Just Foreign Policy Iraqi Death Estimator    

Saturday, June 04, 2005

$1B spent on Baghdad embassy, $1.3B to go:

With a staff of about 1,000 Americans and 400 Iraqis, the mission is one of the United States' largest. It is dramatically larger than what came before it in Baghdad: When the United States pulled out of the country after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the embassy staff numbered around 50 and had an annual operating budget of $3.5 million.

http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20050602-040125-3089r.htm

http://snipurl.com/fd1o
U.S. disbands Iraqi army unit

An Iraqi army unit has been disbanded after it refused to attend a U.S. training course in Baghdad, former members of the unit said on Saturday.

The soldiers said they feared reprisals from locals if they were seen to have cooperated with the Americans. (Reuters)

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3094763,00.html
Pentagon spin doctors control media coverage of Quran Desecration:

Releasing the report when most beat reporters have left for the weekend was a calculated move by White House and Pentagon spin doctors to control media coverage of the explosive report.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9051.htm

http://snipurl.com/fd1a
Before The U.S. Attacked Iraq

Facts EVERY war supporter should have known


Who "mass-graved" thousands of Iraqis by bulldozing over them?

Where did the figure of "300,000" originate as the number of Iraqis "killed by Hussein"?

What nation had the highest number of citizens with PhDs on the world? And had more PhDs than America?

What nation won Humanitarian Awards for its literacy programs?

Answers Here
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9045.htm

http://snipurl.com/fd12

===

U.S. Effort to “Spread Democracy” Leaves A Trail of Conflict and Suffering

One-Tenth of Arabs live directly under foreign occupation. — Statement by Rima Khalaf, assistant secretary-general of the United Nations Development Program, New York Times, April 6, 2005.

By Rachelle Marshall

Given George Bush’s practice of saying one thing while doing another (hailing the “advancing rights of mankind” at the United Nations while his Justice Department was jailing immigrants without due process), it is not surprising that his campaign to bring democracy to the Middle East so far has only meant replacing unfriendly regimes with more obliging ones. The people of Afghanistan and Iraq are still waiting for real freedom.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9044.htm

http://snipurl.com/fd16

Just to remind people of what we have lost
1646 Fatalities
In hostile actions: 1263In non-hostile actions: 383 Posted by Hello

Says it all Posted by Hello
$18.5 million misspent by U.S. Homeland Security Dept., 146 arrested

WASHINGTON (AP) - Investigations by the U.S. Homeland Security Department's internal watchdog yielded the arrests of 146 workers and grant recipients and identified $18.5 million in unsupported costs during a six-month period that began last fall. Full Story

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/WarOnTerrorism/home.html

Hell Yeah, It would also be good for Liars I think Posted by Hello
Sex abuse costs diocese $160m

In the largest-ever US church abuse settlement, the Catholic diocese of Covington, Kentucky, has agreed to set up a $US120 million ($160 million) fund to compensate victims of child-molesting priests and other employees. more

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/index.html
Florida test shows e-vote fraud possible

Without legislature-rejected paper trails, voter tallies can be changed, go undetected.

http://www.rawstory.com/
US lowers standards in army numbers crisis
Jamie Wilson in Washington
Saturday June 4, 2005The Guardian

The US military has stopped battalion commanders from dismissing new recruits for drug abuse, alcohol, poor fitness and pregnancy in an attempt to halt the rising attrition rate in an army under growing strain as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

An internal memo sent to senior commanders said the growing dropout rate was "a matter of great concern" in an army at war. It told officers: "We need your concerted effort to reverse the negative trend. By reducing attrition 1%, we can save up to 3,000 initial-term soldiers. That's 3,000 more soldiers in our formations."

Officially, the memo, reported in the Wall Street Journal and posted on Slate.com, ordered battalion commanders to refer cases of problem soldiers up to brigade level. Military experts warned that the move would make it more difficult to remove poor soldiers and would lower quality in the ranks.

A military spokesman told the Guardian yesterday: "It was merely a question of an additional set of eyes looking at an issue before we release potential recruits."

The Wall Street Journal quoted a battalion commander as saying: "It is the guys on weight control ... school no-shows, drug users, etc, who eat up my time and cause my hair to grey prematurely ... Often they have more than one of these issues simultaneously."

Asked what the new policy meant, John Pike from the thinktank Globalsecurity.org said: "It means there is a war on. They need all the soldiers they can get. But it is a dilemma. You need good soldiers more in wartime than peacetime."

The latest controversy comes amid a growing recruitment and retention crisis in the US military. Last month the army announced that it was 6,659 soldiers short of its recruitment targets for the year so far. On Wednesday, the department of defence withheld the latest figures, a move seen by most commentators as heralding more bad news.

The military's target is 80,000 new recruits this year, but the army only managed 73% of its target in February, 68% in March and 57% in April, forcing the expansion of a pilot programme offering 15-month active duty enlistments, rather than the usual four years.

The crisis has even led to fears - despite repeated denials by President George Bush - of a return to the draft system that conscripted 1.8 million Americans during the Vietnam war.
Major General Michael Rochelle, the head of army recruitment, said this was the "toughest recruiting climate ever faced by the all-volunteer army", with the war raising concern among potential recruits and their families.

"Recruiters have been given greater leeway," said Mr Pike. "By doing things to increase quantity you are also doing things to decrease quality, but they have made the judgment that that is the way to go."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1499164,00.html
One recruiting standard that was about to be lowered was a rule governing tattoos in the navy and marines. "If you have excessively prominent and vulgar tattoos they will not take you right now, but that is about to change," he said.
A commander quoted in the Wall Street Journal linked the growing attrition rate among new recruits to a slipping of standards by recruiters, who were under pressure to meet their monthly quotas.
An army spokeswoman said: "We are doing our best to decrease attrition level, but we have not and will not lower our standards for recruiting and retaining soldiers."
Yet in March 17.4% of all new army recruits failed to complete training, while another 7.3% did not finish the first three years with their unit.
Last month it emerged that one recruiter gave advice on how to cheat a mandatory drug test to a potential would-be soldier who said he had a drug problem.
In another incident in Texas, a recruiter threatened a 20-year-old man with arrest if he did not turn up to an interview. As a result all military recruiters stopped work for one day to attend retraining classes on acceptable practices.
Holding "History's Actors" To Account
By Onnesha Roychoudhuri
May 27, 2005

How, exactly, does the Bush administration get away with everything?

http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2005/05/holding_history.html
THE WORLD
Latin America Leaders Balk at U.S. Plan
Many oppose the push to get the OAS to set democratic standards, saying they want to avoid
the Washington- Venezuela dispute.

By Paul Richter, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — Latin American leaders are quietly resisting a Bush administration proposal to strengthen democracy in the region, saying they fear it was crafted to target Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.U.S. officials have been trying to persuade the Organization of American States to adopt what they say are standards for democratic government.


Diplomats from many countries fear that it is aimed at Chavez, viewed by some as an anti-U.S. leader, and that it also could amount to an invitation for the U.S.-dominated group to meddle in other nations' affairs.

"This organization has followed a principle of non-intervention for many years," Salvador Rodezno, the Honduran ambassador to the OAS, said in an interview. "Many countries are just not ready for this…. We should move gradually.

" The dispute over the proposal, which will be the focus of discussion at an OAS meeting in Florida next week, also is a sign of Latin America's growing resistance to U.S. influence. Left-leaning leaders are now in charge of three-fourths of the hemisphere's governments.

The OAS has historically organized joint actions to help countries that have suffered coups or blows to the governing order. But officials of the United States and other countries have argued for some time that it would be better to head off these crises. Officials made this point after governments fell in Ecuador this year, in Haiti last year and in Bolivia in 2003.

U.S. diplomats have been circulating a proposal that would create a mechanism by which the OAS could evaluate how well each country's democratic institutions functioned. The standard of measurement would be the Inter-American Democratic Charter, a collection of core democratic principles that OAS members voted to adopt in September 2001.

The OAS could compile a list of countries that don't meet the standards, just as the United States and other international organizations do for countries that are judged lacking on narcotics, human rights, corruption or other criteria.

Making such judgments would assign a more muscular role to the OAS, which usually shies from strong action against its own members.

But many Latin American countries dislike the idea that they could be stigmatized by inclusion on such a list, even if it didn't necessarily entail any other punishment, OAS diplomats and analysts say.

"Latin American countries don't like lists of who's naughty and who's nice," said Daniel P. Erikson of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington. "They've watched the U.S. government developing lists for years; they don't go down well

." Many Latin American countries are also unwilling to support the proposal if it means taking sides with the United States in its growing confrontation with Chavez.

The populist Venezuelan leader has been steadily stepping up his denunciation of the United States, which he accuses of seeking to dominate the region. He has recently threatened to break off relations with the United States — a key customer for Venezuelan oil — over its unwillingness to extradite a Cuban exile wanted in Venezuela for the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner. >>>>continued

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-oas3jun03,1,69304.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

This child is innocent of any crimes Posted by Hello

The Real War, In Iraq the war they do not publicise Posted by Hello
Army told to release abuse videos
ACLU prevails in lawsuit over Abu Ghraib images

Associated Press
June 3, 2005, 12:26AM

NEW YORK - A judge has ordered the government to release four videos from Abu Ghraib prison and dozens of photographs from the same collection of photos that touched off the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal a year ago.

The federal judge issued the order late Wednesday requiring the Army to release the material to the American Civil Liberties Union to comply with the Freedom of Information Act.
The ACLU said the material would show that the abuse was "more than the actions of a few rogue soldiers."

Judge Alvin Hellerstein said the 144 pictures and videos can be turned over in edited form to protect the victims' identities. He gave the Army one month to release them.

The judge ordered the release after he viewed eight of the photos last week. They were given to the Army by a military policeman assigned to Abu Ghraib.

In October 2003, the ACLU filed a lawsuit seeking information on treatment of detainees in U.S. custody and the transfer of prisoners to countries known to use torture. The ACLU contends that prisoner abuse is systemic.

"These images may be ugly and shocking ... (but) the American public deserves to know what is being done in our name," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU.

So far, 36,000 pages of documents and the reports of 130 investigations, mostly from the FBI and Army, have been turned over to the ACLU.

The group is seeking documents from the CIA and the Department of Defense as well.

The judge said last week that he believed photographs "are the best evidence the public can have of what occurred" at the prison.

Government lawyer Sean Lane had argued that releasing pictures, even in redacted form, would violate Geneva Convention rules by subjecting the detainees to additional humiliation.

Lane did not immediately return a telephone message for comment Thursday.

Photo gallery: Prisoner abuse evidence turned over to U.S. military. Note graphic content. • Photo gallery: Soldiers accused of Abu Ghraib abuse.
Multimedia: Overview of Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse case.
DOD independent panel's final report
The Taguba report

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/3209344
Growing Problem for Military Recruiters: Parents
By DAMIEN CAVE
Published: June 3, 2005

Rachel Rogers, a single mother of four in upstate New York, did not worry about the presence of National Guard recruiters at her son's high school until she learned that they taught students how to throw hand grenades, using baseballs as stand-ins. For the last month she has been insisting that administrators limit recruiters' access to children.

Orlando Terrazas, a former truck driver in Southern California, said he was struck when his son told him that recruiters were promising students jobs as musicians. Mr. Terrazas has been trying since September to hang posters at his son's public school to counter the military's message.

Meanwhile, Amy Hagopian, co-chairwoman of the Parent-Teacher-Student Association at Garfield High School in Seattle, has been fighting against a four-year-old federal law that requires public schools to give military recruiters the same access to students as college recruiters get, or lose federal funding. She also recently took a few hours off work to stand beside recruiters at Garfield High and display pictures of injured American soldiers from Iraq.

"We want to show the military that they are not welcome by the P.T.S.A. in this building," she said. "We hope other P.T.S.A.'s will follow."

Two years into the war in Iraq, as the Army and Marines struggle to refill their ranks, parents have become boulders of opposition that recruiters cannot move.

Mothers and fathers around the country said they were terrified that their children would have to be killed - or kill - in a war that many see as unnecessary and without end.

Around the dinner table, many parents said, they are discouraging their children from serving.
At schools, they are insisting that recruiters be kept away, incensed at the access that they have to adolescents easily dazzled by incentive packages and flashy equipment.

A Department of Defense survey last November, the latest, shows that only 25 percent of parents would recommend military service to their children, down from 42 percent in August 2003.

"Parents," said one recruiter in Ohio who insisted on anonymity because the Army ordered all recruiters not to talk to reporters, "are the biggest hurdle we face."

Legally, there is little a parent can do to prevent a child over 18 from enlisting. But in interviews, recruiters said that it was very hard to sign up a young man or woman over the strong objections of a parent.

The Pentagon - faced with using only volunteers during a sustained conflict, an effort rarely tried in American history - is especially vexed by a generation of more activist parents who have no qualms about projecting their own views onto their children.

Lawrence S. Wittner, a military historian at the State University of New York, Albany, said today's parents also had more power.

"With the draft, there were limited opportunities for avoiding the military, and parents were trapped, reduced to draft counseling or taking their children to Canada," he said. "But with the volunteer armed force, what one gets is more vigorous recruitment and more opportunities to resist."

Some of that opportunity was provoked by the very law that was supposed to make it easier for recruiters to reach students more directly. No Child Left Behind, which was passed by Congress in 2001, requires schools to turn over students' home phone numbers and addresses unless parents opt out. That is often the spark that ignites parental resistance.

Recruiters, in interviews over the past six months, said that opposition can be fierce. Three years ago, perhaps 1 or 2 of 10 parents would hang up immediately on a cold call to a potential recruit's home, said a recruiter in New York who, like most others interviewed, insisted on anonymity to protect his career. "Now," he said, "in the past year or two, people hang up all the time. "

Several recruiters said they had even been threatened with violence.

"I had one father say if he saw me on his doorstep I better have some protection on me," said a recruiter in Ohio. "We see a lot of hostility." >>>continued

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/nyregion/03recruit.html?

Click to Enlarge and Read.


This is NOT a joke, NOR is it fake.

Reported by British paper New Nation in 2003 and BURIED by the US media. FOUR MONTHS AFTER being accused of RAPE bush invaded IRAQ.

Wake up. Wake Up.

Reposted because there are STILL more questions than answers. Posted by Hello

Al Jezeera Smacks Rummy.


---Read Rummys words VERY CAREFULLY... THINK..Its' Patriotic.---

Al Jazeera denies Rumsfeld charge it airs killings
Live Link Above.


DUBAI (Reuters) - The Arab TV channel Al Jazeera rejected on Saturday as unfounded Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's accusations that it was encouraging Islamic militant groups by airing beheadings of foreign hostages in Iraq.

ADVERTISEMENT

"Al Jazeera ... has never at any time transmitted pictures of killings or beheadings and ... any talk about this is absolutely unfounded," the television said in a statement.

Al Jazeera, repeatedly accused by Washington of biased reporting on Iraq, has often shown video of hostages pleading at gunpoint for their government to withdraw its troops. But it does not broadcast footage of killings, posted on the Internet by militants.

The channel voiced "deep regret and surprise" over Rumsfeld's remarks.

Rumsfeld earlier said: "If anyone lived in the Middle East and watched a network like the Al Jazeera day after day after day, even if he was an American, he would start waking up and asking what's wrong. But America is not wrong.

"It's the people who are going on television chopping off people's heads, that is wrong," he told a security conference in Singapore.

"And television networks that carry it and promote it and jump on the spark every time there is a terrorist act are promoting the acts," he said.

Al Jazeera's offices in Baghdad and in the Afghan capital, Kabul, have been hit by U.S. fire but Washington said the bombings were accidental and had not targeted the network.

Al Jazeera, based in Qatar, won millions of Arab viewers before and during the U.S-led war against Afghanistan, and aired exclusive footage of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

The channel has angered some Arab governments as well as Washington with its coverage of the war in Iraq, Islamic militancy and interviews with Arab dissidents.

Al Jazeera is forbidden to report from Saudi Arabia, and Iraq's U.S.-backed authorities closed its office there, accusing it of supporting insurgents.

The station, which has interviewed Iraqi government and U.S. officials on Iraq, denies it is helping the militants' cause.

More than 150 foreigners have been kidnapped in Iraq in the past year. Some have been released, but about one third have been killed.

(Additional reporting by Heba Kandil in Dubai)


Link in headline.


--- Let me repost what Rummy said...

xxRumsfeld earlier said: "If anyone lived in the Middle East and watched a network like the Al Jazeera day after day after day, even if he was an American, he would start waking up and asking what's wrong. But America is not wrong.xx

No, of course not, because if America was WRONG...that would make you a WAR CRIMINAL.

Gee, I guess if you did see someone questioning oh, say, WMD LIES everyday, I suppose that would make you wake up and say, "Duh, I think there is something WRONG..!!!''

EVEN if you are an AMERICAN!!---
Video: Britain's Iraq war poster boy:

42-year-old Colonel Tim Collins was Britain's Iraq war poster boy. The adulation suddenly died away when Collins was accused of war crimes. He was totally cleared by a searching investigation. But when he left the army and began to speak his mind about the Iraq war and the wider war on terrorism, many in the British establishment must have wanted to strip him of his OBE.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9029.htm

http://snipurl.com/fchx
===

Dahr Jamail : The failed siege of Fallujah:

Simmering anger grows with time among Fallujans who, after having most of their city destroyed by the US military onslaught, have seen promises of rebuilding by both the US military and Iraqi government remain mostly unfulfilled.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GF03Ak01.html

http://snipurl.com/fchn
Administration's offenses impeachable

So, what does it mean?

By Robert Shetterly

It means that our president and all of his administration are war criminals. It's as simple as that. They lied to the American people, have killed and injured and traumatized thousands of American men and women doing their patriotic duty, killed at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians, destroyed Iraq's infrastructure and poisoned its environment, squandered billions and billions of our tax dollars, made a mockery of American integrity in the world.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9035.htm

http://snipurl.com/fcgz
VIDEO SPECIAL Aidan Delgado: What I Saw in Iraq

http://www.truthout.org/multimedia.htm

Friday, June 03, 2005


An Amazing illusion. Posted by Hello

Art As Illussion. Posted by Hello

You Have Got To Be Fucking Kidding Me....

Live Link Above.

Jailers splashed Koran with urine - Pentagon

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - American jailers at the Guantanamo prison for foreign terrorism suspects splashed a Koran with urine, kicked and stepped on the Islamic holy book and soaked it with water, the U.S. military said on Friday.

U.S. Southern Command, responsible for the prison at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, described for the first time five cases of "mishandling" of a Koran by U.S. personnel confirmed by a newly completed military inquiry, officials said in a statement.

In the incident involving urine, which took place this past March, Southern Command said a guard left his post and urinated near an air vent and "the wind blew his urine through the vent" and into a cell block.

It said a detainee told guards the urine "splashed on him and his Koran." The statement said the detainee was given a new prison uniform and Koran, and that the guard was reprimanded and given duty in which he had no contact with prisoners.

Southern Command said a civilian contractor interrogator, who was later fired, apologized in July 2003 to a detainee for stepping on his Koran. In August 2003, prisoners' Korans became wet when night-shift guards had thrown water balloons in a cell block, the statement said. In February 2002, guards kicked a prisoner's Koran, it added.

In the fifth "confirmed incident" of mishandling a Koran, Southern Command said a prisoner in August 2003 complained that "a two-word obscenity" had been written in English in his Koran. Southern Command said it was "possible" a guard had written the words but "equally possible" the prisoner himself had done it.

Southern Command released its findings on a Friday night.


---The Wind..Blewwwwww The urine...through..OH FUCKING WHATEVER!!!.. AND WATER BALLOONS...?? Yeah..WHAT EXACTLY were the WATER BALLOONS being used for again...? Oh and By The Way...That brown guy could just be lying...This is an insult to ANYONE with an I.Q. above 20...Unfreakingbelievable.---

Ground Zero, where only prayers remain in the void. Posted by Hello
FAA Managers Destroyed 9/11 Tape
Recording Contained Accounts of Communications With Hijacked Planes

By Sara Kehaulani GooWashington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 6, 2004; 6:16 PM

Six air traffic controllers provided accounts of their communications with hijacked planes on Sept. 11, 2001, on a tape recording that was later destroyed by Federal Aviation Administration managers, according to a government investigative report issued today.

It is unclear what information was on the tape because no one ever listened to, transcribed or duplicated it, the report by the Department of Transportation inspector general said.

The report concluded that the FAA generally cooperated with the independent panel investigating the terrorist attacks by providing documents about its activities on Sept. 11, but the actions of two FAA managers "did not, in our view, serve the interests of the FAA, the Department [of Transportation] or the public."

The report was conducted at the request of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) after the panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, officially known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, complained that the FAA had been less than forthcoming in turning over documents and issued a subpoena to the agency for more information.

The FAA said it was cooperating fully with the 9/11 panel. The agency said it took disciplinary action against the employee who destroyed the tape but declined to elaborate on what kind of action they took. [Earlier, an FAA official incorrectly stated that the agency took action against two employees in the case.]

"We believe the audiotape in question appears to be consistent with written statements and other materials provided to FBI investigators and would not have added in any significant way to the information contained in what has already been provided to investigators and members of the 9/11 commission," said FAA spokesman Greg Martin.

Hours after the hijacked planes flew into the World Trade Center Towers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, an FAA manager at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center gathered six controllers who communicated or tracked two of the hijacked planes and recorded in a one-hour interview their personal accounts of what occurred, the report stated.

The manager, who is not named in the report, said that his intentions were to provide quick information to federal officials investigating the attack before the air traffic controllers involved took sick leave for the stress of their experiences, as is common practice.

According to the report, a second manager at the New York center promised a union official representing the controllers that he would "get rid of" the tape after controllers used it to provide written statements to federal officials about the events of the day.

Instead, the second manager said he destroyed the tape between December 2001 and January 2002 by crushing the tape with his hand, cutting it into small pieces and depositing the pieces into trash cans around the building, the report said.

The tape's existence was never made known to federal officials investigating the attack, nor to FAA officials in Washington. Staff members of the 9/11 panel found out about the tape during interviews with some controllers who participated in the recording.

One controller said she asked to listen to the tape in order to prepare her written account of her experience, but one of the managers denied her request.

The New York managers acknowledged that they received an e-mail from FAA officials instructing them to retain all materials related to the Sept. 11 attacks. "If a question arises whether or not you should retain the data, RETAIN IT," the report quoted the e-mail as saying.
But the managers decided not to include the tape in a November 2001 "Formal Accident Package" report the office prepared because one manager said he did not want to break his word to the union official and he did not think the tape should ever have been made.

The inspector general concluded today that the managers' actions resulted in the loss of potential evidence that would allow the 9/11 commission to compare controllers' recollection of the events immediately after the attacks with the written statements prepared three weeks later.

"The destruction of evidence in the Government's possession, in this case an audiotape -- particularly during times of national crisis -- has the effect of fostering an appearance that information is being withheld from the public."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A6632-2004May6&notFound=true

Governors' ex-aide linked to campaign probe

Governors' ex-aide linked to campaign probe
Friday, June 03, 2005
John Caniglia, Sandy Theis and Becky GaylordPlain Dealer Reporters

H. Douglas Talbott, a former top aide to two Ohio governors, told federal authorities that Republican coin dealer Tom Noe persuaded him to contribute $2,000 to President Bush's re-election campaign - then reimbursed him for the donation, The Plain Dealer has learned.

Talbott appeared Wednesday before a federal grand jury in Toledo that is investigating whether Noe illegally reimbursed as many as two dozen contributors to a Bush fund-raiser in October 2003. The grand jury is looking into whether Noe made the reimbursements to circumvent campaign finance laws, which limit individual contributions to $2,000.

Repeated attempts to reach Talbott were unsuccessful.

His appearance before the grand jury marked the first time a former top aide to Gov. Bob Taft and former Gov. George Voinovich has been linked to the federal investigation of possible laundering of Bush campaign money.

Jon Richardson, an attorney for Noe, could not be reached for comment.

In a separate investigation, the Ohio Ethics Commission is looking into a personal loan that Talbott received from Noe in 2002 to buy a home in Lakeside, near Port Clinton.
He is not the only former state employee who once advised Noe on his state duties, then benefited from Noe's largess.

Doug Moorman, a former executive assistant to Taft, told The Plain Dealer that he accepted a $5,000 loan from Noe.

The payment occurred in August 2004 - about 13 months after Moorman left the state payroll to join the Greater Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce, he said.

Terms of the loan are not in writing, Moorman said. In fact, the only term appears to a promise of repayment.
Hope we are getting some truth here

Breaking News : Kerry To Push For Bush Impeachment
Posted by News Reporter on 2005/6/3 10:29:52
By Sher Zieve

John Kerry announced Thursday that he intends to present Congress with The Downing Street Memo, reported by the London Times 1 May 2005. As reported by NewsMax, the memo purports to include minutes from a July 2002 meeting with Tony Blair, in which Blair ostensibly said that President Bush’s Administration “fixed” intelligence on Iraq in order to justify the Iraqi war. In an interview with the Standard Times, Kerry said: "It's amazing to me the way it escaped major media discussion. It's not being missed on the Internet, I can tell you that."

The Boston Globe published an article by Ralph Nader, Tuesday, in which Nader also called for President Bush’s impeachment. The story is being carried on Michael Moore’s website and the Democratic Underground. Failed presidential candidate Kerry advised that he will begin the presentation of his case for President Bush’s impeachment to Congress, on Monday.

http://www.theconservativevoice.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=6057

SHOULDN'T THIS GUY BE LOCKED UP Posted by Hello
LOOK WHO'S TALKING SHOULDN'T THIS WANKER DRUG USER BE IN THE SLAMMER, OHHH SHIT ANOTHER ONE THEY FORGOT TO LOCK UP

Limbaugh: Making Election Day a holiday won't help Dems because "[m]ost of their voters don't work anyway"

Nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh declared that the Democratic Party's plan to make Election Day a national holiday, outlined by Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean at the June 2 "Take Back America" conference, won't "help them that much" because "[m]ost of their voters don't work anyway."

From the June 2 edition of The Rush Limbaugh Show:

LIMBAUGH: The two to three big opportunities so far mentioned by Howard Dean -- pension portability and changes to election laws. ... So portability of pensions. What's the second one? Oh, yeah, Election Day a holiday. And well, you know -- I don't know why they need to do that. Most of their voters don't work anyway, so I don't know how that's going to help them that much. At least in a percentage basis.

Posted to the web on Friday June 3, 2005 at 12:21 PM EST

http://mediamatters.org/items/200506030003
Three GIs to Face Trial in Iraqi's Death
ROBERT WELLER, Associated Press Writer

DENVER -- Three soldiers have been ordered to stand trial at Fort Carson on murder charges in the suffocation of an Iraqi general, who died during an interrogation 1 1/2 years ago.

Chief Warrant Officers Lewis Welshofer and Jeff L. Williams and Spc. Jerry Loper, all of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, also face charges of assault and dereliction of duty during combat operations, Army spokeswoman Kim Tisor said Thursday.

Prosecutors claim the soldiers put Maj. Gen. Abed Mowhoush headfirst into a sleeping bag, tied him up with an electrical cord and threw him to the ground. The Army accuses the soldiers of sitting and standing on Mowhoush's chest.
Previously secret court testimony indicates the Iraqi general's body was badly bruised and he may have been severely beaten two days before he suffocated on Nov. 26, 2003.

No date was set for the court-martial. If convicted of all charges, the soldiers face life imprisonment without parole, forfeiture of all pay and dishonorable discharges.

Welshofer and Williams were interrogators, and Loper a prison guard. All have denied wrongdoing, saying commanders had sanctioned their actions.

Messages left for Welshofer's lawyer, Frank Spinner, and Williams' lawyer, William Cassara, were not returned. No number was immediately available for the lawyer representing Loper.

A fourth soldier, Sgt. 1st Class William Sommer, also faced charges, but hearing officer Capt. Robert Ayers had recommended that they be dismissed.
Ayers recommended Sommer, an interpreter, receive a reprimand for failing to protect Mowhoush and be given immunity so he can testify against the other soldiers, according to a report obtained last month by The Denver Post.

Ayers also had recommended that Williams face reduced charges of involuntary manslaughter and assault instead of murder charges.

"It is possible his actions were inherently dangerous, but more than likely government counsel will only be able to prove at court-martial that CW2 Williams acted with culpable negligence," Ayers wrote in his report dated May 5.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/ats-ap_us14jun03,1,3276016.story

Says it all Posted by Hello
The Other Bomb Drops
Jeremy Scahill

It was a huge air assault: Approximately 100 US and British planes flew from Kuwait into Iraqi airspace. At least seven types of aircraft were part of this massive operation, including US F-15 Strike Eagles and Royal Air Force Tornado ground-attack planes. They dropped precision-guided munitions on Saddam Hussein's major western air-defense facility, clearing the path for Special Forces helicopters that lay in wait in Jordan. Earlier attacks had been carried out against Iraqi command and control centers, radar detection systems, Revolutionary Guard units, communication centers and mobile air-defense systems. The Pentagon's goal was clear: Destroy Iraq's ability to resist. This was war.

But there was a catch: The war hadn't started yet, at least not officially. This was September 2002--a month before Congress had voted to give President Bush the authority he used to invade Iraq, two months before the United Nations brought the matter to a vote and more than six months before "shock and awe" officially began.

At the time, the Bush Administration publicly played down the extent of the air strikes, claiming the United States was just defending the so-called no-fly zones. But new information that has come out in response to the Downing Street memo reveals that, by this time, the war was already a foregone conclusion and attacks were no less than the undeclared beginning of the invasion of Iraq.

The Sunday Times of London recently reported on new evidence showing that "The RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war." The paper cites newly released statistics from the British Defense Ministry showing that "the Allies dropped twice as many bombs on Iraq in the second half of 2002 as they did during the whole of 2001" and that "a full air offensive" was under way months before the invasion had officially begun.

The implications of this information for US lawmakers are profound. It was already well known in Washington and international diplomatic circles that the real aim of the US attacks in the no-fly zones was not to protect Shiites and Kurds. But the new disclosures prove that while Congress debated whether to grant Bush the authority to go to war, while Hans Blix had his UN weapons-inspection teams scrutinizing Iraq and while international diplomats scurried to broker an eleventh-hour peace deal, the Bush Administration was already in full combat mode--not just building the dossier of manipulated intelligence, as the Downing Street memo demonstrated, but acting on it by beginning the war itself. And according to the Sunday Times article, the Administration even hoped the attacks would push Saddam into a response that could be used to justify a war the Administration was struggling to sell.

On the eve of the official invasion, on March 8, 2003, Bush said in his national radio address: "We are doing everything we can to avoid war in Iraq. But if Saddam Hussein does not disarm peacefully, he will be disarmed by force." Bush said this after nearly a year of systematic, aggressive bombings of Iraq, during which Iraq was already being disarmed by force, in preparation for the invasion to come. By the Pentagon's own admission, it carried out seventy-eight individual, offensive airstrikes against Iraq in 2002 alone. >>>continued

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050613&s=scahill



These Boots are Made for Walking
Fascism in America -- you say it can't happen here? Ask someone who has lived beneath its jackboot in Germany -- and is watching it rise again in the Bush Regime. Doris Colmes reports in The Smirking Chimps

Papers, Please: I Smell the Long-Forgotten Rot of Fascism.

Well Look Who Woke Up...

WHERE'S OSAMA?

Bush Doesn't Care. Do We?

By Ted Rall / Yahoo News

---Yeah Yahoo...The picture scrubbers...Go Figure..---

NEW YORK--It has been one thousand three hundred fifty-two days since George W. Bush promised to find Osama bin Laden, "dead or alive." So where is he?

"Not around Afghanistan," U.S.-installed president Hamid Karzai said on May 25. "We'll catch him if he ever comes in here." If not Afghanistan, where? "Well, that we don't know." Pakistani foreign minister Kursheed Kasuri says: "[He] is alive and moving around from place to place, but not with a large group of people." Thank you, great oracle. Such helpful allies we have.

"It (the search for bin Laden) has not gone into cold storage," swears British envoy to Pakistan Mark Lyall Grant, but it's hard to avoid drawing one of two conclusions at this late date: Either the Bushies are too stupid to catch bin Laden or they're not really trying. Capturing him alive, after all, could lead to discomfiting revelations--from interesting info re Reagan's Stinger missile giveaways to reports that a CIA agent hung out with the suspect of the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings weeks before 9/11.

---HUH????!!!! Now that IS a new one.---

If the United States government were to devote its full attention and resources to the hunt, it would capture Osama. Low manpower and financing equals low priority. But the 3,000 people who died that day cry out for justice. The American people deserve answers--answers that, guilty or innocent, bin Laden should provide under oath. We know Bush doesn't want to catch Osama. "I don't know where he is," Bush said in 2002. "I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him." The question is: are we?

Bin Laden moved into Tarnak Farm, a compound of 80 mud-brick buildings four miles south of the Kandahar airport in Afghanistan, after arriving under U.S. supervision from Sudan in 1996. Video from a U.S. Predator drone plane places him there as of the fall of 2000. "Bin Laden is 6 foot 5," reported NBC. "The man in the video clearly towers over those around him and seems to be treated with great deference."

Most Americans believe that our first military response to the attacks in New York and Washington--invading Afghanistan--was part of an attempt to capture Osama "dead or alive." Actually the war had nothing to do with bin Laden, who wasn't even in Afghanistan on 9/11. On January 28, 2002, CBS reported: "The night before the September 11 terrorist attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment...Pakistan intelligence sources tell CBS News that bin Laden was spirited into this military hospital in Rawalpindi for kidney dialysis treatment."

White House officials have never denied this report.

If 150,000 American troops haven't been enough to subdue Iraq, the 800 sent to Afghanistan--a mountainous country of similar size and population--were a sad joke of a posse hunting for someone who wasn't there to be found. And Bush knew that. Then-secretary of state Colin Powell's initial request for extradition was issued to Pakistan on 9/12. Only later, when neoconservative cabinet members like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld won a high-level internal debate over what to do about 9/11, was the hunt for Osama back-burnered in favor of the Afghan war of distraction.

Pakistan closed its border with Afghanistan on September 17. It's unlikely that bin Laden would have tried to return to Afghanistan, which everyone knew was about to be bombed and probably invaded, during that five-day window of opportunity. The main border crossing via the Khyber Pass would have been indiscreet and distant from the Taliban's safe haven around Kandahar. It's even more of a stretch to believe that Osama, still afflicted with a bum kidney, would have trekked by horseback over the rugged mountains of the Northwest Frontier Province after that date. Odds are that, at least for the time being, bin Laden remained in Pakistan.

U.S. state-controlled media put bin Laden in a redoubt in the mountains of Tora Bora, a stone's throw west of the Khyber Pass, in mid-November 2001. According to this official account, corrupt Eastern Shura militia let bin Laden and hundreds of other Al Qaeda fighters escape. "There were only 21 bedraggled Al Qaeda fighters who were taken prisoners," writes the Christian Science Monitor.

Neither the Talibs nor Northern Alliance sources I spoke with while covering the war in Afghanistan in November 2001 put much credence in the Tora Bora story. "Everyone knows Osama went to Kashmir," an Al Qaeda POW told me. "He took the road north from Rawalpindi. That's where they always go."

Indeed, Pakistani-controlled Kashmir is topographically and politically more hospitable to bin Laden than the Pakistani-Afghan frontier regions targeted by joint U.S.-Pakistani military operations since 2002. Massive, craggy mountains separate bandit-ridden canyons where road signs mark routine ambush points. Tribal authorities allied with exiled Talibs fighting a proxy border war against India operate with so much impunity that recruiting centers for Al Qaeda and other "banned" Islamist parties operate openly out of storefronts. Pakistani troops rarely venture into the "Northern Areas"--not that their pro-Taliban officer corps would order them to do so. For these reasons Islamist militants fleeing eastern Afghanistan traditionally leave via Kashmir.

Of course bin Laden may have chartered a plane from Kashmir to Yemen or elsewhere. But if I were hunting for Osama, I'd start there. If I were serious.

Please Help, Speak Up.

--A concerted effort is underway to wake our media up. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE take the time to lend your voice to the following and send a direct blow across the bow of tyranny.--

From Daily Kos...
Live link above.

Awaken The Main Stream Media!

Today begins a series of diaries aimed at helping to lift the virtual news blackout on that political bombshell, the Downing Street Minutes. Though it was published one month ago, the US news media has produced just a small trickle of reports to date. Many of us have appealed for more coverage by the news media, but with only limited success. It is high time to wake the MSM up. We will need to focus, coordinate, and sustain our efforts if we wish to get their attention. Clearly a scatter-shot approach will not get this information before the wider public, which deserves to know about it.

Therefore every weekday this month I will post a diary listing three news outlets. Please email, fax, or call all three on that day requesting politely that they report on DSM. The contacts for today are:

(A) CBS Evening News. email: evening@cbsnews.com phone: 212-975-3247

(B) Associated Press. email: info@ap.org phone: 202-776-9400 (DC) or 212-621-1500 (National News)

(C) C-Span Washington Journal. email: journal@c-span.org

Other websites are participating in this campaign as well. More below the fold.


Link in headline.

Hey Osama...Fuck You. Just because you played bush like a cheap fiddle does NOT mean WE are finished with you yet.  Posted by Hello
'I knew what I had right away' :

Last year, Kevin Sites filmed a marine shooting an apparently unarmed insurgent in Falluja. He tells Dan Glaister the truth of what he saw and how what followed changed his life
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9008.htm

http://snipurl.com/fbmt
Unconfirmed report:

Fallujah Sheikh Says AL-Zarqawi Died On Friday:


His body is in Fallujah's cemetary, an Iraqi Sunni sheikh, Ammar Abdel Rahim Nasir, has told the Saudi on-line newspaper Al-Medina. He claims that gunfights which broke out in Fallujah in the last few days involved militants trying to protect the insurgency leader's tomb from a group of American soldiers patrolling the area.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9020.htm

http://snipurl.com/fbms
Video: “Falluja-The day After”

“Falluja-The day After” shows the total devastation of the Iraqi town, the corpses of the victims, the mass graves, the exhumation of many corpses by local rescue teams in order to try to recognize some of the victims.

Warning

Video contains images depicting the reality and horror of war and should be viewed by a mature audience.

Click here to watch it online. Windows media
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9010.htm

http://snipurl.com/fbmi

Thursday, June 02, 2005


Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (left) has been sued by Michael Schiavo (right),
the husband of Terri Schiavo.
Posted by Hello

Jury: State Must Pay Brain-Damaged Girl
Posted by Hello
WHAT COURAGE BABY GIRL, YOU KEEP FIGHTING:
IT IS YET TO BE SEEN IF THE COURTS HAVE THE
COURAGE, THIS CHILD HAS, TO STAND BY ITS JUDGEMENT
UPDATE ON EARLIER POST

Code Red: Jeb Bush Strikes Back!
This is the new Global Eye column for the June 3 edition of The Moscow Times.

Last month, we reported here about Jeb Bush's courtroom efforts to crush the life of an abused, poverty-stricken six-year-old girl in his gubernatorial satrapy of Florida. Later, against all odds, a jury of ordinary citizens thwarted the dynast's brutal will. But as befits a scion of the ruling family, Bush is now brushing aside this interference from the rabble and pressing ahead with his plans to strip the little girl of all public assistance.

Bush's minions went to court earlier this year in a bid to cut off medical aid to Marissa Amora, who, at the age of 2, had been abandoned by Jeb's "Department of Children and Families" despite overwhelming evidence of horrific past abuse – and the imminent danger of more to come. More came: within weeks she was beaten almost to death – and then Jeb's agents tried to stop her medical treatment and let her die. She survived their malign intervention and is now thriving with a new family – but still suffers from permanent, catastrophic damage caused by the entirely predictable beating she received after the DCF cast her aside.

But late last month, the jury in the case issued a stern rebuke to these perverted Bush Family values: they awarded Marissa $35 million in damages for institutional neglect and for her future medical care, with the DCF ordered to pay the bulk of the costs. So, a happy ending, right?

Don't be silly: we're dealing with the Bush-Walker gang here. And for almost 100 years, from their ammo-dealing days in World War I to their heavy investments in Nazi Germany to their profitable hook-ups with Arab oil tyrants to their back-door buttressing of Saddam Hussein to their present-day bonanza of blood money gushing from the slaughter in Iraq, this clan of wing-tipped thugs has always built its fortune on the backs – and the bones – of the poor. And no self-respecting Bush clansman would ever let some uppity little black girl and her foster mother make him look bad, no matter how egregious his failures.

Jeb had three choices after the verdict. He could have simply accepted responsibility for his agency's horrible neglect and paid the full amount. Or he could have accepted responsibility but asked that the large award be reduced, as often happens in such cases, which would still leave Marissa with enough money to afford the extensive and costly health care she will need for the rest of her life. The first course would have been just and honorable; the second, pragmatic yet not inherently cruel. But honor, justice and responsibility have no place in the Bush clan's ruthless operations. So Jeb picked the third choice, the "nuclear option": he has asked an appeals court to throw out the entire award – even the damages levied against other, non-state parties in the case – leaving Marissa with absolutely nothing, the Palm Beach Post reports.

Filing for dismissal, Bush's lawyers blasted the jury for being too stupid to process the complex documentation of the case and acting instead on "prejudice and sympathy." While any "prejudice" in the case would seem to lie with the lily-white governor's attempt to grind a black child under his heel, it's true that the jury probably did have some measure of sympathy for a six-year-old girl who will have to be kept alive through a feeding tube for the rest of her days because Bush's bureaucrats failed to protect her from well-documented abuse. But sympathy is for "girlie-men" in the demented moral universe of the Bushist faction. Or as one of the Bush Family's old business partners once said, just before he launched an unprovoked war of aggression against Poland based on lies, propaganda and manipulated intelligence about a bogus threat to the nation: "Close your hearts to pity. The stronger man is right. Be steeled against all signs of compassion." Power is everything; people are nothing; the weakest go to the wall: that's the Kennebunkport Code.

But of course you have to dress up your blood-and-iron philosophy with the prevailing pieties of the day if you want to snow the hoi polloi and weasel your way into power. And Jeb is one of the great whited sepulchres of our time, a master of the hypocritical arts, ever eager to hog the nearest camera and blubber teary platitudes about the "culture of life" – even as he feverishly signs death warrants in an apparent bid to surpass his older brother's record as the most bloodthirsty executioner in modern American history. If Marissa were, say, a nice white woman in a vegetative state whose case had been taken up by powerful financial and political interests then ballyhooed into a national media carnival, then doubtless Jeb would even now be dabbing his eyes as he knelt for a photo-op at her bedside.

But because Marissa is "nobody" – one of the poor, the powerless, the "insulted and injured," in Dostoevsky's phrase – she can be flushed down the toilet and no one will notice. For the aim of Bush's legal maneuvering is clear: he wants to "run out the clock" on Marissa, litigating the case quite literally to death, until her family sinks beneath the overwhelming financial and physical burden of keeping her alive and at some point her makeshift, overstrained support system suffers the inevitable breakdown.

It's a despicable strategy, a wicked strategy, but entirely in keeping with the Ruling Family's ethos, which has given the world a terror-spawning quagmire of murder and atrocity in Iraq – 10,000 Marissa Amoras, dead, mangled, orphaned, abandoned, abused, forgotten. And for what? For power. For money. For the Code.

Chris Floyd

http://www.empireburlesquenow.blogspot.com/
White House, N.Y. Face Off Over 9/11 Funds
By DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press Writer
Wed Jun 1, 5:52 PM ET

WASHINGTON - New York has yet to spend $125 million for workers injured in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and their aftermath. Tired of waiting, the federal government wants the money back.

New York lawmakers are trying to hold on to the funds ahead of a House committee meeting next week to consider reclaiming the money as the Bush administration has proposed for the budget year that begins Oct. 1.
Twenty-one lawmakers from the state, including Democratic Sens.
Hillary Rodham and Charles Schumer, want the White House to redirect the money toward health programs for ground zero workers affected with long-term lung problems that might not appear for years.
So far, the administration has resisted.

The federal government agreed to give more than $20 billion to help New York recover from the attacks. That money included $175 million for the state's workers compensation program.

But as the claims were processed, the bulk of the money was not spent.

A report last year by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, found that the state spent $44 million to pay out money quickly through other state agencies.
>>>continued

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050601/ap_on_re_us/sept_11_workers_comp_3
THE WORLD
Suicide Attacks Rising Rapidly
Increasingly, the bombers are Iraqis instead of foreign infiltrators. Civilians and police, not GIs, are the prime targets.

By Carol J. Williams, Times Staff Writer

BAGHDAD — Suicide bombings have surged to become the Iraqi insurgency's weapon of choice, with a staggering 90 attacks accounting for most of last month's 750 deaths at the militants' hands.Suicide attacks outpaced car bombings almost 2-to-1 in May, according to figures compiled by the U.S. military, The Times and other media outlets. In April, there were 69 suicide attacks, more than in the entire year preceding the June 28, 2004, hand-over of sovereignty.

The frequency of suicide bombings here is unprecedented, exceeding that of Palestinian attacks against Israel and of other militant insurgencies, such as the Chechen rebellion in Russia.

Baghdad saw five suicide bombings in a six-hour span Sunday. Early today, three suicide bombers killed at least 16 Iraqis in blasts north of Baghdad.

The first, around 8 a.m., ripped through a restaurant in Tuz Khurmatu where the Kurdish deputy prime minister, Rosh Shawais, was having breakfast.

He was unharmed but a bodyguard was among the nine killed.In Baqubah, another blast killed the deputy head of the Diyala province governing council, Hussein Alwan Timimi, and four others.

In Kirkuk, a bomber plowed his car into a U.S. consulate convoy.Two Iraqis died and 12 were hurt, a witness said.

With U.S.-led forces now better protected with concrete blast walls and rings of concertina wire and sandbags, militants have taken to targeting Iraqi police and civilians in their bid to convince Iraqis that their new leaders can't protect them.

And increasingly, Iraqis are believed to be carrying out some of the suicide attacks.U.S. officials and Iraqi analysts say the insurgents' resources are increasing on several fronts: money to buy vehicles and explosives, expertise in wiring car and human bombs and intelligence leaks that help them target U.S. and Iraqi forces. >>>>continued

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-fg-bombers2jun02,0,4779899.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Amnesty defends 'gulag,' urges Guantanamo access

Amnesty defends 'gulag,' urges Guantanamo access
Thu Jun 2, 9:50 AM ET

TOKYO (Reuters) - Human rights group Amnesty defended its description of Guantanamo prison as a "gulag" Thursday and urged the United States to allow independent investigations of allegations of torture at its detention centers for terrorism suspects

A verbal feud between Amnesty International and Washington has escalated since Amnesty last week compared the prison at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the brutal Soviet system of forced labor camps where millions of prisoners died.

President Bush' dismissed as "absurd" the Amnesty report, which also said the United States was responsible for an upsurge in global human rights violations, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called the description "reprehensible."

"The administration's response has been that our report is absurd, that our allegations have no basis, and our answer is very simple: if that is so, open up these detention centers, allow us and others to visit them," Amnesty International Secretary General Irene Zubaida Khan told a news conference.

"Transparency is the best antidote to misinformation and incorrect facts," said Khan, who is here to meet with Japanese officials.

The United States holds about 520 men at Guantanamo, where they are denied rights accorded under international law to prisoners of war.

Many have been held without charge for more than three years.

Khan rejected a suggestion that Amnesty's use of the emotive term "gulag" had turned the debate into one over semantics, and distracted attention from the situation in the detention centers.

"What we wanted to do was to send a strong message that ... this sort of network of detention centers that has been created as part of this war on terrorism is actually undermining human rights in a dramatic way which can only evoke some of the worst features of human rights scandals of the past," she said.

"I don't think people have got off the hook yet.">>>continued

Message to Tech Guy...

Ummmm Baby...About those links you inserted...

Ty for the RedCross and Cell Phone for Soldiers link, but on that other one...Ummm darling Ashcroft is no longer the Attorney General of the United States...

That would be Alberto 'The Electrode' Gonzalez..

Since I missed it when looking at the site last night, its' probably my fault...Please do me ONE MORE favor??...(You know I LOVE you baby!) Please find a link to replace it thats a little more up to date.

And any thoughts on a replacement search engine...? I mean while your down there and all...

Love You.
Will Be Home Soon.

For the Ladies....6 K Posted by Hello

Art For Boys. Posted by Hello

Who Needs DeepThroat?...Oh Lordy...Yer Gonna LOVE this...

Via www.bradblog.com

Snip...


To Tim Russert and Tom Brokaw:

This morning, I turned on TV briefly (to catch the weather report, since we really need rain here in Tennessee) and I heard the two of you discussing the self-outing of "Deep Throat" yesterday. At the end of your on-air discussion, you said, "If there's another Deep Throat out there, give us a call, won't you. We're waiting for your call."

Yeah, bullshit. For the past eight months, thousands of people have been sending you information on the 2004 stolen election and you've been ignoring it like a burning herpes sore on your anus when your wife asks you why you just can't sit still. So here's one more attempt to call your bluff. How about contacting Clint Curtis and Sherole Eaton, both of whom have very important stories to tell about the 2004 election theft, and neither of whom is hiding anything (including their identities).

Clint Curtis has testified under oath numerous times and has taken a polygraph test (which he passed) saying that he was hired by Tom Feeney (now a Republican Congressman from Florida and the chief beneficiary of Tom DeLay's largess) to create a software program to hack electronic voting machines (and throw the elections) in south Florida. Sherole Eaton has been fired as an elections official in Ohio after going public with an affidavit saying that a Triad employee (another electronic voting equipment vendor) had illegally tampered with the vote tabulating equipment in her county (including replacing the hard drive) just before the sham recount occurred there. Once again, neither of these brave Americans have hidden their identities or their stories. But they may as well have, for all the attention that you and the rest of the corporate media has given their stories since they went public.

So don't fool yourselves, because you certainly are not fooling us. There are no more Woodwards and Bernsteins left in the corporate media, only patriotism-deficient reporters competing to out-trivialize "Access Hollywood" on the evening (non) news. If you had an ounce of journalistic curiosity or patriotic relevance left, you would write Clint Curtis immediately (his email is above) and arrange an on-camera interview tomorrow. Or you would contact Bob Fitrakis with the Columbus Free Press or Brad Friedman with BradBlog (whose email addresses are also listed above) to conduct an interview with Ms. Eaton -- I am sure they would be happy to arrange it right away. If you don't do those things, stop kidding yourself that you are American journalists in the Woodward/Bernstein tradition any more than the "hot military stud" whose presence in OUR White House press corps was another quickly forgotten and barely covered story. Your self-imposed journalistic castration says more about your fear of, or fawning flirtatiousness with, this illegitimate regime which has captured our country than anything that you and your bloated cohorts have revealed in quite some time.

"Deep Throat, call us -- we're waiting." Waiting for what -- to put Clint and Sherole on indefinite hold, where they can listen to Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA" played ad nauseum until the shuttle service to Gitmo comes to pick them up. Shame on you folks -- your on-camera hubris is only matched by your irrelevance these days.

So get in touch with Clint and Sherole or stop pretending you do anything of value for this country. Hurry along now, there must be another celebrity somewhere doing something else nauseating enough to keep us distracted while our votes are stolen and our democracy is smothered under a Paris Hilton-stained pillow.

If you're what passes for journalists these days, we don't need no steenkin' journalists. At least not ones who cash GE checks.

Most assuredly,
Bernie Ellis,
Organizer
Gathering To Save Our Democracy



-----AMEN BRAVO>>WHHOOOaaaOOOO HELL YES... AND OHHH YEAH.!!!!!! That was so freaking GOOD for me!---

The last throes of truth in Iraq

By Derrick Z. Jackson,
Globe Columnist June 1, 2005

THE WHITE HOUSE is searching for weapons of mass deletion.

On CNN's ''Larry King Live" on Monday, Vice President Dick Cheney said of the violence in Iraq, ''I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."

This is after May became the deadliest month for US forces since the January elections, with 76 US military casualties.

At a press conference on Tuesday, President Bush was asked about the US casualties and the deaths of 760 Iraqis since the new Iraqi government was named April 28. A reporter asked Bush, ''Do you think that the insurgency is gaining strength and becoming more lethal?"

Bush responded, ''I think the Iraqi people dealt the insurgents a serious blow when they, when we had the elections."

Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers was asked on ABC's ''Good Morning America" about the deaths. ''Myers said, 'Well, first of all, the number of incidents is actually down 25 percent since the highs of last November, during the election period. So, overall, numbers of incidents are down. Lethality, as you mentioned, is up. . . . I think what's causing it is a realization that Iraq is marching inevitably toward democracy."

Do not even think of bringing up Amnesty International. The human rights group published its annual report last week, a report in which the organization's secretary general, Irene Khan, said, ''The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law."

To that, Bush cried, ''Absurd." Cheney said, ''I was offended." Myers said, ''absolutely irresponsible."

All that is missing is a banner behind them saying, ''Misinformation Accomplished."

Bush, Cheney, and Myers are saying all these things as their invasion of Iraq is closing in on a dubious milestone. The number of soldiers who died in the invasion and occupation, 858, is about to be passed by the number killed after the United States handed over sovereignty to hand-picked Iraqi leaders. The latter number just crossed the 800 mark.

Soon, the number of US soldiers who have died in the ''free" Iraq will surpass the number who died dismantling the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. The two-deaths-a-day average suffered by the US-led forces is the same as during the period from when Bush stood under the banner ''Mission Accomplished" until the handover. The number of Iraqi police and guardsmen who have been killed is 880 this year alone, according to the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count. At the current pace, this year's deaths will easily outstrip the prior 1,300.

Yet Bush says, ''I'm pleased with the progress." If the Iraqi people have already dealt the insurgency a serious blow, as Bush claims, or if it is in the final throes, as Cheney claims, one shudders to consider what Iraq will look like if they are wrong.

On the Amnesty International flap, conservative commentators and The Washington Post editorial page have slammed Amnesty's rhetoric as way over the top, saying it is a cheap shot to compare US prisons in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and in other parts of Iraq and Afghanistan to the horrors of Stalin. Amnesty definitely overdid it on the surface, but there was one thing the Bush administration of course did not mention in its rush to trample Amnesty's name.

When our State Department released in March its own massive annual report of human rights abuses around the world, it was quick to criticize other nations for human rights abuses. The State Department often quotes Amnesty International on other nations' abuses. But there was no self-criticism of our prisoner treatment in the so-called war on terror.

The reason is quite ironic. A year ago, Assistant Secretary of State Michael Kozak said, ''The reason we don't do a report on ourselves is the same reason you wouldn't write investigative reports about your own finances or something; it wouldn't have any credibility. Somebody else needs to do that. It's not that we're against being scrutinized, and indeed we are scrutinized by many other organizations: Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International."

With new allegations of Guantanamo prisoner treatment by the Associated Press, the questions continue about American moral authority. If the chaos continues, what could the Bush adminsitration possibly say next?

To My Kids Sensie...

---Dear Sensie, Here is the answers to your questions about Ted Turner and how much control he has..---

Live Link Above.


Turner: CNN spends too much time on 'pervert of the day'

CNN should cover international news and the environment, not the "pervert of the day," network founder Ted Turner said Wednesday as the world's first 24-hour news network turned 25.

Turner, an outspoken media mogul who started CNN in 1980 but no longer has control over the network, said he envisioned CNN as a place where "trivial news" like rapes and murders that dominated local news wouldn't be emphasized. But recently, he said, he's seeing too much of that "trivial news" on the network he created, now second in ratings to rival Fox News Channel.

"I would like to see us to return to a little more international coverage on the domestic feed and a little more environmental coverage, and, maybe, maybe a little less of the pervert of the day," he said in a speech to CNN employees outside the old Atlanta mansion where the network first aired.

"You know, we have a lot of perverts on today, and I know that, but is that really news? I mean, come on. I guess you've got to cover Michael Jackson, but not three stories about perversion that we do every day as well."

His remark won applause and laughter from CNN employees, but the moderator for Turner's remarks, CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour, said, "But everyone else is doing that. Why do you think it's important not to?"

Turner replied, "Somebody's got to be a serious news person. Somebody's got to be the most respected name in television news, and I wanted that position for CNN.

"I wanted to be the New York Times of the airwaves. Not the New York Post, but the New York Times. And that's what we set out to do, and we did it."

The brash Turner acknowledged that CNN wasn't all highbrow when he was in charge, either. "We followed O.J. Simpson around L.A. a lot, and we had Jessica in the well. It was pretty trivial, but high-interest."

Turner, 65, also took a jab at Gerald Levin, the former CEO of AOL Time Warner whom Turner blames for forcing him out of the media giant after it merged with Turner Broadcasting. Talking about how CNN positioned itself to cover the first war in Iraq in 1991, Turner said CNN beat everyone else by having friendships beforehand with Iraqi television workers.

"You can be nice sometimes and it works out real well. On the other hand, you can be nice to Jerry Levin..." he trailed off, to more laughter. "I'd rather put myself in Iraqi hands than some Americans."

As usual, Turner made his biting remarks with a roguish smile. Sitting back in a chair for the Q-and-A, most of the media pioneer's comments were laudatory of the network, which he called his greatest professional achievement. Turner has always had more panache than diplomacy, and he at one point in the program claimed partial credit for ending the Cold War.

He talked about his role in ending the Cold War, and Amanpour asked his if he honestly thought he had a hand in it. "I'm absolutely certain I did," he said.

It sounds like a stretch, and it is, but the CNN employees gathered Wednesday said they felt the network created a conduit for international dialogue and that CNN has changed the world.

"Anyone with a sense of history understands the significance of what started in this place on this day 25 years ago," said Phil Kent, current CEO of Turner Broadcasting. "Many talk about the world being a global village. But through the creation of CNN, Ted Turner made the world a global village."

Amanpour joked that most of CNN's early employees were recent college grads who had little faith themselves that CNN would turn into a major media outlet.

"We thought it was a stepping stone to the big leagues," she said. "But this was the big leagues."

Punk. Posted by Hello

Do you feel a draft suddenly..?

Pentagon delays release of May recruiting data

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon on Wednesday postponed by more than a week the release of military recruiting figures for May, as the Army and Marine Corps struggle to attract new troops amid the Iraq war.
The military services had routinely provided most recruiting statistics for a given month on the first business day of the next month.

Air Force Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said the May numbers for the active-duty and reserve components of the all-volunteer military will be released on June 10.

"Military recruiting is instrumental to our readiness and merits the earliest release of data. But at the same time, this information must be reasonably scrutinized and explained to the public, which deserves the fullest insight into military performance in this important area," Krenke said.

Asked whether the move would simply delay the release of bad news, Krenke said, "That's not necessarily true," noting that "we expect the numbers to improve during the summer months."

Military recruiters have said potential recruits and their parents were expressing wariness about enlisting during the Iraq war. They said improving civilian job opportunities also were affecting recruiting.

The regular Army missed its recruiting goals for three straight months entering May, falling short by a whopping 42 percent in April. The Army was 16 percent behind its year-to-date target entering May, with a goal of signing up 80,000 recruits in fiscal 2005, which ends Sept. 30.

The Marine Corps missed its goal for signing up new recruits for four straight months entering May and was 2 percent behind its year-to-date goal. It hopes to sign up 38,195 recruits in fiscal 2005.


---Rossi, I will post again this afternoon...I'll be back!---

Art For Everyone Posted by Hello
Deep Throat Cover Blown
Washington Post Still Sucks
Wednesday, June 1, 2005
By Greg Palast

I've been gagging all morning on the Washington Post's self-congratulatory preening about its glory days of the Watergate investigation.

Think about it. It's been 33 years since cub reporters Woodward and Bernstein pulled down the pants of the Nixon operation and exposed its tie-in to the Watergate burglary. That marks a third of a century since the Washington Post has broken a major investigative story. I got a hint of why the long, dry spell when I met Mark Hosenball, "investigative" reporter for the Washington Post's magazine, Newsweek.

It was in the summer of 2001. A few months earlier, for the Guardian papers of Britain, I'd discovered that Katherine Harris and Governor Jeb Bush of Florida had removed tens of thousands of African-Americans from voter registries before the 2000 election, thereby fixing the race for George Bush. Hosenball said the Post-Newsweek team "looked into it and couldn't find anything."

Nothing at all? What I found noteworthy about the Post's investigation was that "looking into it" involved their reporters chatting with Florida officials -- but not bothering to look at the voter purge list itself.

Yes, I admit the Washington Post ran my story -- seven months after the election -- but with the key info siphoned out, such as the Bush crew's destruction of evidence and the salient fact that almost all those purged were Democrats. In other words, the story was drained of anything which might discomfit the new residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Let's not pick on the Post alone. Viacom Corporation's CBS News also spiked the story. Why? "We called Jeb Bush's office," a CBS producer told me, and Jeb's office denied Jeb did wrong. End of story.

During the Clinton years, the Washington Post and Newsweek allowed reporter Mike Isikoff to sniff at the President's zipper and write about our Commander-in-Chief's Lewinsky. But when it came to a big story about dirty energy industry money for Clinton's campaigns, Mike told me his editors didn't "give a sh--" and so he passed the material for me to print in England.

Today, Bob Woodward rules as the Post's Managing Editor. And how is he "managing" the news? After the September 11 attack, when we needed an independent press to keep us from hysteria-driven fascism, Woodward was given "access" to the president, writing Bush at War,a fawning, puke-making fairy tale of a take-charge president brilliantly leading the war against Terror.

Woodward's news-oid story is a symptom of a disease epidemic in US journalism. The illness is called, "access." In return for a supposedly "inside" connection to the powers that be, the journalists in fact become conduits for disinformation sewerage.

And woe to any journalist who annoys the politicians and loses "access." Career-wise, they're DOA.

Here's a good place to tote up part of the investigative reporter body count. There's Bob Parry forced out of the Associated Press for the crime of uncovering Ollie North's arms-for-hostages game. And there's Gary Webb, hounded to suicide for documenting the long-known history of the CIA's love-affair with drug runners. The list goes on. Even the prize-laden Seymour Hersh was, he told me, exiled from the New York Times and now has to write from the refuge of a fashion magazine.

And notice someone missing in the Deep Throat extravaganza? Carl Bernstein, the brains and soul of the All-the-President's-Men duo, is notably absent from the staff of the Post or any other US newspaper.

But before we get too weepy about the glory days of investigative journalism gone by, we should remember that the golden era was not pure gold.

Newspapers are part of the power elite and have never in US history gone out of their way to rock the clubhouse. Let's go back to Hersh's stellar story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.

The massacre was first uncovered by the greatest investigative reporter of our era, the late Ron Ridenhour. Then a soldier conducting the investigation on his own, Ridenhour turned over his findings to Hersh, hoping to give it a chance for exposure. That wasn't so easy.

Ridenhour told me that he and Hersh pushed the story -- with photos! -- at dozens of newspapers. No one would touch it until Ridenhour threatened to read the story from the steps of the Pentagon.

It's only gotten worse. After all, Hersh's latest big story, about Abu Ghraib prison, was buried by CBS and other news outlets before Hersh put it in the New Yorker.

The Washington Post has no monopoly on journalistic evil. If anything, the Post is probably better than most of the bilge contaminating our news outlets. This is about the death-march of investigative journalism in America; or, at least, its dearth under the "mainstream" mastheads.

Why don't we read more "Watergate" investigative stories in the US press? Given that the Woodwards of today dance on their hind legs begging officialdom for "access", news without official blessing doesn't stand a chance.

The Post follows current American news industry practice of killing any story based on evidence from a confidential source if a government honcho privately denies it. A flat-out "we didn't do it" is enough to kill an investigation in its cradle. And by that rule, there is no chance that the Managing Editor of the Washington Post, Bob Woodward, would today run Deep Throat's story of the Watergate break-in.

And that sucks.


****
Greg Palast's reports for Britain's Guardian newspapers and Harper's Magazine can be found at www.GregPalast.com. Palast won this year's George Orwell Courage in Journalism award at the Sundance Freedom Cinema Festival for his investigations of the Bush family for BBC Television.
free hit counter