More media shenanegans

U.S. Military Covertly Pays to Run Stories in Iraqi Press
As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq. The articles, written by U.S. military "information operations" troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a defense contractor, according to U.S. military officials and documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times. Lincoln Group, formerly known as Iraqex, is one of several companies hired by the U.S. military to carry out "strategic communications" in countries where large numbers of U.S. troops are based. Besides its contract with the military in Iraq, Lincoln Group this year won a major contract with U.S. Special Operations Command, based in Tampa, to develop a strategic communications campaign in concert with special operations troops stationed around the globe. The contract is worth up to $100 million over five years, although U.S. military officials said they doubted the Pentagon would spend the full amount of the contract. Many of the articles are presented in the Iraqi press as unbiased news accounts written and reported by independent journalists. The stories trumpet the work of U.S. and Iraqi troops, denounce insurgents and tout U.S.-led efforts to rebuild the country. Though the articles are basically factual, they present only one side of events and omit information that might reflect poorly on the U.S. or Iraqi governments. Records and interviews indicate that the U.S. has paid Iraqi newspapers to run dozens of such articles.(Sound familiar? It works here, why not there?)
The operation is designed to mask any connection with the U.S. military. The Pentagon has a contract with a small Washington-based firm called Lincoln Group, which helps translate and place the stories. The Lincoln Group's Iraqi staff, or its subcontractors, sometimes pose as freelance reporters or advertising executives when they deliver the stories to Baghdad media outlets. The military's effort to disseminate propaganda in the Iraqi media is taking place even as U.S. officials are pledging to promote democratic principles, political transparency and freedom of speech in a country emerging from decades of dictatorship and corruption.
It comes as the State Department is training Iraqi reporters in basic journalism skills and Western media ethics. The military's information operations campaign has sparked a backlash among some senior military officers in Iraq and at the Pentagon who argue that attempts to subvert the news media could destroy the U.S. military's credibility in other nations and with the American public.
"Here we are trying to create the principles of democracy in Iraq. Every speech we give in that country is about democracy. And we're breaking all the first principles of democracy when we're doing it," said a senior Pentagon official.
The arrangement with Lincoln Group is evidence of how far the Pentagon has moved to blur the traditional boundaries between military public affairs and psychological and information operations, which use propaganda and sometimes misleading information to advance the objectives of a military campaign. The Bush administration has come under criticism for distributing video and news stories in the United States without identifying the federal government as their source and for paying American journalists to promote administration policies, practices the Government Accountability Office has labeled "covert propaganda." One of the military officials said that, as part of a psychological operations campaign that has intensified over the last year, the task force also had purchased an Iraqi newspaper and taken control of a radio station, and was using them to channel pro-American messages to the Iraqi public. Neither is identified as a military mouthpiece. The official would not disclose which newspaper and radio station are under U.S. control, saying that naming them would put their employees at risk of insurgent attacks.
U.S. law forbids the military from carrying out psychological operations or planting propaganda through American media outlets. Yet several officials said that given the globalization of media driven by the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle, the Pentagon's efforts were carried out with the knowledge that coverage in the foreign press inevitably "bleeds" into the Western media and influences coverage in U.S. news outlets. "There is no longer any way to separate foreign media from domestic media. Those neat lines don't exist anymore," said one private contractor who does information operations work for the Pentagon.
One senior military official who spent this year in Iraq said it was the strong pro-U.S. message in some news stories in Baghdad that first made him suspect that the American military was planting articles. "Stuff would show up in the Iraqi press, and I would ask, 'Where the hell did that come from?' It was clearly not something that indigenous Iraqi press would have conceived of on their own," the official said.
A debate over the Pentagon's handling of information has raged since shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.In 2002, the Pentagon was forced to shut down its Office of Strategic Influence, which had been created the previous year, after reports surfaced that it intended to plant false news stories in the international media.


FLASHBACK: Why Were Government Propaganda Experts Working On News At CNN?
3/27/00
> Reports in the Dutch newspaper Trouw (2/21/00, 2/25/00) and France's Intelligence Newsletter (2/17/00) have revealed that several officers from the US Army's 4th Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) Group at Ft. Bragg worked in the news division at CNN's Atlanta headquarters last year, starting in the final days of the Kosovo War. In the U.S. media, so far only Alexander Cockburn, columnist for The Nation and co-editor of the newsletter CounterPunch, has picked up on the story. Cockburn's column on the subject is available at www.counterpunch.org. The story is disturbing. In the 1980s, officers from the 4th Army PSYOPS group staffed the National Security Council's Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD), a shadowy government propaganda agency that planted stories in the U.S. media supporting the Reagan Administration's Central America policies. A senior US official described OPD as a "vast psychological warfare operation of the kind the military conducts to influence a population in enemy territory." (Miami Herald, 7/19/87) An investigation by the congressional General Accounting Office found that OPD had engaged in "prohibited, covert propaganda activities," and the office was soon shut down as a result of the Iran-Contra investigations. But the 4th PSYOPS group still operates.
CNN has always maintained a close relationship with the Pentagon. Getting access to top military officials is a necessity for a network that stakes its reputation on being first on the ground during wars and other military operations. What makes the CNN story especially troubling is the fact that the network allowed the Army's covert propagandists to work in its headquarters, where they learned the ins and outs of CNN's operations. Even if the PSYOPS officers working in the newsroom did not influence news reporting, did the network allow the military to conduct an intelligence-gathering mission against CNN itself?
For instance, one PSYOPS officer worked in CNN's satellite division. According to Intelligence Newsletter, rear admiral Thomas Steffens, a psychological warfare expert in the Special Operations Command, recently told a PSYOPS conference that the military needed to find ways to "gain control" over commercial news satellites to help bring down an "informational cone of silence" over regions where special operations were taking place.
An unofficial strategy paper published by the U.S. Naval War College in 1996 and written by an Army officer ("Military Operations in the CNN World: Using the Media as a Force Multiplier") urged military commanders to find ways to "leverage the vast resources of the fourth estate" for the purposes of "communicating the [mission's] objective and endstate, boosting friendly morale, executing more effective psychological operations, playing a major role in deception of the enemy, and enhancing intelligence collection."


Duke & the Gravy Train
by George Neumayr
The difference between Randy "Duke" Cunningham and many of his Congressional colleagues is one of degree, not kind. He is an extreme manifestation of a corruption pervasive in Congress, a crookedness that spreads with the size of the federal government. Had Cunningham just waited a little while and become a defense firm lobbyist, he could have received his Rolls-Royce, yacht, and Louis-Philippe commode legally.
In Washington, D.C., cause and effect are never examined honestly. Politicians are expert at bemoaning a troubling effect even as they deepen its cause. So while the Democrats crank up their "culture of corruption" campaign and Republicans express to the press horror at their colleague Cunningham's conduct, both parties will continue to approve and strengthen the catalyst of money-related corruption: the Leviathan-like size and power of the federal government. This is the reason so much dirty money is sloshing back and forth between them and lobbyists. The more the federal government's reach is extended, the more lobbyists' money is spent to stay or release its hand.
What will come out of the furor over Cunningham? A new crop of politicians willing to reduce the size of government so that lobbyists' won't bother to buy them off? No, the only change that is likely to occur is the creation of a few more phony "ethics" guidelines. Perhaps Congress will even hold another "hour-long ethics briefing." Remember that episode earlier this year? The "ethics" briefing was to help Congressmen learn how to fill out the proper forms after lunching with lobbyists.
Congress has become avarice writ large, taking more and more money from the American people for projects the people never see, use, or need but enrich pols and the special interests to which they are allied. In any other context this would be called theft. In Congress it is called outreach to constituents or government services. The real crisis, in other words, is not this or that avaricious clown (who is usually too inept to conceal his corruption like his colleagues) but a widely held corrupt political philosophy that normalizes avarice as a routine practice of the federal government.
"Ethics" rules have been multiplying since the Watergate era. Yet they never make politicians any more ethical, because they are detached from any just political or moral philosophy that would impress upon politicians the duty to exercise power modestly. The money scandals of recent years are due not to the absence of enough ethical rules but the presence of a widening federal trough that attracts an absurdly large number of lobbyists to D.C. each year.
The test of a politician's commitment to getting "money out of politics" is not whether he supports "campaign finance reform" but whether he is willing to remove money from the federal purse and return it to taxpayers. "Campaign finance reform" and big government just cancel each other out. Any serious answer to the question -- what is proper for a Congressman to do? -- depends upon the answer to a more basic one: What is proper for the federal government to do?
One of the glaring hypocrisies of the liberal outrage over Ken Tomlinson's tenure at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting -- in numerous editorials, he has been castigated for spending $10,000 on a lobbyist during his campaign to bring some programming balance to PBS -- is the indifference these same editorialists display when PBS, a government program with no real federal imperative, uses taxpayer money to hire much more expensive lobbyists to guarantee its access to taxpayer money.
Robert Novak reported on this form of corruption in June, noting that Tomlinson's tiny expenditure was dwarfed by "public broadcasting's permanent payments to big-time lobbyists. Respected Republican lobbyist Charlie Black's firm has represented PBS for four years at $180,000 a year.... Lobbyist Domenic Ruscio, a former Carter administration official, for many years has represented the Association of Public Television Stations, receiving $60,000 a year. He has been trying to pack the nine-member CPB with four from the public television community that the board presumably is overseeing."
Cunningham is a clumsy practitioner of a lobbying racket that is ubiquitous in D.C., a racket that revolves around a federal government that feels entitled to steal money from the taxpayer for frivolous purposes. Had Cunningham waded more circumspectly into the cesspool, he might have come up as clean as his colleagues with his yacht and commode.



Video Broadcast of Kidnapped Members of Christian Peacemaker Teams that Helped Expose Abu Ghraib Prisoner Abuse Scandal
(now why would Insurgents want to kidnap THEM? Maybe someone else pretending to be Insurgents is responsible?)
The Christian Peacemaker Teams has confirmed that four peace activists working with the group were kidnapped in Baghdad on Saturday. A videotape showing the four men was broadcast on al Jazeera. CPT is a non-missionary organization that has been documenting the abuse of Iraqi detainees. We speak with Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh about CPT's work in helping expose the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal and we go to Baghdad to speak with a member of the organization.

The real estate vultures are circling
Rescue efforts lead to arrest nightmare for New Orleans businessman
I saw a helicopter hovering in one spot for a few minutes. he was close to the ground. I didn't want to go close to the helicopter cause, every time I did, my canoe would spin around and almost flip over. So I waited for it to leave. When he left, I saw why they were hovering that area. They were marking the areas where the dead bodies were. This was the first time I saw dead bodies in our area. I went back to my house on Claiborne...
When I entered the area where the phone was, I saw a strange man there. I asked my tenant who he was, and what he was doing here. My tenant said that he was with the search and rescue team, and he needed to use the phone. I told him, "Oh, ok." We heard people outside. My tenant went to talk to them. It was the military. They asked him if we needed water. We told him no thank you, we have some. Then they jumped out the boat, went inside the house with their machine guns, and they were yelling at us to get in the boat. One of the military persons searched the house, for what? Only God knows. They treated us like hard criminals. They asked to see our ID cards, we showed it to them, they didn't even look at it. They only returned it to us. I told them I own this house, and my tenant was trying to prove to them that he lived there. They didn't care. They forced us out by gunpoint.
We asked them where they were taking us. They said, "talk to my boss." We were taken to St. Charles Ave and Napoleon Ave. As soon as we got out of the boat, the military personnel jumped on us in a very rough manner, and handcuffed us. We were treated very, very badly. Then they put us in a white van. We asked the military who were they and why are they doing this to us. They said they were from Indiana, and they were only following orders, and doing their job.
They brought us to the bus station. We saw lots and lots of military personnel with many different types of weapons/guns. They made us sit down and wait to be as they called it "processed". They took our fingerprints, and photos. They had us under maximum security. We did not know what was going on. There were guards from Angola and New York prisons that were running the bus station like a prison camp.
After processing us, they put us in a make shift chicken cage. Actually, it was the bus terminals that they turned into prison cells. It looked like a giant chicken cage. It was filthy dirty. They left us there for 3 days on this stinky, oily, filthy dirty floor. With no blankets or pillows. I swear, had we been in a prison in Afghanistan or Iraq, we would have been treated better. Somehow, I got a splinter the size of a tooth pick in my foot. It was the size of a tooth pick in width, and about half the length. It was getting infected, and caused me quite a bit of pain. I asked them if I could see a doctor. They refused me. Every day, I asked for a doctor. the splinter was lodged in my foot. I couldn't get it out. I saw a doctor helping other prisoners. I called out to him for help. He yelled at me in a very rude voice, that he was not a doctor. But he was a liar. He was a doctor. He was wearing green clothes, and he had a stethoscope. No one would help me.

Chipping away at our freedoms

Report: Pentagon Expands Ability to Spy At Home
The Washington Post is reporting the Pentagon has expanded its ability to spy on citizens within the United States. According to the Post, the Bush administration is considering allowing a little known Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity to investigate certain crimes domestically . The Pentagon is also pushing legislation on Capitol Hill that would create an intelligence exemption to the Privacy Act, allowing the FBI and others to share information gathered about U.S. citizens with the Pentagon, CIA and other intelligence agencies. Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies, said such an exemption would remove one of the few existing privacy protections against the creation of secret dossiers on Americans by government intelligence agencies." Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon said "We are deputizing the military to spy on law-abiding Americans in America. This is a huge leap without even a [congressional] hearing."

UK investigates Shootings by Private Contractors in Iraq
The British Foreign Office is investigating allegations that private contractors with the defense company Aegis have randomly shot at Iraqi cars. According to the Telegraph newspaper, a video recently appeared on a site affiliated with Aegis that contained four clips of an unidentified gunman shooting at cars in Iraq. One Iraqi Interior Ministry officials confirmed such shootings occur. He said: "When the security companies kill people they just drive away and nothing is done... I would say we have had about 50-60 incidents of this kind."

Al Jazeera Demands Answers from Bush Administration
The director-general of the Arabic tv network Al-Jazeera has demanded Washington respond to reports that President Bush wanted to bomb the network's headquarters in Doha. Last week the Daily Mirror cited a secret British memo revealing that Bush told Tony Blair last year of his desire to bomb the news outlet. The Bush administration has described the Daily Mirror's report as "outlandish."

U.S. Admits Troops Burned Bodies of Taliban Fighters
In Afghanistan, the U.S. military has admitted its troops burned the bodies of two Taliban fighters last month. After the troops burned the bodies, a U.S. Army psy-ops unit was caught on tape broadcasting news of the burning to local residents.

Major Climate Control Conference Opens in Montreal
One of the world's largest conferences ever on global warming opens today in Montreal but the world's worst polluter - the United States - has decided not to take part. Some 10,000 delegates from around the world are scheduled to attend the UN-sponsored conference to decide the future of the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty signed by 156 nations to curb greenhouse gases. The Bush administration has opposed the Kyoto Protocol and said individual nations should be able to pursue their own ways to curb emissions. The conference opens just a week after scientists revealed the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now higher than at any time in the past 650,000 years.

U.S. Still Silencing Scientists
More than 200 biologists and other researchers in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service confirm that they have been directed to alter their official scientific findings, says a survey released last week. The scientists say business interests apply political pressure to reverse scientific conclusions that might interfere with profits, including timber, grazing, development and energy companies.

FLASHBACK: Scientists' deaths are under the microscope
Eleven microbiologists mysteriously dead over the span of just five months. Some of them world leaders in developing weapons-grade biological plagues. Others the best in figuring out how to stop millions from dying because of biological weapons. Still others, experts in the theory of bioterrorism.

US to reach out to Iran in bid to quell Iraq unrest
President George W. Bush has asked US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad to reach out to Iran for assistance in subduing the unrest in Iraq — the first high-level US contact with Tehran in decades, Newsweek magazine reported yesterday. (Talk about a switch! Wasn't that the tactic they were using back in the Shah era?)

Anticipating a "Terrorist" Attack on Congress?
If the entire Congress gets blown up, Bush would "have no choice" but to assume dictatorial powers to deal with the "emergency". (Those kind of threats might keep the congress "in line") Will there be a "terrorist" attack on Congress? The strategy to militarize the country is moving forward as planned despite apparent setbacks in Iraq. As the Washington Post reported on Nov. 27 the Dept of Defense is expanding its domestic surveillance activity to allow Pentagon spies to track down and "investigate crimes within the United States". An alarmed Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore) said, "We are deputizing the military to spy on law-abiding Americans in America. This is a huge leap without a congressional hearing". Is this the first time that the naïve Wyden realized that the war on terror is actually directed at the American people?

Merck to cut 7,000 jobs Merck & Co. on Monday said it will cut 7,000 jobs and close five plants in a bid to save up to $4 billion in costs by 2010, marking the first steps by its chief executive to revive the drugmaker's fortunes.

Annual Buy Nothing Day is today!

Jane Goodall on Democracy Now!
Read the transcript or listen or watch the interview. She discusses her life, the environment, war, and her new book "Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating."

AMY GOODMAN: And what would you say to the animal farmers, the mass, large corporate, for example, hog farmers and others who say it's more efficient to do it this way?

JANE GOODALL: It's more efficient in that they can produce more meat quickly and, therefore, sell it cheaper. But if you balance against all of that the suffering of the animals, the contamination of the environment from the animal waste, which is huge, and finally, the sickness of people who are eating things that we shouldn't be eating, and again, I come back to the children. And children's health is suffering, and in addition we have this epidemic of obesity, which comes from fast foods.
So, you know, the antidote is to buy organic food if you can and to eat locally when you can to support farmers’ markets and to go back to an old feeling of when we used to feel in touch with our food. And I'm thrilled at some of the movements that are happening.

AMY GOODMAN: How do these movements fit in? How do you fit into the anti-corporate globalization movement in this country and around the world?

JANE GOODALL: See, I -- it's very -- it's a very complex, difficult kind of thing to tackle, really, but I think it boils down to this, that in the old days, many of the indigenous people, before they made a major decision, like ‘Let's cut down all this forest and grow grass for grazing cattle to make hamburgers,’ before making such a decision, the elders would gather and ask themselves how will this decision we make now affect our people in seven generations to come? But today so many decisions are made in relation to the next shareholders meeting. So in other words, it's making a quick buck now, and it's not thinking about the future.
And what I find so extraordinary is that with this amazing brain we have and our ability – I mean, think what we've done with it. And yet, at the same time we can create weapons of mass destruction, we can destroy huge areas of the environment, and we are destroying the planet upon which we live. We're harming our own health.

Investigation Shows Mainstream Media Not Interested In Freedom Of Information
A listing of all requests made of the Pentagon under the Freedom of Information Act since 2000 provides new insight into the aggressiveness of American news agencies. Under the Freedom of Information Act, the public can request records of government agencies. Records seen as jeopardizing national security or individual rights are typically exempted. All requests are public.
The Pentagon’s records reveal that the law is broadly used—more than 10,000 requests have been made since 2000. But they also illuminate a seeming dearth of curiosity by news organizations about the internal files of the U.S. military establishment. This lack of curiosity appears particularly evident among the nation’s three largest newspapers.
In total, the three papers with daily circulations greater than one million--USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times -- made just 36 requests of the Pentagon between 2000 and February 2005. USA Today made nine; the Journal, six; and the Times, 21. The Associated Press, the nation’s most widely used wire service, made 73 requests. Two other AP reporters made a handful of requests not identified by their employer. Leading print newspapers was the Los Angeles Times, with 42 inquiries. The Times recently ditched its national edition and announced last week it would lay off 85 newsroom staffers. Following the LA Times was the Washington Post, with 34—just shy of the total requests made by the three largest U.S. newspapers combined.
The largest television networks made slightly fewer requests than the top print outlets. CBS News led the pack with 32 queries; Fox News followed with 22; and NBC News just was shy of that with 21. Fox—a frequent target of the left—filed more requests than the New York Times. CNN, the most-watched 24 hour news channel, made just 11 inquiries.
The largest individual requestor was the National Security Archive, an independent non-governmental research institute and library based at George Washington University. The Archive filed 895 requests, representing about 8.4 percent of the total, considerably more inquiries than the 20 largest U.S. newspapers and all major television and cable news networks combined. A sampling of the group’s requests: records regarding U.S. drug policy in Latin America, declassified atomic energy commission files, information on Indian affairs in the 1960s, reports and briefing papers on an alleged X-ray rocket interceptor program under Reagan, and any information on China’s nuclear program.
Also among top FOIA watchdogs are the American Civil Liberties Union and Judicial Watch, a conservative government watchdog. Both groups filed more than 50 requests.

"Brownie" to form "emergency planning" consulting business
Ousted FEMA director Michael Brown, who was vilified over his handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, plans to make a fresh start in Colorado, selling his expertise (????) about how emergency planning can go right or so very wrong. (He's definitely an expert on that!!) Brown acknowledged key mistakes he made while overseeing the federal response to the hurricane that ravaged Louisiana and Mississippi. He also lashed out at the media and discussed plans to base his fledgling consulting business in the Boulder-Longmont area of Colorado.
Brown went from a little-known political appointee to national lightning rod status just days after Katrina made landfall in Louisiana on Aug. 29. Over the next several days, national television viewers were outraged by images of evacuees still waiting to be rescued or suffering in over-crowded shelters.
Brown, a lawyer, was lampooned for the scant emergency management experience he had before early 2001, when his friend, former FEMA director Joe Allbaugh, brought him to the agency as general counsel. Critics portrayed him as the ultimate political crony, since his emergency experience was brief, as a low-level government employee and city councilman, in Edmond, Okla., and he had more recently spent a decade as commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association, based in Colorado. As FEMA counsel, he played a role in the response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, was promoted to deputy director and later replaced Allbaugh in the top job. He describes that advancement as "the American Way."
"I had a very close friend to me come up and say that, 'You'll be judged by how you handle and how you react to this,' " he said. "I came out with a couple of goals in mind, to tell the truth, to admit to the mistakes that were made. . . . If people want to take shots at me, fine, but let's figure out a way to make this thing work better next time."

THE STORM Frontline, November 22, 2005
Watch or read online this PBS documentary aired last week, and see Brown doing anything but admitting to his mistakes. A great analysis of the horrible mistakes made by incorporating FEMA into DHS.

"Snipers" killed and wounded in Katrina aftermath by cops include childlike retarded adult, other innocents
NEW ORLEANS — Even in the desperate days after Hurricane Katrina, the news flash seemed particularly sensational: Police had caught eight snipers on a bridge shooting at relief contractors. In the gun battle that followed, officers shot to death five or six of the marauders. But nearly three months later — and after repeated revisions of the official account of the incident and a lowering of the death toll to two — authorities said they were still trying to reconstruct what happened Sept. 4 on the Danziger Bridge. And on the city's east side, where the shootings occurred, two families that suffered casualties are preparing to come forward with stories radically different from those told by police. A teenager critically wounded that day, speaking about the incident for the first time, said in an interview that police shot him for no reason, delivering a final bullet at point-blank range with what he thought was an assault rifle. Members of another family said one of those killed was mentally disabled, a childlike innocent who made a rare foray from home in a desperate effort to find relief from the flood.
On Sept. 4, the Danziger Bridge was a high and dry ridge in the middle of inundated neighborhoods, the highway became a magnet for evacuees. But before 9 a.m., the police reported snipers shooting from the bridge. Initial accounts given to the media by Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley had the targets as 14 civilian contractors, part of a convoy that drove to the area to help with storm repairs. But in a measure of the confusion and poor communication that prevailed, another police official gave a different account.
"Five men who were looting exchanged gunfire with police. The officers engaged the looters when they were fired upon," killing four, said Steven Nichols, the police official, according to the Reuters news agency.In the following weeks, the official account would be modified again. It turned out, police said, that only two of the suspects had been killed. Although not disclosed by police, one of the dead was the mentally retarded man, 40-year-old Ronald Madison, family and friends said. The other was a 19-year-old man. Four others were injured: Leonard Bartholomew, 44; his wife, Susan, 39; their daughter, Leisha, 17; and their nephew, Jose Holmes Jr., 19.
Lance Madison, 49, had played football at Southern University, a wide receiver who had a chance at the pros before settling into a career with Federal Express, his relatives said. Ronald Madison, nearly a decade younger, had been mentally disabled since birth. A fourth Madison brother, Romell, said that his brothers, after being stranded for several days on the roof of Lance's apartment building in New Orleans East, were trying to reach his office on the Chef Menteur Highway. To get there they had to cross the Danziger Bridge. But when they were nearing their destination, gun-toting teenagers shot at the brothers and sent them running, Lance testified at a September preliminary hearing.
"We ran for our lives," Lance told a judge at the hearing, where he faced eight felony counts for the attempted murder of eight police officers. The brothers escaped only to encounter another group of men — assembled at the west end of the bridge.
Chief Orleans Parish Magistrate Judge Gerard Hansen, who presided at the preliminary hearing, said he found it "hard to believe" that Madison would have been shooting at anyone that day. In the police statement on the incident, Ronald is not named. It says only that the "suspect" accompanying Lance fled to a motel about a block from the west end of the bridge.
Members of the Bartholomew family, driven out of the Lower 9th Ward by the flooding, also arrived at the bridge that morning. Six days after the storm hit, Susan and Leonard Bartholomew hoped to catch a rescue boat to navigate the still-flooded streets to retrieve a wallet they had left at home. The Bartholomews' nephew, Jose Holmes Jr., 19, went along, as did one of his friends, another 19-year-old, who planned to search for his missing mother, Holmes said. Police said Jose Holmes and his friend were among a group of "at least four suspects" near the east end of the bridge who began shooting at officers. When police returned fire, they said, the shooters jumped over a concrete barrier to a pedestrian walkway along the north side of the span. The suspects continued firing from behind the barrier, the police said.
On the day he was released from the West Jefferson Medical Center last week, Jose Holmes Jr. insisted that was not how it happened. Speaking haltingly, just above a whisper and nodding to answer some questions, the 108-pound teenager continued to move slowly after 10 weeks in the hospital. The teenager said he was "just walking" with his family and his friend when gunfire erupted behind them. "It was loud, real loud. After we heard the gunshots, we just started running," said Holmes, who displayed wounds to his arm, neck, chin and stomach. "Then we hopped over into a little walkway."
Holmes said he was down and badly wounded when one of the men approached, put an assault rifle to his stomach and pulled the trigger. He said he didn't get a good look at the shooters. "They came up real close, real close," Holmes said, adding that he was too terrified to look up. "They was trying to kill us." A colostomy bag now drains Holmes' bowels. His left forefinger and thumb are frozen. Doctors told him the hand had nerve damage. Leonard, Susan and Leisha Bartholomew were also wounded by the police. Susan lost an arm to what the family believed was a shotgun blast.
The preliminary conclusion of the investigation is that none of the three Bartholomews was carrying a gun that day, said police spokesman Defillo. But their nephew, Jose Holmes, who has moved into his father's Georgia home, is suspected of targeting the police. He will be charged with attempted murder and possibly other crimes "imminently," Defillo said. Authorities have not identified the other man killed by police that day, but Jose Holmes said it was his friend. "Out of anger, frustration, no leadership, the police just went berserk," said Jose Holmes Sr. on the day he brought his son home from the hospital.

Exclusive: Classified Pentagon Document
Described White Phosphorus As
‘Chemical Weapon’

from: ThinkProgress.org
To downplay the political impact of revelations that U.S. forces used deadly white phosphorus rounds against Iraqi insurgents in Falluja last year, Pentagon officials have insisted that phosphorus munitions are legal since they aren’t technically “chemical weapons.” The media have helped them. For instance, the New York Times ran a piece today on the phosphorus controversy. On at least three occasions, the Times emphasizes that the phosphorus rounds are “incendiary muntions” that have been “incorrectly called chemical weapons.”But the distinction is a minor one, and arguably political in nature. A formerly classified 1995 Pentagon intelligence document titled “Possible Use of Phosphorous Chemical” describes the use of white phosphorus by Saddam Hussein on Kurdish fighters:

IRAQ HAS POSSIBLY EMPLOYED PHOSPHOROUS CHEMICAL WEAPONS AGAINST THE KURDISH POPULATION IN AREAS ALONG THE IRAQI-TURKISH-IRANIAN BORDERS.
IN LATE FEBRUARY 1991, FOLLOWING THE COALITION FORCES’ OVERWHELMING VICTORY OVER IRAQ, KURDISH REBELS STEPPED UP THEIR STRUGGLE AGAINST IRAQI FORCES IN NORTHERN IRAQ. DURING THE BRUTAL CRACKDOWN THAT FOLLOWED THE KURDISH UPRISING, IRAQI FORCES LOYAL TO PRESIDENT SADDAM ((HUSSEIN)) MAY HAVE POSSIBLY USED WHITE PHOSPHOROUS (WP) CHEMICAL WEAPONS AGAINST KURDISH REBELS AND THE POPULACE IN ERBIL (GEOCOORD:3412N/04401E) (VICINITY OF IRANIAN BORDER) AND DOHUK (GEOCOORD:3652N/04301E) (VICINITY OF IRAQI BORDER) PROVINCES, IRAQ.

In other words, the Pentagon does refer to white phosphorus rounds as chemical weapons — at least if they’re used by our enemies. The real point here goes beyond the Pentagon’s legalistic parsings. The use of white phosphorus against enemy fighters is a “terribly ill-conceived method,” demonstrating an Army interested “only in the immediate tactical gain and its felicitous shake and bake fun.” And the dishonest efforts by Bush administration officials to deny and downplay that use only further undermines U.S. credibility abroad.
To paraphrase President Bush, this isn’t a question about what is legal, it’s about what is right.

FEMA hung up on me!

Less than three months after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, relief legislation remains dormant in Washington and despair is growing among officials here who fear that Congress and the Bush administration are losing interest in their plight. As evidence, the state and local officials cite an array of stalled bills and policy changes they say are crucial to rebuilding the city and persuading some of its hundreds of thousands of evacuated residents to return, including measures to finance long-term hurricane protection, revive small businesses and compensate the uninsured.
Few people in Congress are openly threatening to block money for reconstruction. More typical are sotto voce mumblings about whether federal money will be squandered through incompetence or graft by Louisiana officials. (How about incompetence and graft of FEMA officials and federally-hired contractors?) And some lawmakers have openly wondered whether each neighborhood in New Orleans needs to be rebuilt and protected with expensive floodwalls....
Representative Richard H. Baker, a Republican from Baton Rouge, has introduced legislation to create a corporation authorized to issue bonds to buy destroyed properties. The corporation would sell the properties to developers. Former owners would then have the first right to buy refurbished properties. (why would they have to buy properties that they formerly owned??? Couldn't a former resident come back & refurbish it himself????) Governor Blanco and Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans have endorsed the bill.

"We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." -Rep. Richard Baker (R-LA) to lobbyists, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal

Former Aide to DeLay Pleads Guilty in Conspiracy Case
Michael Scanlon, former aide to a powerful congressman and onetime partner of a wealthy lobbyist, pleaded guilty today to a federal conspiracy charge as part of a deal in which he agreed to cooperate with an investigation into possible wrongdoing by some lawmakers. Scanlon's comedown from a young and wealthy Washington power-player to disgraced felon had been expected. But it still may have sent shivers down Capitol corridors. Scanlon agreed to pay restitution totaling more than $19 million to the tribes and faces up to five years in prison. He was allowed to remain free on $5 million bond. After pleading guilty, the well-tanned Mr. Scanlon appeared incongruously cheerful. Asked by reporters why he was smiling, he replied, "I'm always smiling." Scanlon, 35, was accused of conspiring to defraud Indian tribes out of millions of dollars as part of a lobbying and corruption scheme that involved wining and dining of some lawmakers, treating them to lavish trips and contributing to their campaigns. Representative Bob Ney, an Ohio Republican, who heads the House Appropriations Committee, was alluded to in the indictment (although not by name) as a main beneficiary of largess, in return for helping Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Scanlon with their clients. Lawyers involved in the case have confirmed that Mr. Ney is the "Representative #1" cited in the indictment. The congressman - who has not been charged - has asserted that he was duped by the two and is cooperating with prosecutors, a spokesman for Mr. Ney says.
Mr. Scanlon's lawyer, Plato Cacheris, was asked whether any other members of Congress had anything to fear. "I have no comment on that," he replied. Until recently, Mr. Scanlon occupied a powerful - and lucrative - position at the intersection of political power and lobbying influence. For several years, he worked as a top aide to Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, the Republican majority leader. He left Mr. DeLay's office in 2000 to become an associate of Jack Abramoff, a Republican lobbyist.Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Scanlon earned more than $80 million representing a few wealthy Indian tribes on gambling issues. Those transactions have been under investigation by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee as well as federal prosecutors.In an e-mail message made public by the committee, Mr. Scanlon seemed to lust for wealth, and seemed to see the Indian tribes as easy targets. "I want all their money!!!" he wrote of one tribe in 2002. Referring to the money available from another tribe, he exclaimed, "Weeez gonna be rich!!!"
Mr. DeLay has been indicted in Texas on charges involving political fund-raising that are not related to the inquiry in which Mr. Scanlon pleaded guilty today. And Mr. Abramoff has been indicted in Florida on unrelated fraud-and-conspiracy charges involving an attempt to buy a fleet of casino boats. Like Mr. Ney, Mr. DeLay has been named as a beneficiary of Mr. Abramoff's and Mr. Scanlon's generosity. He, too, has denied wrongdoing. Mr. Cacheris, when asked whether Mr. DeLay had reason to worry over Mr. Scanlon's cooperating with prosecutors, said, "You'll have to ask his lawyers."

U.S. Military Criticized For Killing of Five Iraqi Civilians
Back in Iraq - the U.S. military is coming under criticism after troops opened fire on a car in Baquba killing five members of an Iraqi family. Iraqi police said the dead included three children under the age of four. Witnesses said the family was traveling to a funeral at the time. Military officials claimed the car was shot at after the driver ignored orders to stop. A military spokesperson said "This is a tragedy. But these tragedies only happen because Zarqawi and his thugs are out there driving around with car bombs." (And because certain other thugs are driving around in humvees). A relative of the family broke down in tears on Monday as he spoke to reporters. He was standing over the body of one of the men killed.

No, Robert Fisk, there were not 19 Saudi hijackers.
When asked if he ever looked into 9/11 for veracity of the official story, Fisk said that he just doesn’t have the time. Though one could argue that this is understandable as he is a full time correspondent in the Middle East, however, ultimately, in the long run he is responsible for telling an accurate story using journalism’s cardinal rules of Who, What, Why, When and How, especially if it figures so prominently in his premise. It is his responsibility to get to the truth of the story and not keep reiterating the official “Big Lie”. There are plenty of books written today that put out in detail the evidentuary material that would prove this had to be an inside job. Some of the best books are "Crossing the Rubicon", by Michael Ruppert, "The 9/11 Commission--Omissions and Distortions", and "The New Pearl Harbor" by David Ray Griffin, and "The War on Freedom" by Nafeez Ahmed. And there are plenty of web resources like http://www.911truth.org, wtc7.net, whatreallyhappened.com (one of my favorites) and globalresearch.ca.
(After hearing Fisk pontificate on Democracy Now! about Osama, etc. I have come to the conclusion that he's a big windbag who would rather listen to himself complain about his favorite Baghdad restaurant going Islamic so he can't get his favorite Lebanese wine, than doing some investigative research into the real stories).

Report: Bush Wanted to Bomb Al Jazeera Last Year
The British newspaper the Daily Mirror is reporting that President Bush considered bombing the Arabic tv station Al Jazeera last year. The paper based its report on a top secret Downing Street Memo that reveals Bush told British Prime Minister Tony Blair in April 2004 that he wanted to attack Al Jazeera's headquarters in Doha, the capital of Qatar. Blair allegedly feared such a strike would spark revenge attacks. The Mirror quoted one source saying "The memo is explosive and hugely damaging to Bush. There's no doubt what Bush wanted to do -- and no doubt Blair didn't want him to do it." Another British source said Bush's threat was humorous and not serious. In 2001 the U.S. bombed Al Jazeera's office in Kabul Afghanistan but claimed it was done by accident.

Venezuela to Offer Discounted Oil to Massachusetts Residents
The Boston Globe is reporting 45,000 low income families in Massachusetts will soon start getting discounted home-heating oil from a subsidiary of the Venezuelan national oil company. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has offered to ship 285,000 barrels of oil to Massachusetts and sell it at a 40 percent discount. The deal was arranged by U.S. Congressman William Delahunt, the Venezuelan gas company Citgo and a Massachusetts nonprofit called Citizens Energy. Nationwide home heating oil prices are expected to increase by as much as 50 percent this winter because of rising oil prices.

40 Million Now Infected With HIV; 500,000 Die A Year
The number of people living with HIV has topped 40 million worldwide for the first time. The organization UNAids reports 3 million have died of AIDS-related illnesses this year including 500,000 children. Sub-Saharan Africa remains home to more than half of those with HIV. And concern is rising over the spread of HIV elsewhere. Infection rates spiked in Pakistan and Indonesia. Latin America saw a record number of new infections. And the U.S., Canada and Europe also witnessed an increase in infections. It is estimated 5 million people worldwide have been infected with HIV so far this year.

New York's HIV experiment
November 30, 2004
HIV positive children and their loved ones have few rights if they choose to battle with social work authorities in New York City.
Jacklyn Hoerger's job was to treat children with HIV at a New York children's home. But nobody had told her that the drugs she was administering were experimental and highly toxic.
"We were told that if they were vomiting, if they lost their ability to walk, if they were having diarrhoea, if they were dying, then all of this was because of their HIV infection."
In fact it was the drugs that were making the children ill and the children had been enrolled on the secret trials without their relatives' or guardians' knowledge. As Jacklyn would later discover, those who tried to take the children off the drugs risked losing them into care.
The BBC asked the Alliance for Human Research Protection about their view on the drug trials.
Spokesperson Vera Sherav said: "They tested these highly experimental drugs. Why didn't they provide the children with the current best treatment? That's the question we have. Why did they expose them to risk and pain, when they were helpless? Would they have done those experiments with their own children? I doubt it."
When I first heard the story of the "guinea pig kids", I instinctively refused to believe that it could be happening in any civilised country, particularly the United States, where the propensity for legal action normally ensures a high level of protection. But that, as I was to discover, was central to the choice of location and subjects, because to be free in New York City, you need money. Over 23,000 of the city's children are either in foster care or independent homes run mostly by religious organisations on behalf of the local authorities and almost 99% are black or hispanic. Some of these kids come from "crack" mothers and have been infected with the HIV virus. For over a decade, this became the target group for experimentation involving cocktails of toxic drugs. Central to this story is the city's child welfare department, the Administration for Children's Services (ACS). The ACS, as it is known, was granted far-reaching powers in the 1990s by then-Republican Mayor Rudi Giuliani, after a particularly horrific child killing. Within the shortest of periods, literally thousands of children were being rounded up and placed in foster care. "They're essentially out of control," said family lawyer David Lansner. "I've had many ACS case workers tell me: 'We're ACS, we can do whatever we want' and they usually get away with it." Having taken children into care, the ACS was now, effectively, their parent and could do just about anything it wished with them.
One of the homes to which HIV positive children were taken was the Incarnation Children's Center, a large, expensively refurbished red-bricked building set back from the sidewalk in a busy Harlem street. It is owned by the Catholic church and when we attempted to talk to officials at Incarnation we were referred to an equally expensive Manhattan public relations company, which then refused to comment on activities within the home.
Hardly surprising, when we already knew that highly controversial and secretive drug experiments had been conducted on orphans and foster children as young as three months old. We asked Dr David Rasnick, visiting scholar at the University of Berkeley, for his opinion on some of the experiments. He said: "We're talking about serious, serious side-effects. These children are going to be absolutely miserable. They're going to have cramps, diarrhoea and their joints are going to swell up. They're going to roll around the ground and you can't touch them." He went on to describe some of the drugs - supplied by major drug manufacturers including Glaxo SmithKline - as "lethal". When approached by the BBC, Glaxo SmithKline said such trials must have stringent standards and be conducted strictly in accordance with local regulations.
At Incarnation, if a child refused to take the medicines offered, he or she was force-fed through a peg-tube inserted into the stomach. Critics of the trials say children should have been volunteered to test drugs by their parents.
When Jacklyn Hoerger later fostered two children from the home where she used to work with a view to adopting them, she discovered just how powerful the ACS was.
"It was a Saturday morning and they had come a few times unannounced," she said. "So when I opened the door I invited them in and they said that this wasn't a happy visit. At that point they told me that they were taking the children away. I was in shock."
Jacklyn, a trained paediatric nurse, had taken the fatal step of taking the children off the drugs, which had resulted in an immediate boost to their health and happiness. As a result she was branded a child abuser in court. She has not been allowed to see the children since. The experiments continue to be carried out on the poor children of New York City.

Cost of living wage increase

Congress Helps Self to $3,100 Pay Raise
The Republican-controlled Congress helped itself to a $3,100 pay raise on Friday, then postponed work on bills to curb spending on social programs and cut taxes in favor of a two-week vacation. In the final hours of a tumultuous week in the Capitol, Democrats erupted in fury when House GOP leaders maneuvered toward a politically-charged vote -- and swift rejection -- of one war critic's call for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. "You guys are pathetic, pathetic," Massachusetts Rep. Martin Meehan yelled across a noisy hall at Republicans.
"The Republicans are taking food out of the mouths of children to give tax cuts to America's wealthiest. This is not a statement of America's values," said the Democratic leader, Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California.
The cost-of-living increase for members of Congress which will put pay for the rank and file at an estimated $165,200 a year marked a brief truce in the pitched political battles that have flared in recent weeks on the war and domestic issues. Lawmakers automatically receive a cost of living increase each year, unless Congress votes to block it. (Unlike the minimum wage, which they just voted against raising from $5.15 to $6.25 per hour).
The House-passed measure attacks deficits by limiting spending for the first time in a decade on Medicaid, food stamps, student loans and other benefit programs that normally rise with inflation and eligibility. The tax bill presents difficulties of its own for a GOP majority struggling to translate last fall's election gains into this year's legislative achievements.

Italia Federici: another link in slimy Abramoff chain
Italia Federici is the president of a Republican anti-environmentalist group based in Washington who has been caught up in the alleged influence peddling of former GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Abramoff and his partner Michael Scanlon are accused of bilking $80 million from six Indian tribes who had hired the lobbyists to represent their interests in the Capital. Abramoff donated between $225,000 and $500,000 he collected from his tribal clients to Federici’s nonprofit group, the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy (CREA). Investigators allege that, in return, Federici used her influence at the Dept. of Interior to help one of the tribes maintain its monopoly over gambling in its home region.
The “favors” Italia Federici did for Abramoff’s clients usually involved making requests to her friend Steven Griles, who was a deputy interior secretary. Whatever she did for Abramoff, it had little or nothing to do with the activities or purview of CREA, which was founded by anti-tax whack job Grover Norquist and Gale Norton before she became interior secretary. Its pedigree is squeamish-making and, sure enough, CREA’s role seems to be to support the GOP’s efforts to rape and pillage Mother Earth as quickly as possible. Headlines for recent news releases on their website sound like talking points from Tom DeLay’s office: “ANWR Passage an Important Part of Energy Diversity” and “[Endangered Species Act] Reform Victory in the U.S. House.” CREA appears to be a very light organization, without even the incumbrance of rent. It’s listed address is a mail drop.
Earlier this month, Federici astounded members of the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs by skipping a hearing where she was supposed to testify, along with others in the alleged payola chain. Her absence prompted committee chairman Sen. John McCain. McCain to send U.S. marshals after her. She appeared this week at a rescheduled hearing in which she was the only witness.
Finally, another sign that everybody will soon know Italia Federici’s name, she interconnects with another GOP scandal - one that the Republican Congressional leadership passed on. She wrote at least one op-ed piece for GOPUSA, the propaganda “news” site that “employed” the Republican prostitute/reporter, Jeff Gannon.

Abramoff investigation threatens to ensnare lawmakers
The inquiry has already reached into the White House; a White House budget official, David H. Safavian, resigned only days before his arrest in September on charges of lying to investigators about his business ties to Mr. Abramoff, a former lobbying partner.
"I think this has the potential to be the biggest scandal in Congress in over a century," said Thomas E. Mann, a Congressional specialist at the Brookings Institution. "I've been around Washington for 35 years, watching Congress, and I've never seen anything approaching Abramoff for cynicism and chutzpah in proposing quid pro quos to members of Congress."
Mr. Abramoff, with his lobbying team, collected more than $80 million from the Indian tribes and their gambling operations; he was known by lobbying rivals as "Casino Jack." Mr. Abramoff's lobbying work was not limited to the casinos, though. Newly disclosed documents from his files show that he asked for $9 million in 2003 from the president of Gabon, in West Africa, to set up a White House meeting with President Bush; there was an Oval Office meeting last year.
The Justice Department signaled last month that Tom DeLay had come under scrutiny in the investigation. London newspapers quoted a document prepared by the British Home Office that outlined the Justice Department's investigation and said that "it is alleged that Abramoff arranged for his clients to pay for the trips to the U.K. on the basis that Congressman DeLay would support favorable legislation."

Stephen Hadley named as Woodward Source
Times of London
The mysterious source who gave America’s foremost journalist, Bob Woodward, a tip-off about the CIA agent at the centre of one of Washington’s biggest political storms was Stephen Hadley, the White House national security adviser, according to lawyers close to the investigation.
A spokeswoman for the National Security Council denied that Hadley was the journalist’s source. However, in South Korea on Friday during an official visit with President George W Bush, Hadley dodged the question: “I’ve also seen press reports from White House officials saying that I am not one of his sources,” Hadley said with a smile. Asked if this was a yes or no he replied: “It is what it is.”
Two years ago, when Plame’s identity was first revealed, Hadley was Condoleezza Rice’s deputy at the NSC. He is also thought to have been a key source for two books by Woodward on the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Other potential suspects have been denying they are Woodward’s source. Cheney has come under suspicion, although sources close to the investigation claim he is not in the frame. Woodward's colleagues at the Washington Post have been criticising him on their internal message board. One accused Woodward of being the “800-pound elephant in the room”, adding: “I admire the hell out of Bob, but this looks awful.”

Al Qaeda – The Database
Shortly before his untimely death, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that "Al Qaeda" is not really a terrorist group but a database of international mujaheddin and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan.

"The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the 'devil' only in order to drive the 'TV watcher' to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are only interested in making money."

Female Iraq vets experiencing infertility, birth defects in offspring

"I was in the military from 91-95 and received all sorts of vaccinations....Several of my female counterparts that served in the 90's have had difficult pregnanies and numerous miscarriages, or difficulty getting pregnant to start with. I'm one of those. I haven't been able to conceive for the past 4 years. My specialist is questioning the vaccinations I received while on active duty, and my medical records does not show everything that I was given. My pregnancy with my son, was difficult and we both almost died. What I would like to do is survey Vets on this forum to see if they have had similar problems...4 of my male counterparts had kids with problems..One has Downs, one was missing half of his arm, one has spinabifida (my son was supposed to have this, but didn't), and one has chronic respiritory problems....The number of miscarriages was high as well. Has anyone seen any documentation on this?"

Please read or do your own search:
du weapons birth defects There are 293,000 pages, you be the judge. http://www.chimerafilms.co.uk/children4.html http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/95178_du12.shtml http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/1112-01.htm http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/aug1999/du-a05.shtml
http://www.bpac.info/DU/du.html
http://www.thewandererpress.com/a10-28-2004.htm http://www.laka.org/teksten/Vu/hap-99/4.html

Japan Links Tamiflu to Psychosis, Sudden Deaths in Children
Tokyo--Japan's health ministry says it plans to reissue a warning of dangerous behavioral side effects linked to the anti-influenza drug Tamiflu. This comes amid reports that several children in Japan died after taking the medication. Japan's health ministry confirms that it has concluded that the death of one boy was the result of side effects from the drug. The ministry says it has found 64 cases of psychological disorders linked to the drug in the past four years.
Dr. Rokuro Hama, head of the Japan Institute of Pharmaco-Vigilance, says he has investigated eight suspicious deaths of children aged between two and 17 over the past three years, which he thinks are linked to Tamiflu. He reported his findings Saturday at a meeting of the Japan Society of Pediatric Infectious Diseases. Dr. Hama said Sunday that Tamiflu appears to be similar to other powerful drugs that can cause behavioral changes. (LSD?)
"These are tranquilizers, sedatives or hypnotics. These cause discontrol or disregulation of the central nervous system. So it may cause very bizarre phenomenon or behavior," said Dr. Hama.
Investigators say in one case last year, a 17-year-old boy, after taking the medication, left his home during a snowstorm, and jumped in front of a truck and died. Earlier this year, a 14-year-old boy, after taking one Tamiflu capsule, jumped or fell from the ninth floor of an apartment building. Doctors say in both cases the boys had not exhibited any abnormal behavior before taking Tamiflu.
In Japan, the medication comes with a warning alerting patients to the possibility of impaired consciousness, abnormal behavior, hallucinations, and other psychological and neurological symptoms. In other countries, including the United States, there is no such explicit warning with the medication.
Roche, in its consumer information, says there have been cases of seizures and confusion in patients who have taken Tamiflu but, as with a number of other side effects, "it is not possible to reliably estimate their frequency or establish a causal relationship to Tamiflu exposure."
(Why not use other people's children as guinea pigs, eh Roche?)

Hawkish Democrat Calls For Immediate Troop Withdrawal
In an important development in the growing Congressional debate over the US occupation of Iraq, a hawkish Democrat who voted to authorize the war has introduced a bill calling for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops. Democratic Congressman John Murtha of Pennsylvania said:
"It is time for a change in direction. Our military is suffering. The future of our country is at risk. We cannot continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action in Iraq is not in the best interest of the United States of America, the Iraq people or the Persian Gulf region."
Murtha is an army veteran with close ties to military commanders. He’s also the top Democrat on the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, and has visited Iraq several times since the war began. His proposed bill reads in part: "The deployment of US forces in Iraq, by direction of Congress, is hereby terminated and the forces involved are to be redeployed at the earliest practicable date.”
The bill marks the first time a resolution has been submitted to Congress calling for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. In response, White House spokesperson Scott McClellan said:
"Congressman Murtha is a respected veteran and politician who has a record of supporting a strong America. So it is baffling that he is endorsing the policy positions of Michael Moore and the extreme liberal wing of the Democratic Party." (Oh, and don't forget, 66% of the American public, too!)

From MSNBC: Dated June 16, 2005: Guys, the public's onto you already!

	Do you believe President Bush misled the nation in order to go to war with Iraq? * 71756 responses
	Yes 94%
	No 6%

Cheney whines about dishonesty & pernicious falsehoods!
WASHINGTON - In the sharpest White House attack yet on critics of the Iraq war, Vice President Dick Cheney said on Wednesday that accusations the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to justify the war were a “dishonest and reprehensible” political ploy. Cheney called Democrats “opportunists” who were peddling “cynical and pernicious falsehoods” to gain political advantage while U.S. soldiers died in Iraq.
He's an expert on opportunism, dishonesty and pernicious falsehoods to gain political advantage.

It's official: CNN reports Pentagon lied about WP use as a weapon on human targets

Iraq has launched an investigation into allegations at first denied by the Pentagon, then admitted to Wednesday, that U.S. soldiers aimed artillery rounds of flammable white phosphorus at human targets. Doctors and teams from Iraq's Health Ministry have been dispatched to Falluja "so we can get a real answer," acting Human Rights Minister Nermin Othman Hassan told a news conference on Thursday. (Yes, you'll get nothing but double-talk from )U.S. military officials confirmed Wednesday that its troops used white phosphorus during an offensive to rid Falluja of insurgents last November (i.e.: They targeted human beings with it), but the officials denied an Italian documentary allegation that the weapon was aimed at civilians. In an article in the March-April issue of Field Artillery magazine, soldiers said the white phosphorus was used to flush out insurgents so U.S. forces could target them with high explosives. The documentary, on Italy's state-run RAI24 television news channel, showed dozens of badly burned victims. (If you watch the film of it being dropped from helicopters, you can see that it created a deadly cloud over the entire area, undiferentiating who it killed).
(Watch how white phosphorus was used in 'shake and bake missions')
A protocol to an accord on conventional weapons that came into force in 1983 forbids the use of incendiary weapons against civilians, Reuters reported. The 1993 protocol also bans their use against military targets near concentrations of civilians, except when they are clearly separated from civilians and "all feasible precautions" are taken to avoid civilian casualties, Reuters reported. (Why aren't YOU saying it, CNN? Is Reuters the only news service that has the facts about International Weapons Protocols? The way they write it assumes that Reuters is saying it, but that's not confirmed or something. And they include denials by the State Department from 2004:
In 2004, the State Department said the United States had not used white phosphorous against enemy forces in the November offensive. Earlier this month, the department said that statement was incorrect. "There is a great deal of misinformation feeding on itself about U.S. forces allegedly using 'outlawed' weapons in Falluja. The facts are that U.S. forces are not using any illegal weapons in Falluja or anywhere else in Iraq." (Yes, they are!)
The military just admitted Wednesday that the original statement was untrue (or "incorrect")--why doesn't CNN confront them a bit more stridently? I guess we all know the answer to that.

Hurricane evacuees angered by housing crisis
With 2 weeks until FEMA stops paying hotel tab, many unsure where to go
As the impact of the FEMA hotel deadline sinks in with Hurricane Katrina evacuees, government officials offered no plan to move thousands of people out of hotels across America. (Yup, sounds like FEMA to me -- Failing Everyone Made Addressless by Katrina)
There was anger in Houston on Thursday as hurricane evacuees reacted to news that FEMA will soon stop paying the hotel bills of an estimated 150,000 people who lost their homes. (Why doesn't FEMA make good on the $2000 payment to each person left homeless? All those people could have rented apartments with the money wasted on CONTRACTS to HOTELS).
Joining the frustrated was Mayor Bill White of Houston, the city with the greatest number of hurricane evacuees. “I am concerned that what they say is different than what they wrote in a directive,” White says.
In a news conference Thursday on the housing issue, FEMA offered no explanation of how it will implement the plan to get thousands out of hotels across the country in two weeks.
“Hotel and motel program is always temporary,” says Vice Adm. Thaddeus Allen, who directs FEMA's Gulf Coast efforts. “I don't think anybody would indicate that it is a permanent housing solution that someone is displaced from a house in New Orleans.” (What he is not telling you is that FEMA is keeping many people from returning to clean up their homes, which are rapidly decaying from mold and other damage).
While FEMA insists it won’t be throwing anyone out on the streets who's staying in one of these hotel rooms, it is standing by the deadline. The payments on the rooms will stop two weeks from now. (Then what? Move them to FEMA concentration camps?)
“We need to get them into a better temporary solution pending a longer-term housing solution,” says Allen. “That's always been the goal.” (Then why didn't you get them into apartments in the New Orleans area so they could have been repairing their former homes for the last two months? There were over 11,600 empty apartments in neighborhoods like the French Quarter undamaged by the hurricane, but left vacant by the landlords rather than housing poor people displaced by the storm).
Check this info out from an article by Naomi Klein on THE NATION website, Sept 22, 2005:

"Roughly 70,000 of New Orleans' poorest homeless evacuees could move back to the city alongside returning white homeowners, without a single new structure being built. Take the Lower Garden District, where Drennen himself lives. It has a surprisingly high vacancy rate--17.4 percent, according to the 2000 Census. At that time 702 housing units stood vacant, and since the market hasn't improved and the district was barely flooded, they are presumably still there and still vacant. It's much the same in the other dry areas: With landlords preferring to board up apartments rather than lower rents, the French Quarter has been half-empty for years, with a vacancy rate of 37 percent.
The citywide numbers are staggering: In the areas that sustained only minor damage and are on the mayor's repopulation list, there are at least 11,600 empty apartments and houses. If Jefferson Parish is included, that number soars to 23,270. With three people in each unit, that means homes could be found for roughly 70,000 evacuees. With the number of permanently homeless city residents estimated at 200,000, that's a significant dent in the housing crisis. And it's do-able. Democratic Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, whose Houston district includes some 150,000 Katrina evacuees, says there are ways to convert vacant apartments into affordable or free housing. After passing an ordinance, cities could issue Section 8 certificates, covering rent until evacuees find jobs. Jackson Lee says she plans to introduce legislation that will call for federal funds to be spent on precisely such rental vouchers. "If opportunity exists to create viable housing options," she says, "they should be explored." (Unfortunately, they were not).

Woodward Downplayed CIA Leak Case Despite Involvement
On Monday Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald questioned Washington Post editor and best selling author Bob Woodward for two hours. It turns out that Woodward was a central figure in the story. He was told of Plame's identity 29 months ago in June of 2003 before Miller or any other reporter. Woodward never reported this in the pages of the Washington Post and only mentioned it to his editors last month. The revelation raises new questions about the status of the investigation and whether Fitzgerald will seek any other indictments. Questions are also being raised about Woodward and his style of reporting. According to the Wall Street Journal, Woodward has been given unusual autonomy in the Washington Post newsroom as he writes a trilogy of books about the Bush administration. (Sounds a lot like Miss Runamok in the NYTimes) He is free to report for his numerous books but he isn't obligated to share his scoops before the books are published. This has allowed him to sit on stories of national significance for months - and even years.
In this case because Woodward concealed his own involvement, it hindered his paper's ability to report fully on the leak investigation. Criticism of Woodward is escalating even from his own colleagues.
STEVEN CLEMONS of TheWashingtonNote.com: Well, Bob Woodward really rolled a very big bowling ball into the investigation. There was a U.S. official who triggered this to Fitzgerald, and I'm sure he's going to have a lot of questions. What really ought to anger the American public and which makes me very, very frustrated with Bob Woodward is not just that he knew all along that he was a material witness in this case, but was his outrageous commentary about the case earlier and his defense of the source. You have to understand Bob Woodward said on Larry King that he thought that this was a small-time deal, that he called Patrick Fitzgerald a "junkyard dog investigator" and that this will disappear over time.
Read entire interview Transcript

Activists Protest CIA Contractor in North Carolina
Peace activists in North Carolina are holding a protest against a private airline company. Aero Contractors provides a fleet of chartered jets and pilots to the CIA for transporting detainees to foreign countries that practice torture in a practice the government calls "extraordinary rendition."

Pentagon to Review Feith’s Intelligence Activities
Congressional officials announced Thursday the Defense Department will investigate the pre-war activities of Douglas Feith, one of the Iraq war’s key architects. The office of the Pentagon's inspector general says it will comply with a Senate request to review the intelligence activities of former U.S. defense undersecretary Feith, & will focus on whether Feith gave the White House uncorroborated evidence to support the case for invasion in the lead up to war.

Indicted Felon Charged in Latest US Reconstruction Scandal in Iraq
A new indictment has led to the disclosure the US government hired Robert Stein, a convicted felon, to oversee over $80 million dollars in reconstruction money in Iraq. (Sounds pretty typical to me). Stein was charged this week with accepting kickbacks and bribes while working as a financial officer for the Coalition Provisional Authority. Prosecutors say Stein received at least $200,000 dollars a month for his role in steering reconstruction contracts to American businessman Phillip Bloom. Bloom was charged with several offenses Wednesday. A court filing says Stein used money earmarked for Iraqi library and police facilities to buy cars, property, and jewelry for himself and his wife. According to the New York Times, Stein was hired as a comptroller for the US occupation authority despite having served a prison sentence in the mid-1990s for fraud. A Florida construction company also says it fired Stein in 2002 after it was discovered he had falsified invoices and payroll records.

Congress Approves Budget, Tax Measures
On Capital Hill earlier today, the House narrowly approved a budget measure that cuts funding for programs for the poor, for college students and for farmers. The $50 billion dollar cost cutting plan passed by just two votes. The Washington Post reports the House measure would cut about 220,000 people off food stamps, allow states to impose new costs on Medicaid beneficiaries, squeeze student lenders, cut aid to state child-support enforcement programs and trim farm supports. Meanwhile, the Senate passed a $60 billion tax bill that includes a $4 billion dollar tax penalty on oil companies.

House Defeats GOP Health, Education Bill
On Thursday, dissenting Republicans joined Democratic House colleagues to defeat a major GOP health and education spending measure. Democrats had criticized the bill for ending more than 20 existing programs and preventing eight others from being introduced. The cuts included $900 million dollars in funding for federal disease control and $8 billion dollars towards preparing for a potential flu pandemic. (Yeah, they really care about our health, don't they?)

Diebold Attempts to Evade Election Transparency Laws
Raleigh, North Carolina - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is going to court in North Carolina to prevent Diebold Election Systems, Inc. from evading North Carolina law. In a last-minute filing, e-voting equipment maker Diebold asked a North Carolina court to exempt it from tough new election requirements designed to ensure transparency in the state's elections. Diebold obtained an extraordinarily broad order, allowing it to avoid placing its source code in escrow with the state and identifying programmers who contributed to the code.On behalf of North Carolina voter and election integrity advocate Joyce McCloy, EFF asked the court to force Diebold and every other North Carolina equipment vendor to comply with the law's requirements. A hearing on EFF's motion is set for Monday, November 28.

Thousands Rally at APEC Summit in South Korea
And in South Korea, thousands of protesters demonstrated outside the APEC summit in the port city of Busan today. Police used water cannons and barricades to hold back protesters chanting slogans against President Bush, who is there meeting with 20 other Asia-Pacific leaders. Demonstrators burned an effigy of Bush attached with the slogan: "No APEC, No Bush." Police said they have assembled a security force of up to 46,000 officers for a protest expected to reach 30,000 people.

South Korea To Withdraw 1,000 Troops
Meanwhile, South Korea announced today it plans to withdraw one-third of its forces from Iraq in the next year. With over 3,000 troops in the country, South Korea maintains the third-largest foreign military presence in Iraq after the United States and Britain. The announcement appeared to take the Bush administration by surprise. A National Security Council spokesperson said : "They have not informed the United States government of that."

Theft, conspiracies, weapons, & poisons

Tucker Carlson's blog comments after having Stephen Jones, a professor in the department of physics and astronomy at Brigham Young University on his MSNBC program, talking about his theory (in a 25 page paper available on the BYU website) that WTC 9/11 building collapse was caused by bombs in the buildings:

Yet - and here's the interesting part - he seemed to connect with a huge number of viewers. Some who e-mailed were offended that Jones would dare question the official version of 9-11. Some were confused by what he was trying to say. But the overwhelming majority wrote to thank me for my "courage" in putting him on, and to complain that we didn't give him more time to explain the conspiracy.
In other words, a lot of people seem to think it's possible that the U.S. government had a hand in bringing down the World Trade Center buildings.
Ponder that for a second: The U.S. government killed more than 3,000 of its own citizens. For no obvious reason. Then lied about it. Then invaded two other countries, killing thousands of their citizens as punishment for a crime they didn't commit....
Continuing to pay taxes to a government capable of something so evil would make you complicit in the crime.

N.Y. to Lose $125 Million in 9/11 Aid
By DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press
Congressional budget negotiators have decided to take back $125 million in Sept. 11 aid from New York, which had fought to keep the money to treat sick and injured ground zero workers, lawmakers said Tuesday. New York officials had sought for months to hold onto the funding, originally meant to cover increased worker compensation costs stemming from the 2001 terror attacks. But a massive labor and health spending bill moving fitfully through House-Senate negotiations would take back that funding, lawmakers said.
"It seems that despite our efforts the rescission will stand, very sadly, and that is something of a promise broken," said Rep. Vito Fossella, R-N.Y. "We will try hard in the coming weeks, but ultimately Congress will have something of a black eye over this."
A spokeswoman for Rep. John Sweeney, R-N.Y., said the congressman also had been told New York would lose the funding in whatever compromise version of the spending bill finally reaches the floor. The tug-of-war over the $125 million began earlier this year when the White House proposed taking the money back because the state had not yet spent it. New York protested, saying the money was part of the $20 billion pledged by President Bush to help rebuild after the Sept. 11 attacks. Health advocates said the money is needed to treat current and future illnesses among ground zero workers. The Senate voted last month to let New York keep the $125 million, but the House made no such move. House and Senate budget negotiators then decided to take the money back, lawmakers and aides said. Top New York fire officials recently lobbied Congress to keep the funding. Fire and police officials say they worry that many people will develop long-term lung and mental health problems from their time working on the burning pile of toxic debris at ground zero and they want to use the money to help them. Fossella and other New York officials hope they can win the money back in an emergency spending measure, expected later this year, that would pay for Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts.

150,000 Katrina Evacuees To Lose Hotel Subsidies
FEMA announced Tuesday it will stop subsidizing hotel stays for an estimated 150,000 Hurricane Katrina evacuees. The decision will go into effect December 1st, giving evacuees fifteen days to find a new place to live. Some families will be eligible for an additional three months’ rental assistance, while evacuees in Lousiana and Mississippi may have their subsidies extended on a two-week basis up until the first week of January. Housing advocates criticized the decision. Sheila Crowley, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, said : "Unless they have some serious plan for helping move people from hotels into apartments, other than putting up fliers . . . as of December 1, there's going to be a lot of homeless people.”

EPA plans to allow pesticide testing on handicapped and abused children
Send a letter to EPA here!
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Public Comment Period Closes December 12, 2005
Public comments are now being accepted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on its newly proposed federal regulation regarding the testing of chemicals and pesticides on human subjects. On August 2, 2005, Congress had mandated the EPA create a rule that permanently bans chemical testing on pregnant women and children. But the EPA's newly proposed rule, misleadingly titled "Protections for Subjects in Human Research," puts industry profits ahead of children's welfare. The rule allows for government and industry scientists to treat children as human guinea pigs in chemical experiments in the following situations:

1. Children who "cannot be reasonably consulted," such as those that are mentally handicapped or orphaned newborns may be tested on. With permission from the institution or guardian in charge of the individual, the child may be exposed to chemicals for the sake of research.
2. Parental consent forms are not necessary for testing on children who have been neglected or abused.
3. Chemical studies on any children outside of the U.S. are acceptable.

Police used 'dum dum' bullets to kill de Menezes
The Brazilian man shot dead by police in the mistaken belief that he was a suicide bomber was killed with a type of bullet banned in warfare under international convention, The Daily Telegraph has learned. The firing of hollow point ammunition into the head of Jean Charles de Menezes, 27, is believed to be the first use of the bullets by British police.

It will re-ignite controversy around the shooting, at Stockwell Underground station, south London, on July 22. Modern hollow point bullets are descendants of the expanding "dum dum" ammunition created by the British in an arsenal of the same name near Calcutta, in India, at the end of the 19th century and outlawed under the Hague Declaration of 1899. The bullets, which expand and splinter on impact, were available to officers taking part in Operation Kratos, the national police drive against suspected suicide bombers which has been described as a "shoot to kill" policy.


Hotel Bombings: Early Evidence Indicates State Terror
by Paul Joseph Watson, Prison Planet
The triple blasts that killed 57 and wounded 90 people at the Radisson, Grand Hyatt and Day Inn hotels last week raise very suspicious questions as to who was really behind the attack. The LA Times and Haaretz both reported that Israelis were evacuated from the Radisson hotel before the blasts occurred. Amos N. Guiora, a former senior Israeli Defense Force official, told the Tehran Times that his sources also warned him of the imminent attack. He was quoted as saying, "It means there was excellent intelligence that this thing was going to happen. The question that needs to be answered is why weren't the Jordanians working at the hotel similarly removed?"
One of the apparent suicide bombers was known to have been in US custody in November 2004. Safaa Mohammed Ali was released in Fallujah after it was determined he didn't pose a threat.
The images of the aftermath of the bombings at the Hyatt and the Radisson completely contradict the official version of events.

The photo above shows damage at the Radisson hotel. The bomb has clearly blown the ceiling down as if it was placed in the roof of the building. This image does not support the notion of a bomb strapped to a suicide bombers chest.

Similarly, this image taken from the Hyatt bombing again shows the roof blown and the debris hanging down. Furthermore, there is no blood at the scene. This would obviously be evident if this was the work of a suicide bomber. Original Reuters reports state that the bombs were placed in false ceilings. The story then later changed after the Iraqi patsy women was paraded on worldwide television, bombs freshly re-strapped to her chest, and used as a link to justify a continued presence in Iraq.
Establishment media coverage of the bombings has taken on its usual blinkered and agenda driven tone. News anchors and politicians openly brag that this is 'an opportunity' and that it 'helps the US' in the PR war against the Iraqi resistance. Why would Al-Zarqawi mastermind a plot that would severely damage his support base amongst Sunni Jordanians? The Jordanian government is a client state of the US and its intelligence agency and security forces are completely controlled by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Al-Zarqawi's website claim of responsibility came as no surprise. Such claims are taken with a pinch of salt in light of previous examples of outright hoaxes. Both professors and terrorism experts have now gone on record to assert that Al-Zarqawi is a US created myth. As the imaginary head of the Iraqi resistance, whenever something big blows up Al-Zarqawi takes responsibility and the resistance loses credibility. In this instance we are not lending support to the resistance or the occupational government, just pointing out the fact that the counterfeit Al-Zarqawi is being used as a tool of black propaganda. However, it goes beyond a PR campaign when innocent people are being ripped limb from limb in their hotel rooms. Just six days after the bombing the motive is clear and the evidence is plentiful. This was another false flag operation and a desperate attempt to re-invigorate support behind a deepening chasm in Iraq.

Fire Bombs in Iraq: Napalm By Any Other Name

Napalm at Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado, US
(photo: Buckley Air Force Base Misc. Historical Archives)

A fire bomb, or incendiary weapon, is a thin-skinned container of fuel gel. It ignites on impact, spreading the burning gel over a wide area. The composition of the fuel gel has evolved over the years:

• World War II: gasoline plus naphthenic and palmitic acids
• Vietnam & Korea: gasoline, benzene and polystyrene
• Iraq (MK-77 Mod 5): kerosene-based jet fuel and polystyrene

In the past, incendiaries were used most notoriously in the 1945 fire-bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, and by the US in Vietnam. The 1972 photograph of the child Kim Phuc running from her napalmed village with her naked body burning was a defining moment in worldwide opposition to the Vietnam War. Napalm has also been used in Iraq in the past. The Ba'ath regime of Saddam Hussein used it during the 1991 uprising.
The US military has in its current arsenal a modern form of napalm. Known as the MK-77 Mod 5, the bombs are dropped from aircraft and ignite on impact. They contain a lethal mixture of aircraft fuel and polystyrene, which forms a sticky, flammable gel. As it burns, the gel sticks to structures and to the bodies of its victims. The light aluminium containers lack stabilising fins, making them far from precision weapons.
The MK-77 is the only incendiary now in use by the US military. It is an evolution of the napalm bombs M-47 and M-74 that were used in Vietnam and Korea. In the new weapon, the flammable gel is made up of kerosene-based jet fuel and polystyrene. The MK-77 bomb reportedly also contains an oxidizing agent. This makes it even more difficult to put out once ignited.
While the composition of the weapons has evolved, the targets remain the same. Incendiaries are typically used against dug-in troops, supply installations, wooden structures, and land convoys.
Use of incendiaries is restricted by the 1980 UN Convention on 'Weapons Which May Be Deemed To Be Excessively Injurious Or To Have Indiscriminate Effects'. [2] The United Kingdom has fully ratified this convention and must abide by it and its additional protocols. More than 80 other countries have done the same.

"Most of the world understands that napalm and incendiaries are a horrible, horrible weapon," said Robert Musil, director of the organisation Physicians for Social Responsibility. "It takes up an awful lot of medical resources. It creates horrible wounds." [3]

However, although the United States has ratified the convention, it has not signed up to the protocol on incendiary weapons. Read Entire Article

Iraq human rights team probes US phosphorus weapons

An Iraqi human rights team has gone to the city of Falluja to investigate the use of white phosphorus as a weapon by US forces, a minister has told the BBC. Acting Human Rights Minister Narmin Uthman said her staff would examine the possible effects on civilians. The US has now admitted using white phosphorus as a weapon in Falluja last year, after earlier denying it. The substance can cause burning of the flesh but is not illegal and is not classified as a chemical weapon. The US initially said white phosphorus had been used only to illuminate enemy positions, but now admits it was used as a weapon. BBC defence correspondent Paul Wood says having to retract that denial is a public relations disaster for the US. A Pentagon spokesman, Lt Col Barry Venable, confirmed to the BBC the US had used white phosphorus "as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants" - though not against civilians, he said. He said earlier denials had been based on "poor information". Washington is not a signatory to an international treaty restricting the use of the substance against civilians.
Professor Paul Rogers, of the University of Bradford's department of peace studies, said white phosphorus could be considered a chemical weapon if deliberately aimed at civilians. He told the BBC: "It is not counted under the chemical weapons convention in its normal use but, although it is a matter of legal niceties, it probably does fall into the category of chemical weapons if it is used for this kind of purpose directly against people."

Iraqi cancers, birth defects blamed on U.S. depleted uranium
SOUTHERN DEMILITARIZED ZONE, Iraq -- On the "Highway of Death," 11 miles north of the Kuwait border, a collection of tanks, armored personnel carriers and other military vehicles are rusting in the desert.
They also are radiating nuclear energy.

In 1991, the United States and its Persian Gulf War allies blasted the vehicles with armor-piercing shells made of depleted uranium -- the first time such weapons had been used in warfare -- as the Iraqis retreated from Kuwait. The devastating results gave the highway its name. The desert around the vehicles was 100 times more radioactive than background radiation; Basra, a city of 1 million people, some 125 miles away, registered only slightly above background radiation level. But the radioactivity is only one concern about DU munitions. A second, potentially more serious hazard is created when a DU round hits its target. As much as 70 percent of the projectile can burn up on impact, creating a firestorm of ceramic DU oxide particles. The residue of this firestorm is an extremely fine ceramic uranium dust that can be spread by the wind, inhaled and absorbed into the human body and absorbed by plants and animals, becoming part of the food chain. Once lodged in the soil, the munitions can pollute the environment and create up to a hundredfold increase in uranium levels in ground water, according to the U.N. Environmental Program. Studies show it can remain in human organs for years.
Today, nearly 12 years after the use of the super-tough weapons was credited with bringing the war to a swift conclusion, the battlefield remains a radioactive toxic wasteland -- and depleted uranium munitions remain a mystery. Although the Pentagon has sent mixed signals about the effects of depleted uranium, Iraqi doctors believe that it is responsible for a significant increase in cancer and birth defects in the region. Many researchers outside Iraq, and several U.S. veterans organizations, agree; they also suspect depleted uranium of playing a role in Gulf War Syndrome, the still-unexplained malady that has plagued hundreds of thousands of Gulf War veterans.
Depleted uranium is a problem in other former war zones as well. Yesterday, U.N. experts said they found radioactive hot spots in Bosnia resulting from the use of depleted uranium during NATO air strikes in 1995.
With another war in Iraq perhaps imminent, scientists and others are concerned that the side effects of depleted uranium munitions -- still a major part of the U.S. arsenal -- will cause serious illnesses or deaths in a new generation of U.S. soldiers as well as Iraqis. Read Entire Story-- more photos

There are four rules derived from all of humanitarian law regarding weapons:

• Weapons may only be used in the legal field of battle, defined as legal military targets of the enemy in war. Weapons may not have an adverse effect off the legal field of battle. Weapons can only be used for the duration of an armed conflict. A weapon that is used or continues to act after the war is over violates this criterion. Weapons may not be unduly inhumane. Weapons may not have an unduly negative effect on the natural environment.

The Truth is Out

The US used chemical weapons in Iraq - and then lied about it
by George Monbiot, The Guardian UK
Did US troops use chemical weapons in Falluja? The answer is yes. The proof is not to be found in the documentary broadcast on Italian TV last week, whose evidence that white phosphorus was fired at Iraqi troops is flimsy and circumstantial. But the bloggers debating it found the smoking gun. The first account they unearthed in a magazine published by the US army. In the March 2005 edition of Field Artillery, officers from the 2nd Infantry's fire support element boast about their role in the attack on Falluja in November last year: "White Phosphorous. WP proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE [high explosive]. We fired 'shake and bake' missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out."
The second, in California's North County Times, was by a reporter embedded with the marines in the April 2004 siege of Falluja. "'Gun up!' Millikin yelled ... grabbing a white phosphorus round from a nearby ammo can and holding it over the tube. 'Fire!' Bogert yelled, as Millikin dropped it. The boom kicked dust around the pit as they ran through the drill again and again, sending a mixture of burning white phosphorus and high explosives they call 'shake'n'bake' into... buildings where insurgents have been spotted all week."
White phosphorus is not listed in the schedules of the Chemical Weapons Convention. It can be legally used as a flare to illuminate the battlefield, or to produce smoke to hide troop movements from the enemy. Like other unlisted substances, it may be deployed for "Military purposes... not dependent on the use of the toxic properties of chemicals as a method of warfare". But it becomes a chemical weapon as soon as it is used directly against people. A chemical weapon can be "any chemical which through its chemical action on life processes can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm".
White phosphorus is fat-soluble and burns spontaneously on contact with the air. According to globalsecurity.org: "The burns usually are multiple, deep, and variable in size. The solid in the eye produces severe injury. The particles continue to burn unless deprived of atmospheric oxygen... If service members are hit by pieces of white phosphorus, it could burn right down to the bone." As it oxidises, it produces smoke composed of phosphorus pentoxide. According to the standard US industrial safety sheet, the smoke "releases heat on contact with moisture and will burn mucous surfaces... Contact... can cause severe eye burns and permanent damage."

Until last week, the US state department maintained that US forces used white phosphorus shells "very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes". They were fired "to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters". Confronted with the new evidence, on Thursday it changed its position. "We have learned that some of the information we were provided ... is incorrect. White phosphorous shells, which produce smoke, were used in Fallujah not for illumination but for screening purposes, ie obscuring troop movements and, according to... Field Artillery magazine, 'as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes...' The article states that US forces used white phosphorus rounds to flush out enemy fighters so that they could then be killed with high explosive rounds." The US government, in other words, appears to admit that white phosphorus was used in Falluja as a chemical weapon.
The invaders have been forced into a similar climbdown over the use of napalm in Iraq. In December 2004, the Labour MP Alice Mahon asked the British armed forces minister Adam Ingram "whether napalm or a similar substance has been used by the coalition in Iraq (a) during and (b) since the war". "No napalm," the minister replied, "has been used by coalition forces in Iraq either during the war-fighting phase or since."
This seemed odd to those who had been paying attention. There were widespread reports that in March 2003 US marines had dropped incendiary bombs around the bridges over the Tigris and the Saddam Canal on the way to Baghdad. The commander of Marine Air Group 11 admitted that "We napalmed both those approaches". Embedded journalists reported that napalm was dropped at Safwan Hill on the border with Kuwait. In August 2003 the Pentagon confirmed that the marines had dropped "mark 77 firebombs". Though the substance these contained was not napalm, its function, the Pentagon's information sheet said, was "remarkably similar". While napalm is made from petrol and polystyrene, the gel in the mark 77 is made from kerosene and polystyrene. I doubt it makes much difference to the people it lands on.
So in January this year, the MP Harry Cohen refined Mahon's question. He asked "whether mark 77 firebombs have been used by coalition forces". The US, the minister replied, has "confirmed to us that they have not used mark 77 firebombs, which are essentially napalm canisters, in Iraq at any time". The US government had lied to him. Mr Ingram had to retract his statements in a private letter to the MPs in June.
We were told that the war with Iraq was necessary for two reasons. Saddam Hussein possessed biological and chemical weapons and might one day use them against another nation. And the Iraqi people needed to be liberated from his oppressive regime, which had, among its other crimes, used chemical weapons to kill them. The Neocons referred, in making their case, to Saddam's gassing of the Kurds in Halabja in 1988. They accused those who opposed the war of caring nothing for the welfare of the Iraqis.
Given that they care so much, why has none of these hawks spoken out against the use of unconventional weapons by coalition forces?
Saddam, facing a possible death sentence, is accused of mass murder, torture, false imprisonment and the use of chemical weapons. He is certainly guilty on all counts. So, it now seems, are those who overthrew him.

Civil liberties in danger, says ex-intel official
The man who leaked thousands of pages of top secret documents to the media in 1971 to expose the U.S. government's handling of the Vietnam War warned Saturday that another terrorist attack could permanently damage civil liberties.
Daniel Ellsberg, the former U.S. intelligence official responsible for leaking the so-called Pentagon Papers to The New York Times and 18 other newspapers, told an audience of about 400 that the Bush administration most likely would respond to any terror attack on U.S. soil by severely restricting freedom of the press and the individual's right to speak out.
"In a time of fear, I believe that the majority of the American people will cling to authority," Ellsberg told the gathering at Columbia High School for New Jersey Peace Action's annual luncheon."And if there is another terror attack," Ellsberg added sarcastically, "I believe the president will get what he wants. And what he wants is a new Patriot Act, one that will make the current Patriot Act look like the Bill of Rights."
Ellsberg, 74, said he worries that with the Iraq war at a stalemate, a terrorist attack on American soil was "not just possible, but highly likely." Were that to happen, Ellsberg predicted that Bush would respond by escalating the war on terror - possibly to include military action against Syria or Iran - while pushing for harsher restrictions against dissent at home.
Ellsberg said that as part of Patriot Act revisions, Bush most likely would push for an Official Secrets Act - one that would make it a crime for whistle-blowers to reveal government secrets to the public. And he added, such a ban probably would apply to journalists as well.
Ellsberg worked as an analyst for the RAND Corp. in the 1960s, which conducted a huge study of U.S. policy in Vietnam. That study, which was top secret and eventually numbered 7,000 pages, is the story of what went wrong in Vietnam. Once leaked to The Times, the document became known as the Pentagon Papers, and it told of the official lies by the Johnson and Nixon administrations that the war in Vietnam was winnable. The Nixon administration tried to prevent publication of the Pentagon Papers, but the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the public's right to know. Ellsberg eventually stood trial for leaking official secrets, but the government eventually dropped the case. He said Saturday that he had grave doubts he would enjoy the same freedom today.
"I don't think the current Supreme Court would see it that way," he told the audience. He added that should an Official Secrets Act be adopted, "leaks would be a thing of the past."
He drew parallels between the Valerie Plame affair and the beginning of the Vietnam War. Ellsberg pointed out that the government said the Johnson administration also lied about the second Gulf of Tonkin incident on Aug. 2, 1964. At the time, President Lyndon Johnson claimed that a U.S. destroyer had been attacked by a North Vietnamese patrol boat in the Gulf of Tonkin, but Ellsberg said the incident never happened.
"I felt terrified by what he said," said Zella Geltman of West Orange. "What can we do to save ourselves?"
Eleanor Mason of Morris Plains said the best thing to do is keep speaking out. "We are patriotic Americans, and we don't want war," she said. "We need to keep saying this until the government is forced to listen to us."

Government showdown could break up Internet, experts warn
A tense dispute over US control of the Internet in the run-up to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) could eventually lead to the break-up of the global network and hamper seamless browsing, officials warned Monday.
The warning came as the United States told EU participants at negotiations on Internet governance that it was determined to maintain its oversight over the technical and administrative infrastructure at the root of the network.
Either the search for a "democratic" international solution prevails, or the Internet could fragment into a multitude of networks before an eventual international coordination mechanism sticks them back together, he added. The outcome could determine who eventually controls the Internet's technical and administrative infrastructure, which allows the computer network to function worldwide.


Students rebuffing military recruiters
BOSTON, MA-- More than 5,000 high school students in five of the state's largest school districts have removed their names from military recruitment lists, a trend driven by continuing casualties in Iraq and a well-organized peace movement that has urged students to avoid contact with recruiters. The number of students removing their names has jumped significantly over the past year, especially in school systems with many low-income and minority students, where parents and activists are growing increasingly assertive in challenging military recruiters' access to young people.
Since 2002, under the federal No Child Left Behind law, high schools have been required to provide lists of students' names, telephone numbers, and addresses to military recruiters who ask for them, as well as colleges and potential employers. Students who do not wish to be contacted -- or their parents -- notify their school districts in writing.
In Boston, about 3,700 students, or 19 percent of those enrolled in the city's high schools, have removed their names from recruiting lists. At Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, 952 high school students, more than half the student body, ordered the school system not to give their names to the military this year. Overall, approximately 18 percent of the public high school students eligible in Cambridge, Boston, Worcester, Lowell, and Fall River have opted to remove their names. Though no official national statistics are available, a group founded six months ago to raise awareness of the law said visitors to its website have downloaded 37,000 copies of a form that can be used to remove students' names from the recruiting lists. Students cite the rising death toll in Iraq as a key factor for their lack of interest in the military, but also acknowledge concerns raised by their parents.

Secrecy order in CIA leak case challenged by media
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A major U.S. media organization on Monday challenged efforts by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to keep documents secret in the CIA leak case that involved the Bush administration.
Dow Jones & Co, which publishes The Wall Street Journal, filed court papers asking Judge Reggie Walton to deny a sweeping motion by Fitzgerald that would bar public disclosure of documents in the case. The proposed protective order, which was agreed to by Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, would cover grand jury transcripts, witness statements and a wide range of other documents involved in the case. Any leaks could result in civil and criminal fines, the order warns.
"Dow Jones has a substantial interest in ensuring timely access to information of importance to its readers and the general public," Dow Jones said in its motion. "That interest is particularly strong in a case like this one, which concerns a matter of great national importance."

'I treated people who had their skin melted'
By Dahr Jamail
Abu Sabah knew he had witnessed something unusual. Sitting in November last year in a refugee camp in the grounds of Baghdad University, set up for the families who fled or were driven from Fallujah, this resident of the city's Jolan district told me how he had witnessed some of the battle's heaviest fighting.
"They used these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud," he said. He had seen "pieces of these bombs explode into large fires that continued to burn on the skin even after people dumped water on the burns".
A doctor from Fallujah working in Saqlawiyah, on the outskirts of Fallujah, described treating victims during the siege "who had their skin melted".
Burhan Fasa'a, a freelance cameraman working for the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation, witnessed the first eight days of the fighting. "I saw cluster bombs everywhere and so many bodies that were burnt, dead with no bullets in them," he said. "So they definitely used fire weapons, especially in Jolan district." Mr Fasa'a said that while he sold a few of his clips to Reuters, LBC would not show tapes he submitted to them. He had smuggled some tapes out of the city before his gear was taken from him by US soldiers.
Some saw what they thought were attempts by the military to conceal the use of incendiary shells. "The Americans were dropping some of the bodies into the Euphrates near Fallujah," said one ousted resident, Abdul Razaq Ismail.
Dr Ahmed, who worked in Fallujah until December 2004, said: "In the centre of the Jolan quarter they were removing entire homes which have been bombed, meanwhile most of the homes that were bombed are left as they were." He said he saw bulldozers push soil into piles and load it on to trucks to carry away. In certain areas where the military used "special munitions" he said 200 sq m of soil was being removed from each blast site.

The fog of war: white phosphorus, Fallujah and some burning questions
Ever since last November, when US forces battled to clear Fallujah of insurgents, there have been repeated claims that troops used "unusual" weapons in the assault that all but flattened the Iraqi city. Specifically, controversy has focussed on white phosphorus shells. The use of such incendiary weapons against civilian targets is banned by international treaty.
Yesterday, demonstrators organised by the Italian communist newspaper, Liberazione, protested outside the US Embassy in Rome. Today, another protest is planned for the US Consulate in Milan. "The 'war on terrorism' is terrorism," one of the newspaper's commentators declared.
Some within the US government have previously issued disingenuous statements about the use in Iraq of another controversial incendiary weapon - napalm.
AWashington Post story gave an idea of the sorts of injuries that WP causes. It said insurgents "reported being attacked with a substance that melted their skin, a reaction consistent with white phosphorous burns". A physician at a local hospital said the corpses of insurgents "were burned, and some corpses were melted".
The use of incendiary weapons such as WP and napalm against civilian targets - though not military targets - is banned by international treaty.MORE

Jordanian bombing--terrorists can float on air?

From What Really Happened.com:
The above is a photo of damage to the Hyatt from the recent bombing. We are being told that this bombing attack was carried out by "suicide bombers" wearing explosive belts. We are being told there is no truth to initial reports that the bombs were hidden above the ceilings (or that Israelis were yet again given advance warnings to leave).
Take a look at this photo. Does that look like a bomb went off about waist-high, or in fact exploded downward from the ceiling? Where is the blood splatter? If you wrap a belt around yourself like the one they claim and detonate it, you make a really big gooey bloody mess. The wall is clean.
Is the "confession" a repeat of the infamous phony "Kuwaiti nurse"? (I think this is a reference to the fake "incubator babies" story from Gulf War I)

U.S. Had Iraqi With Same Name As Bomber
American forces detained and later released an Iraqi with the same name as one of the suicide attackers who struck three hotels in Amman, Jordan, last week, the U.S. military said Monday. Jordanian authorities said Safaa Mohammed Ali, 23, was among the suicide attackers who struck last Wednesday at the Grand Hyatt, SAS Radisson and Day's Inn hotels, killing at least 57 people. A statement by the U.S. command said someone by that name was detained in November 2004 in connection with the American assault on the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah. The command said it could not confirm whether the person detained was the same man who took part in the Amman attack. "He was detained locally at the division detention facility" but was released two weeks later because there was no "compelling evidence to continue to hold him" as a "threat to the security of Iraq."
Many Jordanians, however, expressed doubt al-Rishawi's confession was real or that she was even involved in the plot.
"I don't buy it. There are many contradictions, and it just doesn't make sense," said Mohammed al-Fakhiri, a 33-year-old mobile telephone shop owner in the Jordanian, capital, Amman. "The first thing she would have done is get rid of her explosive belt, so how come she was caught with it?" He also said al-Rishawi claimed that her husband had detonated his explosives apparently before she fled. "So how come she wasn't wounded?"

MORE COINCIDENCE THEORY!!
Credit Card From A Flight 11 Passenger Turns Up In Perfect Condition One Year After the Fact
The ATM card of Waleed Iskandar was returned to his parents, allegedly found by the Ground Zero Recovery Team on Sept. 11, 2002. Questions remain as to why it turned up a year later and how could such a flimsy card survive such a towering inferno? One year after 9/11, as unbelievable as it sounds, the parents of a Flight 11 passenger were notified by the Ground Zero Recovery Team that they found the unscathed Wells Fargo ATM card of their son who allegedly perished on the doomed flight. After being notified of the miraculous find on Sept. 11, 2002, Joseph and Samia Iskandar were sent their son's bank card within days, noting it was in "perfect condition," but asking the obvious question: "How could a plastic card survive the fire of the terrorist attack of the Black Tuesday on the USA?"
One observer who wants to remain anonymous and who claims the FBI planted numerous pieces of bogus evidence at all locations on 9/11 to justify an equally bogus official 9/11 story, had this to say about the Iskandar ATM card: "I guess his ATM card must have slid out of his wallet, flown out of his pocket, then out of his seat and around the seat belt, then through the exploding jet fuel and debris, out of the building, then to be found picture perfect!"
The miraculous recovery of Iskandar's ATM card is not the only piece of 9/11 evidence suspected of being planted by the FBI. Recently, the Arctic Beacon first reported a first responder at the Pentagon finding a perfectly intact California ID card of one of the alleged Flight 77 passengers. Capt. Jim Ingledue said two days after 9/11 he found the perfectly unscathed ID of Susanne Calley, 42, one of the alleged passengers, adding he thought the find "highly unusual and strange to find a perfectly intact card amidst the devastation and rubble at the Pentagon." (especially as they found no bodies, luggage, or airplane!!!!)
How on earth could a plastic card, normally contained inside a man's wallet or his pocket, survive a massive explosion that completed consumed an airliner as well as pulverized a 100 story skyscraper? However, besides the possibility that Calley's ID and Iskandar's ATM card were both planted by the FBI, the same question was also ignored by the press and authorities the day after 9/11 when miraculously the unscathed passport of Satam Al Suqami, one of the alleged 19 Arab terrorists, turned up several blocks from Ground Zero.
Now with the Calley ID and the Iskandar ATM card, both turning up in perfect condition like the passport, it only triples the necessity of launching a full scale investigation into the possibility that all three items were planted by the FBI in an attempt to hoodwink the American people into believing the official 9/11 story, a story that has so many holes that it makes a perfectly good piece of Swiss cheese look like a solid object.
Besides the Al Suqami passport, numerous other accounts of suspicious evidence have conveniently surfaced linking the alleged hijackers to 9/11, including two of the alleged ringleader, Mohamed Atta's bags also found right after 9/11. Not only did authorities find the bags but they conveniently contained a handheld electronic flight computer, a simulator procedures manual for Boeing 757 and 767 aircraft, two videotapes relating to "air tours" of the Boeing 757 and 747 aircraft, a slide-rule flight calculator, a copy of the Koran, Atta's passport, his will, his international driver's license, a religious cassette tape, airline uniforms, a letter of recommendation, "education related documentation" and a note to other hijackers on how to mentally prepare for the hijacking.
"If the hijackers could pull off the perfect crime, fooling the entire U.S. military, how could they be so stupid and leave such incriminating evidence behind unless it was planted and set up by the FBI/CIA/Mossad agents?"



Neocon Journalist excited by recreation of 1918 Killer Flu virus
Charles Krauthammer is a [PNAC] neocon journalist for the Washington Post:

It was announced last week that U.S. scientists have just created a living, killing copy of the 1918 “Spanish” flu. This is big. Very big. First, it is a scientific achievement of staggering proportions. The Spanish flu has not been seen on this blue planet for 85 years. Its re-creation is a story of enterprise, ingenuity, serendipity, hard work and sheer brilliance.

Doesn’t he sound excited? Scary. Beyond the brilliance lies the sheer terror. We have brought back to life an agent of near-biblical destruction…(And it was a BIRD FLU). Not only has the virus been physically re-created, but its entire genome has also now been published for the whole world, good people and very bad, to see….Why [would terrorists] try to steal loose nukes in Russia? A nuke can only destroy a city. The flu virus, properly evolved, is potentially a destroyer of civilizations.We might have just given it to our enemies.

From PBS website "Killer Flu" on "Secrets of the Dead":
Jeffery Taubenberger, a Molecular pathologist with the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Rockville, Maryland, bristles at the assertion by some activist groups that recreating, at least in part, the deadly 1918 virus would be considered bioterrorism if the work were done outside of the United States:
"I think one thing these people get excited about is that the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology belongs to the Department of Defense," he adds. "But this is not a DOD-funded project. It is a project of my lab, being funded by the National Institute of Health. The sequences we generate are put into GenBank" -- a storehouse of genetic sequence data that is publicly available. "It is clearly not a secret project." Furthermore, Taubenberger says, "the experiments that involve reconstructing viruses that contain 1918 genes are done in high biological containment with appropriate biosafety oversight. We don't want to be cavalier and say there is nothing to worry about, no risk. What we want to say is that we think that working with this virus, trying to understand what happened in 1918 using the sequence of the virus, is really important work."
Although immunologists have no clear evidence that the immunity exists -- or any idea of how it works -- the theory has fabulous potential; exploiting that response could someday lead to new types of super-vaccines that, for example, would ramp up the immune system to maintain that short-term protection over the long haul to completely stave off the flu. Such vaccines, if even possible, are at least decades in the future, and that doesn't help flu specialists now faced with the looming threat of another pandemic like 1918's. (This is circa 2004). "Nobody can say with certainty that there will be another pandemic, but if you go back several hundred years in history it looks like, on average, a pandemic emerges every 30 years," Taubenberger says. The last pandemic was in 1968 -- 36 years ago.
Nor does the promise of a super-vaccine help researchers deal with the next flu season. During this past flu season, the influenza vaccine didn't quite hit the mark; the flu that raged through the winter was a new, or "drifted," strain not targeted by the vaccine. According to a preliminary study by the Centers for Disease Control of vaccinated healthcare workers in Colorado, the vaccine was not effective or had very low effectiveness against "influenza-like illness" in a group of healthcare workers in Colorado.

GOP in decline now considering desperate strategies

GOP memo touts new terror attack as way to reverse party's decline
A confidential memo circulating among senior Republican leaders suggests that a new attack by terrorists on U.S. soil could reverse the sagging fortunes of President George W. Bush as well as the GOP and "restore his image as a leader of the American people." The closely-guarded memo lays out a list of scenarios to bring the Republican party back from the political brink, including a devastating attack by terrorists that could “validate” the President’s war on terror and allow Bush to “unite the country” in a “time of national shock and sorrow.” The memo says such a reversal in the President's fortunes could keep the party from losing control of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections. GOP insiders who have seen the memo admit it’s a risky strategy and point out that such scenarios are “blue sky thinking” that often occurs in political planning sessions.
“The President’s popularity was at an all-time high following the 9/11 attacks,” admits one aide. “Americans band together at a time of crisis.” Other Republicans, however, worry that such a scenario carries high risk, pointing out that an attack might suggest the President has not done enough to protect the country. “We also have to face the fact that many Americans no longer trust the President,” says a longtime GOP strategist. “That makes it harder for him to become a rallying point.”
The memo outlines other scenarios, including:

• Capture of Osama bin Laden (or proof that he is dead);
• A drastic turnaround in the economy;
• A "successful resolution" of the Iraq war.

GOP memos no longer talk of “victory” in Iraq but use the term “successful resolution.”
“A successful resolution would be us getting out intact and civil war not breaking out until after the midterm elections,” says one insider. The memo circulates as Tuesday’s disastrous election defeats have left an already dysfunctional White House in chaos, West Wing insiders say, with shouting matches commonplace and the blame game escalating into open warfare. “This place is like a high-school football locker room after the team lost the big game,” grumbles one Bush administration aide. “Everybody’s pissed and pointing the finger at blame at everybody else.”
Republican gubernatorial losses in Virginia and New Jersey deepened rifts between the Bush administration and Republicans who find the President radioactive. Arguments over whether or not the President should make a last-minute appearance in Virginia to try and help the sagging campaign fortunes of GOP candidate Jerry Kilgore raged until the minute Bush arrived at the rally in Richmond Monday night. “Cooler heads tried to prevail,” one aide says. “Most knew an appearance by the President would hurt Kilgore rather than help him but (Karl) Rove rammed it through, convincing Bush that he had enough popularity left to make a difference.”
Bush didn’t have any popularity left. Overnight tracking polls showed Kilgore dropped three percentage points after the President’s appearance and Democrat Tim Kaine won on Tuesday. Conservative Pennsylvania Republican Senator Rick Santorum told radio talk show host Don Imus Wednesday that he does not want the President's help and will stay away from a Bush rally in his state on Friday. The losses in Virginia and New Jersey, coupled with a resounding defeat of ballot initiatives backed by GOP governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in California have set off alarm klaxons throughout the demoralized Republican party. Pollsters privately tell GOP leaders that unless they stop the slide they could easily lose control of the House in the 2006 midterm elections and may lose the Senate as well.
“In 30 years of sampling public opinion, I’ve never seen such a freefall in public support,” admits one GOP pollster.
Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin says the usual tricks tried by Republicans no longer work. "None of their old tricks worked," he says.

BYU Professor thinks bombs, not planes, toppled WTC
The physics of 9/11 — including how fast and symmetrically one of the World Trade Center buildings fell — prove that official explanations of the collapses are wrong, says a Brigham Young University physics professor.In fact, it's likely that there were "pre-positioned explosives" in all three buildings at ground zero, says Steven E. Jones. In a paper posted online Tuesday and accepted for peer-reviewed publication next year, Jones adds his voice to those of previous skeptics, including the authors of the Web site http://www.wtc7.net, whose research Jones quotes. Jones' article can be found at http://www.physics.byu.edu/research/energy/htm7.html.
"It is quite plausible that explosives were pre-planted in all three (WTC) buildings," BYU physics professor Steven E. Jones says.


"GRAHAM AMENDMENT PASSES: HABEAS CORPUS SUSPENDED
From The Center for Constitutional Rights:
Bush’s New Assault on Democracy: Habeas Corpus Stabbed in the Back
The Bush Administration, through an amendment introduced by South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, has just successfully stripped federal courts of jurisdiction to hear applications for habeas corpus brought by those unilaterally declared enemy combatants without any process and held by the U.S. indefinitely throughout the world and even in the United States. This was accomplished by means of a last minute amendment to the Military Authorization Bill, brought up on the floor of the Senate without committee deliberations and virtually no advance warning to the American people that it was happening.
It was not only human rights groups like the Center for Constitutional Rights, but many in the military or retired from the military who opposed the Graham amendment: Judge John Gibbons, who argued the landmark CCR case Rasul v. Bush before the Supreme Court, John Hutson, Dean of Franklin Pierce Law Center and former Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Navy, and the National Institute for Military Justice, among others, wrote open letters to the Senate to oppose the dismantling of habeas corpus.
The Graham amendment will create a thousand points of darkness across the globe where the United States will be free to hold people indefinitely without a hearing and beyond the reach of U.S. law and the checks and balances of the courts enshrined in our Constitution. The last time this country suspended habeas corpus was for the internment of tens of thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II, a travesty that is now universally recognized as a blot on our nation’s history. The purpose of the writ of habeas corpus has always been to relieve those wrongfully held from the oppression of unchecked executive power. The most reliable way to determine whether someone is properly held or a victim of injustice is to have a right to judicial review of the detention. This has been understood at least since the proclamation of the Magna Carta in 1215.
While the Administration and its supporters have tried to characterize the men being held at Guantánamo as the worst of the worst against all evidence, the fact is that even the military has admitted that they often apprehended the wrong people. Most have no ties to Al Qaida, many were turned over to the U.S. for bounty, and many more were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. If they have no way to appeal their innocence or their status, they will be left to rot in detention indefinitely.
Senator Graham's jurisdiction-stripping efforts come as allegations of secret CIA detention facilities around the world dominate headlines; the Bush Administration has consistently sought to put itself above the law and evade oversight and accountability for torture and other abuse. It is no secret that arbitrary indefinite detention and widespread prisoner mistreatment have taken and continue to take place at Guantánamo and other U.S.-run facilities. The Graham Amendment will only serve to reinforce the growing perception in the world that the United States has become an enemy of human rights.

Tell everyone you know about this amendment. Please help stop it before it becomes law. If it passes, ANYONE AT ALL could be detained without being able to the defend themselves in a court of law.

Negroponte won't back Cheney on torture
U.S. intelligence czar John Negroponte is declining to support VP Dick Cheney's effort to exempt the CIA from law banning mistreatment of detainees.
"It's above my pay grade," he told a secret briefing for Senators last month, Time Magazine reported, adding that Negroponte then "artfully dodged another question about whether the harsher interrogation tactics Cheney wants the agency to be free to use actually produce valuable intelligence."
GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona has attached an amendment to the Defense Authorization bill which would specifically incorporate the Geneva Conventions' ban on cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners into U.S. law. But the vice-president and -- according to Time magazine -- Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, have been lobbying against it on Capitol Hill, and the White House has threatened to veto the bill if the language is included.
The news is the latest salvo in the debate which continues to rage about the treatment of a few dozen suspected senior al-Qaida leaders, held by the CIA in secret locations scattered across the world. Pressure was ratcheted up by reports last week that some of those detainees are being held in former Soviet-era facilities in two countries in Eastern Europe -- believed by human rights activists to be Poland and Romania. Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a challenge to the legality of the military commissions that the administration plans to use to try another group of detainees -- those held by the military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

White Phosphorus rounds being dropped from helicopters
What is White Phosphorus?
Phosphorus is a federal hazardous air pollutant and was identified as a toxic air contaminant in April 1993 under AB 2728. When exposed to air, phosphorus emits white fumes and can spontaneously ignite. In the military, white phosphorus is used in ammunition such as mortar, artillery shells, and grenades. When ammunitions containing white phosphorus are fired in the field, they burn and produce smoke which contains both unburned phosphorus and burned phosphorus products. In military operations, this smoke screen is used to protect potential targets and to conceal movement of personnel and material. On contact with the skin it may ignite and produce severe skin burns with blistering. It is considered a dangerous disaster hazard because it emits highly toxic fumes. If this smoke is inhaled, the acid can burn the lungs and result in chemical pneumonia. White phosphorus may auto-ignite if it comes in contact with water. (The human body is 60% water) Burns usually are limited to areas of exposed skin (upper extremities, face). Burns frequently are second and third degree because of the rapid ignition and highly lipophilic properties of white phosphorus. [lipophilic - literally "fat loving", which means it will be absorbed through the skin]

White Phosphorus is a Chemical Weapon
(PDF file including photos of victims)
The use of white phosphorus violates the Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare. Incendiary agents such as napalm and phosphorus are not considered to be Chemical Weapons agents since they achieve their effect mainly through thermal energy. However, a report by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry concludes that White Phosphorus achieves its effects mainly through non-thermal energy. It must be concluded that White Phosphorus is considered a CW [chemical weapon] agent, and would violate the Geneva Protocol since its use causes indiscriminate and extreme injuries especially when deployed in an Urban area such as Falluja, Iraq. Pictures of the dead of Falluja have been published by reporter Dahr Jamal of the Electronic Iraq project, and several commentators have suggested that their injuries are consistent with the use of White Phosphorus by US forces in Falluja.

San Francisco Chronicle (Nov 10, 2004)
Some artillery guns fired white phosphorous rounds that create a screen of fire that cannot be extinguished with water. Insurgents reported being attacked with a substance that melted their skin, a reaction consistent with white phosphorous burns. Kamal Hadeethi, a physician at a regional hospital, said, "The corpses of the mujahedeen which we received were burned, and some corpses were melted."

Abstract atrocity or reality of suffering?
But such melting of human flesh is an abstraction in U.S. media, as it is apt to be for holy warriors. On NBC’s "Today" show Nov. 9, a network correspondent in Baghdad mentioned phosphorous shells just long enough to say that they are "meant to burn through metal bunkers." Presumably a description of effects on human beings would not have gone well with viewers breakfasts.
A live report from a CNN correspondent in Fallujah, on Nov. 8, was similarly circumspect: "Tanks have been blasting away inside the city, and shells filled with phosphorous -- shells to hide the movement of the Marines inside the city -- have been exploding overhead."

What is an MK-77?
From Federation of American Scientists' Military Analysis Network website
"The MK-77 500-pound fire bomb is the only fire bomb now in service. Fire bombs rupture on impact and spread burning fuel gel on surrounding objects. MK 13 Mod 0 igniters are used to ignite the fuel gel mixture upon impact. The MK-77 is a napalm canister munition. Napalm is an incendiary mixture of benzene, gasoline and polystyrene. The Marine Corps dropped all of the approximately 500 MK-77s used in the Gulf War. MK-77s were used to ignite the Iraqis oil-filled fire trenches, which were part of barriers constructed in southern Kuwait. While the MK-77 is the only incendiary munition currently in active inventory, a variety of other incendiary devices were produced, including white phosphorous.
Napalm is a mixture of benzene (21%), gasoline (33%), and polystyrene (46%). Benzene is a normal component of gasoline (about 2%). The gasoline used in napalm is the same leaded or unleaded gas that is used in automobiles."

US denies using white phosphorus on Iraqi civilians
ROME (Reuters) - The U.S. military in Iraq denied a report shown on Italian state television on Tuesday saying U.S. forces used incendiary white phosphorus against civilians in a November 2004 offensive on the Iraqi town of Falluja. It confirmed, however, that U.S. forces had dropped MK 77 firebombs (according to the above Federation of American Scientists article, MK 77 is Napalm)-- which a documentary on Italian state-run broadcaster RAI compared to napalm -- against military targets in Iraq in March and April 2003. The documentary showed images of bodies recovered after a November 2004 offensive by U.S. troops on the town of Falluja, which it said proved the use of white phosphorus against men, women and children who were burned to the bone.
"I do know that white phosphorus was used," said Jeff Englehart in the RAI documentary, which identified him as a former soldier in the U.S. 1st Infantry Division in Iraq. "Burned bodies. Burned children and burned women," said Englehart, who RAI said had taken part in the Falluja offensive. "White phosphorus kills indiscriminately." The U.S. Marines in Baghdad described white phosphorus as a "conventional munition" used primarily for smoke screens and target marking. It denied using it against civilians.

Skin burned away to the bone but clothing unscathed--white phosphorus reacts with water, i.e. human skin.
Some Western newspapers reported at the time that white phosphorus had been used during the offensive. In the documentary called "Falluja: The Hidden Massacre," RAI also said U.S. forces used the Mark 77 firebomb.
RAI posted the full report, including television images, at http://www.rainews24.rai.it/ran24/inchiesta/

“Meanwhile, a reconstruction conference in the devastated city of Falluja has called for an international committee to investigate the use of illegal weapons by US forces in their offensive against the town last November. Falluja residents have alleged that US forces used chemical weapons during the offensive - a charge the Americans deny.”

Microwave gun to be used by US troops on Iraq rioters
Microwave weapons that cause pain without lasting injury are to be issued to American troops in Iraq for the first time as concern mounts over the growing number of civilians killed in fighting. The non-lethal weapons, which use high-powered electromagnetic beams, will be fitted to vehicles already in Iraq, which will allow the system to be introduced as early as next year. Using technology similar to that found in a conventional microwave oven, the beam rapidly heats water molecules in the skin to cause intolerable pain and a burning sensation. The invisible beam penetrates the skin to a depth of less than a millimetre. As soon as the target moves out of the beam's path, the pain disappears. Because there are no after-effects, (Suuuure there aren't) the United States Department of Defence believes that the weapons will be particularly useful in urban conflict. The beam could be used to scatter large crowds in which insurgents operate at close quarters to both troops and civilians.
"The skin gets extremely hot, and people can't stand the pain, so they have to move - and move in the way we want them to," said Col Wade Hall of the Office of Force Transformation, a body formed in November 2001 to promote rapid improvement across all of the American armed services.
Rich Garcia, a spokesman for the Air Force Research Laboratory in New Mexico, where the systems were developed, took part in testing the weapon and was subjected to the microwave beam which has a range of one kilometre. "It just feels like your skin is on fire," he said. "[But] when you get out of the path of the beam, or shut off the beam, everything goes back to normal. There's no residual pain."
A heated battle on a crowded Baghdad street last week that left 16 Iraqis dead, highlighted once again the pressing need to reduce the number of civilian casualties, and at the same time prevent further damage to relations between American troops and the Iraqi population. (Somehow this doesn't make sense--shooting microwave pain beams into crowds of civilians is going to make relations better????) American commanders later admitted using seven helicopter-launched rockets and 30 high-calibre machine gun rounds in last Sunday's incident.

Oil Co. Execs Defend Record Profits
WASHINGTON (Nov. 9) - The chiefs of five major oil companies defended the industry's huge profits Wednesday at a Senate hearing where lawmakers said they should explain prices and assure people they're not being gouged. There is a "growing suspicion that oil companies are taking unfair advantage," Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., said as the hearing opened in a packed Senate committee room. "The oil companies owe the country an explanation."
Lee Raymond, chairman of Exxon Mobil Corp. defended his companies huge profits, saying petroleum earnings "go up and down" from year to year. ExxonMobil, the worlds' largest privately owned oil company, earned nearly $10 billion in the third quarter. Raymond was joined at the witness table by the chief executives of Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BPAmerica and Shell Oil USA. Democrats had wanted the executives to testify under oath, but Republicans rejected the idea. "If I were a witness I would demand to be put under oath," said Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii. The soaring prices have sent shivers through a Congress worried about political fallout. A number of Democrats, joined by a few Republicans, have called for a windfall profits tax on oil companies.

• $9.92 billion--Exxon Mobil's profits last quarter, the largest quarterly profit of any U.S. company ever
• $100.7 billion--The company's quarterly revenue, also a record
• $96 billion--Profits expected for the energy industry this year -- more than industrial and telecom companies combined
• $364 million--Profits for the nation's top five oil companies the day that gas prices hit an all-time high of $3.06 per gallon, a week after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast

Some analysts predict the 29 largest oil companies will earn $96 billion this year.
"Consumers need relief from high energy prices," Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., said, reiterating his call for a windfall profits tax on oil companies. "Talk is cheap. The price of energy is not. Congress needs to act."
"They are unhappy with the behavior of the oil companies," said Republican pollster David Winston, who advises GOP congressional leaders. "These are free market guys. They believe the market works. But in this case they are concerned that the consumer was clearly taken advantage of ... and they're pretty angry about it."

Big Day for News

DON'T FORGET TO VOTE!
Today's Headlines from Democracy Now!
France Uses Colonial-Era Law To Impose Curfews
Last night Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin appeared on national television to announce that emergency powers would be invoked under a 50-year-old law. The curfew law was first used in Algeria in an unsuccessful attempt to quell an insurrection at a time when the North African country was a French colony. Suburban youths quoted in the Le Parisien newspaper claimed the emergency measures "won't change anything". One youth said "This isn't going to solve things. More repression means more destruction... more cops is just provocation." Earlier today police announced that nearly 1,200 cars were burnt overnight and 330 arrests were made.
President Bush: "We Do Not Torture" ("We 'interrogate with enthusiasm'!")
In Panama on Monday, President Bush responded to increasing criticism over the mistreatment of detainees overseas. "We are finding terrorists and bringing them to justice. We are gathering information about where the terrorists may be hiding," Bush said. "We are trying to disrupt their plots and plans. Anything we do to that end in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law. We do not torture." Bush refused to directly answer whether he would allow the Red Cross to have access to prisoners held by the CIA or whether he agreed with Vice President Cheney that the CIA should be exempt from legislation to ban torture.
Senate Prepares to Vote on Investigating Prisoner Abuse
On Capitol Hill, the Senate is preparing to vote as earlier as today on creating an independent commission to investigate prisoner abuse in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. (Finally!)
Supreme Court To Rule on Guantanamo Military Tribunals
The U.S. Supreme Court announced Monday it will decide whether the Bush administration can use military tribunals to try detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay. In July a three-judge federal appeals court upheld that a tribunal made up entirely of military officials could try and sentence Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemini man accused of being Osama Bin Laden's bodyguard and driver. (That's a crime?--they helped Osama's family leave the country on 9/12/01!) On Monday Chief Justice John Roberts recused himself from the case since he was one of the appeals court judges who previously ruled on the case.
Canadian Teen At Guantanamo to Face Military Tribunal
The Pentagon filed war crimes charges against five more detainees at Guantanamo. Those charged include Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who has been held by the US since he was 15 years old. Khadr's attorney Muneer Ahmad protested Monday's decision saying "Through torture, abuse, and three years of illegal detention, this government has robbed Omar of his youth... The fact that this Administration has seen fit to designate a child for trial by military commission is abhorrent." The Bush administration has refused to provide assurances that they will not seek the death penalty against him. Khadr was detained in Afghanistan allegedly after throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier.
Pentagon Issues New Directive on Prisoner Interrogation
The Pentagon has issued a new directive on the interrogation of prisoners held by US soldiers. According to the New York Times the new directive prohibits 'acts of physical or mental torture." But the Times reports the Bush administration still hasn't decided whether to ban "cruel" and "humiliating" punishment. The new directive does not apply to CIA interrogators.
Five U.S. Soldiers Charged With Beating Iraqi Detainees
The military announced Monday five U.S. soldiers had been charged with punching and kicking detainees in Iraq. The beatings occurred two months ago.
U.S.-Led Assault on Syrian Border Continues
In Iraq, a major U.S.-led air and ground offensive along the Syrian border has entered its fourth day. U.S. warplanes have been firing Hellfire missiles and dropping 500 pound bombs. The U.S. military has said it has killed 36 in the assault and claimed they were all insurgents.
Four U.S. Troops Killed in Suicide Attack
In Baghdad, four US troops died Monday in a suicide car bombing. It was deadliest suicide attack against U.S. forces in four months. In Mosul an Iraq newspaper journalist was shot and killed at an Internet cafe. And in Washington, the Pentagon announced it would likely keep at least 92,000 troops in Iraq through 2008.
Iran: Debris From U.S. Spy Planes Found
The Iranian government is claiming it has found the wreckage of two U.S. spy planes inside its borders. The planes reportedly crashed during the summer. Iran disclosed the find at the United Nations on Monday where it accused the United States of breaking international law and violating its sovereignty. Earlier this year Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker reported that the Pentagon has begun secretly sending forces in to Iran to identify possible future military targets.
Chalabi Heads Back to D.C.; No Investigation Yet on Iran Spy Charges
The Wall Street Journal reports 17 months have passed the Bush administration announced a full criminal inquiry into allegations that Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi leaked U.S. intelligence secrets to Iran. Mr. Chalabi will hold a private meeting with Vice-President Cheney. Though he has been accused in the past by Washington officials of giving Iran classified intelligence before Saddam Hussein was toppled, Mr. Chalabi has been telling Vice-President Cheney’s aides that he is the only Iraqi leader who can control the Iranians. Chalabi’s message is short and simple: support me or Iran will become a greater adversary than you could ever have imagined.
Legal analysts are studying the proposition of serving Mr. Chalabi with legal documents involving him in “wrongful death claims” associated with American soldiers who have lost their lives in Iraq. Meanwhile, anti-war Members of Congress are planning to send a letter to Mr. Chalabi demanding a meeting with him to discuss pre-war intelligence. “They want to talk to Mr. Chalabi because he deliberately provided false information to the U.S. government regarding a series of intelligence issues,” according to one congressional aide.
Australia Arrests 15 Disrupting Alleged Plot
In Australia, police have arrested 15 people including a prominent Islamic cleric. They are accused of preparing to stage a "catastrophic act of terrorism" but few details on the plot were released. The arrests came in a dramatic fashion. More than 450 heavily-armed officers backed by helicopters raided 20 homes across Sydney and Melbourne. One of the suspects was shot in the head. Police said he had refused orders to stop.
Click on the stories below to listen to audio or download:
U.S. Broadcast Exclusive - "Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre" on the U.S. Use of Napalm-Like White Phosphorus Bombs
Democracy Now! airs an exclusive excerpt of "Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre," featuring interviews with U.S. soldiers, Iraqi doctors and international journalists on the U.S. attack on Fallujah. Produced by Italian state broadcaster RAI TV, the documentary charges U.S. warplanes illegally dropped white phosphorous incendiary bombs on civilian populations, burning the skin off Iraqi victims. One U.S. soldier charges this amounts to the U.S. using chemical weapons against the Iraqi people.
(This is the story that Guilana Sgrena, the Italian Journalist who was kidnapped, then nearly assassinated by US troops following her release, had been reporting on, along with one other journalist who was killed by US troops at the time. The British Press picked up the story this morning. The rest of the world is picking up the story.)
from OpEdNews:
US Used Chemical WMD in Fallujah-- video; US GI witness being swiftboated.
Italian state TV reported this morning that the US used chemical weapons-- white phosphorus, which melts human flesh to the bones "I saw the burned bodies of women and children. The phosphorous explodes and forms a plume. Whoever is within a 150 metre radius has no hope," one former US GI, Jimmy Massey reports. Actual video clips from the Italian Documentary, 'Fallujah - the hidden massacre' show charred remains of female victims and an interview with a former US GI.
The Italian Documentary reported, on Tuesday, November 8th, that white phosphorous is supposed to be used "to illuminate enemy emplacements" purposes, to light up the sky. This documentary claims the shells were fired indiscriminately and the documentary claims to show images of Americans strafing the city with phosphorus.
Mohamad Tareq, a biologist who was in Fallujah, reported in the film, "A rain of fire fell on the city, the people struck by this multicolored substance started to burn. We found people dead with strange wounds, the bodies burned but the clothes intact."
The film also reveals the use of a new kind of Napalm, called MK77, reporting that "The use of these incendiary substances on civilians is prohibited from the conventions of the UN since 1980."
In the US, Massey, author of a book published in France, Kill, Kill, Kill is being Swift-boated by "fellow GIs and the mainstream media are reporting that he has never actually witnessed what he's reported. The US military has denied the accusations as "disinformation."

Here's a link on Information Clearing House where you can download the English translation of the film: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10907.htm
A Debate: Did the U.S. Military Attack Iraqi Civilians With White Phosphorous Bombs in Violation of the Geneva Conventions?
We speak with a former U.S. soldier who witnessed orders being given to drop white phosphorous bombs over Fallujah; a Pentagon spokesperson in Baghdad who admits such bombs were used but denied they were used as a chemical weapon; and the news director of RAI TV, the Italian TV network that produced “Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre.”
Covering Up Torture? At Pentagon's Request the Washington Post Refuses To Report on Location Of Secret CIA Jails in Europe
We speak with Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archives on the paper's decision to abide by a Pentagon request not to name which European nations house these secret facilities. Kornbluh compares this decision to the New York Times' refusal to report on details of the U.S. invasion of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in 1961.

$5,000 for loss of wife and son: how US prices death
Hameed Hassan sat in the remains of his car, next to his dead wife, and watched his four-year-old son begin to bleed to death. The family had been on the way to buy clothes in Rawah's small market when the American soldiers opened fire. A helicopter gunship joined in the attack, cutting the car and two of its occupants to pieces. Hassan's wife, Basima Taha, died almost immediately. His youngest son, Mahmoud Muhsin, was not as lucky. Hit in the torso, his abdomen was torn open, a wound that would prove fatal.
The soldiers drove off, leaving the family in the street. The US military has not apologised for the incident. But it has agreed to pay compensation for the killings, an acceptance that innocent lives were lost. Under the US "consequence management" system, there is a maximum payout of $2,500 per claim. A dead wife and a dead son are equivalent to two claims; meaning Hassan is in line to receive a total of $5,000 in cash.
Sergeant Jeffery Mubarak, a 37-year-old veteran of four US wars, is one of the soldiers processing compensation in Rawah. "Do I think we're paying the man enough money," he said, "No, I don't. But I just work here. I don't set the rates. I try to stay removed from it all and I'm trying to get the man what money I can. That doesn't mean I think it's fair."
The claims are investigated and, if found to be legitimate, payments are made according to a sliding scale. A damaged high-value car or dead family member brings $2,500, while a television destroyed by a hand-grenade is valued at $350. One entry in the 4/14 Cavalry compensation log reads: "blown-up house, pay $1,300". Another: "destroyed boat, $20". Others include a blown-up potato field and irrigation equipment ($2,000), a damaged door in a hospital ($50) and a burned-down store ($2,500).
(Wouldn't they be shocked in Hameed Hassan decided to join the insurgents?)

$100 million of bunk

Bloomberg's ads shade the truth
Juan Gonzales, NY Daily News
To win support from traditionally Democratic black voters in Tuesday's election, Mayor Bloomberg's TV and radio commercials have touted his efforts to expand job and business opportunities for minorities and women. But there are a few facts black voters won't find in any mayoral ad.
Start with the infant mortality, a key indicator of public health.
Between 2001 and 2004, the infant mortality rate for blacks increased by 16% - from 10.0 per 1,000 live births to 11.6. This is the first significant jump in the death rate for black babies since 1987.
"We really don't know why this is happening," said Ngozi Moses, director of the Brooklyn Perinatal Network, "but the mayor has so far refused to focus any effort on the problem." According to Moses, the City Council has rebuffed several City Hall attempts to cut funding for infant mortality programs. "But each time [the City] Council provides money in the budget," she said, "the Health Department takes up to nine months to release those funds to community groups."
Then there's the question of city jobs and contracting.
During the Giuliani years, whites held 70% of all agency head and senior management positions, according to a study by Blacks in Government. That has increased under Bloomberg to 79%. Among black managers, however, there has been no change. Blacks hold the same 14% share of senior city jobs as under Giuliani.
This year, a City Council study revealed that more than 90% of city contracts were being awarded to firms owned by white males. In September, Bloomberg announced an executive order calling on city agencies to improve contracting goals for minority- and women-owned firms.
"He's been the mayor for four years and doesn't do anything until he's running for reelection," said City Councilman Hiram Monserrate (D-Queens).

Finally, there's police-community relations.
They've no doubt improved improved under Bloomberg compared with the Giuliani years, but that doesn't mean all is well. This year, I reported that police in the 105th Precinct in Queens had conducted mass sweeps and arrested at least 181 men, most of them black, on misdemeanor charges and even summonses, then put all of them through the system. This happened after a black man allegedly shot a cop during a marijuana arrest. I interviewed several young blacks who claimed they were standing on the street doing nothing when police swooped in and grabbed them without warning. On Aug. 3, Bloomberg and Walcott were asked about my report by radio host Bob Slade during an interview on KISS-FM.
"It was in Dennis Walcott's neighborhood and he says it just didn't happen," Bloomberg told Slade. "So there's that ... if there were 200 kids arrested, it would have been the front pages of all the papers."
"There were not mass arrests, I know that for a fact," Walcott chimed in.
After that interview, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all court records on misdemeanor arraignments in Queens for that week and for the previous week as well. Sure enough, those records revealed that during the 3-1/2 days after the shooting incident, there were 805 arraignments in Queens Criminal Court, compared with 647 for the same period of the previous week - a 24% spike. Of the 805 arraignments, 22% came from the mass sweep in the 105th Precinct - a number confirmed yesterday by Kevin Ryan, spokesman for Queens District Attorney Richard Brown. Ryan could not say how many had been dismissed. The borough's other 15 precincts accounted for the other 624 arraignments.

Just a few of the facts you won't see in any commercial.

Poll: Issues Favor Dems in 2006 Elections
Suggests Opening for Change
A year out from the 2006 midterm elections, the Democrats hold an extraordinary lead in voter preferences. The party has a 12-point advantage over the Republicans in trust to handle the nation's main problems, and it leads in nine of 10 individual issues, with some huge gains from three years ago.
Indeed, 55 percent of Americans in this ABC News/Washington Post poll say they'd like to see the Democrats take control of Congress in 2006. And if the election were today, registered voters would favor the Democrat in their congressional district by 52-37 percent. That 15-point margin is numerically the biggest for the Democrats since an ABC/Post poll in September 1984 although about the same as a 14-point Democratic lead in one poll in 1996 (when they gained nine).
The Democrats' advantage on issues extends to some surprising areas -- Iraq and the economy, for example -- and show striking gains from late 2002.

Which Party Do You Trust to Handle...
		Democrats		Republicans
Economy		56%		34%
Social Security		56		29
Education		55		32
Health Care		54		29
Taxes		48		38
Iraq		48		37
Federal Budget		48		34
Gas Prices		47		26
Terrorism		42		42
Ethics		42		36

Party Attributes
		Democrats		Republicans
Is more open to ideas of political moderates		60%		24%
Is more concerned with needs of people like you		56		33
Better represents your values		50		40
Has stronger leaders		35		51

Insiders say Rove may leave White House
(UPI) -- Karl Rove's colleagues are preparing for the possibility that he may leave the White House because of the CIA leak case. Despite the insistence of friends that he is out of legal jeopardy, several of the lawyers who deal with special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald believe Fitzgerald is continuing to look into the possibility of charging Rove with lying to investigators or the grand jury or both, Time magazine reports. If that happens, Rove almost certainly would resign immediately.Several Bush administration officials predict that within a year, the president will have a new chief of staff and press secretary, probably a new treasury secretary and maybe a new defense secretary, the magazine said. If Rove does head out, he may leave behind a wounded president.
"A president who loves to hit home runs and wants to be remembered for swinging for the fences is being forced to take base hits," says a former White House official.

Cheney Fights for Detainee Policy
Over the past year, Vice President Cheney has waged an intense and largely unpublicized campaign to stop Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department from imposing more restrictive rules on the handling of terrorist suspects. Last winter, when Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV began pushing to have the full committee briefed on the CIA's interrogation practices, Cheney called him to the White House to urge that he drop the matter. In recent months, Cheney has been the force against adding safeguards to the Defense Department's rules on treatment of military prisoners. Just last week, Cheney showed up at a Republican senatorial luncheon to lobby lawmakers for a CIA exemption to an amendment that would ban torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners. The exemption would cover the CIA's covert "black sites" in several Eastern European democracies and other countries where key al Qaeda captives are being kept.
Increasingly, however, Cheney's positions are being opposed by other administration officials who once stood firmly behind the administration on all matters concerning terrorism. Elliot Abrams, traditionally one of the most hawkish voices in internal debates, is among the most persistent advocates of changing detainee policy. At the same time Rice has emerged as an advocate for changing the rules to "get out of the detainee mess," said one senior U.S. official.
Cheney's camp is a "shrinking island," said one State Department official who, like other administration officials quoted in this article, asked not to be identified because public dissent is strongly discouraged by the White House.
On the other side of the debate are those who believe that unconventional measures -- harsh interrogation tactics, prisoner abuse and the "ghosting" and covert detention of CIA-held prisoners -- have so damaged world support for the U.S.-led counterterrorism campaign that they have hurt the U.S. cause. Also, they argue, these measures have tainted core American values such as human rights and the rule of law. McCain's amendment would limit the military's interrogation and detention tactics to those described in the Army Field Manual, and it would prohibit all U.S. government employees from using cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Cheney pushed hard to have the entire amendment defeated. Despite Cheney's concerns, Graham said he has not heard any concerns from the CIA suggesting it needs an exemption from the McCain amendment. The CIA declined to comment.
Beside personal pressure from the vice president, Cheney's staff is also engaged in resisting a policy change. Tactics included "trying to have meetings canceled ... to at least slow things down or gum up the works" or trying to conduct meetings on the subject without other key Cabinet members, one administration official said. The official said some internal memos and e-mail from the National Security Council staff to the national security adviser were automatically forwarded to the vice president's office -- in some cases without the knowledge of the authors.
Cheney's chief aide in this bureaucratic war of wills is David S. Addington, who was his chief counsel until last week when he replaced I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby as the vice president's chief of staff. Addington exerted influence on many of the most significant policy decisions after Sept. 11, 2001. He helped write the position on torture taken by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, a stance rescinded after it became public, and he helped pick Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as the location beyond the reach of U.S. law for holding suspected terrorists. When Addington learned that the draft Pentagon directive included language from Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits torture and cruel treatment, including "humiliating and degrading treatment," he summoned the Pentagon official in charge of the detainee issue to brief him.
On Tuesday, Cheney, who often attends the GOP senators' weekly luncheons without addressing the lawmakers, made "an impassioned plea" to reject McCain's amendment. After Senate aides were ordered out of the Mansfield Room, Cheney said that aggressive interrogations of detainees such as Khalid Sheik Mohammed had yielded useful information, and that the option to treat prisoners harshly must not be taken from interrogators.
McCain then rebutted Cheney's comments, the aide said, telling his colleagues that the image of the United States using torture "is killing us around the world."

If Cheney's for torture, why not use it on Scooter?
Linwood Barclay, Toronto Star
Here's an idea, and I can't believe I'm the first to come up with this modest proposal, but why doesn't the U.S. government just go ahead and torture Lewis "Scooter" Libby? And not just for that ridiculous name. Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald has laid five charges against Libby related to the investigation into how an undercover CIA operative's identity was leaked to the press. One can only imagine how long it's going to take for Fitzgerald to lay out the evidence, to put witnesses on the stand, to build a case against Libby, and find out whether he lied to cover up for his actions or those of others at the White House.

Who knows how many other CIA agents may be outed while this case works its way through the courts? Now, couldn't the whole process be expedited if Fitzgerald could attach a few electrodes to Libby's chest and then crank up the volts? Some of you might find this position a bit extreme, but unless I'm reading the situation all wrong, this is exactly the sort of thing that Libby's boss, vice-president Dick Cheney, could get behind.

Just last week, Cheney met privately with Republican senators to make the case that the CIA should be exempted from any laws that would ban the use of torture on terror suspects. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying ol' Scooter is a terrorist. I don't see him strapping dynamite to his waist and getting on a bus. I mean, look at the nice suits he wears. Who'd want to ruin one of those? But it's not much of a leap to suggest that the leaking of a CIA agent's name is a matter of national security. And if just one U.S. official thinks it's okay to blab the names of undercover operatives, or at the very least, cover up for those who think it's okay to blab the names of undercover operatives, isn't everyone going to start thinking it's okay?

If Dick Cheney is pushing for the authority to torture terror suspects to find out what they know and what threats they pose to national security, why would he be opposed to using the same methods on his former chief of staff? Even if Libby turns out to be completely innocent? It's certainly a great shortcut to the truth.

Of course, there are some Republicans who might be worried that, under torture, Libby might say anything, or implicate anyone, to make the pain go away. Maybe even make stuff up, confess to crimes he didn't commit, just to please the folks putting in the bamboo shoots or flicking the power on or off. But surely Dick Cheney wouldn't be worried about that.

If Cheney were worried that torture can be an unreliable method for extracting the truth, he'd hardly be seeking an exemption from any laws that would ban "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of criminal suspects. So he'd be hard pressed to argue that torturing Libby might unfairly incriminate other White House officials. In fact, the very suggestion that Libby would offer up lies while under torture borders on un-American. Surely he's made of better stuff than that.

The only real question remains, who should do it?

If Fitzgerald feels uncomfortable performing the torture himself, there are any number of foreign countries where Libby could be sent to have it done. He could check with the White House for a complete list.

Like I say, it's just a thought. Maybe Cheney should issue a statement: "I'm so committed to torture for extracting information, I'm willing, as a gesture of goodwill, to have it used on my former chief of staff first."

He'd make a believer out of me.

Trinidad police detain Israeli; may be linked to bombings
from Ha'aretz
Trinidadian authorities have detained an Israeli national found living in a remote mountainous area east of the capital, police said, declining to state if he was being questioned in connection with a recent spate of bombings in the Caribbean island nation. A string of bombings, the latest one occuring last Thursday, have rocked the capital of Port-of-Spain. The bombings have injured 28 people. Authorities identified the detained man as Dahtang Mik Agarunov, 26. They said he was found living in a wooden shack in Arouca, about 10 miles east of Port-of-Spain. Agarunov was detained on Friday and questioned by Interpol, Trinidadian police and immigration officials. Authorities would not say if Agarunov was being questioned in connection with a spate of four bombings last month. No one has claimed responsibility for the bombings or linked them to any political movement.
"Once we have completed our investigation, we will be in a better place to provide more detail," said Police Commissioner Trevor Paul.
Agarunov has not been charged with any crime. He arrived in Trinidad on October 18, but authorities have not confirmed why he was visiting the island. The Israeli Embassy spokesman in Venezuela, Giora Loterstein, said he was unaware of Agarunov's detention. The Israel Embassy in Venezuela - 7 miles (11 kilometers) from Trinidad - oversees Israeli affairs in the twin-island nation.

Vote for Ferrer-- "Dignity Against Money"

Bloomberg can't put price on dignity
Editorial from 11/5/05 Daily News
When Fernando Ferrer says that New Yorkers have two choices in the mayoral race, "Dignidad contra dinero," he is doing nothing but speaking the truth.
"Dignity against money" is an accurate description not only of the shameful current mayoral campaign - in which our billionaire mayor has outspent his Democratic rival to the tune of 17 to 1 - but also of the daily life of the majority of New Yorkers. As has been reported, New York has the richest mayor in the country, but U.S. Census Bureau figures make it clear that it is America's poorest city. The one in five New Yorkers - 500,000 of them children - now surviving on less than the $15,205 per year for a family of three that constitutes the federal poverty line, have not much more to their names than their dignity as honest, hardworking men and women. The cost of living in New York is so high that 20% of its population is forced to live with the constant threat of being forced to choose between food and rent, utilities and medical care. Not only that, on Bloomberg's watch, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the gulf between rich and poor has become considerably deeper.
Somehow one thinks that the mayor of the city could put the fortune he is spending just to get reelected - expected to go as high as $100 million - to much better use. Worse, "dignity against money" also fits like a glove the sorry state of our democracy today. A system in which more and more often only those with money - tons of it - have a real chance to get elected to any position of true power. It's a tasteless parody of what the democratic system was meant to be.
In his Gettysburg Address President Lincoln defined our system as the "government of the people, by the people and for the people," meaning, of course, all people. If he could see what is going on in our city today, Lincoln would be appalled.
The phrase "dignity against money" was first used by the Democratic candidate's wife in a new Spanish-language TV ad a few days ago. And as The News reported on Friday, Bloomberg's aides weren't happy about it. They shouldn't be. Stifling debate and smothering the opposition by the overwhelming power of money, could be legally right, but undoubtedly is questionable from any other point of view. Four years ago, when he had the excuse of not being well known by the voters, candidate Bloomberg himself declared that excessive campaign spending would be obscene. This time, after four years at the city's helm, everybody knows who he is. Yet, he is running the most expensive mayoral campaign in history.
Ferrer is not a billionaire. But he is a true New Yorker and an experienced public servant who knows firsthand what surviving in a city like New York entails.
"I am running for mayor because there are two New Yorks and the bridge made of hope and opportunity - the bridge that I crossed over to get to this place - is in poor repair, and it's about time somebody fixed it," Ferrer recently said.
The fact that despite the number of poor New Yorkers having grown during his first four years in power, our billionaire mayor believes it is okay to buy four more years in City Hall is very powerful proof of how much to the point "dignity against money" really is.

Why isn't Bloomberg making promises like this?
Venezuela On The Road to Eliminating Homelessness
from Prensa Latina
The Venezuelan government will distribute 14,000 houses before the end of 2005, as part of socio-economic programs promoted by President Hugo Chavez. Housing Minister Luis Figueroa said Saturday that by December 31 no Venezuelan will remain in a shelter. Figueroa said the government provided funds to purchase houses and will construct others to help reduce housing problems. Venezuela is currently operating Mission Habitat to solve construction problems faced by families and create communities possessing all necessary services, from education to health.

Family Homeless Statistics In New York City
New York City is in the middle of a severe crisis: there are more homeless children now than anytime since the Great Depression. And after 9/11, the economic recession, inflated real estate markets and budget cuts, that record number grew fast.
Did you know?

• There were 5,000 homeless families—9,000 children – in New York City in 2000, a number not seen since the Great Depression.
• The city peaked at over 9,500 homeless families—almost 17,000 children—in 2003/4
• There are over 9,500 homeless families—almost 17,000 children—in 2003
• The average stay at a family homeless shelter has lengthened from 2-3 months to 11 months
• Homeless children suffer from (all caused by their homeless circumstances)
  - traumatic stress
  - developmental delays
  - illness
  - educational absences
  - poor nutrition
• The average homeless child is homeless more than once

• The majority of New York City’s homeless population is now families
• 44% of homeless New Yorkers are children
• The average homeless family is a single mother, African American or Latina, age 27, with two young children
• Over 50% have experienced domestic violence
• 25% of the mothers were homeless or in foster care as children
• A working family can become homeless by a fire, escaping domestic violence, eviction

Sources: NYC Dept. of Homeless Services; Institute for Children and Poverty;
Coalition for the Homeless

White House Spokesman Losing Credibility

from NPR.com
With Libby facing criminal charges and with Rove still under a cloud, the White House press corps is demanding an explanation from McClellan about statements that have turned out to be false. For close to two years, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan has responded to reporters' questions about the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame's name to the press with some variation on the following line: “The President directed the White House to cooperate fully with the investigation, and as part of cooperating fully with the investigation, we made a decision that we weren't going to comment on it while it is ongoing.”
But over the course of that investigation certain facts have become known. Most significant is that I. Lewis Libby, a top aide to both the president and vice president, has been indicted on five counts of perjury, making false statements and obstruction of justice. We also know now that White House political strategist Karl Rove talked to reporters about Plame during that same period in the summer of 2003. Back in October 2003, McClellan said he personally vouched for both Rove and Libby, assuring reporters that neither had anything to do with the leaking of Plame's name. McClellan said at the time: "They're good individuals, they're important members of our White House team, and that's why I spoke with them, so that I could come back to you and say that they were not involved." What's more, he labeled any suggestion to the contrary “ridiculous.”
Now, with Libby facing criminal charges and with Rove still under a cloud, the White House press corps is demanding an explanation from McClellan about statements that have turned out to be false. And there was this pointed exchange a day earlier, between David Gregory of NBC News and McClellan. It came on a day when McClellan would have preferred talking about that morning's big news, the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court.

Gregory/NBC News: You speak for the president. Your credibility and his credibility is not on criminal trial. But it may very well be on trial with the American public, don't you agree?
McClellan: No, I'm very confident in the relationship that we have in this room, and the trust that has been established between us. This relationship --
Gregory: See those cameras? It's not about us. It's about what the American people --
McClellan: This relationship is built on trust, and you know very well that I have worked hard to earn the trust of the people in this room, and I think I've earned it --(And now, you have lost it)

McClellan can't expect to hold off commenting on false statements he has made until the investigation into Plamegate & legal proceedings end, which could take a year or more. If he intends to do so, he'll have a hard time standing at the podium as a credible spokesman for the administration. He can no longer count on the assumption of trust that makes it possible for a spokesman to do his job.
Most reporters at the White House believe that Rove and Libby told McClellan they were not involved in the Valerie Plame matter, and that McClellan simply passed this along. This puts McClellan in a difficult position, but whether he has discussed that fact with either Libby or Rove is not known. Neither man has apologized so far for talking to reporters on background about Plame. Nor has either come forward to let McClellan off the hook by admitting publicly that they told him a lie. It may not be possible for either to do so without complicating his own legal situation. That's why, some speculate, McClellan's only way out of the vise is to step down.

Panicky Bush slinks away from Chavez
by Mike Whitney, OpEd News
The easiest way to understand the institutional bias of western media is to analyze reporting from the developing world. The economic summit in Mar Del Plata, Argentina, provides an excellent opportunity to evaluate the coverage and decide whether such partiality exists. Although tens of thousands of working people came to protest George Bush and his suspiciously-named “free trade” economic policies; they were invariably smeared by the corporate media as “Leftists” or “radicals”; eliminating the possibility that they were simply concerned citizens participating in the democratic process. This is the familiar tactic of the media to marginalize ordinary people whose interests don’t correspond to those of the ruling elite.
“Latin America’s radical leftists took to the streets on Friday,” Jack Chang breathlessly reported for Knight Ridder, but all the other news outlets invoked the same disparaging language.
The main target at the event was Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a leader who is invariably slandered by the media with the monikers “leftist firebrand”, “radical president” (Financial Times) or fiery, populist president (NY Times). At some point in every article, Chavez is lumped together with Fidel Castro or Che Guevara in a conspicuous attempt to dismiss him as an anti-American troublemaker. In fact, Chavez was among the first countries to come to America’s aid following Hurricane Katrina, offering doctors, medicine and oil to the devastated region. No major media source publicly credited him for his charitable contributions. Chavez, of course, is guilty of redistributing some of Venezuela’s prodigious oil wealth to the poor and needy of his country. This has made him an imminent threat to the entrenched oligarchy and their teammates in the media.
“We are creating a great political body in the south, and not only geographically,” Chavez opined. “This is the great task of our region, to create a consensus of ‘the south’ that will bring better lives to all our people.” Chavez’s innocuous comments were vilified in most of the reports as inciting anti-Americanism or, worse still, “subverting democracy in his country”. (Knight Ridder) In fact, it is the rising tide of democracy in South America that has Washington so concerned.
Chavez has captured the imagination of the common man and is pointing to a way out of the neoliberal policies that have kept Washington’s boot placed firmly on neck of southern hemisphere economies for 20 years. “We’ve come to bury FTAA,” Chavez roared to the capacity crowd. “I even brought a shovel”. The Venezuelan president’s remarks were enthusiastically applauded by the thousands in the crowd who chanted back, “Fascist Bush, You are the terrorist”.
Chavez was flanked by antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan and former footballer Diego Maradona. Maradona added to Chavez’s stinging repudiation of free trade by calling Bush, “human rubbish.” (This was only reported in one outlet; the Australian based News.com) Like many Argentines, Maradono believes that the US policies precipitated Argentina’s economic meltdown which left 40% of the population living in poverty. Most of the articles failed to report this crucial fact which contextualizes the negative sentiment that many in the south feel for America. It has nothing to do with the “fiery oratory” of Chavez, but a clear grasp of the devastating effects of US free trade policies.
The majority of Latin Americans are now opposed to the creation of a free trade region in the Americas. They are also against the repayment of the foreign debt and the growing threat of US militarization. They are increasingly frustrated with the increasing disparity of wealth between rich and poor as well as with rising unemployment. Again, none of these factors has anything to do with Chavez who is mistakenly held responsible for inciting hatred of America. Chavez has, however, been a unifying figure who has shared his oil wealth with other countries in the region and created an alternate economic model, Mercosur, which challenges the US’s dominance in the hemisphere. It was a stunning blow to the Bush team when free trade loyalist Vicente Fox announced at the summit that Mexico would be joining Mercosur.
Chavez’s comments only added insult to injury:
“The planet is being destroyed under our own noses by the capitalist model, the destructive engine of development. Every day there is more hunger, more misery, thanks to the neo-liberal, capitalist model.”
The rejection of FTAA is a mainstream position emerging from the political awakening of the people themselves. Simply put, the methods applied by the Washington Consensus have been tried and have failed rather spectacularly. The new majority doesn’t want to “destroy local industry, roll back social safety nets and labor protections”, destroy the environment, or prolong America’s supremacy in the region.
“We have come to bury FTAA because it’s an old project of the imperial eagle that from the beginning planned to sink its claws into Latin America,” said Chavez.
The media coverage of the summit obscured the details that would have provided the necessary background for understanding the rage at Bush’s appearance. The event was framed as a “showdown” between Chavez and Bush. Even on this superficial level the corporate media demonstrated its deftness at tip-toeing around what really took place. As Reuters pointed out, the strutting Texan, who exudes confidence and courage behind a phalanx of security guards and concertina wire, “carefully avoided” Chavez while the world waited with baited-breath. “Carefully avoided”!?!
“This summit is not about Hugo Chavez,” one Bush advisor said defensively. “This is not news.” But, of course, it is news. And, when the word gets out that the boastful Bush slinked out of Argentina rather than face his arch-rival, it will be very big news indeed.

Republicans Still Hiding Evidence of Lies for War
by Rob Kall, OpEd News
Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee bottled up information that showed the administration knew that evidence they cited as reasons to go to war was provided by a source who was known to "fabricate" bogus information. The NY Times reports Bush, Cheney, Powell, and other administration officials repeatedly cited known dissembler's information as “credible’’ evidence that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons. Before the 2004 elections, a Republican majority in the Senate Armed Services Committee forced key documents and information to be kept secret, preventing the American public from knowing that the arguments for war were built upon known lies and fabrications. The NY Times article reports,

"A top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document. The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, “was intentionally misleading the debriefers’’ in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda’s work with illicit weapons."

And there were numerous other known informants whose bad information, although known to be bad, was used by the administration to lie to the American public and the UN to sell the war, including one who told about mobile bio-weapon labs, and Ahmad Chalabi. The key document, proving the Bush administration's early knowledge that their claims were false, is called DITSUM No. 044-02. The Times reports:

"the document would have circulated widely within the government, and it would have been available to the C.I.A., the White House, the Pentagon and other agencies. It remains unclear whether the D.I.A. document was provided to the Senate panel."

The report was clear in stating the weak, unlikely veracity of the informant's statements,

“It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers,’’ the February 2002 report said. “Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest.’’

The Times article says the DIA report states

“Saddam’s regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements,’’ the D.I.A. report said in one of two declassified paragraphs. “Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control.’’

In late October, Harry Reid demanded in a closed session of the senate that a report be released to the American people disclosing these and other facts. Senate Republicans said they'd been planning to release it anyway. (Suuuuuuuuure they were)

Torture: It's the new American way
by Rosa Brooks, LA Times
'WE WILL bury you," Nikita Khrushchev told U.S. diplomats in 1956. The conventional wisdom is that Khrushchev got it wrong: The repressive Soviet state collapsed under the weight of its own cruelties and lies while democratic America went from strength to strength, buoyed by its national commitment to liberty and justice for all. But with this week's blockbuster report of secret CIA detention facilities in Eastern Europe, cynics may be pardoned for wondering who really won the Cold War.
According to Dana Priest, the Washington Post investigative reporter who broke the story Wednesday, it all started on Sept. 17, 2001, when President Bush signed a secret executive order authorizing the CIA to kill, capture or detain Al Qaeda operatives. There was only one problem: The CIA didn't know where to put the people it detained. Those detainees thought to be of "high value" needed to be kept somewhere special. Somewhere impregnable, like Alcatraz. And somewhere secret, far from the prying eyes of reporters or Red Cross officials. Because these high-value prisoners — so-called ghost detainees — were going to be subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques." That's Orwell-speak for what's known in English as torture. The list of enhanced techniques is classified but reportedly includes such old favorites as "waterboarding" (feigned drowning) and feigned suffocation. Authorized techniques also may have included the "Palestinian hanging," a "stress position" in which a detainee is suspended from the ceiling or wall by his wrists, which are handcuffed behind his back. (Gee, wonder what nice group of folks came up with that idea?)
It was this enhancement that preceded the death of Manadel Jamadi, an Iraqi who died in CIA custody at Abu Ghraib in November 2003, according to government investigative reports. When Jamadi was lowered to the ground, blood gushed from his mouth as if "a faucet had turned on," said Tony Diaz, an MP who witnessed his torture. Later, other guards posed with Jamadi's battered corpse, and the leaked photos shocked the world.
That's not the kind of publicity a freedom-loving democracy needs, so the CIA reportedly opted for secret "black sites." It's not as easy as you might think to find a spot where you can torture people in peace. Abu Ghraib is full of camera-clicking reservists, and the Marquis de Sade's castle lies in ruins. And Guantanamo's CIA interrogation facility had to be closed when the Supreme Court pointed out that Guantanamo is not a law-free zone. Remember the flap last spring when Amnesty International called Guantanamo an American "gulag"? Maybe that's what gave the CIA the idea of locating some black sites in Eastern Europe. ("Hmm, gulag, gulag … that reminds me of something…. Hey! Maybe there are some leftover Soviet-era detention facilities we can use for our enhanced interrogations!")
At the request of "senior U.S. officials," the Washington Post declined to identify the locations of the Eastern European black sites. But Marc Garlasco, a military analyst at Human Rights Watch, says that host countries may include Poland and Romania. Human Rights Watch examined flight records showing that on Sept. 22, 2003, for instance, around the same time several high-value Al Qaeda detainees were transferred out of CIA facilities in Afghanistan, a CIA-linked Boeing 737 with the tail number N313P flew from Kabul to Szymany Airport in Poland. The next day, it landed at Mihail Kogalniceanu military airfield in Romania. Released Guantanamo detainees have corroborated the use of this plane as a prisoner transport, and rights groups and journalists say witnesses also have reported seeing hooded prisoners being loaded and unloaded from the same plane at various other locations.
During the Cold War, we thought we knew what distinguished us from our Soviet bloc enemies. We did not have a gulag; we did not imprison and torture our enemies. But the war on terror has distorted our national values. We have used some of the same tactics we once decried. The Soviet Union's legacy of terror lives on, its tactics embraced by some of our leaders. Vice President Dick Cheney continues to insist that the McCain amendment, which prohibits U.S. personnel from cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners, should not be applicable to the CIA. Somewhere in Moscow's Novodevichyi cemetery, Khrushchev is probably laughing inside his grave.

Argentina welcomes GWB -- Not

Latin America prepares to 'say no to Bush'
United States President George Bush left his problems at home on Thursday only to find himself flying into a whole new world of hurt at the Summit of Americas in Argentina, where tens of thousands of protesters, led by the football star and broadcaster Diego Maradona, were due to greet the president in a "say no to Bush" march. The president can expect an equally unfriendly welcome from some of the leaders and top officials attending the summit in the seaside town of Mar del Plata. Among those he can expect to come face to face with is Hugo Chávez, the outspoken President of Venezuela who has accused the Bush administration of attempting to orchestrate a coup against him and last week said the US was planning to invade his country. Maradona has urged viewers of his popular television show to join him in a protest outside the meeting. Argentina's piquetero movement -- made up of protesters known for blocking roads and confronting authorities -- has promised to descend on the resort in force. Family members of fallen US soldiers in Iraq as well as Iraqi civilians who have suffered at the hands of US troops will also be there. Chávez said Venezuela would object to any attempt by the US to revive proposals for the creation of Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which would overtake the European Union as the world's largest tariff-free zone. Bush has been a forceful proponent of the idea, (probably to force Latin American countries to trade in US dollars instead of Euros?) but talks have repeatedly stalled, with opponents fearful it would allow corporations to dominate the poor.
"They aren't going to revive it, even if they produce a 10 000-page document," Chávez told the Caracas-based TV channel Telesur.

These Stats Are a Crime
While Bloomberg boasts of crime drop, the hospitals' work on assault victims is booming

See also:

Double Dutch in a War Zone
On Ghetto Streets in 2003, It's Bloodshed and Tears All Over Again

Bloomberg Billions Shut Lots of Mouths

Mayoral Race: Poor New Yorkers Wait to Be Heard

Bloomy's Hypocritical Oath

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been free to spend his fortune on campaign advertisements touting the continued drop in crimes police have reported. His campaign website declares that, under Bloomberg, "the neighborhoods of New York have become safer than ever." Tell that to the people in the emergency rooms. The number of people who went to New York City hospitals because they were assaulted jumped sharply in four of the last five years for which figures are available—a direct contrast to the plunging number of assaults the NYPD reported.
But the stark contrast between these two sets of official statistics demonstrates again the need for a thorough, independent probe of the police department's crime reports. And it shows how wrong it was for the Bloomberg administration to have allowed the NYPD to thwart a probe earlier this year of the crime statistics.
According to health statistics on the city government's website, more and more assault victims flocked to emergency rooms for four years in a row. In 2002, the last year for which data is available and Bloomberg's first year in office, the number of assault victims either hospitalized or treated in emergency rooms shot up 6 percent from the year before. Not to worry: The police department reported a 10 percent drop in aggravated assaults, according to FBI records.

Senate, House Approve Food Stamp, Health Care Cuts
On Capitol Hill, separate measures in both Houses of Congress approved cuts in health care and food stamp programs Thursday. The US Senate passed a bill that will trim $10 billion dollars by restructuring Medicare and Medicaid health programs. The Associated Press notes the bill’s $36 billion in overall savings would be dwarfed by the $13.8 trillion expected to be spent under a Republican budget plan approved in April. The approved bill also enables a controversial plan to allow oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Meanwhile, the House Budget Committee approved a $844 million dollar cut in food stamp and child welfare programs. (And they're planning a $70 billion dollar tax cut package for the rich).

Alito: A "Mafia Friendly Insider"?
Former Italian government informant talks about Alito's shady past, including dishing out favors to known underworld figures.
By Greg Szymanski
The dirt is starting to fly around the Supreme Court nomination of federal court judge Samuel Alito, Jr., called by some a “mafia friendly insider” who takes a liking to shady, smoke-filled backroom dealings with thugs in the New York Gotti crime family and other New Jersey mobsters. Alito, 55, familiar with the underworld’s influence in New Jersey politics as well its racketeering and bribery operations in other states like Illinois and Pennsylvania, has been linked to “going easy, turning the other cheek and knowingly turning loose” crime family thugs when he served as a U.S. Attorney in New Jersey, primarily handling organized crime cases.
One former FBI/CIA undercover informant, living in Italy and who will remain anonymous, came forward this week, saying talk on the street when he was on the East Coast during Alito’s tenure as a supposed crime-busting U.S. Attorney was that he was “tight and friendly, dishing out legal favors to known crime members.”
Although certain FBI reports since have internally cleared Alito of any mischief or wrongdoing, critics including the former Italian informant, claim “official investigations” don’t tell the real story behind Alito’s backroom legal antics.
“He was close to everything and a lot of connected people walked when he was a U.S. Attorney,” said the informant from an undisclosed location in Italy. “He knows how to play the game and he plays it well. Getting the truth is going to be tough. Alito has a lot of friends, the kind of guys who don’t talk.”
Further reports have also surfaced from the U.S., Italy and elsewhere that Alito is a key member of a renegade but influential worldwide group called “Propaganda-Due” or P-2, well-known overseas for orchestrating assassinations of key figures in order to advance its jaded notion of world supremacy. The shady activities of P-2 has for decades been on the front pages of Italian newspapers, linking its members to numerous Vatican finance scandals and assassinations as far back as the murder of former Italian leader Aldo Moro.
And now stories are beginning to surface that Alito is a part of P-2, a group that considers itself above the law, consisting of influential politicians, bankers and businessmen from countries like the U.S., Italy, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
With the emotionally charged issues of abortion and other social concerns about to take center stage in the Alito nomination hearings, watchdog judicial groups are now starting to demand Senators delve deeply into Alito’s past ties with organized crime as well as his underhanded dealings with politicians like New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), both interconnected with corrupt financial affairs involving the New York and New Jersey underworld.
Another interesting aspect of Alito’s past, showing the “good old boy’s club” at work in the Bush administration, is his relationship with the corrupt and unscrupulous Michael Chertoff, the head of Homeland Security.
Chertoff, who took over administering what has been termed by many Americans as a “Gestapo-like” homeland surveillance agency after 9/11, served as Alito’s First Assistant in the New Jersey’s U.S. Attorney’s office where together they supposedly arranged cover-ups, benefiting financially from many shady dealings with the underworld, as well as Israeli fronted companies dealing in the illegal arms trade sanctioned by the Mossad and the CIA.
Citing specifics and circulated on various internet outlets including www.cloakanddagger.de, the shady report on Chertoff and Alito alleged:
“They jointly arranged apparently to cover up and personally financially benefit from numerous crimes committed by renegade groups of officials and agents of Israeli Intelligence, The Mossad, operating front companies for various scams.
“These criminal gangs arranged rackets skimming off vast sums from runaway corruption among Judges and other court officials in the U.S. Bankruptcy Courts. Also Alito and Chertoff reputedly profitably engaged in clandestine and corrupt weapons deals with supposedly Israeli weapons and defense contractors located in New Jersey. In favor of Gestapo tactics, Chertoff after 9-11 became head of Homeland Security.
Alito, originally appointed to the federal bench in 1990 by Daddy Bush is seen as a strong conservative voice nicknamed “Scalito” for his philosophical similarities with Justice Scalia, also called my many of his critics the “Go To Hell Judge” for his insensitive and underhanded rulings.
Regarding abortion, Alito is most definitely opposed to it, backing a Pennsylvania law as a federal judge in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, that required women to inform their husbands before they sought an abortion.

AIPAC judge keeps evidence classified
The federal judge in the AIPAC classified-information case ruled that prosecutors may withhold evidence from the defense.In a hearing Wednesday in the case against Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, two former staffers of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Judge T.S. Ellis of the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., ruled in favor of government arguments that recordings and transcripts of tapped conversations involving the defendants include material that would be harmful to the national interest if revealed. Ellis said he would determine what material the defense can use and what material it can not access.
from What Really Happened.com:
"Once again we see the US Government hiding the facts about Israel's spies from the American people. Why? Is it because the AIPAC spy scandal lies right at the heart of the lies that tricked our nation into war at the cost of 2000 young American lives and trillions of dollars? Or is there a still darker secret hiding behind the blindfold called "National Security"? "
"Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified information." -- US official quoted in Carl Cameron's Fox News report on the Israeli spy ring and its connections to 9-11.

Brownie: "Can I quit now?"--
(no wonder Chertoff delayed releasing Katrina emails--he still hasn't released his own!)
A Louisiana congressman Rep. Charlie Melancon says e-mails written by the government's emergency response chief as Hurricane Katrina raged show a lack of concern for the unfolding tragedy and a failure in leadership. Although Chertoff has not turned over all the documents requested by the committee, Melancon charged that the material received so far contradicts testimony by Brown before the committee in which he described himself as an effective leader.
In one, two days after Katrina hit, Marty Bahamonde, one of the only FEMA employees in New Orleans, wrote to Brown that "the situation is past critical" and listed problems including many people near death and food and water running out at the Superdome.
Brown's entire response was: "Thanks for the update. Anything specific I need to do or tweak?"
Brown is still on the federal payroll at his $148,000 annual salary.
"Can I quit now? Can I come home?" Brown wrote on the morning of the hurricane. A few days later, Brown wrote to an acquaintance, "I'm trapped now, please rescue me."
"In the midst of the overwhelming damage caused by the hurricane and enormous problems faced by FEMA, Mr. Brown found time to exchange e-mails about superfluous topics," including "problems finding a dog-sitter," Melancon said.
Brown could not be reached for comment Wednesday night on the e-mails and Melancon's charges.
Melancon used an e-mail sent September 2, four days after the hurricane hit, to illustrate his point. On that day, Brown received a message with the subject "medical help." At the time, thousands of patients were being transported to the New Orleans airport, which had been converted to a makeshift hospital. Because of a lack of ventilators, medical personnel had to ventilate patients by hand for as long as 35 hours, according to Melancon.
The text of the e-mail reads: "Mike, Mickey and other medical equipment people have a 42-foot trailer full of beds, wheelchairs, oxygen concentrators, etc. They are wanting to take them where they can be used but need direction. Mickey specializes in ventilator patients so can be very helpful with acute care patients. If you could have someone contact him and let him know if he can be of service, he would appreciate it. Know you are busy but they really want to help."
Melancon said Brown didn't respond for four days, when he forwarded the original e-mail to FEMA Deputy Chief of Staff Brooks Altshuler and Deputy Director of Response Michael Lowder. The text of Brown's e-mail to them read: "Can we use these people?" Melancon also charged that few of the e-mails from Brown show him assigning specific tasks to employees or responding to pressing problems.
This is the second time a congressional committee had dealt with e-mails relating to FEMA's Katrina response. A complete transcript of Brown's e-mail traffic during the Katrina crisis has not been released by the Department of Homeland Security.

Army Chaplain Sentenced For Sodomizing Troops
BAMBERG, Germany -- A U.S. Army chaplain has been sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to three counts of forcible sodomy against enlisted men.Capt. Gregory Arflack, a 44-year-old Roman Catholic priest, apologized at his court-martial in Germany. He sobbed and said, "I've had a lot of time to pray and consider what I've done as a priest and an officer and I'm ashamed."One of the victims, whom Arflack had been counseling about homesickness and family troubles, told the court, "I don't understand how a person of the cloth could do something like that."He added, "I didn't believe God would allow something like that to happen."Arflack confessed to plying three soldiers -- ages 18, 19 and 20 -- with alcohol and making unwanted advances. He forced oral sex on one soldier in the bathroom of a bar.

Libby Pleads Not Guilty at Arraignment
In Washington, Lewis Libby entered a plea of not guilty in U.S. federal court Thursday. Libby resigned last week as Vice President Cheney's chief of staff after being indicted in the case surrounding the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. The Associated Press reports Libby is represented by two attorneys known for winning acquittals in white-collar criminal cases. Ted Wells has won acquittals for several corporate executives and former cabinet members. William Jeffress is a partner in the law firm Baker Botts, where former Secretary of State James Baker is a senior partner. The New York Times reports Libby was greeted at by several hecklers as he entered the courthouse. One admonished him for “taking the country to war on a pack of lies."

Italy Warned US On Iraq-Niger Documents
Meanwhile, the Italian government says it warned the Bush administration documents purporting to show an Iraqi attempt to buy uranium from Niger were fakes. Italian Senator Massimo Brutti said the warning was issued around the same time President Bush made the claim in his State of the Union speech of January 2003. Brutti later called the Associated Press to retract the statement.

Red Cross Calls for Access to Detainees in Secret Prisons
The International Committee of the Red Cross has called for access to detainees held in secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe. The unidentified facilities were revealed in Wednesday’s Washington Post. Meanwhile, the European Union announced it would be looking into allegations made by Human Rights Watch that Poland and Romania are the likely sites of the prisons. Both countries have denied the allegations.

No answer yet on what caused spill at nerve agent depot
NEWPORT, Ind. - Army contractors resumed inspecting a chemical reactor built to destroy a deadly nerve agent Monday, trying to determine what caused a weekend spill that forced a temporary halt to operations at the western Indiana complex. On Saturday, nearly 500 gallons of caustic wastewater produced by the destruction of the VX nerve agent spilled in a contained area at the Newport Chemical Depot's disposal facility. In May, work began to destroy Newport's more than 250,000 gallons of VX, a substance so toxic that a single droplet can kill a healthy human. The project was halted in June after a leak resulted in a spill of about 30 gallons of VX, sodium hydroxide and water. Work resumed at Newport in late August.
Elizabeth Crowe, an organizer for the Berea, Ky.-based watchdog Chemical Weapons Working Group, said delays have been common at the nation's weapon destruction facilities. Newport is one of eight chemical weapons storage sites across the nation where the Army is working to destroy stockpiles as part of an international treaty. Pending federal approval, the Army plans to ship millions of gallons of hydrolysate to a DuPont Inc., plant in New Jersey for treatment and eventual discharge into the Delaware River.

The Gun is Smoking: Ohio Exit Poll Data Provides Virtually Irrefutable Evidence of Vote Miscount
by The National Election Data Archive (NEDA)
Summary: New analysis of the precinct-level Ohio exit poll data provides virtually irrefutable evidence of large scale vote miscounts in Ohio during the 2004 presidential election. 6% of Ohio's exit-polled precincts had impossible vote counts and 57% had significant discrepancies (a less than 5% chance of occurring in any one precinct). The pattern of Ohio's exit poll results is not consistent with any exit poll error hypothesis. However, it is consistent with pro-Bush vote miscounts. The full paper "The Gun is Smoking: Ohio Precinct-level Exit Poll Data Show Virtually Irrefutable Evidence of Vote Miscount" is available at http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/OH/ohio-exit-polls-2004.pdf
In two Ohio precincts, even if all voters who did not complete exit polls had voted for Bush, the total Bush vote count would have been less than the official count. In a third precinct, all voters who did not complete exit polls would have had to vote for Bush to equal the official count. Unless Bush voters lied much more than Kerry voters on exit polls, or massive exit poll error occurred that was not detected by the pollsters, the results are mathematically impossible. The Ohio exit poll data are a smoking gun for vote miscounts in Ohio. Ohio exit poll results are consistent with earlier findings of similar unexplained and implausible exit poll discrepancies in the national exit poll sample as described in the January 21, 2005 Edison/Mitofsky report.

Forced Inoculations Beginning of Bush's Bird Flu Plan
from Prison Planet
Last week's column warned of imminent federal legislation that would toss powerful pharmaceutical companies billions of dollars and complete protection from liability suits in case untested and experimental bird flu vaccines damage American recipients. It drew heavy response. The bill (S. 1873) -- a big congressional wet kiss to the drug industry -- is dressed up in a noble-sounding title: "Biodefense and Pandemic Vaccine and Drug Development Act." In essence, however, it would force Americans to receive inoculations against a disease that has yet to kill one of them, while removing their constitutional right to seek redress in our courts in case of injury or death from the shots because of company negligence. The proposal, now moving its way through the Senate, would also ban citizens from using the Freedom of Information Act and other popular informational laws to discover whether the new vaccine (when it is finally produced) was effective and safe, and even whether anyone had suffered adverse reactions to it.
One thing the bill-backer friends of Big Pharma are trying to slip through with this legislation is a market exclusivity provision that would extend patents on hugely profitable drugs that are about to evolve into the category of cheaper generic medicines. Further, it would prohibit federal drug buyers from contracting with generic medicine makers to save taxpayers billions of dollars -- a current admirable practice. Further, it would allow federal health officials to purchase medicines, vaccines and other palliatives by simple fiat without taking bids. Further, and most onerously, the bill would vastly broaden the definition of products eligible to be characterized as "countermeasures" to terrorism -- in other words, potentially classifying commonly purchased substances like ibuprofen and aspirin as terrorist-fighting devices.
The Coalition for a Competitive Pharmaceutical Market (CCPM) is an unusually broad-based national coalition of organizations powerful on Capitol Hill in representing employers, health insurers, chain drugstores, generic drug makers and pharmacy benefit managers. Last week, this huge group urged the Senate to revise the "biodefense" bill to remove the broadened definition of terrorism "countermeasures" because the proposal allows it to be done "in a way that could grant existing everyday medicines -- rather than novel products related to (defense) against bioterrorism -- multiple years of additional market exclusivity."
Even the big health insurance companies and pharmaceutical management lobbyists were startled by the brazen provisions at the expense of common citizens Senate 1873 portends. Mark J. Rubino, chief pharmacy officer for Aetna Inc., states, "For private and public purchasers seeking to provide consumers with therapeutically equivalent, but more cost-efficient generic drugs, the market exclusivity provision included in the Biodefense bill takes us in exactly the wrong direction."
In the 1970s, the panic over swine flu led to an ill-advised vaccine push that crippled many recipients and cost the drug makers millions. In the 1980s, a dangerously reactive vaccine against whooping cough injured andkilled thousands when a safer foreign alternative was already available but stubbornly unapproved by the FDA. In the 1990s, the federal health establishment insisted -- and still insists -- there is no connection between toxic mercury preservatives in mandated childhood vaccines and the astounding increase in autism (from 1 in 10,000 births to 1 in 166 births), despite ample scientific evidence to the contrary. Experimental anthrax vaccine is still being tested on troops without informed consent, and was almost tested on infants until a big public fuss erupted.

Former soldier wins landmark case over Gulf War Syndrome
A former guardsman suffering from Gulf War Syndrome has won a landmark legal case against the Ministry of Defence. Daniel Martin, 35, who has suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome, memory loss and impaired concentration since the 1991 conflict, will receive a disability award under the "umbrella term" of Gulf War Syndrome. He is one of 1,500 soldiers who made a claim for a disablement pension because of the syndrome, which, for the past 14 years, the MoD has said does not exist. A war pensions tribunal in London yesterday ruled "the term Gulf War Syndrome is the appropriate medical label to be attached" to Mr Martin's condition. The ruling will enable the other servicemen to claim their disablement pensions.
Charles Plumridge, Co-ordinator for the National Gulf Veterans and Families Association, said: "Hundreds of veterans have applied to have the diagnostic label of Gulf War Syndrome recognised. While the Ministry of Defence has said in the House of Commons that they do not recognise the syndrome, the Pensions Appeal Tribunal has ruled that there is enough evidence to warrant the term." Mr Plumridge, an army reservist called up at the age of 50 to serve in the first Gulf War, has been waiting five years to be granted a disablement pension from the MoD. "A precedent has now been set," he said. "I would expect, at last, the Veterans Agency to accept what everyone else already knows, and grant pensions to the 1,500 veterans who have claimed them due to Gulf War Syndrome."
The veterans claim the syndrome was caused by the many vaccinations they received before combat, including the Anthrax vaccine, combined with exposure to depleted uranium and the pesticides used on the servicemen's tents while serving in the Gulf during the Allied action.

http://www.iacenter.org/depleted/du.htm
POISON DUst: The Documentary
Poison DUst tells the story of three young men from New York who could not get answers for their mysterious ailments after their National Guard unit’s 2003 tour of duty in Iraq. A mother reveals her fears about the extent of her child’s birth defects (born with no fingers on one hand-- the same birth defect seen in Iraq where DU has been used) and the growing disability of her young husband – a vet. Filmmaker Sue Harris skillfully weaves, through interviews, their journey from personal trauma, to ‘positive’ test results for uranium poisoning, to learning the truth about radioactive Depleted Uranium weapons. Their frustrations in dealing with the Veterans Administration’s silence becomes outrage as they realize that thousands of other GI's have the same symptoms.
Today more than 1/3 of all 1991 Gulf war vets are on VA Disability Benefits. Meanwhile U.S. use of radioactive DU weapons has increased six-fold from 1991 to Gulf War II!
The U.S. military now admits that it deliberately radiated its own soldiers, known as the “Atomic Veterans,” during the Cold War. (Also see the documentary "Radio Bikini" showing that US soldiers in WWII were intentionally exposed to atomic radiation in the Bikiki Island nuclear bomb test). This documentary exposes U.S. use of radioactive weapons on peoples in not only Iraq, but the Marshall Islands; Vieques, Puerto Rico; Meihyang-Ri, South Korea; and Yugoslavia.

Judith Miller used to tip-off terror linked muslim charity
NY POST - October 18, 2005 -- A ONCE-SIMPLE story has become far too convoluted for anyone but the most obsessive to follow. Patrick Fitzgerald took Judith Miller to court to get her to reveal a leak inside his own office — in a case in which Miller arguably committed a great offense against national security. In December 2001, Fitzgerald was preparing to issue indictments against the Holy Land Foundation, which he had determined was a fund-raising front for radical Islamic terror groups. His office was preparing to stage a midnight raid on the Holy Land Foundation's headquarters. Just then, Miller called the Holy Land Foundation seeking comment on the pending indictments. Fitzgerald evidently believes Miller's phone call led to a shredding party at the foundation's headquarters in Richardson, Texas — thus preventing him from getting at files that might have revealed important information about domestic U.S. support for terrorists. Eager to know who in his office had leaked information that had caused such damage to his case, Fitzgerald subpoenaed Miller's phone records. But the case landed in the New York courtroom of the leftist U.S. District Court Judge Robert Sweet. Sweet ruled — in the same week as a D.C. court compelled Miller to comply with Fitzgerald's subpoena in the Plame case — that The New York Times did not have to surrender Miller's phone records to Fitzgerald.
If you want to understand why Fitzgerald came down so hard on Judith Miller, maybe this story of Miller's indefensible conduct in the Holy Land matter might offer you a clue.

Bigger Than Watergate
by Ted Rall
To weigh the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame against historical standards, consider that no leader of the Soviet Union--including that master of ruthlessness, Josef Stalin--ever arranged for the name of a KGB operative to appear in a newspaper. Adolf Hitler had countless millions murdered, yet getting at a political enemy by endangering agents of the Sicherheitsdienst, the Nazi intelligence service, didn't cross his mind. In this respect, not even the worst tyrants have stooped to the level of George W. Bush.
Don't let the Republicans distract you. Treasongate isn't just about deposed vice presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby, who has been charged with five felony counts and faces 30 years in prison, or even deputy presidential chief of staff Karl Rove, who may soon be charged as well. The Libby charges clearly point to the real culprit: Dick Cheney, who told Libby about Plame's covert status in the first place. Cheney abused his security clearance to find out. "Libby understood that the vice president had learned this information from the C.I.A.," reads page five of the indictment. "Cheney doesn't have a legal problem, but he has a political problem," a White House official told the New York Times. For now.
An earlier News report revealed a secret White House Iraq Group (WHIG) that "morphed into a virtual hit squad that took aim at critics who questioned its claims [that Saddam Hussein had nuclear and biochemical weapons]" from late 2002 to mid-2003. WHIG's members included Rove, Libby, and disgraced Times reporter/Bush stenographer Judith Miller.
"In our system," Bush reminded, "each individual is presumed innocent and entitled to due process and a fair trial." Unlike the thousands of people Bush tossed into prison after 9/11--without charges or access to a lawyer--Libby is a rich guy with pale skin. He gets to confront his accusers.
Treasongate includes many of the essential components of Watergate: smearing opponents of the Iraq war and their loved ones, financial shenanigans and a cover-up. Actually it was a cover-up of a cover-up; they lied about trashing Plame, who they targeted because her husband revealed their lies about Iraqi WMDs.
Trust us, they ask. We're incompetent, not evil. That's their defense.
(Same thing they claimed about 9/11& Hurricane Katrina, remember?)
"One can believe that the neocons are utterly wrong without also assuming that they are evil," Nicholas Kristof argues in a Times op-ed. But people willing to lie their country into war and stab the people who protect it in the back are evil.

US military massacres Iraqi civilians near Syrian border
In the immediate aftermath of the vote on the Iraq constitution, the US military has stepped up its campaign of violence in several cities near the Syrian border. The new wave of killings underscores the cynicism of the claims that the referendum embodied the birth of democracy in Iraq—compliments of US missiles, bombs, bullets and torture chambers.
In the border city of Al-Qaim, US warplanes dropped bombs that killed 40 people and wounded 20, according to an article October 31 in Al Jazeera. The hospital doctor said most of the victims were women and children, and a local tribal leader explained that there were no weapons nearby. An Associated Press television news crew near the Syrian border filmed Iraqis searching the rubble for their belongings and digging out the corpses of family members, which they rolled in blankets. In three of the bundles were mere children. One man told AP, "At least 20 innocent people were killed by the US warplanes. Why are the Americans killing families? Where are the insurgents? We don’t see democracy. We just see destruction."
The US has also launched an offensive against the nearby town of Hsaiba, which is located on Iraq’s border with Syria and is the town through which Syrian-bound rail traffic from Baghdad passes. Reporter Mahmud Al-Rawi told Al Jazeera that six homes in Hsaiba were destroyed by American warplanes, which have been conducting almost daily bombings of the town. As of this writing, the city has been encircled by US ground forces, which are preventing anyone attempting to flee the carnage from getting past. (Genocide?)
"While we were trying to attend to the wounded, US fighter planes began bombing the place again," Al-Rawi reported, "They are turning this town into another Fallujah."
On Saturday, according to an article in the New York Times, the US military was active in the town of Ubeidi, also near the Syrian border. There, US soldiers shot and killed four men as they drove in a car. The buildup of the US military presence on Syria’s eastern border is coordinated with diplomatic maneuvers by the US to place pressure on the Syrian government. On Monday, with joint European and American backing, the UN Security Council passed a resolution demanding full cooperation by the Syrian government in the UN’s probe into the assassination of the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, and threatening "further action" against Damascus. Ten separate operations have been conducted this year in Iraq’s Anbar province, which borders Syria.
The US government has not even bothered to produce an estimate of the number of Iraqi civilians killed and mutilated by its soldiers, bombs, smart missiles and "interrogators." However, several independent investigations have put the number of Iraqi civilian deaths caused by the US-British military occupation at 100,000 or more.The latest US bombing atrocities underscore the tragic waste of human life—American as well as Iraqi—resulting from the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Deceitful & Disgraceful

"No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices."
-- Edward R. Murrow

Cheney-Staffer-Turned-Reporter Now Covering Libby Indictment for NBC News
by David Sirota
How can NBC's Pete Williams be allowed to cover the Scooter Libby story for the network, considering Williams was a longtime former staffer for Dick Cheney? That's right – according to Williams' biography on NBC's website, Williams is "a native of Casper, Wyoming" – where Cheney is from.
In 1986, Williams "joined the Washington, DC staff of then Congressman Dick Cheney as press secretary and a legislative assistant. In 1989, when Cheney was named Assistant Secretary of Defense, Williams was appointed Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs." Now Williams is being allowed to report on the indictment of Cheney's chief of staff for NBC, as if he was just a regular old nonpartisan objective journalist. And, Williams seems to be using his position on TV in some pretty nefarious ways when it comes to the case.
UPDATE: I received a hysterical, breathless email from a well-known NBC reporter complaining about the fact that I raised questions about Williams' objectivity. He whined that I am overlooking "14 years of spotless, impartial work for NBC News" by Williams. But as I told him, here's the deal: Dick Cheney's former longtime flack is reporting for NBC on a scandal surrounding Dick Cheney. If you can't see the conflict there...well, then the media really has bigger problems than even I had originally thought. Regardless of Williams' previous reporting (which has been fine), this is about as blatant a conflict-of-interest as you can get. It's one thing for him to be reporting on the Bush administration in general, despite being a former Republican flack. But it is quite another for him to be reporting directly on a scandal surrounding his longtime former boss. It's right out of Journalism 101 in terms of what not to allow. Period. Not only has Dan Carol raised questions about it, but so has the New York Times, and plenty of others. The media is quick to demand politicians recuse themselves from any situation that even appears to look like a conflict of interest. But when the public asks the same of the media - surprise surprise - the media goes and cries. Pathetic.
I sent an email to MSNBC: letters@msnbc.com to complain. I hope you will too.

Do you trust the government to protect you from the bird flu? * 1690 responses Yes 12% No 88%

Rich Senators Defeat Minimum-Wage Hike
Congressional Pay Rises While Minimum Stays Same
Helen Thomas, Hearst White House columnist
U.S. senators -- who draw salaries of $162,100 a year and enjoy a raft of perks -- have rejected a minimum wage hike from $5.15 an hour to $6.25 for blue-collar workers. Can you believe it? The proposed increase was sponsored by Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and turned down in the Senate by a vote of 51 against the boost and 49 in favor. Under a Senate agreement, it needed 60 votes to pass. All the Democrats voted for the wage boost. All the negative votes were cast by Republicans. Four Republicans voted for it. Three of the four are running for reelection and were probably worried about how voters would react if they knew that their well-heeled senators had turned down a pittance of an increase in the salaries of the lowest paid workers in the country.
The minimum wage was last increased in 1997.
Kennedy called the vote "absolutely unconscionable." The lawmakers are hardly hurting. They get health insurance, life insurance, pensions, office expenses, ranging from $2 million on up, depending on the population of a state. The taxpayers also pay for their travel, telecommunications, stationery and mass mailings.
AFL-CIO president John Sweeney said the rejection was "outrageous and shocking." Sweeney said minimum-wage workers "deserve a pay raise -- plain and simple -- no strings attached." He said it is "appalling that the same right-wing leaders in Congress -- who have given themselves seven pay raises since the last minimum wage increase -- voted down the modest wage increase proposed by the Kennedy amendment."During the same period since 1997, raises that the Senate has given itself bolstered senatorial pay by $28,000 a year, Kennedy said."If we are serious about helping hard-working families, we will give a fair raise to America's low-income workers without taking away essential protections," he added.
According to the Census Bureau, there are 37 million Americans living in poverty, up 1 million in just a year.
"It is shameful that in America today, the richest and most powerful nation on earth, nearly a fifth of all children go to bed hungry at night because their parents, many of whom are working full time at the minimum wage, still can't make ends meet," Kennedy said. Kennedy has been in the forefront of the fight for increases in the minimum wage for years, and I don't expect him to throw in the towel now. Congress still may have a chance to redeem itself in the eyes of the less fortunate -- before the 2006 elections.

Texas Leads Nation in Household Hunger
A higher percentage of Texas households were at risk of going hungry over the past three years than in any other state, according to data released Friday by the U.S. Agriculture Department. Between 2002 and 2004, more than 16 percent of Texas households at some point had trouble providing enough food for all their family members, the USDA report said. In nearly 5 percent of Texas households, at least one family member actually went hungry at least one time during that period because the household couldn't afford enough food. That's the fourth-highest rate in the country. Nationwide, 11.4 percent of households were at risk of going hungry during that period, and 3.6 percent of U.S. households had at least one member go hungry, the USDA said. The latest national figures were higher than in the previous three-year period. Between 1999 and 2001, an average of 10.4 percent of households were at risk for hunger, and an average of 3.1 percent of households experienced hunger.

This is fishy: FBI had DNA samples of 9-11 terrorists before attack
The city scientist who led the effort to identify 9/11 victims said officials made sure to keep the remains of the three terrorists identified away from those of the innocents killed. The remains of the killers were removed from the medical examiner's makeshift memorial park on the East Side and "put in another place," Robert Shaler, former head of the medical examiner's forensic unit, told the Daily News. (Just like JFK's Brain!!)
In "Who They Were," his new inside account of the identification effort, Shaler writes that he believes the terrorists identified were in the back of the planes - and not the monsters who plowed the jets into the towers. "I still doubt the pilots have anything remaining to collect or analyze," he writes. "Likely, they were vaporized along with many of the innocent victims."
Shaler recounts with fresh detail the scientific challenge and personal anguish that marked the more than three years it took to process the bodies and 20,000 body parts recovered from Ground Zero. Though the remains of 1,594 of the 2,749 WTC victims have so far been identified by name, Shaler makes clear the terrorists were a case apart.
To begin with, Shaler's office could not identify the three by name. That's because the 10 DNA profiles used to make the first matches were supplied by the FBI without names attached. "No names, just a K code, which is how the FBI designates 'knowns,' or specimens it knows the origins of," Shaler wrote. "Of course, we had no direct knowledge of how the FBI obtained the terrorists' DNA."
Terrorist remains were separated from the others, to allay families' concern that the killers might someday be commingled with the unidentified remnants of their victims, due to rest at the Trade Center site. Shaler said he didn't know where the terrorists' remains are now but assumed they are kept somewhere in the city.
"We didn't say where we put the terrorists' remains because it's not important," the medical examiner's spokeswoman, Ellen Borakove, said yesterday, adding she did not know the location herself.


“Prescott Bush - Nazi Dealings Continued Until 1951” - Federal Documents
By John Buchanan and Stacey Michael, New Hampshire Gazette
After the seizures in late 1942 of five U.S. enterprises he managed on behalf of Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen, Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, failed to divest himself of more than a dozen "enemy national" relationships that continued until as late as 1951, newly-discovered U.S. government documents reveal. Furthermore, the records show that Bush and his colleagues routinely attempted to conceal their activities from government investigators. Bush's partners in the secret web of Thyssen-controlled ventures included former New York Governor W. Averell Harriman and his younger brother, E. Roland Harriman. Their quarter-century of Nazi financial transactions, from 1924-1951, were conducted by the New York private banking firm, Brown Brothers Harriman.
The White House did not return phone calls seeking comment.
Although the additional seizures under the Trading with the Enemy Act did not take place until after the war, documents from The National Archives and Library of Congress confirm that Bush and his partners continued their Nazi dealings unabated. These activities included a financial relationship with the German city of Hanover and several industrial concerns. They went undetected by investigators until after World War Two. At the same time Bush and the Harrimans were profiting from their Nazi partnerships, W. Averell Harriman was serving as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's personal emissary to the United Kingdom during the toughest years of the war. On October 28, 1942, the same day two key Bush-Harriman-run businesses were being seized by the U.S. government, Harriman was meeting in London with Field Marshall Smuts to discuss the war effort.
After the war, a total of 18 additional Brown Brothers Harriman and UBC-related client assets were seized under The Trading with the Enemy Act, including several that showed the continuation of a relationship with the Thyssen family after the initial 1942 seizures. The records also show that Bush and the Harrimans conducted business after the war with related concerns doing business in or moving assets into Switzerland, Panama, Argentina and Brazil - all critical outposts for the flight of Nazi capital after Germany's surrender in 1945. Fritz Thyssen died in Argentina in 1951.
One of the final seizures, in October 1950, concerned the U.S. assets of a Nazi baroness named Theresia Maria Ida Beneditka Huberta Stanislava Martina von Schwarzenberg, who also used two shorter aliases. Brown Brothers Harriman, where Prescott Bush and the Harrimans were partners, attempted to convince government investigators that the baroness had been a victim of Nazi persecution and therefore should be allowed to maintain her assets. "It appears, rather, that the subject was a member of the Nazi party," government investigators concluded.
At the same time the last Brown Brothers Harriman client assets were seized, Prescott Bush announced his Senate campaign that led to his election in 1952. No further action beyond the initial seizures was ever taken, and the newly-confirmed records went unseen by the American people for six decades.
So why are the documents relevant today?
"The story of Prescott Bush and Brown Brothers Harriman is an introduction to the real history of our country," says L.A. art book publisher and historian Edward Boswell. "It exposes the money-making motives behind our foreign policies, dating back a full century. The ability of Prescott Bush and the Harrimans to bury their checkered pasts also reveals a collusion between Wall Street and the media that exists to this day." Sheldon Drobny, a Chicago entrepreneur and philanthropist who will soon launch a liberal talk radio network, says the importance of the new documents is that they prove a long pattern of Bush family war profiteering that continues today via George H.W. Bush's intimate relationship with the Saudi royal family and the bin Ladens, conducted via the super-secret Carlyle Group, whose senior advisers include former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III. In the post-9/11 world, Drobny finds the Bush-Saudi connection deeply troubling. "Trading with the enemy is trading with the enemy," he says. "That's the relevance of the documents and what they show."
"The discovery of the Bush-Nazi documents raises new questions about the role of Prescott Bush and his influential business partners in the secret emigration of Nazi war criminals, which allowed them to escape justice in Germany," says Bob Fertik, co-founder of Democrats.com and an amateur 'Nazi hunter.' "It also raises questions about the importance of Nazi recruits to the CIA in its early years, in what was called Operation Paperclip, and Prescott Bush's role in that dark operation."
Fertik and others, including former Justice Department Nazi war crimes prosecutor John Loftus, a Constitutional attorney in Miami, and a former Veterans Administration official, believe Prescott Bush and the Harrimans should have been tried for treason. Now, say Fertik and Loftus, there should be a Congressional investigation into the Bush family's Nazi past and its concealment from the American people for 60 years.
"The American people have a right to know, in detail, about this hidden chapter of our history," says Loftus, author of The Secret War Against the Jews. "That's the only way we can understand it and deal with it."
For his part, Fertik is pessimistic that even a Congressional investigation can thwart the war profiteering of the present Bush White House. "It's impossible to stop it," he says, "when the worst war profiteers are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who operate in secrecy behind the vast powers of the White House."

"There's three things to remember: claim everything, explain nothing, deny everything."
-- Senator Prescott Bush (Skull & Bones 1917)