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Diego Garcia: Grunts Sense Tsunamis in Advance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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?

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

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

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

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.