Welcome to my rants page! You can contact me by e-mail: bob@goodsells.net. Blog roll.
Site feed.
A senior leader of Al Qaeda who was captured in Pakistan several months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was the main source for intelligence, since discredited, that Iraq had provided training in chemical and biological weapons to members of the organization, according to American intelligence officials."New" questions? Assuming Libi actually was an al Qaeda agent, wouldn't any intelligence officer take anything he said to be highly dubious? If his will hasn't been broken by torture or "abuse," what he says would likely still be calculated to further al Qaeda's causes. If he was broken, his statements would most likely be whatever he thought his interrogators wanted to hear. My guess would be that the proper assumption to make with statements made by such prisoners would be that everything they say is false, or at best worthless, until it has been corroborated by several other sources. Even then you would have to consider whether the sources may have agreed on a story. Of course, to use logic like this you can't be a bloodthirsty ghoul like Cheney or an idiot like Bush.
Intelligence officials say the detainee, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a member of Osama bin Laden's inner circle, recanted the claims sometime last year, but not before they had become the basis of statements by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and others about links between Iraq and Al Qaeda that involved poisons, gases and other illicit weapons.
Mr. Libi, who was captured in Pakistan in December 2001, is still being held by the Central Intelligence Agency at a secret interrogation center, and American officials say his now-recanted claims raise new questions about the value of the information obtained from such detainees.
Intelligence officials declined to say precisely when Mr. Libi changed his account, and they cautioned that they still did not know for sure which account was correct. They said they would not speculate as to whether he might have been seeking to deceive his interrogators or to please them by telling them what he thought they wanted to hear.Given aWol's public belligerence against Iraq, starting with the "axis of evil" speech in early 2002, Libi would have realized that there was no conflict between deceiving his interrogators (or at least their bosses) and telling them what they wanted to hear. Since both the US and Saddam were enemies of al Qaeda, deceiving the interrogators by telling them what they wanted to hear--that is, that Iraq had supported al Qaeda--was both the smartest and simplest thing Libi could have done. Not only did he possibly make things better for himself, at least temporarily, but he furthered al Qaeda's cause. Saddam is out of power, and the US is bogged down in a bloody and pointless occupation which has earned it the hatred of almost the entire Muslim world.
Bill Clinton got 43.9% of the vote in 1992, while Michael Dukakis - the victim of another myth as the purportedly worst possible sort of candidate - got 45%. True, Clinton was up against Ross Perot who got 19% as well as Bush, but Clinton might well have lost were it not for Perot, in which case he would have joined Michael Dukakis in the hall of shame.
Clinton won a majority in only two state-like entities: Arkansas and DC. In only 12 other states was he able to get ever 45%. Dukakis, meanwhile, got over 50% in 11 states and got over 45% in 12 others.
Here's what happened to the Democrats under Clinton, based on our latest figures:
GOP seats gained in House after Clinton became president: 48
GOP seats gained in Senate after Clinton became president: 8
GOP governorships gained after Clinton became president: 11
GOP state legislative seats gained since Clinton became president: 1,254 as of 1998
State legislatures taken over by GOP after Clinton became president: 9
Democrat officeholders who have become Republicans since Clinton became president: 439 as of 1998 Republican officeholders who became Democrats: 3
The White House projected Friday that this year's deficit will hit a record $445 billion, further fueling a campaign-season dispute over President Bush's handling of the economy.So they planned ahead and predicted the deficit would be even larger, and now the largest deficit in history is a "political plus." Of course, the $445 billion itself is just a projection, and probably a substantially fudged one at that.
The figure easily surpassed last year's $375 billion, making it the largest-ever in dollar terms. That gave ammunition to Democrats who say Bush's tax cuts and failure to prevent a loss of jobs during his term have worsened the outlook for the budget and the economy.
But in a political plus for Republicans, the new projection was also an improvement over forecasters' expectations of earlier this year. In February, the administration projected a $521 billion shortfall for 2004, while the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated a month earlier that the deficit would be $477 billion.
The protest, in which some 1,100 veterans participated, took place the week of April 20 in Washington. Kerry, as a representative of the group, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971.How depressing. Soldiers like Kerry did help in the turning. And politicians like Kerry have helped in the turning back.
There he reported on the findings of a recent VVAW conference on war atrocities. In one of the most oft-quoted sections of his remarks, Kerry told the Senate committee: "They [Vietnam veterans] told the stories of times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam, in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country."
Kerry continued: "We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum. We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of Orientals."
In concluding his remarks, Kerry declared: "We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission, to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and the fear that have driven this country these last 10 years and more, and so when, in 30 years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say 'Vietnam' and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning."
More than 20 British tourists are now "safe and well" after being held hostage in a village in northern India, the Foreign Office said today.Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but could it be a hint that people around the world are starting to think that they can expect nothing from their governments, that direct action against imperial interests is their only way to make a statement?
They were among a group of 37 people travelling in two buses that were stopped last night near Santoshgarh, in Una district. Local people seized the group in protest at the kidnapping of three Indian truck drivers in Iraq.
P.S.: Another story you may not see on TV: Jeb Bush insists that electronic voting machines are perfectly reliable, but The St. Petersburg Times says the Republican Party of Florida has sent out a flier urging supporters to use absentee ballots because the machines lack a paper trail and cannot "verify your vote."
P.P.S.: Three weeks ago, The New Republic reported that the Bush administration was pressuring Pakistan to announce a major terrorist capture during the Democratic convention. Hours before Mr. Kerry's acceptance speech, Pakistan announced, several days after the fact, that it had apprehended an important Al Qaeda operative.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A campaign worker for President Bush (news - web sites) said on Thursday American workers unhappy with low-quality jobs should find new ones -- or pop a Prozac to make themselves feel better.Compassionate Conservatism at its finest.
"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?" said Susan Sheybani, an assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt.
Mischer's stage instructions were available to all major media -- for their guidance, not for broadcast. CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer apologized to the audience "if you heard a bad word."An old habit dating back to Gulf War I, I guess--when I want to watch a news event I turn on CNN. But jeez, they are awful!! They've got that stupid crawl going along the bottom all the time, and Wolf, Judy and Jeff seemed to be in serious competition as to who could make the most inane and trivial comments. Never a word about whether something a speaker said was accurate--only crap about how the message would play to certain voters, and even dumber stuff than that. And it's hard to imagine anything they could have done to pop Kerry's balloon, so to speak, than to put the Cheney-esque balloon guy on open mike for several minutes right after the speech.
I know what we have to do in Iraq. We need a president who has the credibility to bring our allies to our side and share the burden, reduce the cost to American taxpayers, and reduce the risk to American soldiers. That's the right way to get the job done and bring our troops home.No. Having kids from Leipzig and Marseilles and Cairo getting killed to save the lives of kids from Lansing and Memphis and Compton, using yen and euros instead of dollars, is not how you correct something that was both a terrible crime and a mistake. Expecting the French to go along just because you drink their wine instead of pouring it down the drain, and because you speak two languages instead of none, seems naive. Our "allies" knew that the war was a terrible idea, and neither Bush nor Kerry listened to them. Kerry mentioned several times about not sending troops to war unless it was absolutely necessary. I just can't see how that reconciles with his October 2002 vote to give an idiot clearly intent on starting a war the authorization to do so.
Yesterday, my buddy Michael Moore and I held a press conference in Boston. Some joker of a reporter asked Mr. Fahrenheit about Kerry's gung-ho keep'm-in-Baghdad position. Michael fudged and fidgeted. I felt bad for him as he faked the answer, "President Kerry would not have sent us to war." But as Senator, Kerry did.
I've got an easier job than Michael: as a journalist I don't have to defend any candidate. Nevertheless, I know that my Democratic Party friends will want to ship me to Guantanamo for asking, "You believe in Kerry, but does he believe in you?"
Remember, comrades, I'm only asking questions, here. I'm sorry if the answers make you uncomfortable about your favorite rich guy.
I know what you're going to say. "Isn't Bush worse?"
By a long shot. But asking if Kerry is as bad as Bush is like asking if a slap in the face is as painful as a brick to the skull.
But don't you get tired of being slapped around by privileged politicos on hypocrisy hyper-drive -- then having to applaud? It can't be pleasant, no matter how many pretty balloons they drop on your head.
A British parliamentary committee has warned that Afghanistan is likely to "implode, with terrible consequences" unless more troops and resources are sent to calm the country.Medecines Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) decided to pull out of Quagmiristan yesterday. I saw several blog comments suggesting that MSF is usually the first NGO in and the last one out; when they leave things are already several levels below sucking horribly.
The all-party Foreign Affairs Select Committee, in a report released Thursday, said warlord violence and the struggle between U.S.-led troops and insurgents continues to be a threat to security in Afghanistan.
The wide-ranging report on the war against terrorism also said raised concerns over the failure of the UK government and its allies to limit the production of opium in Afghanistan.
In his speech at the Democratic convention, Jimmy Carter noted how the Bush administration had willfully generated public panic over terrorism. Statistics show that, last year, acts of terrorism killed 300 to 400 people, ranking it so far down the list of dangers to livelihood that it is barely visible. The threat of terrorism certainly shouldn't be minimized; but it also shouldn't be exaggerated by a cowed media to fit the White House agenda. For anyone who looks at some of history's worst threats -- the German military machine that killed tens of millions, the Soviet Union with a nuclear arsenal that could have turned this continent into rubble -- the terrorism of today, though George Bush has seeded so much more of it in Iraq, isn't anywhere close.Of course, the Democrats have had plenty of free air time this week to bring some perspective to this issue, but did they? From their platform:
But how often does the media carry this context? The toll from weapons of mass destruction, which played no part in 9/11, has been trifling over the past decade, but the White House, playing the media as puppets, has made WMD a momentous issue of our times.
If it weren't so politically useful to Mr. Bush -- check the midterm elections -- and media buttons weren't so easy to push, it's safe a bet that the terrorism threat wouldn't get half the air time.
Today, we face three great challenges above all others – first, to win the global war against terror; second, to stop the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons; and third, to promote democracy and freedom around the world, starting with a peaceful and stable Iraq.Of course, John Edwards maintained perspective last night:
And we will have one clear unmistakable message for al Qaida and the rest of these terrorists. You cannot run. You cannot hide. And we will destroy you.More people die on our highways in an average month than have died in all terror attacks in the U.S. in the past 12 years? (Over 3400 on the highways each month, compared with slightly under 3000 on 9/11, 159? in Oklahoma City, 6 in the first WTC bombing, a few others here and there.) Way more American soldiers have been killed in the past year in Iraq than by terrorist attacks on Americans in any year except 2001.
Caracas, Venezuela, July 27 (Venezuelanalysis.com).- A new poll of Venezuelan voters finds that, if the election were held today, the recall referendum on President Hugo Chavez would fail.And even if a plurality or even a majority of voters vote to recall Chavez, they would still have to exceed the 3.76 million votes by which he was elected for him to actually be recalled, according to the Bolivarian Constitution of 1999.
The survey shows the referendum losing by eight percentage points, with forty one percent (41%) of all voters in favor of recalling President Chavez and forty nine percent (49%) opposed to recalling the President.
Among likely voters -- those who tell interviewers that they are certain to vote -- the prospects for recall proponents are even worse, with forty three percent (43%) favoring the recall and fifty one percent (51%) opposing it. Even if the pro-recall base turned out ten percent higher than the anti-recall base, the no vote would still prevail with fifty one percent (51%) of the vote.
hen he accepts the Democratic presidential nomination tonight, John Kerry needs to give the nation a clearer idea of how his choices would have differed from President Bush's - particularly when it comes to the war in Iraq. The nation deserves to be told whether Mr. Kerry would have voted to authorize the invasion if he had known that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction.Back in February, former weapons inspector Scott Ritter also demanded answers of Kerry:
Mr. Kerry, as the world already knows, is not a black-and-white kind of thinker, especially when it comes to foreign policy. That's good - it should give voters a real sense of choice this fall, given George Bush's tendency to view the world in absolutes. But it's not an excuse for fudging every issue. Mr. Kerry's history on the critical Iraq question has been impossibly opaque.
...
Bush still insists that he was right to invade. He says the war was justified because of Mr. Hussein's military ambitions and because Iraq is better off without him.
Voters need to know whether Mr. Kerry agrees.
Two years later, in the buildup toward war that took place in the summer of 2002, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on which Kerry sits, convened a hearing on Iraq. At that hearing a parade of witnesses appeared, testifying to the existence of WMD in Iraq. Featured prominently was Khidir Hamza, the self-proclaimed "bombmaker to Saddam," who gave stirring first-hand testimony to the existence of not only nuclear weapons capability, but also chemical and biological weapons as well. Every word of Hamza's testimony has since been proved false. Despite receiving thousands of phone calls, letters and e-mails demanding that dissenting expert opinion, including my own, be aired at the hearing, Sen. Kerry apparently did nothing, allowing a sham hearing to conclude with the finding that there was "no doubt" Saddam Hussein had WMD.He hasn't done so so far, in my opinion.
Sen. Kerry followed up this performance in October 2002 by voting for the war in Iraq. Today he justifies that vote by noting that he only approved the "threat of war," and that the blame for Iraq rests with President George W. Bush, who failed to assemble adequate international support for the war. But this explanation rings hollow in the face of David Kay's findings that there are no WMD in Iraq. With the stated casus belli shown to be false, John Kerry needs to better explain his role not only in propelling our nation into a war that is rapidly devolving into a quagmire, but more importantly, his perpetuation of the falsehoods that got us there to begin with.
President Bush should rightly be held accountable for what increasingly appears to be deliberately misleading statements made by him and members of his administration regarding the threat posed by Iraq's WMD. If such deception took place, then Bush no longer deserves the trust and confidence of the American people.
But John Kerry seems to share in this culpability, and if he wants to be the next president of the United States, he must first convince the American people that his actions somehow differ from those of the man he seeks to replace.
"Cheney said terrorists are as determined to destroy America as the 'Axis powers' of Germany, Italy and Japan during World War II."Juan goes on to point out how Cheney and Bush have been uniters, not dividers--Muslims in the Middle East now almost uniformly hate us. (Of course John Edwards' "We will destroy you" will be sure to calm their feelings.)
...
Although it may be true that al-Qaeda is as determined to destroy the US as the Axis Powers were in World War II, this observation is a Himalayan exaggeration if it is meant to suggest a parallel. Al-Qaeda is a few thousand fanatics mainly distributed in a handful of countries. If Zacharias Moussaoui and Richard Reid are any indication, a lot of them are one step away from from collecting old soda cans on the street in their grocery carts while mumbling about the radios the government implanted in their asses.
So while their determination may be impressive (or just creepy), they are not comparable to the might of three industrialized dictatorships with populations in the tens of millions. Some 13 million men served in the German army (Heer) alone between 1935 and 1945. (And WW II killed 55 million persons, not 3 thousand).
Cheney is lying again. Iraq is obviously a much greater priority for him than is fighting al-Qaeda. All the country's military resources are being sunk into Iraq. Silly decisions are made on macho grounds like deciding to besiege Fallujah or arrest Muqtada al-Sadr (from both endeavors Cheney had to slink away with his tail between his legs, because political considerations got in the way of mere application of massive force).
Why is Iraq a bigger priority for Cheney than is fighting al-Qaeda? Because there are corporate profits to be made in Iraq. There are virtually none in Afghanistan or the Pakistani tribal regions. Cheney wants to crucify the Bill of Rights on the cross of "national security," but has avoided doing the one thing that would make us both free and safe. That is developing a serious counter-insurgency plan for the Middle East that wins hearts and minds and deals effectively with asymmetrical threats. All his emphasis has been on dealing with governments, like that of Iraq, which can be defeated militarily, and the defeat of which unlocks national resources for American companies to exploit. The problem is that those governments do not pose a threat to the US mainland. To the extent that there is a threat, it comes from a shadowy network of radical Islamist guerrillas. Cheney is doing virtually nothing about them.
On Flashpoints tonight, ubiquitous activist Medea Benjamin recounts the story of how she pulled out an antiwar banner while Teresa Heinz Kerry was on the podium saying:Isn't it awful that the Repugs actually have candidates that are WORSE than Kerry and Edwards?
"And that is why as president my husband will not fear disagreement or dissent. He believes that our voices -- yours and mine -- must be the voices of freedom. And if we do not speak, neither does she.
"In America the true patriots are those who dare speak truth through power."
To which Benjamin called out, "When will he bring the troops home?" and was then immediately surrounded by police (police! not security guards employed by the Democrats, police!), pulled off the floor of the convention (for which she had a valid pass), and was interrogated by police and Secret Service agents for a half an hour.
Analysts said the proposal has little chance of success given that Arab and Muslim leaders, facing public opposition over pro-U.S. policies, have declined so far fearing unrest and that their troops would be dragged into Iraq's quagmire.Reuters, while not mentioning any unmentionable motives for last year's invasion (oil, imperialism), no longer gives credence to any good motives (eliminate WMD's, humanitarian concerns), and blandly points out the lack of planning on the part of the Bushies. From the article:
The United States invaded Iraq last year to topple former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and it now has about 140,000 troops battling a deadly insurgency it did not anticipate.On a brighter note, postal service in Iraq is apparently improving. Good thing there wasn't any anthrax there, huh?
Conservatives, believers in a world of danger and weakness, must have experienced first hand, through their senses and bodies, violence, the threat of violence, abuse, neglect, repression, deprivation, uncertainty, morally atrocity, and/or moral 'failure'. We learn from what we see and what we are shown, not what we're told, which would explain why children of conservatives who live very comfortable lives tend to be more liberal, why children who are abused tend to be both conservative and abusive, and why liberals, as they get older and experience more violence, tend to get more conservative. It would also explain why liberalism peaked in the late 1960s, a time of unprecedented comfort and peace (so that, unlike the Iraq War, most saw the Vietnam War for what it was -- ideological aggression -- not for what the conservative government portrayed it as -- protection). By contrast, conservatism has peaked in depression, wartime and post-war times, when there is more physical evidence of violence, deprivation, danger and the other factors that promote a conservative worldview.I say it reminds me of what the Democrats were saying because they all seemed to mention something about the triumph of hope over fear, while at the same time trying to out-Bush Bush in scaring us about terrorism. Pollard goes on to explain that the "war on terrorism" is really a war between conservatives:
What is particularly surprising to me is that the conservatives who are trying to make the world 'safe from terrorism' don't realize that terrorism is, in most forms, an innately (if extreme) conservative act. Bush can bluster about terrorists "hating freedom" and "being evil" but the truth is that most terrorists are not anarchists who blow things up for a lark out of self-indulgence, but rather devout, conservative fanatics who are acting out of moral outrage against what they see as evil, and who kill others as acts of retribution that they see as profoundly moral. Very much as the American neocons saw their hysterical and immensely-costly destruction of two Arab nations as profoundly moral acts of retribution for 9/11. In this sense, conservatism is self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing, and what we have seen in the last three years is different sects of aggrieved conservatives attacking each other with increasing savagery and calling each other 'evil', while we liberals sit on the sidelines saying 'huh?'Pollard concludes:
But my view of all this is, of course, a liberal one. Both the American neocons and the Arab fundamentalists would be outraged by the above paragraph, because their bodies and their personal experiences have taught them to know who is moral and who is evil, and to them, liberals just don't get it and are therefore morally weak and 'evil' as well. If you're not on the side of America/Allah/God/Whoever, you're on the side of terrorism/our enemy/Satan/evil. If you aren't part of the solution, you're part of the problem.
I could be a pessimist and confess that the conservatives are bound to win, because as the world gets more crowded and hence more violent, dangerous and filled with catastrophe this will breed more conservatives (and because conservatives are now breeding, on average, much larger families than liberals). But as a liberal, I can't be too pessimistic. As a liberal I believe that all humans are born and remain inherently 'good', or at least start out undamaged. We are all born liberals. We have to be trained to be conservatives.
The great rule of this convention is that nobody should say anything to upset the swing voters. The environmentalists have refrained from complaining that their party platform contains an ode to Americans' God-given right to own S.U.V.'s. Discussions of foreign affairs are so heavy on talk about working with people of other lands that you expect the Fleet Center to burst into "It's a Small World After All.'' More unpleasant topics, like Americans torturing Iraqi prisoners or nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, get shorter shrift. The Kerry people have spread the word that negativism is out.That's MY congressman, readers! Read it and be jealous. On the other hand, doesn't that make ME pretty irrelevant? On most things I don't even want to change Dingell's positions--he voted against the Patriot Act and the Iraq war. On the things I disagree with--his undying support for the auto companies, especially--I have no chance of swaying him. Dingell has been in Congress WAY longer than Bush has been sober, and the Big Three have had a lot to do with that.
It would have been interesting to report on a convention in which a party preparing to run against an incumbent administration actually limited itself to positive comments. The prime-time speakers would have wound up doing charades. The organizers have had enormous success in emptying out Boston's normal population. Take away the Democrats' right to talk trash about the Bush-Cheney ticket and the place would resemble the silent morning-after scene in one of those zombie movies.
Fortunately, not everybody is paying attention. "This is America versus the panderers. This is America versus the rascals," said Representative John Dingell at the environment rally. Mr. Dingell even failed to say that this was the most important election in his lifetime, settling for an announcement that "I've had three and a half years of these scoundrels and it's all of them I can take."
We are stuck with a federal election system designed by people who did not want to leave the future of slavery to majority rule, and the modern technology of polling allows candidates to pinpoint the swing voters in the swing states - star pupils in the Electoral College.
To make things still weirder, the parties organize their primaries so that the nominees are chosen by only a few lucky states. Democratic voters in early primary states selected John Kerry as the presidential nominee because they thought he would appeal to people in places like Florida. But something happened in the long months between the Iowa caucus and the Boston convention. Despite the fact that Mr. Kerry's great selling point was being a winner, the Democrats now regard him as, at best, a non-loser who can, with great effort, possibly be dragged across the finish line ahead of the other guy. If everybody is very careful not to tick off the six people in Ohio and Pennsylvania [who Dems seem to believe will decide the election].
They have a saying in Baghdad these days about their new American-delivered freedom: the terrorists are free to kill us, and we are free to stay in our homes.
A car bomb exploded in a town north of Baghdad today, killing at least 51 people, according to the health ministry, in the worst such attack in Iraq since the United States-led coalition handed over formal sovereignty to the Iraqi government.Lives continue to be lost in service of a lie. The lie is no longer the one about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction; that one was totally exposed about a year ago. If that was why we went, then we should have pulled out immediately, leaving huge apologies and billions of dollars in reparation money behind, and the killing would have subsided. The lie that people are dying for now is the one that the invasion was about democracy. US troops continue to battle "insurgents" in the streets, bomb "safe houses" in Fallujah (an oxymoron if ever there was one), and try to recruit Iraqis as soldiers and cops in service to Allawi's corrupt puppet regime.
The Iraqi health ministry also said that 40 people were wounded and the death toll could rise. A statement from the United States military said the attack took place at a commercial district in the town of Baquba.
The attacker drove a car packed with explosives up to a crowd of people who had gathered outside of a police recruiting center and detonated it, said Gen Walid al-Azawi, chief of police in Diyala Province, according to The Associated Press.
Also in Iraq, 35 fighters, described by the military as "anti-Iraqi" fighters, were killed in a battle with American-led troops and Iraqi government forces. Seven Iraqi Force members were killed and 10 were injured during the operation in Suwayrah, the American military said in a statement.
HAVANA (Reuters) - Drilling of an exploratory well in Cuba's virgin Gulf of Mexico waters that could make the Communist nation an oil exporter and undermine the U.S. embargo has been completed, a senior official said.Expect the anti-Castro rhetoric to go into overdrive now--from both Bush and Kerry.
We head back to the Fleet Center and as we are getting out of the Town Car, Bill O'Reilly is across the street getting out of his limo. "Hey Moore, when ya gonna come on my show?" he shouts. Michael responds, "When you see the rest of my movie." (O'Reilly walked out of the premiere halfway through.) He claims to have gone back and seen the whole thing, but when pressed for specifics, hems and haws. Nonetheless, Michael takes him at his word and they stand there out on the street negotiating the terms of the appearance as various Guardsmen and law enforcement types gawk and snap photos. They finally settle on a format: they will take turns asking each other questions. O'Reilly agrees not to edit the segment, and to explain in the intro that Michael has only been boycotting him because he walked out of the premiere. (It should air tonight. We'll see if he keeps the last part of that promise.)
I hate to make jokes about this, because Kurds have had, to put it mildly, a hard time of it. But...
HOW MANY TIMES DO WE HAVE TO BETRAY THE KURDS BEFORE THEY GET IT?
By my count, we're now working on our sixth betrayal of the Kurds since World War I. Yet they keep coming back for more. The Kurds have really become the Charlie Brown of international relations, always believing that Lucy, in the form of the US, is finally going to let them kick the football.
"Our dominant international challenge is to restore the greatness of America -- based on telling the truth, a commitment to peace, and respect for civil liberties at home and basic human rights around the world," Carter said.Before the Clintons spoke, CNN reminded me why I almost never watch CNN. Wolf Blitzer, Judy Woodruff and Jeff Greenfield (?) had a ridiculous discussion about whether Kerry being photographed in a clean-room outfit at Cape Canaveral was his Dukakis moment. The level of stupidity was just astounding.
Carter said the primary issue in November is whether "America will provide global leadership that springs from unity and integrity" at home, "or whether extremist doctrines and manipulation of the truth will define America's role in the world."
Carter said at stake in the election "is nothing less than our nation's soul."
Venezuelan opposition leader, and two time president Carlos Andres Perez (CAP), made a series of statements calling for violence and hinting at an eventual dictatorial period that the Venezuelan opposition must implement if current President Hugo Chavez is to be removed from office.--Venezuelanalysis
"I am working to remove Chavez [from power]. Violence will allow us to remove him. That's the only way we have," said CAP in an interview published Sunday in El Nacional, one of Venezuela's main daily newspapers.
CAP, who was speaking from Miami, denied being involved in a plot to assassinate Chávez, but said Chavez "must die like a dog, because he deserves it."
An attention-craving vulgarian and a sensitive institution have given the amusingly notorious F-word remarkable attention locally. My position on the F-word is tolerantly neutral while favoring the view that real pain comes from sticks and stones, not words. I can respect the little obscenity's fight over centuries to get in dictionaries and out of public speech. In the Navy, I had a wartime captain who used a version of the F-word to modify practically every noun he spoke. He was a terrific skipper. My personal stand is that the word is harmless and also that it is adolescently boorish, bullying and exhibitionist to use it publicly where it isn't wanted.
This brouhaha has reminded me of two F-words that do great harm and matter much more than the tiny outlawed verb. Fascism as a description of anti-democratic, totalitarian brutality is the F-word that still merits maximum opprobrium and relentless resistance.
The other F-word, fool, which snugly fits so many who can't question authority or face the truth, may do even more damage at voting booths and elsewhere.
These F-words I fear fit many contemporary Americans. Fascist or fool will apply to those in the coming election who vote to let an illegal president installed by a right-wing cabal continue in office to abuse power and insult good sense. Let's avoid those F-words, restore the nation's sanity with a regime change, and reconnoiter again with a nice little F-word, fun.
Roy E. Meador, Ann Arbor
The Democratic National Convention, which opened Monday in Boston, is the culmination of a drive by the most powerful forces in the Democratic Party, the media and the US ruling elite as whole to banish from the November presidential election any debate on the most critical issue facing the American people—the war in Iraq.
The impending coronation of Massachusetts Senator John Kerry as the Democratic presidential candidate is the result of a concerted effort during the Democratic primaries to undermine the campaign of then-front-runner Howard Dean, whose bid to win the nomination became a rallying point for mass antiwar sentiment among Democratic voters and in the population at large. The aim was to silence and suppress that sentiment.
This process of political disenfranchisement is to be completed with the official endorsement of Kerry and his running mate, North Carolina Senator John Edwards. Both are multimillionaire representatives of the US ruling elite. Both voted in October of 2002 for the congressional resolution authorizing Bush to attack Iraq, and both voted in favor of the Patriot Act. That measure, under the guise of fighting the so-called “war on terror,” gives the CIA, FBI and other police agencies unprecedented powers to spy on the American people and override constitutionally protected civil liberties.
...
The contempt of the party hierarchy for the sentiments of Democratic voters and the squelching of any democratic discussion were underscored by a New York Times/CBS News poll released on Sunday showing that nine out of ten of the convention delegates thought the United States should not have gone to war in Iraq.
In the run-up to the convention, Kerry has gone out of his way to stress his support for the occupation of Iraq and the crushing of the anti-US insurgency, mainly criticizing Bush for not deploying more troops and, in general, botching the colonial enterprise. He has repeatedly proclaimed his support for the “war on terror” and the doctrine of preemptive war, which is the centerpiece of the Bush administration’s policy of using military force to topple unwanted governments and seize the land and resources of foreign peoples.
...
The further turn to the right represented by the convention is underscored by cautions from Kerry and other Democratic officials against any outright political attacks on the Bush administration. “This is not going to be about attacking George Bush,” Terry McAuliffe, the national Democratic chairman, declared over the weekend.
...
What is planned is an orgy of flag-waving patriotism, in which Kerry’s Vietnam War record will take center stage. An unnamed “senior Democrat” told the New York Times, “You’re going to see more veterans, more patriotism, more talk about protecting our country. You’re going to think you’re looking at a Republican convention.”
...
The New York Times, in its convention-eve editorial, felt obliged to pose the question: what is the point of the whole affair? Acknowledging that the convention was a political coronation, that the Democratic platform refused to even take a position on the invasion of Iraq, and that no real debate would be permitted, the newspaper said it could not argue with the decision of the broadcast networks to limit prime-time coverage to one hour a night.
...
There is no longer any room within a capitalist system awash in insoluble contradictions for a party of social reform. Instead, the people are confronted with two right-wing parties which, no matter how sharp and even explosive the partisan conflicts, are united in their commitment to a strategy of US global hegemony abroad and social reaction at home.
State of siege
Perhaps the starkest manifestation of the underlying social and political crisis is the extraordinary and unprecedented security surrounding the Democratic convention. This event, supposedly a showcase of American democracy in action, is being held under conditions of a virtual state of siege. Entire sections of Boston have been closed down. Steel barriers have been erected. Ordinary people are being excluded from the convention’s environs. Thousands of police, security personnel and plainclothes federal agents have descended on the city. Police are randomly searching the belongings of people riding the subways.
Demonstrators are prohibited from assembling anywhere near the convention site. They are being herded into fenced-off, isolated “free speech zones”—an Orwellian term if ever there was one—where no one can hear what they have to say.
Meanwhile, behind the barricades and phalanxes of armed police, the politicians and corporate fat cats are indulging themselves in corporate-sponsored bashes.
The report found that there were 691,301 people in local and county jails and 1,387,269 in state and federal prisons last year, for a total of 2,078,570. That was an increase of 3.9 percent in the jail population and 2.3 percent in the prison population.That's 6.9 million, or 3.2 percent of the population. This is the system the Bushies thinks should be exported. Not only is it controlling these 6.9 million, but it serves as a reminder to the rest of us how easy it is for the cops to plant drugs in your car. Meanwhile, the real criminals like Bush and Cheney, responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands, not only go unpunished but are actually rewarded.
At the same time, the report said, there were 4,073,987 Americans on probation at the end of last year, an increase of 1.2 percent from the end of 2002, and 774,588 on parole, up 3.1 percent.
