The powerful ocean current that bathes Britain and northern Europe in warm waters from the tropics has weakened dramatically in recent years, a consequence of global warming that could trigger more severe winters and cooler summers across the region, scientists warn today.

Researchers on a scientific expedition in the Atlantic Ocean measured the strength of the current between Africa and the east coast of America and found that the circulation has slowed by 30% since a previous expedition 12 years ago.

The current, which drives the Gulf Stream, delivers the equivalent of 1m power stations-worth of energy to northern Europe, propping up temperatures by 10C in some regions. The researchers found that the circulation has weakened by 6m tonnes of water a second. Previous expeditions to check the current flow in 1957, 1981 and 1992 found only minor changes in its strength, although a slowing was picked up in a further expedition in 1998. The decline prompted the scientists to set up a £4.8m network of moored instruments in the Atlantic to monitor changes in the current continuously.

The network should also answer the pressing question of whether the significant weakening of the current is a short-term variation, or part of a more devastating long-term slowing of the flow.

If the current remains as weak as it is, temperatures in Britain are likely to drop by an average of 1C in the next decade, according to Harry Bryden at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton who led the study. "Models show that if it shuts down completely, 20 years later, the temperature is 4C to 6C degrees cooler over the UK and north-western Europe," Dr Bryden said.

Although climate records suggest that the current has ground to a halt in the distant past, the prospect of it shutting down entirely within the century are extremely low, according to climate modellers.

The current is essentially a huge oceanic conveyor belt that transports heat from equatorial regions towards the Arctic circle. Warm surface water coming up from the tropics gives off heat as it moves north until eventually, it cools so much in northern waters that it sinks and circulates back to the south. There it warms again, rises and heads back north. The constant sinking in the north and rising in the south drives the conveyor.

Global warming weakens the circulation because increased meltwater from Greenland and the Arctic icesheets along with greater river run-off from Russia pour into the northern Atlantic and make it less saline which in turn makes it harder for the cooler water to sink, in effect slowing down the engine that drives the current.

The researchers measured the strength of the current at a latitude of 25 degrees N and found that the volume of cold, deep water returning south had dropped by 30%. At the same time, they measured a 30% increase in the amount of surface water peeling off early from the main northward current, suggesting far less was continuing up to Britain and the rest of Europe. The report appears in the journal Nature today.

Disruption of the conveyor-belt current was the basis of the film The Day After Tomorrow, which depicted a world thrown into chaos by a sudden and dramatic drop in temperatures. That scenario was dismissed by researchers as fantasy, because climate models suggest that the current is unlikely to slow so suddenly.

Marec Srokosz of the National Oceanographic Centre said: "The most realistic part of the film is where the climatologists are talking to the politicians and the politicians are saying 'we can't do anything about it'."

Chris West, director of the UK climate impacts programme at Oxford University's centre for the environment, said: "The only way computer models have managed to simulate an entire shutdown of the current is to magic into existence millions of tonnes of fresh water and dump it in the Atlantic. It's not clear where that water could ever come from, even taking into account increased Greenland melting."

Uncertainties in climate change models mean that the overall impact on Britain of a slowing down in the current are hard to pin down. "We know that if the current slows down, it will lead to a drop in temperatures in Britain and northern Europe of a few degrees, but the effect isn't even over the seasons. Most of the cooling would be in the winter, so the biggest impact would be much colder winters," said Tim Osborn, of the University of East Anglia climatic research unit.

The final impact of any cooling effect will depend on whether it outweighs the global warming that, paradoxically, is driving it. According to climate modellers, the drop in temperature caused by a slowing of the Atlantic current will, in the long term, be swamped by a more general warming of the atmosphere.

"If this was happening in the absence of generally increasing temperatures, I would be concerned," said Dr Smith. Any cooling driven by a weakening of the Atlantic current would probably only slow warming rather than cancel it out all together. Even if a slowdown in the current put the brakes on warming over Britain and parts of Europe, the impact would be felt more extremely elsewhere, he said.

The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists. Experts said that they will also make unsettling reading for a President who has insisted national defence is a priority.

The report was commissioned by influential Pentagon defence adviser Andrew Marshall, who has held considerable sway on US military thinking over the past three decades. He was the man behind a sweeping recent review aimed at transforming the American military under Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Climate change 'should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern', say the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network.

An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is 'plausible and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately', they conclude. As early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions.

Last week the Bush administration came under heavy fire from a large body of respected scientists who claimed that it cherry-picked science to suit its policy agenda and suppressed studies that it did not like. Jeremy Symons, a former whistleblower at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said that suppression of the report for four months was a further example of the White House trying to bury the threat of climate change.

Senior climatologists, however, believe that their verdicts could prove the catalyst in forcing Bush to accept climate change as a real and happening phenomenon. They also hope it will convince the United States to sign up to global treaties to reduce the rate of climatic change.

A group of eminent UK scientists recently visited the White House to voice their fears over global warming, part of an intensifying drive to get the US to treat the issue seriously. Sources have told The Observer that American officials appeared extremely sensitive about the issue when faced with complaints that America's public stance appeared increasingly out of touch.

One even alleged that the White House had written to complain about some of the comments attributed to Professor Sir David King, Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser, after he branded the President's position on the issue as indefensible.

Among those scientists present at the White House talks were Professor John Schellnhuber, former chief environmental adviser to the German government and head of the UK's leading group of climate scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. He said that the Pentagon's internal fears should prove the 'tipping point' in persuading Bush to accept climatic change.

Sir John Houghton, former chief executive of the Meteorological Office - and the first senior figure to liken the threat of climate change to that of terrorism - said: 'If the Pentagon is sending out that sort of message, then this is an important document indeed.'

Bob Watson, chief scientist for the World Bank and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, added that the Pentagon's dire warnings could no longer be ignored.

'Can Bush ignore the Pentagon? It's going be hard to blow off this sort of document. Its hugely embarrassing. After all, Bush's single highest priority is national defence. The Pentagon is no wacko, liberal group, generally speaking it is conservative. If climate change is a threat to national security and the economy, then he has to act. There are two groups the Bush Administration tend to listen to, the oil lobby and the Pentagon,' added Watson.

'You've got a President who says global warming is a hoax, and across the Potomac river you've got a Pentagon preparing for climate wars. It's pretty scary when Bush starts to ignore his own government on this issue,' said Rob Gueterbock of Greenpeace.

Already, according to Randall and Schwartz, the planet is carrying a higher population than it can sustain. By 2020 'catastrophic' shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into war. They warn that 8,200 years ago climatic conditions brought widespread crop failure, famine, disease and mass migration of populations that could soon be repeated.

Randall told The Observer that the potential ramifications of rapid climate change would create global chaos. 'This is depressing stuff,' he said. 'It is a national security threat that is unique because there is no enemy to point your guns at and we have no control over the threat.'

Randall added that it was already possibly too late to prevent a disaster happening. 'We don't know exactly where we are in the process. It could start tomorrow and we would not know for another five years,' he said.

'The consequences for some nations of the climate change are unbelievable. It seems obvious that cutting the use of fossil fuels would be worthwhile.'

So dramatic are the report's scenarios, Watson said, that they may prove vital in the US elections. Democratic frontrunner John Kerry is known to accept climate change as a real problem. Scientists disillusioned with Bush's stance are threatening to make sure Kerry uses the Pentagon report in his campaign.

The fact that Marshall is behind its scathing findings will aid Kerry's cause. Marshall, 82, is a Pentagon legend who heads a secretive think-tank dedicated to weighing risks to national security called the Office of Net Assessment. Dubbed 'Yoda' by Pentagon insiders who respect his vast experience, he is credited with being behind the Department of Defence's push on ballistic-missile defence.

Symons, who left the EPA in protest at political interference, said that the suppression of the report was a further instance of the White House trying to bury evidence of climate change. 'It is yet another example of why this government should stop burying its head in the sand on this issue.'

Symons said the Bush administration's close links to high-powered energy and oil companies was vital in understanding why climate change was received sceptically in the Oval Office. 'This administration is ignoring the evidence in order to placate a handful of large energy and oil companies,' he added.

President George Bush said yesterday that America was on course for "complete victory" and he ruled out any firm timetable for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. Instead he declared that Iraqi forces were beginning to take the lead in the battle against the insurgency.

In a speech aimed squarely at restoring morale on the home front, and to meet the growing clamour for a pull-out, Mr Bush set out what critics say he has conspicuously failed to deliver: a clear exit strategy from the two-and-a-half-year conflict.

In the midst of a war that has cost the lives of more than 2,100 US troops and in which public opinion has turned decisively against the President, he was trying to persuade the home front that despite evidence to the contrary, they were winning.

Victory would come, he said, thanks to the same Iraqi forces which critics say are demoralised, divided and ineffective. In front of a cheering audience at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Mr Bush held out the prospect of a gradual troop withdrawal, under a new approach that would mean US soldiers moving out of Iraqi cities and making fewer patrols, leaving that to newly trained Iraqi soldiers and police. "As Iraqi forces gain experience and the political process advances, we will be able to decrease our troop level in Iraq without losing our capability to defeat the terrorists," Mr Bush said.

Standing before a gold and blue banner proclaiming "Plan For Victory", the President added that decisions about troop levels would be dictated by conditions on the ground in Iraq and the judgement of US commanders, "not by artificial timetables set by politicians in Washington".

In practical terms, neither the 30-minute speech, nor a 35-page National Strategy for Victory in Iraq issued by the administration beforehand, offered great novelty. The aim was to convince Americans deeply sceptical about the handling of a war that has taken the lives of so many US troops and is costing $6bn (£3.47bn) a month, that the White House had a policy beyond a mantra-like repetition of "stay the course".

Polls show a majority of Americans think the US is bogged down in a Vietnam-like conflict that has made the US more, not less, vulnerable to terrorism, and Mr Bush's approval ratings have slumped to a dismal 37 per cent, the lowest of his presidency.

The key to the conflict, Mr Bush says, is that the Iraqis themselves assume responsibility for securing their country. He acknowledged there had been "some setbacks" in the creation of a capable force, and that the performance of Iraqi troops was "still uneven in some areas". But progress was being made, the President declared, claiming more than 120 army and police battalions (average strength 700) were ready to fight unaided, and 80 more battalions were in combat beside coalition forces.

These figures are hotly contested by critics (and challenged even by many US commanders) who say only a handful of Iraqi units are able to fight on their own and morale is low.

Republicans hailed the speech as a clear and realistic blueprint for the future, but Democrats were scathing. Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader, accused Mr Bush of "recycling his tired rhetoric of 'stay the course'." He had "again missed an opportunity to lay out a real strategy for success in Iraq that will bring our troops safely home".

Senator Edward Kennedy described the speech as "a continuation of a political campaign to shore up the failed policies in Iraq ... It does not respond to what the American people want."

Mr Bush portrayed Iraq as "the central front" in the war on terror, saying a precipitate US departure would send the wrong signal to its enemies. "Pulling our troops out before they achieve their purpose is not a plan for victory," he said. "America will not run in the face of car bombers and assassins as long as I am your commander-in-chief."

There were a few hints of change, but on tactics, not on underlying strategy. "If by 'stay the course' they mean we will not allow the terrorists to break our will, they're right," he said. "If by 'stay the course' they mean we will not permit al-Qa'ida to turn Iraq into what Afghanistan was under the Taliban, they're right as well." But if critics interpreted 'stay the course' as an inability to learn from experience, "then they're flat wrong".

The new White House document defines who the US sees as the enemy in Iraq. The largest group are "rejectionists", primarily Sunnis who prospered under Saddam Hussein. The document says this resistance will diminish if a democratic government that emerges from the December elections protects minority rights.

The second group are "Saddamists", former regime members who kept influence. Their power, says the administration, will prove no match for better-organised Iraqi forces.

The White House has dropped its insistence that foreign fighters were the main foe and now concedes that terrorists linked to al-Qa'ida are the smallest component of the insurgency.

The first female suicide bomber of European origin was identified yesterday when prosecutors said a Belgian-born woman was the perpetrator of an attack on US forces in Baghdad earlier this month. The woman, thought to be 37 or 38 years old, is said to have gone to Iraq to carry out the attack after marrying a radical Muslim and converting. Identified only by her first name, either Mireille or Muriel, the women is said to have come from southern Belgian city of Charleroi.

What the President said... and the reality of the war

'Our strategy in Iraq is clear. Our tactics are flexible and dynamic. We have changed them as conditions required and they are bringing us victory against a brutal enemy.'

After two-and-a-half years of war, nobody in Iraq believes the US is winning against the insurgents who have the active or passive support of the five million-strong Sunni Arab community. A key objective for Mr Bush is troop reduction and convincing the public the administration has a "strategy". No-one anticipates withdrawal of all troops any time soon.

'This war is going to take many turns. And the enemy must be defeated on every battlefield. Yet the terrorists have made it clear that Iraq is the central front in their war against humanity. And so we must recognise Iraq as the central front in the war on terror.'

The supporters of al-Qa'ida now have a haven in Iraq which they did not have before the war. Prior to invasion, there was no serious al-Qa'ida presence in Iraq. CIA director Porter Goss said that "Islamic extremists are exploiting the Iraqi conflict to recruit new anti-US jihadists." Mr Bush has admitted that al-Qa'ida accounts for only a tiny part of the insurgency. The aim of the bulk of the insurgency appears to be localised - namely driving out the US.

'Iraqi security forces are on the offensive against the enemy, cleaning out areas controlled by the terrorists and Saddam loyalists, leaving Iraqi forces to hold territory taken from the enemy, and following up with targeted reconstruction to help Iraqis rebuild their lives.'

The US has been taking territory from the insurgents since the start of the fighting but the war is still intensifying. There is little sign of reconstruction.

'Iraqi forces are earning the trust of their countrymen who are willing to help them in the fight against the enemy. As the Iraqi forces grow in number, they're helping to keep a better hold on the cities taken from the enemy. And as Iraqi forces grow more capable, they're increasingly taking the lead in the fight against the terrorists.'

Iraq is getting closer to outright civil war. Sunnis are terrified of Shia troops and police. The Kurds want to reclaim Kirkuk. Each side has its death squads. John Pike, a military analyst, said it was impossible to assess the ability of Iraqi forces. "If they're saying there has been a change around and American forces are not taking the lead, but that Iraqi units are taking the lead, then it's difficult to understand why they are still shipping home so many body-bags."

'At this time last year there were only a handful of Iraqi battalions ready for combat. Now there are over 120 Iraqi army and police combat battalions in the fight against the terrorists, typically comprised of between 350 and 800 Iraqi forces.'

Iraqi government officials say that without US support they could not hold much of Baghdad. Many Iraqi units are "ghost battalions", the number of soldiers inflated by commanders who pocket the pay of non-existent men.

'These decisions about troop levels will be driven by the conditions on the ground in Iraq and the good judgment of our commanders, not by artificial timetables set by politicians in Washington. Some are calling for a deadline for withdrawal. Many advocating an artificial timetable for withdrawing our troops are sincere, but I believe they're sincerely wrong.'

He could scarcely say anything else, to talk of a timetable to pull out would have pointed to US desperation to extricate itself. The leader of the Sunni - the core of the uprising - say armed resistance will continue until the US pulls out. But the recent demand by some Iraqi parties for a timetable to pull out may be part of the choreography that will, in practice, hand Bush an opportunity to discuss withdrawal.

He then goes on to predict that some of these states face ethnic social destruction from within "and in some a civil war is already raging."

The writer goes on to bemoan Israel's relinquishment of the Sinai to Egypt under the Camp David Peace Treaty due to that area's "oil, gas and other natural resources."

"Regaining the Sinai Peninsula is therefore a political priority which is obstructed by Camp David . . . , he writes . . ."and we will have to act in order to return the situation to the status quo which existed in Sinai prior to Sadat's visit and the mistaken peace agreement signed with him in March 1979."

Yinon then predicts that if Egypt is divided and torn apart some other Arab countries will cease to exist in their present form and a Christian Coptic state would be founded in Upper Egypt. (I always wondered why Egypt was referred to as 'the prize' in a 2002 Rand presentation to the Pentagon at the behest of chief neo-conservative and friend of Israel Richard Perle)

Now how about this?

"The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon is Israel's primary target in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target," he writes.

"Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel's targets," says Yinon. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel."

"Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and Lebanon. In Iraq, three or more states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul."

Remember that Yinon's paper was penned in 1982.

But the writer also makes grave mistakes of judgment. For instance, he felt certain that both Jordan and Egypt would revert to Nasser-style Pan-Arab philosophies and break their treaties with Israel, which was what Yinon hoped they would do. But it didn't happen.

Yinon further predicted "there is no chance that Jordan will continue to exist in its present structure for a long time and Israel's policy both in war and in peace, ought to be directed at the liquidation of Jordan."

This was because Yinon wanted to see the transfer of Palestinian Arabs from the West Bank into Jordan. "It is not possible to go on living in this country in the present situation without separating the two nations, the Arabs to Jordan and the Jews to the areas west of the river," he says.

Was Yinon's paper the precursor of the 1996 "Clean Break: A new strategy for securing the realm" document authored by current and former Bush administration leading lights, such as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith as well as David and Meyrav Wurmser on behalf of Benjamin Netanyahu?

"Clean Break" advised the Israeli government to "publicly question Syria's legitimacy," contain Syria and strike selected targets, and "reject" the land for peace concept related to the Golan Heights.

It was also proposed that Syria should be isolated and surrounded by a friendly regime in Iraq, while Arab states should be challenged as "police states" lacking legitimacy. Isn't this exactly what is happening today as part of Bush's democratization policy?

Richard Perle -- who journalist and film-maker John Pilger describes as one of George W. Bush's thinkers -- later pops up again in the 2000 Project for the New American Century document, which lays out the neocon vision for US domination of the land, seas, skies and space.

Pilger writes in December 2002: "I interviewed Perle when he was advising Reagan; and when he spoke about 'total war', I mistakenly dismissed him as mad. He recently used the term again in describing America's 'war on terror'. 'No stages,' he said. 'This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there.

"'All this talk we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq . . . this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war . . . our children will sing great songs about us years from now'."

Those children that survive, maybe, but I'll bet that Perle and gang are far more likely to go down in the annals of history alongside mankind's most brutal, ruthless and self-serving.

And Rep. John P. Murtha (D. Pa.), a 73 year-old former Marine who had served in Vietnam, called for an immediate withdrawal of American troops. Vice President Dick Cheney countered by calling war opponents on the Hill “dishonest and reprehensible.” And the White House claimed that Murtha was advocating “surrender to the terrorists, while Republican members called their fellow legislator a “coward.” Not to be outdone in this mud-slinging free-for-all, Rep. Murtha fingered Bush and Cheney as “guys who got deferments and never been there, and send people to war.”

For the United States, in the second half of the 20th century, waging war in countries whose complex histories, alien culture and national sensibilities are not even remotely similar to its own, has not been an easy enterprise. There always lay more behind the jungles of Vietnam, the civil conflict in Lebanon (where in October 1983 a suicide bomber killed 241 American servicemen at a Marines barracks in the capital), the urban morass of Somalia, the moonscapes of Afghanistan and the minarets of Iraq, than the American experience could assimilate.

You extrapolate from your own culture at your own peril — and you blunder into a situation that will confuse, not to mention trap, you as rebellion flows into rebellion, undercurrents of ethnic dichotomies morph into civil war and old sectarian grudges explode into a settling of scores. Things break down and break apart all around you. On the eve of war in Iraq, that was known as the perils of the “day after,” when nothing goes according to plan and everything appears beyond one’s comprehension.

The American sensibility draws its tone — its archetypal essence, as it were — from that weld of values that began to define it in the early 1800s with the struggle against the British Crown. Deeply ingrained in that sensibility is a paradox: The belief that common sense and human decency can rule the day in conflict resolution, and the notion that a big power is entitled to wield its resources so that the world can be reordered to its liking — a posture at once conciliatory and belligerent. Go for the carrot, in other words, or feel the swish of our stick.

Consider the radical cadence of American English, its sinew of pugnacious idiom, often borrowed from competitive sports (and sports define popular culture and social values), which attest to that.

One general’s instructions to his troops, as they prepared to deploy to Iraq, for example, were: “Wave at them, but have a plan to kill them.” Verbal reticence, I’ll have you know, is not an American trait.

In its decades-long intellectual effusions, the academic left’s great insight — that the exercise of military might, such as, shall we say, “shock and awe,” against lesser societies — is shown to be true. In the end, however, there is no such thing as “lesser” societies. Lesser societies, and the lesser species of men that inhabit them, will not knuckle under to the facile contempt that an outsider exhibits as he unloads his white man’s burden on them. Cultures and polities are marketed wholesale; they evolve on their own, and at their own pace.

In our time, the French, after 130 years of occupation in Algeria, finally found themselves having to lift anchor and sail away, along with a million of their Pieds Noirs settlers, when they discovered that they were pitted against an insurgency they could not defeat. The Soviets, in like manner, did not exactly leave Afghanistan with their heads held high. And let’s face it, the American retreat from Vietnam was not a pretty sight either.

After two and a half years of conflict, it doesn’t appear that the US is likely to make Iraq go its way, let alone advance it as a model of democracy for the entire region. That was both, we now know in the cold light of hindsight, a pipedream and a fantasy. Or in the words of Rep. Murtha, a “flawed policy wrapped in an illusion.” These are the political special effects that project for us the image of today’s Iraq: Sectarian hatred and schisms have increased. Shiite-led government security forces now brazenly operate torture chambers, and the armed wing of Abdul Aziz Hakim’s party, known as the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, send out death squads to target Sunnis.

Well over 2,000 Americans, along with approximately 4,000 Iraqi troops, and reportedly 30,000 Iraqi civilians, have lost their lives. And to those who say, well, heck, this is happening only in the Sunni triangle, an area comprising a mere four of Iraq’s eighteen provinces, here’s a sobering fact: These four provinces contain the nation’s capital and roughly half its population.

It remains a mystery how the US plans to extricate itself from Iraq. As to how it got itself there in the first place, examine the occult rationale of the neocons, those ultimate bullies who set out to reorder the Middle East in a fashion that would fit their geopolitical agenda.

Perhaps at a seminal level of relating to this mess, there was always a foredoomed relationship between those ruthless neocon geopoliticians and the “uppity Arabs” they set out to subdue, whether Iraqi or Palestinian, Islamists or nationalists.

If that is the case, these neocons, who have sent young Americans to kill and be killed in Iraq, may have cut off the American people from all that is alive and decent about them, from their values and their culture, both beloved by people around the world, and alienated millions of Arabs, Muslims and Europeans against them.

Allawi, one of Hussein’s victims, became a trusted CIA asset and later was handpicked by the United States to be the leader of the new Iraq. He now is the leading secular alternative to the Shiite theocrats expected to win the Dec. 15 election.

What Allawi is decrying is the brutal behavior of new security forces empowered by the U.S. invasion but beholden, according to most reports, to Shiite religious parties intent on controlling Iraq. To accomplish their mission, they’re using the kind of “ethnic cleansing” terror seen so recently in Rwanda and the Balkans.

“We are hearing about secret police, secret bunkers where people are being interrogated,” said Allawi. “A lot of Iraqis are being tortured or killed in the course of interrogations. We are even witnessing Shariah courts based on Islamic law that are trying people and executing them.”

Allawi was not alone in painting a grim picture this week of what our president trumpets as an emerging democracy.

“Hundreds of accounts of killings and abductions have emerged in recent weeks, most of them brought forward by Sunni civilians, who claim that their relatives have been taken away by Iraqi men in uniform without warrant or explanation,” reports the New York Times. “Shiite Muslim militia members have infiltrated Iraq’s police force and are carrying out sectarian killings under the color of law, according to documents and scores of interviews,” reports the Los Angeles Times.

Through our careless and uncaring attempts at “nation-building,” the United States has put itself in the position of providing a convenient shield for what is increasingly looking like a takeoff on the Cambodian Killing Fields — down to the continuing targeting of academics of all ethnicities by self-appointed executioners. Civil war is no longer a possibility; it is a reality.

Amazingly, in Bush’s Iraq, just as in Hussein’s, you’re either a victim or a victimizer — often both. The grim ironies of this Darwinist nightmare are everywhere. For example, while the military is defending the use of white phosphorus on the battlefield — “shake and bake” in U.S. military slang — by citing loopholes in chemical weapons restrictions, it can’t look good to the world that one of the human-rights crimes Hussein himself is charged with is — you guessed it — shelling Kurdish rebels and civilians with chemical weapons in 1991.

When presented with such consensus depictions of Iraq as it is, not as our cloistered and purposely ignorant president believes it to be, those who still defend the occupation make two main claims: This is all just the birthing pains of a democracy, and the civil war will get worse if we leave. I don’t agree with either prediction; the U.S. presence fuels both the Sunni insurgency and Shiite radicalism. The argument, however, should be moot anyway, because both the Iraqi and American publics have clearly signaled they want us to get out, starting now.

Yet, as investigative reporter Seymour Hersh reports in the current issue of the New Yorker, it is unclear what it’s going to take to convince our increasingly isolated commander in chief to change course. Bush, according to a highly placed unnamed source Hersh cites, thinks his razor-thin win in 2004 is “another manifestation of divine purpose,” and that history will judge him well.

“The president is more determined than ever to stay the course,” a former defense official told Hersh. “He doesn’t feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage, ‘People may suffer and die, but the Church advances.’.”

Maybe that is not the thinking that motivates Bush, but can anyone come up with a more rational explanation for his determination to stay the course that leads into the abyss? It is time we called a halt to our mindless messing in other people’s lives. As we wind down the third year of an occupation that has killed and maimed tens of thousands of Americans and Iraqis and cost U.S. taxpayers upwards of $300 billion, isn’t it time to give the Iraqis the chance to see if they can do better — on their own?

In the past week, the issue of Jewish support for war has become a hot media issue. The immediate trigger was Virginia Congressman James Moran. He told a public forum that ``If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq we would not be doing this.. . The leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this is going."

Republicans immediately cried anti-semitism. They saw it as Trent Lott payback time: If my racist must go, so must yours. Within a week, the nation's ranking liberal, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, moved to end the controversy. She forced Moran to quit his post as Democratic House whip for the mid-Atlantic region.

Moran's words were certainly inept. But there is no reason to believe they were anti-semitic. Moran himself says he only put it that way because he was responding to a questioner who identified herself as Jewish. If the questioner had been Catholic, he says, he would have blamed Catholics. Maybe that's true. Maybe it's just trying to cover his behind. In any event, Moran was offering a somewhat crude political analysis, not a racial slur.

His crude analysis is not terribly convincing. If the Jewish community were neutral and relatively silent about Iraq, the Bush administration would surely still be pressing just as hard for war. If the organized Jewish community took a very strong principled stand against war, it would surely strengthen the antiwar movement. But most of the national church organizations have come out against the war, and it's not clear they've changed the direction of events. Why do people think the Jews could?

The answer lies partly in an old fantasy that Jews control the banks, the government, and just about every big institution you can think of. It was a common expression of anti-semitism among small, marginalized, disempowered people in this country in the early 20th century. It has not vanished by any means.

But there is no way to know how much the current belief in Jewish power reflects anti-semitism. In the last 30 years or so, it has also become a sober reading of reality in one respect. Jewish organizations now do have a disproportionate influence on the U.S. government, when it comes to Middle East policy.

Last week the New York Times gave one of its writers a chunk of the op-ed page to deny that "we are about to send a quarter of a million American soldiers to war for the sake of Israel." "The idea that this war is about Israel is persistent and more widely held than you may think," Bill Keller wrote.

The idea rests on far more than vague awareness of the power of the "Israel lobby." The smoking gun is a coterie of influential neo-conservatives in the Bush administration, who have long histories of promoting right-wing leaders and policies in Israel.

No one will ever know for sure whether these neo-cons (notably Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith) really promoted war with Iraq primarily to help Israel. It is not very likely, as Keller say. If a war in Iraq "goes bad," though, the truth will not matter. Americans will look for scapegoats, and the organized Jewish community may be near the head of the line.

It won't be just the organizations who will be blamed; it will be "the Jews." That is certainly unfair. The organizations and their leaders are more conservative than the whole Jewish population, especially on Israel and the Middle East. While nearly all the leaders support a war in Iraq, polls show that 40% or more of U.S. Jews are hesitant, at best, about war. But the organizations and leaders always claim to speak for all American Jews. Why shouldn't most American non-Jews believe them and assume all Jews are to blame?

These Jewish groups and leaders have struggled hard to gain their enormous influence on Middle East policy. They have largely achieved their aim. They, and the many Jews who do support them, have had a free ride. They wield great clout without any noticeable increase in anti-semitism. Here's the irony. If we have the war they want, and it "goes bad," the Jewish community might pay a steep price in rising anti-semitism. Are U.S. Jews really willing to take this risk?

Congressman Moran was probably wrong. A major Jewish push against war, by itself, is not likely to stop war-especially since it would be resisted by Jewish leaders and Bush administration neo-cons who are pro-war. But Jews with common sense should make that push anyway. They should see that the price they might pay for this war is too high, especially when so little good is likely to come of it. They should quickly put as much distance as they can between themselves and those Jews who support the war.

Jews with sensitive moral conscience will not stop to calculate their chances of success. They will work against war because they know that thousands of Iraqis are sure to die. They know that Israel's Jews will be directly at risk, too (though Israeli military intelligence foresees less risk this time around than during the 1991 Gulf War, since Iraq's weaponry is far inferior now.) They should also know that, under cover of war, Israel may very well step up its actions against Palestinians. Imagine a Jewish community where that kind of moral concern, all by itself, would be enough to turn all of us Jews against war. Imagine an American community where moral concern turns all of us against war. This season of debate about war gives us a golden opportunity to take a big step toward that kind of community.

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Wednesday, more than two years later, he stood before another banner, this one claiming “A Plan for Victory,” and cited progress that doesn’t exist and promised a victory that the many pros in the Pentagon tell him is unattainable.

Bush claimed Iraq’s security forces are assuming more and more responsibility for security in the troubled nation. What security? Every day brings more death and destruction from insurgents who bomb at will and add to the mounting death tolls. Members of Iraq’s security forces – often the target of insurgents – complain they must pay for their own uniforms and weapons and say the insurgents are far better armed than they.

All Bush did was feed “the very ethnic and sectarian tensions that could well lead to civil war," says Wayne White, former deputy director of intelligence and research for the Near East at the State Department,

Even members of Bush’s own party question the honesty of the President’s rosy view of how things are going in his failed war.

“We need some discussion of whether Iraqis want to be Iraqis, whether there is in fact sufficient cohesion among all the groups to prevent a civil war,” said Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, after the speech. Lugar added that Congress needs to be consulted “if, in fact, we are going to have sustained support through what could be a fairly long period.”

Newspapers found little to support in Bush’s speech.

“Americans have great cause for distrust,” The San Jose Mercury-News editorialized in today’s editions. “The administration has deceived Americans about the reasons for, and progress of, the war. Two years ago, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld assured Americans over and over that the insurgents were in their last throes. That wasn't true then, and it's not true now.”

A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released after the speech Wednesday shows 55 percent of Americans do not believe Bush’s plan will achieve victory. Those who doubt polls that show Bush in a bad light will point out that only 10 percent of those polled watched the speech live but that, in itself, is an indicator of how little Americans trust Bush and how unwilling they are to listen to anything he has to say. The polls also put Bush’s approval rating at just 37 percent – a 51 point drop.

“If the president's goal in kicking off a series of speeches detailing his Iraq policy was to rebuild support for the war, he missed his moment,” editorialized USA Today in today’s editions. “In doing so, he threw into sharper relief the long-running disconnect between his rosy perceptions and what's attainable. Bush's narrative seemed at times more plucked from a black-and-white fantasy than the more complex reality.”

In the end, Bush’s “major policy address” was either a recycling of lies by a politician who is incapable of honesty with the American people or the ravings of a stubborn, intellectually-challenged President in over his head.

Hell of a choice.

"Setting an artificial deadline to withdraw would vindicate the terrorist tactics of beheadings and suicide bombings and mass murder and invite new attacks on America," Bush boomed.

Bush loves the applause. He luxuriates in the warm glow of human affection. In many ways he is the consummate politician feeding his fragile ego with the ephemeral praise of complete strangers. Too bad, his only springboard to fame has been as bullhorn for right-wing fanatics and war-mongers. Now, he finds himself toddling on a narrower and narrower ledge, peering down into the abyss of defeat and disgrace.

"To all who wear the uniform, I make you this pledge: America will not run in the face of car bombers and assassins so long as I am your commander-in-chief."

Who could have dreamed that events would overtake Bush so quickly? A hawkish congressman takes the floor of the House and whispers "Withdrawal" and suddenly the whole neocon master-plan begins to unravel like a ball-o-yarn skittering across the kitchen floor.

The Bush team knows they're losing ground; and fast. That's why they dispatched poor Rummy to 4 TV talk shows on one morning alone. That must be some kind of record. Rumsfeld was reduced to rehashing the same lame gibberish the administration has been slinging for years, only this time, no one is buying. The air is hissssing out of the tire; the momentum has shifted. The country is tired of Bush, tired of war, and tired of Iraq.

Bush-fatigue has set in like an oily pall hanging over the nation.

"At this time last year there were only a handful of Iraqi battalion's ready for combat," Bush thundered. "Now, there are over 120 Iraqi Army and police combat battalions in the fight against the terrorists, typically comprised of between 350 and 800 Iraqi forces. Of these about 80 Iraqi battalions are fighting side-by-side with coalition forces, and about 40 others are taking the lead in the fight."

Lies, lies, and more lies. Mountains of lies; oceans of lies; an entire constellation of lies where every twinkling point of light is just another fraud issued from the raspy larynx of the master of mendacity, George W. Bush."

This is Bush's "Victory Strategy"; stacking one deception on top of another like cord-wood and hoping the wary public will believe it; hoping they'll approve another zillion dollars for earth-poisoning ordinance; hoping they'll send another 2,000 sons and daughters into the Iraqi meat-grinder; hoping they'll sign off on the genocidal attack on Iraqi civilians.

Bush "war-whoop" has lost its resonance; its allure. The bubble-president has become a shadow of his former self; a tattered coat on a stick. Perhaps, he doesn't know that the battle is lost.

All around him a palpable sense of desperation is setting in. Cheney and Rove are already manning the bunkers for next tsunami of bad news. Still, Bush is sent on his fool's errand; trying to appear popular in the last remaining bastion, where support is reflexive and perfunctory.

The war in Iraq is lost. John Murtha said it best:

"Oil production and energy production are below pre-war levels. Our reconstruction efforts have been crippled by the security situation. Only $9 billion of the $18 billion appropriated for reconstruction has been spent. Unemployment remains at about 60 percent. Clean water is scarce. Only $500 million of the $2.2 billion appropriated for water projects has been spent. And most importantly, insurgent incidents have increased from about 150 per week to over 700 in the last year. Instead of attacks going down over time and with the addition of more troops, attacks have grown dramatically. Since the revelations at Abu Ghraib, American casualties have doubled. An annual State Department report in 2004 indicated a sharp increase in global terrorism."

Iraq is over; we lost. Someone had better tell Bush.

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state.

As the Washington Post's David Broder argued on NBC's Meet the Press (11/27/05), there's no point in raising such questions: "This whole debate about whether there was just a mistake or misrepresentation or so on is, I think, from the public point of view largely irrelevant. The public's moved past that. The public wants to know what we're going to do next in Iraq." (The 44 percent of the public that wants to see a withdrawal from Iraq, according to a October 30-November 2 ABC-Washington Post poll, is out of luck, however; Broder added that Rep. John Murtha's advocacy of withdrawing U.S. troops "certainly crystalized the debate about the possibility of an immediate withdrawal, but that was very quickly rejected.")

When Sen. John Kerry accused Vice President Dick Cheney of making "misleading" arguments about the state of the intelligence on Iraq, U.S. News & World Report's Gloria Borger (12/5/05) was unimpressed: "Ah, 'misleading.' Didn't we live through that argument already? In fact, wasn't that in the Democratic talking points in the 2004 election? Are we still arguing over who lied or did not lie about WMD?"

Borger doesn't explain why these old debates are worth nothing more than a roll of the eyes. She does, however, try to argue that her attitude conforms to public opinion: "Democrats and Republicans may not be over the finger-pointing, but the public has moved beyond the blame game--and is clearly growing impatient." Her evidence: a poll that "shows that 51 percent of Americans would like to elect someone other than their current politicians to Congress." How that demonstrates a public unwillingness to debate the pre-war Iraq intelligence is not clear.

Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly spun the issue in terms of politics (11/17/05): "You got to know that a lot of Democrats, particularly on the far left, far left, OK, are undermining the president's position in the world, in the world, by calling him a liar, saying that he juiced up the intelligence, that he knew it was false, and invaded anyway. This hurts not only the United States everywhere in the world, but it hurts our military people as well." But a Pew poll in early November (11/3-6/05) found that 43 percent of respondents believed the White House lied about Iraq's WMD programs. Such poll numbers suggest that, by O'Reilly's standards, more than two-fifths of Americans are on the "far left."

O'Reilly's colleague Brit Hume (Fox News Sunday, 11/27/05), on the other hand, took the position that public opinion, at least for now, is irrelevant: "The Iraqi forces and the U.S. forces are winning. Iraq is moving forward. This is all happening. It's unfolding. And when it does and proceeds to its logical conclusion, this war will, for all intents and purposes, have been won. Iraq will not be a terrorist state, and the world will be better off and the public will, in the fullness of time, know that. You can't expect the public to get it right every minute of every day at all times." An odd stance to take for the main anchor of a news outlet whose slogan is, "We report, you decide."

Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria at least acknowledged (12/5/05) that "why and how we got into this war are important questions," before writing: "But the paramount question right now should not be 'What did we do about Iraq three years ago?' It should be 'What should we do about Iraq today?'" This is more important, he writes, because the White House has a "political-military strategy for Iraq that is sophisticated and workable." Zakaria--whose column is headlined "Panic Is Not the Solution"--writes that Democrats should not respond to the GOP's partisan attacks, since "in responding in equally partisan fashion they could well precipitate a tragedy. Just as our Iraq policy has been getting on a firmer footing, the political dynamic in Washington could move toward a panicked withdrawal."

With multiple reports of widespread torture and death squad killings on the part of the U.S.-backed government (New York Times, 11/28/05, Los Angeles Times, 11/28/05), with the former U.S.-installed Prime Minister Ayad Allawi comparing the current human rights situation in Iraq to conditions under Saddam Hussein's regime (Observer, 11/27/05), and with a gathering of Iraqi leaders from all the major sects calling for a pull-out of U.S. forces (New York Times, 11/22/05), it's hard to see how U.S. policy there can be described as being on a "firmer footing."

While elite journalists argue that public debate is somehow incapable of tackling more than one important question at a time, their real concern may be that a robust discussion of pre-war intelligence could very well leave all sides--Republicans, Democrats and the mainstream media as well--looking culpable for the Iraq War. That could explain why some in the press have long been opposed to examining the White House's record of deception. The Downing Street Memos, for example, leaked to the British press corps last May, were largely ignored by the U.S. press corps because the questions they raised about White House intelligence manipulation were already considered "old news."

One can certainly understand why many in the media would be reluctant to revisit a period in which they and their colleagues failed to do the most fundamental job of the press, which is to serve as a reality check on government claims (see FAIR's "Bush Uranium Lie Is Tip of the Iceberg"). To avoid such a look back, however, only prolongs their dereliction of duty.

Yesterday I saw Morley Safer, one of the real old timers of CBS, once again bemoaning the almost total loss of freedom in reporting on these invasions and occupations. As he said, in Vietnam, U.S. and other national reporters could hop a ride on U.S. or other vehicles to cover anything they wanted to cover, which led directly to their exposing the Big Lies of the U.S. military and politicians about what was going on there. In Iraq and Afghanistan the reporters are "in-bedded" (as I call it) with the military to prevent such free lancing and the soaring dangers of guerilla attacks almost totally prevents their even trying to circumvent the official censorship. Of course, none dare call it censorship for fear of being fired and ostracized to Alaska, so he did not use that forbidden word.

What they do not normally realize or, at least, ever mention is that the very concept of "The News" now totally blinds the media people and, thence, the public about the Big Realities everywhere. We all know that it is common for "specialists" to focus all their attention on the trees and, thereby, fail to see the forest. We all know about "Learned Ignorance," the way in which even truthful, massive facts can totally mislead about the important Big Realities. In a society of immense division and specialization of function and labor, we are continually bombarded by narrow-minded, even stereotypic thinking about almost everything. Everyone focuses on the factoids of his narrow specialty and almost no one puts it together, "draws the lines to connect the dots," as people routinely put it today. We know those things, but the media are overwhelmingly focused at all levels and in every way on narrow views of realities – today's food section, today's casualty number in Iraq provided by the U.S. military, today's promises by Bush, today's endless "human interest" kickers, and on and on. The best and brightest journalists know all of this and much more – but they fall victim to all of these problems every day in every way. The media are set up that way. That's how they function. That's what they do, over and over again, day after endless day in an eternal return of Groundhog Day. The brilliant analysts of the news media like David Altheide have shown us over many decades how the media operate in these ways and the effects they have on public thinking.

Brilliant media strategists and government propagandists have worked together intimately for decades to exploit these facts about the news media to control as best they can the thinking of the American public about the issues vital to the politicians who rule the U.S. By the 1980's they brought all of this together under the direction of people like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove in the Republican Party and created a very powerful Media Propaganda Grand Strategy for controlling public thinking. The Party has daily media-war strategy consultations at the top, instant response teams, overnight polling and instant response special ops teams, daily talking points fed to massive brigades of media operatives worldwide to make the messages come from a vast number of seemingly independent inputs, and on and on. This Propaganda War Against the American People makes the Big Lie campaigns of Hitler and his media specialists look totally amateurish.

An obvious example is the Character Assassination Operation they launch against anyone who becomes or might become an effective critic of their vital policies in the media, thus undermining their Media War Strategy. A war hero Congressman who comes out strongly against the Party line on Iraq is instantly attacked from a great many "independent" sources using variations on the day's talking points. The instant polls and quick response focus groups track the public response to the Assassination News.

When the polls for Bush and the Party plunged over their Assassination attacks on the war hero, the Party talking points immediately reversed their position on him, calling him a "fine American," a strategic retreat to prepare for a counterattack – recoil to regroup, regain strength and attack in a new way.

Less obvious are Party campaigns like "Emphasize the Positive In Iraq." Anyone who knows anything about history knows that the crucial facts about any war tend to be negative facts on a narrow front. The U.S. and French defeated the British at Yorktown over a relatively few days when 99% of Americans were not paying any attention at all, but were going on with their daily, happy lives. (They couldn't get news for days.) But those few days in that tiny part of America had profound consequences for Americans and for world history in the past few centuries. What happened in the U.S. prison at Abu Ghraib was tiny by comparison with the millions of children going happily to school in Iraq, but it has already had profound global effects, increasing the already soaring loathing of the U.S. for its hypocrisy, Big Lies, and mass killing. The children going to school did not have any comparable effect. Any newsman senses that. The U.S. media managers try to deceive them and the public by trying to force them with attacks for "Bias" to cover the irrelevant Happy News.

The powerful censorship effects of this Media War Against the American Public are most obvious in all of the language used by the American media to talk about Iraq, Afghanistan, and almost everything else. The media use only the U.S. government issued words for everything from the U.S. GHQ in Baghdad – "The Green Zone," a very Happy Talk Name – to "Liberation" instead of "Imperialist Invasion and Occupation," which is what almost all intelligent people around the world see it as.

The same is true about everything. "Inflation," "Terrorism," "Unemployment," "War Crimes," "blindness," and on and on across the global spectrum is what the Party defines them as, not what they really are or what we in the public want them to mean. The Big Media especially speak only in Government Speak, not in truth speak. That is a fact of overwhelming and obvious importance in understanding the Media, but it is a fact that none dare ever mention. The Media in America are controlled more secretly and in some ways more indirectly than Pravda and Izvestia in the Soviet Disunion Empire (not the name they used for themselves), but their mission, daily operations and effects on government are basically the same. The U.S. media have covered a wider spectrum of the public discourse before invasions and annihilations and vast war crimes, but they always have fallen in line and saluted once the firing starts. On the vast majority of crucial issues in social life, from inflation to taxation and government debt and medical care, the media "News" stories are little more than parroting of discussions among government officials and their "experts." There is certainly more "opinion" in the op-ed pieces and a somewhat wider spectrum of opinion, mainly from the Republican wing to the Democratic wing of the Republicrat Party, than in Soviet Media. But only a tiny percent of the people, the more intelligent and educated, read even that narrow spectrum of pre-approved Party opinion, all of it done in the officially approved Government Speak words.

"Good Journalism" as now taught in the best schools of journalism is now an enemy of the truth in America and, as far as I know, around the world where similar Parties rule and manage their Media in similar ways, always making adjustments for the local situations. An "Elite" newspaper like the New York Times is now almost entirely irrelevant to understanding what is really going on in our world. The journalists are not purposefully misleading or lying to people, though some of the top publishers and editors know exactly what is going on and they go along to get ahead in the Party or just to make more money by fattening the corporate "bottom line." The reporters are generally telling truths about what is going on in Podunk and in Iraq, just as Pravda (Russian for truth) did to maintain their credibility. But those masses of little facts are irrelevant to understanding the crucial facts and the Big Truths in our world. They are the trees blinding the public to what is being done to them by The Party. The Media can be mined for "pearls" of facts, as serious analysts do, but they cannot be relied on in any serious way to tell you the Truth.

The public needs desperately to tune-out on these Party Media, just as the best and brightest young people are now doing more and more. They need to think critically and creatively, see how the massive dots go together in reality. When George Bush or one of his armies of media hacks makes his umteenth pronuncio by reading from a telepromter Party Script that is not NEWS – that is a Big Lie. Anyone who covers it as News is deceiving you, whether he intends to do so or not.

People need to swear off on Party Government Speak. Make up your own names. The GHQ for the U.S. Imperial Invasion Force in Iraq is The Forbidden City, a huge inner city where Iraqis are not allowed to go without being totally vetted by the U.S. Government of Iraq. The Forbidden City was the term used by the Chinese for the Imperial Palace in Peking. The U.S. Forbidden City is just like that.

Free men and women think freely. They do not submit to Party Speak, a crucial fact of life George Orwell made all intelligent people aware of fifty years ago. Only those who think freely can be free. Those who think as the Party dictates through its Media are Party slaves, not free people.

Jack D. Douglas is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 30 - Titled "The Sands Are Blowing Toward a Democratic Iraq," an article written this week for publication in the Iraqi press was scornful of outsiders' pessimism about the country's future.

"Western press and frequently those self-styled 'objective' observers of Iraq are often critics of how we, the people of Iraq, are proceeding down the path in determining what is best for our nation," the article began. Quoting the Prophet Muhammad, it pleaded for unity and nonviolence.

But far from being the heartfelt opinion of an Iraqi writer, as its language implied, the article was prepared by the United States military as part of a multimillion-dollar covert campaign to plant paid propaganda in the Iraqi news media and pay friendly Iraqi journalists monthly stipends, military contractors and officials said.

The article was one of several in a storyboard, the military's term for a list of articles, that was delivered Tuesday to the Lincoln Group, a Washington-based public relations firm paid by the Pentagon, documents from the Pentagon show. The contractor's job is to translate the articles into Arabic and submit them to Iraqi newspapers or advertising agencies without revealing the Pentagon's role. Documents show that the intended target of the article on a democratic Iraq was Azzaman, a leading independent newspaper, but it is not known whether it was published there or anywhere else.

Even as the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development pay contractors millions of dollars to help train journalists and promote a professional and independent Iraqi media, the Pentagon is paying millions more to the Lincoln Group for work that appears to violate fundamental principles of Western journalism.

In addition to paying newspapers to print government propaganda, Lincoln has paid about a dozen Iraqi journalists each several hundred dollars a month, a person who had been told of the transactions said. Those journalists were chosen because their past coverage had not been antagonistic to the United States, said the person, who is being granted anonymity because of fears for the safety of those involved. In addition, the military storyboards have in some cases copied verbatim text from copyrighted publications and passed it on to be printed in the Iraqi press without attribution, documents and interviews indicated.

In many cases, the material prepared by the military was given to advertising agencies for placement, and at least some of the material ran with an advertising label. But the American authorship and financing were not revealed.

Military spokesmen in Washington and Baghdad said Wednesday that they had no information on the contract. In an interview from Baghdad on Nov. 18, Lt. Col. Steven A. Boylan, a military spokesman, said the Pentagon's contract with the Lincoln Group was an attempt to "try to get stories out to publications that normally don't have access to those kind of stories." The military's top commanders, including Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, did not know about the Lincoln Group contract until Wednesday, when it was first described by The Los Angeles Times, said a senior military official who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Pentagon officials said General Pace and other top officials were disturbed by the reported details of the propaganda campaign and demanded explanations from senior officers in Iraq, the official said.

When asked about the article Wednesday night on the ABC News program "Nightline," General Pace said, "I would be concerned about anything that would be detrimental to the proper growth of democracy."

Others seemed to share the sentiment. "I think it's absolutely wrong for the government to do this," said Patrick Butler, vice president of the International Center for Journalists in Washington, which conducts ethics training for journalists from countries without a history of independent news media. "Ethically, it's indefensible."

Mr. Butler, who spoke from a conference in Wisconsin with Arab journalists, said the American government paid for many programs that taught foreign journalists not to accept payments from interested parties to write articles and not to print government propaganda disguised as news.

"You show the world you're not living by the principles you profess to believe in, and you lose all credibility," he said.

The Government Accountability Office found this year that the Bush administration had violated the law by producing pseudo news reports that were later used on American television stations with no indication that they had been prepared by the government. But no law prohibits the use of such covert propaganda abroad.

The Lincoln contract with the American-led coalition forces in Iraq has rankled some military and civilian officials and contractors. Some of them described the program to The New York Times in recent months and provided examples of the military's storyboards.

The Lincoln Group, whose principals include some businessmen and former military officials, was hired last year after military officials concluded that the United States was failing to win over Muslim public opinion. In Iraq, the effort is seen by some American military commanders as a crucial step toward defeating the Sunni-led insurgency.

Citing a "fundamental problem of credibility" and foreign opposition to American policies, a Pentagon advisory panel last year called for the government to reinvent and expand its information programs.

"Government alone cannot today communicate effectively and credibly," said the report by the task force on strategic communication of the Defense Science Board. The group recommended turning more often for help to the private sector, which it said had "a built-in agility, credibility and even deniability."

The Pentagon's first public relations contract with Lincoln was awarded in 2004 for about $5 million with the stated purpose of accurately informing the Iraqi people of American goals and gaining their support. But while meant to provide reliable information, the effort was also intended to use deceptive techniques, like payments to sympathetic "temporary spokespersons" who would not necessarily be identified as working for the coalition, according to a contract document and a military official.

In addition, the document called for the development of "alternate or diverting messages which divert media and public attention" to "deal instantly with the bad news of the day."

Laurie Adler, a spokeswoman for the Lincoln Group, said the terms of the contract did not permit her to discuss it and referred a reporter to the Pentagon. But others defended the practice.

"I'm not surprised this goes on," said Michael Rubin, who worked in Iraq for the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003 and 2004. "Informational operations are a part of any military campaign," he added. "Especially in an atmosphere where terrorists and insurgents - replete with oil boom cash - do the same. We need an even playing field, but cannot fight with both hands tied behind our backs."

Two dozen recent storyboards prepared by the military for Lincoln and reviewed by The New York Times had a variety of good-news themes addressing the economy, security, the insurgency and Iraq's political future. Some were written to resemble news articles. Others took the form of opinion pieces or public service announcements.

One article about Iraq's oil industry opened with three paragraphs taken verbatim, and without attribution, from a recent report in Al Hayat, a London-based Arabic newspaper. But the military version took out a quotation from an oil ministry spokesman that was critical of American reconstruction efforts. It substituted a more positive message, also attributed to the spokesman, though not as a direct quotation.

The editor of Al Sabah, a major Iraqi newspaper that has been the target of many of the military's articles, said Wednesday in an interview that he had no idea that the American military was supplying such material and did not know if his newspaper had printed any of it, whether labeled as advertising or not.

The editor, Muhammad Abdul Jabbar, 57, said Al Sabah, which he said received financial support from the Iraqi government but was editorially independent, accepted advertisements from virtually any source if they were not inflammatory. He said any such material would be labeled as advertising but would not necessarily identify the sponsor. Sometimes, he said, the paper got the text from an advertising agency and did not know its origins.

Asked what he thought of the Pentagon program's effectiveness in influencing Iraqi public opinion, Mr. Jabbar said, "I would spend the money a better way."

The Lincoln Group, which was incorporated in 2004, has won another government information contract. Last June, the Special Operations Command in Tampa awarded Lincoln and two other companies a multimillion-dollar contract to support psychological operations. The planned products, contract documents show, include three- to five- minute news programs.

Asked whether the information and news products would identify the American sponsorship, a media relations officer with the special operations command replied, in an e-mail message last summer, that "the product may or may not carry 'made in the U.S.' signature" but they would be identified as American in origin, "if asked."

He said Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had indicated that Pentagon officials are looking into the reports.

"We need to know what the facts are. Gen. Pace indicated it was news to him as well," McClellan said.

The Los Angeles Times said it based its story on interviews with U.S. military officials who spoke on condition of anonymity and with Iraqi newspaper employees, as well as documents it obtained.

A defense contractor, a Washington-based public relations firm called Lincoln Group, helped translate the stories and used staff or subcontractors posing as freelance journalists or advertising executives to bring them to Iraqi media outlets, the Times reported.

The Times depicted the stories as "basically factual," but said they omitted information that might not reflect well upon the United States or the U.S.-backed Iraqi government.

The newspaper also reported that the "Information Operations Task Force" in Baghdad has bought an Iraqi newspaper and taken control of a radio station, and was using them to disseminate pro-American views as well.

The Bush administration was embarrassed early this year when it was disclosed that the Education Department had paid commentator Armstrong Williams $240,000 to tout President George W. Bush's landmark education plan, "No Child Left Behind."

The French International News Network (CFII) - known colloquially as "CNN a la francaise" - will be run by a joint company owned by the leading private French television broadcaster TF1 and the public broadcaster France Televisions, Communications Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres told a media conference on Wednesday.

France Televisions will be in the driving chair of the entity, whose 240 staff will produce programmes beamed to Europe, Africa and the Middle East at first, then later to Asia, Latin America and North America.

Wide reach

News will be provided around the clock in French, though the plans also call for a four-hour slot of English programming and the option of adding Arabic and Spanish.

Cope said the CFII would begin broadcasting "before the end of 2006".

Chirac stated that "the goal is to show everywhere in the world the values of France and its vision of the world", according to Cope, and promised that it would have the public financing "commensurate with its ambition".

The French president has pushed for the network for nearly four years, since February 2002, when he called for a "big international news channel in French able to rival the BBC and CNN".

International coverage

Impetus for the idea picked up before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when French officials were dismayed at the way non-US and British positions were being reported in international media.

Some reports in US media stating that "Paris is burning" during the recent three weeks of rioting around the capital and elsewhere in France also nettled the government.

The European Commission gave the green light to the CFII in June, saying it did not breach EU state aid rules.

The French government has given initial funding of 30 million euros ($35 million) for this year and allocated another 65 million euros for next year.

The budget for the CFII is a small fraction of that spent by the BBC or CNN, both of which have built global networks and enjoy established reputations.

Competition

BBC World, the privately financed international arm of Britain's public broadcaster, has 250 staff and an undisclosed budget.

CNN's US and international divisions employ 4000 people and have revenues of $860 million.

The path to getting the CFII off the ground was a rocky one.

Relations between TF1 and France Televisions are often frosty and competitive.

France Televisions chief executive Patrick de Carolis had argued for TF1 to be dropped from the project but relented after the government assured him that the state broadcaster would call the shots.

Concerns

An early plan for CFII to be unavailable in France itself - as an accommodation to TF1, which has a domestic 24-hour all-news cable channel called LCI - was revised after consumer groups complained about the public financing a channel it would not be able to watch.

Journalist unions at France Televisions have warned that their members are balking at having their work used by a company part-owned by a private group and want guarantees that TF1 will not have access to their reports.

The new network is expected to rely on state-owned Radio France Internationale and on Agence France-Presse for some of its output, through contracts or associative arrangements.

Newspapers across the United States and beyond told readers Wednesday about sensational new statements by a former top assistant to Colin Powell when he was secretary of state. After interviewing Lawrence Wilkerson, the Associated Press reported he "said that wrongheaded ideas for the handling of foreign detainees after Sept. 11 arose from a coterie of White House and Pentagon aides who argued that 'the president of the United States is all-powerful,' and that the Geneva Conventions were irrelevant."

AP added: "Wilkerson blamed Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and like-minded aides. Wilkerson said that Cheney must have sincerely believed that Iraq could be a spawning ground for new terror assaults, because 'otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard.'"

Such strong words are headline grabbers when they come from someone widely assumed to be speaking Powell's mind. And as a Powell surrogate, Wilkerson is certainly on a tear this week, speaking some truth about power. But there are a few big problems with his zeal to recast the public record:

1) Wilkerson should have spoken up years ago.

2) His current statements, for the most part, are foggy.

3) The criticisms seem to stem largely from tactical critiques and image concerns rather than moral objections.

4) Powell is still too much of a cagey opportunist to speak out himself.

Appearing on the BBC's "Today" program Tuesday, Wilkerson said: "You begin to wonder was this intelligence spun? Was it politicized? Was it cherry-picked? Did, in fact, the American people get fooled? I am beginning to have my concerns."

So Wilkerson, who was Powell's chief of staff from 2002 till early this year, has started to "wonder" whether the intelligence was spun, politicized, cherry-picked. At the end of November 2005, he was "beginning" to have "concerns."

"Beginning to have my concerns" is a phrase that aptly describes the Colin Powell approach.

Overall, appearances remain key. And so, Wilkerson included this anecdote in his AP interview: "Powell raised frequent and loud objections, his former aide said, once yelling into a telephone at Rumsfeld: 'Donald, don't you understand what you are doing to our image?'"

Now there's a transcendent reason to begin to have concerns: Torturing prisoners is bad for "our image."

Rest assured that if the war had gone well by Washington's lights, we'd be hearing none of this from Powell's surrogate. The war has gone bad, from elite vantage points, not because of the official lies and the unrelenting carnage but because military victory has eluded the U.S. government in Iraq. And with President Bush's poll numbers tanking, and Dick Cheney's even worse, it's time for some "moderate" sharks to carefully circle for some score-settling and preening.

In its account of Wilkerson's BBC appearance, the British Guardian newspaper reported Wednesday: "Asked whether the vice president was guilty of a war crime, Mr. Wilkerson replied: 'Well, that's an interesting question -- it was certainly a domestic crime to advocate terror and I would suspect that it is ... an international crime as well.' In the context of other remarks it appeared he was using the word 'terror' to apply to the systematic abuse of prisoners."

Strong stuff, especially since it's obvious that Wilkerson is channeling Powell with those statements. But Powell was a team player and a very effective front man for the administration that was doing all that politicizing and cherry-picking -- and then proceeding with the policies that Wilkerson now seeks to pin on Cheney as possible war crimes.

White House war makers deftly hyped Powell's "moderate" credibility while the Washington press corps lauded his supposed integrity. Powell was the crucial point man for giving "diplomatic" cover to the Iraq invasion fixation of Bush and Cheney. So, typically, Powell proclaimed three weeks into 2003: "If the United Nations is going to be relevant, it has to take a firm stand."

When Powell made his dramatic presentation to the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, he fudged, exaggerated and concocted, often presenting deceptions as certainties. Along the way, he played fast and loose with translations of phone intercepts to make them seem more incriminating. And, as researchers at the media watch group FAIR (where I'm an associate) pointed out, "Powell relied heavily on the disclosure of Iraq's pre-war unconventional weapons programs by defector Hussein Kamel, without noting that Kamel had also said that all those weapons had been destroyed." But the secretary of state wowed U.S. journalists.

Powell's televised U.N. speech exuded great confidence and authoritative judgment. But he owed much of his touted credibility to the fact that he had long functioned inside a media bubble shielding him from direct challenge. It might puzzle an American to read later, in a book compiled by the London-based Guardian, that Powell's much-ballyhooed speech went over like a lead balloon. "The presentation was long on assertion and muffled taped phone calls, but short on killer facts," the book said. "It fell flat."

Fell flat? Well it did in Britain, where a portion of the mainstream press immediately set about engaging in vigorous journalism that ripped apart many of Powell's assertions within days. But not on the western side of the Atlantic, where Powell's star turn at the United Nations elicited an outpouring of media adulation. In the process of deference to Powell, many liberals were among the swooners.

In her Washington Post column the morning after Powell spoke, Mary McGrory proclaimed that "he persuaded me." She wrote: "The cumulative effect was stunning." And McGrory, a seasoned and dovish political observer, concluded: "I'm not ready for war yet. But Colin Powell has convinced me that it might be the only way to stop a fiend, and that if we do go, there is reason."

In the same edition, Post columnist Richard Cohen shared his insight that Powell was utterly convincing: "The evidence he presented to the United Nations -- some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail -- had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude otherwise."

Inches away, Post readers found Jim Hoagland's column with this lead: "Colin Powell did more than present the world with a convincing and detailed X-ray of Iraq's secret weapons and terrorism programs yesterday. He also exposed the enduring bad faith of several key members of the U.N. Security Council when it comes to Iraq and its 'web of lies,' in Powell's phrase." Hoagland's closing words sought to banish doubt: "To continue to say that the Bush administration has not made its case, you must now believe that Colin Powell lied in the most serious statement he will ever make, or was taken in by manufactured evidence. I don't believe that. Today, neither should you."

On the opposite page the morning after Powell's momentous U.N. speech, a Washington Post editorial was figuratively on the same page as the Post columnists. Under the headline "Irrefutable," the newspaper laid down its line for rationality: "After Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council yesterday, it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction."

Also smitten was the editorial board of the most influential U.S. newspaper leaning against the push for war. Hours after Powell finished his U.N. snow job, the New York Times published an editorial with a mollified tone -- declaring that he "presented the United Nations and a global television audience yesterday with the most powerful case to date that Saddam Hussein stands in defiance of Security Council resolutions and has no intention of revealing or surrendering whatever unconventional weapons he may have."

By sending Powell to address the Security Council, the Times claimed, President Bush "showed a wise concern for international opinion." And the paper contended that "Mr. Powell's presentation was all the more convincing because he dispensed with apocalyptic invocations of a struggle of good and evil and focused on shaping a sober, factual case against Mr. Hussein's regime."

Later, in mid-September 2003, straining to justify Washington's refusal to let go of the occupation of Iraq, Colin Powell used the language of a venture capitalist: "Since the United States and its coalition partners have invested a great deal of political capital, as well as financial resources, as well as the lives of our young men and women -- and we have a large force there now -- we can't be expected to suddenly just step aside."

Now, after so much clear evidence has emerged to discredit the entire U.S. war effort, Colin Powell still can't bring himself to stand up and account for his crucial role. Instead, he's leaving it to a former aide to pin blame on those who remain at the top of the Bush administration. But Powell was an integral part of the war propaganda machinery. And we can hardly expect the same media outlets that puffed him up at crucial times to now scrutinize their mutual history.

This article includes an excerpt from Norman Solomon's new book "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." For information, go to: www.WarMadeEasy.com

Besides the fact that it should be disheartening that it took three years of war for this administration to actually draft out a plan for victory, the real problem is one of the English language.

When asked for a “plan”, Bush has responded with what we call in the English language, as goals. Saying you have a plan is quite different then actually having one. Bush was high on rhetoric today, trying to buy time for his failed war by stating his plan was to have “complete victory” and to not leave until “Iraq is a democracy.” Memo to the president: those are GOALS, not plans. If you have a goal of complete victory, America needs to know what the PLAN is to achieve that goal. If you have a goal of establishing Iraq as a democracy, then America needs to know your PLAN to achieve that.

No, the fact seems apparent that President Bush does not actually have any plan other than to continue the rhetoric. Bush’s plan is to confuse the word insurgent with terrorist. The fact is that only 7% of the people fighting in Iraq are terrorists, the rest are Iraqis. They are fighting the very civil war Bush claims will occur if we dare leave. We simply are using our troops, our children; to die in that civil war because we have chosen which side we want to win. Knowing that would never go over with the American people, Bush interchanges the word insurgent with terrorist in every speech and has his minions do the same.

The only plan Bush seems to have is to convince us that things are going great in Iraq. You do not dress up a lame public relations stunt, and that is all the speech was today, as a “plan.” Iraq is not going well at all. There are now over 2,100 reported American deaths with over 10,000 permanently wounded. Ninety-four percent of these deaths have occurred AFTER Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” public relations stunt. Sixty percent of these deaths have occurred since Bush’s “Transfer of Sovereignty” public relations stunt. How high a percentage will we accept dying from the point of today’s public relations stunt? Three soldiers die every single day now, the highest casualty rate during this entire war singling the fact that things are getting progressively worse, not better, no matter what the pretty glossy book Bush was peddling today may have said.

The defenders of this war always claim that mistakes are made in every war. We were sold on this war based on WMD which has turned out to be a lie. The defenders say, “Saddam was a bad guy.” We were told the Iraq oil earnings would fund the war but now we are out over 200 billion dollars, most going not to rebuild the infrastructure we have obliterated but just to security to keep us alive over there and to add billions to the coffers of Halliburton. We were told we would be met as liberators and instead 45% of Iraqis think it is justified to kill Americans while 80% want us gone. We were told this would take six months and now today the defenders are saying another 25 years on the day Bush simply looks America in the eye and says: DROP DEAD, we are not going anywhere. The critics are right, mistakes are made in every war but in this war, we are left to the ridiculous notion that EVERYTHING was a mistake. It is not feasible that people can be this wrong by accident.

Today it was also revealed that the Pentagon paid to have Americans write occupation-friendly stories and then have them translated and printed in Iraqi papers as if they were written by Iraqis. Propaganda is as propaganda does. This is simply how this administration operates. It is not a matter of a mistake, it is a willful POLICY. Faced with the truths, they create their own reality, pretty it up, slap a glossy cover on it and run the president out before the cameras to sell it to you. Then the war whores and administration flunkies all go on the evening news shows to say how resolute Bush is because he came out today and said the exact same thing he has said for three years now, DROP DEAD. The difference today is he is saying it to 68% of America. Bush said we will stay the course, the enemy must not win, we are fighting a war on terror, democracy is on the march, freedom is not easy, terror, terror, fear, fear, take a look at the shiny new book we have saying the same thing we have said over and over again for three years now…

Iraq is an unmitigated disaster because the people running the war do not understand the difference between the words plan and goal. They have a goal that cannot be measured such as “victory” or “democracy”. The purpose of such non-measurable goals is to allow one simple truth to continue, and that is the war. To convince the Iraqis they publish fake stories in the Iraqi papers and to convince Americans they publish their failed goals dressed up as fake plans in a glossy-covered book.

Three American soldiers died today in a desert half a world away. They died because the man who sent them there sets non-measurable goals and pretends they are plans. The truly frightening prospect of course is that this administration knows full well the difference between a goal and a plan; they just do not think you need to have a plan. Sixty-eight percent of this country has spoken and said they disagree and the message from Bush today could not have been clearer:

"America will not run in the face of car bombers and assassins so long as I am your Commander-in-Chief."

Bush to America: DROP DEAD.

Anthony Wade, a contributing writer to opednews.com, is dedicated to educating the populace to the lies and abuses of the government. He is a 37-year-old independent writer from New York with political commentary articles seen on multiple websites. A Christian progressive and professional Rehabilitation Counselor working with the poor and disabled, Mr. Wade believes that you can have faith and hold elected officials accountable for lies and excess. Anthony Wade’s Archive: http://www.opednews.com/archiveswadeanthony.htm Email Anthony: takebacktheus@yahoo.com

In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on November 28, Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) put forward an argument for staying the course in Iraq. Of course, his argument in "Our Troops Must Stay" was filled with false information.

Lieberman describes "real progress" and "self-securing nationhood." What are the facts? Rep. Murtha laid them out clearly saying the "war in Iraq is not going as advertised" and, more specifically:

"Oil production and energy production are below pre-war levels. Our reconstruction efforts have been crippled by the security situation. Only $9 billion of the $18 billion appropriated for reconstruction has been spent. Unemployment remains at about 60 percent. Clean water is scarce. Only $500 million of the $2.2 billion appropriated for water projects has been spent. And most importantly, insurgent incidents have increased from about 150 per week to over 700 in the last year. Instead of attacks going down over time and with the addition of more troops, attacks have grown dramatically. Since the revelations at Abu Ghraib, American casualties have doubled. An annual State Department report in 2004 indicated a sharp increase in global terrorism."

And, on the same day as Lieberman's column, United Press International reported that U.S. deaths in Iraq were on the rise saying: "The latest figures issued by the Department of Defense and other U.S. and Iraqi official sources reveal an insurgency still raging unabated in which the number of total casualties inflicted on U.S. troops is once again climbing, and where the insurgents appear to be switching resources from targeting Iraqi security forces to carrying out Multiple Fatality Bomb (MFB) attacks."

UPI went on to report that in the last 14 days 45 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq. MFB attacks are rising, UPI reports: "In all, 40 of these attacks have been recorded so far in November up to Nov. 27, making this month the second worst so far in the whole insurgency. Only September was worse, with 46 of them. Up to Nov. 27, MFBs had killed 401 people and wounded 519 more in less than four weeks."

This does not sound like a self-securing nation! And, if Lieberman were right that Iraq was "self-securing" wouldn't that mean U.S. troops were not needed and it was time to come home. Not only are his arguments based on false information but they make no sense.

And, Lieberman also makes the claim that Iraqi's want the U.S. to stay. This after opinion polls showing over 80 percent want the U.S. to leave. And, a week after a statement issued in Cairo by Iraqi officials covering the political and ethnic spectrum of Iraq called for U.S. withdrawal. At the end of an Arab League Conference the Final Statement of the National Accord Conference said three times that the Iraqis called for a U.S. withdrawal expressing the sentiment of the Iraqi people saying: "The Iraqi people are looking forward to the day when the foreign forces would leave Iraq."

Time Magazine Baghdad bureau chief Michael Ware showed the absurdity of Liberman's comments when he said:

"I and some other journalists had lunch with Senator Joe Lieberman the other day and we listened to him talking about Iraq. Either Senator Lieberman is so divorced from reality that he's completely lost the plot or he knows he's spinning a line. Because one of my colleagues turned to me in the middle of this lunch and said he's not talking about any country I've ever been to and yet he was talking about Iraq, the very country where we were sitting."

Sen. Lieberman is so divorced from reality that he can no longer be taken seriously. Yet, The Wall Street Journal published this nonsense. The Iraq War and occupation is too serious for any more arguments based on false information. The security of the world is at stake if the United States continues to handle this situation wrong. Not only are Americans and Iraqis dying, and billions being wasted but Iraq is becoming a destablizing force that attracts and trains terrorists. Elected officials like Sen. Lieberman are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Kevin Zeese is director of Democracy Rising.

The GOPMOB's Magic Horn of Plenty

But as the extent of the damage to America’s national security wrought by the bribes which crossed Cunningham’s greasy palm begins to come into focus, the fraud being revealed is orders of magnitude greater than has been hinted at so far.

Here’s how it worked:

Money budgeted for U.S. Defense went in at the ADCS end of something called the “Wilkes Corporation” for services which the Pentagon protested it never requested, and out the other end came a magical cornucopia of bribes, kick-backs, campaign contributions, yachts, Lear jets and Rolls Royce’s.

Over the course of almost an entire decade, from 1994 to 2001, Cunningham’s Appropriations Committee repeatedly added funding, to the Pentagon budget, even though the Pentagon didn't ask for the money, for a previously non-existent (prior to 1995) software company, ADCS, owned by the “Wilkes Corporation,” a private company (natch) owned by San Diego businessman Brent Wilkes.

The money then made a short trip—courtesy the wonders of modern accounting—from one of Brent Wilkes’ pants pocket to the another, called “Group W Advisors,” which proceeded to obligingly send hundreds of thousands of dollars in ‘client fees’ annually to The Alexander Strategy Group, a lobbying and consulting firm currently under scrutiny in the Justice Department's investigation of Casino Jack Abramoff.

"A little trouble keeping the company names straight, is all."

Wilkes himself seems to have had trouble remembering which of his legal fictions was which. In newspaper reports state that his sweet deal grew out of requests from the House National Security Committee, of which Cunningham was then a member, for the military to add an automated-document program to its budget.

His firm ADCS, according to Government Computer News, began by selling $5 million in document conversion software to the Pentagon. But on the website of his lobbying firm, Group W Advisors, the firm claims it has been "instrumental in introducing (digital document) technology to the Department of Defense,” and that that the company's document-automation work, which began as a small “congressionally mandated pilot project," has since generated more than $500 million in appropriations.

Here we pictured the memorable movie scene in “Chinatown” where Fay Dunaway explains to Jack Nicholson what may have been a similarly-complicated state of affairs...

“She’s my sister! (Slap.) She’s my daughter! (Slap.) She’s my sister AND my daughter!”

"Thinking outside the tank"

Confusing details aside, the scheme resembles nothing so much as the blatantly phony Abramoff-sponsored Institutes, Foundations, and political “think tanks” (whose ‘scholars in residence” turn out to be lifeguards and yoga instructors) which were exposed in recent Senate Hearings as vehicles used to move money through the bank accounts of a network of DeLay cronies and former aides.

During this same time frame Cunningham also steered Pentagon money to another tiny “defense contractor” called MZM Inc, which went from zero dollars in Federal contracts to $169 million just two short years later through the simple expedient of indulging Cunningham’s taste for expensive yachts and a new $2 million dollar mansion in ritzy Rancho Santa Fe, California, to go with the trophy wife, also on the payroll.

That’s a preliminary total of almost $700 million earmarked for national security which went to “companies” which didn’t exist until a few years earlier to provide services the Pentagon didn’t ask for and presumably didn’t need.

The point man on the Cunningham “account” for the Alexander Strategy Group was former DeLay aide Karl Gallant, who a few years earlier signed up Enron Corp. to a $750,000 lobbying contract (no doubt because Enron’s pensions were already fully funded.)

CONTINUE READING

It was a day that anyone who was old enough knows where they were when the heard the news.

President Kennedy was not really as popular that day as he would be a week later when it no longer mattered. One report that went around the world was that schoolchildren in Dallas cheered when they heard of Kennedy’s death. That was true, but the story was distorted.

The children who cheered were a class of five-year-olds. They were told the president had been shot and they were getting the rest of the day off school. They were cheering for the half-day.

For people who have not yet reached their mid-50s, 42 years may seem like an eternity, but most other people probably have a clear memory of the events of that day.

How much more fresh must the memory of subsequent events be in the minds of people in Vietnam and Cambodia, whose right to independence was trampled on by the United States during the following decade?

The Americans deliberately prevented free elections in Vietnam because they realised that the Communists would win at least 80% of the vote.

Comparatively few American soldiers were involved in the Vietnam War in 1963.

There were less than 20,000 so-called “military advisors” in Vietnam.

Just before his assassination Kennedy announced that 1,000 of them would be withdrawn the following month. Kennedy’s aides maintained forever after that he was intent on withdrawing from Vietnam, but his successor sent over half a million men there within the next couple of years.

Kennedy’s biggest political disaster as president was the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba, in 1961, when the Americans financed and secretly supported an invasion by Cuban émigrés in the hope of ousting Fidel Castro.

The CIA led the president to believe the Cuban people were ripe for counter-revolution and the invading forces would be welcomed, but it quickly became apparent that the people resented the American-backed invasion. Kennedy could have committed American troops at that point and probably over-run Cuba without too much difficulty, just as Soviet forces had over-run Hungary less than five years earlier, but he would have had problems convincing the rest of the world that this was appropriate.

He recognised that he was in a hole, and he got out of it by refusing any further support to the invaders whom he abandoned, at least for the time being. It was a military debacle that had the makings of a political disaster.

“In view of the fact that God limited the intelligence of man,” German chancellor Konrad Adenauer lamented, “it seems unfair that he did not also limit his stupidity.”

Kennedy was barely three months in office at the time, so he could have blamed the CIA or his predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, whose administration was primarily responsible for the planning of the Bay of Pigs operation, but he did not try to put the blame on anyone else. Kennedy accepted full responsibility for the disaster. He sent a salutary warning to his vice-president, Lyndon Johnson.

“Lyndon, you’ve got to remember we’re all in this and that, when I accepted responsibility for this operation, I took the entire responsibility on myself, and I think we should have no sort of passing of the buck or backbiting, however justified.”

Kennedy was braced for a backlash, but there was none. His acceptance of responsibility for the debacle and his refusal to blame anybody else seemed refreshing. If he had been prime minister of Britain, he said that he would probably have been thrown out of office, but his direct election to the White House - even by one of the smallest margins in history - put him in a much stronger position than any prime minister.

His acceptance of responsibility for the Bay of Pigs seemed to increase his charm. The next Gallup Poll showed that his administration had a then unprecedented 82% support.

Kennedy tossed his advance copy of the poll aside. “It’s just like Eisenhower,” he said. “The worse I do, the more popular I get.”

He had been badly advised and quietly moved to get rid of those who had been so wrong about the Bay of Pigs, but he never blamed anybody publicly.

IN this country in recent years we have had one disaster after another, without anyone being held responsible, despite over €250m being spent on various tribunals. At the Beef Tribunal it came out clearly that Albert Reynolds was primarily responsible for ignoring the advice of civil servants in ordering the reintroduction of State insurance cover on around IR£200m worth of beef exports to Iraq.

Was Albert held responsible? Not likely. He was made Taoiseach instead without even waiting for him to testify. When he did testify in November 1992, he turned the spotlight on Des O’Malley by essentially accusing him of giving perjured testimony, which brought down the government. Since then we have had a rash of other tribunals. They clearly disclosed an amount of financial abuse. Charlie Haughey used the party leader’s fund to line his own pockets and then pay for designer shirts and expensive dinners. There was supposed to be a control on the fund in the form of a second signature on every cheque, but Bertie Ahern kindly facilitated things by signing blank cheques.

Bertie was not held responsible for that either. Nor did he accept any responsibility for the unfounded claim that he attended the London School of Economics. In recent days we have been learning that a veritable fortune in government money is being paid to at least four ‘graduates’ of Pacific Western University with the phoney degrees that they bought.

We had the debacle of around €60m being squandered on the electronic voting machines, but that is only peanuts compared to the money being wasted on the health service.

And what are we getting for that? Our health service is not just in crisis; it is in a shambles. In 1999 the Department of Health introduced, at a cost of €8m, Payroll, Personnel and Related Service (PPARS), a computerised system that was supposed to save money, but has already cost over €150m.

Of course, nobody is going to accept responsibility for it. Mary Harney inherited that mess, so it looks like Micheál Martin’s legacy. The way things have been going, that should ensure he will be Taoiseach.

Our hospitals are incubating the MRSA bug, which could be the key to this Government’s promise to end the waiting lists once people realise that by going into hospital they are risking their lives. Maybe they will not get the needed expert medical care at home, but it is probably a lot safer. Are the Government going to accept responsibility? Forget it. That constitutional concept has essentially been annulled. What we have now is collective cabinet irresponsibility. What’s even worse - people seem to be accepting it.

The chairmen of both the Democratic and Republican parties are making a lot of noise lately about reaching out.

Democratic Chairman Howard Dean has been touting a "50 State Strategy" as a way for his party to claw its way back into power. According to Dean, the goal is "an active, effective group of Democrats organized in every single precinct in the country." To achieve this, the Dems are bulk-hiring, looking to train new recruits to head up efforts in states previously neglected.

Paul Hackett's near victory in an Ohio special election would seem to attest to the wisdom of this strategy. Hackett lost so narrowly in so heavily Republican a U.S. House district that it was virtually a win for a disheartened party hungry to go on the offensive.

But let's be honest. Come the next presidential election season, Democratic organizers in red states are going to have trouble getting their calls returned. Democratic candidates aren't going to win such states as Mississippi, Texas or Utah any time soon, even if the party nominates a candidate with "red appeal" such as Evan Bayh of Indiana, or a heartland candidate such as Tom Vilsack of Iowa. Every Democratic voter in Texas is as locked out of the system as every Republican voter in Massachusetts.

If Dean is serious about this "50 state" philosophy, the Democrats should pursue the true realization of the ideal. Only direct election of the president would engage all voters in all 50 states. Currently, battleground states monopolize the campaign -- the Floridas, Ohios and Nevadas of the country. Safe states are nothing but rest areas on the presidential highway, where candidates stop to hold fund-raisers and refuel their bank accounts. Presidential candidates engaging all the states would be good for the country. As long as the Electoral College remains, however, that just won't happen.

On the other side of the aisle, Republican Chairman Ken Mehlman has been working hard to coax more African Americans into the GOP tent. Mehlman visited the National Black Chamber of Commerce this summer, where he insisted, "Republicans are committed to inclusion." Addressing the NAACP, Mehlman defended the administration on what Dean charged was a weak response to Hurricane Katrina, which hit predominantly poor and black neighborhoods hard.

Mehlman could go beyond rhetoric. To make good on the promise of inclusion, the GOP should change its presidential primary system. 2008 wanna-be candidates already are making pilgrimages to the two meccas of the presidential race, Iowa and New Hampshire. By virtue of their first in the nation status, these states make or break presidential candidates of both parties time after time.

These two states are -ahem- overwhelmingly white. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's fair to say they do not represent the United States as a whole. Is this "inclusion?" To reverse the problem, both parties should embrace a fairer primary system, one that doesn't shut out the majority of the country.

A commitment to real inclusion of African Americans should push Republicans and Democrats alike to make direct election of the president a priority. Take a look at the swing states, of which there are fewer and fewer: 30 percent of white Americans live there. In stark contrast, only 21 percent of African Americans, 18 percent of Latinos and 14 percent of Asian Americans live in competitive states. That is a terrible disparity.

Today, the parties are trying to expand their tents -- one in order to survive and the other to lock in their future dominance. But without real attention to the underlying electoral problems that prevent all 50 states from mattering, and all people from counting equally, these chairmen are expanding their tents with hot air.

Ryan O'Donnell is Communications Director for FairVote - The Center for Voting and Democracy, a nonprofit, nonpartisan election reform group in Washington DC.

Suddenly, I'm just not seeing the things anymore. I suppose it's possible that they all just fell off, but then why am I still seeing Kerry/Edwards bumper stickers? (And besides, The Bush stickers from the 2000 campaign seemed to hand around on cars for years. I seem to remember seeing some even last year.)

No, I suspect something else is at work: buyers' remorse, or maybe shame.

At this point, it must be a little embarrassing to have a sticker on your car broadcasting the fact that you voted for those two clowns.

The Zogby poll conducted between Oct. 29 and Nov. 2 found that even among Republicans, 29 percent say that they think Bush should be impeached if he lied about the reasons for going to war against Iraq. The percentage can only have risen since then, as more evidence comes out that there's no reason for the "if."

It's too early to predict how this tectonic shift in political attitudes will play out in the November congressional races across the country, but I'm guessing that my neighborhood is not that different from much of the red and purple parts of America, and that there are going to be a lot more contested House and even Senate races than people were expecting a few months back.

Iraq seems to be going predictably from bad to worse for the military and the administration. The Shiite-led government that Bush and his Neocon advisers placed their bets on is slaughtering Sunnis, who are certain to strike back. Everyone's getting increasingly pissed at the US occupiers, and if the Pentagon follows through on the Bush/Rumsfeld plan to cut back on ground troops by increasing use of air power, with the resulting increase in "collateral damage" deaths of civilians, America's popularity in Iraq will only decline over the next year, while Moktada Sadr's rises.

Meanwhile, the Bush voodoo economic program of massive tax cuts for the rich and massive spending on the military is finally starting to tell. The US economy is slowing, housing prices are slumping, jobs are going south and abroad and, in a sign that inflation is nigh, the price of gold today spiked above $500 per ounce.

What's missing from this picture?

Oh yeah. The Democrats. They've made a few feeble moves in Congress-enough to remind Republicans that they're there-but so far, they haven't even decided whether to block the appointment of Judge Sam Alito to the Supreme Court.

I'm still waiting for somebody on the left side of the aisle to toss an impeachment or at least a censor resolution into the hopper in the House, just to kick-start some discussion of the president's crimes and abuses of power. Maybe they could start with Cheney, whose popularity is even lower than the president's.

If they did that, they might even find some people starting to put "Vote Democrat" stickers on their Volvos and minivans again.

Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press. Information about both books and other work by Lindorff can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net.

He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com

The Center for Public Integrity, a private ethics watchdog, studied two years of the Clinton administration and four years of the current Bush administration. Data came from public disclosure forms required of each federal office and of outfits that lobby government.

Other high-profile free travelers included Clinton's chief of staff, John Podesta, and - from Bush's first term - national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, homeland security adviser Tom Ridge and legal counsel Alberto Gonzales.

"These trips are often indirect conduits to influence policy," Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, another private watchdog group, told the center.

White House deputy press secretary Erin Healy said that Bush administration officials "abide by the rules and regulations that have guided staff travel for many years."

Regulations forbid private trip payments if the circumstances "would cause a reasonable person with knowledge of all the facts ... to question the integrity of agency programs or operations."

The center found:

A third of the trips were paid for by entities registered to lobby the federal government. In all, White House officials accepted free travel from 216 companies and organizations that reported spending more than $1.1 billion lobbying between 1998 and 2004.

Taken together, AFL-CIO labor unions were the top sponsor. They spent $200,000 to fly White House staffers to speak to conventions around the world. During the same period, they spent $26 million lobbying.

Drug maker Eli Lilly and Co. spent more than $20,000 on trips while spending more than $36 million lobbying federal officials. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce paid for $16,000 worth of trips while expending more than $200 million lobbying.

Harvard University spent the second largest amount on trips, $85,137, while spending $3.5 million lobbying. Harvard reached the top of the list by inviting Vice President Al Gore to give speeches and had to pay the high cost of bringing several aides with him on a government jet. That produced identical bills of several thousand dollars for each aide.

Of the 51 White House officials who had more than $10,000 in sponsored trips, 29 were in Gore's office, because of such travel. The reports only cover staff, not the president or vice president.

The center could not compare spending under Clinton and Bush because Vice President Dick Cheney's office has not filed any accounting of staff travel. Cheney counsel David Addington wrote government ethics officials that no one in the office accepted travel payments between April 1, 2001, and March 31, 2004.

Cheney's office appears "to have labeled all trips `official trips' and used untold millions in taxpayer money to cover costs rather than accepting trip sponsors' funds that the rules would require to be disclosed," the center said.

Berger, the Clinton aide, traveled to speak at Stanford, Cornell and Dartmouth.

In September 2002, Rove, Bush's top political adviser, accepted $2,300 to go to Aspen, Colo., for a conference sponsored by the venture capital firm Forstmann Little & Co. Fifteen months later, Bush signed a Medicare prescription benefit law, which "sent millions in additional revenues each year to a select group of hospital chains," the center said. "At the time, Rove's trip sponsor owned almost half the stock of one" such chain.

Among his seven other trips, Rove spoke at Harvard, the University of Utah, and an economic consulting firm in Palm Beach, Fla.


The center's study: http://www.publicintegrity.org/lobby/report.aspx?aid766

JERUSALEM (AP) -- A suspected Israeli mob boss who is described by U.S. prosecutors as one of the world's most wanted drug traffickers can be extradited to the United States, Israel's Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.

Zeev Rosenstein is suspected of involvement in distributing more than 1 million Ectasy pills in the United States, mostly in New York and Miami.

Israeli Justice Minister Tzipi Livni is expected to approve Rosenstein's extradition, and his lawyers said they might appeal such a decision. However, two senior Israeli officers are already in Miami to help U.S. authorities build a case against Rosenstein, and a prison cell has been prepared for him there, Israel Radio said.

In April, a lower court ruled that Rosenstein could be extradited, but he appealed the ruling. On Wednesday, a three-judge Supreme Court panel upheld the lower court ruling.

"The United States is the country which was hurt by the evil acts which were committed ... and how just and right it is, that it should be the United States which judges him and sentences him (should he be convicted)," Judge Michael Cheshin wrote.

Israeli police, acting on an international arrest warrant, arrested Rosenstein a year ago for allegedly smuggling drugs from Europe to the United States.

A U.S. extradition request, submitted last December, said Rosenstein was involved in distributing more than 1 million pills of Ecstasy, court documents said.

In one shipment, Rosenstein allegedly coordinated the distribution of 700,000 Ecstasy pills that were seized in a Manhattan apartment along with $187,000 in July 2001, according to the extradition request. The drugs, which originated in Europe, were seized after they were offered for sale to an undercover Miami-Dade County police informant. The informant also worked for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The investigation leading to Rosenstein's arrest spanned three years and several countries.

Rosenstein, 51, has long been accused of being one of Israel's top mob leaders, but aside from a brief stint in prison for armed robbery in the 1970s, he had eluded authorities.

In December 2003, a bomb attack in Tel Aviv targeted Rosenstein -- the seventh attempt on his life -- leaving him with scratches while killing three passers-by and wounding 18 others. The attack was believed to have been ordered by rival mob bosses, police said.

Rosenstein has been charged in the United States with conspiracy to distribute a controlled substance and conspiracy to import a controlled substance into the United States. The maximum penalty under American law is 20 years, or more if the drugs sold caused death or serious injury.

Wednesday's ruling "is good for the country and good for the cooperation between countries against international crime," said Israeli prosecutor Yitzhak Bloom.

France's one-time colonial jewel won independence in 1962 after a brutal eight-year conflict that France only recently dared to call a war.

Offensive law

Education Minister Gilles de Robien said last month that textbooks would not be changed despite the law.

However, the Socialists said the measure was offensive to former colonies and French citizens with roots there, and should be erased.

The debate comes on the heels of three weeks of unrest by youths in France's poor suburbs - many of them immigrants are of North African origin.

The troubles were widely seen as a desperate cry for equality by a population shunted to the margins of mainstream society.

Repairing mistakes

Jean-Marc Ayrault, head of the Socialist group in the National Assembly, the lower chamber, said the law was a political and educational aberration.

"Today we can repair this mistake, because it is a mistake," he said on France-Inter radio before the debate.

"Our history, if we want it to be shared by French citizens as a whole, must recognise both glorious achievements, but also the darker moments with lucidity, without there being an official history decided by parliamentarians."

Lawmakers from the governing conservative UMP party passed the law in February when only a handful of deputies were present. It came under full public scrutiny only in recent months with a petition by history teachers. It was denounced at a recent annual meeting of historians.

French influence

The language that offends stipulates that "school programmes recognise in particular the positive character of the French overseas presence, notably in North Africa".

Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has equated the law with "mental blindness", and said it smacks of revisionism. Algeria's Parliament called it a "grave precedent".

The measure threatens to delay the signing of a friendship treaty between France and Algeria, which once was an integral part of France, just like Normandy.

The friendship treaty would soothe years of passions between Paris and Algiers.

Only in 1999 did Paris finally call the Algerian conflict a "war". Before then, France referred only to operations to "maintain order".

“ When Fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and be carrying a cross”, Sinclair Lewis

On the news this morning was an item about the Pope commissioning a study to give a “progressive” look at the issue of whether infants who die before baptism should still be considered as going to limbo or whether the heaven or hell options should be reconsidered. After breakfast on the way to work there was a story on NPR about a Father Dowling, a priest in Africa, concerning his belief that the church should condone the use of condoms because of his experiences where 47% of the women are suffering from AIDS because the women are in a society dominated by males in which compulsory sex is normal in order to survive. At least I’m glad that these arguments between obvious superstition and prejudice and reason are not confined to my own family.

For Thanksgiving, I went to my Aunt-In-law’s in the East Texas, hard-core Republican country. While there, my brother-in-law and his wife from Waco, the religious center of Baptist theology and even more reactionary religious beliefs (of which they are) visited as well. There in the piney woods some of the major impediments to changing the world became obvious. Everyone expresses familial affection for each other as long as the more intimate challenges of free thought go unspoken. The internal dissonance that one feels of towards loved ones who have superstitions that shock the sensibilities, makes the idea of bringing about change in the world daunting at best. It is clear that these superstitions effectively stand in the way of changing the politics of a nation. Even more disturbing is not only the fact that they are superstitious, but that they believe they must impose these beliefs on the rest of us. That is where they move from the quaint to the downright dangerous.

Even talk about the weather is not exempt, with rainfall 16 inches below normal, talk of global climate change is dismissed as God’s will. Attempted discussions of loss of civil rights and invasions of the government and business into personal privacy are acknowledged as disturbing, and then written off as the sign of the beast. This was followed by a curious conversation that this is surely the end times and the rapture can’t be far away intermingled with discussion of their children’s college plans. Even there the discussion is about how to prevent them from coming into contact with contradictory information from the rest of the world. The father wants the daughter to live at home and go the confines of Baylor. A brilliant girl, they think teaching or nursing would be good. They feel they are being tolerant by allowing their son to pursue a music career, something they hope he will grow out of. They are encouraged by the fact that he will go to the local junior college but live in a house for young men run by the church where they start each day with a bible study.

My own family is not immune to such absurdities. I have a sister and brother-in-law who speak in tongues and have convinced one of their sons that he has been chosen. Very bright, he debated throughout high school against evolution, spent his Senior college year at Cambridge, joining a very conservative club and plans on going to Jerry Falwell’s law school to become an international lawyer ready to take on countries who do not allow Christian proselytizing, such a waste of talent. His mother and father talk openly and repeatedly about their good deeds, charity and righteousness while complaining about the ungrateful employees who work for them in their small factory. The have let it be known that they would support any war against nonbelievers which probably would include Catholics who they believe are all going to hell. If they were Muslims you’d think you were having holiday dinner with the Osama Bin Laden.

What makes for such retreats into pre-enlightenment thinking? How can someone like my kind and thoughtful sister-in-law be concerned about sex slavery in Thailand while supporting politicians who increase poverty, deprivation and corporate plundering here at home? Iraq we can’t even go there. My 88 year old aunt-in-law who lives in a village of 50 people and gets her information on politics from her overweight, divorced Baptist preacher, a local right wing newspaper, FOX news and Pat Robert’s CBN is somewhat understandable. She even confessed to always having always voted Democratic until the Republicans and the church teamed up to make the issue abortion. She said, “I just couldn’t bring myself to vote for abortion”.

I can understand her isolated, non-global, parochial views, but my brother in law with an engineering degree and his wife a tutor at a public community college? How do you manage to stay so ill informed? How can my other brother-in-law who ministers in prisons and has traveled extensively with the military be so blind to the unchristian policies of the politicians he supports? It’s easy, you do what a majority of the Christian right has done, you check out of trying to cope with reality. You see that is the promise of right wing Christianity, you won’t have to mess with those queasy feelings that somehow we are all on a train that is going to plunge over a precipice because your God is going to lift you off from the train at the last minute into the air like eagles, no messy coping with the post apocalyptic world.

No mad max reality for me, no sir. I can just go on in my SUV, praying and isolating myself from real world news because I have all of the answers, the secret of Jesus. Sorry the rest of you pitiful creatures will just have to burn in hell. It’s very disturbing to know that people who you care about very much and say they care about you would probably stand by and watch the government disappear you without a word of protest because of their superstitions, unless of course you were willing to repent your evil ways.

Kelley’s Theorem of Human Nature

What the recent November Texas constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage that passed by 76% showed is that there is a hard-core Bush voter that is immune to reality. Only 12% of the registered voters actually voted, which means that only 9% turned out in response to a huge get out the vote effort. Unfortunately this small committed base that Lincoln identified (“you can fool some of the people all of the time”) is enough to swing the outcome of an election. Add that to a disinterested uncommitted middle, a minority mix of committed ideologues (fiscal republicans, libertarians, corporate exploiters) and you have the Republican majority.

How this translates to votes is the craft of various election consultants, candidates, pollsters and pundits. The mistake of the Democrats has been to listen to the poll following consultants who try to second guess the polls without really looking at what motivates the answers of the pollees. Consultants are following the confused middle not providing positions to lead them. For that we need to look at what determines individual human nature, a combination of intelligence and mental health. These are the factors that determine how people get, perceive, analyze and use information and consequently how they vote. One of the huge mistakes most people make when they read polls is that they think of all people as basically the same. They forget basic statistics. One of the principles I have always fallen back on when the world seems really depressing is something I came up with while daydreaming in a graduate statistics class in 1975 which I call Kelley’s Theorem of Human Nature.

Distributions in any population follow a bell curve. Intelligence, mental health, height, weight all follow a bell curve. Even if the whole population gets obese it will still follow a bell curve of 50% in the middle and 25% distributed on each side of it. You see the bell curve isn’t measured in the success or failure of the trait only by the average. So Kelley’s Theorem of Human Nature says that following the law of the bell curve will yield a clue to the nature of humans.

First let’s talk about Intelligence Quotient. It doesn’t matter whether IQ is a totally accurate measurement of intelligence or not, it is the way we pass out privilege and opportunity in the education system and consequently for life as well. It is a measurement which does measure the ability to abstract. This is in all likelihood somewhat skewed by life experience but does provide us with some ability to measure intellectual ability, and guess what it follows a bell curve. Normal intelligence is from 90-110, in other words 50% of the population when tested falls between these two scores. 25% falls below and 25% falls above.

Now what normal intelligence says is not that you are particularly creative, inquisitive, analytical or possess any real level of higher thinking skills, it just means you are average. With respect to abstract information (understanding things that can’t be comprehended with the five senses such as ideas) the average person has the ability to do that by pairing the abstract information with symbols such as numbers. This allows people to be manipulated by repetitive pairing of concrete internal feelings of abstract origins with symbols associated with unrelated causes i.e. fear-terrorists-Iraq.

In other words average intelligence means in human beings is that you can complete the tasks of a structured job, keep a checkbook, find your way to work, can be reasonably expected to learn from your concrete experiences to apply that information to the same situation next time. In other words you can be expected to find a comfortable rut and stay there. It also means that when you encounter problems that you can’t understand (like complex abstract paradigms) you are easily swayed to believe in superstitious, illogical and incorrectly interpreted causal relationships.

Now the 25% below that normal (from 89-0 IQ) cannot even successfully do those things. The 25% above normal (spread from 111-200 IQ) have an exceptional ability in those areas. In the area of abstraction, that means that they can predict future events from similar events not just the same events. They have the ability to perceive complex abstract data and manipulate it freely in their minds, testing it against various potential realities and outcomes. So only 25% of the people can consistently perceive, interpret, analyze and process abstract information like ideology, economics, history, advanced mathematics, philosophy, scientific theory, etc. That means that 75% cannot.

Now let’s talk about mental health, it also follows a bell curve with the 50% in the middle being “normal”. What does normal mean in mental health? It means that you don’t have any mental health condition that interferes significantly or prevents you from normal functioning. In other words, you can get up on time, go to work, focus on your work throughout the day without going postal on your colleagues, go home after work get along at least marginally well with your spouse and kids. You may be neurotic (have unrealistic fears) but not enough that it prevents you from working or causes you to act violently. It also means that you know who you are, where you are and what year it is. It does not mean that you are especially insightful of why you behave the way you do, understanding your feelings and their connections to your actions, to particularly understand the motivation or actions of other people or anything other then to just get by.

Now 25% are below this meaning they are not normal, they are not mentally healthy enough to function at a basic level. They may have been born with chemical imbalances, been damaged by traumatic life events, substance addiction, mental or physical impairment, or raised without being taught successful emotional coping skills. They have almost no insight to the cause of their problems and almost universally blame others for their circumstances. On the opposite end of the scale are the 25% who are above normal in terms of emotional health. They maintain a healthy balance between their interests and others and understand that interaction, they usually have a deep understanding of what there purpose is and feel content with their role in life and most of all have a keen sense of what is within their sphere of influence and exert their efforts there.

Now here is the kicker, they are not necessarily the same 25% as the 25% who are more intelligent then normal. This is where childhood rearing, life experiences and opportunity come into play. In all statistical likelihood only 10% of the people are both mentally healthier than normal and more intelligent than normal and guess what, none of them probably want to be CEO’s or political leaders. Given that fact it truly is amazing the world runs as well as it does! As James Fenimore Cooper said "The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity."

What Does This Have to do With Winning Elections?

What this means is that probably only 10% of the population can intelligently and consistently examine the issues and what they mean to them and vote for their long term interests. I think we can trust that most of these people vote even if for no other reason then the intellectual exercise although there are some who may logically avoid the whole thing on the honest evaluation that it doesn’t make any difference. In all probability the 21% who are not even registered are so mentally or emotionally disabled to not be able to participate. Of those who do vote most vote on 1) what they believe are their best concrete short term interests; 2) what their fears are; 3) some combination there of. Out of the almost 175,000 people who did register only 70% of them voted, so let’s assume that the other 24% of the voting age people who were registered but didn’t vote were too confused, hopeless or angry with the choices presented to bother. It is difficult to say they were apathetic if they bothered to register. That leaves 55% who voted, most of who fell into the average range of our hypothetical scale of combined mental health and intelligence, let’s look at them.

By definition they recognize symbols as concrete expressions of abstract concepts but lack the ability to fully abstract theories, problems and consequences. They also harbor a range of neurotic behaviors from mild to moderate that they lack the insight to release themselves from. The primarily copy others solutions, rarely accomplishing original thinking. On top of that they live in a world where they are inundated with a deluge of media information, news/views and demands while living in an ever-increasing stream of technological change. In the background is the ever-shifting financial ground of the impacts of modern capitalism.

Isolated from traditional social structures such as family and community that help people process such information they have to fall back on their own limited capacity to understand and interpret events. When faced with this situation they will select consistent sources of information so as to avoid the cognitive dissonance that is the natural result of conflicting information. They will also tend to select the information, which gives them the most concrete, immediate and simple explanation for their discomfort given to them by someone with apparent authority. As H.L. Mencken said,” for every problem there is a simple solution, usually wrong”.

This ability to understand representative abstraction while lacking more complex insight to its meaning is key to dismantling one of the great misperceptions of capitalism, that rich people are smarter. Money is basically a concrete symbol for wealth and power. You don’t have to be above average to be rich. You just have to understand that you have to bring more in than expend. It doesn’t mean that you understand the long term consequences of your actions on yourself or others, especially if those consequences are in some abstract future. Conscience in one’s own interest as opposed to some externally imposed guilt structure is very abstract and can get in the way of financial accumulation, while the seduction of imaginary power of money seems very concrete.

When it comes to religious beliefs this mix of fear and concreteness explains the main argument between religious and non-religious as well as inter-religious battles that are going on today. Religion is a mix of three things philosophy, mythology and superstition. On the left you have a mix of atheists, agnostics and many of the mainline churches who rely on philosophy to guide them. Concerning Christianity this means they focus on the philosophical teachings of Jesus as a way to conduct their life. They tend to believe that people are basically good. They have no or little attachment to the mythology of the miracles, the virgin birth, the resurrection or any of the Old Testament. They think of the after life as insurance at best. Some are non-religious believers while some attend church for the reassurance and ritual to renew their personal commitment. They understand the ritual and the mythology of the church as symbols.

Then there are the superstitious and fearful. They think that people are born bad. They believe in being “saved” that all non-believers will go to hell or heaven, the divinity of Jesus, past and present miracles, most believe in the rapture, the second coming and the Bermuda Triangle. They cannot separate the symbols from the realities and are easily manipulated by people who know how to adjust the mythology and symbols to accomplish their own selfish ends. Elmer Gantry knew this used it to exploit people while Pat Robertson may just be popular because he reflects the same basic misunderstandings of the world..

Now guess which ones are concrete, fear based thinkers and which ones are not. Pretty clear huh? Now remember most fall somewhere in between and the platform and message needs to be crafted with that in mind.

Now because the middle 50% has a mix of both of these characteristics they will look for leadership and when they don’t find it they either won’t vote or will vote what they think will take care of their financial interests and reduce their fears. The war on crime, the war on drugs, the war on terror, the Republicans have mastered war on stuff for propaganda purposes all the while the real war has been on working people. One of the reason Bush even got close to winning two elections is that this great confused middle saw him as one of them and all indications are they are right, Bush is a concrete, superstitious thinker who doesn’t understand the abstract realities behind the rhetoric and symbols. The other problem was that the Democrats did not offer any clear alternative solution to the two main worries of this group, financial and personal security except warmed over Republican positions. This group for the most part wants to do the right thing, they just need to believe that someone is offering them that path.

The other thing the Republicans have managed to do is to create the supporting mythology around the symbols. Reagan ended the cold war, Republicans are tough on crime, the Republicans are the tough guys, Viet Nam was lost because of those cowardly protesters. The Democrats are still trying to live off from the mythology of the New Deal. They have failed to develop and advance their own mythology as champions of the workingman and the oppressed to counter the competing images.

Does this mean that Democrats can never win an election; no it does mean that big changes have to occur though. They have to pursue class issues as a way to unite people behind a positive philosophy and whether in a religious or secular manner espouse that philosophy while pointing out the short and long term financial interests to people in this group to gain their votes. When you ask people if they are liberal only 18% say yes, but ask about helping poor people, universal education & healthcare, providing for reasonable pensions, helping everyone to find work you get an overwhelming majority that supports those ideas. People are already there on philosophy they just need someone ready to challenge the corporate control and articulate that philosophy in a way to attract religious and non-religious people alike.

Last but not least, the left must be humble. The perception of many is that the Republicans are right when they call the left elitist. As Ayn Rand, darling of the right said "Mediocrity doesn't mean average intelligence; it means an average intelligence that resents and envies its betters". Too often the left’s leadership talks down to people about what their own best interests are without asking them. That is because the union, civil rights and other populist leaders are shut out of the process and not seen as the face of the party. In many cases the candidates have been separated from the party structure by corporate contributions. Taking the leadership away from the corporatists and bourgeoisie liberals and returning it to the common peoples own emergent leadership is the only chance of success of offering truly progressive alternatives to their concerns and winning elections. Until then I’ll just have to rely on Kelley’s Theorem of Human Nature to get me through.

www.mytown.ca/johnkelley

John Michael Kelley is a teacher, philosopher, writer, artist, political activist, singer of ballads, rebellious Irishman and agent for change who worries daily about the world he is leaving for his grandchildren.

The Gallup organization reports that thirty-five percent of Americans believe the Bible to be the “inerrant word of God," while another forty-eight percent believe it to be the “inspired” word of God, but nonetheless “inerrant” if certain parts are interpreted symbolically rather than literally. Similarly, The Barna Group reports that 61% of Americans believe that "the Bible is totally accurate in all of its teachings." (More statements of Biblical “inerrancy” here, here and here).

Most of the industrialized world would be astonished, bewildered and appalled upon reading such statistics, especially in view of the fact that the United States has long been the world leader in scientific research and technological development. Due to that leadership, American Universities and research institutions have been magnets, drawing outstanding scientists, engineers and students from around the world, many of whom have remained to further enhance the scientific, technological and economic vigor of the United States. We have led the world in Nobel Prizes and in the volume of scientific publications, as we have exported our technologies throughout the civilized world.

There is no guarantee that this pre-eminence will continue.

Heretofore, American society has been, in a sense, schizoid. Educated elites, with the support of enlightened commercial interests and government subsidies, have flourished atop a mass culture that was suspicious and dismissive of intellectual "eggheads," and stubbornly attached to traditional "old time religion." And yet, the entire national economy has benefited enormously from scientific research, technological development and application, and public higher education, facilitating the opportunity for gifted and enterprising young people of modest means to join the elites -- a Jeffersonian "natural aristocracy of talent and virtue."

But now that order has been overturned by the regressive right. It has done so with the enlisted support of a faction of religious fundamentalism that is hostile to science and that demands and receives unprecedented influence in public policy.

Consequently, American leadership in science and technology may now be in jeopardy as the theory of evolution is challenged in our public schools, as (so-called) “conservative” students in our universities are encouraged by the likes of Lynn Cheney and David Horowitz to harass “liberal” professors, as cutting-edge biomedical research is blunted by religious qualms about stem cells, and as research funding for the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other federal scientific agencies is being severely curtailed.

There is a great deal at stake here. And yet scientists, secular scholars, and even liberal and moderate churches have been reluctant to challenge the fundamentalists, holding that such pre-modern beliefs should be “respected” as “private” and “personal.” Unfortunately, for their part, the fundamentalists have not displayed reciprocal respect and tolerance for contrary views about theology, scripture, or the grounds of morality.


The fundamentalists take the issue of Biblical infallibility very seriously. As one of their leading spokesmen, Rev. Jerry Falwell warns, if Christians are “able to say out loud that the Bible is not the inerrant word of God--that its inspiration is not really different from that of the Bhagavad-Gita or Thoreau's Walden or Maya Angelou's poems--then a great number of conservative and fundamentalist idols begin to topple."

In this case, I agree completely with the good Reverend: challenge “inerrancy,” and those “idols” become vulnerable. Which is precisely why I propose to criticize and refute the doctrine of the infallibility of the Bible. Once that is accomplished, the progressive will be better equipped to topple those conservative and fundamentalist idols.

In this analysis, I propose an unusual approach: Let us assume that the Lord God, Creator and Ruler of the vast universe, dictated eternal truths to the original authors of the 66 books of The Holy Bible. As a secular philosopher, I don’t believe this nonsense for a moment. But even if we assume all this, then even so, I will argue that the Bible that is in our hands today simply cannot be “infallible.”

First of all, when the fundamentalists claim that the Bible is “inerrant” – literally true from back to front – which Bible are they talking about? If they mean the English translations, then there is no point going back to original Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek texts to dig out the “original meaning.” God's truth is before us in plain English. But to believe this, we must also a believe that The Lord God guided the hands of King James’ scholars, through every word. Or if not those scholars, then those who produced a “preferred” translation of the Bible into English.

But which translation? If God won’t tell us, then to the degree that those many Bibles differ, to that degree they are “errant” – subject to error.

However, since no one seems to claim that the translators of the English language Bibles we now have in hand were elevated to the status of holy prophets, we look to the sources, for the “original” words and meanings. But again, which sources?

It gets worse. No one fully understands ancient languages. The best experts on the meaning of ancient Hebrew or classical Greek and Latin were those who spoke it and wrote it as their first languages – and they are all dead, of course. (For that matter, “living” natural languages are inherently vague and ambiguous to some degree – but that’s the subject of another essay).

So modern scholars do the best they can by reading ancient texts as they try to “get into the heads” of those who wrote them. And, of course, those scholars disagree with each other – even if one or another of them entertains the colossal conceit that they are reading, and understanding, the “inerrant word of God.”

So who will tell which of these worthies really has a grip on “God’s Words.” Is it just possible that none of them has that grip?

Some fundamentalists avoid the translation problem by asserting that while the original texts, the “autographs,” were free of error, “mistakes many have crept into the translated version.” (Swaggert, Straight Answers to Tough Questions, p. 8). The Mormons’ eighth “Article of Faith” concurs: “We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly...” This is presumably the position taken by most Christians who believe the Bible to be truly “Holy.”

The kicker is that “translated correctly” bit. How does one determine whether a translation is “correct” or not? On this question, God is silent. So when the preacher pounds his Bible and says "this is the word of God! (assuming, of course, it is translated correctly, which we can't know for sure)" he can not claim to be speaking God's “inerrant” truth.

It comes to this: If there is no “inerrant” way to determine which translation or interpretation of text is the one, singular, “inerrant” Holy Truth of the Bible, then there is no “inerrant” Biblical truth. Once you add the qualifier, “as far as it is translated correctly,” you have given away the game.

Some logicians call this “the bottleneck problem,” which might as well be called “the weakest link in the chain problem.”

Here’s another example. According to Catholic doctrine, the Pope speaks “the infallible truth” when he speaks “ex cathedra” – from his “office” -- on matters of faith and morals.

Let’s assume he does so. (Of course I don’t believe this, but let’s be hypothetical here). But do we know, infallibly, when the Pope is speaking infallibly (ex cathedra)? If not, then nothing the Pope says is infallible. The “fallible” ex cathedra criterion is the weak link in the chain.

To return to our original albeit extreme assumption, let’s suppose that when the Pentateuch (the first five books) was written (presumably in Mesopotamia during the Babylonian Captivity in the sixth century BC) The Lord God Himself was in the room dictating inerrant Holy Truth to the scribes. He did so in a language half forgotten today, and on a manuscript that is long lost. The “chain of custody” – copies of copies, translations of translations – is long and replete with uncounted “weak links.” This is also the case with New Testament texts.

Because the “weak links” in this “chain of custody” are fallible (“errant”), so too is the received text that we have today – no matter how perfectly and “inerrantly” true the original message might be.

In sum: even if we assume that the original “autographs” of the books of the Bible were the 100% certified error-free “Word of God,” the Bible that we have today and that we read from must necessarily be “errant” – containing messages and meaning not intended by the original authors.

In fact, I am personally unpersuaded by the doctrine of original infallibility. According to my secular perspective, the unknown authors of the books of the Bible wrote in the language and amidst the culture of their times – a fact that is clearly indicated by a scrupulous (“higher critical”) examination of the received texts. Those were pre-scientific times and tribal cultures. Thus the Bible is scientifically worthless and, in the early texts, often morally atrocious. Still, late in the Old Testament (the so-called “minor prophets”) and most assuredly in the four gospels of the New Testament, we find inspired moral teaching.

If we free ourselves of the dogma that every word in the Bible comes straight from the mouth of God, we will no longer feel obliged to justify the genocides depicted in the early books of the Old Testament, and might be even more outraged by the genocides taking place today. We can accept the evidence of the sciences without being distracted by ancient myths. No longer claiming to be in possession of eternal truth, we can open our minds to new ideas and can be tolerant of other faiths – or even of those with no faith. Free of such fantasies as “the rapture,” we can act with enlightened determination to restore the earth’s environment and to build a just and compassionate society and world. The doctrine of “inerrancy” is a crutch and a shackle, and for the sake of our intellectual growth, moral well-being and domestic tranquility, we should be well rid of it. (See my One Nation, Under God, Divisible).

That said, we can still acknowledge that The Bible is a valuable legacy from the past, from which we can learn a great deal – if we read it critically, informed by the knowledge and scholarship that has accumulated since it was written over the span of several centuries.

But that’s just my opinion – an opinion, I am told, that has earned me an eternity of damnation.

http://www.crisispapers.org

Dr. Ernest Partridge is a consultant, writer and lecturer in the field of Environmental Ethics and Public Policy. He publishes the website, "The Online Gadfly" (www.igc.org/gadfly) and co-edits the progressive website, "The Crisis Papers" (www.crisispapers.org). His book in progress, "Conscience of a Progressive," can be seen at www.igc.org/gadfly/progressive/^toc.htm . Send comments to: crisispapers@hotmail.com.

Deborah Davis said Wednesday she has been overwhelmed by the support she has received via the Internet and telephone for her stance against having to show her identification while riding on an RTD bus that crosses the Federal Center in Lakewood.

But she's trying to keep up with her daily routine, doing her laundry and, on Tuesday, cleaning the gutters on her home. "It keeps me normal," she said.

Bill Scannell, who has publicized other challenges to government ID requirements, said the Web site he created for the Davis case, www.papersplease.org/davis,had received visits from 2.4 million individuals by about 2 p.m. Wednesday.

Scannell said the Web site also has received more than 1,800 e-mails about Davis' case, and that all but about 20 have been supportive.

"There's become so many I can't even read them all," Davis said.

"I never thought this would happen," she said. "I was just trying not to show my ID because I don't have to. That's all."

Davis, 50, of Arvada, refused in September to show her identification when federal police boarded RTD's No. 100 bus when it entered the Federal Center. Davis wasn't getting off there but riding through on her way to work elsewhere, as were some other passengers.

Federal police removed her from the bus and handcuffed and ticketed her for refusing to show her ID. She is scheduled to appear in federal court Dec. 9.

A Rocky Mountain News story about Davis on Tuesday drew about 120,000 Web site readers by late afternoon. A link to the News article appeared on The Drudge Report, a popular Web site about current events at drudgereport.com.

"I feel really good that people care, that they are just terribly supportive," Davis said. But she said she's been embarrassed by comparisons that have been made to civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks.

The most critical responses she had read, she said, were from people wondering why she didn't just comply with the police order.

Davis' refusal to show her ID as a matter of principle clearly touched a nerve among News readers. Many e-mailed the newspaper expressing widely differing views.

Some examples:

• "Deborah N. Davis is absolutely correct and the guards at the federal building behaved as the Nazi fascists did 65 years ago in Germany, controlling 'free' movement of citizens by frequent demands of papers."

• "They should have shot this (expletive deleted) first and then looked through her purse for ID."

• "If she doesn't like it here, she can leave any time. In fact, from what I read in today's news, they have 4 openings in Iraq for Peace Activists. It seems like her 'donating' herself to become another kidnapee by 'The Swords of Righteousness Brigade' would be a cause she might be worthy of."

• "Good for her. This country is becoming more and more a police state!!!! Well done!!"

Rain and snow began lashing Pakistan's part of Kashmir late Saturday, blocking several roads and grounding helicopters used to ferry aid to remote areas. Since the quake struck on Oct. 8, killing more than 87,000 people, aid agencies have been warning of another disaster among the survivors, who have been living in tents in the Himalayan highlands.

"We received about 200 patients with cold-related diseases in the past 12 hours," said Bashir Rahman, a doctor at the main hospital in Muzaffarabad. Health officials said the number of people being treated at hospitals for hypothermia, pneumonia and other respiratory problems had surpassed 700.

"Most people were taken to hospitals Tuesday night, and patients are still pouring in," Rahman said.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Pakistan has said the onset of winter conditions is severely hampering relief operations.

"This development shows why it is very important for us to do more - and quickly, too - as we keep the focus on the relief phase," U.N. Emergency Operations Chief Andrew MacLoed said in a statement.

He also appealed for more relief funds.

Donors have pledged more than $6 billion, but much of it is meant for reconstruction. MacLoed said less than half of the $550 million appeal for relief funds has been received.

In the coming weeks, he said, NATO plans to start using helicopters that have been hauling aid to the quake zone to carry shelter materials into the high mountains "before the winter really bites" and take medical teams to inaccessible areas.

"It sounded like someone was standing on my roof and dropping a box full of magazines," said Cathie Southern, who lives on Spalding Avenue and last heard the noise Monday night. "It was a 'Foomp!' sound."

She's heard the noise for the past three weeks, mostly at night. At its worst, it goes off about every half-hour.

The din has scared her dachshund so much that he refuses to go outside, so Southern has to pick him up and carry him out to the yard.

When Southern hears the noise she sometimes runs outside to see if she can identify the source, but it always seems to stop by the time she's out the door.

She wanted to call someone to complain, but wasn't sure who to contact.

"What am I gonna do? Call the police and say I've been hearing a noise, but you need to sit in my living room to hear it?" Southern said.

She called the city twice, but had to hang up while she was on hold.

Southern thought the mystery was solved when her son heard the noise at the same time he saw flames shooting out of a neighbor's rooftop heating unit.

It seemed to make sense. The noise happened about every half-hour, around the same time a heating unit would cycle on and off. Perhaps the heating unit was malfunctioning.

But when Southern's husband investigated, the neighbor told him the noise was coming from another house where someone was setting off CO2 rounds to scare away birds.

Not so, says Hans Marsen, who lives on Valencia Way.

Marsen's house is set back from the road on a lot with many trees.

"Nobody can really see our property because it's up a driveway," said Marsen. "They don't know how big an area it is. So there is this kind of mystery about this property."

As a result, he's gotten several phone calls from neighbors who assume the noise is coming from his yard.

"We thought it was funny," said Gloria Marsen, who described the noise as sounding like a cannon in the distance.

"We could imagine all the neighbors thinking 'Oooh, what have they got in their backyard?' "

Hans joked with one caller that the noise was a result of the large amount of beans he and his wife had eaten for dinner.

But when police showed up at the Marsens' house at 10 p.m. last week, the joke got a little stale.

Police asked whether the Marsens were setting off fireworks or shooting guns in their backyard. No, said the Marsens.

When Gloria Marsen called the police later to follow up, they told her they had figured it out.

It's the Dole plant scaring birds away from fruit trees.

Nope, says Bob Barnhouse, vice president of operations at Dole.

He said Dole doesn't own any equipment to scare off birds or do anything else that makes loud noises.

And there's no fruit on their trees right now, anyway.

"The guys are out there thinning the trees," said Barnhouse. "They're cutting the branches off. But you don't blow them off. You cut them off."

Calls to the city, the fire department, and the police department yielded no further clues.

But residents are hopeful that the source of the sound will be discovered soon. Or better yet, that the noise will stop.

"It sounds like someone is blowing up a whole city block," Southern said. "If I was a bird I wouldn't be coming back."

It has successfully driven away noisy teens from a grocery store in the Welsh town of Barry and a shop in Stapleton's home town Merthyr Tydfil, making smoking, lounging and foul-mouthed youths a thing of the past.

The ability to hear high frequencies deteriorates with age, but some adults might still be able to hear the Mosquito. No one except young troublemakers appears annoyed, however.

"All I'm getting is pats on the back," Stapleton told Reuters. "No bricks thrown at me yet."

He said teenagers he had talked to welcomed the device too, because they used to be intimidated by gangs hanging around the shops.

The Mosquito has turned Stapleton into a media star, with appearances on British TV and radio and interest from as far afield as Australia, the United States and Canada.

Dubernard would not discuss the surgery, but confirmed that it involved the nose, lips and chin.

"We still don't know when the patient will get out," he said.

A news conference is planned for Friday.

Most difficult parts

Scientists in China have performed scalp and ear transplants, but experts say the mouth and nose are the most difficult parts of the face to transplant.

In 2000, Dubernard did the world's first double forearm transplant. The surgery drew both praise and sobering warnings over its potential risks and ethical and psychological ramifications.

If successful - something that may not be known for months or even years - the procedure offers hope to people horribly disfigured by burns, accidents or other tragedies.

The woman was "severely disfigured" by a dog bite in May that made it difficult for her to speak and chew, according to a joint statement from the hospital in Amiens and another in the southern city of Lyon where Dubernard works.

Such injuries are "extremely difficult, if not impossible" to repair using normal surgical techniques, the statement said.

"For pushing the bounds of science, they are to be applauded, as long as they have got full informed consent from the patient and the donor's family," added Dr Iain Hutchison, chief executive of the London-based Facial Surgery Research Foundation.

Scar tissue

Scientists around the world are working to perfect techniques involved in transplanting faces. Today's best treatments leave many people with facial disfigurement and scar tissue that doesn't look or move like natural skin.

A complete face transplant, which involves applying a sheet of skin in one operation, has never been done before. The procedure is complex, but uses standard surgical techniques.

Critics say the surgery is too risky for something that is not a matter of life or death, as regular organ transplants are.

The main worry for both a full face transplant and a partial effort is organ rejection, causing the skin to slough off.

The trackway, measuring six metres (20 feet) long, was found on the overhang of a bed of sandstone that, 330 million years ago, was probably close to the sea and had the consistency of soft plaster.

The traces comprise crescent-shaped prints left by the creature's limbs and a sinuous curve believed to have been gouged out by its tail.

"The slow stilted progression, together with the dragging of the posterior, indicates that the animal was not buoyant and that it was probably moving out of the water," says Martin Whyte, a geography professor at Britain's University of Sheffield.

The find is unique, not just because of the gigantic size of the arthropod, but for the evidence it offers that this invertebrate species could survive out of water.

Until now, the only advanced creatures believed to have ventured onto land from the sea at that era were early tetrapods -- vertebrates with four limbs.

The Italian scientists found far higher levels of NGF in the blood of 58 people who had recently fallen madly in love than in that of a group of singles and people in long-term relationships.

But after a year with the same lover, the quantity of the 'love molecule' in their blood had fallen to the same level as that of the other groups.

The Italian researchers, publishing their study in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology, said it was not clear how falling in love triggers higher levels of NGF, but the molecule clearly has an important role in the "social chemistry" between people at the start of a relationship.

"This was such a marvelous story, that we wanted to add something to it," Fleury told AP Television News. A full-fare ticket for Emily's seat would normally cost about $6,000 and the airline provided a company escort for the cat.

Emily vanished from her home in late September. She apparently wandered into a nearby paper company's distribution center and crawled into a container of paper bales.

The container went by truck to Chicago and by ship to Belgium before the cat was found Oct. 24 at Raflatac, a laminating company in Nancy, France. Emily, who turned 1 year old that very day, was thin and thirsty but still alive.

Workers at Raflatac used her tags to phone her veterinarian in Wisconsin, and the vet called her owners.

Emily faced one last packed day of travel before her homecoming. She was due to arrive in Newark, N.J., later Thursday, board a connecting flight to Chicago, and then be driven home to Wisconsin, Fleury said.

Emily's escort, Newark-based Continental employee George Chiladze, said he was thrilled to be taking Emily back across the Atlantic.

"I will make somebody really happy to deliver this poor traveler back home," he said.

She said some seven televisions, 15 stereos, three telephones and countless bottles of schnapps had been stolen from the "Tages-Bar" in the eastern district of Treptow.

"In January, robbers even rang up a sex hotline," the 61-year-old Hoffmann told Reuters by telephone. "I am not going to be intimidated, no, I'm going to fight," she said.

Hoffmann's regular clients, who presented her with flowers last month to mark the occasion of the 80th break-in, have taken to guarding the bar themselves.

Police have only twice caught offenders red-handed.