SHANGHAI (AFP) - China's rapid industrialisation has likely made extinct a species of fresh water dolphin that had been on Earth for over 20 million years, Chinese and British biologists said Wednesday.
Scientists from China, Japan, Britain and the United States failed to find the white dolphin, known as the baiji, during a six-week search of its natural habitat in the Yangtze river last year.
"This result means the baiji is likely extinct," Wang Ding, co-author of the survey and one of the world's leading experts on the species, told AFP.
The dolphin was a victim of devastating pollution, illegal fishing and heavy cargo traffic on the Yangtze, Wang said.
The findings mean the baiji is likely the first mammal to become extinct in more than 50 years. It is the cousin of the bottlenose dolphin, which is also on the critically endangered list.
Wang, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, emphasised that not all hope was lost for the dolphin, which had made its home along the lower reaches of China's now heavily polluted Yangtze River for more than 20 million years.
"We are not saying the baiji is already gone," he said.
But he lamented that further searches this year had failed to find any sign of the dolphin.
Wang said that a letter written by the survey team had been published in the latest issue of the Royal Society Biology Letters journal in Britain to confirm the dolphin was believed to be extinct.
The baiji, identifiable by its long, teeth-filled snout and low dorsal fin, was last officially sighted more than two years ago.
The last confirmed count by a research team was conducted in 1997, when just 13 were recorded.
Up to 5,000 baiji were believed to have lived in the Yangtze less than a century ago, according to the baiji.org website, which was established by a range of international conservation groups.
"The decline in the baiji population has been caused by extreme human pressure on its freshwater habitat," the website said, blaming illegal fishing and massive discharges of industrial and agricultural waste into the river.
Other rare species that live in the Yangtze, such as the Chinese sturgeon and the finless porpoise, are also in danger of extinction.
The British-based zoologist who also worked on the six-week search meanwhile said the loss of the Yangste dolphin was a huge blow.
"The loss of such a unique and charismatic species is a shocking tragedy," said co-author Sam Turvey of the Zoological Society of London.
"The Yangtze River dolphin was a remarkable mammal that separated from all other species over 20 million years ago."
International environmental group WWF has warned that river dolphins are key indicators of a river's health and of the availability of clean water for people living on its banks.
"River dolphins are the watchdogs of the water," said Jamie Pittock, head of WWF's Global Freshwater Programme in a recent alert over their fate.
"The high levels of toxic pollutants accumulating in their bodies are a stark warning of poor water quality. This is a problem for both dolphins and the people dependent on these rivers," he added.
Turvey added: "This extinction represents the disappearance of a complete branch of the evolutionary tree of life and emphasises that we have yet to take full responsibility in our role as guardians of the planet."
Habitat Loss Threatens Pygmy Elephants By VIJAY JOSHI
Associated Press Writer
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Satellite tracking of pygmy elephants has found that the endangered animals — unique to Borneo island — are under threat due to logging and commercial plantations encroaching on their habitat, conservationists said Thursday.
A World Wildlife Fund study, based on two years of satellite tracking, found that pygmy elephants thrive best in forests on flat lowlands and in river valleys — the same terrain preferred by loggers and oil palm plantations.
About 40 percent of forest in the Malaysian state of Sabah, where most pygmy elephants live, has been lost to logging, conversion for plantations and human settlement over the last four decades, WWF said.
Very little was known about pygmy elephants until a chance DNA analysis in 2003 revealed them to be a distinct subspecies of Asian elephants, which triggered a new effort to conserve them.
In June 2005, the WWF set in motion a landmark project to track pygmy elephants in the rain forests of Sabah by placing collars fitted with transmitters around the necks of five elephants, known to be leaders of their herds.
The collars beamed their locations via satellite to a WWF-Malaysia computer as often as once a day in the first study of its kind, providing valuable information about the elephants' grazing habits and movement patterns.
Data gathered so far reveals there are probably not more than 1,000 pygmy elephants left in Sabah — less than the 1,600 or so estimated previously.
The study revealed that pygmy elephants prefer lowland forests because there is more food of better quality.
"The areas that these elephants need to survive are the same forests where the most intensive logging in Sabah has taken place, because flatlands and valleys incur the lowest costs when extracting timber," said Raymond Alfred, head of WWF-Malaysia's Borneo Species Program.
The study also showed that elephants' movements are noticeably affected by human activities and forest disturbance. It found that some of the elephants were trekking five times as far as they normally would each day in search of food.
The loss of habitat brings them into more frequent contact with people and cultivated land, generating conflict with humans who sometimes capture or poison them to protect their farms.
While pygmy elephants can live in logged and secondary forests, it is crucial that their remaining habitat is managed in a sustainable manner and not converted into plantations, the WWF said.
Logging in elephant habitat should only occur if there is a long-term forest management plan in place, and oil palm plantations should be established on degraded, non-forested land devoid of elephants and orangutans, it said.
Malaysian officials could not immediately be reached for comment, but in the past they have accused Western activists of trying to undermine the palm oil industry by claiming that forest clearing in Malaysia and Indonesia is threatening wildlife. The government says most palm oil plantations are established where forests have already been cleared for other crops.
Alfred said an initiative aimed at conserving 92,650 square miles of rainforest straddling the border between Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia should ensure that most herds will have a home in the long term.
Adult pygmy elephants stand up to 8 feet tall — a foot or two shorter than mainland Asian elephants. They are more rotund and have smaller, babyish faces with longer tails that reach almost to the ground. They are also less aggressive than their Asian counterparts.
Though smaller than its cousins, an adult pygmy elephant can still devour up to 330 pounds of vegetation each day. One of their favorite treats is the large, thorny and pungent durian fruit, which they often roll in mud to gulp it down whole, spikes and all.
Tornado in Brooklyn New York City Storm Wake-Up
Wednesday, 08 Aug 2007
Heavy rain and thunderstorms brought down trees in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. A tornado warning had been issued for the area for several hours. It's not clear if a tornado touched down. SideBar
MyFoxNY.com -- Some people in Bay Ridge Brooklyn think a tornado touched down early Wednesday in a storm that killed one woman. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that at least 40 buildings in Brooklyn had damage from the storm.
The National Weather Service had issued a tornado warning in the 6 a.m. hour for Brooklyn. It expired at 7 a.m.
New York Weather Authority Mike Woods says Fox 5 Sky Guardian showed conditions that could have spawned a tornado. The National Weather Service will send an investigator to the scene to determine if a tornado hit the area.
Heavy rains caused localized flooding and Fox 5 news crews showed dozens of downed trees. Several trees crushed cars and roads were blocked.
A woman on Narrows Avenue reports a tree that would rival the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree was uprooted on her block.
There were some power outages reported in the area. That's bad news as it will be a hot and humid afternoon in New York City. The temperatures could climb to over 100 degrees.
At a 12:15 p.m. news conference Mayor Michael Bloomberg said a woman on Staten Island has died as a result of the storm.
Rodents Plague Northern Spain By DANIEL WOOLLS, Associated Press Writer (08-08) 11:24 PDT MADRID, Spain (AP) --
It's been a messy summer in Spain: a blackout in Barcelona, an oil spill in the Mediterranean and giant schools of jellyfish lurking off beaches packed with vacationers.
Now comes another woe: millions of mouse-like rodents called voles feasting on beets and potatoes in an infestation that has prompted desperation in one of Spain's agricultural heartlands.
The invasion of Castille-Leon in north-central Spain began gently 10 months ago but has snowballed to stunning proportions. Farmers' unions say the region is crawling with an estimated 7.5 million voles. The local government doesn't know the cause, or the solution.
Spanish television aired footage of scores of voles darting in and out of holes in what would normally be rich, healthy farmland, or quivering in the throes of death brought on by pesticide. Some of the critters have even made it into gardens of homes in the region's main city, Valladolid, according to news reports.
"There has never been a plague like the one we have now," said the Castille-Leon regional agriculture minister, Silvia Clemente. Officials have asked agronomists, veterinarians and biologists what on earth is happening and nobody really knows, she told Cadena Ser radio.
"There are no measures that have been proven to work against a plague of these characteristics," Clemente said.
For now, crews are fighting with fire. They started igniting controlled blazes Wednesday on harvested farmland to try to kill off the pests, acting with utmost care to keep the flames from spreading to bone-dry terrain prone to forest fires.
Jose Antonio del Brio, head of the local farmers' association in the town of Fresno el Viejo, where the first fires were set, said literally every farm in the area is being eaten by voles. First it was the grain crops — 40 percent lost to the critters — and now beets, potatoes and corn are on the menu.
"We cannot do anything against these animals, who are taking food out of our children's mouths," del Brio said.
A vole problem was first detected in Castille-Leon last September. Then, officials used chemicals to try to kill them off, but ecological groups filed a complaint and the practice was halted. The vole population suddenly exploded.
"Nothing of what is happening with this plague falls within the expected because there are no precedents," Clemente said.
Activists Want Chimp Declared a 'Person'
By WILLIAM J. KOLE Associated Press Writer
VIENNA, Austria (AP) - In some ways, Hiasl is like any other Viennese: He indulges a weakness for pastry, likes to paint and enjoys chilling out watching TV. But he doesn't care for coffee, and he isn't actually a person—at least not yet.
In a case that could set a global legal precedent for granting basic rights to apes, animal rights advocates are seeking to get the 26- year-old male chimpanzee legally declared a "person."
Hiasl's supporters argue he needs that status to become a legal entity that can receive donations and get a guardian to look out for his interests.
"Our main argument is that Hiasl is a person and has basic legal rights," said Eberhart Theuer, a lawyer leading the challenge on behalf of the Association Against Animal Factories, a Vienna animal rights group.
"We mean the right to life, the right to not be tortured, the right to freedom under certain conditions," Theuer said.
"We're not talking about the right to vote here."
The campaign began after the animal sanctuary where Hiasl (pronounced HEE-zul) and another chimp, Rosi, have lived for 25 years went bankrupt.
Activists want to ensure the apes don't wind up homeless if the shelter closes. Both have already suffered: They were captured as babies in Sierra Leone in 1982 and smuggled in a crate to Austria for use in pharmaceutical experiments. Customs officers intercepted the shipment and turned the chimps over to the shelter.
Their food and veterinary bills run about $6,800 a month. Donors have offered to help, but there's a catch: Under Austrian law, only a person can receive personal donations.
Organizers could set up a foundation to collect cash for Hiasl, whose life expectancy in captivity is about 60 years. But without basic rights, they contend, he could be sold to someone outside Austria, where the chimp is protected by strict animal cruelty laws.
"If we can get Hiasl declared a person, he would have the right to own property. Then, if people wanted to donate something to him, he'd have the right to receive it," said Theuer, who has vowed to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights if necessary.
Austria isn't the only country where primate rights are being debated. Spain's parliament is considering a bill that would endorse the Great Ape Project, a Seattle-based international initiative to extend "fundamental moral and legal protections" to apes.
If Hiasl gets a guardian, "it will be the first time the species barrier will have been crossed for legal 'personhood,'" said Jan Creamer, chief executive of Animal Defenders International, which is working to end the use of primates in research.
Paula Stibbe, a Briton who teaches English in Vienna, petitioned a district court to be Hiasl's legal trustee. On April 24, Judge Barbara Bart rejected her request, ruling Hiasl didn't meet two key tests: He is neither mentally impaired nor in an emergency.
Although Bart expressed concern that awarding Hiasl a guardian could create the impression that animals enjoy the same legal status as humans, she didn't rule that he could never be considered a person.
Martin Balluch, who heads the Association Against Animal Factories, has asked a federal court for a ruling on the guardianship issue.
"Chimps share 99.4 percent of their DNA with humans," he said. "OK, they're not homo sapiens. But they're obviously also not things—the only other option the law provides."
Not all Austrian animal rights activists back the legal challenge. Michael Antolini, president of the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said he thinks it's absurd.
"I'm not about to make myself look like a fool" by getting involved, said Antolini, who worries that chimpanzees could gain broader rights, such as copyright protections on their photographs.
But Stibbe, who brings Hiasl sweets and yogurt and watches him draw and clown around by dressing up in knee-high rubber boots, insists he deserves more legal rights "than bricks or apples or potatoes."
"He can be very playful but also thoughtful," she said. "Being with him is like playing with someone who can't talk."
A date for the appeal hasn't been set, but Hiasl's legal team has lined up expert witnesses, including Jane Goodall, the world's foremost observer of chimpanzee behavior.
"When you see Hiasl, he really comes across as a person," Theuer said.
"He has a real personality. It strikes you immediately: This is an individual. You just have to look him in the eye to see that."
Record poppy crop to be harvested in Afghanistan By Matthew Lee Associated Press Saturday, August 4, 2007
WASHINGTON - Afghanistan will produce another record poppy harvest this year that cements its status as the world's near-sole supplier of the heroin source, yet a furious debate over how to reverse the trend is stalling proposals to cut the crop, U.S. officials say.
As President Bush prepares for weekend talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, divisions within the U.S. administration and among NATO allies have delayed release of a $475 million counternarcotics program for Afghanistan, where intelligence officials see growing links between drugs and the Taliban, the officials said.
U.N. figures to be released in September are expected to show that Afghanistan's poppy production has risen up to 15 percent since 2006 and that the country now accounts for 95 percent of the world's crop, 3 percentage points more than last year, officials familiar with preliminary statistics said.
But counterdrug proposals by some U.S. officials have met fierce resistance, including boosting the amount of forcible poppy field destruction in provinces that grow the most, officials said. The approach also would link millions of dollars in development aid to benchmarks on eradication; arrests and prosecutions of narcotraders, corrupt officials; and on alternative crop production.
"Afghanistan is providing close to 95 percent of the world's heroin," the State Department's top counternarcotics official, Tom Schweich, said at a recent conference. "That makes it almost a sole-source supplier" and presents a situation "unique in world history."
Almost all the heroin from Afghanistan makes its way to Europe; most of the heroin in the U.S. comes from Latin America.
Afghanistan last year accounted for 92 percent of global opium production, compared with 70 percent in 2000 and 52 percent a decade earlier. The higher yields in Afghanistan brought world production to a record high of 7,286 tons in 2006, 43 percent more than in 2005.
A State Department inspector general's report released Friday noted that the counternarcotics assistance is dwarfed by the estimated $38 billion "street value" of Afghanistan's poppy crop, if all is converted to heroin, and said eradication goals were "not realistic."
"Narcotics have been systematically scapegoated and demonized. The idea that anyone can use drugs and escape a horrible fate is an anathema to these idiots. I predict that in the near future right-wingers will use drug hysteria as a pretext to set up an international police apparatus." -- William S. Burroughs
US weighs role in heroin war in Afghanistan By Anne Barnard and Farah Stockman
KABUL, Afghanistan -- The burgeoning illegal opium trade in Afghanistan has become the biggest single threat to democracy, surpassing Al Qaeda and the Taliban and prompting US officials to consider military intervention against the traffickers, US and Afghan officials say.
Even as the Bush administration hails Afghanistan as a major foreign policy success, the country's soaring drug profits now equal about half of its gross national product and have become the principal source of funds for reconstruction, outpacing foreign aid. The drug trade also is fueling corruption at the highest levels of the government, involving army generals and other top officials who routinely work with the US military on antiterrorism operations, according to the officials.
In Washington yesterday, the senior American ground commander in Afghanistan said the United States is considering expanding the role of the roughly 18,000 American troops in the country to help crack down on the skyrocketing drug economy.
"We're assessing exactly how the military's role may be reshaped as we go into this coming year, given the significant threat that drugs is making to the future of Afghanistan," Army Lieutenant General David Barno told reporters. "We're assessing right now how the military will be able to . . . provide further assistance in that fight."
US military commanders have sharpened their focus on the opium poppy trade -- which produces 75 percent of the world's opium and its derivative, heroin -- and plan to target militia commanders who profit from trafficking.
For instance, Hazrat Ali, a former Afghan commander paid by American forces to help fight Al Qaeda, is now widely cited by US and Afghan officials as a key opium trafficker. He is also the police chief of Jalalabad.
"One day, he will wake up and find out he's out of business," Colonel David Lamm, chief of staff for US forces in Afghanistan, said of Ali in a recent interview in Kabul, the capital. "We know where the drug traffic moves, we know who profits, and we are beginning to deal with it."
The approach is a shift for the Pentagon, which has been hesitant to involve the US military in drug-enforcement efforts because its main mission is to combat terrorism. Currently, the standing order to ground troops is to destroy drugs only when encountering them during military operations and not to take initiative on their own against drug warehouses or laboratories. US soldiers routinely have let trucks full of poppies pass on the road once it was clear they weren't transporting Al Qaeda.
"It's only since July that Americans have begun to see the importance of dealing with warlords," said a senior European diplomat in Kabul, on condition of anonymity. "One reason why I'm slightly optimistic about Afghanistan is that the American government appears to have woken up in the last few months to the problem of drugs and the relations of drugs to the power of warlords and commanders."
When US troops first entered Afghanistan in October 2001, they found themselves in a bind: They knew local commanders were involved in a centuries-old drug trade, but they needed help in winning the war against the Taliban.
Major James Hawver, a reservist in Jalalabad in 2002, said Ali's blessing made it easier for US troops to operate in his area.
"He was sort of our benefactor," Hawver said. "He let it be known that if anybody messed with us he'd deal with them." But pressure has been mounting for over a year for the Department of Defense to take more action against traffickers. US Representative Henry J. Hyde, an Illinois Republican, has written to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld asking for more intervention and asserting that heroin profits are funding weapons for terrorists and insurgents.
Others argue that Afghanistan's new police and judicial systems are no match for the drug economy, which has become an integral part of the country's much-touted rebirth and the income of too many powerful people.
"I am increasingly worried that the whole economy, the whole social fabric, is going to be dominated by the drug question," said Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. "Just like people can be addicted to drugs, countries can be addicted to a drug economy. That's what I am seeing in Afghanistan."
In recent years, it is most often drug money -- not foreign aid -- that has financed shiny new vehicles in towns that had only known donkey traffic and mobile phone communications systems in places that had never had electricity, Costa said.
In 2002 and 2003, income from opium reached $4.8 billion, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, nearly twice that of income from international aid for projects that began in that time period. Next year, it is expected to climb even higher, as two out of three farmers questioned by a United Nations survey said they planned to significantly increase their opium crop.
"Drugs are the principle sources of reconstruction money, far outweighing combined international assistance," said James Dobbins, Bush's special envoy for Afghanistan in 2001.
Much of the country's tax revenues come from the import of vehicles and other expensive goods, largely purchased with drug profits.
President Hamid Karzai, whose newborn central government lacks the reach to confront the problem, told a donors conference in April that "drugs in Afghanistan are threatening the very existence of the Afghan state."
Karzai blamed drug smugglers -- not Al Qaeda or the Taliban -- for the attack in September on his vice president, one of the few instances of election violence.
Drugs threaten democracy in other ways. While the slate of candidates in the recent presidential election was largely free of drug connections, local parliamentary elections scheduled for this spring are expected to feature a large number of candidates involved in the trade.
"It's not merely about drug money financing candidates. Drug lords are candidates," said Mark Schneider, president of International Crisis Group.
On the road to the northern village of Balkh, the return of the drug economy -- once severely curtailed by the Taliban -- is no secret. Forests of marijuana plants line both sides of the highway. Their pungent smell penetrates passing cars even with the windows shut. The more profitable opium poppy fields lie farther from the road, but their products aren't hard to find.
Kamaluddin Kuchai, a retired small-time commander in the war against the Soviet occupation and the devastating militia battles that followed, says he makes 10 times more growing opium poppies than he would growing wheat, the other major crop in the region.
"When we grow other crops, I cannot earn a living," he said. "We don't do it because we like it, but because we have no other choice."
Kuchai, who is 49 but looks much older with his gray beard and lined face, invited visitors into his tiny sitting room and brought out a plastic sack that made a squelching sound as he laid it on the carpet. Inside was a brown paste the consistency of cake batter, raw sap from his poppy fields. A kilo brings between 3,000 and 12,000 afghanis, or $60 to $240, depending on the quality, he said.
Poppy sap and marijuana are traded openly in Balkh's central marketplace, along a road ringing a circular park where tall trees shelter a 500-year-old shrine, he said.
Kuchai and his friends describe a business that involves most of the community: The police chief's son charges a tax on all sales.
This past July, in a rare move, the police chief in Balkh seized a cache of drugs and accused a powerful local commander of trafficking. But instead of being punished, the commander, Atta Muhammad, was swiftly promoted. His new job: governor of Balkh Province.
Bryan Bender of the Globe staff contributed to this report from Washington. Barnard reported from Afghanistan; Stockman from Washington.
US and Britain accused of creating heroin trail
War on terrorism: Drugs Trade By Raymond Whitaker in Islamabad
Pakistan's hapless army of three million drug addicts has found that the price of oblivion has halved since the world was thrown into crisis on 11 September. Some of the purest heroin in the world, produced just over the border in Afghanistan, can be had in the streets of Peshawar, Quetta and other cities for as little as 20p a gram.
The sudden torrent of heroin, opium and hashish is being described as the Afghan regime's ultimate weapon. Afghanistan is already responsible for three-quarters of the world's heroin exports, and the Taliban have threatened that if they are attacked, they will lift a ban on opium poppy production in the areas they control.
But as Tony Blair may have discovered during his visit here yesterday, few issues in this region are simple, least of all the drugs trade. When they banned poppy growing, the Taliban were accused of cynically attempting to manipulate the drugs market by squeezing supplies. Now, it is claimed, the Afghan regime is flooding the market. The price of a kilogram of opium in Pakistan soared from $44 (£30) to $400 after the ban and before 11 September. Immediately afterwards, it surged further to $746 before slumping dramatically.
Asked to explain the sudden fall in the street price of heroin, a narcotics official said it could indicate sales by terrorists needing to finance their operations because their bank accounts had been frozen across the world. But at the same time, he added, it was the probable result of a market decision by thousands of smaller players seeking to sell stocks while they could.
"Drugs are a currency in Afghanistan and border areas of Pakistan," he said. "Farmers, traders and ordinary people keep drugs in their homes rather than money in the bank. Today we are in a war situation, so what do people do? They go to the market and sell their assets to realise cash, just as people in the West sell shares."
Britain has just released a detailed indictment of Osama bin Laden, his al-Qa'ida network and their Taliban protectors, which accuses them of jointly exploiting the drugs trade. American officials agree, and have leaked a sensational though thinly substantiated claim that Mr bin Laden's group tried to develop a "super-powerful" brand of heroin that would enslave Western addicts yet further. They admit, however, that proof that either the Taliban or al-Qa'ida actually control the trade is hard to find.
When the Taliban swept to power in Afghanistan in 1996, the drugs industry was already well established. The movement imposed taxes on poppy cultivation, just like the ones that existed for other crops, and charged fees for narcotics production, which brought in $15m to $27m annually, according to a United Nations report. Just over a year ago it finally fulfilled its promises to stamp out poppy growing, reducing production from 3,100 tons in 2000 to virtually nothing in the first half of this year, again according to the United Nations.
But the criminal gangs in charge of refining and distribution remain powerful, and the Taliban did nothing to stop the production and export of heroin from existing stockpiles. The threat to allow poppies to grow again could be a sign of the movement's weakness rather than its strength, observers say. It may be seeking to regain lost support from farmers angered by the ban. One source said confiscated weapons had been returned to farmers in an effort to enlist them in a struggle against any US-led attack.
Before the present intelligence offensive, attempts to link Mr bin Laden directly to drugs had been vague. Congressional staff in Washington who had seen the files said he did not actually traffic in drugs, but made money from the trade by hiring out his fighters to guard refineries and escort convoys on their way out through Iran. The Taliban rake off money from drugs in similar ways. A report to the House of Commons accuses them of protecting stockpiles – but the narcotics official scoffed at the idea of "mullahs selling heroin".
There is also the uncomfortable fact that almost half the heroin flowing out of Afghanistan is thought to come from areas controlled by the Northern Alliance, the West's putative partner in the campaign to oust the Taliban. Any expansion of the alliance's territory could see an increase in the drugs supply.
In his meeting last night with Mr Blair, Pakistan's military President, General Pervez Musharraf, would have been entitled to point out to his visitor that the drugs trade had its origins in the war against the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The Afghan mujahedin, with the full knowledge of the intelligence agencies of America, Britain and other allies, refined and exported heroin – previously unknown in this part of the world – to finance their struggle. Evidence even exists that the CIA encouraged the spread of hard drugs to demoralise Russian troops.
Interview with Alfred McCoy, professor of Southeast Asian History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade
Barsamian: Was the anti-communist ideology so powerful and so strong that the CIA would risk the worldwide opprobrium of being linked with drug trafficking? Why would they take that risk?
McCoy: It's easy. Look, it's effective. I interviewed a guy named Lt. Col Lucien Conein who, since I published my book now despises me, and I asked Col Conein why they worked with the Corsicans in Saigon, for example. He said that there aren't very many groups that know the clandestine arts. When you think about the essential skills it takes to have an extra-legal operation - to have somebody killed, to mobilize a crowd, to do what it does when societies are in flux, when power is unclear and to be grabbed and shaped and molded into a new state - you want to overthrow a government and put a new one in - how do you do it? Who does this? Accountants? - They go to the office every day. Students? They go to classes - they're good for maybe one riot or something, but they've got to get on to medical school or law or whatever they're doing. Where do you get people who have this kind of skill? You have your own operatives and they're limited.
Particularly if you're a foreigner, your capacity to move something in the streets is very limited. You know, sometimes you can turn to a state intelligence agency in a country you're working with, but most effectively you can turn to the underworld. That's why the CIA always worked very effectively with the warlords of the Golden Triangle. It's worked very effectively with Corsican syndicates in Europe, worked very effectively and continuously with American Mafia - because they have the same clandestine arts. They operate with the same techniques.
And they have the same kind of amorality. They are natural allies. There was a conversion of cultures between the milieu of the underworld and the world of the clandestine operative.
You've got, then, a CIA secret war which in an essential way, in a fundamental way is linked with the opium traffic. More than that, it appears that a number of CIA operatives as individuals got involved. They started smuggling, started wheeling, started dealing and started doing a couple of bags here and there. We know, for example, there's a famous case of a CIA global money-moving bank called the Nugan-Hand bank which was established in Australia. The founder of that was a Michael John Hand. He was a green beret who was a contract CIA operative in Laos. When he first came to Australia in 1969-1970 Australian federal police got intelligence on him - I've seen the files - saying that what he's basically doing is he's bringing down light aircraft that are flying from Thailand to northern Australia into those abandoned air strips that were left over from World War II and he's dealing heroin. That's what Michael John Hand, according to Australian federal police intelligence, was doing. So, as individuals CIA operatives were getting involved and more or less what you've got then as a result of Laos is that the policy of integrating intelligence and cover operations with narcotics gets established.
You get, then, an entire generation of covert action warriors used to dealing with narcotics as a matter of policy. In short, you get a policy and personnel which integrates covert action with narcotics. This manifests itself in a number of ways. First of all the Nugan-Hand bank. Not only was it moving money globally for the CIA, but it was the major money laundering conduit that was trimming funds up to Southeast Asia from Australia and linking the Golden Triangle heroin trade of Southeast Asia with the urban markets of Australia. In Afghanistan as well, this same distributing pattern that we saw in Laos emerges.
This is one case that hasn't been well studied. I've spoken to one correspondent for the Far East Economic Review which is a Dow-Jones Publication, Mr. Lawrence Lifschultz(?), a friend of mine, and what he found was something of a similar pattern that I found in Laos. He was a correspondent in Pakistan and Afghanistan during the Mujahadeen campaign and he wrote articles in the Nation and elsewhere describing this similar pattern. You've got Pakistani government officials very heavily involved in narcotics, you've got the Mujahadeen manufacturing heroin, they're exporting it to Europe and the United States. They're using it to support their guerrilla campaign. the Pakistanis and the CIA are complicitous on the level of (1) not doing anything or (2) actually getting involved in the case of some of the Pakistani elite. So, it's a case where the Mujahadee operation becomes ultimately integrated with the narcotics trade and the CIA is fully informed of the integration and doesn't do anything about it.
Moving on to our fourth instance, one close to home, is the whole Iran-contra operation.
First of all, I think the Laos parallel is very strong in the Iran-contra operation. Just in the formal outlines of the policy - you know, you've got the contras on the border of Nicaragua, they're a mercenary army, they're supported through a humanitarian operation, they're given U.S. logistic support, they're given U.S. equipment and they're given U.S. air power backup to deliver the equipment and the logistic support. All the personnel that are involved in that operation are Laos veterans. Ted Shackley, Thomas Clines, Oliver North, Richard Secord - they all served in Laos during thirteen-year war. They are all part of that policy of integrating narcotics and being complicitous in the narcotics trade in the furtherance of covert action.
In this case, what I think we can see is it's not just the same. It's not just simply that the CIA was complicitous in allowing the contras to deal in cocaine, to serve as a link between the Andes and across the Caribbean into the United States. I think we can see the situation has gotten worse. In Laos, as I said, the CIA was hands-off. Once it got beyond their secret base, they wouldn't touch it. They gave Vang Pao the aircraft and once it got any further they didn't really know about it and didn't want to know about it. They remained ignorant about it. And ultimately what you're looking at was a traffic that was in a remote region which, in a way I don't think the CIA saw was going to happen, wound up serving Americans. An estimate of 50% of U.S. combat forces in Vietnam taking drugs, that was common at that time. But it's still remote and it's still not going directly into the United States.
The level of cynicism in Central America is even worse. We're not talking about original traffic or moving the raw product - we're talking about taking finished cocaine, providing aircraft, moreover providing protection for these traffickers as they fly across the Caribbean with these massive loads of cocaine. Now, I don't know. Can one estimate what percentage of the cocaine was politically protected by these intelligence operations. Until there's a formal investigation, which there's not likely to be, it's difficult to say.
I think that one can say that as you look at the drugs flowing into the United States during the 1960s when this Lao operation was going, there was probably a much smaller percentage of narcotics entering the United States from politically protected brokers than there is today. In other words, this CIA policy of integrating covert action operations with narcotics, both at a level of individuals being involved and also just turning a blind eye to the fact that our allies are drug brokers, this complicity in the narcotics trade has gotten worse. It's closer to home. It's not moving the raw material out in the jungles, it's actually bringing the finished narcotics, cocaine, into the United States. So it's gotten that much closer to home and that much more cynical.
Barsamian: In your view, there will be a marked increase and expansion of drug addiction and drug use in the United States, Europe and Australia - Incidentally, earlier you mentioned that the drug flow went into Europe and Australia, but not into Japan, is that correct?
McCoy: Yes.
Barsamian: Why not?
McCoy: The relationship between the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (the conservatives) and the big organized crime syndicates, which are enormous in Japan, is a very tight one and has been historically since the end of World War II. There's been a very close integration with the organized crime operations and the ruling conservative party. The conservatives have been in power now in Japan since 1948. It's one of the longest reigns of any party anywhere in the world. There's a kind of entente, an understanding between the syndicates and the government - it's not rigid - but the basic understanding is no drugs. That's the basic thing. Don't move drugs. And the Japanese police are ruthlessly efficient. If any of the syndicates, any of the big families - some of them have 10,000 members in them - broke this rule, the police have sufficient mechanisms of control to punish them for it. So in this complex politics of organized crime in Japan, they can do prostitution, they can do all kinds of fraud, they can do many things - but not drugs. So Japan's never opened up.
DeGaulle had a very similar relationship with the Corsican syndicates during his reign in the 1960s and early 1970s. The understanding was that the Corsican syndicates in Marseilles would manufacture in Marseilles under protection. But they would not sell in France. They would only export to the United States. That began to break down. DeGaulle died, Pompidoux replaced him and the Gaullists lost power, there was pressure on the syndicates, some new groups came in and started breaking the rule, and France wound up with a drug problem. But for practically a decade that rule held.
Taliban prepare to unleash their deadliest weapon in War on terrorism: Drugs By Raymond Whitaker in Peshawar
Sohrab, an Afghan refugee, stared listlessly from the culvert where he and his companion had taken the heroin they had just bought. The other man was holding a match to a piece of silvered paper, waiting for the fumes to start rising.
"You can see the dealers down there," said Dr Shah Agha Saadat, head of a drop-in centre for street addicts where Sohrab is registered, pointing to a couple of men who sauntered round the corner when they noticed our interest. Every few yards along the road, addicts were lying in the dust.
Dr Saadat had taken us out into the street, a couple of hundred yards into Pakistan's lawless tribal territories, to show us what he called a graveyard for former addicts. I had been expecting a corner of a field with a few whitewashed stones to mark their final resting-place. Instead he indicated a strip of recently-turned earth beside the road, only feet from where Sohrab was crouching. "This is where we bury them if they have no family to take them," he said. "There are 25 in there."
Opium poppies have always been grown on both sides of Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, but the region did not become the world's main exporter of heroin until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 brought near-anarchy. Production and refining exploded as the Afghan mujahedin, with the connivance of Western intelligence agencies, traded in drugs to finance their war against the Russians, with results that can be seen in the streets of Western cities as well as Peshawar.
The culture of narcotics, guns and criminality has taken a terrible toll in Pakistan, where there are more than three million heroin addicts and several senior politicians, military officers and policemen have been implicated in drug-running. Most of the drugs which reach the West now go out through Iran, which has half a million addicts of its own. But even though Pakistan and the Taliban in Afghanistan have almost stamped out poppy growing in the areas they control, the Afghan regime has done nothing to stop the refining and export of heroin from huge stockpiles within their borders.
A diplomatic source in Pakistan said: "The drugs trade continues to finance not only the Taliban, but the terrorism their friend Osama bin Laden carries out around the world. If we had spent more on drugs intelligence, we would have known more about terrorism as well, and that would have enabled us to put greater pressure on the Taliban and Mr bin Laden."
A collapse of the Taliban, however, could lead to a sharp rise in poppy growing in Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance, which is hoping for international aid in its five-year campaign to drive out the Taliban, recently staged a public burning of opium for Western television cameras, but the United Nations Drugs Control Project (UNDCP) is expected to report shortly that it has made no effort to stop the production, refining and export of heroin from its territory.
The Taliban themselves are threatening to allow the resumption of poppy cultivation if the Americans attack. According to Lateef Afridi, a Pakistani politician whose base is among the tribal Pashtun on both sides of the border, it may already have done so. "The ban on poppy growing was very unpopular, and right now the Taliban need friends," Mr Afridi told The Independent. "In the past few days I have heard that the Taliban have not only lifted the ban, they have given the farmers back the weapons they confiscated from them."
The crisis since the attacks in the US has halted a $1.5m UNDCP scheme to give immediate aid to Afghan farmers who had ceased poppy cultivation, heightening their incentive to start again. "There are very serious doubts about the future," said Bernard Frahi, head of the UNDCP in Islamabad. "We are seeing all the ingredients for illicit opium cultivation: civil war, an absence of law and order and no alternative for farmers. The criminal gangs which control the refining and shipment of heroin are still very much in place.
"Opium provides credit and savings for farmers, while wheat fetches only two thirds of the price, and there is no guarantee that you can sell your crop when it is ready. If farmers have a choice, they grow opium."
Many of the people seen by the Dost Foundation, a Pakistani charity which specialises in fighting heroin addiction, became hooked by the fumes in the refineries of Afghanistan. Apart from its centre for street addicts, the organisation runs projects for drug victims and their families. But it can treat only a tiny proportion of the region's vast army of addicts.
"The number is still rising, however much we try to get it down, because the supply of heroin is still so high," said Dr Saadat. The project treats the addicts' many skin, eye and digestive ailments, gives them a place to wash, dispenses tea and tries to warn them about the rising dangers of hepatitis and Aids. The increasing minority of addicts who inject can get disposable syringes as well.
Sohrab may well end up buried by the side of the street he frequents, but every month the project sends about 15 street addicts for rehabilitation. The man who goes out to try to persuade them to clean up is Bahar Ahmed Arbab, who used to be hooked on muffara – a fearsome combination of opium, Mandrax and hashish seeds. "It was so powerful that someone once shot me when I was high, and I didn't notice," he says with a grin, pulling up his shalwar kameez to show off the scar. "When addicts say it's difficult to give up, I tell them I'm a role model. If I can do it, anyone can."
"There is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman." -- André Malraux
Why is Half of Iraq in Absolute Poverty
"This is the first time I've read anything by Layla Anwar (see end for bio). This is one of the most moving articles I've ever read---it makes me as an American feel so helpless, and ashamed. Because I know I would feel as angry as Layla does if I were in her shoes. This is an intelligent, passionate woman, who speaks for all of the women of Iraq." Dr. Reese Kilgo, Retired Professor, University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH)
Why Is Half Of Iraq In Absolute Poverty?
by Layla Anwar, August 3, 2007 Information Clearing House
Why? Yes why? What for? What does it say about you? What does it say about your countries? What does it say about your institutions? What does it say about your governments, your "culture", your "civilization", your history, your "progress", your "values", your concepts...?
Have you ever stopped and pondered these questions? Have you ever stopped and asked yourselves; how come? How come we are so advanced, how come we are so democratic, how come we are so great, how come we are so free... And how come we allow so much murder, oppression, abuse, go unaccounted for? Have you ever asked yourself this question?
I was just listening to the BBC World radio. A report from Oxfam - and in your eyes that makes it credible - over 70 % of us Iraqis, no longer have access to clean drinking water. I say no longer have because I remember not so long ago, one could turn on the tap and drink. As simple as that. The report goes on to say that over 50% of Iraqis are undernourished and 1 out of 3 is literally starving. And that 50% live in abject poverty. 50% !!!
Again, I remember a time, even during the "civilized" sanctions that your countries imposed upon us, everyone had something to eat. Not much, but there was food. The Iraqi government had developed a system of rationing that, to this day, still leaves your top U.N reps in awe. When I mention that in my posts, I am accused of waging a war of disinformation, psy-ops and being a paid agent.
Listening to a Concerned Arab Woman
Now you listen to me and you get off your butts and read. Educate yourselves, oh great people of the West. A few years back, you could not even locate Iraq on a map. Now you have all suddenly become experts on Her.
Prior to your liberation, there was no starvation in Iraq. Prior to your liberation, there was no abject poverty, the kind we witness today. Prior to your liberation, kids did not stutter out of fear. Prior to your liberation, they went to free schools, learned, grew up and became fully functioning adults, with degrees, diplomas and expertise. No, we did not have learning impediments before your liberation. Today 92 % of Iraqi children suffer from it. Today, 99% of Iraqi children are traumatized for life.
So I ask you again - Why? What have Iraqis done to you? Did they invade you? Did they steal your homes? Did they imprison you? Did they torture you? Did they rape you? Did they occupy your lands? Of course, some of you will come and present me with your usual condescending, paternalistic, patronizing lists of political theories, attempting to explain the inexplicable.
Save your time and energy. I know all about your theories. I know all about your theories of imperialism, neo-cons, Zionists... I also know all about your handy explanations regarding oil, cartels, monopolies, globalization... None of that satisfies me. I still need to know why?
Why us? Why Iraq? Why this? Why now? If you fail to answer that question, then you would have not learned one single thing about yourselves. And I say yourselves, because your governments are a reflection of who you are, your aspirations, your mindsets, your thinking, your illusions...You are part of it and it is part of you.
And all I can see right now are nothing but murderous thoughts - yours. A few days ago, I was reading an article about a French film producer called Alain Tasma who has just finished directing a film on the Rwandan Genocide.
During "Operation Turquoise", between 700'000 and 900'000 Rwandans perished. None of you, not a single one of you, had any objections to calling it a Genocide. It was a given, it was accepted, it was fact. And rightly so, because it was a genocide. But when it comes to Iraq, all sorts of counter figures pop up. All kinds of other statistics are put forward to try to prove "well, yes but"...
Continuation of Genocide
Again my question is why? Why did you accept it without questions in the case of Rwanda, why did you accept it without questions in the case of the Holocaust, why is it when it comes to Arabs and Arab Muslims in particular, it becomes a topic for debate and nit picking? And "it" refers to Genocide.
Can you answer this question? Why is it that what happened over 60 years ago in your lands, still makes you grovel in mortification and supplications of forgiveness but when it comes to us, you have so many "red flags"? Your phrases are almost always qualified with a "yes but..."
What does that tell me about you? It tells me exactly what I said earlier on, you and your governments are one and the same. And you will come and say "yes but... I did not vote", "yes but, I sent an email", "yes but....yes but...yes but..."
I don't care for your "yes buts". I truly don't. And that applies to all of you. All of you whose governments have a finger in the Iraqi pie.
If you had really wanted, you could have easily gone out en masse, in front of your government's offices... If only 5 million of you, not more, only 5 million, had done that and had thrown your passports in a huge bonfire in front of your White house, 10 Downing Street or wherever the hell you happen to be, then I am sure, we would not be experiencing what we are experiencing now.
There are also mass pickets, sit ins, huge demonstrations, strikes... There are ways, many ways. You just need to get your "creativity" going. Or maybe you are just creative in killing us? I don't care much for your opinions and comments anymore. Actually I don't give a damn. All I know is that you have participated directly or indirectly in the crime. That is all I know.
But there is still a little hope left. Go and sit with yourself for a little while and ask yourself why and then ask yourself what am I supposed to do next?
I can assure you, answers will come to you. For those of you who prefer to sit and engage in quid pro quos of ifs and buts, then I can already tell you in advance, you are a hopeless case. And I will not even bother to ask why.
Layla Anwar, Who am I? The eternal Question. Have not figured it out fully yet. All you need to know about me is that I am a Middle Easterner, an Arab Woman - into my 40's and old enough to know better. I have no homeland per se. I live in Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Egypt simultaneously.... All the rest is icing on the cake.
"I read some of the Comments on this article. The one below from Susan is the best one I found, and is partly what I would reply. But I know it's only trying to explain, to say "I'm doing all I can. I wish I could do more. I wish five million of us would and could go to Washington and burn our passports on the Capitol lawn, storm the White House." Dr. Reese Kilgo, Retired Professor, University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH)
"I think there were 5 million of us in the USA protesting in Feb 2003. There were 10 million world-wide. The five million was spread out across the country, and there was no passport bonfire. I know lots of people gave up on protesting after that. I didn't. I do it regularly in town and I have gone to DC eight times in the last four years to protest the war on Iraq. And it certainly is a genocide.'' Susan 08.01.07 - 5:30 pm
"Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a big fucking television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disk players and electrical tin openers...choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on the couch, watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life. But why would I want to do a thing lke that? I chose not to choose life. I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got heroin?" Irvine Welsh TRAINSPOTTING
More Hollywood celebrities showed up at the demonstration than buttoned-down Washington typically sees in a month.
Actor Sean Penn said lawmakers will pay a price in the 2008 elections if they do not take firmer action than to pass a nonbinding resolution against the war, the course Congress is now taking.
"If they don't stand up and make a resolution as binding as the death toll, we're not going to be behind those politicians," he said. Actors Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins also spoke.
Fonda was a lightning rod in the Vietnam era for her outspoken opposition to that war and her advocacy from Hanoi at the height of that conflict. Sensitive to the old wounds, she made it a point to thank the active-duty service-members, veterans and Gold Star mothers who attended the rally.
She drew parallels to the Vietnam War, citing "blindness to realities on the ground, hubris ... thoughtlessness in our approach to rebuilding a country we've destroyed." But she noted that this time, veterans, soldiers and their families increasingly and vocally are against the Iraq war.
The House Judiciary Committee chairman, Rep. John Conyers, threatened to use congressional spending power to try to stop the war. "George Bush has a habit of firing military leaders who tell him the Iraq war is failing," he said, looking out at the masses. "He can't fire you." Referring to Congress, the Michigan Democrat added: "He can't fire us.
"The founders of our country gave our Congress the power of the purse because they envisioned a scenario exactly like we find ourselves in today. Now only is it in our power, it is our obligation to stop Bush."
White House spokesman Trey Bohn responded that Conyers "needs to learn the difference between fact and fable, between a soundbite and a slur." He said Conyers' "assertion that the president fires generals with whom he disagrees is flat wrong."
On the stage rested a coffin covered with a U.S. flag and a pair of military boots, symbolizing American war dead. On the Mall stood a large bin filled with tags bearing the names of Iraqis who have died.
A small contingent of active-duty service members attended the rally, wearing civilian clothes because military rules forbid them from protesting in uniform.
Air Force Staff Sgt. Tassi McKee, 26, an intelligence specialist at Fort Meade, Md., said she joined the Air Force because of patriotism, travel and money for college. "After we went to Iraq, I began to see through the lies," she said.
In the crowd, signs recalled the November elections that defeated the Republican congressional majority in part because of President Bush's Iraq policy. "I voted for peace," one said.
"I've just gotten tired of seeing widows, tired of seeing dead Marines," said Vincent DiMezza, 32, wearing a dress Marine uniform from his years as a sergeant. A Marine aircraft mechanic from 1997 to 2002, he did not serve in Iraq or Afghanistan.
About 40 people staged a counter-protest, including Army Cpl. Joshua Sparling, 25, who lost his leg to a bomb in Iraq.
He said the anti-war protesters, especially those who are veterans or who are on active duty, "need to remember the sacrifice we have made and what our fallen comrades would say if they are alive."
Bush reaffirmed his commitment to his planned troop increase in a phone conversation Saturday with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The president was in Washington for the weekend. He is often is out of town during big protest days.
"He understands that Americans want to see a conclusion to the war in Iraq and the new strategy is designed to do just that," said Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council.
Protest organizers said the crowd included people who came on 300 buses from 40 states.
An icon of the Vietnam War peace movement -- Jane Fonda -- joined protesters who rallied in the nation's capital against the U.S. military presence in Iraq
"What Part of "Bush Lied" Don't You Understand?"
By MICHAEL RUANE AND FREDRICK KUNKLE
Washington Post Service Sun, Jan. 28, 2007 WASHINGTON, D.C.
WASHINGTON - A raucous and colorful multitude of protesters, led by some of the aging activists of the past such as Jane Fonda, staged a series of rallies and a march on the Capitol on Saturday to demand that the United States end its war in Iraq.
Under a blue sky, tens of thousands of people angry about the war and other policies of the Bush administration danced, sang, shouted and chanted their opposition.
They came from across the country, and across the activist spectrum, with a wide array of grievances. Many seemed to be younger than 30, but there were others who said they had been at the famed antiwar protests of the 1960s and 1970s.
They came to Washington at what they said was a moment of opportunity to push the new Congress to take action against the war, even as the Bush administration is accelerating plans to send an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq. This week, the Senate will begin debating a resolution of disapproval of the president's Iraq policy, setting up a dramatic confrontation with the White House.
Some protesters plan to stay and lobby their representatives in Congress. Other antiwar activists intend to barnstorm states this week urging senators to oppose the troop escalation.
Actor Sean Penn, right, joins Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, and his wife, Elizabeth Kucinich, at the U.S. Navy Memorial in Washington as they participate in a rally to voice their opposition to the war in Iraq on Jan. 27, 2007.
GROWING MOVEMENT?
While Saturday's crowd was large and vociferous, its size was unclear because there was no official crowd estimate. It was filled with longtime opponents of the conflict and the administration.
''Its primary value is that it keeps up the pressure,'' said former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, of South Dakota. ``There is a sense that, by summer, a march like this will be two or three times as large.''
Many of the demonstrators Saturday were garbed in clothes of many colors -- pink, green, red and black -- and T-shirts and buttons of many sentiments.
''Think,'' read one shirt. ''It's not illegal yet.'' A button read: ''Is It Vietnam Yet?'' Another read: ``Cheney/Satan '08: 'Cause Oil Companies Aren't Rich Enough.''
But the overriding complaint was the U.S. prosecution of the war in Iraq.
''Peace is controversial,'' civil rights and community activist Jesse Jackson, 65, said in a rousing address to the crowd gathered at the east end of the Mall. ``But so is war. The fruit of peace is so much sweeter.''
Some came on behalf of relatives who were in the service. A New York woman came on behalf of her younger brother, who she said was about to be deployed to Iraq. She had a framed picture of him in a knapsack. An Akron, Ohio, woman came with her infant son, saying his father, in the Navy in Kuwait, had yet to see him.
Among the celebrities who appeared was Jane Fonda, 69, the actress and activist who, during the Vietnam War, was criticized for sympathizing with the North Vietnamese.
She told the crowd that this was the first time she had spoken at an antiwar rally in 34 years.
''I've been afraid that because of the lies that have been and continue to be spread about me and that war, that they would be used to hurt this new antiwar movement,'' she told the crowd. ``But silence is no longer an option.''
Members of the conservative Free Republic group picketed an antiwar rally at the Navy Memorial where Fonda spoke earlier in the day. ''Hanoi Jane,'' one sign read. ``Wrong then, wrong now.''
The day's events unfolded peacefully. And after a cold morning with temperatures in the mid-20s, the day quickly warmed, and protesters were unzipping jackets as the mercury topped 50 degrees.
The day's events were organized chiefly by a group called United for Peace and Justice, which describes itself as a coalition of 1,400 local and national organizations. Among them are the National Organization for Women, United Church of Christ, the American Friends Service Committee, True Majority, Military Families Speak Out, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Farms Not Arms, CODEPINK, MoveOn.org and September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.
The day began with a 10 a.m. rally at the Navy Memorial sponsored by the peace group CODEPINK. There, several thousand activists heard speeches by actor Sean Penn, presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, U.S. Reps. Maxine Waters and Lynne Woolsey.
Laura Sinderbrand, 79, and her husband, Alvin, 84, of New York City, said they attended dozens of Washington protests against the Vietnam War during the 1960s and early 70s.
''The biggest difference back then, of course, was the draft,'' said Alvin Sinderbrand, a retired patent attorney. ``That made everything much more emotional. There was a sense that everybody was vulnerable.''
The Sinderbrands opposed involvement in Iraq from the beginning, they said, attending a 2003 protest here. The couple made the protest a day trip. ''We're doing it with the hope that it's going to be the last time we need to protest this,'' said Laura Sinderbrand, a retired museum director.
The Peace Alliance Presents: Turning Peace into Political Force February 5th in Washington, D.C.
A night of education and support for Legislation to create a U.S. Department of Peace
Special Performance by Steven Tyler of Aerosmith With
Members of Congress, including Rep. Keith Ellison, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, Rep. Dennis Kucinich & more and Marianne Williamson Plus Special Appearance by Joaquin Phoenix
Monday, February 5, 2007 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm The George Washington University Lisner Auditorium 730 21st Street, NW Washington, DC
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Tickets: $25 General Admission $10 students, seniors and Congressional staff ($10 rate use code 'TPA', I.D.'s checked at door).
BUY TICKETS NOW! Tickets included with conference registration, or order online, visit any Ticketmaster location or call the GW Lisner Auditorium information line at (202) 994-6800. Day of ticket sales at box office are cash only. On Monday February 5th, box office is closed until one hour before program.
Transportation and Parking: The GW Lisner Auditorium is three blocks from the Foggy Bottom/GWU Metro stop (orange/blue line). Parking is available in the University Garage, located on Eye and 22nd Streets.
This event is the 2007 Department of Peace Campaign National Conference Grand Finale. REGISTER FOR CONFERENCE (Monday night tickets included in conference registration.)
Sundance closes with nods to war and family Sun Jan 28, 2007 11:29am ET
PARK CITY, Utah (Reuters) - The Sundance Film Festival drew to a close on Sunday with organizers calling it a landmark year for independent filmmakers who added breadth and depth to movies dealing with global issues, war and family.
"Padre Nuestro" on Saturday won the jury prize for best film drama by a U.S. filmmaker with a tale of a young illegal immigrant from Mexico who travels to New York seeking a father he never knew.
"Manda Bala" earned the jury award for best U.S. documentary with a tale of crime and corruption in Brazil.
"Grace is Gone," starring John Cusack as a father of two whose wife dies in Iraq, picked up the audience trophy for favorite drama and a writing award for filmmaker James Strouse. "Grace" also was among the movies whose distribution rights were sold in one of the most active markets in years at Sundance.
"For so many different reasons, this work is exceptional in terms of how much of it will get into the marketplace, and the range of issues and maturity of the filmmakers," said festival director Geoffrey Gilmore, who hailed 2007 as a "landmark year."
Sundance, which is backed by Robert Redford's Sundance Institute, is the top U.S. gathering for movies made outside Hollywood's mainstream studios, and each year festival favorites top movie marquees worldwide.
With wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and African nations making headlines, "indie" filmmakers at the 2007 edition were looking outward for their subject matter as opposed to the insular and more personal movies that often played here in the 1990s.
Yet, even as that world view seemed to dominate Sundance 2007, many festival movies were grounded in the idea that family is where people seek safety in troubled times.
"Padre Nuestro" and "Grace" were both examples of tales of family bonds set against issues of illegal immigration and death during wartime, respectively.
But those movies were not the only ones. The audience award for best documentary went to "Hear and Now," in which filmmaker Irene Taylor Brodsky detailed a year in the life of her deaf parents who decided to undergo surgery so they could hear.
Sundance juries also handed out honors for international movies, and the World Cinema drama prize went to Israeli movie "Sweet Mud," about a boy dealing with his mentally ill mother on a kibbutz in the 1970s.
Denmark's "Enemies of Happiness," which details the life of an Afghani woman politician, earned the World Cinema jury prize for best documentary, and a special jury prize went to non-fiction film "No End in Sight," about U.S. policy mistakes in the Iraq war.
Like many award winners at Sundance, "No End" director Charles Ferguson took the opportunity to address the U.S.-led war in Iraq with an eye toward the future, not the past.
"It might be too late for Iraq, but I hope it isn't too late for this country to conduct itself differently in the future," he said.
World Cinema audiences gave "In the Shadow of the Moon," an emotional tale of the Apollo astronauts from Britain's David Sington, the trophy for top documentary, while Irish musical "Once" earned the audience award for best drama.
Husband-and-wife Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine won the documentary director's award for "War/Dance" about child soldiers in Uganda -- an issue they said they had no idea existed until they began their work.
Finally, the directing award for film drama went to Jeffrey Blitz for "Rocket Science," about a high school stutterer who learns lessons in love while on the debate team.
Sundance Festival Eyewitnesses Suggest Celebs Are Boring
HecklerSpray.com 24 Jan 2007 08:00 AM CST
If you ignore those pesky rumours that films are shown at the Sundance Film Festival, you can really score some useless star-gazing. Although we keep a chateau just a short jaunt from the annual event taking place in Park City, Utah, we’re too lazy to get the first hand experience for ourselves. As tempting as it is to circle narrow, packed city blocks for hours to find parking only to battle the mania of everyday average nobodies dying to catch a glimpse of anyone remotely famous, we’ve decided to continue with our high standard of journalistic integrity and mooch celebrity info from other sources. Interestingly enough, these voyeurs are consistently reporting that celebs are, in fact, boring. It seems stars only do things like disarm nuclear bombs, leap buildings with a single bound, and engage in Kung-Fu fights with mortal enemies when they’re on screen. Instead, they drink their way from party lounge to party lounge, gathering obscene amounts of free swag (because they are truly in need of financial assistance), which will for sure be properly reported on their tax forms.
To the Congress of the United States, Entering Its Third Century
by Howard Nemerov
because reverence has never been america's thing, this verse in your honor will not begin "o thou." but the great respect our country has to give may you all continue to deserve, and have.
* * * here at the fulcrum of us all, the feather of truth against the soul is weighed, and had better be found to balance lest our enterprise collapse in silence.
for here the million varying wills get melted down, get hammered out until the movie's reduced to stills that tell us what the law's about.
conflict's endemic in the mind: your job's to hear it in the wind and compass it in opposites, and bring the antagonists by your wits
to being one, and that the law thenceforth, until you change your minds against and with the shifting winds that this and that way blow the straw.
so it's a republic, as Franklin said, if you can keep it; and we did thus far, and hope to keep our quarrel funny and just. though with this moral:—
praise without end for the go-ahead zeal of whoever it was invented the wheel; but never a word for the poor soul's sake that thought ahead, and invented the brake.
A man removes a bloodied schoolbook at a school gate in a mostly Sunni area of western Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, Jan. 28, 2007. Mortar shells rained down Sunday on a girls secondary school killing four pupils and wounding 21, witnesses and police said. AP
LOVE, WAR & MORAL INDIGNATION
By Robin Meyers Senior Minister of Mayflower Congregational Church
I am angry because I have watched as the faith I love has been taken over by fundamentalists who claim to speak for Jesus, but whose actions are anything but Christian.
We've heard a lot lately about so-called "moral values" as having swung the election to President Bush IN 2004. Well, I'm a great believer in moral values, but we need to have a discussion, all over this country, about exactly what constitutes a moral value. I mean what are we talking about.
Because we don't get to make them up as we go along, especially not if we are people of faith. We have an inherited tradition of what is right and wrong, and moral is as moral does.
Let me give you just a few of the reasons why I take issue with those in power who claim moral values are on their side:
1. When you start a war on false premises and then act as if your deceptions are justified because you are doing God’s will, and that your critics are either unpatriotic or lacking in faith, there are some of us . . . who believe that this is not only not moral, but immoral.
2. When you live in a country that has established international rules for waging a just war and built the United Nations on its own soil to enforce them, if you then arrogantly break the very rules you set down for the rest of the world, you are doing something immoral.
3. When you claim that Jesus is the Lord of your life, and yet fail to acknowledge that your policies ignore his essential teachings, or turn them on their head (the Sermon on the Mount says we must never return violence for violence, and those who live by the sword shall die by the sword), you are doing something immoral.
4. When you act as if the lives of Iraqi civilians are not as important as the lives of American soldiers, and refuse even to count them, you are doing something immoral.
5. When you find a way to avoid combat in Vietnam, and then question the patriotism of someone who volunteered to fight, and then came home a hero, you are doing something immoral.
6. When you ignore the fundamental teachings of the Gospel (which says that the way the strong treat the weak is the ultimate test) by giving tax breaks to the wealthiest among us so that the strong will get stronger and the weak will get weaker, you are doing something immoral.
7. When you wink at the torture of prisoners and deprive so-called “enemy combatants” of the rules of the Geneva Convention, which your own country helped to establish and insists that other countries follow, you are doing something immoral.
8. When you claim that the world can be divided up into the good guys and the evildoers, slice up your own nation into those with you and those who are with the terrorists, and then launch a war that enriches your friends and seizes control of the oil to which we are addicted, instead of helping us to kick the habit, you are doing something immoral.
9. When you fail to veto a single spending bill, but ask us to pay for a war with no exit strategy and no end in sight, creating an enormous deficit that hangs like a great millstone around the necks of our children, you are doing something immoral.
10. When you cause most of the rest of the world to hate a country that was once the most loved country in the world, and act as if it doesn’t matter what others think of us, because God thinks well of you, you have done something immoral.
11. When you use hatred of homosexuals as a wedge issue to turn out record numbers of evangelical voters, and use the Constitution as a tool of discrimination, you are doing something immoral.
12. When you favor the death penalty, and yet claim to be a follower of Jesus, who said an eye for an eye was the old way, not the way of the Kingdom, you are doing something immoral.
13. When you dismantle countless environmental laws designed to protect the earth, God’s gift to all of us, so that the corporations that bought you and paid for your favors will make higher profits while our children breathe dirty air and live in a toxic world, you have done something evil. The earth belongs to the Lord, not to Halliburton.
14. When you claim that our God is bigger than their God, and that our killing is righteous while theirs is evil, you have made us resemble the enemy we claim to be fighting, and that is immoral. We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us.
15. When you tell people that you intend to run and govern as a “compassionate conservative,” using the word that is the essence of all religious faith, and then show no compassion for those who disagree with you, and no patience with those who cry to you for help, you are doing something immoral.
16. When you constantly talk about Jesus, who was a healer of the sick, but do nothing to make sure that anyone who is sick can go to see a doctor, even if she doesn’t have a penny in her pocket, you are doing something immoral.
17. When you put judges on the bench who are racist, and will set women back a hundred years, and when you surround yourself with preachers who say gays ought to be killed, you are doing something immoral.
I'm tired of people thinking that because I'm a Christian, I must be a supporter of President Bush, or that because I favor civil rights and gay rights I must not be a person of faith. I'm tired of people saying that I can't support the troops but oppose the war -- I heard that when I was your age, when the Vietnam war was raging. We knew that that war was wrong, and you know that this war is wrong -- the only question is how many people are going to die before these make-believe Christians are removed from power.
This country is bankrupt. The war is morally bankrupt. The claim of this administration to be Christian is bankrupt. And the only people who can turn things around are people like you -- young people who are just beginning to wake up to what is happening to them. It's your country to take back. It's your faith to take back. It's your future to take back.
Don't be afraid to speak out. Don't back down when your friends begin to tell you that the cause is righteous and that the flag should be wrapped around the cross, while the rest of us keep our mouths shut. Real Christians take chances for peace. So do real Jews, and real Muslims, and real Hindus, and real Buddhists -- so do all the faith traditions of the world at their heart believe one thing: life is precious. Every human being is precious. Arrogance is the opposite of faith. Greed is the opposite of charity. And believing that one has never made a mistake is the mark of a deluded man, not a man of faith.
And war -- war is the greatest failure of the human race -- and thus the greatest failure of faith.
There's an old rock and roll song, whose lyrics say it all: War, what is it good for -- absolutely nothing.
And what is the dream of the prophets? That we should study war no more, that we should beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks. Who would Jesus bomb, indeed? How many wars does it take to know that too many people have died? What if they gave a war and nobody came? Maybe one day we will find out.
Time to march again my friends. Time to commit acts of civil disobedience. Time to sing, and to pray, and refuse to participate in the madness. My generation finally stopped a tragic war. You can too!
"Only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” --Martin Luther King.
Dr. Robin Meyers is Senior Minister of Mayflower Congregational Church (an Open and Affirming, Peace and Justice church in northwest Oklahoma City) and professor of rhetoric at Oklahoma City University. He is also a columnist for the *Oklahoma Gazette* and a commentator for National Public Radio.
When you become aware that madmen are running the governments & militaries, armed with planet-scorching doomsday weapons, and on top of that the climate and atmosphere are degrading by the minute as solar flares are about to increase to maximum... don't you think every living human should be taking emergency measures?
The truly crazy-making realization one comes to when addressing the mass extinction event underway is that most humans are completely oblivious, confused, or too desperate or drugged to care. Entire societies are obsessed with celebrity & entertainment, sports & economics-- while outside the weather is battering at the roof & walls.
You end up asking yourself if this is the sad, tragic, ridiculous end of the planet Earth as we know it? And what will the survivors be reminiscing about, in their underground hovels? Snack foods once in abundance, the great films once playing at the megaplexes, the myriad strange & beautiful creatures which millions of years of evolution unfurled upon the world? All wiped away by human hunger & stupidity... while the society partied & hurried along after money & entertainments.
I feel obligated to pass on the 3-point salvation plan from Haidakhan Baba: Truth, Simplicity & Love can save the world. Truth as in "The Truth shall set you Free." Simplicity as in the scientific rule that the simplest solution is usually the correct, and most practical one. Love seems self-evident & world-reaffirming, yet appears to be the most elusive, in a world filled with murderous disappointment.
I must add the sage advice of Terence McKenna, who believed that only psychedelics ("Visionary Plants") could liberate the human chains of habitual doom in time to avert "Eschaton"-- the end of the world as we know it-- scheduled for the end of 2012. Unfortunately, these plants are mostly deemed illegal in the industrial society of citified folk.
Another avenue of addressing the epic endtime is questioning who benefits from the devastation & suffering? I suggest searching: Weapons, Drugs, Oil. All of which you will find leading the current US administration in the White House, whose friends are making billions upon billions of profit dollars while most of the world is going to hell.
Let us all pray that the changes in political sensibility in the new year will awaken a radical shift toward planetary survival. Otherwise, enjoy the luxuries & creamy essence of the world we are are witness to rapidly disappearing from under us. Shake up your community, go postal, make a scene. What do you have to lose? Only the livable planet & all its wonders...
"There have never in history been so many opportunities to do so many things that aren't worth doing." -- William Gaddis
"God will not look you over for medals, degrees, or diplomas, but for scars." -- Elbert Hubbard
This is not your father's war protest Young people need to speak out, folks from days of Vietnam say By SUMMER HARLOW, The News Journal
Posted Sunday, January 28, 2007 The News Journal/SUCHAT PEDERSON
June Eisley has spent most of her life protesting war.
In the 1960s and '70s, she marched on the Capitol, attended rallies at the University of Delaware, and even organized a local chapter of Mothers United for Peace.
With millions of other Vietnam War protesters across the country, she hoped to make a difference, and prevent the United States from engaging in any such conflict again.
Fast-forward to today. Eisley, of Wilmington, has watched with dread as the United States has enmeshed itself in another unpopular war.
"I had hoped Americans had learned their lesson not to believe the government about their reasons for getting into a war," she said. "More people should have been paying attention at the start of this war."
Many have drawn parallels between the war in Iraq and the Vietnam War -- both guerrilla wars in unfamiliar countries with histories and cultures the United States knew little about; both long-term conflicts with conflicting views about when to withdraw troops.
But peace activists, war veterans and historians all note one major difference -- Saturday's march in Washington aside, Operation Iraqi Freedom has not generated nearly the same level of anti-war demonstrations that were sustained throughout much of the Vietnam era. And without protesters pressuring politicians, they say, policy is unlikely to change.
"There's not the same kind of groundswell today," said Rudi Matthee, a University of Delaware history professor specializing in the Middle East. "Which is exactly why Bush has been able to push through his plans and vision. ... The Bush administration hasn't gotten the same kind of pressure from the populace as the administration did during the Vietnam era."
Keith Pluymers, a sophomore at the University of Delaware and co-president of the campus Civil Liberties Union, called the political activism on campus "comatose."
"During the Vietnam era, there was the very pressing concern of the draft that was making young people concerned about what was happening with the war," he said. "Today, people are concerned solely with getting a job and securing that middle-class lifestyle. Politics aren't that big a concern."
Back then, the resistance was about more than just protesting the war, said Darlene Battle, campaign director for Delaware ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
"It was about peace, and women recognizing their empowerment," she said. "We were finding ourselves, so it was a lot different then."
Until the war hits home -- such as with the delivery of a letter ordering someone's child to report for duty -- parents and youths alike aren't likely to take to the streets in protest, said Susan Mangini of Newark, who as a child in the 1960s and '70s accompanied her mother to demonstrations.
"It would be over my dead body before they ever took my son," she said. "You'd see me out there protesting then."
Alan Muller, who heads Green Delaware, was in his early 20s during the Vietnam War.
"People were being forced to go to Vietnam against their will. They were being taken out of college and forced to go and fight," said Muller, who said he wasn't a pacifist and had been in the ROTC program. "If the government were to tell students today they would be drafted, their interest in opposing the war would perk up greatly."
'The draft is inevitable'
Tom Daws, president of the New Castle County and state chapters of Vietnam Veterans of America, said he believes the Iraq war is as unpopular as the war in Vietnam.
"I don't know why more young people aren't protesting, because I think the draft is inevitable," Daws said. "And it's not going to be just young men, but young women, because the troops already in the military are spent. They're worn out from serving two or three tours and not having any new replacements."
And with the president calling for more than 20,000 additional troops, more bodies are going to have to come from somewhere, he said.
Young people should be the ones questioning this war, Daws said, because they're the ones who can do something about it.
Andrew Christy, a University of Delaware sophomore and president of the Men Against Rape Society, said he thinks students are cynical, and don't believe protesting would accomplish anything.
And while the Princeton Review recently rated the university as the fourth-most apathetic campus, he said he believes the problem isn't unique to Delaware.
"People care, but they're not motivated to get involved," he said. "They don't pay attention to what's going on in the world or how it will affect them in the long run."
Matthee said it's easy to blame the lack of constant protesting on an apathetic public in an age of consumerism.
"In the '60s, there was this notion of a new utopia, and high ideals," he said. "Not all idealism is gone, but some of the energy has gone out of it. A grand vision is lacking. Capitalism absorbs everything."
Peter Jackson, a senior at the Charter School of Wilmington, said many students are more focused on school than activism.
"A lot of kids don't really think the war's affecting them," said Jackson, who said he was the only one of his friends to protest during Bush's visit. He wore a homemade sign that read, "Send me to college, not Iraq."
"They don't expect a draft, so they don't really get involved," he said.
Emily Taylor, a University of Delaware sophomore and chairwoman of the Delaware Federation of College Republicans, said there aren't as many protests now because today's generation came of age after Sept. 11, 2001.
"That shaped the way we look at things, and I think a lot of people understand that if we want to be successful in the war on terror, we have to be successful in Iraq," she said. "We support our soldiers and we want them to do well."
Vivid memories of Vietnam era
Mangini was only 10, but she remembers the Vietnam protest skits enacted on the green at the University of Delaware.
Like the time she played a Vietnamese child, beaten and killed in a simulated jungle massacre.
Other times, she marched with the demonstrators -- she still has the buttons and patches to prove it.
"I understood what was going on because there was something on TV every night, and in the paper, there were these horrible pictures of people with napalm and people getting shot in the head," she said.
Sally Milbury-Steen, executive director of the local peace organization Pacem in Terris, was in college during much of the Vietnam era.
She recalled one protest in the nation's capital in 1972 that had a "picnic-type" atmosphere.
"It was a combination of a protest and a love fest," she said.
Although the University of Delaware wasn't a hotbed of political activism, Muller said, the campus wasn't as "dead" then as it is today.
"When I went away to the University of Delaware, I had no political consciousness, but I developed some, even in Newark," he said. "The administration was afraid of the students. There was this tremendous anger, and tremendous determination that the war had to stop. There was also fear of being sent to a remote place to be killed."
Protest, treason not synonymous
Before the Iraq war started, massive protests and marches conjured up images of the activism of the 1960s and '70s. But that activity quickly died out.
"It was like treason to oppose the war, like we were anti-American," Battle said. "People were scared to speak out."
As the war has worn on, Milbury-Steen said, people have come to understand that one can oppose the war and still support the soldiers.
After nearly four years now, the war has been going on for too long without accomplishing anything, Muller said.
"People were willing to give the government the benefit of the doubt," he said. "American people will give you two or three years, but then if they don't see a result, they will call it off, and I think that's what's been going on."
"It was the people on the streets who got us out of Vietnam," said Fred Sinton of Unionville, Pa., who protested President Bush's visit to Wilmington on Wednesday.
If demonstrators can mount the same type of pressure against the Iraq war, it could help shape policy. Without a groundswell, Eisley said, the government won't act.
"There has to be a public outcry if you want to make a difference," she said. "That's why things are changing now, because people have had enough."
Pluymers said a lack of people in the streets means the administration isn't forced to be accountable. And young people need to realize they are partly to blame, he said.
"It hurts progressive movements when no young voices are behind it," he said.
"Young people are more concerned about where they're going to get their illegal booze for the weekend or where they're going to get their new-technology toy. Whether we realize it or not, everything we do, from the toys we buy to the protest this Saturday that people won't attend, it makes an impact."
If Bush succeeds in sending more troops to Iraq, Milbury-Steen said, she expects to see demonstrations become more common.
"People are suspect of what's going to happen with this surge, and the question of whether the current administration wants to let time run out so a new administration will have to deal with ending this thing," she said.
Just as was true during Vietnam, Americans are doubting the Iraq war, said Matthee, the history professor.
"For Vietnam, the tipping point was the early '70s, and from there they were just trying to rescue and salvage a mission," he said.
"I think we're very close to the same place in Iraq. I think we've reached the point of no return and America will have to leave, probably ignominiously."
With reservists being called up repeatedly, resentment is growing among the public, Matthee said.
"Especially since it's been made clear this war is not winnable and body bags are coming home for perhaps no reason at all," he said.
Pacem in Terris -- Latin for "peace on earth" -- organized three 47-passenger buses to transport protesters to the Capitol on Saturday.
"People are coming out because they see this is a pivotal time and they want to prevent the surge and call for the war to end and bring the troops home," Milbury-Steen said.
"This is an important time because a new Congress is just getting under way, and people are holding their feet to the fire."
Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the US House of Representatives, is in Afghanistan where she has held talks with President Hamid Karzai. Pelosi and her congressional delegation earlier paid a visit to US troops at a base in Bagram, the largest US base in Afghanistan. The trip to Afghanistan followed a stopover in Pakistan on Saturday, where Pelosi met with President Pervez Musharraf to discuss the situation in Afghanistan and cooperation in countering terrorism.
"It's not a matter of what is true that counts but a matter of what is perceived to be true." -- Henry Kissinger
Americans Trapped in the Panic-Stricken Present What'd You Do Before the War, Uncle Dick?
The wonderful folks at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in London have shown a correlation between brain damage to the hippocampus and amnesia which not only prevents remembering the past but the ability to visualize the future, as presented in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Patients where unable to imagine realistic situations in the future, instead seeing "just a collection of seperate images," much like the amnesia associated with their past. Their study suggests the hippocampus acts like a processor in your PC, giving context to raw data. Damage to the processor causes loss of meaning and application, and the video chip reverts to bitmap images.
Now, much has been made of the younger George Bush's hard drug use & alcoholism, his slurring & dis-communications, inferring brain damage & classic "passive-aggresive personality disorder"-- the real brains behind the Bush regime are Cheney & Rice. Maybe in this coming confrontation with the White House we can address Bush 43 as a patient in the mental ward of America...
The inability to acknowledge the past, because it is too corrupted (think "CIA") or painful (think "slavery"), is preventing our social processors from envisioning the TRUE destiny of the American colonial expansion. For example, if I ask you, as an American: "Are you still a colonizer?" can you formulate a response with historical context? If so, how far back does that history go...
If one subscribes to the concept of karma & reincarnation, or in the case of Christ, salvation & resurrection, then one would have to say America is the ultimate karmic melting pot, and possibly the "inscrutable event at the end of time," as Terence McKenna prophecized. For the most part, the average American has little concept of history, especially "intelligence" history, since most of us have no clue what was actually going on-- that's what we pay the politicians to do.
So we have no ability to formulate a coherent vision of America's future, now that we are dragged into Bush's perpetual war, because we are trapped in the present panic, disabled by a corrupted past. Sounds almost like we all need some serious therapy... a truth serum perhaps? As for boy George, brain damage is no excuse for war profiteering & after many thousands are dead and maimed-- he needs to go directly to jail, no pass or excuses.
Get in touch with your past: Get a copy of our 1st "CIA War Library Film Fest"-- in 1 hour you can get an entire university level overview of the world's "CIA problem" (destabilizations, terror, torture, drugs...think "Ollie North")! Send a production & propagation donation to: FutureWorks Films PO Box 268 Laupahoehoe, HAWAI'I 96764 & we'll rush a DVD out to you, along with the ones we're sending to the Senators.
Check out the latest Tom Tomorrow (in living color) re: Bush's "Very Bad Idea" at http://Bombshelter.org
Posted By:Ministry of Mutation Invalid video URL. Get this video and more at MySpace.com
Bush quotes made a mark in '06: "I use The Google."
21 Jan, 2007 2152hrs ISTREUTERS
LOS ANGELES: President Bush scored high Thursday on a list he may not be keen to top. Three of Bush's quotes, led by his "I'm the Decider" remark in April, head 2006's most notable quotations compiled by Fred R Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations.
Bush's comment that "I'm the decider, and I decide what is best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defence" is followed by his State of the Union address quote that "America is addicted to oil" and by his comment on Hurricane Katrina to high school students in New Orleans: "I take full responsibility for the federal government's response."
The "decider" quote was also named "Bushism" of the year by the Global Language Monitor, which issues a list of best George Bush quotes each year. The monitor's Paul JJ Payack said No 2 on that list was "I use The Google."
Other notable quotes of the year compiled by Shapiro include British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's explanation about his movie Borat, in which he plays a boorish Kazakh TV journalist: "The joke is not on Kazakhstan. I think the joke is on people who can believe that the Kazakhstan that I describe can exist."
Cohen's quote was followed in fifth place by another comic's remark — Stephen Colbert's comment on Bush at the White House correspondents dinner: "The greatest thing about this man is he's steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday."
The quotes are not chosen because they are eloquent or admirable, Shapiro said, but "because they are important or they are particularly revealing of the spirit of our times".
Right-wing polemicist Ann Coulter made the list for her attack on the widows of men who died in the World Trade Center on September 11: "These broads are millionaires, lionised on TV and in articles about them, revelling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husbands' death so much."
The Bush Regime Presents: Dark Clouds for America Meet the most powerful organized crime family in the world Bush Cabinet and Inner Circle
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate.... Returning violence for violence multiples violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
-- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
DVDs Now on sale at Freedom to Fascism website
The time has arrived we are now offering the DVD for sale at the website for 19.95 or you can watch it on pay per view for $5 with the highest quality resolution on the internet or you can watch it for free on Google video in a lower resolution. all of this can be done by going to the Freedom to Fascism.com website
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<a href="http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&hl=en&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lr=&q=war+criminal&btnG=Search" target="_blank"><img alt="Kelly Casilio, dressed as a U.S. soldier, at an antiwar protest Thursday in Boston. The number on Casilio's face represents the number of U.S. soldiers killed in the Iraq war to date. Who will be next to die, not for their country but , unfortunately, for a monstrous lie and illegal occupation of a sovereign country." src="http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/01/16/antiwar/story.jpg" border="0" /></a>
<strong>"It's not a matter of what is true that counts but a matter of what is perceived to be true." -- Henry Kissinger
<span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:180%;color:#000099;"><span style="color:#ff0000;">Americans Trapped in the Panic-Stricken Present</span> What'd You Do Before the War, Uncle Dick?</span>
The wonderful folks at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in London have shown a correlation between brain damage to the hippocampus and amnesia which not only prevents remembering the past but the ability to visualize the future, as presented in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Patients where unable to imagine realistic situations in the future, instead seeing "just a collection of seperate images," much like the amnesia associated with their past. Their study suggests the hippocampus acts like a processor in your PC, giving context to raw data. Damage to the processor causes loss of meaning and application, and the video chip reverts to bitmap images.
Now, much has been made of the younger George Bush's hard drug use & alcoholism, his slurring & dis-communications, inferring brain damage & classic "passive-aggresive personality disorder"-- the real brains behind the Bush regime are Cheney & Rice. Maybe in this coming confrontation with the White House we can address Bush 43 as a patient in the mental ward of America...
The inability to acknowledge the past, because it is too corrupted (think "CIA") or painful (think "slavery"), is preventing our social processors from envisioning the TRUE destiny of the American colonial expansion. For example, if I ask you, as an American: "Are you still a colonizer?" can you formulate a response with historical context? If so, how far back does that history go...
If one subscribes to the concept of karma & reincarnation, or in the case of Christ, salvation & resurrection, then one would have to say America is the ultimate karmic melting pot, and possibly the "inscrutable event at the end of time," as Terence McKenna prophecized. For the most part, the average American has little concept of history, especially "intelligence" history, since most of us have no clue what was actually going on-- that's what we pay the politicians to do.
So we have no ability to formulate a coherent vision of America's future, now that we are dragged into Bush's perpetual war, because we are trapped in the present panic, disabled by a corrupted past. Sounds almost like we all need some serious therapy... a truth serum perhaps? As for boy George, brain damage is no excuse for war profiteering & after many thousands are dead and maimed-- he needs to go directly to jail, no pass or excuses.
Get in touch with your past: Get a copy of our 1st "CIA War Library Film Fest"-- in 1 hour you can get an entire university level overview of the world's "CIA problem" (destabilizations, terror, torture, drugs...think "Ollie North")! </strong> <strong>Send a production & propagation donation to: FutureWorks Films PO Box 268 Laupahoehoe, HAWAI'I 96764 & we'll rush a DVD out to you, along with the ones we're sending to the Senators.
Check out the latest Tom Tomorrow (in living color) re: Bush's "Very Bad Idea" at <a href="http://Bombshelter.org">http://Bombshelter.org</a></strong><strong>
Keep the Flames Alive
<span style="font-size:130%;">B.Z. Bywydd</span> (Rhymes with Druid) <a href="http://MinistryofMutation.com">http://MinistryofMutation.com</a></strong> <strong></strong> <strong>"He's not from Texas, and he ain't a cowboy, so let's stop trashin' Texans and cowboys."</strong> <strong>-- Willie Nelson </strong> <a href="http://www.president-bush.com/" target="_blank"><img alt="We're here as American citizens to say that this war crime regime must be shut down!" src="http://www.alaskareport.com/images3/bush_george.jpg" border="0" /></a>
<strong><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:180%;color:#ff0000;">AN AGITPROP BUMPER CROP FOR 2007:</span>
Jail to the Chief: Impeach the W!
Liar, Liar- World on Fire!
"W": Wicked Weasel Warlord
America: One Nation, Under Surveillance
That's OK, I Wasn't Using My Civil Liberties Anyway
Let's Fix Democracy In This Country First </strong> <strong>George Bush: Creating the Terrorists Our Kids Will Have to Fight
<span style="font-size:180%;color:#ff0000;">BushSalute </span> Posted By:<span style="font-size:130%;color:#000066;">Ministry of Mutation</span></strong> <embed src="http://lads.myspace.com/videos/vplayer.swf" width="430" height="346" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars="m=1367459937&type=video"></embed> <strong>Get this video and more at </strong><a href="http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=1367459937"><strong>MySpace.com</strong></a>
<strong><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:180%;color:#ff0000;">Bush quotes made a mark in '06: </span></strong> <strong><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:180%;color:#000099;">"I use The Google."</span>
21 Jan, 2007 2152hrs ISTREUTERS
LOS ANGELES: President Bush scored high Thursday on a list he may not be keen to top. Three of Bush's quotes, led by his "I'm the Decider" remark in April, head 2006's most notable quotations compiled by Fred R Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations.
Bush's comment that "I'm the decider, and I decide what is best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defence" is followed by his State of the Union address quote that "America is addicted to oil" and by his comment on Hurricane Katrina to high school students in New Orleans: "I take full responsibility for the federal government's response."
The "decider" quote was also named "Bushism" of the year by the Global Language Monitor, which issues a list of best George Bush quotes each year. The monitor's Paul JJ Payack said No 2 on that list was "I use The Google."
Other notable quotes of the year compiled by Shapiro include British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's explanation about his movie Borat, in which he plays a boorish Kazakh TV journalist: "The joke is not on Kazakhstan. I think the joke is on people who can believe that the Kazakhstan that I describe can exist."
Cohen's quote was followed in fifth place by another comic's remark — Stephen Colbert's comment on Bush at the White House correspondents dinner: "The greatest thing about this man is he's steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday."
The quotes are not chosen because they are eloquent or admirable, Shapiro said, but "because they are important or they are particularly revealing of the spirit of our times".
Right-wing polemicist Ann Coulter made the list for her attack on the widows of men who died in the World Trade Center on September 11: "These broads are millionaires, lionised on TV and in articles about them, revelling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husbands' death so much."
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<strong><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:180%;color:#000099;"><span style="color:#ff0000;">The Bush Regime Presents</span>: </span></strong> <strong><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:180%;color:#000099;">Dark Clouds for America</span> Meet the most powerful organized crime family in the world Bush Cabinet and Inner Circle
Investigative Resource of Bush Family Empire <a href="http://www.moldea.com/bushology.html">http://www.moldea.com/bushology.html</a></strong><strong> Bush jr. the Dark side <a href="http://www.realchange.org/bushjr.htm">http://www.realchange.org/bushjr.htm</a></strong><strong> The Bush Family Evil Empire <a href="http://www.govsux.com/bushfiles.htm">http://www.govsux.com/bushfiles.htm</a></strong><strong> How the Bush Boys made their Money <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/news_wire/bushboys.html">http://www.motherjones.com/news_wire/bushboys.htm</strong></a><a href="http://www.motherjones.com/news_wire/bushboys.html"><strong>l</a></strong> Bush Drug period: Daddy's candy <a href="http://www.bushwatch.net/bushcoke.htm">http://www.bushwatch.net/bushcoke.htm</a><strong> How Bush really made his millions <a href="http://www.bushwatch.net/bushmillions.html">http://www.bushwatch.net/bushmillions.html</a></strong><strong> Bush Military Record <a href="http://awolbush.com/">http://awolbush.com/</a></strong>
<strong>"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate.... Returning violence for violence multiples violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
-- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. </strong> <a href="http://www.cafepress.com/buy/clinton+obama/-/pv_design_details/pg_1/id_15519071/opt_/fpt_/c_360/" target="_blank"><img alt="Hillary Clinton for President and Barack Obama for Vice President! Support a Clinton-Obama 2008 Ticket!" src="http://www.hcjic.org/images/Photos/obama-clinton.jpg" border="0" /></a> <a href="http://www.president-bush.com/" target="_blank"><img alt="We're here as American citizens to say that this war crime regime must be shut down!" src="http://images.cafepress.com/product/77767346v4_240x240_Front.jpg" border="0" /></a> <strong><span style="color:#ff0000;"><span style="font-size:180%;">DVDs Now on sale at Freedom to Fascism website</span> </span> The time has arrived we are now offering the DVD for sale at the website for 19.95 or you can watch it on pay per view for $5 with the highest quality resolution on the internet or you can watch it for free on Google video in a lower resolution. all of this can be done by going to the Freedom to Fascism.com website <http:>and clicking on your choice of how you want to view the film. The objective is to see the movie and wake up America! Have house parties and spread the message of freedom to fascism across the world. You may also sign up to become an affiliate. the ball is now in your court!
<strong>Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the new chairman of the Intelligence Committee, questions the administration’s understanding of Iran.
<span style="font-size:180%;color:#ff0000;">New Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee Assails Bush Over Iran Stance</span>
Doug Mills/The New York Times Published: January 20, 2007 </strong> <strong> WASHINGTON, Jan. 19 — The new chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Friday sharply criticized the Bush administration’s increasingly combative stance toward Iran, saying that White House efforts to portray it as a growing threat are uncomfortably reminiscent of rhetoric about Iraq before the American invasion of 2003.
Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who took control of the committee this month, said that the administration was building a case against Tehran even as American intelligence agencies still know little about either Iran’s internal dynamics or its intentions in the Middle East.
“To be quite honest, I’m a little concerned that it’s Iraq again,” Senator Rockefeller said during an interview in his office. “This whole concept of moving against Iran is bizarre.”</strong>
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/20/washington/20intel.html?ex=1169960400&en=04ba7f27fb82d237&ei=5040&partner=MOREOVERNEWS">NY TIMES ARTICLE</a>
<a href="http://www.president-bush.com/" target="_blank"><img alt="We're here as American citizens to say that this war crime regime must be shut down!" src="http://www.president-bush.com/president-bush.gif" border="0" /></a> <strong>BOSTON GLOBE EDITORIAL
<span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:180%;color:#000099;"><span style="color:#ff0000;">Where in Hell are We Going Now?:</span> </span></strong> <strong><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:180%;color:#000099;">Making Bush listen to reason </span> January 23, 2007
THE RESOLUTIONS against President Bush's Iraq war policies offered by Senator Edward Kennedy and colleagues of both parties are expressions of the democratic will of the country.
The November election and recent polls leave no doubt that a large majority of Americans opposes Bush's war policy and a troop increase. Similarly, several senior generals, both serving and retired, have issued strong public criticisms of Bush's troop increase and his new emphasis on asking US forces to quell Iraq's sectarian warfare by attacking Shi'ite militias as well as Sunni Arab insurgents. The bipartisan Baker-Hamilton Commission unanimously endorsed a new approach.
But Bush has refused to heed calls for a change of course, and against the dispatch of an additional 21,000 troops to Iraq. It is this almost monarchical indifference to criticism that justifies the resolutions the Senate will be considering this week, even though their immediate effect is largely symbolic.
Kennedy was hardly indulging in hyperbole Sunday on "Meet the Press" when he said: "If we have a president that is going to effectively defy the American people, going to defy the generals, defy the majority of the Congress of the United States, Republicans and Democrats, then we, I think, have a responsibility to end the funding for the war."
The bill Kennedy introduced two weeks ago would not actually halt funding for the war. Rather it would oblige Bush to ask for congressional authorization of funds to pay for a troop increase "above the numbers existing as of January 9, 2007." The White House claims it already has the funds for the extra 21,000 troops, and those troops are likely to be deployed before any version of the Kennedy bill could be passed.
Nevertheless, the bill's "findings" offer a powerful brief for not expanding America's mission in Iraq and for curtailing Bush's conduct of an imperial presidency. Those findings rightly note that the grounds for the original 2002 congressional authorization of war in Iraq -- weapons of mass destruction, an unproved claim of Saddam Hussein's "operational relationship with Al Qaeda," and the dead dictator's defiance of United Nations resolutions -- no longer apply.
Above all, the bill correctly points out that the US mission in Iraq has changed utterly since the 2002 authorization vote. Chuck Hagel, the Nebraska Republican who is co-sponsoring another Senate bill against escalation, cast a cold eye on that changed mission Sunday. "It is wrong to put American troops in the middle of a sectarian civil war," Hagel said. "Are we not to register our sense of where we are going in this country?"
Symbolic as their bills and resolutions may be, Hagel, Kennedy, and their colleagues are using their powers as legislators wisely by trying to turn the country away from an even worse disaster in Iraq.</strong>
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<strong><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:180%;color:#ff0000;">If Dubya Talks And Nobody Listens, Does He Make a Sound? </span>by Tom Chartier
So… Wednesday, January 10th the Democratic Dictator of the United States of America, George W. Bush is going to announce his sinuously scripted snow job to the world.
Why in the blazes would anybody waste precious time to witness this drivel? He’s going to drone on and on and on in an attempt to sell us the same old sow’s ear.
I’ve got better things to do and so do you. I need totrain The Hounds (Nimrod and Little Brain) to defend the perimeter, take advantage of 10% off day at the local market and repair the head gasket on the Dive Master Special. In the evening, right as Dubya makes his big speech, I’ve got a hot date with Princess Shalmar. That’s right, Road to Morocco starring Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour, is sitting on top of the DVD player right now. Oh goodie, goodie!
We’ve known for weeks what Bush is after. Let’s see, there will be no withdrawal of troops. Duh. It’s what the U.S. public wants so it must be the opposite of what Bush has decided. Bush wants as many as 50,000 more troops to be raised out of the 9,000 available. Maybe he thinks the US Army clones GI Joe? I thought Bush was opposed to stem-cell research and high tech science stuff… other than "nukular" bombs. These troops will "surge" into Baghdad "temporarily" in a "New Way Forward." Look sharp! This is not the same as "staying the course" to secure a "long-term" U.S. objective.
Huh? Anyone notice a contradiction there? If you don’t… enlist! Be all that you can be! Well… give it your best uh… shot… until an IED blows up you and your worn and dilapidated Hum Vee.
The bottom line is that we’re going to be asked to "sacrifice." Mark me if I’m wrong but it seems there’s been more than enough sacrificing.
Let’s see. The number of sacrificed U.S. soldiers has topped 3,000. That’s a bigger "sacrifice" than the fatalities due to 9/11. Then there are the sacrifices of families and friends of the dead and the maimed. Let’s not forget the permanently wounded. Such physical and emotionalwounds don’t go away. So let the sacrifices begin… uh… escalate! Sounds like ancient Rome.
The U.S. citizen has sacrificed plenty! The U.S. has gone from a subtle police state under Richard Nixon to a blatant police state under George W. Bush. Been to an airport lately? Tried taking a tube of toothpaste onto an airplane? Did you get your Free Total Body Microwaves the last time you went through Security? Don’t miss out! No carry-on hair gel for your dream vacation, for which you’ve been saving for the past ten years? Oh and make sure your socks are clean and without holes!
Once protected by the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, the sanctity of your mail has been sacrificed! Who knows what evils lurk in the mail of men? The Shrub does! And he’s going to snoop through your letters to get the real skinny.
Matter of fact, except for the Third Amendment, the whole Bill of Rights is dead. The sole remaining protection ensuresthat Soldiers cannot demand to hang out in your house watching the Super Bowl and making long distance, tapped, phone calls. I guess the Bill of Rights have been abbreviated, just like Keith Olbermann says. Now it’s the "Bill of Right." Well, that’s simpler.
Oh yeah… the Iraqis need to make more sacrifices too. Only 655,000 dead Iraqi civilians? That is not enough?! The citizens of Iraq had better gear up for a surge in sacrifices.
Since we know all this stuff, do we have to listen to it? Can’t we just turn off the talking monkey and watch a video? Then all you have to do is to throw the next morning’s paper in the trash and don’t forget to stay off the Internet for one day!
What if nobody in Congress showed up or the White House Press Corps telephoned in sick that day? I’d say Helen Thomas deserves a day off.
So, hypothetically speaking, on Wednesday, January 10, 2007, what if George were to speak and nobody listened? Would it count? Does he even make a sound? What is the sound of one fool yapping ~ if no one listens? </strong> <a href="http://www.president-bush.com/" target="_blank"><img alt="We're here as American citizens to say that this war crime regime must be shut down!" src="http://www.sunflower.com/~420/jul/jul24kir.jpg" width="500" border="0" /></a>
<strong><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:180%;color:#ff0000;">THINGS IRAQ AND VIETNAM HAVE IN COMMON </span> Danny Schecter, Media Channel
1. Both wars were illegal acts of pre-emptive aggression unsanctioned by international law or world opinion.
2. Both wars were launched with deception. In Iraq it was the now proven phony WMD threat and contrived Saddam-Osama connection. In Vietnam, it was the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident and the elections mandated by the Geneva agreement that were canceled by Washington in l956 when the U.S. feared Ho Chi Minh would win
3. The government lied regularly in both wars. Back then, the lies were pronounced a "credibility gap." Today, they are considered acceptable "information warfare." In Saigon military briefers conducted discredited "5 O'Clock Follies" press conferences. In this war, the Pentagon spoon-fed info at a Hollywood style briefing center in Doha.
4. The U.S. press was initially an enthusiastic cheerleader in both wars. When Vietnam protest grew and the war seen as a lost cause, the media frame changed. In Iraq today most of the media is trapped in hotel rooms. Only one side is covered now whereas in Vietnam, there was more reporting occasionally from the other. In Vietnam, the accent was on progress and "turned corners." The same is true in Iraq.
5. In both wars, prisoners were abused. . .
6. Illegal weapons were "deployed" in both wars. The U.S. dropped napalm, used cluster bombs against civilians and sprayed toxic Agent Orange in Vietnam. Cluster bombs and updated Mark 77 napalm-like firebombs were dropped on Iraqis. Depleted uranium was added to the arsenal of prohibited weapons in Iraq.
7. Both wars claimed to be about promoting democracy. Vietnam staged elections and saw a succession of governments controlled by the U.S. come and go. Iraq has had one election so far in which most voters say they were casting ballots primarily to get the U.S. to leave. The U.S. has stage-managed Iraq's interim government. Exiles were brought back and put in power. Vietnam's Diem came from New Jersey, Iraq's Allawi from Britain.
8. Both wars claimed to be about noble international goals. Vietnam was pictured as a crusade against aggressive communism and falling dominos. Iraq was sold as a front in a global war on terrorism. Neither claim proved true.
9. An imperial drive for resource control and markets helped drive both interventions. Vietnam had rubber and manganese and rare minerals. Iraq has oil. In both wars, any economic agenda was officially denied and ignored by most media outlets.
10. Both wars took place in countries with cultures we never understood or spoke the language. Both involved "insurgents" whose military prowess was underestimated and misrepresented. In Vietnam, we called the "enemy" communists; in Iraq we call them foreign terrorists. (Soldiers had their own terms, "gooks" in Vietnam, "ragheads" in Iraq) In both counties, they was in fact an indigenous resistance that enjoyed popular support. (Both targeted and brutalized people they considered collaborators with the invaders just as our own Revolution went after Americans who backed the British.) In both wars, as in all wars, innocent civilians died in droves.
11. In both countries the U.S. promised to help rebuild the damages caused by U.S. bombing. In Vietnam, a $2 Billion presidential reconstruction pledge was not honored. In Iraq, the electricity and other services are still out in many areas. In both wars U.S. companies and suppliers have profited handsomely; Brown &Root in Vietnam; Halliburton in Iraq, to cite but two.
12. In Vietnam, the Pentagon's counter-insurgency effort failed to "pacify" the countryside even with a half a million U.S. soldiers "in country." The insurgency in Iraq is growing despite the best efforts of U.S. soldiers. More have died since President Bush proclaimed "mission accomplished" than during the invasion. The insurgency in Iraq is growing despite the best efforts of U.S. soldiers. More have died since President Bush proclaimed "mission accomplished" than during the invasion.
The Vietnamese forced the U.S. into negotiations for the Paris Peace Agreement. When the agreement was continually violated, they brilliantly staged a final offensive that surprised and routed a superior million-man Saigon Army. Can the Iraqi resistance do the same?
(Yes- they probably will if we continue to ignore the first Law of Holes ~ Stop Digging ) ALR</strong> <strong> </strong> <a href="http://www.cafepress.com/buy/clinton+obama" target="_blank"><img alt="We're here as American citizens to say that this war crime regime must be shut down!" src="http://ak.imgfarm.com/images/ap/CLINTON_2008.sff_NY116_20070120083933.jpg" border="0" /></a> <span style="font-size:85%;"><strong>U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., reacts to applause before addressing the Association for a Better New York (ABNY) breakfast as guest speaker in New York, Monday Nov. 13, 2006. Clinton will embark on a widely anticipated campaign for the White House Saturday, Jan. 20, 2007, a former first lady intent on becoming the nation's first female president.</strong> </span> <strong><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:180%;"><span style="color:#ff0000;">Redford lands left hook, criticizes Bush policy</span> </span> By Gregg Goldstein Jan 19, 2007
PARK CITY -- Robert Redford came out swinging at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival's opening news conference Thursday, attacking the Bush administration for its politics as strongly as he dismissed film buyers who want his fest to serve as a market.
"Anyone with a rational mind and a sense of decency is being positioned as a lefty by the extreme right," he said, responding to an attendee who asked whether he thought Sundance selections were politically oriented to the left. "I believe in the tenets of democracy, and when they get pushed, it pisses me off," he said.
Redford maintained that Sundance films always have been politically diverse but said that "in light of what's happened in the past six years, we haven't adhered to snuffing attempts from the administration. ... (Documentaries) have become more of a truth to power in an environment where lying is treated like a political asset."
"I'm left-handed," he joked. "I'm not a very moderate person."
Redford's remarks were in sharp contrast to his mild-mannered opening-day appearance last year, but politics are now very much on his mind. He was accompanied by festival director Geoffrey Gilmore and film director Brett Morgen as they introduced this year's opening-night film, Morgen's Vietnam War-era documentary "Chicago 10."
Redford was in town for only a day before heading off to work on "Lions for Lambs," which he will direct and star in as a professor with two students in the war in Afghanistan. The politically themed omnibus film, featuring Tom Cruise as a U.S. senator and Meryl Streep as an investigative journalist, is the first project for the new Cruise- and Paula Wagner-run United Artists.
Redford also offered tough talk about the commercialization surrounding Sundance, which reached new heights last year with the $10.5 million sale of "Little Miss Sunshine" to Fox Searchlight. "We program it like a film festival and not a market," Redford said sternly. "Buyers are continuously asking, 'What's this? What's that? Is there going to be a breakout hit?' which I don't really care about."
He derided the "buzz" factor on certain films, noting that "there's been buzz about stuff that's tanked."
Redford began the conference speaking in his characteristically laid-back style, ruminating on how far the fest had come since its start at Park City's Egyptian Theatre, where the news conference took place.
He reminisced about the World War II newsreels of his childhood that led to his interest in documentaries. His anger seemed to build steam, however, as he quietly mentioned family and friends whose lives were affected by what was shown in the newsreels. He also lamented the "greed factor" that has led most theater owners to abandon shorts.
He said his interest in nonfiction led him to incorporate a docu style to the early films he had a hand in producing, such as "Downhill Racer" and "The Candidate." In creating Sundance, he also chose to highlight documentaries.
"Chicago 10," which combines archival footage of the 1968 Democratic National Convention protesters with animated re-enactments and voice-overs, speaks to Redford's interest in docus and politics. "You're going to see what went wrong with the movement as well as what went right," he said. "We're moving in a similar place today, except there's no draft."
Emphasizing the fest's theme, "Focus on Film" -- buttons with the slogan were passed around -- Redford and Gilmore also spoke of the fest's more international slate and the opening of New Frontier on Main, a venue for what Gilmore described as "a nexus (that) the art world, film world and new technology will create." </strong> <strong><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;">Sundance Abu Ghraib film shows America's dark side </span>Sat Jan 20, 2007 4:04pm ET
By Mary Milliken
PARK CITY, Utah (Reuters) - When documentary film maker Rory Kennedy wanted to make a movie about why ordinary people commit extraordinary acts of evil, the images of U.S. soldiers torturing detainees at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison kept coming back to haunt her.
The result was "Ghosts of Abu Ghraib," one of the most talked about documentaries at this year's Sundance Film Festival and one that appeals to a public at odds with U.S. policy on the war in Iraq.
As Kennedy -- daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy -- interviewed soldiers and witnesses to the abuse in the fall of 2003, she concluded it was the product of a system fighting terror after the 9/11 attacks rather than a few maverick individuals.
"It is not just about Abu Ghraib, it is about America and who we are as a country," Kennedy told Reuters on Saturday on the sidelines of the festival.
As a member of America's most famous political family, the award-winning filmmaker said she grew up believing the United States represented human rights and dignity.
"In the last three years, we are now a country that represents just the opposite and we are now known for torturing people," she said. "That is directly connected to the policies put into place."
Kennedy is not the only film maker at Sundance with a movie about Iraq. Her documentary is competing against "No End in Sight," a film that aims to expose a chain of critical errors, denial and incompetence in the Iraq war. And last year, the documentary "Iraq in Fragments" won some of the festival's top awards. </strong> <a href="http://www.cafepress.com/buy/clinton+obama" target="_blank"><img alt="We're here as American citizens to say that this war crime regime must be shut down!" src="http://images.cafepress.com/product/93967074v5_240x240_Front.jpg" border="0" /></a>
<strong><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:180%;color:#ff0000;">A Power Governments Cannot Suppress: </span>From Famed City Light Books of San Francisco Comes the Latest Book by <span style="font-size:130%;">Howard Zinn</span>
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress is Howard Zinn’s major new collection of essays on American history, class, immigration, justice, and ordinary citizens who have made a difference.
Like Zinn, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress is something of a national treasure. Having fought in World War II as a bombardier, Zinn brings a profoundly human, yet uniquely American perspective to each subject he writes about, whether it’s the Founding Fathers, winning the war on terrorism, respecting the holocaust, or defending the rights of immigrants. Written in an accessible, personal tone, Howard approaches the telling of U.S. history from an active, engaged point of view. “America’s future is linked to how we understand our past,” writes Zinn; “For this reason, writing about history, for me, is never a neutral act.”
<span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:180%;color:#ff0000;">"Surge" Without Congressional Approval Is Impeachable Offense </span> By Francis Boyle Professor of international law at the University of Illinois
01/06/07 "Information Clearing House" -- -- "Concerning the proposed 'surge' by the Bush administration of 20,000-plus U.S. troops into Iraq, this requires further authorization by the U.S. Congress under the terms of the War Powers Resolution. Section 4(a)(3) makes it quite clear that the War Powers Resolution is triggered ... 'In the absence of a declaration of war [which we do not have for Iraq], in any case in which United States Armed Forces are introduced ... (3) in numbers which substantially enlarge United States Armed Forces equipped for combat already located in a foreign nation....'
"We currently have about 140,000 troops in Iraq. Sending in an additional 20,000-plus would 'substantially enlarge' those forces. Therefore, the Bush administration would require further authorization from Congress for this euphemistic 'surge,' which is really a substantial escalation. Failure to obtain additional authorization from Congress for this substantial enlargement of U.S. Armed Forces in Iraq would constitute an impeachable offense under the terms of the United States Constitution for violating the Constitution's War Powers Clause and Congress's own War Powers Resolution."
Francis Boyle, Professor of international law at the University of Illinois. Author of Destroying World Order: American Imperialism in the Middle East Before and After September 11
<a href="http://www.cafepress.com/buy/clinton+obama" target="_blank"><img alt="We're here as American citizens to say that this war crime regime must be shut down!" src="http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Sections/Newsweek/Components/Photos/mag/011103_Special/FrontofBook/041103_ElectObama_hu.standard.jpg" border="0" /></a> <strong><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:180%;color:#000099;">Profile: Barack Obama</span>
Just visiting for now - but will the White House soon be home? "Rock star" and "beach babe" are not labels normally applied to United States senators.
But few senators have ever generated the kind of buzz associated with Democrat Barack Obama of Illinois.
He is being tipped as a formidable candidate to replace George W Bush as president, although he will have spent only four years in Washington by Election Day 2008.
He first shot to national - and international - prominence with a speech that stirred the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
The son of a Kenyan man and a white woman from Kansas, Mr Obama emphasised his personal history in a speech reflecting traditional American ideals of self-reliance and aspirations.
"Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place - America, which stood as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before," he said.
BARACK OBAMA
Born 4 Aug 1961 in Hawaii Studied law at Harvard Worked as a civil rights lawyer in Chicago Elected to the US Senate in 2004
Since his landslide election victory a few months later, he has become a media darling and one of the most visible figures in Washington.
<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3936013.stm">http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3936013.stm</a></strong><strong> </strong> <a href="http://www.cafepress.com/buy/clinton+obama" target="_blank"><img alt="We're here as American citizens to say that this war crime regime must be shut down!" src="http://www.alaskareport.com/reuters/bush_president.jpg" border="0" /></a> <strong>Weasels Guard the Chickenhawks Roosting on the Henhouse </strong> <strong>(No News at 11) xox BzB:
<span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:180%;color:#ff0000;">Secret Court to Govern Wiretapping Plan </span> Jan 17, 2:34 PM (ET) By LARA JAKES JORDAN
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Justice Department, easing a Bush administration policy, said Wednesday it has decided to give an independent body authority to monitor the government's controversial domestic spying program.
In a letter to the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said this authority has been given to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and that it already has approved one request for monitoring the communications of a person believed to be linked to al-Qaida or an associated terror group.
The court orders approving collection of international communications - whether it originates in the United States or abroad - was issued Jan. 10, according to the two-page letter to Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Arlen Specter, R-Pa.
"As a result of these orders, any electronic surveillance that was occurring as part of the Terrorist Surveillance Program will now be conducted subject to the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court," Gonzales wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press.
"Accordingly, under these circumstances, the President has determined not to reauthorize the Terrorist Surveillance Program when the current authorization expires," the attorney general wrote.
The Bush administration secretly launched the surveillance program in 2001 to monitor international phone calls and e-mails to or from the United States involving people suspected by the government of having terrorist links.
The White House said it is satisfied that the new guidelines meet its concerns about national security.
"The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has put together its guidelines and its rules and those have met administration concerns about speed and agility when it comes to responding to bits of intelligence where we may to be able to save American lives," White House press secretary Tony Snow said.
Snow said he could not explain why those concerns could not have been addressed before the program was started. He said the president will not reauthorize the present program because the new rules will serve as guideposts. </strong>
<a href="http://www.cafepress.com/buy/clinton+obama" target="_blank"><img alt="We're here as American citizens to say that this war crime regime must be shut down!" src="http://www.dvorak.org/blog/images2/clinton-obama.jpg" border="0" /></a>
<strong><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:180%;color:#ff0000;">Sundance opens with call to speak out against war</span>
Fri Jan 19, 2007 1:54 AM ET By Bob Tourtellotte
PARK CITY, Utah (Reuters) - The Sundance Film Festival opened on Thursday night with an innovative movie harkening back to Vietnam anti-war protests and a call by actor/activist Robert Redford for an apology by U.S. leaders.
Redford, whose Sundance Institute for independent film backs the annual festival, said in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks he, like many others, showed a "spirit of unity" with President George W. Bush and others who backed the war on terrorism and led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
"We put all our concerns on hold to let the leaders lead," Redford told a packed audience for the opening night documentary film, "Chicago 10."
"I think we're owed a big, massive apology," he added.
Sundance is the top gathering in the United States for independent film, and typically in his opening night address, Redford exhorts audiences to stay focused on the movies and moviemakers who are creating their work outside Hollywood's commercial, mainstream studios.
But this year, the Oscar-winning actor and director of films like "Ordinary People" dispensed with his normal speech to focus his few words on current-day politics. His change seemed appropriate for the debut of "Chicago 10."
Director Brett Morgen's documentary looks back at the notorious late 1960s trial of anti-war activists including Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, known at that time as the "Chicago Seven."
<span style="font-size:130%;">SUNDANCE ON EDGE </span> Using a cutting-edge blend of historical TV footage with animated characters, Morgen looks back at the anti-war protests at the 1968 Democratic convention and the trial of the famed "Chicago Seven," who were convicted of inciting riots.
As history later judged, many of the protesters were viewed less as lawbreakers and more as the voice of a new generation of leaders who chose to openly protest government policies.
Morgen, who took the stage to a standing ovation after the screening, urged today's audiences to speak out again.
One of his goals in making the documentary, he told the more than 1,000 people in attendance, was to "mobilize the youth in the country to get out and stop this war." He was, obviously, referring to the current war in Iraq.
Festival director Geoffrey Gilmore told Reuters ahead of the premiere of "Chicago 10," the documentary typifies many of the movies playing at this year's festival.
"It's about being inspired to take risks to change the world you're in," Gilmore said.
But "Chicago 10" is more than just about taking risks and speaking out against war. Morgen challenges conventions in documentary filmmaking, where tradition has it that filmmakers interview subjects talking about an issue or a topic.
In his movie, he utilizes the transcripts from the federal trial and re-creates the events by having actors including Nick Nolte and Mark Ruffalo voice the animated characters.
Hayden, who attended the premiere, was impressed. He took the stage after the premiere and wondered aloud how Morgen, who was born after the 1968 protests and trial, could have captured the intense emotion of the time.
"I thought he did it brilliantly," said the veteran anti-war protester and political activist.
More than 120 films will be screened throughout the 10-day festival that ends on January 28, and while most of them will not address the war or current events, there was little doubt "Chicago 10" set the tone for the festival, known for cutting-edge films and new, fresh voices in cinema. </strong>
Current Mood: excited Current Music:Bukka White Birth of Blues
DAKAR, Senegal (AP) -- Rebels in eastern Congo have killed and eaten two silverback mountain gorillas, conservationists said Wednesday, warning they fear more of the endangered animals may have been slaughtered in the lawless region.
Only about 700 mountain gorillas remain in the world, 380 of them spread across a range of volcanic mountains straddling the borders of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda in Central Africa.
One dismembered gorilla corpse was found Tuesday in a pit latrine in Congo's Virunga National Park, a few hundred yards from a park patrol post that was abandoned because of rebel attacks, according to the London-based Africa Conservation Fund. Another was killed in the same area on Jan. 5, said the group, which based its report on conservationists in the field.
The group blamed rebels loyal to a local warlord, Laurent Nkunda, for the latest killing. Nkunda is a renegade soldier who commands thousands of fighters in the vast country's east who have in recent years assaulted cities and clashed sporadically with government forces.
Silverbacks are older adult males and usually group leaders, though some are loners.
Paulin Ngobobo, a senior park warden, wrote an Internet blog about finding the latest remains.
"We've learned a lot: the gorilla had in fact been eaten for meat. His name was Karema, another solitary silverback that had been born into a habituated group _ meaning that he had grown to trust humans enough to let them come to within touching distance," Ngobobo wrote.
"We learned that the remaining gorillas are extremely vulnerable _ the rebels are after the meat, and it's not difficult for them to find and kill the few gorillas that remain."
Ngobobo said the first gorilla reported killed had been shot by rebels and eaten.
"A local farmer was ordered to help the rebels collect the meat of the gorilla," Ngobobo said. "He told them that the meat was dangerous to eat, and immediately informed us."
Robert Muir of the Frankfurt Zoological Society, who accompanied Ngobobo, said: "We need to impress on Nkunda and his men that it is inexcusable to destroy national and world heritage of such critical importance. ... Now that we know that the slaughtered gorilla was eaten, the gorillas habituated for tourism are at extreme risk _ and we are worried that more have been killed already."
The last remaining hippo populations in Congo are in Virunga and are also on the verge of being wiped out. Conservationists have blamed rebels and militias for slaughtering them, and say more than 400 were killed last year, mostly for food. Only 900 hippos remain, a huge drop from the 22,000 reported there in 1998.
Virunga park has been ravaged by poachers and deforestation for more than a decade. The 1994 Rwandan genocide saw millions of refugees spill into Congo, marking the beginning of an era of unrest, lawlessness and clashes between militias and rebel groups.
Mineral-rich Congo, which held its first democratic elections in more than four decades last year, is struggling to recover from a 1998-2002 war that drew in the armies of more than half a dozen African nations.
The job of protecting the country's parks falls on local rangers, and the risks are high. In Virunga alone, some 97 rangers have died on duty since 1996, the Africa Conservation Fund said.
On his blog, Ngobobo also described being shot at and beaten by the military, who he and other rangers were trying to persuade to stop cutting down the forest.
Richard Leakey, a conservationist credited with helping end the slaughter of elephants in Kenya during the 1980s, said: "The survival of these last remaining mountain gorillas should be one of humanity's greatest priorities. Their future lies with a small number of very brave rangers risking their lives with very little support from the outside world."
Thanks to you, the polar bear won Round One of its fight for survival against the ravages of global warming.
Your activism and support of NRDC helped persuade the Bush Administration to propose protecting the bear under the Endangered Species Act.
Round Two is now beginning. The Administration is starting a 12-month review process that will lead to its final decision about whether or not to protect the polar bear.
But they won't hold nationwide public hearings during that process unless we speak up now! They will take your request for public hearings until February 23.
Please send a message to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service right away, telling them to hold nationwide hearings on the fate of the polar bear!
Your message can have a big impact. The Fish and Wildlife Service is not required by law to hold such hearings. But they can be swayed by an outpouring of public concern.
The American people are alarmed by the plight of the polar bear -- and escalating damage from global warming.
We should be allowed to express our concern -- and our support for polar bear protection -- directly to Fish and Wildlife officials before they make their life-or-death decision.
Let the Fish and Wildlife Service know that you want public hearings on polar bear protection!
Sincerely,
Frances Beinecke President Natural Resources Defense Council
WASHINGTON (AP) - Scientists who tested monkeys with the resurrected 1918 killer flu virus now have a better idea of how the deadliest epidemic in history attacked and killed so many people - by over-amping the victims' own immune systems.
Those findings in a first-of-its-kind experiment also help explain why so many of the roughly 50 million who died in the Spanish flu pandemic were young and healthy. Based on what was seen in monkeys, the human victims' strong immune systems likely were overstimulated, causing their lungs to rapidly fill with fluid.
"Essentially people are drowned by themselves," said University of Wisconsin virology professor Yoshihiro Kawaoka, lead author of a study being published Thursday in the journal Nature.
Scientists believe the results open a window into what could happen if the current bird flu in Asia morphs into a highly lethal strain that spreads easily among people.
The 1918 virus was reconstructed with reverse genetics, relying on tissue from victims of the early-day flu pandemic. The virus is kept only in two labs where scientists are studying it: the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and the Public Health Agency of Canada's lab in Winnipeg where the monkey experiment was done.
When seven macaques were given the virus at the high-level biosafety lab there, scientists were struck by how suddenly and overwhelmingly the flu struck. The virus spread faster than a normal flu bug and triggered a "storm" response in the animal's immune systems.
Their bodies' defenses went haywire, not knowing when to stop, researchers said. The lungs became inflamed and filled with blood and other fluids.
The scientists believe the virus had the same effect on humans in 1918.
The macaque experiment was supposed to last 21 days, but after eight days the monkeys were so sick - feverish, in pain, and struggling to breathe - that ethical guidelines forced the researchers to euthanize them.
"There was some surprise that it was that nasty," University of Washington virologist and study co-author Michael Katze said. "It was the robustness of the immune system that helped victimize them."
The virus is very good at replicating itself, said Peter Palese, chairman of the microbiology department at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. Its effect on the immune system "triggers what one refers to as a cytokine storm," he said. Cytokines transmit messages among cells in the immune system. Palese wasn't part of the study but has worked on the resurrected virus before.
No other flu virus is deadly to monkeys, and the speed in its spread and the overwhelming immune system response is similar to those in the H5N1 bird flu, Kawaoka said.
If bird flu spreads person-to-person, scientists believe understanding the 1918 virus may give them clues about how to protect people from the new one.
The new work "gives us another tool," said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, who was not part of the research. Fauci praised the study and said what it found in the effects on the body are stunning: "There aren't a lot of things that can induce that robust of an inflammatory response that quickly."
The 1918 flu research suggests that those fighting the bird flu in the future could try using drugs that reduce inflammation and control the body's immune response, Katze said.
In the Winnipeg research, the first controlled introduction of the 1918 flu to primates, the monkeys were given extra high doses of the flu virus by nose, mouth, eye, and direct injection into the trachea to ensure infection.
The virus had been tested before on mice, but macaques provide better models of how viruses work on humans, the scientists said.
The fate of the monkeys was sealed within hours of their infections, Katze theorized.
In normal flu, the immune system response wanes, but in the 1918 flu "the innate response stayed up and didn't go down," Katze said.
Adolfo Garcia-Sastre, a Mount Sinai microbiology professor who conducted some of the earlier mouse work, cautioned that it may be a mistake to focus so heavily on immune system response. The 1918 flu "induces an overwhelming and probably damaging immune response system" but it is largely because the virus grows so much, he said.
In mice, when the overactive immune response was eliminated, mice died because of high viral levels.
"It's like a vicious circle, you get more viruses, you get more immune response and this results in damage," Garcia-Sastre said.
Six million years ago, chimpanzees and humans diverged from a common ancestor and evolved into unique species. Now UCLA scientists have identified a new way to pinpoint the genes that separate us from our closest living relative- and make us uniquely human. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports the study in its Nov. 13 online edition.
"We share more than 95 percent of our genetic blueprint with chimps," explained Dr. Daniel Geschwind, principal investigator and Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics at the David Geffen School of Medicine. "What sets us apart from chimps are our brains: homo sapiens means 'the knowing man.'
"During evolution, changes in some genes altered how the human brain functions," he added. "Our research has identified an entirely new way to identify those genes in the small portion of our DNA that differs from the chimpanzee's."
By evaluating the correlated activity of thousands of genes, the UCLA team identified not just individual genes, but entire networks of interconnected genes whose expression patterns within the brains of humans varied from those in the chimpanzee.
"Genes don't operate in isolation- each functions within a system of related genes," said first author Michael Oldham, UCLA genetics researcher. "If we examined each gene individually, it would be similar to reading every fifth word in a paragraph ? you don't get to see how each word relates to the other. So instead we used a systems biology approach to study each gene within its context."
The scientists identified networks of genes that correspond to specific brain regions. When they compared these networks between humans and chimps, they found that the gene networks differed the most widely in the cerebral cortex -- the brain's most highly evolved region, which is three times larger in humans than chimps.
Secondly, the researchers discovered that many of the genes that play a central role in cerebral cortex networks in humans, but not in the chimpanzee, also show significant changes at the DNA level.
"When we see alterations in a gene network that correspond to functional changes in the genome, it implies that these differences are very meaningful," said Oldham. "This finding supports the theory that variations in the DNA sequence contributed to human evolution."
Many of the human-specific gene networks identified by the scientists related to learning, brain cell activity and energy metabolism.
"If you view the brain as the body's engine, our findings suggest that the human brain fires like a 12-cylinder engine, while the chimp brain works more like a 6-cylinder engine," explained Geschwind. "It's possible that our genes adapted to allow our brains to increase in size, operate at different speeds, metabolize energy faster and enhance connections between brain cells across different brain regions."
Future UCLA studies will focus on linking the expression of evolutionary genes to specific regions of the brain, such as those that regulate language, speech and other uniquely human abilities.
"Chimpanzees: An Unnatural History" is a program that will probably make many viewers cry.
But Allison Argo felt she had to stay as dry-eyed and clear-sighted as possible while making this documentary, which she also narrates.
It can't have been easy.
The documentary, which on Sunday night launches the 25th season of PBS'"Nature" & available on DVD, explores the sad story of generations of captive chimps - our very genetically close relatives, with almost the same DNA as humans.
Gloria Grow and her husband, veterinarian Dr. Richard Allan, run the Fauna Foundation, which has become a haven for abused animals, including chimps used in biological research. Even chimps that were once people's pets, or performed to audience laughter in circuses and commercials, can end up in research facilities. Once they get to about five or six years old and can no longer be handled safely they are often dumped in medical laboratories or imprisoned in isolation.
Grow's nonprofit foundation, based near Montreal, Canada, is featured in the documentary.
So, too, is Dr. Carole Noon's Save the Chimps group, of which she is founder and director. The nonprofit central Florida organization works to create a safe and suitable habitat for chimpanzees, such as those used in numerous experiments by the United States Air Force, which in 1959 captured dozens of baby chimps in Africa. These naturally social animals, whose life span in the wild mirrors humans, have long been locked in separate cages, taken out only to be used in grueling, dangerous, and painful research, which may or may not ultimately benefit mankind.
One of the chimps featured in the program is Lou, a 42 year old veteran of the Air Force programs.
The documentary is about "the chimps having a voice finally," said Grow. "Allison Argo was able to speak on their behalf ... about the tragedy of their lives."
The sight of an aged chimp, a victim of years of confinement, trying to summon up the courage to walk free beneath the sky, is just one of the many devastatingly emotional moments in Argo's movie.
"I'm not a raving animal-rights person, but I do think there is a need for accountability," said Argo.
She understands, she said, there are other points of view than the animal-lovers' about the use of chimps in research. But the medical community she tried to have a dialogue with, she said, chose not to respond.
"I couldn't even get the NIH (National Institutes of Health) to grant us an interview," she said, adding that laboratories can't or won't supply any detailed records.
Argo, who made the Emmy-winning 2000 documentary "The Urban Elephant" for "Nature," said the film took nearly three years to make, because, "It's such a complex topic and there are so many hot buttons that it really needed to be researched thoroughly."
Despite all the sadness in the film, Argo feels it can be viewed in a positive light.
"I think that the main thing that gives me hope it that I don't think people realize what happens. I think people who laugh at the chimps in the commercials just don't know. The purpose of this film is to just open the window so that people can look into the chimps' lives, see what's on the other side, the dark side, and what the consequences are."
Nearly three quarters of all bird species in northeast Australia and more than a third in Europe could become extinct unless efforts to stop global warming are stepped up, a report says.
Up to 72% of bird species in northeastern Australia and 38% of bird species in Europe could disappear completely if the planet's temperature continues to rise, according to the international environmental group WWF.
"This report finds certain bird groups, such as seabirds and migratory birds, to be early, very sensitive responders to current levels of climate change," says WWF's director of climate change policy Hans Verolme.
"Large-scale bird extinctions may occur sooner than we thought," he says in Bird species and climate change: the global status report, released today on the sidelines of the UN climate change conference in Nairobi.
"If high rates of extinction are to be avoided, rapid and significant greenhouse gas emissions cuts must be made," WWF says.
Rising sea levels, changes in vegetation and altered temperatures are among the effects of climate change linked to greenhouse gas emissions that impact negatively on bird species worldwide, it says.
In the Great Plains of North America, where up to 80% of the continent's ducks come to breed, three quarters may face extinction because of adverse global warming-related changes to their habitat, the report says.
While the effects would be most significant if the Earth's surface temperature rises 2°C above its pre-industrial level - it is currently 0.8°C above - some birds are already feeling the heat.
The penguin population of the Galapagos Islands has decreased by half since the early 1970s, due to starvation and an inability to reproduce resulting from the effects of the El Niño climate pattern.
While migratory, mountain, island, wetland, Artic, Antarctic and seabirds are all at high risk from climate change, other species that are able to move easily to new habitats will not be as badly effected, it says.
Scientists also point out that existing conservation programs do not provide sufficient protection, as bird species often shift into unprotected zones, the report says.
Increase in number of porpoise deaths due to malnutrition Decline in sandeel numbers thought to be due to climate change Sandeel decline also affecting seabid population Key quote "It is a worrying change. Harbour porpoises eat lots of other fish - haddock, whiting and the occasional cod, mackerel or herring. But it seems that, particularly in the spring in the Scottish North Sea area, sandeels are very, very important to them." - COLIN MACLEOD, ABERDEEN UNIVERSITY
Story in full HARBOUR porpoises are starving to death in the North Sea as a result of rising water temperatures, scientists have revealed.
Climate change has resulted in a dramatic decline in the numbers of sandeels - a major part of the staple diet of the porpoises.
Marine scientists have recorded a significant rise in the percentage of porpoise deaths due to malnutrition. They are also becoming increasingly concerned about the impact of the declining sandeel populations on other species such as the bottle-nosed dolphin and the minke whale, believing this could jeopardise the future of Scotland's booming whale-watching sector.
The potential crisis was highlighted yesterday in a study by a team of scientists from Aberdeen University and the Scottish Agricultural College in Inverness, published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.
Previous reports have already revealed that seabird populations around Scotland's coast have been seriously hit by the decline in sandeel numbers.
But, unlike seabirds that only eat sandeels, it had always been assumed that harbour porpoises and other cetaceans would simply switch to eating other fish species when sandeel numbers fell, without suffering any ill-effects. The study, however, suggests that this is not the case.
Sandeels are anchovy-like fish which spend most of their lives buried in the sand before emerging for a few months in the spring when they become a vital food source.
Separate studies have found the number of sandeels living to adulthood falls during warmer winters, when they grow at too fast a rate to be supported by the available food.
The percentage of stranded harbour porpoises on the North Sea coast of Scotland found to have died as result of malnutrition has risen from 5 per cent to 33 per cent in the past six years.
Colin MacLeod, the scientist at Aberdeen University who led the research, said: "The problem is that climate change is not like bycatch or chemical pollution that can be solved at a local or regional level, it's a global issue that is affecting porpoises at a local level. This was not an effect of climate change we expected for harbour porpoises.
"It makes you wonder how many more hidden impacts of climate change there are for whales and dolphins that we simply did not expect to occur and so haven't taken into account when deciding on suitable conservation strategies."
Mr MacLeod said there were an estimated 350,000 harbour porpoises in the waters around the UK, with 120,000 in the northern North Sea.
Scientists, examining the stomach contents of stranded porpoises from the east coast of Scotland since 1992, have already confirmed that the cetaceans rely heavily on sandeels for food.
But the researchers have now discovered a dramatic change in the cause of death for recent strandings.
Mr MacLeod said that of about 90 animals found stranded on the east coast of Scotland in the late 1990s, only 5 per cent had died of starvation. However, seven of the 21 animals found in the same area between 2002-3 had died from malnutrition.
"These are small numbers but we have shown using statistical analysis that this is a real effect," he said. "There is an increase in the number of harbour porpoises who are dying of starvation but we haven't done the research yet to find out whether that is having a knock-on effect and reducing the overall population. But, certainly, the decline in sandeels cannot be good for population."
He said: "It is a worrying change. Harbour porpoises eat lots of other fish - haddock, whiting and the occasional cod, mackerel or herring. But it seems that, particularly in the spring in the Scottish North Sea area, sandeels are very, very important to them."
Mr MacLeod added: "If, as predicted, the waters of the North Sea continue to warm, the numbers of sandeels are expected to continue to decline."
Peter Ftevick, the science director with the Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust, said: "Evidence on the west coast suggests sandeel populations are down. The increase in the number of stranded animals which starved to death is quite dramatic, but how that extrapolates into the population is a little hard to say."
STAYING CLOSE TO THE COAST THE harbour porpoise is one of about 80 cetacean species around the world.
As their name implies, they stay close to coastal areas, largely in river estuaries or in areas with a mean temperature of 15C. They often venture up rivers, being seen hundreds of miles from the sea.
They measure about 75cm at birth, grow up to 1.7 metres long and live up to 25 years.
The flippers, tail fin, dorsal fin and back are dark grey, while the sides are lighter and speckled.
Giant German Rabbits to Ease Hunger in North Korea
Here comes Peter Cottontail, hopping down the bunny trail --straight to Pyongyang and eventually, North Korean ovens. A German breeder is exporting oversized rabbits to the People's Republic to help fill empty stomachs.
Karl Szmolinsky is taking his first trip abroad this April. But he's not going to a Mediterranean island, or Greece or Italy, or any of the other sunny spots most Germans choose for their vacations. He's headed to one of the most hermitically sealed countries on earth, ruled with an iron fist by an unpredictable dictator, and he's taking his bunnies along.
The 67-year-old is exporting his "German grey giants," which he's bred since 1964, to North Korea, which suffers from chronic food shortages and where, although hard information is nearly impossible to get, malnutrition and even starvation are believed to be common.
"I just want to help the Koreans," said Szmolinsky, who lives in the eastern German town of Eberswalde. He isn't going to get rich off the business deal. He'll receive around 80 euros ($104) per rabbit, meaning his profit margin is going to be small.
Ten of his rabbits are already there, and they've been placed in a petting zoo for children to run their hands through their plush coats. When Szmolinsky arrives, he will advise officials on breeding techniques for these biggest rabbits in the world, which can reach a weight of 10 kilograms (22 pounds) and produce seven kilograms (15.4 pounds) of meat.
Szmolinsky first heard that North Korean wanted rabbits in October. Shortly thereafter, an armored Mercedes limousine arrived at his place and asked the breeder to show him a few animals and then weigh them. The North Korean left impressed and the deal was done. Those bunnies were about to be on their way to the workers' paradise.
The breeder's rabbits could soon be common throughout Kim Jong Il's realm. In mid-September, the state news agency KNCA told the population that rabbits are the most "economically advantageous pets" around and that rabbit hutches should be put up pronto since the German giants produce "a lot of meat with just a little feed."
LOS ANGELES - The late "Godfather of Soul" James Brown will rise again - on screen.
Spike Lee has signed on to direct a feature film about the singer produced by Brian Glazer and Imagine Entertainment, Paramount Pictures announced Wednesday.
"It's an authorized biography done with the cooperation of Mr. Brown before his passing," Paramount spokeswoman Nancy Kirkpatrick said without further comment.
Lee will rewrite a draft by Jezz and John Henry Butterworth, the trade paper Daily Variety on Wednesday. The script has been through several drafts since Steve Baigelman wrote the original. The movie could be in production by late 2007, Variety said.
"Having known him well, and after spending lots of time with him and researching his life, it's somehow not surprising that he died on Christmas Day. He was the ultimate showman, all the way to the end," Grazer told Variety on Tuesday.
Messages left Wednesday for Grazer at his Los Angeles office were not immediately returned.
Brown, whose legendary brand of soul and funk influenced hip-hop, disco and rap, died of congestive heart failure on Christmas morning in Atlanta at age 73.
Samuel L. Jackson Goes To Iraq The veteran actor stars with 50 cent in a new film about the war in Iraq.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE January 12, 2007 WOULD DR. KING BE ON YOUTUBE?
“Our nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power.” -- Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community (1967)
As Americans pause this weekend to reflect on the legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we must take time to remember that one of his greatest legacies is that of unending, enduring and effective advocacy. All over the country – from wooded neighborhood parks to marbled state capitols – people are living King’s true legacy as they join together to fight for a more just, more fair, and more perfect society.
But the very notion of public advocacy has changed dramatically since King’s death. No longer does such advocacy primarily bubble up in discussions at backyard barbecues or church basement socials. Today’s activism is rooted in the liberating, democratizing medium of the Internet – from MySpace to YouTube to podcasts to thousands of micro-targeted political blogs.
As shown in a new report released today by PolicyLink, a national public policy organization, effective electronic advocacy is finally accessible to all people with the passion to make true change. And with the tremendous increase in Internet access among low-income communities and communities of color, advocates can speak directly to a much bigger slice of their once hard-to-reach audience.
“E-advocacy isn’t just for the big-time, big-money groups anymore,” said Arnold Chandler, the author of the new PolicyLink report Click Here for Change: Your Guide to the E-Advocacy Revolution. “Advocacy on the web can help even the smallest group reach out, fundraise and organize with power and passion.”
* Create interactive web sites * Send email alerts and newsletters * Peer-to-peer organize * Effectively Podcast and Blog * Create online animation and videos * Initiate discussion forums and chat rooms
As the state and local races heat up in 2007 and the 2008 presidential race begins in earnest, these tools will become increasingly vital for organizations looking to make a real difference in their communities and their country. Dr. King would be proud.
PolicyLink is a national research and action institute that works collaboratively to develop and implement local, state, and federal policies to achieve economic and social equity.
TRIBUTE TO SIX NATIONS - INDIGENOUS NEWSMAKERS OF 2006: "WE WANT 'HOME RULE ON TURTLE ISLAND' IN CANADA & USA!"
First Nations Start Taking Back Stolen Land
MNN. Dec. 31, 2006. We’ve been saying this from the beginning! On February 28, 2006 Six Nations people swept into international prominence. They took back some stolen land and kicked off the developers. They’ve held it since. Why is this story important?
There were numerous military attacks launched against the people at the site which became known as “Kanenhstaton”. The colonizers want the Indigenous people to go home and stay invisible. With the support of brothers, sisters, hundreds of Indigenous nations worldwide, friends and allies, the people stood firm.
Minister of Indian Affairs, Jim “Jonestown” Prentice, was kicked out as Minister. We refuse to look up to him as our “great white father”. Colonial appointments at the “table talks” were constantly backed further into the wall. Our brilliant researchers put out irrefutable research to back up our claims to the “Haldimand Tract” and beyond.
The colonists pretend they can cut off our rights and take our possessions by the stroke of a pen. They don’t want to discuss the issues on a nation-to-nation basis, as set out even in their own laws. They don’t know what to do. They have become afraid of our truths.
We constantly speak of non-violence. They have the power of guns and weaponry to use on us while we have nothing. We believe they don’t mind striking at defenseless people if no one is looking. Sure, we know what kind of brutality they can mete out to us. When pushed, we defend ourselves as we have a right to do. They call us “vandals” and they say they are the law.
Six Nations people never wanted to be martyrs. They only wanted to do what they’re supposed to do. They showed that we must unite and be treated as equals, and it doesn’t mean becoming Canadians or Americans.
The 500 years of colonialism have been over for a long time. Six Nations and many others have led the way. Canada, wake up and smell the coffee. Yes, someone else was here first. Stop your brutality. Six Nations showed us how to be firm and dignified. It was the principles of the Kaianereh’ko:wa/Great Law of Peace that provided the path. We have laws and we must never submit to their foreign laws. They never got the right from us to have jurisdiction over us and our land.
What did Six Nations reveal?
One of our big problems is the “sell-outs” set up by the colonial governments to do us in. We saw some of our band councilors come out and openly commit espionage and treason against us. We saw rich “Indian” politicians riding around in limos, with big bank accounts and “Indian” and foreign police at their beck and call. They are setting themselves up to be the masters who will replace the colonists to rule over us. So they think!
We found out we don’t need so many cars, shoes and clothes. All we need is one and to wear it with dignity. We don’t want anyone to be the master over another. We must live as who we are, according to our own minds.
The colonists despise our attitude because we object to having our peace disturbed. They don’t know where we find the nerve to assert ourselves like we do.
Our resistance has provoked responses from our Caledonia neighbors who are “squatting” on our land. We embarrassed all those who want to treat us like slaves. We changed their minds about killing us over their anger at us for asking that the colonists be law abiding.
We commend the people of the Six Nations, our brothers and sisters, our friends and allies. They are all our heroes. Especially those who remained on the site through it all. The Six Nations people showed us how to reach into ourselves and how to use our anger in a constructive way. It takes bravery to take all that racist provocation that was hurled at us by the state and their hired guns like the KKK, skinheads and rioters and 'porky pig’s' navy. They wanted to mow us down and tried to set this up many times.
They tried to provoke, intimidate and constantly threatened to kill the men, women and children. Those threats became irrelevant to the point that we wanted to make, even when guns were constantly pointed at us.
We cannot get our freedom by violence and murder. This would create shame. The Indigenous people are marching because we have been aroused. Six Nations did not despair. We have tyrants around us that seem invincible. Many of us were arrested and falsely charged. We used our minds. Many of our people refused to stand up in the colonial court when the colonial judge walked in. We are not Canadians or British subjects.
Our message to Canada is to secure peace by removing your troops and your administration. Put them where they are needed, to control your own people. We want what’s ours. We are never going to lie down and let you walk over us again. We want you to see our wisdom. You cannot go on maintaining your system on us at gunpoint.
Six Nations never said an “eye for an eye” because it makes everyone blind. We know the colonists have bad tempers. They kept trying to bring in martial law to control the situation of the white rioters who wanted to attack us. We saw their desperation. The Indian police, in some instances, can be the most brutal to us even when their police stations have not been burnt down, their uniforms ripped off them, their weapons confiscated or their cars turned over.
Colonists, stop offending the hospitality that we have offered. Don’t be afraid of our desire for freedom and independence. We are not afraid to look any colonists in the eye. We don’t want to cooperate with this foreign system. We have to follow our duties by marshalling what is inside us. We have gone as far as we can under your brutal regime. We want Indigenous home rule on Turtle Island.
Six Nations demonstrated that they will not back down. On February 28th, the anniversary of the reclamation of Kanenhstaton, let us hold our heads high. It is an important day. We must obey the law of the land, our law, not the colonial laws imposed to exploit us and our land. Turtle Island belongs to the Indigenous people. We will never grovel for what is ours. We will not lose strength when there are setbacks.
Six Nations, you made the injustices visible. You gained a victory for all of us with friendship, not fear.
Six Nations persistence continues. Though we’ve been blocked many times, we always try again. On January 1st 2007 the people will take over the Old Confederacy Council House on Six Nations that was stolen in the 1920’s. That’s when Colonel Morgan and Duncan Campbell Scott pretended to depose our government. They also denied us access to what was left of our trust funds after a series of unauthorized gifts and investments to institutions like the Grand River Navigation Company, McGill University and the Law Society of Upper Canada. These and hundreds of other debts have been certified but not repaid. If we don’t succeed, the coming generations will try again and again. The truth is on our side and we know we will win.
Turtle Island will be free. We are still here. We have not retreated. We won’t let the colonists divide us, even when they cling to their old dreams which shall be one day gone.
Creation begins with the power of the women. As long as the sun shines, the grass grows and the water flows, it means that the birth of our people will continue. In the end it is the power of the women and the men together that made it happen. As long as we are people, we will exist. We must remember our original instructions that come from the natural world. Our most precious commodity is our mind. We all have been given a path to be free through the use of our minds. Six Nations people, you used yours to analyze, to disagree and to come to an understanding. That is what freedom is. That is what the Six Nations people stood up for in 2006.
Maxine Waters at Hip Hop 'Post 9-11/Katrina' Symposium:
"We’re at a time when very smart people have been allowing the dumb-ass President of the United States to do as he pleases."
Interview By Kam Williams
Congresswoman Waters is the founding member and chairperson of the ‘Out of Iraq’ Congressional Caucus, established to generate debate about the war in Iraq and the Administration’s justifications for the decision to go to war, and to urge the return of US service members to their families as soon as possible. She is married to Sidney Williams, the former U.S. Ambassador to the Commonwealth of the Bahamas. She is the mother of two adult children, Edward and Karen, and has two grandchildren.
Praised by the younger generation for her support and interest in their concerns, she was the only politician participating in a recent Symposium entitled Hip-Hop in a Post 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina America, staged at Princeton University, which is where this interview was conducted.
KW: When I think of rap music, Congress is probably the last thing that comes to mind. Where do you think that you as a Congresswoman can work constructively with the hip-hop community?
MW: I’m hoping to get the hip-hop community more involved with public policy makers, so that they could begin to influence the thinking of older and mainstream people. They can contribute tremendously in terms of dealing with the setting of public policy that really determines where this country is headed and how it’s going to get there. For instance, the FCC is having meetings all around the country. They were in L.A., and I was there taking them on about consolidation in the media, with the L.A. Times which is owned by the Tribune Company, along with WGN in Chicago, and 27 other TV stations, etcetera, etcetera. Now, wouldn’t it have been wonderful if the hip-hop community had been there with me and others who were prepared to take on the FCC?
KW: Do you really think by patiently waiting for a turn to testify they would be respected at an FCC hearing like a ranking member of Congress?
MW: Not in the same fashion, because if you conform to the outline of the Establishment at these hearings, those people who get to sit at the front of the room to be heard are there because they’re an elected official or the head of this or that organization, or what have you. The hip-hop community has to walk into the room as one, fill up the whole room, and say “I was invited but I’m here. I intend to speak. Yaw’l gonna’ let me speak? I‘ve got something to say!” All I’m saying is you’ve got to change the way things are handled, or you’re not going to have an influence.
KW: When Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela, referred to President as the devil, Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel immediately defended Bush, despite his handling of Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War. Do you think that this sort of response might be why the hip-hop generation feels unrepresented by black politicians?
MW: After Hugo spoke at the U.N., what you basically saw were politicians rolling out to say “It’s not the right thing to say.” Or “How could he say such a terrible thing?” I know that a lot of people in the hip-hop community were upset and asking, “Why do those politicians do that?” But on the other hand, I didn’t see a group of people from the hip-hop activist community call a press conference or put together a rally, and say, “Here’s how we interpret what Chavez was doing.”
KW: I think many folks feel that Kanye West came closer to expressing their feelings about Bush than the Congressman.
MW: Maybe it was an in-artful description of how he felt about the President, but I think we missed an important moment. That was an opportunity that should have been seized upon for some serious discussion about what’s wrong with the public policies of this Administration.
KW: What do you think about the President’s rationalization of ignoring the Geneva Conventions as Constitutional under the Patriot Act?
MW: It’s undermining all of what we stand for. We can’t talk about the Constitution and not understand the danger to the democracy that is being presented at this time, given what they’re talking about, with the enemy combatants and the loss of habeas corpus. How can you know the Constitution, how can you be quiet, when democracy is crumbling before your very eyes, if you aren’t dealing with this issue? We need to deal with whatever’s going on now that’s changing the world and creating the kind of hatred that will not allow you to be an international person, because people don’t want to see you in other countries, understanding you as an occupier, and as an abuser.
KW: What do you think of all the tax dollars squandered on Iraq?
MW: We’ve spent $400 billion between Iraq and Afghanistan. That amounts to a couple of billion dollars a week. I stood on the floor of congress begging trying to get just one billion to fight HIV and AIDS to be able to fund all the outreach programs. But we’re at a time when very smart people have been allowing this dumb-ass President of the United States to do as he pleases.
KW: Are you sure you want to characterize him that way?
MW: Let the media take that and make something of it. But I’m not going to be like Kanye and the rest. I’m not backing off. I said it, and I mean it! The policies that have developed around Iraq and Afghanistan are ridiculous and outrageous and everybody should be protesting. The President has not only lied about why he’s there, but over 3,000 soldiers, men and women, are dead. For what? There were no weapons of mass destruction. You have over 20,000 young men and women seriously injured. Lost their legs, or their arms, eyes lost, brains shot out. They’re over at Walter Reed Hospital trying to figure out how they’re simply going to be able to see another day.
Blacktrospective 2006: Annual Look Back at the Best in Black Cinema
By Kam Williams
How do you go from American Idol also-ran to prohibitive Oscar favorite?
No, don’t ask tone deaf William Hung, but rather the irrepressible Jennifer Hudson, whose screen debut as Effie in Dreamgirls has made everybody forget about Jennifer Holliday, the originator of the role on Broadway back in 1981.
And although Hudson is currently enjoying all the buzz, 2006 was a banner year for breakout performance by black actresses, a sharp departure from 2005. Who could forget luscious Lauren London in ATL, precocious Keke Palmer in Akeelah and the Bee and Madea’s Family Reunion, or Halle Berry look-a-like Paula Patton in Idlewild and Déjà Vu?
The list of the black actors, however, is littered with a lot of familiar names, from Samuel L. Jackson to Laurence Fishburne to Delroy Lindo to Eddie Murphy to Chiwetel Ejifor, though Forest Whitaker was another shoo-in for his chilling channeling of the spirit of the late Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.
Of course, it is also my civic duty as a critic to point out the lousiest outings and offerings, too, so without further ado, I humbly offer the 2006 edition of my annual Blacktrospective.
Blacktrospective 2006: Annual Look at Best in Black Cinema
Best Black Films of 2006
1. Akeelah and the Bee 2. Manderlay 3. ATL 4. Madea’s Family Reunion 5. Dreamgirls 6. Confederate States of America 7. The Pursuit of Happyness 8. Something New 9. Snakes on a Plane 10. Color of the Cross
Best Documentaries
1. SoulMate 2. Black Hair 3. Sisters-in-Law 4. A Girl Like Me 5. Black Gold 6. Dave Chappelle’s Block Party 7. Been Rich All My Life 8. Home 9. Don’t Trip… He Ain’t Through with Me Yet 10. After Innocence
Best Actors
1. Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland, American Gun) 2. Laurence Fishburne (Akeelah and the Bee) 3. Tyler Perry (Madea’s Family Reunion) 4. Delroy Lindo (Wondrous Oblivion) 5. Chiwetel Ejiofor (Kinky Boots, Children of Men, Inside Man) 6. Eddie Murhy (Dreamgirls) 7. Samuel L. Jackson (Snakes on a Plane, Freedomland, Home of the Brave) 8. Will Smith (The Pursuit of Happyness) 9. TI (ATL) 10. Jean-Claude La Marre (Color of the Cross)
Best Actresses
1. Jennifer Hudson (Dreamgirls) 2. Keke Palmer (Akeelah and the Bee, Madea’s Family Reunion) 3. Rosario Dawson (Clerks II, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints) 4. Lauren London (ATL) 5. Sanaa Lathan (Something New) 6. Paula Patton (Idlewild, Déjà Vu) 7. Queen Latifah (Last Holiday) 8. Angela Bassett (Akeelah and the Bee) 9. Rochelle Aytes (Madea’s Family Reunion) 10. Leonie Elliott (Wondrous Oblivion)
Best Directors
1. Andrea Allen-Wiley (SoulMate) 2. Chris Robinson (ATL) 3. Tyler Perry (Madea’s Family Reunion) 4. Kevin Wilmott (Confederate States of America) 5. Sanaa Hamri (Something New) 6. American Gun (Aric Avelino) 7. Clark Johnson (The Sentinel) 8. Bryan Barber (Idlewild) 9. Leslie Small (Don’t Trip… He Ain’t Through with Me Yet) 10. Kiri Davis (A Girl Like Me)
IN RISE ON MONDAY A look at how body parts go in and out of fashion in this week's RISE plus how technological communication has affected the quality of our friendships. Plus... Emergency On Planet Earth
The kids need education, And the streets are never clean, I've seen, a certain disposition, prevailing in the wind, Sweet change, if anybody's listening? Emergency on planet earth. Is that life that I am witnessing, Or just another wasted birth.
Now, we got emergency Oh, we got emergency on planet Earth Now, we got emergency Oh, we got emergency on planet Earth
Think we're standing for injustice, White gets two and black gets five years, Took me quite a while to suss this, But now I know my head is cleared And a little boy in hungry land, is just a picture in the news, Won't see him in that tv advertising, 'cause it might put you off your food
Now, we got emergency Oh, we got emergency on planet Earth Now, we got emergency Oh, we got emergency on planet Earth
Young Black CEO Generates $1 Million At Age 25-- Named Ebony Magazine Top 30 Young Leader For 2006 --Nominated For Black Enterpris Magazine Small Business Award -- Featured Panelist At Tavis Smiley Leadership Institute --Purchase Dante Lee's Book:'How To Think Big...When You're Small'...E-Book Available!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE BLACK PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD HAVE A NEW PLACE TO GATHER: KEMETWORLD.COM
Youngstown, OH (BlackNews.com) - The hottest new Black on-line society...KemetWorld.com debuts with an extraordinary concept that allows seamless transformation into a phenomenal world! KemetWorld.com has its own currency and conversion system that allows members to build and amass properties and fortunes from anywhere on the planet. No matter who you are and whatever your dreams, goals, or aspirations are, KemetWorld.com offers an opportunity to fulfill them. Once people become members of KemetWorld.com, user-to-user interaction and state of the art technologies ensure they have a friendly and engaging experience. Members of KemetWorld.com enjoy live on-line events, entertainment, instant messaging, games, e-mail, chat, cultural forums, their own home school association, and their own radio station. At www.WYWFM.com you can listen, have your own show, and even be a DJ. They can also enjoy the new global TV station designed to highlight the good news and positive contributions of Black People. At www.KemetWorldTV.com you can even create your own television program. Active members are rewarded with metros and US dollars (which can be used for shopping at KemetWorld’s own mall, www.UjamaMall.com) and special promotions are used outworld (off-line). Members can also build stock portfolios and participate in e-commerce. KemetWorld.com provides job search and classifieds from around the world that allow you to get involved inworld (on-line) and outworld (off-line). Members can open businesses, have yard sales, even go to their job day to day – all in KemetWorld.com. We are creating a Black Community that is self-sufficient, and has super sustainability; a Black community that will create wealth for itself to be passed on to future generations. KemetWorld.com will seamlessly bridge the socio-geographic gap and connect Blacks around the world, so that a world community and economic powerbase can be reestablished. With a population of over 39 million and buying power of over $750 billion collectively, in the US alone, KemetWorld is the place where these ideals can transpire.
Whitley Strieber Journal: Strange Days Whitley Strieber has posted a new journal entry called "Strange Days," about the bizarre meteors, strange smells and odd bird deaths that are taking place worldwide. It moves from the mysterious bird deaths being observed around the world to the bizarre meteoric events taking place in recent weeks to a supernova explosion 41,000 years ago to 2012, and it makes quite a read. Click here to read it.
We know you. We know what you want. We know that in rubbishy drizzle-filled January, where you trudge in and out of a tiny cubicle all day without ever seeing the sunlight, you want to be reminded of a beautiful sunny destination you cant afford to go to - right? Maui And The Big Fish does exactly that. The first thing that hits you about Maui And The Big Fish is just how incredible it looks - full of vibrant colours and lush animation that has to be seen to be believed. After that, though, you have to work out exactly how to play Maui And The Big Fish. It's a puzzle game, part colour-matching game, part Breakout clone and part grin-making action game, Maui And The Big Fish is a game that's hard to pin down. But one thing's for sure - you're going to have a lot of fun trying. Order Maui And The Big Fish Now Download Maui And The Big Fish
Columbus, OH (BlackNews.com) - Every year around this time, there is a rush to get the annual flu shot. Everyone becomes concerned about coming down with the flu. The media has managed to create widespread pandemonium from this whole flu vaccine gimmick. This is nothing more than the pharmaceutical and or medical groups and companies tactics to scare people into getting flu shots thus allowing them to make more money and control people. The fact is that there has not been a conclusive scientific study that proved that vaccines are safe and effective. On the other hand, there is enough evidence, in my opinion, showing that vaccines cause cancer, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, Alzheimers, A.D.D. and autism. Dr. Robert Kennedy, Jr., senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and author of Deadly Immunity says that our government is to blame for this epidemic. He showed how a drug called Thimerosal, which is actually mercury, had been placed in vaccines back in the 1930’s. Immediately after the drug was put in as a preservative, autism cases started to appear. According to www.nvic.org, there was no such thing as autism prior to Thimerosal. Autism started and was created by this drug used in vaccines. These vaccines containing mercury are responsible for learning disabilities and cause dozens of other ailments to develop in the human body. Why? Because it is a poison that attacks brain and moto-neurological function. On top of this, vaccines don't even really prevent you from getting the flu. Medical science currently does not have any drugs that can kill viral infections like the flu or even a cold. Tom Jefferson of the Cochrane Vaccines Field, says "There is a big gap between policies promoting annual influenza vaccinations for most children and adults, and supporting scientific evidence." The city of Rome, Italy who coordinated the comprehensive analysis for the Cochrane collaboration, stated, "Given the significant resources involved in annual mass influenza campaigns, there is urgent need for re-evaluation of these strategies." Even the Wall Street Journal in August 2006 exposed the drug companies responsible for promoting useless vaccines through marketing campaigns used to target college students. All as a way to sell more drugs. So for clarity, this is not an attempt to advocate people to not get vaccinated, although we all know at least one person who got a flu shot once and then got the flu right after being vaccinated. This is merely a sharing of information, but everyone has to make their own informed decision. We all have to live with the consequences one way or another. Many natural health care practitioners will agree that if your body is healthy, you don't need vaccines. If you practice a healthy lifestyle where you de-stress, cleanse, and nutritionally fortify your body with what it needs to remain completely balanced, you will have optimal immune response and overall good health. This is a fact that has been confirmed and proven many times over by countless scientists and successful therapists all over the world. So here is some simple advice to use if you feel you are coming down with the flu: Slow down and rest, take long hot baths with Masada's bath salts, and eat lightly - largely consuming organic fruits and vegetables. Dr. Irwin Stone, who is a pioneer in alternative health care, recommends taking 1500-2000mg (or to bowel tolerance) of Vitamin C, and then repeating at 20-30 minute intervals. Vitamin E in addition to Vitamin C is an all natural power house defense team against viruses. Prevention though is always the best choice. Health is no accident! So be informed know what to do to get it and keep it!! Makeisha Lee is a health and nutrition consultant. For more information about cleansing and detoxifying your body, contact her at 614-595-1425 or makeisha@cleanseformula.com or learn more at www.CleanseFormula.com
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CONTACT: Gloria Murry Ford 202-544-0628
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BLACK WOMEN OF FAITH AND MEDICINE: WORKING TOGETHER TO ERADICATE CERVICAL CANCER
The Balm In Gilead Introduces Its New Public Education Campaign Washington, DC (BlackNews.com) - 100% Preventable. Spread the Word. Save a Sister. This is the new public education campaign message from the Balm In Gilead's 2007 ISIS Project (Intimate Sessions for Informed Sexuality). National Spokesperson Estelle H. Whitney, MD; Anafidelia Tavares, MD, MPH along with 20 African-American female clinicians came together at a press conference today at the Four Seasons Hotel to support the campaign and to announce the Balm In Gilead's new component of the ISIS Project: Black Women of Faith and Medicine: Working Together to Eradicate Cervical Cancer. The Balm In Gilead also announced its new public education program for this year's ISIS Project, the goal of which is to inform and educate African-American women about cervical cancer and to encourage them to take the HPV test and to become knowledgeable about the HPV vaccine. The ISIS Project encourages African-American women between the ages of 30 and 70 years old to become empowered to safeguard their health by learning about HPV, cervical cancer and the need for regular screening with the Pap test and HPV test. The medical data speaks for itself: * African-American women are at least 50% more likely to die from cervical cancer than white women. * Cervical cancer is caused by persistent infection with an extremely common and contagious virus, the human papillomavirus (HPV); although there are approximately 15 cancer-causing HPV types, types 16 and 18 are responsible for 70% of all cervical cancers worldwide. * Many women are not aware that cervical cancer is preventable and that new technologies like the HPV test are an important weapon in the fight against cervical cancer. * African-American women are not aware of the vaccine against the disease that is available for women under 26 years of age. * Almost one third of all women in the U.S. had no health insurance in 2005, and some cannot pay for routine screenings like Pap tests or the HPV test or the now available vaccine. * New technologies including HPV testing for screening women and HPV vaccination for girls offer new opportunities to prevent cervical cancer among African-American women. The ISIS Project was initially launched in March 2005 with the partnership of the women's societies of three major African-American religious denominations (African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal Zion, and Christian Methodist Episcopal) with a potential reach of 7 million African-Americans. "The addition of the expertise of African American female clinicians to the ISIS Project makes it a complete program that targets the heart and soul of Black women across our nation," states Pernessa Seele, Founder/CEO of the Balm In Gilead. She further states, "Due to the centrality of the church in African-American life, this program will be able to reach those who frequently under use cancer screening services and the underinsured." Ten markets across the country will benefit from educational training program on cervical cancer – The District of Columbia, Miami, Houston, Montgomery, Oakland, Chicago, Greensboro, St. Louis, Greenville and Pittsburgh. Estelle H. Whitney, MD specializes in Obstetrics & Gynecology in Newark, Delaware. She is a graduate of the Howard University School of Medicine. Anafidelia Tavares, MD, MPH is Director of Women's Health at the Balm In Gilead, where she oversees the ISIS Project. She received her medical degree at the Boston University School of Medicine and completed a Masters of Public Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. The ISIS Project will employ a peer educator strategy in each city. Drs. Whitney and Tavares will conduct 2-day training sessions with 15 women recruited to become peer educators per market. These trainees will become Balm In Gilead Certified Cervical Cancer Peer Educators. After the training sessions, the peer educators will go into the community and deliver five educational sessions within a six month period. These sessions will include information on HPV and cervical cancer, screenings and available vaccines, and how to discuss these issues with health care professionals (role playing scenarios will be used). Grass roots marketing materials (church event listings, flyers, pamphlets and other handouts) will be utilized to solicit community participants to attend the sessions. In addition, the 20 African-American clinicians will serve as expert media spokespersons in their respective markets regarding the overall medical issues of cervical cancer. With the launch of the ISIS project in 2005, the Balm In Gilead is dedicated to educating women about cervical cancer and empowering them to get their annual Pap test and HPV test if they are over 30 years of age. The campaign also wants women to become knowledgeable about the vaccine. The Balm In Gilead is a not-for-profit, non-governmental organization whose mission is to improve the health status of people of the African Diaspora by building the capacity of faith communities to address life-threatening diseases, especially HIV/AIDS. Over the past 18 years, The Balm In Gilead has earned worldwide recognition as the leading organization in the United States dedicated to empowering and mobilizing faith institutions to address life-threatening diseases, especially HIV/AIDS within the African-American community and on the continent of Africa. For additional information about the Balm In Gilead, visit our website at www.balmingilead.org or call toll free: 1-888-225-6243.
Support for the ISIS Project is made possible through an unrestricted educational grant from Digene and Merck Corporations.
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Hi B.Z.,
Today is a landmark day for the Gather community and the entire publishing industry. We're thrilled to announce The Gather.com First Chapters Writing Competition, which will give one aspiring novelist a publishing contract with Touchstone/Simon & Schuster. Guaranteed. Imagine your novel sold alongside Dan Brown or Philippa Gregory!
One talented first-time novelist will receive:
A guaranteed publishing contract with Touchstone/Simon & Schuster
Don't have a novel ready? Your fellow Gatherers need you. In the weeks to come, you can join other book lovers and writers at First Chapters to read and rate entries and help decide who deserves their big break. The Grand Prize winner will be selected by a panel of judges, including Carolyn K. Reidy, President of the Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group; Mark Gompertz, Executive Vice President and Publisher of Touchstone Books; Borders Group CEO George Jones; and Gather's own CEO, Tom Gerace!
Good luck to each and every novelist. And all you avid readers -- get ready to help choose the winner.
After a woeful second season, it's commonly thought that Desperate Housewives really hit its stride again in season three, or at least it did until the ginger one from Desperate Housewives was ordered to stay in bed because she's dangerously full of babies. Marcia Cross is pregnant with twins. This alone must have made it difficult to film Marcia's Desperate Housewives scenes without her belly suddenly expanding and knocking a vase of the mantelpiece, or without a jet of breast milk shooting out of her nipples and getting Teri Hatcher in the eye, but now filming Marcia Cross has just become almost impossible, because a doctor has ordered Marcia Cross to stay in bed until she stops being so chuffing pregnant. The Desperate Housewives producers are getting around this by filming Marcia Cross' remaining scenes in bed, which - given that the last time Marcia Cross was in bed on Desperate Housewives she was having cunnilingus performed on her - should be a real thrill for all those middle-aged, ginger and heavily pregnant porn fetishists out there.
Hooray! It’s Thursday! The best day of the week for you to impress your friends, family and fellow cyber-geeks with some music knowledge they won’t know about! Unless they read this page too! Which they really should do! Traditionally this feature leaps around different styles of music and we aim to continue this trend. From looking at people who build their own equipment, bands who sing about animals and toy cars to artists performing in weird native languages we’ve uncovered some very interesting stuff so far. And this is set to continue as we look at Japanese producer DJ Scotch Egg.
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"Our complex global economy is built upon millions of small, private acts of psychological surrender, the willingness of people to acquiesce in playing their assigned parts as cogs in the great social machine that encompasses all other machines. They must shape themselves to the prefabricated identities that make efficient coordination possible... that capacity for self-enslavement must be broken." -- Theodore Roszak - The Voice Of The Earth
"For we know when a nation goes down and never comes back, when a society or civilization perishes, one condition may always be found ~ they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what brought them along." -- Carl Sanburg
"When Nature has work to be done, She creates a genius to do it." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are." -- Alfred Austin
Australia Herald Sun By Jade Bilowol January 06, 2007
PINT-sized star Bindi Irwin is gearing up to sing and dance in the United States as part of a push to lure more American tourists to Australia.
Bindi will follow in the footsteps of her late father Steve by flying to the US and taking part in Tourism Australia's G'Day USA Week initiative from January 11 to 20.
The eight-year-old wildlife warrior will take her adrenalin-charged stage show Bindi and The Crocmen to Los Angeles and New York.
Bindi will be joined by her mother Terri and the manager of their Australia Zoo wildlife park on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, Wes Mannion, who will be performing with a range of animals including crocs.
The Wiggles, Russell Crowe and The Veronicas are also involved in the G'Day USA promotions.
Family friend and manager John Stainton today said Bindi and Terri were leaving for the state's next week to star in the 90-minute family-orientated show at the Ahmanson Theatre in LA and the New York Civic Centre.
"That's what her dad did for the last three years, he went over every year and did that and he did a big show,'' Mr Stainton said.
"Well he was going to do that next week too, but now that he's not there Terri and Bindi are filling in and they're going to do it in his place.
"The one in New York is sold out and the one in LA is just about gone.''
Bindi has been performing her show to thousands at Australian Zoo's Crocoseum for the first time since her father's death last September when a stingray barb pierced his chest.
Mr Stainton said she would be performing at the zoo until Tuesday.
''(Yesterday) morning before the (first) show she said 'I feel a little bit nervous' - I think it was just the fact of going up there and doing that show and knowing her dad wasn't going to be up there (in the stand) watching her,'' Mr Stainton said.
"She was terrific, as good as she's ever been if not better.''
My Holiday Top
First I went on a plane to Amsterdam. Then I went to Paris, it was lots of fun! In Amsterdam I sometimes visited Dad. I think it was once. After that I went to Paris. It was fun too and I stayed at a beautiful place. Well that was my holiday and I hope if you come to the zoo you have a good time too.
Love Bindi xoxoxox.
Oops I forgot a little bit, the highlight was Disneyland. Me and Mum went on the big thunder mountain ride and had so much fun and we went on lots of playgrounds and stuff too. The End.
US puts out red carpet for Bindi
By Peter Mitchell in Los Angeles January 07, 2007 01:45pm
BINDI Irwin will rub shoulders with one of the Desperate Housewives, appear on Dave Letterman's TV talkshow and walk in the footsteps of Winston Churchill at Washington DC's National Press Club.
Her whirlwind tour of the US which starts this week has a high-profile itinerary any A-List actor campaigning for next month's Oscars would pine for.
Prime Minister John Howard does not receive as much exposure and red carpet treatment when he visits the US.
"America is so excited for Bindi to come here," said Annie Howell, senior vice president of US TV network, Discovery, that plans to launch Bindi's new TV series later this year.
"She'll be welcomed with open arms and rightly so.
"She's a very special child."
Bindi and her mother, Terri, are two of the stars of G'Day USA: Australia Week, a 10 day promotion in Los Angeles and New York highlighting Australian entertainment, tourism, food, business and fashion.
The high-profile tour will launch Bindi's showbiz career in the US, but it will also be dotted with emotional moments where she will honour her late father, Steve "The Crocodile Hunter" Irwin.
Bindi's star-studded tour begins on Thursday in Los Angeles when she appears with Terri as a guest on one of America's most popular TV talkshows, The Ellen Degeneres Show.
The talkshow, shot at NBC's Burbank studios, will provide Bindi and Terri with a great chance to glean some behind the scenes gossip about the catty TV series, Desperate Housewives.
Wisteria Lane's blonde bombshell, Nicollette Sheridan, will also be a guest on Degeneres' show on Thursday.
Next Saturday the glamour ride continues when Bindi and Terri join Russell Crowe, Naomi Watts, Rupert Murdoch, The Veronicas and several hundred other celebrities and dignitaries at the Penfold's Icon Gala Dinner at LA's Hyatt Regency Hotel.
Crowe and Watts will receive entertainment awards, while Steve Irwin will be honoured with an emotional tribute and a Lifetime Achievement Award.
On January 14 Bindi and her backup dancers, the Crocmen, will team up with The Wiggles for a concert at LA's Ahmanson Theatre, where Americans have snapped up tickets worth up to $US65 ($83).
The Irwin's tour then moves to America's east coast, where Bindi and Terri will be guests on another top-rating TV talkshow, The Late Show with David Letterman on in New York on January 17.
The most interesting stop on the Irwin's odyssey occurs two days later when they travel to Washington DC to address a luncheon in the ballroom at the National Press Club.
"It's the Press Club's Newsmaker Luncheon which is reserved only for very important people," Howell said.
The podium at the NPC has been graced by a who's who of world leaders, including Churchill, Nikita Khrushchev, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Charles deGaulle, Boris Yeltsin, Nelson Mandela and Yasir Arafat.
On January 20, Bindi, the Crocmen and The Wiggles team up again for another concert at Manhattan's City Centre.
The Irwin's American tour also coincides with the US airing of the documentary, Ocean's Deadliest.
The show, on which Steve Irwin was working when he suffered the fatal blow to the heart from a stingray barb on the Great Barrier Reef in September, will premiere in the US on January 21 simultaneously on the Animal Planet and Discovery channels.
A separate tribute program to Irwin, put together by Irwin's longtime manager John Stainton, will follow Ocean's Deadliest.
"Ocean's Deadliest is a fairly straight forward documentary, although it's emotional in terms of it's the last show Steve is doing for us," Howell said.
"The tribute show will be emotional. It looks at his life and legacy. It's a beautiful show. It's a salute to Steve."
Howell said Bindi's new US TV series, Bindi, the Jungle Girl, was pencilled in to premiere in America in several months.
"John Stainton has been busy finishing up the two programs, Ocean's Deadliest and the tribute show for Steve, and then he'll finish Bindi's show," Howell added.
"We're guessing it will air sometime in the second quarter of this year."
All set to say 'G'day USA'
Peter Mitchell January 07, 2007 11:00pm Courier Mail
BINDI Irwin will appear on top-rating television talk shows and walk in the footsteps of Winston Churchill at Washington DC's National Press Club in a whirlwind tour of the US which starts this week.
"America is so excited for Bindi to come here," said Annie Howell, senior vice-president of US TV network, Discovery, which plans to launch Bindi's new TV series later this year. "She'll be welcomed with open arms and rightly so. She's a very special child."
Bindi and her mother, Terri, are two of the stars of G'Day USA: Australia Week, a 10-day promotion in Los Angeles and New York highlighting Australian entertainment, tourism, food, business and fashion.
The high-profile tour will launch Bindi's showbiz career in the US but it will also be dotted with emotional moments where she will honour her late father, Steve Irwin.
Bindi's tour begins in Los Angeles on Thursday when she appears with Terri on popular TV talk show, The Ellen Degeneres Show.
The pair will team up with Russell Crowe, Naomi Watts, Rupert Murdoch, The Veronicas and several hundred other dignitaries at the Penfold's Icon Gala Dinner at LA's Hyatt Regency Hotel.
Crowe and Watts will receive entertainment awards, while Steve Irwin will be honoured with an emotional tribute and a Lifetime Achievement Award.
The Irwins will be guests on another top-rating TV talk show, The Late Show with David Letterman in New York.
The most interesting stop on the Irwin's odyssey occurs two days later when they travel to Washington DC to address a luncheon in the ballroom at the National Press Club.
"It's the Press Club's Newsmaker Luncheon which is reserved only for very important people," Ms Howell said.
The podium at the NPC has been graced by a who's who of world leaders, including Churchill, Nikita Khrushchev, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Charles deGaulle, Boris Yeltsin, Nelson Mandela and Yasir Arafat.
The Irwins' tour also coincides with the US airing of the documentary, Ocean's Deadliest.
The show – on which Steve Irwin was working when he suffered a fatal wound to the heart from a stingray barb on the Great Barrier Reef in September – will premiere in the US this month simultaneously on the Animal Planet and Discovery television channels.
A separate tribute to Irwin, put together by Irwin's longtime manager John Stainton, will follow Ocean's Deadliest.
"Ocean's Deadliest is a fairly straight-forward documentary, although it's emotional in terms of it's the last show Steve is doing for us," Ms Howell said.
"The tribute show will be emotional.
"It looks at his life and legacy. It's a beautiful show. It's a salute to Steve."
Howell said Bindi's new US TV series, Bindi, the Jungle Girl, was pencilled in to premiere in America in several months.
"John Stainton has been busy finishing up the two programs, Ocean's Deadliest and the tribute show for Steve, and then he'll finish Bindi's show," Howell added.
"We're guessing it will air sometime in the second quarter of this year."
The Irwin itinerary Thursday: Los Angeles, guest on The Ellen Degeneres Show Saturday: Los Angeles, Penfold's Icon Gala Dinner January 14: Los Angeles, Bindi and The Wiggles' concert at Ahmanson Theatre January 17: New York, The Late Show with David Letterman January 19: Washington DC, National Press Club speech January 20: New York, Bindi and The Wiggles' concert at City Centre January 21: Steve Irwin's Ocean's Deadliest airs in the US
Zoo puts humans on display
Tue Jan 9, 2007 8:20am ET
ADELAIDE, Australia, Jan 9 (Reuters Life!) - An Australian zoo has put a group of humans on display to raise awareness about primate conservation -- with the proviso that they don't get up to any monkey business.
Over a month, the humans will be locked in an unused orang-utan cage at Adelaide zoo, braving the searing heat and snacking on bananas. They will be monitored by a psychologist who hopes to use the findings to improve conditions for real apes in captivity.
Audiences can vote for their favorite "ape" via mobile phone text messages, in the style of reality television shows, and at the end of the month, a "super human" will be selected to represent the zoo.
"They're completely mad," said one visitor to the exhibit, as the humans, who are allowed home at night, played up to the crowds and checked each other for imaginary lice.
"It's not as exciting as the animals actually, they're not really doing very much," another onlooker said, clearly unimpressed by the volunteers' shenanigans.
One of the human apes, Josh Penley, said the experiment was a chance to "get myself out of my comfort zone and to get a week off work."
Participants wear microphones in front of Web cams to allow watchers to hear the action in what has been billed as "Big Brother behind bars."
Dr. Carla Litchfield, who is conducting the experiment, has laid down firm rules for the new apes: no nudity, no rude behavior and no jumping into the enclosure spa.
Zoo vets haven't ruled out using tranquilizer darts if the humans misbehave.
US wants full prints at airports
Craig Skehan January 8, 2007
AUSTRALIANS face having the fingerprints of both hands scanned on arrival in the United States and the details stored on an FBI database, under a reported security crackdown in the country's airports.
The requirement will begin at 10 selected US international airports and then be extended to all terminals, The Observer in London has reported.
Citizens of Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Britain and other European nations would be subject to the new requirement, the report suggests.
The Australian Government has refused to confirm whether Australians will be required to participate.
A spokesman for federal Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said last night: "We are not commenting on a newspaper report quoting sources. We'll wait for more official information."
The Observer said prints were now taken from two fingers. Changing that to all 10 fingers would make the information compatible with the FBI's database. There would be no restrictions on international use of the prints collected, the newspaper said.
The president of the Australian Council for Civil Liberties, Terry O'Gorman, said last night he was concerned about the reported measures. "It is a pretty stupid terrorist who leaves his fingerprints around," he said.
He said that, even assuming a security case could be made, there would need to be strict protections in place. He warned that experience since the terrorism attacks in the US on September 11, 2001, showed that promises that fingerprints, DNA and related criminal intelligence would be restricted to terrorism investigations had proved "empty or illusory".
The risk was that prints would be widely distributed to various law-enforcement agencies, he said.
"The Australian Government should be asking the US whether this proposal, as reported, is going to be extended to Australians," Mr O'Gorman said. "Because if it is, our position would be (that) fingerprints gathered from passengers should be absolutely quarantined for use only in counter-terrorism investigations."
The Observer reported that a US Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman had confirmed that the system would be tested in the northern summer. The paper quoted sources as saying the scheme would be initiated at such airports as New York, Washington and Miami.
British civil-rights group Liberty said the scheme would turn thousands of innocent people into terrorism suspects. However, US officials believed the measure would not deter ordinary people, but would leave any terrorist worried he or she had left fingerprints in a safe house, The Observer said.
There have been concerns in the US and Britain that technological hiccups would result in false fingerprint matches and that there will be longer arrival queues at American airports.
The Observer reported that, under the new measures, passengers could have their credit-card transactions traced when they booked flights to the US.
It said passengers giving their email address to an airline could have their emails investigated.
Wild African lions kill buffalo live on Internet
Tue Jan 9, 2007 7:16 PM IST
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Nature lovers worried growing hordes of tourists might spoil a safari to Africa can now watch the continent's wildlife live and in the raw on the Internet.
Canada's Infotec Business Systems Inc, which uses webcams to broadcast live footage of wild animals on the web, says its 'Africam' site has captured the first live kill of an animal in the wild streamed through the Internet.
The site showed six lions hunt and kill a buffalo live on Christmas Day at the Nkorho Pan on the edge of South Africa's vast Kruger Park, Infotec BSI said on Tuesday.
"The majestic beauty of these animals is rarely seen by the general public. Now we're able to share it with everyone, without harming these animals," said Infotec BSI Chief Executive Arthur Griffiths in a statement.
The Nkorho stream, shown at www.africam.com and www.wavelit.com, films a watering hole in the upscale Sabi Sands reserve on the edge of Kruger Park -- one of the world's top game reserves -- 24 hours a day.
On Tuesday morning a baboon slurped from the watering hole while a cluster of bambi-like impala and a lone warthog chomped on nearby patches of grass.
Infotec drummed up media attention last year when it broadcast a live feed of two bird's nests. It later launched Africam on its Wavelit Internet video site and another stream showing live footage of Canadian grizzly bears.
Websites like Africam have beamed still images from the African bush around the world via the Internet for several years but better technology has made live video footage possible.
The number of people watching TV over the Internet, or IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) is expected to double to 13.3 million in 2007 and surge to 48.8 million by 2010, according to industry analyst Gartner.
Case Point- Why the World Needs 'Cuteness' to Stop the Slaughter of Wildlife:
Bloodbath: Japan's dolphin cull gets underway
The nation's annual hunting season is underway, a tradition stretching back centuries. Now, though, protesters from abroad are trying to end this way of life. David McNeill reports from Taiji UK Independent Online 06 January 2007
In Taiji, the fishermen say that dolphin tastes like venison or beef. But eaten raw with a dab of ginger and soy sauce, the glistening dark flesh resembles liver, with a coppery aftertaste that lingers on the roof of the mouth long after you've chewed it past your protesting taste buds. The ripe, tangy smell stays longer.
"I hate cutting up dolphin," says Toshihiro Motohata, who runs a nearby whalemeat shop. "The stink stays on you for days, even after several baths."
Dolphin-hunting season has arrived again in this sleepy harbour town. Perhaps 2,000 small whales and striped, bottlenose, spotted and Risso's dolphins have been slaughtered for meat that ends up on the tables of local homes and restaurants, and in vacuum-packed bags in supermarkets. By the end of March, many more will go the same way, part of what is probably the largest annual cull of cetaceans - about 26,000 around coastal Japan, according to environmentalists - in the world.
Six hours from Tokyo and accessible only via a coastal road that snakes through tunnels hewn from dense, pine-carpeted mountains, Taiji for years escaped the prying eyes of animal rights activists, but the isolation has been abruptly ended by the internet and the cheap rail pass. A steady trickle of foreign protesters - most Japanese people know little about the tradition - now arrive in the rusting town square to cross swords with the local bureaucrats and the 26 fishermen who run the hunt.
Taiji's notoriety has grown, fuelled by gruesome videos of the dolphin kill posted on YouTube, and by criticism from celebrities such as the American actors Joaquin Phoenix and Ted Danson and from high-profile environmentalists, and tensions have sharpened. Protesters have repeatedly clashed with the fishermen. Nets and boats have been sabotaged, activists arrested and several environmental groups have been effectively banned from the town.
Foreigners now almost inevitably mean trouble, especially when they come with cameras; local people speak with special venom of a BBC documentary that they say depicted them as barbarians. "One fisherman told me if the whalers could kill me, they would," says the best-known protester, Ric O'Barry, who trained dolphins for the 1960s television series Flipper. "But I always try to stay on the right side of the law. If I get arrested, I'm out of this fight."
Around Taiji and in the nearby towns of Kii-Katsura and Shingu, whale meat has been eaten for hundreds of years, claim local officials. Restaurants and shops offer dolphin and whale sashimi and humpback bacon, along with tuna and shark fin soup. A canteen next to the Taiji Whale Museum, where dolphins and small whales are trained to perform tricks for tourists, sells minke steak, sashimi and whale cutlets in curry sauce, in a room decorated with posters of the 80 or so "cetaceans of the world" - whales, dolphins and porpoises.
According to Ikuo Mizutani, a local wholesaler, dolphin meat sells for about 2,000 yen (£9) a kilo, cheaper than beef or whale.
Unlike most Japanese children, who have no idea of what whale tastes like, children in Taiji know their cetaceans. "I don't like the taste of dolphin because it smells," says nine-year-old Rui Utani. "I prefer whale."
In the museum, out-of-towners are often stunned to learn of the local specialities. "I'm shocked," says Keiko Shibuya, from Osaka. "I couldn't imagine eating dolphin. They're too cute."
The hunts are notoriously brutal, and blue tarpaulin sheets block the main viewing spots overlooking the cove where the killings take place, to prevent photographs being taken. Beyond the cove, small boats surround a pod of migrating dolphins, lower metal poles into the sea and bang them to frighten the animals and disrupt their sonar. Once the panicking, thrashing dolphins are herded into the narrow cove, the fishermen attack them with knives, turning the sea red before dragging them to a harbourside warehouse for slaughter.
The fishermen, who consider dolphins just big fish, like tuna, are bewildered that anyone would find this cruel, and describe the protesters as extremists. "If you walked into an American slaughterhouse for cows, it wouldn't look very pretty either," says one, who identifies himself only as Kawasaki. "The killing is done in the open here, so it looks worse than it is." Most of the fishermen are descended from families that have been killing and eating the contents of the sea around Taiji for generations, and reject arguments that dolphins are "special". Says Kawasaki: "They're food, like dogs for the Chinese and Koreans."
Mr O'Barry claims, however, he was told in private by town officials that tradition is not the real reason for the hunts. "It's pest control," he says. "They want to kill the competition for the fish. That's unacceptable. These animals don't have Japanese passports, they belong to the world. They're just trying to get around this town and these 26 guys."
He calls the town "schizophrenic". "It's as pretty as a 1950s postcard, and the people are so friendly, but this secret genocide takes place every year."
The schizophrenia is sharpest, say activists, in the Taiji Whale Museum, where tickets for whale-watching trips in dolphin-shaped boats are sold, while the non-performing animals bump up against each other in a tiny concrete pool. The trainers here help sort the "best-looking" dolphins from the kill, and train them for use in circuses and aquariums across Asia and Europe.
The museum recently made the world's science pages when fishermen handed over a dolphin with an extra set of fins, possibly proving that they once had legs and lived on land. But Mr O'Barry says the story had a dark side. "The Japanese media didn't report that this particular dolphin was taken away from her mother. The mother's throat was slit and she was butchered in the Taiji slaughter house along with more than 200 other bottlenose dolphins."
The bitter controversy over what fishermen in Taiji and other Japanese ports take from the sea is salted with nationalism, one reason why they are backed to the hilt by the Tokyo government. In a country that produces just 40 per cent of its own food, fisheries bureaucrats bristle at "emotional" lectures from Western environmentalists, and amid an intensifying fight for marine resources, they are determined not to yield. For some, cetaceans are a line in the sand. "If we lose on whales, what will happen next?" asks Akira Nakamae, deputy director general of Japan's fisheries agency.
Next, it seems, is tuna, a staple of the Japanese diet in contrast to whale, which is a minor delicacy now eaten by a tiny proportion of the population. Japan's voracious appetite for tuna shows no sign of abating: a report last December claimed that Japanese fishermen poached a staggering 100,000 tons of the coveted southern bluefin tuna above quota between 1996 and 2005.
The Taiji fishermen deny they are taking too much from the sea. "We would be cutting our own throats," says Kazutoyo Shimetani, sales manager of the dolphin hunters' cooperative in Taiji. The cooperative - essentially a closed guild - says it rigidly controls fishing, limiting dolphin hunting to just 26 of the town's approximately 500 fishermen.
Taiji's growing notoriety has widened the cultural gulf between the town and the rest of the world, and most senior officials will no longer talk to Western journalists. But the head of the local board of education, Yoji Kita, who lectures on whaling to schools and colleges, agrees to a brief, testy meeting.
Like many in the town hall, he is defensive, accusing Westerners of failing to understand or explain Japan's culture to their readers, and of inciting protesters, but he is guardedly polite - until a question about the dangerously high mercury levels detected in whales and dolphins. "Why pick on those as reasons to stop eating them?" he asks, voice rising. "The whole environment is poisoned. There is no point in talking to you, because you don't want to listen. That's just racism," he says, standing to terminate the interview.
"It's very difficult," sighs a clerk in the museum. "The town leaders are just so tired of having to deal with this. They want it to go away."
There seems little chance they will get their wish, despite an offer to fund the retirement of the dolphin hunters from a US environmental group. Few in the town took the offer seriously, and the fishermen say they would in any case reject it. "Why should we give up our tradition on the orders of somebody else?" asks Mr Shimetani.
In a world racked by wars, greed and environmental destruction, the fate of a few thousand animals might seem small fry, but activists say the plight of the dolphins is connected to all three. "The dolphin hunt is a symbol of our utilitarian view of nature," says Mr O'Barry. "That we can use and abuse the sea. I honestly believe when the world finds out about this, it will be abolished. It can't possibly survive the light of day."
One man's campaign
Ric O' Barry is one of the world's best known environmentalists. A former US Navy diver, he later trained the five dolphins that played Flipper in the Sixties television series before turning against dolphin captivity in 1970. He has spent his life since as an animal rights campaigner and much of the past decade fighting what he calls the "secret genocide" of dolphins in Taiji, where thousands of the animals are killed between October and March every year. Mr O' Barry travels to the small port town several times a year to film the annual dolphin hunt for a coalition of environmental groups (at www.SaveJapanDolphins.org). He claims he is despised by officials at the town hall, trailed by goons, and harassed and threatened by whalers. "One fisherman down there told me if the whalers could kill me, they would," he says. "I was kind of flattered. They call me 'Samurai dolphin man', which shows that, at least, they respect me." Oddly, the first time the 67-year-old visited Taiji in 1975, he met the mayor and was given the keys to the town after leading a campaign against a US boycott of Japanese products led by anti-whalers whom he considered "racist". He still believes boycotts will not stop whaling. "Boycotts are completely useless because the Japanese people don't even know about this. They are a blanket condemnation of the Japanese people, and the dolphin hunt is led by just 26 fishermen."
Father says ‘Tigger’ hit his son at Disney park Employee temporarily suspended while authorities investigate incident
MSNBC Jan 6, 2007
ORLANDO, Fla. - A Walt Disney World employee dressed as the character “Tigger” was accused of hitting a child while posing for a photo, a spokeswoman for the theme park said Saturday.
Park officials temporarily suspended Michael J. Fedelem while they investigate the accusations, Disney spokeswoman Zoraya Suarez said.
“Naturally, physical altercations between cast members and guests are not tolerated,” Suarez said.
Jerry Monaco of New Hampshire videotaped his son, Jerry Jr., posing with the costumed character at Disney-MGM Studios on Friday and recorded the confrontation, according to a statement from the Orange County Sheriff’s Office.
The father said Fedelem intentionally hit his son “on or about the head,” said sheriff’s spokesman Carlos M. Padilla. “The tape only shows a fraction of what happened. Now it’s up to us to find out what led up to that.”
A message left by The Associated Press for Monaco was not immediately returned. A telephone listing for Fedelem could not be located.
In 2004 a Walt Disney World employee dressed as Tigger was accused of touching the breast of a 13-year-old girl while she posed with him for a photo. A jury found the man not guilty.
World’s too small for Goofy-on-Chip sex video Disney takes ‘appropriate action’ over characters’ ‘mouse orgy’ at Paris park
MSNBC LOS ANGELES - The Walt Disney Co. said it took "appropriate action" against employees at its Paris theme park who were caught simulating sex while dressed as Disney characters in a digital video that has received wide attention on the Internet.
Disney would not say whether it had dismissed any of the costumed employees featured in the grainy video, which appears to have been shot with a hidden camera at a backstage dressing room at Disneyland Resort Paris.
"The behavior shown on the video is unacceptable and inexcusable," Disney said in a statement.
"The video was taken in the backstage area not accessible to guests. Appropriate action has been taken to deal with the cast members involved."
The video shows Minnie Mouse struggling to free herself as she is grabbed from behind by Goofy and then a giant snowman.
Later, Mickey Mouse simulates sex with the snowman and Goofy does the same with either Chip or Dale, the chipmunks, as laughter is heard on the tape.
The tape is described on the Internet as the "mouse orgy."
HAVANA (AP) - Cuba's official youth newspaper on Sunday reported an increase in sales of children's toys this year but warned against a rise in consumerism on the communist-run island.
In a two-page spread, the Juventud Rebelde reported on the revival of "Three Kings Day," a Latin American tradition of giving gifts to children on Jan. 6, commemorating the arrival of three wise men who offered the newborn Jesus gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.
"A tradition that seemed extinct in Cuban society rises again," the state-run newspaper said. "Although no one sees celebrating the millennial festivity of the Three Kings as heresy, the danger could be in (the holiday) accentuating consumerist habits and social differences."
Christmas is a low-key affair in Cuba. The government discouraged holiday celebrations for religious and consumerist reasons for decades following Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution, but made Christmas a holiday in 1997 ahead of a visit by Pope John Paul II in 1998.
Christmas was declared a permanent holiday at the end of 1998, a decision religious leaders embraced while also echoing concerns that it would succumb to Western-style commercialization.
State-run department stores offer no special promotions or sales on toys this time of year. Those interviewed for the Juventud Rebelde article attributed the increase of gift-giving in Cuba to the influence of globalization and visits by Cuban-Americans and other natives living abroad.
"During these days one can hardly move around the toy department of stores ... in the capital," the article said.
The newspaper spread showed photographs of shoppers holding several bags and children playing with toys. Raisa Vazquez, a manager of Havana's La Epoca department store, was quoted as saying toy sales were the highest this year since the store reopened in 1998.
"The enormous demand has forced us to spread out the toys to other departments, like the hardware section or the area with school supplies, so that the customer doesn't have to wait in such an immense line," Vazquez told the newspaper.
No specific sales numbers were reported, however.
Some of those interviewed by Juventud Rebelde expressed disdain for the resurgence of the holiday, calling it "a tradition of capitalist countries." University professors also warned that gift-giving can highlight economic differences.
"What should worry us is the social connotation that this could have, making it an objective of families to buy the most ostentatious gift," Teresa Munoz, a sociology professor at the University of Havana, told the newspaper. "The solution is not to prohibit (the celebration) but rather to be conscientious of the consequences we could face creating consumerist habits that deform little ones and make them feel superior to their companions."
The Three Kings Day tradition comes from Spain. While not actively promoted by the communist government, the newspaper said rebels led by Castro in the 1950s also gave toys on the holiday to children in the mountains where they were fighting the Cuban revolution.
On Monday, the office of Havana's city historian will distribute 100,000 toys to children to celebrate the holiday but also to honor Castro's Jan. 8 entrance in Havana after the triumph of his revolution in 1959.
Mickey's cousins unwelcome guests in Florida town
Reuters Dec 30, 2006
ORLANDO, Fla. - Central Florida, the home of Walt Disney World, is typically invaded by visitors wearing mouse ears this time of year.
But while Mickey Mouse's fans may be welcome, the residents of Apopka, a tiny town 25 miles north of the theme park, are disgusted by the hundreds of thousands of real mice that have overrun their community.
The thumb-sized house mice have chased people out of homes and offices for the second time since 1999, said David Overfield, environmental administrator for the Orange County Health Department.
"It's pretty nasty," said Overfield, whose job includes trying to determine the cause of the infestation.
His current theory says an overabundant crop of acorns may have encouraged well-fed mice to mate -- and mate some more.
Dee Sincavage, owner of one of the many ornamental plant nurseries for which Apopka is known, is hard pressed to pick her worst mouse experience since the infestation began last summer by chasing kids out of Camp Wewa.
Was it the morning she walked into her nursery and felt the squish-crunch of fresh mouse carcasses underfoot? The night mice chewed through plumbing, flooding her office and soaking her business records? Or just the daily ordeal of drowning and disposing of dozens of live mice caught in traps overnight?
"Gosh, they are all over the place," Sincavage said. "The stench is bad and the gnats around here are terrible from all the dead carcasses. It's just disgusting."
Counter-measures by health authorities, who have established a special rodent command center, so far have been only partly successful. Besides dispensing traps and bait, authorities launched an air assault by releasing 17 barn and screech owls expected to feast on dozens of mice a day. News of the buffet apparently traveled far, luring many more birds of prey to the area.
"We have more raptors than we've ever seen before," Overfield said. "They just line up along the telephone wires and dive down and pick stuff off."
So far, Overfield said, the infestation has not sickened anyone, although the smell of all the rotting carcasses trapped in the walls of many homes and businesses is certainly nauseating.
Overfield cautioned residents to be vigilant about inspecting their food supplies since the mice can eat through standard plastic storage containers.
Although Orange County leaders recently allocated another $200,000 to continue the rodent battle, no one knows when or how the infestation might end.
ANTI-WAR activist Cindy Sheehan has defied a US ban on travel to Cuba, flying to Havana to join protesters demanding the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp for terrorism suspects.
Ms Sheehan will join a march to the US naval base in eastern Cuba where about 395 suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters are being held.
The march is part of planned international protests against the prison camp on Thursday, five years after it opened with the first detainees flown in from the US-led war in Afghanistan.
Washington has faced steady criticism over Guantanamo from rights groups and foreign governments because most of the detainees have not been charged and due to reports of prisoner abuse.
Americans who travel to Cuba without special licences from the US Government can be fined thousands of dollars.
"I'm not afraid. What is most important is the inhumanity that my country is perpetrating in Guantanamo," Ms Sheehan told reporters on arrival in Cuba.
"If I worried about reprisals I wouldn't be doing anything … I think it is time for people to step up and try to stop this."
The Cuban Government, which has long condemned the prison as a concentration camp run by its political enemy, has allowed the protesters to march to the security perimeter of the US enclave.
The US has said it does not torture detainees and that the camp is necessary to deal with its war on terrorism.
It has quickened the pace of releasing captives. Last month the Pentagon said the prison's population was about 395 out of more than 770 held there since it opened in January 2002.
The group of 12 marchers will include former detainee Asif Iqbal, a British citizen who was released after two years with no charges.
Ms Sheehan, whose son was killed in the Iraq war, became a central figure in the US anti-war movement in 2005 after camping outside President George Bush's Texas ranch. She has been arrested at a number of protests.
Fellow peace activist Ann Wright, a retired US colonel and diplomat who resigned over the invasion of Iraq, said: "We're here as American citizens to say that this prison needs to be shut down."
REUTERS
Cindy Sheehan Arrives in Havana with Other Anti-war Activists
International Delegation to Visit Guantanamo, Cuba to Protest Infamous US Prison Havana, Jan 6 (RHC) - A group of defenders of peace, including Cindy Sheehan, mother of a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq, arrived in Cuba on Saturday as part of a campaign to demand the immediate closing of Guantánamo prison.
Sheehan is accompanied by a former prisoner of that facility -- illegally located in Cuban territory -- as well as attorneys and relatives of some detainees. The group will call for increased international actions against the U.S.-run prison and against torture.
The delegation will protest the existence of the prison and will give a conference on the abuses committed there on the International Day for the Closing of Guantánamo, slated for Thursday, January 11th.
Asif Igbal, released without charges after years of abuse, and Zohra Zewawi, whose son was jailed, tortured and mutilated in Guantánamo, are also in Cuba on the delegation.
The group will be in Cuba until next Saturday, January 13th. Their program includes a visit to the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Center, the Latin American School of Medicine, the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) and other places of interest.
They will travel to the eastern province of Guantánamo on Thursday to express their rejection of torture and will participate in a press conference to be held in Havana, the Cuban capital.
January 6, 2007 -- Over 1000 people gathered in Nancy Pelosi's district, on Ocean Beach in San Francisco, to spell out the message "IMPEACH!" "America is a great country," said event organizer Brad Newsham, a local cab driver and author. "But President Bush has betrayed our faith. He mislead us into a disastrous war, and is trampling on our Constitution. He has to go. Now. I hope Nancy Pelosi is listening today."
A majority of Americans share Newsham's sentiments. A 2006 Zogby poll found that 52% of Americans agreed with the statement: "If President Bush wiretapped American citizens without the approval of a judge, do you agree or disagree that Congress should consider holding him accountable through impeachment?"
On Jan. 4, 2007, several members of Iraq Veterans Against the War launched a new tactic in an effort to support and encourage resistance among service members to the U.S. war on Iraq by founding "Camp Resistance."
On private land, with the support of the property owner, an IVAW yellow school bus sits just across I-5 from the gates to the massive military base, Fort Lewis. In spite of difficult winter conditions, over half a dozen Iraq, Afghanistan and other recent veterans and resisters are vowing to stay until the conclusion of Lt. Ehren Watada’s court martial Feb. 5.
Lt. Watada is the first commissioned officer to refuse deployment to Iraq. His pre-trial hearing took place Jan. 4 and sparked the establishment of Camp Resistance. Watada is demanding to argue at his court martial the illegality of the war and his duty to resist illegal orders. He is facing six years in prison.
The Camp Resistance bus also displayed posters in support of Suzanne Swift and Ricky Clousing. Swift was released on Jan. 3 after serving 30 days in detention for refusing to redeploy to Iraq. She is legally obligated to remain in the army for two more years, although she is fighting for a medical discharge. Swift was sexually harassed and assaulted by military superiors while in Iraq.
Ricky Clousing went AWOL for 14 months after his deployment to Iraq. He came forward last August at the national Veterans for Peace convention in Seattle. He turned himself in to authorities, served three months in a military prison and was released on Dec. 23, 2006.
Both Clousing and Sara Rich, Swift’s mother, are involved with and committed to Camp Resistance.
In a remarkable protest from inside the ranks of the military, First Lieut. Ehren Watada has become the Army's first commissioned officer to publicly refuse orders to fight in Iraq on grounds that the war is illegal. The 28-year-old announced his decision not to obey orders to deploy to Iraq in a video press conference June 7, saying, "My participation would make me party to war crimes."
An artillery officer stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington, Watada wore a business suit rather than his military uniform when making his statement. "It is my conclusion as an officer of the armed forces that the war in Iraq is not only morally wrong but a horrible breach of American law," he said. "Although I have tried to resign out of protest, I am forced to participate in a war that is manifestly illegal. As the order to take part in an illegal act is ultimately unlawful as well, I must as an officer of honor and integrity refuse that order."
28 arrested as Lt. Watada faces hearing by Watada Support Committee/API's Resist! Tuesday Jan 9th, 2007 12:24 AM
Over 200 people gathered at the Federal Building in downtown San Francisco on January 4, 2007 to show support for Lt. Ehren Watada, the first U.S. commissioned officer to refuse deployment to Iraq,and to demand an end to the Iraq war as the death toll has reached over 650,000 Iraqi's and over 3,000 U.S troops.
San Francisco, CA (January 4, 2007) - Over 200 people gathered at the Federal Building in downtown San Francisco on January 4, 2007 to demonstrate support for Lt. Ehren Watada, the first U.S. commissioned officer to refuse deployment to Iraq, and to demand an end to the Iraq war as the death toll reaches over 650,000 Iraqi's and over 3,000 U.S troops. 28 people laid down with white shrouds in front of the doors of the Federal Building to declare "No business as usual while the killing and dying continue in Iraq."
Grace Shimizu, a member of the Watada Support Commitee/Asian Pacific-Islanders Resist!, was one of the 28 arrested at the doors of the Federal Building. She explains the reasons she was compelled to risk being arrested for the first time, "Lt. Ehren Watada has inspired me to make my own decision of conscience to take action against this illegal and immoral war and occupation of Iraq which has killed over 3000 US troops and 600,000 Iraqi men, women and children. I took part in this civil disobedience on the same day which marked the beginning of Lt. Ehren Watada's court martial process. Supporting the courageous resisters within the military, like Lt. Watada, and their families is one very important way to stop the war crimes, end the occupation, bring the troops home and defend our Constitution."
Shimizu, along with other Bay Area supporters, plans to travel to Ft. Lewis to demonstrate her support for his refusal to deploy to Iraq. Watada faces over six years imprisoned if convicted of all the charges he faces. In addition to the one charge of missing troop movement for refusing to board a plane to Iraq on June 22, he is charged with four counts of conduct unbecoming an officer, all of which stem from public statements he made about his reasons for refusing what he believes is an "illegal order" and that by participating "would make me party to war crimes".
Speakers at the Vigil included David Hartsough, Ken Butigan, Rev. Dr. Dorsey Blake, Rev. Meg Whitaker-Greene, and Rev.Lloyd Wake, but the crowd was moved to tears by Marilyn Saner, member of Miliatry Families Speak Out, and mother of an active duty Army soldier injured by an IED in Iraq currently facing the possibility of re-deployment. "Our children are not going to Iraq to spread democracy in the Middle East: They're going to keep their fellow soldiers alive with the hope and prayers that they will survive that mission...We must demand of our leaders that they bring our troops home now..Remember it's the people who have the power" View a video of her speech here: http://indybay.org/newsitems/2007/01/05/18344239.php
The day's event began at the SF Japantown Peace Plaza in the late morning when over 30 people gathered displaying banners and signs in support of Lt. Watada as his pre-trial hearing was underway in Ft. Lewis, WA. There was a procession to the to the First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco where they were joined by members of the Unitarian congregation and the Declaration of Peace.
The delegation then joined the peace vigil already underway at the Federal Building. There has been a weekly peace vigil at the SF Federal Building from noon to 1pm every Thursday since October 2001, but this week as the death toll in Iraq continues to mount and Lt. Watada faces court martial for following his conscience and refusing to participate in the Iraq war, the numbers swelled to over 200 people demanding "Troops Home Now!".
The vigil was sponsored by Watada Support Committee, APIs Resists!, Declaration of Peace, First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco, American Friends Service Committee, Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Episcopal Peace Fellowship and San Francisco Friends Meeting. Other groups participating were Courage to Resist, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out, and Code Pink.
"It is heartening to see so many different groups and people come together and to see support of Lt. Watada merging with the larger anti-war movement. It is not only a right but an obligation to resist illegal war and I'm especially supportive and inspired by the immense courage it takes those within the military to resist," said Buff Whitman Bradley, another arrested at the doors of the Federal Building. "By supporting these brave individuals, together we have the power to stop this war." He says he also intends to make the long journey to the Ft. Lewis area for the beginning of the upcoming court martial.
This action was the first civil disobedience in support of Lt. Ehren Watada. Organizers say that it demonstrates that support for Lt. Watada is escalting as his court martial approaches. Nationally, supporters are gearing up for a Day of Action to Stand with Lt. Watada on February 5, 2007 to coincide with the beginning of his court martial. A regional mobilization is planned at Ft. Lewis and solidarity events are being planned across the country. For more info visit: http://www.CouragetoResist.org or http://wwwThankYouLt.org
A Citizens' Hearings is being convened January 20-22 at Evergreen State College , Tacoma campus in order to fully evaluate Lt. Watada's claims regarding the legality and morality of the Iraq War. Confirmed witness include: Daniel Ellsberg, military analyst who released the Pentagon Papers in the Vietnam War; Denis Halliday, former UN Assistant Secretary General; Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University. For more information: http://www.WarTribunal.org
We're Losing the Infowar Insurgents using simple cell-phone cameras, laptop editing programs and the Web are beating the United States in the fierce battle for Iraqi public opinion.
By Scott Johnson Newsweek
Jan. 15, 2007 issue - For nearly four years, U.S. military officials have briefed the Baghdad press corps from behind an imposing wooden podium. No longer. Last week U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell relaxed with reporters around a "media roundtable." He replaced the cumbersome headset once used for Arabic translations with a discreet earpiece. He cut short his opening statement, allowing for more back-and-forth banter. Yet even as Iraq emerged from the deadliest month in 2006 for American soldiers, Caldwell maintained the relentlessly upbeat patter that has come to characterize the briefings. "The key difference you're going to see in 2007," he said proudly, "is this is truly the year of transition and adaptation."
A draft report recently produced by the Baghdad embassy's director of strategic communications Ginger Cruz and obtained by NEWSWEEK makes the stakes clear: "Without popular support from US population, there is the risk that troops will be pulled back ... Thus there is a vital need to save popular support via message." Under the heading DOMESTIC MESSAGES, Cruz goes on to recommend 16 themes to reinforce with the American public, several of which Bush is likely to hit: "vitally important we succeed"; "actively working on new approaches"; "there are no quick or easy answers."
What's even more telling is that the IRAQI MESSAGES—the very next section—are still "TBD," to be determined. Indeed, the document so much as admits that despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars, the United States has lost the battle for Iraqi public opinion: "Insurgents, sectarian elements, and others are taking control of the message at the public level." Videos of U.S. soldiers being shot and blown up, and of the bloody work of sectarian death squads, are now pervasive. The images inspire new recruits and intimidate those who might stand against them. "Inadequate message control in Iraq," the draft warns, "is feeding the escalating cycle of violence."
Rome's Colosseum lights up in death penalty protest
Jan 06 5:00 PM US/Eastern
The Colosseum in Rome was illuminated evening as part of Italy's campaign for a global moratorium on the death penalty following the bungled hanging of Saddam Hussein. Following an initiative by the Italian capital's left-wing mayor Walter Veltroni, the arches of the world-famous 2,000-year-old Roman era stadium were lit up as night fell.
In attendance were members of Italy's libertarian Radical Party, whose 76-year-old leader Marco Pannella began a hunger strike on December 26 in support of the moratorium.
Italian politicians were unanimous in their revulsion over Saddam's execution, with former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi calling it a "political and historic error."
Rome's initiative will involve 85 UN member states that signed a non-binding declaration in December against capital punishment, Prime Minister Romano Prodi has said.
Hanging is worse than porn:'Make Love not War'
Sarah Smiles, Canberra January 8, 2007
THE film of Saddam Hussein's execution should be given a more restricted classification than pornographic films, says an adult-industry lobby group with the motto "make love, not war".
The Eros Association is considering classifying the film to illustrate what it says is the "hypocrisy" of Australia's film-rating system, which gives explicitly violent films a restricted R 18+ rating, and explicit pornographic films X 18+.
Freely available on the internet, the Saddam film, which depicts hooded men hanging the former Iraqi dictator, likely would be rated R 18+ if sold commercially here, said Robbie Swan, Eros' chief executive officer.
He said the Classification Review Board viewed "consenting sexuality" more harmful than depictions of real-life murders and executions.
"In Victoria, you can go to jail for selling sexually explicit and consensual films, but you can sell a film that shows someone being murdered in a convenience store," he said.
It was illegal to sell X-rated films in Victoria, but not to possess or buy them from Canberra, where sale was legal. Mr Swan said he did not think the film of Saddam's hanging should be censored, but called for "a more even-handed approach" to violence and sex.
The Australian Family Association defended the Classification Review Board system as reflective of community standards, and said the classification of sex and violence were separate issues.
"The Eros Association thinks that the people defending the current laws are pro-violence," said spokeswoman Angela Conway.
"This is ridiculous. The community does not say that extremely violent content is any worse than X-rated content. There's always been a concern in the community to give a special classification to very, very explicit pornographic films.
"There's anecdotal evidence around the country about children and adolescents being traumatised by this content.
"We've had Aboriginal leaders raising big concerns about the impact of this sort of content on child-protection issues."
Ms Conway said current laws were perhaps too permissive.
"The Eros Association is a coalition of businesses that have money to make," she said. "They've got another agenda here. They want this explicit content available in public cinemas, or to pick up in any old video shop."
Yet Mr Swan said the classification system was out of touch with prevailing attitudes towards sex. In the past, Victorians probably thought depiction of explicit sex was worse than murder.
But young people now were more free-thinking.
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Channel 4 television has unveiled details of its new satirical drama in which Prime Minister Tony Blair faces war crimes charges over the Iraq conflict in an imagined, not-too-distant future. "The Trial of Tony Blair" is set in 2010 and sees Blair (actor Robert Lindsay) on the brink of extradition to a war crimes tribunal, plagued by nightmares about the war and fears that he will be killed by a suicide bomber.
In the programme, to be screened next week, Blair converts to his wife Cherie's faith, Catholicism, in a bid to seek forgiveness for his sins.
"I gather Mr Blair is very concerned about his place in history. This film is my idea of where that place might be. Whether it's fiction or prediction remains to be seen," writer Alistair Beaton said.
"If it contributes to the public perception that Blair has done something wrong and he needs to pay a price for that, that would be terrific."
He said he hoped it would "get up Tony Blair's nose".
At a pre-screening Tuesday, Lindsay said he had made the film because he was "seriously angry" with Blair over the "illegal" Iraq war.
The drama could also make unpleasant viewing for Blair's likely successor, finance minister Gordon Brown, who is shown winning his first election after taking charge with a parliamentary majority of just two seats.
A jealous Blair, incensed by Brown's huge popularity, is seen to sabotage his chances of winning more votes by leaking an email Brown sent while finance minister saying that taxes would have to be raised.
But as prime minister, Brown ultimately gets his revenge by allowing Blair to be sent for trial at The Hague.
Meanwhile in the fiction, former US president George W Bush is shown in rehab after being discovered comatose at his ranch.
Domestically, Blair has moved from the premier's residence in Downing Street to London's Connaught Square, home to many wealthy Arabs and celebrities, which his wife describes as "ghastly" and like "Little Beirut".
"Not a great place to live when your husband is hated by 250 million Arabs," she says.
Blair is convinced he will be offered a top job at the United Nations or in the US administration as an adviser to new president Hillary Clinton.
But instead his former celebrity friends -- U2 pop star Bono, actor Kevin Spacey and Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates -- refuse to return his calls and the US abandons him to his fate.
Damn Liberals Cost Us The War! At the dinner table in a very red state, little room for obvious truths. But can you try?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Friday, January 5, 2007
So I'm up in the Idaho hinterlands at the family getaway lake house over the holiday break and I'm sitting at a nice dinner party with some family friends, and the wine is flowing and the friends are lovely and the conversation seems relatively open and hence I forget what a deeply, aggressively red part of the country I'm in because, well, the wine was very good, and when you're from San Francisco you tend to carry the progressive bubble with you as some sort of happy delusion that much of the world must be at least relatively informed and open and somewhat willing to lick the divine candy of current truths.
It can be, you know, a problem.
This is when it happened. One of the dinner guests I've met before but don't know very well, he asks me about the media world and the general timbre of my column and, more specifically, what the atmosphere was like in San Francisco when the Dems swept back into power in November like a glorious gob of long overdue balm for our festering national BushCo rash (analogy, of course, mine).
I smiled, I sighed, the nubile S.F. bubble present over my head like a hum of cosmic lubricant as I mentioned the general feeling of a wary sense of renewed hope, a feeling among the attuned and the informed that maybe there can now be a slight return to balanced humanitarian progress in the nation, alongside a blessed reduction in all sorts of brutal, dehumanizing, embarrassing scandals and BushCo atrocities and environmental devastations, et cetera and so on and pass the wine.
This is when I should've noticed. This is when I should've been paying attention to the signs: the crossed arms, the utter lack of smile or nod, the narrow eyes looking at me like I was from some planet where pagan pervert yoga teachers grow Toyota Priuses on the backs of organic chickens.
But alas, I forget. Or rather, I don't really care to stop to ponder, and so I begin tell my tablemate what I think is the terribly amusing and illuminating tale about the recent spate of hate mail I've received, much of it in response to a column I wrote about how the United States has so obviously and painfully lost yet another war, this time in Iraq, and how we have so little idea what we're really doing on the world stage anymore, how we cannot seem to learn from our mistakes.
The hate mail, I tell him, goes something like this: Yes, we have probably lost the war, you freak hippie commie punk. But do you know why we lost? You know why the terrorists hate us even more? I'll tell you why: Because of the goddamn liberal media! Because of the liberal agenda, the one that wouldn't give Bush a chance to really unleash the dogs of war, to quash our evil Islamic enemies, to really make America into a strong and ruthless machine of brutal moral justice.
We lost the war (my hate mail sneers), in short, because of people like you (that is, me), who so obviously hate America and hate our president and won't allow our fine and manly military to take whatever actions necessary to bring terrorism down because of some stupid ethics rules and anti-torture laws and hippie-dippy Geneva Conventions and silly pagan notions about saving innocent lives and examining true causes. Goddamn you liberals!
Something was wrong. There was a decided lack of laughter and incredulity on the part of my tablemate. There was no knowing nod, no chuckle, no shake of the head at the absurdity and intellectual despair of it all. I had the distinct feeling, in fact, that nearly everything I had just said came out in Greek and I'd just hurled a whole pile of words at a large and uncomprehending sweater.
Perhaps, I think to myself, he did not understand the humor? The rich and sickening irony? I decide to reiterate: Isn't that hilarious? Isn't it amazing how, despite nearly six full years of unchecked Republican power, despite a brutal and scandal-ridden rule over both houses of Congress, despite a stunning gutting of the treasury and a war that is costing us $100,000 per second, despite a lapdog media that was terrified as a Chihuahua in a hurricane of Karl Rove's appalling disinformation machine -- a supposedly liberal media that, for more than five years, didn't dare question anything about Dubya's rush to war for fear of upsetting the wailing evangelical neocon "majority" that ruled the schoolyard with a bloody iron Bible, is it not amazing that the GOP's historic national disgrace is, of course, all the liberal's fault?
Nothing. No response. Just a narrowing of the eyes, a slight shift in the seat. And finally the words that sound like fingernails on the chalkboard of truth: "You know what bothers me?" he said. "The feeling I get that I'm never really told the truth about Iraq and all the good things that are happening there."
Wait wait wait. What?
"You know, that I never hear what's really going on from the liberal media. They just can't be trusted. I never feel like I'm getting the real story. And we're doing some damn good things over there. That's what I think."
My jaw hung open, a smile of disbelief drifted across my face as statistics and studies and staggering death tolls and harsh anti-war comments from American generals and tens of thousands of dead civilians and the shrill idiocy of Fox News swam into my head and prepared to launch out my mouth in a torrent of arguments and fact and proofs that would have done, well, absolutely nothing to penetrate the ideological fortress of what I had just heard. There was, I see now, simply no room. But I was about to try anyway.
Then something unexpected happened. Before I could unleash my disbelief, my other tablemate, herself a young and whip-smart New York liberal and history buff, jumped in. Deftly, calmly, with the ease of a seasoned rhetoric pro, she wiggled into our friend's seemingly impenetrable frame of reference and first offered some understanding, some consideration of his "position," then skillfully steered him to another relevant, though less volatile point that still made him think and reconsider, just a little. And she did it all sans combat, or angry debate, or wary rolling of the eyes.
There was, in other words, no jumping down of the throat. There was no hammering home of the obvious numbers, the headlines, the countless undeniable proofs of the Bush disaster that would have found no intellectual purchase anyway. There was only the deft maneuvering of simplified ideas, a calm allowing of another's observations -- no matter how foreign or uninformed -- so as to, at the very least, keep it all on a reasonable keel. It was a precious -- if frustrating -- lesson indeed.
After all, we all have our frames, our boundaries of perception, into which we only allow certain notions of truth that resonate with our levels of education, spiritual understanding, experience. And the true art lies in respecting the frames of others, plying those borders with words of polite wisdom, all while still able to enjoy the same wine.
Which is not to say it all doesn't make you want to scream and tear out your hair and whip out the picture of George Bush giving Satan a back rub and some smooches over at Ted Haggard's bathhouse. But, hey, you do what you can.
Bush's Obfuscators vs. the 'Prince of Darkness': When mates let you down
January 8, 2007
Three advocates of the Iraq war condemn themselves with fierce criticisms of the Bush team, writes Michael Gawenda.
WHEN Vanity Fair magazine posted excerpts of an article about them on its website in late October, two weeks before the mid-term congressional elections, several leading neoconservatives who had been among the most bullish supporters of the Bush Administration's war in Iraq cried foul.
The excerpts were part of a long article by the British journalist David Rose that was due to be published in the January edition.
But after reading the piece, Vanity Fair's editors decided it was important to post excerpts in October, before the elections. The elections, after all, were in part a referendum on the Bush Administration's Iraq fiasco.
In the excerpts, several of the neoconservatives who were interviewed by Rose — who was a supporter of the war — said that the disaster in Iraq was basically the fault of George Bush, who did nothing about his dysfunctional and inept senior national security officials, including Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
These were not just your ordinary, garden variety neoconservatives. Richard Perle, known as The Prince of Darkness, was the chairman of the Pentagon's defence policy board advisory committee; David Frum was the speech writer who wrote Bush's 2002 State of the Union speech that dramatically referred to Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an "axis of evil"; and Ken Edelman was a member of Perle's Pentagon advisory committee, a former Pentagon official in the Reagan administration and a close political and personal friend of Donald Rumsfeld.
Other neoconservatives were interviewed for the article published last week, including James Woolsey, the former CIA director in the Clinton administration, and Douglas Feith, who was under-secretary of defence in the lead-up to the war and who helped plan the Iraq invasion.
But the main focus of the Rose article is on Perle, Edelman and Frum, and that's because these three most fervent advocates and supporters of the Iraq war are so fierce in their criticism of Bush and Rumsfeld and Rice and everyone else in the Administration, even as they deny any personal responsibility for the decision to go to war in Iraq and for the disaster that followed.
Woolsey and Feith do not play that basically disgusting game of denying any responsibility for what happened in Iraq, for which they deserve some considerable credit.
Both Frum and Perle complained bitterly after the excerpts were posted. Both said they had either been misquoted or quoted out of context. Both said they thought Rose had agreed that nothing would be published before the mid-term elections.
Their complaints were always suspect at best. The claim that the excerpts could not be published before the mid-terms lest they damage the Republican Party's chances was not worth a moment's consideration.
Here were three leading proponents of the war and former Administration insiders saying that George Bush was a hopeless President surrounded by incompetent advisers. The idea that these damning judgements should have been kept secret from the American people until after they had voted was contemptible.
Then there is the claim of Frum and Perle that they were quoted out of context. Having read the full article, this charge is ridiculous. It was an attempt to deflect the criticism of former friends in the Administration who would have been beside themselves with fury at the timing of the Perle and Frum interventions, on the eve of an election.
There are no qualifications from Perle: the planning and "policy process" in the lead-up to the war was "disastrous". And that was the main cause for the catastrophe in Iraq. Decisions were endlessly debated and Bush did nothing to end the divisions. He was living in a fantasy land.
Reading all this, one wonders about Perle's own grip on reality when he complained that the excerpts published in October were out of context. And one wonders where he was when all this incompetence, all these fantasies, all the endless divisions were on display in the lead-up to the war?
He surely must have known. So did he remain silent because he figured even an incompetently fought war was better than no war at all? Or is all this criticism of Bush and his team an unseemly attempt at self-exoneration?
As for Frum, he, too, ultimately blames Bush for the catastrophic failures, saying at one point that Bush could read the words written for him by people such as Frum, but that it seems he didn't understand what he was saying. This seems to be about as serious a charge as could be laid against a president.
If this is what Frum always thought, then that he remained silent about it and remained an unabashed supporter of the war is unforgivable. That is the real context in which Frum's charges against Bush and the Administration should be judged.
Edelman, who in late 2002 said the war in Iraq would be a cakewalk, sheets home the blame for everything that has gone wrong to his old friend Rumsfeld, describing him as the leading player in the "most incompetent team" of national security advisers and officials in the post-war era.
He, too, remained silent, it seems, when he came to realise that Rumsfeld was, in Edelman's words, enormously flawed. Edelman's silence when he should have been blowing the whistle on Rumsfeld and the national security team means that whatever he says now has no moral force.
All the neoconservatives quoted in the article fear that Iraq is lost and the consequences for America and the world will be dire. Perhaps they are right. Perhaps they are even right when they argue that the incompetence of the Bush Administration doomed the Iraq project even before it started.
But the attempts by Edelman, Frum and Perle to deny any responsibility for the war is contemptible. It means that whatever they have to say now can't be taken seriously.
US MARINES took dozens of gruesome photographs of the 24 civilians who were killed in Haditha, Iraq, in November 2005.
The images, which investigators tracked down on several laptop computers and digital media drives — some in the US — provide visual evidence of a series of shootings outside a taxi and inside three homes that military criminal investigators have alleged were murders.
Much like the photographs that emerged in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse cases, the Haditha images have provided investigators with powerful and visceral evidence of what happened. But unlike the detainee photographs, which were turned over to officials who then investigated the case, the Haditha images were discovered months after the shootings as more than 60 Naval Criminal Investigative Service agents scoured the globe for them.
Investigators found images on laptop computers that were shipped back to the US and recovered images that had supposedly been deleted from a Sony PlayStation Portable memory drive, according to investigative documents.
Marines were found to have downloaded the images from each other's devices, traded them and loaded them onto personal websites, and one marine told investigators he saw some of the photographs set to music on one computer. Some were emailed from Iraq to a civilian in the US, but none surfaced publicly until now.
Several marines took photos on November 19, 2005, some of them as part of an intelligence-gathering operation and some in order to record what had happened to the Humvee that was destroyed by a massive roadside bomb, killing Corporal Miguel "T. J." Terrazas.
The photographs of the bomb crater and the shredded vehicle show the power of the explosion that first set the Haditha incident in motion.
Among the images, there is a young boy with a helicopter on the front of his pyjamas, slumped over, his face and head covered in blood. There is a mother lying on a bed, arms splayed, the bodies of three young children huddled against her right side.
There are men with gaping head wounds, and a woman and a child hunkered down on their knees, their hands frozen around their faces as if permanently bracing for an attack.
The images are contained in thousands of pages of NCIS investigative documents obtained by The Washington Post.
Post editors decided that most of the images were too graphic to publish in the newspaper.
Ed Buice, an NCIS spokesman, said he could not comment on an open investigation: "NCIS strives to ensure the integrity of every investigation and finds the idea that someone might leak any of its investigative products to be deeply troubling."
A Shameful Retreat From American Values By Garrison Keillor
Tribune Media Services
I would not send my college kid off for a semester abroad if I were you. This week, we have suspended human rights in America, and what goes around comes around. Ixnay habeas corpus.
The U.S. Senate, in all its splendor and majesty, has decided that an "enemy combatant" is any non-citizen whom the president says is an enemy combatant, including your Korean greengrocer or your Swedish grandmother or your Czech au pair, and can be arrested and held for as long as authorities wish without any right of appeal to a court of law to examine the matter. If your college kid were to be arrested in Bangkok or Cairo, suspected of "crimes against the state," and held in prison, you'd assume that an American foreign service officer would be able to speak to your kid and arrange for a lawyer, but this may not be true anymore. Be forewarned.
The Senate also decided it's up to the president to decide whether it's OK to make these enemies stand naked in cold rooms for a couple days in blinding light and be beaten by interrogators. This is now purely a bureaucratic matter: The plenipotentiary stamps the file "enemy combatants" and throws the poor schnooks into prison and at his leisure he tries them by any sort of kangaroo court he wishes to assemble and they have no right to see the evidence against them, and there is no appeal. This was passed by 65 senators and will now be signed by Mr. Bush, put into effect, and in due course be thrown out by the courts.
It's good that Barry Goldwater is dead because this would have killed him. Go back to the Senate of 1964 -- Goldwater, Dirksen, Russell, McCarthy, Javits, Morse, Fulbright -- and you won't find more than 10 votes for it.
None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Idea. Mark their names. Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor. Alexander, Allard, Allen, Bennett, Bond, Brownback, Bunning, Burns, Burr, Carper, Chambliss, Coburn, Cochran, Coleman, Collins, Cornyn, Craig, Crapo, DeMint, DeWine, Dole, Domenici, Ensign, Enzi, Frist, Graham, Grassley, Gregg, Hagel, Hatch, Hutchison, Inhofe, Isakson, Johnson, Kyl, Landrieu, Lautenberg, Lieberman, Lott, Lugar, Martinez, McCain, McConnell, Menendez, Murkowski, Nelson of Florida, Nelson of Nebraska, Pryor, Roberts, Rockefeller, Salazar, Santorum, Sessions, Shelby, Smith, Specter, Stabenow, Stevens, Sununu, Talent, Thomas, Thune, Vitter, Voinovich, Warner.
To paraphrase Sir Walter Scott: Mark their names and mark them well. For them, no minstrel raptures swell. High though their titles, proud their name, boundless their wealth as wish can claim, these wretched figures shall go down to the vile dust from whence they sprung, unwept, unhonored and unsung.
Three Republican senators made a show of opposing the bill and after they'd collected all the praise they could get, they quickly folded. Why be a hero when you can be fairly sure that the Court will dispose of this piece of garbage.
If, however, the Court does not, then our country has taken a step toward totalitarianism. If the government can round up someone and never be required to explain why, then it's no longer the United States of America as you and I always understood it. Our enemies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They have made us become like them.
I got some insight last week into who supports torture when I went down to Dallas to speak at Highland Park Methodist Church. It was spooky. I walked in, was met by two burly security men with walkie-talkies, and within 10 minutes was told by three people that this was the Bushes' church and that it would be better if I didn't talk about politics. I was there on a book tour for "Homegrown Democrat," but they thought it better if I didn't mention it. So I tried to make light of it: I told the audience, "I don't need to talk politics. I have no need even to be interested in politics -- I'm a citizen, I have plenty of money and my grandsons are at least 12 years away from being eligible for military service." And the audience applauded! Those were their sentiments exactly. We've got ours, and who cares?
The Methodists of Dallas can be fairly sure that none of them will be snatched off the streets, flown to Guantanamo, stripped naked, forced to stand for 48 hours in a freezing room with deafening noise, so why should they worry? It's only the Jews who are in danger, and the homosexuals and gypsies. The Christians are doing just fine. If you can't trust a Methodist with absolute power to arrest people and not have to say why, then whom can you trust?
Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" can be heard Saturday nights on public radio stations across the country.
F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story."
As we recover from a dizzying New Year's Eve, we bring you a brand new show from Honolulu, Hawaii. While we were there in November, we recorded two shows, so you get even more of slack-key guitar virtuosos Danny Carvalho and Owana Salazar, another dose of the seldom-seen Na Pali, and of course, traditional Hawaiian songstresses Puamana. Plus new adventures of Guy Noir and the News from Lake Wobegon.
We're producing another Prairie Home Listener's Choice program, and we need your help. If you've been itching to hear an old skit or a favorite musical performance, write us and tell us about it. Be as specific as you can be about what you heard and when you heard it, and be sure to tell us why you enjoyed it so much. We love to hear your stories!
Did you hear about the three missionaries that were eaten by a tribe of cannibals? The cannibals had Lutheran, Methodist and Roman Catholic missionaries for dinner.
The next day the tribe had an ecumenical movement.
This joke was submitted by Russ S., of Seward, Nebraska. Thanks Russ!
Tech companies enlightened and confused in 2006 Listen in RealAudio or MP3
Dell, Google, AOL, and Apple were naughty AND nice in 2006, according to Future Tense news analyst Dwight Silverman.
(AP) Iraqis pray at the grave of the country's executed former president Saddam Hussein in Ouja, 115... Full Image
Manuel Garcia Jr comes the closest to exposing this charade in his article in Dissident Voice EXECUTING SADDAM, PROTECTING THE RACKETShttp://dissidentvoice.org/Dec06/Garcia30.htm
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Legendary director Robert Altman's take on Garrison Keillor's show boasts a dream cast, terrific music, and a story that tugs at the heartstrings. Keillor, Meryl Streep, Lindsay Lohan, Lily Tomlin, Woody Harrelson, John C. Reilly, Kevin Kline, Virginia Madsen, and Tommy Lee Jones star in a film about the final broadcast of America's most celebrated radio show. (Don't worry; it's only a movie.)
"What a lovely film this is, so gentle and whimsical, so simple and profound" —Roger Ebert. "A great gang of stars having a great time, brilliantly directed by Robert Altman" —Larry King. 1 hour 45 min.
Prairie Home Companion listeners are frequently treated to a song. Sometimes to a familiar tune, sometimes to original music—with words by Garrison Keillor. In them, he sings of home, love, friendship, family, faith, or just plain fun. These sixteen songs, specially recorded for this collection, are some of his best.
This 3 DVD set features classic A Prairie Home Companion broadcasts includes special guests Emmylou Harris, Vince Gill, Leo Kottke, Doc Watson, Bobby McFerrin, The Everly Brothers, Taj Mahal, and Robin and Linda Williams. Music abounds, as do jokes, skits, and "The News from Lake Wobegon."
A Prairie Home Companion is produced by Prairie Home Productions and presented by American Public Media.
Advertisers Exploit Video Game Secrets AP - Found 1 hour ago SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Crouched in military fatigues, you peer through night-vision goggles and brandish a semiautomatic gun as you hunt down...
"Our complex global economy is built upon millions of small, private acts of psychological surrender, the willingness of people to acquiesce in playing their assigned parts as cogs in the great social machine that encompasses all other machines. They must shape themselves to the prefabricated identities that make efficient coordination possible... that capacity for self-enslavement must be broken." -- Theodore Roszak - The Voice Of The Earth
"For we know when a nation goes down and never comes back, when a society or civilization perishes, one condition may always be found ~ they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what brought them along." -- Carl Sanburg
"When Nature has work to be done, She creates a genius to do it." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are." -- Alfred Austin
Man has dreamt of flight ever since our ancestors first saw birds soaring into the sky. And even after the dream was realised, first with hot-air balloons and later with heavier-than-air aeroplanes, the dream remained unfulfilled.
Because being truly at one with the air, able to swoop and soar like a falcon or an albatross, remained an impossibility. And in legends where the dream became real, as in the myth of the Ancient Greek birdman Icarus, the price was a heavy one; an ignominious crashing to Earth.
But for one brave Swiss pioneer, a former military pilot called Yves Rossy, the dream has become reality.
For as these amazing pictures show, Rossy, 45, has managed to come as close as it is possible to get to the feeling of being truly like a bird.
Back in 2003 Rossy, now a commercial airliner captain, began his Flying Man project, when he strapped a pair of stubby wings to his back and leapt out of a plane, swooping eight miles in freefall for the loss of just 1000ft in altitude.
Strapping on the contraption, which is made of various metals, fibreglass, Kevlar and carbon fibre, Rossy climbs into the small aircraft which is to launch him into his flight.
At an altitude of some 7750ft, he leaps out, just like a skydiver. But unlike a skydiver, he does not plummet to the Alps below.
There is just enough lift generated by the 10ft aerofoil strapped to his back to negate the effects of gravity. At first, after the wings are unfolded electrically, he becomes a glider then, when the four kerosene-powered engines are turned on, he becomes a jetplane.
Thanks to the engines, each of which develops 22kg of thrust, he can not only maintain altitude but actually gain height, he says, at a rate of several hundred feet a minute - until the fuel runs out six minutes later. He lands with a conventional parachute.
"There have been no proper aerodynamic studies of how to simulate this sort of flying," he says. "All simulations involve a rigid aircraft. My wings are rigid, but of course I am not." He steers the contraption, he says, 'purely by intuition'.
Like a bird, he can adjust his 'trim' with incredible precision with the flick of a foot or by simply leaning his body one way or the other.
"It is like how a child would fly," he says. He says his ultimate goal is to take off and land just using his Jetwing without an aircraft to take him into the air.
Now he has gone one better, strapping four, small kerosene-fuelled turbojet engines (mini-versions of the engines used to power airliners designed to power model aircraft) to his wings to create what is effectively the first rocket-propelled hang-glider: the ultimate microlight, jet-powered flight at its most minimalist.
His passion to fly like a bird began at the age of 30 when he began learning how to do free-fall parachute jumping. He has completed 1,200 free-fall jumps.
He said: "I had tried sky-surfing, but that didn't last long enough either, so I decided to create my own wings to enable me to fly for longer."
Rossy's flights have taken place from the Yverdon airfield in western Switzerland. Last week, after opening the wings, he glided to 7750ft, ignited the engines and waited 30 seconds for them to be able to stabilize and began to open the throttle.
At 5000ft, he achieved horizontal flight for more than 4 minutes at 115 mph, faster than the small aircraft which took him into the air.
He steers simply by shifting the weight of his body, and lands with the aid of a parachute once the fuel is exhausted.
"It was an amazingly good feeling, like in a dream. When you are in an aircraft you have to steer by a stick. You have no contact with the elements," Rossy told the Daily Mail.
His extraordinary flight can be seen on Rossy’s website, www.jet-man.com.
Like the semi-mythical flying jet-backpack (which was actually tested by the US military in the 1960s) Rossy's £150,000 flying machine, which with engines, wings and fuel weighs only 110lbs, sounds like something out of science fiction.
"It would be a great device for James Bond so he can go behind enemy lines," he says. "I want to fly, not to steer."
"Up there in my invention, I am as free as a bird."
Best not let the health and safety brigade hear about this.
How Long to the Star Trek replicator?
TalkBack
This fascinating video explains how a desktop device using reservoirs of basic materials will be able to assemble almost anything from scratch. While this isn't the way I'd want to cook a meal, like the replicator did for the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise, the opportunities implicit in nanomanufacturing devices are extraordinary. Imagine being able to design and build anything to an atomic levelWe'll hear we don't need or can't afford home nanomanufacturing, just as we did with computing of precision on your desktop with the waste products consisting of air and water.
On Star Trek, the advent of the replicator makes money irrelevant, since anyone can have whatever they want. Somehow, that seems a bit Utopian to me, since the financial foundations of nanotechnology rest firmly on the profit-driven investment by venture capitalists. At some point, scarcity will become totally irrelevant, but I imagine that we'll see more than a few people along the way try to declare that there is enough manufacturing capacity in industrially operated nanotech systems, basically that all we need is "mainframe" nanomanufacturing, just as we once heard that no one will need a computer in the home. Of course, the people making those arguments will own the systems they say are sufficient to serve everyone—at a reasonable profit, of course.
When we're talking about unlimited wealth, better to talk about spreading it around rather than concentrating it in the hands of the one percent that control half the world's resources today. How soon can we get to the point where every home or every village around the world might be offered the Apple II of nanomanufacturing? That's a goal to aim for at the beginning of a new year.
If you're working in the field, give me a ring at "godsdog" on Skype and let's talk about the economic models that might support home nanomanufacturing systems.
What year will home nanomanufacturing become affordable?
Blue Origin Summer Internship in space related research June - August 2007 Interns will study and participate in real engineering design projects related to the development and construction of a manned launch vehicle. They will work directly with program staff, contributing to project goals in fields of mechanical design, aerodynamics, rocket propulsion, flight controls, electronics, flight software, human safety and systems engineering.
Students focusing on careers in engineering, science and technology are invited to apply for this 10-week summer program that will start in early June and end in August. Specific program dates are flexible and adjustments will be made to fit the academic schedules of selected interns.
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Application Forms Please click here to download the application form with instructions (in MS Word format). The application deadline is January 31, 2007.
The mockingbird says, Hallelujah, coreopsis, I make the day bright, I wake the night-blooming jasmine. I am the duodecimo of desperate love, the hocus-pocus passion flower of delirious retribution. You never saw such a bird, such a triage of blood and feathers, tongues and bone. O the world is a sad address, bitterness melting the tongues of babies, breasts full of accidental milk, but I can teach the flowers to grow, take their tight buds, unfurl them like flags in the morning heat, fat banners of scent, flat platters of riot on the emerald scene. I am the green god of pine trees, conducting the music of rustling needle through a harp of wind. I am the heart of men, the wild bird that drives their sex, forges their engines, jimmies their shattered locks in the dark flare where midnight slinks. I am the careless minx in the skirts of women, the bright moon caressing their hair, the sharp words pouring from their beautiful mouths in board rooms, on bar stools, in big city laundrettes. I am Lester Young's sidewinding sax, sending that Pony Express message out west in the Marconi tube hidden in every torso tied tight in the corset of do and don't, high and low, yes and no. I am the radio, first god of the twentieth century, broadcasting the news, the blues, the death counts, the mothers wailing when everyone's gone home. I am sweeping through the Eustachian tube of the great plains, transmitting through every ear of corn, shimmying down the spine of every Bible-thumping banker and bureaucrat, relaying the anointed word of the shimmering world. Every dirty foot that walks the broken streets moves on my wings. I speak from the golden screens. Hear the roar of my discord murdering the trees, screaming its furious rag. The fuselage of my revival-tent brag. Open your windows, slip on your castanets. I am the flamenco in the heel of desire. I am the dancer. I am the choir. Hear my wild throat crowd the exploding sky. O I can make a noise.
by Barbara Hamby, from Babel
"I overdid everything as a matter of course." -- Henry Matisse
Jewish Filmmaker Breaks Taboos with Hitler Send-Up Both German and Jewish sensitivities are to face a severe test next month with the launch of a comedy movie in German that turns Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler into a clown with 90 minutes of juvenile jokes. http://newsletter.dw-world.de/re?l=evu6ckI44uhbrxI9
German Traveler Mistakes Sidney, US for Australian City A German trainee insurance salesman who wanted to visit his girlfriend in Australia ended up in smalltown America after buying a ticket online for Sidney in the US state of Montana, a press report said on Friday. http://newsletter.dw-world.de/re?l=evu6ckI44uhbrxI1
Can You Survive Germany?Take the German Survival Bible Quiz! You can tell immediately you're in a German apartment if you see: A case of Jägermeister Row upon row of two-ring binders Lederhosen hanging on the wall Click Herefor German Bible
Current Mood:enthralled Current Music:Art Blakey Holiday for Skins
Bush's Lynch Mob "Milestone" & the Stooges of Convenience: America Now One Long BAD Movie! What depths of humanity will the American spectacle reach for in the coming year? Lynch mobs for "peace"? Merry hangings & a happy executions for all? Good Lord, ladies & germs, this Bush "nuke-yooler" reality is surely melting down before our eyes, like the polar ice-caps!
In the oily recesses of the Bush brain trust, this end-of-the-year "execution" (a grand Bush Texas tradition) stomps its fat cowboy boots directly on the UN retirement of Kofi Annan-- Friday's doom Bush's 5 ton elephant on Annan's Sunday retirement. What better way to say "Fuck You and take your conscience with you"?
The radio (Coast to Coast) & web (check our blogs! Burning Bush:http://burnbush.blogspot.com) are buzzing with still-smoking loose ends of Saddam's CIA-woven rope. Like the forensic & photographic evidence that the man on trial & in custody was one of Saddam's hired doubles. Seems entirely like a classic CIA /Mossad maneuver, after making multi-million deals all around for "resource distribution"-- which is really what the whole deadly mess is about.
Enclosed some very profound images & evidence: Copy them for future reference RE: the Bush regime war crimes trials!
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." -- Arthur Schopenhauer
* Kill him right away, preferably today. * Restore him to his rightful position as ruler of Iraq. * Put him in prison for the rest of his life, preferably in one of the deep underground bunkers he built. * Turn him over to the Iraq Governing Council for a fair trial. * Turn him loose on the streets of Baghdad and let his own people decide what to do with him. * Let him buy a mansion in Beverly Hills, where he will write his memoirs. * Turn him over to the United Nations for a War Crimes Trial. * Torture him until he tells us where all the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD's) are located and until he reveals his hidden assets and secret bank accounts. * Take him to Guantanamo Base in Cuba and hold him there indefinitely. * Keep him in a secret location and never tell anybody what happened to him, or whether he is even dead or alive. (This is actually the most likely outcome).
Note the Real Saddam's Straight, Shiny White Teeth!
Saddam & His Hired Imposters: CBS Slips the Truth
NEW YORK, March 20, 2003
(CBS) Twice since the shooting started the world has been shown videotape from Baghdad of a man who looks, acts, and talks like Saddam Hussein. But, as CBS News Correspondent Jim Stewart reports there's an ongoing debate within the Bush administration over whether this is actually the man himself or just a darn good imposter.
Several hours after the first cruise missiles struck Baghdad late Wednesday, Iraqi television showed this tape of Hussein allegedly answering the challenge. He even made reference to the date to prove this wasn't an old videotape.
But is it really Saddam? Veteran Hussein watchers were thrown by the thick glasses the heaviness in the face, and the uncharacteristically narrow shoulders.
"My initial reaction was, 'Gee. That does not look like him,'" said Jerrald Post, who created the CIA's psychological profile unit and has studied Hussein intensely.
"Either that was a really quite drawn and stressed out, puffy-faced from not getting enough sleep Saddam, or it represented a double," he said.
Iraqi defectors have long insisted that Hussein uses doubles to throw off his enemies and maintain an air of secrecy. The look-alikes reportedly had plastic surgery and were trained in the dictator's mannerisms, including the way he walks, and even down to his facial tics.
Over the years the CIA has kept careful watch as well, from his first Gulf War days of usually wearing a uniform to the more presidential Hussein usually seen in business suits and matching ties.
A German forensic pathologist studied hundreds of Hussein photos and videotapes, concentrating on his mustache and eyebrow measurements.
Then he used computer software to locate specific points such as the tip of his nose and the cheekbone creating a face print which was compared to the Hussein photographs.
His conclusion: that there are three Hussein impersonators, all with small, distinct differences.
Interestingly, the German pathologist reportedly has carefully examined these latest tapes from Baghdad and concluded that this is the real Hussein. The truth, obviously, is hiding somewhere in Baghdad.
ANOTHER "SMOKING" GUN from Baghdad for the Record: Check the TIMING Folks! x0x BzB:
Russian Convoy Caught In Crossfire Unclear Whether U.S. Or Iraqi Forces Were Responsible For Attack MOSCOW, April 7, 2003
(CBS) Russian diplomats who came under fire while trying to flee Iraq entered Syria on Monday, after leaving behind an injured diplomat in an Iraqi-controlled hospital, the Foreign Ministry said.
It was unclear whether U.S. or Iraqi forces were responsible for the attack Sunday.
Nine Russian diplomats, including Ambassador Vladimir Titorenko, left the Iraqi city of Fallujah, 30 miles west of Baghdad, on Monday en route to Syria, where a medically-equipped Russian plane was headed to bring them back to Moscow.
Syrian border officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the delegation from the Russian Embassy in Baghdad crossed the Tanef crossing point on the Syrian-Iraqi border. Tanef is 187 miles northeast of Damascus.
"They are on the Syrian side of the border," said the officials.
One diplomat injured in the attack was left behind in a Fallujah hospital, Alexander Yakovenko, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, told Russia's NTV television. Another diplomat also stayed behind to help the injured Russian, who underwent surgery in the Iraqi hospital, Yakovenko said. Others among the 23 diplomats and journalists in the convoy traveled to the Jordanian border on Sunday.
The Russian convoy was fired upon as it headed out of Baghdad toward the Syrian border, injuring at least four. A journalist in the convoy said it was caught in crossfire while passing Iraqi positions near the city's outskirts.
Alexander Minakov of state-run Rossiya television said it appeared that the U.S. forces had fired first, unleashing a heavy barrage on the Iraqi positions, and the two sides then exchanged fire.
The United States had been aware of the Russian diplomats' evacuation plans, and the convoy was flying a Russian flag.
Yakovenko did not comment on Russian media reports that bullet holes in the vehicle and a bullet removed from an injured diplomat matched the caliber of bullets from an American M-16 rifle.
He said Russia had not yet received any official information from either side, and was awaiting their conclusions.
Russian President Vladimir Putin instructed Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov on Monday to keep him informed of the convoy's movements and the status of the injured, Russian news agencies reported.
Dmitri Rogozin, head of the lower house of parliament's international affairs committee, suggested that Russia should have evacuated its diplomats from Baghdad earlier. Russia, which firmly opposes the war, had been reluctant to close its embassy, and announced the decision to evacuate the ambassador only Saturday.
The evacuation came three days after Russia alleged that American airstrikes had targeted a Baghdad neighborhood where the Russian Embassy is located.
"Clearly there was a desire to have full and objective information about developments in Iraq," Rogozin was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying. "In this case, it would have probably been sufficient to keep a smaller group of diplomats and not leave the ambassador until the last moment, because he is a political representative of the country, after all."
In spite of Russia's opposition to the war, Putin has adopted a softer tone toward the United States in recent days, saying a U.S. defeat would not be in Russia's interests and pledging continued cooperation with Washington.
U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was in Moscow for talks Monday on deepening U.S.-Russian cooperation.
Royal Wombat :
CentComm said we were nowhere near the route the Russians were taking.
I also find this quote from the Russian ambassador rather curious. After claiming that "American armored vehicles, tanks and artillery" were present, he said:
"We were about 40 meters away from the [American] vehicles. We tried to talk to them but they opened fire directly and continuously for 40 minutes," he said.
I guess with the route change, the convoy did pass within range of US forces (or US commandoes working with Kurdish/Iraqi forces) after all.
Mrs Saddam says Saddam is not Saddam Confused? Now ask yourself why George Dubya Bush suddenly blurted out, "I want to make sure when sovereignty is transferred, Saddam Hussein stays in jail."
Joe Vialls, 18 June 2004
Although just about anyone with eyes could tell that the knock-kneed man hiding in his custom-designed funk hole was not the real Sadda Hussein [full report linked at the bottom of this page], the Americans got away with the false-flag public relations stunt until April of this year, when disaster approached in the formidable person of Sajida Heiralla Tuffah, Saddam's wife and the mother of his children.
After the Russians applied enormous diplomatic pressure, America was finally obliged to allow Sajida Heiralla Tuffah access to her husband in Qatar, where he had been flown in some luxury aboard a United States Air Force VIP jet. The facilities at Baghdad Airport were considered to be sub-standard, besides which, people were beginning to talk about the laughing and bourbon-swilling Muslim prisoner, who was the only one in sight not wearing a hood and sensory deprivation earphones, and not being sexually abused by Ricardo Sanchez.
Well, you could have heard a pin drop all the way across Qatar. Sajida arrived from Syria with her official escort Sheikh Hamad Al-Tani, and then entered the prison, emerging only moments later pink with rage and shouting, "This is not my husband but his double. Where is my husband? Take me to my husband".
American officials rushed forward to shield Mrs Saddam from perplexed Russian observers, trying to insist that Saddam had changed a lot while in custody and she probably didn't recognise him. This was certainly not the best way to handle the Iraqi President's wife. "You think I do not know my husband?" Sajida shouted furiously, "I was married to the man for more than twenty-five years!" Then she stormed off, never to return.
This remarkable confrontation was reported by Pravda and four other newspapers in the east between 13 and 17 April, but the New York Times and others made damn sure you didn't read or hear about it in the west. After all, this was an integral part of Wall Street's psychological campaign to convince the public that America was "Winning the War", so please to send more sons and body bags to Iraq.
Sometimes it is difficult to remember how thin the ice really is in Iraq, because Wall Street relies heavily on the limited memory-span of most readers and viewers, successfully thinking that each new exciting and thus distracting Orwellian lie it presents to the public, obverwhelms the one before it, and so on.
The entire "war" and its lack of progress is simply a giant public relations exercise, artfully managed by some of the best spin-doctors and media forgers in New York. So every now and again it pays to go back to the roots of the deception, if only to remind ourselves how badly we have been fooled.
U.S. CAPTURED SADDAM'S DOUBLE
by Der Voron December 15, 2003
Maybe the U.S. military has itself created a full double for Saddam? It is not as hard as may seem. Today's technologies allow many possibilites.
Finally, compare the behavior of captured dictators Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic. When Milosevic was arrested, he behaved quite adequately and no TV channel showed him like half an idiot. But Saddam, or "Saddam", said different unclever things, for example:
Q: "How are you?" A: "I am sad because my people are in bondage"
(Offered a glass of water) A: "If I drink water I will have to go to the bathroom, and how can I use the bathroom when my people are in bondage?"
Repetitive "bondage" makes think that the conversation is unnatural. Indeed, I am sad as my people are in bondage, and how can I drink if I will need to go thereafter to the bathroom (maybe restroom?), and how can I use the bathroom or restroom if my people are still in bondage?
Q: "If you had no weapons of mass destruction then why not let the U.N. inspectors into your facilities?" A: "We didn't want them to go into the presidential areas and intrude on our privacy."
Yes. Saddam was disturbed about his presidential apartments, but certainly not about military units where he allowed the inspectors into. Don't TV watchers and newspaper readers see that he is an idiot?
Did Milosevic say anything similar to this when he was arrested? Saddam was a dictator of Milosevic's level, or better to say, Milosevic was a dictator of Saddam's level.
It is either a Saddam double who was created by the US military and said all these answers to show the audience what an unclever person Saddam was and is -- or it is his own double whom Saddam himself arranged to be caught (please see about this version below). It resembles the "public relations" practice in some backward countries when a double of, say, a candidate to mayor or parliament's deputy (arranged by the candidate's rival) comes to you in person and says some very "clever" things; often such a "double" is drunk. Some people don't understand that a candidate to mayor or deputy just cannot come to inhabitants in person, moreover drunk, and get a very poor impression of this candidate.
I don't defend Saddam, but let us be unbiased. Our enemies cannot be as silly as we want them to be. For example, when shah Reza Pehlevi ruled Iran, you could think that it was 45,000 American military and other specialists that were the principal support to his regime. But the reality showed that things were absolutely contrary. When in 1979 Iranians insurged against Reza Pehlevi, 45,000 Americans couldn't do anything to help his regime. Evidently, it was the regime and its security service "SAVAC" who made American presence in Iran possible, and not American specialists who made the regime's presence possible in Iran.
It may also be that it is Saddam's own double (not made up by US military), who was captured, and he maybe intentionally responds so silly, for Saddam his boss. An old rule of war says:
1) If you are weak then show that you are strong; 2) If you are strong then show that you are weak; 3) If you a-far then show that you are close; 4) If you close then show that you are a-far; etc.
Continuing this row of strategems, we can compose the 5th one:
5) If you have something on mind then show that you don't; 6) If you have nothing on mind then show that you do.
Because of this, I dare to believe it is somewhat more probable that it was Saddam's own double whom we got in a not very deep hole with a minimum of commodities.
As Iraq rapidly descends into total anarchy, a new Broadway comedy opens in Baghdad: Shaddam & the Amazing Zionist Vaudeville Scam
Joe Vialls, 3 July 2004
To say that New York's latest propaganda initiative got off to a bad start would be the understatement of the year. Initially, journalists who had personally viewed the prisoner stated that when an Iraqi judge asked whether or not he was Saddam Hussein, the response was affirmative. The journalists further described the prisoner as, "in good health and shorn of the long hair and gray beard he had when he was arrested in December in a bunker near his hometown in Tikrit," who afterwards "acknowledged that he was Saddam Hussein." We were then shown fanciful artistic sketches of the alleged clean-shaven tyrant and other members of his co-accused legitimate government ministers because, "no photographs of Saddam Hussein are allowed due to high security."
Clearly these accredited journalists from San Francisco and Sydney must have been hallucinating badly, or simply mistook a clean-shaven court janitor for the alleged President of Iraq, because less than two hours later they were swiftly cast aside in favor of the "A" team from New York, headed by Mossad favorite Christiane Amanpour of CNN, a hard-nosed chief correspondent who never let truth get in her way during Gulf War One.
Christiane had photographs all right, in fact she had several hundred feet of edited video footage direct from the 'courtroom', though we have no proof of where the mock courtroom actually is, or where the video footage was shot. But as we will see quite clearly in a moment, Amanpour's damning footage actually proves that the prisoner cannot be President Saddam Hussein, leaving us with the problem of how to label the different players in this bizarre Orwellian tableaux. So let us shorten the name of the Mossad imposter from "Sham Saddam" to simple "Shaddam", and refer to the absent Saddam Hussein as "President Hussein", which was and still is his correct title in international law.
Psychological flooding of this sort is not new, and has been around almost as long as Sigmund Freud. In this particularly crude example, you were flashed more frames per second of Shaddam than you had been flashed frames per month of President Hussein when he was still visibly present in Iraq. This sheer weight of numbers then forces your brain to accept Shaddam as President Hussein, even though you may be deeply skeptical. Once you realize what has been done to you, unraveling the illusion becomes easier, because behavioral psychology in itself is merely a series of manufactured stage tricks.
Allowing Shaddam to open his mouth at all in court was a serious error of judgement, because like fingerprints used by law enforcement agencies, teeth and dental work are absolutely unique, in this case proving one-hundred-percent that Shaddam never was and never could be President Hussein. If you look closely at the photo-composite at the top of this page, you will see four small inset photographs of President Hussein. In all of them you can clearly see his neat white even teeth, made possible in part by the fact that Iraq has [or had] more dental surgeons per head of population than any country in the world apart from Libya. This expert dental service was free to all Iraqis, and President Hussein's teeth were and are in pristine condition.
Now look again closely, and you will see that President Hussein's upper teeth naturally close in front of his lower teeth, known in professional dental circles as 'overbite'. This condition is normal for nearly all of us, but sadly not for Shaddam, who in at least fifty of Christiane Amanpour's separate video frames proves he suffers from a rare condition known as 'underbite', where a defective or misshapen jaw bone causes the lower teeth to close in front of the upper teeth. This single forensic fact is absolute proof that Shaddam is not President Hussein. The additional fact that Shaddam has ragged uneven teeth when compared to the even teeth of President Hussein is interesting of course, but unnecessary because we already have absolute dental proof that Shaddam is an imposter.
Two hours later while Christiane Amanpour was still furiously flooding your startled and thus receptive senses with hundreds of flashing quasi-hypnotic video frames of Shaddam via CNN, an American Marine corporal on a road west of Ramadi suddenly exploded in front of his terrified platoon. One second the corporal was standing there quite cheerfully, and the next he suddenly and without warning transformed into more than a thousand bloodied fragments of body armor, tissue and bone.
Lying motionless more than 1,000 yards away, the Republican Guard counter-insurgency sniper responsible for this execution continued to peer through the telescopic site of his South African Truvelo .50 caliber rifle. The Guardsman had fired a single devastating Norwegian Raufoss round which hit the corporal in his chest body armor, instantly compressing and heating the bullet's internal incendiary tip, which then ignited the high explosive charge, in turn fragmenting the bullet's outer casing, the corporal's body armor, and the corporal himself in less than 10 milliseconds.
Please note that this highly demoralizing trauma in the American Marine platoon was caused by a single .50 Cal armor-piercing explosive Raufoss rifle round, and the Republican Guard still has a minimum inventory of 2.2 million Raufoss rounds secreted across Iraq. No doubt these highly-trained snipers will use these awesone Raufoss rounds sparingly, and with the same deadly accuracy every time.
Back in the mock courtroom, more than a few people were wondering why Saddam Hussein, a real stickler for being clean shaven and having short hair since he was a teenager, should suddenly choose to change the habits of a lifetime and appear like a tramp with long matted hair and a bushy unkempt beard. Though we no longer need the extra details because we already have 100% dental proof that Shaddam is an imposter, here are those details for readers who still want to know the answers.
Rather like fingerprints and teeth, every human on earth has a uniquely shaped skull. The shorter the hair the more obvious the shape of the individual skull becomes, and because we have already proved that Shaddam is an imposter, mismatched cranial comparison as well would have made the Zionists a complete laughing stock. That takes care of the inexplicable long hair, essential to conceal this particularly revealing element of the deception.
Whilst it would be nice to speculate that the Iraqi people will one day be able to uncover this gross deception for themselves, I can assure you this will not happen, if only because Zionists [and in particular the Mossad] never leave any loose ends lying around. On the same day that the mock trial was announced, American Dictator Iyad Allawi [a former Mossad operative himself], declared that the death penalty had just been placed back on the Iraqi statutes. So we can take it as read that President Hussein, who was never captured by the Americans at all, will be 'executed' at a classified location for security reasons, then buried in quicklime at an equally classified location to prevent pilgrimages to the grave of a 'martyr'.
Of course, Shaddam is hoping that it will only be a mock execution and a mock burial, because he has been promised the usual Mossad perks of a new identity, two million bucks, a fast car, and free airline tickets to Monte Carlo. This would normally be honored if Shaddam had further vital work to do afterwards [like James Bond], but sadly this is not the case. When the "Tyrant Saddam" has been officially executed by the victorious Zionists, poor old Shaddam will fall into the category of someone who knows far too much for his own good, and in particular far too much for the greater good of the Jewish State. So, one dark night, a Mossad assassin will pump a couple of bullets into the back of his head, and Shaddam's lights will go out forever.
Though this and earlier reports have proved and still prove that President Hussein was never captured by the Americans, nor his sons killed by them in the manner claimed, readers should be very circumspect in assuming that all three are necessarily alive and well today. Since America first illegally invaded sovereign Iraq, it has killed an absolute minimum of 5,500 civilians with random fragmentation weapons, and targeted various areas with deep penetration bunker-busting bombs.
Thus the total number of Iraqis murdered by the Zionists is currently unknown, as are their individual identities. Under such circumstances, no serious analyst would stick his neck out and claim that Saddam, Uday and Qusay are still alive out there, because it is impossible to tell for sure. The only people likely to know the truth of the matter are very senior members of the Republican Guard, and possibly the Kremlin.
Romania Free Press By Hans Dahne December 30th 2006
US President George W Bush slept through the execution of Saddam Hussein after learning that the former Iraqi dictator was about to be hanged.
Presidential spokesman Scott Stanzel said Bush was informed of the impending hanging Friday afternoon and went to bed shortly before it took place at 9 p.m. Washington time, with instructions not to be woken up.
In a brief statement, the president acknowledged the execution would not end the violence in the country. However, he said it was an "important milestone in Iraq's course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain, and defend itself."
Saddam's execution came as US troop losses in December were the highest for any month of 2006.
Bush, who has been conducting an internal review of his policy aimed at halting the deteriorating situation, is expected to publically outline a new plan for Iraq early in the new year.
Neither Bush nor members of his inner circle showed any compassion for the fate of Saddam or expressed doubts about the death penalty, which was criticized by many European governments.
During Bush's term as Texas governor, some 152 persons were executed, more than under any other US state governor.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke of "a great day" for the Iraqi people after the death sentence was carried out.
White House spokesman Tony Snow said Saddam had the lives of between 500,000 and 1 million people on his conscience, adding that his death was a warning to other dictators that they could also be held accountable for their actions.
Right up till the end the US administration had sought to convey the impression that it was not involved in any way in the events surrounding the trial of Saddam.
"We are only observers," said one official. But the US financed the special tribunal that sentenced him to death, trained the judges and helped formulate the charges against the deposed leader.
US troops guarded Saddam until shortly before his death when they handed him over to his Iraqi hangmen, according to television reports.
Bush said that "despite his terrible crimes against his own people, Saddam Hussein received a fair trial." Saddam's lawyers and the rights organization Human Rights Watch see things differently.
"The injustices will remain in memory for a long time," said Curtis Doebbler, a lawyer for Saddam.
Vali Nasr from the Council on Foreign Relations said the execution was not a good omen to bring the rival Sunni and Shiite communities in Iraq closer together.
But Mike Newton, an advisor to the special tribunal, said he believed the death of Saddam would lead to a process of reconciliation and greater stability in Iraq.
The execution of Saddam brings to a close one of the most controversial chapters of the Bush presidency.
The main reasons he gave for the March 2003 invasion that toppled the Iraqi leader proved groundless. No links to al-Qaeda were proven and no weapons of mass destruction were found.
After the capture of Saddam in December 2003, Bush achieved his best ever popularity rating. Now it's lower than ever.
Europe & the Vatican Condemn Saddam Execution
Deutsche Welle 30.12.2006
Britain: Saddam 'held to account'
Britain on Saturday said Saddam Hussein had been "held to account" but reiterated its opposition to the use of the death penalty.
"I welcome the fact that Saddam Hussein has been tried by an Iraqi court for at least some of the appalling crimes he committed against the Iraqi people," said Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett. "He has now been held to account."
Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Britain still has over 7,000 soldiers in Iraq
Britain was the US' main ally during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and still has some 7,200 troops in the country.
Saddam's execution has put Blair's government in a difficult position however because of its opposition to the death penalty.
"The British government does not support the use of the death penalty, in Iraq or anywhere else," Beckett said. "We advocate an end to the death penalty worldwide, regardless of the individual or the crime.
"We have made our position very clear to the Iraqi authorities, but we respect their decision as that of a sovereign nation," she added. "Iraq continues to face huge challenges. But now it has a democratically-elected government which represents all communities and is committed to fostering reconciliation."
Bush: "An important milestone"
US President George W. Bush meanwhile hailed Saddam Hussein's execution as "an important milestone" on the road to building an Iraqi democracy but warned it would not end deadly violence there.
"Saddam Hussein's execution comes at the end of a difficult year for the Iraqi people and for our troops," Bush said in a statement released as he prepared to usher in 2007 at his Texas ranch.
Europe condemns death penalty
Others in Europe also commented on the execution.
"The EU condemns the crimes committed by Saddam and also the death penalty," Cristina Gallach, a spokeswoman for Javier Solana, the EU high representative for foreign affairs, told news agency AFP.
France, a staunch opponent of the death penalty as well as the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, called on Iraqis to work towards reconciliation and national unity after the execution.
"France calls upon all Iraqis to look towards the future and work towards reconciliation and national unity," the French foreign ministry said in a statement. "Now more than ever, the objective should be a return to full sovereignty and stability in Iraq.
Vatican: "tragic news"
The Vatican called the execution of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein tragic, saying it could feed a spirit of vengeance.
"There is a risk that it feeds the spirit of vengeance and plants the seeds for fresh violence," Vatican spokesman Frederico Lombardi said. The hanging of Saddam Hussein, early on Saturday, was "tragic news", he said on Vatican Radio.
"This is a reason for sadness, even if this is about a person who is guilty of serious crimes. The position of the Catholic church, which is against the death penalty whatever the circumstances, needs to be repeated again," he said. "Putting a guilty person to death is not the way to rebuild justice and reconcile society," Lombardi added.
Human rights group condemns hanging
However US-based rights group Human Rights Watch (HRW) condemned the hanging, saying history would judge Saddam's trial and execution "harshly."
"Saddam Hussein was responsible for horrific, widespread human rights violations, but those acts, however brutal, cannot justify his execution, a cruel and inhuman punishment," said HRW's international justice program director, Richard Dicker.
"The test of a government's commitment to human rights is measured by the way it treats its worst offenders," he said. "History will judge the deeply flawed Dujail trial and this execution harshly."
This trial was perhaps the most idiotic & criminal miscarriage of justice in the past century... What idiot can believe Saddam would be scruffy and hiding in a hole, when he had millions & global connections, tunnels, bunkers & elite police?
Look at your own picture on DW-World to see the most convincing forensic evidence: Those teeth do NOT belong to the REAL Saddam Hussein! The real Saddam had the most expensive dental work available, as he was a very vain Tyrant-- now any doctor can tell you dental work doesn't change to crooked and brown in a matter of months!
The real Saddam was convoyed out of Iraq as the US was invading, by mercenary forces & the Russians-- his wife even said the person in the notorious "examination" was NOT her husband!
Now that the "Iraqi Oswald" is dead, the US puppet govt. & CIA are going to keep their "evidence" literally buried in secret!
What a massive, idiotic SHAM this entire Bush/CIA war machine has been!
The Brits are largely responsible, Blair in particular-- since they've enabled & encouraged the "invasion" and occupation of Iraq, which will prove to be a war crime over the course of WWW history...
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Thousands of Indians, most of them Muslims, took to the streets in sporadic protests across the country against the execution of Saddam Hussein on Saturday, accusing U.S. President George W. Bush of murdering him.
The protests came as New Delhi, which had friendly relations with Saddam's Iraq, said it was disappointed he was executed and hoped this would not hurt the process of reconciliation and restoration of peace in that country.
Thousands of Muslims and communist party activists marched in the eastern city of Kolkata and the northern city of Lucknow after news of Saddam's execution broke on TV channels.
The protesters shouted anti-American slogans, burned straw effigies of Bush and briefly blocked trains at Lucknow's main train station, police and witnesses said.
"This was a glaring example of America's dictatorship over the rest of the world," said Imam Maulana Khalid Rasheed, a cleric at a local mosque.
"It is ironic that those who claim to be champions of human rights and justice do not practice what they preach," he said.
India is home to an estimated 140 million Muslims, the world's third-largest Islamic population after those of Indonesia and neighbouring Pakistan.
In the eastern communist stronghold of Kolkata, thousands of leftist activists marched through the city carrying portraits of Saddam, waving red flags and stopping traffic as they shouted slogans against Bush and the U.S. "occupation of Iraq".
"Bush is the one who should be hanged. They have killed a man without even giving him a fair trial," said Ramesh Pyne, one of the protesters. Some Muslims offered prayers at mosques for Saddam's soul, witnesses said.
Leftist students also protested in the technology hub of Bangalore while demonstrations were planned for later on Saturday in the financial centre of Mumbai, police said.
Massive Protests in India: No Bakri-Id this Year
New Delhi: There have been massive protests following the execution of deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
Saddam was hanged before dawn Saturday for crimes committed in a brutal crackdown during his reign.
CPI activists and its allied organisations "hanged" an effigy of US President George W Bush in Hissar on Saturday to protest the execution.
Addressing the protesters, various leaders criticised the US administration for attacking Iraq and Afghanistan in the name of fight against terrorism.
In Junagadh, Over 45,000 Muslims will not celebrate Bakri-Id on Monday as a mark of protest against Saddam's execution.
Congress leaders belonging to the minority community, Iqbal Hussein Motanvala, Pathan IC Khan and Hussain Hala was quoted by news agency UNI as saying that they are declaring that Saddam died a "martyr's death".
In this connection, they will also hand over a protest note to district collector Ashwin Kumar on Monday, they added.
Meanwhile, Kozhikode witnessed demonstrations by various organisations to vent their anger against "US imperialistic designs".
Hundreds of activists of Pro-CPI DYFI and the National Development Front, a Muslim fundamental oufit, Sunni Students Federation and outfits affiliated to the Indian Union Muslim League took out protest marches condemning the "heinous murder" of the former Iraqi President and the "imperialistic designs" of President George W Bush, police sources were quoted by news agency PTI as saying.
AN INTIMATELY RELATED NEWS STORY (In Bush's Brain) x0x BzB:
Analysis: Annan to leave office Sunday: "You Can't Take the UN Out of the Man"
Updated 12/30/2006
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Kofi Annan steps down as U.N. secretary-general at midnight Sunday, leaving behind a global organization far more aggressively engaged in peacekeeping and fighting poverty — but struggling to restore its tarnished reputation. Taking office six years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Annan helped preside over a decade that saw the world unite against terrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, then divide deeply over the U.S.-led war against Iraq which toppled Saddam Hussein.
At a Millennium Summit in September 2000, he spurred world leaders to adopt a blueprint to wage a global war on poverty and bring the United Nations into the 21st century.
Five years later, he called a follow-up summit to mark the U.N.'s 60th anniversary. Hoping to complete the bold changes, he sought to promote development, ensure international security and end human rights abuses. History's largest gathering of world leaders took a first step, but it fell far short.
Unlike the upbeat atmosphere at the dawn of the new millennium, the World Summit in 2005 took place after a year of almost daily attacks on the United Nations over allegations of corruption in the U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq, bribery by U.N. purchasing officials, and widespread sexual abuse by U.N. peacekeepers.
World leaders agreed to create an internal ethics office but they did not give Annan the authority to make sweeping management changes. The major overhaul of the U.N.'s outdated management practices and operating procedures will be left to Annan's successor, Ban Ki-moon, who takes over on Jan. 1.
In what was considered a major summit achievement, world leaders pledged to protect civilians from genocide, war crimes and ethnic cleansing — but before stepping down earlier this month U.N. humanitarian chief, Jan Egeland accused leaders of failure to translate their pledge into action, especially in Sudan's Darfur region, Iraq and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
The 2005 summit also approved a fund to promote democracy and a new Peacebuilding Commission to help countries make the difficult transition from war to peace, and it renewed a commitment to achieve the Millennium Development Goals including cutting extreme poverty by half and achieving universal primary education by 2015.
A new Human Rights Council was highly touted as a replacement for the discredited Human Rights Commission — but in its first year, the council disappointed Annan and human rights activists by following the commission's tradition of focusing its attacks on Israel and ignoring abuses elsewhere.
At a farewell news conference earlier this month, Annan said he considered his top achievements the promotion of human rights, fighting to close the gap between extreme poverty and immense wealth, and the U.N.'s campaign to fight AIDS and other infectious diseases.
"His greatest accomplishment was to set a framework that moved the U.N. from one century to the next — the response to mass atrocities, the central role of democracy, the importance of human rights, and a priority to development," said Lee Feinstein, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Under Annan, U.N. peacekeeping has expanded with nearly 80,000 U.N. troops and international police currently deployed from Africa and the Mideast to Kosovo, Haiti and East Timor.
Annan's first five-year term culminated in 2001 with the Nobel Peace Prize — shared with the United Nations — for "their work for a better organized and more peaceful world." Annan himself was lauded for "bringing new life to the organization."
But Annan's second five-year term was not without shadows. An investigation led by former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker blamed shoddy U.N. management and the world's most powerful nations for allowing corruption in the $64 billion oil-for-food program in Iraq to go on for years. Volcker's final report in October 2005 accused more than 2,200 companies from some 40 countries of colluding with Saddam Hussein's regime to bilk the humanitarian program in Iraq of $1.8 billion.
Annan was besieged with questions about his son's involvement with a company that won an oil-for-food contract, and U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman, a Minnesota Republican, called for his resignation.
Annan told reporters that one of his worst moments was the way oil-for-food "was exploited to undermine the organization."
Feinstein said that "Annan was perhaps the most pro-American secretary-general who nonetheless was never accepted by U.N. critics in the Congress."
"His greatest failings were clearly the failure to rein in the U.N. Secretariat and streamline management more broadly," Feinstein said.
Professor Edward Luck, director of the Center on International Organization at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, said he thinks "historians are going to give Kofi Annan relatively high marks."
"He's certainly someone who aimed high and sometimes failed to achieve what his rhetoric promised," Luck said. "But he certainly did succeed in restoring the individual to the center of the U.N.'s agenda, both in terms of human security and human rights and the responsibility to protect."
Annan, 68, said he will maintain all those U.N. concerns — and many more — in his new life, likely to be divided between Switzerland and his native Ghana.
"You can take the man out of the U.N.," Annan told one recent farewell party, "but you can't take the U.N. out of the man."
Bush on the Couch (Hardcover) Dr. Justin Frank
BuzzFlash.com's Review (excerpt) updated on 12/30/2006:
We normally don't offer a book a second time around on BuzzFlash, but we decided to bring back the excellent psychiatric profile of Bush by Dr. Justin Frank, a D.C.-based psychoanalyst. We also were able to obtain the original hard-cover version of "Bush on the Couch" at a reduced cost and pass the savings onto our readers.
Recently -- with the euphemististic adoption of the Bush "surge" in lieu of calling it what it really is: the escaclation of a war without end -- we came to realize even more that our nation is being driven by one person's psychiatric problems, not concerns for our national security.
How ironic that a man touted for his affability and outward empathy is devoid of any inner empathy, the true ability to feel the pain of others.
That is why he keeps sending GIs -- including young women and grandmothers in the reserves -- to their deaths. Bush feels only self-righteousness and that nothing will prove him wrong, even if others must die for his mistakes. His face must be saved at all costs, including the deaths of others.
We tend to think of Christians from the Midwest and South -- as far as stereotypes -- as regarding pschoanalysis as some kind of self-indulgent weakness. It is viewed by many of the fundies and red staters as the nefarious territory of that cosmopolitan Jew, Dr. Freud. Texans don't need psychological self-exploration; they just need guns and wars to blow away people who get in their way.
Such is the case of one George W. Bush.
"Bush on the Couch" received a brief buzz a couple of years back, but it deserves much more than that. It is, in essence, the Rosetta Stone to George W. Bush, a man who will not confront his inner demons. As a result, the world will be destroyed because he is unable to admit that he is capable of error or guilt.
This is a must-read book, because our White House has now transcended politics. We are into a deep, deep psychoanalytic cul-de-sac, because the patient is non-compliant. Read The Full Review >>> http://www.buzzflash.com/store/reviews/316
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Current Mood: embarrassed Current Music:Charlie Parker Groovin' High
WILL STINKY CUT THE BIG ONE? Frat Times at the White House
By Sheila Samples
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. ~~McBeth, Act V, Scene V
It's almost painful to watch the disintegration of George W. Bush and what's left of his murderous administration. Those who haven't fled are racing blindly through the halls of power, lurching into one another in a desperate attempt to distance themselves from Bush and to escape reaping what they have sown.
Even cutting a bit of slack, it's still inconceivable that any thinking person could spend more than five minutes in the presence of Bush without the shock of recognizing what a total idiot this country has as its president. Other than breaking stuff, killing anything in his path, refusing to admit mistakes, and making an obscene mess of anything he touches, apparently the only thing Bush can do with any success is break wind --pass gas -- fart.
First Fart Boy
In his Aug. 20 U.S. New & World Report "Washington Whispers" under the heading "Animal House in the West Wing," Paul Bedard wrote that Bush not only loves to cuss, but "... the first frat boy lovesflatulence jokes...can't get enough of fart jokes. He's also known to cut a few for laughs, especially when greeting new young aides..."
Bedard also told the Boston Herald's Margery Eagan that he’s heard about Bush’s full-salute “Austin Greeting” when new aides arrive. "He likes to gas a couple, and then bring the aide in and see what the kid’s face looks like.” Eagan, who admitted she was grossed out, commented, "Naturally, the aide can’t accuse the President or grimace or hold his nose. This dilemma apparently drives the presidential funny bone wild."
Most of us stopped laughing at Bush's coarse antics long ago. The boastful sound and fury of hot air blasting from both ends of this crude, immature thug as he rips one windy flatulent speech after another while saying absolutely nothing is not only vulgar, but is indescribably evil. The stench of Bush's lies mingles with, and hovers over the growing mounds of mangled and broken bodies of innocent men, women and children in Iraq and Afghanistan -- swirls around coffins laden with American service members sneaked back in-country with no fanfare.
The Big One
Bush reminds us often that he's The Decider. Nobody has the right to question his decisions ~ not even him ~ because history has called him to action, and he is delivering God's gift of freedom to every individual on earth whether they want it or not.
Who can forget the profound deliberation that preceeded Bush's decision to invade Iraq? On 9-11, he announced, "I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass." And, in March 2002, a full year before invading Iraq, his decision was, "Fuck Saddam. We're taking him out!"
When asked during a press conference last week if he questioned hisown decisions, Bush replied confidently, "No, I haven't questioned whether or not it was right to take Saddam Hussein out, nor have I questioned the necessity for the American people -- I mean, I've questioned it; I've come to the conclusion it's the right decision. But I also know it's the right decision for America to stay engaged, and to take the lead, and to deal with these radicals and extremists, and to help support young democracies. It's the calling of our time .... And I firmly believe it is necessary."
We're losing in Iraq, but Bush says that doesn't bother him -- it just means we're going to win if we expand the armed forces, put more and more troops on the streets of Baghdad, and stay the course.
Bush is a brutal, pathological liar -- arguably a homicidal maniac. After losing two wars against helpless, unarmed nations, he's bored. The Decider is moving on to greater things, and those who know how to listen to him know the decision to nuke Iran has already been made.
Before he leaves office, Bush plans to spread the same freedoms throughout Iran that Iraq is presently enjoying, only this time he has decided to attack a huge, oil-rich, armed-to-the-teeth nation which has the capacity not only to defend itself, but to wreak death and destruction upon its attackers.
Will Stinky cut the big one on his way out? Or is he just whistling past the graveyard -- yodeling past the skull orchard -- as he goes mano-a-mano with Poppy?
Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites. Contact her at: rsamples@sirinet.net
AP Poll: Bush Both a Villain & Hero President Bush & Britney Spears Top Bad List By DARLENE SUPERVILLE The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Bad guy of 2006: President Bush. Good guy of 2006: President Bush. When people were asked in an AP-AOL News poll to name the villains and heroes of the year, Bush topped both lists, in a sign of these polarized times.
Among entertainment celebrities, Oprah Winfrey edged out Michael J. Fox as the best celebrity role model while Britney Spears outdistanced Paris Hilton as the worst.
Bush won the villain sweepstakes by a landslide, with one in four respondents putting him at the top of that bad-guy list. When people were asked to name the candidate for villain that first came to mind, Bush far outdistanced even Osama bin Laden, the terrorist leader in hiding; and former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who is scheduled for execution.
The president was picked as hero of the year by a much smaller margin. In the poll, 13 percent named him as their favorite while 6 percent cited the troops in Iraq.
On the question of celebrity role models, a pop singer's bad behavior claimed worst honors.
When asked to choose from a list of names, nearly three in 10 adults, or 29 percent, bestowed the honor of worst celebrity of the year on Spears.
The 25-year-old pop singer and mother of two young sons recently filed for divorce from Kevin Federline, her husband of two years. She then followed with highly publicized nights out with party girls Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, including photographic evidence of Spears wearing no underpants, which raised questions about her fitness as a parent.
Spears apologized on her Web site, saying she probably went "a little too far" with her newfound freedom.
Second-worst celebrity billing went to Hilton, 18 percent. The 25-year-old celebutante was arrested for drunken driving in Los Angeles in September while, she has said, she was on a late-night hamburger run.
Mel Gibson, 50, was third-worst celebrity with 12 percent, surely the result of his anti-Semitic tirade at police in Malibu, Calif., during his arrest on suspicion of drunken driving. He later apologized and said he harbored no animosity toward Jews.
In the best celebrity role model category, 29 percent of adults chose talk-show host Winfrey.
The philanthropist and entertainment mogul contributed $40 million toward the establishment of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa, which is scheduled to open next month.
Fox, who has Parkinson's disease, finished second with 23 percent. He recently was criticized by conservatives for political ads that showed his body shaking as he urged support for a ballot measure promoting stem cell research and for the Democratic Senate candidate over the Republican.
Actor George Clooney, who's been advocating for refugees in the war-ravaged Darfur region of Sudan, finished third with 12 percent.
Eight percent chose Angelina Jolie over boyfriend Brad Pitt, 2 percent. Newlyweds Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes tied at 2 percent.
Rounding out the worst celebrity role model category were Cruise, 9 percent; former "Seinfeld" star Michael Richards, 6 percent; Nicole Richie, 5 percent; Federline, 4 percent; Lohan, 3 percent; and Jolie, 2 percent.
Jolie and Cruise were the only celebrities to land on both the best and worst lists. But more people named Jolie best celebrity role model, and more people named Cruise worst.
Bush was the choice of 43 percent of Democrats for villain, and 27 percent of Republicans for hero.
The telephone poll of 1,004 adults was conducted Dec. 19-21 by Ipsos, an international polling firm. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.
The power brokers in Washington spent the week carefully arranging fig leaves and tasteful screens to cover the emperor's nakedness while he was busy pretending to listen hard to everyone with an opinion about Iraq while hearing nothing. Sometime early in the new year, President Bush will go on national television to tell a disgruntled American public what he has decided should be done to salvage ''victory'' from the jaws of certain defeat in the war he started.
The word on the street, or in the Pentagon rings, is that he'll choose to beef up U.S. forces on the ground in Iraq by 20,000 to 30,000 troops by various sleight-of-hand maneuvers ~ extending the combat tours of soldiers and Marines who are nearing an end to their second or third year in hell and accelerating the shipment of others into that hell ~ and send them into the bloody streets of Baghdad.
These additional troops are expected to restore order and calm the bombers and murderers when 9,000 Americans already in the sprawling capital couldn't. They're expected to do this even when Bush's favorite (for now) Iraqi politician, Prime Minister Nouri Kamel al-Maliki, refuses to allow them to act against his primary benefactor, the anti-American cleric Moqtada al Sadr and his Shiite Muslim Mahdi Army militiamen who kill both Americans and Sunni Arabs.
This hardly amounts to a ''new way forward'' unless that definition includes a new path deeper into the quicksand of a tribal and religious civil war where whatever Bush eventually decides is already inadequate and immaterial.
The military commanders on the ground -- from Gen. John Abizaid, the head of the U.S. Central Command, to his generals in Iraq -- have said flatly that more American troops aren't the answer and aren't wanted. For them, it's obvious that only a political decision -- an Iraqi political decision -- has even the possibility of producing an acceptable outcome.
The White House hopes that its much-trumpeted reshuffling of a failed strategy and flawed tactics will buy time for their bad luck to change miraculously. That this time will be bought and paid for with the lives and futures of our soldiers and Marines -- and their families -- apparently means little to these wise men who've never heard a shot fired in anger.
This president has made it painfully obvious that he has no intention of listening to anyone who doesn't believe that he's going to win in Iraq. He'll march stubbornly onward without any real change of co
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mutanex's journal
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