A Mexican judge has dismissed charges against a former domestic security chief accused in the disappearance of six reputed guerrillas at the height of the government's 'dirty war' against insurgents.

Miguel Nazar Haro had been accused of a direct role in the disappearance of six members of Brigada Lacandona, a 1970s guerrilla faction. But the judge found there was not enough evidence to show he was involved.

most of them children. Twenty-three of them

In Baghdad, an attack has been carried out on relatives of Mohammed al-Ureybi, the judge presiding over the trial of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Their car was fired at by several gunmen. Police say the judge's brother-in-law was killed, while his sister and ten-year-old nephew were injured.

"The only one who didn't call was God"

change of agenda:

Cases of corruption come and go; the public anger they generate is inevitably diluted by the slow pace at which the legal system delivers justice. All the while, the country stays wrapped in a near-permanent bulletproof vest, preparing for the next war even as we recover from the last one.

And throughout, we Israelis insist that we are the victims. When we harass and when we rape, when we mislead and when we deceive, when we kill and bombard or when we get killed — it is always explainable and excusable, without a meddlesome inquiry committee and without too many regrets.

For years, we have believed Israel to be a country whose vast military power is tempered by moral strength, supported by social solidarity and guided by well-balanced leadership. The recent war with Hezbollah shattered, at great cost, what was left of this belief.

Yael Dayan/Forward 29.09.06

you can say that again:

The state's chief medical expert in defense of its lethal injection procedures testified Thursday that doctors who reported apparent problems in past executions at San Quentin State Prison probably didn't understand what they were seeing.

Egelko/Chronicle 29.09.06

You know that these things are black and white:

I found the Saints' victory last night really stirring, you know, to see New Orleans come back that way.

RICE:Yeah. First of all, I can't tell you how tired I am of getting up and reading leaked documents in the newspaper. I think it's - it really is not responsible. And people who do it are acting irresponsibly especially in a time of war.
Secondly, there were selective pieces leaked, and the President said today that they were going to declassify the key judgments. And I think people will see that it's a much more complex argument that's being made in the NIE. But let me just take on the argument itself. In the idea that because we're finally confronting terrorists, because we're actually fighting them in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, that they're -- that's making more of them, is the implication then that we should stop fighting them, that we should stop going on the offense?
The fact is they always had an excuse for fighting us, whether it was that we had troops in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War or whether it was that we were in Afghanistan or now in Iraq, they've always had an excuse. And they attacked us in 1993, in 1998, in 2000 with the Cole, and then finally on September 11th. And we weren't fighting in Iraq at any of those times.

HANNITY: Well, I think the President was very clever considering it was cherry picked and leaked to the media, which I agree with you is really troubling to anybody. I said, all right, well, let's release all of this to the public and let them be able to examine it for themselves and not just have selected information put out there. But you rightly point out that this was predicated on the idea that somehow they wanted to get along with us and that they weren't attacking us all along the way. The 9/11 Commission Report said that they were at war with us; we were not at war with them.

RICE: That's right. They were at war with us, and we were not at war with them. Now we're at war with them.

Condoleeza Rice Interview With Sean Hannity
The Sean Hannity Show
ScoopNZ 26.09.06
-
It's hard, to get to it, so much of the noise seems so reasonable, so much of the insanity makes sense when you take it apart and don't look at anything else.

"Gaza is a prison; and Israel seems to have thrown away the key," John Dugard, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, told a session of the Human Rights Council.

That story, the UN special rapporteur saying the Israelis have turned Gaza into a prison, that's central, that's Nazareth, Bethlehem, the star in the East. Birth pangs, baby.
bin Laden says 9/11 was about the Palestinians - but that never made it to the table Americans sit at when they discuss terrorism with each other.
Even now, it's brushed aside.
AlQa'ida is the enemy

"alQa'ida will continue to pose the greatest threat to the Homeland and US interests abroad by a single terrorist organization"

that's the leaked document, that's the intelligence report, that's what the best we have say is happening right now.
AlQa'ida took down the WTC.
And AlQa'ida said it was in response to what was being done to Arabs, to the Arab world, and the first specific instance of what was being done that they named, that bin Laden named as cause, was Palestine.
And the UN special rapporteur for Palestine now says the Israelis have turned it into a veritable prison, and thrown away the key.
And Condoleeza Rice, who is so disconnected from her own history that she can say on national television that the lesson she carries from the Birmingham church bombing is that "...there really is good and evil"
that "...these things are black and white"
says there's no reason.
The remote diagnostic is hatred. She hated the whites who bombed the church, and she hated the ignorant blacks who met the stereotypes of their bigotry, she hated everyone but the successful - the clean-living, viciously judgmental, but not racially prejudiced; prejudiced in favor of ambition, pride, determination - and scornful of despair, apathy, surrender - with contempt for the degraded of both races.
But she could only live that out by amputation, divorce, and it's coloring the world she sees, the world she's so prominent in.
That same soul-schism's working in her bizarre comment about New Orleans.
There really is good and evil, just like there really is hot and cold, and light and darkness; and when you make yourself the center of the moral universe, evil will always be what harms or threatens you. Something that wants to destroy your world is evil, but if you do it yourself, accidentally, that's not evil. A man who butchers an innocent family is horribly evil, but a car wreck that does the same thing isn't evil, just an accident.
I don't have any illusions about how personally dangerous jihadis and fundamentalist Islamic hatred are to me, as an American, as what they would call a Christian - but Sean Hannity and Condoleeza Rice and the people they stand for and the things they stand for are dangerous enough, to me, that truthfully putting one above the other is impossible. And Hannity and Rice are operating a lot closer to where I live.

If the bill passes, it won't matter

Geldof Lebanon
-
Bono Lebanon
-
Geldof Lebanon Bono

he was loath to declassify any classified document:

The Bush administration released late this afternoon declassified parts of a major intelligence report stating that intelligence agencies found the Iraq war had become a "cause celebre" for Islamic militants, and that Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups present a serious and continuing threat to the United States.

"The Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere," excerpts from the report said.

Knowlton/NYTimes 26.09.06
-
United States-led counterterrorism efforts have seriously damaged the leadership of alQa'ida and disrupted its operations; however, we judge that alQa'ida will continue to pose the greatest threat to the Homeland and US interests abroad by a single terrorist organization. We also assess that the global jihadist movement - which includes alQa'ida, affiliated and independent terrorist groups, and emerging networks and cells - is spreading and adapting to counterterrorism efforts.

• Although we cannot measure the extent of the spread with precision, a large body of all-source reporting indicates that activists identifying themselves as jihadists, although a small percentage of Muslims, are increasing in both number and geographic dispersion.
• If this trend continues, threats to US interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide.
• Greater pluralism and more responsive political systems in Muslim majority nations would alleviate some of the grievances jihadists exploit.
• Over time, such progress, together with sustained, multifaceted programs targeting the vulnerabilities of the jihadist movement and continued pressure on alQa'ida, could erode support for the jihadists.

Declassified Key Judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate
"Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States"
dated April 2006 [pdf]

ICG provided grief counseling to Sago employees
after the accident and has since renewed the offer:

"I'm not sure anybody ever gets over it," said Vickie Boni, the former wife of John Nelson Boni, who police said shot himself Saturday at his home in Volga. "You live with it every day."

Both Boni and William Lee (Flea) Chisolm, 47, who authorities said shot himself at his Belington home Aug. 29, were working at the Sago Mine on the day of the blast and had been questioned by investigators along with dozens of other witnesses.

A former co-worker of Boni's said investigators made them feel like they had done something wrong. Ron Grall, who escaped with Boni and the rest of their crew that day, said: "They treated me the same way. They acted like it was our fault, like we did it."

Mine owner International Coal Group has said it believes a lightning bolt somehow ignited methane gas that had accumulated naturally in a sealed-off section of the mine.

Smith/AP/CBS
-
The Manchin administration has yet to start spending a federal grant approved five months ago meant to help provide counseling to residents struggling with the lingering trauma of the Sago Mine disaster.
Federal officials approved the $35,000 grant in April, but the state has not released the funding to the Appalachian Community Mental Health Center in Elkins.

"We're not sure where it is," said Richard Kiley, a licensed psychologist and director of the Elkins center.

Ward/CharlestonGazette
-

"With all these roof falls and everything that has happened over the multiple months, not weeks, MONTHS, that this has happened, and they STILL send men in there?"

John Bennett, son of a Sago miner, confronting West Virginian Gov. Joe Manchin Today show, Jan. 4, 2005

The miners knew the Sago Mine was unsafe. And their families in the surrounding towns knew it too. The slap-on-the-wrist fines of the mine inspectors left an unmistakable paper trail for everyone else - serious violations jumped four times in 2005 over 2004.

Mike Ely/Counterpunch January 2006

-
It was the worst week of Wilbur Ross' life, that week those guys were trapped down there. Not much danger of him suiciding, though.
All in all he's keeping pretty busy.
That's the ticket, that's the key - keeping busy.

Tears can get contagious:

When the United States sent Maher Arar to Syria, where he was tortured for months, the deportation order stated unequivocally that Mr. Arar, a Canadian software engineer, was a member of Al Qaeda. But a few days earlier, Canadian investigators had told the F.B.I. that they had not been able to link him to the terrorist group.
[...]
Mr. Arar spent 10 months in the custody of Syrian interrogators who beat him repeatedly with a heavy metal cable and held him in a dank cell scarcely larger than a coffin, according to the commission report. In October 2003, he was released and returned to his wife and children in Canada.

Shane/NYTimes 25.09.06
-

For those who have suffered losses in the wars he initiated, Bush prefers to offer comfort in private. He writes letters to families of those killed, visits soldiers at military hospitals and meets with relatives of the dead. Altogether, according to the White House, Bush has met with 1,149 relatives of 336 dead service members. These sessions generate little attention because the White House bars journalists, but some relatives have described them.
"It's absolutely painful for him," said Beth Karlson, 63, a retired school food-service manager whose son died in Iraq and who met with Bush in Wisconsin last month. The president hugged her and held her hand. "He's a genuine person. He wants to reach out to the families and let them know how he feels."

Baker/WaPo 25.09.06

ABC News - Terrorists Could Target the Food Supply:

"Agro terrorism is clearly one of the pillars of terrorism that we worry about," said Vahid Majidi, assistant director for the FBI Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate.

Former U.S. counterterrorism czar Dick Clarke agreed.

"There are clearly people in other countries, who are hostile to the United States, who have the knowledge to be able to wipe out a food crop or to be able to poison a food crop," said Clarke, now an ABC News consultant.

It's the kind of nightmare scenario that used to keep Tommy Thompson, former head of Health and Human Services, up at night.

ABCNews 24.09.06
-

Agro terrorism, Dick Clarke, Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate?
One of the reasons illegal immigration's become such a knee-jerk excitement issue is there's a percieved overpopulation in the US. Not enough gas, not enough water, not enough of a lot of things and too much and too many of other, not-good things mostly coming from having too many people around.
Blaming everything on terrorists is so easy, you just know someone, somewhere, some day, has got to be tempted to at least try to pawn off some heinous move or disastrous incompetence on them, or "them".
"Terrorists have thinned the population down to a nice sustainable level. Terrorists have reduced the over-population problem. Terrorists have made it possible for us to continue to drive our Ford Expulsions and our Lincoln Annihilators.
Plus real estate prices have really come down."
Every cloud has a silver lining.

woe:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.
Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous,
and say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.
Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets.
Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers.
Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers

Bartleby - KJV
-

FRANCISCO LETELIER: The declassification of the documents is essential. It's essential not only for, as Peter says, historical purposes and the case here in the United States, but it's also very important for legal efforts occurring now in Santiago. An enormous issue that's raised in this case is the idea of impunity, impunity by people who are entrenched in power and who hide behind the scenes.
Pinochet and the other individuals that worked to murder my father had already joined in to Operation Condor, which was occurring throughout Latin America and the United States. My father's murder, Ronni's murder, was part of Operation Condor.
[...]
PETER KORNBLUH: Well, Luis Posada Carriles and three other anti-Castro Cubans were caught in Panama with 35 pounds of C-4 explosive. They apparently had planned to blow up an auditorium that Fidel Castro was going to be speaking in that would have killed many, many innocent people. And they were finally prosecuted and sentenced to eight years for - not for an assassination attempt, but for a threat to public security. After four years, they were actually pardoned by the outgoing Panamanian president, a conservative. There is some allegation that wealthy Cubans in Miami paid off the president and his people to issue this pardon. Posada became a fugitive. Then Guillermo Novo and two others flew back to Miami. There was a group of anti-Castro Cubans waiting at the airport applauding him. Guillermo Novo was intricately involved in the assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt. He actually served two years in prison for perjury in that case.

Democracy Now!
-
Venezuela's foreign minister said he was illegally detained for 90 minutes by officials at a New York airport and accused them of treating him abusively by trying to frisk and handcuff him.
[...]
"We were detained for an hour and a half, threatened by police with being beaten," Maduro told reporters at Venezuela's mission to the U.N. "We hold the U.S. government responsible."

ABC News

We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise:

...the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.

To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.

...religion, "The End of Faith" major religions global civilization priests, journalists, scientists, politicians, soldiers, rabbis, actors, aid workers, students belief and nonbelief all creeds and political persuasions religion liberals and conservatives religion human conflict future of liberalism liberal bone fides Bush administration war in Iraq science liberals liberalism realities devout Muslims West paradise faith national security liberals religious demagogues Christian right acquiescence liberals terrorism cult of death Muslim world Islamic doctrines martyrdom and jihad war on terror
pestilential theology and a longing for paradise
Muslims death in defense of the faith good cartoonists the prophet Muslim faith apostasy religious extremism studies Muslims educations religious ideas society economic intellectual resources
nuclear bomb 72 virgins in paradise evidence liberals Muslim terrorism economic despair lack of education and American militarism liberal denial subculture of conspiracy theorists atrocities of 9/11 government poll Americans government
9/11 terrorist attacks United States Middle East 16%
twin towers jets agents Bush administration eruption of masochistic unreason liberalism decline of Western civilization phantasmagoria debilitating dogma liberalism Western power malevolent powerless people of the Earth reason and tolerance economic opportunities engineers and architects journalists fantasy Muslims Islam Muslims sociopathic behavior benighted religious solidarity greatest problem civilization obfuscated by liberals mendacity incompetence Bush administration mishandling Iraq liberals conservative war on terror liberals hate administration fail dangerous depraved enemies Muslim condemnations Bush administration Islamic fascism Islamists fascists schisms Islamists propaganda alleged liberals analyses U.S. and Israeli liberals basic moral distinctions fact Muslims murder noncombatants we and the Israelis avoid Muslims routinely use human shields collateral damage we and the Israelis cause political discourse Muslim world
especially with respect to Jews
is explicitly and unabashedly genocidal distinctions
no question Israelis moral high ground
conflict Hamas Hezbollah liberals United States Europe speak truth otherwise age of unchecked nuclear proliferation nuclear terrorism no future martyrs good neighbors us liberals millions Muslim world scarier Cheney unable protect civilization genuine enemies Americans believe people hard-headed fight religious lunatics Muslim world religious lunatics people with the greatest moral clarity Middle East members of the Christian right infatuation biblical prophecy troubling ideology enemies Religious dogmatism dangerous game liberals Iron Age madness increasingly irrelevant reasonable and tolerant of diversity liberals dangers religious literalism failure of liberalismWestern Europe dogma of multiculturalism secular Europe slow looming problem of religious extremism immigrants people speak most sensibly threat Islam Europe fascists bode well liberalism understatement:
It does not bode well for the future of civilization.

Sam Harris/LATimes 18.09.06
-
So we're clear on this:
As far as I can tell from what I've read the "twin towers" came down as a result of fast-buck construction and massive architectural trauma.
But there are anomalies, coincidences, and a lot of little people's lives have been thrown away since 2001. Whoever was willing to sacrifice all those American kids in Iraq - not to mention the Iraqis - obviously wouldn't have a problem with other deadly conspiratoid scenes.
Not all of it's dismissable as paranoia; and in a time like this the word "conspiracy" has no useful meaning left.
Everybody's conspiring, man.
Sam Harris would appear to be a "sleeper", called into action to cowboy the herd back toward docile acceptance of the way forward. He earned his bona fides in popularizing semi-new-age attitudes toward spirituality, back when it was still relatively easy to talk about spiritual things publicly without committing to a hard-line position. Credentialed, waiting.
Now there's a lot of temptation to crawl under the couch and pull some cushions over your head.
People want it to be okay, they want it to be what the big voices are telling us.
There's an enemy out there that wants to cut our heads off and make our women wear long shapeless clothes.
But it doesn't really look like that's the case. Too many lies, too many examples of covert foreign influence and behind-the-scenes control.
So Harris gets the nod and swings into action.
Chavez' dramatic exorcism of the UN podium the other day probably played some part in the decision to have Harris run a flanking move on an awakening American public.
Notice the worsening climate gets no mention at all.
That would be because:

a. it's a hoax just like the climate deniers on the Exxon payroll have been saying
b. it's planned for, and at this stage unnecessary to confuse the world-view of the simple folk
c. the decision-makers are as freaked out about it, and as unable to come directly to grips with it, as most of the rest of us.

Politics, even at the disgusting level Harris is operating on, is a relief from the possibility of a melting world.

A modest suggestion for wikipedia, to avoid the neutered banality of the non-commited, non-committal entry.
Branch from the original toward the actual biased entries, more than one. Partisan edits toward polarization linked to from header article.
So that entries like this, on Filiberto Ojeda Rios, Puerto Rican hero, can be more than an obviously bowdlerized collection of statistics.
Branch one out to the FBI-philic, another toward the Independencias. Let the reader decide. This fence-straddling is weak, and conveys timidity where there should be passion.

link Open Democracy

RIP, all of them

We're not being seen as:

"...to capture terrorists, to detain terrorists, to question terrorists, and then to try them."

The White House yesterday reached a compromise with Republican senators over treatment standards for the nation's most dangerous terrorism suspects, with President Bush declaring that "the most potent tool we have" - aggressive interrogations - will continue.

He said the president will issue an executive order outlining "standards and regulations" governing interrogations, but said it will not mention specific methods because that would allow terrorists to train for ways to frustrate those methods.

Klein/Globe 22.09.06
-
Most dangerous suspects. Suspects meaning you're not sure, meaning you suspect them.
None of these lightweights ever talks about what happens to the ones who weren't terrorists after all. Oh well. Another disposable human being.
Capture, detain, question, torture, and then try them.
In the name of democracy and freedom.

QUESTION: Thank you.

QUESTION: (Inaudible) suspension (inaudible)

SECRETARY RICE: Suspension for suspension. If there is to be - if there is to be negotiations, they need to suspend.

QUESTION: Thank you.

worse than under:

Italy, the last major Western European ally of the United States and Britain in Iraq, ended its mission on Thursday, handing the province under its control over to Iraqi troops.

Cinelli/Reuters 21.09.06

Speaking of illegal immigration - to get the whole "fence out the little brown people" US-Mexican border fence thing in perspective, try imagining the threat to the southern border coming from blacks instead.

crazy weather:

Sir Richard Branson has pledged three billion dollars (1.6 billion pounds) towards renewable energy initiatives, saying business had a duty to future generations.
He said the money would come from the Virgin empire's airline and train businesses, adding that he hoped the move would encourage others to "do what they can".
-
The global sea level rise caused by climate change, severely threatening many of the world's coastal and low-lying areas from Bangladesh to East Anglia, is proceeding faster than UN scientists predicted only five years ago, Professor Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, said yesterday.
[...]
Last week, two American studies showed that the melting of the winter sea ice in the Arctic had accelerated enormously in the past two years, with a section the size of Turkey disappearing in just 12 months.
-
Another summer of record-breaking temperatures brought power failures, heat waves, droughts and tropical storms throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia. Only one place seemed to remain cool: the air-conditioned offices of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. As New York City wilted beneath them, they sat insouciant and comfortable, hurling editorials of stunning misdirection at their readers, continuing their irresponsible drumbeat that global warming is junk science.
-
Global warming might cause an increase in illegal immigration as people "flee storm-ravaged or sun-parched regions" to find refuge in the U.S., according to an expert who addressed a gathering on climate change in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.
"Large-scale climatic disruptions in nearby nations, such as Mexico or Caribbean Island nations," may result in "spillover effects on the health system in the U.S.," said Devra Lee Davis, director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, in an abstract on the subject, "Changes in Severe Weather and Climate: Implications for Human Health."
-
Some travel agencies touting Arctic tours have been revving up their recent promotions to tourists about the increased likelihood they will spot polar bears in this region where several populations of polar bears live. According to scientists from NASA and the Canadian Wildlife Service, these increased Arctic polar bear sightings are probably related to retreating sea ice triggered by climate warming and not due to population increases as some may believe.
The new research suggests that progressively earlier breakup of the Arctic sea ice, stimulated by climate warming, shortens the spring hunting season for female polar bears in Western Hudson Bay and is likely responsible for the continuing fall in the average weight of these bears.
-
The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew has issued a "position paper" saying that man-made global warming is changing the outlook for plants and trees worldwide.
It says four species on its own lands are flowering earlier each year.
Kew's conservation scientists say other human activities such as the expansion of cities are also hurting plants, some which poorer societies depend on.
-

and, to show we haven't lost our sense of fun:

Global warming might cause an increase in illegal immigration as people "flee storm-ravaged or sun-parched regions" to find refuge in the U.S., according to an expert who addressed a gathering on climate change in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.

an aggressive legal posture in California:

The state attorney general's office is seeking unspecified damages from General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Honda, Toyota and Nissan because they "either knew or should have known the severe impact their vehicles would have on the health of the planet".

Gumbel/IndependentUk 21.09.06

BY GEORGE BUSH
some brief opening remarks have been omitted.

At the start of the 21st century, it is clear that the great use terror as a weapon to create fear, and work.

Five years ago, I stood and called on a world where ordinary men and women are marginalized by desperate poverty.

As liberty was ruled by the brutal and freely elected government which is represented today by a dictator who killed his neighbors and showed his contempt for the world. Now the President announced that half the women were to run and continue to move at a different pace, and the traditions where people live with each other and the changes we're seeing are destabilizing, the reality we thought we saw was a mirage, millions of men and women trapped in a country that is not moving.
You're 21 years old, and while your peers in other parts of the world are powerless your peers in other parts of the world have been fed shortcomings. And everywhere you turn, you hear misery and violence and martyrdom. For many this is the dismal day.
Every civilized Muslim must blow themselves up when leaders are accountable to decent men and women who want their children to speak propaganda. This propaganda is false, and its purpose is to confuse our people the car bombers and assassins firm in the face of horrendous acts your struggle to build the government you stepped forward to fight. We will not yield the future.
In return, your leaders brought death to the citizens of many nations, we have watched your democratic government serving side by side with the extremists. We'll help these enemies and build a safe haven for terrorists.

To the people of Lebanon: you have seen your homes and communities caught by a model of democracy - and it will be again.

To the people of Iran: The United States have chosen to deny you liberty and to use your nation's resources to fuel extremism. Iran must abandon its pursuit of a truly peaceful solution to this crisis. And as we do, we look to the day when you can be the people of Syria: Your land is a crossroad for the world.

To the people of Darfur: You have suffered unspeakable violence, and my nation is not strong enough to protect you.

So today I'm announcing that I'm committed to Israel. I'm committed to the Jewish state of Israel. This is the vision set forth in the map of the objectives of my presidency.
The Palestinian people have suffered from brutal acts of terrorism and constant fear of attack. Many brave extremists are in the Palestinian territories. The world is waiting to see whether Israel's Prime Minister Olmert is committed, and I support Israeli leaders. Prime Minister Blair has indicated we can help Israelis build a Holy Land.

Freedom, by its nature, cannot be gathered in this chamber. America has made its choice: We wrote me a letter.
"The journey demands perseverance."
The United Nations was created to support the dreams of God.

It smells of sulfur here, but God is with us

modus vivendi-making:

It is not "settlements," not checkpoints, not the Security Fence - not Israel - that prevents the evolution of a more peaceful Middle East or even the establishment of a Palestinian State. It is Palestinian behavior and the President quite rightly focused his attention on that point and left Israel out.

JINSA 20.09.06

"I still don't do carrots"

"We're not going to address that kind of comic strip approach to international affairs," said John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

No matter what

there is no such thing as a liberal hawk

In a very real way this constant threat of terror - coming from those who are supposedly going to protect us from it - is itself a form of torture: a traumatic application of the painful, then the controlled and precise reminder of that application - the beefy police sergeant with his sleeves rolled up slapping the rubber hose against his beefy palm, a glimpse of the humming transformer and the electrodes dangling from it.
"If we can't torture, if we aren't allowed to torture, if you won't give us permission to torture - bad things will happen to you."

the trees are full of bomblets
the trees are still full of bomblets

links validated

"a brighter, secure and more prosperous future"

a substantial break from Iraq's past

John R. Bolton To UNSC - The Situation in Iraq
I am pleased to report to the Security Council on behalf of the 29 countries making up the Multinational Forces-Iraq (MNF-I), on the Force's progress towards fulfilling its mandate

The sustained level of ethno-sectarian violence is one of the most significant threats to security and stability in Iraq.
Nonetheless, the Iraqi people continue to reject overwhelmingly violence as a means to drive political change
[...]
Although Baghdad remains the focus for sectarian and terrorist violence in Iraq, violence tied to the Rejectionist insurgency, terrorist intimidation, political and tribal tensions and criminality continue in other regions.
[...]
The Iraqi people continue to express confidence in the Iraqi Army to provide for their security and to reject the extremists' vision of Iraq's future.
[...]
Mr. President, the evolution of a fully free, secure, and prosperous Iraq remains a work in progress.

State Dept. press release
ScoopNZ 18.09.06
-
The Rejectionist insurgency.

September 17, 2006

Initial attack activity was light nationally with 76 new fires reported. Two new large fires were reported one each in California and Missouri. Firefighters contained one large fire yesterday in Texas.

NIFC

Large Incidents September 17, 2006
MODIS Active Fire Mapping Program
RSAC

The Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group
To develop capabilities to quantitatively describe the structure and function of ecosystems, from regional to global scales, using emerging technologies in satellites, geographic information systems, computer simulation and visualization, and biophysical theory

Wives tell gangsters to lay down arms or go without sex

terrifying simplifications:

My own dark suspicion is that the neoconservatives in the U.S. - the powerful and secretive few that they are - actually believe that they can use these kind of provocations to homogenize the Islamic threat, bring everybody forward, radicalize them, and then bomb the hell out of them.

LeCarre/Jyllands-Posten/StarTribune 05.09.06
-
Instead of "failure in Lebanon", instead of the Israeli army beaten to a stand-off and finally submitting to a cease-fire, with the next stage of the game wide-open and unknown, try seeing it as a controlled and premeditated series of relatively precise and calculated moves.
By invading and then sort of withdrawing from Lebanon - or at least retiring to their corner like a winded boxer, claiming no new territory - the Israelis don't look like a colonizing invader whose might and intent, in context, are becoming scarily parallel to Germany's in the Anschluss.
As in any other military campaign, the element of surprise is key.
Public attitudes have incalculable weight now, and the linkage of information is so profound and rapid that those attitudes can shift dramatically within hours, even though the recognition of that power is almost a proprietary secret. It wouldn't do to have the public, especially the American public, wake up suddenly to how thoroughly and profoundly they've been lied to and taken advantage of, and it won't do to have the underdogs exposed as just as the opposite. Not yet anyway.
Instead they look - from a distance, through the fog of propaganda and an ever more tightly controlled media - like what they're representing themselves as being: victims, defending themselves against terrorist attack.
Flawed, less than glamorously competent, unable to win.
So that the next move will be much easier to sell to the people who are paying for it, and will inevitably require greater force.
In order to win they'll have to...
It's very much as though the stage is being set for a far more blatant and deadly campaign.
To bomb the hell out of them.

Los jodidos todavia permanezcans aqui :

In the end, the tribunal that ratified his victory on 5 September also refused a vote recount; for many, this was a confirmation of the irregularities tainting the election. As the confirmed elected president, Calderon now faces a decision that will allow him both to build bridges towards those who remain dissatisfied and demonstrate his commitment to transparency and democracy.
The name of this opportunity is citizen recount. After the election, some 800 individuals, businesses and organisations requested the Instituto Federal Electoral (IFE, Mexico's electoral institute) access to the voting ballots in order to perform a vote recount. Amongst the petitioners are the magazine Proceso and the newspaper El Universal, and even though the exercise lacks any legal value, it has enormous symbolic value.
[...]
In 1988 Carlos Salinas won thanks to a monumental electoral fraud, and months after its consummation, the then governing PRI and the Partido Accion Nacional (National Action Party / PAN) approved in congress the burning of the ballots that destroyed fundamental evidence about a key incident in Mexico's history.

Sergio Aguayo Quezada /openDemocracy 12.09.06
-
In other words, the electoral law, the one that's being cited by the IFE as the reason to burn the ballots and move on, was made to cover up the fraudulent election of a corrupt and criminal President, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and his corrupt and criminal party, the PRI.
The constant parroting by the US news media of the meaningless information that Obrador's a "leftist" means the conspiracy is continental and systemic.
Most Americans have no idea what being a "leftist" in Mexican politics means, or even what a "leftist" would want or hope for from political change.
At the same time most Americans are compassionate and giving people, and would do a lot to help those in need.
If they understood what they were looking at.

The following story is not one that leading US investigative media like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal should be proud of, because for reasons that are unclear, they basically dropped the ball on covering it back in the 1980s. But it certainly still deserves their attention now. As former Mexican President Miguel de la Madrid has now confirmed in his autobiography, published this week in Mexico City, former Michoacan State Governor and Mexico City Mayor Cuauhtemoc Cardenas would have won Mexico's 1988 Presidential election, if not for the systematic fraud committed by the PRI, de la Madrid's party.

The following article examines this 1988 Mexican electoral fraud, one of the first "computer-assisted" electoral frauds that we know of, in detail.

Submerging Markets 16.05.04

link NMM
-

Amigos!

The current members of IFE were appointed to 10-year terms in 2003. However, none of the nine members was approved by the PRD. The majority that elected them was made up of legislators from the PAN and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had ruled the country for seven decades until Fox won the elections in 2000.The chairman of the IFE, Luis Carlos Ugalde, is reportedly a friend of Calderon's, and served as an adviser to the PRI in the past.

IPS 28.08.06

Mr. Novak says:

"First, Armitage did not, as he now indicates, merely pass on something he had heard and that he 'thought' might be so. Rather, he identified to me the CIA division where Mrs. Wilson worked, and said flatly that she recommended the mission to Niger by her husband, former Amb. Joseph Wilson.

"Second, Armitage did not slip me this information as idle chitchat, as he now suggests. He made clear he considered it especially suited for my column..."

E&P 13.09.06
-
Although, as we know, having been assured of this by the nearly unanimous corporate voices of American news media, Mr. Armitage was acting solely and entirely and absolutely completely on his own. Case closed.

too late to worry about that now:

Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before being used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary said Tuesday.

The object is basically public relations. Domestic use would make it easier to avoid questions from others about possible safety considerations, said Secretary Michael Wynne.

"If we're not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation," said Wynne. "(Because) if I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press."

CNN 12.09.06

and monstrous:

"What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs," the head of an IDF rocket unit in Lebanon said regarding the use of cluster bombs and phosphorous shells during the war.

Quoting his battalion commander, the rocket unit head stated that the IDF fired around 1,800 cluster bombs, containing over 1.2 million cluster bomblets.

In addition, soldiers in IDF artillery units testified that the army used phosphorous shells during the war, widely forbidden by international law. According to their claims, the vast majority of said explosive ordinance was fired in the final 10 days of the war.

Meron Rapoport/HaAretz 12.09.06
-

Just World News/Helena Cobban

before destroying them to erase doubt:

Electoral officials said Tuesday that they will burn the ballots from the disputed presidential election despite calls from both candidates to spare them.

Luis Carlos Ugalde, chairman of the Federal Electoral Institute, or IFE, said in a letter to President-elect Felipe Calderon that a 1990 law clearly called for the burning of the ballots from the July 2 election.

'The IFE is obliged to destroy electoral documentation once the electoral process is concluded,' Ugalde wrote.

No date was set for the burning.

Weissert/AP/CAChron 13.09.06

crazy weather:

Sir Richard Branson has pledged three billion dollars (£1.6 billion) towards renewable energy initiatives, saying business had a duty to future generations.
He said the money would come from the Virgin empire's airline and train businesses, adding that he hoped the move would encourage others to "do what they can".
-
The global sea level rise caused by climate change, severely threatening many of the world's coastal and low-lying areas from Bangladesh to East Anglia, is proceeding faster than UN scientists predicted only five years ago, Professor Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, said yesterday.
[...]
Last week, two American studies showed that the melting of the winter sea ice in the Arctic had accelerated enormously in the past two years, with a section the size of Turkey disappearing in just 12 months.
-
Another summer of record-breaking temperatures brought power failures, heat waves, droughts and tropical storms throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia. Only one place seemed to remain cool: the air-conditioned offices of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. As New York City wilted beneath them, they sat insouciant and comfortable, hurling editorials of stunning misdirection at their readers, continuing their irresponsible drumbeat that global warming is junk science.
-
Global warming might cause an increase in illegal immigration as people "flee storm-ravaged or sun-parched regions" to find refuge in the U.S., according to an expert who addressed a gathering on climate change in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.
"Large-scale climatic disruptions in nearby nations, such as Mexico or Caribbean Island nations," may result in "spillover effects on the health system in the U.S.," said Devra Lee Davis, director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, in an abstract on the subject, "Changes in Severe Weather and Climate: Implications for Human Health."
-
Some travel agencies touting Arctic tours have been revving up their recent promotions to tourists about the increased likelihood they will spot polar bears in this region where several populations of polar bears live. According to scientists from NASA and the Canadian Wildlife Service, these increased Arctic polar bear sightings are probably related to retreating sea ice triggered by climate warming and not due to population increases as some may believe.
The new research suggests that progressively earlier breakup of the Arctic sea ice, stimulated by climate warming, shortens the spring hunting season for female polar bears in Western Hudson Bay and is likely responsible for the continuing fall in the average weight of these bears.
-
The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew has issued a "position paper" saying that man-made global warming is changing the outlook for plants and trees worldwide.
It says four species on its own lands are flowering earlier each year.
Kew's conservation scientists say other human activities such as the expansion of cities are also hurting plants, some which poorer societies depend on.
-

and, to show we haven't lost our sense of fun:

Global warming might cause an increase in illegal immigration as people "flee storm-ravaged or sun-parched regions" to find refuge in the U.S., according to an expert who addressed a gathering on climate change in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.

It is more pitiful than that:

When the tempter is a temptress, and really wants you to sin, she needs to be both available and willing. And it is almost inconceivable that poor Sayyid, the frail, humourless civil servant, and turgid anti-semite (salting his talk with quotes from that long-exploded fabrication, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), ever encountered anything that resembled an offer.

Martin Amis/Observer UK 10.09.06
-
Any mention of the PotEoZ has to be followed immediately by the fact of its being a hoax made plain and clear. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a hoax, a forgery, a fabrication.
Therefore any discussion of Jewish intrigue and control in the arcane world of international finance, or Jewish ownership and self-interested control of the media in America and Britain, and Australia - or long-range Jewish planning for dominance and control of anything anywhere - is anti-Semitic nonsense and must be dismissed without argument as bigotry and a kind of gentile pathology with obscure and ancient roots and no basis in reality whatsoever.
Also Amis need never mention that he is himself a Jew, because this would never in any way influence his views on "terrorism" and "faith" and especially faith "recently and almost endearingly defined as 'the desire for the approval of supernatural beings'".
Amis says:

We should understand that the Islamists' hatred of America is as much abstract as historical, and irrationally abstract, too; none of the usual things can be expected to appease it. The hatred contains much historical emotion, but it is their history, and not ours, that haunts them.

And again it's not necessary to disclose the fact that this is a Jew speaking to this most volatile of subjects, because he speaks not as a Jew, toward Jewish interests, but as a Western Man, to his fellow Western Men, about "Islamists".
"...it is their history, and not ours, that haunts them."
The word "Islamists" means something much different here than the word "Muslims". In an academic setting it means someone who studies Islam, a term like "botanist" or "physicist", in a less anxious social moment it could mean someone who advocates Islam, like Christian missionaries advocate Christianity; but Amis means it to convey something more like "communist" or "racist" or, even more basely, "terrorist". In his use it implies something pushy and arrogant, zealous, something with an agenda, something that wants to change us, use us, bring us submissively into relation with its dominance.
There is no equivalent term for Amis, who speaks here, not as a Jew but as the voice of Western Man. Islamist is now a term of withheld bigotry, a signifier that carries the disgust and virulence of a term like "Islamo-fascist" in reserve, for later, for private display.
Amis says:

The West isn't being seductive, of course; all the West is being is attractive. But the Islamist's paranoia extends to a kind of thwarted narcissism.

Paris Hilton isn't the Whore of Babylon, but she is the currently most visible archetype of Western Woman, not as gender counterpart to Western Man, but as subsidiary - not as wife, but as temporary chattel - and Paris Hilton is the embodiment of seduction, she is nothing but the posture and glance of seduction personified, and she has been delivered to the world by...well, not by Martin Amis, surely.
But what has delivered her to us, whoever and whatever that is, is also running the campaign to ridicule and reduce the power of Islam.
To say that the West isn't being seductive is to speak from what must be either crippling self-delusion or intentional denial. The Western presence in the world - at least until the invasion of Iraq began to supplant its seductive imagery with real-time glimpses of the horror it carried - the Western image, whether in China or Patagonia or Nairobi or Mumbai, is an image created and maintained by commercial advertisement - chiefly by television, whose programs are merely a growth medium for the commercial messages attached to them. This is how the West has announced itself, through the agency of commercials for its things, its products - and its political leaders are elected through strategies identical to the marketing of things, are in fact marketed to their constituencies like products.
The logos for five generations of Americans now has been the mercenary writing on the wall that is commercial advertising - we're so deep into that most kids can't get to the idea of it not being an essential part of reality. Children are seduced by the marketers of things on television from before they're capable of coherent speech. Seduction is the business of the West.
Amis says:

All men are my brothers. I would have liked to have said it then, and I would like to say it now: all men are my brothers. But all men are not my brothers. Why? Because all women are my sisters. And the brother who denies the rights of his sister: that brother is not my brother. At the very best, he is my half-brother - by definition. Osama is not my brother.

That there is misogyny all through the Old Testament, and quite a bit of it in the New is inarguable. That the Judeo-Christian civilization of the last two thousand years was adamant enough in its denial of rights to women as to make it a virtual twin of the most repressive fundamentalist Muslim caliphate is also inarguable.
Pictures of women in the costumes of 19th c. America make them seem nearly equivalent to the hijab - complete covering, denial of any feminine display, nothing showing but a glimpse of eye and shoe. There were women who pushed the boundaries of taste and acceptability then too of course, and each step of the way the once-daring became the now-commonplace; but there were women in Iraq before the invasion who dressed just like their sisters in Boston and Philadelphia and New York, and women in Beirut and Gaza who did, as well.
Women were beaten, women starved themselves in hunger strikes and were publicly humiliated less than a hundred years ago, in America and England, for demanding the right to vote. Beaten by officers of the law and ridiculed by voices as smug, pompous, and self-congratulatory in their time as Amis is in his. Yet the current champions of justice and equality point only to Islam as the cause of women's disenfranchisement. It works well on an ahistorical people, that kind of trick, on people who don't remember their great-grandmothers' world. Because a recognition of how recently this supposedly more enlightened society was equally bigoted and intolerant and repressive might temper judgment, and leave us less quick to condemn.
Amis is speaking to that ahistorical audience, and he speaks as though, except for the villainous horde of angry Arabs out there waiting to oppress our sisters and cut our heads off, all is fine. But all is not fine.
The same rhetorical sleight of hand is being used, today - as the fifth anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001 is marked - and for the same purpose; and that same ahistorical audience is being told to continue to pretend that the Islamic world is a seething mass of vicious irrational hatreds, and that the men who hijacked those planes and took down those towers were motivated purely by a simplistic irrational hatred of "freedom" and by a puritanical disgust at our more natural and liberated morals, that they chose to see as the seductive evil of the West.
Osama bin Laden said clearly and plainly that the violent injustice done to the Palestinians was a primary cause of his hatred of Israel and the US:

As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:

(1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.

a) You attacked us in Palestine

Their history is our history. If Osama bin Laden is not my brother, then Martin Amis is not my brother.
If the history of the Palestinians isn't ours, then the history of the Jews isn't ours.
The alternative is that we're all in this together.
That this accusation of bin Laden's might be addressed by the many decent people for whom September 11, 2001 was a traumatic mystery - an horrifically violent act that seemed to come from out of nowhere, without warning or explanation - is of course impossible, and it's impossible for very simple reasons.
An examination of the accusation, what bin Laden says is the cause of 9/11, would lead to the very clear and obvious conclusion that yes, the Palestinians have been treated with injustice - have been attacked, driven from their homes, killed, beaten, humiliated - and that the naturally occurring violent response to that injustice has been treated, dishonestly, as itself a primary cause of Israeli "retaliation", which has meant still further attacks.
The discovery that the very clear injustice done to the Palestinians has been hidden from the basically decent American people, who were in large part financing it, would inevitably follow from any honest public examination and discussion, any serious attempt to understand what's causing the anger that's causing the terrorism.
And that's impossible.
Not impossible that it exist - it exists, it's what's happening now in Palestine and what's been happening there for decades. And what's happening in Palestine was what caused the hatred that caused 9/11.
It's impossible that it ever be discussed publicly and dispassionately, because the places where that public and dispassionate discussion would take place are no longer there. They've fallen - they're a hole in the ground surrounded by promises and plans, an empty place where politicians can lay wreaths, and make speeches about honor and freedom and remembrance.

twice transformed

War narrative does three essential things.
First, it is the organizing framework for policy. Policy cannot exist without an interlocking foundation of "truths" that people easily accept because they appear to be self-evident and undeniable.
Second, this "story" works as a framework precisely because it represents just such an existential vision. The "truths" that it asserts are culturally impossible to disassemble or even criticize.
Third, having presented a war logic that is beyond dispute, the narrative then serves practically as the anointed rhetorical handbook for how the war is to be argued and described.

Michael Vlahos/AsiaTimes 09.09.06

How worried should we still be?

QUESTION: Over the last several days, the President has given a number of a speeches in the run-up to the anniversary of 9/11. One of the things that he has done is he has again talked about Iraq in the context of the war on terror. But Democrats disagree about the relevance of Iraq in this context and in fact Senator Jack Reed said yesterday that U.S. action in Iraq was always a goal for the Administration even before 9/11. So whatever Iraq has become now, is that true? Was action in Iraq always a goal?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, it depends on how you think about the need to respond to September 11th. If you think that September 11th was simply the 19 hijackers who ran the planes into buildings and perhaps the al-Qaida network and their safe haven in Afghanistan, and that if you've dealt with that you've dealt with the causes of 9/11, then of course you don't see Iraq as a part of the war on terror.

But of course, if you see instead, as the President does, that there is an ideology of hatred that has been born of the problems in the Middle East, then you see that going to the source of that, dealing with the root causes, is very important. And in that context it's very hard to imagine a different kind of Middle East with Saddam Hussein still in power. Iraq is, like the young democracies that are being -- that are growing up in Afghanistan and in other places, those young democracies are the answer to the ideologies of hatred that the terrorists drew upon to cause September 11th. And that's the link between Iraq and the 9/11 events.

Interview With Laurie Kinney of Hearst Broadcasting Corporation
-

QUESTION: How worried should we still be?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, of course, we have to know that the terrorists could strike at any time, and that they may succeed. But that's not how we think about it. We go through every day, the President goes through every day, starting out with a report on his senior intelligence advisors about threats to the homeland. When there is a threat to the homeland, they're a threat of a kind that we saw just recently in the London plot. The President now has an apparatus that can really stay on top of that in follow-up information. But as I said, we're safer, but not yet safe.

[...]

QUESTION: Do you think they'll try to strike here again?

SECRETARY RICE: I think there's no doubt that practically every day terrorists are planning and plotting to try to hurt the United States again. Washington is obviously a prime target, because of its symbolic meaning. But we've seen that it's not just the United States, it's Great Britain and it was Madrid and it was Bali and it was Jordan. This is a worldwide threat, a worldwide network that wants to attack nations everywhere. So we have an obligation to work with our international partners on intelligence sharing, on getting information from detainees because the real long pole in the tent for stopping the next attack is can you find out before that attack happens, and that means getting to terrorists and getting to know what they know because they know best what's being planned.

[...]

QUESTION: Last quick question. The argument's been made that if we're not going to fight them here; we're fighting them overseas. And the reason we're fighting them over there is so we don't have to fight them here.
Many people say that's just kind of a false argument.
What's your response?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, it is absolutely the case.

Interview With Morris Jones of Sinclair Broadcast Group
-

Condoleeza Rice
-
ScoopNZ 09.09.06

eight million acres of pristine Alaskan wilderness goes on sale to oil and gas companies Sep. 27

a bad, bad sign
-
Yes, but for who? Everyone?
Or just those who want to see Iraq healed and whole?

'They will make fun of us.'

Like a soccer field full of bombs :

My soul is important to me. When I hug my girlfriend, I want to feel good about myself. And I don't feel good about what I did...

"Tell me, how do the villages there look? Are they all destroyed?" S. asked me after I told him that I was in contact with UN personnel who were patrolling the villages. What really made something inside S. snap was when his battalion was given an entire village as a target one night. He thinks it was Taibeh, a village in what is called the eastern sector, but he's not sure. The battalion commander assembled the men and told them that the whole village had been divided into parts and that each team was supposed to "flood" its alloted space - without specific targets, simply to bombard the village.

Meron Rapaport/Haaretz

'Just World News' /Helena Cobban 08.09.06
-
Haaretz

"However, if the Climate Prediction Center is right, we can expect an earlier than usual end to hurricane season in the Atlantic, and a quiet November and December..."

Continuation of the National Emergency With Respect to Certain

what might be over now:

We may be the first country to create national parks, but our endangered species are a political football and a joke.
[...]
Irwin was also unlike the Las Vegas tiger tamers Siegfried and Roy. Roy Horn was mauled and nearly killed by a white tiger he had anthropomorphized. Irwin was perfectly happy to let his love scenes with crocs remain unrequited.

Sally Eckhoff/Spiegel 07.09.06
-

Nearly half the fish consumed as food worldwide are raised on fish farms rather than caught in the wild...
FAO
-

"What consumers don't know, however, is that most of the salmon they buy comes from the marine equivalent of industrial-scale pig farms."

Farmed and Dangerous
-
Living Oceans
-
Save Our Wild Salmon Coalition
-
FFAW/CAW
-
Raincoast Research Society

"Shrimp farmers clear-cut mangrove forests and other coastal ecosystems then bulldoze shallow pools of several acres each. Local fishermen are prohibited from reaching the ocean by armed guards. People have been killed for walking too close to shrimp farms. The wild seed stock harvest kills five times the non-target species. Water pumped into the pools dries nearby forests while the waste effluent pollutes. Algal blooms thrive on this waste. Drugs can control disease for about seven years. Then the pools must be abandoned and the process repeated further down the coast."

Alexandra Morton
-
Post on salmon fishing becomes infested with lice
-
[Disturbance in the gallery]

QUESTION: Wow. Okay. Another question is, who do you turn to when you have something to really talk about or you're struggling with, you know, an issue, or you just really need to talk something through?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, first, I turn to God. I really am a big believer in prayer. And so if it's something particularly heavy or weighty, I'll pray about it.
I also have good friends, people that I've known for years and I'm also very close to the National Security Advisor, Steve Hadley, who was a deputy national security advisor when I was National Security Advisor.
So I talk to him quite a bit.

Condoleeza Rice
interview with Essence magazine/ScoopNZ 25.05.06

Stephen J. Hadley
Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser
February 12, 2003
Council on Foreign Relations:

Should it be necessary for the United States to take military action, here are some of the principles that are guiding our thinking:

• First, we will demonstrate to the Iraqi people and the world that the United States aspires to liberate, not occupy.
• Second, Iraq must be disarmed of all nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, weapons production capabilities, and the means to deliver these weapons. This will be a complex, dangerous, and expensive task -- one for which detailed planning is underway.
• Third, we must also eliminate Iraq's terrorist infrastructure.
• Fourth, Iraq must be preserved as a unified state, with its territorial integrity intact. Concern for the safety of Iraq's people will begin not on the day hostilities cease, but on the day they begin. The United States and its coalition allies will provide security that should prevent chaos, score-settling, and bloodletting.
• Fifth, along with our coalition partners, we must begin the process of economic and political reconstruction, working to assist the people of Iraq in putting their country on a path towards prosperity and freedom. In many ways, this will be our greatest challenge.

For starters, the United States and the international community will have to ensure the rapid flow of humanitarian relief and the rapid start of economic reconstruction efforts. Many of the Future of Iraq working groups are focused on this challenge.

January 28 to March 24, 2003
Timeline of events leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq
Cooperative Research

Can't, won't, don't want to, ain't gonna:

Reporter: Do you worry that if you impose sanctions on Iran, they could retaliate? You know they are the biggest producer on oil.
Would they use that against a country like yours or ours?
That could be their weapon.

Ambassador Bolton: I can't speculate on what the government of Iran will do. But I can say that President Bush has been very emphatic that it is unacceptable for Iran to have nuclear weapons.

USUN Press Release #223
ScoopNZ 06.09.06
-
But John, it's your job to speculate on stuff like that.
You're supposed to know, or at least have a real good idea, what the outcome of something like, say, an invasion might be.
Or sanctions that kill thousands of kids, or cluster-bombing. You know, stuff like slapping people around because they don't do what you want.
And isn't the reason we don't want Iran to have nukes because we've, or I mean you've, speculated on what they might do with 'em?

The same information in each instance;
it's the same thing said different ways:

Quoting repeatedly from Osama bin Laden, President Bush said Tuesday that pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq would fulfill the terrorist leader's wishes and propel him into a more powerful global threat in the mold of Adolf Hitler

"Problem is, we get oil from some parts of the world, and they simply don't like us," he said.
-

Bush warns of Iraqi caliphate
-
Bush warns of terrorist cells in Canada
-
Political Season Opens With Focus on Security
-
Bush: America safer 5 years after 9/11
-
Conservative Calderon declared winner of Mexico's presidential vote

"The ineptness of the Israeli Defence Forces against Hezbollah has raised the Iranians' confidence," said a leading defence analyst. - Times UK
-
Richard Perle, who sold the American people the fantasy that the US could march into Iraq, install corrupt businessman Ahmad Chalabi in power, and would be greeted with garlands of flowers, is disappointed that Israel did not attack Syria during its recent war on Lebanon. Hey, Perle, in case you didn't notice, the Israeli military did not do so great against 5,000 Hizbullah militiamen. - Juan Cole
-
Hezbollah 3, Israel 0 - NY Post
-
But of course the "airpower plan" developed and used by IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz failed miserably at taking down Hizbullah's military capacity-- even while it had the entirely predictable political effect of uniting the Lebanese population more firmly around Hizbullah than it had been for the past three or four years.
Interesting results for the "field-test" of tactics that might be used against Iran, huh? - Just World News
-
Do you agree with the opinion that the war against Hezbollah is not over and that we can expect another round in a few months?
"Absolutely. We must prepare for another war. The IDF must prepare for war against short- and long-range missiles. We were blessed with a miracle in this war. If even 10 percent of the 4,000 missiles fired at Israel had hit citizens, we would have had 400 deaths. The fact that only 39 citizens died proves this was a miracle." - Haaretz
-
"Strategic bombing has been a failed military concept for ninety years, and yet air forces all over the world keep on doing it," John Arquilla, a defense analyst at the Naval Postgraduate School, told me. Arquilla has been campaigning for more than a decade, with growing success, to change the way America fights terrorism. "The warfare of today is not mass on mass," he said. "You have to hunt like a network to defeat a network. Israel focussed on bombing against Hezbollah, and, when that did not work, it became more aggressive on the ground. The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result." - New Yorker

-

"We must prepare for another war..."
"The definition of insanity..."
So next time it won't be a limited engagement, maybe. Maybe next time the gloves come off. Maybe next time this taste of failure and the perception of it get transmuted into the rage of annihilation. Maybe this is the early foundation of the coming rationalizations for the use of nuclear weapons - against an enemy too cunning for conventional weapons and strategy.
A miracle of annihilation.
A people raised to hate the wilderness, and convinced of their election, their superiority, their inevitable right. And carrying atomic weapons.
The wilderness because it's where the message comes from, from outside, from beyond human control. A God not made in the image of man.
Now we're being raised in rooms, learning the world of artificial scale and total human dominance, worshipping our own creations, that feed that self-love back to us in extrapolated measure.
It's made us crazy, desperately clever, heartlessly selfish, and we've evolved into a species-transitional state, between human and some other thing.
Nostalgia for what was drives some of this thought - but a yearning for health in the sickened isn't nostalgia, and neither is grief to the mourning.

One possible explanation:



From the Independent Sunday.
I'm not sure if "deluded" is appropriate. Blair always seemed to understand where he was and what he was up about, with that boyish paternalism the privileged have when they know they're in the know, and are being criticized for things that are tangential at best to what's really going.
Speaking of what's really going on:
Sarkozy - the continental right-wing Blair analog - is being brought through the rabble under imperial guard, headed straight for the throne.
Of France.

A rose by any other name:

Among the items federal agents were searching for in Alaska legislative offices this week are hats or garments labeled "Corrupt Bastards Club" or "Corrupt Bastards Caucus," according to the search warrant.

Alaska Report 01.09.06
-
what nourishes the rose as well:

The Corrupt Bastards Club started as a barroom joke last spring among Alaska legislators whose names were linked to large campaign contributions from oil field services company VECO Corp.

Anchorage Daily News 02.09.06
-
BTS:
new passenger
car sales (in thousands)
car sales BTSx x 1970xxxxxxxxx2004

Totalxxxxxxxxx 8,400xxxxxxx7,506
-
Domestic^bxxxxx 7,119 xxxxxxx5,357
-
Imports xx xxxx 1,280xxxxxxx 2,149
-
^bIncludes cars produced in Canada and Mexico.

deeper kimchi

the subject of rich debate:

Mr. Fitzgerald may also point out that Mr. Armitage knew about Ms. Wilson's C.I.A. role only because of a memorandum that Mr. Libby had commissioned as part of an effort to rebut criticism of the White House by her husband...

Johnston/NYTimes 02.09.06