2004 q2

April

• 2: Powell admits doubts about whether those trailers for making balloon hydrogen were bioweapon labs. BBC · G
• 3: Deanna Laney found not guilty by reason of insanity. She had bashed in the heads of two of her sons because God told her to. USAT (Think she got off light? Then remember God told me to strike at al-Qaida…then He instructed me to strike at Saddam… GWB)
• 4: Occupation forces—apparently Spanish-led—gun down a couple dozen Shiïa protesting a couple of their friends run over by a US tank yesterday. (The US claims they threw themselves under the tank. ABC) This prompts their leader, Moqtada Sadr, a pacific type thus far, to declare jihad on the occupiers. IO (Winning hearts and minds. Just remember this when there're a bunch of attacks on the occupiers this week, and the US media whore themselves trying to get sympathy, like last week.)
• Thailand is not enthused about renewing thier Iraq commitment, so their troops may be gone after September. A
• Sharon sez Arafat deserves death for killing Israelis. A Perhaps. But then Sharon deserves death for killing Palestinians and Lebanese etc; Bush deserves death for killing Afghanis and Iraqis and Mercans etc…
• Australia announces no more troops for Iraq. A
• 6: Things go all to hell in Iraq. The US hopes that by calling Iraqis insurgents the world will forget who's the illegal occupier and who're the legal resistors. Go Iraqis!

  One of those killed is Gray Branfield, working for Hart Group, security specialists. He had been in South Africa's security forces N24 where he'd gained notoriety as part of the death squad that killed Joe Gqabi and Umkhonto weSizwe in Zimbabwe on 1981 Jul 31. AA · TA

• Some of the US' mercenaries—Blackwater Security, apparently—gun down a Najaf crowd, killing 30, wounding a couple hundred. LF (The US refers to an Iraqi militia, but it was more like a parade.) Then the US bombs a Fallujah mosque and kills 40 more. BBC · Y! This the US calls pacification. Would it pacify you? The British took three years to turn both the Sunnis and the Shias into their enemies in 1920. The Americans are achieving it in just under a year. ICH
• Kerry may actually be more pro-Sharon than Bush EI although it might be an election ploy.
• Anonymous British army officer accuses the US as viewing Iraqis as untermenschen. T (This is a laugh. The British have been damn good at treating unWASPs as untermenschen themselves. A prisoner-abuse flap a few days from now shows Brits no better than Yanks.)
• Even its puppet Iraqi government is criticising Shrub over the vengeance taken on Fallujah. AW
• 11: NBC's Homeland Security is a real piece o' fiction, trying to repaint 9/11 as an intelligence failure and the Office of Vaterland Security as not a Gestapo.
• I see Air Force One on telly again, inflated to three hours of deletions, dubbings, and commercials—incl one to join the USAF. I twig to a subtlety in the infection you call freedom line. It must be punctuated ‘infection you call “freedom”’—ie, not in reference to freedom as would be found in the dictionary, but what the modern West inaccurately labels freedom: wage slavery, heavy taxation with no return of services, heavy debt rising from an induced lust for mountains of useless stuff, elections with no actual choices, polluted air, polluted water, diseased gene-modified overstretched food supply, licensing permits and red tape, etc etc etc. The infection is capitalism, not freedom.

• O'Reilly continued his spin to absolve the US of responsibility for Hussein: all US presidents agreed that it was expedient to support him. The problem is that he evolved into a monster. Albright agreed, saying we now regret the relationship but he got worse over the years. Right, O'Reilly concurred, it was that evolutionary thing, sounding, understandably enough, very much like Bush Senior.

  Except this evolutionary theory doesn't square with what a former US government official said in 1959 about Hussein after the latter lost his nerve in a failed assassination attempt against Iraq's prime minister: Saddam was known as having no class. He was a thug—a real cutthroat. CL

• The coverup panel did not ask Ms. Rice…about Sibel Edmunds, the FBI wiretap translator who found pre-911 intercepted messages that clearly identified a looming suicide hijacking plot. They didn't ask why Edmunds was threatened with jail by John Ashcroft if she spilled the beans about what she heard on those intercepts. They didn't ask Rice to respond to Edmunds' comment: Especially after reading National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice where she said, we had no specific information whatsoever of domestic threat or that they might use airplanes. That's an outrageous lie. And documents can prove it's a lie.…

  They didn't ask Rice why Attorney General John Ashcroft was forbidden from flying commercial aircraft in July 2001.

  They didn't ask Rice why on Sept. 10, 2001, 10 Pentagon generals cancelled their plans to fly the following day.

  They didn't ask Rice why there was no air defense over Washington and New York and no stepped up airport security in light of the Aug 6. presidential daily briefing and the fact that Bush had just returned from a Genoa summit that had been the target of a plot to kill Bush by crashing planes into the complex that housed him [and] the multitude of specific warnings received from British, Russian, French, Israeli, Jordanian and Moroccan intelligence…

  Conspicuously missing from the hearings was any mention of Project Bojinka, the 1995 plot to crash hijacked planes into the World Trade Center, White House, and CIA headquarters, Chicago's Sears Tower, and San Francisco's pyramid building. CL

• New murmurs the US is trying to plant WMD in Iraq. Given that the 9/11 whitewash isn't going well—it's now obvious there was no intel failure and the admin had ample info for an effective defense—they need a big distraction; and the hubbub in Iraq provides both motive and opportunity. CD However, it's possible the US will say fuck this and use WMD in Iraq.

  Bush's press conference on April 13 was a scary performance. Not because his second sentence was ungrammatical: This has been tough weeks in that country. Not because he pronounced instigated as instikated in his fourth sentence. Not because he said Donald Rumsfeld was Secretary of State. Not because of his foolish comment that before 9/11 we assumed oceans would protect us. (Ever since the Russians built their first ICBMs fifty years ago, the oceans haven't protected us.) Not because he said of the August 6 briefing, Frankly, I didn't think it was anything new! Not because he said that even if he had known beforehand that Iraq did not have WMD stockpiles, he still would have gone to war against Saddam Hussein. Not because he had no coherent answer as to why Dick Cheney must hold his hand when he testifies to the 9/11 commission. Not because he said that no one in his Administration had any indication that bin Laden might hijack an airplane and run it into a building, whern in fact, at the Genoa G-8 summit, there were precautions taken against incoming airplanes as missiles. And not because he repeatedly refused to take a shred of personal responsibility for allowing the 9/11 attacks to happen on his watch.

  No, his performance was scary because he plunged the US deeper into a no-win war in Iraq. We will finish the job of the fallen, he said…I have directed our military commanders to make every preparation to use decisive force, if necessary, to maintain order and to protect our troops…Our commanders on the ground have got the authority necessary to deal with violence, and will—and will in firm fashion.…That is a signal for slaughter. CD

• 13: Iraqi beaten to death by US troops for keeping a picture of al Sadr in his car. NCA

  A raid on Baghdad's Mustansuriye University was similar. Troops smashed every window that held a picture of al-Sadr. Then the Army sent tanks into the middle class neighborhood around the university, blasting out a message.

  First the soldiers said you are a very good neighborhood and you have to stand with us, not against us, recalls Mustansuriye resident Salahadul Karim. He says the message was delivered by a US military interpreter who sat on top of the tank, his head covered with a hood to hide his identity.

  The translator told us we will crush (al-Sadr's) Mehdi Army and if this neighborhood stands with them we will crush you too, Karim says.

  Like many middle class Sunnis, Salahadul Karim does not much like Muqtada al-Sadr. The cleric's followers, who are mostly young and poor, are a source either of crime or of vigilante justice on the streets.

  But Karim has been thrown in prison twice by the US Army in the last month, and he is not happy with the way they are keeping the peace.

  Really I hate Muqtada, he says. But now with the Americans going after him so strongly and Muqtada speaking out, I begin to respect him somehow. AW This is the infection the US calls freedom.

  Negroponte to succeed Bremer. TIL (Assuming Gilligan kept his notes in order this time. This could be a feeler on world opinion; or the subtler trick of getting a bad choice accepted by first offering an absolutely unacceptable choice. We'll have to wait to see who the bad choice is though.)

  During last year's invasion, both American and British forces again used uranium-tipped shells, leaving whole areas so hot with radiation that only military survey teams in full protective clothing can approach them. No warning or medical help is given to Iraqi civilians; thousands of children play in these zones. The coalition has refused to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to send experts to assess what Rokke describes as a catastrophe. When will this catastrophe be properly reported by those meant to keep the record straight? I

  (Canada bears some blame for this, since we supply most of the dU.)

  GWB (rare press conf): Well, the oil revenues, they're bigger than we thought they would be at this point… NYT Wolfowitz said before the war that "we are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon" with Bush administration officials claiming "that Iraq's oil revenues would be G$20 to G$30 a year." Those oil revenues are now only "running at a rate of about G$14 a year" while Americans taxpayers are shelling out billions for reconstruction. [DS citing NYT via IHT]

  GWB (rare press conf): [The Iraqis are] really pleased we got rid of Saddam Hussein. And you can understand why. This is a guy who was a torturer, a killer, a maimer; there's mass graves. The Iraqis also know who tortured, maimed, and killed in Afghanistan (GWB) and who bulldozed thousands of live Iraqis into mass graves (GHWB). The Iraqis also know who kept Saddam in power at least 20 years. Iraqis are mostly glad to be rid of Saddam but they mistrust the US and hate the occupation.

  Zapatero takes the reins, orders Spain's troops withdrawn ASAP. With the information we have, and which we have gathered over the past few weeks, it is not foreseeable that the UN will adopt a resolution satifactory to Spain. C

  Sharon gets Bush to reverse six presidents' policy; Kerry supports it 100%

  15: Alex Moise, head of French Friends of Israel's Likud Party, gets 2 months suspended and $1000 fine on admitting those antisemitic phone calls he got were his own work. [JR quoting FPP]

  17: Israel does another extrajudicial execution with collateral damage.

  EU's external-relations minister says comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam are misplaced. Iraq is much worse. Y!

  The hostagetaking has given a glimpse at the kind of democracy the US creates. The mood at the moment is that Japan has to hang on to the alliance with America, but this is tinged with resentment among those who most advocate it. The feeling on the right is that Japan has to say yes to what America wants because it's not strong enough to say no. R

  19: Negroponte officially named US ambassador to Iraq. WSWS

  Dominican Republic, highly connected w/US, nevertheless plans to pull its Iraq troops shortly. SBS Honduras promises to pull its troops; Thailand will pull its medical and engineering troops if they're attacked SMH

  Canadian parliament votes in favour of some sort of mention of Turkey's c1915 genocide of the Armenians. Turkey sputters; I imagine the US sputters a bit too, but I haven't heard any actual reports. The Martinets were against it, but only the cabinet were required to vote so. Bill Graham, trying to assuage Turkey, makes some pathetic comment about leaving matters of genocide to the historians. Too bad his own government doesn't take that attitude about the early 1940s. We want our Turkish friends and our Armenian friends to put these issues in the past, sez he. Can you picture them telling the Zionists to just get over it? Liberal Hedy Fry supported the motion but said it's important to note the atrocities were carried out under the Ottoman empire, which has faded into history and was long ago replaced by a modern Turkish state. Mahathir was right.

  US tries to bury the release of coffin photos by claiming some are actually of the Columbia crew—even though the flags are all Starsnstripes.

  25: Joe Clark complains that Stephen Harper's too far to the right. (This is like Goldwater whining to Dole that he and Bob were the new liberals of the Republican Party. Can you imagine that?)

  US wants to take control of Malaysian straits in the guise of fighting terror; Malaysia's not keen on the idea. CNA · CNA

  28: Spain completes Iraq withdrawal. I

  Abe Foxman basically admits Europeans are wising up that antiZionism != antiJudaism. The disparity between the drop in anti-Semitism and the rise in hostility toward Israel suggest that political intervention has helped Europeans separate their feelings about Jews from their views on Israel, Foxman said. JTA

  BP pulling out of Iraq. G

  The neocon chickenhawks take the logically bizarre path of attacking a person who got three purple hearts in Vietnam over his military record. CD But since logic is dead in the US…

  Bush and Dick have a joint informal nonbinding chinwag with the 9/11 whitewashers.

  American contractors and soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners in a prison outside Baghdad? A huge story, by anyone's standards, surely, especially when pictures of the abuse were broadcast on the US TV network CBS.

  So it was no surprise that newspapers around the world made huge, horrified play of the events at the Abu Ghraib prison. It was more of a surprise [sic], however, that the story did not receive the same level of coverage in the US papers. AOL

  One minute we are told that the clash between US soldiers and anti-coalition forces is an epoch-shaping battle. A recent report described Fallujah as a defining moment in America's history; British journalist in Washington Andrew Sullivan said the battle of Fallujah contained the entire future of the attempt to break the back of Islamist terror and Muslim autocracy. It's Iraqalypse Now, said some reports. Yet this morning we hear that US marines have started to pull out of Fallujah, having handed authority over the city to a new 1000-strong Iraqi force called the Fallujah Protective Army, headed by a former Ba'athist general no less. SO

  A senior Iraqi general was greeted by flag-waving crowds yesterday as he arrived at the Sunni stronghold city of Fallujah to take over from withdrawing American forces. Scenes of jubilation greeted Major-General Jassem Mohamed Saleh at Fallujah's eastern edge. ST

  Pictures of US troops torturing Iraqi prisoners will damage Britain as well as the US, it was claimed today. S Lord Owen said the pictures were damaging for Britain as well as the US. I hope, I believe, nothing like this happens in the British Army. BN A few hours later Owen would see photos of UK troops beating up and pissing on Iraqis. BBC

  A hooded Iraqi captive is beaten by British soldiers…with rifle butts and batons in the head and groin, was kicked, stamped and urinated on, and had a gun barrel forced into his mouth. After an eight-hour ordeal, he was left barely conscious and close to death. Bleeding and vomiting and with a broken jaw and missing teeth, he was driven from a Basra camp and hurled off the truck. No one knows if he lived or died…

  It is claimed officers turned a blind eye. One of the soldiers said: Basically this guy was dying as he couldn't take any more. An officer came down. It was Get rid of him—I haven't seen him. The paperwork gets ripped. So they threw him out, still with a bag on his head.…

  I can't believe it has taken the Iraqis so long to fight back. If it had been me or my family, I'd have retaliated straightaway. They've just got f****d around so much. You can't go in now, and say Right, let's forget about what has happened and start again. M

  The British immediately try to explain away the evidence. BBC The occupiers plead that they're still better than Saddam Hussein. Nevermind that according to some calculations before the insurgency Iraqis were dying at 15× the rate they were under Saddam. Nevermind the calculations that there are more Iraqis locked up than at any time under Saddam.

  While most Iraqis are glad to be rid of Saddam, they are split on whether they're better off: 42% think they are, 45% think not. ST Some pro-democracy Iraqis have more fear of speaking up now than under Saddam. CSM

  82% of Canadians agree Bush is not necessarily a friend of Canada and doesn't really know anything when it comes to Canadian issues. Support for a closer more friendly relationship with the US is highest in Atlantic Canada (55%), followed by Alberta (45%), Saskatchewan/Manitoba (44%). I I wonder what Shrub-loving Harper had to say about those tidbits.

  Ireland drops electronic voting for June; calls for resignation of the minister who spent the money on the crap. EN

  A Melbourne coroner said this week it was unlikely he would be able to rule whether wealthy widower Arthur Reynolds Pegram was murdered or committed suicide…Suffering terminal cancer and with a year at the most to live, Mr Pegram was originally thought to have died of natural causes. But an autopsy showed the former engineer had 26 stab wounds to the chest, with two fatal wounds to his heart. He had three fractured ribs…No weapon was found nearby. Yet one of the world's leading forensic pathologists has been unable to eliminate the possibility that Mr Pegram killed himself. NCA

  Germany may cease to have its troops guard US bases in Germany while the US troops who do it usually are in Iraq. Y!

  US begins to babble that it didn't leave Saleh in charge of Fallujah, that that job's still being vetted. S Well, Fallujans think he's in charge, and many were happy to see him. He thinks he's in charge. The US has got a h@ll of a mess on its paws to get him out at this point.

  US trade deficit for April G$48.3, or M$67.1/hr. B (The article also mentions 1.2M new jobs, but the methodology behind that number seems to be wacky imagination. RT)

May

• 2: Hamill escapes, which is nice, but it sounds more exciting than it is. It's as if his captors got bored with him. He, at least, didn't get backlash from the Abu Ghraib story. Either his captors hadn't learned it yet. or they weren't that uncivilised, or they knew it would lose them face. Especially since he was just a poor dairy farmer and not a mercenary. (I find later that he says his captors asked him about Abu Ghraib and his treatment deteriorated some after that.)
• 6: NY Times smears IRC, a means for the masses to communicate amongst themselves.
• Mandated annual US jollygood report on its human-rights efforts delayed a few days. Not 'cause they have to fill in the gaping hole in the coverage of Iraq or nothin'. TOI My, it must be hard writing a credible whitewash when you've lost so much control over the public's information stream.
• John Scarlett, author of dodgy dossier, promoted to head MI6. G
• Crude futures reach $40 US/bl, the highest since the $41.15 of 1990 Oct 10 in the Gulf War I buildup and the $39.99 last Feb 27 in the GWII buildup. B
• The cause of terrorism is not poverty, it is hatred, Martin said. Yeah, but what causes the hatred, dipstick? It's now apparent we'd be in Iraq if he'd been in charge, making his ads attacking Harper on that point all the more hypocritical.
• 11: Just when the ShruBlair most needs an A-rabs is baaaad refresher a video appears on the web that's supposed to be the al-Zarqawi group beheading Nick Berg. FOX The facts are so strange and fluid that the story is treated with great skepticism by almost anyone not a Free Republican. (Free Republic is part of the story; between Nick's trips to Iraq an article was posted listing Nick's father Michael as an enemy of the occupation.) On the second trip to Iraq Nick was detained, for reasons that are still obscure, by what the US insists were Iraqi police B but the family claims to have an official paper referring to military custody. R Or maybe it's just emails. TD But Nick told his friends consistently that he'd been transferred from Iraq to US custody, possibly because his Jewish name raised espionage suspicions. T The Mosul police claim to have no record of him. B · TBO (The FBI interrogated him three times. R) His family sued the US military over it; Berg was released the next day (after 13 incommunicado w/o charges). He supposedly returned to his Baghdad hotel and after a couple of days dropped out of sight again.

  From here things get really confusing. Supposedly on Monday a body was found by the side of a road. Over the weekend the body was supposedly identified as Berg's. Then this video appears with a statement dated May 11. AJ (Just about in time to, as it were, bail out Inhofe's verbal sewage. AB) One report said the body was found on Saturday. R Another said it was found today! FT (ABC World News Tonight (13th) said his body was found on Saturday—hanging from a bridge near US HQ. Oddly different from the found by the road stories.) Why did this group pick on him? According to the US he was in no way affiliated with the coalition. (Even Hamil, in Iraq not to liberate it for MegaCorp but to feed the family, was a coalition employee.) Berg was in phenomenal physical shape—had to be for the work he was in. T The Berg in the video seems scrawny—'course he probably had not been fed and exercised well, either.

• In December 2003, a guard at a notoriously brutal prison used a German shepherd to attack a 20-year-old prisoner lying on the ground and not resisting. The attack, reported on May 9th by the Los Angeles Times…occurred in Stockton, California at a juvenile correctional facility. Such abuse runs rampant throughout America's prison system, where prisoners are routinely raped, tortured, beaten and humiliated by guards employing brutality to enforce order. Thus it is not surprising that two of the alleged ringleaders in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal are both former civilian prison guards. BF

  
  
  
  

• How could I have been such a mug?

  Just remind me, I said, turning to a colleague and friend, what is the case for this war in Iraq? You voted for it. I voted for it. We both spoke in favour of it…But is there not a time when we have to admit, in all intellectual honesty, that our positions have been overwhelmed by countervailing data?…

  Oh come off it, mate, he said, because he is not only a hawk, but has a keen and impatient mind, don't be so wet. You want a single big argument for the war? The key point is that people are no longer being tortured in jails in Baghdad. That's what we have achieved.…

  I felt a sudden burst of optimism…

  The following day I saw the pictures from the Abu Ghraib jail. T

• In the article, Mr Ramsbottom questions whether all those alleged British troops we see from time to time, both in person and on television, are really troops, and not out-of-work actors left over from some film set or other…he suggests that they are merely provided by the government to dupe the public into believing that it is being protected. The clinching argument, according to Mr Ramsbottom's thesis, is the presence in the UK of a large US occupation force. Why, he asks, would that allow a real British army to exist alongside it? That would be too much of a challenge to the US force's sovereignty in the UK, he suggests. DB

  I like Deadbrain. It tends to string you along a good laugh and then yank your leash =)
• Powell fully admits the Wagons of Mass Destruction weren't. (Earlier he'd prevaricated a bit.) R
• US kites stories of Iraqi sarin and mustard artillery, burying deep in the stories the fact these are decrepit leftovers of the Iran-Iraq war dug up by the resistance who seem to think they're explosives. FOX
• 16: Bizarre incident on Meet the Press as Powell's press aide apparently tries to cut off the interview.
• 17: Worst day so far of India's 129-a-old stock market. Sensex index dropped 15.52%, Nifty dropped 17.47%. MT
• Jews prefer Germany to Israel, according to Israel. AJ Whodathunkit.
• 22: Shrubby falls off his bike because It's been raining a lot and the topsoil is loose even though zero precipitation had been recorded in Waco (a dozen miles east) that week. BF citing AP and WU
• The Berg beheading having totally failed to stop the plunge in his numbers, Shrubby resorts to something scarier—a series of speeches. The first is a flop. (The signs were bad before it even began 'cause the networks pretty much ignored it. ABC) The offer to demolish Abu Ghraib doesn't wash with the Iraqis; the public says it won't make them forget what the Mercans did there and the governing council says it's just a waste of resources—the building's perfectly good (not half 'cause one of the very few things the US has rebuilt since its invasion), it's the staff that needs reform. Y! (His total inability to pronounce Abu Ghraib M while getting the rest nearly flawless was a reminder how little contact he has with the world. The rest of us have settled on a reflexive pronunciation; he's totally unaware of it.) What passes for brainiacs in the neocons think the speech just shows an administration in gratuitous panic. SFG
• The media continue to pretend bafflement over why Shruby's numbers keep going down while Kerry's go up only very little. The reason's obvious: Kerry's been clear he's stay the course on Iraq. He's pledged immortal allegiance to Isfake. He's a Skull and Boner. They know he's a wealthy guy playing at being ornery. (Tho' he 's got a wealthy wife, too.) In other words, he's not an actual alternative. He's the six to Shrub's half-dozen, and the votes are dividing accordingly.
• Since the speech didn't work, the booga booga is cranked up. BBC Asscruft announces an attack definitely coming, definitely, can't do anything about it though. By the way it's based on that message sent after the Madrid bombing which we dismissed at the time as unreliable. B And here's a list of persons we wanna talk to, including Aafia Siddiqui, who's been missing since last April when she was kidnapped by the FBU, the ISI, or her husband, depending who y'ask. The New York police say no-one told them of any great impending threat; more tellingly, the Homeland Security Dep't is taken by surprise. They knew about an announcement but expected it to focus on seven suspects…[they] were caught off guard when Ashcroft went further and warned that al-Qaida is ready to attack the United States. ND
• 27:
  Two crazies apparently decide to try out Zarqawi's methods on their young cousins, 9, 9, and 10 years old. There's blood all over my apartment went the 911 call. USAT
• US sends seven carrier groups to sea on a two-month exercise. WAVY This sounds just like the big USUK mideast military exercise that was all set to go just as 9/11 happened. Soon after, three more are dispatched; leaving in port only one able carrier and one under refit.

June

• 4: Granby CO learns how the Palestinians spend their days. SOSD
• 5: Ronnie Raygun escapes his war-crimes trial.
• US plans to move its Okinawa marines to Hokkaido and subsume Japan's self-defense HQ. X See what the US means by fully sovereign democracy?
• Anti-Stephen-Harper sputter:
  • Yeah, I really want a PM who's every other week slouching off to apologise to Bill O'Reilly.
  • I want a PM whose loyalties lie with a foreign power.
  • I want a PM that's president of exactly the kind of secret society the US creates when it wants to diddle the democracy of another country under cover fo astroturf.
  • The NCC was created to fight healthcare. Harper has long advocated provinces bear their own healtcare burdens. So I'm supposed to believe the campagn shit that he's going to improve the federal responsibility for healthcare?
  • He's told Albertans to build a firewall around their province. Yet the campaigners call him a uniter. This is the only unity Stephen Harper cares about.
  • The party cries Support the troops| yet they're the ones who wanted to send them into a war that had nothing to do with out own security.
  • I can agree we need more/better military; but not to end up as a contractor the Pentagon doesn't have to pay for.
  Don't get me wrong; I despise Martinet too. Martinet wanted us in Iraq.
• UK, US and Australia to begin total internet chat room surveillance. PP To catch pædophiles. Yup. The three instigators of the conquest and butchery in Iraq are monitoring chatrooms, but never think it's to find those nonsheep who don't believe their lies, to consign same to the purifying flames to save the rest of the flock…
• Some 6000 municipal-level elections loses Phony Bliar's Labour about 450 council seats. They even lose their Newcastle bastion. Jack Straw declares The prime minister's position is very secure. As FT pu it One crumb of comfort for Mr Blair was Ken Livingstone's re-election as London mayor. The Labour candidate fought off a strong challenge&hellip but they neglect to mention that Livingston was from the very beginning a loud opponent of conquering Iraq.
• Once Raygun mournathon is all played out another snuff video turns up, supposedly of Robert Jacob, 44, Jewish American working for Vinnell, in Riyadh. He was reported killed on Tuesday, shot nine times in the head. ICH · CNN · X · IHT (Why does CNN say he was 63?)
• Bowell admits the State Department's latest annual terrorism report wasn't accurate. It had claimed terrorism was its lowest in three decades, but the corrections indicated it was up some from the year before. He makes the cryptic comment It's not a political judgment that said, Let's see if we can cook the books. We can't get away with that now. MBOL
• 18: Another beheaded American found, in Saudi Arabia. Or no, wait, maybe not. First we're told his chief killer was killed dumping the headless body; later we're told there was no body.
• A Congressional report concludes that not only are Canadian internet pharmacies safe, they sometimes have higher standards than the US.
• Since Dickhead asserts Saddam and al-Qaida did have significant ties and that he probably knows things about the Saddam-al-Qaida relationship the 9/11 commission doesn't, chair Kean and vice chair Hamilton say they wanna be told. NYT (Maybe they wish now they'd had Bush and Dick under oath.)
• News Canada's going to let its Afghanistan option die and pull 2000 troops. TS I bet that'll change if Stuffy Harpy wins.
• Somewhere I had read the 9/11 commission had found no credible evidence of the bin Laden airlift, which struck me as bizarre since there had never been much dispute on them. Now I read via Hitchens' smear of Fahrenheit 9/11 the 9/11 commission has found nothing to complain of in the timing or arrangement of the flights. HWBS So I guess there was skewed reporting yet again.
• British att'y gen'l figures out that the Gitmo prisoners will not get fair trial.
• 28: US hands over soveriegnty a couple of days early; I hear it's some goony idea about foiling terror plots aimed at the event, like a couple of days are going to make a big difference to terrorists (whoever they are). The first taste of what the US calls sovereignty came when as they thumbed their nose at an Iraqi court's acquittal of Iyad Akmush Kanum #27075. FT

  Canadians don't take the hard right turn Harper and his US pals had been hoping for. TS Harper told reporters he believed his campaign was hindered by being constantly bombarded with accusations of a hidden agenda as he tried to put a moderate face on his party. However, some of the veteran MPs from the party's Reform and Alliance incarnations made some controversial pronouncements on bilingualism, gay rights, abortion, the death penalty and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. CTV (Not to mention former PCs who left with comments that started at can't work with Harper and went downhill. Of course in fairness there was a Liberal or two who decided Harper was dandy, one of them a Senatrix. And the hidden agenda accusations have at least the reality that the CRAPs have not had a policy convention.)

Loose Ends

I thought this was a very good protest sign. Spotted on WRH 2002 Oct 9. City unspecified, but it looks like the Citicorp building on the left. Citibank, incidentally, was likely loansharking the Caribbeans. T

Not to overstate their wonderfulness, but Clinton and Gore have both noticed the If we can't investigate 9/11 because it'd divert effort from TWAT, and Iraq is not a current terrorism problem, and a Whack Iraq would be a big diversion of effort, then there should be no Whack Iraq at this time. In fact it appears the work of manufacturing consent has diverted enough effort from TWAT that TWAT's already losing ground. G

GWB: `We need common-sense judges who understand that our rights were derived from God. Those are the kind of judges I intend to put on the bench.' Constitution: `The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the US and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the US.' MSN

Joseph Sobran: It would be a healthy exercise for every politician to look in the mirror every morning and remind himself that he holds office only because, in a two-man race against another mediocrity, a modest majority of those half-informed people who imagined that their votes mattered reckoned that he was the lesser evil. And they weren't too sure about that. FOT

William E. Simon: Freedom is strangely ephemeral. It is something like breathing; one only becomes acutely aware of its importance when one is choking. FOT

Hugo Chavez: The US government should accept that the time of cowardly governments on this continent, subordinated to the dictates of Washington, is coming to an end…The US does not want to acknowledge that the true cause of the fall of governments such as Sanchez de Losada's [in Bolivia] has to do with the poverty and misery generated by neoliberal [sic] policies imposed by imperialist economic models. That's the real cause of instability in this continent. AOL (That this time of cowardice is ending may be so; but that merely serves to corner the US—make it even more dangerous.)

Following on my rant about Frontline's Missile Wars, some things to think on:

Early in 1993 Clinton proposed softening the impact of defense cutbacks with programs to help contractors develop products for civilian markets. But after nearly two years and several gigadollars of federal funds, plowshares are not proving as profitable as swords. In fact, there are rather few plowshares to be seen…The Nat'l Commission for Economic Conversion and Disarmament, a nonprofit organization in Washington DC, reports that defense-related jobs are disappearing at an ever-quickening pace. In the first half of 1994 alone, 115,000 defense-related manufacturing jobs were cut—close to the total of 164,000 such jobs lost during the whole of 1993. The commission has recorded the loss of 728,000 positions between 1990 and mid-1994, most of them in California. [`Fighting for Survival: Peace has fizzled for defense contractors' Scientific American 1994 Nov p 98]

US arms manufacturers are also among the benefactors. The Aerospace Industry Association has given twice as much money to political campaigns as all of the pro-Israel groups combined. The arms industry is far more influential on Capitol Hill than AIPAC. According to Stephen Zunes, Middle East editor for Foreign Policy in Focus, the `general thrust of US policy would be pretty much the same even if AIPAC didn't exist.' CD

In the fall of 1993, when many were supporting what they hoped would become a viable peace process, 78 senators wrote to former President Bill Clinton insisting that aid to Israel remain at current levels. Their reasons were the `massive procurement of sophisticated arms by Arab states.' Yet the letter neglected to mention that 80% of those arms to Arab countries came from the US itself. Stephen Zunes has argued that the Aerospace Industry Association (AIA), which promotes these massive arms shipments, is even more influential in determining US policy towards Israel than the notorious AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) lobby. AIA has given two times more money to campaigns than all of the pro-Israel groups combined. Zunes asserts that the general thrust of US policy would be pretty much the same even if AIPAC didn't exist: `We didn't need a pro-Indonesia lobby to support Indonesia in its savage repression of East Timor all these years.' WRMEA

Israel is by far the largest recipient of US military aid in the world. As a result the defense industry has grown very fond of the special US/Israeli relationship. The Aerospace Industry Association (AIA), a huge campaign contributor, is an ardent supporter of Israel's `right to defend itself.' (Stephen Zunes referred to in Bowles 3-2002) CR

Robert Kennedy: [Gross nat'l product] measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. LAC

Martin Sheen: although my opinion is not any more valuable or relevant merely because I am an actor, that fact does not render it unimportant. Some have suggested otherwise, trying to denigrate the validity of this opinion and those of my colleagues solely due to our celebrity status. This is insulting not only to us but to other people of conscience who love their country enough to risk its wrath by going against the grain of powerful government policy.Whether celebrity or diplomat, cabdriver or student, all deserve a turn at the podium. AN

Henry Kissinger: Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy. GO · ADL · [TH citing Jensen-Stevenson Kiss the Boys Goodbye p97 citing Woodward and Bernstein The Final Days] (I think we see who supports the troops and who does not.)

Michael Boren Williams, former Campaign Manager for Senator Gary Hart and Bush murder-attempt victim: George Bush is a satanic, sadistic, brutal monster. Compared to George Bush, Adolf Hitler was a true gentleman. BN

Lily Tomlin: `No matter how cynical I get, I just can't keep up.' [MCP `What they're hiding in Venice FL'] (Jane Wagner: `No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up.' BS)

Felix Frankfurter, Supreme Court Justice cWW2: The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes. AMPP

Judge Earl Johnson Jr.: Poor people have access to the courts in the same sense that Christians had access to the lions. AMPP

R. Buckminster Fuller Critical Path: Great nations are simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes, vastly ambitious individuals who had become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery. AMPP

R. Buckminster Fuller: To expose a T$4.2 ripoff of the American people by the stockholders of the 1000 largest corporations over the last 100 years will be a tall order of business. AMPP

R. Buckminster Fuller: I find that approximately no one knows what is going on. That's why we have been leaving it to the politicians to make the world work. DC

Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn: When you have robbed a man of everything he is no longer in your power. He is free again. DC (R. B. Fuller would substantiate that with personal experience. At one point he had lost everything including his family, and was about to commit suicide when he realised he was now totally free: he could try anything, and if it failed, so what? He had nothing to lose and noöne to disappoint, things could only get better. As they say, the rest is history.)

Thomas Carlyle: Burke said there are three Estates in Parliament; but in the reporters' gallery yonder, there sat a fourth Estate more important than them all. DC (In case you wonder where 4th estate came from.)

Hitler: Confusion, indecision, fear; these are my weapons. DC (Not Bill Gates: Fear, uncertainty, doubt (FUD) are my weapons)

Nixon: When the president does it, that means it is not illegal. DC (Roman law: What pleases the prince has the force of law. GBUB)

Terry Reed Compromised: Our government is so corrupt that citizens no longer become incensed when they learn the CIA is running drugs into the US. AMPP

Rep. Louis T. McFadden: The Federal Reserve Banks are one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever seen. There is not a man within the sound of my voice who does not know that this Nation is run by the International Bankers. AMPP

Robert Tefton: `Patriot, n. A herd member who compensates for lack of self-esteem by identifying with an abstraction. An enemy of individual freedom. See also bootlicker.' AF

Franklin Roosevelt: `In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happened, you can bet it was planned that way.' C2

Some bleedinheart librul named Dwight D. Eisenhower: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in a final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed—those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone—it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. AF

Hyman Rickover: If you're going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won't. FOT

Martin L. King Jr: Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal. FOT

Will Rogers: The difference between death and taxes is that death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets. FOT

Anonymous: If you're happy and you know it, clank your chains. FOT

Anonymous: In a democracy, two wolves and a sheep take a majority vote on what's for supper. In a constitutional republic, the wolves are forbidden on voting on what's for supper, and the sheep are well armed. FOT

Oscar Wilde: Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people. FOT

George Orwell: `The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.' AF

H. L. Mencken: `Samuel Johnson's saying that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels has some truth in it but not nearly enough. Patriotism, in truth, is the great nursery of scoundrels, and its annual output is probably greater than that of even religion. Its chief glories are the demagogue, the military bully, and the spreaders of libels and false history. Its philosophy rests firmly on the doctrine that the end justifies the means—that any blow, whether above or below the belt, is fair against dissenters from its wholesale denial of plain facts.' AF

George Will: Football exemplifies the worst features of American life: it's violence punctuated by committee meetings. AMPP

Ernst Jan Plugge: The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is probably the day they start making vacuum cleaners. AMPP

Tim Freeman (à la Niemöller): When they took the 4th amendment, I was silent because I don't deal drugs. When they took the 6th amendment, I kept quiet because I know I'm innocent. When they took the 2nd amendment, I said nothing because I don't own a gun. Now they've come for the 1st amendment, and I can't say anything at all. BW

Friends Committee on National Legislation: The US ranks last among developed countries in the percentage of its GNP (0.11%) given in aid. On average, governments in the European Union contribute three times as much of their GNP (0.33%) in non-military foreign aid. 3WT

Robert Bowman, Vietnam veteran, Bishop of the United Catholic Church in Melbourne Beach FL: We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism and in the future, nuclear terrorism. 3WT

For instance, hearings held by Sen. John Glenn a few years ago (1988 Aug? EN) disclosed that there was a meltdown at the Savannah River reactor which was producing tritium for H-bombs and had been completely kept quiet. In fact, as Gould and Goldman show in Deadly Deceit they falsified the meteorological measurements, the radioactive measurements, and the measurements of Sr-90 and were actually high when they were nearby, but they showed that for the station nearest Savannah River there was practically no radioactivity in the air, but all around the area there were huge releases into the air recorded. So they were manipulating the data in order to protect the secrecy that was essential in order not to have the public demand an end to the bomb-building. [GSP quoting R] (Savannah River is that green circular area. GlobeXplorer has no high-detail images; such may be classified.) One section of the SR complex is a `high-security, high-priced, high-tech cocoon…to process radioactive materials from contaminated [Gulf-War] equipment. It has special walls and flooring to prevent any air or dust from escaping…It's known as Building 101.' CBC

Long Is. Sound for instance, we calculated that the liquid releases from the Millstone [2 & 3 Waterford CT] reactor failures in the 1970s accounted for something like 60–70% of all the liquid releases of radioactivity in the US. And its been killing Long Is. Sound. And of course the people eat the fish and the oysters and don't know what's happening. This liquid causes diseases among the fish and the oysters and they die off. In addition the reactor gases produce an OX in the atmosphere, that is, a combined nitrogen and oxygen into nitrates, and these go and, like fertilizer, cause the algae blooms. R · S

Enrico Fermi, south of Detroit.

At the close of 35 years of operations, the Fernald OH plant had leaked 150 tons of radioactive U. [S citing Sen. John Glenn in Reactors at the Savannah River Plant: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Strategic Forces and Nuclear Deterrence of the Senate Committee on Armed Services 100th Cong., 2nd. sess., 1988 Feb 29, at 7]

Shippingport PA `December 2, 1957 The first full-scale nuclear power plant at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, goes into service. Twenty-one days later it reaches full power, generating 60 megawatts of electricity.' NEI · NMC 1970, 3rd April—SHIPPINGPORT, PENNSYLVANIA, USA Sr-90 in the soil at the end of the site of the Shippingport nuclear reactor (claimed to be the safest in the US) reached a level 100 times greater than the national average. The radioactivity in milk was 4 times greater. (N. Thieberger Op.Cit.p.5) P

Part of ID Nat'l Lab Freaky circle about 300 m across at the lab. I doubt it's a film spot because there're roads that seem arranged around it.

Ralph Hodgesson/Hodgson: The handwriting on the wall may [well] be a forgery. VS · PA · AQ

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