The Gang's All Here!

All Rock n' Roll R.I.P. tributes are missing somebody, but this one is pretty damn close to having everyone. Can you think of anyone worth mentioning (besides Ricky Nelson and Stiv Bators), that isn't already here? I Dare ya'!

PEDOPHILIA CLUB PAYS ITS DUES

WASHINGTON -- The church sexual abuse crisis cost Catholic dioceses and religious institutes nearly $467 million last year in settlements to victims, legal expenses, therapy, and training, a staggering amount in the aftermath of the abuse scandal that surfaced in 2002, according to an independent audit released yesterday by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
The data, collected by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, also showed that 783 new and credible allegations of sexual abuse by clergy were reported last year, down from 1,092 allegations reported in 2004 and bringing the total number of accusations to more than 12,000 nationwide since 1950.
While the number of allegations is decreasing, the financial cost to the church increased over the last year due to some large settlements paid in 2005, said Teresa M. Kettelkamp, director of the USCCB's Office of Child and Youth Protection. The church paid more than $399 million last year in settlements alone, and spent $67 million more on therapy for victims, legal fees, and counseling for offenders, according to the data.
The audit's results bring the total cost of the church sexual abuse crisis to nearly $1.2 billion, not including undisclosed payments the church made during 2003 and this year.
''It is disheartening to us bishops, as it must be to all Catholics, to find that there are still some allegations of abuse by clerics against today's children and young people," said Bishop William S. Skylstad, president of the bishops' conference. Skylstad is himself the subject of a sex abuse allegation that he has vigorously denied, and his Spokane, Wash., diocese is in bankruptcy. But he said that ''only a small minority of Catholic clergy" have been accused or convicted of sexual abuse, which he described as a problem that extends well beyond the church.
Faced with explosive evidence that priests had been abusing hundreds of children for decades without serious consequences, the church issued formal guidelines to its dioceses in 2002 meant to detect and prevent such abuse. The document, called the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, urges dioceses to immediately report and take action when sexual abuse allegations are made, as well as ensure that church personnel are properly screened, and offer help to any abuse victims.
But 12 percent of dioceses are not following all of the guidelines in the plan, according to a separate audit released yesterday by the Winthrop-based Gavin Group. That report is the third such audit of compliance by dioceses since the charter was issued; last year, more than 95 percent of dioceses had reported they were in compliance.
Further, two dioceses -- including an Eastern Rite Catholic church headquartered in Roslindale -- refused to participate in the audit, and the vast majority of dioceses provided their own information to the auditors instead of being subjected to visits from investigators, according to the report.
As a result, victims' groups were suspicious of the findings, which they said most likely understated the problem.
''Because the dioceses were being allowed to fill out questionnaires as opposed to on-site visits taking place, the number of sexual abuse victims, although staggering, is probably defective and low. On-site visits would be much more effective in determining the number of sexual abuse claims," said Mitchell Garabedian, an attorney representing many of the sexual abuse claimants.
''The fact that they're not complying reflects on how cold and indifferent they are to the sexual abuse crisis involving innocent, vulnerable children," he said. ''Maybe the reason the church is not being trusted is that they allowed 12,000 children to be sexually abused by priests."
The bishops' conference noted that only those dioceses found to be in full compliance with the guidelines in 2004 were allowed to conduct their own surveys.
Both the report by the Gavin Group, as well as a separate data analysis by John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, suggest that reports of abuse are waning. The college, in a new analysis of data collected from abuse cases that occurred between 1950 and 2002, found that the number of reported molestations spiked in the 1970s and 1980s before falling steadily.
The trend mirrors statistics for overall criminal behavior, sexual abuse, and ''general deviance" in the country during that era, said Margaret Leland Smith, data analyst for the report.
While current reports of abuse appear to be declining, ''800 new allegations is still a shocking number," said Susan Archibald, president of The Linkup-Healing Alliance, a victims group. ''Despite the fact that the numbers may be going down, we're still in the middle of a crisis."
The Gavin Group assessment cited the Archdiocese of Boston for failing to provide ''safe environment training" for children, parents, and church personnel to prevent sexual abuse. The Archdiocese, which announced last week that the assessment found it was not in compliance, said in a statement that a portion of parochial school and religious education students had not received the training. Such training will begin immediately, Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley said in the statement, adding that ''anything short of full compliance is unacceptable."
Patricia O. Ewers, chair of the National Review Board for the Protection of Children, said the audit did not go far enough. While the annual study records whether dioceses have adopted the directives in the 2002 charter, ''it has not examined the effectiveness of thee measure," said Ewers, whose group collaborates with the USCCB on the charter. She called for ''reworking" the audit process.
The John Jay College analysis provided some insights into sexually abusive clergy, finding that on average, such abusers had begun to offend after 11 years on the job. The largest portion of first-time offenders -- 22 percent -- were between 30 and 34 years of age.
Those who had the greatest numbers of allegations against them tended to abuse younger children and were more likely to victimize boys than girls, according to the college researchers.

WORDS TO LIVE (OR DIE) BY

Washington, D.C. - U.S. officials are confirming that a unmanned 'Predator' drone attacked three insurgents in Iraq, who were in the process of planting a homemade bomb.

A MQ-1B Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) engaged the insurgents with an AGM-114 Hellfire missile as they attempted to place the explosive device along a road near Balad Air Force Base in Iraq.

Air Force Brig. Gen. Frank Gorenc, commander of the 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing at Balad, says, "This is a prime example of how air-power is supporting the fight on the ground."

"We're able to provide a persistent view of the battlefield to commanders on the ground and, if called upon, put a weapon on a target within minutes."
According to officials, the Predator monitored the terrorists for up to a half hour before using deadly force.

General Gorenc says, "This strike should send a message to our enemies that we're watching you, and we will take action against you any time, day or night, if you continue to stand in the way of progress in Iraq."

That last statement by Gorenc also goes for all you pesky American citizens out there mouthing off against this administration.

FIVE-PLUS YEARS FOR ABRAMOFF
MIAMI - Assuring the judge he is working to become “a new man,” disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff was sentenced Wednesday to nearly six years in prison for committing fraud in the purchase of a fleet of gambling boats.
He will remain free while helping prosecutors with a vast bribery investigation involving members of Congress.
Abramoff, 47, and former business partner Adam Kidan, 41, received the minimum under federal guidelines: five years and 10 months.The two pleaded guilty earlier to conspiracy and fraud for concocting a fake $23 million wire transfer to make it appear they were contributing their own money toward the purchase of the $147.5 million SunCruz Casinos gambling fleet. Based on that fraudulent transfer, lenders provided the pair with $60 million in financing.
Abramoff told U.S. District Judge Paul C. Huck that he had “started the process of becoming a new man. I am much chastened and profoundly remorseful. I can only hope that the Almighty and those I have wronged will forgive my trespasses.”
He and Kidan were also ordered to pay restitution of more than $21 million. Both must serve three years’ probation after they get out of prison.
Abramoff pleaded guilty in the SunCruz fraud in January. The same week, he pleaded guilty in Washington to defrauding Indian tribes and other lobbying clients out of millions of dollars. He also agreed to cooperate in a corruption probe that could involve up to 20 members of Congress, including former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas. No date has been set for his sentencing in that case.
The judge said Abramoff and Kidan will not have to report to prison for at least 90 days so they can continue cooperating with investigators in the corruption case and the slaying of former SunCruz owner Konstantinos “Gus” Boulis.
Boulis was gunned down in 2001 at the wheel of his car amid a power struggle over the gambling fleet. Three men face murder charges, including one who worked for Kidan as a consultant at SunCruz and who allegedly has ties to New York’s Gambino crime family.
Abramoff and Kidan have denied any role in the killing and neither has been charged.
If prosecutors are satisfied with their cooperation in those cases, the two men’s sentences could be reduced.
Abramoff and his attorneys declined to speak with reporters as they left court. His defense team filed 62 pages of documents that depicted Abramoff as a deeply religious Orthodox Jew who was generous to charities, dedicated to his wife and five children and filled with remorse over his crimes.
But the documents also distanced Abramoff from the SunCruz fraud and laid most of the blame on Kidan, a New York businessman and disbarred lawyer.
“After the company was purchased, Mr. Abramoff learned that some of the representations made by his partner were untrue,” the defense said.
Kidan’s attorney, Joseph Conway, said his client has acknowledged his guilt but disagrees “with the statement of facts as laid out by Mr. Abramoff.”
In his own letter to the judge, Kidan said that he knew the SunCruz deal was wrong but that he “was very caught up in the fast-paced world of my partner and the high profile that came along with it.”
The SunCruz fleet of 11 ships sailed from nine Florida ports and Myrtle Beach, S.C., to international waters. The company operates gambling cruises under new ownership after emerging from bankruptcy.

Catholic majority approves of torture

By TOM CARNEY

Is the American public apathetic about charges its government uses and sponsors torture in its fight against terrorism?
Not apathetic, according to surveys. Fact is, a majority of Americans actually approve of the use of torture under some circumstances. What’s more, according to one survey, Catholics approve of its use by a wider margin than the general public.
“This may be a reaction to 9/11, the horrible loss of life and the atrocities of those acting in the name of Islam,” says Bishop John H. Ricard of Pensacola-Tallahassee, Fla., member of the bishops’ Committee on International Policy. “Some people feel the situation is out of control. They feel a vulnerability and a temptation to respond in kind. We have to resist that.”
A survey by the Pew Research Center in October showed that 15 percent of Americans believe torture is “often” justified, and another 31 percent believe it is “sometimes” justified. Add to that another 17 percent who said it is “rarely” justified, and you have two out of three Americans justifying torture under certain circumstances. Only 32 percent said it is “never” justified, while another 5 percent didn’t know or refused to answer.
But the portion of Catholics who justify torture is even higher, according to the survey. Twenty-one percent of Catholics surveyed said it is “often” justified and 35 percent said it is “sometimes” justified. Another 16 percent said it is “rarely” justified, meaning that nearly three of four Catholics justify it under some circumstances. Four percent of Catholics “didn’t know” or refused to answer and only 26 percent said it is “never” justified, which is the official teaching of the church.
Carroll Doherty, associate director of the Pew center, said these results mirror those of similar surveys.
That could be why Bush administration officials have been emboldened to use terms like “torture lite,” referring to abuse that does not result in organ failure or death, and why international and humanitarian organizations have been outspoken about American and American-sponsored torture.
A United Nations statement last year said that inmates at the four-year-old Guantánamo Bay detention center were deprived of legal assistance and information and living in conditions of detention that “amount to inhuman and degrading treatment.”
In February, five investigators of the United Nations’ Commission on Human Rights concluded an 18-month study and recommended that the detention center at Guantánamo Bay be closed immediately.
Torture, according to the International Convention against Torture of 1984, “means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person.”
The United Nations has not been alone in charging the United States with torture. Amnesty International has complained of the “use of torture and ill-treatment against prisoners” at Guantánamo, citing the testimony of former prisoners. And it has detailed American-sponsored torture by Iraqi military brigades.
In February the American-based organization, Human Rights First -- formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights -- charged the U.S. government with the deaths of 100 detainees during “the global war on terror.”
A New York Times article, also in February, said the American military’s detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, operates in “rigorous secrecy,” refusing to name, let alone bring charges against, its 500 or so prisoners. The facility may not be photographed, even from a distance. It is believed to be keeping prisoners that normally would have been sent to Guantánamo were it not for the recent critical publicity.
The article said an Army investigation discovered two practices -- since reportedly halted -- that resulted in at least two deaths at Bagram. One was the chaining of prisoners by the arms to the ceilings of their cells. The other was the use of knee strikes to the legs of disobedient prisoners by guards. Other practices, since phased out, included use of barking dogs to frighten new prisoners and handcuffing of prisoners to cell doors to punish them for talking.
“It was like a cage,” one former prisoner told the Times, likening it to the animal cages he had seen at the zoo in Karachi, Pakistan.
Besides conducting torture and sponsoring it, the American government has been accused of using “rendition,” sending suspects to another country without regard for the torture that might await them there.
While some in the Bush administration have appeared to support limited uses of prisoner abuse, Congress has been lukewarm in opposing it, with some exceptions.
“At Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq, at Guantánamo, and in Afghanistan, allegations and evidence of detainee abuse have damaged the standing of the United States in the world,” said a statement by House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi in December.
She was speaking after the House passed the Murtha motion, 303 to 122, supporting the prohibition of torture. The motion, sponsored by Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., was identical to an amendment by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., that passed the Senate overwhelmingly in October.
“Our struggle with the forces of international terrorism is as much a battle of ideas as a battle of arms,” Pelosi said. “We weaken ourselves when we compromise our ideals. Standing against torture helps define the differences between the United States and those who offer no message other than hatred and violence.”
On the other hand, the House International Relations Committee rejected in February a resolution introduced by Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., that would have required the Bush administration to provide information on the people who have been subjected to rendition.
Murtha, Pelosi and Markey are Catholic, as is U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who has defended America’s treatment of prisoners. This month Gonzales denied the U.S. government engages in torture or ill-treatment of terror suspects as well as the use of rendition.
“The United States has always been and remains a great defender of human rights and rule of law,” he said. “I regret that there has been concern or confusion about our commitment to the rule of law.”
That “concern or confusion” appears to be widespread, extending to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and Catholic peace organizations.
Bishop Ricard says Catholics should be concerned about charges of torture because “it’s more about us and our values as Catholics and Americans” than anything else.
Ricard, and Stephen Kolecchi, director of the bishops’ conference Office of International Justice and Peace, said the church is unequivocal in its denunciation of all torture.
“It cannot be contravened under any circumstances,” said Kolecchi, “including the use of detention for the sole purpose of trying to obtain information. It’s so standard in Catholic teaching that we’re opposed to torture.”
Ricard has written several letters to members of Congress stating the opposition of the church to torture and urging laws to ban it. The bishops’ conference has issued statements against torture in the wake of current charges.
The Catholic peace movement, Pax Christi USA, is also making its voice heard on the subject. Its Web site, www.paxchristiusa.org, has many statements on the Christian teaching on torture. It includes a national sign-in statement, “A Christian Call to Stop Torture Now.”
After a quote from John Paul II, the statement says: “As followers of Jesus, we must state clearly and unequivocally that torture violates the basic human dignity afforded all of God’s children, and is never morally acceptable. On this two-year anniversary of the revelations of the cruel, inhumane and humiliating treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison -- the first of numerous revelations regarding institutionalized torture practices in the U.S. war on terrorism -- we reiterate our church’s profound respect for the dignity of all persons and reject as antithetical to Christianity any and all justifications for the use of torture.”
Most disturbing now, says Pax Christi’s executive director, David Robinson, is the “merging of the profit motive with the routine use of torture.” Robinson says the U.S. government is “outsourcing torture to private entities” in Iraq that use abusive interrogation methods. The introduction of profit into the mix, he says, assures that there will be more of it.
During Lent especially, he says, the image of Jesus, who was tortured to death, should be powerful for Catholics, reminding them that “Christ is being crucified today through the practice of torture.”

Tom Carney is a media consultant and former reporter for The Des Moines Register.

A modern-day fable

The LAPD, The FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security are all trying to prove that they are the best at apprehending bad guys. The President decides to give them a test. He releases a white rabbit into the Great Smokey Mountains national park and each of them has to catch it.The Department of Homeland Security goes in. They place the entire forest on condition white. Squirrels, racoons, and foxes are all rounded up and shipped to a holding facility in another country as suspected associates of the rabbit. After a year of meetings and press conferences, they say that capturing the rabbit is not important. They then have the military invade Yellowstone National Park, saying it was a hotbed of rabbit insurgency.The CIA goes in. They place animal informants throughout the forest. They question all plant and mineral witnesses. After three months of extensive investigations they conclude that rabbits do not exist.The FBI goes in. After two weeks with no leads they burn the forest, killing everything in it, including the rabbit, and they make no apologies. The rabbit had it coming.The LAPD goes in. They come out two hours later with a badly beaten bear. The bear is yelling: "Okay! Okay! I'm a rabbit! I'm a rabbit!

Bush hypocrisy knows no bounds
(please click on highlighted links for more information)

In case you missed it in the news yesterday, former First Lady Barbara Bush on Friday generously donated to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund, but included a fairly specific request with her contribution.
Former first lady Barbara Bush donated an undisclosed amount of money to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund with specific instructions that the money be spent with an educational software company owned by her son Neil.
Since then, the "Ignite Learning program" has been given to eight Houston, Texas area schools that took in substantial numbers of Hurricane Katrina evacuees.
I didn't think my regard for the Bush family could get any worse but these people somehow manage to surpass even my overly-cynical expectations.
I can appreciate Barbara Bush looking out for her ne'er-do-well son, but using the Katrina Fund to promote Neil Bush's software company isn't just tacky, it's lower than low; especially when you consider the fact that her other son is mostly responsible for all the death and destruction caused there.
It's not like the former First Lady's reputation on the disaster was strong before. When we last heard from her, she was telling us that families left with nothing after the hurricane "were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them."
But that was just a dumb remark; Barbara Bush's earmark is far more ridiculous. As fellow blogger Josh Marshall noted:
"Ignite!'s has a unique business model, which works like this. Neil goes around the world finding international statesmen, bigwigs and criminals who want to 'invest' in Ignite! as a way to curry favor with his brother in the White House."
United Arab Emirates is reportedly a HUGE investor.

Rockefeller 'blows whistle' on Bush
(Make sure to go back and click on highlighted links throughout this story)

Did the Bush administration “authorize” the leak of classified information to Bob Woodward? And did those leaks damage national security?The vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) made exactly that charge Thursday night in a letter to John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence. What prompted Rockefeller to write Negroponte was a recent op-ed in the New York Times by CIA director Porter Goss complaining that leaks of classified information were the fault of “misguided whistleblowers.”Rockefeller charged in his letter that the most “damaging revelations of intelligence sources and methods are generated primarily by Executive Branch officials pushing a particular policy, and not by the rank-and-file employees of intelligence agencies.”Later in the same letter, Rockefeller said: “Given the Administration’s continuing abuse of intelligence information for political purposes, its criticism of leaks is extraordinarily hypocritical. Preventing damage to intelligence sources and methods from media leaks will not be possible until the highest level of the Administration cease to disclose classified information on a selective basis for political purposes.”Exhibit A for Rockefeller: Woodward’s book “Bush at War".Here is what Rockefeller had to say:
In his 2002 book Bush at War, Bob Woodward described almost unfettered access to classified material of the most sensitive nature. According to his account, he was provided information related to sources and methods, extremely sensitive covert actions, and foreign intelligence liaison relationships. If it no wonder, as Director Goss wrote, “because of the number of recent news reports discussing our relationships with other intelligence services, some of these partners have even informed the C.I.A. that they are reconsidering their participation of some of our most important antiterrorism ventures.”I wrote both former Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) George Tenet and Acting DCI John McLaughlin seeking to determine what steps were being taken to address the appalling disclosures contained in Bush at War. The only response I received was to indicate that the leaks had been authorized by the Administration. The CIA has still not responded to a follow-up letter I sent a year and half ago on September 1, 2004, trying to pin down which officials were authorized to meet with Mr. Woodward and by whom, and what intelligence information was conveyed during these authorized exchanges.Were leaks of classified information “authorized” to Woodward? Rockefeller's letter says exactly that. And among other things, it is well known and has been reported long ago that one of Woodward’s sources for both of his books about the Bush presidency was then-VicePresidential chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, who is portrayed in quite a flattering manner in both.Rockefeller also said alleged in his letter that the President’s directing of administration officials to co-operate with the administration-friendly Woodward was only one example of such “authorized leaks”.Rockefeller said elsewhere in his letter:
On February 9th, the National Journal reported that I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby told a grand jury that he was `authorized’ by Vice President Cheney and other White House superiors to disclose classified information from a National Intelligence Estimate to the press to defend the Administration’s use of pre-war intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq...
This blatant abuse of intelligence information for political purposes is inexcusable, but all to common. Throughout this period leading up to the Iraq war the Administration selectively declassified or leaked information related to Iraq’s acquisition of aluminum tubes, the alleged purchase of uranium, the non-existent operational connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and numerous other issues.”The White House is declining tonight to comment on Rockefeller's letter, as is Woodward. (If either of them does at some point have something to say, either to me, or elsewhere, I will update this post accordingly.)Did the leaks to Woodward damage national security? Michael Scheuer, the CIA’s former head of the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit, wrote in his book Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror:“After reading Mr. Woodward’s Bush at War, it seems to me that the U.S. officials who either approved or participated in passing the information—in documents and via interviews—that is the heart of Mr. Woodward’s book gave an untold measure of aid and comfort to the enemy.”What was not known by Scheuer at the time was that officials on the “seventh floor” of the CIA were literally ordered by then-CIA director George Tenet to co-operate with Woodward’s project because President Bush personally asked that it be done. More than one CIA official co-operated with Woodward against their best judgment, and only because they thought it was something the President had wanted done or ordered.One former senior administration official explained to me: “This was something that the White House wanted done because they considered it good public relations. If there was real damage to national security—if there were leaks that possibly exposed sources and methods, it was not done in this instance for the public good or to expose Watergate type wrongdoing. This was done for presidential image-making and a commercial enterprise—Woodward’s book.”Woodward himself perhaps lends credence to that possibility.On page 243 of his book “Plan of Attack”, Woodward wrote:[O]n December 18, my wife, Elsa Walsh, and I attended a huge White House Christmas party for the media hosted by the president and his wife. The Bushes stood for hours in a receiving line as a photographer snapped pictures with the first couple.When we reached the front of the line, the president remarked that my book Bush at War was selling well. “Top of the charts,” he said, and asked, “Are you planning to do another book?” He then stretched out his arms and indicated with his body language that there might be a story there, that it should be done.Without any irony, Woodward didn’t seem to understand how far he had come from meeting Mark Felt in the dead of night in a parking garage.

Caspar Weinberger dies at 88

Caspar Weinberger, defense secretary under the Reagan administration and central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal, has died at the age of 88.
Weinberger died about 5 a.m. in a hospital near his home in Mount Desert, Maine, his family said. He had recently been treated for pneumonia.
"He was just a worn-out guy," his son, Caspar Weinberger, Jr., told Reuters.
"He should be remembered as a world statesman, a great American patriot," the son said. "What he did with Reagan really brought down the Soviet Union. They stuck to their plan and simply outspent the Soviets despite all sorts of doubts here."
Weinberger was pardoned by former President Bush on the eve of his trial in the Iran-Contra case in 1992. He was charged with making false statements.
Military spendingWeinberger, who presided over an unprecedented peacetime military buildup costing more than $1 trillion, began his government career as a cost-cutter.
He was born in San Francisco in 1917. He received a law degree at Harvard and was on General Douglas McArthur's intelligence staff in World War II. Following the war, he returned to California and worked as a law clerk for a federal judge, then at a San Francisco firm. In the 1950s, he was elected to the California State Assembly. He remained active in California politics through the '60s.
In 1970, President Nixon named him as chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. He was named deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget in 1971, where his cost-cutting policies earned him the nickname "Cap the Knife." In 1973, he became secretary of health, education and welfare. He returned to the private sector in 1975.
When he took the defense post in January 1981, Weinberger soon erased the his budget-cutting nickname.
Arms raceWeinberger performed with gusto the task of persuading Congress to spend over $1 trillion on arms in Reagan's first term and billions more after that.
He also steadfastly opposed concessions to Moscow in arms-control negotiations advocated by Secretary of State George Shultz and other more moderate members of the Cabinet.
He made himself unpopular with many lawmakers by his unbending, often contentious push for funds for arms and for Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative -- a program, commonly known as "Star Wars," to develop a land- and space-based shield against incoming ballistic missiles.
A longtime member of Reagan's inner circle of California friends, Weinberger was one of the president's strongest supporters in the Cabinet.
He called "absurd" a White House decision in 1985 to sell arms to Iran but supported Reagan a year later after the president decided to send missiles and spare parts to Tehran.

White House Chief of Staff Quits!

White House chief of staff Andy Card has resigned and will be replaced by budget director Joshua Bolten, President Bush announced Tuesday amid growing calls for a White House shakeup and Republican concern about Bush's tumbling poll ratings.
Bush announced the changes in a nationally broadcast appearance in the Oval Office.
"I have relied on Andy's wise counsel, his calm in crisis, his absolute integrity and his tireless commitment to public service," Bush said. "The next three years will demand much of those who serve our country. We have a global war to fight and win."
Card, 58, stood stoically with his hands by his sides as Bush lauded his years of service through the Sept. 11 attacks, war and legislative and economic challenges. Gripping the podium, Card said in his farewell: "You're a good man, Mr. President." Card's eyes were watery. Card said he looks forward to just being Bush's friend. Bush then gave him five quick slaps on the back and the two walked out of the Oval Office together.

The president called Bolten, 51, a man with broad experience, both on Wall Street and in Washington, including the last three years as director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Alarmed by Bush's declining approval ratings and unhappiness about the war in Iraq, Republicans have been urging the president to bring in new advisers with fresh ideas and energy. Bolten has been with Bush since his first campaign for the White House. There was no immediate indication of other changes afoot.
"The good news is the administration has finally realized it needs to change its ways, but the problems go far deeper than one staffer," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. "Simply rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic by replacing Andy Card with Josh Bolten without a dramatic change in policy will not right this ship."
Bush gathered with members of his Cabinet in the Rose Garden at mid-morning after discussions about the war on terror. He ignored shouted questions from reporters about why he made the staff changes. Bush said he would deliver a speech on Wednesday about Iraq.
"We had a chance to honor two members of my Cabinet who won't be with us much longer - Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, Chief of Staff Andy Card," Bush said. "These two folks have served our country with distinction and honor. I'm proud to work side-by-side with them, and I'm proud to call them friend."
Just Monday night, Card had given what participants described as a stirring speech to the Butler County Republican Party in Ohio.
"When I heard this morning, I said 'What?'" said Scott Owens, executive director of the party. Owens said that Card gave no indication of his imminent resignation announcement.
To the public, Card may be best known as the aide who calmly walked into a Florida school room and whispered into Bush's ear that America was under attack on Sept. 11, 2001. He was known for keeping his cool under pressure. When Bush's father, then President George H.W. Bush, got sick at a banquet in Tokyo, aides and security officials ran toward the president. Card ran in the opposite direction, out the door to make sure the motorcade was ready to rush Bush away.
"Josh is a creative policy thinker," Bush said. "He is an expert on the budget and our economy. He is a man of candor and humor and directness. No person is better prepared for this important position."
"I'm deeply honored now by the opportunity to succeed Andy Card as White House chief of staff," Bolten responded. "I said, 'Succeed Andy Card, not replace him,' because he cannot be replaced."
The move came as Bush is buffeted by increasing criticism of the drawn-out war in Iraq and as fellow Republicans have suggested pointedly that the president bring in new aides with fresh ideas and new energy.
Card came to Bush recently and suggested that he should step down from the job that he has held from the first day of Bush's presidency, said an administration official earlier.
Bush decided during a weekend stay at Camp David, Md., to accept Card's resignation and to name Bolten as his replacement, said the source who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to pre-empt the president.
Bolten is widely experienced in Washington, both on Capitol Hill as well as at the White House, where he was deputy chief of staff before becoming director of the Office of Management and Budget.
At a White House news conference last week, Bush was asked about rumors that a shake up in the White House staff was in the works. Bush said he was "satisfied with the people I've surrounded myself with."
"I've got a staff of people that have, first of all, placed their country above their self-interests," he said at the time. "These are good, hard- working, decent people. And we've dealt with a lot. We've dealt with a lot. We've dealt with war. We've dealt with recession. We've dealt with scandal. We've dealt with Katrina.
"I mean, they've had a lot on their plate. And I appreciate their performance and their hard work and they've got my confidence," he said.
Bush said, "I'm satisfied with the people I've surrounded myself with. We've been a remarkably stable administration, and I think that's good for the country."
A veteran of the administrations of both President Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush, Card was widely respected by his colleagues in the Bush White House. They fondly called him "chief."
He usually arrived at work in the West Wing by around 5:30 a.m. and frequently did not leave until 9 or 10 p.m.
Card plans to stay on the job until April 14, when the switch with Bolten takes place.
Associates said that Card, who was secretary of Transportation and deputy chief of staff for the first President Bush, had wanted to establish himself as the longest serving White House chief of staff. James Steelman, who was President Harry S. Truman's chief of staff, had served for six years and Card's tenure will have gone not much longer than five years.
A recent AP-Ipsos Poll found that Bush's job approval has dipped to 37 percent, his lowest rating in that poll. Nearly 70 percent of people say the U.S. is on the wrong track, a six-point jump since February. Bush's job approval among Republicans plummeted from 82 percent in February to 74 percent, a troubling sign for the White House in an election year.
Card did not immediately disclose his plans. His resignation immediately prompted questions about whether he would return to Massachusetts to run for governor or perhaps challenge Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., who currently faces no major GOP challenge for re-election this fall, or Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., whom he helped defeat as the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee and who faces re-election in 2008.
Card, a Holbrook native, served as the state representative from his hometown from 1975 to 1982.

Brain cell microchip a reality

The line between living organisms and machines has just become a whole lot blurrier. European researchers have developed "neuro-chips" in which living brain cells and silicon circuits are coupled together.
The achievement could one day enable the creation of sophisticated neural prostheses to treat neurological disorders or the development of organic computers that crunch numbers using living neurons.
To create the neuro-chip, researchers squeezed more than 16,000 electronic transistors and hundreds of capacitors onto a silicon chip just 1 millimeter square in size.
They used special proteins found in the brain to glue brain cells, called neurons, onto the chip. However, the proteins acted as more than just a simple adhesive.
"They also provided the link between ionic channels of the neurons and semiconductor material in a way that neural electrical signals could be passed to the silicon chip," said study team member Stefano Vassanelli from the University of Padua in Italy.
The proteins allowed the neuro-chip's electronic components and its living cells to communicate with each other. Electrical signals from neurons were recorded using the chip's transistors, while the chip's capacitors were used to stimulate the neurons.
It could still be decades before the technology is advanced enough to treat neurological disorders or create living computers, the researchers say, but in the nearer term, the chips could provide an advanced method of screening drugs for the pharmaceutical industry.
"Pharmaceutical companies could use the chip to test the effect of drugs on neurons, to quickly discover promising avenues of research," Vassanelli said.
The researchers are now working on ways to avoid damaging the neurons during stimulation. The team is also exploring the possibility of using a neuron's genetic instructions to control the neuro-chip.

Do pop stars give birth doggie style? On bear-skin rugs?

Britney sculpture a tribute to bad taste

TORRANCE, Calif., March 27 - Sculptor Daniel Edwards, who this week announced a controversial sculpture dedication 'Nude Britney Spears Giving Birth' at Capla Kesting Fine Art in Brooklyn's Williamsburg gallery district, is one of many entertainment guests who have been interviewed on the Christopher Simmons Entertainment Podcast. Simmons is an award-winning journalist, musician, digital artist, and a member of PRSA and ASCAP.
The clay sculpture features a nude Britney Spears on a bearskin rug while giving birth to her firstborn because, according to Edwards, pop-star Britney Spears is the "ideal model for Pro-Life." His latest sculpture is the subject of a dedication at Capla Kesting Fine Art in what is proclaimed the first Pro-Life monument to birth, in April. The dedication includes materials provided by Manhattan Right to Life Committee. "Monument to Pro-Life" is on view April 7th thru 23rd with a reception for the dedication April 7th from 6:00 - 9:00pm at Capla Kesting Fine Art, 121 Roebling St., Brooklyn, NY
Edwards is a classically trained sculptor from New York's Graduate School of the Figurative Arts. His notable public sculpture work includes The Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy Memorial in Indianapolis, of which groundbreaking ceremonies were performed by President Clinton. He also has works in the permanent collections of the National Art Museum of Sport in Indianapolis, the Las Vegas art museum, and the Indiana statehouse. Edwards' prior gallery show (September 2005) was called "The Ted Williams Memorial Display with Death Mask, from The Ben Affleck 2004 World Series Collection."
Christopher Laird Simmons is a veteran journalist and contributor to numerous entertainment and technology publications, an award-winning photographer and digital artist, a musician who has composed soundtracks for two TV cable shows, and a highly regarded marketing technologist who has been interviewed by TrendWatch, PCworld, Entrepreneur, and many other national publications and talk shows.
Simmons is also the author of the forthcoming Podcasting business and marketing book, "The Savvy Guide to Podcasting" (Indy-Tech Publishing, Nov. 2006) which covers the practical how-to aspects of developing content; mechanics of recording, mastering and Web optimization; advertising and marketing; and audience measurement.
The Podcast subscription link is:
http://www.send2press.net/podcast/rss.xml

IRAN STEPS UP NUCLEAR AGENDA

With efforts to halt its nuclear program at an impasse, Iran is moving faster than expected and is just days from making the first steps toward enriching uranium, said diplomats who have been briefed on the program.If engineers encounter no major technical problems, Iran could manufacture enough highly enriched uranium to build a bomb within three years, much more quickly than the common estimate of five to 10 years, the diplomats said.Iran insists that it is interested only in producing electricity, which requires low-grade enrichment of uranium.New information about Iran's program came from diplomats representing countries on the United Nations Security Council. They were briefed by senior staff of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which maintains monitors in Iran. The diplomats spoke on condition of anonymity because the briefing was private.Even as Iran apparently moves forward, diplomatic efforts to persuade it to halt its nuclear work appeared to be faltering in the face of distrust among powerful Security Council members and disagreements over the best strategy."We're getting conflicting signals from the United States; it now appears they want to escalate the situation," said a senior diplomat in Vienna. "The Russians see that as a slippery slope."Officials said Iran was on the verge of feeding uranium gas into centrifuges, the first step toward enrichment. That move is in keeping with Iran's experience level and its previous statements, experts said.According to one non-Western official who closely follows Iran's progress, engineers at a pilot plant in Natanz are likely to start crucial testing in the next couple of days to ensure that the centrifuges and the pipes connecting them are properly vacuum sealed. They are likely to begin feeding uranium hexafluoride gas into a series of 164 connected centrifuges within about two weeks, the official said.Diplomats and experts say Iran has forgone usual testing periods for individual centrifuges and small series of linked centrifuges, instead apparently trying to put together as many as possible, as quickly as possible.They said Iran also was likely to begin assembling more centrifuges in mid-April to put together additional cascades of linked centrifuges. The pilot plant can hold up to six cascades of 164 centrifuges each. It could take many months to complete that work, the diplomats said.The U.S. and its British, French and German allies believe Iran intends to build nuclear weapons, and must be stopped before learning how to enrich uranium. They view the ability to operate a series of centrifuges as a technological tipping point."If you can do one centrifuge, you can do 164," said Emyr Jones Parry, British envoy to the U.N. "If you can do 164, you probably can do many more. That means you have the potential to do full-scale enrichment. If you can do enrichment up to 7%, you can do 80%. If you can do 80%, you can produce a bomb."Policymakers watching Iran's program are making two separate assessments: a technical one based on Iran's ability to enrich uranium and a political judgment on whether Iran is attempting to make a bomb or merely trying to enrich uranium to a low level for civilian purposes, as Iranian officials insist.The three-year time frame for Iran to produce a bomb cited by diplomats is the same as an estimate by former nuclear weapons inspector David Albright.In a paper that will be released Monday by the Institute for Science and International Security, which Albright founded, he and a colleague give a detailed description of how, under a best-case scenario, Iran would be able to manufacture enough highly enriched uranium for a crude nuclear device in three years. Albright cautioned, however, that Iran faces many technical hurdles it might find difficult to overcome.Gary S. Samore, a former nonproliferation expert at the National Security Council, now at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, also said it was far more likely that the Iranians would encounter problems and that it could take them four to five years.If Iran decides to make highly enriched uranium, it would need either to do so clandestinely, or leave the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which prohibits signatories from producing highly enriched uranium.The IAEA board of governors reported Iran to the Security Council for failing to respond to requests from inspectors for information about its program, which it kept hidden for 18 years.All the members of the Security Council agree that Iran should not be permitted to produce a bomb. Under an agreement with Russia and China, the council only began to discuss Tehran's case in mid-March. The next steps are hotly disputed.The European Union and the Americans want to exert vigorous pressure on Iran. They insist on a reinstatement of a total moratorium on uranium enrichment that Iran had voluntarily put in place in late 2004 while negotiating with the EU. The U.S. and EU are willing to use a U.N. procedure that gives Security Council resolutions the force of law, and to impose sanctions.The Russians and the Chinese, mindful of the buildup to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq three years ago, fear that taking too hard a line would lead to an escalation of tensions that could result in military action against Iran. They believe that sanctions and other measures might push Iran to abandon the nonproliferation treaty, which keeps international inspectors in the country.Russia and China would be willing to allow Iran to retain a small cascade of centrifuges for research purposes.The difference among the permanent Security Council members suggest it could be a long time before they reach a consensus."I don't think anyone can predict if there will be serious action in the Security Council," said Stephen G. Rademaker, acting assistant secretary of State for security and nonproliferation, in an interview this week.The U.S. and its allies face the difficulty of allaying Russian suspicion that reporting Iran to the Security Council was a way to make the case for military action."The Russian concern is with the medium- and long-term plan: 'Where's it going?' " said a diplomat from a European Union country. "Even though we say military action is not an option, they have a concern that we're going down a route that ends up in a single place."The diplomat said the West's counter-argument is that moving ahead in a unified way sends a signal that the five powerful permanent members of the Security Council are united and that Iran needs to listen.However, getting Russia on board probably will be more difficult after a letter written by John Sawers of the British Foreign Office to his counterparts in the United States, France and German, was leaked this week. The letter touched on several issues, including the need for the U.S. to be involved in a package of incentives for Iran to halt its uranium enrichment, but it also made it clear that the U.S. and its European partners jointly were negotiating a position without consulting the Russians and Chinese."Moscow is unlikely to agree to anything devised behind its back and then presented as the sole solution possible," said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei V. Lavrov.In the meantime, the situation is changing daily as the Iranians move ahead."We're getting to the point where this fundamental difference between the U.S. and EU position and that of the Russians is being overtaken by Iran's … putting new facts on the ground," said Mark Fitzpatrick, a nuclear nonproliferation expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, who previously worked for the U.S. State Department on nuclear issues. "Iran is closer and closer to enrichment, so the effort to deny them the capability is rapidly failing."

V for Vendetta: The IMAX Experience

LOS ANGELES, March 24 - IMAX Corporation and Warner Bros. Pictures today announced that V For Vendetta: The IMAX Experience debuted with impressive box office results and outstanding moviegoer response this past weekend. The digitally re-mastered IMAX DMR(R) release of V For Vendetta opened in 56 North American IMAX(R) theatres, grossing an estimated $1.36 million during the three-day period between March 17 and March 19 for a per screen average of $24,341.
As V For Vendetta opened, Deep Sea 3D: The IMAX Experience continued its strong box office performance, grossing $594,711 for the weekend domestically. In its first 17 days in IMAX theatres, the film has now grossed approximately $2.67 million on 44 screens. The two films earned a combined box office total of $1.96 million during the three day weekend, demonstrating a strong start to a robust 2006 IMAX film slate for Warner Bros. Pictures.
"We are very pleased with the results from the opening weekend," said Dan Fellman, President of Domestic Distribution at Warner Bros. Pictures. "Given the overwhelmingly positive audience response to The IMAX Experience(R), we look forward to strong results for weeks to come. V For Vendetta and Deep Sea 3D are a great one-two IMAX punch for moviegoers this spring."
"The strong opening weekend performance of V For Vendetta: The IMAX Experience is a testament to a fantastic film ideally suited to IMAX's format, and the outstanding job Warner Bros. Pictures has done marketing and distributing it," said IMAX Co-Chairmen and Co-CEOs Richard L. Gelfond and Bradley J. Wechsler. "We are encouraged by the strong word of mouth coming out of the first weekend, leading us to believe this film will continue to be a significant draw for the IMAX theatre network during the weeks ahead."
"Warner Bros. Pictures has yet again delivered another fantastic event film to IMAX theatres," said Greg Foster, Chairman and President of IMAX Filmed Entertainment. "We are very pleased that moviegoers are choosing to experience the incredible vision of Joel Silver, James McTeigue and the Wachowski Brothers in IMAX's immersive format. The tremendous audience response - especially among 15-24 year old males - is further proof of the growing consumer demand to experience event motion pictures in a unique and premium way that cannot be replicated at home."
Set against the futuristic landscape of totalitarian Britain, V For Vendetta tells the story of a mild-mannered young woman named Evey (Natalie Portman) who is rescued from a life-and-death situation by a masked vigilante known only as "V." Incomparably charismatic and ferociously skilled in the art of combat and deception, V ignites a revolution when he urges his fellow citizens to rise up against tyranny and oppression. As Evey uncovers the truth about V's mysterious background, she also discovers the truth about herself - and emerges as his unlikely ally in the culmination of his plan to bring freedom and justice back to a society fraught with cruelty and corruption.

Click on cartoon to enlarge

Two tastes that don't go well together...

WASHINGTON – In an unusual move, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice telephoned Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Thursday, March 23, seeking a “favorable resolution” of the case of an Afghan man on trial for his life for converting to Christianity from Islam.
It is important for the Afghan people to know that freedom of religion is observed in our country and yours..., Rice's spokesman, Sean McCormack, said in reporting Rice's call to Karzai.
In deference to the country's sovereignty, Rice evidently did not demand specifically that the trial be halted and the defendant released but she flexed her state department muscles.
Her direct appeal to a foreign leader in a proceeding in his country is a very unusual move, especially in light of recent religious persecution in the U.S.:

In an extremely dangerous precedent, The Bush administration recently won an initial Supreme Court decision limiting the religious freedom of a church in New Mexico. The administration had been in a legal battle with the South American based
church over its use of Hoaska Tea in its religious ceremonies. The tea, which has been used for centuries in Brazil as a spiritual aid, contains naturally produced DMT, which when produced synthetically, is a controlled substance in the U.S.
The church beat a lower-court injunction but the Bush administration appealed and meanwhile flexed its establishment muscle by having Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer (on behalf of the entire Supreme Court) issue a temporary stay. The stay prohibited the church from performing its traditional religious tea ceremony until the matter was resolved.
To get an idea of what this must been like for this church—and the precedent that it sets—imagine a court-ordered ban on baptism or communion.

Although the supreme court just last month ruled the practice to be a legal religious ceremony and ruled any governmental interference as unconstitutional, it shows the two-faced religious bigotry of this administration especially when put up next to Rice's recent plea to Afghanistan. Does anyone need further proof that this administration is comprised of Christian right-winged zealots rife with their own hypocritical agendas?

More wool over our eyes...

Not unethical, but not smart : An internal investigation has concluded that the Education Department did nothing unethical but did use “poor judgment,” when it hired commentator Armstrong Williams to promote President Bush’s education policy. Williams insisted he had always supported Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” law, but he didn’t mention it once until he started getting paid. Then he praised it in five columns over five months. President Bush said in January that the White House knew nothing about the Williams contract, but the report revealed that one Bush aide discussed the arrangement four times with education officials last summer, when the contract was renewed.

CIA purge underway: The White House has ordered the new CIA director to get rid of agents disloyal to President Bush, Newsday reported this week. A former intelligence official said Bush aides considered the Central Intelligence Agency a “hotbed of liberals” out to thwart Bush’s agenda with damaging leaks on Iraq and the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Several top CIA operatives have resigned, including two this week, since former Florida congressman Porter Goss became director, in September. Bush spokesmen denied the president ordered a purge. Goss told employees there was nothing political about the personnel changes, saying they were needed to make the CIA more efficient.

FOX fakes it: Fox News apologized last week for posting a phony report on its Web site based on made-up quotes from former Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. The article quoted Kerry gloating that he was a “metrosexual,” and that he looked terrific in his first presidential debate thanks to an excellent manicure. “Didn’t my nails and cuticles look great?” said one of the bogus quotes. A Fox spokesman said the item was simply intended as a “poor attempt at humor” by the network’s top political correspondent, Carl Cameron, and that it never should have been posted. Fox executives, whom liberals have long accused of having a Republican bias, said that "it was really no big deal" but that nonetheless, "Cameron would be told that what he did was wrong."

China saves face...and backs, chests...

A Chinese cosmetics company has been using skin taken from the bodies of executed convicts to develop beauty products for sale in Europe, a London newspaper reported.
An agent for the company informed customers it is developing collagen for lip and wrinkle treatments from skin taken from prisoners after they had been shot. The agent said some of the company‘s products have been exported to Britain, and that the use of skin from condemned convicts was “traditional" and nothing to “make such a big fuss about,“ the Guardian reported
In addition to ethical concerns, there is the potential risk of infection from the harvested skin products.
The company was not identified by name for legal reasons and it is unclear whether collagen made from the skin of prisoners was in the research stage or in actual production.
“A lot of the research is still carried out in the traditional manner using skin from the executed prisoners and aborted fetus," the agent was quoted as saying. The material, he said, was being bought from “biotech" companies based in Heilongjiang Province and was being developed elsewhere in China.
He suggested that the use of skin and other tissues harvested from executed prisoners was not uncommon. “In China it is considered very normal and I was very shocked that Western countries can make such a big fuss about this," he said.
In the past, human rights groups have charged that China was using organs harvested from executed prisoners for medical transplants both domestically and internationally. China executed about 3,400 prisoners last year, according to Amnesty International.

There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear.There's a man with a gun over there, Telling me I got to beware. I think it's time we stop, children, what's that sound, Everybody look what's going down. Battle lines being drawn... Nobody's right if everybody's wrong. Young people speaking their minds, Getting so much resistance from behind. I think it's time we stop, hey, what's that sound. Everybody look what's going down. What a field-day for the heat, A thousand people in the street. Singing songs and carrying signs, Mostly say, hooray for our side. It's time we stop, hey, what's that sound, Everybody look what's going down. Paranoia strikes deep, Into your life it will creep. It starts when you're always afraid. You step out of line, the man comes and takes you away. We better stop, hey, what's that sound--Everybody look what's going down. Stop, hey, what's that sound--Everybody look what's going down. Stop, now, what's that sound? Everybody look what's going down. Stop, children, what's that sound? Everybody look what's going down...

--For What Its Worth, by Buffalo Springfield, (1968).



Battle lines being drawn...

BEIJING, 3/24--China said on Thursday, a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin left Beijing, that Beijing and Moscow are in accord on Iran's nuclear standoff with the West.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Wednesday criticized a draft U.N. Security Council statement aimed at pressuring Iran to stop enriching uranium, despite a new offer of amendments by Western powers.
The next step is likely to be bilateral contacts among ministers of the council's five veto-wielding permanent members, the United States, France, Britain, China and Russia, diplomats close to the talks said.
A spokesman for China's Foreign Ministry, Qin Gang, said President Hu Jintao and Putin discussed Iran during Putin's two-day visit.
"China and Russia exchanged views and both sides agreed the Iran nuclear issue should be resolved through diplomatic means," Qin told reporters.
Hu and Putin agreed that "all the related parties should display flexibility and patience," Qin added. "China supports Russia's active efforts to appropriately resolve the Iran nuclear issue."
Russia, backed by China, wants to delete large sections of the draft statement the Security Council has been studying for nearly two weeks as a first reaction to Iran's nuclear research, which the West believes is a cover for bomb-making. Iran insists it wants only to produce electric power.
Both nations fear that involvement by the 15-member council, which can impose sanctions, could escalate and lead to punitive measures including possibly military action.
Asked whether China and Russia would block the proposed U.N. statement on Iran, Qin said: "In making any actions or decisions the concerned parties should be focused on whether they truly help to reach a lasting resolution of the Iran nuclear issue, and whether they help the peace and stability of the region ... That is why we should give diplomacy more time and more space."
Qin said on Tuesday China supported a Russian compromise proposal that would allow Iran to use nuclear fuel enriched in an internationally monitored plant on Russian soil, easing fears that Tehran could divert atomic material to develop weapons.

Holloway OD'd say police

3/24--Gerold Dompig, deputy chief of police in Aruba and the man leading the investigation into the disappearance of Alabama teen Natalee Holloway, says he feels strongly that Holloway was not murdered, but probably died from complications involving alcohol and, possibly, drugs as well. Dompig makes his remarks in an exclusive interview with 48 HOURS Correspondent Troy Roberts that will be broadcast on 48 HOURS MYSTERY: “Natalee Holloway: New Clues in Paradise,” Saturday, March 25 (10:00-11:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network. The chief investigator tells Roberts that he has credible witnesses who say the young woman had drugs in her possession. Dompig also says police have witnesses who claim Holloway was drinking “excessively” on the day she disappeared. Deputy Chief Dompig tells 48 HOURS that drugs are now part of the investigation. Roberts: “Have you been able to confirm whether Natalee Holloway purchased or consumed illegal narcotics during her stay here [Aruba]?” Dompig: “We have statements claiming that she had drugs.” Roberts: “What kind of drugs?” Dompig: “I cannot say.” Chief investigator Dompig goes on to say, “We do not have proof that [Natalee] used drugs, but that [witnesses] saw her with drugs in her possession.” Police say Holloway was last seen with Joran van der Sloot and brothers Deepak and Satish Kalpoe. Dompig says all three remain prime suspects in the case. Deputy Chief Dompig says he now believes that Natalee Holloway was not murdered. “We feel strongly that she probably went into shock or something happened to her system with all the alcohol -- maybe on top of that, other drugs, which either she took or they gave her -- and that she…just collapsed.” The deputy chief believes that after Holloway’s death there was a panicked cover-up. Dompig says the investigation has entered a “critical last phase.”

BUSH MAKES ME SICK! (click on document to enlarge)
A top producer at ABC NEWS declared "Bush makes me sick" in an email obtained by the DRUDGE REPORT. John Green, currently executive producer of the weekend edition of GOOD MORNING AMERICA, unloaded on the president in an ABC company email . "If he uses the 'mixed messages' line one more time, I'm going to puke," Green complained. The blunt comments by Green, along with other emails , further reveal the disgust felt by many toward this administration's bullshit. A friend of Green's at ABC says Green is mortified by the email. "John feels so badly about this email. He is a straight shooter and great producer who is always fair. That said, he deeply regrets the sentiment expressed in the email and the embarrassment it causes ABC News." Of course, The administration and all its blind followers will use this as an excuse to show how "liberally biased" the media is, when in fact Green is simply feeling the same way over 100 million Americans feel about this presidency. More patriotic Americans should speak up and out against this administration as it sells out the credibility of our country. Green should embrace the media attention to his comments and forcefully declare, "That's right! I said it! Bush makes me sick and I know for a fact that I am not the only one! This administration has inflicted more damage to these United States than any other in its history! As a patriotic American, I cannot in good conscience sit back and watch my country deteriorate at the the hands of these greedy incompetents! I am a principled man and need to speak the truth! My personal feelings do not affect my work as an unbiased producer any more than Bush's cocaine-addled alcoholism affects his ability to lead this country...uh...let me rephrase that... My personal feelings and my professional work ethic remain two mutually exclusive entities. However, my love for this country and for what it used to represent, precludes me from remaining silent in my personal life!

VP Hotel Requirements (click on document to enlarge) MARCH 23-- The media has obtained a copy of Vice President Dick Cheney's standard "tour" rider, the document provided to hotels where Cheney will be bunking and lists how the Republican politician's "Downtime Suite" needs to be outfitted. While the vice president's requests are pretty modest, Cheney does like his suite at a comfy 68 degrees. And, of course, all the televisions need to be preset to the Fox News Channel. Decaf coffee should be ready upon his arrival along with four cans of caffeine-free Diet Sprite. And when Cheney is traveling with his wife Lynne, the second family's suite needs an additional two bottles of sparkling water. Mrs. Cheney's H2O should be either Calistoga or, curiously, Perrier, a favored beverage of French terrorism appeasers. The document, prepared by the vice president's advance team, was obtained after it was provided to a hotel employee prior to a Cheney visit. When we asked Cheney spokesperson Jenny Mayfield about the document's reference to gifts that hotels might leave in the suite for the vice president, she told us she was unable to address that question since she had not seen the "downtime requirements" rider. At the source's request, I've blacked out the handwritten name and Washington, D.C. phone number of a Cheney staffer. As for the notations regarding extra lamps, specific newspapers, and a carafe, it is unclear whether they were added by an advance team staffer or a hotel official.

A LEG POSSESSED!

Witness comes forth in Holloway case

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (March 22) - Aruban police reportedly have a new witness in the disappearance of Alabama teen Natalee Holloway and plan to conduct another search for her body on the Dutch Caribbean island.
The witness provided specific information that prompted investigators to organize a search in sand dunes along the northern tip of the island, Gerald Dompig, Aruba's deputy chief of police said in an interview with CBS television's "48 Hours Mystery" program, which released a partial transcript of the interview on Wednesday.
Dompig said investigators will use cadaver dogs to search near a lighthouse and believe that someone took steps to carefully hide Holloway's body - perhaps burying her twice. The CBS interview was scheduled for broadcast on Saturday.
The witness said "he knew more about the whereabouts of Natalee," Dompig said. "The information that this person gave was too specific to just be a story that was just made up by someone."
Aruban authorities declined to comment on the report Wednesday.
Holloway's mother, Beth Twitty of Mountain Brook, Ala., said she's aware of the program.
"I'm just waiting to see it Saturday night," Twitty said.
Holloway, 18, was last seen leaving a bar with Dutch national Joran van der Sloot and Surinamese brothers Deepak and Satish Kalpoe. No one has been charged in her disappearance and the investigation has produced a number of false leads.
In January, Aruban investigators searched sand dunes on the northwest coast of the island with more than 50 officers. At the time, Dompig said police have considered the dunes a place of interest since the investigation began and had searched them before.

Teen back home after 10 years
Abduction or adolescent whim?

MCKEESPORT, Pa. (March 23) - For 10 years, Tanya Nicole Kach says she was told that her parents didn't want her, that she was stupid and no one cared about her but the middle school security guard who was keeping her in his home.

It took her a decade to build the confidence to come forward, but on Wednesday she finally learned the truth as she hugged her father, Jerry Kach, in a tearful reunion.

"He's crying, I'm crying. All he kept saying was, 'I got my baby,'" said Kach, now 24, clutching her father's hand. "I'm touching blood, and I get to say, 'I love you, Dad.'"

Kach said she was looking forward to seeing her mother on Thursday for the first time since February 1996, when her parents reported her missing.

For a decade, Kach had been living at the home of Thomas Hose, 48, in the same town where her father lived in a home about two miles away. She had met Hose at her middle school, where he worked as a security guard.

Allegheny County Police Superintendent Charles Moffatt said Kach wasn't allowed out of the house for the first four years she lived with Hose in a home he shared with his parents since 1996. She was made to stay in the bedroom when visitors were over.

"She had no contact with people, other than the people that were in the home," Moffatt said.

Kach wasn't being held against her will, Moffat said, but Hose used "mind games" to control what she wore and where she went and to convince her that her parents, who are now divorced, didn't care about her. He said the girl had help changing her appearance shortly after she disappeared but wouldn't elaborate.

Kach described to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review how she was manipulated as a teenager.

"You're stupid. You're immature," she said Hose told her. "Nobody cares about you but me."

Hose was jailed Thursday on charges of statutory sexual assault and involuntary deviate sexual intercourse. His attorney, James Ecker, said Hose didn't force Kach to live with him.

"I don't think you'll find anybody in these United States who says she was held against her will," Ecker said.

For the last six months Kach would visit J.J.'s Deli Mart two blocks from where she lived in a Pittsburgh suburb, police said. Kach, always neatly dressed, befriended the convenience store owner Joseph Sparico and his family.

Then, earlier this week, she told Sparico something extraordinary.

"'My name is not Nikki Allen, it's Tanya Nicole Kach,"' he recalled her saying in a frightened voice. "'If you go to a Web site for missing children, you will see me there.'"


Sparico said Kach told him she wasn't allowed out after dark, and that she thought nobody wanted her other than her boyfriend, who threatened her.


He called his son _ a retired police officer who recognized Kach's name _ and a missing children hot line, helping to reunite the woman with her family.


"She wanted to be wanted, that's all," Sparico said. "She'd come up to get a pop, a tea, a paper ... she'd confide in me."


A woman who answered the phone at Hose's house Thursday morning said, "They're not talking," and hung up.


Kach plans to meet with her mother, Sherri Koehnke, who remarried while her daughter was missing.


"It's the best ending I could have thought about when I thought about what could have happened to her," Koehnke told WTAE-TV.


Kach's father, Jerry, said, "I just say thank you, there is a God and he brought my little girl back home."

REAL-LIFE SIMPSONS

Televised Revolution

Two independent filmmakers were inside the presidential palace on April 11, 2002, when Hugo Chavez was forcibly removed from office. They were also present 48 hours later when, remarkably, he returned to power amid cheering aides. Their film records what was probably history's shortest-lived coup d'état. It's a unique document about political muscle and an extraordinary portrait of the man The Wall Street Journal credits with making Venezuela "Washington's biggest Latin American headache after the old standby, Cuba."

Chavez warns US, Takes up for Cuba

Caracas, Venezuela--If U.S. troops were to invade any Latin American country, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez warns that "revolutionaries" from across the region would join forces to battle the Americans.
Although U.S. officials often dismiss his claims as outlandish, Chavez insists his country must be on guard to face any potential U.S. military attack, and pledges to go to the aid of any ally the U.S. might hypothetically invade, such as Cuba. Washington repeatedly denies it has any plans to attack Cuba.
According to the Associated Press report, the U.S. accuses Chavez of trying to export his socialist "revolution" to neighboring countries, saying he is a destabilizing force in the region.
Meanwhile, Chavez remains indignant, saying it is the U.S., not he, who has a history of invading countries from Iraq to Panama.
Yet, despite political tensions between Chavez's government and Washington, Venezuela still sells the largest share of its oil to the United States.

CHINA BECOMES THE NEW RUSSIA

WASHINGTON- The United States, wary of potential "crossed wires" as China steps up its involvement in Washington's traditional sphere of influence in Latin America, plans to start a dialogue with Beijing on the issue.
Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon, who oversees Latin American affairs, said on Tuesday he would visit Beijing in early April, ahead of Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit to Washington later in the month.
Shannon said the goal of his trip to China was to get a better idea of "how they feel about the Caribbean and the Americas."
He told reporters traveling with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the Bahamas for a meeting of Caribbean foreign ministers that he would also go to Japan and South Korea.
"We're going to begin a series of conversations that will allow us to understand what the other is up to in the region, to make sure we don't get our wires crossed," said one official who is involved in organizing the talks with China but was not authorized to speak for the record.
China's quest for oil to meet surging energy demands and commodities for other areas of its economy are propelling expanding trade with Latin America. Chinese interests have included bids for Venezuelan oil, Chilean copper and soybeans from Brazil and Argentina.
The United States has long been closely involved in the region politically and economically -- despite periodic resentment in Latin America countries at the domineering presence to the north.
In an interview with Reuters, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick said that as its economic power grows, China wants a greater role in the world but is "trying to proceed in a way that avoids antagonism."
While they have growing economic interests in Latin America, the Chinese "don't want to be perceived in the U.S. as a threat in Latin America because that would be counterproductive," he said.
China's courtship of Venezuela, the world's No. 5 oil exporter, worries some in Washington given that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is one of President George W. Bush's fiercest critics and has ties with Cuba and Iran, both longtime foes of Washington.
A White House report on security strategy released last week described Chavez as a "demagogue" who uses Venezuela's oil wealth to destabilize democracy in the region.
While China imports small quantities of Venezuelan oil, a congressionally-mandated group, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, has warned "this development may eventually affect the U.S. oil market, which now absorbs two-thirds of Venezuela's oil exports."
The White House report accused China of "expanding trade but acting as if they can somehow 'lock up' energy supplies around the world or seek direct markets rather than opening them up."
The U.S. official who spoke anonymously predicted that Venezuela would not be the most important part of Shannon's talks and said the new dialogue aimed to ensure that Washington and Beijing understood each other's interests in the region.
This includes talking about U.S. efforts to promote democracy and to link democracy reforms with development assistance, he said.
U.S. officials say Chinese arms sales to Latin American countries could be a problem. They said Shannon was expected to stress Washington's desire to see transparency and accountability in weapons deals.

Thomas gets to ask one question

WASHINGTON - Journalist Helen Thomas has questioned every president since John Kennedy. On Tuesday she got what has become a rare chance to question the current commander in chief.
"You're going to be sorry," Thomas warned President Bush when he called on her in his news conference at the White House.
"Well, then, let me take it back," Bush joked to laughter from the press corps.
Thomas, a columnist for Hearst Newspapers, is an outspoken critic of Bush's war policies and is known around the White House for her daily haggling with press secretary Scott McClellan. Bush rarely calls on her even though she always raises her hand, and once she got her chance she pointedly challenged his reason for wanting to go to war "from the moment you stepped into the White House."
"To assume I wanted war is just flat wrong, Helen, in all due respect," Bush responded. He repeated, "Excuse me, excuse me," as Thomas tried to interrupt him five times during his answer.
"No president wants war," he said. "Everything you may have heard is that, but it's just simply not true."
As he finished, Thomas kidded him about their debate and thanked him for taking her question.
"You're welcome," he said. "I didn't really regret it. I kind of semi-regretted it."

This is a 3-part column that was published on January 7, 2004.
I am reprinting it here today because I feel that it has not lost its relevance and because I believe that it goes a long way in explaining why the country is in such a mess...the running of it is simply a distraction to this administration.


The Bush/Bin Laden connection

I have been asked recently by some folks to explain the link between the President, his dad the former president, the Bin Laden family, Dick Cheney, Halliburton and the war in Iraq.
Well, you asked for it, so here goes:
Six Trillion dollars, that’s what it all seems to be about.
Six Trillion dollars is the estimated amount of oil that is in the Caspian Sea area. That is roughly more oil than in all of Saudi Arabia. As a bonus, the area boasts a lower population of anti-American Muslims. The problem however, is getting all that oil to the Arabian Sea, where it can be loaded onto tankers and brought back to the US.
Apparently, the only viable way of doing this is by building a pipeline through Afghanistan.
Yes, that Afghanistan. The one who’s Freedom Fighters—including Osama himself—we fed, trained and armed when they were knocking back the Soviet Union’s imperialist invasion. As a matter of fact, according to some reports, the US supported Bin Laden and the Taliban as late as 1998.
At that time, UNOCAL, an American oil conglomerate, was in negotiation with the Taliban to construct (you guessed it) an oil pipeline. It was to be one thousand miles long, ending at (you guessed it again) the Arabian Sea. Unocal performed millions of dollars of geological surveys, made plans for construction and everything was hunky-dory.
But then something happened.
For some historically undocumented reason, the Taliban changed its mind.
Perhaps it was a culture clash, perhaps UNOCAL got too greedy or perhaps it was Osama who just wanted to stick his finger into America’s eye (he is, remember, part of a Saudi oil family; and one that the US would be less dependant upon should it complete the pipeline.)
Whatever the reason, after spending millions in preparation, after anticipating receiving and spending six Trillion dollars, UNOCAL was asked to leave. This was in late 1998.
Clinton’s eight years were quickly coming to an end. Candidates for the 2000 Presidential race were beginning to assemble. Bush (II) became a candidate.
At this point, former CIA Director and President Bush (I) had already held a seat for nearly ten years on the board of the Carlyle Group; an investment firm valued at $3.5 Billion dollars, which invests in huge oil deals worldwide. In 1990, Bush (II) had been appointed to the board of one of Carlyle’s first purchases, an airline food business called Caterair. He left the board in 1992 to run for Governor of Texas.
Who else holds seats on the Carlyle board? Let’s see: Former Prime Minister of England John Major, Former Secretary of State Howard Baker, Frank Carlucci, secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, the list goes on.
According to the British publication The Guardian, “ Carlyle has become the thread which indirectly links American military policy in Afghanistan to the personal financial fortunes of its celebrity employees, not least the current President’s father. And until (October, 2001), Carlyle provided another curious link to the Afghan crisis: among the firm’s multi-million-dollar investors were members of the family of Osama Bin Laden.”
The former president worked for the Bin Laden family business in Saudi Arabia through the Carlyle Group, meeting with them at least twice. But their relationship goes all the way back to 1977. In that year, George Bush Senior set Junior up with an oil company named Arbusto, which means “Bush” in Spanish. Part of the financing came from a financier named James R. Bath.
Bath was a Houston aircraft broker who served with President Bush (II) in the Texas Air National Guard.
According to a 1976 trust agreement, Salem bin Laden, (Osama’s brother!) appointed James Bath as his business representative in Houston. Salem invested at least $50,000 into baby Bush’s oil company.
The revelation about Bath's relationship with the bin Laden financial empire and the CIA was made public in 1992 by Bill White, a former real estate business partner with Bath. White informed federal investigators in 1992 that Bath told him that he had assisted the CIA in a liaison role since 1976 - the same year former President George Herbert Walker Bush served as director of the CIA.
Fast forward to November, 2001. After 9-11, some in-the-know people, appalled at the destruction of so many innocent lives, began to question the fact that the Bin Laden family was a major investor in the Carlyle Group (You remember, the firm that Poppa Bush has a seat on). So, under pressure, the group asked the Bin Ladens to withdraw their investments.
Supposedly, by this time Osama bin Laden had been “disowned” by his family, which runs a multi-billion dollar business in Saudi Arabia and was a major investor in the Carlyle Group (about $2,000,000 in investments).
Other reports have stated his Saudi family has not truly cut off Osama bin Laden. The official stance is he was banned in 1994 and his assets were frozen. This is the official position of the Saudi government. But in an article published in 2001 in the New Yorker Magazine, it was reported that The Bin Laden family had not cut ties with Osama and that his share of the family fortune is estimated at approximately $30 Million.
In a book (Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth) written in 2002 by two French intelligence agents, it is proposed that until 1998, Osama was able to use economic and financial structures in Saudi Arabia. He could have linked working bank accounts in Sudan with companies registered in Saudi. He had various contacts with Saudi officials. And the Saudis were supporting the Taliban regime at the time, which was hosting him. According to the book, the FBI was fully aware of the situation.
According to the book, Former FBI deputy director John O'Neill (who died in the attack on the World Trade Center, where he was the chief of security) resigned in July, 2001 because of the policy of giving U.S. oil interests a higher priority than bringing al-Qaida leaders to justice.
The authors also allege that the terror attacks were aimed at sparking a widespread war in Central Asia and thereby reinforcing the Islamic extremists' grip on power.
Why spark widespread war in Central Asia?
The authors allege that the Bush administration was bargaining with the Taliban, over a Central Asian oil pipeline and Osama bin Laden, just five weeks before the September attacks.

In last week’s column I began a solicited look into the Bush/Bin Laden connection.
Since then, several interesting new developments have surfaced. Most notably, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s revelation— on the TV show “60 Minutes” this past Sunday—that the Bush administration had planned and prepared an invasion of Iraq just days after the president’s inauguration in January of 2001—a full eight months before the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Also, Colin Powell admitted on Thursday of last week—at a state department news conference—that there was “no smoking gun or concrete evidence” of Iraq’s connection with al-Qaida or Osama Bin Laden.
Well, I beg to differ on that one. There is at least one mind-blowing connection: Osama is highly likely to be benefiting monetarily from the U.S. rebuilding of Iraq.
Insane? Read on.
As I explained last week, the official position of the Saudi government is that Osama was banned in 1994 from Saudi Arabia and cut-off from his family’s multi-billion dollar fortune.
But the New Yorker Magazine reported in 2001 that his family did not cut ties to Osama and that they continue to provide him with his estimated $30 million share of the family fortune.
The New Yorker’s assertion was reinforced by a video broadcast on Al-Jezeera, which showed Osama and his family together at a wedding of Osama’s son in January of 2001.
In May 2003, an article by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported that Bin Laden's family is a substantial investor in a private-equity firm founded by the Bechtel Group of San Francisco. Bechtel is also the global construction and engineering company to which the Bush administration awarded the first major multimillion-dollar contract to reconstruct war-ravaged Iraq.
In a closed competitive bidding process, the United States Agency for International Development chose Bechtel to rebuild the major elements of Iraq's infrastructure, including its roads, railroads, airports, hospitals, and schools, and its water and electrical systems. In the first phase of the contract, the U.S. government will pay Bechtel nearly thirty-five million dollars. Overall, under the contract, Bechtel may make as much as six hundred and eighty million dollars before the whole deal is done.
When the contract was awarded last year, Bush failed to mention that his old business partners—the Bin Laden family—had an ongoing relationship with Bechtel.
That relationship is a ten-million-dollar stake in the Fremont Group—a company formerly called “Bechtel Investments,” which until 1986, was a direct subsidiary of Bechtel.
The Fremont Group's Website states, "Though now independent, Fremont enjoys a close relationship with Bechtel."
Also according to Mayer’s report, a spokeswoman for the company confirmed that Fremont's "majority ownership” is the Bechtel family. A list of the corporate board of directors still shows substantial overlap between the two companies: Five of Fremont's eight directors are also directors of Bechtel.
One Fremont director, Riley Bechtel, is the chairman and chief executive officer of the Bechtel Group, and is also (hold on to your hat) a member of the Bush Administration: he was appointed in 2003 to serve on the President's Export Council.
So let’s recap. The Bin Laden family—who is highly likely to still be funding Osama—is a major investor in a company that “enjoys a close relationship” and shares five directors with, the company that the Bush administration contracted to rebuild Iraq to the tune of anywhere from$35 million to $680 million. In addition, an appointed member of the Bush administration also happens to be a director of the company in which the Bin Laden family is a major investor. Got all that?

This is the third, and last installment in this series of columns outlining the previous and current connections between the Bush and the Bin Laden dynasties. In the previous two, I’ve shown some of the more incredible and unpublicized history of business transactions between our President and Osama Bin Laden, the man responsible for the 9-11 attacks.
After looking back at the last two columns, I realized that I did not mention the events of September 11, 2001 itself. I also did not go into detail about Halliburton, Vice President Cheney’s former company that has already received $6 billion from the current administration in reconstruction contracts.
Let’s take care of both these things right now.
According to The New York Times, on September 11, 2001, when all planes were grounded and no American citizen was allowed to be in United States airspace, 24 members of the Bin Laden family were allowed to fly their private jet to safety in Europe.
The New York Times reported that they were quickly called together by officials from the Saudi Embassy, which feared that they might become the victims of American reprisals. With approval from the FBI, according to a Saudi official, the Bin Ladens flew by private jet from Los Angeles to Orlando, then on to Washington, and finally to Boston. Once the FFA permitted overseas flights, the jet flew to Europe.
So, the relatives of the mastermind of the 9-11 attacks were allowed not only to just up and leave but our own authorities assisted them. Why?
Like I said in my first column on this subject, the Bin Laden Family, at the time, were longtime investors in Poppa Bush’s Carlyle Group.
Like investigative reporter Michael Moore says in his book, “Dude, Where’s My Country”:
“If after the 1994 terrorist attack on the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Bill Clinton suddenly started worrying about the “safety” of the McVeigh family up in Buffalo—and then arranged a free trip for them out of the country then it was later revealed that Clinton and his family had financial dealings with Timothy McVeigh’s family, what do you think the Republican Party and the media would have done with that one?”
Just imagine.
Now for Halliburton.
According to the Associated Press, the Inspector General of the Department of Defense discovered early last week that the same Pentagon auditors that accused Vice President Cheney’s former company “Halliburton” of overcharging the US by as much as $61 million for fuel in Iraq—criminally falsified its own internal reports.
The AP reported Sunday that an internal review of the agency’s New York office revealed that the office spent over 1300 hours illegally altering its own files.
The effect of the inspector general’s report is that it immediately undermined the auditors’ credibility. Coincidence? Or was it a stiff lesson set up and issued by the Vice President? You have to remember that Cheney still receives up to one million dollars a year from Halliburton as part of a "deferred compensation" package following his resignation as chief executive in 2000, the year he quit to run as Bush’s running mate.
Since then, Halliburton has come under criminal investigation by the inspector general and remains there now.
Halliburton was founded in 1919 by Earl Halliburton in Texas as an oil-field supply and services company.
Today, Halliburton provides a wide range of engineering services, technology and equipment for oil and gas fields, platforms, pipelines, refineries, highways and military operations around the world. Building pipelines is one of their main sources of income, so is drilling.
You know Bush’s recent plan to go to Mars? Well, in the 4/24/00 edition of “Oil & Gas Journal,” a top Halliburton scientist said that a "Mars exploration program presents an unprecedented opportunity" for the oil industry to make billions. He noted the reason there was such "great potential for a happy synergy between [Halliburton] and space researchers" was because the new drilling techniques developed in a Mars program would aid Halliburton's drilling for oil on Earth.
Vice President Dick Cheney headed the company as CEO from 1995 until 2000.
In the Cheney years, the company's revenues rose from $5.7 billion in 1994 to $14.9 billion in 1999, fueled primarily by growth outside the United States. During Cheney's tenure as CEO, Halliburton's overseas operations went from 51 percent of revenue to 68 percent of revenue. How did he do it? He primarily went to countries where American embassies didn’t exist and other American companies wouldn’t go because of human rights violations, such as Burma.
Since 1988, when the Burmese army killed thousands of pro-democracy protesters to stay in power, the country's military has been condemned worldwide as one of the world's most brutal violators of human rights. The U.S. withdrew its ambassador and suspended aid to Burma over a decade ago, and has since banned new U.S. investments in the country.
Halliburton however, was grandfathered in, and remains one of the last U.S. companies to keep an office in Burma.
Vice President Cheney, according to public records, has long opposed unilateral U.S. business sanctions on the grounds that they put American businesses at a disadvantage to foreign rivals and that the U.S. can influence a foreign government best by doing business with the country, rather than placing embargoes on it.
As a matter of fact, after taking the helm of Halliburton, he became one of corporate America’s most vocal opponents of sanctions.
"I personally have spoken many times on unilateral sanctions, I think they are a mistake. They almost never work," he said when asked if he supported easing sanctions against Iran. "We seem to be sanction-happy as a government," he said in 1997, according to an oil-industry newsletter. "The problem is that the good Lord didn't see fit to always put oil and gas resources where there are democratic governments."
"You've got to go where the oil is. I don't think about (political volatility) very much," Cheney told the Panhandle Producers and Royalty Owners Association in their annual meeting in 1998. Though neglected by major media in the United States, “Le Figaro,” one of France's biggest (and most conservative) newspapers, reports "an investigative judge is looking into allegations of corruption during construction of a natural gas complex in Nigeria by Halliburton and a French oil company."
International news sources report that French law enforcement authorities have made Vice President Dick Cheney the target of a criminal investigation for his role in a massive bribery scandal during his time as CEO of Halliburton.
Dyed-in-the wool Republican Kevin Phillips says in his new book “American Dynasty”:
“You have to focus on the Bush family itself. They have made the presidency into an office infused with an almost hereditary dishonesty. There’s so much lying and secrecy and corruption to it. Just look at the way Neil and Jeb and Marvin and George W. have earned their livings, with all these parasitic operations: profiting from their political connections, cashing in on favors from big corporations and other governments. It’s a convergence of arrogance--the sense that you don’t have to pay attention to democratic values. It’s happening again with Halliburton. They can’t help but let their old cronies in there to make buckets of money off the war. Their own arrogance provides a handle for their defeat. If the country does not come to grips with what Bush has done, then we may lose what we value about our republican and democratic government.”
And Phillips is no left-winger, he served as the chief political strategist for Richard Nixon in 1968, and, in his book “The Emerging Republican Majority,” he formulated the “Southern Strategy” that helped hand the White House to the GOP for a generation. Here’s some proof that just might make you think about Phillip’s assertions. The US government seized several business operations managed by Prescott Bush, the president’s grandfather, during World War II under the Trading with the Enemy Act.
On October 20, 1942, the federal government seized the Union Banking Corporation in New York City as a front operation for the Nazis. Prescott Bush was a director. Bush, E. Roland Harriman, two Bush associates, and three Nazi executives owned the bank’s shares. Eight days later, the Roosevelt administration seized two others corporations managed by Prescott Bush. The Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation, both managed by the Bush-Harriman bank, were accused by the US federal government of being from organizations for Hitler’s Third Reich. Again, on November 8, 1942, the federal government seized Nazi-controlled assets of Silesian-American Corporation, another Bush-Harriman company doing business with Hitler. Unbelievable, but unfortunately true.
So, when you take all this into consideration, it is not so difficult to perceive of the UNOCAL pipeline as the crux of the entire Middle-Eastern mess. I mean, if you think about it, you just cannot impose democracy on any given group of people, it only comes from within. Even if you could impose democracy on a nation, the first democratic vote it would cast would be to get rid of our presence in their country. So go figure.
Here’s a really interesting bit of information. Hamid Karzai (the American puppet leader of the new Afghanistan government) is a former employee of UNOCAL. And according to the Irish Times Newspaper, he and Pakistan President Pervez Musharref (you know, the guy who cooperated in reporting and capturing al-Qaida agents for the US) agreed at a very unpublicized meeting in 2002, to build a proposed gas pipeline from Central Asia (i.e. Caspian Sea area) to Pakistan via Afghanistan.
So, you could say that the UNOCAL pipeline through Afghanistan is on again. The only player that needs to join the black-gold rush now is Turkmenistan, and Donald Rumsfeld has been seen there recently. And what of “Osama-Been-Forgotten”? My guess is that he will never be caught as long as there is a Bush in the White House, and that’s no accident. Again, according to Kevin Phillips, “The (Bush) administration has not been interested in turning over any rocks that represent Saudi Arabia, because the Bush family has been in bed with them for so long. In addition, many of the people surrounding the president are former retainers of his father. They wanted to nail Saddam because he got away from them before. That’s a central element of restorations: the settling of old scores.”
Meanwhile the Bush administration as a whole insists that we remain in Iraq even though two American soldiers, on average, are killed every day.