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Saturday, August 21, 2004

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The Other O'Reilly

Dear Reader,

Ignacius here. The others are out of the office today. Thought I'd take the opportunity to catch up on something that has been bothering me for a long, long time:

Bill O'Reilly.

There he is on Fox News dirtying the good name of my family with his idiotic defense of Bush and war and being paid big bucks to do it. What is a guy to do?

Worse thing is, you start worrying about your own genetics when you see a jerk like this who shares your name... Could I, too, be the spawn of Satan? I have nightmares about it.

Oh Really O'Reilly?

August 14-20, 2004

Bill O'Reilly continues to earn the millions of dollars he's paid by the bourgeoisie to misinform and brainwash US workers. Night after night he demonstrates unequivocally that far from being a serious and ethical journalist aiming to provide his viewers with facts so they can decide for themselves, O'Reilly is nothing but a two-bit mouthpiece and propaganda arm for the capitalist class that pays his overinflated salary.

Throughout the bloody course of Washington's predatory and colonial invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, O'Reilly has shamelessly and openly called for the slaughter of any Afghan and Iraqi citizens who have the audacity of being in the way--in their own country--of US forces achieving their military objective of conquering those nations.

O'Reilly was one of those bloodthirsty bourgeois pundits who had urged Bush to destroy Falluja when the Sunni insurgents valiantly beat back the US aggressors. Similarly, ever since the Shiite uprising in April--the uprising that O'Reilly never recognized--he has been urging Bush to crush Al-Sadr's militias in Najaf.

In reaction to the outbreak of the latest Uprising That Wasn't, O'Reilly used his August 10 Talking Points memo, "Radical Cleric Muqtada al-Sadr Must Go," to strongly urged Bush to wipe out Sadr's Mahdi Army militias in Najaf, "mosque or no mosque."

"This vicious man [al-Sadr] has caused the deaths of hundreds, maybe thousands of people and hides behind a sacred shrine for protection."

Oh Really O'Reilly? Al-Sadr has not caused the deaths of hundreds or thousands of people. BUSH, CHENEY, RUMSFELD, and O'REILLY have caused the deaths of as many as 37,000 civilians in Iraq according to one Iraqi estimate, in addition to another 50,000 Iraqi workers in uniform. And that's just in THIS Iraq war. Add another 100,000-200,000 from the first Gulf War, plus tens of thousands Afghans.

Al-Sadr fighters didn't invade Najaf, Baghdad, Nasiriya, Basra, and Kut. Al-Sadr forces didn't kill thousands of civilians in those cities. They LIVE there. It was the Americans and British who shelled and bombed Iraqis in their neighborhoods and homes. The Mahdi Army didn't invade New York or Philadelphia and start shelling churches and synogagues. Al-Sadr's soldiers are defending themselves against an illegal foreign invasion. They have the right under international law to wage armed struggle and guerrilla warfare to defend their homeland against an illegal and preemptive aggression.

Al-Sadr's not "vicious." He's only vicious in O'Reilly's eyes because he has the valor, honor, and courage to defend his land and people against imperialist aggressors. The vicious and vindictive thug is O'Reilly, who thirsts for the blood of Iraqi and Afghani workers and peasants.

It is the American forces who are attacking the sacred Imam Ali shrine. The Mahdi Army would not be holed up there if the invaders were not shelling the city and killing its people. Given the overwhelmingly military superiority of the occupiers against the poorly armed militamen, Sadr's fighters have the right to defend their people from wherever they choose.

O'Reilly: "Al-Sadr knows that if American troops enter the mosque, that would be used by Muslims all over the world to stoke up even more hatred against the U.S.A. But what choice is there? This al-Sadr has to go."

Earth to O'Reilly: The fact that US troops threaten the Imam Ali shrine and have already turned the holy cemetery into a killing field has already enraged Sunni and Shiite Muslims in Iraq as well as Muslims and all people of conscience everywhere. In the Sunni town of Samarra, over 700 protesters demanded that US forces withdraw from Najaf while chanting, "Long live al-Sadr!" In Falluja, 3,000 demonstrators marched to s upport al-Sadr, chanting, "Falluja is with Najaf, the target is America."

Bush and O'Reilly were repeatedly warned this would be a consequence of invading Iraq. But they knew smarter than everyone. They had the confidence of knowing God was on their side.

O'Reilly: "'Talking Points' has come to the conclusion that the Bush administration has to fight to win right now in Iraq. Al-Sadr has had enough chances. He's a killer and he will not stop until Iraq becomes a fundamentalist nation, just what the world does not need."

Here O'Reilly reflects the desperation and madness of the US warmakers. The Iraqi resistance has challenged Washington's so-called military supremacy, most importantly in Falluja and Najaf. Bush has lost all chance to win this war politically--and he knows it. The hearts and minds facade is long dead. All that's left is brutalizing and terrorizing Iraqis into submission. Bush, Rumsfeld and O'Reilly have actually deluded themselves into believing this can happen. But there is no way Iraq can be stabilized. Even if the US succeeded in crushing Falluja and Najaf, Bush loses. The hatred and hostility caused by such atrocities would only strengthen the resistance in Iraq and further inflame Muslim and nonMuslim masses worldwide.

Al-Sadr is not a "killer." He is a genuine national liberation leader engaged in a legitimate and legal struggle against foreign occupation. He didn't send his forces to America or Britain to kill and terrorize civilians. Bush, Rumsfeld, and their puppet Allawi are the killers. As for Sadr not stopping until Iraq becomes a fundamentalist nation, his position is for a free and independent election in Iraq. If Shiites win, well, that's democracy, folks. Bush was also told this would be a likely result of his invasion, too.

Comment: There. That feels better. At least I am not alone in thinking Bill O'Reilly is deluded. Well, actually, I doubt he is deluded. He probably knows quite well what he is about and how to influence the minds of people who look no further than Fox News for their information about the world. As their Nazi masters used to say, repeat a lie often enough and people will believe it.

Though what I'd like to know is, if some foreign power were to invade the United States, would this disgrace to all the O'Reilly's follow his own advice and collaborate? Of course, in a few years it might take a foreign invasion to "restore democracy" to the US given the road its leaders have chosen, in which case I have little doubt that O'Reilly would be on the side of the fascists currently in power, under the name of "patriotism". But as I always say, a "patriot" is an "I" in the middle of "rot".

Coincidence. I think not.

I'll keep you informed on the genealogical research I have undertaken on my family if I learn anything important about my links with this guy. Hopefully we'll discover that his branch of the family has nothing to do with mine and emerged out of a petri dish on Zeti Reticuli, which would mean he is related to lots of other big wigs down here. Probably Bush and Kerry, and it might help us understand how one gets into the Skullcap and Bones secret society at Yale.

Now that I have taken care of that, let's see what else has happened in the last 24 hours. Unfortunately, the momentum towards chaos we have seen over the last few years continues. There's a farce of an election in the US between two peas in a lizzie pod: Bush and Kerry. The insults are flying as Bush, the deserter, degrades Kerry, the holder of some questionable Purple Hearts. They are trying to outdo each other to convince the public that they will be tougher against terrorism than their opponent. In other words, everybody loses. Some game. Diversion. Bread and circuses. Friends, we are watching the Fall of the Roman Empire as choreographed by the Adolph Bush family. World War is coming to your screens, and the colour commentator is very likely to be that other O'Reilly.

God help us.

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Witnesses: U.S. plane launches air strike in Iraqi city of Fallujah

Canadian Press
Friday, August 20, 2004

FALLUJAH, Iraq (AP) - U.S. forces launched two airstrikes Friday on the troubled Iraqi city of Fallujah, hospital officials and witnesses said.

Two people were killed and six injured in the first attack just after midnight, said Dia'a al-Jumeili, a doctor at Fallujah's main hospital. A second warplane fired at least one missile into an industrial area of the city later Friday morning. It exploded in an open field, leaving a crater and spraying shrapnel across the doors of nearby automobile shops, but causing no serious damage.

Shrapnel from the second blast also hit an ice cream factory, wounding three people, said Adel Khamis, another doctor at Fallujah General Hospital.

Comment: We know Bush doesn't read the papers, so it is left to you and me to lose our breakfast each morning reading the previous day's murder and mayhem in Iraq. Children, mothers, fathers, all sacrificed to Yahweh. That is the psychopath's advantage: no conscience, no empathy. Just like the God they worship.

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Al-Sadr militia remains in Imam Ali mosque

Saturday 21 August 2004, 10:35 Makka Time, 7:35 GMT

Despite earlier conflicting reports, fighters loyal to Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr have retained control of a revered religious site in the Iraqi city of Najaf.

Four loud explosions rattled the area around Najaf's Imam Ali mosque on Saturday where al-Mahdi Army militiamen have been besieged by US and Iraqi government forces for nearly a fortnight.

And clashes broke out between al-Sadr's militia and US-led forces in the twin city of Kufa overnight, leaving at least one dead and a dozen wounded, including civilians.

Confusion about who controls the Imam Ali mosque - revered by Muslims and especially Shia believers - reigned on Friday after al-Sadr aides suggested they had symbolically handed the keys to the shrine to Iraq's top Shia Muslim religious authorities.

But in an interview with Aljazeera late on Friday night, al-Sadr's senior spokesman in Najaf, Ahmad al-Shaibani, denied handing over the keys of the Imam Ali shrine to representatives of Ayat Allah Ali al-Sistani.

Al-Shaibani also denied Iraqi police had entered the site, insisting the shrine was still under the control of the al-Mahdi Army.

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Unwilling participants: Iraqi soccer players angered by Bush campaign ads

PATRAS, Greece -- Iraqi midfielder Salih Sadir scored a goal here on Wednesday night, setting off a rousing celebration among the 1,500 Iraqi soccer supporters at Pampeloponnisiako Stadium. Though Iraq -- the surprise team of the Olympics -- would lose to Morocco 2-1, it hardly mattered as the Iraqis won Group D with a 2-1 record and now face Australia in the quarterfinals on Sunday.

Afterward, Sadir had a message for U.S. president George W. Bush, who is using the Iraqi Olympic team in his latest re-election campaign advertisements.

In those spots, the flags of Iraq and Afghanistan appear as a narrator says, "At this Olympics there will be two more free nations -- and two fewer terrorist regimes."

"Iraq as a team does not want Mr. Bush to use us for the presidential campaign," Sadir told SI.com through a translator, speaking calmly and directly. "He can find another way to advertise himself."

Ahmed Manajid, who played as a midfielder on Wednesday, had an even stronger response when asked about Bush's TV advertisement. "How will he meet his god having slaughtered so many men and women?" Manajid told me. "He has committed so many crimes."

"The ad simply talks about President Bush's optimism and how democracy has triumphed over terror," said Scott Stanzel, a spokesperson for Bush's campaign. "Twenty-five million people in Iraq are free as a result of the actions of the coalition."

To a man, members of the Iraqi Olympic delegation say they are glad that former Olympic committee head Uday Hussein, who was responsible for the serial torture of Iraqi athletes and was killed four months after the U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq in March 2003, is no longer in power.

But they also find it offensive that Bush is using Iraq for his own gain when they do not support his administration's actions. "My problems are not with the American people," says Iraqi soccer coach Adnan Hamad. "They are with what America has done in Iraq: destroy everything. The American army has killed so many people in Iraq. What is freedom when I go to the [national] stadium and there are shootings on the road?"

At a speech in Beaverton, Ore., last Friday, Bush attached himself to the Iraqi soccer team after its opening-game upset of Portugal. "The image of the Iraqi soccer team playing in this Olympics, it's fantastic, isn't it?" Bush said. "It wouldn't have been free if the United States had not acted."

Comment: Bush probably believes this trash. His record shows that he doesn't have much in the way of brains. You could hear how excited he is: "It's fantastic, isn't it?" Have a pretzel, Mr. President.

Sadir, Wednesday's goal-scorer, used to be the star player for the professional soccer team in Najaf. In the city in which 20,000 fans used to fill the stadium and chant Sadir's name, U.S. and Iraqi forces have battled loyalists to rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr for the past two weeks. Najaf lies in ruins.

"I want the violence and the war to go away from the city," says Sadir, 21. "We don't wish for the presence of Americans in our country. We want them to go away."

Manajid, 22, who nearly scored his own goal with a driven header on Wednesday, hails from the city of Fallujah. He says coalition forces killed Manajid's cousin, Omar Jabbar al-Aziz, who was fighting as an insurgent, and several of his friends. In fact, Manajid says, if he were not playing soccer he would "for sure" be fighting as part of the resistance.

"I want to defend my home. If a stranger invades America and the people resist, does that mean they are terrorists?" Manajid says. "Everyone [in Fallujah] has been labeled a terrorist. These are all lies. Fallujah people are some of the best people in Iraq."

Everyone agrees that Iraq's soccer team is one of the Olympics' most remarkable stories. If the Iraqis beat Australia on Saturday -- which is entirely possible, given their performance so far -- they would reach the semifinals. Three of the four semifinalists will earn medals, a prospect that seemed unthinkable for Iraq before this tournament.

When the Games are over, though, Coach Hamad says, they will have to return home to a place where they fear walking the streets. "The war is not secure," says Hamad, 43. "Many people hate America now. The Americans have lost many people around the world--and that is what is happening in America also."

Comments: I wonder how many American athletes are as aware of what is happening in their country as these Iraqis? Notice that they have no quarrel with the American people. It is the government they are upset with. Objective observers might even say they have reason: tens of thousands of dead Iraqis, the country in turmoil, shooting and criminality everywhere, and an occupation force installed in the capital. Unfortunately, objective observers have been noting that hatred of the US is tied closely to US policies in the Mid East, particularly their unbridled support for the killing of every Palestinian living under the Israeli occupation. Is this occupation thing becoming a familiar thread here?

We have noticed from our own experience as well as from reports from readers that the tendency to confuse the government with the people over which it rules is most serious in the US. Not only was Saddam or the Taliban attacked in the US press or in the word on the street, but Arabs or Moslems as a whole are denounced. We saw this in the build-up to Iraq in the hate campaign waged against all things French.

This blurring of concepts is a strong indicator of the inability of most Americans to think clearly and rationally. Their thought processes are replaced by slogans and ready-made ideas furnished by the media. Their thoughts are not their own. Pretty scary. The programming and reprogramming of the population goes on through the TV, through shows like that of Bill O**** [I can't bring myself to write it out again - I]. The next election is going to be a scene out of Dawn of the Dead.

What is astonishing is the near complete mind control over the American population coupled with the firm belief that Americans are free, are "individuals", and have control over their lives. Thomas Jefferson must be rolling over in his grave. Watch for earthquake reports from Virginia.

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Bombs go off at UN-run voter registration office, 6 Afghan police injured

Canadian Press
Friday, August 20, 2004


KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) - A series of bombs went off at a UN voter registration office in western Afghanistan, injuring six Afghan police, setting vehicles ablaze and shattering windows, police and the United Nations said Friday. It was the latest in a string of attacks targeting election workers.

The blasts occurred at about 8 p.m. Thursday at a voter registration site in Farah City, near the border with Iran and about 750 kilometres southwest of the capital, Kabul, said Mohammed Rasool Khan, the deputy police chief for the province.

UN spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva said there were six explosions in all. He said there were three international UN staffers at the site at the time, and none were injured.

The UN staffers had finished most voter registration work in the province and were to be moved to Herat, the province directly north of Farah.[...]

It was not clear who was behind the attack.

Taliban militants have been blamed for a series of attacks on workers preparing the country for its first presidential vote. Scores of election workers and civilians have been killed in the attacks.

Still, UN officials say some violence in Farah and other provinces has been over drug-smuggling and other turf wars.

In other violence, militants attacked a police post in central Ghzani province, killing one officer and injuring two others, state television reported Friday.

Three militants and a civilian caught in the crossfire also died in the fighting Thursday in Rahman, a village 160 kilometres south of Kabul.

Comment: While the Afghani flag flies proudly in George Bush's campaign propaganda, Afghanis on the ground are practising events that are not official Olympic sports: dodging mortars freestyle; the endless sprint from the occupying forces; long distance drug-running. It is now over two years since Afghanistan was "liberated", and the occupation army controls a bit of the area around Kabul and several other cities. The war lords with whom they made an alliance are running the country. This is democracy, American style. These are conditions in which "free elections" will someday take place.

Perhaps by the 2008 elections in the US, the same "democratic" conditions will exist there. That seems to be the gameplan.

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A degrading memorial

By Alexander Yakobson

In the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Beit Yisrael, the Jerusalem municipality has erected a memorial to the fatalities of the August 2003 terror attack on the No. 2 bus: a memorial plaque bearing the names of those who were killed. The name of one of the dead, Maria Antonia Reslas of the Philippines, was engraved separately from the others, and she was given the title "Mrs.," while the Jewish dead were awarded the title "sainted" (kadosh). "Shortly after the ceremony," the newspaper (Haaretz Hebrew edition, August 9) reports, "there was already evidence of the scratching that unknown persons had done over Reslas' name."

The damage to the plaque is an ugly act of vandalism but the plaque itself, which officially declares that one of the dead is a second-class victim because she is not Jewish, is far more shameful and ugly. This is not a matter of an act by extremists. The hand hesitates to write this, but the truth must be told: The municipality of Jerusalem decided to degrade the woman who was killed out of consideration for the feelings of the public.

[...] The question is whether the ultra-Orthodox public in Israel, including its leaders and its spokesmen, is prepared to rid itself entirely of the view that non-Jews are not really human beings. If the answer is negative, this does not bode well for initiatives that aim to nurture dialogue and understanding between various segments of the Israeli public.

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Maoist rebels bomb Nepalese capital

Last Updated Fri, 20 Aug 2004 15:23:25 EDT

KATHMANDU - Suspected Maoist rebels exploded two bombs in Kathmandu on Friday, the third day of their blockade of Nepal's capital city.

The attackers shot their way into a government building and then set off a bomb inside. One policeman was shot and injured, another man was hurt in the explosion.

The guerrillas also set off a bomb at an empty police post on the outskirts of the city of 1.5 million people. No one was injured in that explosion.

The Maoists, who have led an eight-year insurrection against the country's constitutional monarchy, set up the blockade of Kathmandu on Wednesday.

The government hasn't agreed to do that but it has said it will look into the disappearance of several other left-wing activists over recent months.

Some limited transport in and out of the city is continuing, but the government has imposed fuel rationing and food prices are reported to have risen.

On Monday, a luxury hotel in Kathmandu was bombed, again with no injuries. Some businesses and hotels have shut down amid the rebel threats. Business leaders are calling for a ceasefire and for negotiations between the government and the insurgents.

The civil war has claimed an estimated 10,000 lives since 1996, with atrocities being committed on both sides, according to human rights groups.

The bloody conflict has devastated the tourism industry and deterred foreign investment in the already desperately poor country.

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Fraud ruled out in Chavez's referendum victory

www.chinaview.cn 2004-08-21 11:05:35

CARACAS, Aug. 20 (Xinhuanet) -- The National Electoral Council (CNE) of Venezuela on Friday ruled out any possibility of a fraud, as claimed by the opposition, in the victory of President Hugo Chavez in the recall referendum held last Sunday.

A senior official of the CNE, Tibisay Lucena, said no irregularity has been spotted in the auditing of 150 electoral centers, as confirmed by the international observers.

In 15 percent of the audited centers, "we have not drawn a single ballot showing any irregularity," she added.

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Canadian observer disputes claims of vote fraud in Venezuela referendum

Colin Perkel
Canadian Press
August 20, 2004

TORONTO (CP) - Anti-democratic fanatics will continue to insist Venezuela's presidential recall vote was fraudulent even though there's no evidence to back the assertion, a Canadian observer of the vote said Thursday.

Leading opponents of President Hugo Chavez are claiming that machines used in Sunday's referendum were rigged, dealing a setback to international efforts to bring stability to the oil-rich country.

"I don't know where that's coming from," said Greg Albo, one of two Canadians among 300 independent observers formally designated to watch the balloting.

"There was no evidence of (fraud)."

One foe of the president, Nelson Rampersad, said this week the touch-screen voting machines were rigged to impose a "ceiling" on the number of votes in favour of ousting Chavez.

Rampersad refused to take part in a spot audit comparing the electronic and paper ballots.

Albo, a political science professor at York University who was stationed in the city of Maracay for the vote, said he watched dozens of the machines in operation.

"(They) all worked fine," he said.

In addition, he said, voters checked to make sure the machines accurately reflected their vote before putting paper slips from the machines into ballot boxes.

About 58 per cent of Venezuelan voters opted to leave the leftist president in office.

Albo's belief that the vote was fair echoed the consensus view of hundreds of other international observers, including former U.S. president Jimmy Carter.

"(The fraud claim) is partly to sustain a very strong, fanatical . . . part of Venezuelan politics that has been there since the 1940s and is still refusing to concede to more democratic norms," Albo said.

Still, the opposition's refusal to accept the referendum result has raised the spectre of further bloodshed in a country rocked by violence in recent years.

On Monday, pro-Chavez gunmen opened fire on opposition protesters in the capital of Caracas, killing one woman and injuring half a dozen others.

Critics maintain Chavez intends to install a Cuban-style dictatorship, while supporters praise him for giving the poor majority better services and a voice in politics.

Nicolas Lopez, a student at York University who was also on hand for the vote, said those who support Chavez won't be cowed by the opposition.

"People have learned what their rights are," Lopez said.

Disadvantaged and younger Venezuelans are particularly keen to be involved in the political process, and the openness and vigour of the referendum campaign was impressive, he said.

Albo said Venezuela is increasingly becoming one of the best exponents of democracy in South America.

However, he said tighter controls are needed on outside financing -especially from the U.S. -that can unduly influence the democratic process.

Although Washington has long savaged Chavez, the U.S. State Department has indicated acceptance of the vote.

Comment: From the same folks that told us they had hard intelligence that Saddam had WMDs, this assertion of their acceptance of the voting results should be taken with a grain of salt. The US has been behind the general strikes, street protests, and the attempted coup d'état in 2002.

Remember Colin Powell going in front of the UN to make his case in February 2003? He had photos. He had "facts". He was lying through his teeth. Powell, the "good cop" to everyone else's "bad cop" in the good cop/bad cop routine of the Bush Reich. Chavez is dangerous in the eyes of the US for at least two reasons. He is president of a country that is the fifth largest oil producer in the world. He has stood up to US interference in the democratic process in Venezuela. The US can't let this continue. If Venezuela stands up, that will inspire other Latin American countries to follow the path of Chavez's Bolivarist politics.

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THE LOVE GOV

By MURRAY WEISS, STEFAN C. FRIEDMAN and ANDY SOLTIS

August 20, 2004 --

Golan Cipel's alleged extortion demand for millions of dollars from New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey was backed up by a threat to release embarrassing tapes and photos of him, The Post has learned.

The FBI wants to question McGreevey about the sensational gay sex case as early as next week and federal subpoenas for evidence are expected to be issued soon, sources said.

No specific date for the FBI questioning has been set but a McGreevey spokesman said, "We will cooperate fully."

McGreevey, who is married and has two children, has remained silent about the scandal since his bombshell announcement last week that he was gay and had a homosexual affair — when he didn't mention extortion or the name of his lover.

But shortly after the speech, sources close to the governor claimed that Cipel had demanded $5 million in blackmail from him — or he would go public with their affair and file a sexual-harassment lawsuit.

Sources said yesterday that the key to the alleged extortion was compromising tapes and photographs of McGreevey that Cipel's side warned would be made public.

The contents of the material were not disclosed.

The FBI will investigate the possibility of extortion, as well as the conduct of McGreevey and his aides, sources said.

Cipel's lawyer, Allen Lowy, yesterday denied he or Cipel had threatened McGreevey with damaging photos or tapes.

"Never. It's absurd," Lowy said. "We haven't threatened anyone. We contemplated filing an action. After that, there were settlement discussions.

"Neither I nor Golan — who are the only people who know of the existence of any evidence — have described any kind of evidence except to say that we have corroborating evidence."

McGreevey's lawyer could not be reached for comment.

The FBI became involved in the case even before McGreevey's "I am a gay American" speech — when his office asked the feds to investigate Cipel for attempted extortion.

Cipel, now in Israel, said this week he would return to the United States in "a few weeks, so that justice will be done."

The Israeli has said he is not gay.

He met McGreevey when the former mayor of Woodbridge, N.J., toured Israel in 2000. After being elected governor, McGreevey hired Cipel as a $110,000-a-year homeland-security chief, but was forced to fire him amid public outrage.

Besides being a potential source of evidence against Cipel, McGreevey may be a target of investigators himself.

Federal officials will look into whether McGreevey attempted to obtain money to pay off Cipel, Fox News reported last week.

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Crazier still! Cipel's 'lover' arrested

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEWARK — A state judge on Friday ordered a psychiatric evaluation for a doctor who told reporters he had an affair with the man accusing Gov. James E. McGreevey of sexual harassment.

Dr. Michael David Miller was repeatedly urged by a public defender and Judge Donald Volkert to refrain from speaking during his 20-minute arraignment on charges including pretending to be a law enforcement officer.

Despite their efforts, Miller made several remarks, including, “I have no law enforcement responsibility in this country whatsoever.” Miller was charged with three counts of impersonating law officers and public officials, and one count each of false public alarm and making a false report to law enforcement.

His public defender, Charles Mautone, entered not guilty pleas to all the charges.

Before concluding a mental evaluation was warranted, Assistant Prosecutor Judy Gagliano listed a series of what she said were “bizarre statements” attributed to Miller. Those statements from Miller included that he was a CIA operative and that his tenant in Livingston has al-Qaida ties and would blow up the Essex County Courthouse and the adjacent Essex County Hall of Records, Gagliano said.

The hearing took place in the Essex County Courthouse. Miller, 51, remained in custody on $500,000 bail. Miller was arrested about 11:30 p.m. Thursday at his home.

He told the Daily News that he had an affair with Golan Cipel, a former adviser to the governor. McGreevey announced last week that he is gay and said he had an affair with a man and intends to resign from office. Sources close to McGreevey, speaking on condition of anonymity, have identified the man as Cipel, a former homeland security aide, and said the Israeli had demanded millions of dollars to stay quiet.

However, Cipel says he is heterosexual and was subject to sexual harassment by McGreevey. His lawyer has said the extortion claims are false and that the governor’s representatives offered money for Cipel to stay quiet. Cipel has also denied Miller’s claims. Authorities started investigating Miller after he began making threats from Aug. 12-18 that increasingly raised concern, acting Essex County Prosecutor Paula T. Dow said.

“Our charges are not related to Golan Cipel,” Dow said, “and we’re not focused on that.”

Authorities noted that the investigation started before Miller made his statements about Cipel. When asked how much general credibility Miller possessed, Essex County Sheriff Armando Fontoura said, “zero.”

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Ex, lies & no tape

BY RALPH R. ORTEGA,
NANCY DILLON
and ALISON GENDAR
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

The man in the middle of the New Jersey gay sex mess came out swinging yesterday, accusing Gov. Jim McGreevey of being out to get him.

"I am a single person fighting a monstrous and organized machine of lies and manipulations, systematically working to destroy me," former McGreevey aide Golan Cipel said in a statement.

"I'm not afraid and will continue to tell you the truth and fight for it," said Cipel, who is staying at his parents' home in Israel. "They won't shut me up with scare tactics." Cipel's expression of outrage came a day after Jersey mystery man Dr. David Miller stepped forward to say he had an affair with the handsome Israeli.

Cipel retorted he had never had a relationship with a man in his life "and certainly not with the man who made declarations in the United States."

He hinted that Miller was pushed forward by either McGreevey or the governor's powerful moneyman, Charles Kushner, who just pleaded guilty to trying to scare off a government witness.

Miller said he went to the same synagogue as Kushner but had no other contact with him. Miller's allegations - that he dated Cipel for several months over the past year - threw doubt on Cipel's claims that he's straight and was sexually assaulted by McGreevey. The doctor said the two spent time together at his home in Spain when Cipel dropped by in between trips to Israel.

Miller has been unwilling to produce any proof of such an affair, and further undercut his credibility with tales of being a CIA operative.

"We didn't film ourselves in bed. That's kinky. I'm not into kink. Golan's not into kink," Miller said.

Cipel's lawyer called Miller's allegations lies that were only the latest chapter in an intimidation campaign by McGreevey.

McGreevey tried to contact Cipel after the former adviser left state government, Allen Lowy, Cipel's lawyer, said Thursday. McGreevey sent people to talk Cipel out of filing any sort of sexual harassment complaint or lawsuit - visits that intensified after July 23, when Lowy told the governor's office a lawsuit would be filed, the attorney said.

"There are letters that he has that can be traced back to the governor's office," Lowy said, refusing to release them. "I cannot provide them. If there is going to be a trial, I can provide those letters."

McGreevey's lawyer rejected claims of attempted intimidation and said the governor's office did not contact Cipel.

"Not at all," William Lawler said. "The answer's no."

In another development, efforts by McGreevey's fellow Democrats to get the governor to step down in time to hold a special election appeared to crumble yesterday when Rep. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), who had spearheaded the effort, backed down.

Details continued to trickle out about Miller, a father of two who divorced his wife in 1993 after he came out of the closet.

The Daily News reported yesterday that Miller was an adjunct professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey after checking with the school. College officials later said a different David Miller worked at Montclair State.

Neighbors knew Cipel's alleged lover as the former doctor for the Livingston, N.J., school district.

"He's not a phony," said Livingston school counselor Judith Krafchick. "I think if he tells you something, it's true."

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Israeli Sexpionage : The McGreevey, Condit and Clinton Affairs

Ernesto Cienfuegos
La Voz de Aztlan

Los Angeles, Alta California - August 17, 2004 - (ACN) The current Governor James McGreevey homosexual scandal is actually the result of yet another Israeli sexpionage operation targeting "sexually loose" Democratic Party government officials. Two other recent operations, that should be fresh in the memories of the American people, are the Congressman Gary Condit and the President Bill Clinton Affairs.

In the parlance of the shadowy underworld of international espionage, the use of "sex" by foreign spies to obtain information or concessions from government officials is called "sexpionage". The sexual seduction of high level government officials by foreign spies is usually of the illicit category which provides foreign operatives the added advantage of being able to better bribe the targeted victims which may be married with children. The operation may involve compromising the government officials through the use of professional prostitutes, underage girls (or boys) or by providing homosexual lovers to not yet "out-of-the-closet" targets, as was the case with Governor James McGreevey of New Jersey.

Sexpionage has a very long history. One of the most notorious cases was that of a Dutch spy known as Mata Hari. The seductress was a "nude dancer" who operated as a double agent for both the French and German armies during World War I. The British Security Service claim that Mata Hari was a Jewess who's real name was Margaretha Geertruida Zelle. She was executed in 1917 by a French firing squad.

A more recent "sexpionage" case occurred in 1963 in Great Britain. The scandal brought the entire Harold McMillan government down. The case involved the Secretary of State for War, John Dennis Profumo. Profumo, a Tory and a married man, was compromised by an illicit affair with a London cabaret showgirl by the name of Christine Keeler. The problem was that Christine Keeler was also sleeping with Eugene Ivanov, a naval attache at the Soviet Embassy. It was widely claimed, at the time, that Keeler was passing British defense secrets, obtained from Profumo, to the Soviets.

Today, after the "Cold War against the Soviets" and the beginning of the "War of Civilizations against Islam", Israeli covert sexpionage operations are on the increase in the USA and around the globe. In fact, a significant number of ex-Soviet sexpionage agents of Jewish descent, who once worked for the KGB and the Stasi, have emigrated to Israel. They now work for the Zionist government. These sexpionage agents were well trained in special Soviet spy schools, a practice that continues to this day in Israel. A secret training ground for many of these Zionist sexpionage agents is the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. Among the papers in the archives of the Israel Institute of Technology is one authored by Golan Cipel, Governor McGreevey's lover, titled "Shabtai Shavit Identified as Outgoing Mossad Chief".

In the parlance of the Israeli intelligence services, female sexpionage agents are called "Swallows" and males who are trained to compromise women or other men are called "Ravens." Under this nomenclature, the Israeli who was former Chief of Homeland Security for New Jersey, Golan Cipel, can be properly called a "Raven", and the Jewesses Chandra Levy and Monica Lewinsky, which I will discuss later, can be called "Swallows".

Zionist Israel places great importance in its "symbiotic" relationship with the USA. In fact, the State of Israel would be unable to exist without the vast amounts of aid, both military and social welfare, that is sent yearly to prop up the Zionist government. This total amount is estimated to be more than 5 Billion dollars per year. In addition, Israel survives and depends on critical technology transfers that are obtained both through cooperation and covertly. For example, Israel now possess thermonuclear bombs and missiles, thanks to an American Jew, Jonathan Pollard, who stole the "nuclear secrets" while working as a US Naval Analyst. Pollard, it was admitted by the Israeli government, was a MOSSAD spy. He is presently doing a life term in a US Federal Prison for his crime.

The success and effectiveness of the Israel/USA symbiotic relationship depends on many factors. One is massive propaganda through the US based Zionist press that keeps the American people in a constant stupor about certain political and economic realities. Another is the near total subserviency of corrupt politicians, especially of the Democratic Party, who do not speak up because they are on the take. Another is the massive infiltration into government of what are nothing less than Israeli agents. Israeli agents in the Pentagon, for example, has caused the USA dearly in terms of the costs of the "War on Iraq" and in terms of its "hated image" around the world.

Lastly, a factor that is very important for Israel in keeping a profitable symbiotic relationships with the USA is effective sexpionage. Sexpionage is so important to Israel, that it has opened an office for this purpose right smack in the center of US political power -- Washington D.C. The office fronts as a post 911 anti-terrorism institute and is located at 3811 N. Fairfax Drive, Suite 720 Arlington, VA 22203. The Chief of the office is non other that the immediate former Director of the Israeli MOSSAD, Shabtai Shavit.

The current scandal in New Jersey concerning the "Raven" Golan Cipel is a classic example of an Israeli sexpionage operation. James McGreevey, a Catholic, was a rising Democratic Party politico when he was introduced, about four years ago, to Golan Cipel while on a "Jewish Junket" to the Tel Aviv suburb of Rishon Le-Zion. Cipel had been conveniently placed on the staff of the Mayor of Rishon Le-Zion by the MOSSAD, which has its headquarters in Tel Aviv, for this very purpose. The MOSSAD keeps extensive "dossiers" on a large number of US politicians and McGreevy, who the MOSSAD probably already knew was a sodomite, had been targeted.

The American people would be very surprised at the huge number of US politicians who are taken, all expenses paid, to Israel for political indoctrination. One of these Democratic Party politicos is Antonio Villargairosa (aka Tony Villar) whom we call the "Chicano Manjewrian Candidate". Tony is running for mayor of Los Angeles for the second time.

During the period between meeting James McGreevey and the revelation of the scandal, Golan Cipel moved from assignment to assignment with the ease that only an Israeli sexpionage operative could have. According to official documents, Cipel worked for the Israeli Parliament, the Israeli Embassy in New York, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and ultimately as Chief of Homeland Security for the US State of New Jersey at a salary of $110,000 per year, even though he was an Israeli illegal alien.

The allegations by Cipel of "sexual harassment" by Governor McGreevey is only a ruse to cover up the real purpose of the operation. The allegation by Cipel that he was sexually assaulted by the governor "twenty times" is preposterous and only the dumbest Americans will believe it. In fact, Golan Cipel allowed the governor to buy him an apartment a mere few blocks from the condominium where McGreevey lived with his so called wife. The scandal involves much more than just the outing of a "queer governor"! We may never know how much damage to US interests this Israeli sexpionage operation has or will cost the country and the American people.

Another recent sexpionage operation was that involving the now ousted Congressman from California Gary Condit and the Jewish sexpionage agent Chandra Levy. This operation, however, went terribly wrong resulting in the disappearance of the 24 year government intern Chandra Levy on April 30, 2001. Levy remains were found 13 months later in a park in Northwest Washington D.C. and not far from the home of than Democratic Party Congressman Gary Condit. The official cause of death was ruled "a homicide" though no one was ever charged or prosecuted for the murder.

The target in this sexpionage operation was the married Gary Condit, who was a senior member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. As member of the this committee, Condit was privy to highly classified information of much interest to Zionist Israel. The MOSSAD leaned on their "sleeper and sexpionage agent" Chandra Levy to obtain the secret US government information that the Israeli government needed. The MOSSAD arranged for Chandra Levy, than a US government intern, to meet Congressman Condit. Soon, the married Condit was having a sexual affair with the voluptuous 24 year old Chandra Levy.

Whatever classified information Levy was able to obtain, on her "sexpionage mission", was at the cost of her life. One day before she was to return to California, she disappeared without a trace. The Washington D.C. police searched Congressman Condit's apartment for clues to no avail. Thirteen months later the "skull and bones" of Chandra Levy were found at Washington's Rock Creek Park even though the park had been repeatedly searched during the early phases of the investigation.

Everyone reading this report should be acquainted with the President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky affair. This has been called "The Mother of all Sexpionage Scandals" because it almost toppled a US presidency. Generally less known is the fact that Monica Lewinsky was actually a "sexpionage agent" working on behalf of the Israeli government. She was, and probably still is, what the MOSSAD calls a "Swallow".

It is believed that Lewinsky's primary mission was to sexually compromise Bill Clinton in order to bribe him to release the Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. The timing and unfolding of the "White House Sex Scandal" coincided with the efforts and meetings by the than Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu with President Bill Clinton in the White House.

The mission for Israel failed but it ended giving the Zionist state some peripheral benefits. In an effort by Clinton to rid himself of the "Swallow", he transferred her to the Pentagon with the highest "security clearance" possible and which is only afforded to top brass and a few high level government officials. Soon Monica Lewinsky was cavorting with Admirals and Generals and became pregnant. She says she aborted the baby.

No one knows what Pentagon secrets Lewinsky was able to pass on to the Zionists, but perhaps Paul Wolfowitz' great success in involving the USA in the War against Iraq may be the results of Monica Lewinsky's efforts on behalf of Israel. Sexpionage pays and it is paying big for Israel.

As you hear the spin, by the Zionist press, given to the current sexpionage scandal involving "The Queer Governor of New Jersey", hopefully this report will provide just the right facts to enable you to see clearly through all their lies.

Comment: We are driven by basic instincts: sex, fear, and hunger. Intelligence operations use these three fears to corral, hook, and turn their prey. Sex is the obvious lure. Once the victim has been hooked, fear controls them: fear of being exposed, of having their sexual proclivities brought to the "light" of the press, although the light of the press has little in common with the shining of the light of truth on any topic.

Upon these three basic drives, we live the lives of automatons. We are predictable, so predictable that the psychological dossiers of the alphabet soup agencies can predict how we will respond to the bait. In Victor Ostrovsky's By Way of Deception, he gives many stories of how Mossad was able to turn people and get them to work for Israel. If it wasn't sex, it was money. Only those who had no shame were unhookable, such as the men who, when confronted with photos of their sexcapades, wanted copies made for all of their friends. McGreevey appears to have felt that coming clean, in spite of the consequences, was better than to play Mossad's game.

The same machine works its foul ways in every country across the globe. Where power awaits, its lures are strong. Is this not evidence of the fact that we are led by the worst of humanity?

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Blairs trapped in palace by security fears

By Peter Popham
20 August 2004

Italian newspapers reported yesterday that the Blairs have been confined to base in Tuscany since the discovery of a time bomb in a Sardinian resort close to the villa where Silvio Berlusconi entertained the Prime Minister and his wife with fireworks and wine.

Tony and Cherie Blair flew back to Tuscany from Sardinia on Tuesday afternoon. Later police defused a bomb close to the Italian Prime Minister's villa on the island.

The repercussions of that discovery have been felt outside the medieval hill town of San Gimignano, where the Blairs are staying as guests of Prince Girolamo Guicciardini Strozzi.

Security around the 15th-century palace has been stepped up, with 150 guards and four helicopters protecting the wooded enclave.

Corriere della Sera said the Blairs had cancelled a visit to see Puccini's Bohème in San Gimignano and an outing to Siena.

The first cracks have appeared in San Gimignano's genial, tolerant welcome for Mr Blair. Posters have gone up around the town informing the Prime Minister that he is not welcome. Notices stuck up by Partito della Rifondazione Comunista, the most left-wing of the established Italian parties, said that Mr Blair had "initiated an illegitimate war founded on lies", adding, "while you are on holiday, your war is killing people".

In response, the San Gimignano mayor has threatened to have the Rifondazione thrown off the local council.

Comment: Cherie and Tony holed up because of bomb threats...This story reminds me of a dream I had the other night. I was trapped in a world gone mad. Civil liberties were being stripped away. There were storms, earthquakes, flash floods, thousands dying in Europe, tens of thousands in Asia. Above my head, meteors streaked across the heavens. The great power of the day, led by a raving lunatic who thought he talked to God, was invading other nations for no reason.

I hope to wake up soon.

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A war of words

20 August 2004

The 14-year-old sister of a teenage soldier killed in Iraq made an impassioned plea yesterday to Tony Blair to withdraw British troops.

Maxine Gentle, whose brother Gordon, aged 19, was killed in June by a roadside bomb in Basra, delivered a letter to Downing Street in which she criticised the Prime Minister for dispatching troops to "a war over oil and money".

Soon after arriving in Downing Street, the teenager and her mother, Rose, stormed out of an impromptu meeting with John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, accusing him of "talking rubbish". Mother and daughter said they had made a "forceful" statement to Mr Prescott during the brief meeting.

In her letter, Maxine told the Prime Minister: "My big brother died at the age of 19, and what for? A war over oil and money, that's what I think the war is all about. There was no such thing as weapons of 'mass destruction'.

"I think that you should withdraw all of our soldiers from Iraq. After all, it's not our war, it's America's. So why did we, the British, have to get involved?"

Maxine and her family are the latest in a series of relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq to question the role of troops there. They were furious that a handwritten letter from the Prime Minister expressing sorrow at his death arrived only on Tuesday, seven weeks after his death in June.

Mr Blair, who writes to relatives of all soldiers killed in Iraq, told the family: "You and Mr Gentle are in my thoughts and prayers. I believe what Gordon and his fellow soldiers are doing out in Iraq is vital not just for the change necessary in that country, but vital for the security and stability of this country. It is a heavy responsibility to send young soldiers into war and I can assure you I did not take the decision lightly."

Mrs Gentle handed back the letter in disgust when she led a small delegation of anti-war campaigners to Downing Street. She and her daughter, from Pollok, Glasgow, were invited to speak to Mr Prescott, who is deputising for Mr Blair.

Mr Prescott apologised for the delay in posting Mr Blair's letter, blaming administrative problems. Mrs Gentle said she demanded a meeting with the Prime Minister, but walked out within minutes: "He [Mr Prescott] did not know why I had just received it [the letter]. I then walked out. He was just talking a lot of rubbish."

Opponents of the war seized on the case and repeated their calls for British troops to be withdrawn from Iraq. Jeremy Corbyn, Labour MP for Islington North, said: "I feel the tragedy for the family is that a young man has died for a war not of his making. I applaud the Gentle family for being prepared to share their grief.

"Both mother and daughter gave a very forceful presentation to him and told him exactly what they thought. It is a meeting Mr Prescott will not forget.

"Mrs Gentle made it clear that she was certain Gordon was murdered by the political decision of sending troops into war."

The family wore T-shirts printed with a photograph of Gordon in his military uniform as they delivered Maxine's letter.

Maxine told yesterday how she wept when her brother was posted to Iraq. She said: "I said to my pals: 'I don't think he is coming back.' They said: 'Of course he's coming back.'

"Now I can't believe this has happened. I still think he is coming home. I have just lost my big brother, who meant the world to me, and I don't want others to go through that."

The Gentles are angry Gordon was posted to Iraq just a month after he finished training, and have raised concerns about whether his patrol had equipment to jam radio signals that could detonate roadside bombs.

Mrs Gentle, who works as a cleaner, said she had foreseen her son's death when she went to see him off to his posting in Iraq earlier this year. She said: "I told him, 'Keep your head down, son.' He said, 'I'll be OK.' He didn't ring for the first two weeks, but then he was allowed 20-minute phone calls home. He never really spoke about it."

Comment: Empathy. We discussed it earlier this week. Blair mimics empathy when he writes to the parents of fallen British troops. This family saw through the mask. Unfortunately, Tony was holed up in Italy.

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Moscow police raid rights group as row over brutality grows

By Michael Mainville in Moscow
20 August 2004

Under increasing pressure after accusations of brutality, Moscow police have raided the office of a human-rights group set up to protect people from abuse at the hands of those meant to serve and protect them.

Public-transport division officers searched the offices of Moye Pravo (My Right) on Wednesday, although the officers have no jurisdiction outside the underground Metro. They had raided My Right's offices in July, seizing documents, computers and the cash-box.

Mikhail Anshikov, the group's chairman, said Muscovites were feeling increasingly terrorised. "People are scared; they feel the need to protect themselves from the police instead of the police protecting them."

My Right was set up this year after a brutal attack on German Galdetsky, a 19-year-old university student campaigning against police abuse. Mr Galdetsky is recovering in a Moscow hospital, barely able to walk or speak. After Metro police allegedly tried to rape a female friend, Mr Galdetsky persuaded several people to report similar assaults and press charges. A few days later, he was assaulted in the Metro by two men in camouflage uniforms, and was shot twice in the head with rubber bullets.

Mr Galdetsky's mother, Alyona, is convinced her son paid the price for taking on the police. "He behaved like any normal, decent person should have," she says, dismissing any suggestion her son is a hero. "How is that doing something normal makes you a hero nowadays?" In the months since the attack on Mr Galdetsky, Moscow police have been accused of a series of brutal beatings and murders.

Comment: "He behaved like any normal, decent person should have." Think about it. Can you feel the distance between the world described by this mother and the world in which we live today? How did we get here? Weren't we all taught the same things in school about decency? The Golden Rule?

How is it that some people take these things seriously while others don't? It seems that there are people, and a goodly number of them at that, who take these values as weakness, or opportunities to exploit. These values remain empty words for so many because the actual values propagated by society are diametrically opposed: look out for number 1, winning is everything, screw your neighbor before he screws you.

Did someone say "Empathy"?

For some ideas on why this is, we suggest you read Laura Knight Jadczyk's article on Official Culture.

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NYC TO GOP: DROP DEAD

Tue Aug 17, 3:02 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL

Tourists are pleasantly surprised when New Yorkers act as friendly and polite as the people back home in Maybury. However, delegates to this month's Republican National Convention shouldn't expect to be treated to our standard out-of-towner treatment. The Republican delegates here to coronate George W. Bush are unwelcome members of a hostile invading army. Like the hapless saps whose blood they sent to be spilled into Middle Eastern sands, they will be given intentionally incorrect directions to nonexistent places. Objects will be thrown in their direction. Children will call them obscene names.

Well aware that it is barren soil for their party's anti-urban, anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, overtly racist ideology, Republican leaders have wisely avoided New York City as a convention site for the past 150 years. Even as the rest of America turns red, we New Yorkers remain as liberal as the people's republic of San Francisco: fewer than 18 percent of the citizens of New York's five boroughs (which include relatively conservative places like Staten Island) cast ballots for Bush/Cheney in 2000. But White House strategist Karl Rove sees the continued exploitation of 9/11 for partisan political gain as Bush's key to victory in November. That means bringing the big bash three miles north of the hole where the Twin Towers used to stand, where most of the victims of 9/11 were burned, suffocated, impaled and pulverized.

Making hay of the dead is also the point of this confab's timing. The 2004 Necropublican National Convention is being held a full month later than normal, from August 30 to September 2. The original plan was to have Bush shuttle between Madison Square Garden and Ground Zero for photo ops to coincide with the third anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Bush's visits to the Trade Center site were quietly canceled a few months back after 9/11 survivors expressed revulsion at the idea. But it was too late to change the date.

Anti-Republican sentiment is rising to a fever pitch here as the dog days tick down to the dreaded affair. A poll cited by the local ABC affiliate shows 83 percent of New Yorkers don't want their city to host the RNC. And many of them are planning to do something about it.

Rejecting ex-mayor Ed Koch's call to "make nice" with the party that used the deaths of 2,801 New Yorkers--most of them Democrats--for everything from tax cuts for the rich to building concentration camps at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib to invading Iraq (news - web sites) to enrich Dick Cheney (news - web sites) and his fellow Halliburton execs, some groups are encouraging liberal-minded New Yorkers to volunteer for the city's squad of official greeters. Creatively altered maps of streets and subways will be handed out to button-clad stupid white men. Other saboteurs wearing fake RNC T-shirts will direct them to parts of town where Bush's policies have hit hardest. Rumor has it that prostitutes suffering from sexually transmitted diseases will discourage the use of condoms with Republican customers.

Anywhere between 250,000 and 1,000,000 anti-Bush demonstrators are expected to hit the streets of Manhattan, but the city and protest organizers can't agree on where to put them. Activists say they'll direct marchers to Central Park, their preferred site; city officials are threatening mass arrests if they do. Adding to the already combustible Chicago '68 vibe is a possible wildcat strike by city cops and firefighters. And now, as if everyone concerned wasn't already tweaky, FBI (news - web sites) agents are traveling around the United States, to harass members of leftist groups planning to protest the New York RNC.

Strikebreaking policemen and private security personnel may be able to keep the protesters away from the convention hall. But Republicans who venture outside the Garden deserve the abuse ordinary New Yorkers will likely inflict upon them.

True, the Administration eventually coughed up the $20 billion aid package Bush promised the city after 9/11. But that sum--equal to the cost of occupying Iraq for four months--barely made up for such disaster-related expenses as police overtime, debris removal and rebuilding damaged subway stations and tunnels. New York's economy hasn't even begun to recover. As the nation's official unemployment rate hovers at six percent, the city's runs around eight. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a Republican, opposes virtually every Bush Administration decision concerning New York City.

Even viler than Bush's urban neglect is his failure to avenge the World Trade Center victims as he pledged to do on 9/14, dusty firefighter helpfully posing under his arm on The Pile. After 9/11, Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) were in Pakistan. They and the Taliban received funding from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The 19 hijackers, organized by Egyptian Islamic Jihad, were Egyptian and Saudi. But Bush didn't attack Pakistan, Saudi Arabia or Egypt. He went after Afghanistan (news - web sites) and Iraq instead, nations that had nothing to do with 9/11 but offered business opportunities for GOP-connected oil concerns. Incredibly, he siphoned more money and arms to the Egyptians, Saudis and Pakistanis.

Not only did Bush let the terrorists get away, he raised their allowance.

If today's GOP retained a shred of the dignity and patriotism that it once possessed as the Party of Lincoln, it would have dumped Bush in favor of a candidate more interested in defending America than his wealthy contributors. Republicans are neofascists now, and that's why New Yorkers good and true will be yelling at them to go back home.

Comment: The only way Bush could have avenged the victims would have been with a mass hari kiri session with Rummy's cabal, Cheney, the neocons and the Israeli government. But ritual suicide has never been as popular in Washington as it has in Japan, honour not being one of the values vehiculed by Yahweh who prefers the blood of the sons and daughters of the disenfranchised.

I had a dream about this the other night. Reverand Moon rented Yankee Stadium. The stands and the field were filled with Bush, Rummy, and the neocons. Sharon and the entire government of Israel were way out in right field. The Zionist settlers in Gaza and the West Bank had returned to New York for the event and were behind Sharon. Reverand Moon, Billy Graham, and Meir Kahane were leading the crowd singing "My Way". They were just getting ready to take out the swords when the phone rang and woke me up. Boy was I pissed off.

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NYC Denies All Central Park Rally Permits

By LARRY NEUMEISTER, Associated Press Writer
Fri Aug 20, 7:32 PM ET

NEW YORK - The city's decision to deny a permit to protesters for a rally on Central Park's Great Lawn on the weekend before the Republican National Convention is about preserving the lawn, not suppressing speech, lawyers for the city said in federal court Friday.

The lawn would be ruined if 75,000 people gathered there for a rally on Aug. 28 and then 250,000 people used the lawn for another rally the next day, said Gail Donoghue, representing the city.

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Cops Disciplined for Tasering Grandmother

Fri Aug 20, 5:04 PM ET

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Police said Friday two officers have been disciplined and department policy changed following an investigation into the officers use of a taser when arresting a 66-year-old grandmother who honked her car horn at a police cruiser.

Louise Jones was arrested in June on charges of misuse of a car horn on a city street, resisting arrest and intentionally inflicting bodily harm on an officer. Her husband, Fred Jones, 74, was also arrested and charged with interfering with an arrest.

Police said Louise Jones tussled with officers when they tried to give her a ticket for honking the horn. One of the officers used the taser, which is capable of issuing a 50,000-volt shock, to stun her. The officers said Fred Jones then came downstairs and jumped on one of the officers' backs.

Louise Jones said she pulled away from the police when one of the officers grabbed her arm, and her husband said one of the officers had his knee on his wife's chest.

As a result of an internal investigation, the department has increased the threshold for when taser use is appropriate and now requires a field commander to look into each taser deployment. Police also have developed a task force made up of community members and department personnel to look into the department's current taser-use policies.

"This was an unfortunate incident that I believe could have been avoided if there would have been a less confrontational environment," said Chief Richard Easley in a statement. "Officers of this department, however, are held to a very high standard in their professional conduct, regardless of the conduct of other persons."

Comment: Yeah, right.

Police said the investigation was delayed because Louise Jones and other witnesses declined to be interviewed by investigators, though the department did review affidavits from Jones and the witnesses that were submitted by her attorney.

Police said the officers involved did cooperate in the investigation. The statement didn't indicate how the officers were disciplined.

Comment: Maybe because they weren't???

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Sceptic's tests support homoeopathy. Now the challenge for scientists is to repeat it

By Steve Connor, Science Editor
19 August 2004

To some it is the snake oil of the New Age. To others it is a tried-and-trusted treatment that has been good enough for the likes of Bill Clinton, the Prince of Wales, Geri Halliwell and David Beckham.

Homoeopathy is big business and getting bigger. Yet there is little if any evidence to show that it works, and absolutely nothing to justify its central claim - that highly diluted solutions containing nothing but water can affect human health.

That is until now. Researchers have just published what could be the first hard evidence in a peer-reviewed scientific journal that appears to support the central idea behind homoeopathy.

The scientists, from Britain, France, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands, have chosen the relatively obscure but respected Inflammation Research to publish what some call the "holy grail" of homoeopathy.

In summary, the study found that extremely dilute solutions can have a biological effect. Like homoeopathic remedies, the solutions in the experiments were so diluted that there was no realistic chance of a single molecule of the substance remaining in the liquid.

Scientists have likened this to believing in magic. How could something that was once dissolved in a solution, and can no longer be present in that solution, still have an effect? The scientists themselves are baffled. "We are not yet able to propose any theoretical explanation of these findings," they write. In showing that high dilutions exert a biological effect, the findings seem to break the laws of physics. Surely there must be errors in the experiment; an accusation the scientists reject. "Despite searching for artefacts, we have been unable to find any," they write.

An editorial in Inflammation Research explains why the journal published such controversial research: "The authors are unable to explain their findings but wished to encourage others to investigate this area," it says. "It is with this spirit of openness that the journal, after submitting the paper to a rigorous reviewing process, has agreed to publish the paper."

Understandably, the practitioners of homoeopathy have seized on the findings as vindication. Peter Fisher, of the Royal Homoeopathic Hospital in London and homoeopath to the Queen, said the findings were nothing short of groundbreaking. "History may come to view [the study] as a turning point in the scientific controversy surrounding homoeopathy," Dr Fisher said.

"Of course further repetition is required, but it may be that this represents the holy grail of basic research in homoeopathy," he said.

There are two central tenets of homoeopathy. The first is that an illness or malady can be treated by administering tiny amounts of a substance that might under normal circumstances actually result in similar symptoms - extract of onion for instance to treat hay fever.

The second belief is that the concentrations have to be really minute, so minute that the dilutions involved in effect get rid of the substance in question from the liquid solvent.

Homoeopathic solutions are diluted repeatedly to produce solutions that are millions of times weaker than they were originally. Often the solutions are so weak that they are equivalent to dissolving a tiny speck of something in a volume of water several times greater than all the world's oceans.

Scientifically, this would mean that the chance of just a single molecule of the homoeopathic remedy being left in the solution is next to nil. Sceptics say patients might just as well treat themselves with distilled water - which is cheaper.

Science cannot explain how such highly dilute solutions could have an effect, that is until the French biologist Jacques Benveniste came along. Working at his laboratory in Paris, Dr Benveniste formulated the idea that water retains a "memory" of what has been dissolved in it and that it is this memory that results in the homoeopathic effect. In 1988 Dr Benveniste published a study in the journal Nature in support of his water-memory theory. He claimed his experiments showed that an ultra-dilute solution exerted a biological effect.

However, the then editor of Nature, Sir John Maddox, had insisted that he would only agree to publication if he was able to investigate Dr Benveniste's laboratory procedures. A few weeks later Sir John invited an American science fraud investigator, Walter Stewart, and a professional magician and arch sceptic, James Randi, to watch over Dr Benveniste as he and his team tried to repeat the experiments.

The Nature investigation concluded that Dr Benveniste had failed to replicate his original study. In subsequent issues of Nature, Dr Benveniste suffered the professional ignominy of being ridiculed by arguably the most influential scientific journal in the world.

As a result, the idea of memory water was consigned to the dustbin of science history, or so it was thought.

France as a country is a keen advocate of homoeopathy and there were many French scientists who had not given up on the notion of investigating the phenomenon. Among them was a one-time collaborator of Dr Benveniste called Philippe Belon, who now works for a French homoeopathy company, Boiron.

Dr Belon, who fell out with Dr Benveniste a long time ago, has investigated high dilutions for 20 years and although he works for Boiron, and has himself tried homoeopathic remedies, he insists he is only interested discovering the truth about the claims.

In the spirit of scientific investigation he organised a collaboration between four different groups in Europe who all undertook to carry out identical high dilution experiments at separate places involving separate teams of scientists.

The British end was run by Professor Madeleine Ennis, an established asthma researcher at Queen's University of Belfast and an avowed sceptic of all things homoeopathic.

In fact Professor Ennis became involved in the project in the first place because she could not accept what some of her scientific colleagues were saying. "I told people I didn't believe it so they said 'why don't you try it'," Professor Ennis said.

The dilution experiments they carried out, and now published in Inflammation Research, involved a substance called histamine which is released by a type of white blood cell called a basophil. Normally basophils release histamine, and as levels of histamine rise this exerts a "negative feedback" which inhibits further release of histamine.

The four teams of scientists tested highly dilute solutions of histamine to see whether they still exert an effect on basophils in a test tube. At extreme dilutions, three out of four laboratories found a statistically significant effect and the fourth found an effect which just fell out of the typical range for statistical significance.

Professor Ennis emphasised that the research does not prove that homoeopathy works, nor does it even show that Dr Benveniste was right because he had used a different test for a high-dilution effect. "The paper didn't test homoeopathy, it tested high dilutions of histamine. I know what we tested and I cannot explain the results," said Professor Ennis.

For Dr Belon, however, the research does at least support the basic premise behind homoeopathy. "Of course it supports it, on the other hand it is not a demonstration that homoeopathy works," he said.

In whatever ways the latest findings are interpreted, they cannot be ignored. The experiments were repeated by four different teams using the same experimental protocol that involved a blind code - the scientists did not know whether they were working with a high dilution solution or a control sample of pure water until the code was broken at the end of the experiment.

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Spirit Reaches New Heights on Mars

By Thomas H. Maugh II, Times Staff Writer

After spending 160 days traversing a plain and climbing a steep hill, the Mars explorer Spirit is finding the first strong indications of significant quantities of water at Gusev Crater.

Spirit's twin, Opportunity, has found powerful evidence of water halfway around Mars in Meridiani Planum. Both NASA craft have been exploring the planet since January.

After a complicated climb to an altitude of about 30 feet in the Columbia Hills, Spirit is now parked at an outcrop of bedrock called Longhorn that shows strong signs of weathering by water. The key feature of Longhorn, said principal investigator Steven Squyres of Cornell University, is the presence of two kinds of rocks: "some gray, others light-toned, crumbly and cruddy."

Squyres suspects that the rocks represent a "before and after" pair. The gray rocks appear to be relatively pristine, whereas the lighter ones have undergone some kind of alteration. The most likely cause is the action of water, he said.

"This is different from the rocks out on the plain," Squyres said. "Here we have a more thorough, deeper alteration, suggesting much more water."

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Six die as lightning strikes

August 20, 2004

AT least six people were killed today when a bolt of lightning struck a junior grade school in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand, police said.

Twelve others were injured when the lightning struck a group, among them a number of children, who had taken shelter in the school during a downpour in Bhawanthpur village, the Press Trust of India quoted police as saying.

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'Toyota-isation' is latest global threat as desert dust storms spread

By Michael McCarthy
20 August 2004

There is an environmental problem that is just beginning to be recognised as being of global significance: "Toyota-isation".

The surfaces of deserts are being broken up by four-wheel drive vehicles such as the Toyota Land Cruiser, the Japanese version of the Land Rover and a great favourite with drivers in the Sahel, the dry states to the south of the Sahara, as well as many other challenging places.

The surface disturbance is proceeding at such a rate in Africa, the Middle East and Asia that it is contributing substantially to a rise in dust storms, and to an increase in dust in the global atmosphere generally, which could have serious climatic and health repercussions. Andrew Goudie, the professor of geography at Oxford University, told the International Geographical Congress in Glasgow that annual dust production in some parts of north Africa had increased ten-fold in the past 50 years, and that across the Sahel, from the Sudan to the Gulf of Guinea, it had increased six-fold since the 1960s.

Global dust emissions were between two and three billion tons a year, and this was even being felt in Britain, Professor Goudie said, with an increase in episodes of "blood rain" - the deposition of dust from the Sahara on the British land mass. "The world is getting a lot dustier," he said. The reasons included land use changes caused by growing populations, such as deforestation and overgrazing, but Toyota-isation, a word coined by him to mean disturbance by 4x4s, was a specific cause, the professor said.

"If you take almost any desert now, people go all over it in four-wheel drives," he said. "The number of four-wheel drives in the south-west US and indeed in the Middle East is staggering.

"The desert surfaces have been stable for thousands of years because they usually have a thin layer of lichen or algae, or gravel from which the fine sand has blown away. Once these surfaces are breached you get down to the fine sand again, which can be picked up by the wind."

The effect was particularly bad near cities. "If you take a city like Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, there are tracks leading out across the desert in all directions," he said.

Sand is often carried by the wind at the base of the storm. A typical storm could move on a front 100 kilometres or more across, and contain 30 to 40 million tons of dust. It was possible that disease-causing organisms - such as those responsible for foot-and-mouth disease - could be transported with it, the professor said.

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Mystery illness strikes vacation spot

Friday, August 20, 2004 Posted: 5:06 PM EDT

PUT-IN-BAY, Ohio (AP) -- Diane Mahdinel arrived Friday on a popular Lake Erie resort island with her own bottled water, sandwiches and hand sanitizer.

She wasn't taking any chances with the mysterious intestinal illness that has sickened several hundred tourists and residents on South Bass Island.

"People at work said, 'Don't drink anything, don't eat anything and don't touch anything,"' Mahdinel, of Broadview Heights, said on the ferry to South Bass.

With its quaint downtown next to a park, abundance of bars and party atmosphere, the island is sometimes called the "Key West of the Midwest," drawing about 15,000 people by boat on the weekends.

But lately many visitors and islanders haven't felt like partying. At least 378 of them have had cramps, diarrhea, nausea, fever and chills. Another 150 cases are being checked out by health officials.

Most visitors said they became sick within two or three days of visiting the island. So far state health officials haven't found a cause. The Ohio Department of Health has confirmed one case of salmonella, three of norovirus and 10 cases of campylobacter, said spokesman Kristopher Weiss.

All three germs have symptoms that match the outbreak. Campylobacter is one of the most common bacterial causes of diarrhea and is usually caused by eating or handling undercooked or raw chicken, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Samples of well water that the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency took at a winery and a bar tested negative for bacteria, and no connection was found between the businesses and the illness, agency spokeswoman Heather Lauer said on Friday.

Weiss said the CDC has sent three researchers to Ohio to help try to pinpoint the cause.

Despite a steady rain for most of Friday morning, tourists were checking out the island on golf carts, and boats began filling the harbor, snagging prime spots before the weekend rush.

"We've got our own water just in case," said Detroit area resident Sean Kelly, while tying a boat to a dock.

Jaime Hoy, 20, a server at the Blue Iguana restaurant, said she came down with the illness about three weeks ago along with 10 other workers.

"It was like every two days somebody else would get it," she said. "It was not fun."

Hoy said fewer people have been coming into the restaurant, and those who do ask if the water is OK.

Island business owners are frustrated because business is down, but no one knows why people are getting sick.

"Somebody's got to tell us where it's coming from," said Mike McCann, manager of the Chicken Patio, a mostly outdoor restaurant. "It's all hearsay."

Tim Niese, owner of two downtown hotels, said he has been averaging 300 to 600 guests a night and no one has gotten sick.

"It's very isolated," he said of the illness. He said he has had no cancellations at his hotels, but his golf cart rental business was down by as much as 50 percent.

At The Shirt Shack -- selling Mardi Gras beads, T-shirts, flip-flops and hats shaped like beer mugs that say "Got Beer?" -- business has been slow.

"People are afraid," manager Ursula Thermes said. "That's the problem."

But fear didn't stop Connie Weaver and her five friends from central Ohio, who had planned their trip six months ago. They got an early start on the weekend, drinking beer and eating vodka-soaked cherries around noon Friday in the Frosty Bar.

"I was coming. I didn't care," said Weaver, of Circleville. "Our husbands and co-workers were more concerned than we were."

Nick Polanski, of Akron, said he would stay away from the water.

"Who comes up here to drink the water?" he said with a laugh.

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Archeologists uncover 2,400-year-old golden mask

Last Updated Fri, 20 Aug 2004 17:34:34 EDT

SOFIA, BULGARIA - Archeologists in Bulgaria say they have discovered a 2,400-year-old golden mask that was likely made for a monarch's funeral.

The mask depicts a full face with moustache and beard.

The rare artifact is made of 500 grams of solid gold and "is without paragon in archeology," lead archeologist Georgi Kitov told Agence France-Presse on Friday.

Kitov and his team unearthed the find on Thursday near the village of Shipka, 200 kilometres east of Sofia.

Dozens of Thracian mounds from the fifth century BC were found in the region. The Thracians lived in parts of what is now modern-day Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia, Turkey and Greece.

Researchers have dubbed the artifact-rich site "the Bulgarian valley of the kings." Egypt's Valley of the Kings near Luxor is home to the tombs of Egyptian Pharaohs.

Previously, Thracian masks have been unearthed covered with golden foil, Kitov told the local Trud daily.

The mask could belong to King Seutus III, the Thracian king who ruled in the fifth century BC, he suggested.

Besides the mask, archeologists also found a golden ring showing a rower, and many bronze and silver vessels, the newspaper reported.

No remains have been found but archeologists continue to excavate the tomb, Kitov said.

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Mystery rocks may be meteorites

Saturday, August 21, 2004

A few mysterious rocks were found on Tuesday at a resident’s home in Turlock. Home owner’s Albert and Lisa Darmousseh believe that the rock fell from the sky. The couple thinks the fist-sized rocks are meteorites, possibly from Mars, but it has not been confirmed the small boulders are anything other than ordinary rocks.

Many people were watching the Olympics on Monday night, including the Darmoussehs, until Lisa was disrupted by a loud noise that she described as a thump.

“I thought a tree fell in my backyard because the noise was so loud so I went outside and didn’t see anything. The next day I went in the backyard to walk my dog and discovered the first meteor. At first I thought it was left over from my dog but then I noticed it was smoking,” Lisa Darmousseh said.

“I was not expecting this at all. I am very excited and I feel lucky that it happened here. Something like this to happen to us is amazing, Albert Darmousseh said. At first I was shocked and didn’t know what it was. I never saw anything like it. I thought it was a mushroom or poop but then I saw that is was smoking and when I picked it up, it was hot so then I thought maybe it came from the sky.”

Comment: Damn meteorites. They're popping up all over the place these days. They're gonna give the game away. Fortunately, the sheeple have faith in their leaders. There are millions of Americans who think Bush wouldn't lie to them!

Till next time, keep the faith, baby!

Ignacius

A Final Thought

From To Have or To Be, Erich Fromm:

Faith, in the having mode, is the possession of an answer for which one has no rational proof. It consists of formulations created by others - usually a bureaucracy. It carries the feeling of certainty because of the real (or only imagined) power of the bureaucracy. It is the entry ticket to join a large group fo people. It relieves one of the hard task of thinking for oneself and making decisions. One becomes one of the beati possidentes, the happy owners of the right faith: it claims to pronounce ultimate, unshakable knowledge, which is believable because the power of those who promulgate and protect the faith seemes unshakable. Indeed, who would not choose certainty, if all it requires is to surrender one's independence? [...]

Faith, in the being mode, is not, in the first place, a belief in certain ideas (although it may be that, too) but an inner orientation, an attitude. It would be better to say that one is in faith than that one has faith.


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