THE LEEK

MyPhD

2006-05-04T03:13:00.000-04:00

Diego Garcia: Grunts Sense Tsunamis in Advance

2005-01-04T01:47:00.000-05:00

no surprise landing

One of the few places in the Indian Ocean that got the message of last week’s earthquake and tidal waves in advance was Diego Garcia, a speck of British territory about 900 miles south of India, which hosts about 3200 US military personnel and civilian contractors and many US long-range bombers and Navy ships. Although directly in the path of the tidal wave, the Diego Garcia military base reported no damage. The base Commander, Lt. General Moro, said that “grunts have a sixth sense about this kind of thing,” and unusual marine behavior observed in the hours and days preceding the arrival of the tsunami had led to the timely securing and evacuation of coastal areas.

The suddenness of last week’s events and the absence of a broad network of early warning systems meant that most people did not know they were in danger until the wave began to rise from the sea and reach inland. According to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center: “we tried to warn people in Sri Lanka and the Maldives, but we don’t have contacts in our address book for anybody in that part of the world.” And the International Tsunami Information Centre in Hawaii agreed that “We didn’t have a contact in place where you could just pick up the phone. We were starting from scratch. So, everybody basically went home to watch it on TV.”

According to General Moro, two days before the disaster, grunts were seen running around in packs, and driving around the base wildly. He referred to reports that, the evening before the earthquake, several grunts failed to return from liberty and thus were far from the most affected sites. Local people saw more grunts than usual sleeping in the streets, and by mid-December unusual behavior in large animals such as cows, horses, dogs and pigs was also reported. A mess cook, feeding some grunts before dawn on the day of the disaster, reported that, instead of eating, they started “jumping and kicking until they finally broke loose and ran outside.” A few seconds later, tremendous rumbling noises were heard as a thirty foot high wave struck the coast.

Other reports of unusual grunt behavior prior to the occurrence of earthquakes and other disasters include: refusing to stay in barracks; keeping their valuables with them outdoors; snoring strangely; jumping out of their bunks in the middle of the night; dashing about aimlessly; and losing their packs. It has also been reported that they began to congregate in huge swarms; sought higher ground; became agitated; and left their usual hangouts, and refused to conduct dangerous missions. General Moro said there was a noticeable increase in strange behavior in the 24 hours before the tsunami struck, and he made the decision to prepare for an unspecified large scale disaster.

Researchers find it very difficult to understand such mechanisms of response stimuli. “Physical or chemical stimuli come out of the earth prior to a major disruption, and these must be the stimuli that the grunts sense. For example, they may be able to hear the micro-fracturing of rocks a few milliseconds before a quake shock reaches the surface. Electromagnetic changes in the earth prior to an earthquake may be sensed by such animals as sharks and catfish which have low or high frequency receptors and sense such changes actively or passively. Also such electromagnetic field changes could be affecting migrating birds and the navigational ability of fish. The reduction of marines in basic training to a pre-civilized stage of development is bound to unearth some instinctual responses,” Moro said.

Iraqi Boat People Arrive in Sri Lanka

2004-12-31T06:00:00.000-05:00

terrorist plot?

A small boat overloaded with refugees fleeing the destruction of their homes in Fallujah has been rescued from the waters off Sri Lanka. More "boat people" can be expected to make the hazardous journey from Iraq in the coming weeks, as rumors of tens of millions of dollars of emergency aid to be sent to regions devastated by this week's earthquake filter through to the growing refugee population in that war torn country.

The 1,243 men, women, and children rescued from a small riverboat with a makeshift sail that was foundering in the harbor of Kokkilai on the devastated northeast coast of the island nation, are being held in a refugee camp once reserved for captured Tamil Tiger rebels while the Indian government processes their requests for political asylum. In order to avoid deportation, they will need to prove to Indian authorities that they will face political persecution, if they return to their country of origin.

“We have to think of the millions of Indians who have had their normally comfortable lives devastated for the first time in recent memory by natural disasters, for whom the current wave of generosity from our friends in the international community is intended, before allowing merely economic refugees to make an end run around our immigration laws,” a statement from New Delhi said.

President Bush was forced to backtrack from an earlier statement that “those who attempt to flee from justice and freedom to caves in Afghanistan or rogue nations or anywhere else will be tracked down and implanted with computer chips.” Just-about-out-the-door Secretary of State Colin Powell yesterday told the UN that the president was only referring to “Iraqis who conceivably could be thought of as potential terrorists or enemies of the United States,” and he vowed that the refugee problem would be left up to the individual nations involved to deal with.

He warned the Indian government, however, that the desire to help the needy by rescuing foundering boatloads of illegal immigrants would not be allowed to interfere with security concerns incurred by the presence of US aid workers. “Terrorist elements,” Powell said, “would immediately exploit any such signs of an increasingly porous border. We have intelligence that terrorists have gained access to ships and other secure locations by pretending to drown with a bunch of women and children. America is not about to stand by and allow that to happen,” Powell said.

Some conservatives in the Indian government are claiming that the boat people are merely using the war as an excuse to seek a better life in northeastern Sri Lanka, where international aid and assistance is steadily raising living standards. They point out, however, that hundreds of thousands of Indians have had their homes leveled, and an immanent threat of epidemic hangs over the region. “Essential water delivery and sewage disposal systems are destroyed, and the entire infrastructure including the electrical grid is still in disarray.”

Currently, even in the best neighborhoods of Colombo, there is only twelve hours of electricity per day, and this only intermittently. Most areas of the capitol have between six and eight hours of power per 24 hours. Gasoline also has become scarce owing to disrupted pipelines.

Bechtel Group Inc., a US contractor, has volunteered to accept a contract to reconstruct the region’s devastated infrastructure, but this project could take weeks and cost India billions and billions of dollars. If the trickle of Iraqis seeking greater opportunity abroad becomes a flood after the liberation of more Iraqi cities, the project can be expected to go over budget. In addition to the four million dollars of direct aid with plenty more in the mail, Powell said the US would contribute to reconstruction efforts by providing bodyguards for Bechtel executives working in the region.

When we called Bechtel to inquire about the estimated time span of the reconstruction project, a spokeswoman told us that they had to send for parts to Italy and Germany, “which should be here any day now.” But she added that “the security situation created by unidentified boats recently spotted in the region has made it more difficult to get these imported.”

Bush Condemns Guantanamo Psychiatric Malpractice Suit

2004-12-29T10:24:00.000-05:00

decay of doctor-patient relations

Several hundred Iraqi prisoners have mounted a class action lawsuit in American court against psychiatrists from the Fleet Hospital at Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay. According to the complaint, psychiatrists at the prison hospital regularly conveyed data about prisoners’ “mental health and vulnerabilities” to the Behavioral Science Consultation Team (Biscuit) in order to integrate mental health care with the system of psychological and physical coercion.” Several trial lawyers we contacted agreed that such a medical torture and interrogation machine would constitute a flagrant violation of current US malpractice laws, and could mean millions of dollars to the victims or their next-of-kin.

Injury Lawyers 4U, a consortium of leading personal injury lawyers—no loans, no credit, no catch—who will be representing the Guantanamo prisoners, claimed that: “The use of medical personnel to facilitate abusive interrogations and the calibration of levels of pain inflicted on patients violates medical ethics.” More than the pain, distress, and possible morbidity from abusive interrogations, Injury Lawyers claimed that the deterioration of the therapeutic alliance conveyed to his clients a strong sense of “the practitioner’s emotional detachment.”

Pentagon lawyers claim, however, that this deterioration is owing to the doctor’s fear of litigation. “The emphasis of the doctor-patient interaction shifts from concern for the interrogation of the prisoner to concern with the legal vulnerability of the practitioner.” Thus, in a “bitter irony,” litigation, exacerbates the very problem it is designed to solve: “rather than protecting the practitioner from lawsuits it may create a climate of provocation in which lawsuits are even more likely to occur, due to the bad feelings engendered by the impaired therapeutic alliance.”

Frequent attention in the media to interrogation methods together with the issue of malpractice may increase the level of paranoia among practitioners, in which doctor-patient relationships become torturer-prisoner relations or—at worst—defendant-litigant relations; and medical services are viewed as some kind of weapon with concomitant conventions and protocols.

The Pentagon referred to one prisoner whose condition was probably aggravated by being left in intense isolation by doctors trying to avoid the malpractice liability incurred in treating him. “The patient’s regular interrogator was unavailable, so a guard asked the psychiatrist who usually worked with him to turn out the lights in the cell. He said, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ Cpl. Latos recalled. ‘I have never seen this patient before, I could get creamed.’” As a result, the patient’s cell was flooded with light 24 hours a day for three months, and he ended up talking to nonexistent people, hearing voices, and crouching in a corner of the cell covered with a sheet. The “creaming” the psychiatrist feared, according to the Pentagon was a malpractice suit.

At the request of Donald Rumsfeld, an August 2002 Defense Department memo laid down new ground rules for what constitutes medical malpractice for psychiatrists at US military prisons. If an Army psychiatrist “knows that severe psychological trauma will result from his treatment,” but if causing such harm “is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent even though he did not act in good faith.” The doctor is guilty of malpractice only “if he acts with the express purpose of inflicting harm or suffering on a patient within his control.”

In other words, malpractice is not malpractice if the specific intent of the doctor is not to inflict harm, but rather some other objective, such as extracting information. Injury Lawyers objects that no psychiatrist would acknowledge outright sadism. Abuse of the mentally ill throughout history has always been justified as a necessary tool in the “war” against some sort of demonic possession, they claim.

The enlistment of doctors in the service of the torture of prisoners is hauntingly reminiscent of the work of Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazis’ “Angel of Death” at Auschwitz. In that case, instead of receiving one lump sum, plaintiffs received malpractice payments over time, and non-economic damages and legal fees were capped at $250,000. the Bush administration claims that, if meaningful tort reform applied the same standards today, psychiatrists at Guantanamo would pay less than $10,000 this year in malpractice premiums, their Abu Ghraib colleagues less than $9,600. Dr. Strange, a former Navy psychiatrist for the Fleet Hospital, said that premiums for his three-doctor interrogation group jumped on Jan. 1 from $47,000 to $75,000. As a result, he said, the Navy has put off hiring new staff, even though it recently opened a new camp. Other groups at the prison are deferring equipment purchases.

The Guantanamo malpractice suit claims that the indefinite detention of prisoners who had no idea when or if they would be released prescribed by psychiatrists at the Fleet hospital clearly led to widespread mental health problems, including dementia and suicidal behavior, and these were aggravated by increasingly “refined and repressive” treatments, including experimental medications, designed to break the will of the approximately 550 prisoners at the camp.

Injury Lawyers 4 U said that Biscuit’s methods were “from the Dark Ages” of medicine and had long since been abandoned by Western psychiatry. Making the patient dependent on the therapist—through the use of humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions and even beatings—is now considered counterproductive at best and at worst, “an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture.”

According to Injury Lawyers 4 U, one regular procedure during the Middle Ages was making uncooperative mental patients strip to their underwear, having them sit in a chair while shackled hand and foot to a bolt in the floor, and forcing them to endure strobe lights and loud rock and rap music played through two close loudspeakers, while the air-conditioning was turned up to maximum levels. “But it’s now generally accepted that the risk of adverse side effects in such treatments is far greater than their benefits,” they said, “and their use at Guantanamo is a clear case of medical malpractice.”

At a press conference, President Bush condemned the lawsuit as more evidence of the ongoing malpractice litigation crisis which Bush has vowed to address in his second term. “Despite the best efforts of drug company lobbyists and the AMA, the number of claims and suits is still epidemical [sic].” This alarming situation has triggered widespread (and not always realistic) fear among medical practitioners.

Bush called the Guantanamo malpractice suit “a perfect example of the out-of-control litigiousness of our society.” He recalled that John Kerry once blamed him for failing to head off a flu vaccine shortage he knew was coming. Bush said the Guantanamo suit illustrates the “broken medical-malpractice liability system that Democrats falsely claim to want to fix, while voting ten times against reforming” that is the real reason so few companies make flu vaccines, and not the incapacity of profit driven corporations for developing money-losing treatments even in the interest of national health.

Bush said that fear of malpractice litigation has resulted in a likely influenza pandemic. “A minimum of 25% of the population will become ill” and “10% to 35% of the workforce may be absent from work. Mortality is likely to be high—estimated at 1% of the total population. The global death toll could be between 50 and 100 million.”

Bush suggested that a good part of the blame for this impending holocaust lies in the increasingly adversarial nature of the doctor-patient relationship created by the epidemic of frivolous lawsuits like the one mounted this week by the Guantanamo prisoners. “US drug companies are afraid to sell flu vaccine, because if a batch happens to be ‘contaminated’—because of cost cutting measures or for whatever reason—and ends up killing people, they’re liable to be sued and lose money on their initial investment.”

“In an atmosphere in which both parties are frankly suspicious of one another,” he said, “it is difficult to build a mutually supportive relationship.”

Osama’s New Release Goes Platinum for Christmas

2004-12-29T10:23:00.000-05:00

at the grammys

In an audiotape broadcast Monday by Al-Jazeera satellite television, a man purported to be Osama bin Laden endorsed Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi as his deputy in Iraq and called for a boycott of next month's elections there. The voice on the tape described al-Zarqawi as the “emir” of al-Qaida in Iraq and said “I’m the new Sharif, and Zarqawi is my deputy.”

“All around Afghanistan, they’re trying to track me down. They say they want to bring me in guilty for the killing of the deputy. For the life of the deputy. But I say: I’m the new Sharif, and Zarqawi is my deputy.

Sheriff George Bush always hated me. For what, I don’t know. Every time I plant a poppy seed, he says kill it before it grows.

Freedom came my way one day. And I started out of Sudan. All of a sudden I see Sheriff George Bush aiming to shoot me down. So I knocked the World Trade Center down.
I swear.

Reflexes got the better of me. The Holy Q’ran says “what is to be must be. Every day the bucket goes to the well, but one day the bottom will drop out,” and I say one day the bottom will drop out. I swear.

I’m the new Sharif, and Zarqawi is my deputy.” Repeat. Fade.

NY Times Finds Wide Support for Torture and Prison Abuse in Aftermath of Mosul Bombing

2004-12-25T08:04:00.000-05:00

free the abu ghraib 7

In response to Tuesday’s attack on a US base in Mosul, the New York Times published a front-page article Wednesday, entitled “Torture is the Only Option, Americans Say.” In an “objective characterization of the nation’s mood following the deaths of the US soldiers,” the piece quoted a number of US citizens who expressed their full support for ongoing violations of the Geneva Conventions and presented their views as being representative of the US population as a whole. “The Bush and Blair administrations will be forced to acknowledge that any demand for an end to the torture and abuse of prisoners is now illegitimate and beyond the main stream,” concluded Times reporter, Heidi Fleiss.

A total of 33 cases of prisoner abuse among British forces have been investigated. Seven American soldiers have been charged with abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Charges include: the use of military dogs to frighten prisoners; shooting prisoners with slingshots; sodomizing children; running around in civies; torturing prisoners to death; covering latrines with graffiti; summary executions; photographing female subordinates showering; trussing prisoners in stress positions, dousing them with cold water, and dragging them by their feet through barbed wire; smuggling in beer; the use of military dogs to frighten prisoners; strangulation, beatings, and putting lit cigarettes into prisoners’ ears; housing hookers in cells; beating prisoners with cables; walking in the halls in their flip-flops; getting dogs to smell prisoners’ asses; shooting them; parading them naked; sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses; breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on prisoners; threatening them with pistols; beating them with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male prisoners with rape; the use of military dogs to frighten prisoners; sodomizing a prisoner with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick; maintaining inadequate laundry facilities; using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate prisoners with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a prisoner; punching, slapping, and kicking prisoners; urinating on them; jumping on their naked feet; videotaping and photographing naked male and female prisoners; leaving them to cook to death in container trucks in the desert; arranging them in sexually explicit positions for photographing; keeping them naked for several days at a time; forcing prisoners to masturbate while being photographed and videotaped; the use of military dogs to frighten prisoners; arranging naked male prisoners in a pile and then jumping on them; positioning a naked prisoner on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture; fomenting a prison riot in order to slaughter unarmed prisoners; writing “I am a Rapest” (sic) on the leg of a prisoner who raped a 15-year old fellow prisoner, and then photographing him naked; placing a dog chain or strap around a naked prisoner’s neck and having a female Soldier pose for a picture; having sex with female prisoners; taking photographs of dead prisoners; throwing them from a moving truck and leaving them to die; poor living conditions, escapes, and accountability lapses; humiliating and murdering prisoners; rape rooms; keeping prisoners naked for days in darkness; the use of military dogs to frighten prisoners; forcing them to kneel and stomping on their necks until dead; drinking too much alcohol and vomiting; losing paperwork; losing prisoners; throwing a prisoner from a bridge; beating prisoners to death; putting them on top of each other and forcing them to masturbate; wrapping a dead prisoner in cellophane and packing him in ice; leaving prisoners in their cell with no clothes or in female underpants; placing prisoners in isolation cells with little or no clothes, no toilet or running water, no ventilation or window, for three days; allowing them to be questioned by underqualified intelligence officers; taking away their mattresses, sheets, and clothes; moving ghost prisoners around to hide them from a Red Cross survey team; gross differences between the number of prisoners and the number officially recorded; setting physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses by Army intelligence officers, CIA agents, and private contractors; potential human-rights, training, and manpower issues; conspiracy, dereliction of duty, cruelty toward prisoners, maltreatment, assault, and indecent acts; keeping prisoners awake for all but four hours in a 24-hour period; dirty bathrooms; dragging prisoners by their handcuffs from a moving vehicle; dietary manipulation, sleep deprivation, and stress positions; the use of military dogs to frighten prisoners; hiring members of the paramilitary martyrs of Saddam as guards; killing four prisoners and wounding nine who were marching and yelling, “down with Bush”; mixing lethal and non-lethal ammo in their shotguns; feeding prisoners food full of bugs and dirt that made them vomit; jamming 7,000 prisoners into a complex supposed to hold no more than 4,000; failing to keep the area clean of trash; giving filthy water bottles to prisoners; keeping them in tents without floors; providing no treatment to mentally ill prisoners; indefinitely detaining innocent Iraqis; sexually propositioning superior officers; allowing six prisoners to escape; holding prisoners for months without ever being interrogated; allowing them to walk around in knee-deep mud defecating and urinating all over the compounds; failing to separate juveniles, females, the mentally ill, hardened criminals, and security prisoners from a small number of suspected high-value leaders of the insurgency; binding and gagging a prisoner and hanging him from a rope on a fork-lift; punching a prisoner in the chest so hard he almost went into cardiac arrest; maintaining a chaotic and dangerous environment; unlawfully killing Iraqi civilians; making prisoners engage in sexual activity between themselves; prejudicing good order and military discipline; environmental manipulation such as the use of loud music and sensory deprivation; the use of military dogs to frighten prisoners; unauthorized interrogations; forcing prisoners to kneel for three days or to go without sleep four or five days; leaving them chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water for up to 24 hours to urinate and defecate on themselves; turning up the air-conditioning until prisoners were shivering; turning it off until the temperature in the unventilated room was over 100 degrees; videotaping a translator raping a teenage boy; pushing a prisoner’s head into urine and pressing his ass with a broom and spitting on it; leaving a prisoner naked in his cell for six days; throwing pepper in a prisoner’s face, beating him with a chair until it broke and choking him; kicking prisoners until they passed out; beating a prisoner until his nose split open; putting bags over prisoners’ heads and beating them; making them bark like a dog and laughing at them; slamming their heads against walls; making them crawl on their stomachs while spitting on them and hitting them on the back, head and feet; beating them until they lost consciousness; putting part of a stick inside a prisoner’s ass about two centimeters, approximately; female guards hitting prisoners with a ball made of sponge on their dicks and otherwise playing with their dicks; tying prisoners to their beds and sodomizing them; punching a hooded prisoner in the head until he was unconscious; making naked and hooded prisoners form a human pyramid, and taking each other’s pictures; making them crawl across the floor on their hands and knees while riding on their backs; posing them as performing oral sex on each other; lining them up against the wall and forcing them to masturbate while pointing and leering at their genitals; accepting prisoners from Other Government Agencies (OGAs) without accounting for them, knowing their identities, or even the reason for their detention; creating a hell on Earth worse than Saddam’s; aggressive and improper methods of interrogation; serious physical abuses; allowing special interrogations by the CIA without any outside witnesses; grabbing people at random and throwing them into torture dungeons; and having had no more luck finding real weapons of mass destruction than the torturers of Torquemada had finding real witches. “There are even suggestions that the murder of a prisoner has been recorded,” the Times said.

The Times is again stepping forward at a critical juncture for the US’s fortunes in the Middle East. Coming less than two months after the destruction of Fallujah, which was heralded as a major blow against the resistance, the Mosul bombing has demonstrated the fragility of the entire US operation, which now hangs in the balance. The Times’ editors are acutely aware that these developments threaten American imperialism with a catastrophic defeat.

Defeat is unimaginable for the US ruling class—and for the editors of the New York Times. A recent editorial called for increased recruitment into the armed forces, more troops to be sent to Iraq, and for the stepping up of efforts to cultivate a pro-US Sunni layer. In the past, however, the newspaper prudently avoided any discussion of the strategy to manipulate and suppress information and opinions on the subject of torture and prison abuse. Photographs of the sadistic torture of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of US troops became front-page news around the world after their release. Only in the United States and Iraq itself were they largely suppressed, and Americans think the US media should have stayed focused on Michael Jackson's court appearance, yesterday’s Times article claims.

The article begins by quoting Ricardo Sanchez, an “oil and gas industry employee” from Dallas. “They should never have published the abuse photos in the first place, but that’s beside the point now,” he declared. “We upset the apple cart and now there’s pretty much no choice. We have to press ahead.” He was aware that more than sixty per cent of the civilian inmates were deemed not to be a threat to society, but “that doesn’t mean there are no terrorists in the prison population even if only among the guards.”

The article cites images of humiliated and tortured prisoners published in the US press and rebroadcast by Arab satellite TV channels, further inflaming anti-US sentiment in Iraq and across the Middle East. The Army subsequently was forced to lighten up on its abusive practices which, according to Geoffrey Miller, a former prison warden interviewed by the Times, created the conditions for Tuesday’s bombing.

A few days after the US pictures came out, the British political science journal, The Daily Mirror, published pictures that appeared to show a UK soldier using violence and urinating on a hooded Iraqi captive. However, the British military later concluded the truck shown in the picture had never been in Iraq, and items of uniforms and weaponry were also different from those used in Iraq. The Mirror later said it had printed the fake images in order to discredit authentic photos of torture and abuse turned in by a film shop worker who said she “felt sick” when she saw them. The Times article suggested a similarity with the forged document used to discredit critics of Bush’s absentee military service. The editor of the Mirror was nevertheless sacked, and the journal apologized.

Miller claimed that it was irresponsible of the Red Cross to violate confidentiality rules in reporting the case of an arrested Iraqi who died after being severely beaten. “Saying the death occurred after the beating makes it seem like the soldiers killed him,” said Miller. He also claimed that nothing was illegal or wrong about stripping prisoners. “In fact, it’s a tried-and-true intelligence tactic.”

“Miller’s sentiment was echoed in interviews in shopping malls, offices, sidewalks and homes on a day when the news from Iraq was bleak,” the Times continued. “With 14 American service members killed and dozens injured, many people said they were dispirited or angry, but many expressed equal unhappiness about seeing a lack of options. Whether one supported or opposed the use of torture and abuse has become irrelevant, many said—there is only the road ahead now, with few signs to guide the way.”

The article quoted 72-year-old Air Force veteran Thomas Pappas, who repeated the Bush administration’s claim that the increased violence in Iraq was an indication of the insurgents’ desperation. “It tells me that they are scared about the consequences of being taken prisoner,” he declared. “They are just trying to stay out of Abu Ghraib prison, and they don’t care how they do it.”

The Times added that the veteran would not call for prosecution of those found responsible for prison abuse in Iraq, as the loss of promotion and the indignity of a public rebuke were enough punishment. “Bush should say it’s the work of just a few rogue soldiers, a few bad apples.” But the Times reporter voiced concern that “the Army’s attempt to have six soldiers atone for its sins rather than dragging every involved intelligence officer and civilian contractor into court” might stretch public credulousness. “Will Americans really believe the Army relieved a general because of six soldiers? Not a chance” Fleiss wrote.

Despite the fact that the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) has cited human rights as a motivating factor in the invasion last spring to oust the authoritarian regime of Saddam Hussein, human rights sentiments were nowhere to be seen in the Times interviews.

Steven Jordan, former director of a federal agency, stressed his support for the soldiers now facing charges of “sadistic, blatant and wanton abuses” saying that the only way to get the war over quickly was to “treat the detainees like shit until they will sell their mother for a blanket, some food without bugs in it and some sleep.” Janice Karpinski, a business consultant from Colorado, suggested that “the Pentagon should hire professional torturers, give them a free hand, and help the Iraqi people make up their minds which side they want to be on,” while Donald J. Reese, a reservist and salesman, said that, for many of the Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib, “living conditions are better in prison than at home. They probably don’t want to leave.”

The Times pointed out that those incidents which led to the killing or wounding of inmates and MPs had already resulted in a series of “lessons learned” inquiries within the brigade and many changes in day-to-day procedures. Jordan said that the riots, escapes, shootings, corrupt Iraqis, dirty bathrooms, lack of showers, unsanitary conditions, rampant sexual misbehavior, bug-infested food, daily mortar shellings, lack of materiel, and too few soldiers would have “made any one of us a little crazy.” He said the troops at the front have to be allowed to “blow off a little steam now and then.”

Michael Shavers, an Army civilian employee from Virginia, hoped to see the “whole thing swept under the rug” as soon as possible. “Who is making the charges that there is dirt, bugs, or whatever in the food?” he asked. “If it is the prisoners, I would take that with a grain of salt.” The Times pointed out, however, that salt is in as short supply at Abu Ghraib as showers, shampoo, blankets, and toilet paper.

The latest poll conducted for ABC News and the Washington Post before the Mosul bombing found that 51 percent said they disapproved of the abuse of prisoners in Iraq. When asked if the US should stop torturing and abusing prisoners, “even if that means civil order is not restored there,” 49 percent said yes. But the Times article hinted at a potential solution for such damaging findings—censorship and the elimination of opinion surveys. “Some people said that the publication of the pictures themselves were the main problem,” the article claimed.

“Steven Stephanowicz, of CACI International, said he supported President Bush but had been lukewarm about the torture issue. Now, he said there was no choice but to press forward, and that photos and opinion polls were only ‘aiding and abetting’ the enemy by getting the media all excited and making human rights organizations think the American will is weak. ‘We’ve got to hang in there and get it done,’ Mr. Stephanowicz said.”

The Times article cited a letter from FBI Director Robert Mueller which vowed to redouble efforts to cover-up abuses. The names of the agents assigned to the cover-up were blacked out, but these comments, reported without rebuttal by the Times, can only be understood to mean that the newspaper supports, in the interests of the war effort, the torture and abuse of prisoners and suppression of any expression of opposition.

The Times quoted Scott Silliman, one of the military defense attorneys in the My Lai prosecutions, as saying that his client’s defense will be that he was carrying out the orders of his superiors and, in particular, the directions of military intelligence. He said, “Do you really think a group of Virginia hillbillies and some limies from Warwickshire a thousand miles apart spontaneously decided at the same time to photograph prisoners pretending to sodomize each other and send the film home to be developed?” He claims that 5 or 6,000 pages of classified files in the annexes to his report show that military-intelligence teams, which included CIA officers and linguists and interrogation specialists from private defense contractors, were the dominant force inside the military prisons.

Such charges are denied by the Pentagon who say that officers at the prison tried to limit, not facilitate, abuses, often yelling at interrogators to keep the noise down. However, the Bush administration’s policies on torture and abuse now seem to be in a state of limbo. After the capture of al Qaeda leader Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in 2003, when an unnamed official told the Wall Street Journal that US interrogators may authorize “a little bit of smacky-face” while questioning captives in the war on terrorism, the administration claimed that “the United States will torture terrorism suspects and treat them cruelly in an attempt to extract information.”

The failure to block a proposal before the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva designed to give more teeth to the Convention Against Torture, however, forced Bush to state that “The U.S. is committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example” and to “call on all governments to join with the U.S. and the community of law abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating and prosecuting all acts of torture.”

But in reality, Bush formally rejected the treaty establishing the ICC, the first permanent international institution dedicated to trying cases of genocide, war crimes and other human rights abuses, which was formulated by the US and used as a weapon throughout the cold war, and signed an executive order authorizing some or all of the interrogation methods with which the soldiers currently stand charged.

Administration officials now deny that such an executive order exists; they say the media press have it confused with an earlier order for “aggressive techniques” issued by Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, which was rescinded after complaints from military lawyers. They claim Bush only approved the use of military dogs to frighten prisoners, as long as they were muzzled. But the FBI papers state repeatedly and unequivocally that Bush himself authorized the aggressive techniques, and, as the abuses occurred long after the first Rumsfeld order was invalidated, the administration’s denial is based on a clear falsehood.

But no criticism of the Bush administration was quoted by the Times on Wednesday, nor was any reference to the wider political, legal and moral questions involved in the Iraq war noted.

“[W]hile some said the Mosul attack reinforced their belief that the Bush administration had failed in its goals, others found it hard to place blame,” the article declared. “Alberto Gonzales, a former real estate lawyer from Miami, said he thought the administration was wrong about the actual effectiveness of torture in extracting useful information. ‘They know now we don’t get the whole picture when we torture prisoners,’ he said. ‘But that doesn’t mean it’s not useful in other ways. When the Iraqis see what can happen at random to perfectly innocent people, it makes them extra careful nobody suspects them of even thinking about joining the insurgency.’”

Rumsfeld agreed that allowing the publication of prisoner abuse photos and negative opinion polls had left “a stain on our country’s honor.” Instead of court-martialing the man whom he claims authored the plan to subject prisoners at Abu Ghraib to harsh abuses, Rumsfeld has left him in charge of the facility. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have changed this,” Rumsfeld told reporters in May. “Trust us. We are doing this right.”

Tauzin Signing Threatened by Doping Scandal

2004-12-19T06:23:00.000-05:00

politician's little helper

Imagine a situation: a junior congressman faces a boring, six hundred page appropriations bill in which is hidden a scale-back in farming subsidies. The bill comes up for a vote in fifteen minutes, and the party leadership has "suggested" he approve it. Local farmers and their families in his district are routinely forced to go to food banks to feed their own families, while the agro-businesses that lobbied for the rider are reaping record profits for their stockholders. There will be no line item veto tonight. The power this legislator can unleash with a single word will bring hardship, hopelessness and unforgettable injustice. The air around him will be filled with the cries of hungry children, and he'll have to walk right through. Every value he learned as a boy tells him to vote "nay," to return to negotiations and find another way of greasing the lobbyists. Or, he reasons, he could complete the task and rush back to start popping pills that can, over the course of two weeks, immunize him against a lifetime of crushing remorse. He draws one last clean breath and raises his hand. "Aye," he says.

The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) announced last Tuesday that as many as 83 federal lawmakers tested positive for CSD's (Conscience-Suppressing Drugs), experimental drugs which Dr. Leon Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, called "morning-after pills for just about anything that produces regret, remorse, pain, or guilt." This afternoon, the Health Department requested a grand jury investigation into PhRMA, the Washington lobby representing US drug manufacturers and its new president and CEO, outgoing chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, "Billy" Tauzin (R-La), for possible drug and money laundering violations.

A person describing himself as "an anonymous highly placed official" called the US Anti-Doping Agency to say he knows of several lawmakers using an undetectable conscience-suppressing substance. The official provided a syringe for testing and named a San Mateo County man, Victor Conte, and his lobbying firm, PhRMA, as the source of the CSD contained in the syringe. The agency then notified federal authorities of the discovery of a previously undetectable designer CSD and named PhRMA, through its subsidiary, SNAC, or Scientific Nutrition for Advanced Conditioning, as the source of the drug. Agency chief Terry Madden said several lawmakers have tested positive for the drug, calling it a "conspiracy" of lobbyists, chemists and politicians that represents "intentional doping of the worst sort," and the largest conscience-suppressing drug scandal in U.S. history.

Agents of the Internal Revenue Service, the Food and Drug Administration and the San Mateo County Narcotics Task Force, along with a representative of the anti-doping agency raided the Burlingame home of Billy Tauzin's personal physician, Greg Anderson, seizing suspected CSD's, $60,000 cash and computer and paper documents with the names of several congressmen and details of their use of conscience-suppressing drugs. "It's no secret what's going on in Washington," said one congressman. "At least half the guys are using CSD's." Former California Representative, Jose Canseco said he thought the problem was bigger, estimating about 80 percent of Capitol Hill was on the juice. And then-Arizona Senator Curt Schilling told the Washington Post: "CSD's are incredibly prominent; I don't think there's any question about that. ... It has enhanced numbers into the stratosphere."

Tauzin himself has denied using such conscience-suppressing drugs. "You can test me and solve that problem real quick," he said. ". . . To me, in politics it really doesn't matter what you do; you still have to make that payoff. If you're incapable of making it, it doesn't matter what you take. You have to be able to produce. I think conscience is really irrelevant to the game of politics." Tauzin attributed his success in securing the $2 million a year position with PhRMA to talent and hard work.

For example, he played a leading role in shepherding through Congress last year the Medicare prescription drug bill - portrayed by the administration as a boon to the elderly - that will bring a windfall of as much as $200 billion for the US pharmaceuticals industry. Tauzin was widely credited for language appearing in the bill ensuring that Medicare will pay full price for pharmaceuticals and barring the importation of much cheaper drugs from Canada to the obvious detriment of seniors.

Tauzin claims his elevation on retirement from the public sector to chief executive of one of the world's largest lobbyist firms is nothing more than a payoff for services rendered, but his relationship with his new employers has underscored speculation that his late-career assault on the all-time corporate welfare record was CSD-fueled. By the start of the 2002 session, there were already growing questions about what Tauzin might be doing to enhance his performance. After he secured the highest salary ever paid an ex-congressman turned Washington lobbyist, he was asked about CSD's.

CSD's first made headlines early in 2003 when the Pentagon announced they were developing drugs to help soldiers suffering from Post Traumatic Stress (PTSD). "Feelings of guilt and regret travel neural pathways in a manner that mimics the tracings of ingrained fear, so a prophylactic against one could guard against the other," Gen. Richard Myers, said at the time and pointed to several current lines of research, some federally funded, which he said "show strong promise for this."

At the UC Irvine, experiments in rats indicate that the brain's formation of memories can be inhibited softening the emotions they evoke. At NYU, researchers are mastering the means of short-circuiting the very wiring of conscience. At Columbia one Nobel laureate's lab has discovered the gene behind a conscience-inhibiting protein, uncovering a vision of "primal aggression" at the molecular level. In Puerto Rico, at the Ponce School of Medicine, scientists are discovering ways to help the brain unlearn conscience and inhibitions by stimulating it with magnets. And at Harvard, survivors of car accidents are already swallowing propranolol pills, in the first human trials of that common cardiac drug as a means to nip the effects of trauma in the bud.

An indictment handed up by a federal grand jury, however, charges that, while they are not approved for sale in the US by the FDA, a black market for CSD's opened up in Iraq some time prior to the publication of prison abuse photographs by the British in 2003 and that CSD use may have played a part in that incident, at least as far as the souvenir photos were concerned. Two British and two US prison guards tested positive for CSD's and are facing possible four weeks suspended pay and extra duty each.

PhRMA claims its advances into the shadowy field of memory and remorse are not intended to produce morally anesthetized grunts and political hacks. "We're trying to fend off post-traumatic stress so that women who've been raped can leave their houses without feeling like targets. So that survivors of terrorist attacks can function, raise families, and move forward. So that young soldiers aren't left shattered for decades by images of dead children and the screams of tortured prisoners. And yes, so that those influence peddlers we send to fight for us in Washington are not paralyzed with shame by what they've seen and done in public service." said Tauzin's press secretary. PhRMA nevertheless voluntarily canceled its Washington laboratory license, citing "adverse financial circumstances."

But some researchers are worried that CSD abuse in the government only makes it easier for moral atrocities to be committed. "If you have the pill, it certainly increases the temptation for the congressman to blur the line between lobbying and bribery, if he thinks he'll be numbed to the personal risk of remorse. We don't want politicians saying willy-nilly, 'Screw it. I can take my pill and even if signing this is not really ethical, I'll be OK,'" says psychiatrist Edmund G. Skinner, director of the Program on Medical Ethics at the National University of the Health Sciences. "If legislators are going to have that lower threshold, we might have to build in even stronger safeguards than we have right now against, say, knowingly misrepresenting the implications of proposed laws. We'll need a higher standard of proof [that a law is more than a kickback to financiers]."

James L. McGaugh, a neurobiologist at U.C. Irvine whose study of stress hormones and memory consolidation in rats is one of the cornerstones of the conscience-suppression research, acknowledges the ambiguities but comes out swinging in defense of his work. "Is it immoral to weaken the memory of horrendous acts a person has committed? It doesn't surprise me at all that politicians would wake up screaming, thinking of the young children they destroyed," McGaugh says. "But is treating that worse than saying, 'Don't worry if your constituents hate you, we've got a huge war chest and voter software to prevent you from getting kicked out of office'? Why is it any worse to give them a drug that prevents them from having PSTD for the rest of their lives? The moral dilemma is sending corporate whores to represent the interests of poor people in the first place."

But veteran lawmakers torn apart by PTSD don't have a choice about being Exhibit A in the case against Washington politics. "When you see what can happen to a page or a junior congressman, it passes on in a very real way, not in a history-class sense, that reality of what political power really is," Kass says. "Who are we to impose this emotional albatross on public servants? As a nation, we pretend to elect our leaders. It seems unjust to make them a special class to suffer for our sins over wrongheaded laws, or pay a continuing emotional price for securing their future careers."

"That's a heavy burden to put on people to preserve the obsolete morality you're talking about," says Dr. Roger K. Pavlov of Harvard University, who's leading a propranolol study on five Special Forces soldiers from Ft. Bragg who violently stabbed their wives to death after returning from Afghanistan in 2002. "By that same logic, if you could make a lightweight bulletproof garment for soldiers we still shouldn't do it. For moral reasons we ought to make them able to be shot, to preserve the cost of war, the deterrent to war. But we work to prevent our soldiers from being shot, and I say there are mental bullets flying around in Washington, too."

Nevertheless, fellow conscience-suppression researcher Dr. Gregory Quirk of the Ponce School of Medicine, in Puerto Rico, is troubled by how his work might be used. Quirk thinks a physician could stimulate areas of the brain with magnets while politicians view images of the people they've destroyed, and could thus restore balance to the mind. With that same method, he says, firemen could stave off episodes of life-threatening panic. "Certainly the military might be interested in something like that," he says. "If this would be used to go against moral conscience to kill people, I would have a problem with that."

The indictment of Tauzin claims that PhRMA produced the CSD's that supplied the Iraq market and furthermore that, through Tauzin, they had kept up a lucrative business on Capitol Hill since 1999. Sen. John McCain (R/D-Az) said in September that President Bush did not believe more than one or two lawmakers had used conscience-suppressing substances, but would back tougher testing standards, which, until now, were mocked and lambasted as everything from "a joke" to "worse than terrible." Current rules allow a lawmaker to test positive for CSD use five times before receiving a reprimand - and even then the language gives the vice president an option to fine a lawmaker rather than reprimand him. In the military, a soldier caught once can lose privileges for two months.

Since McCain's statement, however, the names of several senators who tested positive for CSD's have begun to leak out. And, in Washington, some of the world's most influential power brokers began appearing before the grand jury in a room on the 17th floor of the Merck Federal Building. The testimony was secret, but sources familiar with the proceedings said some of these elite politicians were reluctant participants until offered immunity for any truthful testimony. Then, many admitted knowing they had been getting illicit drugs from PhRMA. Some said they called their drugs "the clear" and "the cream." The clear was taken orally, and the cream was a lotion rubbed onto the body.

PhRMA sometimes flaunted its elite clientele. "We don't just hang out with elite politicians, they pay us large sums of money to advise them," a recent PhRMA email said. Another one read: ". . . elite politicians like Tom Delay and Billy Tauzin are routinely paid for their services to us in cashier's checks." The company boasted a client list that included scores of politicians from federal, state and local government. According to federal prosecutors, Tauzin was its premier client as well as its pied piper, bringing in star lawmakers from the Senate and House. "All of us wanted to deal with the guy," says Gregg Tafralis, a former congressman from Ohio and one of Tauzin's original customers. "The guy is the smartest son of a bitch I've ever met in my life."

On Dec. 4, Tauzin strode into the federal building wearing a gray sport coat, tie and dark slacks. He spent five hours behind closed doors, though only testifying for about half that time. What he said inside the grand-jury room is unknown. Officially, he denies the trafficking charge, claims he held no discussions with PhRMA about the CEO position during the time the Medicare bill was being drafted, and points out that numerous other lobbies publicly bid for his contract, including the Hollywood trade group MPAA and several telecommunications firms.

In 1997, however, Tauzin was chairman of the subcommittee on Telecommunications, Trade, and Consumer Protection, with jurisdiction over telephone, cable, wire, and Internet communications and commerce, as well as the Federal Communications Commission. He held other committee and subcommittee seats on panels with oversight of the oil and chemical industries. Contributions from these industries accordingly swelled his campaign coffers, although he was never to face a serious reelection challenge, and the balls just kept on sailing out of ballparks. The interest of these lobbyists in bidding for his contract is, therefore, no evidence against conscience-suppression in the final two seasons of his career.

There nevertheless was little doubt about who the eventual highest bidder would be. PhRMA is one of the wealthiest and most active political lobbies. The association and its member companies poured as much as $70 million into lobbying and campaign contributions in the 2002 election cycle, and much more during the current year, counting contributions to both presidential and congressional campaigns.

Tauzin claims that any drugs PhRMA may have supplied him were for a bleeding ulcer that was later diagnosed as a rare form of cancer, for which he was successfully treated. Few details of this health crisis have been released, but the irrepressible congressman volunteered that he had been using an experimental drug made available by a leading pharmaceutical firm, an experience that has reinforced his gratitude to his new employers. According to the indictment, however, Tauzin received more than testing and ulcer medicines from PhRMA; records show that his wife, Julie, told investigators that he obtained propranolol from them on several occasions. PhRMA denies being the source of black market CSD's, questions whether they really are banned substances, and says that they're the victim of jealous and hypocritical liberals.

For doctors, the drugs present a tricky dilemma. Most people exposed to horrific situations don't end up with PTSD, but there are few means of knowing on the spot who might need treatment much further down the line. Patients are supposed to take CSD's soon after ruthless or shameful behavior. There is evidence, however, that CSD abusers tend to try to curb normal emotional responses by taking the drugs beforehand so that pangs of conscience don't impede their performance. Having thus unplugged their conscience before committing a morally repugnant act, they are not subject to remorse afterwards or "the full sting of self-examination."

"The idea is to help people to not fall apart," says Dr. Skinner, "and preventing remorse is far more effective than treating it." But a conscience-born irrational aversion to influence peddling? Moral scruples in the face of lucrative opportunities? isn't healthy either. "Such emotions can blind us as well as make us wiser," says Pavlov. "It's possible that these kinds of drugs would help lawmakers see in a clearer way."

An uncomfortable reality is that lobbying by gargantuan corporations isn't an aberration; it has a very codified place in our political economy. We agree through regulations to normalize it. We demand punishment for politicians who violate those regulations, though more often those from the opposing party. But we don't deny them medical treatment. And one needn't have committed a crime to feel wracked by remorse. "In my dreams I meet six New Yorkers I screwed over. Whether I did it legally or not is irrelevant," says Sen. Hillary Clinton (D/R-NY).

Further indictments, already predicted by one defense lawyer, could come early next year. PhRMA is suspected of laundering funds generated through the sale and distribution of controlled substances. If the investigation proceeds to criminal prosecution, the testimony of the lawmakers could become public. Some could find themselves testifying about drug use in open court. PhRMA's attorney, Robert Holley, has predicted the doping scandal could become "bigger than the Kobe Bryant case when you talk about the way politics are looked at in the United States."

McCain says that the Bush administration will begin enforcing its much-criticized anti-doping policy in the next session, but he thinks the voters will impose their own judgment.

"I think the public will put its own asterisk (on all the records), even if Washington doesn't," McCain said. "The sad thing about Tauzin is that Americans are so jaded, they'll probably look at him exactly the way they did before all these drug allegations." Many observers concur that, in the end, all parties will agree to address the issue through further de facto limitations on drug testing.

Dire Shortage of Homeland Security Reading List Analysts

2004-12-16T19:03:00.000-05:00

why we fight

After winning a tough legal battle for access to the library records of suspected terrorists, the Department of Homeland Security has been unable to recruit a sufficient number of agents qualified to analyze them. "The people who apply for jobs here are not generally familiar with the names of radical political theorists let alone the significance of their various works," said outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge. On a recent test, for example, 100% of applicants picked Alan Greenspan as the author of Das Kapital. "We used to count that kind of ignorance as a plus," Ridge said, “but many new forms of dual use literature developed by our enemies, such as subversive comic books and web-based political satire, have greatly complicated the task of prying into people’s reading habits.

“Most of our applicants wouldn’t know the difference between what a Shi’ite and a Sunni would read, let alone a Troskyist and a Stalinist,” Ridge said. “They’re likely to flag people as possible fundamentalists for reading Salman Rushdie.” According to Ridge, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find candidates among new recruits who are familiar with the Dewey decimal system, let alone the tell-tale signs of a terrorist’s summer reading list.

“Sure,” said Ridge, “if a terrorist takes out a book on bomb making or beheading techniques, any agent, or at least the software, would pick that right up. But would an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist go to the local town library for something like that? You’d have to think a guy like that is more likely to blow his hands off than anything.” Ridge said. He pointed out that by the time they’re at the bombing stage, most terrorists have figured out the risks of library cards. Not to mention being well funded, supplied with weapons, and to have connections at Immigration and the Department of Motor Vehicles. “Taking out a library book when you could go to Barnes and Noble would be like driving around the Bible belt in a rental car pricing crop dusters with your own credit card,” Ridge said. “No dangerous terrorist would be that stupid.”

The problem, according to Ridge, is identifying potential terrorists who have never committed crimes before, but are likely to massacre massive numbers of American citizens one day soon. “You have to get a sense of what they’re reading before they know they’re going to commit a crime when their guard is down.” And doing that right, Ridge says, takes a lot of experience with a wide range of literature. He said the problem is a lot like the one they’re having with translators at the CIA. “Until September 11,” he said, “they only had to worry about Russian and Chinese, with some Spanish thrown in. They had no idea they might have to deal with Arabic speaking countries, which is why they missed two important messages just days before the attack.”

He described a case in which an internet journalist was held incommunicado for two months for suspicion of terrorist intentions merely because a Washington DC guide book and several copies of Soldier of Fortune magazine he had checked out from a Springfield, Ohio library were overdue. “those agents who made that case should have realized that journalists often use libraries for research for their stories,” Ridge said. One man was even put on a temporary no-fly list for repeatedly checking out Harpo Speaks, by Harpo Marx. “The computer did that one,” Ridge told us.

When we asked him how the problem would be addressed, he said he was tired with the whole mess and was going to spend more quality time fishing with his family at Disneyland, but he wished us all luck with the terrorists and reminded us that it’s always a good idea to keep some duct tape around the house.

Gary Webb: Did Wellstone Commit Suicide?

2004-12-16T19:01:00.000-05:00

the fortunate son

A newly published book by author and investigative journalist Gary Webb suggests that Paul Wellstone, the Minnesota Senator killed in a plane crash in 2002, together with his wife, daughter, three staff assistants, and two pilots, was actually at the controls of the plane at the time and crashed it on purpose because he was despondent over ill feelings between him and the Bush family.

In Prodigal Son of a Bitch, set to hit the bookstores next month, Webb suggests that Wellstone’s opposition to Plan Colombia had given rise to bitter words between him and the elder Bush, “a man he looked up to almost as a father.” According to Webb, since the senator took up the cause of Colombian farmers whose crops are being destroyed by US sponsored chemical spraying, the affection went only one way. The former president is on record referring to Wellstone as “this chicken shit.”

The book presents a mountain of evidence that the initial determination of accidental death was based on falsified reports of inclement weather. A similar issue cropped up recently when a plane full of Hondurans which former President Bush was supposed to be on crashed in Texas. Initial reports said that the plane had clipped a light pole on its landing approach, but the pole was miles from the airport, and the plane was obviously in trouble when it struck it.

Bush himself was still suffering too much “heartfelt non-political sadness” to be interviewed for the book, but it does contain numerous interviews with Wellstone and Bush associates who confirm that the late senator was despondent in the weeks before the tragedy. Bush, for his part, issued some strange comments immediately after Wellstone's crash. He called Wellstone—who was a political science professor for 21 years before he was a senator—a "plain-spoken fellow." He said he wanted to issue his "condolences,” ostensibly to the Democratic Party, “for the loss of the Senate.”

Mr. Wellstone died 11 days before the election. If he had died 10 days before, the Democratic Party could have left his name on the ballot. He would be a shoe-in as a sympathy vote, then the Democrats could have found someone later to take his seat. Knowing this, Wellstone made sure he took his wife with him so she would not substitute for him on the ballot as did Jean Carnahan for her husband Mel, running against John Ashcroft in Missouri in 2000, Webb speculates.

Webb suggests, in fact, that Wellstone modeled his suicide after that event. Carnahan’s death occurred under almost identical circumstances: right before an election, at the height of a close race in which the victim had started to pull ahead, a popular, well-loved senator — suddenly dead in a plane crash. To the GOP's shock, the Missouri voters elected Mel anyway, and his wife Jean stepped in and took his place in Congress.

He may also have been thinking of John Kennedy Jr., who died in a 1999 plane crash. In both of those cases, the planes were descending towards their landing when they suddenly wandered off their approach paths and crashed, similar to Wellstone's craft. In all three cases, radio contact appears to have been cut off while the planes were still in the air. Webb says that there’s more here than just coincidence. He speculates freely that “somewhere down inside, Wellstone hoped that he could somehow please this overwhelming father figure by removing himself from the picture and creating a Republican majority in the Senate in the crucial months leading up to the Iraq invasion.”

When Wellstone first met Bush Jr. in 2001, the latter disrespectfully called him "Pablo." According to Webb, this gave rise to a misplaced sense of sibling rivalry harbored by the late senator. He presents as evidence the fact that no senator had a more consistent record of voting against Bush administration proposals in 2001. Wellstone voted against the Iraq war resolution, the Homeland Security Act and many of Bush's judicial nominees. He pushed for stronger environmental programs, for measures to counter corporate fraud, for investigations into Sept. 11, and $350 million that was missing from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The rivalry heated up the following year. Getting rid of Wellstone was a passion for Bush Jr., Karl Rove, and Cheney, but the senator was pulling away from “Jr.’s” hand-picked candidate and foiling his opportunity to seize control of the U.S. Senate. “He was really lashing out at what he perceived as his rival’s invincible position as the real son,” writes Webb, “but the continued contempt he felt from the elder Bush began to drive him to despondency, alcohol, and pain killers.” He even started making wild accusations, referring to “dark actors” and telling the press that Cheney told him, "If you vote against the Iraq war, we’ll get you.”

Contrary to the official claim that the crash had been caused by "freezing rain and snow," limited visibility, and likely icing of the wings, Webb presents evidence that Wellstone’s wrist had been slit with a pen knife and that he had taken an overdose of coproxamol, a prescription pain killer, and he marshals some impressive authorities to support him. Former coroner Dr. Michael Powers has stated, “I am concerned that the due process has not been followed. There evidently are contradictory views that were never put to the experts who gave evidence. In consequence the rigors that are normally undertaken at a coroner’s inquest simply were not fulfilled.” On the evidence he has studied, Powers believes any inquest would be forced to conclude the death a suicide. Two republican members of the House of Representatives, who spoke on condition of anonymity, stated that they believed that Wellstone had committed suicide. One said, "I don't think there's anyone on the Hill who doesn't suspect it. It's too convenient, too coincidental, too damned obvious."

Webb speculates that the Bush administration covered up the suicide out of respect for the dead. He points out that, in an atmosphere of constant terrorist scare campaigns, including Washington DC sniper attacks and “the possibilities of sniper attacks on golf courses,” there was absolutely no speculation that this was a terrorist attack, despite the fact that Wellstone had hired an associate of Zacarias Moussaoui, the accused Sept. 11 conspirator, as a co-pilot, and he makes the serious charge that “this is clear evidence of knowledge that suicide was the true cause of death at the highest levels of government. The team of FBI recovery agents left Minneapolis before Wellstone’s plane took off,” Webb claims, “and records of private aircraft arriving in Duluth that morning have been conveniently destroyed.” Webb points out that that apparent prior knowledge was similar to Dallas police putting out an all-points bulletin for Lee Harvey Oswald a half hour before he shot a police officer.

Prodigal Son of a Bitch makes the claim that there is no chance that this was an accidental plane crash. “The plane was exceptional, the pilots well-qualified, and the weather posed no significant problems. Even the National Transportation Safety Board's simulations were unable to bring the plane down. An article in the Duluth News Tribune a few days after the tragedy said that ‘for some still unexplained reason - [the plane] turned off course and crashed.’ It quoted Carol Carmody, the NTSB's acting chair and reportedly a former CIA employee, as saying, ‘We find the whole turn curious.’”

If anything clinches the case for suicide, according to Webb, it’s that the odds of another democrat dying accidentally in a plane crash are infinitesimal. He cites in addition to Carnahan and Kennedy, for example: Rep. Jerry Litton of Missouri in 1976, while campaigning for U.S. Senate nearly two months before the election (exactly the same fate that befell Carnahan); Rep. Hale Boggs of Louisiana, in 1972, a member of the Warren Commission who expressed doubts about the commission's findings concerning JFK; Rep. Larry McDonald, the national chairman of the John Birch Society linked to massive domestic spying and the CIA; Rep. Larkin Smith in 1989 who was looking into the deaths of five Green Beret colonels connected to a covert CIA drug operation; Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, another possible suicide, according to Webb, as photographs clearly show a bullet wound in the back of his skull; Rep. Mickey Leland of Texas in 1989; and Rep. Nick Begich of Alaska in 1972.

Of 22 air crashes involving state and federal officials, 14 (64 percent) were members of the Democratic Party and 8 (36 percent) were members of the Republican Party. If the list was limited to only elected members of Congress, the total was eight Democrats and four Republicans. Six of the fatalities occurred during election campaigns. Of those, four were Democrats and two were Republicans. “Another democrat killed in another accidental plane crash under these conditions would be statistically impossible,” Webb’s book claims.

Webb is still enjoying the success of the bestselling exposé of the Bush administration he penned last year in which he revealed that, despite outward appearances, the White House was rife with arguments and differences of opinion on numerous issues, and shouting could often be heard in cabinet meetings. He says that, once he’s done with the book signing tours for Prodigal Son of a Bitch, he plans to start work on a book investigating the possibility that Martin Luther King died of a drug overdose.

Pentagon Reveals Secret Cloning Program

2004-12-12T07:53:00.000-05:00

fully interchangeable

Breaking twenty years of carefully guarded silence, the Pentagon's chief medical officer, Army Maj. Gen. Anne S. Thesia, admitted today that research has been conducted since the 1980's at Ft. Detrick, the Army's secret biowarfare laboratory, on stem cell technology, and also that the Army has successfully cloned 150,000 combat ready troops from a single female sex cell. The soldiers turn eighteen in January and are set to begin basic training in all branches of the service by spring.

"We're very excited," Gen. Thesia said. "Their mother was a Marine officer in Vietnam, a green beret. If only half of them take after her, our recruitment problems are over." The General referred to recent reports that the US military is fighting desertion, recruitment shortfalls and legal challenges from its own troops.

The stock of several Halliburton subsidiaries rose sharply on the news. Because all of the new soldiers will wear the same size boots, eat the same food, like the same sports and recreation, and are in all respects eerily uniform, the cost of providing services is expected to plummet, making war by far the most profitable commercial sector in the US economy in 2005.

"We expect this to do for war what interchangeable parts did for capitalism," said Elizabeth Cheney, spokeswoman for Kellog, Brown, and Root. Not only can uniforms and armor easily be exchanged between damaged and functional clones, but blood and organs can be transplanted without the usual, sometimes fatal, screening delays.

"Because clones fall under the rubric of materiel rather than personnel," she explained, "they can simply be scrapped if they malfunction." The clones will not be assigned fixed tours of duty, and that will preclude the need for the stop-loss retention and other forms of back-door draft that have caused so many legal problems for the Pentagon in recent months. "We can just keep sending them into battle until we run out," Gen. Thesia said.

When asked what the clones were called, Gen. Thesia said that each one had been assigned a number from 1 to 150,000. She said that research had determined that names were bad for morale. "Individual names tend to breed individual thinking and individual personalities, and pretty soon launching an offensive becomes a little like herding cats. The only identity you need in the Army is your rank and your rating," she insisted.

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell for Women in Combat?

2004-12-12T05:30:00.000-05:00

don't ask

This is the first in a one part series on females in the military.

Part One: The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff spoke to Unconfirmed Sources today, under condition that we not use his name, concerning charges that the White House is promoting a don’t ask, don’t tell policy for women. If this policy is not halted, he said, “yet more women will die – or be captured and possibly raped or hung up by their ankles and painted with graffiti.”

The so-called “Aspin Rules” of 1994 are supposed to prohibit female soldiers from serving in deliberate offensive action against the enemy. Seven female U.S. soldiers have nevertheless been killed in combat in Iraq and many more have been wounded. And that’s not counting Afghanistan as usual. According to the general, the White House is trying to sidestep the law against females serving in combat by suggesting that field commanders and recruiters no longer inquire into the sexuality of soldiers, a policy they contend does not violate the hard-and-fast rules.

The general showed us a leaked White House report indicating plans to turn a blind eye to females in the military. “To support premature elimination of non-male personnel from all units designated to be or to become or to be collocated with unit of action elements would create an immediate and lasting personnel readiness impact issue of insufficient male soldiers in inventory to fill forward support companies and a potential long-term challenge to the Army’s pool of male recruits.” This means they don’t have enough soldiers, the general explained. The report went on to recommend that Army commanders simply “transfer forward-support companies from the maneuver battalions into brigade-support battalions without the need actively to screen for biological eligibility thereby avoiding the requirement to report the policy change to Congress.” The general told us this means “don’t ask.”

Incoming Secretary of State, Condaleeza Rice, said recently that “We could not do what needs to be done over there without women. If there needs to be a cavity search of an Iraqi woman, there’s no way an American male could do that.” The general, however, disagrees.

“We’re not talking about searching their cavities, we’re talking about blowing their heads off. American males are perfectly capable of that without the problems involved in living and fighting in close quarters with members of the opposite sexuality.”

Some male soldiers have, in fact, complained to their commanders about the likelihood of having to live in close quarters with possible females.

One, Sgt. Edward Erins, 23, often travels in armed convoys as part of his work as an aide to a commander of the 4th Infantry Division in Tikrit. His commander admitted confidentially to us to being female.

“Sure, I would love to go to a safe warm whorehouse any day,” Erins said. “That’s one of the great things about the Army, but you’re liable to get stuff cut off around here these days.” He said that, ever since rape began to be frowned on outside the prison camps by the “suits in Washington,” combat duty has been a frustrating experience. He admitted that the thought of attacking his commanding officer has occurred to him more than once, and he knows that others in his company have had the same thoughts.

Another, Marine Lance Cpl. Erin Edwards left her 3-year-old son and infant daughter with her in-laws to serve in Iraq because her husband serves in the Army in South Korea.

“They told me when I checked into my squadron they didn’t care if I were male or female, as long as I could carry a 50-caliber,” said Edwards. “So I didn’t try to hide it.” Now Cpl. Edwards is facing a possible permanent desk job in Kuwait. “It’s not fair,” Edwards said. “I came here to pull triggers, not push papers.” It’s a complaint echoed by females who have chosen to keep their sexuality secret.

Kay Barnes, a 30-year-old reservist originally from Richmond Hill, Ga., and a crew chief on a “Huey” gunship serving in Afghanistan, told us:

“I didn’t see (myself) sitting around while my country was going to war without me.” But having to live a lie all the time is hard. “It gets a little rough around shower time,” she admitted. Once a surprise inspection caught her with tampons, and she had to pretend that she thought they were for bullet holes.

Congress Denies Passing Secret Intelligence Bill

2004-12-11T01:48:00.000-05:00

total info awareness dude

A number of high ranking lawmakers were hard pressed on the morning talk shows today to dispel rumors of a major intelligence overhaul supposedly passed by Congress earlier this week. Details of the supposed bill, leaked to the press and then spread through the internet rumor mill, eventually resulted in a complaint by the ACLU that it "would centralize the intelligence community's surveillance powers, increasing the likelihood for government abuses." The complaint criticized especially the expansion of wiretap and other surveillance powers and said that the creation of a so-called Civil Liberties Oversights Board was merely a token measure that "risks becoming the proverbial fox guarding the hen house."

"The ACLU jumped the gun on this one," Joseph Lieberman, one of the bill's alleged sponsors, told Oprah Winfrey. "What they're talking about would be over three thousand pages long. How could we have had enough time to read it, let alone pass it?" Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, appearing on the Today Show this morning, said that the so-called "September 11 Bill" was confused with another secret intelligence bill that was passed the same week and which he couldn't discuss "because it's secret." He insisted that the sweeping domestic police powers implied in the so-called September 11 Bill not only would be "totally unjustified and very, very wasteful and dangerous to the national security," but would be "stunningly expensive."

When asked by Rosie O'Donnell if the rumors of the bill's passage were true, Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner denied it and said that he was still seeking to remove language from it that would limit government persecution of immigrants and that a compromise was unlikely until the new session of Congress that begins in January.

Rep. Jane Harman of California, senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, complained on Regis and Kelly that the media had gone "overboard" with rumors of a national ID card and a national intelligence director who would be little more than head of secret police. "According to one website I saw," Harman told Kelly, "this guy would establish an NCC that would control the CIA, the NSA, and 13 other intelligence agencies. Just a few years ago," said Harman, "that would have been looked at as a police state."

Rockefeller seems to agree. "Not even during the height of the Cold War spy mania of the McCarthy period could we have gotten away with the kinds of things they're saying," he insisted. "Now people are supposed to believe that it just sailed through both houses of Congress by overwhelming margins." He pointed out that, although the CIA is forbidden by law from spying in the US or against American citizens, and the FBI is supposed to conduct criminal investigations, not intelligence-gathering, these legal restraints, put in place after revelations in the early 1970s of illegal FBI political spying and CIA assassination plots, are regularly ignored.

"Why pass a law admitting that we're spying?" Rockefeller asked. "When you tell people you're spying on them, you never catch them doing anything; you just hopefully make them too paranoid to do anything." Sensenbrenner likewise complained that some "Monday morning quarterbacks" on the internet were "trying to make it sound like we're bringing back the Japanese internment camps." He was referring to one website that claimed the new law included "detention centers to hold 8,000 immigrants imprisoned while awaiting deportation or trial," as well as 15,000 more border police and immigration agents.

Lieberman told Oprah that "if you really spied on the internet and wireless communications systems like their saying, and coordinated and shared all the data, you'd end up with one big database with everybody in it and anybody just considered politically suspect or targeted for surveillance that the Gestapo could only dream about." Any such legislation, Lieberman insisted, would be compelled to stipulate that only members of terrorist organizations were subject to such surveillance or else "just any individual could be labeled a suspected 'lone wolf' terrorist by Ashcroft or who knows who and subjected to the same treatment as Al Qaeda."

The lawmakers were in agreement that the alleged authorization of outsourcing torture of prisoners would have been completely uncalled for, as it is already employed against suspects captured by the CIA or US military overseas, but only illegal for prisoners detained in the US. All were agreed, too, that the bill was still held up by the ongoing warfare within the military-intelligence apparatus, and especially between the CIA and Pentagon, which has been raging for years and has intensified along with the deteriorating situation for the US in Iraq. The CIA is still trying to avoid being blamed by the Pentagon for the lies it was ordered to tell by the White House.

Rockefeller said that the source of the confusion was the passage on December 7 of another mysterious secret spy program that drew extraordinary praise from leading Democrats. Rockefeller and three other Democratic senators-Richard Durbin of Illinois, Carl Levin of Michigan and Ron Wyden of Oregon-signed the measure, saying that it was overdue. The four senators believed that the funds for the September 11 Bill would be better spent on this mystery program "which will make a surer and greater contribution to national security."

Each senator--and more than two dozen current and former U.S. officials contacted by Unconfirmed Sources--declined to further describe or identify the program, citing its classified nature. Thirteen other senators on the Intelligence Committee and all their counterparts in the House approved it. In signing the measure Harman said, "I have always said that good people need better tools. Here come the tools to help good people succeed." She could not reveal, however, what the tools were or when the good people might be expected.

The rare praise of a highly secretive project in such a public forum intrigued outside intelligence experts, who said the program was almost certainly a spy satellite system. They cited tantalizing hints in Rockefeller's remarks, such as the program's enormous expense. "It's sure as expensive as a satellite program," said James Bamford, author of two books about the National Security Agency. "In the intelligence community, satellite programs are so hard to get a handle on, and this one is hard to get a handle on, so it's probably a satellite program." They also pointed out that Donald H. Rumsfeld, prior to his appointment as defense secretary for President Bush, once remarked that the United States was "an attractive candidate for a Space Pearl Harbor. For somebody else, I mean."

Rockefeller's description of the spy project as a "major funding acquisition success" suggests a price tag in the range of billions of dollars, intelligence experts said. John Pike, a defense analyst with GlobalSecurity.org, who has studied anti-satellite weapons for more than three decades said that the secret program was so totally a spy satellite program. He said that other countries would inevitably demand proof that any weapons were only defensive, but he was certain that most Americans wouldn't care one way or the other. "That's good," a Pentagon spokesman said, "as it would present just absolutely insurmountable verification problems because we are not going to let anybody look at our spy satellites. It's just not going to happen."

Condaleeza Rice Orders Invasion of Iran: Congress Angry but Vow to Support Troops

2004-12-09T13:57:00.000-05:00

always around when you need one

Citing an intercepted communiqué from an Iranian pilot who shouted an Islamic oath as he approached Washington's Dulles Airport, incoming Secretary of State, Condaleeza Rice, informed Congress late last night that she had ordered the downing of the passenger jet he was piloting and the immediate launch of Patriot missiles at Tehran. By the time reviews of the tapes by the CIA revealed that a flight attendant had spilled coffee on the pilot who merely uttered a common Arabic exclamation, it had been too late to call back the missile strike.

Insisting that there was no alternative but to "stay the course," a bipartisan show of hands in both houses of Congress unanimously approved a follow-up landing of Marines from an amphibious battle group that happened to be parked off the coast after training operations in the Persian Gulf. Two fighter wings recently stationed in Pakistan and Azerbaijan began bombing raids on several major Iranian cities early this morning.

Outgoing Secretary of State, Colin Powell, defended the invasion saying that “some intelligence failures” may have been involved, “but we know that the Iranians had no intention of halting their nuclear program, and our former allies in old Europe seemed intent on helping them hide their nefarious plans.” Powell also cited Iran’s record on women’s rights.

The passenger jet, along with 250 mostly Middle Eastern passengers along with one or two Russian dignitaries, an Azerbaijani and a possible member of the Pakistani ISI, were intercepted and destroyed by F-16’s from Bolling Air Force Base.

Some eye witnesses who said they “were out fishin’” early this morning, however, claim they saw the plane go down after an explosion long before the fighter jets arrived. “It was like a bomb went off near the tail section,” said one fisherman who declined to be identified.

Their claims are being dismissed by Dr. Rice who says that she gave the orders in response to intelligence reports from the CIA that Iran was about to attack Washington DC with a passenger jet.

“Well, we did say that and we didn’t,” said Porter Goss, the incoming director of the CIA. “George Tenet may have said that,” said Goss, referring to the outgoing director, “but I certainly didn’t.” Goss also defended the invasion, insisting that Tehran was a sponsor of international terrorism. “We know that Iranian intelligence was involved in the recent ETA bombings in Madrid, as well as the funding of Ansar al Islam in Indonesia,” he said.

Vice President Cheney assured reporters at a press conference this afternoon that the White House “personally” would launch a full investigation into the intelligence snafu, but insisted that “total and immediate liquidation” of Iran’s military capabilities was now necessary to forestall an inevitable retaliatory strike. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld insisted that the massive use of small tactical nuclear weapons would keep US casualties to a minimum. He noted that ground troops in eastern Iraq were still needed there to maintain order for the upcoming elections. Since the election of Hamid Karzai, however, some troops currently stationed in Afghanistan may be freed up to maintain border security, he said.

Mass Grave in Bosnia Found to Contain Iraqis

2004-12-08T07:02:00.000-05:00

smoking gun

Forensic scientists from the WTO have determined that some of the bodies unearthed last week from a mass grave in Bosnia are Iraqis. Identities of most of the bodies have yet to be determined. This will be bad news for Slobodan Milosevic who is currently standing trial for war crimes committed in Bosnia from 1987 until late 2000, prior to and during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

He was originally charged only with the forcible removal of non-Serbs from Bosnia/Herzegovina which resulted in the indiscriminate slaughter of anywhere from 2,788 to 225,000 people – although this number admittedly might include combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma killed by the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army.

It now seems, however, that Milosevic’s program of ethnic cleansing stretched all the way to the Middle East,” said council for the prosecution, Geoffrey Nice. The news has caused a stir among those who were directly involved in the conflict. William Cohen, the US defence secretary during the NATO campaign said that he expects the discovery of more graves containing as many as 100,000 men “aged between 14 and 59” who “may have been murdered.” British Prime Minister Tony Blair said the new evidence of Milosevic’s perfidy “invoked the Holocaust and the spirit of the Second World War.” The British press echoed his horror-stricken indignation: “Spirit of the Holocaust,” wrote the Daily Mail. The political science journal, The Daily Mirror said the new discovery “invoked the Second World War.”

Having not found a single mass grave in 1999, the FBI had gone home. The Spanish forensic team also returned home, its leader complaining angrily that he and his colleagues had become part of “a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because we did not find one - not one - mass grave.” Even The Wall Street Journal dismissed “the mass grave obsession.” Instead of “the huge killing fields some investigators were led to expect . . . the pattern is of scattered killings [mostly] in areas where the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army has been active.” The Journal concluded that NATO stepped up its claims about Serbian killing fields when it “saw a fatigued press corps drifting toward the contrary story: civilians killed by Nato's bombs . . . The war in Kosovo was cruel, bitter, savage. Genocide it wasn't.”

With the claims of genocide now vindicated, British MP Clare Short is demanding that such “Nazi propagandists” be investigated for intentional mishandling of evidence. The next step, according to Short, is to subject Kosovo to minute examination. MI6 has yet to bring evidence of the infamous “Serbian rape camps” to the Hague tribunal. This task may be taken up by the American FBI who arrived in Bosnia this week to investigate the newly discovered grave, called “the largest crime scene in the FBI's forensic history.”

Short also demanded investigation into false charges that NATO’s client in Kosovo, the KLA, was “a terrorist organisation in league with al-Qaeda,” as well as that NATO deliberately bombed civilian targets including public transport, hospitals, schools, museums, and churches. She reminded Parliament that Blair had berated Belgrade for its failure to embrace "economic reform" fully.

“People forget,” she said, “that Yugoslavia was the last economy in central-southern Europe to be uncolonized by western capital. They had publicly owned petroleum, mining, car and tobacco industries, and 'socially owned enterprises' still predominated."

In the bombing campaign, it was state-owned companies, rather than civilian or military sites, that were targeted. NATO only destroyed 14 Yugoslav army tanks compared with 372 centers of industry.

"Not one foreign or privately owned factory was bombed," Short insisted. “Besides,” she added, "it was common knowledge that Milosevic was transporting dead bodies in freezer trucks. Otherwise, they would not have been bombing bridges on Sunday afternoons, and ice cream parlors."

She was referring to charges by the KLA that Milosevic’s henchmen had dug up mass graves and transported bodies in freezer trucks to hide evidence of their genocide. “It’s now clear that the transportation of dead bodies was common practice and not just a fantasy fed to the press by spooks to explain the lack of evidence of genocide earlier in the trial,” said Short.

Short says it is the profound sense of injustice from the international courts that has turned what should have been a "free-market economy" and the privatization of all government assets into a violent, criminalized, UN-administered free market in drugs and prostitution. The sense of victimization has driven unemployment up to 65 per cent. The KLA, with NATO forces standing by, has consequently been forced to relocate more than 200,000 Serbs, Roma, Bosniaks, Turks, Croats and Jews, and closed 85 Orthodox churches and monasteries, in order to prevent ethnic violence from erupting again.

To make matters worse for Milosevic, traces of banned chemical weapons were found in the autopsies of many of the bodies in the newly uncovered mass grave. Until these recent findings, the former president of Yugoslavia had sought to use his trial as a soapbox to hurl unsupported allegations at NATO and the US of the intentional destruction of Yugoslavia, the funding of terrorists, and the propagation of lies to justify an illegal aggressive war.

The prosecution insists that it was Milosevic who “controlled, manipulated or otherwise utilized Serbian state-run media to spread exaggerated and false messages of ethnically based attacks by Bosnian Muslims and Croats against Serbs intended to create an atmosphere of fear and hatred among Serbs living in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina which contributed to the forcible removal of the majority of non-Serbs,” according to the charges. “He thinks it’s very clever to accuse his enemies of the very crimes he himself committed,” said Nice, “but let’s see him squirm out of this.”

"Milosevic played us like a Stradivarius violin," wrote the former UN commander in Bosnia, Major General Lewis MacKenzie, last April. "He convinced us we had subsidized and indirectly supported the KLA’s violent campaign for an ethnically pure Kosovo. We never blamed him for being the perpetrator of the violence in the early 1990s, and we would have continued to portray him as the designated victim today, if not for this overwhelming evidence to the contrary."

In another blow to Milosevic’s defense, anonymous intelligence sources at the CIA have leaked aerial photographs of freezer trucks being offloaded at the site of the mass grave. “When we heard Milosevic standing up there and misrepresenting the intelligence we had submitted,” said one veteran CIA spook, “our feelings were deeply hurt. A lot of good spooks put in a lot of hours only to see their work distorted,” by the Yugoslavian ex-president. “The CIA is not in the business of concocting lies to serve the interests of the corporate imperialist war machine,” he said.

Price of Poppy Seeds Plummets: Afghanistan Accused of Dumping

2004-12-06T11:53:00.000-05:00

hi carbs, low prices

With US bread sales suffering from the proliferation of low-carb diets, poppy producers have another headache to deal with. An organization of seed producers has complained to the Bush administration about the dumping of subsidized poppy seeds on western markets by Afghanistan.

Since the liberation of Afghanistan, the price of poppy seeds on international markets has plummeted nearly 50%, from about $1000 per kg to just under $600. Producers in Holland and Canada have joined in the complaint which accuses the government of Hamid Karzai of violating the WTO anti-dumping agreement by subsidizing poppy seeds exported to western markets.

Afghan Agricultural Minister, Manuel Noriega, said that his agency was looking into the charges. While poppy products account for 50% of the GDP of Afghanistan, the Karzai government was unaware that cultivation had continued under its leadership. Noriega explained that last month's elections had kept officials so busy, they hadn’t had much chance to leave Kabul since being installed by the CIA in 2002.

US seed producers are not waiting, however, and have asked the Bush administration to impose import tariffs on Afghani poppy products. “Christmas is our biggest season,” said John Santo, director of the US Seed Council. “Most small producers don’t become profitable until December. We can’t afford to wait until Karzai trips over some poppies over there. If Osama was hiding in a poppy field, they'd never find him,” Santo complained.

Nevertheless, the Bush administration does not appear eager to play Santa Claus this year. US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick claimed that, until there was some confirmation from the Karzai government of poppy cultivation and export, there could be no legal basis for WTO action.

According to the WTO’s Committee on Anti-Dumping Practices: “If an investigation shows dumping is taking place and domestic industry is being hurt, the exporting company can undertake to raise its price to an agreed level in order to avoid anti-dumping import duty.”

As there are apparently no exporting companies in Afghanistan, that puts the ball back in Zoellick’s court. WTO rules allow for measures to be taken against products imported from member countries, whether or not those countries have exported them. “The importing country can launch its own investigation and ultimately charge extra duty (known as “countervailing duty”) on subsidized imports that are found to be hurting domestic producers.”

Judging by the obvious reluctance of the Bush administration to take economically damaging measures against the still fragile democracy in Afghanistan, US poppy seed producers will certainly be hurting this Christmas.

“Tracking down poppy growers in Afghanistan would take all kinds of expensive equipment like planes and helicopters, not to mention hundreds of personnel on the ground,” said Zoellick. “Where would we find them?” US government offices would have to be established in Kabul, and trade representatives sent out to the war-torn countryside. “That kind of government spending won’t be good for either of our economies,” Zoellick insisted.

September 11 Suicide Pilot Pleads Not Guilty

2004-12-03T10:19:00.000-05:00

the murder weapon

Marwan Alshehhi, accused of piloting a Boeing 757 that crashed into the World Trade Center two years ago has entered a plea of not guilty in US Federal Court from his home in Morocco. His lawyers are saying that he has an airtight alibi and that they can prove he was nowhere near the scene of the crime on Sept. 11, 2001.

Federal Prosecutors claim that the case is open and shut and that Alshehhi’s lawyers are trying for a plea bargain, perhaps in exchange for giving evidence against the remaining eighteen men still awaiting trial. According to prosecutors, the hotel owner where Alshehhi was staying two days before found a box cutter in his room and, realizing the implications of an Arab with a box cutter, he had the presence of mind to check the dumpsters outside, where he found a duffel bag.

Rudy Giuliani who will be handling the prosecution for the government said: “We have Boeing 757 manuals, three illustrated martial arts books, an 8-inch stack of East Coast flight maps, a three-ring binder full of handwritten notes, an English-German dictionary, an airplane fuel tester, and a protractor.” The FBI, unfortunately, threw away the notebook which may have provided important evidence. “We don’t need it,” Giuliani said, “the case is open and shut.” Three senior agents have nevertheless been roundly promoted, in the hopes that they will respond better to more responsibility than to criticism or reprimands.

In Morocco, Alshehhi’s family and friends don’t believe he took part in the attack. “Since he’s been back in Morocco,” said his current employer, “he’s been a model citizen. He hasn’t missed a day of work. He’s the best employee I have.” Alshehhi’s aunt claims that Marwan is not a fundamentalist. “He’s hardly religious. I’m always trying to get him to take me to the mosque, but he’s too busy.”

A man describing himself as Alshehhi’s best friend said that Marwan and he went to Afghanistan as teenagers to fight the Russians, and that they had become favorites with their CIA trainers. “Marwan used to love Americans,” he said. “He wouldn’t have lifted a finger to hurt them. But these charges have damaged his reputation and employment prospects. I don’t think he’ll be sending any Christmas cards to George Bush.”

Alshehhi refused to be interviewed “on the advice of my lawyers,” but he reiterated his claim that he had nothing to do with the crimes with which he is charged and is confident that he will be acquitted. Giuliani is not so sure. According to him, Alshehhi’s defense depends in part on his having breakfast that morning with Satam Al Suqami, but because Suqami’s passport was found in the rubble of the towers, Alshehhi’s alibi is not likely to stand up, especially as Suqami is looking for a plea bargain himself.

Pentagon: Everything We Tell You is a Lie, Including This

2004-12-02T11:38:00.000-05:00

who are they trying to fool?

Expressing concern that the credibility of US foreign policy may have suffered as a result of the numerous lies disseminated by the White House and Pentagon concerning the war on terrorism, Gen. Richard Myers today reiterated the policy laid out in 2001 by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld of using disinformation as a weapon of psychological warfare.

He cited as an example, a case where a young Marine was caught on camera shooting a prone prisoner in the head. While 1st Lt. Lyle Shepherdboy, the Marine's CO, earlier claimed that it only happened that one time, several Pentagon officials admitted today that wasn't true.

Shepherdboy's carefully worded statement was an elaborate psychological operation - or "psy-op" - intended to terrify insurgents in Fallouja who knew it wasn't true and allow U.S. commanders to see how U.S. citizens would react if they believed a Marine had committed a summary execution, the officials agreed. CNN, which had been alerted to expect a big video, nevertheless quoted the statement as it had been written. It took a week to figure out that the statement was false.

"As the Pentagon gave us the green light, we quickly made it clear to our viewers that that kind of thing goes on all the time," CNN spokesperson Xaviera Hollander said.

Officials at the Pentagon and other U.S. national security agencies said the CNN incident was not an isolated feint - the type used throughout history by armies to deceive their enemies - but part of a broad effort underway within the Bush administration to use lies to their advantage.

The Pentagon in 2002 claimed to have shuttered its controversial Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), which was opened shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, after reports that the office intended to plant false news stories in the international media. But since they planted that story, it's probably false. Officials nevertheless admit that much of OSI's mission - using lies as a tool of power - has been assumed by other offices throughout the U.S. government as well as by private military contractors.

Although most of the work remains classified, officials say that some of the ongoing efforts include having military trained spokesmen in Iraq play a greater role in psychological operations on U.S. TV, as well as planting information with sources used by Arabic TV channels such as Al Jazeera to help influence American perceptions of the terrorist threat.

Other specific examples were not known, although U.S. national security officials said an emphasis had been placed on influencing how foreign media depict the United States as the internet was making it easier for Americans to access which was undoing many of their successes in the domestic press.

These efforts have set off a fight inside the Pentagon over the proper use of lies. Several top officials see a danger of blurring what are supposed to be well-defined lines between the private interests of defense contractors and corporate financiers and psychological and information operations, the use of often-misleading information and propaganda to influence the outcome of a campaign or battle.

"The movement of disinformation has gone from the public affairs world to the psychological operations world," one senior defense official said. "What's at stake is the credibility of people in uniform. If we lie every time we open our mouths, people eventually stop believing what we say."

Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Pinocchio said he recognized the concern of many inside the Defense Department, but that "everybody understands that there's a very important distinction between information operations and public affairs. Nobody has offered serious proposals that would blur the distinction between these two functions." As a Pentagon spokesman, of course, his statements can now safely be assumed to be untrue.

One recent development critics point to is the decision by commanders in Iraq in mid-September to combine public affairs, psychological operations and information operations into a "strategic communications" office. Its first accomplishment was settling on a better name for itself than "ministry of propaganda."

Partly out of concern about this new office, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, distributed a letter Sept. 27 to the Joint Chiefs and U.S. combat commanders in the field warning of the dangers of having military public affairs (PA) too closely aligned with information operations (IO).

"Although both PA and IO conduct planning, message development and media analysis, the efforts differ with respect to audience, scope and intent, and must remain separate," Myers wrote, according to a copy of the letter obtained by Unconfirmed Sources. Demonstrating the tactics of official disinformation, Myers claimed to be worried that "world audiences" might begin to question the honesty of statements from U.S. commanders and spokespeople, despite the fact that the audience for PA is primarily domestic.

"While organizations may be inclined to create physically integrated PA/IO offices, such organizational constructs have the potential to compromise the commander's credibility with the media and the public," Myers wrote, again using "strategic communication" to imply that physical separation of the offices would solve the problem.

Myers' letter is not being heeded in Iraq, officials say, in part because many top civilians at the Pentagon and National Security Council don't believe him.

"Lies are part of political power in a way that they've never been before," said anonymous Bush administration official, Pudgy Waterhouse. "We'd be foolish not to try to use them to our advantage."

Advocates also cite a September report by the Defense Science Board, a panel of outside experts that advises Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, which concluded that a "crisis" in U.S. "strategic communications" had undermined American efforts to fight Islamic extremism worldwide. Rumsfeld admitted that the constant lies had cost them some credibility, but insisted that it was nothing compared to what the truth would get them.

The study cited polling in the Arab world that revealed widespread hatred of the United States throughout the Middle East. A poll taken in June by Zogby International revealed that 94% of Saudi Arabians had an "unfavorable" view of the United States, compared with 87% in April 2002. In Egypt, the second largest recipient of U.S. aid, 98% of respondents held an unfavorable view of the United States. After equating an unfavorable view with hatred, the study recommended that international opinion polls be vetted by the Pentagon before publication.

The Defense Science Board recommended a presidential directive to "coordinate all components of strategic communication including public diplomacy, public affairs, international broadcasting and military information operations." It determined that the problem was not the non-stop lying, but failing to keep their stories straight. There are currently three or four separate lies being used publicly to justify the war, and this fact may have confused some people. "When people ask, 'what are we fighting for?'" the report said, "they don't want a menu."

Di Pinocchio said there was general agreement inside the Bush administration that the U.S. government was ill-equipped to communicate its policies and messages abroad in the current media climate. "If we lie, they don't believe us, and if we tell the truth, they want to prosecute us," he complained.

During a Nov. 10 briefing by Marine Lt. Gen. John F. Fibber, reporters were shown a video of Iraqi troops saluting their flag and singing the Iraqi national anthem. "Pretty soon, we're going to have the 5 o'clock follies all over again, and it will take us another 30 years to restore our credibility," said a second senior Defense official, referring to the much-ridiculed daily media briefings in Saigon during the Vietnam War and strategically suggesting that the Pentagon had regained its credibility since then.

According to several Pentagon officials, the strategic communications programs at the Defense Department are being coordinated by the office of the undersecretary of Defense for policy, Douglas J. Feith. Feith suggested that, "since we can't tell the truth all the time, it's better that we never tell the truth. That way, Americans will know better than to believe a word we say."

Allawi Accuses Hekawi of Aiding Zarqawi, Moussaoui

2004-12-02T10:30:00.000-05:00

where the heck is zarqawi?

Iraqi elections planned for next month may have to be postponed owing to accusations by the interim Prime Minister that the Hekawi have had secret dealings with rebel leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The small tribe of Native Americans, who settled in western Iraq during the Civil War after getting lost on a hunting party, purportedly supported Zarqawi's operations through the sale of beads, blankets, and jewelry to tourists. The tribe took its name from the exclamation of their leader, Sitting Duck, on reaching the Tigris river in 1868: "where the heck a' we?"

Allawi also insisted he had incontrovertable proof of a meeting between Roaring Chicken and accused 20th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, in Prague in early 2001.

Hekawi spokesman, Crazy Cat, immediately denied the allegations, saying that the tribe had only contacted Zarqawi to negotiate the release of a US contractor kidnapped while working at Fort Courage the cavalry base west of Baghdad. He said that US intelligence had been financing the tribe's souvenir trade in a proposed "beads for hostages" deal.

While the base commander, Captain Parmenter, said he had no intelligence concerning the supposed negotiations, two of his enlisted men, Sgt. O'Rourke and Cpl. Agarn, may have had some contact over the past month with the Hekawi concerning the kidnapping of Wrangler Jane, the hard-riding, fast-shooting cowgirl who was out to marry Parmenter.

Interim Prime Minister Allawi said that, until the matter is cleared up, the Hekawi will be considered a terrorist organization and their Chief Wild Eagle will not be allowed to participate in the interim government or in the upcoming elections. As there is little chance of disproving the allegations until the Jordanian born terrorist is captured, the now outlawed tribe can only ask: "where the heck is Zarqawi?"

Britney Spears Calls for Violent Revolution in Ukraine

2004-12-01T07:13:00.000-05:00

no free concert

A massive pro-democracy concert sponsored by Pepsi Co. to take place in the troubled nation of Ukraine next month may be cancelled owing to protests by the government over statements by the concert's headliner, Britney Spears.

In an appearance on NBC's Tonight Show, Spears was asked by host Jay Leno what she hoped the concert would accomplish. She said she hoped the youth of Ukraine would realize that "their democracy is being stolen" and would "get together and do something about it."

Mr. Leno asked her if she meant that they should demand a recount of the votes or a new election, and Ms. Spears replied that "they should do whatever it takes. What good is a new election if it's only going to be as rigged as the first one? What good is a recount if the same people are doing the counting? Freedom is a precious thing," she said, "and once you lose it, it's gone."

Doffing her Pepsi ballcap, she said that US officials had been unsuccessful in having the fraudulent results of the election overturned and that now it was "up to the kids" to "take back their democracy." She said that, while it "might be scary" to "go up against the police and the government," losing their freedom to choose their leaders was "even scarier."

NBC was immediately besieged with calls from the Ukraine and Russian governments protesting Ms. Spears apparent instigation of widespread and bloody violence. While spokeswomen from NBC and Pepsi Co. insisted that the First Amendment prevented them from censoring the political opinions of late night talk show guests, for the time being, plans for the upcoming Kiev concert are "on hold."

Kenneth Lay Beheaded by Zacarias Moussaoui

2004-11-29T13:53:00.000-05:00

the one that didn't get away

A video tape showing the beheading murder of Kenneth Lay was delivered to the offices of Unconfirmed Sources yesterday and has since been confiscated by the FBI. The tape shows a masked man identifying himself as Zacarias Moussaoui, the Islamic militant currently facing four capital charges connected with the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on New York and Washington, affirming his involvement in that attack before sawing the head off of the Bush supporter and former Enron chairman.

Because of the graphic nature of the video, it is doubtful that it will be released to the television press, but we can reveal that it was pretty gross. Lay maintained a stoic silence throughout, which the FBI explained to us was, along with the absence of blood, mostly owing to the heavy sedation Moussaoui used to overpower him.

Prison officials are at a loss to say how Moussaoui broke out of his maximum security cell long enough to travel to Texas to commit the heinous murder, let alone how he managed to sneak back in two days later, but the governor vowed not to let current budget problems stand in the way of protecting the public from prison escapees "no matter how much it costs."

Lay was awaiting trial on a number of charges relating to his handling of the collapse of Enron four years ago. As for Moussaoui, the new charges have forced the governor to accede to earlier requests by the Attorney General to transfer his case to a military tribunal, where public scrutiny and the rules of evidence will no longer impede his swift and just execution. Some questions still puzzle investigators, such as motive and who was holding the video camera, the fact that the murderer seemed to be tall, thin and left handed, his British accent and expensive jewelry, but the FBI assured us that the limited access to legal defense would prevent Moussaoui from exploiting the apparent weaknesses in the prosecution's case.

Democrats Vow to Pay More Attention to Political Concerns of Idiots

2004-11-27T07:46:00.000-05:00

clear message? not to an idiot

Confronted with a chart of relative IQ's of blue and red states in the recent elections, the leadership of the Democratic party said recently that they were forced to reevaluate their assumptions about the constituency they were tasked to represent. The chart below shows the nation divided along stupidity lines: 19 of the 24 states with the highest average IQ voting Democrat and the 31 of the 34 states with the lowest, Republican.

"The results certainly are striking," said Tom Daschle. "It really shows you that we're just not getting our message across to most Americans." DNC spokesman Bull Buchanan said that the party had made serious errors in recent years overlooking the fact that a majority of Americans are idiots and in failing to take their specific political concerns into account.

"George Bush didn't win," Buchanan said, "John Kerry lost. The Republicans have managed to get a monopoly on addressing idiotic issues, and idiots vote for them because they believe that George Bush cares about the things they care about. Trying to address the real interests of idiots doesn't work because it neglects the fact that idiots are too stupid to know what their real interests are. We've made some mistakes, but we're not too big to admit that, as Americans, we can be idiots too," Buchanan said.

In response to an article in the British political science journal, The Daily Mirror, investigating the rise of the American stupidity movement in recent years, Buchanan insisted that the Democrats should not look backwards to failed policies of the past, but instead needed to shed its "chronic state of denial" and "recognize that America fundamentally is a nation of idiots and deserves political representatives who will respond to their idiotic concerns."

President Bush Unwraps Faith Based Environmental Protection Program

2004-11-27T06:33:00.000-05:00

still blue no thanks to scientists

Calling environmentally concerned scientists "a bunch of atheists who don't trust the Lord to look after his own creation," President George Bush announced the "Uncloudy Skies Act" which emphasizes prayer and church attendance over economically crippling regulation of US industrial production.

When asked if he intended to ratify the Kyoto protocol in his second term, Bush said that the claim that the world's climates were changing was false and that anyway it had nothing to do with greenhouse gas emissions which in any case are natural and besides China was just as much to blame as the US.

EPA administrator Jess Leavitt said that he was committed not to let special interest groups such as environmentalists and scientists hijack the process. "All US citizens," Leavitt said, "human and corporate, have a stake in environmental issues. The health of the economy must not be sacrificed to serve those only interested in the health of the planet." He rejected the idea that America should be subjected to "some kind of global test" before deploying its industrial waste products. He said he "wasn't about to let the French tell him where to take a sh*t" and that if the UN Convention on Climate Change persisted in its anti-US diatribes it was in manifest danger of becoming irrelevant.

When asked about the costs to the economy of events such as the thirteen hurricanes that devastated the southeast and the Caribbean this past season, including 18 billion dollars of emergency aid sent to Florida and another 25 thousand sent to Haiti, Bush said: "the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away." He referred to a boom in new housing construction and the aversion of what would have been a crippling budged deficit in the state of which his brother Jeb currently is governor. "The Bible says 'every cloud has a silver lining,' and that's something the tree huggers never want to see."

Bush said that environmental groups "hated the freedoms" of American entrepreneurs and had hired lobbyists and PR firms to "demonize our God given prosperity as some kind of unsustainable over-consumption of resources." They also control Hollywood and the media, he pointed out, who only show images of natural devastation and never any of its benefits, creating a distorted picture of reality in many people's minds. "Because they focus on it," Bush said, "a lot of people are fooled into thinking the eco whatever's getting worse, which is why my new initiative provides incentives for church groups to get more involved. If more people put their faith in the Lord, these chicken littles would have to go home to roost."

Bush Unveils Faith Based Economic Plan

2004-11-24T06:08:00.000-05:00

in GDP we trust

Treasury Secretary Snow joined President Bush in unveiling "Salvations and Loans," a new economic plan that relies heavily on the promotion of prayer and church attendance to stimulate the Second Coming and divine forgiveness of what otherwise promises to be a ten trillion dollar national debt.

Snow denied that raising the national debt ceiling by nearly a trillion dollars together with record trade and budget deficits was leading to a slowdown in the current economic recovery. "Sure, Americans are taking on record levels of personal debt, but that just indicates the high level of confidence they have in the future of the economy." When asked about recent numbers indicating a growing unemployment rate, Snow pointed out that when people get more confident about the future, they re-enter the job market and begin to be counted in the jobs figures.

Snow agreed with President Bush that this new wave of confidence in the future of the American economy could only be attributed to the nationwide renewal of religious faith to which the unexpected results of the recent elections testify, and it was the government's responsibility to do what it could to justify that faith. The new economic plan is designed to drive the US economy so close to breaking point that God will have to intervene on behalf of his chosen nation. Bush acknowledged that a catastrophic crash might precede the second coming, but insisted that the portfolios of the faithful were adequately diversified. "Jesus is all the hedge fund you need," the president said.

Iraqi Doctors Hail Eradication of Obesity

2004-11-23T09:34:00.000-05:00

fake photos and proven lies

On a side note to the sometimes pessimistic news concerning the ongoing insurgency and upcoming elections, Doctors at Iraq's Health Ministry announced that obesity, which had reached epidemic proportions in Iraq in the late 1980's, has finally been eradicated. The WTO added Iraq to the growing list of countries who have eradicated the chronic condition which once constituted the greatest risk to the health of Iraqi children.

"There's no doubt," said Dr. Aziz, the Institute's Chief of Epidemiology, "that US liberation efforts put the nail in the coffin of this debilitating condition. They got the kids up off the couch and away from the video games and weaned them off of junk foods and onto a lower calorie diet." Obesity which used to be number one on the list of health risks for Iraqis is now "completely off the charts," according to one researcher.

Doctors acknowledge that careful monitoring is still necessary to ensure that chronic cases among the ruling authorities remain contained and do not spread the condition to the general population, but doctors at the institute remain confident that Iraq has finally seen the last of the deadly epidemic.

Obesity rates which had risen to 11 percent two years ago, plummeted to 4 percent in the first year of military operations and are now considered negligible.

"These figures clearly indicate the downward trend," said Alexander Malyavin, a child health specialist with the UNICEF mission to Iraq.

Iraq's child obesity rate now roughly equals that of Burundi, a central African nation torn by more than a decade of war. It is far lower than rates in Uganda and Haiti.

Doctors said Saddam had tried to spread propaganda implying that the US intended to establish fast food restaurants and Krispy Kreme doughnut shops throughout the region in order to undermine the health of the people. But photographs (see above) released by the Baathists have been proven by the CIA to be retouched. One doctor said that Sadaam used to hand out food vouchers like candy, and the epidemic only grew. He speculated that it had all been a plot to weaken political opposition.

"He's lost a lot of weight since the war," said Kasim Said, a day laborer who was at Baghdad's main children's hospital to visit his once obese son, Abdullah. The child, lying on a pillow with a Winnie the Pooh washcloth to keep the flies off his head, weighs just 11 pounds.

Parents visiting children recovering from the condition at the hospital admitted that the high price of food and nutritional supplements had contributed to them seeking a more efficient dietary regimen.

International aid efforts and the U.N. oil-for-food program reversed the advances made under the ruinous impact of sanctions, and the rate of obesity among the youngest Iraqis gradually grew to a peak of 11 percent in 2002. But the invasion in March 2003 and the widespread looting in its aftermath severely damaged the basic structures of governance in Iraq, and persistent violence across the country greatly reduced access to Western foods with their high fat and sugar content. Together with the frequent need to run like hell for their lives, these factors have worked what doctors can only describe as a "medical miracle."

Some doctors at the Ministry disputed the findings that lower fat diets and increased exercise alone had brought an end to the epidemic. They believe that dysentery owing to contaminated water supplies plays a key role. By one count, 60 percent of rural residents and 20 percent of urban dwellers have access only to contaminated water. The country's sewer systems are in disarray. All agreed that more research was needed to understand the causes and treatment of obesity, but all were unanimous in thanking America's long term commitment to the future of Iraq for what is hopefully its final eradication.

Secret Service Suspends 3 Agents; 1 Chilean Security Guard Suspended

2004-11-22T08:50:00.000-05:00

Bush comes off bench

The Secret Service suspended three players indefinitely Saturday for their roles in one of the worst-ever brawls in the history of the agency, a fight with Chilean security guards that director Biff Bashem called "shocking, repulsive and inexcusable." Agents Napolean Solo and Ilya Kuryakin and Chilean security guard Augusto Arbusto were suspended, the Secret Service said Saturday. Police in Santiago were investigating, but did not comment on who might be charged.

President Bush lunged into the crowd and fought with security personnel in the final minute of his photo op with the Chilean president Ricardo Lagos and his wife, Luisa Duran on Friday night, and the brawl forced an early end to the press coverage.

After several minutes of US officials fighting with security guards in the entranceway to the cultural center, a chair, beer, ice and popcorn were thrown at the Secret Servicemen as they made their way to the locker room.

About a half-dozen people were treated for injuries at the site of the elegant dinner in downtown Santiago, one was taken to a hospital by ambulance and another sought treatment, police said.

The fight was "shocking, repulsive and inexcusable - a humiliation for everyone associated with the Secret Service," Bashem said in a statement Saturday.

Coaches for both teams apologized. Solo, Kuryakin, and Arbusto—all of whom threw punches at reporters—were to begin serving their suspensions Saturday night, when President Bush met in bilateral talks with Chinese officials.

White House spokesman Pudgy Waterhouse said Saturday the Secret Service plans to use "playoff-level security" starting with that meeting, doubling the number of armed police and increasing security by about 25 percent.

"This demonstrates why the president must not enter the crowd, whatever the provocation or poisonous behavior of people attending the events," Bashem said.

Santiago police gathered videotapes from various media outlets, interviewed witnesses and planned to talk to the agents involved in the melee. Prosecutors will review the evidence and decide on any charges, hopefully before Thanksgiving, a statement from the police said.

The fight started as Chilean agents closed ranks at the door, blocking the president's agents from following. Stopping for more pictures, Bush noticed the fracas and turned back. He reached through the dispute and pulled his agent from the scrum and into the building.

Just when it appeared tempers had died down, agent Solo was struck by a cup thrown from the crowd and jumped up and charged into the crowd, throwing punches as he climbed over seats.

Kuryakin joined Solo in the melee and threw punches at attendees, who punched back.

Later, a man in a security guard uniform approached Kuryakin at the banquet, shouting at him. Kuryakin punched him in the face, knocking him to the floor. Solo stepped in and punched another man who joined the scrum.

The White House said it was reviewing rules and security procedures "so that local representatives can continue to attend our conferences unthreatened by events such as the ones that occurred last night."

Solo has been suspended several times by the Secret Service. Earlier this month, he was benched for asking for time off because of a busy schedule that included promoting a soon-to-be released rap album. He also destroyed TV monitors at the Republican National Convention and missed the flight to one of Bush's campaign stops last season.

Allawi Rejects Claims by Delegation from Mosul that Civilians Still Occupy City

2004-11-21T08:19:00.000-05:00

delegation sent back to Mosul for proof

A delegation of families from the northern Iraqi city of Mosul were forcibly removed from the offices of the interim government yesterday after trying to present Prime Minister Allawi with a petition signed by several hundred thousand residents affirming that non-combattant civilians still occupied many neighborhoods of that city. The delegation, consisting of about fifty doctors, nurses, teachers, shopkeepers and their families told reporters that they were concerned about recent statements by the Prime Minister that only "terrorists, insurgents loyal to Sadam Hussein, and foreign interlopers" now lived in the ancient sprawling town, and that all peace loving Iraqis had fled the rebel stronghold long ago. In a statement later that day, Allawi told the press that the delegation had offered no concrete support for their claims, and that, thus far, he had received no reports from US and Iraqi forces of a single civilian still occupying the city.

"The Western press," said Allawi, "is far too gullible. You believe the unsupported claims of parties with obvious ulterior motives. Of course doctors and nurses are going to say that." When asked about the petition, he said that his years working with the CIA taught him how easy it is to forge such documents, and that most of the people had probably been bribed to sign it. "They hope that by putting me in the impossible position of trying to prove a negative, they can slow down our plans to liberate Mosul from the terrorists that now occupy it. The burden of proof should be on them, as they're the ones making positive claims, and so far, I'm not convinced." He suggested that if the delegation of families persisted in making such "irresponsible and unsupported allegations," they should go back to Mosul and get some real proof of the supposed civilians living there. When asked what would constitute proof, the Prime Minister rejected video tapes, photographs, or audio tapes from unconfirmable sources, all of which, he said, could be doctored. "I guess that's their problem," he said.

Touch Screen Machines to be Used for Opinion Poll on Iraq War and Recruiting Stations

2004-11-20T13:01:00.000-05:00

serving your country's never been easier

Citing concern that the American people were not given an adequate opportunity to voice their opinions concerning the ongoing war in Iraq during the last election, the Pentagon has announced a plan to make a broad survey of opinions across the entire US population. To facilitate this survey, touch screen machines will be distributed to public facilities throughout the nation by Diebold Inc. which will allow citizens to register their support for or opposition to the war. Of particular interest to the Pentagon are the opinions of military service eligible youths from 18 to 28 years of age who's future, said General Richard Myers, will be particularly effected by the future course of the conflict. Because of this concern, the electronic polling machines will be delivered to high schools and college campuses in addition to government buildings, parks, and other public spaces. In addition to providing the federal government with a way of accurately measuring the will of the American people concerning the prosecution of the war in Iraq, the machines will also be equipped with a recruiting facility making it easier for those ready to volunteer for military service to do so without the sometimes difficult and costly trip to a recruiter's office.

A preview of the machines presented to reporters by Diebold shows a touch screen with three selection boxes labeled respectively:

I support the war in Iraq
I oppose the war in Iraq
I hereby volunteer for military service in Iraq

After entering name and Social Security number, citizens will touch a box next to one of the first two choices. Those within the eligible age range may then decide additionally to select the third choice. The Pentagon hopes that the convenience of enlisting via the new machines will greatly assist in what are becoming critical troop shortages in Iraq and elsewhere. Gen. Myers said that the Pentagon was aware of the difficulties involved in finding time to visit sometimes remote recruiting offices and that efforts at outreach placed too much pressure on potential recruits to make a decision they maybe hadn't been ready to make. The machines, he said, will allow those considering volunteering for military service to think through their decisions at their own pace.

Gen. Myers said that at the end of six months the Pentagon will use the results of the survey to formulate a better sense of the degree of support for its current operations than could have been gleaned from last month's election results, given the fact that both candidates spent most of the campaign trying to outdo eachother's warfighting qualifications. "We will only fight the wars that the American people ask us to," said Gen. Myers, and he conceded that the unanimous support for the war in Iraq by all voters in all states might have been skewed.

When asked whether, unlike the machines used in the recent election, these would produce a paper receipt allowing for a recount in case of any glitches, Katherine Harris, Diebold's new spokesperson said that the technological challenges involved in accurate paper receipts were still being explored and likely would be solved by the next round of national elections. She went on to say that there were many safeguards in place and that there was absolutely no chance of a miscount.

Supreme Court Split Over Marine Partial Birth Abortion

2004-11-18T23:41:00.000-05:00

Potential terrorists still roam the streets of Fallujah

With Chief Justice William Rehnquist still recuperating from cancer surgery, the Supreme Court today remained evenly divided over whether the death of an infant being delivered in a hospital in Fallujah qualified as a partial birth abortion. The arguments on both sides concern the fact that the newborn was still attached to the mother at the time of its death, raising the question of whether recent anti-abortion laws passed by the interim government of Iyad Allawi, in consultation with Jerry Falwell's Faith and Values Coalition, defined the death as a war crime. Initial complaints leveled by the obstetrician who was seized by a Marine storming the hospital before the umbilical cord could be cut were dismissed by a US military panel as a "good kill." Let's face it, said Major Rommel who oversaw the panel, "it's not likely the kid would have grown up to love Americans. The odds are pretty good we have one less terrorist to deal with later on down the line." But the details of the case were somehow leaked to Falwell's offices where, as one witness put it, "all hell broke loose."

After threatening to withdraw their support for the war, Falwell's organization succeeded in having the case heard in civilian court where it quickly found its way to the Supreme Court docket. Arguments over the precise definition of "partial birth abortion" seem to have the court hopelessly deadlocked, as the only expert witness offering to provide a definition received his MD from Mr Falwell's university and started talking in tongues as soon as he began to be examined by the Justices. At one point, Clarence Thomas, who some have suggested will replace Rehnquist as Chief Justice later this year, suggested classifying the infant's death as an "after birth abortion," but his fellow conservatives on the bench immediately objected that this new category might complicate the further progress of Iraq liberation efforts.

The case promises to open up a whole range of legal issues surrounding the rights of Marines to perform de facto abortions under the new rules instituted by the interim Iraqi government. For example, if a pregnancy is terminated after fifteen weeks because the mother has her head blown off, a US soldier may be liable for prosecution in Iraq depending on the interpretation of certain language in the new rules. Many such questions will have to wait until Arabic speakers with sufficient education and intelligence to comprehend legal arguments can be found who are acceptable to US and Iraqi officials. For his part, Falwell is adamant that the umbilical cord must be severed for the child's killing to be "good in the sight of God." "The victim was still a fetus," he said, "and therefore a human being, and this Marine is guilty of murder."

The Marine private who has been singled out as the one who let the fetus drop to the floor is charged with performing an illegal abortion paid for with government funds and is being held incommunicado at a secret location. Falwell suggested he should be sent to Egypt with the rest of the abortion loving liberals where "they know what medical instruments are for."

Powell: Krazy Il Kim’s Dongs are Pointed at America

2004-11-16T07:22:00.000-05:00

Koreans still thought to have No Dongs

Outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell today accused the North Korean government of having No Dongs. "We've known for some time that Kim was developing a Dong that could reach across the Pacific Ocean. He thinks that threatening the United States will improve his negotiating position, but we're not about to let a bunch of Korean No Dongs determine our foreign policy," he told the UN Security Council on Wednesday.

In response to these charges by the Bush administration, Hans Blix of the IAEA said that the claim that the North Koreans could get their Dongs operational in 45 minutes was an exaggeration, and that in any case the Dongs would be impossible to hide. "The US would have a hundred photos of their Dongs before they could even get them up," he insisted. He furthermore stated that, although Pyongyang had recently deployed a number of Dongs, they were now cooperating with the UN timetable to withdraw all their Dongs over the next six months.

While the Dong is classified as a conventional weapon, it can be refitted as a Weapon of Mass Destruction. When fully deployed, Korean Dongs are capable of delivering a twenty megaton load. Concern is being expressed by the administration, however, over the prospect of the Dongs falling into the wrong hands. "The North Koreans have not demonstrated the capacity to handle their Dongs responsibly," said anonymous White House official Pudgy Waterhouse. "If the leadership thinks it's acceptable behavior to wave their Dongs around whenever they crave attention, how likely is it that they are taking sufficient security measures to ensure that terrorists or rogue elements don't get their hands on them?"

Blix, furthermore, insisted that it was next to impossible for the Koreans to place a Dong within US airspace, and that even if Kim were crazy enough to try to penetrate a back door in US defenses, the Dong would be detected by missile defense technology newly deployed in Alaska and rendered incapable of delivering its payload. The CIA, however, is concerned that an extremist anti-American faction in possession of a nuclear tipped Dong might use it even less responsibly than Pyongyang. If a rogue Dong did achieve its target from Korean soil, US defenses would assume an attack by North Korea and launch a counterattack immediately, incinerating Pyongyang. While acknowledging the terrible injustice of launching a retaliatory strike against the wrong target, Mr Waterhouse insisted it could not be prevented. "Currently there's no paternity test for Korean Dongs," he quipped. He went on to confirm Powell's charge that the Koreans had developed No Dongs. "Beyond that," he added, "the White House has no intelligence."

Former President Nostalgic for Hollywood

2004-11-16T06:59:00.000-05:00

The Bush family toboggan affectionately known as das boot

Expressing disappointment at his son's command of the English language, former president George HW Bush today confided to Unconfirmed Sources that plans were in place to go back to using Hollywood actors to fill the role of President of the United States in 2008. The aging Bush, who served his country as head of CIA, where he got extensive experience with the rigging of elections all over the world, before spending twelve years in the White House himself, confessed nostalgia for the days of Ronald Reagan. "He was a moron, too, but he could memorize and deliver the lines we gave him like he meant it. We had the world by the short and curlies back then," Bush reminisced. "Jr. can't even handle the teleprompters when we give him a bouncing ball to show him where to pause, and when he tries to ad-lib his press conferences, well, it's just embarrassing."

First on the list of prospective successors to the office is Arnold Schwarzenegger who will have completed the term as Governor prerequisite to being cast as a legitimate presidential candidate when the younger Bush leaves office. Bush Sr. conceded that it would be necessary to rewrite the Constitution in order for the Austrian born actor to be installed, but he insisted that it would be "a damn sight easier" than engineering the recall that put him in the California state house. "The Constitution's been rewritten over twenty times," said Bush, "usurping political office between elections is something you can only get away with once—unless you luck into some Polaroids, or a plane crash," he added with a wink.

Comparing Arnold's acting talents to Reagan, Bush declared that the bodybuilder was even worse than the late president on screen, but noted that his thick accent obscured his lack of comprehension and emotional range allowing him to pull off roles as robots and stony faced Russian spies fairly convincingly. "If you're going to put somebody up there at the White House podium who doesn't understand what he's saying and can't speak proper English, you're better off with a foreigner that has an excuse than with an Ivy league native speaker that people can see is an idiot," the elder Bush observed. "there's a certain amount of suspension of disbelief involved in creating the illusion that people are listening to a man of great personal conviction, and that's something Hollywood actors understand. They know how to take direction and to get into different characters for each particular audience." Bush admitted that Schwarzenegger could only manage about a character and a half, but claimed that "that's all you really need for the role of president."

Asked why he had chosen the current governor of California to succeed his son, the former president was evasive. He did, however, confess a personal affection for him. "My father, as you probably know, had numerous friends and business partners in Austria during the Second World War, and Arnold is just the type of guy he would have tried to help. I guess I'm a chip off the old block." As to whether he thought the American people would not realize that the Constitution had been changed just to make Schwarzenegger's installation possible, Bush remarked that "even Lincoln said you can fool all the people some of the time and some of them all of the time. You only have to fool most of them some of the time in a Democracy, and not even that when you own the voting software."

George W. Bush Vows to Win "War on Puberty " In Second Term

2004-11-16T06:52:00.000-05:00

Bush launches preemptive invasion of privacy

Public high schools across the country are going to have to start teaching classes in sexual abstinence if they expect federal funding from the new Bush administration as part of an initiative dubbed the "War on Puberty." At a ceremony introducing the program's mascot, an animated teenager named Cherry Chastity, President Bush quipped: "I never understood the point of sex education personally; my kids already had too much of that when they got to high school." Other weapons anticipated in the War on Puberty are a modern version of the chastity belt produced by DynCorp that works like a modified stun gun and webcams prominently placed in bathroom stalls.

When asked how all this would be funded, Tom Ridge, whose Department of Homeland Security is to oversee the new program in conjunction with the Education Department, said that costs would be kept down by the use primarily of dummy cameras which were found to be as effective as live ones. Many of the "stallcams" in certain troubled districts will be operational, however, and parents will be able to log onto the internet from work or home to see what little Johnny and Suzy and their friends are doing when away from direct adult supervision.

The new program, which is expected to reduce the rate of STD's, teen pregnancy, and abortion by as much as a whole percentage point, was cheered by members of the Christian Coalition, some of whom prostrated themselves before the president and began speaking in tongues.

To tentative suggestions by two or three Democrats that they were anxious that perhaps some of the planned measures might possibly be perceived maybe by some people hypothetically as an invasion of privacy, Bush replied that "extremists in the Democratic party don't seem to realize that the world has changed since September 11th, and the enemy is no longer attacking us only from beyond our borders."

Ridge went on to affirm that "sleeper cells of potential evil doers and those that harbor them" have already been detected in a number of states. "It makes no sense to sit back and wait until evil is propertuated [sic] before taking action," Bush said. "The people came out on election day and asked me to protect them from evil doers, and if that takes preemptive invasions of privacy, I'm not about to let a bunch of trial lawyer mumbo jumbo stop me. When I said I had I mandate," he joked, "I wasn't talking about Jim McGreevey."