay, now this is what David Kuo said, he worked for the administration, he spoke to them, he met with them, he ate with them, he saw the documents, he watched the money not roll in to help Christian causes, he watched them roll their eyes as they discussed Christian religious leaders.  Atop which, he himself is a DEVOUT CHRISTIAN.

(Still holding it together, trying my best...  keep it logical, don't get mad Amber...)

Alright, so that's pretty good proof that the Christian bend of this government has been a ruse from the beginning.

And that isn't enough proof, there is also a fine documentary called : With God on Our Side , which I'm sure you can netflix that takes you step by step through the grooming and campaigning process for George W.

It takes you through the days of introducing George to born again communities and congregations, it talks of the political value of securing this base, it shows you real clips of the president and his handlers.  It shows how they handle the Christians into becoming they're road to victory.

It show the cold, methodical and often times contemptuous way in which Christians are viewed by the government and by George W. himself.

And if that is also not enough proof, there is also the amazing documentary : Why We Fight that goes into extensive detail on Eisenhower's farewell speech in which he speaks of the military-industrial complex and the real reasons why this war is going on.

For example, does anyone aside from me wonder (hold back, not yet) what it is that the President means when he says, "we'll stay the course till the job is done."???

What's the job?  Does anyone know?

It's very clear in Why We Fight, did you know that America is building 14 bases in Iraq?

14 American bases???

That will be manned, patrolled and secured by American soldiers - for how long?? No one knows.

Is that when the job will be done, when the bases are built?

And why build 14 bases in a far away land?

Wasn't the point to bring them democracy? Or was it to bring them Jesus.

Hopefully it's become a little clearer to people that democracy doesn't come at the barrel of a gun, and certainly not from within 14 bases filled with occupying forces.  And hopefully with this new book, Born Again Christians (to whom I've been trying to appeal FOREVER with my ARE YOU SO GODDAMNED STUPID? rhetoric)

will finally understand that this war also has nothing to do with Jesus.  Because Jesus is the farthest thing from these people's minds or hearts, or better yet, their business plans.

No matter how much a preacher or a president tells you that the other guy is bad because he doesn't have Jesus in his heart - does that make it right to invade their country, kill half a million of their civilian women and children and lose almost three thousand of your own men and women?

Does the Iraq's choice of religion give us the right to bomb them into extinction, to torture them, to rob them of the basic right to live?

Can Christians be so incredibly worried about a fetus' right to life and not give a damn about a Muslim's life?

Is this what Jesus wanted you think?

Did Jesus preach that all who do not believe in him should be killed, maimed, tortured, occupied and robbed?

No.

Is that why America is losing this war?

Because God is not on our side.

It's something to consider.

A

p.s. and Please, please, please, stop listening to your preachers people, you can read for yourself, read the Bible, believe in Christ, or anyone else you choose - but please do not look for your spiritual enlightenment from someone who is being paid off by this administration to get your votes in a row for the upcoming election.

Please think for yourself and decide what would Jesus do, not what your pastor tells you Jesus would want.

THINK FOR YOURSELF... EVERYONE KNOWS WHAT'S WRONG AND RIGHT IN THEIR HEARTS.
 

More good news everyday, eh?

I'm in the process of reading  the new Chomsky (not the one Chavez held up), for more on my love of Chomper go to Strange Ramblings (see option below) and scroll down about a year.

Here's the latest heinous actions of a terrorist state - you think they'll ever try Israel in the International Court?

How many of the Nuremberg crimes you think the Israeli's would be convicted of?

It just makes me sick.  A people who has been tortured, oppressed and murdered just turns around and does it to the next guy...

Doesn't the irony of Israel's violence ever dawn on the Jewish world?

Surely not everyone is blind...

I keep saying it - KARMA IS A BITCH - and this too shall come around... then where will the oppressors hide?

They sure ain't havin' an easy time hiding in Baghdad... this neo-con agenda is turning out to be a DISASTER and the only people profiting are the Administration and Israel - the American people have false lower gas prices (that will shoot right back up after November), the rise of Hunger and Homelessness is at most alarmingly high rate in DECADES - and Haliburton has been charged by the Federal Gov't for selling nuclear technology to Iran (The TOP 25 Censored Stories of 2006, look it up on Amazon).

Land of the Free and Home of the Brave is quickly beginning to look like Land of the Thief and Home of the Depraved.

ALL HAIL THE THIEF!!!

DEPRAVITY IS ON THE MARCH!!!

Welcome to your life, to your country - and guess what, no matter how much you pray to Jesus it's not gonna go away.

Jesus doesn't want people sitting around in churches listening to propoganda.

He wants people to USE THEIR MINDS, READ THE NEWSPAPER, GET INVOLVED AND FIGHT INEQUITY AND INJUSTICE.

Not just sitting around talking about how sorry we are for the people we used to be and reveling in how wonderful we are now that we are born again.

NO!!!!!!

THIS IS THE INDULGENT APATHY OF OUR TIMES!!!

Let's be COMPLETELY self-involved and attribute it all to how much we love Jesus, and therefore all Jews.

Right, cuz Jesus would have REALLY LOVED WHAT THE ISRAELI'S HAVE BEEN DOING FOR THE PAST 50 YEARS, RIGHT???????

Wrong.

Wrong.

Wrong.

And I don't think it matters how much scripture you read, taking land that does not belong to you, raping, mass murdering, imprisoning, and torturing hundreds of thousands of innocents WILL NEVER BE RIGHT, never.

Poor JC man... all these lunatics running around, pawns of the man preaching obediance to the rotten system that has us all running around like

chickens with our heads cut off.

STOP LYING TO YOURSELVES!!!

AMERICA IS LOSING THE WAR!

AMERICANS ARE DYING IN RECORD NUMBERS.

IT'S WRONG TO BE THERE AND EVERYONE KNOWS IT.

YOUR PASTOR CAN'T FIX THAT... and neither can your holy lord and savior.

GOING TO WAR WITH A RELIGION IS ARCHAIC, GOING TO WAR WITH DESERT PEOPLE IN THE DESERT IS STUPID.

JUST PLAIN DUMB.

A

Read below for new and fun ways that Isreali's ("Um, God's chosen people") are tormenting Palestinians.

 

By Martin Patience BBC News, Jerusalem

Business consultant Sam Bahour was used to leaving his Palestinian wife and their two young daughters in the West Bank city of Ramallah every few months to renew his tourist visa.

But now Mr Bahour, 41, faces a tough choice. He can leave the West Bank to renew his visa as usual but risks not being allowed back in. Or he can stay in the West Bank, but illegally. The Israeli authorities have told Mr Bahour that he has received his final tourist visa and must leave the West Bank by 1 October 2006. "My 12-year-old daughter was planning a party for my birthday in mid-October," he says, sitting in his office in Ramallah. "But now she thinks it's not going to happen." Mr Bahour is one of thousands of Palestinians and foreigners affected by an Israeli policy preventing visitors from entering the West Bank in the last few months. 'Hundreds of cases' Human rights organisations claim that Israel's decision to enforce a law requiring a permit to visit the occupied territories is breaking up families, preventing non-Palestinians from working in schools, universities and non-governmental organisations, and stopping tourists from visiting the area.

These people are not Hamas supporters - they are middle-class Palestinians that Israel should want to do business with Gershon Baskin Israel-Palestine Centre for Research and Information

According to the human rights organisation Israel-Palestine Centre for Research and Information (IPCRI), hundreds of cases like Mr Bahour's have emerged in the last few months. Mr Bahour was born in the United States to a Palestinian father. He travels on an American passport but considers himself Palestinian and has spent the last 12 years living in Ramallah. He is one of tens of thousands of Palestinians who are foreign passport holders but do not have the paperwork from the Israeli authorities that allows them to reside in the West Bank. While Israel says they must get a permit to reside and work in the West Bank, human rights organisations say these are extremely hard to obtain. Long wait The Israeli organisation B'Tselem claims Israel has refused to process 120,000 requests for such permits since the start of the second Palestinian uprising in 2000. Mr Bahour says he applied to the Israeli authorities for a permit 13 years ago but a decision is still pending.

For two or three years we didn't pay much attention to [the law allowing Israel to restrict access to the West Bank] but now we're enforcing it Sabbine Haddad Israeli interior ministry

For years, Mr Bahour and thousands of other Palestinians have been forced to leave the West Bank every three months, and to re-enter on a fresh tourist visa to maintain their lives in the West Bank. But now Israel is not issuing these visas to many foreigners. Many Palestinians believe that this policy change is a reaction to Hamas's taking over the Palestinian Authority in March this year. "We think that this is an unjust and stupid policy," says Gershon Baskin, a co-director of IPCRI. "Israel is cutting off its nose to spite its face because of the majority of these people are not Hamas supporters. "They are middle-class Palestinians that Israel should want to do business with - investors, teachers, and professors. It makes no sense." Enforcement The Israeli government denies that there is any change its policy. They say they are only enforcing a law that was always on its books. "For two or three years we didn't pay much attention to this law," says Sabbine Haddad, a spokesperson for the Israeli interior ministry. "But now we're enforcing it." But for people like Mr Bahour, a life of uncertainty has become still more uncertain. He says that he has put much of his life on hold, and that he has stopped taking on new business projects. "I'm a consultant and my business requires face-to-face interaction," he says. "How can I take on new business if I'm not going to be here?" Mr Bahour with other people in a similar situation formed a group to bring awareness to the issue. Mr Bahour says he is busying himself with this work. He says that he is vigorously fighting to remain in the West Bank. But his visa will expire in a few weeks.

Asked what he will do if he cannot get permission to remain in the West Bank, he says "I will cross that bridge when I come to it."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/5345752.stm

 

oh my gosh, I love my husband. That's really all I have to say...

Except, of course, there is too much weird ugliness going on in the world... that's it, I'll stop there, I'm too happy to dwell on it today.

What a romantic day, a little rain, warm, ahhhhh... purrrrrrrrfect to stay inside and...

*AK-P* 

 

I'm so fuckin' jet lagged... it's 6 in the morning and I'm sleepless.

Just saw The Red Shoes on TCM - thanks, very uplifting.

Hope the city has been well to you... Denmark was insanely beautiful and insanely fun... look out for footage from ANALOGIK in the next few days...

They're so freakin' cool...

I'm gonna go smoke...

peace,

A

 

This is all going to lead to another 9-11 and I think that's what the Cheney-Rumsfeld dynamic duo want... alienate everyone on the planet, support Israel, oppress the Muslim world and in the meantime keep everyone occupied with TV and crap... when does it end? How does it stop? When some group or other has finally had enough... an when will that be? Who knows? When the rebels in Nicarugua have enough of the U.S' scheming? When did the rebels of East Timor throw up their weapons in protest? What about Cuba and American oppression that has continued for decades? Have we learned nothing? Are we going to try and play the French in Algeria? Can imperialism work now, solely by having the Jews on your side? Look back in history and you will find that Imperialism, though it may destroy, disarm and maim.... it does not ultimately succeed.  It will fail... the U.S. will fail... so keep sucking on the grande skim latte and worrying about your cellulite... and maybe your grandad in Key West will pay for your lipo next year as a graduation present... but don't be surprised if everything you've got planned comes crashing down and turns to rubble... everyone will pay for the inequities of this nation, for the used of our tax money...and if for some reason you happen to SUPPORT this war and really do think that Jesus is on his way back down in a chariot... keep waiting... hold your breath, please.  This administration has been playing YOU EVANGELICAL BORN AGAINS for every fuckin' penny and vote... not only do they not believe any of the crap they're shoveling into your pigstys, they have utter contempt for you, because of your abject stupidity.

George W. is not a christian, his father is a known atheist, GET WITH IT!

 

And for those who support this tyranny because you are PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN... then I suppose you will be just as proud of the vengence that will befall you for all your proud actions... THE PEOPLE WHO RUN THIS NATION ARE NOT AMERICANS, they are CORPORATE CEO's... you have nothing in common with them, in all honesty they despise you even more than the poor schmucks that think JC is coming back on a winged horse... because you all kiss their ass.... and ultimately you get nothing for it... no Social Security, no health care, no future planet, even.   Skinny jeans, minnie skirts, footless tights and toe rings on too fat over-fed manicured toes does not MEAN JACK SHIT IN THE REAL WORLD...

Think about it....

 

August 25, 2006

Weapons

Inquiry Opened Into Israeli Use of U.S. Bombs

By DAVID S. CLOUD

Correction Appended

WASHINGTON, Aug. 24 — The State Department is investigating whether Israel’s use of American-made cluster bombs in southern Lebanon violated secret agreements with the United States that restrict when it can employ such weapons, two officials said.

The investigation by the department’s Office of Defense Trade Controls began this week, after reports that three types of American cluster munitions, anti-personnel weapons that spray bomblets over a wide area, have been found in many areas of southern Lebanon and were responsible for civilian casualties.

Gonzalo Gallegos, a State Department spokesman, said, “We have heard the allegations that these munitions were used, and we are seeking more information.” He declined to comment further.

Several current and former officials said that they doubted the investigation would lead to sanctions against Israel but that the decision to proceed with it might be intended to help the Bush administration ease criticism from Arab governments and commentators over its support of Israel’s military operations. The investigation has not been publicly announced; the State Department confirmed it in response to questions.

In addition to investigating use of the weapons in southern Lebanon, the State Department has held up a shipment of M-26 artillery rockets, a cluster weapon, that Israel sought during the conflict, the officials said.

The inquiry is likely to focus on whether Israel properly informed the United States about its use of the weapons and whether targets were strictly military. So far, the State Department is relying on reports from United Nations personnel and nongovernmental organizations in southern Lebanon, the officials said.

David Siegel, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy, said, “We have not been informed about any such inquiry, and when we are we would be happy to respond.”

Officials were granted anonymity to discuss the investigation because it involves sensitive diplomatic issues and agreements that have been kept secret for years.

The agreements that govern Israel’s use of American cluster munitions go back to the 1970’s, when the first sales of the weapons occurred, but the details of them have never been publicly confirmed. The first one was signed in 1976 and later reaffirmed in 1978 after an Israeli incursion into Lebanon. News accounts over the years have said that they require that the munitions be used only against organized Arab armies and clearly defined military targets under conditions similar to the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973.

A Congressional investigation after Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon found that Israel had used the weapons against civilian areas in violation of the agreements. In response, the Reagan administration imposed a six-year ban on further sales of cluster weapons to Israel.

Israeli officials acknowledged soon after their offensive began last month that they were using cluster munitions against rocket sites and other military targets. While Hezbollah positions were frequently hidden in civilian areas, Israeli officials said their intention was to use cluster bombs in open terrain.

Bush administration officials warned Israel to avoid civilian casualties, but they have lodged no public protests against its use of cluster weapons. American officials say it has not been not clear whether the weapons, which are also employed by the United States military, were being used against civilian areas and had been supplied by the United States. Israel also makes its own types of cluster weapons.

But a report released Wednesday by the United Nations Mine Action Coordination Center, which has personnel in Lebanon searching for unexploded ordnance, said it had found unexploded bomblets, including hundreds of American types, in 249 locations south of the Litani River.

The report said American munitions found included 559 M-42’s, an anti-personnel bomblet used in 105-millimeter artillery shells; 663 M-77’s, a submunition found in M-26 rockets; and 5 BLU-63’s, a bomblet found in the CBU-26 cluster bomb. Also found were 608 M-85’s, an Israeli-made submunition.

The unexploded submunitions being found in Lebanon are probably only a fraction of the total number dropped. Cluster munitions can contain dozens or even hundreds of submunitions designed to explode as they scatter around a wide area. They are very effective against rocket-launcher units or ground troops.

The Lebanese government has reported that the conflict killed 1,183 people and wounded 4,054, most of them civilians. The United Nations reported this week that the number of civilian casualties in Lebanon from cluster munitions, land mines and unexploded bombs stood at 30 injured and eight killed.

Dozen of Israelis were killed and hundreds wounded in attacks by Hezbollah rockets, some of which were loaded with ball bearings to maximize their lethality.

Officials say it is unlikely that Israel will be found to have violated a separate agreement, the Arms Export Control Act, which requires foreign governments that receive American weapons to use them for legitimate self-defense. Proving that Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah did not constitute self-defense would be difficult, especially in view of President Bush’s publicly announced support for Israel’s action after Hezbollah fighters attacked across the border, the officials said.

Even if Israel is found to have violated the classified agreement covering cluster bombs, it is not clear what actions the United States might take.

In 1982, delivery of cluster-bomb shells to Israel was suspended a month after Israel invaded Lebanon after the Reagan administration determined that Israel “may” have used them against civilian areas.

But the decision to impose what amounted to a indefinite moratorium was made under pressure from Congress, which conducted a long investigation of the issue. Israel and the United States reaffirmed restrictions on the use of cluster munitions in 1988, and the Reagan administration lifted the moratorium.

Correction: Aug. 26, 2006

A front-page article yesterday about a State Department inquiry into whether Israel’s use of cluster bombs violated a secret agreement with the United States gave the wrong year in some copies for one of Israel’s previous wars. It referred to the 1967 war, not 1969.

August 17, 2006

Bombs Aimed at G.I.’s in Iraq Are Increasing

By MICHAEL R. GORDON, MARK MAZZETTI and THOM SHANKER

This article is by Michael R. Gordon, Mark Mazzetti and Thom Shanker.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 — The number of roadside bombs planted in Iraq rose in July to the highest monthly total of the war, offering more evidence that the anti-American insurgency has continued to strengthen despite the killing of the terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Along with a sharp increase in sectarian attacks, the number of daily strikes against American and Iraqi security forces has doubled since January. The deadliest means of attack, roadside bombs, made up much of that increase. In July, of 2,625 explosive devices, 1,666 exploded and 959 were discovered before they went off. In January, 1,454 bombs exploded or were found.

The bomb statistics — compiled by American military authorities in Baghdad and made available at the request of The New York Times — are part of a growing body of data and intelligence analysis about the violence in Iraq that has produced somber public assessments from military commanders, administration officials and lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

“The insurgency has gotten worse by almost all measures, with insurgent attacks at historically high levels,” said a senior Defense Department official who agreed to discuss the issue only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for attribution. “The insurgency has more public support and is demonstrably more capable in numbers of people active and in its ability to direct violence than at any point in time.”

A separate, classified report by the Defense Intelligence Agency, dated Aug. 3, details worsening security conditions inside the country and describes how Iraq risks sliding toward civil war, according to several officials who have read the document or who have received a briefing on its contents.

The nine-page D.I.A. study, titled “Iraq Update,” compiles the most recent empirical data on the number of attacks, bombings, murders and other violent acts, as well as diagrams of the groups carrying out insurgent and sectarian attacks, the officials said.

The report’s contents are being widely discussed among Pentagon officials, military commanders and, in particular, on Capitol Hill, where concern among senior lawmakers of both parties is growing over a troubling dichotomy: even as Iraq takes important steps toward democracy — including the election of a permanent government this spring — the violence has gotten worse.

Senior Bush administration officials reject the idea that Iraq is on the verge of civil war, and state with unwavering confidence that the broad American strategy in Iraq remains on course. But American commanders in Iraq have shifted thousands of soldiers from outlying provinces to Baghdad to combat increased violence in the Iraqi capital.

The increased attacks have taken their toll. While the number of Americans killed in action per month has declined slightly — to 38 killed in action in July, from 42 in January, in part reflecting improvements in armor and other defenses — the number of Americans wounded has soared, to 518 in July from 287 in January. Explosive devices accounted for slightly more than half the deaths.

An analysis of the 1,666 bombs that exploded in July shows that 70 percent were directed against the American-led military force, according to a spokesman for the military command in Baghdad. Twenty percent struck Iraqi security forces, up from 9 percent in 2005. And 10 percent of the blasts struck civilians, twice the rate from last year.

Taken together, the new assessments by the military and the intelligence community provide evidence that violence in Iraq is at its highest level yet. And they describe twin dangers facing the country: insurgent violence against Americans and Iraqi security forces, which has continued to increase since the killing on June 7 of Mr. Zarqawi, the leader of the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and the primarily sectarian violence seen in Iraqi-on-Iraqi attacks being aimed at civilians.

Iraq is now locked in a cycle in which strikes by Sunni Arab militants have prompted the rise of Shiite militias, which have in turn aggravated Sunni fears. Beyond that, many Sunnis say they believe that the new Shiite-dominated government has not made sufficient efforts to create a genuine unity government. As a result, Sunni attitudes appear to have hardened.

As the politics in Iraq have grown more polarized since the elections in December, in which many Sunni Arabs voted, attacks have soared, including sectarian clashes that have killed an average of more than 100 Iraqi civilians per day over the past two months.

In addition to bombs, attacks with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and small-caliber weapons against American and Iraqi military forces have also increased, according to American military officials. But the number of roadside bombs — or improvised explosive devices as they are known by the military — is an especially important indicator of enemy activity. Bomb attacks are the largest killer of American troops. They also require a network: a bomb maker; financiers to pay for the effort; and operatives to dig holes in the road, plant the explosives, watch for approaching American and Iraqi forces and set off the blast when troops approach.

With the violence growing in Iraq, American intelligence agencies are working to produce a National Intelligence Estimate about the security conditions there — the first such formal governmentwide assessment about the situation in Iraq since the summer of 2004.

In late July, D.I.A. officials briefed several Senate committees about the insurgent and sectarian violence. The presentation was based on a draft version of what became the Aug. 3 study, and one recipient described it as “extremely negative.” That presentation was followed by public testimony on Aug. 3 by Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top American military commander in the Middle East, who told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the sectarian violence was “probably as bad as I’ve seen it, in Baghdad in particular” and said if it was not stopped, “it is possible that Iraq could move towards civil war.” General Abizaid later emphasized that he was “optimistic” that the slide toward civil war could be prevented.

Officials who have read or been briefed on the new D.I.A. analysis said its assessments paralleled both aspects of General Abizaid’s testimony.

The newest accounts of the risks of civil war may already be altering the political dynamic in Washington. After General Abizaid’s testimony, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, said that if Iraq fell into civil war, the committee might need to examine whether the authorization provided by Congress for the use of American force in Iraq would still be valid. The comments by Senator Warner, a senior Republican who is a staunch supporter of the president, have reverberated loudly across Congress.

Bush administration officials now admit that Iraqi government’s original plan to rein in the violence in Baghdad, announced in June, has failed. The Pentagon has decided to rush more American troops into the capital, and the new military operation to restore security there is expected to begin in earnest next month.

Yet some outside experts who have recently visited the White House said Bush administration officials were beginning to plan for the possibility that Iraq’s democratically elected government might not survive.

“Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy,” said one military affairs expert who received an Iraq briefing at the White House last month and agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity.

“Everybody in the administration is being quite circumspect,” the expert said, “but you can sense their own concern that this is drifting away from democracy.”

 

 

The world seems stuck in a cycle of violence.  As a species, it appears, we are currently unable to unite on any one life threatening issue.  When sadly, there are many life threatening issues that require a worldwide, cohesive effort.   Not only is the prospect of something as dreadful and irreversible as global warming ineffective in bringing us together, but the onset of what could fatally become World War Three has also been used as a chance to employ political rhetoric and quell any chance of a unilateral peace.  For the sake of humanity my tears fall on a daily basis.   There are innocents dying across the globe tonight, and the only thing I have are my tears for them all.  And this is to say nothing of the deep resentment that grows inside me everyday with the fall of another species into extinction, with the destruction of our trees and our rivers.  From the sweatshop workers who live on 3 cents an hour to the crops being dusted with DDT, there is a question that arises from my most basic of emotions.  Where is God in all this?

Is there a higher being seated somewhere overcome with sorrow, a slow painful nod of acceptance. the acceptance of failure, slipping from his/her divine being.  Has God failed because we are failing so terribly?  Has our divine gift, our mother earth and our divine promise, our humanity been plundered to such an extreme that we are no longer worthy of them.  That we deserve our dire fate because we have written it ourselves. 

I look around me and I see well-dressed men in beautiful suits telling me beautiful whole-baked lies that look like answers and reek with the stench of lies.  I look at people on the street and I see beleaugered faces desperately trying to keep happy and cool.  But the earth continues to boil and the lies just don't ever stop.  And then there is the fear... that unholy, ungodly fear of violence.  Attacks, bombings, killings, torture play havoc on our back brains as we eat and drink the images down with CNN and PS2..." please don't let it happen here" everyone prays, desperate and screaming inside... our humanity cries, it weeps and wails like a mother with a dying son in her arms... the Greater Conciousness weeps - we all weep, together. 

This is the check, is it not?  The philosophical GOD. 

 We are all one.

For whom does the bell toll, right?  It tolls for thee, right?

We all feel the pain of every single death, we are all connected, even if we don't know it - or don't like it.

We are dying it seems.  But........

The sunset brings colors fall in my window and a beautiful man hands me something to smoke, a tiny seed of beauty, of hope is planted.

If we plant the seeds of hope, they may just grow into the trees that will shelter us from the coming storm.

Hope that we can change things before it's too late.

Hope that we can speak the truth.

We may just find our lost humanity.Can you believe this?

They bomb, they mame, they imprison, they torture...

Who are they?

The terrorists or the freedom bringers... it's hard to tell anymore.

-A

The New York Times

July 22, 2006

Weapons

U.S. Speeds Up Bomb Delivery for the Israelis

By DAVID S. CLOUD and HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON, July 21 — The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, American officials said Friday.

The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration, the officials said. Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be compared to Iran’s efforts to arm and resupply Hezbollah.

The munitions that the United States is sending to Israel are part of a multimillion-dollar arms sale package approved last year that Israel is able to draw on as needed, the officials said. But Israel’s request for expedited delivery of the satellite and laser-guided bombs was described as unusual by some military officers, and as an indication that Israel still had a long list of targets in Lebanon to strike.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday that she would head to Israel on Sunday at the beginning of a round of Middle Eastern diplomacy. The original plan was to include a stop to Cairo in her travels, but she did not announce any stops in Arab capitals.

Instead, the meeting of Arab and European envoys planned for Cairo will take place in Italy, Western diplomats said. While Arab governments initially criticized Hezbollah for starting the fight with Israel in Lebanon, discontent is rising in Arab countries over the number of civilian casualties in Lebanon, and the governments have become wary of playing host to Ms. Rice until a cease-fire package is put together.

To hold the meetings in an Arab capital before a diplomatic solution is reached, said Martin S. Indyk, a former American ambassador to Israel, “would have identified the Arabs as the primary partner of the United States in this project at a time where Hezbollah is accusing the Arab leaders of providing cover for the continuation of Israel’s military operation.”

The decision to stay away from Arab countries for now is a markedly different strategy from the shuttle diplomacy that previous administrations used to mediate in the Middle East. “I have no interest in diplomacy for the sake of returning Lebanon and Israel to the status quo ante,” Ms. Rice said Friday. “I could have gotten on a plane and rushed over and started shuttling around, and it wouldn’t have been clear what I was shuttling to do.”

Before Ms. Rice heads to Israel on Sunday, she will join President Bush at the White House for discussions on the Middle East crisis with two Saudi envoys, Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the secretary general of the National Security Council.

The new American arms shipment to Israel has not been announced publicly, and the officials who described the administration’s decision to rush the munitions to Israel would discuss it only after being promised anonymity. The officials included employees of two government agencies, and one described the shipment as just one example of a broad array of armaments that the United States has long provided Israel.

One American official said the shipment should not be compared to the kind of an “emergency resupply” of dwindling Israeli stockpiles that was provided during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, when an American military airlift helped Israel recover from early Arab victories.

David Siegel, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, said: “We have been using precision-guided munitions in order to neutralize the military capabilities of Hezbollah and to minimize harm to civilians. As a rule, however, we do not comment on Israel’s defense acquisitions.”

Israel’s need for precision munitions is driven in part by its strategy in Lebanon, which includes destroying hardened underground bunkers where Hezbollah leaders are said to have taken refuge, as well as missile sites and other targets that would be hard to hit without laser and satellite-guided bombs.

Pentagon and military officials declined to describe in detail the size and contents of the shipment to Israel, and they would not say whether the munitions were being shipped by cargo aircraft or some other means. But an arms-sale package approved last year provides authority for Israel to purchase from the United States as many as 100 GBU-28’s, which are 5,000-pound laser-guided bombs intended to destroy concrete bunkers. The package also provides for selling satellite-guided munitions.

An announcement in 2005 that Israel was eligible to buy the “bunker buster” weapons described the GBU-28 as “a special weapon that was developed for penetrating hardened command centers located deep underground.” The document added, “The Israeli Air Force will use these GBU-28’s on their F-15 aircraft.”

American officials said that once a weapons purchase is approved, it is up to the buyer nation to set up a timetable. But one American official said normal procedures usually do not include rushing deliveries within days of a request. That was done because Israel is a close ally in the midst of hostilities, the official said.

Although Israel had some precision guided bombs in its stockpile when the campaign in Lebanon began, the Israelis may not have taken delivery of all the weapons they were entitled to under the 2005 sale.

Israel said its air force had dropped 23 tons of explosives Wednesday night alone in Beirut, in an effort to penetrate what was believed to be a bunker used by senior Hezbollah officials.

A senior Israeli official said Friday that the attacks to date had degraded Hezbollah’s military strength by roughly half, but that the campaign could go on for two more weeks or longer. “We will stay heavily with the air campaign,” he said. “There’s no time limit. We will end when we achieve our goals.”

The Bush administration announced Thursday a military equipment sale to Saudi Arabia, worth more than $6 billion, a move that may in part have been aimed at deflecting inevitable Arab government anger at the decision to supply Israel with munitions in the event that effort became public.

On Friday, Bush administration officials laid out their plans for the diplomatic strategy that Ms. Rice will pursue. In Rome, the United States will try to hammer out a diplomatic package that will offer Lebanon incentives under the condition that a United Nations resolution, which calls for the disarming of Hezbollah, is implemented.

Diplomats will also try to figure out the details around an eventual international peacekeeping force, and which countries will contribute to it. Germany and Russia have both indicated that they would be willing to contribute forces; Ms. Rice said the United States was unlikely to.

Implicit in the eventual diplomatic package is a cease-fire. But a senior American official said it remained unclear whether, under such a plan, Hezbollah would be asked to retreat from southern Lebanon and commit to a cease-fire, or whether American diplomats might depend on Israel’s continued bombardment to make Hezbollah’s acquiescence irrelevant.

Daniel Ayalon, Israel’s ambassador to Washington, said that Israel would not rule out an international force to police the borders of Lebanon and Syria and to patrol southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah has had a stronghold. But he said that Israel was first determined to take out Hezbollah’s command and control centers and weapons stockpiles.

Thom Shanker contributed reporting for this article.

 

I'm scared and all I can say is that I'm scared.

I'm totally scared and all I can think about is how scared I am.

Syria? We're gonna invade Syria?

How scared are you?

Becuase I'm starting to get really scared.

And all I can feel is the fear.

World War III with George at the helm?

"Oh, God! Are you scared?" I ask.

I'm sad and all I can feel is that sadness.

The fear is rushing over like the hurricane.

 

June 29, 2006

Israelis Batter Gaza and Seize Hamas Officials

By IAN FISHER and STEVEN ERLANGER

GAZA, Thursday, June 29 — Israel stepped up its confrontation on Wednesday with Palestinian militants over the capture of an Israeli soldier, battering northern Gazan towns with artillery and sending warplanes over the house of the Syrian president, who is influential with the Palestinian leader believed to have ordered the kidnapping.

In the West Bank city of Ramallah early on Thursday, Israeli forces detained 8 ministers of the 24-member Hamas-led cabinet and 20 lawmakers, including Deputy Prime Minister Nasser Shaer and Labor Minister Mohammed Barghouti, security officials said.

The crisis seemed to be tipping toward escalation as Israeli tanks hunkered down inside southern Gaza at the airport on Wednesday after warplanes had knocked out half of Gaza's electricity and pounded sonic booms over houses.

The Israeli defense minister, Amir Peretz, approved an extension of the incursion into northern Gaza, where Palestinian militants have been firing crude Qassam rockets into Israel. As of early Thursday, though, Israel denied reports that it was moving tanks into northern Gaza. About 9 p.m. Wednesday, after saying they would drop leaflets urging citizens of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya to leave their homes, Israeli artillery batteries began to shell.

On Thursday, an Israeli warplane fired a missile in Gaza City that an Israel spokeswoman said hit a soccer field near the pro-Hamas Islamic University. Reuters reported that the missile hit inside the university.

Political leaders of Hamas on Wednesday joined the militants to demand the release of Palestinian women and minors from Israeli jails in exchange for the soldier — a condition that the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, rejected.

The choice, Israeli officials said, was the soldier's unconditional release or an escalation that could widen the conflict regionally: Haim Ramon, Israel's justice minister, raised the possibility of a strike in Syria to kill Khaled Meshal, the exiled political leader of Hamas; the men who hold the Israeli soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, 19, are believed to be following his orders.

"We won't hesitate to carry out extreme action to bring Gilad back to his family," Mr. Olmert said of the soldier, who was captured Sunday in an attack near Gaza led by Hamas.

In what the Israelis said was a message to the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, four Israeli warplanes on Wednesday flew over his residence in Latakia, in northwest Syria, where he was believed to be staying. Syrian state television said Syrian air-defense systems had fired on the planes and forced them to flee.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, on Wednesday condemned Israel's attacks on infrastructure in Gaza, which disabled its only power plant and knocked down three bridges. In a statement, Mr. Abbas said he considered "the aggression that targeted the civilian infrastructures as collective punishment and crimes against humanity."

The crisis also spilled over into a second — and possibly third — kidnapping. In Gaza, the Popular Resistance Committees, a militant group with ties to Hamas, displayed the identity card of an 18-year-old Israeli settler, Eliahu Asheri, whom it claimed to have kidnapped in the West Bank. Militants said they would kill him if Israel did not halt operations in Gaza, and early Thursday his body was found near Ramallah. Israeli media carried unconfirmed reports that a 60-year-old Israeli missing for two days had also been abducted.

Two Palestinians, ages 2 and 17, were reported killed Wednesday while playing with an unexploded Israeli shell in the town of Khan Yunis. But there were no reports of casualties in Israeli airstrikes.

There have been no reported skirmishes between the Israeli military and Palestinian militants, though the Israelis stayed largely out of reach at the airport. The airport, Israeli military officials say, will act as a staging ground for an operation that will escalate until Corporal Shalit, reported to be wounded, is freed.

For the Israelis, the operation is aimed at deterring Hamas, which now leads the Palestinian government, from carrying out similar attacks in the future. Israeli newspapers carried articles on Wednesday speaking of the attacks on the infrastructure as a way to extract a concrete longer-term cost for the actions of the Palestinian leaders.

For many Palestinians in Gaza, the refusal to back down seemed a collective effort to highlight their own sense of grievance. The economy has broken down under an embargo of Western aid since Hamas took power in January. The Palestinians contend they remain under siege, even after the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza last year, with their borders often closed and encircled by Israeli warplanes and ships.

And there remains widespread approval for the capture of Corporal Shalit and Hamas's demand for an exchange, given that there are nearly 9,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails, among them 95 women and 313 people under age 18.

"There is support for this because I am not safe when I walk on the street," said Mustafa Raghib, the director of Gaza's largest flour mill, forced to shut for several hours after the electricity was cut. "Give me a good life and I will not support actions like this."

The White House on Wednesday called for the release of the soldier. Mr. Bush's spokesman, Tony Snow, said that Hamas had been "complicit in perpetrating violence" and that Israel had the right to defend itself.

Mr. Snow said the Bush administration was urging Israel to ensure "that innocent civilians are not harmed" and to "avoid the unnecessary destruction of property and infrastructure." But he chose his words with precision, steering clear of questions about whether the Israeli response had been appropriate.

Israeli leaders said Wednesday that they had ordered the military forward after seeing little progress on diplomatic efforts — including by Egypt and France — to win Corporal Shalit's release. Amid sonic booms that shattered windows, Israeli military planes hit the three bridges, as Apache helicopters attacked all six of the transformers at the power plant — an attack that Israeli officials said was necessary to make it harder to move the corporal around.

"Nobody understands the logic," Rafik Maliha, the plant's manager, said. "They want to keep people in the dark so kidnappers don't move? What's the relationship?

"If there is no electricity, there is no water," he added. "It is more than collective punishment."

The plant provided 42 percent of the power to Gaza's 1.3 million residents, and now Gaza is completely dependent on Israel for power. Mr. Maliha said it would take as long as a year to replace the transformers.

On Tuesday, Palestinian negotiators from Fatah, Hamas and other factions rushed to finish a draft of a unified political program, based on a document issued in May by Palestinian prisoners. It contains new language that senior Israeli officials said represented a defeat for President Abbas.

They said they hoped he would walk away from it because, one official said, "it takes him out of the game" and "further alienates him from Israel." The document now represents, the official said, "the basis for future negotiations with Israel, and for us, this is a total nonstarter."

The Israeli analysis, by the Foreign Ministry, focuses on language, inserted in negotiations with Hamas, that insists on the right of return, "without discrimination," for all Palestinian refugees "to their homes and properties from which they were evicted and to compensate them."

The Israelis argue that this stronger language gives the lie to any claim that Hamas has recognized the right of Israel to exist, implicitly or otherwise, because such an interpretation of refugee rights would eliminate Israel as a Jewish state by flooding it with Palestinians.

The document has always been silent on the statehood of Israel, but has been interpreted to give it an implicit recognition because it calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital, "on all territories occupied in 1967," presumably with Israel next door.

But a senior official, who has also briefed European diplomats, argued that the failure to mention Israel's right to exist speaks more loudly. "We don't see any implicit recognition of Israel by Hamas," the official said. "The most significant reason is that this right of return takes out the two-state solution."

Israel, the official said, is concerned that the document is being praised by European officials, without having yet been read. The document, Israel says, accepts previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements only in so far as they do not "affect the rights of our people," which Israel says means "cherry-picking" previous agreements.

The draft also calls for a new legislature of the Palestine Liberation Organization to be organized by the end of 2006 in a way that favors Hamas, the official argued, and for a "national unity government" that Hamas will still dominate. Mr. Abbas also appears to be giving up the right he had insisted upon to be able to call a referendum by presidential decree, without a law passed by the Hamas-dominated Palestinian legislature, the Israeli official said.

Ian Fisher reported from Gaza City for this article, and Steven Erlanger from Jerusalem.

June 28, 2006

Israeli Troops Enter Gaza; Bridges Are Hit

By IAN FISHER and STEVEN ERLANGER

GAZA, Wednesday, June 28 — Israel sent troops into southern Gaza and its planes attacked three bridges and a power station early Wednesday, in an effort to prevent militants from moving a wounded Israeli soldier they abducted Sunday, Israeli Army officials said.

Israeli troops and tanks began to move in force in an effort to rescue the soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, 19, who is believed to be held there.

Witnesses said Israeli troops had taken over the old Gaza airport and were heading toward Rafah on the road that marks the border between Gaza and Egypt, as Egyptian troops watched.

Electricity was knocked out through much of Gaza after a complex of electronic transformers, south of Gaza City, was struck by Israeli planes. Witnesses said that the station was hit by numerous missiles and that it was burning brightly against the night sky.

The Israeli Army said the operation was limited to an effort to rescue the corporal and was not an attempt to reoccupy Gaza.

"If we need to, we continue on," said Capt. Noa Meir, an army spokeswoman. "It's all about getting him home."

The airstrikes hit bridges on the coastal and interior roads near the old Israeli settlement of Netzarim, which divides Gaza between north and south, and near Deir al Balah. Israeli tanks and ground forces massed in staging areas along the border fence with Gaza, especially around Kerem Shalom and Nahal Oz.

On Tuesday, as Palestinians tried to block roads with dirt mounds and barbed wire against any Israeli armored assault, their political factions completed a draft agreement aimed at a national unity government that could include an implicit recognition of Israel by Hamas.

The prospect of an invasion, threatened by Israel if Corporal Shalit was not released, seemed to have pushed the Palestinians toward agreement after months of internal fighting.

The draft agreement between the Fatah faction of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, and the Hamas faction of Prime Minister Ismail Haniya is based on a document outlined by Palestinian prisoners. It is described as containing an implicit recognition of Israel's right to exist, because it calls for the creation of a Palestinian state within pre-1967 borders, presumably next to Israel.

Such an accord would move Hamas closer to recognition of Israel — a significant change — and would raise the possibility of renewed Western aid to the Palestinians, which was severely curtailed after the Hamas victory in January.

If the accord backing what would amount to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is completed, it will represent a victory for Mr. Abbas, who had threatened to put the issue to a referendum next month. But Saeb Erekat, a senior Fatah official close to Mr. Abbas, said that the document was incomplete, and that Mr. Abbas wanted to review it and consult further.

Israeli officials dismissed the draft agreement as an internal Palestinian matter irrelevant to the current crisis over the fate and return of Corporal Shalit.

"We are at the edge of the cliff, and everyone is asking the Palestinian leadership to help avert this crisis and release our serviceman," said Mark Regev, the spokesman for the Foreign Ministry. "Yet energy and time is being put into this prisoners document, and it's in many ways tragic."

Mushir al-Masri, a Hamas legislator in Gaza, said the current crisis had united Fatah and Hamas to hammer out the accord. "It is natural that Israeli threats will unite Palestinians more and more," he said. "It will push us to put our differences aside and unite against a bigger threat."

Mr. Erekat said Mr. Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, and Mr. Haniya were working together to try to free the Israeli soldier. "Abu Mazen has ordered a house-to-house search for the Israeli soldier," Mr. Erekat said. "If we knew exactly where he was, we would go get him ourselves."

Fatah negotiators like Samir Masharawi were eager to describe the document as a big Hamas concession. "It has recognized a state in the '67 borders," Mr. Masharawi said. "It means indirectly recognizing another state."

But Salah al-Bardawil, a Hamas legislator, told Reuters, "We said we accept a state in 1967 — but we did not say we accept two states."

Mr. Masri said in an interview: "They do exist. It's tangible, they exist, we recognize the fact they exist. What we don't recognize is the legitimacy of the occupation."

By the last phrase, Hamas normally means the occupation of historic Palestine by an Israeli state of any kind; the Hamas charter explicitly says that Palestine is Islamic waqf — land given by God to Muslims, who cannot cede it or sell it.

The draft document also contains a clause that supports armed action against Israel, which it says should be "concentrated" in areas occupied by Israel in 1967 but not limited to them.

In Gaza on Tuesday, Palestinians worked to make any arrival of tanks and Israeli soldiers as treacherous as possible. In the town of Jabaliya, big berms of sand were piled up on a main road.

"I believe that against the Israelis, who have tanks and Apaches and all their technological machines, it's not that important," said Abu Raed, 30, a shopkeeper, sitting next to one of the berms. "But the fighters should have something to hide behind."

In anticipation of Israeli military action, the militant group Islamic Jihad called reporters in Gaza on Tuesday to film them, battle-ready, in two fields near the now-abandoned Israeli settlement of Netzarim. At one field, 11 fighters in black masks and camouflage held automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and an antitank mine. Several also held up what they described as inserts for suicide-bombing belts: thin plastic bottles made to hold antiseptics that were filled with ball bearings.

Many in Gaza believed that the Israeli strike had begun shortly before 6 p.m., when a huge explosion tore apart a car in downtown Gaza, not far from the offices of both Mr. Abbas and Mr. Haniya. But it turned out to be a car bomb, which heaved half the car, bits of shrapnel and body parts dozens of yards.

While several bystanders were injured, and nearby windows shattered and walls collapsed, the only death appeared to be that of the driver of the car, identified later as Hamza Abu Mukharreb, 21, a member of Hamas's military wing.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday called on Israel to give diplomacy more time. "There really needs to be an effort now to try and calm the situation, not to let the situation escalate, and to give diplomacy a chance to work to try to get this release," Ms. Rice told reporters during a refueling stop in Scotland en route to Pakistan.

Before the incursion began, Israeli officials on Tuesday had said time for diplomacy would also help their parallel efforts to plan a rescue mission. One intermediate step, an official said, might be to cut off electricity and water to Gaza, which Israel had already sealed from the movement of goods or people, as an effort to increase pressure on those groups holding the corporal.

Those groups are the military wing of Hamas, in particular the Khan Yunis group; the Popular Resistance Committees, made up of militants from various factions; and a new group called the Army of Islam, believed to be close to Hamas. They carried out the raid into Israel on Sunday, emerging from a long tunnel dug for many weeks beneath the border, 300 yards behind Israeli lines. The attack killed two Israeli soldiers and led to the seizure of the corporal, who was said to be slightly wounded.

The Hamas military wing is considered by Fatah and Israel to be under the control of the exiled Hamas political leader, Khaled Meshal, who is in Syria. Even a statement from Mr. Abbas's office on Tuesday, calling for Israeli patience, described "kidnapping the Israeli soldier by forces loyal to Khaled Meshal."

A spokesman for the Popular Resistance Committees, Muhammad Abdel Al, said the corporal was being held "in a secure place that the Zionists cannot reach." The groups have refused to release him, despite efforts by Egyptian, French and other diplomats, and Mr. Haniya, the Hamas prime minister, to end the crisis.

Mr. Al also said his group had kidnapped a Jewish civilian settler in the West Bank. The police said that Eliyahu Asheri, 18, who lives in the settlement of Itamar, near Nablus, had been reported missing since Sunday. They said they were trying to see if there was a connection.

Ian Fisher reported from Gaza for this article, and Steven Erlanger from Jerusalem.

 

Here you go... today you get to have the greatest hits.

This is what YOUR FUCKED UP GOVERNMENT IS DOING NOW...

 

killing children, starving people, shooting old men in wheelchairs, executing A THREE YEAR OLD???

Still proud to be an American you po'dunk pieces of shit???

 

The wounds of the dead Iraqis, as seen in photographs and viewed by the morgue director, were not consistent with attacks by fragmentation grenades and indiscriminate rifle fire, Colonel Watt found. The civilian survivors said the victims were shot at close range, some while trying to protect their children or praying for their lives. The death certificates Colonel Watt examined were chillingly succinct: well-aimed shots to the head and chest.

 

AND OF COURSE... THE TORTURE CONTINUES...

 

Special Operations interrogators gave some detainees only bread or crackers and water if they did not cooperate, according to the investigation, by Brig. Gen. Richard P. Formica of the Army. One prisoner was fed only bread and water for 17 days. Other detainees were locked for as many as seven days in cells so small that they could neither stand nor lie down, while interrogators played loud music that disrupted their sleep.

The inquiry also determined that some detainees were stripped naked, drenched with water and then interrogated in air-conditioned rooms or in cold weather. General Formica said it appeared that members of the Navy Seals had used that technique in the case of one detainee who died after questioning in Mosul in 2004, but he reported that he had no specific allegations that the use of the technique was related to that death.

Despite the findings, General Formica recommended that none of the service members be disciplined, saying what they did was wrong but not deliberate abuse. He faulted "inadequate policy guidance" rather than "personal failure" for the mistreatment, and cited the dangerous environment in which Special Operations forces carried out their missions. He said that, from his observations, none of the detainees seemed to be the worse for wear because of the treatment. "Seventeen days with only bread and water is too long," the general concluded. But he added that the military command's surgeon general had advised him "it would take longer than 17 days to develop a protein or vitamin deficiency from a diet of bread and water."

General Formica's review focused on the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Arabian Peninsula, which included soldiers from the Army's Fifth and 10th Special Forces Groups. It did not cover the actions in Iraq of more highly classified Special Operations units, including Delta Force and some Navy Seal groups, or other specialized units including Task Force 6-26, a subject of extensive allegations of misconduct that were reported by The New York Times in March. General Formica recommended eight changes, including more training for Special Operations interrogators, minimum standards for detention conditions and new policies regulating the use of indigenous forces who worked with those in Special Operations. Pentagon officials said Friday that all eight had been carried out.

General Formica said that the Special Operations forces mistakenly used 5 of 12 interrogation techniques between February and May 2004 that Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, then the top commander in Iraq, had withdrawn in October 2003 because military lawyers had found they were too harsh. "It is regrettable," General Formica said in an interview at the Pentagon with three reporters on Friday. "But they were erroneously given the wrong policy."

General Sanchez had approved the harsher techniques, like blaring loud music and using military dogs to frighten Iraqi captives, in September 2003. But confusion over use of the techniques became widespread, even after they were barred a month later except when approved by General Sanchez. Many of the American captors at the Abu Ghraib prison have also said they believed the techniques were authorized, even without General Sanchez's approval.

The report made public on Friday was a heavily redacted copy of the 75-page classified document that General Formica completed 20 months ago. Members of Congress were briefed on it about a year ago. The Pentagon had refused requests since then from The New York Times and other news organizations to provide a declassified version of it. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had promised that declassified versions of all major inquiries would be made public, but this one was released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Senior Defense Department officials said General Formica's review was not intended to be a wide-ranging evaluation of Special Operations' detention and interrogation practices. General Formica conducted interviews regarding three separate episodes of alleged detainee abuse involving Special Operations, some of them referred from another Army inquiry by Maj. Gen. George R. Fay. General Formica also reviewed the findings of seven other instances that had been previously investigated.

General Formica said there was no physical or medical evidence to substantiate allegations by several members of an Iraqi family that American interrogators at Abu Ghraib in December 2003 had beaten and slapped them, and then sodomized them with a water bottle. In addition, he said, the family members were known to be insurgent sympathizers. In a second case, General Formica said two Iraqi detainees at a safe house in April 2004 were fed only bread and water for 13 and 17 days, respectively. But he said allegations that a former Iraqi policeman and an Iraqi-born Lebanese interpreter, both working with the Americans, had beaten and kicked them were unsubstantiated.

General Formica found that in the third case at a Special Operations outpost, near Tikrit, in April and May 2004, three detainees were held in cells 4 feet high, 4 feet long and 20 inches wide, except to use the bathroom, to be washed or to be interrogated. He concluded that two days in such confinement "would be reasonable; five to seven days would not." Two of the detainees were held for seven days; one for two days, General Formica concluded.

Of the seven other previously investigated cases, General Formica concluded that allegations in two were unfounded and that one did not involve Special Operations, the report said. In two other cases, investigations were still pending when General Formica completed his report in November 2004. A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros, said Friday that those inquiries had been completed, but that he would not comment on their findings.

General Formica said in the interview on Friday that he believed that the Special Operations troops thought they were following authorized procedures, and corrected them after he pointed out their error. "I didn't find cruel and malicious criminals that are out there looking for detainees to abuse," he said.

 

 

June 11, 2006

3 Prisoners Commit Suicide at Guantánamo

By JAMES RISEN and TIM GOLDEN

WASHINGTON, June 10 — Three detainees being held at the United States military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, committed suicide early on Saturday, the first deaths of detainees to be reported at the military prison since it opened in early 2002, United States military officials said.

The deaths come at a time of mounting international criticism of the Bush administration's handling of terrorism suspects at Guantánamo and other prisons around the world. President Bush, who was at Camp David on Saturday, expressed "serious concern" about the deaths, said Tony Snow, the White House spokesman.

The three detainees were not identified, but United States officials said two were from Saudi Arabia and the third was from Yemen. Military officials said that the three hanged themselves in their cells with nooses made of sheets and clothing and died before they could be revived by medical personnel.

Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., the commander of the detention camp at Guantánamo, told reporters in a news conference that the deaths were discovered early on Saturday when a guard noticed something out of the ordinary in a cell and found that a prisoner had hanged himself. Admiral Harris said guards and a medical team rushed in to try to save the inmate's life but were unsuccessful. Then, guards found two other detainees in nearby cells had hanged themselves as well; all were pronounced dead by a physician.

Military officials on Saturday suggested that the three suicides were a form of a coordinated protest.

"They are smart, they are creative, they are committed," Admiral Harris said. "They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us."

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service has opened an investigation into the deaths, and the State Department has notified the governments of Saudi Arabia and Yemen, according to a statement issued on Saturday by the United States Southern Command, the military organization that oversees Guantánamo.

All three men left suicide notes in Arabic, officials said. One of the detainees was a mid- or high-level Qaeda operative, another had been captured in Afghanistan and the third was a member of a splinter group, Admiral Harris said, in an account by The Associated Press. He said all three had participated in hunger strikes at the detention center.

He said the acts were tied to a "mystical" belief at Guantánamo that three detainees must die at the camp for all the detainees to be released. There have been 41 suicide attempts by 25 detainees since the facility opened, officials said.

Lawyers for the detainees, human rights groups and legal associations have increasingly questioned whether many of the prisoners can even rightfully be called terrorists. They note that only 10 of the roughly 465 men held at Guantánamo have been charged before military tribunals, and that recently released documents indicate that many have never been accused even in administrative proceedings of belonging to Al Qaeda or attacking the United States.

Advocates for the detainees said they believed the suicides resulted from the deep despair felt by inmates who are being held indefinitely.

"The total, intractable unwillingness of the Bush administration to provide any meaningful justice for these men is what is at the heart of these tragedies," said Bill Goodman, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, the New York advocacy group that oversees lawyers representing many of the detainees. "We all had the sense that these men were getting more and more hopeless. There's been a general sense of desperation that's been growing."

Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, a lawyer at Dorsey & Whitney in New York who represents one detainee who has repeatedly attempted suicide, said, "These men have been told they will be held at Guantánamo forever. They've been told that while they're held there they do not have a single right."

Foreign governments and international organizations have stepped up their criticism of detainee treatment at Guantánamo. Just last month, a United Nations treaty panel reviewing the United States' compliance with the international prohibition on torture argued that Guantánamo should be shut down. Last week, the Council of Europe issued a separate investigative report that said the United States had created a "reprehensible network" of dealing with terror suspects, highlighted by secret prisons believed to be in Eastern Europe and other nations around the world.

Responding to the growing furor over the issue in Europe, Mr. Bush said in an interview with German television in May that he would like to close the Guantánamo prison, but that his administration had to await the outcome of a Supreme Court ruling on whether the detainees should be tried by civilian courts or military commissions.

Meanwhile, the situation inside the detention center has grown more volatile in recent months, with reports that prisoners have engaged in hunger strikes, suicide attempts and violent attacks on guards.

Lawyers for the detainees have predicted for months that some would kill themselves. They have complained repeatedly about their access to the detainees, and have litigated in federal courts to try to get more information about the prisoners' medical and psychological health.

The lawyers have also strenuously protested the administration's efforts to have all litigation over the treatment of the detainees dismissed under the Detainee Treatment Act, a law signed by Mr. Bush on Dec. 30 that would strip the courts of jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions from detainees.

Action on nearly all of those petitions has been suspended in recent months, pending a ruling by the Supreme Court this month on the case of a former driver for Osama bin Laden.

In public statements, Defense Department officials have often dismissed the detainees' suicide attempts as less than serious and as the actions of trained Qaeda terrorists to manipulate public opinion. The first hunger strikes by detainees at Guantánamo began soon after the camp opened in January 2002, and two of those prisoners were forcibly fed through tubes that year. Dozens of other suicide attempts followed.

Over one eight-day period in August 2003, 23 detainees tried to hang or strangle themselves, including 10 on a single day. But the Pentagon did not disclose the episode until January 2005, and lawyers for the detainees have complained about what they say has been a pattern in which the government has withheld information about suicide attempts or minimized their importance.

In late 2003, military officials at Guantánamo began to re-classify many of the suicide attempts as "manipulative, self-injurious behavior" that was intended to bring pressure for better conditions or for release. Officials at Guantánamo acknowledged that those designations were not necessarily made after any formal psychological evaluation.

But early last summer, as a new wave of protests broke out, officials at Guantánamo and at the Pentagon grew increasingly concerned, Defense Department officials said.

Doctors overseeing the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo sought new guidance from the Pentagon about the circumstances under which they could force-feed hunger strikers by tubes inserted through their noses and into their stomachs. While Defense Department officials took new measures to try to break a wave of hunger strikes that began last summer, they also undertook a review of procedures they would follow for the possible burial of detainees or the transfer of their remains in the event that any of them succeeded in committing suicide, military officials said.

Military officials began trying to discourage the detainees from killing themselves in part by having military and medical personnel cite passages in the Koran that condemn suicide. The detainees were systematically told that annual reviews of their status as "enemy combatants" had been completed, that they would remain at Guantánamo for at least another year, and that they should reconcile themselves to the situation, Defense Department officials said.

The military's review of the hunger-strike issue, which included senior Pentagon officials and officers of the United States Southern Command, which oversees Guantánamo, eventually led to a decision to begin strapping those detainees who refused to eat into metal "restraint chairs" while they were force-fed.

After the use of the chairs was disclosed by The New York Times in February, military officials insisted that they were acting only to save the lives of hunger-striking detainees who were precariously close to serious harm or death.

Interviews with military officials indicated that only a handful of the detainees who were then being force-fed had lost so much weight that they were classified by doctors there as "severely malnourished." The restraint chair was used on all of those who refused to eat, military officials said, regardless of their medical condition.

For months after the use of the restraint chairs became public, lawyers for the detainees and other critics of United States detention policy predicted that the tougher measures would push the prisoners to take more radical steps to end their lives.

What may have been the most serious such incident before Saturday's suicides came on May 18, when two detainees were found unconscious in their cells after ingesting a large quantity of anti-anxiety medication that various prisoners had apparently hoarded for the purpose. Another detainee said he had also tried to commit suicide but did not have enough medication; military officials said they did not believe his attempt had been serious.

Military officials said other detainees violently attacked guards in subsequent searches of their cells. A few of the detainees have since told their lawyers that the upheaval was provoked by guards who mistreated the prisoners' Korans as they tore through their cells.

Another brief hunger strike began barely two weeks later, the military authorities said, and eventually involved some 75 detainees. The chief spokesman for the military task force charged with guarding and interrogating the detainees, Cmdr. Robert Durand of the Navy, described that episode, like others before it, as an "attention getting" effort intended to increase public pressure for their release.

So, Haditha...

Two dozen women and children shot, execution style in the back of the head by an armed, trained, occupying force.  But what exactly did we think was happening over there? Had we imagined that there were ACTUALLY american soldiers walking around "handing out candy" to Iraqi children?  Had we convinced ourselves that being wrapped in television cellophane and ipod wire was sufficient to keep out the drone of innocent life fleeting bodies by the millisecond.

Today, we have more reports of soldiers killing civilians in Iraq.

But today they come from the US bought puppet, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki who denounced the US troops for "habitual attacks by troops against Iraqi civilians".

So, Vietnam, here we are again.

Daily attacks. Habitual attacks... on civilians. Women and children mostly.  That's all that's left.  All the men are out fighting or hiding.  Basically, just trying to stay alive.

And here we sit... on our piles of money.  Tax dollars dripping from our money veins and shooting out of automatic weapons, splattering blood, bone, and tissue across the landscape of an already heartbroken nation.

A sovereign nation has been invaded, occupied, pillaged (long-term pillaging is implied), and now, when there is little else to steal from the land... like an infestation of greedy vampires, we turn our attention to blood.

The oil reserves are secure, with one of the largest PERMANENT US BASES in Iraq SMACK DAB in the middle of the largest oil reserve the nation possess.

The piecemeal dissection and handing out of the country's assets is also complete.  Iraq now has labor, business and accountability laws that no sovereign nation would accept.

Businesses from all over the world now own a piece of Iraq. 

So, if the businesses are in place, the oil reserves are secure and America is in the midst of fighting the most noble war in all of time... then why oh why are the marines killing innocents?  Because they are fed up and frustrated. 

Because although the financial institutions with their shiny humvees and nice suits are all done dotting the i's and setting up percussion grenade perimeters... the people have not been annihilated.

The Abu Gharib approach could have been a successful one... Cheney was on the right track, I think.  If one must subdue the population of a nation to then exploit that nation's natural resources, the fear of death is not enough.  Especially not in a Muslim country.  Then one must find something to replace the fear that the religion has done away with... what could be worse than death we may ask as, for the most part, naive Americans?

Death would mean the end of our apartment, our clothes, our car, our bank account, our lavalife account, and .... damnit, we would for sure miss that party on Sunday at Happy Valley.  Death is the worst.  There's nothing worse.

Except, perhaps having cold water thrown on you while you sit in front of an industrial strength air conditioner meant to cool an entire warehouse.... what about being tied to a chair for five days and having cold water thrown on you every two hours while you sit in front of that industrial air conditioner on full blast... what about being tied to that chair until your eyeballs freeze and fall out of their sockets?  How about that?  Does that seem harsher than death? 

So, the plan is an effective one... pretty smart actually.  Take an extremely tough people and subjugate them with a whole new brand of fear... the fear of NOT BEING ALLOWED TO DIE.

And if they somehow make it through the harrowing stay at one of THOUSANDS of US TORTURE CAMPS (because some MUST make it through, you realize, or else there is no one left to scare the hell out of the people on the outside) then you come home to the bodies of your wife and three children... your wife and INFANT daughter brutally raped by a gang of soldiers, and your son lying in a pool of his own now coagulated blood.

It's a good plan... if you want the people to leave you alone....

But the plan hasn't worked.  The people have been tortured, the pictures have been shown to the world... America must hang it's head in shame, like Germany till the end of time... and the people... those bastards... they're still not scared...

If anything.. the people seem even more unafraid...

How annoying this must be for Dick...

How irritating!!!

WE'RE TEARING THEIR SKIN OFF WITH PLIERS, WE'RE PULLING THEIR NAILS OUT, WE'RE RAPING THE WOMEN, THE MEN, AND THE CHILDREN, WE'RE SITTING ON 80 YEAR OLD WOMEN'S BACKS AND RIDING THEM AROUND AS IF THEY WERE DONKEYS UNTIL THEY COLLAPSE AND DIE, WE'RE KEEPING SEX SLAVES FOR OUR SOLDIERS IN CAMPS AND WHEN THESE SLAVES HAVE CHILDREN, WE TORTURE AND KILL THE INFANTS TO INSTILL EVEN MORE FEAR... AND THEY'RE STILL NOT SCARED~~!!!!!

why????

BECAUSE... THE WAR IS WRONG... AND THE WORLD DEALS IN ABSOLUTES. KARMA CANNOT BE SPUN BY TONY SNOW.

SHOOTING WOMEN AND CHILDREN IN THE HEAD WILL ONLY INCITE THE WORLD'S ANGER MORE... THE IRAQI'S WILL WIN... AND AMERICA WILL DESTROY ITSELF....

you've got a front row seat...

Thank you for coming, enjoy the show.

oh man, someone told me yesterday that I was an angry woman who

needed to be told off...

and it made me think.  do I need to be told off? am I being too open

about my opinions... should I let the people around me run amok without even a word of reproach?

should I be more open to the idea of free love? should I abandon the

notion that relationships are built on exclusivity and respect?

I pondered these questions today and there was but one answer...

I'm right, and you're a brain-dead, has been, two cent skank...

and while, it might be true that I do need a good telling off, I think I should at least reserve the right to be told off by someone with an IQ a bit higher than 10... it just makes it more fun.

:)

kisses,

Amber Khan-Prufer

p.s. eat your fuckin' heart out you apartheid remnant.

 

GO TO  : WWW.YOUTUBE.COM  

AND CHECK OUT STEPHEN COLBERT LETTING THE PRESIDENT HAVE IT!!!

And while we're on the subject of this government let me say one more thing... no, it's probably better not to... how could I even get started without mentioning that there are women being held captive by the US in Iraq that are pregnant, women that are shackled while they are in labor...

Don't believe me?

Here: The U.N. human rights watchdog has expressed concern over domestic U.S. violations of the U.N. torture convention, including use of excessive force by police and electroshock weapons and abuses against women in the prison system. The latter allegedly include sexual abuse by male guards and shackling of women while pregnant and in labor.

 

WHAT THE FUCK IS THERE LEFT TO SAY????

For the Seymour Amour article, look to Strange Ramblings... this one's real interesting ...

 

A Lobby, Not a Conspiracy

By TONY JUDT

Published: April 19, 2006

IN its March 23rd issue the London Review of Books, a respected British journal, published an essay titled "The Israel Lobby." The authors are two distinguished American academics (Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago) who posted a longer (83-page) version of their text on the Web site of Harvard's Kennedy School.

As they must have anticipated, the essay has run into a firestorm of vituperation and refutation. Critics have charged that their scholarship is shoddy and that their claims are, in the words of the columnist Christopher Hitchens, "slightly but unmistakably smelly." The smell in question, of course, is that of anti-Semitism.

This somewhat hysterical response is regrettable. In spite of its provocative title, the essay draws on a wide variety of standard sources and is mostly uncontentious. But it makes two distinct and important claims. The first is that uncritical support for Israel across the decades has not served America's best interests. This is an assertion that can be debated on its merits. The authors' second claim is more controversial: American foreign policy choices, they write, have for years been distorted by one domestic pressure group, the "Israel Lobby."

Some would prefer, when explaining American actions overseas, to point a finger at the domestic "energy lobby." Others might blame the influence of Wilsonian idealism, or imperial practices left over from the cold war. But that a powerful Israel lobby exists could hardly be denied by anyone who knows how Washington works. Its core is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, its penumbra a variety of national Jewish organizations.

Does the Israel Lobby affect our foreign policy choices? Of course — that is one of its goals. And it has been rather successful: Israel is the largest recipient of American foreign aid and American responses to Israeli behavior have been overwhelmingly uncritical or supportive.

But does pressure to support Israel distort American decisions? That's a matter of judgment. Prominent Israeli leaders and their American supporters pressed very hard for the invasion of Iraq; but the United States would probably be in Iraq today even if there had been no Israel lobby. Is Israel, in Mearsheimer/Walt's words, "a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states?" I think it is; but that too is an issue for legitimate debate.

The essay and the issues it raises for American foreign policy have been prominently dissected and discussed overseas. In America, however, it's been another story: virtual silence in the mainstream media. Why? There are several plausible explanations. One is that a relatively obscure academic paper is of little concern to general-interest readers. Another is that claims about disproportionate Jewish public influence are hardly original — and debate over them inevitably attracts interest from the political extremes. And then there is the view that Washington is anyway awash in "lobbies" of this sort, pressuring policymakers and distorting their choices.

Each of these considerations might reasonably account for the mainstream press's initial indifference to the Mearsheimer-Walt essay. But they don't convincingly explain the continued silence even after the article aroused stormy debate in the academy, within the Jewish community, among the opinion magazines and Web sites, and in the rest of the world. I think there is another element in play: fear. Fear of being thought to legitimize talk of a "Jewish conspiracy"; fear of being thought anti-Israel; and thus, in the end, fear of licensing the expression of anti-Semitism.

The end result — a failure to consider a major issue in public policy — is a great pity. So what, you may ask, if Europeans debate this subject with such enthusiasm? Isn't Europe a hotbed of anti-Zionists (read anti-Semites) who will always relish the chance to attack Israel and her American friend? But it was David Aaronovitch, a Times of London columnist who, in the course of criticizing Mearsheimer and Walt, nonetheless conceded that "I sympathize with their desire for redress, since there has been a cock-eyed failure in the U.S. to understand the plight of the Palestinians."

And it was the German writer Christoph Bertram, a longstanding friend of America in a country where every public figure takes extraordinary care to tread carefully in such matters, who wrote in Die Zeit that "it is rare to find scholars with the desire and the courage to break taboos."

How are we to explain the fact that it is in Israel itself that the uncomfortable issues raised by Professors Mearsheimer and Walt have been most thoroughly aired? It was an Israeli columnist in the liberal daily Haaretz who described the American foreign policy advisers Richard Perle and Douglas Feith as "walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments ...and Israeli interests." It was Israel's impeccably conservative Jerusalem Post that described Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, as "devoutly pro-Israel." Are we to accuse Israelis, too, of "anti-Zionism"?

The damage that is done by America's fear of anti-Semitism when discussing Israel is threefold. It is bad for Jews: anti-Semitism is real enough (I know something about it, growing up Jewish in 1950's Britain), but for just that reason it should not be confused with political criticisms of Israel or its American supporters. It is bad for Israel: by guaranteeing it unconditional support, Americans encourage Israel to act heedless of consequences. The Israeli journalist Tom Segev described the Mearsheimer-Walt essay as "arrogant" but also acknowledged ruefully: "They are right. Had the United States saved Israel from itself, life today would be better ...the Israel Lobby in the United States harms Israel's true interests."

BUT above all, self-censorship is bad for the United States itself. Americans are denying themselves participation in a fast-moving international conversation. Daniel Levy (a former Israeli peace negotiator) wrote in Haaretz that the Mearsheimer-Walt essay should be a wake-up call, a reminder of the damage the Israel lobby is doing to both nations. But I would go further. I think this essay, by two "realist" political scientists with no interest whatsoever in the Palestinians, is a straw in the wind.

Looking back, we shall see the Iraq war and its catastrophic consequences as not the beginning of a new democratic age in the Middle East but rather as the end of an era that began in the wake of the 1967 war, a period during which American alignment with Israel was shaped by two imperatives: cold-war strategic calculations and a new-found domestic sensitivity to the memory of the Holocaust and the debt owed to its victims and survivors.

For the terms of strategic debate are shifting. East Asia grows daily in importance. Meanwhile our clumsy failure to re-cast the Middle East — and its enduring implications for our standing there — has come into sharp focus. American influence in that part of the world now rests almost exclusively on our power to make war: which means in the end that it is no influence at all. Above all, perhaps, the Holocaust is passing beyond living memory. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that an Israeli soldier's great-grandmother died in Treblinka will not excuse his own misbehavior.

Thus it will not be self-evident to future generations of Americans why the imperial might and international reputation of the United States are so closely aligned with one small, controversial Mediterranean client state. It is already not at all self-evident to Europeans, Latin Americans, Africans or Asians. Why, they ask, has America chosen to lose touch with the rest of the international community on this issue? Americans may not like the implications of this question. But it is pressing. It bears directly on our international standing and influence; and it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. We cannot ignore it.

THE IRAN PLANS

Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb?

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH

Issue of 2006-04-17
Posted 2006-04-08

The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.

American and European intelligence agencies, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.), agree that Iran is intent on developing the capability to produce nuclear weapons. But there are widely differing estimates of how long that will take, and whether diplomacy, sanctions, or military action is the best way to prevent it. Iran insists that its research is for peaceful use only, in keeping with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that it will not be delayed or deterred.

There is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush’s ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change. Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has challenged the reality of the Holocaust and said that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” Bush and others in the White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler, a former senior intelligence official said. “That’s the name they’re using. They say, ‘Will Iran get a strategic weapon and threaten another world war?’ ”

A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was “absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb” if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do “what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do,” and “that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.”

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ ”

The rationale for regime change was articulated in early March by Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert who is the deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and who has been a supporter of President Bush. “So long as Iran has an Islamic republic, it will have a nuclear-weapons program, at least clandestinely,” Clawson told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 2nd. “The key issue, therefore, is: How long will the present Iranian regime last?”

When I spoke to Clawson, he emphasized that “this Administration is putting a lot of effort into diplomacy.” However, he added, Iran had no choice other than to accede to America’s demands or face a military attack. Clawson said that he fears that Ahmadinejad “sees the West as wimps and thinks we will eventually cave in. We have to be ready to deal with Iran if the crisis escalates.” Clawson said that he would prefer to rely on sabotage and other clandestine activities, such as “industrial accidents.” But, he said, it would be prudent to prepare for a wider war, “given the way the Iranians are acting. This is not like planning to invade Quebec.”

One military planner told me that White House criticisms of Iran and the high tempo of planning and clandestine activities amount to a campaign of “coercion” aimed at Iran. “You have to be ready to go, and we’ll see how they respond,” the officer said. “You have to really show a threat in order to get Ahmadinejad to back down.” He added, “People think Bush has been focussed on Saddam Hussein since 9/11,” but, “in my view, if you had to name one nation that was his focus all the way along, it was Iran.” (In response to detailed requests for comment, the White House said that it would not comment on military planning but added, “As the President has indicated, we are pursuing a diplomatic solution”; the Defense Department also said that Iran was being dealt with through “diplomatic channels” but wouldn’t elaborate on that; the C.I.A. said that there were “inaccuracies” in this account but would not specify them.)

“This is much more than a nuclear issue,” one high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna. “That’s just a rallying point, and there is still time to fix it. But the Administration believes it cannot be fixed unless they control the hearts and minds of Iran. The real issue is who is going to control the Middle East and its oil in the next ten years.”

A senior Pentagon adviser on the war on terror expressed a similar view. “This White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war,” he said. The danger, he said, was that “it also reinforces the belief inside Iran that the only way to defend the country is to have a nuclear capability.” A military conflict that destabilized the region could also increase the risk of terror: “Hezbollah comes into play,” the adviser said, referring to the terror group that is considered one of the world’s most successful, and which is now a Lebanese political party with strong ties to Iran. “And here comes Al Qaeda.”

In recent weeks, the President has quietly initiated a series of talks on plans for Iran with a few key senators and members of Congress, including at least one Democrat. A senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, who did not take part in the meetings but has discussed their content with his colleagues, told me that there had been “no formal briefings,” because “they’re reluctant to brief the minority. They’re doing the Senate, somewhat selectively.”

The House member said that no one in the meetings “is really objecting” to the talk of war. “The people they’re briefing are the same ones who led the charge on Iraq. At most, questions are raised: How are you going to hit all the sites at once? How are you going to get deep enough?” (Iran is building facilities underground.) “There’s no pressure from Congress” not to take military action, the House member added. “The only political pressure is from the guys who want to do it.” Speaking of President Bush, the House member said, “The most worrisome thing is that this guy has a messianic vision.”

Some operations, apparently aimed in part at intimidating Iran, are already under way. American Naval tactical aircraft, operating from carriers in the Arabian Sea, have been flying simulated nuclear-weapons delivery missions—rapid ascending maneuvers known as “over the shoulder” bombing—since last summer, the former official said, within range of Iranian coastal radars.

Last month, in a paper given at a conference on Middle East security in Berlin, Colonel Sam Gardiner, a military analyst who taught at the National War College before retiring from the Air Force, in 1987, provided an estimate of what would be needed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. Working from satellite photographs of the known facilities, Gardiner estimated that at least four hundred targets would have to be hit. He added:

I don’t think a U.S. military planner would want to stop there. Iran probably has two chemical-production plants. We would hit those. We would want to hit the medium-range ballistic missiles that have just recently been moved closer to Iraq. There are fourteen airfields with sheltered aircraft. . . . We’d want to get rid of that threat. We would want to hit the assets that could be used to threaten Gulf shipping. That means targeting the cruise-missile sites and the Iranian diesel submarines. . . . Some of the facilities may be too difficult to target even with penetrating weapons. The U.S. will have to use Special Operations units.

One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites. One target is Iran’s main centrifuge plant, at Natanz, nearly two hundred miles south of Tehran. Natanz, which is no longer under I.A.E.A. safeguards, reportedly has underground floor space to hold fifty thousand centrifuges, and laboratories and workspaces buried approximately seventy-five feet beneath the surface. That number of centrifuges could provide enough enriched uranium for about twenty nuclear warheads a year. (Iran has acknowledged that it initially kept the existence of its enrichment program hidden from I.A.E.A. inspectors, but claims that none of its current activity is barred by the Non-Proliferation Treaty.) The elimination of Natanz would be a major setback for Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but the conventional weapons in the American arsenal could not insure the destruction of facilities under seventy-five feet of earth and rock, especially if they are reinforced with concrete.

There is a Cold War precedent for targeting deep underground bunkers with nuclear weapons. In the early nineteen-eighties, the American intelligence community watched as the Soviet government began digging a huge underground complex outside Moscow. Analysts concluded that the underground facility was designed for “continuity of government”—for the political and military leadership to survive a nuclear war. (There are similar facilities, in Virginia and Pennsylvania, for the American leadership.) The Soviet facility still exists, and much of what the U.S. knows about it remains classified. “The ‘tell’ ”—the giveaway—“was the ventilator shafts, some of which were disguised,” the former senior intelligence official told me. At the time, he said, it was determined that “only nukes” could destroy the bunker. He added that some American intelligence analysts believe that the Russians helped the Iranians design their underground facility. “We see a similarity of design,” specifically in the ventilator shafts, he said.

A former high-level Defense Department official told me that, in his view, even limited bombing would allow the U.S. to “go in there and do enough damage to slow down the nuclear infrastructure—it’s feasible.” The former defense official said, “The Iranians don’t have friends, and we can tell them that, if necessary, we’ll keep knocking back their infrastructure. The United States should act like we’re ready to go.” He added, “We don’t have to knock down all of their air defenses. Our stealth bombers and standoff missiles really work, and we can blow fixed things up. We can do things on the ground, too, but it’s difficult and very dangerous—put bad stuff in ventilator shafts and put them to sleep.”

But those who are familiar with the Soviet bunker, according to the former senior intelligence official, “say ‘No way.’ You’ve got to know what’s underneath—to know which ventilator feeds people, or diesel generators, or which are false. And there’s a lot that we don’t know.” The lack of reliable intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons. “Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap,” the former senior intelligence official said. “ ‘Decisive’ is the key word of the Air Force’s planning. It’s a tough decision. But we made it in Japan.”

He went on, “Nuclear planners go through extensive training and learn the technical details of damage and fallout—we’re talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is not an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a little bit. These politicians don’t have a clue, and whenever anybody tries to get it out”—remove the nuclear option—“they’re shouted down.”

The attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he added, and some officers have talked about resigning. Late this winter, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sought to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans for Iran—without success, the former intelligence official said. “The White House said, ‘Why are you challenging this? The option came from you.’ ”

The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror confirmed that some in the Administration were looking seriously at this option, which he linked to a resurgence of interest in tactical nuclear weapons among Pentagon civilians and in policy circles. He called it “a juggernaut that has to be stopped.” He also confirmed that some senior officers and officials were considering resigning over the issue. “There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries,” the adviser told me. “This goes to high levels.” The matter may soon reach a decisive point, he said, because the Joint Chiefs had agreed to give President Bush a formal recommendation stating that they are strongly opposed to considering the nuclear option for Iran. “The internal debate on this has hardened in recent weeks,” the adviser said. “And, if senior Pentagon officers express their opposition to the use of offensive nuclear weapons, then it will never happen.”

The adviser added, however, that the idea of using tactical nuclear weapons in such situations has gained support from the Defense Science Board, an advisory panel whose members are selected by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “They’re telling the Pentagon that we can build the B61 with more blast and less radiation,” he said.

The chairman of the Defense Science Board is William Schneider, Jr., an Under-Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration. In January, 2001, as President Bush prepared to take office, Schneider served on an ad-hoc panel on nuclear forces sponsored by the National Institute for Public Policy, a conservative think tank. The panel’s report recommended treating tactical nuclear weapons as an essential part of the U.S. arsenal and noted their suitability “for those occasions when the certain and prompt destruction of high priority targets is essential and beyond the promise of conventional weapons.” Several signers of the report are now prominent members of the Bush Administration, including Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; and Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security.

The Pentagon adviser questioned the value of air strikes. “The Iranians have distributed their nuclear activity very well, and we have no clue where some of the key stuff is. It could even be out of the country,” he said. He warned, as did many others, that bombing Iran could provoke “a chain reaction” of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the world: “What will 1.2 billion Muslims think the day we attack Iran?”

 

With or without the nuclear option, the list of targets may inevitably expand. One recently retired high-level Bush Administration official, who is also an expert on war planning, told me that he would have vigorously argued against an air attack on Iran, because “Iran is a much tougher target” than Iraq. But, he added, “If you’re going to do any bombing to stop the nukes, you might as well improve your lie across the board. Maybe hit some training camps, and clear up a lot of other problems.”

The Pentagon adviser said that, in the event of an attack, the Air Force intended to strike many hundreds of targets in Iran but that “ninety-nine per cent of them have nothing to do with proliferation. There are people who believe it’s the way to operate”—that the Administration can achieve its policy goals in Iran with a bombing campaign, an idea that has been supported by neoconservatives.

If the order were to be given for an attack, the American combat troops now operating in Iran would be in position to mark the critical targets with laser beams, to insure bombing accuracy and to minimize civilian casualties. As of early winter, I was told by the government consultant with close ties to civilians in the Pentagon, the units were also working with minority groups in Iran, including the Azeris, in the north, the Baluchis, in the southeast, and the Kurds, in the northeast. The troops “are studying the terrain, and giving away walking-around money to ethnic tribes, and recruiting scouts from local tribes and shepherds,” the consultant said. One goal is to get “eyes on the ground”—quoting a line from “Othello,” he said, “Give me the ocular proof.” The broader aim, the consultant said, is to “encourage ethnic tensions” and undermine the regime.

The new mission for the combat troops is a product of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s long-standing interest in expanding the role of the military in covert operations, which was made official policy in the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review, published in February. Such activities, if conducted by C.I.A. operatives, would need a Presidential Finding and would have to be reported to key members of Congress.

“ ‘Force protection’ is the new buzzword,” the former senior intelligence official told me. He was referring to the Pentagon’s position that clandestine activities that can be broadly classified as preparing the battlefield or protecting troops are military, not intelligence, operations, and are therefore not subject to congressional oversight. “The guys in the Joint Chiefs of Staff say there are a lot of uncertainties in Iran,” he said. “We need to have more than what we had in Iraq. Now we have the green light to do everything we want.”

 

The President’s deep distrust of Ahmadinejad has strengthened his determination to confront Iran. This view has been reinforced by allegations that Ahmadinejad, who joined a special-forces brigade of the Revolutionary Guards in 1986, may have been involved in terrorist activities in the late eighties. (There are gaps in Ahmadinejad’s official biography in this period.) Ahmadinejad has reportedly been connected to Imad Mughniyeh, a terrorist who has been implicated in the deadly bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983. Mughniyeh was then the security chief of Hezbollah; he remains on the F.B.I.’s list of most-wanted terrorists.

Robert Baer, who was a C.I.A. officer in the Middle East and elsewhere for two decades, told me that Ahmadinejad and his Revolutionary Guard colleagues in the Iranian government “are capable of making a bomb, hiding it, and launching it at Israel. They’re apocalyptic Shiites. If you’re sitting in Tel Aviv and you believe they’ve got nukes and missiles—you’ve got to take them out. These guys are nuts, and there’s no reason to back off.”

Under Ahmadinejad, the Revolutionary Guards have expanded their power base throughout the Iranian bureaucracy; by the end of January, they had replaced thousands of civil servants with their own members. One former senior United Nations official, who has extensive experience with Iran, depicted the turnover as “a white coup,” with ominous implications for the West. “Professionals in the Foreign Ministry are out; others are waiting to be kicked out,” he said. “We may be too late. These guys now believe that they are stronger than ever since the revolution.” He said that, particularly in consideration of China’s emergence as a superpower, Iran’s attitude was “To hell with the West. You can do as much as you like.”

Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, is considered by many experts to be in a stronger position than Ahmadinejad. “Ahmadinejad is not in control,” one European diplomat told me. “Power is diffuse in Iran. The Revolutionary Guards are among the key backers of the nuclear program, but, ultimately, I don’t think they are in charge of it. The Supreme Leader has the casting vote on the nuclear program, and the Guards will not take action without his approval.”

The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror said that “allowing Iran to have the bomb is not on the table. We cannot have nukes being sent downstream to a terror network. It’s just too dangerous.” He added, “The whole internal debate is on which way to go”—in terms of stopping the Iranian program. It is possible, the adviser said, that Iran will unilaterally renounce its nuclear plans—and forestall the American action. “God may smile on us, but I don’t think so. The bottom line is that Iran cannot become a nuclear-weapons state. The problem is that the Iranians realize that only by becoming a nuclear state can they defend themselves against the U.S. Something bad is going to happen.”

 

While almost no one disputes Iran’s nuclear ambitions, there is intense debate over how soon it could get the bomb, and what to do about that. Robert Gallucci, a former government expert on nonproliferation who is now the dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, told me, “Based on what I know, Iran could be eight to ten years away” from developing a deliverable nuclear weapon. Gallucci added, “If they had a covert nuclear program and we could prove it, and we could not stop it by negotiation, diplomacy, or the threat of sanctions, I’d be in favor of taking it out. But if you do it”—bomb Iran—“without being able to show there’s a secret program, you’re in trouble.”

Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, told the Knesset last December that “Iran is one to two years away, at the latest, from having enriched uranium. From that point, the completion of their nuclear weapon is simply a technical matter.” In a conversation with me, a senior Israeli intelligence official talked about what he said was Iran’s duplicity: “There are two parallel nuclear programs” inside Iran—the program declared to the I.A.E.A. and a separate operation, run by the military and the Revolutionary Guards. Israeli officials have repeatedly made this argument, but Israel has not produced public evidence to support it. Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State in Bush’s first term, told me, “I think Iran has a secret nuclear-weapons program—I believe it, but I don’t know it.”

In recent months, the Pakistani government has given the U.S. new access to A. Q. Khan, the so-called father of the Pakistani atomic bomb. Khan, who is now living under house arrest in Islamabad, is accused of setting up a black market in nuclear materials; he made at least one clandestine visit to Tehran in the late nineteen-eighties. In the most recent interrogations, Khan has provided information on Iran’s weapons design and its time line for building a bomb. “The picture is of ‘unquestionable danger,’ ” the former senior intelligence official said. (The Pentagon adviser also confirmed that Khan has been “singing like a canary.”) The concern, the former senior official said, is that “Khan has credibility problems. He is suggestible, and he’s telling the neoconservatives what they want to hear”—or what might be useful to Pakistan’s President, Pervez Musharraf, who is under pressure to assist Washington in the war on terror.

“I think Khan’s leading us on,” the former intelligence official said. “I don’t know anybody who says, ‘Here’s the smoking gun.’ But lights are beginning to blink. He’s feeding us information on the time line, and targeting information is coming in from our own sources— sensors and the covert teams. The C.I.A., which was so burned by Iraqi W.M.D., is going to the Pentagon and the Vice-President’s office saying, ‘It’s all new stuff.’ People in the Administration are saying, ‘We’ve got enough.’ ”

The Administration’s case against Iran is compromised by its history of promoting false intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. In a recent essay on the Foreign Policy Web site, entitled “Fool Me Twice,” Joseph Cirincione, the director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote, “The unfolding administration strategy appears to be an effort to repeat its successful campaign for the Iraq war.” He noted several parallels:

The vice president of the United States gives a major speech focused on the threat from an oil-rich nation in the Middle East. The U.S. Secretary of State tells Congress that the same nation is our most serious global challenge. The Secretary of Defense calls that nation the leading supporter of global terrorism.

Cirincione called some of the Administration’s claims about Iran “questionable” or lacking in evidence. When I spoke to him, he asked, “What do we know? What is the threat? The question is: How urgent is all this?” The answer, he said, “is in the intelligence community and the I.A.E.A.” (In August, the Washington Post reported that the most recent comprehensive National Intelligence Estimate predicted that Iran was a decade away from being a nuclear power.)

Last year, the Bush Administration briefed I.A.E.A. officials on what it said was new and alarming information about Iran’s weapons program which had been retrieved from an Iranian’s laptop. The new data included more than a thousand pages of technical drawings of weapons systems. The Washington Post reported that there were also designs for a small facility that could be used in the uranium-enrichment process. Leaks about the laptop became the focal point of stories in the Times and elsewhere. The stories were generally careful to note that the materials could have been fabricated, but also quoted senior American officials as saying that they appeared to be legitimate. The headline in the Times’ account read, “RELYING ON COMPUTER, U.S. SEEKS TO PROVE IRAN’S NUCLEAR AIMS.”

I was told in interviews with American and European intelligence officials, however, that the laptop was more suspect and less revelatory than it had been depicted. The Iranian who owned the laptop had initially been recruited by German and American intelligence operatives, working together. The Americans eventually lost interest in him. The Germans kept on, but the Iranian was seized by the Iranian counter-intelligence force. It is not known where he is today. Some family members managed to leave Iran with his laptop and handed it over at a U.S. embassy, apparently in Europe. It was a classic “walk-in.”

A European intelligence official said, “There was some hesitation on our side” about what the materials really proved, “and we are still not convinced.” The drawings were not meticulous, as newspaper accounts suggested, “but had the character of sketches,” the European official said. “It was not a slam-dunk smoking gun.”

 

The threat of American military action has created dismay at the headquarters of the I.A.E.A., in Vienna. The agency’s officials believe that Iran wants to be able to make a nuclear weapon, but “nobody has presented an inch of evidence of a parallel nuclear-weapons program in Iran,” the high-ranking diplomat told me. The I.A.E.A.’s best estimate is that the Iranians are five years away from building a nuclear bomb. “But, if the United States does anything militarily, they will make the development of a bomb a matter of Iranian national pride,” the diplomat said. “The whole issue is America’s risk assessment of Iran’s future intentions, and they don’t trust the regime. Iran is a menace to American policy.”

In Vienna, I was told of an exceedingly testy meeting earlier this year between Mohamed ElBaradei, the I.A.E.A.’s director-general, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, and Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control. Joseph’s message was blunt, one diplomat recalled: “We cannot have a single centrifuge spinning in Iran. Iran is a direct threat to the national security of the United States and our allies, and we will not tolerate it. We want you to give us an understanding that you will not say anything publicly that will undermine us. ”

Joseph’s heavy-handedness was unnecessary, the diplomat said, since the I.A.E.A. already had been inclined to take a hard stand against Iran. “All of the inspectors are angry at being misled by the Iranians, and some think the Iranian leadership are nutcases—one hundred per cent totally certified nuts,” the diplomat said. He added that ElBaradei’s overriding concern is that the Iranian leaders “want confrontation, just like the neocons on the other side”—in Washington. “At the end of the day, it will work only if the United States agrees to talk to the Iranians.”

The central question—whether Iran will be able to proceed with its plans to enrich uranium—is now before the United Nations, with the Russians and the Chinese reluctant to impose sanctions on Tehran. A discouraged former I.A.E.A. official told me in late March that, at this point, “there’s nothing the Iranians could do that would result in a positive outcome. American diplomacy does not allow for it. Even if they announce a stoppage of enrichment, nobody will believe them. It’s a dead end.”

Another diplomat in Vienna asked me, “Why would the West take the risk of going to war against that kind of target without giving it to the I.A.E.A. to verify? We’re low-cost, and we can create a program that will force Iran to put its cards on the table.” A Western Ambassador in Vienna expressed similar distress at the White House’s dismissal of the I.A.E.A. He said, “If you don’t believe that the I.A.E.A. can establish an inspection system—if you don’t trust them—you can only bomb.”

 

There is little sympathy for the I.A.E.A. in the Bush Administration or among its European allies. “We’re quite frustrated with the director-general,” the European diplomat told me. “His basic approach has been to describe this as a dispute between two sides with equal weight. It’s not. We’re the good guys! ElBaradei has been pushing the idea of letting Iran have a small nuclear-enrichment program, which is ludicrous. It’s not his job to push ideas that pose a serious proliferation risk.”

The Europeans are rattled, however, by their growing perception that President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney believe a bombing campaign will be needed, and that their real goal is regime change. “Everyone is on the same page about the Iranian bomb, but the United States wants regime change,” a European diplomatic adviser told me. He added, “The Europeans have a role to play as long as they don’t have to choose between going along with the Russians and the Chinese or going along with Washington on something they don’t want. Their policy is to keep the Americans engaged in something the Europeans can live with. It may be untenable.”

“The Brits think this is a very bad idea,” Flynt Leverett, a former National Security Council staff member who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center, told me, “but they’re really worried we’re going to do it.” The European diplomatic adviser acknowledged that the British Foreign Office was aware of war planning in Washington but that, “short of a smoking gun, it’s going to be very difficult to line up the Europeans on Iran.” He said that the British “are jumpy about the Americans going full bore on the Iranians, with no compromise.”

The European diplomat said that he was skeptical that Iran, given its record, had admitted to everything it was doing, but “to the best of our knowledge the Iranian capability is not at the point where they could successfully run centrifuges” to enrich uranium in quantity. One reason for pursuing diplomacy was, he said, Iran’s essential pragmatism. “The regime acts in its best interests,” he said. Iran’s leaders “take a hard-line approach on the nuclear issue and they want to call the American bluff,” believing that “the tougher they are the more likely the West will fold.” But, he said, “From what we’ve seen with Iran, they will appear superconfident until the moment they back off.”

The diplomat went on, “You never reward bad behavior, and this is not the time to offer concessions. We need to find ways to impose sufficient costs to bring the regime to its senses. It’s going to be a close call, but I think if there is unity in opposition and the price imposed”—in sanctions—“is sufficient, they may back down. It’s too early to give up on the U.N. route.” He added, “If the diplomatic process doesn’t work, there is no military ‘solution.’ There may be a military option, but the impact could be catastrophic.”

Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, was George Bush’s most dependable ally in the year leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But he and his party have been racked by a series of financial scandals, and his popularity is at a low point. Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said last year that military action against Iran was “inconceivable.” Blair has been more circumspect, saying publicly that one should never take options off the table.

Other European officials expressed similar skepticism about the value of an American bombing campaign. “The Iranian economy is in bad shape, and Ahmadinejad is in bad shape politically,” the European intelligence official told me. “He will benefit politically from American bombing. You can do it, but the results will be worse.” An American attack, he said, would alienate ordinary Iranians, including those who might be sympathetic to the U.S. “Iran is no longer living in the Stone Age, and the young people there have access to U.S. movies and books, and they love it,” he said. “If there was a charm offensive with Iran, the mullahs would be in trouble in the long run.”

Another European official told me that he was aware that many in Washington wanted action. “It’s always the same guys,” he said, with a resigned shrug. “There is a belief that diplomacy is doomed to fail. The timetable is short.”

A key ally with an important voice in the debate is Israel, whose leadership has warned for years that it viewed any attempt by Iran to begin enriching uranium as a point of no return. I was told by several officials that the White House’s interest in preventing an Israeli attack on a Muslim country, which would provoke a backlash across the region, was a factor in its decision to begin the current operational planning. In a speech in Cleveland on March 20th, President Bush depicted Ahmadinejad’s hostility toward Israel as a “serious threat. It’s a threat to world peace.” He added, “I made it clear, I’ll make it clear again, that we will use military might to protect our ally Israel.”

 

Any American bombing attack, Richard Armitage told me, would have to consider the following questions: “What will happen in the other Islamic countries? What ability does Iran have to reach us and touch us globally—that is, terrorism? Will Syria and Lebanon up the pressure on Israel? What does the attack do to our already diminished international standing? And what does this mean for Russia, China, and the U.N. Security Council?”

Iran, which now produces nearly four million barrels of oil a day, would not have to cut off production to disrupt the world’s oil markets. It could blockade or mine the Strait of Hormuz, the thirty-four-mile-wide passage through which Middle Eastern oil reaches the Indian Ocean. Nonetheless, the recently retired defense official dismissed the strategic consequences of such actions. He told me that the U.S. Navy could keep shipping open by conducting salvage missions and putting mine- sweepers to work. “It’s impossible to block passage,” he said. The government consultant with ties to the Pentagon also said he believed that the oil problem could be managed, pointing out that the U.S. has enough in its strategic reserves to keep America running for sixty days. However, those in the oil business I spoke to were less optimistic; one industry expert estimated that the price per barrel would immediately spike, to anywhere from ninety to a hundred dollars per barrel, and could go higher, depending on the duration and scope of the conflict.

Michel Samaha, a veteran Lebanese Christian politician and former cabinet minister in Beirut, told me that the Iranian retaliation might be focussed on exposed oil and gas fields in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. “They would be at risk,” he said, “and this could begin the real jihad of Iran versus the West. You will have a messy world.”

Iran could also initiate a wave of terror attacks in Iraq and elsewhere, with the help of Hezbollah. On April 2nd, the Washington Post reported that the planning to counter such attacks “is consuming a lot of time” at U.S. intelligence agencies. “The best terror network in the world has remained neutral in the terror war for the past several years,” the Pentagon adviser on the war on terror said of Hezbollah. “This will mobilize them and put us up against the group that drove Israel out of southern Lebanon. If we move against Iran, Hezbollah will not sit on the sidelines. Unless the Israelis take them out, they will mobilize against us.” (When I asked the government consultant about that possibility, he said that, if Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel, “Israel and the new Lebanese government will finish them off.”)

The adviser went on, “If we go, the southern half of Iraq will light up like a candle.” The American, British, and other coalition forces in Iraq would be at greater risk of attack from Iranian troops or from Shiite militias operating on instructions from Iran. (Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, has close ties to the leading Shiite parties in Iraq.) A retired four-star general told me that, despite the eight thousand British troops in the region, “the Iranians could take Basra with ten mullahs and one sound truck.”

“If you attack,” the high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna, “Ahmadinejad will be the new Saddam Hussein of the Arab world, but with more credibility and more power. You must bite the bullet and sit down with the Iranians.”

The diplomat went on, “There are people in Washington who would be unhappy if we found a solution. They are still banking on isolation and regime change. This is wishful thinking.” He added, “The window of opportunity is now.”

 

April 6, 2006

Saw an interview with that lying bitch Karpinski on BBC the other day.  She sayin' the SAME damn thing that EVERYONE is saying... the orders for the torture came and ARE coming STRAIGHT from the top.

But of course, that's not something that we want to talk about right now.

Not when the golden boy is trying to legalize Mexicans...

Boy, this must be some pickle for the Midwest.

"hey, we loved him for killin' and torturin' all those damn A-rabs, but what

the hell does he think he's doin' givin' those Mexicans rights??"

It's actually quite funny to me that his home state is the most pissed off.

Of course!! You IMBECILES!

I can't believe that the right actually thought that W. and the gang were on their side... all those bible beaters out there are definitely gonna have somethin' to rant about soon... they were never on the religious right's side. 

That's just a scam they worked out once they realized that Americans could

be controlled that way, that the VOTE could be controlled.  W. father is completely irreligious and George only found religion when it became clear that there was a base there to be had... the prodigal son and all that really fit well with all those goofy lookin', truck drivin' idiots.

Well, idiots, what do you think of your prodigal son now?

What? Isn't it in the bible to treat your neighbor well?

Okay, you wanna kill all the Muslims, torture all the Iraqi's, that's fine... but Mexicans?

They're catholic for Christ's sake!! What the hell is wrong with them?

They just wanna get paid better and live in actual homes instead of tents.

Pretty unChristian to be kickin' up such a fuss over immigration... especially considering that there are

oh, about 14,000 people being held in Iraq by the US military... some of whom are being used as paintball targets by soldiers... that's fun, huh?

Boy, that bible seems to inspire some really kind behavior, huh?

Oh, and about Hamas...

they're here, they're terrorists, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Eat your fuckin' hearts out, bitches...

 

Sorry about the lack of info lately... have been jittering away through the seemingly endless Danish winter... but things are looking up... the sun is beginning to shine and this seaside town is starting to pick up... of course going to good ol Copenhaged and blowing off some steam at a reggae party is always nice.. but to all the fam and friends who may wanna see my mug some time soon expect me in NYC in a couple of weeks... just a quick trip back home, just enough time to kiss the city streets, bask in the disco lights of a gay club and hug my adorable nephews... then back I fly into the Great Cold...

A few words on the situation before I go...

Milosevic... okay... people are crying?

What did they think the International Court was gonna do when they were done anyway?

He's dead... he was a murderer... get over it...

Gitmo and the torture camps in Iraq... new study by Amnesty International claims that widespread torture of Iraqi's continues at American hands...

Should George be tried next at the Hague? And if so, would the kind person who put Milosevic out of his misery still be on duty when Rummy and George are rolled in...

We can only hope, right?

Denmark is calm and scared now, it seems...

Iran is going to fight the bullies and I couldn't he happier about it...

Hamas... I think that everyone knows that no matter what happens now, they're here to stay... cool... cool... cool.

That's it people... see ya later...

My peeps, gimme a ring soon...

Can't wait to see you all...

Love,

A

 

Feb 21

The pictures are from Iraq, the story is about Gitmo... But I'm sure that we're all old enough to figure out what's going on here.  And I'm sure we're all old enough to know that Mr. Burns and his evil henchmen need to be extricated from their

big white house.  Hell, even the fuckin' UN has gotten it's shit together enough to say, "Uh, hi guys, how you doin'? Well, the problem here is... the stuff you're doin'... well, it's not really allowed.  Now, we know you're the most powerful country in the world and God knows we can't make  you do anything... could anyone tell Hitler what to do? No. So, we're not here to boss you around... but the raping of 7 year old girls in Abu Gharib (look it up motherfuckers, spend some time on the goddamned Internet looking at Anti-War sites instead of jacking off in with your Play station) and the torture and rape of Iraqi women and men, the beating, the dogs, the freezing people alive, the TORTURE... yeah, that's not okay with us... so, since we know that there are over 4000 contractors in Iraq and that most of the prisons there are under the direct control of independent contractors like the South African run mercenary team that advised the MORONS working at Abu Gharib to "soften up" the prisoners with these tactics cannot be stopped... how about we make a deal and you just get rid of the CONCENTRATION CAMP you have here in the North America? Would that be okay???? Please?  Because everyone is beginning to realize that we're a bunch of spineless ass kissers and that we have absolutely nothing to offer the world except rhetoric and cowardice.  So keep raping those women in Iraq (SEE PICTURE BELOW FOR PROOF) and killing the infant children that are bourne of your rapes (LOOK IT UP MOTHERFUCKERS)

but just please, close Gitmo, it's embarrassing...

SOOOOOOOO... In direct contrast to all the BULLSHIT in the world... here's my blog... See below.

 

UN-Secretary General Kofi Annan on Thursday said the United States should close the prison at Guantanamo Bay for terror suspects as soon as possible, backing a key conclusion of a U.N.-appointed independent panel

The panel's report, released Thursday in Geneva, said the United States must close the detention facility "without further delay" because it is effectively a torture camp where prisoners have no access to justice.

The U.N. investigators said photographic evidence — corroborated by testimony of former prisoners — showed detainees shackled, chained and hooded. Prisoners were beaten, stripped and shaved if they resisted, they said.

Some of the interrogation techniques — particularly the use of dogs,

exposure to extreme temperatures, sleep deprivation and prolonged isolation — caused extreme suffering, the report said.

"Such treatment amounts to torture, as it inflicts severe pain or suffering on the victims for the purpose of intimidation and/or punishment," the report said.

Amnesty International said the report was only the "tip of the iceberg."

 

 

HELP ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

 

HELP ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

This is what the fuck I'm writing about today....

 

 "Jum'ah understands that officers told the hunger strikers that if they challenged the United States, the United States would challenge them back using these tactics." - NY TIMES

 

Dear God...

Does anyone care anymore about what's happening in the world?

When newspapers like The New York Times can print articles outlining the torture being inflicted on inmates held at Guantanamo Bay, when they can show you pictures of the devices being used, when you can read the comments by the detainees (what a joke) lawyers and not throw up, not scream, not call the white house bursting in sobs, we have to wonder what has happened to us?

 

Have we become so apathetic that to read about men being force fed, tubes forced so brutally down their nasal passages that they bleed and faint from the violence, we just turn to the next page to see what is happening in the rest of the world?

 

Can we stand to know that there are prisoners being put into isolated, extremely air-conditioned rooms, without blankets, shoes, or any other amenities, in the hopes that they will not proceed with their peaceful demonstration against America's might?

They've robbed them of the right to demonstrate peacefully, what the fuck would they have done to Gandhi I wonder...

 

They are being overly fed and made to drink liquids that will cause diarrhea, they are being stripped of all clothing, they are being strapped to chairs and violently fed with tubes to make them scream.  In the hopes that their screams will change some of the other inmates minds...

 

Why is no one saying anything about all this..? There are governments that have enough money and enough power to stop this.  Why are they not standing up? How can they stand to know that these things are happening to innocent people. 

 

We know now that only 8 percent of the people held at Gitmo had any links to Al-Qaeda and that only 40 percent of the people there were involved in ANY WAY AT ALL with Anti-Americanism...

 

WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER 60 PERCENT!!!???

These people have been tortured, beaten, raped, starved, force fed, dehumanized in every way possible,  and sixty percent of them didn't do ANYTHING AT ALL!!!!

Are we really that shaken by September 11th, that the idea of a brown man being tortured to death does not jumpstart our conscience?

Are we all that taken in by the idea of a mysterious network of terrorists across the globe (this is like Carmen San Diego bullshit) that we have lost our humanity?

 

THEY ARE FORCE FEEDING, FREEZING, AND TORTURING PEOPLE!! THEY ARE DOING THIS TO INNOCENT PEOPLE!!

Where have all the good people in the world gone???

 

Oh, and in case you don't agree with my politics, below find the NY TIMES article that states the above mentioned grotesqueries, and you can go fuck yourself as well.

 

Thanks,

A

NY TIMES-

United States military authorities have taken tougher measures to force-feed detainees engaged in hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after concluding that some were determined to commit suicide to protest their indefinite confinement, military officials have said.

In recent weeks, the officials said, guards have begun strapping recalcitrant detainees into "restraint chairs," sometimes for hours a day, to feed them through tubes and prevent them from deliberately vomiting afterward. Detainees who refuse to eat have also been placed in isolation for extended periods in what the officials said was an effort to keep them from being encouraged by other hunger strikers.

The measures appear to have had dramatic effects. The chief military spokesman at Guantánamo, Lt. Col. Jeremy M. Martin, said yesterday that the number of detainees on hunger strike had dropped to 4 from 84 at the end of December.

Some officials said the new actions reflected concern at Guantánamo and the Pentagon that the protests were becoming difficult to control and that the death of one or more prisoners could intensify international criticism of the detention center. Colonel Martin said force-feeding was carried out "in a humane and compassionate manner" and only when necessary to keep the prisoners alive. H e said in a statement that "a restraint system to aid detainee feeding" was being used but refused to answer questions about the restraint chairs.

Lawyers who have visited clients in recent weeks criticized the latest measures, particularly the use of the restraint chair, as abusive.

"It is clear that the government has ended the hunger strike through the use of force and through the most brutal and inhumane types of treatment," said Thomas B. Wilner, a lawyer at Shearman & Sterling in Washington, who last week visited the six Kuwaiti detainees he represents. "It is a disgrace."

The lawyers said other measures used to dissuade the hunger strikers included placing them in uncomfortably cold air-conditioned isolation cells, depriving them of "comfort items" like blankets and books and sometimes using riot-control soldiers to compel the prisoners to sit still while long plastic tubes were threaded down their nasal passages and into their stomachs.

Officials of the military and the Defense Department strongly disputed that they were taking punitive measures to break the strike. They said that they were sensitive to the ethical issues raised by feeding the detainees involuntarily and that their procedures were consistent with those of federal prisons in the United States. Those prisons authorize the involuntary treatment of hunger strikers when there is a threat to an inmate's life or health.

"There is a moral question," the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr., said in an interview. "Do you allow a person to commit suicide? Or do you take steps to protect their health and preserve their life?"

Dr. Winkenwerder said that after a review of the policy on involuntary feeding last summer Pentagon officials came to the basic conclusion that it was ethical to stop the inmates from killing themselves.

"The objective in any circumstance is to protect and sustain a person's life," he said.

Some international medical associations and human rights groups, including the World Medical Association, oppose the involuntary feeding of hunger strikers as coercive.

Lawyers for the detainees, although troubled by what they said were earlier reports of harsh treatment of the hunger strikers, have generally not objected to such actions when necessary to save their clients.

The Guantánamo prison, which is holding some 500 detainees, has been beset by periodic hunger strikes almost since it was established in January 2002 to hold foreign terror suspects. At least one detainee who went on a prolonged hunger strike was involuntarily fed through a nasal tube in 2002, military officials said.

Since last year, the protests have intensified, a sign of what defense lawyers say is the growing desperation of the detainees. In a study released yesterday, two of those lawyers said Pentagon documents indicated that the military had determined that only 45 percent of the detainees had committed some hostile act against the United States or its allies and that only 8 percent were fighters for Al Qaeda.

After dozens of detainees began joining a hunger strike last June, military doctors at Guantánamo asked Pentagon officials to review their policy for such feeding. Around that time, officials said, the Defense Department also began working out procedures to deal with the eventual suicide of one or more detainees, including how and where to bury them if their native countries refused to accept their remains.

"This is just a reality of long-term detention," a Pentagon official said. "It doesn't matter whether you're at Leavenworth or some other military prison. You are going to have to deal with this kind of thing."

Military officials and detainees' lawyers said the primary rationale for the hunger strikes had evolved since last summer. In June and July, they said, the detainees were mostly complaining about their conditions at Guantánamo.

Several lawyers said that military officers there had negotiated with an English-speaking Saudi detainee, Shaker Aamer, who is thought to be a leader of the inmates, and that the detainees had agreed to stop their hunger strike in return for various concessions.

Military officials denied that such negotiations had occurred. But military officials and the lawyers agreed that when another wave of hunger strikes began in early August they were more generally focused on the indefinite nature of the detentions and that it was harder for the authorities there to address.

Colonel Martin said the number of hunger strikers peaked around Sept. 11 at 131, but added that he could not speculate about why other than to note that "hunger striking is an Al Qaeda tactic used to elicit media attention and also to bring pressure on the U.S. government."

Until yesterday, Guantánamo officials had acknowledged only having forcibly restrained detainees to feed them a handful of times. In those cases, the officials said, doctors had restrained detainees on hospital beds using Velcro straps.

Two military officials, who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the question, said that the use of restraint chairs started after it was found that some hunger strikers were deliberately vomiting in their cells after having been tube-fed and that their health was growing precarious.

In a telephone interview yesterday, the manufacturer of the so-called Emergency Restraint Chair, Tom Hogan, said his small Iowa company shipped five $1,150 chairs to Guantánamo on Dec. 5 and 20 additional chairs on Jan. 10, using a military postal address in Virginia. Mr. Hogan said the chairs were typically used in jails, prisons and psychiatric hospitals to deal with violent inmates or patients.

Mr. Hogan said that he did not know how they were used at Guantánamo and that had not been asked how to use them by military representatives.

Detainees' lawyers said they believed that the tougher approach to the hunger strikes was related to the passage in Congress of measure intended to curtail the detainees' access to United States courts.

Federal district courts have put aside most lawyers' motions on the detainees' treatment until questions about applying the measure have been litigated.

"Because of the actions in Congress, the military feels emboldened to take more extreme measures vis-à-vis the hunger strikers," said one lawyer, Sarah Havens of Allen & Overy. "The courts are going to stay out of it now."

Mr. Wilner, who was among the first lawyers to accept clients at Guantánamo and represented them in a case in 2004 before the Supreme Court, said a Kuwaiti detainee, Fawzi al-Odah, told him last week that around Dec. 20, guards began taking away items like shoes, towels and blankets from the hunger strikers.

Mr. Odah also said that lozenges that had been distributed to soothe the hunger strikers' throats had disappeared and that the liquid formula they were given was mixed with other ingredients to cause diarrhea, Mr. Wilner said.

On Jan. 9, Mr. Odah told his lawyers, an officer read him what he described as an order from the Guantánamo commander, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood of the Army, saying hunger strikers who refused to drink their liquid formula voluntarily would be strapped into metal chairs and tube-fed.

Mr. Odah said he heard "screams of pain" from a hunger striker in the next cell as a thick tube was inserted into his nose. At the other detainee's urging, Mr. Odah told his lawyers that he planned to end his hunger strike the next day.

Another lawyer, Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, said one of his three Bahraini clients, Jum'ah al-Dossari, told him about 10 days ago that more than half of a group of 34 long-term hunger strikers had abandoned their protest after being strapped in restraint chairs and having their feeding tubes inserted and removed so violently that some bled or fainted.

"He said that during these force feedings too much food was given deliberately, which caused diarrhea and in some cases caused detainees to defecate on themselves," Mr. Colangelo-Bryan added. "Jum'ah understands that officers told the hunger strikers that if they challenged the United States, the United States would challenge them back using these tactics."

 

Feb.6.06

So ...about five months ago when I was in Denmark I wrote a blog about how the Muslim population of this country was not only not integrated into the society, but that there lacked a will to do so...

(check out the blog log if you wanna take a look at it)

funnily enough, in light of everything that has happened recently, I feel strangely vindicated. 

It is somehow exhilarating to be here right now...

You can wait your whole life for some momentous thing bigger than yourself and your life to shake you...

and you wait and wait, there are wars raging, but somehow, they don't touch you,

there are atrocities being carried out, but not where your eyes can see them...

and then thanks to a simple thing called love you end up being in a Muslim in the worst country to be a Muslim in right now.... l

et the fun begin.

I no longer pine for the right to have lived through something earth-shattering, it's happening now... it's happening forty minutes away from where I live, and yet, I'm afraid to go there...

Have you seen Danish Nazi's?

They are not pleasant, at all... They're very very white, and blond, and angry... it's like the cold makes them angrier-

very aggro... and all I can think is... ahh... this is how it starts in Europe... a little propoganda in the right places, a little

stirring up and soon all of Europe will be harking to the familiar call... humiliate, dehumanize, and soon, kill...

 

Have you ever thought that you would be in the presence of a Qua'ran burning?

I never did....

These things although almost too upsetting to write about need to in some way be addressed...

 

Why is no one asking the hard questions here?

When did it become okay to malign certain religions under the banner of free speech?

If the editor of the Jyllands-Post can readily admit to the fact that his drawers have come up with cartoons such as a caricature of Ariel Sharon strangling a Paliestinian infant, which he has not allowed to run because they endorse a racial stereotype...

(eventhough, we know that good ol, Ariel was responsible for Sabra and Chantila)

(see Stern Gang blog for details)

So...why is propogating violence as a tennent of Islam not also wrong?

Why??

Because Denmark bows to the will of America.

 Because America is trying to kick the shit out of Iraqi's right now, so let's all take a shot at 'em?

 

Well, it must be terribly alarming then for the Scandanavians to see Americans once again hop into bed with Muslims...

strange bedfellows... I've always liked that term... hmmm... very sexy....

 

Now, now... Remember you Northerners,

Americans are religious people, they're ancestors were Puritans... making fun of religion is not okay,

especially not if you've been elected by the Born Again vote...

 

So here sits Denmark now, alone with it's principles, principles that are too thin and too comical a veil for the inherent racism that exists here... to the outside world it may seem fine that they are fighting the noble fight for their freedom of speech...

But shouldn't there also be a level of decorum and taste, a sense of responsibility to your own citizens?

Humourously portraying The Israeli Prime Minister is offensive...

showing the most sacred person of an enormously widespread religion with a bomb on his head...

this is freedom of speech... yes, that's true and it's also a big fuck you to the Danish citizens

who happen to be Muslim, the pizza shop owners, the grocery store guys, the kebab guys...

and oh yeah, there's even some of 'em in Parliment... where does the need to alienate your own come from?

 Perhaps alienation, isolation and ridicule is the point...

And because the Muslim world instinctively knows this... 

The embassies will continue to burn and the nazi's will run through the streets looking for holy books to burn and as the young Muslim gangs defend this little corner of what they thought was also their country, I sit amongst the ashes and try to cling desperately to my love...

 Of course, I had to fall in love with a Danish boy now.. l

ike I'm not screwed up enough.. all I can say really is,

 *sorry mom and dad, I guess calling me the black sheep of the family would be understating it now, huh?*

A

p.s. kisses and big hello to all in big bad NYC... I'm the King of New York and I'm comin' home really soon.

p.p.s. Fuck all this Nazi bullshit... I want some Vietnamese coffee and a slice of pizza...

;)

 

Jan. 08. 06

Another torture suspect has died while being "interrogated" by the CIA.

There are pictures of his bloody corpse lying in a bag of ice, with American soldiers

posing beside him... like Mickey at Disneyland.

You know, come to think of it.  The American OCCUPATION of Iraq is in some ways

quite similar to the inner-workings of Disneyland.

I mean, think about it... do you ever see anyone OUT of costume?

Are there ever any tired or lethargic Donald Duck's moping around?

Do you actually know WHO it is that's running those damnably awful teacups?

How much money does it take to keep Disneyland running?  How much money do they make?

I'm sure the facts and figures are all there, I'm sure the women and men that bravely toil

through the thousands of children and old people (catching it in the shins) everyday exist...

I'm sure that everything at Disneyland is on the up and up (well, no of course it's not, but

hey, we've got much bigger fish to fry than tax evasion and money laundering, right??)

And that's all good, it's an amusement park... so why does the Occupation of Iraq remind me

so much of my childhood trip to Orlando?

Is it that the car bombs remind me of the electric parade?

Is it the evil Jaffar character that resembles Al-Zarqawi?

Is it the incessantly nagging feeling that everything is a facade and that there is a truth behind

these sets that I am not allowed to see?

Yes, I think that might be it... I'm not saying they torture people in Disneyland... then again,

have you actually ever been on that horrible teacup ride?

The wonderful Senate overturned (very quietly) a Supreme Court given right to all detainees of

American prisons to seek retribution and justice for their incarceration...

Yeah, the SUPREME COURT said it's lawful and just to let people have a go at the torturous lizards

running things...

And the Senate, (with the help of some really fucked up and fuck up worthy demo-crats) has

very quietly taken that right away... All the cases that are pending and working their way through

the Federal Court system will be CANCELED.

Man, that sucks... if You get hurt at Disneyland, they take you to this awesome infirmary that looks

like Winnie the Pooh's house... it's awesome... Sure, they keep you there until your negligent parents

can come and retrieve you... and I suppose you can't leave until they let you.. okay, so it is kinda like that.

But now you can't even complain?????

I mean, the government, basically kidnaps you, tortures you (karma is a bitch by the way usa'ers, be

careful) and then you're dropped by the side of the road... oh, and you're not allowed to say

anything about it.. and even if you do... the law is against you...

What the fuck are we, Chinese????

Oh, wait... I forgot, now we love the Chinese...

even though they run people over with tanks...

Well Come to the 6th Reich... did you have a nice life?  Did you enjoy your death?

Did your soul even notice when it died??

How are we letting all this shit happen on our watch??

Shouldn't we be doing something more???

You know what I wanna do... but I hate being a cliche... that's my problem... :)

Peace out,

A

November 11, 2005

Awww man.... I love my husband so much.  And I can finally say it.  Life is Beautiful.

Of course, there's still people like the Asshole of all Assholes, Mr. VIP Dickhead Cheyney

himself, still around... we're still trying to find ways around the Geneve Convention out here

in the land of the spineless, oops, I mean, brave...

But who cares about the Geneva Convention???

We're too worried about the Avian flu to even worry about the rights of humanity being

trampled under the glorious foot of industry.

And speaking of Avian flu pandemics....

Hey, New Yorkers, remember this from last week?

"Umm... what's that smell?"

"Umm... I don't know, smells like candy."

"No, it smells like coffee, not alcohol... no...."

"Hey, we just went from one end of the island to the to another, why can we still smell it?"
"Umm... I don't know... that's creepy dude."

Yeeeeesh, yeah, they're spraying us with Tamiflu, you know they are....

The US of fuckin' A can't afford to have this city infected with an Avian flu... NYC stops makin'

money and this country is out on it's ass... they need us healthy and workin'.

Oh, and just by the by... Check out Land of the Dead for true Washington propoganda... makes you think

about what really happened in New Orleans...

Also, check out the Indypendent for REAL NEWS...

Cool ' eh has also got some good stuff comin' out...

I'm off to London to see my honey....

Try not to get shot or shipped to Cuba ya'll...

See ya next week!
A

P.S. EID MUBARAK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Lost Days Blog

In America...

We beat 64 year old retired school teachers into the ground.  Leaving bloodstained sidewalks as terrible reminders in their wake. 

Those who are revered here as protectors and servers are vicious egoists with a penchant for black male blood. (Insecure much pee-wee?)
In America...

We are taught that everyone is equal and retains the rights of free speech.

Our teachers are the ones who click the locks into place on 500 Guantanamo Bay cells.

In America...

We are assured that we live in the most advanced and civilized nation in the world.

Slowly, we are awakening to see, muddy eyed and tired, the brutality that resides at the heart of this nation.

In America...

We believe in peace and liberty.

We must find a way to overthrow the government and make those beliefs a reality.

It is a nation built on genocide, biological warfare, and hate.

So now what the fuck should we do?

We fight.  We stand up and fuckin' fight.  We fight with our words and our actions.  We fight with our wallets and our choices.  We fight with our opinion and our vote.  We fight with our computers, our pens, our stamps and envelopes.  We fight until they're so fuckin' tired of us that they have no choice but to evacuate the White House.  All of them... all the fuckin' vermin... crawling out of the basement... dead Hitler style... dead in a bunker somewhere is where our administration belongs.

And we all fuckin' know it...

So say something.. even if it's to your friends, your boss, your girlfriend or boyfriend, your wife and your husbands... say something about how much this country sucks... say something while you still can... If everyone said something... we could be rid of this ... they can make us believe that we have no power... but they are liars and thieves... it is their job to distort your mind and take what they can from your moments of confusion... slip out of your house with your shit... under your nose..

I don't have a real job, so I ain't really all that concerned... but if THIS government was taking 15 percent of what I made... I'd be ready to kill someone, no fuckin' joke...

How can we continue to support this man?  Why aren't there rallies in the streets?  What has happened to our love of mankind?  Do we really only care for Beyonce and Jay-Z?

Do we really only care about whether or not Angelina is pregnant with Brad's kid?

Do we really not see the fool in the hat and his evil game? 

Oct 18.05

 do I need to even go into what is happening to me here?

LOVE MINUS ZERO/NO LIMIT              

My love she speaks like silence,
Without ideals or violence,
She doesn't have to say she's faithful,
Yet she's true, like ice, like fire.
People carry roses,                             
Make promises by the hours,
My love she laughs like the flowers,
Valentines can't buy her.

In the dime stores and bus stations,
People talk of situations,
Read books, repeat quotations,
Draw conclusions on the wall.
Some speak of the future,
My love she speaks softly,
She knows there's no success like failure
And that failure's no success at all.

The cloak and dagger dangles,
Madams light the candles.
In ceremonies of the horsemen,
Even the pawn must hold a grudge.
Statues made of match sticks,
Crumble into one another,
My love winks, she does not bother,
She knows too much to argue or to judge.

The bridge at midnight trembles,
The country doctor rambles,
Bankers' nieces seek perfection,
Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring.
The wind howls like a hammer,
The night blows cold and rainy,
My love she's like some raven
At my window with a broken wing.

 

Oct 6. 05

A few words on religion... and colonization.

I was watching a documentary last night called The God that Wasn't There and aside from the pretty standard "daVinci Code" crap, there wasn't much to hold my attention. 
Yes, everyone knows that Christianity was made up by bureaucrats and power-hungry popes.  Yes, everyone knows that the Gospels were written decades later and that three of them are derivative of one, and that one was not written by a disciple of Jesus. 
And yes, it is no longer important what REALLY happened in Biblical times or what Jesus may have actually said.... because, what people BELIEVE happened is ALWAYS
much more important than what DID happen.

So, fine... slightly annoyed and disappointed, I flick through the options and come across 60 minutes of additional interview footage in the Special Features section.

These interviews consist of several learned men, some professors, and all atheists, battling with the notion that GOD has become the central impetus in our society.

And as I began to yawn, once again, at the drab, overworked theories that I have heard a million times as to why Christianity is evil and it's doctrines are entrenched in racism, fascism, and GREED... one of the nerds got my attention.

This particular dorky science guy happened to be a biochemist, an atheist and a paranoid delusional... but he made some pretty keen observations...

One of the most poignant being his criticism and ultimate reviling of Islam.

You see, to the atheistic community, Muslims have become the favorite whipping boy.

Just another great example of how religion and belief in GOD leads to  barbaric behavior and insane brutality.  And sure, taken out of ALL HISTORICAL context, it does seem like a sound argument.  Maybe Muslims are just insane because they believe "too much" in GOD and therefore Islam needs to be "reformed", much like Christianity has, so it can be more palatable to the world and the peace-loving creatures which inhabit it.

Okay....No.   Here's the problem with this dweeb and his scared shitless induced assertions.  Muslims ARE NOT BLOWING THEMSELVES UP BECAUSE THEY BELIEVE

IN GOD.  THEY ARE USING THEMSELVES AS WEAPONS BECAUSE THEY HAVE NO

OTHER ARSENAL AT THEIR DISPOSAL.  It isn't the fact that Islamist ideals "take the sting out of death" that is the problem here... it isn't the fact that Muslims are willing to die for their beliefs that is leading them to kill themselves and take handfuls of Israelis and Americans with them.... IT IS BECAUSE THEY ARE OPPRESSED AND THEY ARE NOT OKAY WITH IT.  Don't you understand you fuckin' morons... Since the late 1940's Europe and it's lap dog the US have made it impossible for the Middle East to make any socio-economic progress.  Every major Middle Eastern leader, with the exception of Colonel Qaddafi and Yasser Arafat, was placed in power, funded, and controlled by the CIA and MI6, to make no mention of the fuckin' Mossad. (I'm not even getting in to THAT today).

The Western world has kept the Middle East under it's watchful greedy little eye for the sole purpose of exhausting EVERY NATURAL RESOURCE AVAILABLE.  Seems to simple?  That's the beauty of it, my little idiots... that's the poetry of it....

To not care for human life.  To have no qualms about dehumanizing, massacring and oppressing innocents of several nations... and for what???
OIL. OIL. OIL. OIL. OIL. OIL. OIL. OIL. LIGHT SWEET CRUDE OIL. OIL. OIL. OIL. OIL.

OIL IS WHAT MAKES THIS WORLD RUN.  THE ARABS HAVE IT, THE CORPORATIONS NEED IT.  FOR THE PAST SIXTY YEARS THEY HAVE JUST COME IN AND TAKEN IT.  But now... the world is changing.  The oppressed have begun to fight. 

And they refused to be silenced.  Another decade will not pass through the Middle East where women and children starve in camps while the oil drenched land that is their birth right is plundered so Puffy can drive around with a thirty-Escalade entourage.

THEY HAVE SEEN THE EVIL AND THEY HAVE RESISTED IT.  The poor, nomadic, admittedly uneducated, unrefined, and uncivilized have learned, finally, how to pick up their heads.  They have seen the hoax and they know now that things can never go back to the way they were in 1947.  Britain, America, and Israel will ALL NOW PAY THE PRICE for years of oppression and exploitation.

But of course, to a Western intellectual geek the idea of people killing themselves is monstrous and the religion should be reformed... no, the religion is not the problem here, it is the strength that the religion is GIVING the people that is the problem.

If the people in the Middle East were CONTENT with being used for their oil (bought at dirt cheap prices for the past six decades) and put under the tyrannical rule of maniacs funded by Uncle Sam, there would be no problem, would there?

"So, you're saying you wanna come in here and put up oil refineries? Clubs? Bars? Whore houses for your workers? You want us to work in all these necessary facilities and get paid JACK SHIT? SURE!!!!!!!!!!!!! WE'LL DO IT!!!!!!! Oh, and while you're here, you'd like to continue the noble time-honored tradition of raping our women and beating the hell out of any brown man that disobeys you on HIS OWN LAND? SURE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHY NOT!!????????? COME ON OVER!!!!!!!!!!!"

See... that would be fine with everyone in the WEST, wouldn't it?

That would be peachy... Muslims are great people.. Just like the Black South Africans, The People of Sierra Leone and of course, OUR FAVORITES... the Native Americans!!!

WE LOVE ALL THOSE PEOPLE!!! WHY?????????????
Because the Great White West has been exploiting those cultures and exhausting ALL THEIR NATURAL RESOURCES SINCE COLONIZATION BEGAN... and guess what??? They've also been exterminating the ones who would not cooperate....

But the MUSLIMS??? THEY SUCK!!!
"What's wrong with them? Why do they hate us so much??? What did we ever do to them???? They're just crazy fanatics that want every woman to wear a burka."

No... Tiffany, put down the Big Mac (please), turn off Jerry Springer, find the closest Public Library (if George already cut the funding for the one nearest you!!) and READ A GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKIN' BOOK...

Oppression leads to Revolution....

Welcome to the New Millenia Motherfuckers... Tag... You're it.

Peace,

A

Sept 29

ooohhhh, man, I know that there's so much going on in the world, from that moron Brown calling Louisiana dysfunctional to the fact that George W. thinks we need more oil refineries... but I can't seem to get my mind off my man...

Okay, I'll try...

so George... George... George... what in the hell do you think you're doing?

A President is briefed by an emergency council on two hurricanes and all the damage, not to mention death, they've caused... and this President comes out of this meeting and says, "Well, I think it's fairly obvious that we need more oil refineries...

Great.  So is that why all those people died in Louisiana?  Was it just easier to watch thousands (you know I don't believe that bullshit number of a couple of hundred, please) of people drown and starve then it would have been to relocate them?

Don't know what I'm gettin at?

Okay, let's make it super simple... the coast of Louisiana is extremely valuable to the US for it's oil richness... there were thousands of off shore oil wells before Katrina... and now, there will be thousands more... why? Becuae no one lives there anymore...

Seems a bit sinister, huh?

Yeah, it is. Welcome to the New World Order.  This is how politics will play out in the new millenium, events will only be addressed if there are in some way useful to the business model and corporate structure.  That's it, that's all that's up...

everyone else can die and starve... it doesn't matter...

We needed the land... hurricane came... people gone... land is ours... MINE THE LAND.

Oh... and why don't you hand out some money to the local churches, Condi... that'll

keep em quiet...

THIS IS HAPPENING... not everyone that disagrees with the President is a conspiracy theorist... there are some things that one only needs to connect the dots and they come into glaring relief... that land is not going to be inhabited by poor black families ever again.... you see?  That land will be turned over to the federal government, until it is livable again... and when will that be?  Never, you know why? Because land populated by oil refineries is NOT LIVABLE...

AHHHHHH... this Administration is killing this country slowly... slowly it is choking the life out of this country and out of this planet... the bald Eagles are dying of mercury poisoning... George allowed more dumping of mercury in the water....

They are killing us all... they're just doing it so slowly that we can't tell...

But it's happening, right under our noses... we can feel it, we just can't see it....

 

A

p.s. JESUS!!! BABY!!!!!!!! I need to see your ass...

 

Good Hits...

 

-Joaquin Phoenix in T magazine doin' a damn good Johnny Cash,

  you know I got that on my wall, right?

 

-Clinton and Bush Sr. making the rounds to collect money for the poor, black peoople

  our present commander in chief doesn't give a shit about, pathetic

  and  MISPLACED,   but hey they're still gettin' the dough together...     

 

- Although George is getting to allocate it... and guess who he's giving it to?

   Churches... that's our leader!!!!

 

-George Bush's pandering to the money-rimmed Key West residents is such a tragic

  display.  Five visits to the Gulf already???

  My, my how we change our tune when there are rich people involved.

 

-Salaam Namaste (main character's name is Amber, she falls in love with a chef...)   (love it !)

A

p.s.

-My humanity seems to be coming undone by the tyranny of the times we live in.

 

 

Sept. 20.05

Jesus, this is a joke, right?

I mean, all these people didn't just die in New Orleans in vain, did they?

Where the fuck are all the Black Americans?? WHERE ARE THEY?

Why have they not marched on Washington and demanded the impeachment,

or at the very least the resignation of the "President"?

Wait, it couldn't be because EVERYONE has once again been taken in by the

Administration's propoganda machine, is it?

No one actually believes that the Bush Administration DIDN'T KNOW what was

going to happen in New Orleans... do they?

Does it mean nothing to ANYONE AT ALL that "THEY" knew five days beforehand

what devastation this storm would bring... does it mean nothing to AnYONE

that "THEY" did nothing at all... that they sat back and let all the poor black people

get washed away with the tide??

Hey, here's a little interesting fact... FEMA awarded millions of dollars to the residents of Miami Dade county last year, places that were UNTOUCHED by hurricane storms...

UNTOUCHED... and in New Orleans?? They promised debit cards then went back on their word.  Volunteer fire fighters from all over the country sat for days and watched the ungodly carnage this storm brought with it, helpless... unable to go out into the field and help... FEMA wouldn't allow it...

Two trucks, one full of food, one filled with water.. after five days... five days of starving,

drowning, violence and death... two trucks...

In the wealthies nation in the world.. what is this??? what the fuck is happening, and what exactly are we letting our politicians get away with??? I mean, either all the

conspiracy nuts (muah) are right and Bush just wants to kill off ALL the Black people here in the  land of "freedom" or he's just so incredibly bad at his job that he should be replaced... doesn't that make sense to anyone... are we that cowardly and afraid that we cannot even ask for those who are mediocre to step down???
And why can't we ask? Because we have been mentally tortured and prodded and mishandled into believing that we are living with a very real and grave threat...

that of suicide bombers... that's what it comes down to...

"Hey, you never know, someone might come up behind you with a bomb strapped to his chest and blow you and your new Eddie Bauer shirt away..."
And that material hustling pimp mentality gets the morons every goddamn time...

"What?? Our "nice" (read: cheesy as fuck) things??? Our "nice" (read: fat as fuck) children??? No, we can't have crazy Muslims running around!! Go kill em George!!"

There is no bogeyman people!! The bogeyman is what adults make up to scare kids into brushing their teeth.... or some version of that (disturbing, yes.. uncommon, no).

So what do we do class when someone tries to bully and scare us??

We are SUPPOSED to realize that the bully is COMPLETELY full of shit, kick him in the balls and walk away....

SO WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING???

We're losing people in Iraq every single day, we've lost so many people to the hurricane

and  to sloppy, inept planning  - THESE PEOPLE ARE ALL DYING AND WILL CONTINUE TO DIE BECAUSE WE ARE NOT SPEAKING UP!!!!

THINK ABOUT IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A

 

 

August 29th. 05

I think that it's extremely strange that all these natural disasters keep tormenting the

US.  Of course, that couldn't have anything to do with karmic payback.

Americans don't believe in Karma.

I also think it's strange that now... slowly, the media is beginning to address the

Iraqi invasion as "another Vietnam".  That's funny, because two years ago, there

was an enormous percentage of the population saying just that... citing it, in fact,

as our reason to oppose this "war".  And the media, intellectuals and politicians,

laughed dismissively in our collective face. 

So, now it is with the utmost regret that The Soft Parade is vindicated...

Yes, this has been and will continue to mirror the horror that was The Vietnam War.

Except now we have even more screwed up weapons and an even more screwed up agenda... so the boys comin' home are gonna be quadruply fucked up...

And those are the poor bastards that make it home in one piece.

Does anyone feel the tension in the air... is it just  because George is in Texas again and September is drawing near?

Or are we permanently scarred?

Let's hope not. 

A

 

 

 

 

 

 

August 22.05

 

We miss you Hunter...

 

From the Times...

 

WOODY CREEK, Colo., Aug. 21 - Hunter S. Thompson indulged in numerous hallucinogenic fantasies over the years, but this weekend, one of them morphed into reality: his ashes were blasted into the sky over his farm here, carried by red, blue and silver fireworks in front of a 153-foot monument that Mr. Thompson, the writer and avatar of "gonzo" journalism, designed himself almost 30 years ago.

Former Senator George McGovern, the protagonist of Mr. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72," was among the 350 invitation-only guests who paid him tribute before liftoff.

"I'm not quite sure where he's going," Mr. McGovern, 83, mused in his flat South Dakota prairie voice during two hours of alcohol-free tributes. "But I salute you and wish you a happy journey in that land of mystery."

Mr. Thompson's family and friends - including Senator John Kerry, Lyle Lovett, Bill Murray, the musician David Amram, Ed Bradley and locals like Bob Braudis, the sheriff of Pitkin County, Colo. - watched Saturday night as his ashes exploded with fireworks, lingered in great puffs of milky smoke, then vanished.

"When the going gets weird," Mr. Thompson once wrote, "the weird turn pro."

Thus, six months to the day after Mr. Thompson shot himself to death at age 67 at his home here, did his family and friends produce a highly professional show, staged and choreographed by Hollywood and underwritten by his friend the actor Johnny Depp for more than $2 million.

"It's nice to be able to give a little something back," Mr. Depp, who played Mr. Thompson in the film version of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," told the crowd as the ceremony began solemnly about 6:30 Saturday night. "Hunter, this is for you."

What unfolded here in the Rockies just outside of Aspen was the complete canonization of Mr. Thompson.

At the entry to what could only be called the set, his portrait was hung at the center of his personal literary solar system, surrounded by the planets of Samuel T. Coleridge, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, John Steinbeck and Mark Twain.

Jann Wenner, publisher of Rolling Stone, whose early history was entwined with Mr. Thompson's emerging career, said that Mr. Thompson was "the DNA of Rolling Stone" and called him "one of the greatest writers of the 20th century."

Douglas Brinkley, the historian and Mr. Thompson's literary executor, said that beyond Mr. Thompson's persona as an outlaw journalist, "Hunter wanted to be remembered as a writer." He called him "the Billy the Kid of American literature."

Throughout the tributes, the monument, sheathed Christo-like in a silky red fabric, loomed in the gloaming, becoming ever more prominent as the natural light faded and spotlights illuminated it against a backdrop of darkening cliffs.

The service was private and laced with what was called "Academy Award-level" security. Mr. Thompson's fans were kept at bay, as were most of the news media, and guests were barred from bringing cellphones, cameras and recording devices. Orange cones marking a tow-away zone extended for three miles beyond Mr. Thompson's home off a narrow strip of rural roadway. Black-clad security guards, aided by a dozen county sheriff's deputies, patrolled the 40-acre property, which Mr. Thompson bought in 1968 for $50,000 and is now worth millions.

By nightfall, scores of fans had gathered at the nearby Woody Creek Tavern and outside the gate to the property. Sheriff's deputies said that "numerous people" tried to crash the scene but were escorted away.

The pavilion for guests, constructed in the last several weeks, was a vast stage set under a glass ceiling. To set a somber tone, everything, including the bar, was initially draped in black velvet. After the service, the black was lifted to reveal couches and Thompson memorabilia like stuffed peacocks and a gong. Above the bar were chandeliers and swatches of red velvet, evoking a frontier bordello.

His widow spoke first.

"We've been through a lot together," Anita Thompson, 32, told the guests. She sobbed her way through Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," which she said was Mr. Thompson's favorite poem.

So. since my blog was a little too scathing...

Let's be a little more virulent today, shall we? heh heh... Actually, the sad thing is, that

I don't even need to be mean or sadistic... the facts, my friends speak for themselves.

Okay, let's take the Shin Bet, just as an example... Israeli secret police.  Since 1957,

they have been engaged in a secret war on the people of Palestine living in Lebanon,

Syria, Jordan and Israel.  The Shin Bet is responsible for hundreds of thousands of

deaths, mainly those of young Palestinian men.  The random selection and systemized

torture of an entire race of people.  All.. for what? To have a home.  Begin, once Prime

Minister of Israel always referred to the Holocaust in his speeches.  He used the phrase

"Never Again" constantly.  After the Israeli led, massacres of thousands of unarmed

civilians living in camps in Lebanon the Associated Press coined the slogan,

"Never Again, except to the Palestinians".

The level of hypocrisy that exists within Israeli policy is truly mind-boggling.

Sure, it is rude, unfeeling and sadistic to say that one feels joy at the removal of

Jews from the West Bank.  But how should one feel after reading the accounts

of three British reporters who first hand witnessed the wreckage left behind at Sabra

and Chatila?  Women splayed on the ground, in the streets, in their homes, skirts

cut open to the waist, raped and left with their throats cut... shall I continue?

(Keep in mind that these reporters were in Sabra while the blood was still wet on the ground)

Infants, hundreds of them, their heads smashed in against a wall, all lying in a mass

grave that was once just an American made dumpster.  Young men, all lined up

against walls, shot in the back of the head and stuffed into a hole in the ground...

Young children, four and five years old, cut open and gutted like fish.

These are the Israeli's that are now crying for their summer houses on the West Bank.

These are the orange clad people who now refuse to leave their palatial waterfront

homes.  These people have since 1957, been responsible for what the international

court has deemed "WAR CRIMES". 

And now, for these people, I should have a conscience?

I should rise above my natural instinct to loathe their existence. 

I should hide the fact that their pain means nothing to me at all? 

No, this I cannot do.

There has been "Final Solution-like" policy being carried out in Israel since it's

inception. 

So, it is socially acceptable to loathe and despise the Nazi's and revel in

their court trials and subsequent executions...

but it is not okay to revel in the evacuation of a people that have been responsible

for the near-extinction of an entire race?

No, sorry... fuck that. 

Yes, I am better than the creature who revels in another's pain...

Yes, I have morals and beliefs and self-respect... but I also have a soul...

and a fuckin'conscience...

and my conscience will not allow me to be in any way apologetic about my joy...

my sheer and absolute joy that the murdering thieves who have robbed millions

of their natural right and ownership of their land, are being told to leave.

And just to give the soft-hearted of the world some perspective, if these were Palestinians

who had to be evacuated by a certain time deadline, do you know how Israel would

handle it?  Do you know how the pathetic, wailing bastards of the West Bank would

handle it???

If it was the Jews coming in instead of going out?

The Shin Bet would come in, just as they have for the past 40 years,

demolish everything in sight, kill every man, woman and child in the area,

and then ask America to foot the bill.

Just because someone cries, doesn't mean they're right... It is a tactic.

Just like using your children to stand in front of army tanks is a tactic. Jesus Christ.

Who the hell does that anyway... of course, they would do it because they know the

Israeli's army won't run the children over... that only happens if the kids are a little

more tan in complexion...

One must look back in history to understand the present...

to be only in the present and tofeel only what is displayed to you at this moment is...

FOOLISHNESS.

The history of Israel speaks for itself...

all that they have done, with ice water running through their veins is now coming back...

there is always a reckoning... everyone must pay for their crimes against humanity...

everyone... even the fuckin' Israeli's...

A

p.s. so, like I said... if you don't like my fuckin' politics, pick up a fuckin' book and

read something and edgemacate yourself...

or, just go fuck yourself....

whatever keeps you living in your rose-colored world...

most people don't have that luxury... just ask the Palestinians.

 

 

 

 

.

 

 

Jeeveh, Jeeveh, Jeeveh, PAKISTAN, PAKISTAN, PAKISTAN, Jeeveh Pakistan MOTHERFUCKERS!!!!!

 

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pakistan test fired its first cruise missile early Thursday without warning archrival India under a new treaty requiring notification of tests involving missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, officials said.

The Foreign Ministry said the missile notification agreement formalized by the two nuclear-armed nations over the weekend did not cover cruise missiles.  India's Foreign Ministry said it had no comment on the test. Pakistani Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said the peace process should still move ahead.  The test was carried out on President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's 62nd birthday, but an army spokesman said that was a coincidence. The timing was determined more by the readiness of scientists, the weather and the celebration of Pakistan's Independence Day which falls on Sunday, Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan said. 

The notification pact is part of a confidence-building process being pursued by the two South Asian neighbors that have fought three wars since independence from Britain in 1947. They also agreed over the weekend to set up a hot line next month to help prevent accidental nuclear conflict.

Their hostile relations stem mainly from their dispute over Kashmir, a Himalayan region divided between them but claimed by each in its entirety.

The Babur cruise missile, which can also carry a conventional warhead, has a range of 310 miles and was fired from an undisclosed site. "By the grace of Allah, all design parameters for the flight were validated," a military statement said.

Cruise missiles are typically low-flying guided missiles that use jet propulsion. The military statement said the Babur can hit a target with "pinpoint accuracy" and be fired from surface warships, submarines and fighter jets.

"The technology enables the missile to avoid radar detection and penetrate undetected through any hostile defensive system," it said.

Sultan said Pakistan had joined the few countries "that can design and make cruise missiles."

India's military also has a cruise missile, the supersonic Brahmos.

Musharraf praised the scientists and engineers involved in the Babur project for their success, "and reiterated Pakistan's resolve to continue to meet emerging challenges and geo-strategic developments in its neighborhood," the army statement said.  Pakistan and India, which both conducted nuclear test explosions in 1998, often carry out tit-for-tat missile tests capable of reaching deep inside each other's territory.

In March, Pakistan successfully test fired its longest range nuclear-capable missile, the Shaheen II, which can reach 1,250 miles.  India has said it will test its longest range missile, the 1,865-mile Agni III, by year's end.

August 6th

          Hey hey hey hey

          Back in NYC for a bit and my GOD is it hot!!!!!! WHAT THE FUCK!!????

          And although this heat should have me laid up drinking somethin' cold and relaxing... here I am, updating my blog...

          The anti-Israel one seems to have ruffled QUITE a FEW feathers... lol (see strange ramblings)

          Love, Marriage, Lust, Fidelity, Companionship, Loyalty, Friendship... All with a man that makes every nerve in your

          body jump...

          Man oh Man it's all very nice...

          A

          p.s. not a very good blog, I'll admit... but hey, I've got my own little family now... that's gotta be somewhat newsworthy :)

          p.p.s. I love you baby!

                                                                      

 

June 2005

Within two months, according to the latest news,  Israel will be pulling out of Gaza...

After spending the last ten days reading about the Intifada and the actions of the Israeli's against Palestinians... it seems very little

Very late....

But then, maybe I'm just trying to make trouble...

Of course, it should be okay, that people who served as Prime Minister's of Israel and received Nobel Peace Prizes were once Nazi

collaborators...part of something cutely called The Stern Gang... look it up motherfuckers...

Of course, I, and everyone else in world should forget that for the past twenty years young Palestinian men have been killed, with

rubber bullets, taken to Israeli's hospitals, releieved of their organs and dumped at the doorsteps of their parent's shanty homes.

Of course, it should go without saying that the great Nation of Israel is not responsible for over three thousand miscarriages suffered

by Palestinian women due to random and continual tear gas attacks on the homes of pregnant women.

Of course, it no longer matters to anyone that from 1948 till now thousands of Palestinians have been imprisoned with no official charges

brought against them, held in huge zoo like detention areas where they are routinely tortured, beaten, and killed.

Of course, the idea of a twelve year old boy lying in a HOSPITAL BED with injuries sustained by Israeli soldiers on break and needing

some fun, being taken FROM HIS HOSPITAL BED, beaten in the hospital yard and thrown back into the entryway is ABSURD...

Children being taken OFF THE OPERATING TABLE, beaten with truncheons and given back, young men killed, disembowled...

relieved of all their vital, and much needed organs (hey, somebody's gotta keep Mr. Olstein alive with that bad liver he's got) ....

random acts of torture including throwing large stone slabs from helicopters during funeral processions, large slabs of cement thrown

from buildings onto the heads of young children, crushing the life out of them...

All of this is now going to be reconciled by the GODDAMN ZIONISTS giving Gaza BACK TO THE PEOPLE IT BELONGS TO??

You know, I'm not generally a very Anti-Semitic person... but there's got to be some sort of recongnition that the Israeli's are

and have been for quite some time acting like NAZI'S...  ISRAELI'S ARE GODDAMN NAZI'S...

I agree now with Col. Qathafi... to be pushed into the sea is their only fate...

The blood of innocent women and children cannot be spilled for decades without recompense...

The Israeli's will in the long run pay for all that they have done.... perhaps, the realization that must now happen all around the

world that the Jews have become the thing that they most despise is enough justice...

But somehow... it doesn't seem like enough...

And you know what?? I don't want to hear one more dumb bitch say one more thing about terrorism...

Israel is and has been for decades engaged in TERRORISM AGAINST THE PALESTINIANS...

Someone must pay for it... someone must answer for all that they have done...

Tear gas canisters found in Palestine... the special kind that cause misscarriages had this written on the side...

Made in the U.S.A.  Jan 1988...

The canisters were used... Jan 1988...

Man, things sure do move fast when they need to, huh?

Will Gaza ACTUALLY be given back to the Palestinians... who knows...

Will the problem end while the corrupt, CRUEL, NEO-NAZI rule of Israel continues...

No, it won't... more will die, more will be tortured, more will be killed, and the stench will rise high...

Perhaps even high enough to scare a conscience into a Zionist mind...

A

p.s. Oh yeah and FUCK GEORGE BUSH AND HIS DUMB SON... and all the senators that think keeping Guantanamo Bay Prison open

is a good idea because it helps us fight the war on a noun... you fuckin' idiots...

may2005

You know it's funny, when you move out of the US, there is this calm that descends over you.. maybe it has something to do with the fact

that you're not constantly afraid of being dragged out of your house, into a waiting black Suburban and flown straight to Gitmo...

Maybe it has to do with the fact that there is no FOX NEWS and perhaps it's the ability to breathe air not on the same continent

as that arrogant son of a bitch Hannity... Regardless, the air is clean and the water is pure... the politics, unfortunately are just

as dirty... the rampant Anit-Muslim sentiment that runs through Scandanavia is almost appalling, the only thing that seems even

a little more heinous is the way the Muslim majority here seems to WANT to propogate that stereotype... shootings,

murders, drunken brawls... all seeping out of Muslim ghettos around Denmark and it's neighbors... of course, this is essentially

the Danish government's fault... to place people in ghettos was the primary mistake... the integration into society that should have

happened, never did.. thus leaving a blank canvas on which these immigrants could now paint their own picture...

And the picture is one common to any race that is made to live in substandard conditions, with low paying wages and a

general dislike by the majority... kinda like Black people in America... it's strange to see that same type of racism applied

to people just like me... not that I'm not used to the threatening and threatened looks of people as I walk through Heathrow,

Schipol or Franfurt... not that I hadn't had my dose of Anti-Muslim glares after September 11th... but this racism here hasn't much

to do with actual terrorism, though that has not made the situation much worse...

No, the racism that exists here stems from a deeply rooted ignorance of the Muslim religion...

Certain aspects of Arab culture are seen as religious pretext, when they are in reality not based on any sort of religious

foundation at all... there exists here a kind of barbaric vision of Muslim treatment of women and children which does not

fly well with the ultra-Socialist mindset... of course, even the Danes have succumbed to the greed of W., Cheyney and my

old Buddy... the grande dame bitch himeself, Rummy...

Denmark is engaged in the Iraqi war, with several other small countries in Europe for a very pragmatic reason... OIL.

They need it, the Iraqi's have it... so on one hand, it's easy to say, hey, fuck em.. they like killing Muslims and taking what

belongs to them... well, then the Muslims should fuck up their country... LOL

But on a much more serious and adult level, the discrepancies that exist in Denmark about Muslims are revolting and

sad... sad because so many ignorant Arabs propogate the stereotype... there is much rape and murder and beating of

Muslim women by their husbands, uncles, fathers and so forth.. of course, this is not at all religious and has nothing at all

to do with the teachings of the Quaran, but that is not really discussed, Islam is seen here as a culture and as a culture...

it is judged extrememly unfairly...

Interestingly, it's an accurate microcosm for the rest of the world.
The way Muslims are viewed here is somehow accurate to the misconception that so many have all around the globe...

Cultures that are very different from Arab culture, cultures that do not understand the difference between thousand

year old tribes with thousand year old rituals and the religion that has become theirs...

Islam has nothing to do, for example with such things as female circumcision... this is an ancient tradition that has been preserved from

the days of Pharoh... But still, it is inextricably linked to the atrocities endured by Muslim women.

Submission being another... in a religion that teaches egalatarianism and total equality of the sexes... if not the deifying

and worship of the female... there is not much room for the unspeakable way that women are ACTUALLY treated by

Arabs and others of who are by religion Muslim.

It is highly unjust to judge a religion by the culture of it's followers... take for example, the fate of those burned and hung

by Puritans in the early days of America, take the terror incited by the white-hooded creeps in the South...

This is not Christianity.. it iis the vileness that man desires a reason for... so, they pick the easiest one..

Religion...

Which is why I would like to leave this rant with one final statement...

Islam is NOT a religion, to follow it, one must not be a DEVOUT FANATIC...

Islam is a way of life... to be a true and pious Muslim, one much devote one's life to doing good and being kind.

The word Islam does after all mean, PEACE.

Peace,

A

End of May

So, today's let's get into the whole "Triangle of Death" thing shall we?  

Every time I read an article about Al-Qaeda's devil work in Iraq, I have to smile.

Does the American government still expect the world (and all the ingrates in the Midwest)

to believe that Al-Qaeda operates out of Iraq?

Has there not been enough data brought to light on this matter to shut Rummy and Condi up?

The truth is, there has been more than enough information put forward stating that there were

absolutely NO TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS OPERATING IN IRAQ, EXCEPT FOR THE

TYRANT (Sadaam) HIMSELF...

The Tyrant that bought and sold and wined and dined with the Americans for a very long time...

Ten years (all through the Iran-Iraq war) to be exact...

The Tyrant was not at all interested in "insurgents" of any kind...

There was NO AL-QAEDA OPERATING IN IRAQ before the US INVASION...

and the funny thing, they're not there now either...

Al-Zarqawi is not a Al-Qaeda member... just because two names start with the same

prefix DOES NOT MAKE THEM SYNONYMOUS Mrs. Johnson...

No, Al-Zarqawi represents a different kind of fear, one that the American gov't was not

counting on at all... These are not pre-existing terror cells that have just mobilized-

these are ordinary people who have gotten ahold of surface to air missiles, anti-aircraft fire

and a host of other fun things (from the tyrants strategically placed ammo depots ALL OVER THE COUNTRY)

But of course, it plays perfectly into the George W. plan of action...

"Hey!! An unforeseen stroke of luck!" they must've thought... now we can prove that there WAS TERRORIST

activity there... but man has that blown up (literally) in their faces...

Just take a looksie...

About 610 people, including 49 U.S. troops, have been killed since April 28, when Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari announced his new government. Washington hopes the government will eventually train police and an army capable of securing Iraq and allowing the withdrawal of foreign troops.

In a bid to halt the violence, more than 2,000 Iraqi and U.S. forces are scouring western Baghdad for insurgents. The U.S. military announced Tuesday that 143 more suspected insurgents were detained Monday in the joint operation, raising the number of people rounded up since Operation Squeeze Play began late Sunday to 428.

 

And that's just what they're telling you... that doesn't include the hundreds and thousands that have died... the ones we

won't know about for years to come... kinda like... right... VIETNAM...

They're doing it again folks...

And instead of our heros emerging from the fog, taking a stand and ending

this insanity... what do we get instead??

In the 60's there was The Airplane... there was Morrison... there Joan Baez and Bob Dylan...

All raising thier small voices together... creating a movement, A Soft Parade, if you will against

the powers that be...

In the big '05 we've got Beyonce signing a multi-million dollar contract to

promote Coca-Cola and McDonald's...

Our hearts have been replaced by our wallets and then we wonder why our government

acts the way that it does...

Our legacy will be one of greed and global piracy...

With pop-stars at the helm...

No more songs written about the latest attack... no more folksy tunes paying homage to the 

fallen innocents... no empathy for anyone...

Just guns and bombs and torture and murder...

Now that America has an excuse to keep the young American bodies coming in...

We'll never get out...

Has it ever occurred to them that maybe there were NO BOMBINGS in Iraq before the US

INVASION??

Has it occurred to anyone yet that we have CREATED AN ENORMOUS TERRORIST THREAT

to the world??

A threat that now has a purpose... to fight the evil Americans and all who help them...

We have picked a fight with a nation that sits on oil reserves larger than we can imagine...

You don't think they're intrinsically attached to the idea of protecting their land??

With sandals and air to surface missiles or boots and guns... war is war...

Calling sophisticated, planned out attacks on major government buildings and

cafes where cops hang out doesn't seem quite like the image of a rock throwing Palestinian,

does it...

This is not the West Bank and these are not people living in refugee camps...

They are Iraq's... I bet George doesn't even know what that means...

In summation, I will say this, for now...

Being out of the country makes me a bit bold, I fear...

No one thought that the face of the globe could be changed by a tiny, little

backwards country called Afghanistan...

And when the Soviet Union fell, I think many were left wondering...

 "What happened?"

Well, picking a fight with a country because it seems like an easy target isn't

always a smart move... and if it can happen to one super power... it sure as

hell can happen to another...

So there, I said it...

My personal feeling is...

Either they pull out now... while they still can... or the oh-so-famous airlifts

out of Vietnam are going to look like a Asian Sight Seeing tour in comparison...

You get my meaning, Jack??

Peace,

A

p.s. It's really nice here, nice and quiet and beautiful and ........ :)  

May5,2005

So, I've been thinking...

What's gonna happen this term? And for the precious few who are unaware of my particular politics,

let me explain... What will George W. pull over on us this time?

You see, I had a very traumatic experience the other day.

Here I am taping my show on 34th street (if you're confused, check out The Work Page)

And who do I see, just strolling down the street???

Well, it looked just like the war-mongering, demon himself!!!

There was W!!!!! Of course, I immediately thought my eyes were playing tricks on me...

Why would the most reviled man on Earth just be strolling down one of the busiest avenues in NYC?

So, I give him the once over... the right suit, the right tie... But anyone can do that...

The right hair, the right face (which can also be duplicated-So I'm not scared just yet)

And then I saw what was in his hand... a bag of Cheetos...

And I thought,
"Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I'm gonna become infamous today."

(We won't go into why I thought that, it's a federal offense to even think it)

(We're all thinking it though, so fuck the NSA, SS, AND ALL THE OTHER NAZI'S ON THE PAYROLL)

And as I prepared myself and my faithful V-Desi microphone for my moment of truth...

He came right up to me and looked me in the eye... and I knew it wasn't him... pretty blue eyes and a sincere smile

looked back at me...

He was a very, very, very good impersonator... (see card below for his info)

When it was all over and we had had our laughs and Bizarro Bush was on his way, I remained, truly,

shaken...

Why? Impending doom, my friends...

Impending doom and the carrier of it scared me... his image, although not even his own, was

enough to scare me into a murderous focused state, almost like a catatonic...

Why?

Impending doom... my friends...

Impending doom...

Why were so many zombie films made in the 50's and 60's?

We were afraid Russia was going to nuke us... nuclear fallout would cause all sorts of fun

mutations... it's called DESENSITIZATION...

Get used to it, kiddos...

"Now ladies and gentleman, if you see people's faces falling off, don't be alarmed, there is

ABSOLUTELY NO REASON TO PANIC.  Remain calm, fight, and if you are good and pure,

You will live. And remember kids, anyone who smokes dope, always dies first."

Bastards...

So now Brown Cow, I ask you... What's with the 28 Days Later and Dawn of the Dead business?

What's with Sean of the Dead?  What's with the rioting, super-violent images of humans...

who are no longer humans...?

Humans that are INFECTED???

Because they're not just zombies anymore... has anyone fuckin' noticed?

They're not rising from the Dead like they did in the 50's... now they're normal, everyday

people... BEING INFECTED WITH CHEMICAL COMPONENTS...

LIKE... LIKE... LIKE... (come on, you know the answer)

CHEMICAL WARFARE VICTIMS...

Why the Desensitization now?

Could it possibly be because we are now being asked to prepare ourselves for the truly

unthinkable? Well, it's not unthinkable, is it? I mean, you've seen it in high-speed, digicam

grainy, picturized reality... IT HAS BECOME PLAUSIBLE...

Why?

Oh, guess what... so my friend Ester was watching 20/20 the other day... (I love people who watch 20/20)

And she said that most of the CHEMICAL PLANTS IN THE US are COMPLETELY UNPROTECTED.

COMPLETELY UNPROTECTED????

Yes... COMPLETELY UNPROTECTED!

Why the fuck are there housewives all over the midwest spending all their time on the Internet

trying to "catch Bin Laden and his evil henchmen" when the chem plant in their backyard is

guarded by a PADLOCK???

Who's got the Teacher's Edition textbook here... I wanna see it!

I received a very interesting package about seven months ago...

it had all types of documents in it (oh yeah, very juicy, X-files stuff)

and one of the numerous discoveries to be made was that the US GOVERNMENT was funding

the creation of a new train system...

How did anyone find out about this covert op?

Well, some of the nice, down home Midwesterners hired to do the welding...

well, they couldn't weld shackles into the trains... IT DID NOT SIT WELL WITH THEM.

When they asked their superiors why they were being made to weld these human shackles

in hundreds of train cars, they were told to do their job, or leave...

So they left... and then they made a big stink about it, of course... (because this is STILL America)

(So, fuck you once again... that one's for you Cheney)

Is it coming together yet? No?

Okay, well, let's add some more celery to this stew, shall we?

How about this... within the same packet there was also documentation of hundreds and hundreds of

buildings that have been purchased by the government and sealed...

AS IN MADE AIRTIGHT... oh, there are vents... but they only work one way...

WHY WAY, AMBER??

Oh, come on, you know, you dopes...

The vents come in... nothin gets out...

These buildings, I was amused to observe, are primarily in the Midwest...

There's also one in Hawaii that used to be a mental institution and can hold ONE MILLION HUMANS.

(that one has also been been airtight, you can start being very afraid now)

So... let's see....

George usually waits, oh, I don't know... a good 10 months to really get things rolling...

So... here's George's clock ticking... the Neo Cons are restless and are in DIRE NEED of

FRESH MEAT to send to "The War on Terrorism" (I'm beginning to find that phrase really funny)

And, unfortunately, things on the home front aren't exactly lookin' positive about the war...

I mean, when 3 out of EVERY 4 soldiers comin' home has "severe mental problems"...

The mood is bound to change...

So they're running out of bodies to throw into the fire, approval ratings are down, everyone

is takin' shots at the Pres... SOMETHING HAS TO CHANGE, right?

I mean, sans the MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR WAR and all the DEAD PEOPLE, this was pretty much

what was happening the FIRST TIME W. was "elected", right?