The Mack Attack

2010-06-18T13:54:00.002-04:00

2009-04-24T10:45:00.004-04:00

DICK CHENEY Unapologetic... and Unrestrained

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/us/24cheney.html?hp

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

2009-02-20T12:29:00.004-05:00

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann:

Fuck You, Dick Cheney!

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

2009-01-21T09:18:00.002-05:00

There's no one more Irish than Barack O'Bama:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEtReeUPFmM

2008-12-30T09:31:00.003-05:00

2008 Endnote

2008-11-26T09:02:00.005-05:00

DOW LOW CAN IT GO?

2008-10-21T00:02:00.000-04:00

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

2008-10-12T17:05:00.001-04:00

And now the future:

"No Rest for the Wicked" by Cage The Elephant

2008-10-10T02:20:00.002-04:00

A blast from the past...

2008-09-26T10:58:00.005-04:00

SARAH PALIN:

The Environmentalist:

(Husband works for British Petroleum)

The Animal Rights Activist:

(Teaching future generations about animal rights)

A lifetime spent in public service:

(1984 Runner-Up; Miss Alaska)

2008-09-18T00:43:00.000-04:00

2008-09-12T10:11:00.000-04:00

2008-09-05T23:17:00.005-04:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Republican Vice Presidential Hopeful--SARAH PALIN:

One 72-year-old heartbeat away from becoming President of the United States of America!

2008-08-23T14:11:00.005-04:00

Everything you ever wanted to know about SUPERMAN, in audio form:

2008-08-21T10:13:00.001-04:00

2008-06-01T19:36:00.001-04:00

McClellan:

Bush should have fired Karl Rove

President Bush broke his promise to the country by refusing to fire aide Karl Rove for leaking a CIA agent's identity, said Scott McClellan, the president's chief spokesman for almost three years.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24918550/from/ET/

2008-05-29T21:56:00.004-04:00

McClellan claims George Bush admits to authorizing Scooter Libby to leak Valerie Plame information!!!!!

SEE FOR YOURSELF: (at the 09:00 mark)

2008-05-29T09:11:00.002-04:00

More on the book...

2008-04-22T00:50:00.003-04:00

WHERE IN THE WORLD IS OSAMA BIN LADEN?

The new movie by Morgan "Supersize Me" Spurlock

Ever since I was a kid, seems like every time I turn on the TV it tells me that I'm supposed to be afraid of something. Growing up in the waning years of the Cold War, it was the Russkies with their great big bombs and funny marching and their hatred of the American way. By the time I was old enough to notice, nobody seriously worried anymore about "nucular combat toe to toe with the Rooskies," as Major "King" Kong put it in Dr. Strangelove. Still, when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1990, I thought we were in the clear.

But it wasn't just the crazy freedom-hating Russians that we were told to be afraid of. They topped the hit parade for years, but in my lifetime we've been told to panic about all kinds of things. Here are some of them, in no particular order:
Soviet nukes, North Korean nukes, suitcase nukes, nuclear power plants, dirty bombs, shoe bombs, guns, assault rifles, semiautomatic weapons, sarin, anthrax, Ebola, E. coli, Lyme disease, Legionnaires' disease, smallpox, salmonella, dengue fever, Asian flu, bird flu, swine flu, yuppie flu, West Nile virus, the pesticides sprayed on the mosquitoes that spread West Nile virus, breast implants, AIDS, SARS, SIDS, ADD, ADHD, PTSD, TB, Y2K, EMP, WMD, illegal aliens, drunk drivers, road rage, asbestos, mercury, lead, oil shortages, the national debt, inflation, stagflation, hurricanes, twisters, tsunamis, asteroids, earthquakes, killer bees, killer canines, mad cows, global warming, the hole in the ozone, flesh-eating bacteria, stem-cell research, Frankenfood, Halloween, poisoned Tylenol, sex addiction, identity theft, secondhand smoke, Crips, Bloods, neo-Nazis, Satanists, pagans, cults, serial killers, postal workers, Catholic priests, heroin, cocaine, crack cocaine, methamphetamines, club drugs, ecstasy, Special K, day-care centers, retirement homes, hospitals, an epidemic of obesity, an epidemic of teen drug abuse, an epidemic of teen murders, an epidemic of teen suicides, an epidemic of teen gambling, an epidemic of teens having sex, an epidemic of teens having babies, an epidemic of child pornography, missing children, workplace violence, violence against seniors, violence on TV, violence in movies, violent video games, rap videos, rap music, heavy-metal music, Dungeons & Dragons, snuff films, Internet porn, high-voltage power lines, cell phones that explode, cell phones that cause brain cancer, drivers on cell phones, pedophiles on MySpace, the air, water, soil, eggs, ham, fish, peanuts, spinach, and dog food.

And in 2001 fear got a new mascot—a glorious rebranding featuring the godfather of fear, the hardest-working man in terrorism: Osama bin Laden. The attacks of September 11 ramped us up to levels of fear and paranoia I'd never felt in my life. Some of it was justified; I mean, it was the first time since Pearl Harbor that outside aggressors had attacked us on our own soil. But all the media-fanned panics that followed were even scarier than the actual event.

The odd thing is that when you look past the terror of the headlines Americans actually live longer, healthier, safer lives than ever before. Our average life expectancy is 60 percent greater than it was at the start of the twentieth century. Medical science has conquered all sorts of diseases that were once common killers. Violent crime has plummeted in every major city. We're safer in our homes, in our cars, on planes, trains, and bicycles than ever before. And globally, since the end of the Cold War no great military power has really threatened us. As shocking as 9/11 was, it wasn't nuclear war.

But we don't feel safer, do we? In poll after poll, we express our belief that times are more frightening now than they used to be, that people are more dangerous and the world is more violent, that we're so close to the apocalypse that you can smell the brimstone. We're afraid of strangers, we're afraid of our own teenagers, we're afraid of insects, we're afraid of the food we eat and the water we drink and the air we breathe, we're afraid of TV and movies and the Internet, we're afraid of the weather, and we're afraid the earth itself is dying.

Fear is a biological survival mechanism. But there's rational, useful fear, and then there are phobias—illogical, unwarranted fears of imagined or highly exaggerated threats. Take the fear of flying. Flying is a much, much safer form of transportation than, say, driving. In 2004, a representative year, almost 43,000 Americans died in car accidents. That same year, only 600 Americans died in aircraft crashes. Your chances of dying in an aircraft are around one in 10 million, versus one in 7,000 in a car. Statistically, you're far safer during your flight than you are driving to and from the airport. (Your luggage, however, is another story.)

Now, take terrorism. Since 9/11 we've been kept on a constant state of alert—i.e., anxiety—about terrorists. Depending on who's doing the math, the average American civilian's chances of being a victim of a terrorist attack are minuscule—about one in 9 million, according to one estimate. According to the National Safety Council, you have an equal, if not greater, chance of being struck and killed by lightning (6,188,298 to 1) or of being bitten to death by a dog (9,089,063 to 1). Yet the National Weather Service doesn't make you leave your golf clubs at the door when it starts raining, and the NSPCA doesn't have color-coded threat levels for German shepherds.

Let me put it another way: From the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 through 2005, about 3,200 American civilians died in terrorist attacks, 2,973 of them on the single day of September 11, 2001. In that same period, in round numbers:
• about 700,000 Americans died of heart disease
• roughly 600,000 Americans died of cancer
• nearly 500,000 Americans died in car accidents
• about 200,000 died in homicides
• nearly 150,000 died after falls
• almost 40,000 people drowned
• and more Americans were killed by police officers—almost 4,000—than by terrorists.

Despite the infinitesimal chance that the average American will be the victim of a terrorist attack, Osama bin Laden, "the terrorist threat," and the Global War on Terror have turned our entire society upside down and inside out. We've started two wars that we can't seem to end, in which thousands and thousands of people are dying. The United States has committed what many see as war crimes and human rights abuses. We've made a lot more enemies around the world than friends, and by the fall of 2006 more Americans had died fighting the War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq than were killed by terrorists from 1995 to 2005.

So why, if the threat is so exaggerated, do we feel so much dread? Partly because we're told to, over and over and over. We live in what sociologists call a "culture of fear," in which the media, the government, and various special-interest groups keep us in a constant state of anxiety about wave after wave of supposed new threats to our health and well-being. Since Machiavelli's time politicians have known how to use fear to keep people distracted, cowed, and obedient. Bureaucrats use it to justify their budgets and their jobs, TV newspeople use fear as a way to keep our eyes glued to the screen, and special-interest groups use it to keep our donations pouring in.

But since September 11, the government hasn't just kept us in a panic; the government itself has been in a panic. In 2002, the Bush administration created the Department of Homeland Security, whose very name invokes insecurity, not to mention the odd sound of that word "Homeland." Maybe it should have been called the Department of We Hate You, Osama, and You'll Never Catch Us with Our Pants Down Again! Because the DHS is nothing but a massive restructuring of the same old federal bureaucracy. It's an interdepartmental Frankenstein stitched together from existing agencies, including Customs, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, FEMA, and various parts of the FBI, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, and the departments of Defense, Transportation, Energy, and Agriculture.

With an annual budget upward of $40 billion, the DHS defends us from terrorists, illegal aliens, drug smugglers, hurricanes, earthquakes, and epidemics. It guards our seaports and coastlines, our farms and reservoirs, and protects us in cyberspace. See, it really is the Department of Disaster Movie Plotlines. It's the DHS that issues those colorcoded threat-level advisories and makes us take our shoes off at the airport.

And the DHS is charged with ladling out hundreds of millions of dollars every year in antiterrorism grants to the states. Having few legitimate terrorist targets in their districts but knowing pork when they smell it, many local bureaucrats have gotten very creative. On the list of 77,069 potential terrorism sites nationwide were "1,305 casinos, 163 water parks, 159 cruise ships, 244 jails, 3,773 malls, 718 mortuaries and 571 nursing homes." Specific targets included "the Old MacDonald's Petting Zoo near Huntsville, Ala., a bourbon festival, a bean festival and the Kangaroo Conservation Center in Dawsonville, Ga. . . . the Amish Country Popcorn factory, the Mule Day Parade, the Sweetwater Flea Market and an unspecified 'Beach at End of a Street.' " Ice-cream parlors, check-cashing joints, and tackle shops also made the list.

Meanwhile, the DHS spends about $5 billion a year screening us at airports. But the reality, as The Atlantic Monthly noted, is that it's "largely for show. . . . 'The inspection process is mostly security theater, to make people feel safe about flying,' says John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State."
Only it doesn't make us feel safer, does it? Take off your shoes! Empty that baby bottle! At Dulles Airport, security personnel ordered a woman to peel her banana. Banana bombs! When fruit and baby formula become potential WMDs, what's next? And who really feels safe? That nursing mother and her child in the seat next to you could be terrorists. She could be carrying liquid explosives in her breasts. How do you know she isn't? Don't rough her up when you arrest her—she might explode.

You think I'm joking? I met a woman who was ordered by an inspector at Newark International Airport to remove the gel inserts from her push-up bra! Just because she's a member of the IBTC (that's the Itty Bitty Titty Committee, for those of you who aren't or don't act like you're twelve), she's a terrorist threat. You'd never see Pamela Anderson getting stopped. Why? Because Pamela Anderson loves freedom, 36D times more than that other girl.

These were the thoughts that were running through my head as I sat in front of the TV in January 2006. I flipped through the news channels, hearing all about the dread and despair, thinking about how unsafe everyone felt (a few weeks before this friends of mine canceled a trip to New York because they had heard about potential New Year's plots on New York City), and about how I got cheated out of the relief I felt entitled to when the Cold War ended. Who was to blame for all this fear? Whom could I confront and say, "Enough already. We get it. The world's a scary place. Leave us all alone." Whom did I have to smack to get some peace around here?

And on the news there he was—the man anointed as the father of all our fears these days. The man who torments and inspires millions around the world from an undisclosed location that even Dick Cheney can't find from his undisclosed location. The most wanted man on the planet: Osama bin Laden.

This was the guy who wrecked the carefree, post-Communist party the twenty-first century was supposed to be. The one guy who screwed it all up for the rest of us. If this guy is such a big deal, why haven't we caught him? Why haven't we found him? Is he a nine-foot-tall ninja with mind-control powers? Why haven't we spent every resource and hired every person we can to turn over every rock on earth to find him? I mean, who is this guy? Why does he like to terrorize us? What does he want? Why do people support him?

Despite all the face time he got in the media, I bet most Americans really don't know much about Osama bin Laden. Be honest. Would you pick him as a category on Jeopardy!? He's the Most Wanted Man on Earth, the man who single-handedly terrorized the entire United States, and I bet most of us know more about Britney Spears than we do about bin Laden.

Sure, there isn't an American alive who doesn't know what he looks like. With his narrow, sharp face and long nose, his dark eyes and scraggly beard, emerging from a cave in long robes and head wrap with an AK-47 dangling from one hand, he was the very image of the evildoer I'd heard so much about. The poster boy for fanatics. If he hadn't made himself the global enemy of the West, we might have created him.

But what did I really know about him? What did I know about his life before September 11? Where did he come from? Where did he get his ideas? Why did he decide to start Al Qaeda? Why did he make us his enemy? Was he married? Did he have kids? Did they run and hug him when he came home to the cave after a hard day of global jihadism? ("What did you do at work today, Daddy?" "Oh, I terrorized the West." "Cool!") And what was he doing living in a cave, anyway? Wasn't he, like, a multimillionaire? What drove him to give up the cushy life in favor of waging jihad?

For that matter, what the hell is a jihad? What's a fatwa? What do other Muslims think of Osama? Do they all hate us, or is it just a lunatic fringe?
I wanted to know. And I really wanted to know how we got to this point where the United States, one of the most revered and respected countries around, is now one of the most hated on earth. I needed some answers, and I figured other people might, too.

So there it was. At that moment, in January of 2006, I decided that I would do what no one else could. I would take my complete lack of knowledge, experience, or expertise and put it to good use by looking for the most wanted and most dangerous man on earth. And to sniff him out I thought I had to try to figure him out. Like Sherlock Holmes getting inside Moriarty's head. Or that chick in Profiler.

Maybe I could fix this mess. Maybe not. Maybe he'd agree to a mano-a-mano cage match to settle this thing forever. Maybe not. At the very least, I'd try to tackle the one question no one else could answer: Where in the world is Osama bin Laden?
Four months later. April 2006. Morning. I opened my eyes to see a beautiful blonde staring at me. It was my girlfriend, Alex. She smiled at me as she came into early-morning focus. I believe I smiled back.
"I think I'm pregnant," she said.

I closed my eyes and said to myself, "You're going to open your eyes and find that this is all a dream."
I opened my eyes and there she was, still smiling.
"How do you know?" I asked her. I was pretty awake now. From the groggy borders of deep REM sleep to a heart-pounding post-marathon dry-mouth sweat in 0.24 seconds.

She pulled one of those little plastic urine sticks out from under the covers and showed me the plus sign in the little window.
"But that's only one test," I said. "You can't be sure with just one test."
She reached under the covers again and pulled out five more little EPT sticks, fanning them out in front of my face. My eyes jumped from plus sign to plus sign to plus sign to plus sign to plus sign, then back to her eyes, glistening and anxious.

I couldn't speak. It felt as if I'd swallowed one of those EPTs. I closed my eyes again, and had another quick conversation with myself: "Pull yourself together, man. What did you think was gonna happen? You're getting married in a month anyway. This is what married people do. Well, this and get very out of shape."
I opened my eyes.

"What do you think?" she asked.
"I think we're going to have a baby," I said. I smiled, rolled over, and hugged and kissed her.
But inside, ten thousand questions and ideas and fears had all started welling up inside me. Me. A dad. What kind of father was I going to be? I just got really good at taking care of myself! I mean, I'd made it through all the pre-planning test stages of responsibility that determine parental aptitude. Stage 1: The plants in my apartment were all still alive. Great sign. I could water and care for greenery. Stage 2: The cat. He was still alive and kicking! He didn't look malnourished or neglected or unhappy. He still slept in the bed with me, so he must like me! Stage 3: The dog. Dammit! I missed the dog stage. This is the most important stage, especially in New York, because dogs are a real responsibility. You gotta walk them and play with them and pay attention to them and pick up their doody off the sidewalk. Great preparation for a kid, and I'd missed it. Crap!
"It's okay," I told myself. "You got two outta three. Still very good signs that you can actually handle some responsibility." Only now this little old-person-space-alien-looking thing is going to be coming into my life, and it's going to be completely dependent on me. Me! Scary.

Fudge. I'd already started the ball rolling on my quest for Osama. The ball hadn't rolled far yet, but I was doing extra push-ups, wearing more sensible shoes, and prepping to leave the country in a few months. What should I do now? Stay home with Alex and discover my nesting instincts, or stay on the path to finding His Scariness?

Double fudge! Being a dad meant that I couldn't just think about what was best for me, or my girlfriend. I had to consider the big picture. And what, exactly, was the big picture? I thought . . . I squinted . . . I started to see something. . . .
Now, suddenly, it came into focus. What kind of a world are Alex and I bringing this kid into? He or she will be our responsibility for at least the next eighteen years. It'll be our duty to nurture her, educate her, protect her. Children are like little sponges, soaking up everything you do and say, everything in their environment—all the good and all the bad, from toxic chemicals to toxic emotions. What sort of world will our little SpongeBob see and hear?

A pretty screwy one, to judge by the news. We'd just marked the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. We'd gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, but we'd been caught completely by surprise in the aftermath of his removal—and had compounded the chaos with extraordinary blunders of our own.

The cost of our occupying the country had risen to nearly $10 billion a month. Ten billion dollars! A month! How would I explain that to my kid? You could house all the homeless people in America with what it was costing us to be in Iraq in April alone. And what was all that money buying us? Every morning I looked in the papers and saw more slaughter, more chaos.

How was our other war, the one in Afghanistan, going?
Don't ask. Though we'd just passed the fourteenth anniversary of the Soviet Union's final retreat from Afghanistan in 1992, the place was still a mess. In March, President Bush had made a "surprise" visit to Kabul, where he promised that we would "help Afghanistan grow its democracy and defend those who . . . can't stand the thought of terrorism. . . . Our desire is to see this country flourish." But all that had flourished in Afghanistan was the Taliban insurgency, Al Qaeda recruiting and training operations, and the poppy harvest.

Iraq and Afghanistan were being called "the frontlines in the Global War on Terror" (also known as the GWOT, pronounced Gee-wot, as in "Gee, wot a predicament we've gotten ourselves into!"). But there were a lot of sidelines in the news. Countries like England, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan paid for being our allies in the GWOT by becoming targets for terrorists.

Pretty much the entire Middle East had seen even more terrorist violence than we had. Israel and the decades-long issue of the Palestinian refugees were still sources of rage for Muslims around the world, and a handy recruitment tool for groups like Al Qaeda. France, where people seem to hate our culture as much as Osama does, had become a major recruiting zone for young extremists.

Was all this trouble really caused by one guy? Or, at least, by the ideas he'd come to symbolize? Somehow, the fact that I had a little bundle of joy (and fear) on the way made it seem even more important that I get out there and try to find some answers. I had to do this—for me, for my family, for the child I was about to have. I had to face the terror. I had to know what kind of world I was about to bring a child into. What kind of father I could be. What hope we had for the future. You know, all that light and fluffy stuff.

And so, with the tentative blessing of my wife-to-be, I set off on the adventure of a lifetime—a trip that would take me around the world in search of someone people say is the Devil himself. As I stared into Alex's eyes after we'd agreed that I wouldn't give up this quest, I remembered something my grandmother used to say to me: Be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it.

-Morgan Spurlock

2008-04-19T02:08:00.001-04:00

CLINTON ON THE OUTS...

Time is running out on Hillary Rodham Clinton, the long-ago front- runner for the Democratic presidential nomination who now trails Barack Obama in delegates, states won and popular votes.
Compounding Clinton's woes, Obama appears on track to finish the primary campaign fewer than 100 delegates shy of the 2,025 needed to win.
Clinton argues to Democratic officialdom that other factors should count, an unprovable assertion that she's more electable chief among them. But she undercut her own claim in Wednesday night's debate, answering "yes, yes, yes" when asked whether her rival could win the White House.
There's little if any public evidence the party's elite, the superdelegates who will attend the convention, are buying her argument anyway.
In the days since the surfacing of Obama's worst gaffe of the campaign—an observation that small town Americans are bitter folk who cling to religion and guns out of frustration—he has gained six convention superdelegates, to four for Clinton.
"I investigated and studied the context of the whole speech," said one of the six, Reggie Whitten of Oklahoma, who told Obama on Tuesday he would support him. "I think the comment was to some extent taken out of context and blown up, but I can tell you I think people in small towns have a lot of reason to be bitter," added Whitten, who grew up in Seminole, a town of 6,700.
Clinton leads in Pennsylvania polls in advance of Tuesday's primary there, with 158 convention delegates at stake. A victory is essential to her chances of winning the nomination, but far from sufficient. Instead, a triumph of any magnitude would instantly establish Indiana on May 6 as her next must-win state, particularly since her aides have privately signaled that defeat is likely in North Carolina on the same day.
Overall, Obama's delegate lead is 1,645-1,507. That masks an even larger advantage among those won in primaries and caucuses. There, his advantage is 1,414-1,250.
An additional 566 are at stake in the remaining contests in eight states, Guam and Puerto Rico before the primary season ends on June 3.
If Obama captures 53 percent of them, which is the share he has gained in contests to date, he would close out the primary season with at least 1,945 delegates, only 80 less than the total needed to clinch the nomination. If he and Clinton split the 566 evenly, he would still be within 100 of the number needed.
Clinton needs to win a forbidding 65 percent of the delegates in the remaining primaries to draw even with Obama in pledged delegates. It's a share she has achieved only once so far, in Arkansas, where her husband was governor for more than a decade.
Given the unyielding delegate math, Clinton has relied for weeks on forbearance from party leaders to sustain her challenge. And they are growing restless, eager for the epic nomination battle to end so Democrats can unify for the fall campaign against John McCain and the Republicans.
In fact, it's unlikely any other candidate could have survived as long without coming under overwhelming pressure to withdraw.
"There aren't many figures in American politics who could sustain 11 straight losses and hang into a race and raise $35 million," Obama said at The Associated Press annual meeting recently. "So in that sense she's unique, and the fact that former President Clinton is there, too, and the structure that he has of loyalty all across the country and the brand name that they have makes it very tough."
If he was bitter about it, he didn't show it.
Still, there are limits to how long party leaders will wait, given polls that show McCain has pulled even in the race for the White House.
New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, a Clinton supporter, said Friday she needs a big win in Pennsylvania, and a loss would be a "door closer."
Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, also a Clinton supporter, said recently that the candidate who trails in delegates after June 3 should quit the race. "Probably before that, once it becomes clear that one or the other is clearly—there's no realistic chance," he told the AP in an interview.
Frank's remarks were merely more pointed than when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said a few weeks ago that he hoped the race would be over by the end of June. Or when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she thought it would be a disservice to the party for the superdelegates to overturn the verdict of the primary voters.
Congressional leaders have their own reasons for wanting an end to the nominating campaign.
They are playing a different numbers game.
Obama and Clinton are focused on 2,025, the magic number of delegates.
But 218 is the number that matters most to Pelosi, the number of seats needed to assure a continued Democratic majority in the Congress that convenes in January. Reid has visions of 60, the probably unattainable number of seats that would allow a unified Democratic majority to break any Republican-led filibuster.
For now, they and other party officials have granted Clinton a little more time to make her case, and she takes every opportunity.
Eager to capitalize on Obama's comments about small town Americans, she announced the support last Tuesday of Bill Kennedy, a commissioner in Montana's sparsely populated Yellowstone County.
Unflustered, Obama countered 24 hours later with an announcement that 25 of the 35 Democratic members of the Legislature in predominantly rural South Dakota were for him.
"I know he's a Christian. I'm a Christian," said one of them, Dale Hargens, the state House leader.
He resides in Miller, S.D., population 1,650.

2008-04-06T16:23:00.004-04:00

Two Moses' in the Holy Land

CLick here: Charlton Heston dies at 84

2008-04-05T16:54:00.007-04:00

All about the Benjamin

I have been watching the HBO Films mini-series "John Adams" in which patriot, philosopher and inventor Benjamin Franklin is portrayed.

I was reminded by the show that ol' Ben had a randy side to him as well. Just thought I'd enlighten those who aren't familiar with that side of him.

From the History Channel:

Benjamin Franklin was a member of the original British Hellfire Club. Meetings of The Hellfire Club were originally held in London's George and Vulture Inn and then at Medmanham Abbey.

Rumors of the questionable activities of the members caused the group to move into the West Wycombe caves. It is believed they continued to perform mock religious rituals and participated in sexual debauchery wearing masks and gothic robes.

The only actually documented sightings of the Hellfire Club's activities occurred several times on the River Thames. Dressed as monks, the group would board a boat with prostitutes dressed as nuns, to engage in sexual activities under the full moon as the boat drifted down the Thames.

"PLUMP BELOW THE WAIST"

Ben also wrote "Reasons to Marry Older Women" In which he extols the virtues of enjoying mature women. Source: Advice to a Young Man (Philadelphia, June 25,1745)

They are smart.

"Because they have more Knowledge of the world, and their Minds are better stored with Observations; their Conversation is more improving, and more lasting agreeable."

They are GOOD.
"Because when Women cease to be handsome, they study to be good. To maintain their Influence over Men, they supply the Diminution of Beauty by an Augmentation of Utility. They learn to do a thousand Services, small and great, and are the most tender and useful of all Friends when you are sick. Thus they continue amiable. And hence there is hardly such a thing to be found as an old Woman who is not a good Woman."

No more kids.
"Because there is no hazard of children, which irregularly produced may be attended with much inconvenience."

They are sensible.
"Because through more Experience they are more prudent and discreet in conducting an Intrigue to prevent Suspicion. The Commerce with them is therefore safer with regard to your reputation; and with regard to theirs, if the Affair should happen to be known, considerate People might be rather inclined to excuse an old Woman, who would kindly take care of a young Man, form his manners by her good Councils, and prevent his ruining his Health and Fortune among mercenary Prostitutes."

They are not afraid of the dark.
"Because in every Animal that walks upright, the Deficiency of the Fluids that fill the Muscles appears first in the highest Part. The Face first grows lank and wrinkled; then the Neck; then the Breast and Arms; the lower parts continuing to the last as plump as ever; so that coving all above with a Basket, and regarding only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two Women to know an old one from a young one. And as in the Dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of Corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal and frequently superior; every Knack being by Practice capable of improvement.

Sin
"Because the sin is less. The Debauching of a Virgin may be her Ruin, and make her Life unhappy."

They have their own life.
"Because the Compunction is less. The having made a young Girl miserable may give you frequent bitter Reflections; none of which can attend making an old Woman HAPPY."

They know a good thing.
"8th and lastly. They are so grateful!!!"

Source: Advice to a Young Man (Philadelphia, June 25,1745)

2008-03-05T02:29:00.004-05:00

Opiate For the Mrs.

When laws are broken, somebody's got to be punished. In the case of Cindy McCain--wife of 2008 GOP Presidential nominee John McCain--that somebody is Tom Gosinski

By Jeremy Voas and Amy Silverman Originally Published: September 8, 1994 in the Phoenix New Times

You're U.S. Senator John McCain, and you've got a big problem.Your wife, Cindy, was addicted to prescription painkillers. She stole pills from a medical-aid charity she heads and she used the names of unsuspecting employees to get prescriptions.

The public is about to find out about it.Until now, you've managed to keep it all quiet. When Tom Gosinski, a man your wife fired, sued for wrongful termination and threatened to expose the whole sordid story, you didn't hesitate to call in the big guns.

John Dowd, the attorney who got you out of your Keating Five mess, worked on getting your wife a sweetheart deal with federal prosecutors. He also made Gosinski's lawsuit go away.

He didn't stop there.To help maintain your reputation and discredit your wife's accuser, Dowd called Maricopa County Attorney Richard Romley and complained that Gosinski was trying to extort money. Romley, your Republican ally, promptly launched an extortion investigation.

But now New Times makes a public records request for documents in the extortion case. It's only a matter of days before the story gets out.
Here's what the senator does.He calls in another big gun, political strategist Jay Smith, who conceives a rather remarkable plan.

On August 19--just three days before the records are to be made public--Smith parades your wife before a select group of journalist friends. She tells a tale of pain and triumph, and, incredibly, all the reporters agree to sit on the story until August 22. When Cindy McCain says her confession is intended to quell rumors and to inspire other druggies to turn their lives around, the journalists lap it up.

They write about her "bravery." The first round of stories is one-sided. There is no mention of Tom Gosinski or Romley's extortion investigation.

But after a week, there is no glossing over huge gaps in the image that has been spun for the public:
• Cindy McCain lied about drug treatment she claims to have undergone. Although she told reporters she went into a residential drug treatment program earlier this year, she told investigators she had treatment during 1991 and 1992. Whom did she lie to--investigators or reporters?

• If Cindy McCain did undergo treatment before 1994, as she told investigators, the senator's claim that he didn't learn of his wife's addiction until this January simply defies credibility.

• Cindy McCain and Jay Smith lied about her status with federal prosecutors. She told a Tucson reporter she had already completed a pretrial diversion program. Smith told another reporter that the case had come to "resolution." In fact, Cindy McCain hasn't even been accepted into a diversion program.

• Jay Smith misled the Arizona Republic when he said that Gosinski had, in an act of retribution, tipped federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents after failing to get a cash settlement. In fact, Gosinski was talking to the DEA 11 months before he ever filed his wrongful termination claim.

• Tom Gosinski no longer has a civil lawsuit against Cindy McCain. It died of neglect this summer.
While the stories told by the senator, his wife and his hired guns are rife with inaccuracies and inconsistencies, everything Tom Gosinski says seems to check out.
John and Cindy McCain are now attempting to return to lives of privilege and prestige. If she gets into a diversion program and lives by its rules, she'll have no criminal record.

Meanwhile, one volunteer doctor who wrote prescriptions at Cindy McCain's behest is under investigation. He could lose his license.

And Tom Gosinski, the man who knew too much, is under criminal investigation, working two jobs and trying to put his life back together.

From September 1991 to January 1993, Tom Gosinski was the director of government and international affairs for the American Voluntary Medical Team, a nonprofit organization headed by Cindy Hensley McCain.

Gosinski says McCain started behaving erratically in the summer of 1992. He says he and other AVMT staff members became convinced she was addicted to the prescription narcotics Percocet and Vicodin. They believed she was obtaining these drugs illegally in the names of her employees and the public charity she founded.

Gosinski's multiple claims--the knowledge of which, he says, led McCain to fire him in January 1993--were central to a federal investigation, a civil lawsuit, the extortion investigation and, finally, a statewide media circus.

FOR MORE ON THIS: Click Here

2008-01-30T13:06:00.000-05:00

Brother, can you spare a dime?

Click center arrow for story:

2008-01-11T12:58:00.000-05:00

Old Terrorists Only, Please

Americans born after Dec. 1, 1964, will have to get more secure driver's licenses in the next six years under ambitious post-9/11 security rules to be unveiled Friday by federal officials.
The Homeland Security Department has spent years crafting the final regulations for the REAL ID Act, a law designed to make it harder for terrorists, illegal immigrants and con artists to get government-issued identification. The effort once envisioned to take effect in 2008 has been pushed back in the hopes of winning over skeptical state officials.
Even with more time, more federal help and technical advances, REAL ID still faces stiff opposition from civil liberties groups.
To address some of those concerns, the government now plans to phase in a secure ID initiative that Congress passed into law in 2005. Now, DHS plans a key deadline in 2011 _ when federal authorities hope all states will be in compliance _ and then further measures to be enacted three years later, according to congressional staffers who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because an announcement had not yet been made. DHS officials briefed legislative aides on the details late Thursday.
Without discussing details, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff promoted the final rules for REAL ID during a meeting Thursday with an advisory council.
"We worked very closely with the states in terms of developing a plan that I think will be inexpensive, reasonable to implement and produce the results," he said. "This is a win-win. As long as people use driver's licenses to identify themselves for whatever reason there's no reason for those licenses to be easily counterfeited or tampered with."
In order to make the plan more appealing to cost-conscious states, federal authorities drastically reduced the expected cost from $14.6 billion to $3.9 billion, a 73 percent decline, according to Homeland Security officials familiar with the plan.
The American Civil Liberties Union has fiercely objected to the effort, particularly the sharing of personal data among government agencies. The DHS and other officials say the only way to make sure an ID is safe is to check it against secure government data; critics like the ACLU say that creates a system that is more likely to be infiltrated and have its personal data pilfered.
In its written objection to the law, the ACLU claims REAL ID amounts to the "first-ever national identity card system," which "would irreparably damage the fabric of American life."
The Sept. 11 attacks were the main motivation for the changes.
The hijacker-pilot who flew into the Pentagon, Hani Hanjour, had a total of four driver's licenses and ID cards from three states. The DHS, which was created in response to the attacks, has created a slogan for REAL ID: "One driver, one license."
By 2014, anyone seeking to board an airplane or enter a federal building would have to present a REAL ID-compliant driver's license, with the notable exception of those more than 50 years old, Homeland Security officials said.
The over-50 exemption was created to give states more time to get everyone new licenses, and officials say the risk of someone in that age group being a terrorist, illegal immigrant or con artist is much less. By 2017, even those over 50 must have a REAL ID-compliant card to board a plane.
Among other details of the REAL ID plan:
_The traditional driver's license photograph would be taken at the beginning of the application instead of the end so that should someone be rejected for failure to prove identity and citizenship, the applicant's photo would be kept on file and checked in the future if that person attempted to con the system again.
_The cards will have three layers of security measures but will not contain microchips as some had expected. States will be able to choose from a menu which security measures they will put in their cards.
Over the next year, the government expects all states to begin checking both the Social Security numbers and immigration status of license applicants.
Most states currently check Social Security numbers and about half check immigration status. Some, like New York, Virginia, North Carolina and California, already have implemented many of the security measures envisioned in REAL ID. In California, for example, officials expect the only major change to adopt the first phase would be to take the photograph at the beginning of the application process instead of the end.
After the Social Security and immigration status checks become nationwide practice, officials plan to move on to more expansive security checks, including state DMV offices checking with the State Department to verify those applicants who use passports to get a driver's license, verifying birth certificates and checking with other states to ensure an applicant doesn't have more than one license.
A handful of states have already signed written agreements indicating plans to comply with REAL ID. Seventeen others, though, have passed legislation or resolutions objecting to it, often based on concerns about the billions of dollars such extra security is expected to cost.

2008-01-08T21:32:00.001-05:00

Papa Smurf or X-Man?

The Amazing Blue Man

2008-01-08T07:27:00.000-05:00

Screw the peanuts, give me some ass!

Federal air marshals charged a Seattle-area man with groping a female passenger aboard a United Airlines flight that the pilot diverted to Pittsburgh because of the disturbance.
Michael Lamar Holland, 46, appeared before a magistrate on Monday on a charge of abusive sexual contact, according to Ted Hresko, special agent in charge of the Pittsburgh air marshals' office.
Holland had been chatting with a 39-year-old woman Sunday on United Flight 917, which was bound for Seattle from Dulles International Airport near Washington D.C., he said.
"The next thing you know, he's groping her," Hresko said. "The flight attendants asked our (air marshals) to get involved."
A witness saw Holland stroking the woman's hair while she was trying the sleep, according to an affidavit filed with the court. Moments later, Holland fondled the woman who repeatedly objected and tried to get away from him, the affidavit said.
Holland was handcuffed by air marshals and taken to an empty seat in another part of the plane. The pilot opted to divert the flight to Pittsburgh so Holland could be removed, Hresko said.
"I think I'm still in a bit of shock," the woman who made the accusations told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review on Monday.
United Airlines officials did not immediately return a call for comment.
The flight left Dulles carrying 182 passengers at 6:08 p.m. and landed in Pittsburgh about an hour later. Pittsburgh airport officials said the flight continued on to Seattle at 9:35 p.m.
Holland was released on bond and the court was to appoint an attorney for him before he returns for a Jan. 7 court appearance, said Margaret Philbin, spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Pittsburgh. Holland was held overnight in the Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh prior to appearing before the magistrate, Hresko said.
Holland did not appear to be intoxicated when he was taken into custody Sunday night, Hresko said.
"There was no alcohol on his breath, and when he was interviewed he said he hadn't had a drink for five years," he said. "We have no reason to believe that he was drunk or on any kind of narcotic."
Abusive sexual contact is a federal misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in prison and $1,000 fine, Hresko said.

2007-12-08T14:15:00.000-05:00

That's a spicy meatball!

A counterterrorism detective who says his failed drug test came because his wife had spiked his meatballs with marijuana has filed a lawsuit to get his job back.

Anthony Chiofalo asked the court to declare that his firing in August from the New York Police Department was unreasonable and unconstitutional, to declare that a damning hair sample was improperly taken and to order his rehiring with back pay plus interest, seniority and all benefits.

Chiofalo, a 22-year veteran assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, was suspended without pay in November 2005 after a random drug test found marijuana in his system. He denied using drugs and demanded a hearing.

During an investigation, Chiofalo's wife, Catherine Chiofalo, said she secretly put enough marijuana for about six cigarettes in her meatball recipe in July 2005, hoping a failed blood test would force him to retire, court papers say.

Catherine Chiofalo, according to court papers, testified at the hearing that she "just wanted my husband not to die of a heart attack or get killed. I wanted him to be around to help raise my son."

The couple later took and passed lie-detector tests about how the marijuana was ingested, Anthony Chiofalo's court papers say.

Chiofalo says his wife had marijuana at home because she used it to relieve nausea caused by medications she took for back pain. He said he did not know where she got it.
An administrative judge recommended that Chiofalo be reinstated. But police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, who has the last word on firings, rejected the recommendation and fired Chiofalo.

A police department spokesman, John Kelly, said in an e-mailed comment on Chiofalo's firing, "The officer's excuse was not credible."

2007-12-01T16:55:00.000-05:00

Hold the Battering Ram

Detroit-- Police used a battering ram to break down the door of an Eastpointe apartment after its occupants refused to pay for a delivery of pizza, ribs, chicken and shrimp valued at $17.18.

A woman was later arrested on suspicion of felony larceny.

"We take this kind of stuff seriously. It is a crime," said Eastpointe Detective Lt. Leo Borowsky. "These (delivery) people are on business and if you steal from them, we're going to prosecute."

According to Eastpointe police, a 21-year-old deliveryman arrived at the apartment in the 16400 block of Nine Mile with the combo meal order from Happy's Pizza about 7 p.m. Wednesday. The door was answered by a woman later identified as Jessica Gray, 19.

Gray told the delivery man she ordered the food and took the meal -- along with a large soft drink. Instead of paying, however, she slammed the door on the delivery person, police said. Occupants inside the apartment -- five females from age 14 to 21 -- yelled insults and threats when the delivery person didn't leave, police said.

"She was rough when she took it from him," Borowsky said. "And she was large enough where he didn't want to fight her."

The police were called, and according to a police report, officers "could hear the occupants laughing and whispering inside but refusing to answer the door. The officers advised the occupants that if they refused to come to the door, it would be opened by force."

Police broke down the door with a battering ram. Gray was identified as the person who took the meal from the hands of the deliveryman. Police recovered rib bones, chicken bones and shrimp tails as evidence.

Gray was arrested and arraigned Thursday in Eastpointe District Court on a felony charge of larceny from a person.

She remains in custody on a $5,000 bond.

2007-11-02T02:05:00.001-04:00

THE COLBERT RETORT...

(Nov. 2007) Stephen Colbert’s satirical run for the presidency has run into its first roadblock — his bid to be on the ballot in the South Carolina Democratic presidential primary was rejected on Thursday.

The party’s executive council voted 13-3 to refuse Colbert’s application for a spot on the ballot. “The general sense of the council was that he wasn’t a serious candidate and that was why he wasn’t selected to be on the ballot,” said Joe Werner, the party’s director.

“There was discussion — I wouldn’t call it a heated debate — but there was discussion about it.”

There is no appeal process, Werner said, adding that the party will certify its ballot as final later Thursday with the South Carolina State Election Commission. The Democrats had to decide whether they considered Colbert to be a bona fide Democrat who is nationally viable and has spent time campaigning in the state. A South Carolina-based lawyer who was working to get Colbert’s name on the Democratic ballot could not immediately be reached for comment, nor could members of the executive council that made the decision.

Colbert could still run as an independent in the general election, though he’d have to collect 10,000 signatures to get on the ballot, said Chris Whitmire, a spokesman for the State Election Commission. Colbert’s candidacy posed a tricky question for the Democratic Party executive council, which has to approve all candidates for the party’s ballot.

If it allowed Colbert to appear as a presidential candidate on their ballot, it would generate attention that might swell the party’s ranks and coffers by attracting previously unaffiliated voters.

But it likely would also attract allegations it was helping Colbert, the host of the popular faux-news program “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central, make a mockery of the election system. On the flip side, by rejecting Colbert, the council might satisfy purists but be scorned as killjoys by others.Members of the executive council expressed a range of similar sentiments before the vote, according to a CNN story.

It quoted council member Waring Howe Jr. saying Colbert would appear on the party’s ballot “over my dead body.” Many members of the executive council likely voted against giving Colbert a spot on the ballot because they have allegiances to specific candidates, said former South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges, a Democrat who knows many council members. “There are various candidates who don’t get the joke in the Democratic Party and who, for whatever reasons, want to keep him off the ballot,” said Hodges, who signed a petition supporting Colbert’s candidacy. “I personally think he doesn’t hurt any of them.

He brings a sense of levity to politics that’s needed, and the people in South Carolina would enjoy it. We probably would have some people participate who otherwise would not do so.”

Hodges, who served from 1999 until 2003, met Colbert at a recent party and said, “I even offered myself up as a vice president. I told him that he could think of me as Dick Cheney but as a better shot,” presumably making a crack about Cheney’s infamous hunting incident.

Less than one hour before a noon deadline, Colbert filed to get on the ballot. He submitted a $2,500 filing fee — paid with a personal check from Colbert — and a letter explaining to the committee why he wanted to run, said Werner. “It is a very, very nice letter.

If you’re from South Carolina, this is going to play a role in the decision, I’m sure,” Werner said before the meeting. Another issue the council may have considered: The state Democratic Party has to pay the state a $20,000 fee for each name it places on the ballot. The council did grant a spot on the party’s ballot to former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel, whose presidential campaign barely registers in most polls and who the Democratic National Committee has barred from participating in official debates.

Also getting approval at Thursday’s meeting: Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, Barack Obama of Illinois, Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Joe Biden of Delaware and former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio and Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico.

Colbert brought his “campaign” to South Carolina last week, speaking at events Saturday and Sunday, attracting a college crowd of about 1,000 people at the latter. On his show last month, Colbert announced he would run on both the Democratic and Republican primary ballots in his native state of South Carolina.

But the fee to apply to get on the Republican ballot was $35,000, while Democrats asked for only a $2,500 fee or the signatures of 3,000 registered South Carolina voters on a petition. Colbert had posted a downloadable copy of the Democratic Party’s petition on a bare-bones campaign website, www.colbert08.org. Though Colbert submitted petitions, Werner said they were unnecessary because he paid the filing fee. He added that he did not think Colbert had collected 3,000 valid signatures. “There are some names on the petition that are interesting names,” Werner said, including Hodges'.

Ironically, even though he likely won’t be on the Democratic ballot, his effort brought him at least halfway to being considered a real candidate under federal election laws. The laws impose strict rules on anyone who raises or spends more than $5,000 to promote a candidacy. If Colbert hits that threshold, whether his campaign was intended as a joke or not, he’d have 15 days to form a campaign committee and file a statement of candidacy with the FEC.

2007-10-11T01:56:00.000-04:00

HAPPY HALLOWEEN,

BWAH-HAHAHAHA!!!

Check out the Bollywood version of "Thriller"

Click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtJRNyPK-lc

2007-08-27T09:59:00.000-04:00

He's still out there...

The hunt for bin Laden.

By Evan Thomas/Newsweek

Sept. 3, 2007 issue - The Americans were getting close. It was early in the winter of 2004-05, and Osama bin Laden and his entourage were holed up in a mountain hideaway along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Suddenly, a sentry, posted several kilometers away, spotted a patrol of U.S. soldiers who seemed to be heading straight for bin Laden's redoubt. The sentry radioed an alert, and word quickly passed among the Qaeda leader's 40-odd bodyguards to prepare to remove "the Sheik," as bin Laden is known to his followers, to a fallback position. As Sheik Said, a senior Egyptian Qaeda operative, later told the story, the anxiety level was so high that the bodyguards were close to using the code word to kill bin Laden and commit suicide. According to Said, bin Laden had decreed that he would never be captured. "If there's a 99 percent risk of the Sheik's being captured, he told his men that they should all die and martyr him as well," Said told Omar Farooqi, a Taliban liaison officer to Al Qaeda who spoke to a NEWSWEEK reporter in Afghanistan.
The secret word was never given. As the Qaeda sentry watched the U.S. troops, the patrol started moving in a different direction. Bin Laden's men later concluded that the soldiers had nearly stumbled on their hideout by accident. (One former U.S. intelligence officer told NEWSWEEK that he was aware of official reporting on this incident.)
And so it has gone for six years. American intelligence officials interviewed by NEWSWEEK ruefully agree that the hunt to find bin Laden has been more a game of chance than good or "actionable" intelligence. Since bin Laden slipped away from Tora Bora in December 2001, U.S. intelligence has never had better than a 50-50 certainty about his whereabouts. "There hasn't been a serious lead on Osama bin Laden since early 2002," says Bruce Riedel, who recently retired as a South Asia expert at the CIA. "What we're doing now is shooting in the dark in outer space. The chances of hitting anything are zero."
How can that be? With all its spy satellites and aerial drones, killer commandos and millions in reward money, why can't the world's greatest superpower find a middle-aged, possibly ill, religious fanatic with a medieval mind-set? The short answer, sometimes overlooked, is that good, real-time intelligence about the enemy is hard to come by in any war, and manhunts are almost always difficult, especially if the fugitive can vanish into a remote region with a sympathetic population. (Think how long—five years—it took the FBI to track down Eric Rudolph, the Atlanta Olympic bomber, in the wilds of North Carolina.) That said, the U.S. government has made the job harder than necessary. The Iraq War drained resources from the hunt, and some old bureaucratic bugaboos—turf battles and fear of risk—undermined the effort. The United States can't just barge into Pakistan without upsetting, and possible dooming, President Pervez Musharraf, who seems to lurch between trying to appease his enemies and riling them with heavy-handed repression.
The story of the search for the men known to American spies and soldiers as high-value targets one and two (HVT 1 and HVT 2)—Osama bin Laden and his possibly more dangerous No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri—is a frustrating, at times agonizing, tale of missed opportunities, damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't choices, and outright blunders. It has been related to NEWSWEEK by dozens of American, Pakistani and Afghan military and intelligence officials, as well as a few Qaeda sympathizers like Omar Farooqi. Capturing bin Laden "continues to be a huge priority," says Frances Fragos Townsend, President George W. Bush's chief counterterror adviser. It may be true, as Townsend points out, that Qaeda leaders do not have anything like the safe haven they enjoyed in Afghanistan before 9/11. But it is also true that Al Qaeda has been reconstituting itself in the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and that the terrorist organization is determined to stage more 9/11s, and maybe soon. "We have very strong indicators that Al Qaeda is planning to attack the West and is likely to attack, and we are pretty sure about that," says retired Vice Adm. John Redd, chief of the National Counterterrorism Center, which coordinates all U.S. intelligence in the so-called Global War on Terror (GWOT). Hank Crumpton, who ran the CIA's early hunt for bin Laden in 2001-02 as deputy chief of the agency's counterterrorism center and recently retired as the State Department's coordinator of counterterrorism, says, "It's bad; it's going to come."
Before 9/11, the hunt for bin Laden was marked by a certain tentativeness, an official reluctance to suck America into the dirty business of political assassination or to get U.S. troops killed. Within days after 9/11, President Bush was vowing to capture bin Laden "dead or alive," and Cofer Black, the CIA's counterterror chief at the time, was ordering his troops to bring back bin Laden's head "in a box." (In fact, CIA operatives in Afghanistan requested a box and dry ice, just in case.) With old-fashioned derring-do, CIA case officers, carrying millions of dollars, choppered into Afghanistan to work with tribesmen to drive out Al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts. The CIA's alacrity caused some heartburn at the Pentagon. According to Bob Woodward's "Bush at War," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld steamed impatiently while the military seemed to dither, stymied by weather and fussing with complex backup and rescue arrangements before the brass would commit any troops.
Rumsfeld's foot-stamping was rewarded. By mid-October, CIA case officers and Army, Navy, and Air Force Special Operations units were working together in unusual harmony, using high-tech air support and, at one point, mounting what Rumsfeld gleefully called "the first cavalry charge of the 21st century" to kill, capture or chase away thousands of jihadists. The Taliban fled for the hills. Bin Laden, it seemed, would be cornered. Indeed, on Dec. 15, CIA operatives listening on a captured jihadist radio could hear bin Laden himself say "Forgive me" to his followers, pinned down in their mountain caves near Tora Bora.
As it happened, however, the hunt for bin Laden was unraveling on the very same day. As recalled by Gary Berntsen, the CIA officer in charge of the covert team working with the Northern Alliance, code-named Jawbreaker, the military refused his pleas for 800 Army Rangers to cut off bin Laden's escape. Maj. Gen. Dell Dailey, the Special Ops commander sent out by Central Command, told Berntsen he was doing an "excellent job," but that putting in ground troops might offend America's Afghan allies. "I don't give a damn about offending our allies!" Berntsen yelled, according to his 2005 book, "Jawbreaker." "I only care about eliminating Al Qaeda and delivering bin Laden's head in a box!" (Dailey, now the State Department's counterterror chief, told NEWSWEEK that he did not want to discuss the incident, except to say that Berntsen's story is "unsubstantiated.")
Berntsen went to Crumpton, his boss at the CIA, who described to NEWSWEEK his frantic efforts to appeal to higher authority. Crumpton called CENTCOM's commander, Gen. Tommy Franks. It would take "weeks" to mobilize a force, Franks responded, and the harsh, snowy terrain was too difficult and the odds of getting bin Laden not worth the risk. Frustrated, Crumpton went to the White House and rolled out maps of the Pakistani-Afghan border on a small conference table. President Bush wanted to know if the Pakistanis could sweep up Al Qaeda on the other side. "No, sir," Crumpton responded. (Vice President Dick Cheney did not say a word, Crumpton recalled.) The meeting was inconclusive. Franks, who declined to comment, has written in his memoirs that he decided, along with Rumsfeld, that to send troops into the mountains would risk repeating the mistake of the Soviets, who were trapped and routed by jihadist guerrilla fighters in the 1980s (helped out, it should be recalled, with Stinger missiles provided by the CIA).
To catch bin Laden, the CIA was left to lean on local tribesmen, a slender reed. NEWSWEEK recently interviewed two of the three tribal chiefs involved in the operation, Hajji Zahir and Hajji Zaman. They claimed that the CIA overly relied on the third chieftain, Hazrat Ali—and that Ali was paid off (to the tune of $6 million) by Al Qaeda to let bin Laden slip away. Ali could not be reached for comment. But Crumpton, who admits that he has no hard evidence, told NEWSWEEK he is "confident" that a payoff allowed Al Qaeda to escape. Unsure which side would win, some tribesmen apparently hedged by taking money from both sides.
Bin Laden was not so much seeking refuge as coming home when he disappeared into the jagged peaks along the frontier of northwest Pakistan. He had always liked hunting and horseback riding in the mountains, and had even built himself a crude swimming pool with a spectacular view near Tora Bora. Though a wealthy Saudi, bin Laden had long since learned to live close to the ground, abjuring his followers to learn to survive without modern comforts like plumbing or air conditioning.
Local Pashtun tribesmen were not about to turn bin Laden in for a reward, even a $25 million one. The strictly observed custom of defending guests, part of an ancient honor code called Pashtunwali, insulated Al Qaeda. The Pakistan central government could do little to crack this social system. The wilds of the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) have been virtually ungovernable for centuries. The British Raj failed, and the Pakistan government never tried very hard, leaving administration up to federally appointed tribal agents and law enforcement in the hands of a local constabulary of dubious loyalty. In the 1980s, during the insurrection against Soviet rule in Afghanistan, the tribal agencies were a kind of staging area for jihadists like bin Laden. Saudi money built hundreds of madrassas—fundamentalist schools that radicalized local youth—and Pakistani intelligence (the ISI) formed alliances with the jihadists to subvert the Soviet-backed Afghan regime.
The American effort to chase bin Laden into this forbidding realm was hobbled and clumsy from the start. While the terrain required deep local knowledge and small units, career officers in the U.S. military have long been wary of the Special Operations Forces best suited to the task. In the view of the regular military, such "snake eaters" have tended to be troublesome, resistant to spit-and-polish discipline and rulebooks. Rather than send the snake eaters to poke around mountain caves and mud-walled compounds, the U.S. military wanted to fight on a grander stage, where it could show off its mobility and firepower. To the civilian bosses at the Pentagon and the eager-to-please top brass, Iraq was a much better target. By invading Iraq, the United States would give the Islamists—and the wider world—an unforgettable lesson in American power. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was on Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board and, at the time, a close confidant of the SecDef. In November 2001, Gingrich told a NEWSWEEK reporter, "There's a feeling we've got to do something that counts—and bombing caves is not something that counts."
When Franks refused to send Army Rangers into the mountains at Tora Bora, he was already in the early stages of planning for the next war. By early 2002, new Predators—aerial drones that might have helped the search for bin Laden—were instead being diverted off the assembly line for possible use in Iraq. The military's most elite commando unit, Delta Force, was transferred from Afghanistan to prep for the invasion of Iraq. The Fifth Special Forces Group, including the best Arabic speakers, was sent home to retool for Iraq, replaced by the Seventh Special Forces Group—Spanish speakers with mostly Latin American experience. The most knowledgeable CIA case officers, the ones with tribal contacts, were rotated out. Replacing a fluent Arabic speaker and intellectual, the new CIA station chief in Kabul was a stickler for starting meetings on time (his own watch was always seven minutes fast) but allowed that he had read only one book on Afghanistan. One slightly bitter spook, speaking anonymously to NEWSWEEK to protect his identity, likened the station chief to Captain Queeg in "The Caine Mutiny." (CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano insists "station chiefs go through a rigorous, multistep selection process, designed to get leaders with the right skills in the right places.")
The frustrations of the snake eaters are well illustrated by the recollections of Adam Rice, the operations sergeant of a Special Forces A-Team working out of a safe house near Kandahar in 2002. With his close-cropped orange hair and beard, wearing a yellow Hawaiian shirt around the safe house, Rice was not the sort to shine at inspections at boot camp. But he had lived in Kabul as a child (his father had been a USAID worker) and he had been a Special Forces operator for more than two decades. In July 2002, a CIA case officer told Rice that a figure believed to be Mullah Omar, the one-eyed chief of the Taliban, had been tracked by aerial drone to a location in the Shahikot Valley, a short flight to the north. The Taliban chief and his entourage would be vulnerable to a helicopter assault, but the Americans had to move quickly.
Rice was not optimistic about getting timely permission. Whenever he and his men moved within five kilometers of the safe house, he says, they had to file a request form known as a 5-W, spelling out the who, what, when, where and why of the mission. Permission from headquarters took hours, and if shooting might be involved, it was often denied. To go beyond five kilometers required a CONOP (for "concept of operations") that was much more elaborate and required approval from two layers in the field, and finally the Joint Special Operations Task Force at Baghram air base near Kabul. To get into a fire fight, the permission of a three-star general was necessary. "That process could take days," Rice recalled to NEWSWEEK. He often typed forms while sitting on a 55-gallon drum his men had cut in half to make a toilet seat. "We'd be typing in 130-degree heat while we're crapping away with bacillary dysentery and sometimes the brass at Kandahar or Baghram would kick back and tell you the spelling was incorrect, that you weren't using the tab to delimit the form correctly."
But Rice made his request anyway. Days passed with no word. The window closed; the target—whether Mullah Omar or not—moved on. Rice blames risk aversion in career officers, whose promotions require spotless ("zero defect") records—no mistakes, no bad luck, no "flaps." The cautious mind-set changed for a time after 9/11, but quickly settled back in. High-tech communication serves to clog, rather than speed the process. With worldwide satellite communications, high-level commanders back at the base or in Washington can second-guess even minor decisions.
In Pakistan, President Musharraf was wary of his American allies in the War on Terror. In 2002, he told a high-ranking British official: "My great concern is that one day the United States is going to desert me. They always desert their friends." According to this official, who declined to be identified sharing a confidence, Musharraf cited the U.S. pullouts from Vietnam in the 1970s, Lebanon in the 1980s and Somalia in the 1990s. Still, he quickly gave the Americans considerable leeway to operate inside Pakistan. He did not demand prior approval of Predator attacks, and he allowed "hot pursuit" for American forces five kilometers or more inside the border. (With a grim laugh, one U.S. officer interviewed by NEWSWEEK recalled watching on Predator video as insurgents fled across the border and stopped on what they thought was safe terrain—until a U.S. Special Ops helo reared up and blasted them.) Musharraf told the Americans he understood that they would do what they had to do to attack high-value targets, although he indicated the Pakistanis might have to issue pro forma denunciations. His one request, said a U.S. official who dealt directly with the Pakistani leader, was that bin Laden not be captured alive and be brought to trial in Pakistan.
The cooperation has resulted in some high-profile successes. Working with the Pakistani police, the CIA and FBI helped to capture "KSM"—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Al Qaeda's operations chief and mastermind of the 9/11 attacks—at a house in Quetta, a city near the Afghan border, on March 1, 2003. Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, a Qaeda communications expert, was picked up in Karachi in 2004 (and released, to the immense frustration of American officials, last week by the Pakistan government without ever having been formally charged with a crime). KSM's successor as chief of operations, Abu Faraj al-Libbi, was seized in May 2005. Qaeda officials who came down out of the mountains to make contact with jihadists risked exposure, especially if they were at all careless about using cell phones that could be tracked.
But the mountains themselves have remained virtually impenetrable. After Al Qaeda twice tried to assassinate Musharraf in 2003, the Pakistani leader decided he had no choice but to go after the jihadists in their lair. Generals blustered about trapping bin Laden between a "hammer" (American forces operating out of Afghanistan) and an "anvil" (the Pakistani military). Pakistani tanks and helicopter gunships began to rumble and roar into the northwestern territories. But despite periodic claims of success, the fighting on the ground went badly. The Pakistani forces had been trained to fight on the plains of Punjab against the Indian Army. They were not well suited for guerrilla war and sustained heavy casualties. More broadly, questions remain about the loyalties of the Frontier Constabulary, the militia responsible for security in the tribal areas. A Western military officer with experience on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border says that FC troops often fail to warn U.S. units of militants crossing over into Afghanistan; in May 2006 one FC soldier even shot and killed an American officer in Pakistan. Musharraf can rightly claim to have purged the ISI of agents with lingering Taliban and Qaeda sympathies, but the Western officer claims that several of those former agents are now unofficially aiding their former charges.
The Iraq War, meanwhile, has proved to be a black hole for the Americans, devouring men and matériel and absorbing the attention of the brass in Washington. In 2005, the CIA gave President Bush a secret slide show on the hunt for bin Laden. The president was taken aback by the small number of CIA case officers posted to Afghanistan and Pakistan. "Is that all there are?" the president asked, according to a former intelligence official, who declined to be identified discussing White House meetings. The CIA had already embarked on a "surge" of sorts, and doubled the number of officers in the field. But many were inexperienced and raw recruits, and they produced little improvement in "actionable" intelligence.
CIA officials at Langley were anxiously watching their flank. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld, vexed by the CIA's inability to provide actionable intel, had been pushing to get Special Forces into clandestine operations and gathering of human intelligence (HUMINT). Under an "execute order" approved by President Bush in July 2005, the Pentagon identified 350 Qaeda targets globally, including senior leaders, recruiters, financiers and couriers, according to a high-ranking Defense official who, like others quoted anonymously in this story, did not wish to be identified revealing such matters. The CIA naturally resisted this invasion of its turf. Congressmen and ambassadors grumbled that they were being kept in the dark about the military's black ops.
The Defense official claims that "the Horn of Africa has been a fruitful place" for missions. But when it came to going after the top Qaeda leadership along the Pakistan border, the military was still dogged by poor intelligence and risk aversion. These two chronic failings combined to undo what may have been America's best shot at killing or capturing some top Qaeda leaders since the escape at Tora Bora.
In late 2005, the CIA and the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command came up with intelligence that gave them "80 percent confidence" that either Zawahiri, bin Laden's longtime sidekick, or another of bin Laden's highest-ranking lieutenants would be attending a meeting in a small compound just inside Pakistan along its northern border with Afghanistan. "This was the best intelligence picture we had ever seen" about a so-called HVT, said a former intelligence official who was involved in the operation. The spooks and Special Operations Forces planned an airborne commando raid that could have been produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. Some 30 U.S. Navy SEALs were to be flown by C-130 transport planes, under cover of darkness, to a spot high above the Afghan side of the Pakistan border, about 30 to 40 miles away from the target. The SEALs would jump from the plane and use parasails—motorized hang gliders—to fly through the night sky, across the mountains, to a secret staging point close to the compound. They would attack the target and capture Zawahiri or whatever other HVTs were on the premises, killing them only if necessary. The SEALs would then spirit their captives away to another staging point, where two CH-53 helicopters awaited to airlift them back to Afghanistan.
The plan was enthusiastically endorsed by the then CIA Director Porter Goss and JSOC Commander Stanley McChrystal, who was a major at the time. But when the Pentagon's civilian leadership, including Rumsfeld and his principal intelligence adviser, Under Secretary Steve Cambone, pored over the plan, they began raising questions. Was the intelligence good enough to justify the risk to U.S. troops and the possible blowback on Musharraf if the mission went bad? "Can't you get the confidence up to 100 percent?" Pentagon officials asked their CIA counterparts, eliciting frustrated eye-rolling in return, according to the former intelligence officer interviewed by NEWSWEEK. According to a former Defense official close to Rumsfeld, a familiar Pentagon planning maxim had already kicked in: the more uncertain the intelligence, the more precautions the military wants to take. The top brass was asking, were two helicopters really sufficient to extract the SEALs? What if one was shot down or had mechanical problems? Images of the failed 1980 Iranian hostage-rescue mission came to mind. Or Rangers fighting their way through Mogadishu to rescue trapped commandos in the 1993 fiasco known as Blackhawk Down. In order to bolster the rescue part of the plan, JSOC proposed sending in teams of Army Rangers to add security. As discussions continued, the size of the Ranger team grew to 150, about five times the size of the initial commando force.
To Rumsfeld, the operations began to seem more and more like an invasion of Pakistan. Musharraf would have to be consulted, or at least informed. But did that mean his unreliable intelligence service, the ISI, would leak the plan to Al Qaeda? The official close to Rumsfeld says that the SecDef became increasingly wary as he weighed potential risk against reward.
But time was of the essence. The C-130s were circling over the border, the SEALs were ready to jump, while Rumsfeld was still deliberating with the top brass. CIA Director Goss went to the Pentagon to implore him to go ahead. At the last minute Rumsfeld called off the raid. "Believe me, if this had been easy and there were certainty, we'd have done this," says the former Rumsfeld adviser. "There just wasn't certainty."
Certainty is painfully hard to achieve in this hunt, despite America's enormous technological edge. American spy satellites, designed for the cold war against the Soviets, don't have antennas sensitive enough to pick up cell-phone or handheld radio transmissions. So Special Ops teams—known as Task Force Orange—have slipped into the tribal areas to plant listening devices on various peaks. The listening posts have been useful, in several cases pinpointing the locations of Qaeda operatives. But the jihadists have adapted, and use codes to disguise the kind of actionable information the hunters need.
The common saying among intelligence and Special Ops officers is that all the thugs have been killed by now—but the smart guys have survived, and become smarter. Predators have scored some hits, including killing Abu Hamza Rabia, another Qaeda operations chief (al-Libbi's successor), in 2005. (To cloak American involvement, the Pakistani government cooked up the story that Rabia had blown himself up experimenting with explosives.) But the jihadists have learned to avoid the drones: it's easier to hear a Predator, which sounds like a loud model airplane, in the Pakistani hill country than in an Iraqi city. And when the Americans shoot and miss, the consequences can be grave. In January 2006, a Predator fired a Hellfire missile at a house in Damadola, Pakistan, where Zawahiri was supposed to be meeting. Once again, the intel was unreliable: Zawahiri was not there, but more than a dozen civilians were killed, and the survivors were enraged.
By 2006, Musharraf was weary. American focus on Afghanistan was fading; the war in the territories was costly in terms of lives and public sentiment; the jihadists were starting to spill into the cities. The president of Pakistan decided to cut his losses, and in September 2006, his local governor signed a peace deal with tribal militants.
Al Qaeda did not hesitate to assert itself. Jihadists paraded brazenly in Waziristan, dragging "criminals" through the streets. American satellite photos soon showed single files of foreign jihadists, their feet sometimes wrapped in plastic bags against the snow, crossing the Pakistani border into Afghanistan. An Algerian man known as "the Bombmaker," a seasoned veteran of Iraq, set up shop to teach jihadists how to build IEDs. Local militants ruled through assassination and intimidation. The experienced Western military official interviewed by NEWSWEEK described how militants killed a petty merchant and his entire family simply for selling watermelons to the local constabulary. "Imagine what they'd do to the guy who sells out Osama," said the officer.
In late 2006 and early 2007, anxious top American policymakers, including Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, traveled to Pakistan to persuade Musharraf to renew his military operations along the frontier. "There is no question the peace agreement failed Pakistan and it failed us," said Townsend, the White House counterterror chief. The Pakistani president was in a difficult position, risking his unpopular and shaky regime if he cracked down on the jihadists and risking it if he didn't. Once more, Sisyphus began to roll the stone up the hill: Musharraf ordered 20,000 soldiers to march into the territories, to reinforce the 80,000 who were already there. But "I don't think the Pakistani military is going to move wholeheartedly against Al Qaeda," a knowledgeable Pakistani military source told NEWSWEEK. "I don't think their hearts are in it." The tough talk by American politicians calling for unilateral action is not helping matters, says retired Pakistani Army Lt. Gen. Talat Masood, a well-regarded moderate. "It's very humiliating for civilians and the military alike," he says. (Mahmud Ali Durrani, Pakistan's ambassador to Washington, insisted that Pakistan is doing more than the United States to attack Al Qaeda. "The threat to us is far greater," he said.)
U.S. Special Operations Forces have had considerable practice by now chasing jihadists in Iraq and Afghanistan. The JSOC headquarters at Baghram is so full of high-tech listening and tracking equipment that it resembles "something out of 'Star Wars'," says a Pentagon official who has seen the place. In recent months, says John Arquilla, a Special Ops expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., the U.S. military has achieved a 100-to-1 kill ratio (100 dead guerrillas to every American). But by calling in airstrikes, the Americans also kill a lot of civilians, which breeds more jihadists. And according to Thomas Johnson, also at the Naval Postgraduate School, the military's continued fixation on body counts and kill ratios is irrelevant and even counterproductive. "When you kill a person it's a multiplication factor. It demands that all the male relatives join the fight."
The Americans will not find top Qaeda leaders unless they can win the trust of local tribesmen who may know their whereabouts. Johnson, an Afghan expert, spent last February at Forward Operating Base Salerno near the Pakistan border, briefing commanders on the tribal custom of Pashtunwali. He says only about 5 percent of American troops in Afghanistan ever leave their bases—a statistic, he believes, that explains better than any other why Americans are struggling in the battle for intelligence. He says most soldiers in Afghanistan don't know simple phrases like "stop," "go," or "put your hands up." Americans continually make cultural blunders, like using canine units to search people's homes (dogs are considered unclean in Muslim culture). Meanwhile the Taliban works at winning the trust and confidence of villagers—or intimidating them. "They go into villages and say, 'The Americans have the watches but we have the time. We might not come back in a week or a year, but you bet your britches we'll eventually come back'," says Johnson.
The American military, understandably, puts a high priority on "force protection," but as a practical matter that means staying behind armor and barricades. Rice, the A-Team sergeant stuck in his safe house near Kandahar, recalls that his team's frustration peaked when a memo came down from the brass at Baghram, ordering men not to initiate fire fights and even not to use words like "death" and "destruction" in their CONOPS. Among Rice's men, it became known as the "limp dick memo." (The Defense Department declined to comment specifically on Rice's memories.)
The American military is forever caught in a dilemma. During the early days of the cold war, the old boys who ran the CIA began to reason that when it came to fighting against an underhanded foe in a battle for global survival, the rules of fair play they had learned as schoolboys no longer applied. If the communists fight dirty, we must, too, they rationalized—or freedom would perish. This ends-justifying-the-means rationale led to foolish and ultimately unsuccessful assassination plots and other dirty tricks that disgraced and demoralized the CIA when the agency's so-called Crown Jewels were revealed during Watergate. After 9/11, Bush administration officials, particularly Vice President Cheney, vowed to take the gloves off against Al Qaeda. But in the aftermath of allegations of torture in secret prisons, there has been a strong push back, particularly among administration lawyers disturbed by the abuse of constitutional rights. According to knowledgeable sources, Rumsfeld's deputy for intelligence, Steve Cambone, engaged in an angry debate with the Pentagon's top lawyer, William Haynes, over the activities of U.S. Special Forces—who in the minds of some government lawyers and lawmakers have been given too much, not too little, license to roam.
The frustrations at the top are understandable. There is a certain desperate quality to the hunt for bin Laden. Some experts think he's constantly on the move; others believe he must be holed up somewhere, never using electronics, impossible to detect. After the close call in 2004, says Omar Farooqi, "the Sheik" shrank his security staff and employed only faithful Arabs. A Western military official who has worked both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border told NEWSWEEK that bin Laden may have deployed small groups of bodyguards spread along the frontier with the same "signature": small security detail, secretive, saying little to local villagers, always moving on. That's a perfect disinformation campaign, says the official. The nearby locals start whispering that bin Laden must be nearby. "Word gets around that it must have been him," he says. "We react. It throws us off the trail and makes us waste assets following bad leads. And it's a cheap and easy way to do."
No wonder the intelligence community is reaching out to anyone who can glean even a hint of bin Laden's whereabouts. As early as November 2001, John Shroder, a geographer at the University of Nebraska, found himself addressing an audience of intelligence officials, analyzing the rock formations behind bin Laden in a video released that October. About all he could do was tell the spooks that bin Laden seemed to be in the western part of Afghanistan's Spin Ghar Mountains. "We were grasping at straws," says Michael Scheuer, who was special adviser to the head of the CIA's bin Laden unit at the time. "We called in geologists. We had the Germans bring in ornithologists because they thought they heard a bird chirping on a video and wanted to see if it was particular to certain regions of South Asia." The agency enlisted doctors to look for signs of kidney disease, which bin Laden was rumored to be suffering from at the time. A Dec. 27, 2001, video, nicknamed by analysts "the Gaunt Tape," shows a haggard-looking bin Laden, who seems to be unable to move his left arm. "But the doctors couldn't pinpoint any problems with his health," says Scheuer.
CIA analysts began calling bin Laden "Elvis" because he was here, there, but really nowhere. Some wonder if he's dead. He has not issued a video since the end of 2004, and he has not been heard on an audiotape for more than a year. It is possible he is incapacitated by disease—the rumors of kidney problems persist. There have been reports that bin Laden has sought medication to be used in the terminal stages of kidney disease. But "I don't have any reason to think he's dead," says Townsend, who sees all the intelligence coming to the office of the president. "It's inconceivable to me to think that he would expire and we wouldn't have some information, intelligence, that something had happened to him."
If he is alive, there is no doubt he means to kill as many Americans as possible. "The Sheik's desire is to strike another blow at the palaces of the West," says Sheik Said, the senior Egyptian Qaeda leader. In 2003, Scheuer points out, bin Laden even managed to gain religious sanction from a radical Saudi cleric to kill "no more than 10 million Americans" with a nuclear or biological weapon.
America remains his obsession. NEWSWEEK interviewed Nasser al Bahri, who served as bin Laden's personal bodyguard for six years. Now under very loose house arrest in Yemen, the former bodyguard still reveres "the Sheik." According to al Bahri, bin Laden used to amuse himself by chanting this bit of doggerel, part of a longer poem by a jihadist poet:I am the enemy of AmericaTill this life is over and doomsday comes. It's the root and trunk of destruction,It's the evil on the branches of trees.
"The only thing that seems to rile him up is mention of America," says al Bahri. "I think from the very beginning of his childhood he hated America. I don't know why. He won't even drink a Pepsi."
Bin Laden's No. 2, Zawahiri, is just as baleful toward the United States. According to various accounts, it was Zawahiri, a well-educated Egyptian doctor, who before 9/11 persuaded bin Laden to turn his terrorist ambitions from the "near enemy" (the corrupt regimes of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt) to the "far enemy" (the United States). Zawahiri may represent more of a threat to the West than bin Laden. By taking himself off the grid, bin Laden may no longer be in operational control; capturing him might be more symbolic than significant. But meanwhile Zawahiri has become more visible. "In the past two years he has put out more than 30 messages," says Rita Katz, director and founder of the SITE Institute, which monitors jihadist Web sites. She notes that within hours of the storming of the Red Mosque by Pakistani forces, Zawahiri's response was uploaded on the Internet. "I believe he's in or near an urban area where he is able to get news and respond to issues quickly," says Katz. "In 2005, you'd still see videos with cheap fabric backdrops that rippled in the wind. Today, they seem to be using better equipment, complete with artificial backgrounds added postproduction." "Al Qaeda may have seventh-century ideas, but they have 21st-century acumen for communications," says Georgetown University terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman. "Al Qaeda has become a world brand and their videos are the juice that fueled that recognition."
The overarching question is whether Al Qaeda has the ability to strike the United States with another "spectacular" along the lines of 9/11, or possibly something worse. When the Qaeda leadership was driven into the hills in 2001, and many of their top operators were killed or captured, the jihadist movement was sustained by local wannabes. They set off bombs and blew up subways and discos from Indonesia to Britain. But they were not very high-tech, and some were klutzes, like the two mokes who last June failed to set off a pair of car bombs in London and then tried, unsuccessfully, to become suicide bombers at the Glasgow airport. (One eventually did die of his burns, but no civilians were injured when their car caught fire but failed to explode.)
When the United States struck Afghanistan in 2001, "there were probably 3,000 core Al Qaeda operatives," says Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School. "We killed or captured about 1,000; about 1,000 more ended up in distant parts of the world. And about 1,000 ended up in Waziristan. But the great terror university in Afghanistan is gone; they've relied on the Web since. They haven't had the hands-on instruction and the bonding of the camps. That's resulted in low-skill levels. Their tradecraft is really much poorer."
The danger now, says Arquilla, is that the longer the Iraq War goes on, the more skilled the new generations of jihadists will become. "They're getting re-educated," he says. "The first generation of Al Qaeda came through the [Afghan] camps. The second generation are those who've logged on [to Islamist Web sites]. The next generation will be those who have come through the crucible of Iraq. Eventually, their level of skill is going to be greater than the skill of the original generation."
It is disturbing to recall that when U.S. forces overran Qaeda training grounds, they found scientific documents discussing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. (Zawahiri is reported to have a particular interest in chem-bio.) A true weapon of mass destruction is very hard to come by, and it may be a while before the jihadists can make, steal or buy a nuclear weapon or a germ bomb capable of killing more than a few people. But dirty bombs are less difficult to craft from conventional explosives and radioactive material, the kind that can be found in the waste bins of hospitals. Crumpton recalls that Zawahiri canceled a planned attack to set off a cyanide bomb in the New York City subways in 2003. "We don't know why," says Crumpton, or what became of the team Al Qaeda recruited to stage the attack but apparently never dispatched to the United States. "You think: Why did he call it off? Where are they?"
Intelligence officials in Europe and America have spent a jittery summer seeing signs that Al Qaeda is gearing up to hit the West in some significant way. In his interview with NEWSWEEK, Admiral Redd of the National Counterterrorism Center was guarded about details. But it was clear from his comments that the terror watchers are seeing signs and hearing chatter that have put them on alert. For an attack on Europe? America? "They would like to come west, and they would like to come as far west as they can," is how Redd puts it. The intelligence community lacks specific information about the movements of terrorists, he said. "What we do have, though, is a couple of threads which indicate, you know, some very tactical stuff, and that's what—you know, that's what you're seeing bits and pieces of, and I really can't go much more into it."
Meanwhile, the hunt for bin Laden goes on. Recently, it has gone all the way back to the beginning—to the Tora Bora region. This summer, about 500 jihadists—Taliban and Al Qaeda, increasingly indistinguishable—infiltrated the area. After three American Special Forces soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in early August, the Americans launched a sweep of bin Laden's old hideout, backed by aerial strikes. Last week a NEWSWEEK reporter, led by a guide, hiked up into the mountains to visit the battlefield.
On the way up, they passed small convoys of American Humvees and Afghan National Army Ford Ranger pickups. Along the trail, past a few dozen unmarked Arab graves from the 2001 bombing, they saw bits of shrapnel, corroded bullets and scraps of military detritus, some of it quite old. Leaflets blew around. They warned the locals that American troops would hunt down people who sheltered terrorists. On the leaflets were garish pictures of evil-looking masked men with glaring white eyes; one had the word OSAMA in a red circle with a diagonal slash through it.
The NEWSWEEK reporter and his guide walked past a series of burned-out Soviet tanks, scrawled with triumphalist Arab graffiti, leftovers from the struggle against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Eventually, they came to bin Laden's old cave complex, just above a gorge known as the Malawa Valley. On a wide ledge was Osama's old swimming pool, dry now, but with its still spectacular view. There had been rumors of sightings of the Sheik and his entourage. But they were just rumors.

This story was reported by Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border; Zahid Hussain in Islamabad; Rod Nordland in Tora Bora; Mark Hosenball, Michael Hirsh, Michael Isikoff, John Barry, Dan Ephron and Eve Conant in Washington; Christopher Dickey in Paris, and Roya Wolverson in New York. It was written by Evan Thomas.

2007-08-11T14:56:00.000-04:00

THE BATTLE AT KRUGER

When there is a drought, and every animal in the jungle gathers at the only water hole available, it doesn't take much to start a fight.
Make sure to watch the whole thing...it's worth it.

And make sure to look for the special guest star...the crocodile.

2007-07-13T01:23:00.000-04:00

Bin Ladens live the good life; Make jokes about Airport Security

Click on the below link to watch a most disturbing video:

http://www.breitbart.tv/?p=2979

The capture or assasination of Osama Bin Laden has become a full-fledged joke.

In the video about Osama's son, make note of the sentence, "He's religious but not extreme, he was with his father in Afghanistan then he left and went to Saudi Arabia..."

Also make note of the quote, "I won't be using Bin Laden Name, Airport check-ins can take forever..."

The Bin Laden's are living the high life and making jokes while Bush remains friends with the family...and screws Americans.

2007-06-18T00:18:00.000-04:00

Israel Bombed By Lebanon

(6-17) JERUSALEM - Two Katyusha rockets fired from Lebanon fell on northern Israel Sunday afternoon, police and the military said. No one was hurt, but there was some damage, they said.
They were the first rockets fired from Lebanon since last summer's war between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas, when almost 4,000 rockets were fired at Israel.
Sunday's attack raised the possibility of an Israeli reprisal raid and a new flare-up between the two countries. It came as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was arriving in the United States for talks. In New York, an official with Olmert said the prime minister was briefed about the incident. "Israel will not succumb to this provocation but will monitor the situation carefully," the official said, requesting anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation, indicating that Israel would not hit back.
Al-Manar, the Hezbollah TV station in Lebanon, broadcast a denial of Hezbollah involvement in the attack.
The rocket attack came as a new defense minister, former premier and army chief Ehud Barak, was about to take over from Amir Peretz, defeated in a party primary election.
Peretz was convening military and security commanders for a meeting that was planned before the rocket attack. Security officials said they would discuss how Israel should respond.
One of the rockets hit a factory and the other hit a car. Channel 2 TV's Arab affairs analyst, Ehud Yaari, said a splinter Palestinian group in Lebanon was probably behind the attack.
In Beirut, there was no immediate comment from the Lebanese army, Lebanese security officials or the Hezbollah group.
'Heaven help us'The rockets exploded near the northern town of Kiryat Shemona, hard hit during last summer's war. The mayor of the town, Haim Barbivai, called for a tough response from both the Israeli and Lebanese government. "Heaven help us if we have another summer like the last one. That would be a tragedy," he told Channel 2.
An eyewitness told Channel 2 TV that she saw one of the rockets explode and heard the other one. Eli Bin, director of the Magen David Adom rescue service, said no one was hurt.
There was no immediate response from Israeli officials.
Area police commander Nir Mariash told Channel 2 that residents in Israel's north were not instructed to enter bomb shelters, rather, "to maintain normal life."
Channel 2 said the rocket fire came from the southern Lebanese village of Adaiseh, just across a ridge from northern Israel.
Channel 2 showed footage of a small crater in a street, and a damaged car. The station's military reporter said that based on the limited damage, the rocket was small. Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the rockets were 107mm.
A sign at a mineral water factory in the northern part of Kiryat Shemona was pockmarked by shrapnel from one of the rockets.
The 2006 war started with a cross-border raid by Hezbollah in which three Israeli soldiers were killed and two captured. Israel launched a full-scale air offensive against Hezbollah targets and Lebanese infrastructure, as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pledged to return the captured soldiers and smash Hezbollah.
The war ended inconclusively after 34 days.

2007-06-15T22:19:00.000-04:00

New Silver Surfer movie far from golden

Just saw the new Fantastic Four II; Rise of the Silver Surfer movie.

Where to begin? Let's start with the fact that they took the ever-suffering Silver Surfer; the character with godlike powers but also a poet's heart; the one soul in the entire Marvel Universe who displays the most humanity...and reduced him to a stiff CGI gimmick.

They also turned the mighty Galactus (another favorite character of mine) into an interstellar dust storm. Yes, that's right. Galactus in this movie is just so much cosmic dust, coming down the pike to destroy earth. No Watcher, either.

And Sue Storm, what have you done to yourself? Jessica Alba looks like an even more tarted-up version of Christina Aguillera in this film; complete with the collagen lips and straw-like hair of Pamela Anderson, and the (so-blue-they're-fake-looking) colored contact lenses that you might see on any light-skinned Wal-Mart checkout girl with a weave.

Also, the Fantasticar is now a Dodge product-placement (complete with the obligatory "Hemi" joke thrown in).

If you look hard enough, you will also see a "Dos Equis" beer product placement as well.

I really enjoyed the first FF feature film, but this one is an insult.

For those out there who know what I mean by this, this movie is much more Hulk than Spider man.

2007-06-08T00:10:00.000-04:00

STARE AT THE SUN AND WIN A FREE DOG...

CHELSEA – A woman facing jail time for "staring" at a police dog had charges against her dropped Monday after an Orange County prosecutor viewed videotape of the alleged crime.Jayna Hutchinson, now of Lebanon, N.H., was scheduled for a jury trial this week on a misdemeanor charge of cruelty to animals.A Vermont State Police sergeant said Hutchinson was intoxicated and stared at his police dog in a "taunting/harassing manner" last July while officers were in the process of investigating a reported melee outside a West Fairlee establishment."Prosecuting a woman for staring at a police dog is absurd," said Kelly Green, a public defender appointed by Vermont District Court in Orange County to represent Hutchinson. She likened the act to giving a police officer the finger – a form of expression protected by rights accorded under the First Amendment."After looking at the video, I did not think it was worthwhile proceeding," Orange County State's Attorney Will Porter said Tuesday.He said it would be difficult to prove that Hutchinson's behavior met the statutory standard for cruelty to animals, which in this case would have required that Hutchinson "intentionally torment(ed) or harass(ed) an animal owned … by a police department."According to an affidavit, Hutchinson approached Sgt. Todd Protzman on the night of July 31 as he and at least three other officers were investigating a fight. Hutchinson, who later registered a .218 blood-alcohol content, told Protzman she wanted to report that she had been beat up the night before by one of the men involved in the fight, according to Green.Green said the video showed Protzman mocking Hutchinson's appearance."I think his comment about Jayna's looks revealed the real reason he arrested her," Green said. "I'd venture a guess to say that if she'd been small and pretty and had been complaining of being assaulted, he may have done more to investigate her claims."Porter said he saw no indication of improper behavior by Protzman and that he was doing his best to deal with a very intoxicated person."Ms. Hutchinson was very intoxicated. Did he have some abrupt comments toward her? Yeah," Porter said. "He had some curt responses to get her out of his hair so he could attend to what he was there for."

2007-04-11T03:59:00.000-04:00

Snake Eats Man

A CREW MEMBER ON A LAND OIL RIG IN AMAZONAS WENT OUT AND TOOK A NAP. YES, A NAP. HE WAS MISSING AND THIS IS WHAT THEY FOUND.

ANYONE WANT TO GO TO THE AMAZON????

2007-03-08T02:45:00.000-05:00

GET THE BALL ROLLING!

The conviction of I. Lewis Libby on charges of perjury, making false statements and obstruction of justice was grounded in strong evidence and what appeared to be careful deliberation by a jury.

The former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney told the FBI and a grand jury that he had not leaked the identity of CIA employee Valerie Plame to journalists but rather had learned it from them. But abundant testimony at his trial showed that he had found out about Ms. Plame from official sources and was dedicated to discrediting her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. Particularly for a senior government official, lying under oath is a serious offense. Mr. Libby's conviction should send a message to this and future administrations about the dangers of attempting to block official investigations.

The fall of this skilled and long-respected public servant is particularly sobering because it arose from a Washington scandal remarkable for its lack of substance. It was propelled not by actual wrongdoing but by inflated and frequently false claims, and by the aggressive and occasionally reckless response of senior Bush administration officials -- culminating in Mr. Libby's perjury.

Mr. Wilson was embraced by many because he was early in publicly charging that the Bush administration had "twisted," if not invented, facts in making the case for war against Iraq. In conversations with journalists or in a July 6, 2003, op-ed, he claimed to have debunked evidence that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger; suggested that he had been dispatched by Mr. Cheney to look into the matter; and alleged that his report had circulated at the highest levels of the administration.

A bipartisan investigation by the Senate intelligence committee subsequently established that all of these claims were false -- and that Mr. Wilson was recommended for the Niger trip by Ms. Plame, his wife. When this fact, along with Ms. Plame's name, was disclosed in a column by Robert D. Novak, Mr. Wilson advanced yet another sensational charge: that his wife was a covert CIA operative and that senior White House officials had orchestrated the leak of her name to destroy her career and thus punish Mr. Wilson.

The partisan furor over this allegation led to the appointment of special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald. Yet after two years of investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald charged no one with a crime for leaking Ms. Plame's name. In fact, he learned early on that Mr. Novak's primary source was former deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage, an unlikely tool of the White House. The trial has provided convincing evidence that there was no conspiracy to punish Mr. Wilson by leaking Ms. Plame's identity -- and no evidence that she was, in fact, covert.
It would have been sensible for Mr. Fitzgerald to end his investigation after learning about Mr. Armitage. Instead, like many Washington special prosecutors before him, he pressed on, pursuing every tangent in the case. In so doing he unnecessarily subjected numerous journalists to the ordeal of having to disclose confidential sources or face imprisonment. One, Judith Miller of the New York Times, lost several court appeals and spent 85 days in jail before agreeing to testify. The damage done to journalists' ability to obtain information from confidential government sources has yet to be measured.

Mr. Wilson's case has besmirched nearly everyone it touched. The former ambassador will be remembered as a blowhard. Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby were overbearing in their zeal to rebut Mr. Wilson and careless in their handling of classified information. Mr. Libby's subsequent false statements were reprehensible. And Mr. Fitzgerald has shown again why handing a Washington political case to a federal special prosecutor is a prescription for excess.

Mr. Fitzgerald was, at least, right about one thing: The Wilson-Plame case, and Mr. Libby's conviction, tell us nothing about the war in Iraq.

2007-03-07T23:04:00.000-05:00

Blogger pushes envelope

He is being cast by some journalists as a young champion of the First Amendment, jailed for taking a lonely stand against heavy-handed federal prosecutors.
Josh Wolf, a 24-year-old blogger, has spent more than six months behind bars in California -- the longest contempt-of-court term ever served by someone in the media -- for refusing to turn over a videotape he shot of a violent San Francisco demonstration against a Group of Eight summit meeting. Unless a mediation session today can break the impasse, he will likely remain imprisoned at least until the current grand jury's term expires in July.
"Even in high school, he was standing up for things that weren't considered popular," says his mother, Liz Wolf-Spada.
But Wolf's rationale for withholding the video, and refusing to testify, is less than crystal clear. There are no confidential sources involved in the case. He sold part of the tape to local television stations and posted another portion on his blog. Why, then, is he willing to give up his freedom over the remaining footage?
"It's one thing to say journalists must respect promises of confidentiality they made to their sources," says Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. "It would be quite another to say journalists have a right to refuse to testify even about non-confidential sources. When something is videotaped in a public place, it's hard to see even an implied agreement of confidentiality."
In an interview with PBS's "Frontline," Wolf says: "There was a trust established between people involved in the organization that I was covering and myself . . . that what I chose to release was what I chose to release, and that I wasn't an investigator for the state."
Wolf taped the anarchists' San Francisco protest, against a G-8 summit meeting in Scotland, in July 2005. One police officer, Peter Shields, had his skull fractured by a hooded assailant with a pipe or baseball bat. Three people were charged in the attack. Police say protesters also put a mattress under Shields's police car and tried to set it on fire.
But in an unusual move, federal prosecutors took over the arson case from state authorities on grounds that San Francisco's police department receives funding from Washington. While there are no outward signs of an active probe, Luke Macaulay, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney in San Francisco, says that "the incident is under investigation so that the grand jury can determine what, if any, crimes were committed." He would not elaborate.
Martin Garbus, Wolf's attorney, says the police car received limited damage. He says Wolf "is staying in jail for close to 200 days so they can investigate who broke the taillight on a cop car." Garbus also questions why federal prosecutors are involved, adding Wolf might be protected under California's shield law for journalists if state authorities were handling the case. There is no federal shield law.
Garbus has offered to allow U.S. District Judge William Alsup to review the tape privately to buttress his client's contention that it contains only interviews with protesters who removed their masks, not evidence of a crime. Alsup, who has described Wolf as an "alleged journalist," declined.
Wolf was a student at San Francisco State who worked part time as an outreach staffer at a community college television station. He started a blog and occasionally sold videotape to news organizations.
"I would define a journalist as someone who brings news to the public," says Garbus, a noted First Amendment lawyer handling the case on a pro bono basis. "It's a definition that might cause journalists some discomfort because it opens up the gates."
But U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan says in a court filing that Wolf's resistance "is apparently fueled by his anointment as a journalistic martyr" and that he needs "to come to grips with the fact that he was simply a person with a video camera who happened to record some public events."
The day after the protest, the San Francisco Chronicle reports, Wolf referred to himself on his Web site as an "artist, an activist, an anarchist and an archivist."
Wolf has repeatedly lost in the courts, with the U.S. Court of Appeals of the 9th Circuit upholding the grand jury subpoena for his testimony. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press is among the groups that filed briefs on his behalf.
Wolf's case is the latest in a spate of prosecutions in which journalists have been threatened with imprisonment. Judith Miller, the former New York Times reporter who spent 85 days in jail for her initial refusal to testify in the Valerie Plame leak investigation, has embraced Wolf's cause. "Mr. Wolf is the latest addition to a club whose growing membership should trouble us all," Miller wrote in the New York Sun last year.
Two San Francisco Chronicle reporters, Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, avoided jail last month for refusing to testify about how they got grand jury testimony involving allegations of steroid use by baseball stars. Their source, Troy Ellerman, a lawyer for an executive with the laboratory under investigation, was revealed when he pleaded guilty to contempt of court and obstruction of justice. The Chronicle has drawn some criticism for protecting Ellerman because he charged that prosecutors had leaked the testimony and said the publicity would deprive his client of a fair trial.
Wolf's case has attracted far less attention because he is not affiliated with any news outlet. Wolf-Spada, who says her son grew up with her in "a liberal Democratic household" after her divorce, urged members of Congress during a Washington visit to press the Justice Department to withdraw the subpoena.
"Truthfully, I don't think it's even about the tape or the police car," she says. "They want him to testify so they can develop a list of who protests in San Francisco."

2007-03-07T00:47:00.000-05:00

For an Opaque White House, A Reflection of New Scrutiny

By Peter Baker of the Washington Post

Shortly before he was inaugurated for his second term, President Bush was asked why no one was held responsible for the mistakes of the first. "We had an accountability moment," he replied, "and that's called the 2004 elections."
Two years and a stinging midterm election later, Bush is having another accountability moment, but this one isn't working out as well. The conviction of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby has coincided with a string of investigations into the mistreatment of injured soldiers and the purge of federal prosecutors, putting the operations of his administration into harsh relief.
The timing may be coincidental, but the confluence of events has revived a pattern largely missing through the six years of Bush's presidency, in which high-level officials accused of wrongdoing are grilled, fired and sometimes even jailed. For an administration that has been unusually opaque and mostly insulated from aggressive congressional oversight and prosecutorial investigation, it may seem like a gut-churning harbinger.
While the president's aides watch uncomfortably as one hearing after another plays out on Capitol Hill, the Libby conviction hit a nerve inside the White House. The onetime chief of staff to Vice President Cheney was well liked in the West Wing, and the notion of him going to prison dispirited the colleagues glued to televisions as the verdict was announced. Bush watched in the Oval Office with aides Joshua B. Bolten and Dan Bartlett, then instructed Bartlett to put out a statement expressing sadness for Libby.
"This has been a huge cloud over the White House," said Ed Rogers, a Republican lobbyist close to the Bush team. "It caused a lot of intellectual, emotional and political energy to be expended when it should have been expended on the agenda. They're never going to fully recover from this. If you're looking at legacy, this episode gets prominently mentioned in every recap of the Bush administration, much like Iran-contra and Monica Lewinsky."
The Libby case never reached the level of those scandals, of course, but it became a proxy for many in Washington eager to re-litigate the origins of the Iraq war. If Libby lied about his role in the CIA leak case, critics eagerly used that to reinforce their argument that Bush led the nation to war on false pretenses, in effect attacking the centerpiece of his presidency.
"This verdict brings accountability at last for official deception and the politics of smear and fear," said Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), Bush's Democratic challenger in 2004.
While the White House publicly withheld comment, some Bush advisers expressed outrage, seeing a double standard and citing the documents-smuggling case of former Clinton national security adviser Samuel R. Berger. "Scooter didn't do anything," said former Cheney counselor Mary Matalin. "And his personal record and service are impeccable. How do you make sense of a system where a security principal admits to stuffing classified docs in his pants and says, 'I'm sorry,' and a guy who is rebutting a demonstrable partisan liar is going through this madness?"
A senior official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the president ordered aides not to comment publicly, disputed the idea that Bush has escaped scrutiny in the past. "I don't buy the conventional wisdom that we haven't had accountability in the past," he said. "Is it different because Democrats are in charge? Of course. . . . But that's fine, that's a reality that we're prepared to deal with."
No one has been quicker to declare the return of accountability than Democrats, who are using their newfound subpoena power to sharp effect in hauling up Pentagon officials to answer for poor conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and in giving fired U.S. attorneys a venue to blame their dismissals on administration politics. In two months, Democrats have held 81 hearings on Iraq. "This is just the beginning," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. "What a difference a year makes."
But accountability politics can also be dangerous to the touch. Washington became consumed during the presidency of Emanuel's onetime boss, Bill Clinton, whose administration came under scrutiny of at least seven independent counsels and even more Republican congressional committees. The atmosphere was so toxic that Clinton adviser Paul Begala put an attorney on retainer before even joining the White House staff.
The Republican-led impeachment of Clinton for lying under oath about his affair with Lewinsky backfired politically, and Washington grew so leery that it let the independent-counsel law lapse. When Bush was elected along with a Congress controlled by the same party, a new era was ushered in. With occasional exceptions, such as the commission that looked into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Bush largely escaped the klieg-light atmosphere. No senior officials were fired for the missing weapons in Iraq or the Abu Ghraib abuse. Three officials blamed by some for mishandling Iraq were given Medals of Freedom.
That began changing after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans in 2005 and congressional Republicans investigated the administration's slow response. The change accelerated with the Democratic victory in the November elections. The next day, Bush fired Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld after months of deteriorating conditions in Iraq. Rumsfeld's successor, Robert M. Gates, has proved willing to fire others for mismanaging Walter Reed.
The risk for Democrats would be overplaying the accountability hand. Their attempts to impose limits on Bush's ability to fight the war have collapsed repeatedly and left them unable to fashion a coherent approach to the most serious issue in the country. Some Republicans suggested that the public could tire of repeated hearings such as those held this week and write them off to partisanship.
"They bring up sort of old Washington," said former Bush aide Nicolle Wallace. "The Democrats have to walk a fine line and be careful. People don't want to turn on the TV and see every story being about the obstruction of people trying to do things. . . . The people who will stand out in Washington are the ones who will look forward."
Two people looking forward with choices to make are Bush and Libby. The president came under instant pressure from conservatives to pardon his former aide. "Justice demands that Bush issue a pardon and lower the curtain on an embarrassing drama that shouldn't have lasted beyond its opening act," National Review said within hours of the verdict.
And Libby may have to decide if he has anything else to tell authorities. John Q. Barrett, an Iran-contra prosecutor who teaches at St. John's University, recalled James W. McCord Jr. in Watergate and Alan Fiers in Iran-contra, who under threat of prison recanted past versions of events. If the jury was right that Libby lied, Barrett said, "he's now sitting wherever he is with cold sweat and troubled stomach and truth that he hasn't told. . . . Whatever the chips, if he held them and didn't lay them down, this may be the moment to decide."

2007-02-28T20:14:00.000-05:00

Her tater tots are the bomb!

NAPLES, Italy -A 74-year-old Italian grandmother who bought a sack of potatoes at the her local market found a live grenade among the spuds.
"I found a bomb in the potatoes," Olga Mauriello said in a telephone interview with Reuters.
"I went to the market to buy some potatoes and that's where the bomb was. But this bomb was covered in dirt, and I put it in water and got all dirt off. And then I realized 'It's a bomb'!"
Police said the pine cone-shaped grenade, which had no pin and was still active, was the same type used by U.S. soldiers in Europe in World War Two. Authorities believe the mix-up happened at a farm in France, where the grenade was plucked from the ground along with potatoes.
To the woman's relief, police and explosives experts in the small town of San Giorgio a Cremano, near Naples, recovered the grenade and safely detonated it on Wednesday.
But Mauriello was still shaking off her close brush with death. It didn't look like a potato and it was heavier than one. But what if she had cooked it?
"If I hadn't felt its weight, I wouldn't even have realized that it was a bomb," she said.

2007-02-22T01:22:00.000-05:00

Libby's Fate In Hands Of Jury

A federal jury ended its first day of deliberations yesterday in the perjury trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby after the presiding judge urged jurors to rely on their "life experiences" in deciding whether the vice president's former chief of staff lied to investigators -- or made an honest mistake -- about his role in a CIA leak.

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton's instructions to the jury of eight women and four men reinforced the issue of the fallibility of human memory that has been central to one of Washington's most celebrated trials in years.

Prosecutors allege that Libby, then Vice President Cheney's top aide, lied to FBI agents and a federal grand jury to obscure the fact that, in the spring and summer of 2003, he aggressively sought out and shared with reporters information about Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA officer. Plame is married to former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who was emerging then as a harsh, early critic of President Bush and the Iraq war.

The only person accused in the three-year CIA leak investigation, Libby, 56, is charged with five felonies: two counts of making false statements to FBI agents, two counts of perjury and one count of obstructing justice. He is not charged with the leak itself. If convicted of all charges, he would face a potential prison term of 1 1/2 to three years under federal sentencing guidelines, prosecutors outside the case have said.

Libby's attorneys contend that Libby did not intentionally lie, but inaccurately remembered his conversations about Wilson and Plame with administration colleagues and Washington journalists.

The trial has delved deeply into a volatile period inside the White House shortly after the war began, when the administration was vulnerable to political attack because no proof had turned up of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that Bush had cited to justify the war.

Evidence and 14 days of testimony have shown that Cheney, Libby and other top administration officials sought to discredit Wilson, who was sent by the CIA to Africa in 2002 and concluded that there was no basis for reports that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear materials there.

Prosecutors have asserted that Libby told reporters and a White House press secretary about Plame as part of the campaign to tarnish her husband by suggesting that the CIA chose him for the mission because of nepotism.

Before the jurors began deliberations late yesterday morning, Walton provided them guidelines for sifting through the prosecution and defense's contradictory depictions of Libby's memory and the memories of other witnesses.

The judge instructed them to use their "common-sense experience" to assess such factors as how long people can be expected to retain clear memories, the nature of the person or event they were asked to recall, the circumstances that existed at the time and their impressions of the "memory capacity" of the people whose memories were questioned.

"Making an honest statement that turns out to be inaccurate or wrong . . . does not rise to the level of criminal conduct," Walton said. On the other hand, the judge emphasized that the jury should consider inconsistencies the prosecution cited in Libby's account of events.

The jurors have been largely attentive during weeks of complex testimony. Many have taken notes and, under a practice that Walton allows, some have questioned virtually all 19 witnesses at the end of each one's testimony.

At the outset of the trial, potential jurors were screened during lengthy questioning by both sides. Defense attorneys filtered out District residents who said they have negative opinions of the Bush administration or the war. The result is a jury that is relatively apolitical. Many of the jurors are highly educated.

Although most District residents are African American, the jury includes six white women, four white men and two black women.

Under rules Walton set yesterday, the jury will deliberate every weekday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

2007-02-22T01:15:00.000-05:00

Who says FEMA is slow?

An elderly woman, who had been living without power in her home due to hurricane damage sustained 15-years ago, finally saw the light on Friday when power to her home was restored.

What makes her story amazing is that the hurricane which put her in the dark was not Katrina or Rita -- but rather it was Andrew, which struck August 24, 1992.

No heat when the winter chill settled over South Florida.
No air conditioning when the mercury climbed into the 90's and the humidity clung to 100% . Not one hot shower at home in nearly 15 years. Every morning started with an icy blast.

Norena, who didn't want her full name used because she is embarrassed by her situation, lives in Cutler Bay, Florida and her home was severely damaged when Hurricane Andrew slammed South Miami-Dade in August, 1992.

Like many people after that horrific storm, she had a problem with an unscrupulous contractor, and when the money from the insurance settlement ran out, the contractor did too, leaving her home half-repaired and not up to code, which meant it would not have the electricity connected.

She didn't have the money to complete the work, and she didn't have anyplace else to go."It just never got done, and the money was gone, so I couldn't do a lot of things to allow me with Dade county to get my power back on," she said.So she lived with it. She celebrated the new millennium with one tiny lamp and a single burner. On the 10th anniversary of Andrew in 2002, while her neighbors celebrated their recovery, she was still living in the disaster.

Electrical contractor Kent Crook was amazed when he saw how she managed to get a tiny amount of electricity into the house for a Spartan existence."She has extension cords running into her house, plugged into a tiny little refrigerator and a cook top, and a lap or two in front of her house," he marveled.

Somehow, her situation fell through the cracks. Her neighbors never noticed her near-pioneer lifestyle, and County code inspectors never caught the violations which prevented her from connecting up the power.

A tip got the city and Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez involved, along with a visit from Crook's company. A few hours of work and an inspection was all it took to get the power flowing again to her home. When darkness fell Friday night, she no longer had to huddle in a single dimly lit room.Something as simple as getting light by flicking a wall switch, something most people do a dozen times a day without thinking, almost overwhelmed Norena.

"It's hard to describe having it come on, to switch on. It's overwhelming," she said.Now, her house is flooded with light, and the hot water is flowing through the pipes for the first time since that terrible night in August, 1992 when the wind shook her home to its foundations and set her life on end.Her plan is to let the water get hot, really hot, and then take her first bubble bath, in her own bathtub, in a decade and a half.While the power is back on, and Norena is again living in the 21st century, many problems remain.

Her home still needs repair, and her overgrown yard is a danger in future hurricanes.Volunteers say they'll be back to help clean up the yard and assist with repairs, but for now Norena is happy for one thing.

She can say "Let there be light", and there will be.

2007-02-19T01:09:00.000-05:00

Clinton, Dean and Griffith

Hillary Clinton so far is dominating the early polls for the Democratic Presidential nomination. Looking across the political landscape it seems this race resembles the Bill Clinton/Bob Dole match up of 1996.
If the theory is that the South still has crucial sway over the Presidential election, pundit Dick Morris may be right that no one can stop Senator Clinton in her quest for the White House in 2008.
Unless of course she stops herself.
Howard Dean’s quest for the Presidency was cut short by a noise canceling microphone. Unknown to Dean at the time, the microphone filtered out the crowd noise so his speech sounded manic to Television viewers. Some question whether he was setup by CNN or others.
One of the great movies of the late 1950’s was “A Face in the Crowd”, the story of the fictional Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, played by Andy Griffith. Rhodes by luck and talent is propelled from radio to Television and becomes a star. Along the way he betrays the people who believe in him and helped him to the top.
In (perhaps) a Howard Dean moment, Rhodes is betrayed by Marcia Jeffries, played by Knoxville Tennessee's own Patricia Neal.
At the end of a “Lonesome” Rhodes Television broadcast while the announcer does a voice over, Rhodes is bragging to the control room how he controls the viewers and mocks them as “idiots,” “morons,” and “guinea pigs.”
Rhodes does not know that Marcia Jeffries has turned on his microphone and the viewing audience can hear his mockery of them.

His career is finished.

Is it possible that the only person in America that can keep Hillary Clinton from the White House is herself?

We'll see.

2007-02-14T10:34:00.000-05:00

More bathroom humor...

Need to sit on the toilet for hours at a time?
Roto-Rooter's "Pimped out John" is outfitted with every feature a modern king or queen could want in a bathroom throne, and underneath all of the trappings, is a superb Kohler® toilet (see link to photo below).

This amazing commode is fully loaded with the following "luxury enhancements":
•
Philips™ 20-inch LCD TV and Star Wars DVD
•
Xbox™ 360 gaming system
•
Philips™ DVD player
•
Gateway® EMachine™ laptop computer with fully articulated robot arm
•
iPod™ with stereo docking station equipped with toilet paper dispenser
•
Roto-Rooter "emergency" button
•
Tivo™ recorder
•
Avanti™ refrigerator with beer tap, stocked with drinks and snacks
•
Magazine rack and subscriptions to Sports Illustrated, ESPN and GQ
•
Bike pedal exerciser
•
Cup warmer / cooler

YOU could win one!
CLICK HERE FOR PHOTO AND CONTEST ENTRY FORM: http://www.rotorooter.com/john/index.php

2007-02-12T23:41:00.000-05:00

PISSY CONVERSATION

2-12-07 (SANTA FE)
New Mexico is taking its fight against drunken driving to men's restrooms around the state.

The state has ordered 500 talking urinal cakes that will deliver a recorded anti-DWI message to bar and restaurant patrons who make one last pit stop before getting behind the wheel.

"Hey there, big guy. Having a few drinks?" a female voice says a few seconds after an approaching male pulls out his pecker and sets off a motion sensor in the device. "It's time to call a cab or ask a sober friend for a ride home," coos the sultry voice.

Transportation Department spokesman S.U. Mahesh said the urinal cakes are a way to reach one group that's a target of state safety campaigns. Men commit about three times as many drunken-driving infractions as women.

The devices, manufactured by New York-based Healthquest Technologies Inc., were invented by Richard Deutsch. He said there's no other device like it on the market.

"The idea is based on the concept that there is no more captive audience than a guy standing at a urinal with his johnson in his hand," Deutsch said. "You can't look right and you can't look left; you've got to look at the ad."

Public awareness campaigns in New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Australia have used the devices, as have commercial advertisers.

In New Mexico, the device uses the state DWI slogan "You drink, you drive, you lose."

Some Albuquerque bars installed the devices this week, and the state plans to distribute them to Santa Fe bars and restaurants as well as establishments in Farmington, Gallup and Las Cruces.

The state spent $21 for each talking urinal cake for the pilot program but will ask bars and restaurants to pay for future orders if the idea catches on, Mahesh said.

The cakes have enough battery power to last about three months. After that, some unlucky soul will have to change them.

2007-02-12T03:29:00.000-05:00

Honeybee barbeque

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp72gXkYJIw

2007-01-31T08:06:00.000-05:00

Glowing squirrel: Bad

Squirrel is off the menu. New Jersey officials are warning residents near a toxic waste dump in the northern part of the state to restrict how much squirrel they eat, two months after a lead-contaminated animal was found in the area.
A letter sent to Ringwood residents, many of whom hunt, advised them that children should not eat squirrel more than once a month, pregnant women should limit their intake to twice a month, and adults should not eat squirrel more than twice a week.
“We’ve known for a long time something was wrong here, we just didn’t know what it was,” resident Myrtle Van Dunk told The Record of Bergen County for Thursday’s newspapers.
Residents and many environmental activists believe the lead comes from toxic waste, including paint sludge, dumped in the area by the Ford Motor Co. during the 1960s and early 1970s, from its now-closed car manufacturing plant in Mahwah.
Ford is removing thousands of tons of waste from a 500-acre former mining property in the Ringwood area. The site was recently relisted on the federal Superfund list, a ranking of the country’s worst environmental dump sites, after multiple cleanups failed to remove all of the sludge.
This is the first time the state has issued warnings on how much squirrel people should eat, Tom Slater, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Senior Services told the newspaper; the department, along with the state Department of Environmental Protection, issued the warning. Lead, which is harmful even in small amounts, can damage the nervous system, red blood cell production and the kidneys.
The Ringwood area is home to many members of the Ramapough Mountain Indian tribe who hunt and fish in the area.

2007-01-23T23:12:00.000-05:00

Libby: I was sacrificed!

WASHINGTON (Jan. 23) - White House officials tried to sacrifice vice presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to protect strategist Karl Rove from blame for leaking a CIA operative's identity during a political storm over the Iraq war, Libby's lawyer said Tuesday.
After Libby complained "they want me to be the sacrificial lamb," Vice President Dick Cheney personally intervened to get the White House press secretary to publicly clear Libby in the leak, defense attorney Theodore Wells said in his opening statement at Libby's perjury trial.
The new details of behind-the-scenes conflict at top levels of the Bush White House, along with some previously unseen blunt language from Cheney, were the high points of a dramatic day in which the prosecutor and the defense dueled in multimedia statements to the jury.
Wells also disclosed that Libby was preoccupied with many national security issues in July 2003, including possible al-Qaida threats to assassinate President Bush on a trip to Africa and the possibility al-Qaida had brought anthrax into the United States. Wells read about these threats from a court-approved summary of classified information to argue that Libby could honestly have forgotten what he told reporters about the CIA operative.
Earlier in the day, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald told the jury Libby lied to the FBI and a grand jury about his contacts with reporters concerning CIA officer Valerie Plame to save his job and avoid political embarrassment. In a rarely seen move, Fitzgerald played four short tape recordings of Libby's statements to the grand jury that he said were lies.
The grand jury was investigating the leak of Valerie Plame's name and CIA employment, which came shortly after her husband, ex-ambassador Joseph Wilson, had become one of the most prominent critics of the months-old war. On July 6, 2003, Wilson alleged in a New York Times article and on NBC-TV's "Meet the Press" that Bush had told the nation Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa for nuclear weapons although the administration had known for some time that story was untrue.
Both sides agreed the Bush White House was consumed with responding to the allegation it had lied to push the nation into war. Wells said Cheney also was concerned that Wilson indicated Cheney was responsible for sending Wilson to Africa to check the uranium story and that his office surely had seen Wilson's report. He said Cheney ordered Libby to rebut that allegation to reporters.
The leak of Wilson's wife's name came in a Robert Novak column July 14, 2003, that said she had arranged for her husband to go on the Africa trip.
When the White House press secretary publicly absolved Rove in the leak but later refused to clear Libby, Libby sought Cheney's help in defending himself, Wells said.
"They're trying to set me up. They want me to be the sacrificial lamb," Wells said, recalling Libby's end of the conversation. "I will not be sacrificed so Karl Rove can be protected."
And why wouldn't they, Wells asked the jury, because Rove was Bush's chief political adviser, "the man most responsible for making sure the Republican Party stayed in office. He had to be protected."
"Libby was an important staffer," Wells thundered. "But Karl Rove was the lifeblood of the Republican Party."
Cheney shared Libby's fears and came to his aid, Wells told the jury. He promised to introduce a blunt handwritten note that Cheney took at the meeting with Libby.
"Not going to protect one staffer and sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others," Cheney's note said, according to Wells.
The note's heading suggested Cheney intended to relay this message to Bush, Wells said. Shortly thereafter, the White House publicly absolved Libby in the leak.
Wells patiently explained that Rove was the one Cheney thought was being protected and Libby was the one being sacrificed. He added that the request to stick his head in a meat grinder was Cheney's request that Libby call reporters to rebut Wilson's allegations.
And Wells said that by the "incompetence of others," Cheney meant the CIA, which he blamed for letting Bush use the uranium story in his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union speech. Wells noted that Cheney, Libby and White House aides devoted considerable time after Wilson's New York Times article on July 6 to persuading CIA Director George Tenet to issue a public statement taking the blame for the reference.
Large portions of Wells' two-hour, 15-minute opening were devoted to suggesting that reporters, including Judith Miller of The New York Times, Tim Russert of NBC and Matt Cooper of Time magazine, could be honestly mistaken when they testify later about their conversations with Libby in 2003. Miller and Cooper have said Libby confirmed that Wilson's wife worked at CIA. Russert says her name never came up, but Libby told investigators he thought Russert said many reporters knew she worked for CIA and he responded he couldn't confirm her CIA employment.
Wells ended with new drama about Libby's national security job. His court-approved list of issues and briefings Libby got in the week after Wilson's column also included negotiations with Turkey over the U.S. capture of Turkish troops in Iraq, possible plans by an Iraq-based terror group to work with al-Qaida on developing a U.S. presence, possible al-Qaida plots to assassinate Bush and his top aides, possible al-Qaida airplane, car bomb and tank truck attacks on U.S. targets.
Libby's talk with Russert came near the end of this week.
"He is an innocent man and he has been wrongly and unjustly and unfairly accused," Wells concluded.
Fitzgerald displayed a computerized video calendar to illustrate his claim that Libby learned from five people _ including Cheney and CIA and State Department officials _ that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and then discussed that fact with reporters and others in the White House. He said it was implausible that Libby would have forgotten this by the time he talked with Russert as Libby had claimed to investigators.
The government's first witness, former State Department No. 3 official Marc Grossman, testified that he was the first to tell Libby that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA _ on June 11, 2003, or June 12, 2003. Grossman acknowledged that the night before he spoke to the FBI, he was visited by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who confessed he had been the first to leak Plame's CIA employment to a reporter. Wells told the judge he would try to suggest that Armitage may have improperly influenced Grossman's account.
Wells' assault on Grossman's credibility foreshadowed future attacks on government witnesses, including former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer. Wells brought out in his opening that Fleischer, who also talked to reporters about Valerie Plame, refused to testify to the grand jury until he received immunity from prosecution.

2007-01-03T01:15:00.000-05:00

NEXT...!BAGHDAD, Iraq (Jan. 2) - Iraq's prime minister ordered an investigation Tuesday into Saddam Hussein's execution to try to uncover who taunted the former dictator in the last minutes of his life, and who leaked inflammatory footage taken by camera phone of the hanging. The unofficial video, on which at least one person is heard shouting "To hell!" at the deposed president and Saddam is heard exchanging insults with his executioners, dealt a blow to Iraq's efforts to prove it was a neutral enforcer of the law. Instead, the emotional, politicized spectacle raised tensions between the Shiite majority and Sunni Arabs who ran the country until their benefactor, Saddam, was ousted in the U.S.-led invasion of 2003. A prosecutor who saw the hanging said some of the taunting came from guards outside the execution chamber, not the masked ones who put the noose around Saddam's neck. The Iraqi government did not say what, if any, punishment would await anyone uncovered in its probe of guards and 14 selected witnesses who attended the execution at a Baghdad prison before dawn Saturday. Some were high-ranking officials or people affiliated with radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a political ally of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who had wanted to speed up the timing of the execution after an appeals court upheld the death sentence. The grainy video appeared on the Internet late Saturday. Al-Jazeera television also showed the footage at that time, saying it was exclusive. The footage contained audio of people taunting Saddam with chants of "Muqtada," a reference to al-Sadr. Also on the video, Saddam accuses his tormentors of being unmanly in scenes that stop just short of pandemonium. The video was inflammatory not only because the chanting was clearly audible, but also for showing the ghastly spectacle of Saddam plummeting through the gallows trapdoor and dangling in death, his vacant eyes open and his snapped neck almost at a right angle to the line of his shoulders. In contrast, the official video showed masked executioners placing a heavy noose around Saddam's neck, without a soundtrack. Another official video shows Saddam wrapped in a burial shroud after his death, though his head and neck are exposed as proof of his identity. Munqith al-Faroon, an Iraqi prosecutor who helped convict and sentence Saddam to death for the killings of 148 people in the town of Dujail in 1982, said he was a witness to the hanging. He said two top officials had their mobile phones with them - even though the government-approved witnesses had been searched before boarding U.S. helicopter that carried them from the Green Zone to the site of the execution, their cell phones placed in a box for safekeeping. Al-Faroon did not name the officials who had their phones and said he did not know whether the Iraqi government had approved the mobile phone video. "It might be for money. Maybe he decided from the start to film it and to sell it to the satellite TV channels," al-Faroon said in an interview with TV2, a Danish television network. "I do not think that an investigation is necessary if they only filmed it for money. The execution was not a secret. The filming was not against the law." Still, the prime minister "ordered the formation of an investigative committee in the Interior Ministry to identify who chanted slogans inside the execution chamber and who filmed the execution and sent it to the media," said Sami al-Askari, a political adviser to the Iraqi leader. Al-Faroon said he vigorously protested when people began to shout just before Saddam was executed, and that shouts of "Muqtada" came from guards outside the execution chamber. "I am certain that the chanting at the moment of the execution was not organized, and that those chanting were not being ordered to do so," al-Faroon told TV2. "The guards made a decision to do so by themselves. This is the truth. I shouted at them and ordered them to keep silent. My voice is very clear in the recording." In the leaked video, one voice called: "Allah, bless those who pray for Muhammad and his descendants. Allah, pray for Muhammad and his descendants and may they bring us their help soon and curse their enemies and back their son Muqtada, Muqtada, Muqtada." At that point Saddam asked, "Is this manly?" A voice responded, "To hell." Another voice called out, "Long live Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr" - a reference to the Dawa Party founder and Shiite cleric who was executed along with his sister by Saddam in 1980. Then, a voice purportedly belonging to al-Faroon said: "Please no, this man is being executed, please no, I beg you no." After Saddam was dropped through the trapdoor, a voice is heard shouting, "Don't rush, come back!" That suggests people were moving toward the body. However, the leader of Saddam's clan has said the body showed no signs of mistreatment after it was returned to Saddam's hometown Sunday. It was unclear how many guards attended the execution. On the official video, seven people were on the gallows platform with Saddam. They included five guards in masks, a man without a mask whose face was blurred over, and a photographer. Sadiq al-Rikabi, an adviser to the prime minister, told the U.S.-financed Al-Hurra television that he does not know who leaked the video and that such an act "is wrong and should be investigated, and I agree that cellular telephones were taken from witnesses before they boarded the helicopter" that headed to the execution site. "I am full of hope that the results of the investigation will be announced, and the person who did this act should pay a price," al-Rikabi said. Still, the results of some Iraqi government probes in the past have not been released. The Vatican's official newspaper on Tuesday decried media images of the hanging as a "spectacle" violating human rights and harming efforts to promote reconciliation in Iraq. Within the country, Saddam's execution and the way it was conducted have provoked anger among Sunni Muslims, who have taken to the streets in mainly peaceful demonstrations across the country. On Monday, a crowd of Sunni mourners in Samarra marched to a bomb-damaged Shiite shrine and were allowed by guards and police to enter the holy place carrying a mock coffin and photos of the former dictator. The protest took place at the Golden Dome, a Shiite shrine bombed by Sunni extremists 10 months ago. That attack triggered the current cycle of retaliatory attacks between Sunnis and Shiites. On Tuesday, police in Baghdad said they had found 45 bodies scattered around the city. Many had been blindfolded, handcuffed and shot, apparent victims of sectarian violence.

2006-12-31T14:38:00.000-05:00

Workers Sacrifice Camel at Turkish Airport

A group of Turkish aviation technicians were so happy to be rid of the last of a batch of troublesome planes that they sacrificed a camel on the tarmac of Istanbul's Ataturk International Airport.
The image of an airport worker raising a large piece of bloodied camel meat on the tarmac on Tuesday adorned the front pages of several newspapers, drawing the wrath of transportation authorities, who promptly sacked the a senior technician on Wednesday.
Under pressure from the European Union, Turkey has introduced fines for those who slaughter animals outside special facilities. The sacrificing of a camel at Turkey's busiest airport was regarded as a disgrace.
"This is a grave incident. Is it compatible with the image of a modern Turkey, trying to enter the EU?," said opposition lawmaker Huseyin Guler on Wednesday.
Transportation Minister Binali Yildirim condemned the incident.
"It is not possible to approve of such an incident," said Yildirim.
Turkish Airlines authorities launched an investigation and sacked chief technician Sukru Can for approving the sacrifice.
Turks traditionally sacrifice animals as an offering to God for when their wishes come true, in addition to sacrificing animals during the Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday, a ritual commemorating the biblical account of God's provision of a ram for Abraham to sacrifice as he was about to slay his son.
"We are happy to be rid of planes which frequently broke down," the daily Cumhuriyet quoted Can as saying after the sacrificing ceremony.
The crew sacrificed the camel to mark the return of the last of 11 four-engined Avro RJ 100 jets leased from Britain to Turkish Airlines 13 years ago.

Workers Fry Turkey at D.C. Airport

WASHINGTON - The air traffic controllers union is blasting its managers at Washington's
Dulles Airport for deep-frying a turkey during a holiday party last week in offices adjacent to the Dulles terminal and just a few hundred feet from the control tower.
An airport fire marshal made managers turn off the cooker.
Kieron Heflin, a union representative, complained in a letter to management: "It has ... come to my attention that the Dulles Management decided it would be a nice idea to DEEP FRY A TURKEY in the Dulles administrative quarters, surrounded by carpet, linoleum, an airport, aircraft, a control tower, thousands if not millions of gallons of jet fuel and thousands of passengers and employees."
A spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration said managers were using an indoor electric fryer, not the more dangerous gas-fired devices. But outside safety experts said that even indoor fryers can be dangerous, especially in such environments as an office surrounded by jet fuel.

2006-11-26T22:59:00.000-05:00

1st Black Prez?
Obama vs. Osama?

Democrat Barack Obama has sought the advice of top campaign workers in Iowa and has established a seedling support network in this state as he prepares to decide whether to seek the 2008 presidential nomination.The first-term Illinois senator has surrounded himself with advisers rich in experience in Iowa, the leadoff caucus state.Obama has vaulted to the top tier among prospective candidates for the Democratic Party's nomination, even as the new star in the party says he has not made up his mind about running.The Iowa connections of Obama's campaign advisers and the senator's behind-the-scenes inquiry into the Iowa caucuses are hardly an announcement that he is running for president. But they show he is visualizing the presidential campaign process, in the event he decides to run.Obama said last month he was considering a campaign for president, as enthusiastic crowds turned out for his political appearances on behalf of other candidates and as he traveled the country promoting his best-selling autobiography.Shortly after the Nov. 7 election, Obama telephoned John Norris, the Des Moines Democrat who ran John Kerry's winning campaign in the 2004 Iowa caucuses."He basically called to talk about the lay of the land in Iowa," said Norris, who described Obama's inquiries as "earnest" and reflecting genuine uncertainty about his future.Iowa's presidential precinct caucuses are scheduled as the first nominating event of the 2008 campaign. Several Democrats have already expressed interest in competing in Iowa, although only Gov. Tom Vilsack has declared his candidacy for the nomination.Vilsack, who filed papers forming a campaign organization on Nov. 9, plans a public kickoff of his campaign this week, with events in Mount Pleasant, which he calls home, and in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Nevada and South Carolina.Besides Vilsack, the Democrats who have spent the most time courting the party's activists in Iowa include Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards and Kerry, a Massachusetts senator.New York Sen. Hillary Clinton is believed to be weighing a campaign for the Democratic nomination.However, she has steered clear of Iowa since the 2004 presidential election while she has campaigned for re-election in New York.Clinton was re-elected handily this month, but she had not begun reaching out to Iowa activists as of last week.Norris told Obama during their recent telephone conversation that the 2008 Iowa campaign would be lively and that Vilsack's presence in the race likely would not deter participation."I said I think it's obvious other candidates are going to compete," Norris said. "Other people are getting in, and Iowa will be a factor. The outcome will be a factor."Obama did not ask if Norris would be willing to advise him, should he decide to run.Obama's three trips to Iowa since his election to the Senate in 2004 came this fall, beginning with his appearance at U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin's annual steak fry in mid-September.That event brought thousands of Iowa Democrats and dozens of journalists from Chicago and around the nation to Indianola, where the steak fry was held.Obama spent little time during the visit, or the two subsequent stops this fall, meeting privately with party leaders.Des Moines Democrat George Appleby saw Obama at Harkin's event and noted the appeal he seemed to have with the crowd of 3,000 at the Warren County fairgrounds.Appleby had been helping former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner make the rounds in Iowa.After Warner decided in October that he would not run for president, Appleby got in touch with Obama's people."I have talked with the Obama people, and I have agreed to do some initial stuff for him, pending his making the decision to go or not to go," Appleby said."They tell me he will make a decision within a couple of weeks."Since acknowledging interest in the 2008 race, Obama's name has shot to the second spot, behind Clinton, on most national preference polls for the Democratic nomination.Iowa City Democrat Dick Myers, the former minority leader in the Iowa House, has also agreed to serve as a caucus contact for Obama, should he decide to run, aides said.Obama also would have campaign workers at his disposal with institutional knowledge of Iowa politics.Acting as a key contact for Obama in Iowa is Steve Hildebrand, a longtime aide to former South Dakota Sen. Tom Daschle. Hildebrand ran Al Gore's campaign for the 2000 Iowa caucuses.Also part of Obama's team is David Axelrod, a Chicago-based media consultant who produced Vilsack's ads during his 1998 and 2002 gubernatorial campaigns.Axelrod also produced ads for Edwards, including for his 2004 Iowa caucus campaign.Longtime Democratic pollster Paul Harsted, who has worked for Harkin and Vilsack, is also signed on with Obama.The group of advisers suggests that Obama could mount a credible Iowa caucus campaign, said his spokesman, Robert Gibbs, who was Kerry's national spokesman for a time during the 2004 presidential campaign."Obviously, should he choose to run, he'll have a team that's very talented with good knowledge of the state," Gibbs said.

2006-11-26T00:57:00.000-05:00

Gay son, pop's skeleton, out of closet

Estranged from his father, a gay Brooklyn man came home yesterday to make peace, only to make a horrifying discovery: His mother had been hiding his dad's corpse in the family's apartment for three years, police sources said.
Joanne Iversen, 73, told her son and cops that she never reported her husband's death because she wanted to continue collecting his Social Security benefits, the sources said.
Her horrific secret was exposed when her 38-year-old son, Paul Iversen, knocked on the apartment door early yesterday. He had not been home since he came out of the closet well before his dad's death, the sources said.
"I want to see Dad," Paul Iversen told his mom, the sources said. "I want to make everything right."
The elderly woman - who almost never allowed anyone into her Bay Ridge apartment - opened the door, sources said. "He's in the bedroom," she told her son.
Paul Iversen walked through the filthy apartment and to his horror found the skeletal remains of his dad, Frank Iversen, 75, in a fetal position under a pile of bed covers and clothes, the sources said.
Sickened by the discovery, he persuaded his mom to go to the cops just after 8 a.m.
At the 68th Precinct stationhouse, Joanne Iversen told cops that she and her husband had made a pact to hide the death of whoever passed away first so the surviving spouse could continue collecting Social Security benefits.
"He died of natural causes," she told cops, the sources said. "It was three years ago."
Detectives questioned the woman for several hours, but released her last night without filing charges. Cops were investigating whether she illegally obtained Social Security checks since her husband's death.
A police source said Joanne Iversen had told another estranged son she had buried her husband years ago.
Tenants in the Bay Ridge Parkway apartment building between Ridge Blvd. and Third Ave. said they noticed Frank Iversen, a quiet man who had worked as a painter, hadn't been around in years. But his wife always told them he had moved upstate.
"I always wondered if he was dead in there," said neighbor Bonnie King. "Frank just disappeared. There was no explanation." Other residents said there were clues, but no one put it all together.
"There were odor issues in that apartment," said Carole Clements, 64. "We complained a lot, but I would have never guessed there was a body inside."
Iversen had no history of medical problems. He hadn't been to the doctor since he got a marriage license.
The medical examiner's office will conduct an autopsy to determine how and when Frank Iversen died, authorities said.
"We don't think she's of sound mind to have done something criminal," a police source said.
"Maybe she's sick," Clements said of Joanne Iversen. "That doesn't make her a bad person."
The widow checked herself into Bellevue Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation.

2006-11-14T22:20:00.000-05:00

FOX PAYS FOR HOSTAGES(11/15) JERUSALEM--Palestinian terror groups and security organizations in the Gaza Strip received $2 million from a United States source in exchange for the release of Fox News employees Steve Centanni and Olag Wiig, who were kidnapped here last summer, a senior leader of one of the groups suspected of the abductions told World Net Daily (WND).
The terror leader, from the Gaza-based Popular Resistance Committees, said his organization's share of the money was used to purchase weapons, which he said would be utilized "to hit the Zionists."
He said he expects the payments for Centanni and Wiig's freedom will encourage Palestinian groups to carry out further kidnappings.
Officials associated with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party and its security organization, the Preventative Security Services, confirmed to WND money was paid for the release of the Fox News reporters.
A senior leader of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group, the declared "military wing" of Fatah, said the group received a small percentage of the $2 million, which all parties interviewed said was transferred in cash.
Centanni and Wiig were released last August after being held hostage by terrorists in Gaza for nearly two weeks. Shortly before their release, a video was issued showing the two dressed in beige Arab-style robes and appearing to convert to Islam. Wiig, a New Zealand citizen, gave an anti-Western speech, with his face expressionless. Centanni later explained he and Wiig were forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint.
One week after the abduction, a clan from the Gaza Strip which leads terror cells of the Popular Resistance Committees were prime suspects in the kidnappings. Senior Palestinian officials told WND their investigation into the abductions led them to the Dugmash family, based in Khan Yunis and Gaza City. They said they have "evidence" the clan was "heavily involved."
Members of the Dugmash clan lead the "Saladin resistance department" of the Popular Resistance Committees, an umbrella of Palestinian terror groups which previously carried out anti-U.S. attacks, including the bombing in 2003 of a U.S. convoy in Gaza in which three American government contractors were killed. The Committtees is also responsible for scores of anti-Israel shooting attacks and bombings and for a large number of rocket attacks against Jewish communities near Gaza. The senior leader of the Committees, speaking to WND on condition of anonymity, would not say whether members of his group carried out the Fox News kidnappings, but he admitted the Committees received money for "aiding" in the release of Centanni and Wiig.
The terror leader said $2 million cash was transferred to the Preventative Security Services, the main Fatah security forces in Gaza, for distribution to various parties.
He said the largest portion of the money was provided to the Committees' Dugmash clan, which Israeli security officials say is heavily involved in the smuggling of weapons and drugs into Gaza and which openly has led anti-Israel terror attacks on behalf of the Popular Resistance Committees. The Committees leader would not provide the exact sum transferred to the clan, but said it exceeded $1 million.
Smaller sums of cash were given to select members of the Preventative Security Services, officially to pay them as "private citizens" for working overtime to free Centanni and Wiig, the terror leader said. He said most of the Security Services members who were paid are associated with elements of the Dugmash clan. A member of the Security Services confirmed the cash transfers.
A sum of about $20,000 was provided to the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group, the Committees leader said, explaining the organization was paid to avoid conflict with militants from Abbas' Fatah party. The Committees is closely associated with Hamas, while the Brigades is a member of the rival Fatah party.
A leader of the Brigades in the northern Gaza Strip confirmed the money was received but maintained his group was not involved with the kidnappings.
The Popular Resistance Committees leader said aside from the large cash transfer to the Dugmash section of his group, the Committees as an organization received about $150,000.
He said the money was used to purchase weapons.
"We used 100 percent of the money for one precise goal – our war against the Zionists," the Committees leader said.
He said weapons purchased included rockets.
"Regarding the others (the Dugmash clan of the Committees) who received the money, I can tell you one thing is very clear – this went also to be used against the Zionists. I can't say every cent went to buy bombs, maybe it also went to pay for salaries, smuggling, buying shelter."
The Committees leader said he "knows" the money came from the U.S. as part of a deal to free Centanni and Wiig but could not identify exactly which organization or government entity transferred the cash.
A spokeswoman for Fox News Channel told WND she could not provide an official statement about whether Fox was aware of money paid to free its two employees.
A source at Fox told WND many parties were involved with the freedom of Centanni and Wiig, including the U.S. government, and that it was possible money was paid.
A State Department spokesman said his agency did not pay for the release of the Fox News employees.
The senior Committees leader and members of Fatah's Preventative Security Services told WND that as part of the cash transfer, leaders of the Security Services pledged to ensure against further kidnappings of Americans in the Palestinian territories.
But the Committees leader balked at the promise.
"This is just so the Americans can turn the affair into a beautiful thing by saying they have a pledge," said the terror leader.
"Maybe the Preventive Security Services took the promise but we didn't. They have no way of enforcing it. The Palestinian groups can still kidnap Americans. Maybe for a short period the groups will not kidnap Americans to show respect for the promises, but if there is an escalation, we will not hesitate to kidnap Americans."
The leader spoke three days after his organization and three other Palestinian terror groups signed a statement warning the U.S. is officially a target for Palestinian attacks, both in the region and abroad.
He told WND the cash transfers for the release of Centanni and Wiig likely will embolden Palestinian terror groups to carry out further abductions.
"This does encourage people to continue kidnappings," said the terror leader.

2006-11-04T00:56:00.000-05:00

Arab states go nuclear

THE SPECTRE of a nuclear race in the Middle East was raised yesterday when six Arab states announced that they were embarking on programs to master atomic technology.
The move, which follows the failure by the West to curb Iran’s controversial nuclear program, could see a rapid spread of nuclear reactors in one of the world’s most unstable regions, stretching from the Gulf to the Levant and into North Africa.
The countries involved were named by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Saudi Arabia. Tunisia and the UAE have also shown interest.
All want to build civilian nuclear energy programmes, as they are permitted to under international law. But the sudden rush to nuclear power has raised suspicions that the real intention is to acquire nuclear technology which could be used for the first Arab atomic bomb.
“Some Middle East states, including Egypt, Morocco, Algeria and Saudi Arabia, have shown initial interest [in using] nuclear power primarily for desalination purposes,” Tomihiro Taniguch, the deputy director-general of the IAEA, told the business weekly Middle East Economic Digest. He said that they had held preliminary discussions with the governments and that the IAEA’s technical advisory programme would be offered to them to help with studies into creating power plants.
Mark Fitzpatrick, an expert on nuclear proliferation at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said that it was clear that the sudden drive for nuclear expertise was to provide the Arabs with a “security hedge”.
“If Iran was not on the path to a nuclear weapons capability you would probably not see this sudden rush [in the Arab world],” he said.
The announcement by the six nations is a stunning reversal of policy in the Arab world, which had until recently been pressing for a nuclear free Middle East, where only Israel has nuclear weapons.
Egypt and other North African states can argue with some justification that they need cheap, safe energy for their expanding economies and growing populations at a time of high oil prices.
The case will be much harder for Saudi Arabia, which sits on the world’s largest oil reserves. Earlier this year Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Foreign Minister, told The Times that his country opposed the spread of nuclear power and weapons in the Arab world.
Since then, however, the Iranians have accelerated their nuclear power and enrichment programs.

2006-10-31T17:40:00.000-05:00

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

2006-10-27T09:34:00.000-04:00

DROWN THE BASTARDS!
WASHINGTON - Dick Cheney, US vice-president, has endorsed the use of "water boarding" for terror suspects and confirmed that the controversial interrogation technique was used on Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the senior al-Qaeda operative now being held at Guantánamo Bay.Cheney was responding to a radio interviewer from North Dakota station WDAY who asked whether water boarding, which involves simulated drowning, was a "no-brainer" if the information it yielded would save American lives. "It's a no-brainer for me," Cheney replied.The comments by the vice-president, who has been one of the leading advocates of reducing limitations on what interrogation techniques can be used in the war on terror, are the first public confirmation that water boarding has been used on suspects held in US custody."For a while there, I was criticized as being the 'vice-president for torture'," Cheney added. "We don't torture ... We live up to our obligations in international treaties that we're party to and so forth."But the fact is, you can have a fairly robust interrogation program without torture and we need to be able to do that."Cheney said recent legislation passed by Congress allowed the White House to continue its aggressive interrogation program.But his remarks appear to stand at odds with the views of three key Republican senators who helped draft the recently passed Military Commission Act, and who argue that water boarding is not permitted according to that law."[It's] a direct affront to the primary authors of the Military Commission Act in the Senate * John McCain, Lindsey Graham and John Warner * all of whom have publicly stated that the legislation signed by the president last week makes water boarding a war crime," said Jennifer Daskal, advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. "This is Cheney ignoring the consensus of his own Pentagon," she said, referring to comments by senior officials that harsh interrogation techniques do not produce reliable intelligence.John Bellinger, the State Department legal adviser, last week declined to answer specific questions on water boarding, saying Congress would have to determine whether specific interrogation techniques were permissible under the Geneva conventions. The Bush administration was forced to work with Congress to pass the Military Commissions Act after the Supreme Court ruled that al-Qaeda suspects were entitled to some protections under the Geneva convention. "Any procedures going forward would have to comply with the standards of Common Article 3 [of the Geneva conventions], including the prohibition on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment," Bellinger said. "Congress would have to agree that they are permitted under the law."Asked in the radio interview whether he would agree that the debate over terrorist interrogations and water boarding was "a little silly", Cheney responded: "I do agree"."I think the terrorist threat, for example, with respect to our ability to interrogate high-value detainees like Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, that's been a very important tool that we've had to be able to secure the nation," he said.

2006-10-26T09:17:00.000-04:00

NAILING IT

The Late A. J. Liebling occasionally used his "Wayward Press" column in the New Yorker magazine to contrast how various newspapers reported on the same story, who got it first, and how it circulated.
Perhaps most famously, Liebling tracked coverage of the death of a notorious Soviet dictator, whose lingering serious illness apparently befuddled the press in the 1950s.
Liebling wrote: "Inconsiderate to the last, Josef Stalin, a man who never had to meet a deadline, had the bad taste to die in installments."
This week, I couldn't help but wonder what Liebling would have made of August Voegl and the recent media coverage that has made him famous, at least in certain circles.
I first came upon Voegl's story Monday, reading an online account that was published in Sunday's Edmonton Journal in Canada.
The headline read: "Roofer nails down new-found notoriety."
And the story: "August Voegl, 59, nailed himself to the roof of a house in Jennersdorf (Austria), when he ... accidentally shot a four-inch nail into his left testicle with a compressed-air nail gun.
"Apparently the construction worker slipped while working and the nail gun misfired. ... Once Voegl realized he was unable to extract the nail or pull himself away from the roof, paramedics were called in.
"The roofer was airlifted to a nearby hospital where he is apparently recovering nicely after the injury."
That was a tough thing to read on a Monday morning, although reading about it no doubt paled in comparison to Voegl's actual experience.
Curious as to how other papers had covered Voegl's misadventure, I checked around and found that it had been taken seriously in Germany ("Man Nails Testicle to Roof") and somewhat less so in South Africa ("His fiddling on the roof got him nailed").
As best I could tell, the story was broken by Austria Today, a publication in Voegl's home country, in the paper's Oct. 16 print edition.
The story had this memorable lead: "An Austrian roofer who slipped on the job ended up nailing himself to the roof - through his wedding tackle."
Wedding tackle?
That might well have been that, but two days later, the story went on the Austria Today Web site and was thus launched into cyberspace, where it was greedily grabbed by the Web site Ananova.com, which bills itself as "news on the move from the leading site for breaking United Kingdom and world news, sport, entertainment, business and weather stories and information."
At which point the story was picked up by news and entertainment outlets around the world, most of whom then credited Ananova with the story.
I went on the Ananova.com Web site and found Voegl's story in a section called "Quirkies."
Among the other stories was one from the Sun, a British tabloid, under the headline "Dog cocks leg and cuts off power."
The story began: "A dog cut off the power in 148 homes when it cocked its leg on a power cable."
This happened in County Durham, in northeast England. The Sun continued: "Bailey, a Staffordshire bull terrier, went for a wee against a faulty pylon.
"His owner Gary Davies said, "There was an almighty explosion and the whole street lit up. I turned around and the dog was on fire."
The power was off for five hours, the Sun reported, but the good news is "Bailey is recovering at home after being treated for burns."
There was also this: "Aussies told to stop singing in the shower." And the story: "Australians have been told to stop singing in the shower in an attempt to save electricity and water.
"Power supplier Energy Australia says exercising the vocal cords in the bathroom adds an extra 9.08 minutes to a shower."
They must all be singing "Stairway to Heaven."
There was one story from the United States (Florida, of course). The headline: "Gold teeth stolen while owner slept." And the story: "A Florida man claims someone reached into his mouth and stole his gold teeth as he slept.
"Bryan Osteen rang police to complain about the theft (and) told officers that someone entered his bedroom and took the teeth out of his mouth. He said he had friends at his home and believes one of them had something to do with the crime. Osteen said he did not wake up because he is a heavy sleeper."
What would A. J. Liebling have made of the Internet? Liebling used to chide publishers by noting that "a free press belongs to the man who owns one." The Internet belongs to no one, and so to everyone. I think Liebling would have had a grand time covering it. Imagine the headlines if August Voegl had been working on a wall instead of a roof.

2006-10-17T23:33:00.000-04:00

FDA Approves Milk, Meat from Clones

Three years after the Food and Drug Administration first hinted that it might permit the sale of milk and meat from cloned animals, prompting public reactions that ranged from curiosity to disgust, the agency is poised to endorse marketing of the mass-produced animals for public consumption.
The decision, expected by the end of this year, is based largely on new data indicating that milk and meat from cloned livestock and their offspring pose no unique risks to consumers.
"Our evaluation is that the food from cloned animals is as safe as the food we eat every day," said Stephen F. Sundlof, the FDA's chief of veterinary medicine, who has overseen the long-stalled risk assessment.
Farmers and companies that have been growing cloned barnyard animals from single cells in anticipation of a lucrative market say cloning will bring consumers a level of consistency and quality impossible to attain with conventional breeding, making perfectly marbled beef and reliably lean and tasty pork the norm on grocery shelves.
But groups opposed to the new technology, including a coalition of powerful food companies concerned that the public will reject Dolly-the-Lamb chops and clonal cream in their coffee, have not given up.
On Thursday, advocacy groups filed a petition asking the FDA to regulate cloned farm animals one type at a time, much as it regulates new drugs, a change that would drastically slow marketing approval. Some are also questioning the ethics of a technology that, while more efficient than it used to be, still poses risks for pregnant animals and their newborns.
"The government talks about being science-based, and that's great, but I think there is another pillar here: the question of whether we really want to do this," said Carol Tucker Foreman, director of food policy at the Consumer Federation of America.
That there is a debate at all about integrating clones into the food supply is evidence of the remarkable progress made since the 1996 birth of Dolly, the world's first mammalian clone, created from an udder cell of an anonymous ewe.
Scientists have now applied the technique successfully to cattle, horses, pigs, goats and other mammals. Each clone is a genetic replica of the animal that donated the cell from which it was grown.
Cloning could solve a number of long-standing farm problems. Many prize males are not recognized as such until long after they have been tamed by castration. With cloning, that lack of semen would not matter. Cloning also allows farmers to make many copies of exceptional milk producers; with natural breeding, cows have only one offspring per year, and half are males.
In the eyes of many in agriculture, cloning is simply the latest in a string of advances such as artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization that have given farmers better control over animal reproduction.
"Clones are just clones. They are not genetically engineered animals," said Barbara Glenn, chief of animal biotechnology at the Biotechnology Industry Organization.
The FDA agrees with that distinction, Sundlof said. The agency has already said it will regulate transgenic animals -- those that have been engineered by adding specific, valuable genes -- in much the way it regulates pharmaceuticals, under a new category called "New Animal Drugs." No such animals are currently on the market.
By contrast, proponents say, clones are simply twins, albeit born a generation apart.
It was October 2003 when the FDA released its first draft document concluding that clones and their offspring are safe to eat, prompting several cloning companies to scale up their operations.
But an agency advisory panel and the National Academies, while generally supportive, raised flags, citing a paucity of safety data.
That, and opposition led largely by the International Dairy Foods Association, which represents such large, brand-sensitive companies as Kraft Foods, Dannon, General Mills and Nestlé USA, put FDA approval on hold. For years the agency has asked producers to keep clones off the market voluntarily while the issues got sorted out, a delay that bankrupted one major company and has left others increasingly frustrated.
But now a large collection of new data submitted to the FDA has revitalized the effort, according to government officials and others.
The biggest new study is a detailed comparison of meat from the offspring of cloned and conventional boars created by Austin-based ViaGen Inc., a major producer of cloned farm animals. Company scientists agreed to share key results with a reporter but withheld details as required by the journal Theriogenology, which will publish the full report in its January issue.
Semen from four clones and three conventional boars was used to inseminate 89 females. A total of 404 progeny (242 from clones) were raised identically by government scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Meat Animal Research Center in Clay, Neb., and slaughtered when they reached market size. (Because clones are so valuable, companies for now anticipate sending only their offspring to market.) Of the 14,036 measures of protein composition, fatty acid profiles and other meat components done on the offspring of clones by an independent lab, all but three were within the same range as those of the conventional animals, and only one was outside what the Agriculture Department considers normal.
The other large research report came from Cyagra, a cloning company in Elizabethtown, Pa.
In that study, 80 blood and urine measures, including various hormone levels, were taken in 10 newborn, 46 weanling and 18 adult clones. Results were indistinguishable from those obtained from conventional animals. Then 79 biochemical measurements from three cuts of meat taken from five male and six female adult clones were compared with those from matched cuts from conventional animals. Again, no differences were found, said Cyagra's director of marketing, Steve A. Mower. The results have been submitted to the FDA and are being reviewed by a scientific journal.
"The data are very clear," said ViaGen President Mark Walton. "You really can't tell them apart."
In light of the new findings, and the FDA's near completion of a complicated, interagency review demanded by the White House Office of Management and Budget, Sundlof anticipates releasing a formal draft risk assessment by the end of the year, along with a proposed "risk management" plan. Those documents would allow the marketing of clones and their offspring for food and milk after a final period of public comment.
Unless, that is, the opponents manage to stop the process, which they are trying to do on two fronts.
One is the petition filed Thursday by the Washington-based Center for Food Safety. It asks the FDA to regulate clones, not just transgenics, as New Animal Drugs. It also calls for environmental impact statements to evaluate the environmental and health effects of each new proposed line of clones.
"The available science shows that cloning presents serious food safety risks, animal welfare concerns and unresolved ethical issues that require strict oversight," the petition states.
Industry scientists derided the petition's safety concerns, built largely on a theoretical possibility that subtle genetic changes seen in some clones may alter the nutritional nature of meat. If those genetic changes were significant, Mower said, they would cause biochemical changes in milk or meat, none of which have been found.
But issues of ethics and public acceptance are not easily dismissed, several experts said.
Surveys show that more than 60 percent of the U.S. population is uncomfortable with the idea of animal cloning for food and milk. The single biggest reason people give is "religious and ethical," with concerns about food safety coming in second, said Michael Fernandez, executive director of the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology, a nonpartisan research and education project.
Those sentiments are a big concern to dairy companies, which fear that any association with cloning could harm milk's carefully honed image of wholesomeness.
Confidential documents from the International Dairy Foods Association, obtained by The Washington Post, indicate the group has played a key role in slowing FDA action and propose a strategy for blocking any future FDA approval.
Association spokeswoman Susan Ruland said the group opted not to adopt the lobbying strategy described in those documents, which included using friends in Congress and "continued outreach to the White House."
In any case, Sundlof said, the FDA has no authority to make decisions based on ethics concerns. Nor is it inclined to call for labeling of products from clones, as some have demanded. For one thing, clonal meat or milk would be impossible to authenticate, since there is no way to distinguish them from conventional products.
The FDA may already be too late. Several owners of clones have been selling semen to farm clubs and others vying to grow prize-winning cattle. Most of those animals end up being slaughtered, sold and eaten, experts said.
"That you can go online today to any number of different Web sites and purchase semen from cloned bulls tells you there are cloned sires out there fathering calves in the food supply," Walton said.
Like it or not, Walton and others said, the clones are out of the barn.

2006-10-11T23:58:00.000-04:00

What does this make Cheney--Satan?

MILWAUKEE - A university instructor who came under scrutiny for arguing that the U.S. government orchestrated the Sept. 11 attacks likens President Bush to Adolf Hitler in an essay his students are being required to buy for his course.
The essay by Kevin Barrett, “Interpreting the Unspeakable: The Myth of 9/11,” is part of a $20 book of essays by 15 authors, according to an unedited copy first obtained by WKOW-TV in Madison and later by The Associated Press.
The book’s title is “9/11 and American Empire: Muslims, Jews, and Christians Speak Out.” It is on the syllabus for Barrett’s course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “Islam: Religion and Culture,” but only three of the essays are required reading, not including Barrett’s essay.
Barrett, a part-time instructor who holds a doctorate in African languages and literature and folklore from UW-Madison, is active in a group called Scholars for 9/11 Truth. The group’s members say U.S. officials, not al-Qaida terrorists, were behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
“Like Bush and the neocons, Hitler and the Nazis inaugurated their new era by destroying an architectural monument and blaming its destruction on their designated enemies,” he wrote.
'An insult to Hitler'Barrett said Tuesday he was comparing the attacks to the burning of the German parliament building, the Reichstag, in 1933, a key event in the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship.
“That’s not comparing them as people, that’s comparing the Reichstag fire to the demolition of the World Trade Center, and that’s an accurate comparison that I would stand by,” he said.
He added: “Hitler had a good 20 to 30 IQ points on Bush, so comparing Bush to Hitler would in many ways be an insult to Hitler.”
Moira Megargee, publicity director for the Northampton, Mass., publisher Interlink, said the book is due out at the end of November and the editing isn’t finished.
“It is not final and for all we know that essay may not be in the book or may be edited,” she said.
The university’s decision to allow Barrett to teach the course touched off a controversy over the summer once his views became widely known.
Sixty-one state legislators denounced the move. One county board cut its funding for the UW-Extension by $8,247 — the amount Barrett will earn for teaching the course — in a symbolic protest, even though the course is unrelated to that branch of the UW System.
Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and his Republican challenger, Mark Green, have both said they believe Barrett should be fired.
One essay Barrett is requiring students to read is entitled: “A Clash Between Justice and Greed,” and argues that conflicts between Islam and the western world were made up after the “collapse of the Soviet Union to justify U.S. ’defense’ spending, and to provide a pretext of controlling the world’s resources.”
The author of another essay, “Interpreting Terrorism: Muslim Problem or Covert Operations Nightmare?,” contends some western intelligence agencies are committing acts of terrorism to make them look like the work of radical Islamics.
The university’s chief academic officer, Provost Patrick Farrell, decided to retain Barrett for the course after reviewing his plans and qualifications. He said Barrett could present his ideas during one week of the course as long as students were allowed to challenge them.
He later warned Barrett to stop seeking publicity for his personal political views.
Farrell said he has not seen the essay, but faculty can assign readings that may not be popular to everyone.
“I think part of the role of any challenging course here is going to encourage students to think of things from a variety of perspectives,” he said.

2006-10-04T19:03:00.000-04:00

HASTERT KNEW

Speaker Dennis Hastert's political support showed signs of cracking on Wednesday as Republicans fled the fallout from an election-year scandal spawned by steamy computer messages from disgraced Rep. Mark Foley to teenage male pages.
At the same time, the congressional aide who last week counseled Foley to quit said in an Associated Press interview he first warned Hastert 's aides more than three years ago about Foley's worrisome conduct toward pages. That was long before GOP leaders acknowledged hearing of it.
The aide, Kirk Fordham, who resigned Wednesday, said he had "more than one conversation with senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives asking them to intervene" at the time.
He made his comments as Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri, third-ranking leader, told reporters he would have handled the matter differently than Hastert , had he known of it.
And Rep. Ron Lewis of Kentucky, in a tougher-than-expected re-election race, abruptly canceled an invitation for Hastert to join him at a fundraiser next week.
"I'm taking the speaker's words at face value," Lewis told the AP. "I have no reason to doubt him. But until this is cleared up, I want to know the facts. If anyone in our leadership has done anything wrong, then I will be the first in line to condemn it."
Ron Bonjean, Hastert 's spokesman, declined to comment on the claim made by Fordham.
He said the entire issue had been referred to the House ethics committee. "We fully expect that the bipartisan panel will do what it needs to do to investigate this mater and protect the integrity of the House," he added.
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi issued a statement saying that Hastert and the rest of the GOP leadership should be "immediately questioned under oath" by the panel.
"The children, their parents, the public, and our colleagues deserve answers and those who covered up Mark Foley's behavior must be held accountable," she said.

2006-10-03T23:38:00.000-04:00

CLICK ON CARTOON TO ENLARGE

2006-09-29T09:21:00.000-04:00

Bob Woodward
NEW BOOK TELLS ALL

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — The White House ignored an urgent warning in September 2003 from a top Iraq adviser who said that thousands of additional American troops were desperately needed to quell the insurgency there, according to a new book by Bob Woodward, the Washington Post reporter and author. The book describes a White House riven by dysfunction and division over the war.
The warning is described in “State of Denial,” scheduled for publication on Monday by Simon & Schuster. The book says President Bush’s top advisers were often at odds among themselves, and sometimes were barely on speaking terms, but shared a tendency to dismiss as too pessimistic assessments from American commanders and others about the situation in Iraq.
As late as November 2003, Mr. Bush is quoted as saying of the situation in Iraq: “I don’t want anyone in the cabinet to say it is an insurgency. I don’t think we are there yet.”
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is described as disengaged from the nuts-and-bolts of occupying and reconstructing Iraq — a task that was initially supposed to be under the direction of the Pentagon — and so hostile toward Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, that President Bush had to tell him to return her phone calls. The American commander for the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid, is reported to have told visitors to his headquarters in Qatar in the fall of 2005 that “Rumsfeld doesn’t have any credibility anymore” to make a public case for the American strategy for victory in Iraq.
The book, bought by a reporter for The New York Times at retail price in advance of its official release, is the third that Mr. Woodward has written chronicling the inner debates in the White House after the Sept. 11 attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the subsequent decision to invade Iraq. Like Mr. Woodward’s previous works, the book includes lengthy verbatim quotations from conversations and describes what senior officials are thinking at various times, without identifying the sources for the information.
Mr. Woodward writes that his book is based on “interviews with President Bush’s national security team, their deputies, and other senior and key players in the administration responsible for the military, the diplomacy, and the intelligence on Iraq.” Some of those interviewed, including Mr. Rumsfeld, are identified by name, but neither Mr. Bush nor Vice President Dick Cheney agreed to be interviewed, the book says.
Robert D. Blackwill, then the top Iraq adviser on the National Security Council, is said to have issued his warning about the need for more troops in a lengthy memorandum sent to Ms. Rice. The book says Mr. Blackwill’s memorandum concluded that more ground troops, perhaps as many as 40,000, were desperately needed.
It says that Mr. Blackwill and L. Paul Bremer III, then the top American official in Iraq, later briefed Ms. Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, her deputy, about the pressing need for more troops during a secure teleconference from Iraq. It says the White House did nothing in response.
The book describes a deep fissure between Colin L. Powell, Mr. Bush’s first secretary of state, and Mr. Rumsfeld: When Mr. Powell was eased out after the 2004 elections, he told Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, that “if I go, Don should go,” referring to Mr. Rumsfeld.
Mr. Card then made a concerted effort to oust Mr. Rumsfeld at the end of 2005, according to the book, but was overruled by President Bush, who feared that it would disrupt the coming Iraqi elections and operations at the Pentagon.
Vice President Cheney is described as a man so determined to find proof that his claim about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was accurate that, in the summer of 2003, his aides were calling the chief weapons inspector, David Kay, with specific satellite coordinates as the sites of possible caches. None resulted in any finds.
Two members of Mr. Bush’s inner circle, Mr. Powell and the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, are described as ambivalent about the decision to invade Iraq. When Mr. Powell assented, reluctantly, in January 2003, Mr. Bush told him in an Oval Office meeting that it was “time to put your war uniform on,” a reference to his many years in the Army.
Mr. Tenet, the man who once told Mr. Bush that it was a “slam-dunk” that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq, apparently did not share his qualms about invading Iraq directly with Mr. Bush, according to Mr. Woodward’s account.
Mr. Woodward’s first two books about the Bush administration, “Bush at War” and “Plan of Attack,” portrayed a president firmly in command and a loyal, well-run team responding to a surprise attack and the retaliation that followed. As its title indicates, “State of Denial” follows a very different storyline, of an administration that seemed to have only a foggy notion that early military success in Iraq had given way to resentment of the occupiers.
The 537-page book describes tensions among senior officials from the very beginning of the administration. Mr. Woodward writes that in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Tenet believed that Mr. Rumsfeld was impeding the effort to develop a coherent strategy to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Mr. Rumsfeld questioned the electronic signals from terrorism suspects that the National Security Agency had been intercepting, wondering whether they might be part of an elaborate deception plan by Al Qaeda.
On July 10, 2001, the book says, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, met with Ms. Rice at the White House to impress upon her the seriousness of the intelligence the agency was collecting about an impending attack. But both men came away from the meeting feeling that Ms. Rice had not taken the warnings seriously.
In the weeks before the Iraq war began, President Bush’s parents did not share his confidence that the invasion of Iraq was the right step, the book recounts. Mr. Woodward writes about a private exchange in January 2003 between Mr. Bush’s mother, Barbara Bush, the former first lady, and David L. Boren, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a Bush family friend.
The book says Mrs. Bush asked Mr. Boren whether it was right to be worried about a possible invasion of Iraq, and then to have confided that the president’s father, former President George H. W. Bush, “is certainly worried and is losing sleep over it; he’s up at night worried.”
The book describes an exchange in early 2003 between Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the retired officer Mr. Bush appointed to administer postwar Iraq, and President Bush and others in the White House situation room. It describes senior war planners as having been thoroughly uninterested in the details of the postwar mission.
After General Garner finished his PowerPoint presentation — which included his plan to use up to 300,000 troops of the Iraqi Army to help secure postwar Iraq, the book says — there were no questions from anyone in the situation room, and the president gave him a rousing sendoff.
But it was General Garner who was soon removed, in favor of Mr. Bremer, whose actions in dismantling the Iraqi army and removing Baathists from office were eventually disparaged within the government.
The book suggests that senior intelligence officials were caught off guard in the opening days of the war when Iraqi civilian fighters engaged in suicide attacks against armored American forces, the first hint of the deadly insurgent attacks to come.
In a meeting with Mr. Tenet of the Central Intelligence Agency, several Pentagon officials talked about the attacks, the book says. It says that Mr. Tenet acknowledged that he did not know what to make of them.
Mr. Rumsfeld reached into political matters at the periphery of his responsibilities, according to the book. At one point, Mr. Bush traveled to Ohio, where the Abrams battle tank was manufactured. Mr. Rumsfeld phoned Mr. Card to complain that Mr. Bush should not have made the visit because Mr. Rumsfeld thought the heavy tank was incompatible with his vision of a light and fast military of the future. Mr. Woodward wrote that Mr. Card believed that Mr. Rumsfeld was “out of control.”
The fruitless search for unconventional weapons caused tension between Vice President Cheney’s office, the C.I.A. and officials in Iraq. Mr. Woodward wrote that Mr. Kay, the chief weapons inspector in Iraq, e-mailed top C.I.A. officials directly in the summer of 2003 with his most important early findings.
At one point, when Mr. Kay warned that it was possible the Iraqis might have had the capability to make such weapons but did not actually produce them, waiting instead until they were needed, the book says he was told by John McLaughlin, the C.I.A.’s deputy director: “Don’t tell anyone this. This could be upsetting. Be very careful. We can’t let this out until we’re sure.”
Mr. Cheney was involved in the details of the hunt for illicit weapons, the book says. One night, Mr. Woodward wrote, Mr. Kay was awakened at 3 a.m. by an aide who told him Mr. Cheney’s office was on the phone. It says Mr. Kay was told that Mr. Cheney wanted to make sure he had read a highly classified communications intercept picked up from Syria indicating a possible location for chemical weapons.
Mr. Woodward and a colleague, Carl Bernstein, led The Post’s reporting during Watergate, and Mr. Woodward has since written a string of best sellers about Washington. More recently, the identity of Mr. Woodward’s Watergate source known as Deep Throat was disclosed as having been W. Mark Felt, a senior F.B.I. official.
In late 2005, Mr. Woodward was subpoenaed by the special prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case. He also apologized to The Post’s executive editor for concealing for more than two years that he had been drawn into the scandal.

2006-09-25T00:26:00.000-04:00

LONDON (Sept. 24) - A leaked intelligence report of Osama bin Laden's death has met skepticism from Western and Muslim governments but may increase a clamor from his followers to show himself on video for the first time in nearly two years.
One theory surrounding the mysterious French leak is that it was designed precisely to flush the al Qaeda leader into the open, prompting him to release a new tape that might give a clue to his whereabouts and state of health.
"Western intelligence, the Americans, the Saudis want bin Laden to appear," said Diaa Rashwan, an expert on Islamist groups at the al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo.
"Perhaps they're trying to agitate him to appear by video to try to fix some information about his real (location)."
Rashwan said expectations of an imminent appearance by bin Laden had mounted among contributors to Islamist Web sites discussing the report of his demise.
The French regional daily L'Est Republican quoted France's DGSE foreign intelligence agency as saying the Saudi secret services were convinced the al Qaeda leader had died of typhoid in Pakistan in late August.
But France, the United States and Britain all said they were unable to confirm the death of bin Laden, who in previous tapes over the past five years has boasted of how he ordered the September 11 attacks on the United States that killed nearly 3,000 people.
Saudi Arabia said on Sunday it had no evidence that he had died, and reports to that effect were "purely speculative."
Bin Laden's most recent audiotapes were issued in July, but the al Qaeda leader, believed to suffer from a serious kidney ailment, has not recorded any new video message since the eve of the U.S. presidential election in late 2004.
That long absence from view -- contrasting with frequent, high-quality video broadcasts from his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri -- has heightened speculation he is either too ill to appear, or too tightly confined to a secret hiding place.
A new tape would give Western intelligence significant clues to bin Laden's physical state. And the logistical chain involved in producing and delivering it to a broadcaster such as Al Jazeera could also be vulnerable to investigation.
But the other, perhaps more likely, explanation behind the French leak is that is just the latest of many speculative and poorly sourced scraps of intelligence on bin Laden, the world's most famous fugitive.
The latest account said he had died from typhoid; others have had him expiring from a lung disease or killed by bombing. Despite a statement last year from then-CIA boss Porter Goss that he had an "excellent" idea of bin Laden's whereabouts, the trail appears to be cold.
"The big question is whether his death ... would have a demoralising effect, or if he achieves the status of martyr and becomes a rallying figure," one U.S. intelligence official said this weekend.
Rashwan, however, was in no doubt bin Laden's death, whenever it happened, would be announced by al Qaeda within days because it would make him an even more powerful symbol and motivator for his supporters.
"He is now the symbol of the Islamic jihad," he said. "He will become for them a kind of myth. It will give them more inspiration than the individual himself."

2006-09-23T15:17:00.000-04:00

Check out the trailer to this 1983 film
http://www.imdb.com/rg/title-tease/trailers/title/tt0086510/trailers

2006-09-23T14:05:00.000-04:00

Is Bin Laden Dead?
Is Bush denying it due to election?

PARIS - President Jacques Chirac said Saturday that information contained in a leaked intelligence document raising the possibility that Osama bin Laden may have died of typhoid in Pakistan last month is “in no way whatsoever confirmed.”
Chirac said he was “a bit surprised” at the leak and has asked Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie to probe how a document from a French foreign intelligence service was published in the French press.
The regional newspaper l’Est Republicain on Saturday printed what it described as a copy of a confidential document from the DGSE intelligence service citing an uncorroborated report from Saudi secret services that the leader of the al-Qaida terror network had died.
The DGSE transmitted the document, dated Sept. 21 or Thursday, to Chirac and other top French officials, the newspaper said.
“This information is in no way whatsoever confirmed,” Chirac said Saturday when asked about the document. “I have no comment.”
In Washington, CIA duty officer Paul Gimigliano said he could not confirm the DGSE report.
The Washington-based IntelCenter, which monitors terrorism communications, said it was not aware of any similar reports on the Internet.
“We’ve seen nothing from any al-Qaida messaging or other indicators that would point to the death of Osama bin Laden,” IntelCenter director Ben N. Venzke told The Associated Press.
Last date known is June 29Al-Qaida would likely release information of his death fairly quickly if it were true, said Venzke, whose organization also provides counterterrorism intelligence services for the American government.
“They would want to release that to sort of control the way that it unfolds. If they wait too long, they could lose the initiative on it,” he said.
The last time the IntelCenter says it could be sure bin Laden was alive was June 29, when al-Qaida released an audiotape in which the terror leader eulogized the death of al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq earlier that month.
Chirac spoke at a news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Compiegne, France, where the leaders were holding a summit.
Putin suggested that leaks can be ways to manipulate. “When there are leaks ... one can say that (they) were done especially.”
Earlier the French defense ministry said it was opening an investigation into the leak.
“The information diffused this morning by the l’Est Republicain newspaper concerning the possible death of Osama bin Laden cannot be confirmed,” a Defense Ministry statement said.
The DGSE, or Direction Generale des Services Exterieurs, indicated that its information came from a single source.
“According to a reliable source, Saudi security services are now convinced that Osama bin Laden is dead,” said the intelligence report.
There have been periodic reports of bin Laden’s illness or death in recent years but none has been proven accurate.
According to this report, Saudi security services were pursuing further details, notably the place of his burial.
“The chief of al-Qaida was a victim of a severe typhoid crisis while in Pakistan on August 23, 2006,” the document says. His geographic isolation meant that medical assistance was impossible, the French report said, adding that his lower limbs were allegedly paralyzed.
The report further said Saudi security services had their first information on bin Laden’s alleged death on Sept. 4.
In Pakistan, a senior official of that country’s top spy agency, the ISI or Directorate of Inter-Service Intelligence, said he had no information to confirm bin Laden’s whereabouts or that he might be dead. The official said he believed the report could be fabricated. The official was not authorized to speak publicly on the topic and spoke on condition of anonymity.
U.S. Embassy officials in Pakistan and Afghanistan also said they could not confirm the French report.
Gen. Henri Bentegeat, the French army chief of staff, said in a radio debate last Sunday that bin Laden’s fate remained a mystery.
“Today, bin Laden is certainly not in Afghanistan,” Bentegeat said. “No one is completely certain that he is even alive.”

2006-09-08T23:07:00.000-04:00

GOOD FOR CLINTON!

Under pressure from former President Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party, ABC scrambled on Friday to make 11th-hour changes to a miniseries suggesting he was inattentive to the Islamic militant threat that led to the September 11 attacks.
Officials at the Walt Disney Co.-owned network said they were still tinkering with the five-hour production, titled "The Path to 9/11," which is scheduled to air without commercial interruption in two parts on Sunday and Monday.
But ABC declined to say how the movie was being reshaped or whether any changes would address specific complaints lodged by Clinton, his former aides and congressional Democrats that the film contained numerous inaccuracies and distortions.
The Hollywood trade paper Daily Variety, citing sources close to the project, reported the network was considering canceling the miniseries altogether.
The docu-drama, which ABC says is based largely on the official 9/11 Commission Report, opens with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York and traces subsequent events leading up to the coordinated suicide hijackings five years ago that killed nearly 3,000 people.
Much of the controversy focuses on a scene depicting CIA agents and Afghan fighters coming close to capturing al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, only to have then-White House national security advisor Samuel Berger refuse to authorize completion of their mission.
An unfinished version of the film circulated by ABC to TV critics for review portrays Berger as abruptly hanging up the phone while the CIA is pressing him to approve the raid.
In letters of protest to Disney President Robert Iger, Berger and former White House aide Bruce Lindsey said no such episode ever occurred.
The executive producer of the film, Marc Platt, acknowledged to Reuters on Thursday the Berger scene was a "conflation of events."
The film also drew denunciations from Clinton supporters for strongly suggesting his administration was too distracted by the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal to deal effectively with the gathering threat of Islamic militancy. Lindsey said the 9/11 Commission Report disputed that notion.
POLITICS AND SHOWBIZ
The show has added fuel to the election-year debate over which party, the Republicans or Democrats, is tougher on terrorism.
The Democratic Party, in a message posted on its Web site, called the miniseries "a despicable, irresponsible fraud" and urged an e-mail campaign demanding Iger keep "this propaganda off the air."
Joining the clamor for changes in the miniseries was the star of the film, Harvey Keitel, who said he accepted the role as an FBI counter-terrorism expert under the premise the story was to be told as "history."
"It turned out not all the facts were correct," he said on the Headline News network's "Showbiz Tonight." "You can't put things together, compress them, and then distort the reality. ... You cannot cross the line from conflation of events to a distortion of the event."
Former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, who chaired the 9/11 Commission and served as a consultant for the miniseries, has defended the production as balanced. But he told The Washington Post he asked for changes that would address complaints raised by the former Clinton officials.
The newspaper quoted one unidentified ABC executive as saying changes were "intended to make clearer that it was general indecisiveness" by federal officials that left America vulnerable to attacks, "not any one individual."
Trade publication the Hollywood Reporter, citing unnamed sources, said the scene involving Berger and an aborted mission to capture bin Laden would be toned down so that no particular individual was made to appear culpable.
The controversy was reminiscent of the furor stirred by a CBS miniseries about Ronald and Nancy Reagan, which the network canceled after Republicans complained it unfairly and inaccurately portrayed the former president. "The Reagans" ended up airing on sibling cable channel Showtime.
Further complicating the situation for ABC was a prime-time address to the nation President George W. Bush has planned for 9 p.m. EDT on Monday to mark the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, right in the middle of part two of ABC's miniseries.
The network said it would air the first hour of the film, break for 20 minutes to carry Bush's speech live, then broadcast the rest of the movie.

2006-09-06T22:22:00.000-04:00

BURBANK, Calif. (Sept. 6) - Brooke Shields says Tom Cruise has apologized for publicly criticizing her use of antidepressants after the birth of her first daughter. The two had a public beef last year after the "Mission: Impossible III" star, echoing the position of Scientology, said in an appearance on NBC's "Today" show that depression can be treated with exercise and vitamins rather than drugs. The 41-year-old actress says Cruise apologized in person Thursday. "He came over to my house, and he gave me a heartfelt apology," Shields said Friday during an appearance on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno." "And he apologized for bringing me into the whole thing and for everything that happened. "And through it all, I was so impressed with how heartfelt it was. And I didn't feel at any time that I had to defend myself, nor did I feel that he was trying to convince me of anything other than the fact that he was deeply sorry. And I accepted it." Cruise's spokesman confirmed the celebrities made up. "It is true that his friendship with Ms. Shields has been mended," spokesman Arnold Robinson said in a statement. "He has not changed his position about antidepressants, which as evidenced by the black label warnings issued by the FDA on these types of drugs, are unhealthy." Shields, who wrote "Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression," has dismissed the actor's remarks as a "ridiculous rant" and "a disservice to mothers everywhere."

2006-08-29T22:23:00.000-04:00

http://www.armorofgodpjs.com/

2006-08-29T22:11:00.000-04:00

"Shoot The White Bitch..."

Krugersdorp, South Africa - A white businesswoman has been raped and sodomized by four black men who kidnapped her and threatened to "shoot the white bitch".
The ordeal began when the 49-year-old woman stopped at a dept. store about 4 p.m.on the road to Randfontein, said police spokesperson Paula Nothnagel.
All of a sudden, there were men at the window of her vehicle.
Four men got into the car and put a revolver to her head.
They ordered her to drive to a nearby mine dump, where
the woman was robbed, kicked,beaten, raped and sodomized.
They tied her hands behind her back and shouted, 'Shoot the white bitch'.
After they took her jewelry, cellphone and credit cards from her bag, they fled, but told her they would return, "to get her".
She managed to free her hands and found her car still had the keys in the ignition.
Nothnagel said that the "seriously traumatized" woman drove to a doctor in Krugersdorp for treatment.

2006-08-27T22:47:00.000-04:00

Two Great Tastes...

Dozens of rural women in the southwestern district of Kapilvastu have stripped naked and ploughed their fields in a desperate attempt to appease the rain god following continuous draught.
Reports said some 50 naked women of Kapilvastu village went to their fields in the dead of the night on Saturday, ploughed the parched field and planted paddy, symbolically. The ‘all-women show’ went on along with reciting of prayers for rain.
Reports said the women made high-pitch cries, which is part of the ritual, as they worked in their fields.
“This is a tradition. We go to the fields without any clothes on and carry out the ritual to appease the gods for rain,” a
participating woman told the BBC Nepali Service.
Women in Kapilvastu villages had done such rituals in previous years as well after continuous drought.

That Go Great Together...

An Indian man born with two penises wants to get one of them removed so that he can marry, a report said Saturday.
The 24-year-old businessman checked himself into a city hospital for the operation after having lived all his life with the rare condition medically known as penile duplication or diphallus, the Times of India said. "It is an extremely rare condition. More so because two fully functional penises is unheard of even in medical literature," the newspaper quoted a doctor as saying. "In the more common form of diphallus, one organ is rudimentary." The doctor said the operation would be extremely complicated as surgeons would have to ensure that the retained organ was fully functional. The report did not name the patient or hospital to protect the man's identity. The developmental abnormality is found in one in 5.5 million men and only around 100 such cases have been reported since the first one in 1609, the newspaper said.

2006-08-23T21:57:00.000-04:00

CLICK TO ENLARGE

2006-08-22T18:04:00.000-04:00

THE DRAFT BEGINS!

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Marine Corps said Tuesday it has been authorized to recall thousands of unwilling non-volunteer Marines to active duty, primarily because of a shortage of volunteers for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Up to 2,500 Marines will be brought back at any one time, but there is no cap on the total number of Marines who may be forced back into service in the coming years as the military battles the war on terror. The call-ups will begin in the next several months.

This is the first time the Marines have had to use the involuntary recall since the early days of the Iraq combat. The Army has ordered back about 14,000 soldiers since the start of the war.
Marine Col. Guy A. Stratton, head of the manpower mobilization section, estimated that there is a current shortfall of about 1,200 Marines needed to fill positions in upcoming unit deployments.

The call-up affects Marines in the Individual Ready Reserve, a segment of the reserves that consists mainly of those who left active duty but still have time remaining on their eight-year military obligation.
Generally, Marines enlist for four years, then serve the other four years either in the regular Reserves, where they are paid and train periodically, or they may elect to go into the IRR. Marines in the IRR are only obligated to report one day a year but can be involuntarily recalled to active duty.

2006-08-19T11:32:00.000-04:00

Masturbating Judge gets four years

BRISTOW, Okla.- A former judge convicted of exposing himself while presiding over jury trials by using a sexual device under his robe was sentenced Friday to four years in prison.
Donald Thompson had spent almost 23 years on the bench and had served as a state legislator before retiring from the court in 2004. He showed no reaction when he was sentenced.
At his trial this summer, his former court reporter, Lisa Foster, testified that she saw Thompson expose himself at least 15 times during trial between 2001 and 2003. Prosecutors said he also used a device known as a penis pump during at least four trials in the same period.
Thompson, 59, was convicted last month of four felony courts of indecent exposure for incidents that took place in his Creek County courtroom.
Thompson, a married father of three grown children, testified that the penis pump was given to him as a joke by a longtime hunting and fishing buddy.
"It wasn't something I was hiding," he said.
He said he may have absentmindedly squeezed the pump's handle during court cases but never used it to masturbate.
Foster told authorities that she saw Thompson use the device almost daily during the August 2003 murder trial of a man accused of shaking a toddler to death. A whooshing sound could be heard on Foster's audiotape of the trial. When jurors asked the judge about the sound, Thompson said he hadn't heard it but would listen for it.
Police built a case against the judge after a police officer testifying in a 2003 murder trial saw a piece of plastic tubing disappear under Thompson's robe. During a lunch break, officers took photographs of the pump under the desk.
Investigators later checked the carpet, Thompson's robes and the chair behind the bench and found semen, according to court records.
A search of his chambers further revealed pornographic images of Native American women in various sexual poses.
Carmelia Brossett, a senior probation officer for the state Department of Corrections, said in a presentencing report that Thompson refused to undergo psychosexual testing.
"Thompson's denial of the offense would likely present difficulty, if not inability for treatment providers to provide meaningful and beneficial sex-offender treatment," she said.
The jury recommended a sentence of one year in prison and a $10,000 fine on each count. The jury foreman has said it was the jury's intent that Thompson serve the full sentence.
Judge C. Allen McCall denied a defense motion asking that Thompson be allowed to remain free pending an appeal. Thompson was also ordered to pay a $40,000 fine.

2006-08-18T02:27:00.000-04:00

Have Demons Broken Through?

Residents are wondering if an animal found dead over the weekend may be the mysterious creature that has mauled dogs, frightened residents and been the subject of local legend for half a generation.
The animal was found near power lines along Route 4 on Saturday, apparently struck by a car while chasing a cat. The carcass was photographed and inspected by several people who live in the area, but nobody is sure exactly what it is.
Michelle O'Donnell of Turner spotted the animal near her yard about a week before it was killed. She called it a "hybrid mutant of something."
"It was evil, evil looking. And it had a horrible stench I will never forget," she told the Sun Journal of Lewiston. "We locked eyes for a few seconds and then it took off. I've lived in Maine my whole life and I've never seen anything like it."
For the past 15 years, residents across Androscoggin County have reported seeing and hearing a mysterious animal with chilling monstrous cries and eyes that glow in the night. The animal has been blamed for attacking and killing a Doberman pinscher and a Rottweiler the past couple of years.
People from Litchfield, Sabattus, Greene, Turner, Lewiston and Auburn have come forward to speak of a mystery monster that roams the woods. Nobody knows for sure what it is, and theories have ranged from a hyena or dingo to a fisher or coydog, an offspring of a coyote and a wild dog.
Now, people are asking if the mystery beast and the animal killed over the weekend are one and the same.
Wildlife officials and animal control officers declined to go to Turner to examine the remains. By Tuesday, the carcass had been picked clean by vultures and there was not much left of the dead animal.
Loren Coleman, a Portland author and cryptozoologist, said it's unlikely that the animal was anybody's pet.
After reviewing photos of the carcass, Coleman said he was bothered by the animal's ears and snout. It reminded him of a case years ago in northern Maine in which an animal shot by a hunter could not be identified. In the end, wildlife officials got a DNA analysis that showed the animal was a rare wolf-dog hybrid, he said.
Mike O'Donnell, who is married to Michelle O'Donnell, said the animal looked "half-rodent, half-dog" to him.
It was charcoal gray, weighed between 40 and 50 pounds and had a bushy tail, a short snout, short ears and curled fangs hanging over its lips, he said. It looked like "something out of a Stephen King story."
"This is something I've never seen before. It's an evil-looking thing," he said.

2006-08-18T00:17:00.000-04:00

Truth behind Lebanon invasion?

WASHINGTON, Aug 8 - Israel has argued that the war against Hezbollah's rocket arsenal was a defensive response to the Shiite organisation's threat to Israeli security, but the evidence points to a much more ambitious objective -- the weakening of Iran's deterrent to an attack on its nuclear sites. In planning for the destruction of most of Hezbollah's arsenal and prevention of any resupply from Iran, Israel appears to have hoped to eliminate a major reason the George W. Bush administration had shelved the military option for dealing with Iran's nuclear programme -- the fear that Israel would suffer massive casualties from Hezbollah's rockets in retaliation for an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. One leading expert on Israeli national defence policy issues believes the aim of the Israeli campaign against Hezbollah was to change the Bush administration's mind about attacking Iran. Edward Luttwak, senior adviser to the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, says Bush administration officials have privately dismissed the option of air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities in the past, citing estimates that a Hezbollah rocket attack in retaliation would kill thousands of people in northern Israel. But Israeli officials saw a war in Lebanon to destroy Hezbollah's arsenal and prevent further resupply in the future as a way to eliminate that objection to the military option, says Luttwak. The risk to Israel of launching such an offensive was that it would unleash the very rain of Hezbollah rockets on Israel that it sought to avert. But Luttwak believes the Israelis calculated that they could degrade Hezbollah's rocket forces without too many casualties by striking preemptively. "They knew that a carefully prepared and coordinated rocket attack by Hezbollah would be much more catastrophic than one carried out under attack by Israel," he says. Gerald M. Steinberg, an Israeli specialist on security affairs at Bar Ilon University who reflects Israeli government thinking, did not allude to the link between destruction of Hezbollah's rocket arsenal and a possible attack on Iran in an interview with Bernard Gwertzman of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York last week. But he did say there is "some expectation" in Israel that after the U.S. Congressional elections, Bush "will decide that he has to do what he has to do." Steinberg said Israel wanted to "get an assessment" of whether the United States would "present a military attack against the Iranian nuclear sites as the only option." If not, he suggested that Israel was still considering its own options. Specialists on Iran and Hezbollah have long believed that the missiles Iran has supplied to Hezbollah were explicitly intended to deter an Israeli attack on Iran. Ephraim Kam, a specialist on Iran at Israel's Jaffe Centre for Strategic Studies, wrote in December 2004 that Hezbollah's threat against northern Israel was a key element of Iran's deterrent to a U.S. attack. Ali Ansari, an associate professor at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and author of a new book on the U.S. confrontation with Iran, was quoted in the Toronto Star Jul. 30 as saying, "Hezbollah was always Iran's deterrent force against Israel." Iran has also threatened direct retaliation against Israel with the Shahab-3 missile from Iranian territory. However, Iran may be concerned about the possibility that Israel's Arrow system could intercept most of them, as the Jaffe Centre's Kam observed in 2004. That elevates the importance to Iran of Hezbollah's ability to threaten retaliation. Hezbollah received some Soviet-era Katyusha rockets, with a range of only five miles, and a hundreds of longer-range missiles after Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000. But Israel's daily Haaretz, citing a report by Israeli military intelligence at the time, has reported that the number of missiles and rockets in Hezbollah hands grew to more 12,000 in 2004. That was when Iranian officials felt that the Bush administration might seriously consider an attack on their nuclear sites, because it knew Iran was poised to begin enrichment of uranium. It was also when Iranian officials began to imply that Hezbollah could retaliate against any attack on Iran, although they have never stated that explicitly. The first hint of Iranian concern about the possible strategic implications of the Israeli campaign to degrade the Hezbollah missile force in southern Lebanon came in a report by Michael Slackman in the New York Times Jul. 25. Slackman quoted an Iranian official with "close ties to the highest levels of government" as saying, "They want to cut off one of Iran's arms." The same story quoted Mohsen Rezai, the former head of Iran's Revolutionary guards, as saying, "Israel and the U.S. knew that as long as Hamas and Hezbollah were there, confronting Iran would be costly" -- an obvious reference to the deterrent value of the missiles in Lebanon. "So, to deal with Iran, they first want to eliminate forces close to Iran that are in Lebanon and Palestine." Israel has been planning its campaign against Hezbollah's missile arsenal for many months. As Matthew Kalman reported from Tel Aviv in the San Francisco Chronicle on Jul. 21, "More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail." Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's main purpose in meeting with Bush on May 23 was clearly to push the United States to agree to use force, if necessary, to stop Iran's uranium enrichment programme. Two days before the meeting, Olmert told CNN that Iran's "technological threshold" is "very close". In response to a question about U.S. and European diplomacy on the issue, Olmert replied: "I prefer to take the necessary measures to stop it, rather than find out later that my indifference was so dangerous." At his meeting with Bush, according to Yitzhak Benhorin of Israel's ynetnews, Olmert pressed Bush on Israel's intelligence assessment that Iran would gain the technology necessary to build a bomb within a year and expressed fears that diplomatic efforts were not going to work. It seems likely that Olmert discussed Israel's plans for degrading Hezbollah's missile capabilities as a means of dramatically reducing the risk of an air campaign against Iran's nuclear sites, and that Bush gave his approval. That would account for Olmert's comment to Israeli reporters after the meeting, reported by the Israel's ynetnews, but not by U.S. news media: "I am very, very, very satisfied." Bush's refusal to do anything to curb Israel's freedom to wreak havoc on Lebanon further suggests that he encouraged the Israelis to take advantage of any pretext to launch the offensive. The Israeli plan may have given Vice President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld new ammunition for advocating a strike on Iran's nuclear sites. Rumsfeld was the voice of administration policy toward Iran from 2002 to 2004, and he often appeared to be laying the political groundwork for an eventual military attack on Iran. But he has been silenced on the subject of Iran since Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice took over Iran policy in January 2005. Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in June 2005.

2006-08-13T13:01:00.000-04:00

Sicko dressed as priest on the run

SANTA ROSA, Calif. - A Roman Catholic bishop apologized Saturday for waiting several days to notify authorities about sexual abuse allegations against a priest, a delay that may have allowed the priest to flee to Mexico.
Bishop Daniel Walsh of the Santa Rosa diocese said in a one-page statement to parishioners that he put “caution” before “doing the right thing” in handling the allegations against The Rev. Xavier Ochoa.
Church officials say Ochoa admitted April 28 to sexually abusing a 12-year-old altar boy, but the allegations were not reported to Child Protective Services until May 1, and Ochoa disappeared the next day.
“I made an error in judgment by waiting to report Rev. Ochoa’s admission,” Walsh wrote in the statement, distributed at Saturday Mass throughout the diocese, which stretches from Santa Rosa to the Oregon border. “I should have acted immediately, and not delayed. For this I am deeply sorry.”
Ochoa, 68, was charged June 22 with 10 felony counts and one misdemeanor count of child sex abuse involving three boys he allegedly abused. A warrant was issued for his arrest.
Walsh said the public admission could aid prosecutors in filing criminal charges against him.
Prosecutors said last month they were investigating whether church officials violated a state law requiring doctors, nurses, teachers and clergy members to immediately report child sex abuse claims.
“If I am found guilty for not taking immediate action, I will accept whatever punishment is imposed,” Walsh said.
Sonoma County District Attorney Stephan Passalacqua told The (Santa Rosa) Press Democrat on Saturday he had not seen the letter and that the investigation was pending.

2006-08-11T00:43:00.000-04:00

Ahmadinejad disses Bush

60 Minutes Interview To Air Sunday

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sat down with Mike Wallace in Tehran on Tuesday in a rare, exclusive interview with a Western reporter.

In the wide-ranging interview, the Iranian leader comments on President Bush's foreign policy, the lack of relations between Iran and the United States, Hezbollah, Lebanon and Iraq.

Speaking about President Bush's failure to answer his 18-page letter that criticized U.S. foreign policy, Ahmadinejad said, "Well, (with the letter) I wanted to open a window towards the light for the president so that he can see that one can look on the world through a different perspective. … We are all free to choose. But please give him this message, sir: Those who refuse to accept an invitation will not have a good ending or fate. You see that his approval rating is dropping every day. Hatred vis-à-vis the president is increasing every day around the world. For a ruler, this is the worst message that he could receive. Rulers and heads of government at the end of their office must leave the office holding their heads high."

On what the "conducive conditions" would be for Iran to establish relations with the U.S., the president said, "Well, please look at the makeup of the American administration, the behavior of the American administration. See how they talk down to my nation. And this recent resolution passed about the nuclear issue, look at the wording. They have given us — presented us with a package which we are studying right now. We even gave them a date for our response. Ignoring that, they passed a resolution. They want to build an empire. And they don't want to live side-by-side in peace with other nations. The American government, sir, it is very clear to me they have to change their behavior and everything will be resolved. (George W. Bush) believes that his power emanates from his nuclear warhead arsenals. The time of the bomb is in the past, it's behind us. Today is the era of thoughts, dialogue and cultural exchanges."

The report will be broadcast on 60 Minutes this Sunday at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

2006-08-10T03:27:00.000-04:00

Hillary Gets Busted

NEW YORK - A "Presidential Bust" of U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton was unveiled on Wednesday at New York's Museum of Sex, where sculptor Daniel Edwards hopes it will spark discussion about sex, politics and celebrity.
Edwards, the artist who also created a life-size nude of Britney Spears giving birth on a bear-skin rug, said he wanted to capture Clinton's age and femininity in the sculpture.
Clinton's office had no immediate comment.
Edwards said his work features a soft "presidential smile" and wrinkles framing her eyes. A floral pattern runs across her breasts, which have faintly raised nipples, part of Edwards' effort to present Clinton "as a woman -- not a covered up person, but as a woman."
"I didn't want to give her a face lift or change her age," he said of his work.
"The key was to reveal her chest a little bit. She usually covers herself up, but I don't think that's necessary."

2006-08-08T01:22:00.000-04:00

Thor worshipper set to die

(Aug. 7) It is often said that inmates find God when they get to prison. That is only partly true for Michael Lenz. Once behind bars, he became a devoted pagan, worshipping multiple gods from Norse mythology -- some with familiar names such as the mighty Thor and his father, Odin.
Lenz, a drifter from Prince William County, Virginia, serving 29 years and 30 days in prison for burglary and firearm possession, converted to Asatru, an ancient heathen religion, and helped found a prison chapter called Ironwood Kindred.
The religion became the focal point of his life -- "the only thing that mattered to him," according to legal documents. And it was this devotion to his gods that, according to his testimony, prompted him to plan a murderous ambush at a makeshift pagan altar set up in a prison conference room.
Tonight, Lenz, who still practices Asatru from his cell on Virginia's death row, is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection for killing in the name of his gods. He has applied for a stay of execution by the U.S. Supreme Court and for clemency from Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D).
Lenz is one of a few inmates in Virginia prisons who practice Asatru. But in prisons across the United States, the number of converts has increased in recent years, according to experts, some of whom say prisoners find encouragement for violence in the gods they worship.
"This is a warrior thing," said Heidi Beirich, deputy director of the Intelligence Project for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups and extremist organizations. "What they take out of it is violence, physical dominance and racial purity. To them, Thor represents the ultimate white male."
Beirich said many of the inmates who have converted to Asatru or Odinism are white supremacists. "It is anti-Christian, and these particular pagan religions glorify deities created by the white race," she said. "They reflect values they are drawn to, like being really strong, being able to fight -- Thor with his hammer. And that's what they worship."
Beirich said there are racist and nonracist versions of the religion in prisons and among the general population.
Stephen McNallen, director of the Asatru Folk Assembly, a leading Asatru group in the United States, has been fielding calls from the media as Lenz's execution approaches.
"There is nothing in Asatru that would justify what he did," McNallen said of the killing by Lenz and Jeffrey Remington, Lenz's best friend, who also was an Asatru devotee.
"There is just not justification for what he did. Like any other group, we expect the holy powers to be honored. Clearly, when someone does something that is just plain wrong, just plain evil, obviously it hurts us. It hurts us in the same way that the lunatic-fringe Muslims hurt Islam. It is an embarrassment."
Once a Catholic altar boy, McNallen, 57, said he became a devotee of Asatru about 35 years ago while contemplating a career in the U.S. Army. "This warrior thing loomed in my own life," he said. He prefers not to use heathen or pagan as adjectives because, he said, both terms carry too much baggage.
"The best way to describe Asatru is to compare it with other native religions: Native American or other native or indigenous religions in any location on the globe," McNallen said in a telephone interview from his California home. "We are a group of people attempting to follow the way of our ancestors and look toward our ancestors as a source of spiritual comfort, nourishment and connection."
He estimated that 10,000 to 20,000 people in the United States share his religious beliefs and only a small percentage of devotees -- less than 5 percent -- are white supremacists. He guessed that a good number of those people are prison inmates.
What drew Lenz, 42, to Asatru while in prison is unclear. He had a "troubled childhood and adolescence," according to his clemency application. He was living in a tent in Prince William and broke into three homes and a restaurant to steal food. In 1993, he was convicted of burglary and possession of a firearm and sent to the Augusta, Ga. Correctional Center.
In court documents, he is described as a rule-abiding inmate with no violent episodes before or after the killing of Brent Parker.
Parker was a convicted murderer serving a 50-year sentence for killing a man in Winchester in 1985 by beating him for an hour. Parker laughed while beating the man, who did not fight back, taking breaks to smoke, according to court documents.
Lenz testified that Parker had threatened Remington and that his efforts to organize his Asatru group in prison were being "thwarted" by Parker.
On the evening of Jan. 16, 2000, Lenz, Parker, Remington and three other inmates attended a meeting of the Ironwood Kindred. A guard was stationed outside the door. Lenz read some poetry and afterward called Parker to the altar.
"I called [Parker] up to the altar and I asked him -- and I said to him, 'It has been a long, hard path between us,' " Lenz testified at his trial. "And Parker said, 'Yes, it is.' And I pulled a knife out of my pocket and I said, 'Are you trying to take it to the next step?' And he said, 'Yes, I am.' And so I stabbed him."
Remington also pulled a knife and began stabbing Parker. The three other inmates ran out of the room and notified the guard. The corrections officer called for backup and yelled at the two men to drop their knives -- an order they ignored. Parker was stabbed 68 times, according to the medical examiner's report, and received multiple stab wounds to the lungs and liver, each of which would have been fatal by themselves.
Remington also was sentenced to death for Parker's slaying, but he killed himself on death row in 2004.
Lenz's attorney, Jennifer L. Givens, said that Lenz's religion surely played a role in the killing but that the jury should have been told about Parker's history of violence. Her appeal to the Supreme Court is also based on the fact that a juror was reading a Bible during deliberations.

2006-08-06T10:29:00.000-04:00

A CONVENIENT SPOOF

A tiny little movie making fun of Al Gore, supposedly made by an amateur filmmaker, recently appeared on the popular Web site YouTube.com.
At first blush, "An Inconvenient Spoof" seemed like a scrappy little homemade film poking fun at Gore and his anti-global warming crusade.
In the movie, Gore is seen boring an army of penguins with his lecture and blaming global warming for everything, including Lindsay Lohan's thinness.
But when the Wall Street Journal tried to find the guy who posted this film — listed on YouTube as a 29-year-old — they found the movie didn't come from an amateur working out of his basement.
The film actually came from a slick Republican public relations firm called DCI, which just happens to have oil giant Exxon as a client.
Exxon denies knowing anything about the film, and DCI says, "We do not disclose the names of our clients, nor do we discuss the work we do on behalf of our clients."
Media ethicists say that if DCI is behind "An Inconvenient Spoof," they should fess up.
"Without the disclosure, it's really ethically questionable," said Diane Farsetta, a senior researcher at the Center for Media and Democracy.
Another question is why would this movie be done in a seemingly unprofessional way, to be shown alongside YouTube's mostly amateur videos, which feature lip-synching, odd performances and funny satires?
"They want it to look like this came from someone who really believes this, who is really critical of Al Gore and global warming," Farsetta said.
Ana Marie Cox, the Washington editor of Time.com, said Americans have come to distrust the mainstream media.
"They're more likely to believe something that comes straight from the horse's mouth," Cox said.
Public relations firms have long used computer technology to create bogus grassroots campaigns, which are called "Astroturf."
Now these firms are being hired to push illusions on the Internet to create the false impression of real people blogging, e-mailing and making films.
"People will become more savvy, and then the people who are making the fake videos will become more savvy about how to cover it up," Cox said.
So next time you're reading something on the Internet from a "real person" pushing a movie or defending an actor's alcohol-fueled rant — be wary. That real person might actually be a hired gun, selling you an idea through deception.

2006-08-05T10:03:00.000-04:00

Iran admits to arming Hizbullah

Iran admitted for the first time on Friday that it did indeed supply long-range Zelzal-2 missiles to Hizbullah.
Secretary-general of the "Intifada conference" Mohtashami Pur told an Iranian newspaper that Iran transferred the missiles so that they could be used to defend Lebanon, Jeruselem's Channel 1 reported.
The extent of Iran's intimate involvement in Hizbullah attacks is starting to emerge.
According to the defense establishment, the reason Hizbullah has not fired long-range Iranian-made Fajr missiles at Israel is due to Teheran's opposition. Israel now understands that without direct orders from the ayatollahs, Hizbullah is not allowed to use Iranian missiles in attacks against Israel.
The IDF also believes that it seriously damaged the long-range rocket array in the first night of air strikes almost three weeks ago and impaired Hizbullah's ability to fire the rockets.
The longer-range Zelzal missiles, manufactured by Iran and capable of reaching Tel Aviv, have also not been fired at Israel, and the IDF believes this is because it destroyed almost two-thirds of these in the Hizbullah arsenal.

2006-08-04T22:27:00.000-04:00

BEIRUT, Lebanon (Aug. 4) -- Israel and Hezbollah fought bloody ground battles and exchanged fierce air and missile strikes Friday - including bombing raids that severed Lebanon's last major supply link with Syria and the outside world, and the guerrillas' deepest rocket attack inside Israel to date.
After days of desultory diplomacy, Washington said it was near agreement with France on a U.N. cease-fire resolution, possibly by early next week. But Israel and Hezbollah showed no signs of holding their fire.
Israeli aircraft on a mission to destroy weapons caches hit a refrigerated warehouse where farm workers were loading fruit, killing at least 28 near the Lebanon-Syria border. And three Hezbollah rockets landed near Hadera, 50 miles south of the Israel-Lebanon border; 188 rockets rained on other towns, killing three Israeli Arabs.
Given the determination of both Hezbollah and Israel to look victorious when the conflict finally ends, the worst of the fighting may still lie ahead with the militant Shiite guerrilla fighters perhaps making good on their threat to rocket Tel Aviv and Israel launching an all-out ground offensive, pushing northward to the Litani River.
Israeli military officials said Friday they completed the first phase of the offensive, securing a 4-mile buffer zone in south Lebanon, though pockets of Hezbollah resistance remained.
Defense Minister Amir Peretz told top army officers to begin preparing for a push to the Litani, about 20 miles north of the border - a move that would require Cabinet approval. Peretz vowed his forces would complete "the whole mission" of driving guerrilla fighters out of missile range, a defiant response to the Hezbollah leader's threat to launch missiles into Israel's largest city.
Israeli airstrikes destroyed four key bridges after dawn, severing Beirut's final major connection to Syria and raising the threat of severe shortages of food, gasoline and medicines within days. The attack in the Christian heartland just north of Beirut killed four civilians and a Lebanese soldier.
Israel said it targeted the bridges to stop the flow of weapons to Hezbollah from Iran through Syria. Those weapons include not only missiles, but sophisticated anti-tank missiles said to be responsible for most of the 44 Israeli soldiers killed in more than three weeks of fighting.
However, aid workers said the destroyed highway was a vital conduit for much-needed food and supplies, with Christiane Berthiaume of the World Food Program calling it Lebanon's "umbilical cord."
"This (road) has been the only way for us to bring in aid. We really need to find other ways to bring relief in," she said in Geneva, Switzerland.
Hospitals were in danger of closing soon because medicines, hospital supplies and fuel for generators was fast running out. Staples like milk, rice and sugar were growing short across the country. Lines at Beirut filling stations stretch longer by the day.
Dr. George Tomey, acting president of the American University of Beirut, said its Medical Center, one of the prime and best known medical facilities in the Middle East, will stop receiving new patients as of Monday, except for emergency cases.
Dr. Ghassan Hammoud, who runs a 320-bed hospital packed with war wounded in the southern port city of Sidon, said he may have to shut down within 10 days.
On the 24th day of the conflict, the State Department said Friday that the United States and France were nearing completion of a U.N. resolution designed to halt the fighting in Lebanon and to set out principles for a lasting cease-fire.
"We are very close to a final draft with the French on a text," the department spokesman Sean McCormack said.
In a sign of billowing support for Hezbollah's Shiite fighters across the Arab world, tens of thousands of Shiite Muslims protested in Baghdad's Sadr City slum, chanting "Death to Israel, Death to America," the biggest rally in support of the militant Shiite organization since the fighting began.
As of Friday the Associated Press count showed at least 559 Lebanese have been killed, including 482 civilians confirmed dead by the Health Ministry, 27 Lebanese soldiers and at least 50 Hezbollah guerrillas.
Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora said that 1 million people - or about a quarter of Lebanon's population - has fled the fighting. Others estimate some 800,000 Lebanese have been made refugee.
Since the fighting started, 74 Israelis have been killed, 44 soldiers and 30 civilians. More than 300,000 Israelis have fled their homes in the north, Israeli officials said.
Lebanese security officials and the state news agency said Israeli airstrikes flattened two southern houses Friday and that more than 50 people were buried in the rubble. Israel denied attacking the villages, Aita al-Shaab and Taibeh.
Friday's attack on the refrigerated warehouse in Lebanon's eastern Bekaa Valley killed at least 28 farm laborers as they loaded peaches and apples onto trucks bound for the Syrian market, Lebanese security and hospital officials said. Syria's official news agency, SANA, reported that 33 people were killed in the raid, including 23 Syrian workers.
Israeli army spokesman Capt. Jacob Dallal said the army suspected the warehouse was used for arms because it tracked a truck it believed was carrying weapons that went into the warehouse from the Syrian side. He said the truck stayed inside for about 90 minutes before returning to Syria.
Israel contends that Hezbollah gets almost all of its weaponry from Syria and by extension Iran. That's why it says cutting off the supply chain is essential - and why fighting Hezbollah after it has spent six years building up its arsenal is proving so painful to Israel.
On Friday, the army confirmed a Hezbollah anti-tank missile killed three soldiers and wounded two others in southeastern Lebanon.
In the last two days alone, these missiles have killed seven soldiers and damaged three Israeli-made Merkava tanks - mountains of steel that are vaunted as symbols of Israel's military might, the army said. It said Hezbollah has fired Russian-made Metis-M anti-tank missiles and owns European-made Milan missiles.
Hezbollah's sophisticated anti-tank missiles are perhaps the guerrilla group's deadliest weapon in Lebanon fighting, with their ability to pierce Israel's most advanced tanks. Experts say this is further evidence that Israel is facing a well-equipped army in this war, not a ragtag militia.
In the second front of Israel's offensive against Islamic militants, an airstrike early Saturday in the southern Gaza town of Rafah killed at least two Palestinians and wounded five others, officials said. The Israeli army said its aircraft fired at several armed Palestinians.

2006-08-02T22:54:00.000-04:00

A Couple of Dicks

Man cuts off penis, throws it at police

Chicago--Before cops threw the book at him, Jakub Fik threw something unusual at them -- his penis.
Fik, 33, cut off his own penis during a Northwest Side rampage Wednesday morning. When confronted by police, Fik hurled several knives and his severed organ at the officers, police said. Officers stunned him with a Taser and took him into custody.
"We took him out without any serious injury, with the exception of his own," said Chicago Police Sgt. Edward Dolan of the 16th District.

Man cuts off penis in drunken bet

Latvia( July 21)--A man who cut off his own penis in a drunken bet had it stitched back on by Latvian doctors, the first such operation in the country's history.
While strongly under the influence of alcohol, the 30-year-old made a bet with his friend for 1000 Lats ($2600.00) that he would cut off his penis, according to a Latvian public television report.
He was taken to hospital with severe bleeding yesterday.
"We have had a few cases with penis traumas, when it was half-cut or damaged, but this is the first time that it was totally cut off - and brought to hospital in a plastic bag," said microsurgeon Aivars Tihonovs from Gailezers hospital in the Latvian capital, Riga.
The operation lasted three and a half hours as doctors had to sew six nerves back together, according to media reports.
"The first operation of this kind in the world was carried out in 1977, and it is still very rare," Dr Tihonovs said, adding that such surgery was sometimes needed after bomb explosions.
The surgeon said that he was proud of his work but also "really angry that he (the patient) did it to himself".
Doctors said that it would take four or five days to assess if the operation was successful. It would take about half a year to be sure that the man's penis was functioning properly.

Pentagon Lied To 9/11 Panel

Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon's initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.
Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping to hide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said.
In the end, the panel agreed to a compromise, turning over the allegations to the inspectors general for the Defense and Transportation departments, who can make criminal referrals if they believe they are warranted, officials said.
"We to this day don't know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us," said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. "It was just so far from the truth. . . . It's one of those loose ends that never got tied."
Although the commission's landmark report made it clear that the Defense Department's early versions of events on the day of the attacks were inaccurate, the revelation that it considered criminal referrals reveals how skeptically those reports were viewed by the panel and provides a glimpse of the tension between it and the Bush administration.
A Pentagon spokesman said yesterday that the inspector general's office will soon release a report addressing whether testimony delivered to the commission was "knowingly false." A separate report, delivered secretly to Congress in May 2005, blamed inaccuracies in part on problems with the way the Defense Department kept its records, according to a summary released yesterday.
A spokesman for the Transportation Department's inspector general's office said its investigation is complete and that a final report is being drafted. Laura Brown, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration, said she could not comment on the inspector general's inquiry.
In an article scheduled to be on newsstands today, Vanity Fair magazine reports aspects of the commission debate -- though it does not mention the possible criminal referrals -- and publishes lengthy excerpts from military audiotapes recorded on Sept. 11. ABC News aired excerpts last night.
For more than two years after the attacks, officials with NORAD and the FAA provided inaccurate information about the response to the hijackings in testimony and media appearances. Authorities suggested that U.S. air defenses had reacted quickly, that jets had been scrambled in response to the last two hijackings and that fighters were prepared to shoot down United Airlines Flight 93 if it threatened Washington.
In fact, the commission reported a year later, audiotapes from NORAD's Northeast headquarters and other evidence showed clearly that the military never had any of the hijacked airliners in its sights and at one point chased a phantom aircraft -- American Airlines Flight 11 -- long after it had crashed into the World Trade Center.
Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold and Col. Alan Scott told the commission that NORAD had begun tracking United 93 at 9:16 a.m., but the commission determined that the airliner was not hijacked until 12 minutes later. The military was not aware of the flight until after it had crashed in Pennsylvania.
These and other discrepancies did not become clear until the commission, forced to use subpoenas, obtained audiotapes from the FAA and NORAD, officials said. The agencies' reluctance to release the tapes -- along with e-mails, erroneous public statements and other evidence -- led some of the panel's staff members and commissioners to believe that authorities sought to mislead the commission and the public about what happened on Sept. 11.
"I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described," John Farmer, a former New Jersey attorney general who led the staff inquiry into events on Sept. 11, said in a recent interview. "The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years. . . . This is not spin. This is not true."
Arnold, who could not be reached for comment yesterday, told the commission in 2004 that he did not have all the information unearthed by the panel when he testified earlier. Other military officials also denied any intent to mislead the panel.
John F. Lehman, a Republican commission member and former Navy secretary, said in a recent interview that he believed the panel may have been lied to but that he did not believe the evidence was sufficient to support a criminal referral.
"My view of that was that whether it was willful or just the fog of stupid bureaucracy, I don't know," Lehman said. "But in the order of magnitude of things, going after bureaucrats because they misled the commission didn't seem to make sense to me."

2006-08-02T01:48:00.000-04:00

Mad Mel to Jews: Sorry

August 2, 2006 -- Mel Gibson's apology for his drunken, anti-semetic ramblings:

There is no excuse, nor should there be any tolerance, for anyone who thinks or expresses any kind of Anti-Semitic remark. I want to apologize specifically to everyone in the Jewish community for the vitriolic and harmful words that I said to a law enforcement officer the night I was arrested on a DUI charge. I am a public person, and when I say something, either articulated and thought out, or blurted out in a moment of insanity, my words carry weight in the public arena. As a result, I must assume personal responsibility for my words and apologize directly to those who have been hurt and offended by those words. The tenets of what I profess to believe necessitate that I exercise charity and tolerance as a way of life. Every human being is God’s child, and if I wish to honor my God I have to honor his children. But please know from my heart that I am not an anti-Semite. I am not a bigot. Hatred of any kind goes against my faith. I’m not just asking for forgiveness. I would like to take it one step further, and meet with leaders in the Jewish community, with whom I can have a one on one discussion to discern the appropriate path for healing.I have begun an ongoing program of recovery and what I am now realizing is that I cannot do it alone. I am in the process of understanding where those vicious words came from during that drunken display, and I am asking the Jewish community, whom I have personally offended, to help me on my journey through recovery. Again, I am reaching out to the Jewish community for its help. I know there will be many in that community who will want nothing to do with me, and that would be understandable. But I pray that that door is not forever closed.This is not about a film. Nor is it about artistic license. This is about real life and recognizing the consequences hurtful words can have. It’s about existing in harmony in a world that seems to have gone mad.

MEL GIBSON

2006-07-27T22:56:00.000-04:00

Skulls,nude juice bar?

Could it be the same hand from Springfield?

Plainfield, Illinois--After she was arrested for keeping a severed hand and six skulls in her South Plainfield home, exotic dancer Linda Kay asked her father and a friend to put up their homes to help secure her $100,000 bail.
Now her father and friend face the prospect of losing their houses after the 31-year-old Kay missed a court hearing yesterday, forfeiting the bail she posted after her arrest Friday on charges of improper disposition of human remains.
South Plainfield Municipal Court Judge John Leonard yesterday issued an arrest warrant for Kay, charging her with contempt of court, and setting bail on that charge at another $100,000.
Kay's father, Robert Kay, said his Scotch Plains house had been used to secure the original bail bond.
"I'm sweating ... I had to put my house up," the father said. He said the South Plainfield house owned by Linda Kay and her childhood friend, Sean McDonough -- where the body parts were discovered -- also was used to secure the bond, along with a third house belonging to a friend.
"I have no clue where she is. I really wish she had gone to court today. I am the last to know anything," Robert Kay said. "She's scared to death. Her friends are, too. They are all together, and I think they all ran away."
Linda Kay, a dancer at Hott 22, an all-nude juice bar on Route 22 in Union, was arrested about 1:15 p.m. Friday when officers investigating a report of a man threatening to kill himself went to the Diana Drive house in South Plainfield.
Police didn't find any man there, but they did find a jaggedly severed hand in a mason jar of formaldehyde on Kay's dresser in her basement bedroom.
Officers also found six human skulls in another bedroom. Authorities said they suspect the skulls were purchased online, but police they were included as part of the criminal charge until they complete an investigation into how Kay obtained them. The Middlesex County Medical Examiner's Office was attempting to get fingerprints from the severed hand.
Polina Nickulina, 26, also was arrested at the house Friday on a warrant charging her with failing to appear in court for a weapons possession charge involving a prior incident at the house. Nickulina was released on bail.

2006-07-26T20:17:00.000-04:00

THE BARE TRUTH

London, England--Men may be barred from baring their chests - and stomachs -and asses--in public under new local laws being considered by town halls.
They would stop men stripping off their shirts and/or wearing thong bikinis in crowded town centers and give powers to police to remove any who defy the cover-up laws.
The proposal has been inspired by the least attractive side effect of the heatwave - the tendency of a number of often middle-aged men to go about in nothing more than thongs and sandals.
Last week the Daily Mail highlighted the wave of revulsion among most of the public at the summer's least welcome fashion trend, and pictured a series of the worst examples in the hope of shaming offenders into keeping their T-shirts and pants on.

Now local authorities have been circulated with a scheme for using by-laws to require shirts and shorts that cover the derriere in town centers and to arrest men who won't wear them.
The laws would operate in a similar manner to local statutes that ban drinking on the streets or which prevent gangs of youths from congregating.
The politician behind the plan is former local government minister Nicholas Bennett, who has canvassed councils across the country for support.
"There is a problem," Mr Bennett said yesterday. "In my part of the country we are trying to revitalize the main shopping precinct.
"But one of the things that is depressing for anyone going shopping is the numbers of shaven-headed men, mainly in their 30s and 40s, who seem to think people want to see their bloated, often tatooed torsos, and their bums."
He added: "It is only a small minority, one in a hundred people. But these men do look aggressive and occasionally behave aggressively. You would see a big difference in the shopping centre if they were made to put on a shirt and some trousers."
"It is nice weather and most of us are wearing fewer clothes. But a town center is not the beach, and taking your top off or showing your cheeky side is going too far, for men as well as women."
"It is an unfortunate thing, but those men who like best to bare their stomachs and bums are usually the ones who have too much stomach and too much bum."
Officials in Bromley, in south east London, have responded warily to the proposal, suggesting that implementation might prove 'difficult'.
However by-laws governing local behavior and giving police powers to act against those who infringe them can be pushed through by town halls if the win approval from the Home Office.

2006-07-25T21:45:00.000-04:00

GIVE THAT MAN A HAND

Springfield, VA- Asghar reached across the counter at the meat market and passed two butchered chickens to the man with the familiar face. Then he ducked into the walk-in freezer to fetch the customer's second order, goat meat.
When the butcher stepped out seconds later, the customer's severed left hand lay on the floor by the meat saw.
The customer ran down the store's center aisle and into the front parking lot, leaving a trail of blood and yelling repeatedly that he was "not a terrorist."
Outside, another witness said, the man announced that he had used the meat saw to cut off his hand "for Allah."
Rescue workers arrived minutes after the incident Saturday evening and took the man -- and his detached hand -- to the hospital.
Fairfax County police declined to comment or release the man's name yesterday, saying no charges would be filed. Those who saw the action unfold remained jarred.
Asghar said the man's son told him that evening that his father was on medication for mental problems. Dan Schmidt, a spokesman for the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department, said authorities believe the man had mental health problems. Schmidt said he did not know whether doctors planned to try to re-attach the man's hand.
"I don't know what happened to that guy," Asghar, 45, said as he leaned yesterday against a stack of Pakistan Link newspapers at the small strip mall store in the Franconia area, which caters to customers from India, Afghanistan and Pakistan. "We are shaking still when we are talking about it."
With his son following, the man went into the parking lot, where Vikas Sinsunwal, 18, was hanging out with a group of friends in front of his parents' store, Niralla Sweets. The young men were admiring a friend's new motorcycle, Sinsunwal said, when the man walked coolly toward them.
The man was holding aloft his bleeding left arm -- sliced several inches above the wrist -- and using his right hand to hold up a photo identification badge that hung around his neck.
"We thought it was fake," Sinsunwal said of the limb. Then they heard the man mumbling calmly but angrily in a mixture of English and Urdu about working in the area and his children attending school here.
"He said, 'I did this for Allah'," Sinsunwal said.
Startled, the friends rushed inside Niralla Sweets, which sells pastry treats adorned with almond slices. The man followed.
As his son tried to calm him, the man stood outside the store's large windows, holding the badge and showing no sign of pain, Sinsunwal said. His sister, Shivani Sinsunwal, 20, called police as frightened customers begged her not to let the man inside.
About 30 seconds later, the man began walking toward the street. By now, workers and customers had poured out of nearby stores and were shouting at the man to stop.
"He wouldn't stop," Vikas Sinsunwal said.
The man cursed at and ran from police officers who arrived a few minutes later, witnesses said.
As he neared the busy intersection of Backlick Road and Spring Garden, witnesses said, police tackled him on a grassy area across from an appliance store.
Yesterday, a piece of cardboard blocked the narrow walkway that separates the shopping area of the meat market from the work area, where meat is cut with a vertical saw, a large contraption mounted on a shiny metal counter.
Asghar said a large door will be installed to block the space.
A freshly handwritten sign, a replacement for one that was spattered with the man's blood, was taped on the glass front of the meat counter.
It read:

"Employes Only, Please Stay Out Side, Thanks"

2006-07-23T19:40:00.000-04:00

Bypass in a box

The box of Swanson's Hungry-Man XXL frozen dinners proudly proclaims that it's crammed with one and a half pounds of "food," but what isn't proclaimed is the nutritional information. As is common with most frozen dinners, the amount of sodium in the Hungry-Man XXL meals is staggering.
Sure, the calories (970), fat (40 grams), and carbohydrates (106 grams) of the Roasted Carved Turkey are not for the weak-hearted (literally), but the 3,600 mg of sodium in the one meal is outlandishly high, especially when the Food and Drug Administration recommends keeping your daily sodium intake below 2,400 mg. for the entire day!
One Thousand Miligrams equals1 Gram. So, we're talking about 3+ GRAMS of sodium in one sitting.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong about this, but I believe that 3 Grams of Cocaine, inhaled in one huge mega-fat line, would likely do you less harm than 3 Grams of sodium scarfed down in one meal.

Think about it.

2006-07-22T17:53:00.000-04:00

Israeli Tanks Roll Into Lebanon

Avivim,Israel- An estimated 10 Israeli armored vehicles rolled into Lebanon Saturday by crushing a border fence near the Lebanese town of Maroun al-Ras.
A report by the local news agency ABS-CBN said the tanks drove past a UN observation post and is the latest Israeli offensive against Hezbollah guerillas. Maroun al-Ras is a strategic hilltop that has been the scene of heavy fighting between Israeli troops and Hezbollah fighters.
But Israeli army spokesman Jacob Dalal downplayed reports of a major ground assault. "This is only a pinpoint operation," said army spokesman Jacob Dalal.
Thousands of Israeli troops are massed on the border apparently in preparation for a major push deep into Lebanon.

The Lebanese president warned that its military will engage Israel if a full-scale invasion is launched, an action that could very well begin a much larger, perhaps global, conflict.

Israeli forces have been mounting relentless sea, land and air attacks in Lebanon after Hezbolla guerillas captured two of its soldiers 11 days ago.
The international community has condemned Israel's "disproportionate use" of force against Lebanon which saw the destruction of most of the country's infrastructures and the deaths of over 360 people and injuring hundreds more.
Early Saturday, Israeli war planes destroyed a communications tower disrupting television and phone service throughout the northern country.
The strikes destroyed transmission towers, including one for the leading LBCI satellite television, in Fatqa, in the Kesrwan mountains northeast of Beirut. Transmission towers for TV stations and mobile telephone networks were also destroyed in Terbol in northern Lebanon.

2006-07-22T03:17:00.000-04:00

2006-07-22T01:51:00.000-04:00

BUSH SENDS MISSILES TO ISRAEL

The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hizbollah targets in Lebanon, The New York Times reported on Saturday.
Citing U.S. officials who spoke on Friday on condition of anonymity, the Times said the decision to ship the weapons quickly came after relatively little debate within the administration, and noted in its report that its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others who could perceive Washington as aiding Israel in the manner that Iran has armed Hizbollah.
The munitions are actually part of a multimillion-dollar arms-sale package approved last year which Israel is able to tap when it needs to, the officials told the Times. But some military officers said the request for expedited delivery was unusual and indicated that Israel has many targets it plans to hit in Lebanon.
The arms shipment has not been announced publicly. The officials who described the administration's decision to rush the munitions included employees of two government agencies, one of whom described the shipment as just one example of a broad array of armaments that the United States has long provided Israel, the Times said.
Pentagon and military officials declined to describe in detail the size and contents of the shipment to Israel, the newspaper said, and they would not say whether the munitions were being shipped by cargo aircraft or some other means.
But one U.S. official said the shipment should not be compared to the kind of an "emergency resupply" of dwindling Israeli stockpiles that was provided during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, according to the Times report.
A spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington told the Times: "We have been using precision-guided munitions in order to neutralize the military capabilities of Hizbollah and to minimize harm to civilians. As a rule, however, we do not comment on Israel's defense acquisitions."

2006-07-22T01:42:00.000-04:00

2006-07-21T00:24:00.000-04:00

Man, that is so cold...

MADISON, Wis. - A man convicted of keeping his dead mother in a freezer for years so he could keep collecting her Social Security checks avoided federal prison during his sentencing Wednesday.
A judge ordered Philip Schuth, 53, to serve four months simultaneously with the state prison sentence he is already serving and to repay about $35,000 he stole from the federal government.
Schuth pleaded guilty in April to a federal count of misusing a Social Security number
He is serving a seven-year sentence as the result of a standoff with police last year at his home on French Island, just outside La Crosse. It was during the standoff that officers found the frozen body.
Schuth told investigators she died of natural causes in 2000, but he hid the body because he didn't want to be blamed for her death and wanted to keep collecting her Social Security.
U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb on Wednesday also ordered Schuth to spend four months in a halfway house after his release from prison.
Schuth's attorney, Mike Lieberman, said most of the money has been repaid after police found about $10,000 in his client's house and $24,000 in his bank account.