MAY LOVE PREVAIL ON EARTH
September 17, 2004
The Writing on the Wall Series #32: Plenty of Smoking Guns - Literally and Figuratively
Hello everyone
Looking at all the evidence compiled below, it is hard to conceive even how Bush and his cohort of criminals can still possibly be in the race for re-election and not be thrown in jail.
I guess it just shows how brainwashed, ill-informed and/or plain gullible are the American people that still care to follow the sleek Pravda-style news they get.
Jean Hudon
Earth Rainbow Network Coordinator
http://www.earthrainbownetwork.com
P.S. A new Meditation Focus will be issued this Saturday night.
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Worthy of Your Attention
Be a Bush Stylist - Dress up George in funny garbs
http://www.eneaies.com/satira/bush_dressup/bush_dressup.htm
But make sure to undress him first... Recommended by Star Light andromedan01@yahoo.com>
Airline pilot explains why Pentagon wasn't hit by a 757
http://tinyurl.com/4bo58
Once there click on "Cliquez pour démarrer RealPlayer" to get it started - The key details begin at about 7 minutes into this interview. Very explicit and revealing as to the impossibility of air manoeuvres reported of this alleged 757 airplane and as to the absolute impossibility of the absence of wreckage of the airplane and small size of the hole left in the building.
The Coincidence Theorist's Guide to 9/11 - EXTREMELY WELL RESEARCHED SATIRE
http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2004/08/coincidence-theorists-guide-to-911.html
A MUST SEE!
CONTENTS
1. When the Rabbits Get a Gun
2. Far Graver than Vietnam
3. Bob Dole’s former chief of staff says Bush ordered 911 events
4. Flying Fascism on Your Doorstep
5. HR163 DRAFT TO INCLUDE *ALL* MEN/WOMEN 18-26
6. Kerry's 1971 speech to the House Foreign Relations Committee
7. Time to Consider Iraq Withdrawl
8. 9/11 Pollution 'Could Cause More Deaths than Attack'
9. History of Bush... What the people think
10. New book on the language of political debate is released
11. Bush's New Mental Screening Plans Evoke Memories of Clockwork Orange
12. Republican beliefs
13. Drunken Humor
See also:
You ain't seen nothing yet: after Hurricane Ivan, prepare for the return of El Niño (Sept 12)
http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=560845&host=3&dir=507
Disastrous weather is set to continue for at least another six months, it was officially announced yesterday, as Hurricane Ivan headed for the Cayman Islands and Cuba after leaving at least eight people dead in Jamaica. The US government confirmed that a new El Niño is about to strike, bringing torrential rain and droughts around the world. (...) During an El Niño, warm water flows eastwards across the Pacific, bringing heavy rain to the US West Coast and most of Central and South America. By contrast Australia, Indonesia and parts of north-east and southern Africa usually suffer drought. Europe is relatively unaffected. The last big El Niño in 1997-98 cost hundreds of lives and caused $34bn (£19bn) in damage worldwide, partly through flooding to Chile, Ecuador and Bolivia and partly through failing harvests in Australia, the Philippines and Indonesia. A more recent, milder one in 2002-03 caused the worst Australian drought in a century. CLIP
Ivan May Just Be a Messenger (September 15, 2004)
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,64952,00.html
Hurricane Ivan is among the most powerful Atlantic storms in recent history, and more such storms are likely in the future due to global warming, say climate experts. "Global warming is creating conditions that (are) more favorable for hurricanes to develop and be more severe," said Kevin Trenberth, head of the climate analysis section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. CLIP
Baked Alaska (Sept 10)
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/09/10/toolik/print.html
In the Arctic, where flowers are madly blooming, trees are growing to mutant sizes and the snowpack is thinning, researchers are getting an incontrovertible view of global warming.
Bush: Global warming is just hot air (Sept. 10, 2004)
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/09/10/bush/
| Don't expect President Bush to discuss global warming -- the world's most serious environmental problem -- on the campaign trail in the next eight weeks. The former oilman from Texas doesn't dare alienate his friends in the fossil fuel and auto industries, prime purveyors of global warming. Bush still refuses to admit that burning Chevron with Techron in our Jeep Grand Cherokees, not to mention megatons of coal in our power plants, has brought us 19 of the 20 hottest years on record since 1980. "You're talking about a president who says that the jury is out on evolution, so what possible evidence would you need to muster to prove the existence of global warming?" says Robert F. Kennedy Jr., author of the new book "Crimes Against Nature." "We've got polar ice caps melting, glaciers disappearing all over the world, ocean levels rising, coral reefs dying. But these people are flat-earthers." In fact, Bush's see-no-evil, hear-no-evil stance on global warming is so intractable that even when his own administration's scientists weigh in on the issue, he simply won't hear of it. CLIP
Judge Orders U.S. to Find Bush Records (Sept 17)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/091804Z.shtml
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A federal judge has ordered the Pentagon to find and make public by next week any unreleased files about President Bush's Vietnam-era Air National Guard service to resolve a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by The Associated Press.
Rumsfeld's Dirty War on Terror (13 September 2004)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1303294,00.html
In an explosive extract from his new book, Seymour Hersh reveals how, in a fateful decision that led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, the US defence secretary gave the green light to a secret unit authorised to torture terrorist suspects. (...) But the interrogations at Guantánamo were a bust. Very little useful intelligence had been gathered, while prisoners from around the world continued to flow into the base, and the facility constantly expanded. The CIA analyst had been sent there to find out what was going wrong. He was fluent in Arabic and familiar with the Islamic world. He was held in high respect within the agency, and was capable of reporting directly, if he chose, to George Tenet, the CIA director. The analyst did more than just visit and inspect. He interviewed at least 30 prisoners to find out who they were and how they ended up in Guantánamo. Some of his findings, he later confided to a former CIA colleague, were devastating. "He came back convinced that we were committing war crimes in Guantánamo," the colleague told me. "Based on his sample, more than half the people there didn't belong there. He found people lying in their own faeces," including two captives, perhaps in their 80s, who were clearly suffering from dementia. "He thought what was going on was an outrage," the CIA colleague added. There was no rational system for determining who was important. (...) As the CIA analyst's report was making its way to Rice, in late 2002 there were a series of heated complaints about the interrogation tactics at Guantánamo from within the FBI, whose agents had been questioning detainees in Cuba since the prison opened. A few of the agents began telling their superiors what they had witnessed, which, they believed, had little to do with getting good information. "I was told," a senior intelligence official recalled, "that the military guards were slapping prisoners, stripping them, pouring cold water over them, and making them stand until they got hypothermia. The agents were outraged. It was wrong and also dysfunctional." (...) There was, we now know, a fantastical quality to the earnest discussions inside the White House in 2002 about the good and bad of the interrogation process at Guantánamo. Rice and Rumsfeld knew what many others involved in the prisoner discussions did not - that sometime in late 2001 or early 2002, the president had signed a top-secret finding, as required by law, authorising the defence department to set up a specially recruited clandestine team of special forces operatives and others who would defy diplomatic niceties and international law and snatch - or assassinate, if necessary - identified "high-value" al-Qaida operatives anywhere in the world. Equally secret interrogation centres would be set up in allied countries where harsh treatments were meted out, unconstrained by legal limits or public disclosure. The programme was hidden inside the defence department as an "unacknowledged" special-access programme (SAP), whose operational details were known only to a few in the Pentagon, the CIA and the White House. CLIP
Sick From Aspartame? Meet Donald Rumsfeld
http://www.soundandfury.tv/Pages/Rumsfeld.html
Aspartame was passed despite FDA scientists' disapproval by a significant force in politics: Donald Rumsfeld. When we started the documentary, "Sweet Misery", we did not know that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was the CEO of Searle at the time aspartame was approved. Not until our first interview with Dr. Jim Bowen. According to a G.D. Searle's salesperson, Patty Wood Allott, Donald Rumsfeld stated "he would call in all his markers and that no matter what, he would see to it that aspartame be approved this year." This interview with consumer attorney Jim Turner reveals how Donald Rumsfeld "called in his markers" as part of Reagan's transition team in 1981. Here is why G.D. Searle felt compelled to reapply for aspartame's approval one day after Reagan's inauguration. This is despite rejection of aspartame over brain tumors.
Recommended by Betty Martini Bettym19@mindspring.com>
Roundup: Mystery shrouds Osama, Omar whereabouts (Sept 11)
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-09/11/content_1970431.htm
KABUL -- Three years have elapsed since the historic 9/11 terror attack on the United States, but the whereabouts of the alleged masterminds of the attack Osama bin Laden and his Afghan host -- the Taliban's leader Mullah Omar has been haunting many as an enduring puzzle. At the very first day of the Doomsday-like attack which claimedover 3,000 lives, a terrified US President George W. Bush promised his nation as well as the whole world to bring to justice Osama and his one-eyed host Mullah Omar for the crime. The angry leader of the uni-polar world's superpower in his attempts to catch the "big fish" announced 50 million US dollars head prize for each of the fugitives beside launching a heavy military campaign that ousted their regime in late 2001. The Taliban's fundamentalist hierarchy has gone; the US-dominated coalition troops and NATO-led multinational forces have been deployed in the post-Taliban nation to root out terrorists besides ensuring security here. For several times over the past nearly three years, the mighty US army claimed cornering Osama in tribal areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan but failed to deliver. The inability of the US army and the consecutive failures of its advanced high-tech reconnaissance facilities to pinpoint the king of terror and his host created questions in the inquisitive mind of many across the world. "How is it possible to oust a regime, consolidate your control but fail to nab its runners," questioned Afghan educationalist Noorul Haq Khan. (...) "Both Osama and Mullah Omar either are a drama or living somewhere in connivance with the US military," maintained the observer. Around 800 civilians, Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives, supporters of former Prime Minister and renegade commander Gulbudin Hekmatyar, US troops, Afghan soldiers and aid workers have been killed in increasing insurgency since late last year. "The situation will be deteriorated if the government fails to check the increasing militancy in southern Afghanistan," maintained retired Brigadier Jahangir Khan. CLIP
'I Thought We Were Different' (Sept 9)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/091304F.shtml
(...) This week, as we approach the third anniversary of the attacks on 9/11, one question hangs over many in the country, surely most of the people I meet. It is no longer a question of whether we can "win" this war (we cannot, in any traditional sense, without a cost so humongous it would destroy us morally as a nation). It is no longer a question of whether the purported reason for the Iraq war was false or even falsified (we know beyond the shadow of a doubt that the WMD threat did not exist). No, this third anniversary brings us face to face with a deeper and endlessly haunting question: Have we changed as a people so as to be willing, as the polls show us, to re-elect men and women who have misled us and lied to us every step of the way? And others: Are we willing to accept the fact that, even as our American losses topped 1,000 this week, we probably also killed up to 2,500 "insurgents" in only the last week? Have we, the rational, "exceptional" people of our history, been overtaken by the war fever and that same identification with the demented warrior-leader as lesser peoples throughout history? CLIP
Amid Cheers, Terrorists Have Landed in the U.S. (Sept 12) http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/091304L.shtml
Washington - A little-noticed but chilling scene at Opa-locka Airport outside Miami last month demonstrates that the Bush administration's commitment to fighting international terrorism can be overtaken by presidential politics - even if that means admitting known terrorists onto U.S. soil. That's what happened when outgoing Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso inexplicably pardoned four Cuban exiles convicted of "endangering public safety" for their role in an assassination plot against Fidel Castro during a 2000 international summit in Panama. After their release, three of the four immediately flew via private jet to Miami, where they were greeted with a cheering fiesta organized by the hard-line anti-Castro community. Federal officials briefly interviewed the pardoned men - all holders of U.S. passports - and then let them go their way. The fourth man, Luis Posada Carriles, was the most notorious member of this anti-Castro cell. He is an escapee from a prison in Venezuela, where he was incarcerated for blowing up an Air Cubana passenger plane in 1976, killing 73. He also admitted plotting six hotel bombings in Havana that killed one tourist and injured 11 others in 1997. Posada has gone into hiding in Honduras while seeking a Central American country that will harbor him, prompting Honduran President Ricardo Maduro to demand an explanation from the Bush administration on how a renowned terrorist could enter his country using a false U.S. passport. The terrorist backgrounds of Posada's three comrades-in-arms are as well documented as their leader's. (...) "I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world," Bush recently said in an interview. But the decision to allow members of the Posada gang into this country, and the televised spectacle of Miamians applauding their return, sends a different and dangerous message: In a swing state, some terrorists are not only acceptable but welcome.
War Crimes and Imperial Fantasies - Noam Chomsky (Sep 14, 2004)
http://www.memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=3217&mo%20de=thread&order=0&thold=0
When enemies commit crimes, they're crimes. In fact, we're allowed to expand them, lie about them, make up stories about them and so on, but surely to get angry and infuriated about them. When we commit crimes, they didn't happen. And you see that very strikingly in the Reagan worship that has been created as a cult through the 1990s by a massive propaganda campaign. Noam Chomsky, internationally renowned MIT professor, practically invented modern linguistics. In addition to his pioneering work in that field he has been a leading voice for peace and social justice. He is in such demand as a public speaker that he is booked years in advance. And wherever he appears, he draws huge audiences. The New Statesman calls him, "The conscience of the American people." He is the author of scores of books, his latest is the bestseller Hegemony or Survival. He has done a series of books with David Barsamian. The most recent one is Propaganda & the Public Mind. David Barsamian is the director and producer of the award-winning Alternative Radio in Boulder, Colorado. He interviewed Noam Chomsky at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge on June 11, 2004. CLIP
Ex-Feds Blast 9-11 Panel and Bush (13 September 2004)
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0436/mondo3.php
Government agencies roasted for screw-ups in war on "terror".- WASHINGTON, D.C. - A group of 25 former federal employees directly involved in the government's counterintelligence and counterterrorism programs held a press conference here this morning to lambaste both the 9-11 Commission and the Bush administration for failing to hold government officials accountable for failures leading up to 9-11. The ex-employees, from the FBI, CIA, FAA, Customs, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, had firsthand knowledge of their agencies' activities in counterintelligence and counterterrorism. Bogdan Dzakovic, a former special agent at the FAA, said he repeatedly sought to warn his superiors of mismanagement and the dangers of terrorism, but to no avail. He was a leader of a "Red Team" at FAA, engaged in preparing for terrorist attacks. But he said the security measures in his agency were "little more than window dressing," and quoted one frustrated colleague as saying, "The FAA is so screwed up I don't know where to begin." Diane Kleiman, a former Customs agent at JFK who was fired in 1999, scoffed at the idea that airport security has been improved. Emphasis on checking passengers coming into the airport hides the real problems in the back of the airport, she said, where literally anybody can board a parked plane. She outlined a scenario, for instance, in which, say, 10 terrorists could apply to be cargo handlers (a job with high turnover), get hired and work, but then quit, retaining their passes, which give them access to ramps and the unlocked aircraft. They then could enter the airports with backpacks full of explosives, get on the planes, stash the bags in the cargo holds, and leave. In this way, 10 planes with all their passengers could be blown up. CLIP
JUDGE FINDS BUSH COMMERCE DEPARTMENT PUT POLITICS OVER SCIENCE IN "DOLPHIN SAFE" TUNA ACTIONS (September 16, 2004)
http://www.bushgreenwatch.org
A federal judge has issued a stinging rebuke to the Bushadministration by ruling that the Commerce Department allowed politics, not science, to determine whether to relax the "dolphin safe" label for tuna sold in the U.S. In a harshly worded opinion, San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson last month overturned an earlier Commerce Department finding that dolphins were not harmed by Mexican tuna boats when they encircled schools of tuna with purse seine nets. The Commerce finding would have opened the way for the Mexican tuna industry to sell its catch in the U.S. and label it 'dolphin safe', despite the killing of thousands of dolphins annually by the fishery. At the same time, Judge Henderson commended the government's own scientists, who had argued that purse seine fishing was depleting dolphin populations. CLIP
Omega-News Collection 10. September 2004
http://omega.twoday.net/stories/328009/
Omega-News Collection 13. September 2004
http://omega.twoday.net/stories/330120/
Omega-News Collection 16. September 2004
http://omega.twoday.net/stories/333287/
URBAN LEGEND
http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/mondex.asp
Claim: Mondex is planning to replace money with biochips embedded in people's heads and hands. Status: False. CLIP
1.
AS YOU READ THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE, MAY I SUGGEST YOU LISTEN TO...
"How Much Can Our Hearts Take"
http://www.consueloluz.com/a_music_hearts.htm
A mother and son collaboration for peace. Wakes up the mind, opens the heart and moves the spirit - Listen to "How Much Can Our Hearts Take" in RealAudio (at http://www.consueloluz.com/au_hearts.ram) or MP3 (athttp://www.consueloluz.com/au_hearts.m3u)
"Deep and powerful, needs to get out …", Linda Hibbs - People for Peace
"Most moving song I've heard in 30 years …", Leslie LaKind - Tikkun
"Amazing, powerful, important …", Gunter Pauli - ZERI International
"Play this song now …", David Cooper - Rocky Mountain Youth Corps
(...) The song lists the millions of casualties of wars and genocides and asks: "As we gasp for air, for kindness, for sanity, for life itself … how much can our hearts take …".
---
From: http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/091504A.shtml
When the Rabbits Get a Gun
By William Rivers Pitt
15 September 2004
Dead and injured Iraqi civilians on Haifa Street, Baghdad, after a U.S. helicopter attack.
(Photo: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad / Getty Images)
This is the comforting fiction: Osama bin Laden is a monster who sprang whole from the fetid mire. He had no childhood, no influences, no education, no experiences to form his view of the world. He did not exist, and then he did, a vessel into which the universe poured the essence of evil. It is a simple, straightforward story of a man who hates freedom and kills for the pure joy of feeling innocent blood drip from his fingers.
This is the fairy tale by which children are put to bed at night. As frightening and terrifying as bin Laden may be, it is a comfort to imagine him as having been chiseled from the dust. The fiction of his existence, absent of detail, makes him unique, a singular entity not to be replicated. Osama bin Laden becomes truly scary only when the actual context of his life is made clear, where he is from, what he has seen, and why those things motivated him to do what he does.
Osama bin Laden becomes truly scary when the realization comes that he is not unique, not singular, not an invention of the universe. He becomes truly scary when the realization comes that there are millions of people who have seen what he has seen, who feel what he feels, and why. He becomes truly scary when the realization comes that he is a creation of the last fifty years of American foreign and economic policy, and that he has an army behind him created by the same influences. Simply, Osama bin Laden becomes truly scary when the realization comes that he can be, and has been, and continues to be, replicated.
Osama bin Laden, after being educated at Oxford University, learned how to kill effectively while working as an agent of American Cold War policy in Afghanistan. He was a helpful American ally throughout the 1980s as a ruthless and wealthy warrior against the Soviet Union. It was the desire of the American government to deliver to the Soviets their own Vietnam, to arrange a hopeless military situation which would demoralize the Soviet military and bleed that nation dry.
Osama bin Laden played the part of the Viet Cong, and he was good at it. With the help of the American government, he was able to create an army of true believers in Afghanistan. Our government believed that if one bin Laden was good, a hundred would be better, and a thousand better again, in the fight against the Soviets. So strong was this group America helped to create that it became known as 'The Base.' Translated into the local dialect, 'The Base' is known as al Qaeda.
Osama bin Laden learned something else besides the art of killing while he was working as an ally of the United States. He learned that given enough time, enough money, enough violence, enough perseverance, and enough fellow warriors, a superpower can be brought to its knees and erased from the book of history.
Bin Laden was at the center of one of the most important events of the 20th century: The fall of the Soviet Union. Political pundits like to credit Reagan and the senior Bush for the collapse of that regime, but out in front of them, in the mountains of Afghanistan, was Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, the sharp end of our sword, who did their job very well. Today, the United States faces this group and its leader, armed with their well-learned and America-taught lessons: How to kill massively and how to annihilate a superpower.
Osama bin Laden learned a few other things before he became the monster under our collective bed. When Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein began to make his move against Kuwait, bin Laden was outraged. Hussein was a despised name on the lips of bin Laden and his followers; here was an unbelieving heretic who spoke the words of Allah, a self-styled Socialist who pretended piety, a ruthless dictator who killed every Islamic fundamentalist he could get his hands on.
Osama bin Laden went to King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, home of the holiest sites of Islam. The royal family was not to be found anywhere on bin Laden's list of friends at the time. A shrewd observer of local politics, bin Laden knew that the Saudi government enjoyed having the Palestinians living in squalor, bereft of homeland and hope, because it distracted the fundamentalists within Saudi Arabia from focusing on the inequities within their own country. With the crooking of a single oil-rich finger, the Saudi royals could solve the Palestinian problem. Their refusal to do so fed bin Laden's rage, for in his mind, they were aiding and abetting what he saw as an intolerable Israeli apartheid.
Bin Laden asked Fahd to help him resurrect the army that fought with him against the Soviets so that he could fight Saddam Hussein. Here again is an irony of the times: As in the 1980s, Osama bin Laden was spoiling for a fight against an enemy of the United States - for his own purposes, to be sure, but it is difficult to avoid a shake of the head when considering all of the recent rhetoric about a Saddam/Osama alliance.
Fahd turned bin Laden down, and allowed the American military to set up bases in Saudi Arabia for use in what became known as Operation Desert Storm. According to the version of Islam practiced by bin Laden, it is rank heresy to allow soldiers from an infidel army to occupy the land of Mecca and Medina. Bin Laden learned from this that regimes in the Middle East which claim fealty to Islam, but which in fact act at the behest of the Unites States, were not to be trusted. The royal family of Saudi Arabia joined the list of bin Laden's enemies, along with the United States, Saddam Hussein, and Israel.
It was Israel, proxy of the Unites States, which taught Osama bin Laden what could be considered the final, irrevocable lesson of his life. In April of 1996, Israel began a military action against Beirut and southern Lebanon called Operation Grapes of Wrath. "It is quite obvious," wrote Israeli writer Israel Shahak at the time, "that the first and most important Israeli aim to be established in the 'Grapes of Wrath' is to establish its sovereignty over Lebanon - to be exercised in a comparable manner to its control over the Gaza Strip."
On April 13, an ambulance driver named Abbas Jiha was rushing patients to a hospital in Sidon. Civilians caught in the crossfire of 'Grapes of Wrath' begged him to take them to Sidon, and so he squeezed his wife, his four children and ten others into his ambulance. An Israeli helicopter targeted his ambulance and fired two missiles. The ambulance was blasted sixty feet into the air, and Jiha was thrown clear. When he made it back to the remains of his rig, he found his nine year old daughter, his wife, and four others dead within the flaming wreckage.
On April 18, the small village of Qana was flooded with some 800 refugees from the fighting who were seeking protection from UN forces there. At about two in the afternoon, the village came under bombardment by Israeli 'proximity shells' - antipersonnel weapons which explode several meters above the ground and shower anyone below with razor-sharp shrapnel. The result was a massacre, a blood-drenched scene of shredded humanity.
Robert Fisk, the most decorated and reputable journalist in Britain, was there. "It was a massacre," he wrote. "Israel's slaughter of civilians in this 10-day offensive - 206 by last night - has been so cavalier, so ferocious, that not a Lebanese will forgive this massacre. There had been the ambulance attacked on Saturday, the sisters killed in Yohmor the day before, the 2-year-old girl decapitated by an Israeli missile four days ago. And earlier yesterday, the Israelis had slaughtered a family of 12 - the youngest was a four-day-old baby - when Israeli helicopter pilots fired missiles into their home."
These stories barely made a dent in the American press in 1996, but were widely reported at length by both European and Middle Eastern media outlets. Photographs of headless babies and slaughtered civilians reached far and wide, inflaming a region already filled with rage against Israel and America. From this time on, Osama bin Laden used Qana as a rallying cry against what he called the Israeli-United States alliance. The rest, as they say, is history.
Osama bin Laden is a damned murderer of innocents, with thousands of notches in his belt. His actions are indefensible by any measure. Yet to dismiss him as something other than the creation of his experiences, to categorize him as some unique freak whose motivations are beyond comprehension, is to deny the most important dilemma that faces our world. Monsters are not born. They are made.
On Sunday, September 12, 2004, a large crowd of Iraqi civilians came under fire from U.S. attack helicopters on Haifa Street in Baghdad. An American Bradley Fighting Vehicle had been attacked and destroyed by 'insurgents' fighting the ongoing occupation of their country, and the civilians - after more than a year of deprivation and violence which came on the heels of a decade of deprivation and violence - were dancing on top of and beside the vehicle. 13 of them were killed and dozens more wounded. A reporter from the UK Guardian named Ghaith Abdul-Ahad was there, and was wounded in the attack.
"One of the three men piled together," wrote Abdul-Ahad, "raised his head and looked around the empty streets with a look of astonishment on his face. He then looked at the boy in front of him, turned to the back and looked at the horizon again. Then he slowly started moving his head to the ground, rested his head on his arms and stretched his hands towards something that he could see. It was the guy who had been beating his chest earlier, trying to help his brother. He wanted help but no one helped. He was just there dying in front of me. Time didn't exist. The streets were empty and silent and the men lay there dying together. He slid down to the ground, and after five minutes was flat on the street."
The survivors of this attack, like the survivors of Qana, were probably not terrorists before the fire came raining down. It is a safe bet they are now, after seeing what they have seen, willing to trade their lives to see Americans die. They have seen the massacre of civilians, and so believe that civilians are fair game in this dirtiest of wars. They are monsters now, not born, but made.
The story of the 20th century Middle East is one of American action. We created Saddam Hussein, and then twice attacked him, leaving nearly two million civilians dead in the process. We created the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and bent our policies towards defending that house of cards and its precious oil. We created the Shah of Iran, then lost him, and propped up Hussein to checkmate our failure. We created Israel, a nation that has become our front line against the hostilities we manufactured in the region through our relentless military and economic meddling, and supported them militarily and financially as they committed acts of barbarism. We have paid great lip service to the plight of the Palestinians, but have always deferred to Israel.
More recently, we invaded Iraq on the pretext of destroying weapons of mass destruction which, according to recent comments by Secretary of State Powell, do not actually exist. We accused Saddam Hussein of collaborating with bin Laden, and of being involved in 9/11, despite the fact that bin Laden has wanted Hussein dead for years. We killed over 10,000 Iraqi civilians. We raped and tortured Iraqi men, women and children in the dungeons of Abu Ghraib. All of our poor history in the region has been distilled into that one nation, a place that now manufactures bin Laden allies by the truckload.
We created Osama bin Laden. We taught him to kill, we showed him how to destroy a superpower, and we gave him a face-first lesson in American interventionism in his back yard. Whatever predispositions towards violence and murder existed in him when he was born became honed, refined and perfected as he watched our government storm the policies, rulers and innocent people of the Middle East like so many rabbits. We have created millions more like him.
We are learning now that the game isn't much fun when the rabbits get a gun.
---
William Rivers Pitt william.pitt@truthout.org> is a New York Times and international bestseller of two books on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know' and 'Greatest Sedition is Silence.' (Available through Amazon.com)
2.
From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1305360,00.html
Far Graver than Vietnam
By Sidney Blumenthal
The Guardian
16 September 2004
Most senior US military officers now believe the war on Iraq has turned into a disaster on an unprecedented scale.
'Bring them on!" President Bush challenged the early Iraqi insurgency in July of last year. Since then, 812 American soldiers have been killed and 6,290 wounded, according to the Pentagon. Almost every day, in campaign speeches, Bush speaks with bravado about how he is "winning" in Iraq. "Our strategy is succeeding," he boasted to the National Guard convention on Tuesday.
But, according to the US military's leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush's war is already lost. Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: "Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse, he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost." He adds: "Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving Bin Laden's ends."
Retired general Joseph Hoare, the former marine commandant and head of US Central Command, told me: "The idea that this is going to go the way these guys planned is ludicrous. There are no good options. We're conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in Iowa, no sense of the realities on the ground. It's so unrealistic for anyone who knows that part of the world. The priorities are just all wrong."
Jeffrey Record, professor of strategy at the Air War College, said: "I see no ray of light on the horizon at all. The worst case has become true. There's no analogy whatsoever between the situation in Iraq and the advantages we had after the second world war in Germany and Japan."
W. Andrew Terrill, professor at the Army War College's strategic studies institute - and the top expert on Iraq there - said: "I don't think that you can kill the insurgency". According to Terrill, the anti-US insurgency, centred in the Sunni triangle, and holding several cities and towns - including Fallujah - is expanding and becoming more capable as a consequence of US policy.
"We have a growing, maturing insurgency group," he told me. "We see larger and more coordinated military attacks. They are getting better and they can self-regenerate. The idea there are x number of insurgents, and that when they're all dead we can get out is wrong. The insurgency has shown an ability to regenerate itself because there are people willing to fill the ranks of those who are killed. The political culture is more hostile to the US presence. The longer we stay, the more they are confirmed in that view."
After the killing of four US contractors in Fallujah, the marines besieged the city for three weeks in April - the watershed event for the insurgency. "I think the president ordered the attack on Fallujah," said General Hoare. "I asked a three-star marine general who gave the order to go to Fallujah and he wouldn't tell me. I came to the conclusion that the order came directly from the White House." Then, just as suddenly, the order was rescinded, and Islamist radicals gained control, using the city as a base.
"If you are a Muslim and the community is under occupation by a non-Islamic power it becomes a religious requirement to resist that occupation," Terrill explained. "Most Iraqis consider us occupiers, not liberators." He describes the religious imagery common now in Fallujah and the Sunni triangle: "There's talk of angels and the Prophet Mohammed coming down from heaven to lead the fighting, talk of martyrs whose bodies are glowing and emanating wonderful scents."
"I see no exit," said Record. "We've been down that road before. It's called Vietnamisation. The idea that we're going to have an Iraqi force trained to defeat an enemy we can't defeat stretches the imagination. They will be tainted by their very association with the foreign occupier. In fact, we had more time and money in state building in Vietnam than in Iraq."
General Odom said: "This is far graver than Vietnam. There wasn't as much at stake strategically, though in both cases we mindlessly went ahead with the war that was not constructive for US aims. But now we're in a region far more volatile, and we're in much worse shape with our allies."
Terrill believes that any sustained US military offensive against the no-go areas "could become so controversial that members of the Iraqi government would feel compelled to resign". Thus, an attempted military solution would destroy the slightest remaining political legitimacy. "If we leave and there's no civil war, that's a victory."
General Hoare believes from the information he has received that "a decision has been made" to attack Fallujah "after the first Tuesday in November. That's the cynical part of it - after the election. The signs are all there."
He compares any such planned attack to the late Syrian dictator Hafez al-Asad's razing of the rebel city of Hama. "You could flatten it," said Hoare. "US military forces would prevail, casualties would be high, there would be inconclusive results with respect to the bad guys, their leadership would escape, and civilians would be caught in the middle. I hate that phrase collateral damage. And they talked about dancing in the street, a beacon for democracy."
General Odom remarked that the tension between the Bush administration and the senior military officers over Iraqi was worse than any he has ever seen with any previous government, including Vietnam. "I've never seen it so bad between the office of the secretary of defence and the military. There's a significant majority believing this is a disaster. The two parties whose interests have been advanced have been the Iranians and al-Qaida. Bin Laden could argue with some cogency that our going into Iraq was the equivalent of the Germans in Stalingrad. They defeated themselves by pouring more in there. Tragic."
---
See also:
U.S. Intelligence Shows Pessimism on Iraq's Future (16 September 2004) http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/091704A.shtml
Washington - A classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared for President Bush in late July spells out a dark assessment of prospects for Iraq, government officials said Wednesday. The estimate outlines three possibilities for Iraq through the end of 2005, with the worst case being developments that could lead to civil war, the officials said. The most favorable outcome described is an Iraq whose stability would remain tenuous in political, economic and security terms. CLIP
Kofi Annan: Iraq War was Illegal, Breached U.N. Charter
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/091704D.shtml
17,000 Short: Press Lowballs Reports on U.S. Casualties
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/091704C.shtml
3.
Forwarded by "Mark Graffis" mgraffis@vitelcom.net>
Bob Dole’s former chief of staff says Bush ordered 911 events
Transcript: Alex Jones Interviews Stanley Hilton
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/september2004/130904hiltontranscript.htm
The Alex Jones Show | September 13 2004
The MP3 of this interview is available at http://www.prisonplanet.tv/audio/091204hilton.htm
AJ: He is back with us. He is former Bob Dole’s chief of staff, very successful counselor, lawyer. He represents hundreds of the victims families of 9/11. He is suing Bush for involvement in 9/11. Now a major Zogby poll out – half of New Yorkers think the government was involved in 9/11. And joining us for the next 35 minutes, into the next hour, is Stanley Hilton. Stanley, it’s great to have you on with us.
SH: Glad to be on.
AJ: We’ll have to recap this when we start the next hour, but just in a nutshell, you have a lawsuit going, you’ve deposed a lot of military officers. You know the truth of 9/11. Just in a nutshell, what is your case alleging?
SH: Our case is alleging that Bush and his puppets Rice and Cheney and Mueller and Rumsfeld and so forth, Tenet, were all involved not only in aiding and abetting and allowing 9/11 to happen but in actually ordering it to happen. Bush personally ordered it to happen. We have some very incriminating documents as well as eye-witnesses, that Bush personally ordered this event to happen in order to gain political advantage, to pursue a bogus political agenda on behalf of the neocons and their deluded thinking in the Middle East. I also wanted to point out that, just quickly, I went to school with some of these neocons. At the University of Chicago, in the late 60s with Wolfowitz and Feith and several of the others and so I know these people personally. And we used to talk about this stuff all of the time. And I did my senior thesis on this very subject – how to turn the U.S. into a presidential dictatorship by manufacturing a bogus Pearl Harbor event. So, technically this has been in the planning at least 35 years.
AJ: That’s right. They were all Straussian followers of a Nazi-like professor. And now they are setting it up here in America. Stanley, I know you deposed a lot of people and you’ve got your $7 million dollar lawsuit with hundreds of the victim’s families involved….
SH: 7 billion, 7 billion
AJ: Yeah, 7 billion. Can you go over some of the new and incriminating evidence you’ve got of them ordering the attack?
CLIP - Read the whole transcript at http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/september2004/130904hiltontranscript.htm
(...) AJ: Why have you decided to go public again after a year of being under the radar?
SH: Because the more and more evidence that I’ve been adducing over a year and a half has made it so obvious to me that this was now without any doubt a government operation and that it amounts to the biggest act of treason and mass murder in American history. I mean George Bush makes Benedict Arnold look like a patriot. He makes Benedict Arnold look like George Washington. I mean that’s what we have – a criminal and a traitor sitting in the White House pretending he’s a patriot, wrapping himself in the flag. And it’s pretty disgusting because the other side of the so-called opposition, the Kerry camp is just saying nothing because they’re afraid to speak.
CLIP
(...) AJ: Stanley, the globalists, the new world order crowd, definitely intend to carry out more terror attacks. I know they would have carried out more attacks if we wouldn’t have done what we’ve been up to, if you wouldn’t have been out there boldly speaking out and many others. And then their electronic Berlin wall has a bunch of cracks in it now. Thanks to good people like yourself and many others who are speaking out and telling the truth. But do you think that they may carry out what they’ve been hyping – a suitcase nuke attack, a biological release to try to smokescreen all of this? I know it’s a catch 22, you’ve got to expose the murderers. We’ve got to get the word out on this but some government people that I’ve talk to say, “Yeah, but if you do that, they are going to go even more hard core and must totally try to take over.” But I say regardless, they are already doing that. So what do you say to that?
SH: Well, yeah, I think they have an agenda. They have contingency plans. I think they are laying low now because there are an increasing number of people, like myself, who are openly challenging them and accusing them of criminal conduct. I think they would have done it again if we had not spoken up. I think they’re planning, what they would like to do is silence any dissenters. That’s why we are trying to get the Patriot Act declared unconstitutional in this lawsuit also.
AJ: Let’s talk about polls. In the beginning a patriot is a scarce man, hated and feared, but in time when his cause succeeds, the timid join him, because then it costs nothing to be a patriot. You are one of those guys who hit the barbwire for us, or figuratively jumped on the hand grenade for America. But when you’ve got a Zogby poll, who is highly respected, half of New Yorkers believe that the government was involved. When you have a Canadian poll, 63% on average believe that the U.S. government was involved. And some groups, as high as 76% in polls believe the government was involved. European polls, two-thirds show the same thing. We have German defense ministers and technology ministers and another member of their government now, three of them going public, known conservatives, and progressives. You have an environment minister, Michael Meacher, saying that if they didn’t do it, they sure as hell knew what was going on. Look, if anybody who is a thinking person looks at the evidence, their official story is impossible. Then you investigate and they are involved in it. Comments to this massive awakening and what’s happening.
SH: Well, I think that’s why they want the Patriot Act to suppress political dissent. They have to, they’re anticipating, they are not dumb individuals. I know these people personally, Wolfowitz. These are criminal individuals but they are smart and so they anticipated political dissent. And that’s why, like the Nazis, their forebears, and their blood brothers, the Nazis and the Stalinists, they’re all for political repression. Every corrupt and criminal government has done this – they suppress their own people: Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, Mao Tse-Tung, that’s why we have the Patriot Act. So it’s hand in hand. They had it planned to go right up to September 11th, this was all part of the plan. You have to do it. It was part of my senior thesis. You must follow through the terrorists attacks with a political suppression mechanism in the law. And that’s why they want Patriot I and Patriot II and their plans are to continue launching more terrorist attacks to justify even more repression. The goal is to make this a one party dictatorship in this country, to pursue their dubious ends with their blood brothers like the Saudi Royal family. And also, historical blood brothers, such as the Nazi Germany and the Communist Russian. That’s the goal
CLIP
---
See also:
9/11 Widows: "President Bush Thwarted Our Attempts at Every Turn" (Sept 15)
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/09/15/widows/index_np.html
The widows known as the "Jersey Girls" changed history by demanding an independent 9/11 investigation. Now they want to change who's president - though some voted for Bush four years ago.
4.
BIG HOVERING BROTHER IN YOUR FACE - WORST POSSIBLE NIGHTMARE! THIS IS WHAT RE-ELECTING BUSH COULD BRING TO AMERICA...
From: http://www.federalobserver.com/archive.php?aid=1620
Flying Fascism on Your Doorstep
Sept 17, 2004
By Al Martin - Al Martin Raw
New high-tech surveillance equipment revealed at the Redstone Arsenal's Weekly Arms Bazaar promises a dismal future for freedom-loving people of the world.
The Friendly Colonel has filed the latest report from the most recent arms show at the Redstone Arsenal, which has been shut down and is essentially used for storage. Housed in this facility are several thousands of the new modified urban control Humvees, equipped with 14.5 mm cannons as well as many aerials and satellite dishes. Some are camouflage in color, but most of them are dark matte gray. They looked like they were painted with a sealer coat of paint (primer paint), before the final coat is painted on depending on the theater of operation in which they will be used.
Of greater significance was the introduction of the new DCHD (Domestic Control Hover Drones), which were displayed and offered for sale. They're about a meter in diameter and probably weigh about twenty kilograms each. It looks like a life ring (life preserver) with a motor in the middle of it.
The Chinese and Russian arms dealers were interested in them, and evidently the British Government has been one of this device's primary buyers. Evidently we're not selling them to a lot of foreign countries at this time, but still building inventories for ourselves. Each of these DCHDs costs $178,000 a copy.
He met with an Iranian colonel who is some sort of an engineer, who was trying to explain to him what these things can do. The Friendly Colonel admitted that he didn't even know such technology even existed.
Here are some specs. They can hover to a maximum ceiling of 500 feet, although they're really meant to hover about 50 feet off the ground. They not only hover, but they can go forward and back. Their maximum speed is 50 miles an hour, and they can stay aloft for up to three hours at a time.
There are counter-rotating rotors in the middle of the device with what appears to be an engine on top. All of the internal components appear to be made of some sort of super-advanced composite, like boron-graphite composite material that is very, very light, but is also very strong. The propellers are also made of this same material, and they weigh practically nothing.
There are two counter-rotating propellers, two propellers that rotate counter-synchronously, the way the Russians used to build turbo-prop airplanes like the TU-95s. The reason they do it that way is because it gives a much higher speed, lift and stability.
They're controlled electronically - either through satellites or through what they call Fixed or Mobile Relay Command Centers, built right into the Humvee. They showed how the two worked together.
The Friendly Colonel reports that inside this Humvee, which can control a certain quad of these things, it looked like the inside of a spaceship. The components and views screens, which appear to be holographic, and the technology are simply amazing -- "It's like nothing you ever saw."
The surveillance drones come in different color schemes -- a very dark black matte for night use or a two-tone matte white and sky blue top -- so it's hard to see them during the day.
They started one of these hover drones up, and he said it virtually makes no sound at all. Even if you're ten feet away, you couldn't hear the thing. That's how quiet they are.
They are fitted with what is purported to be one of the most-advanced micro-cameras ever invented by the US Government. Through satellites, their transmission capability is virtually limitless. Satellites can access its transmissions and give it directions, signals, codes, and tell it what to do.
They can be pre-programmed for certain flight paths, but the computer has the ability to think, so that if it acquires a target, it can deviate from a flight path. It also has sensors so it can get out of the way and not run into a tree or the side of a building. It also has infrared cameras and high-resolution night cameras with multiple neutral density filters.
They also have see-through capability -- with a thermal imaging sensor camera, which can actually see inside of buildings and see through walls. The device is meant to be used as a domestic control drone. It not only has cameras, but the most sensitive audio receivers that have ever been made. It can pick up a human conversation from five hundred feet away -- one human conversation. Not only can they photograph and relay still shots and real time video and transmit video, but they also have a "non-lethal" weapons capability, some sort of stun gun based on energy discharge technology. They're powered by what's known as a fusion power cell, which looks like a square pack of film. The power is produced through some sort of chemical reaction.
These drones can stop and detain people. Since they have a microphone, they can hover right in your face, while you're looking into the camera. It also has a transmitter, which can play pre-recorded messages, or someone can actually talk to you even though they're a thousand miles away.
During the demonstration, they hovered the thing around the room and then it came down in front of this Air Force captain's face, and it said, "Citizen, kindly present your national identification card."
Then a little telescoping plate comes out of it, and you're supposed to hold your national identification card in front of this plate. They wouldn't reveal all of its abilities of the drone because some of it was still classified. The manufacturer is the same company, located in Indiana, which makes other equipment for the NSA.
Let's think about where this device could be used. How about South Central Los Angeles street corners? Using these devices, only Government-Authorized crack dealers would be able to sell their product. Crack dealers, not approved by the Government, could then be sanctioned -- or removed.
The exhibit hall had high-definition presentation screens around the room, which showed how these things could be used. It showed them moving down a darkened street at night, and then it showed what the cameras were seeing, pictures of the people and how they looked through an infra red camera and an ultra violet camera and how different images looked through different camera receptors. It looked like it was right out of Star Trek.
There was actually a computer generated voice simulator, which announced, "Base price starts at just $178,543 for the Class IV model." Then it proceeded to announce the prices for all the options and add-ons, which could bring the total price up to $350,000.
And who would be most interested in buying these items? As the Friendly Colonel pointed out, as usual, there were a lot of Russian and Chinese arms dealers there - but you never really know their ultimate clients. And there were some military officers (they had staff patches) who appeared to be from the Office of Homeland Security, although they don't have military designation insignia yet.
These surveillance drones could be used in Small Town America -- to cruise down the streets to seek out those who are potential threats to the security of the State - those who are "disloyal," those who are "different," and those who have already been deemed to be suspicious by Neighborhood Watch Groups, following the new protocols and reported to the newly created Civilian Defense Force.
At any rate, it was a very slick and very well done presentation. They had the giant Australian prawns, lightly fried in a light batter and served with an oriental plum sauce. The Friendly Colonel says they were just out of this world -- and there was an open bar, of course. He said there's nothing like having taxpayer-funded prime rib and shrimp.
Coming soon to your neighborhood - sci-fi fascism. People already understand that this advanced technology exists, and the government has not denied that they are using miniaturized fusion power cells. The reason they're not making a big deal out of it is because people would say, "let's replace the oil industry with fusion power." And that is something that even I understand could not be done - without massive economic dislocation, of course.
---
See also:
Sound Cannon in Place in NY Pointed at Protesters (Sept 9, 2004)
http://www.infowars.com/print/ps/soundcannon_photos.htm
Here are photos from NY of the sound weapon in place and pointed at protesters. Sound Cannon in Place in NY Pointed at Protesters
5.
Forwarded by "Mark Graffis" mgraffis@vitelcom.net> on Sept 11, 2004
JUST IN! HR163 DRAFT TO INCLUDE *ALL* MEN/WOMEN 18-26
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=55305
Actions:
Please send this on to all the parents and teachers you know, and all the aunts and uncles, grandparents, godparents. . . And let your children know - - it's their future, and they can be a powerful voice for change!
This legislation is called HR 163 and can be found in detail at this website: http://thomas.loc.gov/
Just enter in "HR 163" and click search and will bring up the bill for you to read. It is less than two pages long.
If this bill passes, it will include all men and ALL WOMEN from ages 18 - 26 in a draft for military action. In addition, college will no longer be an option for avoiding the draft and they will be signing an agreement with the Canada which will no longer permit anyone attempting to dodge the draft to stay within it's borders. This bill also includes the extension of military service for all those that are currently active. If you go to the select service web site and read their 2004 FYI Goals you will see that the reasoning for this is to increase the size of the military in case of terrorism. This is a critical piece of legislation, this will effect our undergraduates, our children and our grandchildren. Please take the time to write your congressman and let them know how you feel about this legislation.
http://www.house.gov
http://www.senate.gov
Please also write to your representatives and ask them why they aren't telling their constituents about these bills and write to newspapers and other media outlets to ask them why they're not covering this important story.
The draft
$28 million has been added to the 2004 selective service system budget to prepare for a military draft that could start as early as June 15, 2005. Selective service must report to Bush on March 31, 2005 that the system, which has lain dormant for decades, is ready for activation.
Please see http://www.sss.gov/perfplan_fy2004.html to view the Selective Service System annual performance plan, fiscal year 2004. The Pentagon has quietly begun a public campaign to fill all 10,350 draft board positions and 11,070 appeals board slots nationwide. Though this is an unpopular election year topic, military experts and influential members of congress are suggesting that if Rumsfeld's prediction of a "long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan (and permanent state of war on terrorism) proves accurate, the U.S. may have no choice but to draft.
http://www.hslda.org/legislation/national/2003/s89/default.asp entitled the Universal National service Act of 2003, "to provide for the common defense by requiring that all young persons (age 18-26) in the United States, including women, perform a period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, and for other purposes."
These active bills currently sit in the committee on armed services. Dodging the draft will be more difficult than those from the Vietnam era. College and Canada will not be options. In December, 200 1, Canada and the U.S. signed a "smart border declaration," which could be used to keep would-be draft dodgers in.
Signed by Canada's minister of foreign affairs, John Manley, and U.S. Homeland Security director, Tom Ridge, the declaration involves a 30 point plan which implements, among other things, a "pre-clearance agreement" of people entering and departing each country. Reforms aimed at making the draft more equitable along gender and class lines also eliminates higher education as a shelter. Underclassmen would only be able to postpone service until the end of their current semester. Seniors would have until the end of the academic year.
What to do: Tell your friends, Contact your legislators and ask them to oppose these bills
Just type "congress" into the aol search engine and input your zip code. A list of your reps will pop up with a way to email them directly. We can't just sit and pretend that by ignoring it, it will go away. We must voice our concerns and create the world we want to live in for our children and grandchildren.
---
See also:
Edwards: No Military Draft if Dems Win (16 September 2004) http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040916/ap_on_el_pr/edwards_8
Parkersburg W. Va. - Vice presidential candidate John Edwards promised a West Virginia mother on Wednesday that if the Democratic ticket is elected in November the military draft would not be revived. (...) "Iraq is a mess. It is a mess because of George Bush and Dick Cheney. It's that simple," Edwards said. "The facts are overwhelming. This president's father did the work, the hard work, of bringing others with us before the Gulf War." Edwards said the Gulf War cost American taxpayers $5 billion. "This president did not do that. The result is over $200 billion and counting" and a thousand American deaths, Edwards said.
Report: U.S. May Run Out of Guard and Reserve Troops for War on Terrorism (Sept 15)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=afp/us_military_reserves
6.
SO MANY PARALLELS COME TO MIND IN RELATION TO THE CURRENT IRAQI QUAGMIRE... FROM A TIME WHEN JOHN KERRY WAS MORE FORCEFUL IN DENOUNCING THE VAIN CRUELTIES OF WAR...
From: "Mark Graffis" mgraffis@vitelcom.net>
Subject: Kerry's 1971 speech to the House Foreign Relations Committee
Date: 12 Sep 2004
Decorated veteran John Kerry, testifying before the House Foreign Relations Committee, questions the War in Vietnam, Washington, D.C., April 22, 1971. Thank you very much, Senator Fulbright, Senator Javits, Senator Symington and Senator Pell.
---
I would like to say for the record, and also for the men sitting behind me who are also wearing the uniforms and their medals, that my sitting here is really symbolic. I am not here as John Kerry. I am here as one member of a group of 1,000, which is a small representation of a very much larger group of veterans in this country, and were it possible for all of them to sit at this table, they would be here and have the same kind of testimony. I would simply like to speak in general terms. I apologize if my statement is general because I received notification [only] yesterday that you would hear me, and, I am afraid, because of the injunction I was up most of the night and haven't had a great deal of chance to prepare.
I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago, in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis, with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit--the emotions in the room, and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.
They told stories that, at times, they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam, in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
We call this investigation the Winter Soldier Investigation. The term "winter soldier" is a play on words of Thomas Paine's in 1776, when he spoke of the "sunshine patriots," and "summertime soldiers" who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough.
We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country, we could be quiet, we could hold our silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel, because of what threatens this country, not the reds, but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out.
I would like to talk to you a little bit about what the result is of the feelings these men carry with them after coming back from Vietnam. The country doesn't know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped.
As a veteran and one who felt this anger, I would like to talk about it. We are angry because we feel we have been used it the worst fashion by the administration of this country.
In 1970, at West Point, Vice President Agnew said, "some glamorize the criminal misfits of society while our best men die in Asian rice paddies to preserve the freedom which most of those misfits abuse," and this was used as a rallying point for our effort in Vietnam.
But for us, as boys in Asia whom the country was supposed to support, his statement is a terrible distortion from which we can only draw a very deep sense of revulsion. Hence the anger of some of the men who are here in Washington today. It is a distortion because we in no way consider ourselves the best men of this country, because those he calls misfits were standing up for us in a way that nobody else in this country dared to, because so many who have died would have returned to this country to join the misfits in their efforts to ask for an immediate withdrawal from South Vietnam, because so many of those best men have returned as quadriplegics and amputees, and they lie forgotten in Veterans' Administration hospitals in this country which fly the flag which so many have chosen as their own personal symbol. And we cannot consider ourselves America's best men when we are ashamed of and hated what we were called on to do in Southeast Asia.
In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.
We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but, also, we found that the Vietnamese, whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image, were hard-put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.
We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, North Vietnamese or American.
We found also that, all too often, American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes were used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by the flag, and blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs and search-and-destroy missions as well as by Viet Cong terrorism, - and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong.
We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a (http://themoderntribune.com/john_kerry_speech_viet_nam_us_congress.htm#footnote1) My Lai, and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.
We learned the meaning of free-fire zones--shooting anything that moves--and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals.
We watched the United States falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while, month after month, we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against (http://themoderntribune.com/john_kerry_speech_viet_nam_us_congress.htm#footnote2) "oriental human beings" with quotation marks around that. We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using, were we fighting in the European theater. We watched while men charged up hills because a general said that hill has to be taken, and, after losing one platoon, or two platoons, they marched away to leave the hill for reoccupation by the North Vietnamese. We watched pride allow the most unimportant battles to be blown into extravaganzas, because we couldn't lose, and we couldn't retreat, and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point, and so there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 81s and Fire Base 6s, and so many others.
Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of "Vietnamizing" the Vietnamese.
Each day, to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam, someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."
7.
INDEED!!
From: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0911-26.htm
Published on September 10, 2004 by the Financial Times/UK
Time to Consider Iraq Withdrawl
This week a macabre milestone was passed in Iraq. More than 1,000 American soldiers have now been killed since the US-led invasion of the country began nearly 18 months ago. The overwhelming majority lost their lives after President George W. Bush declared major combat operations over in his now infamous "Mission Accomplished" photo-opportunity in May last year.
In that time, an unknown number of mostly civilian Iraqis, certainly not less than 10,000 and possibly three times that number, have perished, and hundreds more are dying each week. After an invasion and occupation that promised them freedom, Iraqis have seen their security evaporate, their state smashed and their country fragment into a lawless archipelago ruled by militias, bandits and kidnappers.
The transitional political process, designed to lead to constituent assembly and general elections next year, has been undermined because the nervous US-dominated occupation authority has insisted on hand-picking various permutations of interim Iraqi governors, mostly exiles or expatriates with no standing among their people. Whatever Iraqis thought about the Americans on their way in - and it was never what these emigré politicians told Washington they would be thinking - an overwhelming majority now views US forces as occupiers rather than liberators and wants them out.
The aftermath of a war won so quickly has been so utterly bungled, moreover, that the US is down to the last vestiges of its always exiguous allied support, at the time when Iraq needs every bit of help it can get. The occupation has lost control of big swathes of the country. Having decided that all those who lived and worked in Iraq under Saddam Hussein bore some degree of collective guilt, Washington's viceroys purged the country's armed forces, civil service and institutions to a degree that broke the back of the state, marginalised internal political forces, sidelined many with the skills to rebuild Iraq's services and utilities and, of course, fuelled an insurgency US forces have yet to identify accurately, let alone get to grips with.
There are signs that US officials are beginning to "get it" - in the phrase Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary, patronisingly used this week to characterise Iraqis' grasp of the security situation. But if they are increasingly aware that what they have created in Iraq is a disaster, they seem at a loss to know what to do about it.
The core question to be addressed is this: is the continuing presence of US military forces in Iraq part of the solution or part of the problem?
As occupying power, the US bears responsibility for Iraq under international law, and is duty-bound to try to leave it in better shape than it found it. But there is no sign of that happening.
The time has therefore come to consider whether a structured withdrawal of US and remaining allied troops, in tandem with a workable handover of security to Iraqi forces and a legitimate and inclusive political process, can chart a path out of the current chaos.
Faced with a withdrawal timetable, Iraqis who currently feel helpless will know that the opportunity to craft a better future lies in their hands.
Take security. Iraqi forces are being rebuilt to take over front-line tasks. This is slow work, but that is not the real problem. It is that those forces already trained cannot stand alongside a US military that daily rains thousands of tonnes of projectiles and high explosives on their compatriots. Each time there is a siege of Fallujah or Najaf, with the US using firepower that kills civilians by the hundred, these Iraqi forces melt away. Until eventual withdrawal, there would have to be a policy of military restraint, imposed above all on those US commanders who have operated without reference to their own superiors, let alone the notionally sovereign Iraqi government.
Politically, if next year's elections are to have any chance of reflecting the will of the Iraqi people, the process must be opened up. Last month's national conference or proto-assembly was monopolised by expatriate politicians aligned with the interim government of Iyad Allawi. The only way national coalitions can be woven from Iraq's religious and ethnic patchwork is by including the opposition to the occupation. That means negotiating with the insurgents, probably through religious leaders of the stature of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. It also means an amnesty, which should help Iraqi authorities acquire the legitimacy to crush jihadist and other hold-outs.
Ideally, the US would accompany withdrawal by stating it has no intention of establishing bases in Iraq, and instead wishes to facilitate regional security agreements. That would be more stabilising than the current policy of bullying neighbours such as Iran and Syria, whose borders with Iraq the US in any case cannot control.
None of this will be less than messy. But whether Mr Bush or John Kerry wins the upcoming election, the US will eventually have to do something like this. Chaos is a great risk, and occupiers through the ages have pointed to that risk as their reason for staying put. But chaos is already here, and the power that is in large part responsible for it must start preparing now to step aside and let the Iraqis try to emerge from it.
---
See also:
Insurgents hammer central Baghdad, 25 dead in surge of violence in the capital (Sept 12)
http://www.boston.com/dailynews/256/world/Insurgents_hammer_central_Bagh:.shtml
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) Insurgents hammered central Baghdad on Sunday with one of their most intense mortar and rocket barrages ever in the heart of the capital, heralding a day of violence that killed at least 25 people in the city as security appeared to spiral out of control. Many of the dead were killed when a U.S. helicopter fired on a disabled U.S. Bradley fighting vehicle as Iraqis swarmed around it, cheering, throwing stones and waving the black and yellow sunburst banner of Iraq's most-feared terror organization. The dead from the helicopter strike included Arab television reporter Mazen al-Tumeizi who screamed, ''I'm dying, I'm dying,'' as a cameraman recorded the chaotic scene. An Iraqi cameraman working for the Reuters news agency and an Iraqi freelance photographer for Getty Images were wounded. Maimed and lifeless bodies of young men and boys lay in the street as the stricken U.S. vehicle was engulfed in flames and thick black smoke. Across the city, at least 104 people were wounded in explosions and barrages, the Health Ministry said. Strong detonations again shook the center of Baghdad after sunset Sunday. There were no reports of damage of casualties. CLIP
Thirteen killed as US chopper fires on crowd (Sept 12)
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=123&art_id=qw1094998141887B262
Baghdad - A United States helicopter gunship fired at a crowd of Iraqis swarming round a burning US vehicle in a Baghdad street on Sunday, and witnesses and officials said 13 people were killed and 61 wounded in violence in the area. Elsewhere, attacks in Baghdad killed nine other Iraqis on a day when insurgents fired more than a dozen mortars or rockets around the Green Zone compound housing the US and other embassies, in one of the heaviest barrages in Baghdad in months.
At least 45 killed in Iraq unrest as PM hits out at 'terrorists' (Sept 12)
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world/view/106292/1/.html
At Least 80 Civilians Die in Iraqi Violence (Sept 13)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/091404B.shtml
U.S. Helicopter Fires On Crowd in Baghdad - Baghdad - Car bombings, mortar attacks and clashes between insurgents and U.S. and Iraqi security forces killed at least 80 civilians across the country Sunday, Iraqi officials said. In Baghdad, the scene of some of the most intense fighting in months, at least 27 people were killed and 107 were wounded. A U.S. military helicopter fired into a crowd of civilians in the capital who had surrounded a burning Army armored vehicle, killing 13 people, said Saad Amili, spokesman for the Health Ministry. Among those killed was a Palestinian journalist reporting from the scene for the Arab satellite network al-Arabiya. (...) In Ramadi, a city west of Baghdad, 10 people were killed and 40 were wounded, including women and children, when U.S. tanks and helicopters opened fire in a residential district, Abdel Salam Mohamed, a doctor at Ramadi Hospital, told Reuters. CLIP
20 Said Killed in U.S. Airstrikes in Iraq (Sept 13)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&e=3&u=/ap/20040914/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq
BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. warplanes unleashed devastating airstrikes on a suspected hideout where operatives from an al-Qaida-linked group were meeting Monday, and hospital officials said 20 people died. (...) Witnesses said one explosion went off in a market as sellers were setting up their stalls, wounding several people and shattering windows. An ambulance was struck while rushing from the area, killing the paramedic driver and five wounded patients, hospital official Hamid Salaman said. At least 20 people were killed and 29 wounded in the airstrike, said Dr. Ahmad Taher of the Fallujah General Hospital. Women and children were among the dead. The hospital was overwhelmed with the wounded, its white sheets soiled with blood.
Baghdad experiences heaviest barrages for months (Sept 12)
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-09/13/content_1973312.htm
Preventive War: A Failed Doctrine (Sept 12)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/091304Y.shtml
If facts mattered in American politics, the Bush-Cheney ticket would not be basing its re-election campaign on the fear-mongering contention that the surest defense against future terrorist attacks lies in the badly discredited doctrine of preventive war. Vice President Dick Cheney took this argument to a disgraceful low last week when he implied that electing John Kerry and returning to traditional American foreign policy values would invite a devastating new strike. So far, the preventive war doctrine has had one real test: the invasion of Iraq. Mr. Bush terrified millions of Americans into believing that forcibly changing the regime in Baghdad was the only way to keep Iraq's supposed stockpiles of unconventional weapons out of the hands of Al Qaeda. Then it turned out that there were no stockpiles and no operational links between Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda's anti-American terrorism. Meanwhile, America's long-standing defensive alliances were weakened and the bulk of America's ground combat troops tied down in Iraq for what now appears to be many years to come. If that is making this country safer, it is hard to see how. The real lesson is that America dangerously erodes its military and diplomatic defenses when it charges off unwisely after hypothetical enemies. CLIP
8.
THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION IS AN UNIMAGINABLY IRRESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT (bordering on utterly criminal, frankly!) . ONE COULD NOT IMAGINE ANY OTHER COUNTRY ON EARTH - EXCEPT PERHAPS RUSSIA - WHERE SYSTEMATIC COVER UPS OF SUCH LIFE-THREATENING PROPORTIONS AS THE ONE DESCRIBED BELOW IS SO WIDESPREAD. JUST THINK ALSO ABOUT THE DEPLETED URANIUM-CONTAMINATED FIRING RANGES AROUND THAT COUNTRY AND ALL THE RADIOACTIVE FALLOUTS FROM PAST NUCLEAR TESTS -- FOR INSTANCE!... NO WONDER THEY SHOW SUCH POOR RESPECT FOR THE LIVES OF OTHER PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD.
From: http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=560842&host=3&dir=507
9/11 Pollution 'Could Cause More Deaths than Attack'
By Geoffrey Lean
Independent U.K.
12 September 2004
Up to 400,000 New Yorkers breathed in the most toxic polluting cloud ever recorded after the twin towers were brought down three years ago, but no proper effort has been made to find out how their health has been affected, according to an official report.
The US government study provides the latest evidence of a systematic cover-up of the health toll from pollution after the 9/11 disaster, which doctors fear will cause more deaths than the attacks themselves.
The Bush administration suppressed evidence of increasing danger and officially announced that the air around the felled buildings was "safe to breathe". Another report reveals that it has since failed at least a dozen times to correct its assurances, even when it became clear that people were becoming sick.
The official report - sent to Congress last week by the US Government Accountability Office - says that between 250,000 and 400,000 people in lower Manhattan were exposed to the pollution on 11 September 2001. But it shows that the government has yet to make a comprehensive effort to study the effects on their health.
And it reveals that there is no systematic effort to adequately monitor the well-being of those affected, give them physical examinations or provide treatment.
Scientific studies have shown that the cloud of pulverized debris from the skyscrapers was uniquely dangerous. The US government's own figures show that it contained the highest levels of deadly dioxins ever recorded - about 1,500 times normal levels. Unprecedented levels of acids, sulphur, fine particles, heavy metals and other dangerous materials were also measured.
Asbestos was found at 27 times acceptable levels, and scientists found about 400 organic alkanes, phthalates and polyaromatic hydrocarbons - many suspected of causing cancer and other long-term diseases.
The site at Ground Zero went on smoldering, becoming what scientists describe as a "chemical factory", creating new dangerous substances.
9.
Date: 13 Sep 2004
From: Keith Hay aokay4@shaw.ca>
Subject: History of Bush... What the people think
COMMENT FROM A POLITICAL CHATROOM...WHAT THE PEOPLE THINK.
HISTORY OF BUSH.... STEALS ELECTION.... STAGES 9-11 TO CONTINUE NWO AGENDA... TELLS EVERYONE THAT HE WILL PROTECT US, BY SHREDDING THE CONSTITUTION..... GOES AFTER GOVERNMENT SUPPORTED TERRORISTS IN AFGHANISTAN.... DROPS NUCLEAR WASTE ALL OVER IRAQ.... TELLS US THIS SHIT WILL NEVER END... SO OUR KIDS AND THEIR KIDS CAN LIVE IN HORROR AND TERROR FOR MORE TIME TO COME.... FOUND GUILTY OF BEING THE GREATEST WAR CRIMINAL IN HISTORY.... AND HAS HIS MEDIA MINIONS CONVINCING EVERYONE.... HE IS THE BEST MAN TO UPHOLD FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY....INSANE.... GOD HELP US ALL, OR VOTE KERRY '04.
SEND THIS TO AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE, IF YOU CARE TO VIEW HISTORY, OR VOTE BUSH TO END HISTORY ALTOGETHER.
CHEERS
10.
MARGO IS A LONG-TIME ERN SUBSCRIBER...
Date: 14 Sep 2004
Subject: New book on the language of political debate is released for last minute progressive drive
From: Margo Baldwin mbaldwin@chelseagreen.com>
Jean, we’re rushing this book out for the elections. Lakoff is really amazing! Hope you can let your list know. I’ll get a copy in the mail to you as well. Thanks as always!
Margo
New book on the language of political debate is released for last minute progressive drive
DON'T THINK OF AN ELEPHANT: KNOW YOUR VALUES AND FRAME THE DEBATE
The Essential Guide for Progressives
by George Lakoff
Foreword by Howard Dean; Introduction by Don Hazen
http://www.chelseagreen.com/2004/media/elephant
The countdown to the presidential election is underway, and a new book from Chelsea Green shows exactly how to understand the language being used in our contentious political discourse today, and how progressives can better frame and communicate about their values.
With his book, Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, George Lakoff, a University of California cognitive linguist, is fast becoming the great hope of the progressive movement. Lakoff has crisscrossed the country in recent months, sharing his theories relating to the "nation as family" metaphor. According to Lakoff, conservatives see the world through a "strict father morality," while liberals filter their existence through a "nurturant parent mentality." These opposing world views are at the heart of this nation's current great divide and the hostility between the two parties--and the reason why so many people say they still don't know for whom they will vote. (see Lakoff’s op-ed in The Boston Globe this past Sunday for a great, short intro to his ideas: http://www.chelseagreen.com/2004/items/elephant/AssociatedArticles
But, Lakoff has a plan to help progressives build a bridge to these swing voters. Until recently, Lakoff was relatively unknown, with his ideas being bandied about primarily by environmental leaders. Until Howard Dean subscribed. And now John Kerry. Lakoff's new book, Don't Think of An Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate is being rushed out by Vermont publishing house, Chelsea Green, and is being dubbed, The Essential Guide for Progressives. In his foreword to the book, Dean writes that, "George Lakoff will be one of the most influential political thinkers of the progressive movement when the history of this century is written."
A variety of progressive groups and media are helping Chelsea Green to launch the book, and bring Lakoff to the people. Dean's Democracy for America, The Apollo Alliance, the Center for America's Future, Sierra Club, Green Festival, AlterNet.org, JimHightower.com. AnitaRoddick.com, The Nation and more will be sending email blasts to their members and promoting the book on their sites. MoveOn is reportedly planning to use the book as part of 10-week countdown to the election and a national tour is being organized by Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities. Blue America, it is hoped, will be reached by way of a massive viral email campaign, beginning next week.
When the presidential debates take place, Lakoff, a political commentator and world-renowned linguist will also be uniquely placed to give his take on the rhetorical successes and failures of each candidate. Lakoff's insights on the impact of language on politics have recently been featured in the Boston Globe, Time Magazine, U.S. News and World Report, CBS News, NOW with Bill Moyers, Topic A with Tina Brown, San Francisco Chronicle, All Things Considered, MediaChannel.org, AlterNet.org and The Nation, and his views are revolutionizing the way we understand political speech in America. His commentary on the language used at the Republican national convention can be viewed at: http://www.chelseagreen.com/2004/items/elephant/PDFs
Time is short! I urge you to buy this book and pass it around. I urge you to buy multiple copies and give them away to family and friends. You can buy it directly from Chelsea Green ($10) or from Amazon and other Internet booksellers, but probably the best thing you can do is ask your local bookseller to order 10 copies (tell them we have a special offer from now until election day) so it’s made widely available in as short a time as possible. We’d like to make this book the bestseller it deserves to be and by doing so, knock the latest right-wing attack books down and off the lists!
Thanks!
Margo
Margo Baldwin, President & Publisher
Chelsea Green Publishing Company
85 North Main St., Suite 120, P.O. Box 428
White River Junction, VT 05001
802-295-6300, Fax 802-295-6444
http://www.chelseagreen.com
the politics & practice of sustainable living
11.
From: http://omega.twoday.net/stories/331557/
Bush's New Mental Screening Plans Evoke Memories of Clockwork Orange
I seldom ask people to sign and send a petition. When I do, it is because it is of critical importance. This time, it is on behalf of our own children!
Please click on the link below, make sure you take just a minute to read the information and, PLEASE, sign the petition available.
http://capwiz.com/liberty/issues/alert/?alertid=6333001&type=CO
In case you are not familiar with this issue and what is at stake, please view the short ABC News video clip to learn of just one tragic outcome of what happened to a 12 year old girl.
Be sure to access the video from this online link:
http://www.wjla.com/news/stories/0904/171639.html
Bush To Impose Psychiatric Drug Regime
..."The TMAP medication guidelines were established in 1995 as an "expert consensus" based on the opinions of prescribers, rather than an analysis of scientific studies. The pharmaceutical companies who funded the scheme include Janssen Pharmaceutica, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, Astrazeneca, Pfizer, Novartis, Janssen-Ortho-McNeil, GlaxoSmithKline, Abbott, Bristol Myers Squibb, Wyeth-Ayerst and Forrest Laboratories.
The drugs recommended as "first line treatment", many of them with potentially deadly side effects, are patented expensive drugs produced by the sponsors of the guidelines: Risperdal, Zyprexa, Seroqual, Geodone, Depakote, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, Wellbutron, Zyban, Remeron, Serzone, Effexor, Buspar, Adderall and Prozac...."
"TMAP was extended to cover children, again by "expert consensus", and no doubt the Bush program for widespread testing in schools all over the US will find hundreds of thousands if not millions of new "customers" for the dangerous psychiatric drugs the scheme promotes."
http://omega.twoday.net/stories/327093/
Most importantly, FORWARD THIS PETITION to others on your list and ask them to do the same
In gratitude,
Jack Topel
(excerpt from his message)
---
From: http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/september2004/130904clockworkorange.htm
Bush's New Mental Screening Plans Evoke Memories of Clockwork Orange
Jon Rappoport | September 13 2004
I've written about Bush's draconian mental-health screening program for every kid in the US.
Here is something else to think about. If this program really takes hold, psychiatrists will be able to extend their lists of trumped-up fake mental disorders.
In the long run, if a kid gets into a fight on the playground, if a kid makes some kind of anti-gay, anti-white, anti-black, anti-government comment, he could be dragged in for "screening."
Clockwork Orange.
"The state is compassionate. We don't want to punish the offending child. That's the old way. We want to go after that part of his brain function that made him do the anti-social thing. With medication, we can silence or convert that mis-firing in the brain."
Let's assume this Bush program goes nowhere.
But...it's a start. It's part of softening up the populace. Bit by bit, drop by drop, compromise by compromise, the road is built into a future no sane person wants.
That's the way they play the game.
Look what's happening with vaccines. There the goal is forced vaccination of every person. Right now there are still loopholes in every state, so that parents can claim exemptions for their kids.
But with all the propaganda about bio-threats and flu pandemics and SARS and anthrax attacks and smallpox attacks and so on, the population is being pushed in the direction of saying, "Oh, what the hell, they're right, let's give over our kids for the jabs, for their own good..."
Whether you believe in the safety/efficacy of vaccines or not, the question is whether you believe the state has the right to enforce a medical decision on you. On your kids.
The state positions itself as the sensible parent. "Do you want to endanger children?"
Freedom of choice fades as a concern.
I know there are some psychiatrists out there who have awakened to the massive abuses perpetrated by their profession (toxic drugs). Why not form a group and offer a case for the mental screening of George Bush and Dick Cheney?
Why not write an open letter and send it to every large press outlet in the world? Do your best. Use the lingo you learned as a student. Make the diagnosis. Fake out the fakers with a fake assessment. It's a dream assignment.
Suggest what drugs will quiet the brains of our leaders.
Turn the tables.
---
See also:
Bush plans to screen whole US population for mental illness
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/328/7454/1458
(...) But the Texas project, which promotes the use of newer, more expensive antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs, sparked off controversy when Allen Jones, an employee of the Pennsylvania Office of the Inspector General, revealed that key officials with influence over the medication plan in his state received money and perks from drug companies with a stake in the medication algorithm (15 May, p1153). He was sacked this week for speaking to the BMJ and the New York Times. The Texas project started in 1995 as an alliance of individuals from the pharmaceutical industry, the University of Texas, and the mental health and corrections systems of Texas. The project was funded by a Robert Wood Johnson grant—and by several drug companies. Mr Jones told the BMJ that the same "political/pharmaceutical alliance" that generated the Texas project was behind the recommendations of the New Freedom Commission, which, according to his whistleblower report, were "poised to consolidate the TMAP effort into a comprehensive national policy to treat mental illness with expensive, patented medications of questionable benefit and deadly side effects, and to force private insurers to pick up more of the tab" (http://psychrights.org/Drugs/AllenJonesTMAPJanuary20.pdf).
12.
Date: 10 Sep 2004
Subject: And for a little levity! -- Republican beliefs
From: Elizabeth Jones ejones@starpathways.com>
Hi Jean. I just couldn’t resist sending this to you. We all need a little levity now and then! And before the fun stuff, a quote with a little hope shining through it:
“All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.”
– John Arbuthnot, writer and physician (1667-1735)
Thank you your seemingly tireless dedication to the cause.
Blessings from Mt. Shasta,
Elizabeth Jones
http://www.starpathways.com
---
Subject: Republican beliefs
Things you have to believe to be a Republican today:
Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and Hillary Clinton.
Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush's daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him and a bad guy when Bush needed a "we can't find Bin Laden" diversion.
Trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is Communist, but trade with China and Vietnam is vital to a spirit of international harmony.
The United States should get out of the United Nations, and our highest national priority is enforcing UN resolutions against Iraq.
A woman can't be trusted with decisions about her own body, but multinational corporations can make decisions affecting all mankind without regulation.
The best way to improve military morale is to praise the troops in speeches while slashing Veterans' benefits and combat pay.
If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won't have sex.
A good way to fight terrorism is to belittle our longtime allies, then demand their cooperation and money.
Providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy.
Providing health care to all Americans is socialism.
HMOs and insurance companies have the best interests of the public at heart
Global warming and tobacco's link to cancer are junk science, but creationism should be taught in schools.
A president lying about an extramarital affair is an impeachable offense
A president lying to enlist support for a war in which thousands die is solid defense policy.
Government should limit itself to the powers named in the Constitution, which include banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet.
The public has a right to know about Hillary's cattle trades, but George Bush's driving record is none of our business.
Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you're a conservative radio host. Then it's an illness and you need our prayers for your recovery.
You support states' rights, which means Attorney General John Ashcroft can tell states what local voter initiatives they have the right to adopt.
What Bill Clinton did in the 1960s is of vital national interest, but what Bush did in the '80s is irrelevant.
Friends don't let friends vote Republican.
13.
Forwarded by "Mark Graffis" mgraffis@vitelcom.net>
Drunken Humor
A drunk was staggering back from the pub one night when he came across a baptism taking place in the river. He wanted a closer look and, hazily walked right up to the river bank.
The preacher saw him and, seeing the inebriated state he was in, decided to save his soul! He grabbed the drunk, plunging him into the icy water and praying in a loud voice! He lifted his head and asked "now brother...have you found the Lord this day?" "No!" replies the man!
The preacher, taken aback plunges the drunk under the freezing water again. After a time he lets him up again, and asks in a louder voice, if he has yet found the Lord!! To his horror the answer comes back again! "NO!"
Outraged the preacher puts him under the water for a third time and holds him there for a good minute or so! He drags the poor wretch out of the river and shouts "Now, my fallen and unredeemed brother .. for the love of God, have you found the Lord?!"
The man replies..."NO!.... are you sure this is where he fell in?"
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