The abstract illusion of the unseen enemy forces its disseminators and marketers to put a human face on clandestine evildoers. It is a technique used by the keepers at the gate to personify and insert a sense of reality to a war of fiction, thereby granting human flesh to illusion and cementing the idea of real struggle and real evil in the eyes of the masses. The appearance must be made to exist that the enemy is real, a human being whose evil ways must be stopped, regardless of the consequences.

Yet while the faces are real, the deeds and actions of the enemy’s masterminds are but the stuff of Hollywood legend, making of mere mortals demons of unnatural superhuman strength and ability, seemingly unable to be killed, leading their armies with the intelligence of gods and the leadership of generals. Present in multiple theatres of operation, these evildoers extraordinaire always evade capture, appearing to escape death and injury, as always inflicting damage upon our soldiers. Not even a $25 million bounty on their heads is of benefit to America’s soldiers and mercenaries.

The Osama’s and Zarqawi’s of the so-called war on terror are elevated by the propagandists and marketers to realms beyond mere mortality. It is as if these terrorists have had their fates decided by the scripts written by Hollywood writers, their abilities seemingly beyond comparison in the realm of human understanding. Yet their faces and names must be maintained and posterized, their reputation made to resound throughout America, for they are the symbols of the enemy we are fighting over there so we do not have to fight them over here. Their fictitious reputation, an illusion of psychological warfare against us, must be birthed sinister and wicked, deranged and psychotic, for the more dangerous the terrorist the greater the need to continue the war on terror.

With the abrupt disappearance of Osama the poster child of the enemy had to find new life. Thus the impenetrable Zarqawi was born, for his name and reputation impute Al-Qaeda directly into Iraq, allowing the corporatists to manipulate the war on terror, creating the impression that our soldiers are in Iraq because the enemy has made its nest there as well. The illusion of Zarqawi allows the government to claim that Iraq is infested with terrorists, that all attacks on our forces are directly attributed to Al-Qaeda. To the creators of reality the Iraqi resistance does not exist and native Iraqis are not fighting an insurrection against oppressive occupation of their lands.

Therefore the war in Iraq is marketed not as a battle of nationalistic freedom fighters combating oppressive occupiers, wanting American forces expelled, which it is, but rather as the convenient masquerade of pitting American forces against our enemy, jihadi terrorists belonging to Al-Qaeda (in truth, less than 6 percent of all arrests made by US forces are of foreigners, according to War Department research). The Iraqi homegrown resistance, along with the support of them by more than 80 percent of the population is never divulged to the masses, for this would fracture the smoking mirror that has sustained the Iraqi war chimera for three years.

The illusion that America is fighting terrorists, conveniently blamed for 9/11 so as to reenergize the emotions we suffered that horrific day, has helped sustain support for an illegal and immoral war based on lies. After all, we are fighting them there so we do not have to fight them here. In reality, the guerilla war being waged has the support of the vast majority of the Iraqi people whose lives have been spent in Hell on Earth thanks to America’s invasion and occupation.

Yet to the propagandists, we can never be seen as the evildoer or villain in this Hollywood production, which we are, murdering, oppressing, maiming, bombing, torturing, dehumanizing and utterly eviscerating an entire people and culture. And so, it is said we fight terrorists, not freedom fighters, we fight for freedom and democracy, not oil and geopolitical expediency, and we invaded to topple a dictator, even if tyranny is worse than before.

The day will soon come when the face and name of Zarqawi will stop having the desired effect on the American population, his brand having matured. When that time arrives, a new evildoer extraordinaire will rise to claim the throne of propaganda matrix for the corporatists in power, his arrival launched like a new product, ready, willing and able to unleash terror upon the lands of Earth, intent to destroy America, hating us for our freedoms and democracy.

Like Osama and Zarqawi before him, this new evil one will see his reputation grow exponentially, his words and deeds disseminated for our consumption, and manipulation. We will be made to fear him, demanding he be killed after every act of barbarity attributed to him. One hundred of his second and third in commands will be killed in combat, his lieutenants’ names grazing the news sound bites we are given, and he will have evaded imminent capture dozens of times.

He will orchestrate bombings and death and heinous acts of terror, his face posterized for the masses to see and memorize. For a few years he will be most useful to those committing psychological warfare on the people, becoming a treasure trove of propaganda and distraction, his reputation growing with each newscast by the corporate media. His name will be uttered repeatedly, bombarded into our conscious, becoming, thanks to the airplay granted him, evildoer, terrorist, America’s new enemy. The new poster child for perpetual war for perpetual profit will captivate the minds of millions, who will be told to be afraid of attacks against their city and children.

His fictitious legend will live in infamy, giving fresh oxygen to the war on terror, rejuvenating a weakened marketing campaign. The deeds and actions attributed to him will make the Establishment more powerful, granting it sustenance for the continued embezzlement of billions of dollars in taxpayer money. Our treasure will disappear, going straight into the coffers of corporatists and capitalists who will have instructions to assemble and build the instruments of death and destruction the military-industrial complex will need for the next fifty years. Our children will be sent to foreign lands under the pretext of killing him, dying and being maimed for lies upon lies. Never captured, never found, existing like a ghost in our midst, the mightiest army the world has ever known will fail to bring him to justice, for in his freedom the corporatists maintain the illusion, the psychological war upon us, their most profitable war on terror.

In a war of fantasy, without a nation to blame, a face must be given to mystery and ambiguity, enabling the masses to maintain their illusion of a fight against terror, doing battle with an enemy possessing Hollywood prowess, engaged in conflict against Arabs and Persians and Muslims whose only crime is having lived for millennia atop a resource both addictive and essential to maintaining standards of living unsustainable and excessive.


Psychological Warfare


The manufacture of the war on terror – along with the systematic branding of Arabs and Persians as America's enemy – has coincided perfectly with the race in a geopolitical chess match to see who can secure the remaining fields of the resource known as the devil’s excrement, the black blood needed to run the machines of mankind. Had the vast amounts of oil fields been in Latin America instead of in the Middle East and Central Asia the war on terror would be taking place in Brazil or Ecuador or Venezuela, and Hispanics would be today’s bogeymen. Instead, America finds herself having lied and deceived her own people, trying to find justifications to penetrate and control the remaining oil fields, unleashing psychological war on us the easier to manipulate the population and using terror as a pretext to invade and occupy a most important geopolitical and geostrategic prize, Iraq.

Subsequently, the occupation of Iraq has opened the door to the rest of the Middle East and has become a gateway to Central Asia and its vast quantities of oil. In its own right, Afghanistan, now in the hands of the Americans, has become a geopolitical prize of grand strategic importance, used for oil and gas pipelines and for the permanent military bases and the presence they provide needed to contain America’s next enemies, namely Iran, China and Russia. With Iraq and Afghanistan now for all practical purposes American colonies, its military firmly entrenched in permanent bases designed to protect and control the flow of oil, the high possibility exists of further intervention in Iran and/or Central Asia.

The war on terror, born on 9/11, has been the perfect instrument of control for the corporatists in power, its mechanisms allowing the preemptive invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq as well as the perfect excuse to retain a permanent stronghold in Afghanistan. Had the fierce Iraqi resistance not created the debacle now witnessed, trapping American forces in a tar pit of carnage, the charade that is the war on terror would have inevitably been expanded to invade Iran and Syria on the way to Central Asia.

Inside the hallways where neocon and corporatist vultures reside, the thinking was that 9/11 would be the new Pearl Harbor needed to mobilize the citizenry, by exploiting our fragile psychology, toward a perpetual war footing, that invading Afghanistan would be justified and very easy to take, that Iraq would be a cakewalk and that, in the wake of America’s blitzkrieg in the Middle East, the invasion of Iran and Syria would soon follow.

Thereafter, America would dictate terms to all remaining Middle East nations, controlling their leaders but most importantly, their oil fields, pipes, ports, waterways and infrastructure, deciding to sell oil from American and British markets, in dollars, not euros. From controlling the Middle East it would only be a matter of time before Central Asia offered herself to America, granting her terms, prices and barrels of oil favorable to her, deciding it safer to befriend the superpower rather than the Asian giants.

9/11 was the catalyst to the war on terror, the spring that gave sustenance to the imperialistic wet dreams of corporatists and neocons. It was a moment in time, though only affecting a few blocks of downtown New York City, that sent concussions of fear and hatred and immediate calls of anger and vengeance reverberating throughout the land, as if a nuclear bomb of psychological warfare had been unleashed into our atmosphere, transforming us into unthinking animals, our primate psychology and emotions set free, usurping our normal human intelligence.

At that point, after seeing the televised images of the horror and evil spawned that day, its recording repeated continuously without end, with angle after angle of carnage and death shown us, with the immediate propaganda of journalist buffoons penetrating our pores, with stenographers for power injecting us with their venom, we mutated into an army of robots, unwilling to listen to reason, unwise to the lessons of humanity, failing to control our raw emotions, becoming, in the end, a united herd of sheep that was easily corralled into following and obeying the dictates of the corporatists.

We became, with our jingoism, nationalism, patriotism and Nazi-like militarization of the nation a people on the verge of mass psychosis, ready to bomb and murder entire nations, ready to lose all sense of morality in order to attain the vengeance our mammalian brains sought.

Upon the destruction of the Twin Towers we succumbed to our masters’ wishes, allowing ourselves to be molded like fresh clay, becoming exactly what the Establishment wanted us to become. The hatred we felt was manipulated and directed, our attention made to focus on the dark skins and alien religion of the Middle East. Our fear was exploited, our fragile psychology abused, steered toward war against Arabs and Persians and Muslims, for clandestine reasons we did not wish to know or understand.

For control of oil and continued expansion of the economy psychological war was declared on 300 million Americans, the mechanisms of corporatism acting in unison to make of us a marching army of unthinking drones, willing to give up our rights and freedoms, willing to sacrifice our sons, daughters and treasure for the vengeance we felt and the thirst for blood we craved. We came under the myopic control of power, distracted from the war against us. Our animal instincts had taken over us; our human intellect vanished inside the clouds of 9/11, only returning a few years later to claim its rightful place alongside reason and logic. Such is the power of psychological war upon a population and such is the level of human wickedness by corporatists and neocons alike.

In the end, we allowed corporatism to fast forward in time, firmly cementing its claws into our land, slowly rising in stature, growing in power, its instruments becoming ingrained into society, our rights and freedoms slowly eroding. Its rise to prominence now seems inevitable, this stage of American capitalism feeds and sustains it, our acquiescence and apathy helps it grow. With another attack, real or created, America will usher in the era of the police state. Perhaps this has been the plan the overlords of Earth have had all along.

Into Orwellian times have we descended, and, after the corporatists no longer find usefulness to the Arab/Persian terrorist as enemy, a new one will be created, just in time to fit into the grand plans and goals of those in power, molded to entertain and distract us yet again, rising from the Far East to manipulate and control us.

Perpetual Enemy, Perpetual Control

Marketed to exploit our fears and hatreds, manufactured to mobilize our talents towards wickedness, the new enemy will evolve from the carcass of all those that have come before, rising from its cocoon, metamorphosis enabling it to acquire a different appearance, ready to terrorize and frighten us into obedience. It will once again work like magic, capturing our minds, manipulating our psychologies, pushing society in the direction the corporatists want us to follow. Those in power will make barbarians of an entire people, creating subhuman creatures wanting to destroy us for our freedom and democracy.

America’s new enemy will work like a charm, for it always does, always ready to push the interests of the few, willing to demonize the innocent and enrapture the ignorant.

Yes, a new enemy can be seen in the horizon. In a few years time the rivalry with China will grow and intensify, for this world cannot sustain both America and a nation of 1.4 billion people whose economy will surpass our own in a decade or two. A new Cold War will ensue, new enemies will be delineated, and new forms of conditioning will evolve. Two peoples will be taught to hate each other, brainwashed to see the other as evildoer extraordinaire, for the race to the last vestiges of natural resources has begun as the world runs out of water, oil and space.

Like the Soviet and Arab/Persian Muslim terrorist before him, the Chinese enemy will be deviously marketed, his exploits and evil deeds will be told and retold, his hatred of our way of life made to be everlasting. Our minds will be programmed to believe not reality but what the corporatists want reality to be. We will be manipulated to seek victory against the Red menace of China, told to sacrifice blood, sweat, and tears for the cause, for the salvation of America, and that of the corporatists. We will be forced to toil in the sweatshops and assembly lines of the military-energy industrial complex, our corporatist government engorging itself through conquest of land and resources, our wages given to the corporations that own us.

In time the Arab/Persian Muslim terrorist as enemy of America will vanish from our conscious, perhaps once again becoming the freedom fighter he has usually been marketed as, coming full circle in the minds of Americans. Perhaps he will join us in the new Cold War, ready to fight with us against the Chinese, becoming our friend and our ally. For China waits in the wings, growing by leaps and bounds, an ancient civilization wise and patient, a growing behemoth whose drums we now hear, methodically letting her future rival hemorrhage itself to death, letting America defeat itself.

In time we will once again be allowed to see the beauty and grandeur of Arab and Persian cultures, from Morocco to Iraq to Iran, free to explore lands both alien and mesmerizing, with architecture and fashion and decoration and design and music and ideas and ways of thinking as alien as they are appealing. Perhaps we will incorporate some of their culture into our own, for that which has never been seen by human eyes becomes beautiful, soon thereafter coveted and imitated. With the passage of time we will be able to learn from our Arab and Persian friends, for theirs is an old civilization, in many ways different than ours, yet in many ways similar as well, offering, like any culture, both good and bad traits.

In time we will see that the charade we have been living in since mid-2001 has degraded us as a culture, making us torturers and invaders and occupiers and murderers and pillager of human rights, in the process destroying history and culture and ancient civilizations. We will see that America is crumbling under the weight of its hypocrisy and its immorality, her foundations severely damaged by her crimes both against the planet and humanity. Perhaps we will even see the error of our ways, the madness we have allowed to enter our conscious and the destruction we allowed our power and wealth to unleash on innocent human beings.

But just as we are ready to forgive ourselves for what we have allowed to be done in our name and as we seek closure by asking for forgiveness from the world and the Iraqi people in particular a new enemy will be created to distract us away from the anger we now feel for being lied, deceived and manipulated. As the fear, hatred, nationalism and xenophobia engendered by 9/11 evaporates thanks to the passage of time and the escape from psychosis a new adaptation of psychological warfare will be thrust upon us, used to damage our minds and control our lives.

Just as we are finally ready to seek the justice denied us, ready to confront the real enemy among us, new terror will be unleashed to quiet us. New 9/11s, perhaps more destructive and deadly, will usher in an era of the coming American police state, granted to the corporatists by our own willful yet manipulated emotions. Just as we begin to ask questions and seek the accountability that has so far alluded us a new threat will be born, a new attack inside one of our cities will take place, conveniently captured by television, disseminated widely by a corporate media eager to recreate the cycle of propaganda seen on 9/11. Its inevitability is a foregone conclusion.

Once again we will fall for the same trap, becoming the pawns of corporatists, the army of “good Germans.” Terror new and real will arrive on our shores just in time to once again take possession of our minds, making us, yet again, unthinking animals sustained by raw emotion and instinct, becoming the sheep easily corralled, led and controlled by our masters. We will mobilize once more, marching to the trumpets of war and violence, becoming the instrument the corporatists need to further their goals.

An enemy will be chosen, his lands will be targeted, those that look like him will be bombed and all the while, sitting idly on our couches, languishing away our lives next to the television, we will be told what to think and believe, our animal brains commandeering our rational minds. We will be told that we are to fear, even though there is nothing to fear. We will be told we should hate, even though there is nothing to hate. We will be told our security is in peril, even though we are very secure. We will be told that reality is what we see on the monitor, not what our daily lives make it out to be.

We will be told to follow the orders of corporatist leaders, to place undying loyalty and trust in them and that, even though it seems they are pilfering our treasure and sending our children to certain death and destroying our reputation and bringing shame upon our land and leading us into incompetent debacle after debacle, we are never to question, never to protest, never to dissent, yet forever to become the ignorant drone that unbuckles his belt, bends over to the dictates of power and allows for the raping of his mind and the sodomy of his existence.

With the minds of tens of millions lined up, their ability to think independently erased from memory, ready, willing and able to sacrifice children, treasure and morality to professional puppeteers, becoming slaves to the system, the games of geopolitical and geostrategic chess can continue and the power of our corporatist masters can expand.

The name of the game is control, of our society, culture, lives and futures. The game of control is played for world domination, of its resources, peoples and lands, like a grand chess contest dictated by the sacrifice of pawns and the movement of kings. To the overlords of Earth, humanity is but a herd needing to be dominated and controlled; our lives and fates decided by the realities created and decisions made of those players who hold the reigns of ultimate power. It is the story of humankind, of a corrosive pyramid of hierarchy, of a system of castes, of the fortunate and the doomed, of a mechanism of perpetual control.

Civilization has not changed for millennia, it remains its predictable self, with the few at the top as always aggrandized by their control over the masses, and the masses forever easily led and maneuvered, electing to remain captives to what has always been, afraid to confront what could become. The making of the enemy is but one more form of control over us, for those whose power, control and wealth grows exponentially thanks to the making and marketing of enemies would not have it any other way.

Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst and Internet columnist. His articles as well as his archive can be found at his blog, http://www.valenzuelasveritas.blogspot.com and at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info as well as at other alternative news websites from around the globe. Mr. Valenzuela is also author of Echoes in the Wind, a fiction novel. Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at manuel@valenzuelas.net.

Republicans, with a 3-2 majority on the County Council, have been loathe to end in-person voting at polling places. They have argued for a voter's right to cast a ballot at a precinct and have cited a possibility of increased voter fraud with mail-in ballots.

"It seems that most of the problems we've had in the county have come from mail-in ballots," said council Chairman Gary Nelson, a Republican. "It's either someone voting who's not who they say they are or a felon voting by mail."

County Executive Aaron Reardon and Auditor Bob Terwilliger have said a switch would save the county more than $1 million in additional costs for backup equipment required for its electronic voting machines.

Councilman Dave Gossett, a Democrat supporting the change, said he'll bring the issue before the council again as soon as control changes hands.

If the council does approve the switch, all-mail elections in Snohomish County would begin with the September primary. Special elections between February and May would allow for polling-place voting.

On another issue, council members agree: Development of the former Cathcart Landfill property east of Mill Creek will get under way next year.

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What the county purchased in 1986 for $3.4 million — about $7,700 an acre for more than 440 acres — is now worth about $169,000 an acre. The county has sold 65 acres to the Snohomish School District for $11 million.

Don't expect agreement on how the remaining acreage will be developed, however.

Mixed development is the plan, but how much will be dedicated to retail, homes and business is the question. Council members do agree that the Cathcart development is an opportunity to add money to the general fund and to possibly eliminate a user fee attached to county residents' garbage bills. The fee has been collected to pay off bonds that financed the county's purchase.

Development issues aren't likely to disappear next year in this fast-growing county. With the 10-year planning update out of the way, the council will focus on more-specific protection measures, including a shoreline-management plan and critical-areas ordinance.

Much of the work on both regulations, which protect sensitive areas from development, will be led by the state. But with a Democratic council majority, it is possible the county will make the rules tighter than the state requires.

Gossett said he plans to raise the issue of design standards — such as new developments without every garage facing the street — and a tree ordinance, unlikely to be favored by Republicans.

As Republican Councilman John Koster jokingly said, "Next year, all I may do is vote no."

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK):

Some people say that is a broad change in authorization to the Commander in Chief of this country. It is not. It is a very limited concept of giving him the authority to pursue those who have brought this terrible destruction to our country and to pursue those who have harbored them or assisted them and conspired with them in any way. [Congressional Record, 9/14/01]

Rep. James McGovern (D-MA):

The body of this resolution is appropriately limited to those entities involved in the attacks that occurred on September 11th…It reiterates the existing constitutional powers of the President to take action to defend the United States, but provides no new or additional grant of powers to the President. [Congressional Record, 9/14/01]

Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE):

In extending this broad authority to cover those ‘planning, authorizing, committing, or aiding the attacks’ it should go without saying, however, that the resolution is directed only at using force abroad to combat acts of international terrorism. [Congressional Record, 9/14/01]

Rep. Christopher Smith (R-NJ):

The resolution is not a blank check. We do this with our eyes open and in fervent prayer, especially the prayer that President Bush and his national security team will be lavished with wisdom from God above to use only that force which is truly necessary and only that force which is truly appropriate. [Congressional Record, 9/14/01]

Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX):

The tension that we face tonight is to provide the President with enough authority to eradicate wrongdoing without wronging the carefully crafted systems of checks and balances so essential to our democracy. … As we vote for this important resolution with the lives of so many at stake in this important endeavor against terrorism, we cannot let the executive branch become the exclusive branch. [Congressional Record, 9/14/01]

Indeed, for centuries, the Muslim-dominated Middle East has captured the West's imagination in a myriad of ways. Yet, as is often the case, the disparity of power and wealth dictated the course of Western action (and reaction) then concentrated mostly in Europe. Up until the second half of the 20th century, much of the Middle East -- not to mention other regions that were viewed as lands of equally "inferior" races -- fell victim to untold exploitation, degradation and, often, brutal violence.

Little has been done since most Middle Eastern nations attained their independence in recent decades, to redeem the roots of hatred; to the contrary, much was done to exasperate the animosity. In the second half of the past century, colonialism was brought to an end in its conventional ways, perhaps, with Palestine remaining the most practical and tragic exception; but its dialectics -- those of political and economic hegemony -- were hardly altered. The Arabs, after all, still had plenty to offer and the West, now US-dominated, persistently saw Arab offerings purely through colonialist- coloured lenses: spoils, plain and simple.

Evidently, European imperialism, despite constant attempts to delineate the differences between French colonial experiences and those of Britain, for example, had devastated Middle Eastern cultures. Even the positive contributions to local cultures during those years, were mostly unintentional and often cosmetic.

The conventional colonialist experience was forced to yield in the years following the end of World War II to alternative methods that would still allow Western countries to safeguard their economic interests in the region. Militarily weakened and unable to tame the fractious colonies, yet reluctant to treat former subjects as equal partners, Western nations were compelled to devise new colonial stratagem. Arab nations for example were subjugated through Western-sponsored local elites, corruptible and coercive. Many Arab intellectuals have rightly argued that a decided halt of Western imperialism never truly actualised. Direct and indirect intervention in Arab affairs, with the same arrogant expectations, continued to mar the relationship between the West and Arabs.

The United States in particular, joining the colonial club at a later stage, was not always viewed as a colonial menace. The US government's strong stance against the tri-party British-French-Israeli aggression against Egypt in 1956 placed it in a somewhat different category from the rest. However, the US colonial status, bashful and reluctant at first, was forcefully shaped during the Arab-Israel war of 1967. Only then did the United States' devout and resolved support of Israel -- a colonial protégé itself -- fully actualise.

Since then, the US political, financial and military commitment to Israel has further damaged the perception of the Arab and Muslim peoples of the United States. Thus being anti- Israel -- a common feeling among most Arabs and Muslims, for obvious reasons -- was tantamount to being anti-American. The failure of Arab regimes to take a strong stand against both also added to the tension. The fury and bitterness espoused by early colonial experiences lingered, unscathed. To pretend that extremism and terrorism, plaguing many spots in the Arab and Muslim world are irrelevant to this debate is to ignore the roots of the violence at the expense of innocent lives everywhere.

As if its despised involvement in helping shape a miserable reality throughout the Middle East was not enough, the US occupation of Iraq, the heart of the Arab world, in March 2003 earned it the designation of colonial master. More still, the fact that the war on Iraq took place largely as a result of neo- conservative plotting (a dedicated pro-Israeli camp) and amid the cheers of Israeli leaders, Arabs were left, as reflected in their media, with no other option but to view the US as an official enemy of the Arab people, as belligerent as former European colonialists, and twice as lethal.

It appears too late for President Bush to appreciate this attempt at explaining the roots of his country's image problem. Indeed, in his Philadelphia speech, he seemed heedless of history, its complexities and its many good lessons. It was the media who should be blamed for his problem with Arabs and Muslims, he insisted. With such a misconstrued perception, one's hope for a serious change of course in US foreign policy would have to be shelved, long enough for reason to prevail, or for history to repeat itself.

* The writer is a Palestinian-American journalist.

These pro-Israeli Neo-Cons had been schooled in the Machiavellian/Nietzschean theories of Professor Leo Strauss who taught political philosophy at the University of Chicago in its Department of Political Science. The best exposé of Strauss's pernicious theories on law, politics, government, for elitism, and against democracy can be found in two scholarly books by the Canadian Professor of Political Philosophy Shadia B. Drury.(2) I entered the University of Chicago in September of 1968 shortly after Strauss had retired. But I was trained in Chicago's Political Science Department by Strauss's foremost protégé, co-author, and later literary executor Joseph Cropsey. Based upon my personal experience as an alumnus of Chicago's Political Science Department (A.B., 1971, in Political Science), I concur completely with Professor Drury's devastating critique of Strauss. I also agree with her penetrating analysis of the degradation of the American political process that has been inflicted by Chicago's Straussian Neo-Con cabal. (3)

The University of Chicago routinely trained me and innumerable other students to become ruthless and unprincipled Machiavellians. That is precisely why so many neophyte Neo-Con students gravitated towards the University of Chicago or towards Chicago Alumni at other universities. Years later, the University of Chicago became the "brains" behind the Bush Jr. Empire and his Ashcroft Police State. Attorney General John Ashcroft received his law degree from the University of Chicago in 1967. Many of his lawyers at the Bush Jr. Department of Injustice are members of the right-wing, racist, bigoted, reactionary, and totalitarian Federalist Society (aka "Feddies"), (4) which originated in part at the University of Chicago. Feddies wrote the USA Patriot Act (USAPA) I and the draft for USAPA II, which constitute the blueprint for establishing an American Police State. (5) Meanwhile, the Department of Injustice's own F.B.I. is still covering up the U.S. governmental origins of the post 11 September 2001 anthrax attack on Washington D.C. that enabled Ashcroft and his Feddies to stampede the U.S. Congress into passing USAPA I into law. (6)

Integrally related to and overlapping with the Feddies are members of the University of Chicago "School" of Law-and-Kick-Them-in-the-Groin-Economics (e.g., Richard Posner, Frank Easterbrook, Richard Epstein,etc.), which in turn was founded upon the Market Fundamentalism of Milton Friedman, now retired but long-time Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. Friedman and his "Chicago Boys" have raped, robbed, looted, plundered, and pillaged economies and their respective peoples all over the developing world. (7) This Chicago gang of academic con-artists and charlatans are proponents of the Nazi Doctrine of "useless eaters." Pursuant to Friedman's philosophy of Market Fundamentalism, the "privatization" of Iraq and its Oil Industry are already underway for the primary benefit of the U.S. energy companies (e.g., Halliburton, formerly under Vice President Dick Cheney) that had already interpenetrated the Bush Jr. administration as well as the Bush Family itself. Enron.

Although miseducated (8) at Yale and Harvard Business School, the "Ivies" proved to be too liberal for Bush Jr. and his fundamentalist Christian supporters, whose pointman and spearcarrier in the Bush Jr. administration was Ashcroft, a Fundie himself. The Neo-Cons and the Fundies contracted an "unholy alliance" in support of Bush Jr. For their own different reasons, both gangs also worked hand-in-hand to support Israel's genocidal Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, an internationally acknowledged war criminal. (9)

According to his own public estimate and boast before the American Enterprise Institute, President Bush Jr. hired about 20 Straussians to occupy key positions in his administration, intentionally taking offices where they could push American foreign policy in favor of Israel and against its chosen enemies such as Iraq, Iran, Syria, and the Palestinians. (10) Most of the Straussian Neo-Cons in the Bush Jr. administration and elsewhere are Israel-firsters: What is "good" for Israel is by definition "good" for the United States. Dual loyalties indeed. (11)

In addition, it was the Chicago Straussian cabal of pro-Israeli Neo-Cons who set up a special "intelligence" unit within the Pentagon that was responsible for manufacturing many of the bald-faced lies, deceptions, half-truths, and sheer propaganda that the Bush Jr. administration then disseminated to the lap-dog U.S. news media (12) in order to generate public support for a war of aggression against Iraq for the benefit of Israel and in order to steal Iraq's oil. (13) To paraphrase advice Machiavelli once rendered to his Prince in Chapter XVIII of that book: Those who want to deceive will always find those willing to be deceived. (14) As I can attest from my personal experience as an alumnus of the University of Chicago Department of Political Science, the Bible of Chicago's Neo-Con Straussian cabal is Machiavelli's The Prince. We students had to know our Machiavelli by heart and rote at the University of Chicago.

As for the University of Chicago overall, its biblical Gospel is Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987). (15) Of course Bloom was another protégé of Strauss, as well as a mentor to Wolfowitz. In his Bloom-biographical novel Ravelstein (2000) Saul Bellow, formerly on the University of Chicago Faculty, outed his self-styled friend Bloom as a hedonist, pederast, and most promiscuous homosexual who died of AIDS. All this was common knowledge at the University of Chicago, where Bloom is still worshiped and his elitist screed against American higher-education still revered on a pedestal.

In Ravelstein Wolfowitz appeared as Bloom's protégé Philip Gorman, leaking national security secrets to his mentor during the Bush Sr. war against Iraq. Strauss hovered around the novel as Bloom's mentor and guru Professor Davarr. Strauss/Davarr is really the éminence grise of Ravelstein. With friends like Bellow, Bloom did not need enemies. On the basis of Ravelstein alone, Wolfowitz warrants investigation by the F.B.I.

Just recently the University of Chicago officially celebrated its Bush Jr. Straussian Neo-Con cabal, highlighting Wolfowitz Ph.D. '72, Ahmad Chalabi, Ph.D. '69 (the CIA's Iraqi puppet), Abram Shulsky, A.M. '68, Ph.D. '72 (head of the Pentagon's special "intelligence" unit), Zalmay Khalilzad, Ph.D. '79 (Bush Jr's roving pro-consul for Afghanistan and then Iraq), as well as faculty members Bellow, X '39, and Bloom, A.B. '49, A.M. '53, Ph.D. '55, together with Strauss. According to the University of Chicago Magazine, Bloom's rant "helped popularize Straussian ideals of democracy." (16) It is correct to assert that Bloom's book helped to popularize Straussian "ideas," but they were blatantly anti-democratic, Machiavellian, Nietzschean, and elitist to begin with. Only the University of Chicago would have the unmitigated Orwellian gall to publicly assert that Strauss and Bloom cared one whit about democracy, let alone comprehended the "ideals of democracy."

Does anyone seriously believe that a pro-Israeli Chicago/Strauss/Bloom product such as Wolfowitz could care less about democracy in Iraq? Or for that matter anyone in the Bush Jr. administration? After they stole the 2000 presidential election from the American People in Florida and before the Republican-controlled U.S. Supreme Court, some of whom were Feddies? (17) Justice Clarence Thomas is a Straussian to boot. (18)

At the behest of its Straussian Neo-Con Political Science Department, in 1979 the entire University of Chicago went out of its way to grant the "first Albert Pick Jr. Award for Outstanding Contributions to International Understanding" to Robert "Mad Bomber" McNamara. (19) In other words, the University of Chicago itself maliciously strove to rehabilitate one of the greatest international war criminals in the post-World War II era. (20) Do not send your children to the University of Chicago where they will grow up to become warmongers like Wolfowitz or totalitarians like Ashcroft! The University of Chicago is an intellectual and moral cesspool.



Endnotes

1. See, e.g., Rahul Mahajan, Full Spectrum Dominance 108 (2003).

2. Shadia B. Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (1988); Leo Strauss and the American Right (1999). See also Alain Frachon & Daniel Vernet, The Strategist and the Philosopher: Leo Strauss and Albert Wohlstetter, Le Monde, April 16, 2003, translated into English by Norman Madarasz on Counterpunch.org., June 2, 2003.

3. See also David Brock, Blinded by the Right (2002).

4. George E. Curry & Trevor W. Coleman, Hijacking Justice, Emerge, October 1999, at 42; Jerry M. Landay, The Conservative Cabal That's Transforming American Law, Washington Monthly, March 2000, at 19; People for the American Way, The Federalist Society (August 2001); Institute for Democracy Studies, The Federalist Society and the Challenge to a Democratic Jurisprudence (January 2001).

5. Francis A. Boyle, Bush's Banana Republic, Counterpunch.org, Oct. 11, 2002.

6. Francis A. Boyle, Biowarfare, Terror Weapons and the U.S.: Home Brew?, Counterpunch.org, April 25, 2002.

7. See Greg Palast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (2003), at 5 et seq.

8. See Chomsky on Miseducation (Donald Macedo ed. 2000).

9. Francis A. Boyle, Take Sharon to The Hague, Counterpunch.org, June 6, 2002.

10. White House Press Release, President Discusses the Future of Iraq, Washington Hilton Hotel, Feb. 26, 2003.

11. Nasser H. Aruri, Dishonest Broker, 193-216 (2003). See also Tanya Reinhart, Israel/Palestine (2002); Cheryl A. Rubenberg, The Palestinians (2003).

12. Norman Solomon, The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media (1999); Noam Chomsky, Media Control (1997).

13. Seymour M. Hersh, Selective Intelligence, New Yorker, May 8, 2003; Michael Lind, The Weird Men Behind George W. Bush's War, New Statesman - London, April 7, 2003; Julian Borger, The Spies Who Pushed for War, The Guardian, July 17, 2003.

14. Machiavelli, The Prince 147 (M. Musa trans. & ed. 1964): ". . . and men are so simple-minded and so dominated by their present needs that one who deceives will always find one who will allow himself to be deceived." This Bilingual Edition of The Prince by Mark Musa was the one preferred by Joseph Cropsey to teach us students.

15. But see Lawrence W. Levine, The Opening of the American Mind (1996).

16. Between the Lines, University of Chicago Magazine, June 2003, at 54

17. Vincent Bugliosi, The Betrayal of America (2001); Greg Palast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy 11-81 (2003).

18. Gerhard Sporl, The Leo-Conservatives, Der Spiegel, Aug. 4, 2003.

19. McNamara Receives Pick Award Amid Protests, University of Chicago Magazine, Summer 1979, at 4.

20. Noam Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot (1993); Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect (1995).

From the Vatican, Pope John Paul II fires a shot over the bow of the Bush administration by declaring, "war cannot be decided upon, even when it is a matter of ensuring the common good, except as the very last option and in accordance with very strict conditions."

In a television ad, the chief ecumenical officer of the United Methodist Church, Bishop Melvin Talbert, says that his fellow Methodist's rush to war "violates God's law and the teachings of Jesus Christ.''

The Anglican House of Bishops has warned, "without compelling new evidence to confirm that Iraq was stockpiling chemical or biological weapons, war could not be morally justified."

Bush, who, during one of the presidential debates, said his favorite philosopher was Jesus Christ, has apparently decided to ignore his teachings.

Maybe Bush has decided to turn away from Jesus Christ and instead seek Providence from a tequila bottle, as his State of the Union address with numerous examples of slurred speech would seem to indicate.

Bush, a so-called compassionate conservative and born-again Christian, can only find religious support from the same group of hackneyed pseudo-Christians, hate mongers, and religious cult leaders like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham, and Sun Myung Moon. Bush opts for this band of zealots and ignores South African Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu who asked, "When does compassion, when does morality, when does caring come in?" His words fall on deaf ears in the Oval Office.

Content with ignoring the church, Bush has also decided to play with dynamite by ignoring some of America's top military minds.

One of them is retired General Norman Schwarzkopf, the military commander of Desert Storm. He told The Washington Post that he has yet to be fully convinced that war with Iraq is necessary. Schwarzkopf's comments mirror those of other retired top generals, including Anthony Zinni, Wesley Clark, John Shalikashvili, Brent Scowcroft, Joseph Hoar, and Merrill McPeak. Pentagon sources report that the obviously mentally ill Donald Rumsfeld threatened to fire some members of his Joint Chiefs of Staff for not supporting the war against Iraq. These included former Marine Corps Commandant and now NATO commander General James Jones and Army Chief of Staff General Erik Shinseki. Another recipient of Rumsfeld's wrath is the commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command General Charles Holland who Rumsfeld accused of having a "case of the slows" in carrying out Bush's war plans.

Pentagon sources report that morale among senior military commanders is at an all time low. Rumsfeld rubbed salt into open wounds when he ordered his "CINCs" (Commander-in-Chief) to drop that title, declaring that there is only one "commander-in-chief" and that is Bush. Neither did it help when Rumsfeld said military draftees never added any value to the service.

Pentagon sources report that some officers are digging out old message traffic that emanated from the Nixon White House in 1974 during the height of the Watergate crisis. One particular order from then Chief of Staff Al Haig stated that military commanders were to ignore any orders from Nixon unless they were authorized and co-signed by Haig. The fear then was that Nixon might have ordered a military move on the Congress during the impeachment hearings and cite national security as the reason for suspending the congressional proceedings against him.

In the end, however, Nixon understood the gravity of his constitutional responsibilities. He resigned. Bush, on the other hand, has done more to shred the Constitution than any of his predecessors.

Of course, there was once another fanatic war-possessed leader who tore up his constitution and routinely berated his generals and ignored their advice. On July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg strode into a conference room in Hitler's Wolf's Lair compound with a briefcase bomb. Although the plot to rid the world of Hitler once and for all failed, it confirmed that a number of Germany's top generals, including its most famous, Erwin von Rommel, were strongly opposed to Hitler's fanaticism.

War making and saber rattling is not the only similarity of Bush to Hitler. The German leader, along with Joseph Goebbels, was also a master of propaganda. The Bush administration, obviously putting its propaganda arm, the White house Office of Global Communications, into full gear, convinced nine European leaders to take out an ad, billed as an 'article," in several European newspapers supporting the Bush administration. Some of the usual suspects signed on to the article, including Tony Blair, who, in addition to Barney and Spot, is Bush's favorite lap dog. But it is interesting to point out some of the other leaders who backed Bush. They include the Prime Ministers of Poland and Hungary and President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic. These countries, which joined NATO a few years ago with the provision that they buy billions of dollars of American warplanes, tanks, and other hardware, are virtual subsidiaries of America's military-industrial complex.

Denmark's Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen is only in power because of the support he receives from a rabidly anti-immigrant party that mirrors John Ashcroft's brand of conservatism. Italy's Silvio Berlusconi heads a party that has maintained strong links to Italy's neo-fascist movement whose founding father was Benito Mussolini. Likewise, the parties of Spain's Jose Maria Aznar and Portugal's Jose Barroso have historical links to the fascist movements of Francisco Franco and Antonio Salazar, respectively.

Bush's borrowing liberally from Hitler's play book was not lost on Germany's former Justice Minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin, who last September said Bush wanted a war with Iraq to divert attention from domestic problems. She added, "That's a popular method. Even Hitler did that."

Bush, who is content to win the support of Pentagon stooges in Eastern Europe and neo-fascists elsewhere, has chosen to ignore people like former South African President Nelson Mandela who made no secret of his disgust for Bush when he declared at a women's forum, "One power with a president who has no foresight -- who cannot think properly -- is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust."

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who did more to bring peace to the world in a couple of years than either of the Bush's have done in two presidential terms, said last year that George W. Bush is a threat to world peace and that his plans to attack Iraq will destroy the international coalition in the war on terrorism. Former President Jimmy Carter and Nobel Peace Prize laureate warned that a pre-emptive US attack on Iraq would have catastrophic consequences.

Bush's disparaging of the United Nations, world opinion, and international statesmen is reminiscent of an April 28, 1939 speech by Hitler before the Reichstag:

"Members of the German Reichstag: The President of the United States of America has addressed a telegram to me, with the curious contents of which you are already familiar . . . The President of the United States believes that in conference rooms as in courts it is necessary that both sides enter in good faith, assuming that substantial justice will accrue to both. German representatives will never again enter a conference that is for them a tribunal . . . Mr. Roosevelt asks that assurances be given him that the German armed forces will not attack, and above all, not invade, the territory or possessions of the following independent nations. He then names as those to which he refers: Finland, Lithuania, Latvia,' Estonia, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Great Britain , Ireland, France, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Russia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iraq, the Arabias, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Iran. I have first taken the trouble to ascertain from the states mentioned, firstly, whether they feel themselves threatened, and, what is most important, secondly, whether this inquiry by the American President was addressed to us at their suggestion or at least with their consent. The reply was in all cases negative, in some instances strongly so . . . I have reunited the territories that have been German throughout a thousand years of history-and, Mr. Roosevelt, I have endeavored to attain all this without bloodshed and without bringing to my people and so to others, the misery of war . . . For my world, Mr. President, is the one to which Providence has assigned me and for which it is my duty to work. Its area is much smaller. It comprises my people alone. But I believe I can thus best serve that which is in the hearts of all of us a*" justice, well-being, progress and peace for the whole community of mankind."

As Congress cheerfully applauded Bush's State of the Union address, the Reichstag gave Hitler a thunderous reception. Although Hitler's oratory skills were light years beyond Bush's, the two speeches had something extremely fundamental in common-- they were packed with lies.

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and columnist. He wrote the introduction to Forbidden Truth.

Madsen can be reached at: WMadsen777@aol.com

The fourteen-page opinion makes a number of charges against the Administration. Fundamentally, it accuses the government of changing its version of the facts to suit its purposes and improperly seeking to avoid Supreme Court consideration of whether the President has the power to declare a U.S. citizen an "enemy combatant." The Court also castigates the government for at least creating the appearance that there really was not such a great need to hold Padilla as an enemy combatant and that the charges that he had entered the country might not be true.

Shortly after the Court had issued an opinion on September 9th, affirming the right of the President to declare Padilla an enemy combatant and remanding the case to a lower court for a determination of the legitimacy of that designation, Padilla was abruptly indicted in Florida. The indictment "made no mention of the acts upon which the government purported to base its military detention of Padilla … namely that Padilla had taken up arms against the United States forces in Afghanistan and had thereafter entered into this country for the purpose of blowing up buildings in American cities."

The government then asked the appellate court to allow the transfer to civilian court, as may be required by a rule of Supreme Court procedure. When the Court of Appeals questioned the different facts, the government asked the appellate court to withdraw its decision entirely. In a scathing opinion, the court refused to do so.

While it is couched in somewhat legalistic language, the opinion basically says that a citizen would conclude that the government is lying by changing the facts. For three and one half years, the opinion states, the government held Padilla militarily, "steadfastly maintaining that it was imperative in the interest of national security." Then, all of a sudden, the need for military custody was gone and it was fine for Padilla to be in civilian court, with lawyer and all.

"Absent explanation," Judge Luttig wrote, "our authorization of Padilla's transfer under the circumstances described and while the case is awaiting imminent consideration by the Supreme Court would serve only to compound the appearance to which the government's actions, even if wholly legitimate, have inescapably given rise."

But wait, there's more:

"As the government must surely understand, although the various facts it has asserted are not necessarily inconsistent or without basis, its actions have left not only the impression that Padilla may have been held for these years even if justifiably, by mistake – an impression we would have thought the government could ill afford to leave extant. They have left the impression that the government may even have come to the belief that the principle upon which it had detained Padilla for this time, that the President possesses the authority to detain enemy combatants who enter into this country for the purpose of attacking America and its citizens from within, can, in the end, yield to expediency with little or not cost to its conduct of the war against terror – an impression we would have thought the government likewise could ill afford to leave extant. And these impressions have been left, we fear, at what may ultimately prove to be substantial cost to the government's credibility before the courts.... While there could be an objective that could command such a price as all of this, it is difficult to imagine what that objective would be."

Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge James Robertson resigned from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, reportedly because he felt he could not trust the Government's submissions. he was a liberal, so the warbloggers say he does not count. Judge Luttig is anything but a liberal. And he does not appear to believe the President either.

The reasons are many and varied, including a corporate-owned mass media that knew a lot more than it was telling the public. But before we get to the spying and torture scandals -- and the twisted legal reasoning that Bush&Co. use to justify their violating laws whenever they feel like it -- here's my abbreviated chronological take on how we got to this awful place:

THE "OPPORTUNITY" AFFORDED BY 9/11

One could begin with the reasonable presumption that plans for various Administration moves -- taking control of oil abroad, invading Iraq, packing the courts with HardRight judges, neutering the Democratic party, etc. -- were being discussed by Bush&Co. even before the election of 2000. But so much of that was secret.

Let's start with something more public: the tragic events of 9/11. The Bush Administration may not have known the details of those terrorist attacks -- the date, time, and exact targets -- but a barrage of intelligence reports were coming into the White House in the Spring and Summer of 2001 from allies around the globe that a "spectacular" event was about to be launched by al-Qaida on the U.S. mainland.

Comment: Of course they knew! They were complicit!

In the Presidential Daily Briefing of August 6, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," Bush was told that the FBI had found evidence of "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York....CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives." (The Bush Administration apparently ignored intelligence gained after the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center indicating that the terrorists wanted to use airplanes to strike government buildings in Washington.)

Comment: Of course they ignored the PDBs and other "intelligence." Because they knew who was REALLY behind the impending attacks and they were complicit!

Given the urgent warnings from foreign governments along with this PDB, the logical, intelligent, professional thing for Bush to do would be to summon all his key military, intel and emergency-preparedness advisors and figure out how to disrupt the impending attacks. What did Bush and his colleagues do? Absolutely nothing. They chose to look the other way. Nearly three thousand innocents died.

Comment: Of course they looked the other way. Because they knew who was REALLY behind the impending attacks and they were complicit!

On the morning of the attack, what did Bush do? Absolutely nothing. He sat there with those elementary-school students, and took photos with the teacher and kids, even after his chief-of-staff whispered in his ear that the second tower had been hit and America was under attack. Normally, when there's a possible threat to the president, the Secret Service is trained to surround the guy and whisk him immediately to safety; why was no such policy followed here? Very strange indeed.

Comment: Of course they did nothing. Because they knew who was REALLY behind the impending attacks and they were complicit! Of course, we suspect that this writer KNOWS that, but is just a bit shy about coming right out and saying it. Too "fringe," ya know!

What did Rumsfeld do at the Pentagon? Absolutely nothing. He was incommunicado at a meeting in another part of the building when the Twin Towers were hit and collapsed, and when the Pentagon was struck. He emerged only after all the mass-murders had taken place.

Whether all this behavior was simply evidence of utter confusion and/or total incompetence (or, as some would have it, something more sinister) isn't clear. The point is that the Bush Administration did nothing until after the attacks had transpired.

Comment: Of course its not evidence of incompetence or confusion. The confusion was deliberately created as smoke and mirrors. Because they knew who was REALLY behind the impending attacks and they were complicit! Again, we suspect that this writer KNOWS that, but is just a bit shy about coming right out and saying it. Too "fringe," ya know!

A few days later, then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice told NSC staffers that, given 9/11, the key question now was "how do you capitalize on these opportunities" to fundamentally change American doctrine, and shape the world?..."It's important to try to seize on that and position American interests and institutions," she said.

In that sense, 9/11 was analogous to Pearl Harbor, freeing an administration to act boldly, both internally and abroad, in the face of enemy attacks. Recall the telling quotation, referring to radical military reform, from a 2000 Project for The New American Century report: '"[T]he process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor."' Note: The HardRight founders of PNAC -- among them Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Zalmay Khalilzad, et al. -- a year later became those in charge of U.S foreign/military policy.

Comment: Remember that Pearl Harbor has been revealed to have been the result of a U.S. government conspiracy: Roosevelt allowed it to happen because it served the interests of his backers. Is it likely that the Neocons, writing the above statement, would not have known that, and would not have had the same ideas themselves? And certainly, if they did not want to commit the deed themselves, they were quite setting the stage so that someone else with an equally vested interest could do so.

Shortly after 9/11, deadly anthrax spores were mailed to media outlets and to Democratic leaders of Congress, causing additional fright and panic. Nobody ever has been charged in the anthrax attacks; the spores were traced back to stock from the Army's Fort Detrick Biological Weapons Lab.

Clues, anyone???

Congress, which was shaken badly, didn't need much convincing to urgently pass the so-called USA Patriot Act, even though virtually no members had the chance to read the final version from the White House. Large sections of the Patriot Act consisted of bills introduced by HardRight conservatives over the years but which were rejected by earlier Congresses as far too violative of civil liberties. (Four years later, finally, the Senate is standing up for the Constitution, refusing to extend the worst aspects of the Patriot Act.)

Comment: We have a question for the author of this piece: NOW do you get it?

In short, 9/11 gave the Bush Administration a green light to do whatever it said was necessary to locate and destroy those responsible, and to block future terrorists from doing damage to the U.S. again.

But, as we learned years later, that wasn't all that the Bush Administration was engaged in.


THE DOMESTIC SPYING SCANDAL

The Bush crew claim that whatever seemingly shady actions they take are done to "protect Americans" from future terrorist attacks. For the sake of argument, let's assume that they are acting out of those best intentions.

Even if one were to give them the benefit of the doubt, why would they constantly and consistently find it necessary to hide and disguise what they're doing (even paying media types to publicize their spin) and to violate the law and the Constitutional protections of due process? Why wouldn't they explain what they're doing, why, and get Congress (with the GOP controlling both houses) to pass the necessary authorizing legislation? And, most importantly, why would they do everything possible to ensure that the appropriate federal courts would have no role in evaluating the legal correctness of their approach? I'll provide an answer below, but first consider:

Bush ordered the NSA to begin secret domestic spying, even though the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act restricts the NSA to spying abroad, except in certain circumstances when the FISA court can OK a wiretap or whatever. With Bush's secret order in hand, and the court in the dark, the NSA could forget about seeking warrants for phone-taps, computer invasions, email readings, and who knows what else (breaking&entering? sneak&peek black-bag jobs?).

Alberto Gonzales, the Bush toady who then was White House Counsel (now Attorney General), devised a legal philosophy claiming that the President is permitted to violate laws whenever he asserts he's acting as "commander-in-chief" in "wartime." Since Bush unilaterally has declared that the U.S. is at "war" -- a war with no foreseeable end against terrorists -- he feels he's home free to do whatever he feels is required. (For more on this legal mumbo-jumbo, see "No Other Way to Say This: Torture Memos Reveal Fascist Mentality."

So far as is known, the memos establishing this authoritarian legal strategy are still operative; indeed, Bush used the "commander-in-chief" rationale in his most recent radio address and news conference when attempting to justify his ordering the NSA to spy inside the country. To "protect the American people," Bush effectively said, I did it, I'll do it again, what are you going to do about it? Gonzales likewise is pounding the theme that the president is acting legally when acting illegally. (When Richard Nixon tried to sell the president-is-above-the-law justification, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed that argument quickly.)


"WE DON'T TORTURE" RE-DEFINED

Similarly, to get around U.S. laws and international treaties against torture, Gonzales and Rumsfeld's lawyers at the Pentagon, simply redefined torture to mean causing either death or organ-failure; anything else, including "waterboarding" (near-drowning) and beatings and shootings, pass the test. So, follow the reasoning here: If the interrogation doesn't kill the prisoner or result in organ-failure, ipso facto it's not "torture," and Bush and Rice and the others can baldly assert that "we don't torture." (They have yet to explain the estimated 100 or more deaths of detainees in U.S. care. Oops.)

Uncooperative high-value detainees are either spirited to secret CIA prisons around the globe for interrogation -- in Poland, Romania, North Africa, etc. -- or are "rendered" to countries (Egypt being one) that are less squeamish about inflicting excruciating pain. The CIA even has its own planes to fly those suspects to the secret CIA prisons or to the "rendering" countries.

One could go on and on, but you get the central idea: The Bush Administration believes itself to be, and acts in accordance with that belief, that it is above the law, untouchable. By any definition, that is a dictatorship -- maybe not a total dictatorship, yet, but heading full-steam in that direction.

And they're willing to draw the line in the political sand right now, making their stand in the face of a tidal-wave of revulsion and anger, probably because they figure Karl Rove's in-your-face approach -- come and get me, copper! -- has worked in the past, so why not one more time? Besides, they may figure that things are going to get worse for them months down the line, when even more Republicans will desert them, so why not try to stanch the flow of impeachment talk now, while they still can call in their markers from the GOP faithful in Congress.


IT'S THE P.N.A.C. PLAYBOOK

This bullying, take-no-prisoners attitude, it should be noted, mirrors the philosophy behind the brazen foreign/military policy laid out by PNAC in 2000 and which became the official National Security Strategy of the United States two years later: acting unilaterally, courting no competitors for power, steamrolling and destroying opposition by any and all means necessary.

From this point of view, there can be only one locus of power in America: The Chief Executive. The time-honored "checks and balances" between the three branches of government, under Bush&Co., are no longer valid -- they're sort of "quaint," to borrow Gonzales' term about the Geneva Conventions.

The Judicial Branch is either frozen out of the equation where possible, or packed with like-minded HardRight ideologues who believe in Executive dominance. The Legislative branch is run pretty much by the GOP leadership as an appendage to the White House's political agenda, with the Democrats (made to seem "unpatriotic" if they question Bush's war and torture policies and the like) shuffled off into a backwater, with no real power or influence. The corporate-owned mainstream media, the Fourth Estate, which normally would be the public's watchdog over legislative and executive perfidy, seems content to play lapdog instead.


AN END-AROUND THE JUDICIARY

On those rare occasions when the Judicial and/or Legislative branches stand up and assert their rightful place in the checks-and-balance system of government, the Bush Administration finds ways to go around whatever restrictions are placed on Executive power. Let's take three recent examples:

1. After 9/11, the Bush Administration, exercising what amounts to police-state powers, began rounding up terrorist suspects -- including American citizens -- and throwing them in prisons without recourse to any judicial review, or even contact with an attorney. Several years later, the U.S. Supreme Court finally received a case about such authoritarian treatment of detainees, and ordered the Administration to grant the prisoners access to the court system where they could challenge the legality of their incarceration.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was as blunt about the Administration's illegal misbehavior as could be imagined -- and she's a staunch conservative: The court, she wrote in reference to American citizen Yaser Hamdi, '''made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens."'

The response of the Bush Administration to the detainee decision was, in effect, to ignore the court's order. Promises were made, some papers were shuffled, etc., but in practice not much changed. Some prisoners, who had been imprisoned for several years ("the worst of the worst," we were assured when they were first incarcerated), were released as not being threats after all. Few have had their day in court in Bush's military tribunals, and attorneys furnished them by the Administration have denounced the process as pretty much of a fixed farce. Lower courts, packed with Bush appointees, have been supportive, and the Administration is hoping that with two new justices appointed to the Supreme Court -- who will support wide-sweeping Executive power during "wartime" -- the original Hamdi ruling will be overturned. If that were to happen, fascism would have come full flower in America.


THE TORTURE ESCAPE HATCHES

2. Last week, facing rebellion in his own GOP ranks and a united Democratic opposition, Bush seemed to cave on the McCain Amendment that would put the U.S. officially on record as not permitting torture to be carried out on prisoners in U.S. care. Politically it was, on the surface, a major humiliation for Bush, who had vigorously opposed the McCain Amendment and threatened to veto any legislation to which it was attached.

McCain came off looking good, but, in reality, he'd been outmaneuvered by Rove, Cheney and Rumsfeld.

Bush agreed to McCain's language because that trio already had neutered the impact of the amendment. They were able to carve out enough legalistic wiggle room to permit the continuation of torture, without much fear of political or judicial retribution.

For example, those who reasonably believe they are following lawful orders would be permitted to continue their "enhanced" interrogation methods. (It's the old "I was only following orders" ploy -- a defense used by Nazi war-criminals that was disallowed at the Nuremburg Tribunals.)

Note that the McCain amendment said nothing about the ongoing practice of "extraordinary renditions" to countries allied with the U.S. where tortures of high-level suspects are carried out for the Bush Administration.

3. Finally, McCain and others tied their ban-on-torture amendment to the well-respected Army Field Manual that carefully defines what constitutes acceptable (and successful) interrogation methods and what would go over the line into abuse and torture. Pulling the rug out from under McCain, Rumsfeld simply had the Army Field Manual rewritten to permit "harsh" interrogation methods -- and stamped the descriptions of what is now permissible with a "classified" label, to prohibit quoting from them. (An unnamed Pentagon official suggested that the alteration of the Field Manual was designed to be "a stick in McCain's eye.")

As in all things, he who controls the dictionary controls the world. Torture now means what the Bush Administration says it means, so there -- unless enough ruckus can be generated to get them to back off. (Assistant Defense Secretary Stephen Cambone still has to approve the final Field Manual language.)

In short, thanks to Bush & Friends, U.S. torture is alive and well, despite the reasonable words that appear on a no-torture amendment overwhelmingly ratified by Congress. Needless to say, the Bush Administration's torture practices are the best recruiting tool for Muslim extremists, doing great damage to America's long-term national security.


IMPEACHMENT AS AN URGENT NECESSITY

Momentum is moving against the Bush Administration as more and more indictments are delivered against key aides and supporters in the innumerable scandals. (You may wonder why so few Democrats are being indicted. Early on, Bush&Co. made sure that the Democrats were frozen out of the power loop, therefore the big-money lobbyists and bribers went to the locus of power -- i.e., to the Republicans.)

Since we don't have official "votes of no-confidence" in our system of government, electorally we have to wait until November 2006 to get the Republicans out of power in the House so that impeachment hearings can begin, and in the Senate, so that a possible conviction can be obtained. (All this pre-supposes that we finally get an honest, verified voting system in place, with no more outsourcing of vote-counting to partisan corporations, in this case Republican-supporting, who use secret coding and who easily can manipulate the tally-results.)

But non-electoral solutions are available:

* So much citizen pressure could be put on Democratic and Republican incumbents, anxious to preserve their jobs, that they will vote to initiate impeachment hearings in the next few months.

Certainly, there are enough grounds to justify, at the least, calling for impeachment hearings in the House: the felonious outing by Administration officials of a CIA agent for political reasons, Bush's unlawful order to the NSA to spy on U.S. citizens inside the country, commiting perjury before Congress to obtain authorization for war on Iraq -- well, those will do for starters. There are no shortages of willful "high crimes and misdemeanors" in Bushland.

* Or, another option, perhaps a bit more fanciful at the moment, though perhaps more realistic next year: Republican corporate and political leaders will see the handwriting on the wall -- and the long-term effects on the economy of keeping the disgraced, corrupt Bush regime in power -- and urge Bush and Cheney to resign, for the good of the party and the country.

So our job now, as I see it, is first to supply energy and political cover to the Democrats, Independents and traditional Republicans who want to see the reckless reign of Bush&Co. ended, while we're moving the impeachment ball forward day by day by leaning on our opinion-makers and elected officials to start the process of transformation back to a government of which we can once again be proud.

If this takes massive civil disobedience to convince the elected officials that the citizenry is serious, and that they may be ousted at the ballot box if they don't challenge Bush's crimes, so be it. It's time to move; America can't take much more.


Copyright 2005 by Bernard Weiner

Republican leaders and Bush wanted to make most of the law permanent, but were stymied by a filibuster in the Senate and had to resort to a six-month extension.

"This will allow more time to finally agree on a bill that protects our rights and freedoms while preserving important tools for fighting terrorism," said Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., who was the only senator to vote against the original Patriot Act in 2001.

(AP) Senate Judiciary chairman Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., smiles iduring an nterviewe by the Associated...
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House and Senate negotiators had agreed to compromise legislation that would have made most of the anti-terrorism law permanent and added additional safeguards to the law. But Senate Democrats and a small group of GOP senators blocked the legislation, arguing that the compromise needed more safeguards in it to protect Americans' civil liberties.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said he had no choice but to accept a six-month extension in the face of a successful filibuster and the Patriot Act's Dec. 31 expiration date. "I'm not going to let the Patriot Act die," Frist said.

Bush indicated that he would sign the extension. "The work of Congress on the Patriot Act is not finished," Bush said. "The act will expire next summer, but the terrorist threat to America will not expire on that schedule. I look forward to continuing to work with Congress to reauthorize the Patriot Act."

Frist said he had not consulted with House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., yet on the six-month extension. Senior Republicans there have opposed any temporary extension of the current law, insisting that most of the expiring provisions should be renewed permanently, but it would be difficult for the House to reject a plan agreed to by the Senate and President Bush.

The six-month "extension ensures that the tools provided to law enforcement in terrorist investigations in the Patriot Act remain in effect while Congress works out the few differences that remain," said Sen. John Sununu, R-N.H., one of a small group of Republicans who crossed party lines to block the Patriot Act legislation.

(AP) Senate Judiciary chairman Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., is interviewed by the Associated Press in his...
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Republicans who had pushed for legislation that would make most of the expiring provisions permanent said the agreement only postpones the ongoing arguments over the Patriot Act for six months. "We'll be right back where we are right now," said a clearly frustrated Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, added, "Our intelligence and law enforcement officials should not be left wondering, yet again, whether the Congress will manage to agree to reauthorize the tools that protect our nation."

Most of the Patriot Act - which expanded the government's surveillance and prosecutorial powers against suspected terrorists, their associates and financiers - was made permanent when Congress overwhelmingly passed it after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington.

Making permanent the rest of the Patriot Act powers, like the roving wiretaps which allow investigators to listen in on any telephone and tap any computer they think a target might use, has been a priority of the Bush administration and Republican lawmakers.

If Congress fails to renew 16 expiring provisions of the USA Patriot Act by Dec. 31, America will be less safe, Gonzales and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff warned. Chertoff said every morning he reviews threat information against the United States and lies awake at night worrying about "what's coming next."

Comment: Yeah, right. That fake intelligence the administration creates can be terrifying! Are you scared yet?

"The threat is still very much alive," Chertoff said, referring to terror groups that want to strike the United States.

The Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs earlier heard submissions from the Mid-West Alliance against the War which claimed Shannon Airport was facilitating the stopover of CIA military planes carrying prisoners en route to alleged torture camps elsewhere.

Mr Norris told the committee: "There is now speculation that the CIA is using Baldonnel for these rendition flights and that the Department of Defence is sending bills for the fuel to CIA shadow companies at post office box numbers in Central Africa.

"This is the extent to which our involvement is mired further in this appalling filth."

Mr Norris said Mr Bush and Ms Rice has misled the public on the rendition flights issue.

"George Bush and Condleeza Rice are confirmed, consistent and deliberate liars. They have lied and we know this perfectly well."

Seanad leader Mary O'Rourke said: "There have been incidents of which we would not be proud as a country. The democratic process benefits from people questioning things. We're not all cloned dolly sheep bobbing our heads up and down."

The US Ambassador has been invited to appear before the committee, but Senator O'Rourke said she expected him to attend.

"He's an employee of the State Department and he takes his orders and does his job," she said.

Greens chairman John Gormley said George Bush was a puppet of a neo-conservative troupe in the White House.

"The war is continuing in Iraq with horrendous casualties, mostly the citizens of that country," he said.

Senator Pascal Mooney said the removal of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was a good thing and he pointed to the 80% voter turnout for the recent democratic elections in the country.

An agreement could be reached quickly, as early as "the beginning of next week," though the person cautioned that unspecified issues remain to be worked out.

The New York Times first reported on the talks Tuesday night in a story its Web site.

Abramoff's attorney, Abbe Lowell, declined to comment, as did Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrakasse.

Talks have been going on "a long time, months," but only in the past week or so have they come "close to any kind of fruition," the person said.

A former aide to ex-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, has already pleaded guilty in the probe.

Court papers in the plea by former DeLay aide Michael Scanlon say Scanlon and Abramoff "provided a stream of things of value to public officials in exchange for a series of official acts."

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The court papers referred repeatedly to one of the officials as Representative No. 1, acknowledged by his lawyer to be Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio. Both Ney and his lawyer deny wrongdoing.

Recently, members of Congress who accepted campaign donations from Abramoff's clients have begun returning the money as the investigation ratchets up in intensity.

Among those returning the most money is Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., for an estimated $150,000.

The items included travel, golf fees, frequent meals, entertainment, campaign donations, election support for candidates and employment for officials and their relatives.

The official acts included agreements to support and pass legislation, agreements to place statements in the Congressional Record, agreements to contact officials at executive branch agencies to influence agency decisions, meeting with clients of Abramoff and Scanlong and awarding contracts.

Abramoff has not been charged in the corruption investigation.

Abramoff and Scanlon collected over $80 million from Indian tribes to lobby Congress on casino gambling and other issues.

In the Florida case, Abramoff is scheduled to go on trial Jan. 9. He and a former business partner were indicted last summer on charges of conspiracy and fraud. They allegedly concocted a fake $23 million wire transfer to make it appear they were putting a significant portion of their own money in the 2000 purchase of a fleet of gambling boats.

The ex-business partner, Adam Kidan, pleaded guilty last week and agreed to testify against Abramoff, putting pressure on the Washington lobbyist to reach a settlement to reduce any potential prison term.

The Abramoff affair first hit the headlines last year, with the revelation that Mr Abramoff and his partner Michael Scanlon bilked Indian tribes out of more than $80m as they lobbied in Washington to promote the tribes' casino gambling interests.

Since then, Mr Scanlon and another associate of Mr Abramoff have struck plea bargains, placing intense pressure on the latter to do likewise to save his own skin. Mr Abramoff would give the authorities details of contributions and gifts dispensed to members of Congress and their families.

The upshot could be a major political scandal that would further besmirch the reputation of Congress, at a time when its standing is at a low with the public. It would turn a spotlight on ties between the legislature and lobbyists that are incestuous, verging on corrupt.

One Republican Congressman, Robert Ney of Ohio, has already been told by prosecutors that he could face bribery charges over actions on Capitol Hill in favour of Mr Abramoff's clients. Some Democrats are said to be involved as well, and law makers of both parties have scrambled to repay previous contributions from the lobbyist.

Mr Abramoff used his links with prominent Republicans to become one of the capital's most influential and wealthiest lobbyists after the Republicans took control of Congress in 1994. He is now a pariah, and claims to be all but broke.

Abramoff’s White House guests were the chiefs of two of the six casino-rich Indian tribes he and his partner Mike Scanlon ultimately billed $82 million for services tribal leaders now claim were never performed or were improperly performed. Together the six tribes would make $10 million in political contributions, at Abramoff’s direction, almost all of it to Republican campaigns of his choosing.

On May 9, 2001, when he ushered the two tribal chiefs into the White House to meet the President, The Washington Post story that would end his lobbying career and begin two Senate Committee investigations was three years away. (When the Post story broke in February 2004, however, Abramoff and Scanlon, a former Tom DeLay press aide, were already targets of a U.S. Attorney’s investigation in Washington.)

Abramoff brought the Coushatta and Choctaw chiefs to Washington at the request of Grover Norquist. Norquist is founder and director of Americans for Tax Reform, the advocacy group committed to slashing taxes until the federal government is so small you “can drown it in the bathtub.” Norquist started ATR in 1985. His power increased exponentially in 1994, when Republicans took control of the House of Representatives and he collaborated with then-Majority Whip Tom DeLay to launch the “K Street Project”—a coordinated campaign to compel lobbyists to contribute only to Republican candidates and ultimately to hire only Republicans. Like Abramoff and Rove, Norquist considered George Bush’s victory over Al Gore the culmination of a project the three Washington insiders started 30 years ago as national leaders of the College Republicans.

Since the Post’s Susan Schmidt broke the Jack Abramoff story, the media has focused on the stunning $82 million Abramoff and Scanlon billed six tribes for lobbying and public relations work. Far less attention has been paid to the political contributions, by Abramoff’s account $10 million, made by the six tribes. That piece of the story involves the K Street Project, which moves the money of corporate lobbyists and their clients into the accounts of Republican candidates, PACs, and issue advocacy groups.

Republican Campaign Accounts
Abramoff advised tribal leaders that the contributions were the cost of doing business in Washington, where he could protect them from other tribes trying to open casinos to compete with those that already had them. He sent orders for the checks to be cut, designating each recipient. On March 6, 2002, for example, Coushatta Tribal Council Chair Lovelin Poncho followed Abramoff’s orders and disbursed $336,300 in tribal funds, according to tribal accounting ledgers obtained by the Observer.

The Coushattas, a southwest Louisiana tribe of 837 members, operate a casino that does an estimated $300 million in annual business. The $32 million they paid Abramoff and Scanlon makes the tribe the largest victim of the fraud their lawyers now allege in a lawsuit filed by Texas plaintiff’s firm Provost Umphrey. The tribe also contributed what tribal council member David Sickey said was probably “many millions” of dollars to political causes and charities designated by Abramoff.

Since we first reported the White House ATR fundraiser and the $1 million contribution to the Capital Athletic Foundation (see “K Street Croupiers,” November 19, 2004), the Coushattas, speaking through Austin attorneys at Hance, Scarborough, Wright, Ginsburg & Brusilow, and through Louisiana political consultant Roy Fletcher, have vociferously denied that tribal Chairman Poncho visited the White House after contributing $25,000 to ATR. They also denied the $1 million contribution to Abramoff’s foundation. Recently the story has changed. Or at least the version told by the majority that controls the council has begun to change. Two minority members of the five-seat council have pointed to the pay-to-play meeting with President Bush and the $1 million contribution to Abramoff as examples of the council’s financial mismanagement. One of the two members of the minority faction, David Sickey, has regularly made himself available to the press. Normally, press inquiries to the council majority are answered by Hance Scarborough, by Roy Fletcher, or occasionally by sources close to the council majority.

According to a source close to the tribal majority, Chairman Poncho recently “revisited that issue” of his visit to the White House. He had previously denied it because he thought he was responding to press inquiries that implied he had a one-on-one meeting with Bush. He now recalls that he in fact did go to the White House on May 9, 2001. Tribal attorney Kathryn Fowler Van Hoof went with him, although she did not get into the meeting with the President. That meeting lasted for about 15 minutes and was not a one-on-one meeting. At the meeting, Bush made some general comments about Indian policy but did not discuss Indian gaming. Abramoff was at the meeting—for which he charged the Coushatta Tribe $25,000. The change in Poncho’s position is odd in light of the fact that he and his spokespersons have maintained for more than a year that he did not meet with President Bush in May 2001.

Norquist has not responded to inquiries about using the White House as a fundraiser. It is, however, a regular ATR practice to invite state legislators and tribal leaders who have supported ATR anti-tax initiatives to the White House for a personal thank-you from the President. A source at ATR said no money is ever accepted from participants in these events. The $25,000 check from the Coushattas suggests that, at least in this instance, Norquist’s organization made an exception. The $75,000 collected from the Mississippi Choctaws and two corporate sponsors mentioned in Abramoff’s e-mail suggests there were other exceptions. Norquist recently wrote to the tribes who paid to attend White House meetings. His story regarding that event is also evolving. The contributions, he told tribal leaders in letters that went out in May, were in no way related to any White House event. That doesn’t square with the paper trail Abramoff and Norquist left behind, which makes it evident that they were selling access to the President.

The Coushatta Tribal Council majority has also revised its response to questions about the $1 million contribution, which critics in the tribe have insisted was made to Abramoff’s Capital Athletic Foundation in 2001. The foundation funded Abramoff’s Jewish prep school in Bethesda, MD, which closed soon after his lobbying scheme unraveled. When the Observer inquired in November 2004 about the $1 million contribution, we had obtained a copy of the Capital Athletic Foundation’s tax filing, but the contributor’s name was redacted. Following the lead of Lake Charles, Louisiana, American Press reporter Shawn Martin, the Observer last week obtained an un-redacted copy. The $1 million contribution, roughly 95 percent of what the foundation raised in 2001, was attributed to the Coushatta Tribe. A source working with the Coushatta Tribal Council majority said it now appears that the contribution was made in response to a bill sent by Mike Scanlon. Accountants working under the direction of Hance Scarborough found a $1-million Greenberg Traurig invoice that Scanlon sent the tribe. Scanlon routinely sent un-itemized bills for larger sums, which the tribe routinely paid. But as he was not a Greenberg Traurig employee, he billed on his own Capitol Campaign Strategies invoices. On the $1 million Greenberg Traurig invoice Scanlon sent the tribe in 2001, the company name was misspelled.

There will need to be more accounting, probably by different accountants. And perhaps by different legal representation, or at least under a different understanding between the tribe and its lawyers. In the May 28 tribal election on the Elton, LA reservation, a reform slate won a majority on the five-member council. Sickey, who five days before the election maintained that the $1 million contribution was made and that tribal chair Poncho indeed went to the White House in 2001, predicted the new majority will hire forensic accountants to determine where all the money went. (A week before the election he was looking for a tribal newsletter in which, he said, Poncho described his 2001 White House visit.) The shift on the council does not bode well for its Austin law firm. Hance Scarborough had gone to tribal court and successfully blocked a recall election that would have forced the council majority to stand for election a year ago, and David Sickey was a proponent of the recall. “Kent Hance doesn’t represent me or [the other minority dissident] Harold John,” said Sickey. “He represents Lovelin Poncho.”

The White House press office has not responded to our questions about other visits Jack Abramoff might have made to the White House or about Norquist using the official residence of the President to raise funds for Americans for Tax Reform. None of the political contributions Abramoff insisted the tribes make as yet have been returned.

Lou Dubose is a former Observer editor and co-author of The Hammer: Tom DeLay, God, Money and the Rise of the Republican Congress. This story was written with support from the Fund for Constitutional Government.

Abramoff, 46, is under investigation by a Justice Department-led task force; he has already been indicted in Florida in a separate case involving the purchase of a casino boat company.

Abramoff is talking with prosecutors about providing testimony against former political and business associates in exchange for a reduced sentence, the New York Times reported today, citing unidentified people with knowledge of the case.

`Glass Houses'

The National Republican Senatorial Committee has set up a Web page, dubbed ``Glass Houses,'' featuring pictures of Democratic senators and a tally of funds they took from Abramoff or his associates.

In the last week, two Democrats have said they're returning donations from Indian tribes represented by Abramoff and from his associates. Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota -- the top Democrat on a committee investigating the lobbyist -- gave back $67,000. Senator Max Baucus of Montana is returning $18,893.

Mostly Republicans

Between 2001 and 2004, Abramoff joined with his former partner, Michael Scanlon, and tribal clients to give money to a third of the members of Congress, including former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, according to records of the Federal Election Commission and Internal Revenue Service. At least 171 lawmakers got $1.4 million in campaign donations from the group. Republicans took in most of the money, with 110 lawmakers getting $942,275, or 66 percent of the total.

Of the top 10 political donors among Indian tribes in that period, three are former clients of Abramoff and Scanlon: the Saginaw Chippewa Tribe of Michigan, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, and the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians of California. All three gave most of their donations to Republicans -- by margins of 30 percentage points or more -- while the rest favored Democrats.

Abramoff faces allegations that he bilked the casino-owning tribes out of millions of dollars and attempted to corrupt public officials. E-mails released by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee during a year of hearings offer evidence that he directed the tribes to donate funds to specific lawmakers.

Continued to Give

Abramoff's tribal clients continued to give money to Democrats even after he began representing them, although in smaller percentages than in the past.

The Saginaw Chippewas gave $500,500 to Republicans between 2001 and 2004 and $277,210 to Democrats, according to a review of data compiled by Dwight L. Morris & Associates, a Bristow, Virginia-based company that tracks campaign-finance reports. Between 1997 and 2000, the tribe gave just $158,000 to Republicans and $279,000 to Democrats.

The Republican senatorial committee is sending information out to state campaigns and to all Republican press secretaries on Capitol Hill about the Democrat-Abramoff connections, spokesman Brian Nick said. The cover sheet asks, ``They Don't Know Jack???'' in red ink and features a picture of Abramoff surrounded by Democrats including Dorgan and Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

Reid's Response

Reid spokeswoman Tessa Hafen said the senator is still considering whether to return the $60,000 in donations he received from Abramoff associates and clients. The money includes contributions that came from Abramoff's former employer, Greenberg Traurig LLP, a lobbying and law firm with multiple issues in Congress.

Bush, in the Fox News interview, said of Abramoff: ``It seems to me that he was an equal money dispenser, that he was giving money to people in both political parties.''

White House spokeswoman Erin Healy said yesterday that Bush was making the point that Abramoff's links weren't exclusively Republican. ``The president was referring to press reports showing Mr. Abramoff, his clients and associates have contributed to both Democrats and Republicans alike,'' Healy said.

``Republicans are bending over backwards to exaggerate the links'' between Democrats and Abramoff, said Phil Singer, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. ``This is a Republican scandal that involves Republican lawmakers doing favors for a Republican lobbyist.''

`Representative No. 1'

Scanlon, Abramoff's former partner, has pleaded guilty to attempted fraud and corruption of public officials and is cooperating with the Justice Department's investigation. His plea agreement refers to efforts to corrupt U.S. lawmakers, including a ``Representative No. 1,'' identified by lawyers in the case as Ohio Republican Robert Ney.

The other names most frequently mentioned in connection with Abramoff are both Republicans: DeLay, a one-time friend who has cut off contact with the lobbyist, and Senator Conrad Burns of Montana. Burns, who is facing criticism in his home state for being the top recipient of Abramoff-related donations, said on Dec. 16 he planned to give back to the tribes about $150,000 in contributions from Abramoff, his associates and tribal clients.

In the Florida case, in which Abramoff has already been indicted, prosecutors allege that he and partner Adam Kidan conspired to defraud lenders when buying SunCruz Casino Ltd. in 2000. Kidan pleaded guilty Dec. 15, and his lawyer said he's willing to testify against Abramoff.

The extension gives critics — who successfully filibustered a House-Senate compromise that would have made most of the law permanent — more time to seek civil liberty safeguards in the law. Democrats and their allies had originally asked for a three-month extension, and the Senate's Republican majority had offered a one-year extension. The final deal split the difference.

"For a lot of reasons, it made the most sense, given that there are significant differences that remain," said GOP Sen. John Sununu of New Hampshire, one of a small group of Republicans who joined with Senate Democrats to filibuster a House-Senate compromise.

"I think this is a reasonable conclusion," said Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Republicans who had pushed for legislation that would make most of the expiring provisions permanent said the agreement only postpones the ongoing arguments over the Patriot Act for six months. "We'll be right back where we are right now," said a clearly frustrated Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, added, "Our intelligence and law enforcement officials should not be left wondering, yet again, whether the Congress will manage to agree to reauthorize the tools that protect our nation."

The bill's critics gained momentum Wednesday when they released a letter crafted by Sununu and Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., showing they had 52 senators agreeing to support a three-month extension.

"This is the right thing to do for the country," Schumer said after the deal had been announced. "To let the Patriot Act lapse would have been a dereliction of duty."

President Bush, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Republican congressional leaders lobbied fiercely to get the House-Senate compromise passed, and issued dire warnings of what would happen if the Patriot Act expired.

Despite the president's push to renew key elements of the law, many remain concerned with privacy issues (video), reports CBS News White House correspondent John Roberts.

Most of the Patriot Act — which expanded the government's surveillance and prosecutorial powers against suspected terrorists, their associates and financiers — was made permanent when Congress overwhelmingly passed it after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington.

Making permanent the rest of the Patriot Act powers, like the roving wiretaps which allow investigators to listen in on any telephone and tap any computer they think a target might use, has been a priority of the Bush administration and Republican lawmakers.

The battle capped off a bitter day on Capitol Hill, during which lawmakers squabbled over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and budget cuts.

CBS News political analyst Craig Crawford says both sides can claim victories, but only in smaller battles.

"I would say Republicans are getting some of their agenda through," Crawford says, "but they've left an awful lot on the table, going into an election year.

"I would say the Democrats are the winner, except Democrats lack two things: a voice and a message. They have a lot to gain from the Republican in fighting, but Democrats have a long way to go to get some personalities out there on the national stage who articulate a consistent agenda."

Hamas has claimed responsibility for many deadly suicide bombing attacks over the last few years that have left hundreds of Israelis dead and wounded. The group also calls for the destruction of the State of Israel.

At a press conference in Jerusalem's Old City on Wednesday, Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah delivered his annual Christmas message and told reporters that the policies of President Bush were to blame for the militant group's increasing popularity.

"Hamas is getting more and more power thanks to the Bush administration's interventions," said Sabbah.

Washington said Hamas participation was an internal Palestinian affair, but the House of Representatives last week passed a resolution calling for the P.A. to ban Hamas participation unless the group renounces violence. The resolution threatened to cut U.S. funding to the P.A. if Hamas wins in parliament.

Sabbah, who is Palestinian, delivers similar messages every year, putting the onus on Israel to make peace with the Palestinians.

This year, Sabbah said, P.A. Chairman Mahmoud Abbas had decided against violence and succeeded to calm down Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Israel was therefore responsible for continuing violence, because it had continued to arrest Palestinians and take other measures against them.

Sabbah refused to comment on the suicide bomb attack at a mall in the Israeli seaside city of Netanya several weeks ago.

In response, Sharon's spokesman Dr. Ra'anan Gissin said that the reason there is less violence is because of Israeli arrests of Palestinian terrorists.

Without the arrests and other counter-terrorism measures, Gissin said, there would be attacks every day. There are 10 ongoing alerts for possible suicide bombings at present, he said.

Hamas has not decreased its terror activity, said Gissin. It is using other groups as a "front" for its terror activity until after Palestinian elections, he said.

Election row

Abbas is under increasing and opposing pressure from within his Fatah faction to postpone the upcoming elections for fear of Hamas gains and from the international community to hold the elections on time in a democratic manner.

Palestinian Information Minister Nabil Shaath said earlier that there would be no elections if the Palestinians could not vote in Jerusalem. If the international community would not pressure Israel to reconsider, he said, there would be no elections.

Jerusalem is one of the thorniest issues dividing Israel and the Palestinians.

Israel reunited Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day war and later annexed the eastern part of the city where some 200,000 Palestinians live. Most foreign governments never recognized Israeli sovereignty over the city.

Israel considers the city its eternal, indivisible capital. The Palestinians hope to make East Jerusalem the capital of a future Palestinian state.

Israel said on Wednesday that it was not obligated to allow Palestinians to vote in Jerusalem as it had in the past.

"Israel is not required to provide access or conduct [elections] in East Jerusalem," said Gissin. "It's against the law. It's [Israel's] sovereign capital."

According to signed agreements, the P.A. is not allowed to engage in political activity in Jerusalem, said Gissin, although there were years during the 1990s when Israel turned a blind eye to such activity.

In general elections in 1996 and presidential elections in 2005 Israel allowed Palestinians to cast their ballots at post offices in East Jerusalem or travel to polling stations in nearby West Bank towns.

But Gissin said those two cases were exceptions in "very specific circumstances." Allowing the Palestinians to vote there now would "enable a terrorist organization to scuttle the whole political process," he said.

"The organization wants to use the democratic political process to destroy the State of Israel," said Gissin.

Reserve Brig.-Gen. Shalom Harari said earlier that the P.A. had already been looking for a way to postpone the elections and the P.A. might use the issue of the Jerusalem polls to delay the vote and throw the blame on Israel.

Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman met with Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz on Wednesday and said that the P.A. elections should go ahead as planned. Suleiman was instrumental in negotiating a deal between the P.A. and militant groups for a period of calm to last until the January elections.

On the first, consider this example: The National Security Agency, while legally monitoring international communications from a laptop computer or cell phone of an al Qaeda operative in the Middle East, detects that the terrorist has not only been in contact with persons in, say, Frankfort and Amman _ but also Chicago.

Common sense tells us we must begin monitoring (see also: spying on) the Chicago operative's communications to prevent a terrorist strike. Yet, under normal conditions, U.S. law allows the NSA to monitor only international communications, not domestic ones.

But there is good news: The 1979 Foreign Intelligence Security Act ("FISA," in Washingtonspeak) already allows precisely what Bush wants. The president can order instant monitoring of that Chicago operative for 72 hours _ during which he can ask a special, secret FISA Court to grant a warrant for continued surveillance.

Here the good news gets better: The secret FISA Court is as close to a judicial rubber stamp as a president can conjure in his fondest power-dream. According to the FISA Court's statistics, from 1979 through 2004, the secret court approved 18,742 applications and denied just four (all in 2003, none of which were appealed by the government).

But these legal avenues were rejected by a new liberal activism that has surfaced from a most surprising source and threatens America's democratic uniqueness. It is the sort of liberal activism that normally would unleash the wrath of conservative strict constructionists, because it stretches the Constitution, current laws and legal interpretations beyond anything intended by our founding fathers.

But strict conservatives are in a quandary, because this liberal activism was initiated by Bush. For reasons he has never explained, the president chose to ignore the legal path provided by the FISA law and bypassed the courts in unilaterally deciding which American citizens or residents can be spied upon by the government without a court warrant.

Bush says he can do this under his constitutional power as commander-in-chief and also according to the congressional resolution after 9/11 that authorized him to use all necessary force to prevent acts of terrorism against the United States. He said he has repeatedly reviewed and extended his approvals to spy inside the United States in the four years since. Which, of course, means he had time to obey and use the FISA law instead of bending, stretching and ignoring the legal prohibitions on government surveillance without a court warrant.

This controversy points up a bizarre and philosophically contradictory pattern that has occurred when staunch conservatives inhabit the Oval Office. Conservative presidents _ when stymied by laws preventing them from actions they believe in their hearts is right _ turn liberal. They jettison their strict constructionist principles. They liberally interpret their powers in ways conservatives always claimed liberal presidents did.

That is what President Reagan did in his Iran-Contra scandal. He liberally interpreted his powers, claiming the right to bypass congressional prohibitions on providing aid to Nicaragua's contra rebels. He sold weapons to Iran's ayatollah and secretly funneled Iran's anti-American money to Nicaragua's anti-communist contras.

Now another conservative has turned liberal: Bush stretched his executive powers in a way that surely has sent Jefferson, Madison and Barry Goldwater whirling in their places of what should have been final rest.

Philosophic conservatives, being strict constructionists, know that Bush's rationale is liberal, loose and wrong. Conservative Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who was cited for his clear thinking here just a week ago, was right yet again last Sunday. "We can't become an outcome-based democracy," Graham said on CBS News' Face the Nation. "Even in a time of war, you have to follow the process, because that's what a democracy is all about... So you cannot give any executive, Republican or Democrat, the ability to make findings to set aside statutes that exist or play the role of a court...."

Graham's bottom line is both conservative and right: "We have to resolve this issue to build confidence in the American people that we're a nation of laws, not outcomes."

(Martin Schram writes political analysis for Scripps Howard News Service. E-mail him at martin.schram(at)gmail.com.)

Bush's executive order, which he has renewed more than 30 times in the past four years, violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The FISA, which was passed by Congress after Richard Nixon used the nation's intelligence services to spy on his political enemies, requires the government to get a warrant from a special court, the FISC, before it can use shadowy organizations such as the National Security Agency to spy on Americans. The evidentiary standards for obtaining such warrants are low, and indeed the government has an almost unbroken record of success before the FISC.

Furthermore, the FISA provides that in appropriate circumstances the government can proceed with surveillance immediately, as long as it obtains a warrant within 72 hours after the spying begins. In his radio address, Bush claimed he had only authorized spying "to intercept the communications of people with known links to Al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations." If this is true, it's difficult to imagine an FISC court refusing to grant a warrant. And of course it's easy to imagine what sort of spying a president might want to order that wouldn't be approved by a court.

According to the New York Times, approximately 500 people are being spied on at any one time under what was known within the White House as "the president's program." Since people move on and off the list it's possible that thousands of Americans have been spied on by the Bush administration since the program began.

Bush, of course, insists that what he's doing isn't illegal. Yet neither he nor anyone else in the government has explained where he gets the authority to ignore a federal statute. The reason is simple: either he has no such authority, or that authority comes from an extraordinarily expansive interpretation of the president's constitutional powers.

That interpretation can be found in various memos and legal briefs authored by administration officials. For example, these officials have argued that, in least of time of war, the Constitution "vests in the President an unenumerated Executive power. The Commander in Chief power and the President's obligation to protect the Nation imply the ancillary powers necessary to their successful exercise."

Translation: when we are at war _ or to be precise, when the president says we are at war _ the Constitution allows the president to ignore any law that in his opinion interferes with the war effort. (Incredibly, the administration is arguing that the congressional resolution passed immediately after 9/11 authorizing military action against Al Qaeda confirmed this supposed presidential power to disregard inconvenient laws.) War makes the president's executive power unlimited, and not subject to any check or balance from either Congress or the courts. If he orders that Americans be spied on in defiance of federal law, and then assures us that the surveillance targets all have clear links to terrorist groups and that none of them are, for instance, merely ordinary dissidents or his political enemies, then we have no choice but to believe him.

War, in other words, transforms the United States from a constitutional republic into something rather different. All of this, naturally, is for our own good. If we wish to be "safe" then we must trust our president to wield his executive powers without meddlesome interference from judges or legislatures. Or, to echo a famous phrase from another undeclared war, sometimes it's necessary to destroy the Constitution in order to save it.

(Paul Campos is a law professor at the University of Colorado and can be reached at Paul.Campos(at)Colorado.edu.)

But just to shove your words back down your skeptical throats, let’s look at this story that I wrote on November 28 of this year, with the headline: Tom DeLay and the GOP: Milking the system for all it’s worth.

Tom DeLay saw a seat in Congress as a way to live large at someone else’s expense. From the time he arrived in Washington after the 1984 elections, DeLay started working the system to line his own pockets.

“I met Delay at the reception for freshmen members of Congress,” recalls retired lobbyist Jackson Russ. “He walked up, looked at my name tag, introduced himself and asked how he could get some honorariums.”

In 1984, honorariums were a quick way for members of Congress to line their own pockets. Special interest groups would invite the Congressman to a get together with executives of their company or top members of the organization and then pay that Congressman directly for the appearance.

Congress banned honorariums in 1989 but that gave DeLay five years to become one of the top earner of fees for appearances on the Hill, adding an average of $27,000 a year to his Congressional salary.

“DeLay bugged everyone for honorariums,” says Roy Abrahams, who lobbied Capitol Hill for oil interests from 1975 through 1990. “Others were subtle. He wasn’t.”

When the ban went into effect, DeLay switched his tactics to soliciting free trips from special interests and contributions to any of several political funds he controlled back in Texas where the rules are lax.

“Like most, we maxed out on Tom DeLay each cycle,” remembers Ann Wilson, who lobbied for health care before leaving Washington to get married. “That’s $10,000 for each election cycle -- $5,000 for the primary and $5,000 for the general election. But we kicked in another $50,000 or so each year to his Texas state PACs. I have no idea where that money went.”

According to Texas election records, the money went mostly to DeLay for certain ‘in district expenses,” including clothing, entertainment, cars and travel.’ In all, DeLay received more than $100,000 a year in checks from the PACs for personal expenses.

At the same time, DeLay, his family and top aides, were jetting around the country on corporate jets and taking expensive vacations to Europe – all paid for by special interest groups.”

Now, flash forward three weeks, to Tuesday, December 20, and a story that moved on The Associated Press wire, with this headline: Donors underwrite DeLay's deluxe lifestyle.

As Tom DeLay became a king of campaign fundraising, he lived like one too. He visited cliff-top Caribbean resorts, golf courses designed by PGA champions and four-star restaurants -- all courtesy of donors who bankrolled his political money empire.

Over the past six years, the former House majority leader and his associates have visited places of luxury most Americans have never seen, often getting there aboard corporate jets arranged by lobbyists and other special interests.

Public documents reviewed by The Associated Press tell the story: at least 48 visits to golf clubs and resorts; 100 flights aboard company planes; 200 stays at hotels, many world-class; and 500 meals at restaurants, some averaging nearly $200 for a dinner for two.

Instead of his personal expense, the meals and trips for DeLay and his associates were paid with donations collected by the campaign committees, political action committees and children's charity the Texas Republican created during his rise to the top of Congress.

His lawyer says the expenses are part of DeLay's effort to raise money from Republicans and to spread the GOP message.

Put them together and a lifestyle emerges.

Hmmm. Funny how our story re-emerges in the mainstreamers after just enough time expires so that they don’t have to give us credit for it.

And just long enough for the bad-mouthers on the bulletin boards and blogs to forget that we, as usual, had it first.

They may claim they want the truth but, sadly, they can’t handle the truth because the truth doesn’t agree with their biased, partisan view of the world.

Padilla, a U.S. citizen who was arrested in Chicago in 2002, initially was accused of plotting to detonate a radiological "dirty bomb," declared an enemy combatant and held for more than three years in Defense Department custody. But in the criminal charges brought last month, the government does not mention the alleged bomb plot or any attack in the United States.

The government's actions have left "the impression that Padilla may have been held for these years, even if justifiably, by mistake," the court wrote. That impression, the judges said, may hurt the government's "credibility before the courts."

Padilla, a former gang member, has been at the center of a heated battle over governmental powers that arose after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks because he was imprisoned so long without the opportunity to challenge his detention.

Justice Department officials now must decide whether to defy the court and take Padilla before a federal judge in Miami. Tasia Scolinos, a department spokeswoman, said the government is "disappointed that the court has denied the unopposed motion to transfer Jose Padilla to the criminal justice system to face the terrorism charges currently pending against him." She said department lawyers are reviewing the order and "will continue to consider all options with respect to pursuing the criminal charges as expeditiously as possible."

In requesting the transfer to Justice Department custody, the government suggested that the 4th Circuit vacate its ruling allowing Padilla to be held as an enemy combatant. But the 4th Circuit yesterday also refused to lift the earlier decision and suggested that the Justice Department request was made to avoid further judicial scrutiny.

The judges said prosecutors had left "an appearance that the government may be attempting to avoid consideration of our decision by the Supreme Court." They said they welcomed Supreme Court intervention because of the "enormous implications" of the Padilla case.

Some lawyers said high court involvement might be inevitable because it would be difficult for the administration to defy an appellate court and transfer Padilla at a time when it faces criticism over a secret domestic spying program and other parts of its counterterrorism efforts.

"They've been kind of beat up lately about the way they've conducted the war on terrorism," said Eric H. Holder Jr., who was deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration. "It's a difficult thing for them now to take another hit from the 4th Circuit, and then do something contrary to what that court says."

Although the Justice Department asked the 4th Circuit for permission to take custody of Padilla, the department maintained that it does not need that permission. Even the 4th Circuit acknowledged yesterday that the issue is "unclear."

Jonathan Freiman, a lawyer for Padilla, said only that the 4th Circuit opinion "speaks loudly for itself."

Legal experts said the decision showed that a previously friendly appellate court was now casting a more skeptical eye toward the Bush administration's terrorism arguments. The Richmond-based 4th Circuit has been the administration's venue of choice for several high-profile terrorism cases. It is widely considered the nation's most conservative appellate court, and the same three-judge panel that issued yesterday's ruling had earlier strongly backed the president's authority to detain Padilla without trial. Both decisions were written by Judge J. Michael Luttig, who was a leading contender to be nominated to the Supreme Court earlier this year.

"Obviously, the court feels very stung by being presented with what it thought to be a serious and heartfelt argument by the administration [to hold Padilla originally], only to learn it would turn on a dime," said Michael Greenberger, director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland.

Padilla was arrested at O'Hare International Airport in May 2002 and declared an enemy combatant by President Bush a month later. Padilla has been held in a U.S. naval brig since.

Attorneys for Padilla, joined by a host of civil liberties organizations, blasted the detention as illegal, but the 4th Circuit panel ruled in September that Bush had the authority to detain Padilla and that such power is essential to preventing terrorist strikes.

Last month, Padilla was indicted in Miami on federal charges of being part of a violent terrorism conspiracy rooted in North America but directed at sending money and recruits overseas to "murder, kidnap and maim." The indictment did not mention the dirty bomb or any plot to attack inside the U.S.

Some thoughts on where all of this is headed:

* The president says that his highest duty is to protect the American people and our homeland. And it is true that, as commander-in-chief, he has sweeping powers to, as his oath says, “faithfully execute the office” of president. But the entity he swore to “preserve, protect and defend” isn’t the homeland per se — but the Constitution itself.

* The Patriot Act will be extended, but it’s just the beginning, not the end, of the never-ending argument between the Bill of Rights and national security. The act primarily covers the activities of the FBI; the sheer volume of intelligence-gathering across the government has yet to become apparent, and voters will blanch when they see it all laid before them. The department most likely to get in trouble on this: the Pentagon, which doesn’t have a tradition of limiting inquiries, and which, in the name of protecting domestic military installations, will want to look at everyone.

* If you thought the Samuel Alito hearings were going to be contentious, wait till you see them now. Sen. Arlen Specter, the prickly but brilliant chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has said that the issue of warrant-less spying by the NSA — and the larger question of the reach of the president’s wartime powers — is now fair game for the Alito hearings. Alito is going to try to beg off but won’t be allowed to. And members who might have been afraid to vote against Alito on the abortion issue might now have another, politically less risky, reason to do so.

* Arguably the most interesting — and influential — Republicans in the Senate right now are the libertarians. They’re suspicious of the Patriot Act and, I am guessing, pivotal in any discussion of the NSA and others' spy efforts. Most are Westerners (Craig, Hagel, Murkowski) and the other is Sen. John Sununu. He is from New Hampshire, which, as anyone who has spent time there understands, is the Wild West of the East Coast. All you have to do is look at its license plate slogan: “Live Free or Die.” It’ll be interesting to see how other nominal small-government conservatives — Sen. George Allen of Virginia comes to mind — handle the issue.

* For months now, I have been getting e-mails demanding that my various employers (Newsweek, NBC News and MSNBC.com) include in their poll questionnaires the issue of whether Bush should be impeached. They used to demand this on the strength of the WMD issue, on the theory that the president had “lied us into war.” Now the Bush foes will base their case on his having signed off on the NSA’s warrant-less wiretaps. He and Cheney will argue his inherent powers and will cite Supreme Court cases and the resolution that authorized him to make war on the Taliban and al-Qaida. They will respond by calling him Nixon 2.0 and have already hauled forth no less an authority than John Dean to testify to the president’s dictatorial perfidy. The “I-word” is out there, and, I predict, you are going to hear more of it next year — much more.

I'm sure there are many well-meaning Americans who agree with their president's explanation that it's all a necessary evil (and that patriotic citizens will not be spied on unless they dial up Osama bin Laden). But the nasty echoes of apartheid South Africa should at least give them pause. While Bush uses the rhetoric of "evildoers" and the "global war on terror," Pretoria talked of "total onslaught." This was the catchphrase of P. W. Botha, South Africa's head of state from 1978 to 1989. Botha was hardly the first white South African leader to ride roughshod over civil liberties for all races, but he did it more effectively than many of his predecessors. Botha liked to tell South Africans that the country was under "total onslaught" from forces both within and without, and that this global assault was his rationale for allowing opponents to be jailed, beaten or killed. Likewise, the Bush administration has adopted the argument that anything is justified in the name of national security.

Botha was right about South Africa being under attack. Internally, blacks and a few whites were waging a low-level guerrilla war to topple the government. Externally, activists across the globe were mobilizing economic sanctions and campaigns to ostracize Pretoria. By the same token, we all know that Bush is right about the United States facing a very real threat of further terror. Yet should Americans really be willing to accept that autocratic end-justifies-the-means argument?

For so many around the world, the United States is as much a symbol as a nation. Outsiders may scoff at American naiveté in thinking that their conversations are private, but they envy them for growing up in a society so sheltered that it made such a belief possible. Among those who feel this way is Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the South African Anglican leader who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his principled fight for justice in his native country. "It's unbelievable," he told me in an interview, "that a country that many of us have looked to as the bastion of true freedom could now have eroded so many of the liberties we believed were upheld almost religiously."

Tutu recalled teaching in Jacksonville, Fla., when Bush won re-election in 2004. "I was shocked," he said, "because I had naively believed all these many years that Americans genuinely believed in freedom of speech. [But I] discovered there that when you made an utterance that was remotely contrary to what the White House was saying, then they attacked you. For a South African the déjà vu was frightening. They behaved exactly the same way that used to happen here—vilifying those who are putting forward a slightly different view." Tutu made these comments to me exactly a year ago next week. I haven't seen any reaction from him about the latest eavesdropping revelations, but I doubt he is remotely surprised at the U.S. president's response: a defense of the tactic, together with a warning that the government would launch an investigation to find out who leaked the news to The New York Times.

It's not fair, of course, to suggest that all citizens are indifferent to violations of their privacy and their rights to free speech. Yet as I've watched this debate play out, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that not enough Americans really care. Like my Johannesburg neighbor, they seem to hope that unpleasant news will disappear if you just ignore it. It didn't then, and it won't now.

Bush is faced with an open split in Republican ranks in Congress, with Arlen Specter, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, calling for a joint investigation of Congress into the spy program. Both Nebraska’s Chuck Hagel and Maine’s Olympia Snowe are openly critical of the Bush plans.

Meanwhile James Robertson, a federal district judge sitting on the secret FISA court, resigned from that position. He gave no reason, but associates were quoted in the Washington Post this morning as saying he felt the spy program information might have been used to obtain FISA warrants. Colleen Kolla-Kotelly, the federal judge who chairs the panel expressed similar misgivings in2004. “They just don't know if the product of wiretaps were used for FISA warrants—to kind of cleanse the information,” one source told the paper. “What I've heard some of the judges say is they feel they've participated in a Potemkin court.”

Without saying so flat-out, West Virginia’s senior Democratic senator, Robert Byrd, this week set forth the case for impeachment:

“The President claims that these powers are within his role as Commander in Chief,” Byrd said in a December 19 statement. “Make no mistake, the powers granted to the Commander in Chief are specifically those as head of the Armed Forces. These warrantless searches are conducted not against a foreign power, but against unsuspecting and unknowing American citizens. They are conducted against individuals living on American soil, not in Iraq or Afghanistan. There is nothing within the powers granted in the Commander in Chief clause that grants the President the ability to conduct clandestine surveillance of American civilians. We must not allow such groundless, foolish claims to stand.

“The President claims a boundless authority through the resolution that authorized the war on those who perpetrated the September 11th attacks. But that resolution does not give the President unchecked power to spy on our own people. That resolution does not give the Administration the power to create covert prisons for secret prisoners. That resolution does not authorize the torture of prisoners to extract information from them. That resolution does not authorize running black-hole secret prisons in foreign countries to get around U.S. law. That resolution does not give the President the powers reserved only for kings and potentates. ‘’

Justification for War

There were three reasons given for the Bush Doctrine of Pre-emptive War; 1) Saddam had weapons of mass destruction with which he threatened his neighbors and the U.S., 2) Saddam supported and was connected to al-Qaeda and 3) he was a ruthless tyrant. It is now clear to any thinking citizen (Bush apologists are not thinking citizens) that the President and other neo conservatives in the United States Government lied to the American public in order to gain support to launch a war of aggression against Iraq for ideological and economic motives.

Of the three justifications there is no doubt about the last. That alone ignores the fact that we do not invade countries because their leaders are tyrants, in fact we have supported many including Saddam in the past. Even conservative George Will was forced to state in a June 23 editorial “But unless one is prepared to postulate a U.S. right, perhaps even a duty, to militarily dismantle any tyranny, it is unacceptable to argue that Saddam’s mass graves and torture chambers suffice as retrospective justifications for pre-emptive war.” Lets look at what the postulation of that U.S. duty would mean.

Indeed, if that were ample justification, we would be invading Uzbekistan (in case you don’t know Uzbekistan is one of the coalition of the willing, our allies in the invasion), who according to NickWalsh in an article in the May 26th London Guardian states “Independent human rights groups estimate that there are more than 600 politically motivated arrests a year in Uzbekistan, and 6,500 political prisoners, some tortured to death. According to a forensic report commissioned by the British embassy, in August two prisoners were even boiled to death.”

There are any number of countries that imprison, torture and kill political dissidents including China who has most favored trade status with the U.S. North Korea who says they fully intend to produce nuclear weapons and sell them to terrorists is ignored. Liberia, a long term ally during the Cold War, where all parties, the government, the rebels, neighboring countries and the citizens caught in the middle are begged the U.S. for a small peace keeping force, only to have George W. fiddle while the country went in to self destruct. We allow and encourage chaos in Haiti. We also seem to have curiously found new mutual respect for the genocidal government of Sudan as “allies against terrorism” since the discovery of oil in the disputed territories. So much for invasion as a weapon to produce democracy and freedom for other peoples of the world.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Let’s look at just a few of the statements made by Bush and his aides about the justification of the “imminent threat” of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons over the last year to justify the war.

August 26, 2002 – Vice President Cheney – “simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction… What he wants is time, and more time to husband his resources to invest in his ongoing chemical and biological weapons program, and to gain possession of nuclear weapons.”

September 12, 2002 – President Bush to the UN General Assembly – “ Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons… Iraq has made several attempts to buy high –strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon.”

September 19, 2002 – Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld – “(Iraq) amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX, sarin and mustard gas.”

October 7, 2002 - President Bush in Cincinnati – “It (Iraq) possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons… And surveillance photos reveal that the regime is rebuilding facilities that it had used to produce chemical and biological weapons.”

January 7, 2003 – Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at a press briefing – “There is no doubt in my mind but that they currently have chemical and biological weapons.”

January 9, 2003 – White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer in his daily press briefing – “We know for a fact that there are weapons (of mass destruction) there (in Iraq).”

March 16, 2003 – Vice President Richard Cheney on “Meet The Press” – “We believe he (Saddam Hussein) has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. El Baradei (head of the U.N. International Commission on Nuclear Weapons) frankly is wrong.”

March 17, 2003 – President Bush in his weekly address to the nation – “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves not doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.”

March 21, 2003 – White House Secretary Ari Fleischer in his daily briefing – “Well, there is no question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical particularly… all this will be made clear in the course of the operation, for what ever duration it takes.”

March 24, 2003 – Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on “Face The Nation” – “We have seen intelligence over many months that they have chemical and biological weapons, and that they have dispersed them and that they’re weaponized and that, in one case at least, the command and control arrangements have been established.”

March 30, 2003 – Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on ABC’s “This Week” - “We know where they (weapons of mass destruction) are, they are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad.”

This does not include the now infamous 16 words in the President’s State of the Union message or numerous statements made by other members of the administration such as Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell and others. In addition the President made fourteen statements that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction while campaigning in 2002 and eleven statements that Saddam was connected to Al Quedda between October 10th and November 4th, 2002. No accusation of a tie between Saddam and Al Quedda has ever been substantiated. What is clear, is that there was a full court press by the administration to convince the American people to support going to war in Iraq.

Evidence to the Contrary

Lets look at some specific accusations and the truth behind them in the now infamous State of the Union message urging war.

Statement from the President’s State of theUnion Address
The United Nations concluded in 1999 that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons sufficient to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax -- enough doses to kill several million people. He hasn't accounted for that material. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed it.

The United Nations concluded that Saddam Hussein had materials sufficient to produce more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin -- enough to subject millions of people to death by respiratory failure. He hadn't accounted for that material. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed it.
Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. In such quantities, these chemical agents could also kill untold thousands. He's not accounted for these materials. He has given no evidence that he has destroyed them.

U.S. intelligence indicates that Saddam Hussein had upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents. Inspectors recently turned up 16 of them -- despite Iraq's recent declaration denying their existence. Saddam Hussein has not accounted for the remaining 29,984 of these prohibited munitions. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed them.

This a serious distortion of the United Nations information. The United Nations concluded that Saddam could have produced the above quantities of weapons by 1991 if he had been allowed to continue to manufacture chemical and biological weapons at full capacity (doubtful given the lack of facilities and materials). This was presented by the President as if it were a current threat.

The reason we knew that Saddam had these weapons was that we sold them to him during the Reagan Administration to use against Iran, a deal sealed by Donald Rumsfeld. The old joke is that we know they have them, because we have the receipts! The reality is that most of these were used (in violation of international law) at our urging to contain the Iranians, destroyed in the 1991 war or deteriorated because of their instability to a point they were no longer viable. Saddam’s inability to produce proof of their destruction was not a surprise to arms inspectors.

A UNSCOM paper from 1998, cited by former inspector Scott Ritter, declared: “Taking into consideration the conditions and the quality of CW-agents and munitions produced by Iraq at threat time, there is no possibility of weapons remaining from the Mid-1980’s” The same is true of biological toxins produced in the 1980’s. Botulism has a shelf life of about a year, while wet anthrax, the principal form produced by Iraq, has a relatively short life span as well.

A pentagon report by the Persian Gulf War Illnesses Task Force, April 2002 concluded that Iraqi production techniques were poor and the resulting toxins too diluted to be militarily effective. It declared: “We believe Iraq was largely cooperative in its latest declarations because many of its residual munitions were of little use- other than bolstering the credibility of Iraq’s declaration – because of chemical agent degradation and leakage problems.”
Bush’s figures all refer to information about Iraq prior to 1991. Neither the U.S. or Britain ever made the claim that Iraq had continued production of chemical or biological weapons in the period from 1991-98. Sites visited by U.N. Inspectors after November 2002 were consistent with Iraqi claims of production of agricultural chemicals or oil processing.

Two other reports by the Pentagon’s intelligence arm, the Defense Intelligence Agency, (DIA) concluded in 2002 made the following statements about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction:

1. “There is no reliable evidence on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or whether Iraq has – or will- establish its chemcial warfare agent production facilities”

2. “Iraq is assessed to possess biological agent stockpiles that may be weaponized and ready for use” but “The size of those stockpiles is uncertain and is subject to debate. The nature and condition of those stockpiles are unknown.”
In fact on June 6, 2003 Vice-Admiral Lowell Jacopy, the DIA Director confirmed that the DIA had no hard information on weapons, stockpiles or locations.

Statement from the President’s State of theUnion Address
The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb. The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.

It is now clear that claims that yellow cake uranium was being sought was known to be bogus for over a year before the President’s address after being investigated by Ambassador Donald Wilson at the request of Vice President Cheney. The claims about the high-strength aluminum tubes have never been taken seriously by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which Chairman El Baradei reported to the U.N. Security Council in January 2003 “to be consistent with reverse engineering of rockets” used for short range battlefield rocket launchers allowed under the U.N. rules. In spite of repeated statements by the administration about the presence of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons U.N. inspector Hans Blix’s requests for the location of those sites were refused.

Tony Blair is in deep trouble at home in Britain because of his inability to support claims he made about Iraq including the seeming out and out fabrication that Iraq would be able to use weapons of mass destruction on forty five minutes notice and the basing of some claims sourced from a graduate student’s thesis that was over 12 years old. The reality is that Saddam was the head of a nation that had it’s infrastructure and military largely destroyed in the first gulf war and ten years of sanctions. It had no air force and lacked control over large parts of its own territory including Kurdish areas and no-fly zones. He certainly lacked the ability to be a threat to even his neighbors let alone the U.S.

The Options

The administration expects us to believe one of three options. One, we have the most expensive, most incompetent intelligence system in the world. The CIA, DIA and the National Security Administration blew it, they just made a mistake over-amped the intelligence and gave it to an unwitting President. Two, Saddam was so sneaky that he hid all of the weapons before and during the invasion rather than use them against the invading Americans or; Three, Saddam was able to sneak them all out to Syria either of which would be proof of a totally incompetent American military and intelligence community.

The problem with these arguments is that forty years ago President John F. Kennedy was able to present U-2 photos that clearly demonstrated the Soviets were building missile silos in Cuba. The leaps in development of satellite photographic and listening capabilities have improved to the point where we can read a license plate number on a car and listen in on cell phone conversations anywhere in the world. Certainly Mossad, who has the best human intelligence in the world had agents in Iraq that could have pinpointed these weapons. Does anyone really believe that Saddam made the American Intelligence Agencies believe they had weapons they didn’t have for over 10 years? What would be his purpose for such a deception? Or maybe he was a brilliant strategist playing a shell game that fooled the best intelligence in the world.

There is a fourth option and the only rational one is that the President and his Neo Conservative and Military Industrial supporters lied to get support for a war of aggression. Hitler was identified as a megalomaniac because he believed he had a calling that was above the understanding of other men. Bush believes the same thing. In a statement to the new Palestinian Prime Minister Abbas reported in the June 25, 2003 Haaretz.com News Updates he said “God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, …”

The Costs

The costs of the war in economic terms to the U.S. taxpayer alone are likely to far exceed $300 billion dollars. Over 1500 American servicemen and women have been killed and 30,000 wounded so far, more then in the First Gulf War and that number is climbing each day. 15-20,000 Iraqi troops are estimated to have been killed plus another 10-15,000 wounded, many of which were half starved, under equipped and unwilling 15-year-old conscripts. The Doctors Without Borders says there has been at least 100,000 civilian deaths, two thirds women and children. American loss of prestige and credibility around the world has been severely undermined.

The Remedy

For the United States to put an end to this travesty and rejoin the rest of the world two things must take place:
1) The President and other administration officials who participated in this lie to justify this illegal war of aggression should be impeached and removed from office; 2) The President, his officials and war profiteers who supported these illegal acts should be brought before an international tribunal on war crimes and if found guilty sentenced to punishments up to and including hanging for their actions by the standards of international law.

Impeachment

On July 27, 1974 the first Article of Impeachment passed by the House Judiciary Committed read “Richard Nixon endeavor[ed]to be made false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States.”

In the 1998 impeachment proceedings against William Jefferson Clinton it was said he: “has undermined the integrity of his office, has brought disrepute on the Presidency, has betrayed his trust as President, and has acted in a manner subversive of the rule of law and justice, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.”

If any of the allegations above are true then certainly these charges would be applicable and provable to justify the conviction and removal of the president and others in his administration who conspired to carry out this subterfuge on the citizens of the U.S. and the world.

War Crimes

It is now clear why the Bush administration in May of 2002 “unsigned” the 1998 Rome Statute to establish an International Criminal Court (ICC). The court seeks to create the world's first permanent tribunal to prosecute war crimes, genocide, and other crimes against humanity.

Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, John Bolton, asserted that Washington "does not intend to become a party to the (Rome Statute of the ICC)" and that it "has no legal obligations arising from its signature (to the treaty) on December 31, 2000." The administration fully intended to violate international law including wars of aggression and war crimes that include bans on using weapons of mass destruction such as fuel air bombs, cluster bombs and in the future nuclear weapons. The administration has violated the Charter of the United Nations, International Law and the Geneva Convention.
As a guide lets look at the most famous international war crimes trial ever conducted, the International Military Tribunal for Punishment of Major War Criminals of the European Axis known as the Nuremberg War-Crimes Trial held in 1945-46. The definitions of the crimes is as follows:

“The following acts, or any of them, are crimes coming within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal for which there shall be individual responsibility:

(a) Crimes against Peace: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of he foregoing:

(b) War Crimes: namely, violations of the laws of customs of war. Such violations include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity:

(c) Crimes against Humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.

The Nazis were indicted on four points:

1. Conspiracy to commit crimes against peace.
2. Planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression.
3. War Crimes.
4. Crimes Against Humanity.

There is no doubt that key members of the administration including the President conspired to lie to the American people and are guilty of the first two points. It can easily be argued that they are guilty of points three and four based on their violations of previously signed treaties, the United Nations Charter, and the Geneva Convention. The administration used weapons of mass destruction including cluster bombs, fuel air bombs, kidnapped Afghan “enemy combatants”, denied them their rights under the Geneva Convention and plans on executing them. The rules for their trials so blatantly deny their basic rights that the head of the Trial Lawyers Association stated that attorney’s may refuse to be a party to them.

Bush’s Precedent

Bush’s own record on criminal behavior is a good stick to measure an appropriate punishment if found guilty. While Governor of Texas he approved the execution of more criminals then any Governor in history. He vetoed a bill to provide the indigent with defense calling it a “threat to public safety”, he opposed life without parole and legislation which would have ended the execution of people with IQ’s less than 65. Indeed when asked about an interview conducted with Karla Faye Tucker he pursed his lips mocking derisively with a whimper “Please don’t kill me”. Despite Bush’s characterization, Karla Fay Tucker was executed without ever pleading for her life.

George W. has a long record of ignoring international law. While Governor he refused to recognize international treaties requiring notification of a foreign prisoner’s right to consular assistance guaranteed by the Vienna Convention of Consular Relations. He has withdrawn from other international agreements without the consent of congress that were signed by previous presidents including those on ABM Treaty and Nuclear Testing giving the world a vision of future Bush adventures. This has made the word of U.S. Presidents worthless in the international community.
His own father approved the kidnapping of foreign nationals to be brought to the U.S. for trial or the invasion of a country if necessary (remember Manuel Noriega a former CIA informant of Bush Sr.). As a consequence he should expect no assistance from the American government in protecting him from an international decisions about his conduct. In International terms George W. and his neo cons are a blight on international progress towards a peaceful world.

World Precedent

Of those tried at Nuremberg three were acquitted but given prison sentences in other trials during denazification procedures ranging from 3-9 years. They included an ambassador, a banker and a journalist.

Twelve were sentenced to death including Nazi government officials, two military generals, and a leading propagandist and publisher of an anti-Semitic newspaper. Herman Goering, quoted at the beginning of this article, coward to the end, committed suicide before his sentence could be carried out.
Seven were given terms of up to life imprisonment including two Admirals, the Minister for Youth, the General Inspector for Buildings and Construction for Berlin, the Minister for Economic Affairs, Head of the Nazi Labor Front, and a diplomat.

Gustov von Krupp an industrialist and war profiteer was indicted but was physically unable to appear in court and the charges were dropped against him. An American Military Court sentenced his son Alfried Krupp to 12 years in prison and forfeiture of his private property.

Those sentenced to death were executed by hanging in the early morning of October 16, 1946 in Nuremberg Prison Gymnasium, cremated and their ashes strewn in an estuary of the Isar River. Those sentenced to prison terms were interned at Spandau Prison in Berlin. Rudolf Hess the last of the prisoners still in custody committed suicide in August 1987.

Maybe it is once again time for the world to let international criminals of any nation know of its will to rid itself of those whose greed and power seeking threaten the peace and safety of its citizens.
Sources Include:

George Will Column, Washington Post Writers Group, June 23, 2003

www.truemajority.com

Second Intelligence Report: “No Reliable Information” Iraqis Stockpiling Chemical Weapons
by David E. Kaplan and Mark Mazzetti June 13, 2003

Bush’s Claims on Iraqi Weapons- Lies in Pursuit of War
By Patrick Martin Feb. 1, 2003

Excerpts from the Presidents State of the Union Message

Pentagon Report Found “No Reliable Evidence of Iraq WMD”,
Andrew Buncombe in Washington, “The Independent” June 7, 2003

www.Uggabugga.com

Ted Rall: They Impeach Murderers, don’t they? June 13, 2003

Neocon-Nazi War Crimes, Schuyler Ebbets, June 27, 2003, www.thepeoplesvoice.org

Bush Misled US Into Iraq War – An Official Finding?, David Corn, “The Nation”, June 26, 2003

Charter of the International Military Tribunal

Charter of the United Nations General Assembly

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.

He also said he believes that the U.S. War Powers Act, which gives the U.S. Congress the power to be fully engaged in a president's decision to go to war is unconstitutional.

"I am one of those who believe that was an infringement on the authority of the president," he said.

"I believe that the president is entitled and needs to have unfiltered advice in formulating policy. He ought to be able to seek the opinion of anybody he wants to and that he should not have to reveal, for example, who he talked to that morning.

"That issue was litigated all the way up to the Supreme Court and we won."

Cheney was, in fact, successful in hiding the participants in the task force he appointed to form energy policy in this country, fighting off legal challenges from environmentalists who said the secrecy shielded corporate interests from public scrutiny.

Cheney's extensive comments about the need for fewer constraints on presidential powers tossed fuel on a firestorm of controversy which has been building here since The New York Times first revealed the clandestine program on its website last Thursday.

"I think the vice-president ought to reread the constitution," said Senator Edward Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat.

"It reminds Americans of the abuse of power during the dark days of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew," said Howard Dean, the chair of the Democratic National Committee.

But Republicans also have concerns.

Two of them, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia Snowe of Maine, yesterday aligned themselves with Democrats seeking a congressional inquiry into Bush's authorization of the wiretapping by the National Security Agency.

Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, has promised hearings in the new year.

Bush aggressively defended his decision to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which allows emergency wiretaps for 72 hours, then compels the government to go to a secret court to seek retroactive permission. Bush said that law does not allow the administration to be agile enough in fighting the terrorist threats in the post-2001 era.

The NSA has been monitoring international phone calls and emails of Americans they believe are linked to terrorists.

That would presumably include calls made to Canada, although officials are offering no details.

Bush said he had the constitutional authority to act without court orders and Cheney said it was no coincidence the U.S. has not been hit by terrorists since the White House sought more unfettered powers.

Bruce Fein, a former associate deputy attorney-general in the Ronald Reagan administration, said Bush was abusing his power.

"It's more power than King George III had at the time of the revolution in asserting the theory that anything the president thinks is helpful to fighting the war against terrorism, he can do," Fein told National Public Radio.

California Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer has sent a letter to legal scholars asking their opinion on whether Bush's actions amount to an unconstitutional move that warrants Congress considering impeachment proceedings.

Boxer said her interest was sparked after former Nixon White House counsel John Dean said the surveillance order was an impeachable offence.

"I take very seriously Mr. Dean's comments, as I view him to be an expert on presidential abuse of power. I am expecting a full airing of this matter by the Senate in the very near future," she said in a statement.

Dean spent four months in prison for his role in the Watergate cover-up. The wiretapping scandal forced Nixon to resign in disgrace in 1972.

Representative John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat, also told a radio interviewer in Atlanta impeachment proceedings should be considered. Other senior Democrats, however, pulled back on such suggestions, calling instead for congressional hearings.

Democrats also pointed to remarks on wiretapping by Bush in Buffalo last year.

"Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires ... a court order," Bush said.

"Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so."

The White House said he was speaking in the context of the U.S. Patriot Act, not eavesdropping for foreign intelligence.

Bush also took a pummelling on the editorial pages of major U.S. papers.

The New York Times assailed him for a phoney choice, by suggesting he could save lives or follow the law.

"Mr. Bush says Congress gave him the power to spy on Americans," it said in an editorial. "Fine, then Congress can just take it back."

The county commission of Leon County, which includes Tallahassee, voted on Dec. 13 to scrap its Diebold equipment and switch to a different manufacturer, at an estimated cost of $1.3 million. Three days later, the county council of Volusia County (Daytona Beach) approved a similar change. The switch will cost that jurisdiction at least $2.5 million, county officials said.

These actions, and the events that led up to them, can teach us a great deal about our dependence on computer procedures that are developed by flawed human beings.

It's not just elections, of course, that are affected by programming errors and poorly understood code. Imagine your company purchasing a large development project from an outside firm. If that firm overcharges you, and you dispute the bill, can your mission-critical software be disabled at the push of a button by its developers until you pay up? It's a good idea to ask these questions before you invest your money in computerized solutions.

Testing the Vote-Counting Equipment

The revelations in the Florida counties were engineered by Herbert Thompson, a computer science professor at the Florida Institute of Technology, and Harri Hursti, a programmer who lives in Finland. They examined optical-scan ballot counting equipment purchased by Leon County from Diebold Inc., a major maker of ATM and election equipment. The technicians were introduced to county supervisor of elections Ion Sancho by BlackBoxVoting.org (BBV), a nonprofit organization that critiques computerized voting.

Under Sancho's watchful eye, the computer experts ran the following demonstration, according to a BBV report.

• Initializing the counter. A Diebold-specified memory card, a device about the size of a credit card, was inserted into the optical-scan counting machine to initialize it. As is the case before every election, a "zero report" was run, showing that zero votes were recorded in each race.

• Inserting the ballots. Sancho and others marked optical-scan ballots by filling in circles on the printed cards. These forms were then inserted into the counter, as voters normally do after marking their ballots. The totals, counted by witnesses before the insertion, were Yes 2, No 6.

• Tabulating the vote. The totals tallied by the vote counter, however, were Yes 7, No 1. In addition, the totals accepted from the counter by the central tabulator, also made by Diebold, showed Yes 7, No 1. No alerts had been sounded by either machine.

How was the count changed? Hursti had added data to the memory card prior to its insertion. This subtracted votes from one position and added them to the other. The same change could be made by almost any dishonest election official, Hursti explained, without the need for any password or much specialized knowledge. Yet the tampering "will not be detected in any normal canvassing procedure," he said. A recount using the same memory card would deliver the same results.

How the Winning Candidate "Rolls Over" the Loser

In a PDF report released in July 2005, Hursti said the Diebold memory cards can hold "an executable program which acts on the vote data." In a well-designed election system, by contrast, the vote counting mechanism should contain only "the ballot design and the race definitions." In other words, initializing a counting machine should install only a list of the candidates and ballot measures to be tallied in each race.

In his report, Hursti indicates that the vote-changing trick can be accomplished using plain old integer math. The Diebold election machines are designed to count each position's votes up to 65,535, which is 1 less than a power of 2. When 1 more vote is counted, the tally "rolls over" to 0. The following vote brings the total to 1, and so forth.

The Diebold equipment, Hursti explains, can be secretly initialized so that Candidate A starts with 65,511 votes -- which is the same as minus 25 -- while Candidate B starts with 25. The "zero report" would blithely show 0 votes for each candidate. After more than 25 votes have been cast for Candidate A, there would be no indication that any tampering had occurred.

Let's say the exact same number of voters happen to cast ballots for each candidate. Congratulations, Candidate B -- you appear to have won by 50 votes. Multiply this by thousands of precincts in a state, all using identical memory cards, and you're talkin' real results.

Accomplishing the Trick in Actual Elections

Diebold, based in North Canton, Ohio, will not comment specifically on the rejection of its equipment by Leon County. But the manufacturer has sent a letter to county officials saying their testing was "a very foolish and irresponsible act" and may have violated the company's licensing agreements, according to a Dec. 15 Associated Press report.

In a development that may or may not be election-related, long-time Diebold chairman and CEO Walden O'Dell resigned for "personal reasons," effective immediately, according to a company press release dated Dec. 12. In September, Diebold was forced to pay California a fine of $2.6 million for installing uncertified software into the state's voting machines. The company's stock plunged more than 15 percent.

Unfortunately for voters, the trick demonstrated on Diebold's equipment by Hursti may very well have already been used in real elections:

• Partisan access. Several election officials have access to memory cards prior to elections. These officials tend not to be neutral. They're usually high-level partisans in the Democratic or Republican Party. For example, Diebold memory cards became an issue in Ohio after the 2004 Presidential election. Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell ordered the cards and other election records sealed from public inspection until after the state's electors were sworn in, according to a Dayton Daily News article.

• Mysterious miscounts. In one incident that was widely reported in Florida after the 2000 Presidential election, a Volusia County precinct showed a final count of negative 16,000 votes for the Democratic candidate, Al Gore. The error was resolved by making a hand count of the ballots. But Leon County's Sancho now believes the "mistake" is evidence of a real fraud attempt that failed only due to sloppiness. "Someone with access to the vote center in Volusia County put it on a memory card and uploaded it into the main system," the election supervisor told Orlando's WESH-TV News in an interview.

• Impossible recounts. The recount in Volusia County was possible because the actual voting records had been preserved. But that isn't possible in a growing number of U.S. counties. In Florida, about half the state's voters now use touch-screen equipment with no paper ballot and no record of the votes other than a memory card, according to a Dec. 17 Miami Herald article. In addition, the Florida Legislature passed election laws in 2001 eliminating recount requirements for touch-screens and not requiring a paper audit trail, according to Law.com.

How Not to Write Code

Trustworthy vote counting is not a Republican or a Democratic issue. It's essential to any free country. The sloppy code and ludicrous back doors found in some computerized election equipment should be a wake-up call for all Americans -- and an object lesson to businesses everywhere in how not to outsource programming.

I wrote on April 5, 2005, that computer scientists had determined that the reported 2004 election totals in some states, including Ohio, were simply impossible to reconcile with scientifically valid exit polls taken the same day. That article became the top story at Daily Kos, America's most widely read political blog, and others.

Unfortunately, we're going to see a lot more stories like this about election fraud, and it won't be good news. It's bad for democracy and it brings shame on computer professionals who should be exposing these shoddy systems, not programming them.

With everything I've learned in my life about computers, I don't want any votes disappearing into a shiny metal box or an ephemeral memory card. The only way an election can be fair is when tangible, paper ballots are marked by hand by actual voters (with alternate provisions for disabled voters). You can tabulate the votes using any machine you want, as long as the paper ballots can be recounted as the final word.

The president has chosen a new tone - a new tactic - for the struggle in Iraq. Since the beginning of December, he has delivered no less than five speeches on the war. It's as though he wants to emphasize that he understands that the course of the war will determine his place in history

Although different opinion polls show different results, it doesn't look good for George W. Bush: a majority of Americans believe that he intentionally misled them. A majority believe that in retrospect, it was not a good idea go to war to bring down Saddam Hussein. A majority is not taken with George Bush as president in the first place.

According to Bush and his advisors, the remedy is not to admit that the war in and of itself has been a mistake. Almost three years later, the justification for the war is still vigorously debated in American politics, and the president is unwaveringly fanatical in defending the war: "If I had to decide today once more, I would do it again."

However, the admission of mistakes and unintended consequences, sometimes candidly and sometimes between the lines, is new. The tone of those five speeches over the past few weeks was sober, even somewhat worried, and definitely more realistic. It seems it is an attempt to restore credibility while maintaining the same course.

"The work in Iraq has been extraordinarily difficult, more difficult than we had expected." Especially in his fifth and, for the time being, his last speech last Sunday, Bush was almost humble. "I know that some of my decisions have led to terrible losses - none of those decisions were taken lightly. I know that this war is controversial."

Compare this admission with the display of victory which he announced on May 1st, 2003 from an aircraft carrier immediately after the fall of Baghdad. Bush: "Admiral Kelly, Captain Card, officers and midshipmen of the Abraham Lincoln, fellow citizens, the fight in Iraq has ended. In the battle for Iraq, the United States and our allies have triumphed. … You have shown the world your skills and power of the American troops."

Between that moment and today, over 2,000 Americans have died, however, the difference is striking.

This is remarkable, because admissions or even any intellectual doubt have never been a part of the president's repertoire. In his political career, he was always proud of his dependability, as if he could hold up to the facts. He made determination a central theme in his re-election campaign. "Even if you don't agree with me, you know where I stand." He said this a thousand times.

Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. "He tried to obtain nuclear weapons. We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemicals, among which mustard gas and nerve gas," the president said in October of 2002. He kept it up for a long time. When the evidence started to fade, the President obfuscated his justification for the war. I have always said that Saddam was a threat" he then said.

Now there is the candid admission: "We found a certain capacity to restart the production of weapons of mass destruction," he said Sunday night, "But we didn't find the weapons. Much intelligence appeared to be wrong."

Perhaps this departure from stubbornness will work. The opinion polls show a moderate improvement. But it is also conceivable that it is too late for humility.

We still recall the improbable image of President Bill Clinton on television wagging his finger at the American people and saying with a straight face: "I did not have sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky." Clearly the man thought that his salacious activities in the Oval Office with the 20-year-old intern did not constitute sex.

I'm dredging up the image today because it reminded me of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wagging her finger at Europeans last week and saying, with an equally artless dodge - that the U.S. did not have "black sites," did not kidnap and "render" terror suspects, and that the U.S. has not engaged in torture of, and the infliction of "cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment" of detainees.

Now there are two possible explanations for this: Either I've been reading the wrong newspapers or Condi lives in an alternative universe, where CIA agents adhere vigorously to guidelines set by the International Convention Against Torture. Madam Secretary, we need to talk.

In the first week of November, the Washington Post, in a scoop by its correspondent Dana Priest, revealed that the CIA maintains a network of Soviet-era compounds in eight Eastern European countries where 100 or more terror suspects are held in underground cells, denied legal rights, outside visitors and checks on their treatment by the International Red Cross. The existence of this network of black sites, as they are dubbed, remained secret from the American people. It was known only to the president and a handful of top U.S. officials, and in Europe only to heads of state and a few top officials in each host country.

And of course there is the dreadful practice of kidnapping suspects and "renditioning" them to countries known to practice torture, where they disappear for months or years.

When the CIA, a US government agency, out sources torture, what that means is that its agents are party to inflicting on people "cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment." They are as much complicit in the act as the interrogators in the host country to which the suspects are rendered. No two ways about it.

The sad part of it all is that in its zeal to fight "global terror," the CIA has repeatedly discovered, after the fact, that many of the suspects it had "renditioned" were cases of mistaken identity. These have included the Canadian citizen Maher Arar, snatched in 2002 as he was switching planes in New York and rendered to Syria; the German citizen Khaled Masri [SEE VIDEO], who was nabbed on New Year's Eve 2003 in Macedonia and flown from there, handcuffed and blindfolded, to Afghanistan; and the Muslim cleric, Hassan Mustafa Nasir, an Egyptian refugee living in Italy as an asylum seeker, abducted off a street in Milan in March 2003 and 'renditioned' to Egypt, a case that prompted the city's lead prosecutor to call the case "a serious crime against Italian sovereignty and human rights."

It is reported that the CIA, working with other intelligence agencies, including many in the Arab world, has so far captured an estimated 3,000 people in its campaign to dismantle terrorist networks. It is impossible to know exactly how many similar cases of mistaken identities exist. Last week, in a follow-up of her earlier piece on the subject, Dana Priest reported in the Washington Post that, "the agency may have three dozen cases of detentions in error." That would constitute three dozen human tragedies.

Rice was able to weather protests in Europe over the black sites and torture of prisoners by resorting to double-speak. She told reporters in Ukraine, for example, that, "as a matter of policy, the United States' obligation under the International Convention Against Torture, which prohibits cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment - those obligations extend to U.S. personnel wherever they are." Contestants at beauty pageants have given better answers.

It was revealed last week, for example, in a story broke by ABC, that the U.S. is far from having given up its secret prisons, simply transferring them from Eastern Europe to accommodating Arab countries in North Africa, or has given up holding suspects altogether, and is just sending them to countries where torture is standard practice.

Washington has a lot of explaining to do. The Department of Defense's general counsel, William H. Hayne, sent a letter to Congress a while back assuring its members that the administration's policy is "to treat all detainees and conduct all interrogations, wherever they occur, in a manner consistent with the Fifth, Eighth and Fourteenth amendments of the Constitution." Yet that does not jibe with the facts on the ground.

The long and short of it is that the U.S. is not only in violation of the International Convention Against Torture but of American law as well. In a case that was adjudicated by the Supreme Court in 2004, Rasul v. Bush, brought on behalf of the prisoners at Guantanamo, the justices ruled in favor of the detainees' habeas corpus rights, the 800-year old legal procedure derived from the Magna Carta and enshrined in the American Constitution, which requires the government to "show sufficient cause" by explaining to a court why it is holding a suspect.

Secretary Rice returned home last Friday on a positive note, when European governments at a sensitive moment in frayed Trans-Atlantic ties, opted not to pick a fight with Washington over the issue. But that happened only after she found herself repeatedly confronted by skeptical or hostile questions by reporters, to which she responded with a fog of disingenuous statements that her staff, not unlike Clinton's during the Lewinsky scandal, later struggled to explain.

There's only one way to put an end to the practice of torture, and that is to make it unlawful, as an amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill by Senator John McCain seeks to do. Then there would be no need for the secretary of state to resort to double-speak or take the heat from reporters when explaining American policy to Europe and the rest of the world. The U.S. could then safely talk the talk about human rights, and at the same time walk the walk.

Bush and his supporters remain, of course, unrepentant, insisting that the ends do indeed justify the means. Others rightly argue that an imperial president must not be permitted to unilaterally subvert the rule of law in the pursuit of villains or terrorists. To countenance this would effectively grant unlimited and unchecked powers to the executive branch.

The vigorous and necessary debate presently being waged in the United States over the extent to which intelligence services may exercise their extraordinary resources and powers is not, regrettably, mirrored in Canada.

There was pathetically little attention paid among Members of Parliament, civil libertarians and journalists when the federal government moved unilaterally four years ago to lift the ban on the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) - our little-known cyberspace spy service RealVideo ['sister agency' to the U.S. National Security Agency] to intercept the e-mail and cell phone traffic of persons living in Canada.

Without so much as a scintilla of debate in the House of Commons, Ottawa granted an immensely powerful and largely unaccountable spy service the authority to spy on cyber communications in Canada without a court order.

The failure of our politicians to offer up even a whiff of protest to this draconian step is as shameful as Bush's ill-conceived actions.

To be sure, the usual cabal of academics and media-anointed intelligence experts have trotted out the shopworn excuses to defend this affront to Canadians' civil liberties and human rights in the malleable name of national security.

Our secret services, they say, were being unnecessarily "handcuffed" by outdated laws that prevent our intrepid spies from keeping tabs on terrorists lurking in our midst.

This is drivel. Our spy services don't require new powers and money to do their job. What they are in desperate need of is reform and effective oversight.

Two years ago, I published a book that detailed the incompetence, laziness and abuse of authority that is endemic in our spy services. Heaping more powers and resources on our spy services is akin to placing a cast on an injured arm without performing an X-ray to determine the size and nature of the break.

Then there are the assurances that official watchdogs are ever vigilant, protecting our rights and liberties against abuse. Not true.

Retired chief justice Antonio Lamer (and his tiny staff) was appointed the watchdog over CSE only after I reported on a former long-time CSE analyst who revealed to me that the spy agency had illegally intercepted the communications of Canadians, including discussions between a woman and her gynecologist.

MPs, the media and Canadians urgently need to cast a critical eye on the spy services that are charged with protecting us.

Spy services and their political masters are prone to abusing their power in the name of national security.

We need to keep watch because our rights and liberties are at stake.

Provisional results with more than 90 per cent of votes counted in most provinces show that the religious Shia bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance, won at least 110 seats in the 275-seat Council of Representatives which will govern Iraq for the next four years.

The Kurdish Alliance is a distant second with more than 40 seats, the main Sunni bloc Tawafoq in third place with 35 plus and Ayad Allawi, the secular Shia former prime minister upon whom the hopes of Western governments were pinned, far behind in fourth with 20 seats.

All will see their seats boosted over the coming weeks by complex electoral arithmetic that favours the larger factions, while assuring minority groups of some representation.

Adnan al-Dulaimi, leader of Tawafoq, claimed the election was rigged and demanded the poll be rerun in Baghdad, where the ruling Shia United Iraqi Alliance gained 59 per cent. “Such results are not in the interests of the Iraqi people,” said Mr Dulaimi. “This might lead to disturbing results for harmony all over Iraq.”

His fellow Sunni, Mukhlif al-Ulayan, thundered: “We will stand firm against this conspiracy. We will not allow the formation of a government or national assembly no matter how much it costs.”

It is however, unclear whether the Sunnis intend to unleash violence or are merely manouevring for position in the horse-trading that lies ahead. The Shia faction, whose critics accuse it of being close to Iran, dominates the current Government with 140 seats won in the January election largely boycotted by Sunnis.

The Sunnis hoped to whittle away its power by their participation last week, but the partial results caused dismay. Iraq’s electoral commission conceded there were some irregularities, but said they should not affect the overall result. The final result will not be released until the new year pending investigations. The poor performance of Dr Allawi — a former Baathist Shia whom many hoped would prove a moderating influence on the sectarian groups — at least avoided the virtual oblivion to which Ahmad Chalabi and other minority parties were consigned. Dr Chalabi, a former Pentagon favourite, may secure one or more seats in the assembly, but is unlikely to be a kingmaker.

The result clearly disappointed Western governments.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Ambassador who had urged voters to elect unity candidates, conceded last night that they had paid little heed. “It looks as if people have preferred to vote for their ethnic or sectarian identities,” he said.

Remaining upbeat over the turnout, estimated at 68 to 72 per cent, he urged the government to be sensitive about who it appoints as Interior Minister — in charge of the Iraqi police force that Sunnis have accused of operating torture chambers. In what is widely seen as a sideswipe at the incumbent Bayan Jabr, a Shia Islamist, he said: “The selection of the Minister of Interior will be very important. You can’t have someone sectarian, you need to have someone who has the confidence of all communities.”

Mayor Mark Mallory added that it's important the community stand up against this type of act.

"This community must come together. This kind of criminal activity cannot be tolerated in this community. That must be made clear," Mallory said during the press conference.

Details: What Happened

Witnesses called police after an explosion at 3668 Clifton Avenue just after 10 p.m. Tuesday.

Police said there was "light to moderate damage" to a door and a window of a house adjacent to the mosque owned by the Islamic Association of Cincinnati.

"One of the explosions blasted a hole through the ceiling and the roof of the porch and then struck the soffit then blew out the glass," Cincinnati Police Chief Tom Streicher said.

"If people had been there...there was the potential for people to be injured. Or the way the glass was shattered, it could have resulted in death," he added.

The second pipe bomb went off a few minutes after the first, but did not cause any damage.

No one was inside at the time and no one was hurt. The mosque closed for the night at 8 p.m.

Investigation Continues Today

Along with analyzing physical evidence, investigators will spend time Wednesday talking to members of the mosque to see if any individual members might have received threatening mail or phone calls recently.

Police are still trying to find out who is responsible for the crime.

"[We want to] put as much pressure on the people responsible for this so we can find them as soon as possible," Streicher said.

Police Searched For Clues Overnight

That section of Clifton Avenue was closed off to traffic for five hours overnight while firefighters, police and even the FBI investigated the area.

Investigators swept the area looking for other devices but found none.

However, they have been collecting physical evidence, primarily fragments from the door and the explosive device.

"We have every organization on the scene, the FBI, every fire department unit --their bomb unit -- our bomb dog, top investigators, criminal investigations, several other state and federal organizations will be here," said Captain Gene Hamann, of the Cincinnati Police. "It's a very serious incident."

"We've been working in a cooperative fashion overnight," said Cincinnati Police Chief Tom Streicher.

Calls Started Coming In Around 10 p.m.

Police said they initially received two to three calls around 10:10 p.m. from the Clifton and Ludlow area about hearing an explosion.

Police say then they got a call around 10:20 p.m. from someone that claimed they saw an explosion.

Capt. Hamann told 9News that Cincinnati Police have not received any notice of bomb threats, nor have there been any directed towards a place of worship such as the mosque.

Clifton Known For Diversity

The Clifton neighborhood of Cincinnati is well known for its diversity and includes several churches, schools, residences and child care facilities nearby.

A mosque leader also told 9News that he was unaware of any threats to the mosque or its congregation.

"We always get the support of the community here," said Majed Dbdoub, a mosque committee member. "We have not received any threats or any of that. This is why we're shocked, actually, that someone is thinking about harming our community here."

Besides the mosque, several other places of worship have co-existed for years along this culturally diverse stretch of Clifton Avenue -- including churches of both Catholic and Protestant denominations, a synagogue on the campus of Hebrew Union College -- and at one time, a Hindu temple on a side street not far from that campus or the University of Cincinnati.

Theatrics

There were other theatrical moments during Thursday's hearings: the judge dismissed one of the courtroom guards after the defendants complained that he had threatened them.

Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam's half-brother and co-defendant, accused the prosecutors of being former fellow members of the Baath party and a prosecutor asked to be relieved of his duties because of insults from the dock - a request dismissed by the judge.

Barzan also accused his jailers of abuse.

"They asked me questions and when I asked to be able to explain things they demanded that I reply by yes or no and slapped me across the face while I had handcuffs on," he said.

It was not immediately clear if he was referring to US or Iraqi interrogators.

Witness too young

The first witness to testify on Thursday - speaking from behind a curtain and with his voice disguised - said he was eight during the killings in Dujail.

He said his grandmother, father and uncles had been arrested and tortured. The witness said he had never again seen his male relatives, implying that they had been killed.

Saddam said the court should not depend on the testimony of witnesses who had not reached adulthood at the time of the alleged crime.

Defence lawyers also questioned the reliability of the witness.

"This is a waste of time," one said. "He was only a child."

A second witness also gave evidence on Thursday and a third
was due after a recess.

Video editing

Barzan repeatedly interrupted the court, protesting at one stage that much of what he was saying was being edited out of video footage of the trial which is being broadcast on televisions with a 20-minute delay.

"If the sound is cut off once again, then I don't know about my comrades but I personally won't attend again, this is unjust and undemocratic," he said.

Prosecutors have accused the defendants of grand-standing in an attempt to turn the trial into a political forum for their views.

A prosecutor then offered to resign, saying the presiding judge was not keeping proper order in the court and was allowing defendants to speak out of order.

Rizkar Mohammed Amin, the presiding judge, would not accept his resignation.

Barzan then accused the prosecutors of being former members of the Baath, the ruling party under Saddam.

"This is the biggest insult there is, accusing me of belonging to the bloody Baath," one of the prosecutors answered.

Barzan then stood up shouting: "Long live the Baath."

This incident was edited out of video footage broadcast from the courthouse.

Bailiff ejected

In another courtroom incident, Amin ejected a bailiff after
defendants alleged he had threatened them.

It was not immediately clear who had allegedly been threatened or in what way.

Saddam and his seven co-defendants are charged with ordering the killing of 148 people from the mainly Shia village of Dujail, north of Baghdad, in the 1980s.

Prosecutors say Saddam ordered the killings in reprisal for a failed attempt to assassinate him in the village in 1982.

Scores of families from Dujail were rounded up and shunted between jails around Iraq for four years after the attack.

United we stand
The Shi'ite religious parties in the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) were the big winners - from 70% to 95% of the vote in the impoverished southern provinces; 59% in Baghdad; and nationally, well over 40% of the total (they've won in nine of Iraq's 18 provinces plus the capital). It's a relatively unexpected success considering the dreadful record of Ibrahim Jaafari's Shi'ite-dominated government.

All those intimately allied with the US invasion and occupation were big losers. The Iraqi National List of US intelligence asset and former prime minister Iyad Allawi, also known as "Saddam without a moustache", the man who endorsed the Pentagon bombing of the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf and Sunni Arab Fallujah - got a pitiful 14%.

Convicted fraudster and former Pentagon ally Ahmad Chalabi received less than 1% in Baghdad. The neo-conservatives of the American Enterprise Institute were predicting 5% for Chalabi (their overwhelming favorite) and 20% for Allawi; that's proof enough they have no clue about what's going on in Iraq.

Bush's new Iraq is pro-Iran. It will not recognize Israel. And it wants the Americans out; one of the first measures of an emerging, powerful parliamentary alliance between roughly 38 Sadrists of Shi'ite nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and roughly 50 Sunni Arabs will be to call for an immediate end of the occupation.

The details to be ironed out hinge on whether the UIA majority aligns itself with the Sunni Arabs, the Kurds, or with both in a government of "national unity" - as it is being called by the current vice president Abdel Mahdi (a free marketer) as well as current president Jalal Talabani, a Kurd.

"National unity" is improbable; the Shi'ites simply won't forgo their majority. The Kurds for their part know it will be a foolish move to try to break their strategic alliance with the UIA. Sunni Arab votes were split between the neo-Ba'athist National Dialogue Council of Salih Mutlak and the Islamist, Sunni National Accord Front of Adnan Dulaimi. But what matters is that they are both part of the Sunni Arab resistance. Their common line is that their presence in parliament develops a new political front - what we have called the Sinn Fein component of the Sunni Arab resistance.

It never happened
The big problem is that once again in Iraq Shi'ites voted for Shi'ites, Sunnis for Sunnis (they won in four provinces, Anbar, Salahuddin, Nineveh and Diyala, but got only 20% in Baghdad) and Kurds for Kurds (they also won in four provinces, including Kirkuk). Liberal democrats who were dreaming of a democratic, federal, anti-sectarian Iraq have been totally sidelined. Arguably no politician in Iraq is thinking about the future of the country as a whole. No national projects are being discussed.

The constitutional vote in October had already institutionalized the sectarian division - 80% of the Sunni Arabs in the four main Sunni provinces voted against what they saw as an American-designed charter. Washington believed the vote would undermine the resistance. The exact opposite happened. The December elections now paint a vivid picture of a country fractured on sectarian lines. But this is what the Americans wanted in the first place.

Elections or no elections, Iraq enters 2006 mired in the same, usual, gruesome rituals. The Pentagon believes it can subdue the Sunni Arab resistance by bombing them to death while the resistance keeps bombing, suicide bombing and assassinating en masse.

So the endless, gory stream will continue, not even making headlines - explosions at police stations, assassinations of "Baghdad officials", executions of collaborators, mortars over the Green Zone, scores of innocent civilian victims of car bombings, Marines killed in the Sunni triangle, Shi'ite death squads, Turkmen fighting Kurd for Kirkuk ...

Playwright Harold Pinter pulled a Beckett at his Nobel lecture. He offered to be Bush's speechwriter. Then Pinter impersonated classic Bush: "My God is good. [Osama] bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam Hussein's God was bad except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians." And this was even before Bush mixed up Saddam with bin Laden in a "we're winning in Iraq" speech.

Pinter observed, "The United States supported and in many cases engendered every rightwing military dictatorship in the world after the end of World War II." He gave a lot of examples. But then, with devastating irony (a concept seemingly absent from the White House/Pentagon axis), he said: "It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest."

Just like the suffering of Iraqis never happened. Robert Fisk, in his masterful The Great War for Civilization (Fourth Estate, London) remarks, "The sanctions that smothered Iraq for almost 13 years have largely dropped from the story of our Middle East adventures ... When the Anglo-American occupiers settled into their palaces in Baghdad, they would blame the collapse of electrical power, water-pumping stations, factories and commercial life on Saddam Hussein, as if he alone had engineered the impoverishment of Iraq. Sanctions were never mentioned. They were 'ghosted' out of the story. First there had been Saddam, and then there was freedom'."

But Iraqis as a whole have not forgotten the sanctions - imposed by the US, carried out by the "international community" and responsible for the death of thousands of children. As much as the Shi'ites have not forgotten their betrayal by George Bush senior, who called for a Shi'ite uprising in early 1991 and then left thousands of men, women and children to be massacred by Saddam's gunships. There's no way these impoverished masses can trust anything related to American promises of "freedom".

How Bush is winning
There's some evidence that the murderous chaos unleashed by Shi'ite death squads may not be "an accident" but part of a carefully crafted American strategy, as the Bush administration has constantly added fire to the ethnic furnace as the best diversion to not address Iraq's tremendous social tensions.

An atomized and terrorized society is much easier to manipulate, while at the same time the non-stop bloodshed is the perfect justification for "staying the course". The incessant chatter in the US about a partial "withdrawal" is just chatter.

Already in June 2003, proconsul L Paul Bremer's coalition hands were hiring Saddam's Mukhabarat pals for "special ops" against the Sunni Arab resistance, while "torture central", Abu Ghraib, was again operating in full force under American management.

In the Shi'ite south, the Badr Organization - the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq's (SCIRI's) militia - as well as Muqtadar's Mahdi Army were gaining ground. The Badr was finally formally incorporated into the Interior Ministry, where Sunni units had also been carving up their own turf (under the protection of Allawi).

The former Ba'athist Sunnis - and later the Shi'ites - benefited from the invaluable knowledge of American "counter-insurgency" experts who organized death squads in Colombia and El Salvador, as well as retired American Special Forces soldiers. Commandos operating in the "Salvador option" manner have been very much in the cards from the beginning, responding to a sophisticated, state-of-the-art command, control and communications center even while the majority of the Iraqi population had no electricity, no fuel and no medicine.

The pattern was and remains the same; people "disappearing" after they are accosted by groups of men armed to the teeth, in police commando uniforms, with high-tech radios and driving Toyota Land Cruisers with police license plates. Needless to say, the resulting murders are almost never investigated.

The objectives, from the point of view of the Bush administration, also remain the same; keep the Pentagon and its military bases inside an Iraq mired in sectarian bloodshed and with a weak central government.

The "follow the money" trail leads to an array of profitable privatizations, and the upcoming sale of Iraq's fabulous oil reserves to a few, select foreign investors. Abdel Mahdi of SCIRI, one year ago in Washington, had already laid down the script. He is a key player to watch.

No wonder that the real composition of the next Iraqi government will not be determined by the polls - at least not exclusively. The real kingmaker is the US ambassador, the White House pet, Afghan Zalmay Khalilzad.

The Bush administration will pull no punches to safeguard its "follow the money" interests, as well as its precious military bases. Vice President Dick Cheney arrived in Baghdad on December 18, only three days after the election. He didn't even bother to tell Jaafari that he was in the country. First Cheney talked to Khalilzad and assorted American generals, and only then were Jaafari and President Talabani summoned to his presence.

How Bush lost it
The uprising of Muqtadar's Mahdi Army in 2004 was the definitive nail in the coffin of the Bush administration's dream of ruling Iraq. At the time the Pentagon repeatedly said it wanted to "kill or capture him". It did neither.

Muqtada became the man to watch much earlier than his newfound - by American corporate media - prominent role in post-election Iraq. After the bombing of Najaf, the Bush administration completely lost the plot. Then, after the January 2005 elections, the new Jaafari government quickly embraced Iran, received a pledge of $1 billion in aid, the use of Iranian port facilities, and help with refining Iraqi oil.

Sunni Arab regimes like Jordan and Saudi Arabia started to be haunted by the specter of a "Shi'ite crescent". A neo-conservative Iraq as a base to launch an attack on Iran disappeared as a mirage in the desert. As the US has to fight a relentless Sunni Arab guerrilla war, it cannot possibly risk alienating the Iraqi Shi'ite masses (more than they already are) with an attack on Iran.

No wonder military historian Martin van Creveld, a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the only non-American author on the Pentagon's list of required reading for officers, called for Bush to be impeached and put on trial "for misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 BC sent his legions into Germany and lost them".

Bush and his faithful ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, have been playing the same scratched CD track: "We're better off now without Saddam." That is not true. The fall of Saddam led to the rise of al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers; and even Allawi admitted that human rights in Iraq now are no better than under Saddam. Not to mention that there is no reconstruction, unemployment is at 70%, and a country which in the late 1980s had one of the highest standards of living in the Arab world has been razed to a sub-Saharan level.

Whatever the Americans do - with "Iraqification" doomed to failure, as much as "Vietnamization" - the war in Iraq now is a rampaging beast that threatens to spill all over the Middle East.

"Bring 'em on," said Bush, and they did; the result is a new, deadly generation of global jihadis. Sunni-Shi'ite antagonism will spill over to oil-rich Sunni Gulf states (including Saudi Arabia) with huge but heavily marginalized Shi'ite populations. Kurdish separatist dreams have tremendous implications for Turkey, Syria and Iran, especially if Iraq, through civil war, finally disintegrates.

So the most probable scenario for 2006 and beyond is a fragile central government in Baghdad bombarded by an intractable guerrilla movement - a chaotic and sectarian hornets' nest breeding one, 10, 100 mini (or maxi) al-Qaeda leaders able to convulse the Middle East. Maybe this is what the neo-cons meant by "creative destruction".

Al-Qaeda has a masterplan for the Middle East, and the next stages - apart from the Gulf emirates - are to be played in vulnerable Jordan, Turkey, Egypt and even Israel. As for the air war against the Sunni Arab resistance, it may buy a few votes at home but will do absolutely nothing to improve America's dreadful image in the Middle East - especially because civilian "collateral damage" will be enormous.

That bearded, vociferous guy
Saddam's trial - the outcome of which is already determined - will proceed as a purely sectarian propaganda coup. If this were a real trial, Saddam would be in The Hague in front of an international panel of respected judges, experts in human rights law.

Or the United Nations would have been commissioned to organize a special tribunal in a neutral country like Switzerland. Saddam's secrets, though, are so vast - and so extremely embarrassing for the US - that he cannot possibly leave the Green Zone, where he will certainly be executed. Saddam's trial will become the sorry mirror image of the sectarian politics let loose in Iraq at large.

Bush has opened a Pandora's box with his shock and awe tactics. The ultimate quagmire will keep mutating and unleashing its deadly new powers for years on end. And there is nothing anyone - not even the "indispensable nation" - can do about it. We have all been, and will remain, shocked and awed.

Election results released Tuesday, with nearly 90 percent of the votes counted, showed the Shiite Muslim bloc The United Iraqi Alliance, an amalgam of political parties that won the most seats in the interim parliament that was elected in January, won about 110 of the 230 seats up for grabs in provincial balloting for the new assembly. Kurds followed with 43 seats, and a Sunni Arab coalition had about 35. An additional 45 seats will be allocated according to a complicated formula.

"I don't think there is any practical point for us for being in this National Assembly if things stay like this," said And Salah Mutlak, who headed an independent Sunni slate. "This election is completely false. It insults democracy everywhere. Everything was based on fraud, cheating, frightening people, and using religion to frighten the people. It is terrorism more than democracy."

Mutlak said he had expected to capture 70 parliament seats, The Washington Post reported. The Shiite slate appeared to be far short of winning the 184 seats necessary to avoid the need to form a coalition to control the parliament. The Shiite bloc partnered with the Kurds to form an interim government in April and would likely have to turn to the Kurds again.

Among some Sunni residents in Baghdad, there was a sudden feeling of uncertainty about whether their votes for a permanent National Assembly would lead to a stronger government or more division. Many Sunnis, who had rejected the country's election in January for an interim parliament, voted for the first time in last Thursday's election.

The Iraqi Accord Front, made up of the top three Sunni parties, announced Tuesday that it wanted a new election in Baghdad province, where its members had expected to pick up the most seats. Some Sunni leaders suggested that if the results held, insurgents who had put down their arms might resort to violence again.

"The security of Iraq will not be achieved by having such results," said Adnan al-Dulaimi of the Sunni slate. "All the Iraqis know that the results are forged, and this result did not represent the truth."

The Shiites "won't enjoy authority," said Mutlak, the Sunni politician.

Until these announcements by the Sunni groups, many Iraqis had hoped that the election, the first with broad participation, would create a government that was accepted across religious, tribal and ethnic lines. Political groups had begun to discuss coalitions after early results showed that the coalitions would be necessary to reach the two-thirds agreement needed to approve a new president and pass changes to the constitution.

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Sunni leaders allege that in many cases their supporters were prevented from casting votes, ballots were tampered with and militias aligned with the main Shiite religious parties stood outside polling places to intimidate voters.

While the Sunnis' objections were the loudest, many parties charged that ballot-box stuffing and fraud marred the election. Farid Ayar, an elections spokesman, dismissed the charges as politicking but said the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq would investigate 20 "very serious" complaints.

Even the party of former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite whom U.S. officials had championed, got about 20 seats, fewer than his supporters had expected. Allawi's party also charged that the election process favored the more religious parties.

Before the election, Allawi's group had commissioned polling that showed it winning 45 to 60 seats in the new parliament. Judging by the preliminary results, Saad Muttalibi, an aide to Allawi, said members of Allawi's list believe they could have as few as 17 seats, down from the 40 seats held in the interim government.

Election violations were alleged, but Muttalibi said Allawi suffered more from a smear campaign and an implicit message by Shiite clerics that it was the duty of their followers to vote for the main Shiite bloc.

Muttalibi said he hopes an agreement can be reached that would give significant voices to secular politicians.

"If there isn't a political agreement, I fear Iraq will be turned into a weak Islamic state, with Shiite interest and Sunni interest tearing in different directions," he said.

Baghdad province, which includes the capital, was a place where Allawi and the Sunni lists needed to do well to have a chance to win significant power in molding the first full-term government since the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

"If no serious action is taken [by the election commission] in which the others get their rights, we get our rights and every list gets its rights, we will demand the elections be redone in Baghdad," al-Dulaimi said Tuesday

Al-Dulaimi and Mutlak called on the international community, including the United Nations and Arab League, to intervene in the elections.

Speaking at a news conference at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad's Green Zone, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad acknowledged that voters appeared to be casting ballots along sectarian and ethnic lines. The ambassador, however, said he would encourage Shiite leaders to make the government broadly representative.

"For Iraq to succeed there has to be cross-ethnic and cross-sectarian cooperation," Khalilzad said. "Sectarianism undercuts prospects for success and increases the risk of conflict among sects."

The silver lining, of course, is that the election did see broad participation, if not particularly clean execution. And because all of the leading parties say they want the United States to leave on a clear and public time line, this should provide adequate cover for a staged but complete withdrawal from a sovereign country that we had no right to invade in the first place.

What we will leave behind, after hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lost lives, will be a long ways from the neoconservative fantasy of creating a compliant democracy in the heart of the Middle East. It is absurd for Bush to assert that the election "means that America has an ally of growing strength in the fight against terror," ignoring how he has "lost" Iraq to the influence and model of "Axis of Evil" Iran. Tehran's rogue regime, which has bedeviled every U.S. president since Jimmy Carter, now looms larger than ever over the region and most definitely over its oil. "Iran wins big in Iraq's election," reads an Asia Times headline, speaking a truth that American policy makers and much of the media is bent on ignoring: "The Shiite religious coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), not only held together, but also can be expected to dominate the new 275-member National Assembly for the next four years," the paper predicts based on the returns to date. "Former premier Ayad Allawi's prospects of leading the new government seem virtually nil. And Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Accord suffered a shattering defeat."

Allawi and Chalabi are the Iraqi exiles and U.S. intelligence "assets" who played such a huge role in getting the United States into this war. Chalabi, in particular, will go down in history as one of the great con artists of all time, managing to feed phony intelligence to the White House, the New York Times and countless other power players who found his lies convenient for one reason or another. Now, despite -- or, more likely, because of -- their long stints on the U.S. payroll, both of these wannabe George Washingtons have been overwhelmingly rejected by their countrymen. Chalabi, long the darling of the Pentagon, seems headed to obtaining less than 1 percent of the vote nationwide and will fail to win his own seat. Allawi's slate, favored more by the CIA, will end up in the low teens. As much as one should despise the role played by those two men in getting us into this mess, their abject failure is not a good thing for they carried the banner of a more modern and secular Iraq, which is essential to peace and human rights progress. But the Iraqi people will have to come to that truth on their own and not as a result of foreign intervention that only fuels the most irrational political and religious forces. Unfortunately, it is hardly an advertisement for our democratic way of life that the American people were so easily deceived as to the reasons for this war. Or that our president resists the condemnation of torture, renders captured prisoners to be interrogated in the savage prisons of Uzbekistan and Syria, and claims an unrestrained right to spy on U.S. citizens.

Nor does it help that this president is so publicly bent on intruding government-imposed religious values into American civil life, while urging secular tolerance upon the Islamic world. Or that he remains so blind to the reality of life in that world that he still does not grasp that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were on opposite sides of the enormous struggle over the primacy of religion in the Arab world. Iraq, for all of its massive deficiencies, was not a center of religious fanaticism before the U.S. invasion, and the Islamic fanatics that are the president's sworn enemy in the so-called "war on terror" did not have a foothold in the country. Now, primitive religious fundamentalism forms the dominant political culture in Iraq and the best outcome for U.S. policy is the hope that Shiite and Sunni fanatics can check each other long enough for the United States to beat a credible retreat and call it a victory, albeit a pyrrhic one.

Robert Scheer is the editor of TruthDig.com. He can be reached at rscheer@truthdig.com.

The facility, Camp Ashraf, is located about 60 miles northeast of Baghdad and houses approximately 3,800 Iranian exiles who are opposed to the regime in Tehran, according to experts. The MeK disarmed in 2003 as part of an agreement with the United States, the New York Times reported, but the exact conditions of that disarmament are unclear. Lt. Col. Guy Rudisill, a spokesman with the Multi-National Force-Iraq, which oversees the camp, said in an e-mail to United Press International that the MeK has disarmed and that its members have signed statements in which they "voluntarily rejected terrorism and violence." But Sullivan told UPI on Dec. 8 that the group has given up only its "heavy weaponry" while retaining small arms, and that its members "conduct training."

The State Department maintains that the MeK is a terrorist organization and should be identified alongside groups such as al-Qaida and Hamas. Sullivan discounted the suggestion, made by supporters of the MeK, that the group has not carried out terrorist attacks in more than 15 years.

"The argument from which we approach it is [that] this is a group that is engaged in terrorist activity. It's been well-documented in the patterns of global terrorism," Sullivan said. "I would disagree with the characterization that they've been out of the business for a long time. I don't think that's an accurate assessment. From our standpoint -- though there may be some folks out there who may find [the MeK's] viewpoint appealing -- we think it sends the wrong message in the war on terror to distinguish between 'good terrorists' and 'bad terrorists.'"

On Capitol Hill, however, the MeK has received open support, including a statement made in early December by Rep. Ed Towns, D-N.Y., to the Committee for Camp Ashraf Residents, an advocacy group that works to protect the camp from Iranian reprisals. In the statement, which the committee posted on its website, Towns said, "We must take meaningful steps to provide safety and security to both Iraqi[s] and PMOI members in Iraq."

Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., has also expressed support for the MEK in the past and has said that the Clinton administration only added the group's name to the State Department's list of terrorist organizations in the first place to "curry favor with the Iranian regime," according to news sources.

Repeated calls to Towns' offices in Brooklyn and Washington concerning the MeK were not returned; nor did Tancredo return a call.

Although Towns and Tancredo have publicly expressed support for the MeK, the two representatives are far from alone on Capitol Hill, according to a second State Department official, who asked not to be identified.

"There are about 100 members of Congress that, believe it or not, find the MeK useful," the official told UPI.

At the Pentagon, meanwhile, the Defense Department does not openly support the MeK, but views the organization as "protected persons under the Fourth Geneva Convention," according to Mark Ballesteros, a spokesman who was not authorized to provide further details. Ballesteros said the determination that the MeK is entitled to protected status was made by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The Fourth Geneva Convention guarantees a number of basic rights to MeK members in Iraq, including the right to protection from danger or violence and the right not be repatriated to Iran -- where the group's members could face torture or death -- said Steven Schneebaum, counsel for the Committee for Camp Ashraf Residents.

But legal experts said the Fourth Geneva Convention does not prevent the United States from prosecuting any would-be "terrorists" at Camp Ashraf -- and American authorities have not done so. The New York Times reported in 2004 that a 16-month U.S. investigation into MeK members at Camp Ashraf resulted in no prosecutions.

Now, the subject of what goes on at Camp Ashraf remains hotly contested, with conflicting reports not only about whether the MeK is completely or only partially disarmed, but also whether the group has committed human rights violations against its own members to prevent them from leaving Camp Ashraf. A Human Rights Watch report released earlier this year concluded that the MeK abused its members, but a later report by a delegation from the European Parliament called the initial findings "devoid of any truth."

While controversy surrounds Camp Ashraf and the MeK, one observer said U.S. support for the organization in its fight against the Iranian regime -- whether implicit or explicit -- only worsens relations between Washington and Tehran. That's because the MeK is not an effective tool against Iran and supporting the group only subjects the United States to charges of hypocrisy in the war on terror, according to Gideon Rose, managing editor of Foreign Affairs magazine.

"Realistically, I'm not opposed [to supporting the MeK]. You could make a case that if they were extremely effective and had some realistic potential for toppling or seriously undermining the regime in Iran, it might be worth using them," Rose said. "What makes it somewhat hard to understand is that nobody actually believes that. Most serious observers don't see [the MeK] as having any significant gains to bring to the table, except for the fact that they enrage or annoy Tehran."

"The Irish Government has allowed 650,000 US armed troops in uniform to pass through Shannon Airport for the purposes of the Iraq War, and this has resulted in the unlawful killing of up to 100,000 Iraqi people."

Senator Paschal Mooney said he found the Alliance's arguments were one-sided and said the removal of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was a good thing.

He pointed out the 80% voter turnout in the recent democratic elections.

He disagreed with Labour Committee member Michael D Higgins who claimed there may have been political interference in decisions by the DPP in relation to complaints about activity at Shannon.

Mr Money added: "The people in America, particularly Irish Americans, would not understand if a troupe of gardaí was to go onto a plane at Shannon Airport without any specific evidence."

He said he accepted assurances from the Irish and US governments that Shannon was not being used for rendition flights until there was evidence to the contrary.

He also said he would support a parliamentary investigation into rendition flights, similar to other European countries.

Seanad leader Mary O'Rourke said a Seanad Select Committee had been set up to inquire into the matter and report to the European Council.

"There have been incidents of which we would not be proud as a country. The democratic process benefits from people questioning things. We're not all cloned dolly sheep bobbing our heads up and down."

The US Ambassador has been invited to appear before the Committee, but Senator O'Rourke said she didn't expect him to attend.

"I'll give any money that he shan't come because he won't get permission from Washington. He's an employee of the State Department and he takes his orders and does his job," she said.

Greens chairman John Gormley said George Bush was a puppet of a neo-conservative troupe in the White House.

He added that the opposition of Irish people to US foreign policy didn't make them anti-American.

"The war was based on a massive lie. The war is continuing with horrendous casualties, mostly the citizens of that country," he said.

He claimed gardaí were infringing the civil liberties of peace activists at Shannon airport.

"In order to cow-tow to the US, the Garda Siochana is simply making up the law as they go along," he said.

The Dublin TD added: "No US war plane should be landing in Shannon because of our tradition of neutrality. They should not be using Shannon as a military airport ... and treating the country like it is any other state of the US."

Raytheon has been developing a Humvee-mountable ADS for the Pentagon over the last couple of years, as part of an ACTD, or "advanced concept technology demonstration."

By now, the system was supposed to be in the field. But there have been concerns that the ADS tests weren't sufficiently realistic. The Pentagon ordered additional trials. More than 2,370 ADS shots were fired during a pair of "military utility assessments" over the fall.

Now, the head of the Army's Rapid Equipping Force -- the unit in charge of getting gear to the troops in a hurry -- is saying: enough.

The system's "capabilities have, to date, been sufficiently demonstrated in the ACTD [advanced concept technology demonstration] to prove its value to the solider," Col. Robert Lovett notes in a memo, obtained by Inside the Army.

And the 18th Military Police Brigade has requested ADS "to help 'suppress' insurgent attacks and quell prison uprisings."

ADS' technical manager, Diana Loree, said the system "now meets all of the ACTD performance parameters," Inside the Army notes.

"Because the system is a hand-built, one-of-a-kind technology demonstrator, it does not meet conventional humvee curb weight requirements... However, the technology team worked closely with [Humvee manufacturer] AM General to ensure the safety of the system and its occupants."

There has also been talk, at least, of building an airborne model of ADS -- as well as putting together a Hummer with both pain rays and sonic blasters. Needless to say, neither project is as far along as the basic Active Denial System.

"This should be our biggest week, but I had to shut down my business," said Olga Diaz, owner of Olga's Salon in the financial district in Lower Manhattan. "If it wasn't for the strike, I would be back to back, maybe 30 clients a day through here, but yesterday I had only one, and today only two. I could lose $3,000 worth of business this week."

The hairdressers in that shop, like Maria Lozano, earn only on commission. So no work, no pay. Ms. Lozano, who lives in Queens, was unable to get to work on Tuesday. So on Tuesday night, she left her children with her mother and went to her boyfriend's home on Staten Island. She commuted to work by ferry yesterday, but there was little to do.

"I still have to buy a lot of presents, and I'm stuck," she said. "I don't have any money."

Visiting Nurse Service said it feared that if the strike continued, its workers would not be able to keep up with the need for in-home care. It warned hospitals that in the coming days, they might have to hold patients longer than usual, rather than releasing people who need home care.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg continued to describe the strike's economic impact in dire terms, saying that business at restaurants fell by 40 percent, that street traffic on Fifth Avenue's glittering shopping district was down by 50 percent, that sales dropped by 60 percent at the stores on Fordham Road in the Bronx. The office of City Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr. estimated that if the strike continues through Christmas, the cost to the city's economy would reach $1.5 billion.

Experts agreed that the pain would be widespread and deep, but cautioned that so far, the only measure is anecdotal evidence. The first reliable data may be from sales tax reports, which the state's Department of Taxation and Finance said would not begin to trickle in until the first of the year.

Stores and restaurants appeared to be especially hard hit, losing customers and workers at what would ordinarily be their busiest season. The financial company A. G. Edwards estimated yesterday that Federated Department Stores, the nation's largest department store chain and owner of Macy's, Bloomingdale's and Lord & Taylor, would lose 1 to 2 percent of its December sales for the entire nation because of the New York strike.

The greatest hardship may be felt by smaller businesses and their employees, who have fewer resources to fall back on.

The owners of the Coffee Pot, a small chain of restaurants in Manhattan, hit the streets at 4 a.m. yesterday in rented vans to pick up 20 employees who live in the city's other boroughs. They paid for the vans, for parking, and for another 20 workers' cab fare, as much as $50 apiece, roundtrip.

In all, said Sonny Patel, one of the chain's owners, it is costing Coffee Pot close to $1,000 a day just to open the doors each day - and for curtailed hours, at that. And despite their efforts, some workers were unable to make it.

"We're still paying everybody, but I don't know how much longer we can do that," he said.

Nerys Santos lives in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan and works as a bookkeeper at a grocery in Queens, earning $55 a day to support herself and three children. But on Tuesday and again yesterday, the logistics of getting her children to school and herself to work defeated her, so she stayed home and earned nothing. Her boss told her it was essential for her to reach work today. "If he pays for me to go, I'll go," she said. "But I can't afford to get there myself."

Many New Yorkers said that while they had some sympathy for the transit workers, it was quickly wearing thin. In particular, some said, walking out just before Christmas seemed intended to inflict maximum pain.

In its last edition of the year, New York magazine lists 123 reasons "to love New York right now": because "Bush is not our fault," but "we have nothing against Republicans." Because it's possible "in one night to see as many shows as you can see in another city in a year" or because "the people can be downright nasty."

The transport strike isn't on the list but, Tuesday morning, December 20, in Manhattan, some people were tempted to add it to the list. "Look!" said David Frei, director of communication. "Isn't it extraordinary!" To get a good vantage point, he stood in the middle of the avenue. In front of him was a long, silent ribbon: Madison Avenue.

It is usually one of the most crowded streets. Since dawn, it had been reserved for emergency vehicles. It is less than 40 degrees out but the sky is cloudless. The only vehicle visible is a skateboard, upon which a man is treating himself to a wrong-way trip up the one-way avenue. David Frei appreciates the silence in Midtown, but, he said, "New Yorkers won't be patient very long."

The day will prove him right. With 7 million passengers deprived of buses and subways, New York is a city in semi-chaos. It is the first strike in 25 years. The city has implemented siege-like measures. No truck can enter the city before 11 a.m. No vehicle can go below 96th Street unless it has four people in it. Taxis take multiple passengers for a flat rate of 10 dollars each.

In spite of it all, in the middle of the day, the city is full to the brim. Traffic is at a standstill. Drivers are doing U-turns, there they break down. In a city that is already "too cold in the winter, too hot in the summer, and too crowded year-round," as New York writes, the strike is clearly unpopular. The transit workers are demanding a raise. They are also protesting the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA)'s plan to raise the retirement age from 55 to 62, while the company has a billion-dollar surplus (nearly 850 million euros).

In the afternoon, enthusiastic reactions greet the decision of Judge Theodore Jones, who punished the transit workers union with a fine of 1 million dollars per day of the strike.

Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter charged Monday that the reason Veterans Affairs Secretary Anthony Principi stepped down earlier this month was the growing scandal surrounding the use of uranium munitions in the Iraq War.

Writing in Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter No. 169, Arthur N. Bernklau, executive director of Veterans for Constitutional Law in New York, stated, “The real reason for Mr. Principi’s departure was really never given, however a special report published by eminent scientist Leuren Moret naming depleted uranium as the definitive cause of the ‘Gulf War Syndrome’ has fed a growing scandal about the continued use of uranium munitions by the US Military.”

Bernklau continued, “This malady (from uranium munitions), that thousands of our military have suffered and died from, has finally been identified as the cause of this sickness, eliminating the guessing. The terrible truth is now being revealed.”

He added, “Out of the 580,400 soldiers who served in GW1 (the first Gulf War), of them, 11,000 are now dead! By the year 2000, there were 325,000 on Permanent Medical Disability. This astounding number of ‘Disabled Vets’ means that a decade later, 56% of those soldiers who served have some form of permanent medical problems!” The disability rate for the wars of the last century was 5 percent; it was higher, 10 percent, in Viet Nam.

“The VA Secretary (Principi) was aware of this fact as far back as 2000,” wrote Bernklau. “He, and the Bush administration have been hiding these facts, but now, thanks to Moret’s report, (it) ... is far too big to hide or to cover up!”

“Terry Jamison, Public Affairs Specialist, Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, Department of Veterans Affairs, at the VA Central Office, recently reported that ‘Gulf Era Veterans’ now on medical disability, since 1991, number 518,739 Veterans,” said Berklau.

“The long-term effects have revealed that DU (uranium oxide) is a virtual death sentence,” stated Berklau. “Marion Fulk, a nuclear physical chemist, who retired from the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab, and was also involved with the Manhattan Project, interprets the new and rapid malignancies in the soldiers (from the 2003 Iraq War) as ‘spectacular … and a matter of concern!’”

When asked if the main purpose of using DU was for “destroying things and killing people,” Fulk was more specific: “I would say it is the perfect weapon for killing lots of people!”

Principi could not be reached for comment prior to deadline.

References

1. Depleted uranium: “Dirty bombs, dirty missiles, dirty bullets: A death sentence here and abroad” by Leuren Moret, http://www.sfbayview.com/081804/Depleteduranium081804.shtml.

2. Veterans for Constitutional Law, 112 Jefferson Ave., Port Jefferson NY 11777, Arthur N. Bernklau, executive director, (516) 474-4261, fax 516-474-1968.

3. Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter. Email Gary Kohls, gkohls@cpinternet.com, with “Subscribe” in the subject line.

Email Bob Nichols at bobnichols@cox.net.

A group of City Council members and black leaders said Wednesday that Bloomberg's comment was racist because it was directed at leaders of a union that is less than 30 percent white.

"We resent the idea that you would characterize a predominantly black and Latino union as a bunch of thugs," said City Councilman Charles Barron.

Ed Skyler, the mayor's spokesman, replied: "It's despicable to inject race into this situation."

Bloomberg has no official role in the labor negotiations, since city subways and buses are managed by the state Metropolitan Transportation Authority. But he is responsible for keeping New York running during the shutdown of the nation's largest transit system.

The Rev. Herbert Daughtry, an influential black minister, said the mayor, governor and MTA leaders were risking comparisons to Eugene "Bull" Connor. The Birmingham, Ala., segregationist police commissioner turned fire hoses and police dogs on black civil rights marchers in 1963.

Daughtry said Bloomberg was using as his "bully club" the state law prohibiting strikes by public employees.

"Be cautious how you use the law to beat people into submission," Daughtry said.

In the past, Barron and Daughtry have used the word "thug" to describe white attackers involved in bias crimes. Barron stressed that the context of the predominantly black union is what made Bloomberg's comment racially insensitive.

Transport Workers Union President Roger Toussaint stopped short of joining the accusations of racism, but said Wednesday that the "thuggish" remark showed the mayor's "lack of respect" for his members.

"We wake up at three and four in the morning to move trains in this town," Toussaint said. "That's not the behavior of thugs and selfish people."

Democrats as well as a number of Republicans were already angered by Stevens' tactic that delayed action on the $453.5 billion defense bill including $29 billion for hurricane relief, the war and border security, and $2 billion to help low-income households pay this winter's heating expenses.

"Our military is being held hostage by this issue, Arctic drilling," fumed Sen. Harry Reid, the Democratic leader.

But Stevens, 82, the Senate's most senior member known for his sometimes cantankerous nature and fiery temper, expressed frustration, but had no apologies.

"Every time this subject comes up ... the minority has filibustered," Stevens complained, reminding colleagues of his 25-year campaign to get Congress to allow development of an estimated 10 billion barrels of oil beneath the coastal tundra of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the far northeastern corner of his state.

After the vote, Democrats celebrated as did environmentalists, knowing they had tangled with one of the Senate's toughest members and won.

"It took a lot of guts for a lot of people to stand up," Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., said after the vote. He said he expects the 43 senators who voted against drilling — all but four Democrats as well as GOP Sens. Mike DeWine of Ohio and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island — not to yield to further pressures and change their vote.

But no one believes the issue — which has galvanized environmentalists determined to protect the refuge from development — is going away.

"I expect to see it again next year," said Sen.
John Kerry, D-Mass., a longtime drilling opponent.

"Yes, it'll be back," agreed Lieberman.

Environmentalists rejoiced, aware that never before had drilling proponents come so close to victory. The House already had approved the defense bill with Steven's drilling measure included and President Bush was eager to sign it. Congress approved ANWR drilling in 1995 as part of a budget package that was immune from Senate filibuster, but President Clinton, a drilling opponent, vetoed it.

The Sierra Club called it "an against-all-odds" victory.

"Drilling proponents pulled out all the stops, and tried every trick in their playbook," said Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope. "This is a tremendous victory for all Americans and proof that the fate of the Arctic refuge must be debated on its merits, not as part of a sneak attack."

Stevens argued that Congress in 1980 agreed to allow ANWR's oil to be developed at some future date as part an a compromise he supported that expanded the federal refuge to 19 million acres.

It was a commitment, he maintains, that has not been met.

Those who advocate drilling contend the oil — an estimated 1 million barrels a day during peak production — is needed for national security to reduce the country's dependence on imports. Drilling opponents say ANWR's oil would do little to curtail imports.

Steven's proposal would have required the Interior Department to issue its first oil leases in the 1.5-million-acre coastal plain of the refuge within 22 months and another package of leases in 2010. Oil was not expected to flow before 2015.

Developing the Arctic refuge's oil has been one of Bush's top energy priorities and the administration stepped up lobbying for the ANWR provision this week. Interior Secretary Gale Norton has said repeatedly that the oil can be developed without harming wildlife given environmental safeguards in the bill and use of the most modern drilling techniques.

But drilling opponents argued that ANWR's oil should not be exploited because of the coastal plain's fragile ecosystem and wildlife. While the region looks bleak during its long winters, and oil can be seen seeping from some of its rock formations, the coastal strip also is the calving ground for caribou and home to polar bears, musk oxen, and the annual influx of millions of migratory birds.

"Destroying this wilderness will do very little to reduce energy costs nor does it do very much for oil independence," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

Earlier this year, Stevens and his allies thought their best shot was to stick ANWR drilling into a budget bill, which the rules protect from filibuster. When that strategy foundered, they moved it to the defense appropriations bill, which passed the House early Monday and will likely come before the Senate today, with pressure to adjourn for the holidays growing by the hour.

There will be as many as three opportunities for senators to reject this cynical manipulation -- by voting to strip the refuge language; if that fails, by voting to sustain a filibuster; if that fails, by rejecting the entire package and insisting on a mischief-free appropriations bill.

In the House, Minnesota Republican Mark Kennedy joined the minority in a failed attempt to remove the drilling language, but then followed his GOP leaders in voting to pass the bill itself, saying it would be irresponsible to vote against funding for U.S. troops in Iraq.

The best that can be said of this position, almost certainly wrong, is that it was naive -- there is no chance, zero, that the defense appropriations will be allowed to die. Even Stevens has stopped threatening such scenarios, acknowledging in at least two interviews that if the bill can't pass in its current form, the ANWR language can be stripped out and the bill given speedy approval.

Minnesota's Norm Coleman says he'll vote to remove the drilling language; if that fails, he won't support a filibuster and isn't sure about the overall bill. Expressing well-founded pique, he said, "I'm angry at the way this has been handled, that we're forced to revisit this issue again and again."

That is precisely why Coleman and his colleagues should vote against the Stevens ploy at every opportunity -- regardless of their position on preserving Arctic wilderness. This kind of legislating isn't about balancing interests or seeking compromise or making trades. It's hostage-taking, pure and simple, and any concession by the Senate will only invite more of the same.

The deaths are reported today in the respected New England Journal of Medicine by doctors funded by the British Wellcome Trust working in Vietnam. They urge changes to the global plans for fighting a flu pandemic. Other antiviral drugs are needed alongside Tamiflu, they say.

An eminent professor at Cornell University in New York calls the report "frightening" in a commentary in the journal. Anne Moscona, from the department of paediatrics, microbiology and immunology at Weill medical college, says Tamiflu-resistant H5N1 "is now a reality", and calls for efforts to prevent individuals stockpiling the drug. Its misuse, she says - by people who, for instance, take too low a dose - will breed resistance and further undermine its effectiveness if a pandemic sweeps the world.

The British government has ordered 14.6m courses of Tamiflu, enough for a quarter of the population. Its maker, Roche, cannot keep up with demand, however, as most countries attempt to stockpile. So far, 3.5m doses have been delivered, and the rest is due by next September. At a conference last month, the chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, made it clear that Tamiflu was Britain's first line of defence. But he acknowledged that nobody knew for sure how the drug would work in a pandemic against a strain of flu yet to be encountered."It doesn't cure flu, it simply reduces the severity of the attack," he said.

Last night, a spokeswoman for the department of health said Tamiflu was selected on the strength of independent advice. "Internationally, this is agreed as the product of choice," she said. But she added that the research would be carefully considered as part of the government's constant review of its antiviral strategy.

Alan Hay, head of the WHO Influenza Centre of the MRC National Institute of Medical Research, said it was important to remember that four of the eight Vietnamese patients in the study survived after their treatment with Tamiflu. But, he said, the report was of "very significant concern in regard to how we use these drugs to treat people". It had already been recognised that resistance could build against Tamiflu. In Japan, one in six children treated with the drug for ordinary forms of flu developed resistance. It appeared, he said, that resistance was more likely in children because they had not been exposed to the prevailing strains of flu. In the case of bird flu, however, nobody has been exposed.

The report in the NEJM by Jeremy Farrar and colleagues from the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit at the hospital for tropical diseases in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, reveals that they confirmed a resistant form of bird flu in two out of eight patients who were being treated with oseltamivir, of which Tamiflu is the brand name. One was treated at an early stage of infection, when Tamiflu is supposed to be most effective.

Tests found virus samples taken from two patients showed a substitution in a gene that confers resistance to oseltamivir, the generic name for Tamiflu, the researchers report in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

In all, four of eight patients treated in Vietnam for bird flu died despite use of Tamiflu. In one case, a 13-year-old girl was treated during the first 48 hours, which is considered the best time for the drug to work.

Like all viruses, influenza can become resistant to drugs, so the findings are disappointing but not unexpected to virologists.

The cases don't mean Tamiflu won't work in a pandemic, said Dr. Allison McGeer, an infectious disease specialist in Toronto.

Given resistance concerns, three doctors argue in journal commentaries that family physicians have a public health duty not to write prescriptions for patient stockpiles.

Their reasons are:

* The drug should be saved to treat the ill in a pandemic.
* People will be confused about when to take Tamiflu.
* Inappropriate use of Tamiflu could cause the virus to become resistant.

Dr. Ross Upshur, a family physician in Toronto, says several of his patients have asked for Tamiflu because of worries about a pandemic.

"I told them that I wasn't going to write a prescription for Tamiflu and I thought that it was unnecessary," Upshur said.

Demand for Tamiflu is growing. Roche Pharmaceuticals has temporarily stopped sales during the regular flu season because the manufacturer is worried about a shortage.

Canada's chief public health officer, Dr. David Butler-Jones, advises against stockpiling the drug for personal use when it becomes available.

"My advice would be generally, no, I don't think it's appropriate at this time," said Butler-Jones. "But the jury is still out, and that advice may change in a year or two."

The latest studies on Tamiflu show it won't be a magic bullet for treatment, and probably works better at preventing infection.

Using it to prevent infection would require much larger stockpiles. Although it will be expensive, governments should be pressed to stockpile more and use it where it will be most effective, McGeer said.

"Everybody in society has the right to say to public health people and governments: it's important to me that when the pandemic comes, that you're going to be adequately protecting me and people I work with and the people I live with," said McGeer. "How are you going to do that?"

If all government stockpiles of Tamiflu were used for prevention during a pandemic, CBC News conservatively estimates, there would be enough to protect two per cent of Canadians, based on the population and how long the drug needs to be taken.

In the rush to reap profits, Philpott cautions that drug companies may not be sensitive to how poverty can undermine the spirit of informed consent. "Individuals who participate in Indian clinical trials usually won't be educated. Offering $100 may be undue enticement; they may not even realize that they are being coerced," he said.

For decades, pharmaceutical research in India didn't rely on clinical testing. Scientists mostly reverse-engineered drugs already developed in other countries. But in March, everything changed when India submitted to pressure from the World Trade Organization to stop the practice and implement rules that prohibit local companies from creating generic versions of patented drugs.

Now, pharmaceutical companies can rest assured they won't lose profits to a domestic market, and India is suddenly a profitable location for performing the expensive tests required for Food and Drug Administration clearance of any drug. Though it is still too soon to tell how much the legislative change has boosted drug development, observers say the number of studies conducted by multinational drug companies has sharply increased since March.

Given the rising cost of drug research in the United States and Europe, more and more drug companies are conducting clinical trials in developing countries where government oversight is more lax and research can be done for a fraction of the cost. According to a 2004 study by Rabo India Finance, a subsidiary of the Netherlands-based Rabo Bank, clinical trials account for more than 40 percent of drug-development costs. The study also found that performing the studies in India can bring the price down by about 60 percent.

By 2010, total spending on outsourcing clinical trials to India could top $2 billion, according to Ashish Singh, vice president of Bain & Co., a consulting firm that reports on the health-care industry.

Regardless of where clinical trials are performed, the FDA requires the same evidence showing that a drug is safe and effective before it will approve any drug, according to a written comment from Ken Johnson, senior vice president of The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America Foundation.

And it's the responsibility of the institutional review boards at the medical institutions where the studies take place to "actively pursue issues of informed consent," according to another written comment from Jeff Trewhitt, a spokesman for the pharmaceutical industry trade group.



Nevertheless, even before the anti-generic rules were enacted, companies performing clinical trials in India saw their share of problems. In 2004, two India-based pharmaceutical companies, Shantha Biotech in Hyderabad and Biocon in Bangalore, came under scrutiny for conducting illegal clinical trials that led to eight deaths.

Shantha Biotech failed to obtain proper consent from patients while testing a drug meant to treat heart attacks. Biocon tested a genetically modified form of insulin without the proper approval from the Drug Controller General of India or the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee.

In another incident, Sun Pharmaceuticals convinced doctors to prescribe Letrozole, a breast cancer drug, to more than 400 women as a fertility treatment in a covert clinical trial -- and used the results to promote the drug for the unapproved use.

Shantha Biotech, Biocon and Sun Pharmaceuticals did not return e-mails seeking comments for this story.

Pfizer and Eli Lilly have been conducting clinical trials in India for many years, and Novo Nordisk and GlaxoSmithKline have also set up trials in the last two years. The companies did not respond to requests for comment.

Companies are attracted to India not only because of the huge patient pool and skilled workers, but also because many potential study volunteers are "treatment naïve," meaning they have not been exposed to the wide array of biomedical drugs that most Western patients have, said Stefan Ecks, a lecturer in social anthropology at the School of Social and Political Studies in Edinburgh who recently published a paper on the marketing of antidepressants in India.

"Doctors are easier to recruit for trials because they don't have to go through the same ethics procedures as their Western colleagues," Ecks said. "And patients ask fewer questions about what is going on."

After the outcry against Shantha and Biocon, the Indian government adopted stricter ethical guidelines for clinical research, but it's too early to know whether companies are abiding by the new rules.

Also, critics say study volunteers may be taking risks without the potential for reward. Since many pharmaceutical companies are developing the drugs for markets in industrialized nations, it is unlikely that India's poor will have access to most of the new medicine.

"Third World lives are worth much less than the European lives. That is what colonialism was all about," said Srirupa Prasad, a visiting assistant professor of medical history and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Here's a look at the top 10 national stories of 2005:

1. Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast Aug. 29, all but destroying New Orleans and forcing a lengthy relocation of more than 1 million people. President Bush promised to "do what it takes" to rebuild the region, but the price tag estimated at more than $200 billion not only makes it the most costly natural disaster in history but dissipates political interest in paying the bill. There were 26 named storms during the season, surpassing the record of 21 set in 1933. Of those, 14 became hurricanes, beating the previous record of 12 set in 1969.

2. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's decision to retire changed the Supreme Court lineup for the first time in 11 years. Her July 1 announcement, and the Sept. 3 death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, prompted John Roberts' swift confirmation as Rehnquist's successor. But conservative opposition to Harriet Miers forced Bush to withdraw that choice and nominate Samuel Alito instead.

3. The 2,000th American soldier died in Iraq, and debate intensified over when the United States should withdraw. Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., a hawk on defense policy and friend of the Pentagon, stunned the White House by calling for redeployment of all troops as quickly as possible, and President Bush made a series of speeches _ including a prime-time television address, in an attempt to build confidence in his policy.

4. Bush's 2004 election victory failed to translate into a successful 2005 agenda. Questions about the Iraq war, soaring energy prices, bungled federal hurricane response, lack of robust economy and a failed Supreme Court choice caused Bush's poll numbers to tank and sapped his GOP congressional support.

5. Congressional Republican leaders came under legal fire with Tom DeLay forced to step aside as majority leader after his indictment by a Texas grand jury on charges of election-law violations. Senate leader Bill Frist also came under investigation for insider stock trading. While he hangs onto his leadership post, the probe may have killed his 2008 presidential chances. In another blow to Republicans, Rep. Randy Cunningham, R-Calif., pleaded guilty to taking more than $2 million in money and goods from military contractors in exchange for helping them obtain Pentagon contracts.

6. Americans were shocked by skyrocketing prices at the gasoline pumps. The startling increases were partly caused by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which temporarily stopped Gulf Coast production. The average price of regular gasoline rose from $1.78 a gallon on Jan. 3 to as high as $3.07 a gallon on Sept. 5. Also on the increase were prices for natural gas, home heating oil and petroleum-based products.

7. Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was indicted on charges of lying to the grand jury in the CIA leak investigation that became known by some as "Plamegate." The grand jury was investigating whether White House officials illegally disclosed the identity of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame. She's the wife of retired diplomat Joseph Wilson, who accused the administration of twisting intelligence about Iraq's nuclear ambitions. New York Times reporter Judith Miller spent 12 weeks in jail for refusing to testify before the grand jury.

8. The fate of brain-damaged Terri Schiavo ignited a tug-of-war between Congress and President Bush and the federal judiciary. Lawmakers, including House leader Tom DeLay, threatened judges for not keeping her on life support despite her husband's wishes and a Florida court ordered that she be removed. Schiavo died after becoming the centerpiece of a national right-to-die battle.

9. The longest-kept secret in Washington was revealed when Vanity Fair identified retired FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt as "Deep Throat," the anonymous source who led Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to unmask the Watergate scandal that eventually brought down President Nixon in 1974.

10. Michael Jackson was acquitted on all charges of child molestation brought against him by a California D.A. whose earlier case against the entertainer had been frustrated by an out-of-court settlement.

Some 470,000 households in Niigata prefecture have no electricity, probably because the snow and strong winds caused the power lines to short-circuit, said Atsushi Ishii, a spokesman for Tohoku Electric Power Co. He said the company was investigating.

So far, 231 centimetres of snow has fallen in the town of Tsunan in Niigata and 216 centimetres has fallen on Shirakawa Town in central Gifu prefecture, said Kenji Kobayashi, a researcher for the Meteorological Agency. The falls had surpassed records in those regions.

Train services in Niigata, about 250 kilometres northwest of Tokyo, were suspended due to power outages, according to Junpei Yamauchi, a JR East Japan spokesman.

All local and express services as well as some bullet train services in the area were halted, while some night trains linking cities on the west coast will be cancelled, Yamauchi said.

Central Japan International Airport in Aichi prefecture said it would keep its only runway closed until Thursday afternoon because of the snow, said airport spokesman Mitsuoki Hikota.

Fourteen international and 104 domestic flights have been cancelled and eight international flights have been diverted to other airports, Hikota said.

Kansai Electric Power Co. said about 700,000 households in western Japan were without power for about 40 minutes Thursday morning after two power generators at its nuclear power station in Fukui prefecture shut down.

Masaki Todatake, a spokesman for the Osaka-based power company said heavy snow may have caused the generators to shut down automatically. Power had been restored, and the company was investigating.

The new China pipeline runs 962 kilometers (598 miles) and will take China a third of the way to Kashagan in the Caspian Sea, one of the world's largest accessible oil reserves. Kashagan is the largest new oil discovery in decades and exceeds the size of the North Sea. This is a major reason Washington has such a strong interest in supporting democratic regime change in the Central Asia region of late.

In the next 10 years, Kazakhstan plans to almost triple oil production, prompting the landlocked nation to seek new export routes because the country wants to avoid pipelines through Russia and excessive Russian dependence. China is now among Kazakhstan's major target markets.

Best public estimates are that Kazakhstan has 35 billion barrels of discovered oil reserves, twice the amount in the North Sea, and may hold about three times more, according to a Kazakh government report released on November 18 in London. German oil engineers have privately reported that recent drilling by Italy's AGIP, the current oil consortium leader for Kashagan, a huge field offshore Kazakhstan southwest of Tengiz, has confirmed enormous oil deposits there.

The government of President Nursultan Nazarbayev plans to produce 3.6 million barrels a day of oil from all fields in Kazakhstan, onshore and off, by 2015. For 2005, they expect to average about 1.3 million barrels a day, making Kazakhstan far larger than Azerbaijan, and second in oil production of the former Soviet states only to Russia.

The December 15 opening of the new Kazakh-China pipeline was a major event for Beijing. Zhang Guobao, vice chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, China's top economic planning agency, attended the opening. CNPC has invested more than $2.6 billion in Kazakhstan since 1997.

Beijing takes the geopolitical prize
In October, Beijing scored a second major geopolitical coup when China completed a $4.18 billion takeover of PetroKazakhstan Inc. It was, in a sense, revenge on Washington for the blocking of the China acquisition of Unocal. US oil majors had made major efforts to lock up Kazakhstan oil after discovery of major oil offshore in the Kashagan field. They failed. ExxonMobil was charged with bribery of Kazakh officials to win a presence in the Kazakh oil business, and a senior Mobil executive was later jailed on US tax evasion in New York tied to the Kazakh bribery payments.

Nazarbayev enjoys good relations with Russia's President Vladimir Putin. He was general secretary of the Communist Party when Kazakhstan was part of the USSR, and is regarded as a sly fox in terms of dealing with Moscow, while also keeping a clear distance from Moscow.

In October, Russia's Lukoil failed in its bid to buy up the Kazakh state oil company, PetroKazakhstan, in a privatization. Nazarbayev indicated a major geopolitical shift in strategy, compared with a decade or more ago, when it appeared that Washington was to be the major foreign ally of Nazarbayev. At that time Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's company, Chevron, became the lead oil contractor and operator in the Kazakh Tengiz oil field. That was just after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the US oil presence in Kazakhstan was a major US political priority supported by the Bill Clinton administration.

The Chevron Tengizchevoil consortium formed the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) in 1993 amid great fanfare. After years of haggling with the Kazakh government, Chevron finally constructed a pipeline from Tengiz on the Caspian's northeastern shore to the Russian port of Novorossiysk on the Black Sea. Following years of pressure, most members of the CPC group, including Chevron and Oman Oil Co, decided to not pursue future expansions of the CPC line.

Now, a decade later and with the scope of Kazakh oil deposits dwarfing any in the region, with its recent confirmed drillings in the Kashagan field, Nazarbayev has scored a political balance of power coup by turning to Beijing.

In October, Nazarbayev announced that CNPC had won the bid to buy PetroKazakhstan. What will be important to watch, now that Nazarbayev won re-election on December 4, further extending his 14-year reign, is to what extent Washington begins to play up "human rights abuses" by Nazarbayev.

A fledgling "Orange" revolution a la Ukraine has sprung up behind opposition candidate Zharmakhan Tuyakbai and his party, For a Just Kazakhstan. He came in second with 6.6% of the vote and cried fraud, but Washington's and the US media response were muted this time. Rice, in a major trip to shore up sagging US influence in Central Asia on October 10-13, held a private meeting with Tuyakbai. He is clearly being groomed for a possible future role, but clearly not yet.

Washington suffers strategic setback

A major setback for Washington's Eurasian encirclement strategy vis-a-vis China and Russia came several months ago when Uzbekistan's autocratic president Islam Karimov told Washington it could no longer use the Karshi-Khanabad military air base in southeast Uzbekistan, a major piece in Washington's Eurasian chess board play, put into place after September 11, 2001.

Since strong US protest over the government's bloody suppression of protests against a state trial of alleged Islamic fundamentalists in Andijan last May, Karimov's relations with Washington have deteriorated. Karimov's decision to move so aggressively was no doubt influenced by the successful March "Tulip" revolution which toppled Askar Akayev in neighboring Kyrgystan and set the stage for the July election of opposition and US-backed candidate Kurmanbek Bakiev.

On July 29, Karimov announced he was evicting the US entirely from the airbase with a January 2006 exit date. In October, the US Senate, as retaliation, voted not to pay $23 million in base user fees to Uzbekistan for past use. Moscow and Beijing have both moved into the vacuum. A look at the map will indicate why. Uzbekistan is strategic for control or to prevent control by foreign powers such as Washington, of Central Asia and pipeline routes linking Russia, China and Kazakhstan. In October 2004, Moscow secured a long-term military base agreement to station troops in Dushanbe, the capital of nearby Tajikistan, a move by Russia to limit the spread of Washington-backed "color revolutions" in the region.

That appeared to redraw the Eurasian geostrategic map in Moscow's favor, with the recent US loss of Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan is now effectively Russia's main ally in Central Asia.

Washington's position in Eurasia and its future relations with Kazakhstan suddenly assumed high priority. Clearly, the Bush administration decided the time was not ripe to try a full-blown "Orange" revolution in Kazakhstan this month, at least not until Washington's position in the region was stronger. That was a clear purpose of the October Rice visit.

But now with the strong geopolitical turn of Nazarbayev toward playing Beijing to offset potential Washington domination in the region, the situation has begun to change dramatically. A year ago, China attempted to buy out a 16% share in the Kashagan consortium from British Gas, which was willing to sell. That sale was blocked by US consortium member ExxonMobil, the company subsequently charged with bribery and convicted. Now China has opened an oil flow out of Kazakhstan to the East, not the West.

This has major strategic implications for the future of the Washington-backed BTC oil pipeline. That pipeline was built by the Caspian Oil Consortium headed by British Petroleum, and was backed by both Clinton and George W Bush, despite the fact that it was the most costly and least viable oil route out of the Caspian.

Former US national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski had been the chief Washington lobbyist advocating the BTC route to circumvent Russia. Its construction was undertaken on the assumption that it would carry not only Baku oil, but also a major share of Kazakh oil from Tengiz and offshore Kashagan oil fields. Oops!

A larger China energy strategy

The December China-Kazakhstan pipeline opening is one part of a massive Chinese plan to secure as much Kazakh oil riches as possible.

The Chinese plan to connect several pieces of infrastructure - part Soviet-built, part Chinese-built - then reverse the flow of some of them and forge a new export corridor stretching from Kazakhstan's oil-rich Caspian basin, including Kashagan, through a series of western and central-Kazakh oil zones, and ultimately into China. With completion of this major project, China will for the first time have secured a source of imported energy not vulnerable to US aircraft carrier battle groups, as is the case with present oil deliveries from the Persian Gulf and Sudan.

Before opening the new pipeline, China imported only 25,000 bpd from Kazakhstan. Once the link between Kenkiyak and Kumkol is finished, connecting existing infrastructure near the Caspian with the portion inaugurated on December 15, the project will pump 1 million bpd. That would be about 15% of China's crude oil needs.

China then plans to tap into production from dozens of Kazakh sites it has acquired during the past several years. This is oil that currently goes west, or north through Russia.

Beijing still prefers the color 'red'
Beijing has also studied the Washington-backed series of regime changes across Central Asia and the "color revolutions" from Georgia to Ukraine and most recently Kyrgystan, and has evidently decided to "nip in the bud" any similar non-governmental organization efforts within China, or in areas strategic to long-term China energy security.

Kyrgystan's "Tulip" revolution last July sounded alarm bells in Beijing. Possible Chinese pipeline links to Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran and or Russia would clearly be threatened by a ring of new pro-North Atlantic Treaty Organization neighbors and states between western China and its potential oil sources. Their alarm led to warmer ties between Uzbekistan's Karimov and Beijing in recent months, as well as an invitation from Moscow-tied Belarus President Yuri Lukashenko.

The Washington journal Foreign Policy ran a short item in its October edition by an apparent Chinese dissident. The article, titled, "China's Color-Coded Crackdown", is worth quoting:

In China's halls of power, the fall of post-Soviet authoritarian regimes has raised the uncomfortable specter of a Chinese popular uprising. According to the Hong Kong-based Open magazine, a report by Chinese President Hu Jintao, titled "Fighting the People's War Without Gunsmoke", is guiding the Chinese Communist Party's "counterrevolution" offensive. The report, disseminated inside the party, outlines a series of measures aimed at nipping a potential Chinese "color revolution" in the bud.

Some Chinese apparently call it the Battle of the Two Georges - George Bush and global financier George Soros. The Foreign Policy piece continues:

Perhaps the most telling sign of China's concern has been its crackdown on non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Beijing believes that international organizations, especially advocacy NGOs, have acted as Washington's "black hands" behind the recent regime changes in Central Asia. A recent issue of a biweekly journal run by the Communist Party Propaganda Department referred to Washington's "$1 billion annual budget for global democratization" and identified NGOs such as the International Republican Institute, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the US Institute of Peace and the Open Society Institute as organizations that "brainwash" local people and train political oppositions.

In late August, ahead of a visit by the UN high commissioner for human rights, Chinese police raided the office of the Empowerment and Rights Institute, a human rights group supported by the NED. A new regulation offering more freedom to NGOs was initially expected later this year. No longer. The Ministry of Civil Affairs has now stopped processing registration applications, effectively freezing many groups' operations. Instead, the only government offices taking an interest in NGOs are the national security agency [China's secret police] and public security forces.

Both have launched investigations into local NGOs. Some senior Chinese managers working for international NGOs have been called in for "private talks" with authorities, though no related arrests or detentions have been reported. Some NGO offices have had plainclothes security officers show up in an effort to clandestinely ferret out information on foreign staff and organizations. Environmental groups have been singled out for a massive government survey, most likely because they have angered powerful agencies by successfully initiating public debates on controversial issues, such as genetically modified foods and huge dam projects, and because only around 10% of green groups are currently registered with the state.

Meanwhile, Beijing has commissioned researchers from several provincial academies of social science to study the activities of NGOs in China. NGO publications such as directories experienced unexpectedly strong sales in recent months, as they no doubt became convenient study tools. Likewise, experts have been dispatched to Central Asia to study how those color revolutions first sprung roots. In a May 19 Politburo meeting, senior administrators from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, where foreign research funds are usually well received, were reminded of the "acute and complicated struggle in the ideological realm in the new millennium". In other words, be careful about the political implications of your research.

According to sources in Beijing, final decisions on the government's approach to NGOs will be made in a November meeting of the State Council, China's highest executive body. As long as the clouds of color revolution are hovering over Central Asia - some, for example, expect storms in Belarus - the Chinese government will stay on high alert ... Beijing's moves against the country's NGO community remain largely unnoticed outside China. If the international community wants an open and democratic China, it should pay more attention to the survival and growth of Chinese liberal institutions. Otherwise, the country will be destined to remain the same shade of red.

Beijing-Tehran-Moscow

At the end of 2004, Beijing signed a $70 billion energy agreement with Tehran, China's largest Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries energy deal to date. China's state Sinopec agreed to buy 250 million tons of LNG over 30 years from Iran, as well as to develop the giant Yadavaran field. That agreement covered the comprehensive development by Sinopec of the giant Yadavaran gas field, construction of a related petrochemical and gas industry including pipelines.

As part of the huge Iran-China economic cooperation agreement, China's state-run military construction company, NORINCO, will expand the Tehran Metro underground.

A second phase in the Iran-China strategic energy cooperation will involve constructing a pipeline in Iran to take oil some 386 kilometers to the Caspian Sea, there to link up with the planned pipeline from China into Kazakhstan.

On signing the deal, Iran's Petroleum Minister announced that Tehran would like to see China replace Japan as Iran's largest oil importer. As well, Iran has what are estimated to be the world's second largest reserves of natural gas after Russia. Iran is a place of enormous strategic importance to China, to Japan, to Russia, to the European Union, and for all these reasons, to Washington as well.

Iran supplies about 14% of China's oil. Along with Russia, China has been involved since the late 1990s in supplying nuclear technology to Tehran. In 1997, Beijing, under Washington pressure, nominally agreed to stop nuclear-related shipments to Iran, but the flows are believed continuing as the Iran relation is strategic and critical to China's energy security.

China, a veto member of the UN Security Council, has repeatedly called for the issue of Iranian nuclear development to be dealt with by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The IAEA's chief, Nobel Peace Prize awardee, Mohamed ElBaradei, has earned the enmity of Washington war hawks for his open declarations of lack of evidence in both Iraq and now of Iranian atomic bomb capability.

Given the nature of the Bush administration's rush to war in Iraq in 2003, where China had a major stake in oil development, and the subsequent US blocking of other Chinese attempts at securing energy independence, including Unocal, it is not surprising that Beijing is taking extraordinary measures to secure its long-term oil and gas supply.

Energy is the Achilles' heel of China's economic growth. Beijing knows that only too well. So does Washington. A decision by Washington to take military action against Iran now would pull a far larger cast of actors into the fray than Iraq.

F William Engdahl is author of the book, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order from Pluto Press Ltd. He can be contacted via his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

(Copyright 2005 F William Engdahl)

"We are lifting the lid on these explosive comments after Mr Ahern refused to go on the record to denounce claims by former Irish minister Justin Keating that Jews have mounted a 'self-serving and untruthful Zionist myth' to lay claim to Israel."

Gissin says further, "There is a culture of hatred that says the Jews have no right to live here as an entity. We are here as our birthright not as a conqueror."

And he states: "If you don't support Zionism ipso facto you are actually saying, in the logical progression, we don't support the right of the Jewish people to have a state of their own, in their own ancestral homeland.

"That is the problem with the Arabs, they recognise the entity of Israel, but don't recognise the fact that they have an inherent right to a homeland."

So, if one thinks that it is an outrage that the Palestinians, an amalgamation of all of the groups who have been through Palestine, of which the Jews weren't the first, were dispossessed, then one is part of a "culture of hatred."

I think that it is an outrage that raped Palestinians and those who don't let Zionists control their thought are accused of being part of a "culture of hate" for not acknowledging the rapist his "inherent right" to rape them.

Saying it does not make it so, Mr. Gissin. There are a few souls out here who think.

The Songhua becomes the Amur in Russia, and Natalya Zimina, a spokeswoman for the regional administration, said levels in the Amur were normal and water supplies to the city of 580,000 would be maintained.

The slick has been floating downstream and entered Russian territory last week. It could take four days or more to pass through Khabarovsk, but experts warn the ecological effects will last longer. Benzene and nitrobenzene are heavier than water and they are settling on the river bottom or sticking to the ice.

Come spring, melting ice will pollute not just the river water, but also the banks, according to Yevgeny Rozhkov, an engineer from the Far East Meteorological Agency.

Tonnes of carbon are being used to filter out contamination from water supplies taken from the Amur River, which normally provides the city with all its water.

"We have done everything we could to safeguard and filter the water and we do not plan to cut off water to Khabarovsk," said Governor Viktor Ishayev. He appealed to inhabitants of the city "to keep calm."

Officials have set up a telephone hotline to field calls from worried residents who have filled their apartments with bottles, pots and pans and even baths filled with water.

Irina Zakonnikova's family stopped using tap water on Thursday, even though callers to the hotline were assured that it was "absolutely safe" to wash and cook with running water.

"We are trying to keep ourselves from panicking but of course there is fear," she said.

"Residents have stocked up on water and this should be enough to last them for two to three days," said Vladimir Ott, the regional chief of the Federal Natural Resources Service.

The regional administration has already banned fishing on the Amur - possibly for up to two years - and residents such as Zakonnikova have filled their freezers with frozen fish.

But some people are flouting the ban despite the health risks. Galina Denisova, a 69-year-old retiree, was standing at a bus stop in subzero winter temperatures hawking fish.

She said her husband had caught the fish in the Amur that morning.

"I have a small pension, so I eat freshly caught fish myself and make money from selling it," she said.

Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.

The network will incorporate thousands of existing CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main roads, as well as towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts.

By next March a central database installed alongside the Police National Computer in Hendon, north London, will store the details of 35 million number-plate "reads" per day. These will include time, date and precise location, with camera sites monitored by global positioning satellites.

Already there are plans to extend the database by increasing the storage period to five years and by linking thousands of additional cameras so that details of up to 100 million number plates can be fed each day into the central databank.

Senior police officers have described the surveillance network as possibly the biggest advance in the technology of crime detection and prevention since the introduction of DNA fingerprinting.

But others concerned about civil liberties will be worried that the movements of millions of law-abiding people will soon be routinely recorded and kept on a central computer database for years.

The new national data centre of vehicle movements will form the basis of a sophisticated surveillance tool that lies at the heart of an operation designed to drive criminals off the road.

In the process, the data centre will provide unrivalled opportunities to gather intelligence data on the movements and associations of organised gangs and terrorist suspects whenever they use cars, vans or motorcycles.

The scheme is being orchestrated by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) and has the full backing of ministers who have sanctioned the spending of £24m this year on equipment.

More than 50 local authorities have signed agreements to allow the police to convert thousands of existing traffic cameras so they can read number plates automatically. The data will then be transmitted to Hendon via a secure police communications network.

Chief constables are also on the verge of brokering agreements with the Highways Agency, supermarkets and petrol station owners to incorporate their own CCTV cameras into the network. In addition to cross-checking each number plate against stolen and suspect vehicles held on the Police National Computer, the national data centre will also check whether each vehicle is lawfully licensed, insured and has a valid MoT test certificate.

"Every time you make a car journey already, you'll be on CCTV somewhere. The difference is that, in future, the car's index plates will be read as well," said Frank Whiteley, Chief Constable of Hertfordshire and chairman of the Acpo steering committee on automatic number plate recognition (ANPR).

"What the data centre should be able to tell you is where a vehicle was in the past and where it is now, whether it was or wasn't at a particular location, and the routes taken to and from those crime scenes. Particularly important are associated vehicles," Mr Whiteley said.

The term "associated vehicles" means analysing convoys of cars, vans or trucks to see who is driving alongside a vehicle that is already known to be of interest to the police. Criminals, for instance, will drive somewhere in a lawful vehicle, steal a car and then drive back in convoy to commit further crimes "You're not necessarily interested in the stolen vehicle. You're interested in what's moving with the stolen vehicle," Mr Whiteley explained.

According to a strategy document drawn up by Acpo, the national data centre in Hendon will be at the heart of a surveillance operation that should deny criminals the use of the roads.

"The intention is to create a comprehensive ANPR camera and reader infrastructure across the country to stop displacement of crime from area to area and to allow a comprehensive picture of vehicle movements to be captured," the Acpo strategy says.

"This development forms the basis of a 24/7 vehicle movement database that will revolutionise arrest, intelligence and crime investigation opportunities on a national basis," it says.

Comment: The system will certainly be revolutionary - at least in a fascist Big Brother sort of way...

Mr Whiteley said MI5 will also use the database. "Clearly there are values for this in counter-terrorism," he said.

"The security services will use it for purposes that I frankly don't have access to. It's part of public protection. If the security services did not have access to this, we'd be negligent." [...]

A major feature of the national surveillance centre for car numbers is the ability to trawl through records of previous sightings to build up an intelligence picture of a vehicle's precise whereabouts on the road network.

However, the Home Office and police believe that the Big Brother nature of the operation can be justified on the basis of the technology's proven ability to catch criminals. "In simple terms criminals use vehicles. If you want to commit a crime, you're going to use a vehicle," said Frank Whiteley, the Chief Constable of Hertfordshire, who leads the project. " There is nothing secretive about it and we don't want it to be secret, because we want people to feel safer, to see that they are protected."

A 13-month pilot scheme between 2003 and 2004 found the performance of the police improved dramatically when they had access automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras. Project Laser 2 involved 23 police forces using specially fitted vans with ANPR cameras linked to a police database. It led to a fivefold increase in the arrest rate for frontline officers.

But these mobile units will constitute only a tiny proportion of the many thousands of ANPR cameras that by next year will be feeding more than 35 million number plate "reads" every day into the new national data centre at Hendon, north London, the same site as the Police National Computer.

Mr Whiteley, chairman of the ANPR steering committee, said the intention eventually was to move from the "low thousands" of cameras to the " high thousands".

One camera can cover many motorway lanes. Just two ANPR devices, for instance, cover north and south movements through the 27 lanes of the Dartford crossing toll area on the Thames.

By March next year, most motorways, main roads, town centres and petrol station forecourts will be also covered. Some cameras may be disguised for covert operations but the majority will be ordinary CCTV traffic cameras converted to read number plates. "What we're trying to do as far as we can is to stitch together the existing camera network rather than install a huge number of new cameras," Mr Whiteley said.

More than 50 local authorities have already signed up to allow the police access to data gathered from their CCTV traffic cameras. Northampton, Bradford, Stoke and the City of London have had ANPR cameras in use for some time. Many smaller towns, such as St Albans, Stevenage and Watford are in the process of being wired up.

"We also talking to the commercial sector about their sites, particular garage forecourts. One of the biggest truisms about vehicles is that they have got to fill up with petrol," he explained.

Supermarkets are soon to agree a deal that will lead to all cars entering their garage forecourts having details of their number plates sent to Hendon. In return, the retailers will receive warning information about those drivers most likely to "bilk" - drive off without paying their bill.

The plan beyond March 2006 - when the national data centre goes live - is to expand the capacity of the system to log the time, date and whereabouts of up to 100 million number plates a day. "In crude terms we're interested in between two and three per cent of all vehicles on the roads," Mr Whiteley said.

"We can use ANPR on investigations or we can use it looking forward in a proactive, intelligence way. Things like building up the lifestyle of criminals - where they are going to be at certain times. We seek to link the criminal to the vehicle through intelligence. Vehicles moving on the roads are open to police scrutiny at any time. The Road Traffic Act gives us the right to stop vehicles at any time for any purpose. So criminals on public roads are vulnerable.

"What makes them doubly vulnerable is that most criminals not only burgle and steal, but they also don't bother to tax their vehicles, insure them and things like that," Mr Whiteley said.

Early in the new year the National ANPR Data Centre will be able to cross-check its database against all vehicles lawfully taxed and insured. All unlawful vehicles will be flagged and when they pass an ANPR camera their movements will register as "hits". The Home Office and the police believe that such a surveillance tool will have a dramatic impact on crime detection as well as the public's attitude to traffic policing.

"The first plus is that we can concentrate our resources on the vehicles we should be stopping. The other plus side is that the 97 per cent of law-abiding motorists should never be bothered by that," Mr Whiteley said.

The National ANPR Data Centre is being built alongside the Police National Computer because of the need to be constantly updated with lists of suspect drivers and vehicles. The design of the system will also take into account future changes to the way cars will be recognised, such as electronic vehicle identification - when a unique identity chip is built in to the bodywork.

Identity chips are being considered as part of a new road-pricing system based on a network of roadside radio receivers. Such electronic tags would, however, also allow a car's movements to be recorded without the need of number-plate cameras.

Asked whether ANPR will be as important as the forensic use of fingerprints and DNA profiling, Mr Whiteley replied: "It has the capability to be as revolutionary. I would describe it as an ubiquitous policing tool. You can use it in all sorts of different ways."

HOW THE INFORMATION IS GATHERED

Fixed cameras at strategic sites

Many thousands of traffic cameras on main roads, motorways, ports and petrol stations will read car numbers using Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR)

Mobile units

Every force will have a fleet of specially fitted police vans with ANPR cameras. These will work alongside high-speed intercept officers

CCTV in towns & cities

Many existing traffic cameras in towns and cities are being converted to read number plates automatically as part of the new national surveillance network

CONSTANT UPDATES

Police National Computer

The PNC will supply updates on vehicles and drivers of interest to the police

Insurance data

Uninsured drivers will be identified from data provided by the insurance industry

MoT data

Vehicles without a valid MoT test certificate will be flagged

Vehicle licence data

All vehicles without a valid tax disc or with unlawful number plates will be identified

WHERE THE INFORMATION GOES

The new National ANPR Data Centre is to be based at Hendon in north London, the site of the existing Police National Computer. It is being designed to store 35 million number plate 'reads' per day, to be expanded to 100 million reads within a couple of years. The time, date and place of each vehicle sighting will be stored for at least two years, with plans to extend this period to five years. Special 'data mining' software can trawl for movements and associations

WHO USES THE INFORMATION

Police

Every police force will have direct computer access to the National ANPR Data Centre. Intelligence officers will be able to access data on a car's movements over a number of years

MI5

The Security Services have special exemption under the Data Protection Act to use ANPR information for purposes of national security. Anti-terrorism will be their main interest

His successor, Neelie Kroes, is now investigating further complaints about the group's activities.

"I have given Microsoft every opportunity to comply with its obligations," Ms Kroes said in a statement. "However, I have been left with no alternative other than to proceed via the formal route to ensure Microsoft's compliance."

In the 2004 ruling, the commission found Microsoft guilty of abusing its power and ordered it to disclose information to rivals so they could manufacture computers and accessories such as printers that could operate smoothly with the Windows operating software.

Jonathan Todd told a news conference that Microsoft had until January 25 to reply to the commission's statement of objections and it had to comply fully with the commission's anti-trust decision "not with their own interpretation of that decision".

The EU said it was also investigating the royalties Microsoft would charge companies for using its software information and said another legal challenge might be issued if it was unhappy with the financial demands.

Microsoft has pointed to recent technology agreements between Microsoft and rivals such as Siemens and Symbian as evidence that "inter-operability is at the core" of what the company is doing.

In September, Microsoft launched a second appeal against the 2004 ruling in a move to avoid giving more information on its server programs.

Defence Ministry spokesman Jean-Francois Bureau said the ministry had handed over documents to a criminal investigation into the affair which mentionS a second man, called Nestor Mahe.

"The Minister (of Defence, Michele Alliot-Marie) wanted us to share all useful information that we might have because any doubts deserve numerous checks so that they can be cleared up," he told a news briefing.

Bureau said nothing in the investigation so far had indicated there was a case of mistaken identity or that the targeted man was not the highway bandit French troops believed he was. He said Mahe was a common surname in the region.

France acknowledged in November that its troops had suffocated Firmin Mahe in the back of a military vehicle in the French-patrolled security zone separating the government-held south and rebel-controlled north of Ivory Coast.

Two soldiers alleged to have suffocated the Ivorian have been placed under official investigation for voluntary manslaughter. Another soldier driving the vehicle is under investigation for complicity.

As we all likely remember, the CCTV footage of the driver in the Paris Ritz in the run up to the accident showed him walking perfectly normally and, at one point, even crouching down, something he wouldn't have been able to do had he really been as drunk as the blood tests showed.

If this is ever confirmed then the speculation as to what really happened on that fateful August night will once again erupt into a whirlwind of speculation and conspiracy theories.

Ever since the crash many people - some who purport to be experts, others simply conspiracy theorists - have claimed that the levels of carbon monoxide in Paul's blood were especially suspicious.

One has to wonder whether we will ever know what happened in the early hours of August 31st, 1997. Even if the forthcoming results of the official investigation, led by former British Police Chief John Stevens, prove that this was a simple road accident, will everyone accept that and let the issue rest?

Sadly for the Princess's family and friends, the answer to that is likely to be a unanimous 'No'.

Civil rights groups and left-wing opposition parties have expressed concern over the law, which they fear gives authorities too much power to invade citizens' privacy and encourages confusion between immigration and terrorism.

The opposition Socialist Party said it would challenge the law in the Constitutional Council, the court which determines whether legislation abides by France's 1958 constitution.

The law was championed by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, a hard-line conservative politician with hopes of succeeding
President Jacques Chirac in 2007 elections.

He has said that it was drawn up partly with Britain's experience during and after the July attacks in mind and aims to improve France's legislative arsenal to prevent "a catastrophe".

British investigators' used video footage to identify the alleged suicide bombers who killed themselves and 52 people on three London subway trains and a double-decker bus on July 7. It was also used to track down a copycat group that failed in its attempt to create similar mayhem on July 21.

The law paves the way for increased use of surveillance cameras in public spaces such as train stations, churches and mosques, shops, factories or nuclear plants.

Internet and mobile phone operators will be required to keep records of client connections for one year under its provisions, and officials will have greater authority to conduct identity checks on cross-border trains and to automatically monitor vehicles.

Police will have wider access to previously confidential customer information from rail, maritime and air transport companies.

Local authorities will have the right to ban certain individuals from entering sporting stadiums.

Terrorist suspects can also be kept in custody for a maximum of six days without being put under formal, criminal investigation. The previous duration was four days. Longer prison terms for people convicted of terrorism crimes will also be introduced.

The law extended existing anti-terrorism legislation in France that was already considered among the toughest in the 25-nation European Union, particularly with its catch-all offense of "criminal association in relation with a terrorist enterprise".

Clarence Olberding, 57, wasn't just telling a fisherman's fib when he called over another angler to look at the two-mouthed trout. It weighed in at about a pound.

"I reached down and grabbed it to take the hook out, and that's when I noticed that the hook was in the upper mouth and there was another jaw protruding out below," said Olberding.

He said in his 40 years of fishing, he's never seen anything like it.

Don Gabelhouse, head of the fisheries division of the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, said a two-mouthed fish was new to him, too.

"It's probably a genetic deformity," he said. "I don't think there's anything wrong with it."

The second mouth didn't appear to be functional, Olberding said. He has plans for the fish, which don't included mounting.

"I'm going to smoke it up and eat it," he said.

"Kitzmiller is likely to be regarded as the Scopes case of the 21st Century--celebrated and lamented alike as the case that commanded not only the separation of church and state but also the alienation of religion and science," said John Witte Jr., director of Emory University's Center for the Study of Law and Religion in Atlanta. He referred to the 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial," pitting evolution against creationism in Tennessee classrooms.

Hailed as a major victory by the scientific community and dismissed as a temporary setback by supporters of intelligent design, Jones' decision is binding only on the Dover Area School District in central Pennsylvania, but it could have an impact on the way biology is taught elsewhere.

That includes Kansas--where the State Board of Education redefined science last month to include the supernatural--"and all the other school boards across the country that may be flirting with the introduction of intelligent design," said Richard Katskee, legal director for the non-profit Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

In 2005, more than 24 states and school boards have considered introducing intelligent design into their science curricula, according to the National Center for Science Education, a non-profit group based in Oakland that is devoted to defending the teaching of evolution in public schools.

Eugenie Scott, executive director of NCSE, said Jones' decision "will make it more difficult not only to teach intelligent design" but also to "teach the controversy approach," which aims at portraying evolution as a flawed theory in crisis.

But some ID proponents were defiant.

"Anyone who thinks a court ruling is going to kill off interest in intelligent design is living in another world," said John West, associate director of the Center for Science & Culture at the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that funds ID research.

"In the larger debate over intelligent design, this decision will be of minor significance," said Casey Luskin, Discovery's program officer for policy and legal affairs. "As we've repeatedly stressed, the ultimate validity of intelligent design will be determined not by the courts but by the scientific evidence pointing to design."

But the evidence presented at trial for ID failed to establish it as a testable scientific theory, Jones wrote.

Although the most prominent advocacy group for intelligent design, the Discovery Institute opposes mandatory introduction of ID, as adopted by the Dover board, it prefers that school boards take the "teach the controversy" approach regarding evolution, a controversy that the vast majority of scientists says is concocted.

Drawing media attention from around the world, the Dover trial marked the first legal challenge to ID, which opponents deride as thinly veiled religious creationism. ID posits that some complex aspects of the natural world, yet unexplained by evolution, best are attributed to an unnamed and unseen intelligent designer; most ID proponents believe that designer is God.

Evolutionary theory holds that all life on Earth, including human beings, shares common ancestry and developed through the mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection. In science, a theory is not a wild guess but an explanation that ties together known facts and rigorously tested observations of the natural world.

1st Amendment cited

In December 2004, 11 parents of Dover Area School District students sued the district and its board. They contended the district's requirement that a statement be read to 9th grade biology classes denigrating evolution and introducing intelligent design violated the 1st Amendment's ban on state establishment of religion and the U.S. Supreme Court's 1987 ruling banning creationism from public-school science classrooms in Edwards vs. Aguillard.

The statement, first read to students last January, points out "gaps" in Darwin's theory "for which there is no evidence" and introduces ID as "an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view." It then refers students to the ID textbook "Of Pandas and People" in the school library to gain "an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves."

The school board members, some of whom had spoken publicly of their creationist and religious beliefs before adopting the statement, testified in court that their motivation in requiring such a statement was purely secular and educational, not religious.

Describing the board's decision to impose such a requirement as "breathtaking inanity," Jones said he found the assertion of a secular purpose a "ludicrous" pretext. He pointed out board members didn't consult any scientific authorities or even their own science faculty before crafting the statement.

Accused of lying

He also accused board members of lying, writing: "It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy."

In his ruling, Jones agreed with the parents, writing "ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents."

Nearly universally opposed by mainstream scientists, ID is considered by many to have arisen as a way to get around the Supreme Court's ban on public-school teaching of creationism, a concept that adheres to the Biblical account of creation in Genesis.

However, Jones also asserted the compatibility of faith and science, writing that the defendants and leading proponents of ID make a "bedrock assumption which is utterly false . . . that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general."

Dover's newly elected school board members, most of whom support evolution, have indicated they probably will not appeal Jones' decision, erasing any chance of taking the case to the Supreme Court.

But, despite the court ruling, neither adherents nor opponents of ID believe it will disappear anytime soon.

"We expect another change in labels, whether it's sudden emergence" or something else, said Eric Rothschild of the Philadelphia firm Pepper Hamilton, who was among the attorneys representing the parents. "They're coming from the same sources. They're motivated by the same reasons."

Said Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, the Christian firm that handled the defense, in an earlier interview, "There will be other cases coming down the track."

Details of the 1992 debacle, which saw the pound ejected from the Exchange Rate Mechanism, wrecking the Tories' reputation for economic competence, were released in February in response to a Financial Times request. The Conservatives reacted furiously to the disclosure coming so close to the general election, accusing ministers of playing politics with the information law.

The act produced red faces among the wealthy, when disclosure of individual subsidies paid under the Common Agricultural Policy showed plutocratic farmers such as the Duke of Westminster getting some of the biggest handouts. Tate & Lyle, the sugar company, was another notable beneficiary of Brussels largesse. Other disclosures included details of sites that were earmarked for nuclear waste storage in the 1980s, focus group opinions on European Union enlargement and information on the commercial viability of a second runway at Stansted airport in Essex.

The flow of serious information was interspersed with data on the trivial and bizarre. Notable among the oddities was the revelation that the Ministry of Defence was "open-minded" about the possibility of extra-terrestrial lifeforms. A tally of UFO sightings held by the MoD included "strange lights" in the sky over Whitstable, Kent, and a "flying saucer" over Stoke-on-Trent.

Oil executive Gregory Todd is one of the hundreds, if not thousands of northeastern Utah residents who've seen weird objects -- call them UFOs -- over their homes in the past 50 years. The Utah basin has also been a hotbed of other strange activity including Bigfoot encounters and mutilated animals.

In a basin known for an array of unexplained phenomena, the epicenter of high strangeness seems to be a picturesque spread known to many as Skinwalker Ranch. Native Americans who live near the property advise members to steer clear because, they say, this is the path of the skinwalker, an evil force.

The last family to live on this spread lasted only 20 months. From the first day back in 1994, they were terrorized by an unseen intelligence that played mind games with them, shadowy figures inside their house, objects that moved on their own, disembodied voices and bad things happening to their animals beginning with cattle and bulls that disappeared and others that were carved up with surgical precision in broad daylight. A gigantic wolf that attacked one of their calves was tracked through the mud, but the tracks simply stopped as if the animal had evaporated into thin air. Three dogs were vaporized after while chasing blue orbs of light in a pasture.

In 1995, the ranch came to the attention of NIDS, the National Institute for Discovery Science based in Las Vegas. NIDS bought the property and began an unprecedented scientific study. Observation posts were built. Video cameras were installed and operated. Scientific personnel and former lawmen were on the property 24-7 for 8 straight years. Dr. Colm Kelleher headed up the NIDS study.

Dr. Colm Kelleher said, "We probably have, if you count all the pre-NIDS and post-NIDS incidents, close to 100 different incidents. If you look at all of them, the one thing that jumps out is how unreproducible they are."

In other words, nothing ever happened the same. The scientists would spend all night out in the darkness and witnessed dozens of UFOs and odd balls of light. They also encountered large unknown animals, including ones that emerged from tunnels of light in the fields. Whatever it was proved elusive. The cameras that were installed atop telephone poles were attacked and dismantled, but whatever did it was invisible.

Dr. Colm Kelleher said, "We checked the time stamps on this pole versus this pole. We looked at when the camera lost power and nothing was on the tape. There should have been something visible because the range of these things is pretty good."

NIDS still owns the ranch, but it appears the phenomena have gone underground, as if weary of being hunted. As yet, the mystery of Skinwalker Ranch remains unsolved. Kelleher said, "If anything, it has created more questions that I had when I came into this thing."

The ranch remains off limits to outsiders. Visitors -- from this world anyway -- are not welcome.

George Knapp and Colm Kelleher have co-written a book about the ranch. It's called Hunt For The Skinwalker .

Humans learn behavior during cognition and conversely learn to think while behaving, said Takeno.

To mimic this dynamic, a robot needs a common area in its neural network that is able to process information on both cognition and behavior.

Takeno and his colleagues built the robot with blue, red or green LEDs connected to artificial neurons in the region that light up when different information is being processed, based on the robot's behavior.

"The innovative part is the independent nodes in the hierarchical levels that can be linked and activated," said Thomas Bock of the Technical University of Munich in Germany.

For example, two red diodes illuminate when the robot is performing behavior it considers its own, two green bulbs light up when the robot acknowledges behavior being performed by the other.

One blue LED flashes when the robot is both recognizing behavior in another robot and imitating it.

Imitation, said Takeno, is an act that requires both seeing a behavior in another and instantly transferring it to oneself and is the best evidence of consciousness.

In one experiment, a robot representing the "self" was paired with an identical robot representing the "other."

When the self robot moved forward, stopped or backed up, the other robot did the same. The pattern of neurons firing and the subsequent flashes of blue light indicated that the self robot understood that the other robot was imitating its behavior.

In another experiment, the researchers placed the self robot in front of a mirror.

In this case, the self robot and the reflection (something it could interpret as another robot) moved forward and back at the same time. Although the blue lights fired, they did so less frequently than in other experiments.

In fact, 70 percent of the time, the robot understood that the mirror image was itself. Takeno's goal is to reach 100 percent in the coming year.

But officials reported no problems at the ammunition depot or elsewhere. And with nary a cloud in the sky, the booms weren’t weather related, said Ron Steve, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Wilmington.

Steve said he spoke to the U.S. Geological Survey, which said there had been no seismic activity in the area. The weather service radar did, however, pick up signs of “chaff” off the coast of New Hanover and Brunswick counties, he said.

Chaff is like metal confetti that military fighters emit to trick radar-seeking missiles, he said. It’s possible that jets off the coast broke the sound barrier as part of a military exercise.

The public relations office at Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station in Havelock was unable to confirm by press time if Marines were on exercises nearby. Some people reported seeing military planes and helicopters flying in the area after the booms.

But McKinney said the sound came from the ground, blaming the mysterious booms that have been reported in the area for centuries. The name, “Seneca Guns,” comes from a similar phenomenon in New York and Connecticut.

Legend has it that the Seneca Indians are getting their revenge with the guns that Europeans used to displace them.

More scientific explanations say the boom of the guns comes from earthquakes, material falling off the continental shelf, or pockets of hot air exploding like balloons.

The question is whether or not the purple splotches could be blue ice.

‘Blue ice’ is toilet waste that leaks from airplanes.

The FAA says some suspicious spots in upstate New York turned out to the work of birds.

“It's highly unlikely,” said Nicole Begley, of the National Aviary. “I don't want to speculate on what it was, but it would take a rather large flock of fruit eating birds.

“Most of those fruit eating birds have moved on.”

Begley also said that there's not much fresh fruit left around and that birds don't normally defecate all at the same time while in flight.

“There was actually toilet paper inside that purple stuff,” said Stan Walchesky, of Jefferson Township. “I said this ain’t birds.”

Highfield asked the spokesperson from the FAA if there were any health risks involved with ‘blue ice’ and he said that he honestly didn't know.

“The risks of blue ice from a health perspective are relatively small,” said Dr. Bruce Dixon, of the Allegheny County Health Department.

Cheryl Hall in Irwin said that she's afraid to clean up the spots on her deck.

“I don't want to clean it up,” Hall said. “I'm petrified. I have three small children. I don't need any health issues.”

Dr. Dixon says people can hose it off in better weather to prevent stains and that there's no reason to worry about your dogs.

“The issue is much more aesthetic,” Dr. Dixon said. “People don't like the idea of human excrement being dispersed throughout the air and landing on their property.

“The concentrations are small enough that if you have a dog that ingests some of this stuff, it's not going to have any long term health effects.”

If you have had something similar show up in your yard, contact KDKA at newsdesk@kdka.com. Please include your name, address and telephone number.

An international team of astronomers has looked at something very big -- a distant galaxy -- to study the behavior of things very small -- atoms and molecules -- to gain vital clues about the fundamental nature of our entire Universe. The team used the National Science Foundation's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) to test whether the laws of nature have changed over vast spans of cosmic time.

"The fundamental constants of physics are expected to remain fixed across space and time; that's why they're called constants! Now, however, new theoretical models for the basic structure of matter indicate that they may change. We're testing these predictions." said Nissim Kanekar, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), in Socorro, New Mexico.

So far, the scientists' measurements show no change in the constants. "We've put the most stringent limits yet on some changes in these constants, but that's not the end of the story," said Christopher Carilli, another NRAO astronomer.

"This is the exciting frontier where astronomy meets particle physics," Carilli explained. The research can help answer fundamental questions about whether the basic components of matter are tiny particles or tiny vibrating strings, how many dimensions the Universe has, and the nature of "dark energy."

The astronomers were looking for changes in two quantities: the ratio of the masses of the electron and the proton, and a number physicists call the fine structure constant, a combination of the electron charge, the speed of light and the Planck constant.

These values, considered fundamental physical constants, once were "taken as time independent, with values given once and forever" said German particle physicist Christof Wetterich. However, Wetterich explained, "the viewpoint of modern particle theory has changed in recent years," with ideas such as superstring theory and extra dimensions in spacetime calling for the "constants" to change over time, he said.

The astronomers used the GBT to detect and study radio emissions at four specific frequencies between 1612 MHz and 1720 MHz coming from hydroxyl (OH) molecules in a galaxy more than 6 billion light-years from Earth, seen as it was at roughly half the Universe's current age. Each of the four frequencies represents a specific change in the energy level of the molecule.

The exact frequency emitted or absorbed when the molecule undergoes a transition from one energy level to another depends on the values of the fundamental physical constants. However, each of the four frequencies studied in the OH molecule will react differently to a change in the constants. That difference is what the astronomers sought to detect using the GBT, which, Kanekar explained, is the ideal telescope for this work because of its technical capabilities and its location in the National Radio Quiet Zone, where radio interference is at a minimum.

"We can place very tight limits on changes in the physical constants by studying the behavior of these OH molecules at a time when the Universe was only about half its current age, and comparing this result to how the molecules behave today in the laboratory," said Karl Menten of the Max-Planck Institute for Radioastronomy in Germany.

Wetterich, a theorist, welcomes the new capability, saying the observational method "seems very promising to obtain perhaps the most accurate values for such possible time changes of the constants." He pointed out that, while some theoretical models call for the constants to change only in the early moments after the Big Bang, models of the recently-discovered, mysterious "dark energy" that seems to be accelerating the Universe's expansion call for changes "even in the last couple of billion years."

"Only observations can tell," he said.

This research ties together the theoretical and observational work of Wetterich and Carilli, this year's winners of the prestigious Max Planck Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Max Planck Society in Germany. Menten and Carilli have collaborated on research in this area for years, and Kanekar has pioneered the OH molecular technique.

Kanekar, Carilli and Menten worked with Glen Langston of NRAO, Graca Rocha of the Cavendish Laboratory in the UK, Francoise Combes of the Paris Observatory, Ravi Subrahmanyan of the Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF), John Stocke of the University of Colorado, Frank Briggs of the ATNF and the Australian National University, and Tommy Wiklind of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Sweden. The scientists reported their findings in the December 31 edition of the scientific journal Physical Review Letters.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.

However, this terrible secret generated in the remaining Beatles, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, a strong sense of guilt and induced them to insert many hints and clues to the truth in their songs and album covers.

I buried Paul

What had revealed the existence of a conspiracy to the mysterious "Tom" was the publication, two weeks before his telephone call, of the Beatles's latest album, titled Abbey Road. The album cover showed the four Beatles walking in a single file across the now-famous crosswalk at Abbey Road. This was thought to symbolize a funeral procession: John Lennon, dressed in white, represented the Church (and white is the traditional color of mourning in many Eastern cultures); Ringo, dressed in black, represented the undertaker. Paul was out of step with the other three Beatles, with his eyes closed and barefoot: in a number of societies, it appears that corpses are buried without their shoes; furthermore, Paul held a cigarette in his right hand, when everybody knew that the real McCartney was left-handed! George Harrison, last in line, was dressed in work clothes and, to many, represented the gravedigger.

On the street there is also a parked Volkswagen Beetle whose license plate shows an eerie message: "LMW 28IF," interpreted to mean that Paul would have been 28 if he had lived. The fact that Paul was actually 27 years old when Abbey Road was released doesn't seem to make much difference, for in far Eastern societies (the Beatles had quite a fascination with the Far East) an individual's birth included the time spent in the mother's womb. In that case, Paul would indeed have been 28.

These "revelations" quickly launched an unprecedented outbreak of hysteria in the pop world and in the media, as more and more "clues" were found in previous Beatles records.

First of all, the clue-diggers looked at Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the first album that the Beatles recorded after Paul's supposed demise. Released on June 1, 1967, the record was among the most influential in music history. The cover, another famous picture, showed the four Beatles dressed in band uniforms, gathered around a bass drum bearing the album title and with a crowd of cut-out people around them. It proved to be a goldmine for clue-diggers. Again, the spectators resembled the mourners at a funeral and the flowers in front of them not only spelled the word "Beatles," but also a set of yellow hyacinths formed the shape of a left-handed bass guitar, McCartney's instrument.

Paul had a right hand raised above his head: again, supposedly, in certain Far Eastern societies, this was a symbol of death. Also, while the other Beatles held bright, golden, band instruments, Paul held a black clarinet: another supposed symbol of mourning?

A doll wore a striped "Welcome the Rolling Stones" sweatshirt: on her leg there is a small model car, strongly resembling an Aston Martin that seems to be heading towards the word "Stones." Perhaps a hint of the accident?

If you then held a flat mirror perpendicular to the center of the words "Lonely Hearts" appearing on the bass drum this hidden message appeared: "I ONE IX HE ‡ DIE". "I ONE IX" is a direct reference to the supposed fatal crash day (11/9/66), "HE" refers to Paul, as the diamond that points directly to McCartney confirms, "DIE".

In the open album jacket, the Beatles appear still in the Sgt. Pepper's uniforms and McCartney wore an arm patch that read "OPD": an abbreviation for "Officially Pronounced Dead"?

This was also the first album in history that included the lyrics to the songs appearing in the record, and they were published on the back cover, along with a picture of the four Beatles in their outfits. Strangely, Paul is the only one turning his back to the camera, and also strange is the fact that George's thumb points to the opening lines of "She's Leaving Home." The lyric states: "Wednesday morning at five o'clock as the day begins," another reference to the day and time of Paul's fatal accident?

In another song of the album, "A Day in the Life," John sings "He blew his mind out in a car," and in another, "Good Morning, Good Morning," he starts by singing: "Nothing to do to save his life" (and was the title a play on the words "morning" and "mourning"?) And what about "Lovely Rita"? Was the song a reference to the girl that caused Paul's death? Could be, since in it McCartney (or the imposter) sings: "Took her home and nearly made it."

More clues were also found in subsequent albums. The Magical Mystery Tour cover showed the Beatles dressed in animal costumes. In the center was a black walrus and, in certain Scandinavian countries, a walrus is considered a harbinger of death. Was the imposter dressed in the walrus skin? Apparently not, for John Lennon sings in the album the song titled "I am the Walrus." But on the album cover, as if scribbled later, the complete title appears to be: "I am the Walrus (‘No You're Not!' Said Little Nicola)." So who was the walrus?

In a later Beatles release (titled simply The Beatles, the record became better known as the White Album because the cover was plain white), in a song titled "Glass Onion," Lennon sings: "Well here's another clue for you all, the walrus was Paul"!

On the booklet included in Magical Mystery Tour, the clues abounded: Paul is shoeless in some pictures, is the only one to wear a black flower on his lapel while the others are red, has a hand above his head in various pictures, and he even sits behind a sign stating "I Was."

Near the end of the song "Strawberry Fields Forever," upon careful listening, a faint voice stated something like "I buried Paul."

You could also turn the Magical Mystery Tour album jacket upside-down and look at its reflection in the mirror: the title, detailed as stars, became the digits to a phone number. The rumor further explained that if the numbers were dialed, the listener would get the true details of Paul McCartney's death.

On the White Album, if you listened to a strange murmuring following the song "I'm So Tired," you couldn't make out what it said. But, should you decide to play the record backwards the words became something like: "Paul is dead now, miss him, miss him, miss him." Nothing compared to the chilling revelations of "Revolution No. 9," where, after reversing the song, you could hear a voice saying: "Turn me on dead man," and then the sound of a terrible collision, the sounds of crackling flames and a voice screaming "Let me out! Let me out!" A recreation of Paul's terrible accident?

"My death? An exaggeration"

It seems unimaginable that the American public would believe such an unfounded rumor. However, this same generation had been raised on the idea that there may have been a conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy and that the Warren Commission had actually worked to hide this fact from the public. Would it be so impossible, then, to believe that Paul McCartney's death may have been hidden from the public?

The rumors became so noisy that Paul McCartney himself had to reassure his fans that he was still alive. In an exclusive interview with Life magazine (November 7, 1969) he stated, paraphrasing Mark Twain, that "Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. However, if I was dead, I'm sure I'd be the last to know." He also offered a number of explanations for the mysterious clues.

The OPD patch he wore on Sgt. Pepper's actually meant "Ontario Police Department"; he wore a black flower in Magical Mystery Tour because they had run out of red ones; it was John wearing the walrus outfit and, on Abbey Road, he was barefoot only because it was a hot day.

Other "clues" had similar simpler explanations: John did not say "I buried Paul" at the end of "Strawberry Fields" but, as can be clearly heard now on a clearer take of the song in Anthology 3, he says "cranberry sauce."

However, while it is true that most clues can be easily attributed to coincidence and wishful thinking, there are little things that must have been put there by the Beatles for some purpose, like the various "walrus" claims, the backward messages, and some other hints in the album covers. It may just be, as John Lennon said, that they only wanted to have a laugh at the expense of those critics reading cryptic messages in everything they did.

What is sadly true is the fact that Charles Manson and his "family" also believed that there were hidden messages in Beatles songs hinting at the Armageddon. He thought that the Fab Four were actually angels sent by God to reveal the secrets of the approaching apocalypse and that, in order to start the end of the world, they needed Manson's help. This is the tragically absurd reasoning he gave for the murder of Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of film director Roman Polanski, and the guests she was hosting at their house in Hollywood.

According to R. Gary Patterson, author of the well-researched "The Walrus Was Paul" (New York: Fireside, 1996), "Perhaps the Beatles became concerned that if they admitted to planting clues they could very well be charged in some sort of conspiracy that would indirectly link them to the Manson murders. Perhaps it would be much safer to give up the hoax and deny it ever happened. This way, the Beatles would be safe from any lawsuit implicating the band members."

Perhaps. In a lighter vein, however, the rumor also helped to further boost the sale of the Beatles catalog and inspired a lot of cartoons and comedy skits, like one that was presented on The Ed Sullivan Show on Februrary 23, 1970, involving two angels in heaven:

Angel One: Is there any truth to the rumor that Paul McCartney is still alive?

Angel Two: I doubt it. Where do you think we get those groovy harp arrangements?



From the January-February issue of Skeptical Inquirer magazine.

"The girls we spoke to see Barbie torture as a legitimate play activity, and see the torture as a 'cool' activity in contrast to other forms of play with the doll," she said.

"The types of mutilation are varied and creative, and range from removing the hair to decapitation, burning, breaking and even microwaving."

The researchers offered a number of different motivations for the mutilations.

The most common was that the girls felt they had outgrown the doll.

"It's as though disavowing Barbie is a rite of passage and a rejection of their past."

Mattel, which manufactures Barbie, dismissed the study as a very small sampling. Its annual sales of 94 million Barbies are proof that the doll is widely loved by children, it said.

Now, with more and more bacteria developing resistance to antibiotic drugs, some researchers and health care entrepreneurs have returned to silver for another look. This time around, they are armed with nanotechnology, a fast-developing collection of products and skills that helps researchers deploy silver compounds in ways that maximize the availability of silver ions - the element's most potent form. Scientists also now have a better understanding of the weaknesses of their microbial adversaries.

One of the urgent goals is to prevent bacterial infections that each year strike 2 million hospital patients in the United States and kill 90,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Such infections are usually treated with large doses of antibiotics and sometimes with repeat surgeries. They cost the U.S. health care system roughly $4.5 billion annually, and the challenge is growing with the spread of drug-resistant microbes.