March 13, 2003 (posted September 2006)
War on Terror - Rewarding Political Allies: Richard Clarke Legacy
Clarke was the government's first counterterrorism czar -- formally from 1998 to 2002, but in practice beginning in 1995. Security officials, friends and foes alike, said no one rivaled him as a spur to action. He was the first to draw effective attention to the risk that terrorists would acquire nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, the first to force concrete steps to protect critical information networks from cyberattack, and a dominant voice for spending money and covert resources against terrorists at a time when government was inclined to perceive them as a minor threat.

September 20, 2006
An Impeachable Offense
A lie - false threat national security threat
Police call August terror plot 'fiction'
British Army expert casts doubt on 'liquid explosives' threat, Al Qaeda network in UK Identified

Lieutenant-Colonel (ret.) Nigel Wylde, a former senior British Army Intelligence Officer, has suggested that the police and government story about the "terror plot" revealed on 10th August was part of a "pattern of lies and deceit."

"The idea that these people could sit in the plane toilet and simply mix together these normal household fluids to create a high explosive capable of blowing up the entire aircraft is untenable," said Lt. Col. Wylde, who was trained as an ammunition technical officer responsible for terrorist bomb disposal at the Royal Army Ordnance Corps in Sandhurst.

September 19, 2006
Global Warming: Exxon Funds The Denial Industry
Among the organisations that have been funded by Exxon are such well-known websites and lobby groups as TechCentralStation, the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation.

TASSC did as its founders at APCO suggested, and sought funding from other sources. Between 2000 and 2002 it received $30,000 from Exxon. The website it has financed - JunkScience.com - has been the main entrepot for almost every kind of climate-change denial that has found its way into the mainstream press. It equates environmentalists with Nazis, communists and terrorists.

Milloy also writes a weekly Junk Science column for the Fox News website. Without declaring his interests, he has used this column to pour scorn on studies documenting the medical effects of second-hand tobacco smoke and showing that climate change is taking place. Even after Fox News was told about the money he had been receiving from Philip Morris and Exxon, it continued to employ him, without informing its readers about his interests.

September 19, 2006
Iraq in danger of civil war, warns Annan
The UN secretary general warned yesterday that Iraq was in danger of sliding into anarchy and civil war. Addressing an international aid conference at the UN, Kofi Annan said: "If current patterns of alienation and violence persist much longer, there is a grave danger that the Iraqi state will break down, possibly in the midst of full-scale civil war."

September 18, 2006
Benedict was two problems - his ideology is based on fake science and he's a conservative
'A man with little sympathy for other faiths'
Pope Benedict is being portrayed as a naive, shy scholar who has accidentally antagonised two major world faiths in a matter of months. In fact he is a shrewd and ruthless operator, argues Madeleine Bunting - and he's dangerous.

Even worse, in his Auschwitz address, he managed to argue in a long theological exposition that the real victims of the Holocaust were God and Christianity. As one commentator put it, he managed to claim that Jews were the "themselves bit players - bystanders at their own extermination.

September 18, 2006
An Impeachable Offense
Canadians Fault U.S. for Its Role in Torture Case
OTTAWA, Sept. 18 — A government commission on Monday exonerated a Canadian computer engineer of any ties to terrorism and issued a scathing report that faulted Canada and the United States for his deportation four years ago to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured.

Previous Link - 2004: US Sends Canadian to Syria to be Tortured

September 18, 2006
An Impeachable Offense
UK accused of Guantánamo collusion
More than 100 senior doctors today accused the government of colluding in war crimes by refusing to give medical aid to British residents detained at Guantánamo Bay.

The doctors called for an urgent independent investigation into the medical needs of the detainees at the camp.

September 20, 2006
An Impeachable Offense
No one caught the error? Give me a break.
VA used prewar data to estimate the cost of caring for veterans
WASHINGTON - The government used prewar data to estimate the cost of caring for veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, contributing to a $3 billion budget shortfall at the Veterans Affairs Department since 2005, congressional investigators say.

September 09, 2006
What are they afraid of and why isn't the media reporting on pork every day?
Who sponsored that 'pork' project?
In a move that particularly rankled reformers, the powerful House Ways and Means Committee changed the definition of a tax earmark from one affecting fewer than 100 entities to one affecting only one. So an earmark targeted at two companies, instead of one, wouldn't have to be disclosed. The move excludes many of the most controversial targeted tax breaks from the new rule.

September 20, 2006
Hide it and the press will do nothing.
Democrat Party Forces White House to Release List of Visitors
The White House released the Secret Service visit records to settle a lawsuit by the Democratic Party and an ethics watchdog group seeking visitors logs for the two GOP strategists and others who emerged as figures in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.

Earlier this month, the White House suggested to the judge in that lawsuit that such records need not be disclosed because the information was privileged and might reveal how Bush and his staff get private advice, according to court documents obtained by The Associated Press.

September 19, 2006
The Bush story the press won't tell
The categorical refusal by the press to put Bush's consistently dreadful poll numbers into any kind of historical context. The fact that Bush has been bogged down for much of this year with poll numbers in the 30's is nothing short of astonishing. In the last half-century, the only other comparable second-term collapse belonged to Richard Nixon.

September 17, 2006
An Impeachable Offense
Very long but good!
Ties to GOP Trumped Know-How Among Staff Sent to Rebuild Iraq
To pass muster with O'Beirne, a political appointee who screens prospective political appointees for Defense Department posts, applicants didn't need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration.

To recruit the people he wanted, O'Beirne sought résumés from the offices of Republican congressmen, conservative think tanks and GOP activists. He discarded applications from those his staff deemed ideologically suspect, even if the applicants possessed Arabic language skills or postwar rebuilding experience.

When Haveman left Iraq, Baghdad's hospitals were as decrepit as the day the Americans arrived. At Yarmouk Hospital, the city's largest, rooms lacked the most basic equipment to monitor a patient's blood pressure and heart rate, operating theaters were without modern surgical tools and sterile implements, and the pharmacy's shelves were bare.

September 13, 2006
Should the media expose known lies or allow government officials to lie to their faces?
Schieffer, Wallace let Rice lie
Both Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer and Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace allowed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to justify the Iraq war by falsely suggesting that the 9-11 Commission report supports her claim that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had "contacts" with Al Qaeda before the U.S.-led invasion of that country in March 2003. Also, after Rice said she couldn't think of any specific "failures" in the Bush administration's fight against terrorism when asked by Wallace to identify one, Wallace failed to press her on the fact that Osama bin Laden is still at large and his trail has reportedly gone "stone cold."

September 19, 2006
One would have hoped the vast right wing conspiracy would have ended by now.
Media ignored report that White House hampered Iraq rebuilding efforts by hiring unqualified individuals
A Media Matters for America review* of cable and broadcast networks and major newspapers showed no coverage of a September 17 front-page Washington Post report by Washington Post assistant managing editor Rajiv Chandrasekaran detailing the process by which many individuals who "lacked vital skills and experience" were assigned to positions in the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq based on their "loyalty to the Bush administration."

September 19, 2006
An Impeachable Offense
The GOP's tortured logic
As he announced at a press conference earlier this month, President Bush wants to change U.S. law in two different ways that he says will allow CIA officials to keep conducting interrogations that he claims have produced valuable intelligence in the "war on terror." He has asked Congress to pass legislation that would sidestep the part of the Geneva Conventions that prohibits "outrages upon personal dignity," and he also wants Congress to rewrite the 1996 War Crimes Act in such a way that the Geneva Conventions would no longer be enforceable.

October 2006 (posted Sept. 20, 2006)
Seven Conservatives: It's Time For Us To Go
(link to all seven articles)

Restrain this White House:
By Bruce Fein

Idéologie has taken over:
By Jeffrey Hart

Let's quit while we're behind:
By Christopher Buckley

The show must not go on:
By Richard A. Viguerie

Bring on Pelosi:
By Bruce Bartlett

And we thought Clinton had no self-control:
By Joe Scarborough

Give divided government a chance:
By William A. Niskanen

September 20, 2006
25 MOST CORRUPT MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Washington, DC – Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) released its second annual report on the most corrupt members of Congress entitled Beyond DeLay: The 20 Most Corrupt Members of Congress (and five to watch). This encyclopedic report on corruption in the 109th Congress documents the egregious, unethical and possibly illegal activities of the most tainted members of Congress. CREW has compiled the members' transgressions and analyzed them in light of federal laws and congressional rules.

September 19, 2006
An Impeachable Offense
Scientist barred from speaking to press about global warming
The individual who went "off the menu" could have been researcher Thomas Knutson, whose published research indicates that hurricanes will grow stronger because of global warming. But when NOAA press officers asked if Knutson could appear on CNBC, Fuqua asked if Knutson had the same opinion as Landsea. When he learned that Knutson had published research suggesting that hurricanes will be getting stronger, he responded, "Why can't we have one of the other guys on then?"

Fuqua is the former director of media relations for the Republican National Convention.

September 09, 2006
Capitol Hill Corruption Force FBI To Triple Fraud Squad
WASHINGTON - There is so much political corruption on Capitol Hill that the FBI has had to triple the number of squads investigating lobbyists, lawmakers and influence peddlers, the Daily News has learned

September 20, 2006
The US media always quotes fake science when it talks about global warming.
Royal Society tells Exxon: stop funding climate change denial
Britain's leading scientists have challenged the US oil company ExxonMobil to stop funding groups that attempt to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change.

In an unprecedented step, the Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific academy, has written to the oil giant to demand that the company withdraws support for dozens of groups that have "misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence".

September 3, 2006
Poll: Labor Unions Viewed Favorably by 58%
Fifty-eight percent (58%) of Americans have at least a somewhat favorable opinion of labor unions while 33% disagree and have an unfavorable view. Those figures, from a Rasmussen Reports survey of 1,000 adults, include 23% with a "very favorable" opinion and 12% with a "very unfavorable" view.

September 18, 2006
Answer to Howie: not when he lied about the speech being non-political.
Howard Kurtz Defends White House Lies
Before the address, the White House had repeatedly pledged that Bush's September 11 address to the nation would not be "political," but rather a "reflection" of what the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks meant to him and to America.

KURTZ: But Gloria, you say that the journalists are just voicing the concerns of senators who are opposition. But isn't it also our job to voice the concerns of politicians who might support the president?

September 18, 2006
What else should the Pope apologize for?
All divorced Catholics whose difficult decision to leave a bad marriage has condemned them to an eternity of burning in hell.

All unwanted children born because the Catholic Church refused to acknowledge the importance of contraception.

September 18, 2006
You Can Open Diebold Voting Machines With Common Minibar Key
The access panel door on a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine — the door that protects the memory card that stores the votes, and is the main barrier to the injection of a virus — can be opened with a standard key that is widely available on the Internet.

September 09, 2006
An Impeachable Offense
Gov't taxes us so it can persuade us Iraq war is justified
That may be what prompted the United States military to seek bids on a $20-million public-relations contract for the next two years designed to encourage more positive coverage of Iraq. Reporter Walter Pincus wrote about that plan in Thursday's issue of the Washington Post.

September 09, 2006
Pentagon To Hire PR Firm To Monitor Media Coverage Of Middle East
The Pentagon is taking bids for a two-year, $20 million contract to read newspapers and watch TV news and rate the daily coverage of the war in Iraq. The "tone," "key themes" and "messages" of coverage in the U.S. and the Arab world are to be evaluated as positive, negative or neutral.

September 17, 2006
Arch conservative Reagan sold weapons to terrorists and created mountains of debt. Conservatism doesn't exist.
Torture and conservatism
"President Bush has nearly upended that tradition, abandoning traditional realism in favour of a warped and incoherent brand of idealism. At this dangerous point in history, we must depend on the decisions of an astonishingly feckless chief executive: an empty vessel filled with equal parts Rove and Rousseau."

That passage was written by Jeffrey Hart, a speechwriter for Nixon and Reagan and another pillar of the conservative movement. It's a sign of a brewing conservative revolt against Bush's policies that may crest at November's elections.

September 17, 2006
Save Yourself, Blame Bush
How exactly does one convince the teeming masses that Republicans deserve to stay in power despite botching a war, doubling the national debt, keeping company with Jack Abramoff, fumbling the response to Hurricane Katrina, expanding the government at record rates, raising cronyism to an art form, playing poker with Duke Cunningham, isolating America and repeatedly electing Tom DeLay as their House majority leader?

August 11, 2006
Two Congressional Experts Explain What Has Gone Very Wrong With Congress
Congress is out of order. In the words of two of the most knowledgeable experts in the nation on the legislative branch, "it is broken." This conclusion is not the judgment of out-of-power partisans: Thomas E. Mann, the Senior Fellow in Government Studies at the Brookings Institute, and Norman J. Ornstein, a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, have been studying - and working with and for - Congress since 1969.

September 17, 2006
An Impeachable Offense
The US military also murdered a Reuters reporter
In Fallujah, the US military used napalm, a WMD.
U.S. holds AP photographer in Iraq 5 months
The U.S. military in Iraq has imprisoned an Associated Press photographer for five months, accusing him of being a security threat but never filing charges or permitting a public hearing.

September 17, 2006
U.S. war prisons legal vacuum for 14,000
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- In the few short years since the first shackled Afghan shuffled off to Guantanamo, the U.S. military has created a global network of overseas prisons, its islands of high security keeping 14,000 detainees beyond the reach of established law.

Many say they were caught up in U.S. military sweeps, often interrogated around the clock, then released months or years later without apology, compensation or any word on why they were taken. Seventy to 90 percent of the Iraq detentions in 2003 were "mistakes," U.S. officers once told the international Red Cross.

September 17, 2006
A view from Australia.
Repeat after me: we told you so
We are told that it is not good enough to simply say that "George Bush is a dangerous, religious-driven idiot who represents all that is rotten about America". But what if it is true?

Before the rhetorical question is dismissed as anti-Americanism, consider this, written by an American patriot: "George Bush is an ignorant, cruel, closed-minded, avaricious, sneaky, irresponsible, thieving, brain-damaged frat boy with a drinking problem and a taste for bloodshed, whose numerous crimes have been abetted by the moral corruption of his party cohort and whose contempt for American military lives alone warrants his impeachment..."

September 15, 2006
Cheney told the Senate to close its eyes and it did. Now Cheney is powerless.
Senate probes CIA reports on Iraq arms
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. Senate panel has begun an inquiry to determine what a top official in Saddam Hussein's government told the CIA about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in late 2002 as the Bush administration made its case for war.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said in a September 8 report that it launched the investigation after the CIA's former chief of European clandestine operations appeared on the CBS' "60 Minutes" news magazine in April. The official, Tyler Drumheller, told CBS that the Iraqi government source had said Iraq had no active unconventional weapons program.

September 17, 2006
Inside Baghdad: last battle of a stricken city
Targeted daily by both Shia and Sunni extremists resisting the occupation, they now find themselves trying to protect each community from the other, even as they fend off the lethal attacks on themselves. Round it goes: the bomb and the bullet. A Sunni car bomb kills Shias at the mosque or at the market. Angry, the Shia death squads abduct and slaughter any Sunnis they can find, who retaliate with more car bombs. And on, and on, all in the name of 'community protection'.

September 14, 2006
Warming expert: Only decade left to act in time
SACRAMENTO, Calif. - A leading U.S. climate researcher says the world has a 10-year window of opportunity to take decisive action on global warming and avert catastrophe.

NASA scientist James Hansen, widely considered the doyen of American climate researchers, said governments must adopt an alternative scenario to keep carbon dioxide emission growth in check and limit the increase in global temperatures to 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).

September 12, 2006
Air Force chief: Test weapons on testy U.S. mobs
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before being used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary said Tuesday.

September 15, 2006
Democrats question donations to Kean
The same day state Sen. Tom Kean Jr. voted twice to let Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey keep a $40 million tax exemption, he collected $13,300 in contributions for his U.S. Senate race from 17 company executives and their family members.

September 15, 2006
How to Hack a Diebold Voting Machine
Princeton computer scientists have figured out how to hack into a Diebold AccuVote [sic] TouchScreen voting machine. The subversion of democracy takes a coupla minutes, a screwdriver or paperclip, plus a floppy with the malware they've written.

September 9, 2006
Pentagon analyst sentenced to three months in prison after passing intelligence to Chinese
A former Pentagon analyst who passed highly classified intelligence to two Chinese military officers was sentenced to three months in prison yesterday -- far shy of four to five years called for in sentencing guidelines.

September 15, 2006
Republican Congressman Ney Admits Corruption Conspiracy
Ney admitted that in exchange for the stream of things of value he received from Abramoff and his lobbyists, Ney agreed to take and took the following actions:

--supporting and/or opposing legislation at Abramoff's request, including attempting to insert four separate, non election-related amendments sought by Abramoff and his clients into election reform legislation known as the Help America Vote Act;

--inserting two statements into the Congressional Record at Scanlon's request;

--supporting the application of and issuing a license to one of Abramoff's clients involving a multi-million-dollar contract to install wireless telephone infrastructure in the House of Representatives; and

-- contacting personnel in federal agencies in an effort to influence the decisions of those agencies, including telling the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development that Ney's number one priority was Native American Indian Tribal housing because that was an issue important to Abramoff's clients.

September 13, 2006
An "axis of evil" country is promising to help secure Iraq.
Iran Agrees to Help Secure Iraq
"Iran will provide assistance to the Iraqi government to establish full security. We believe strengthening the Iraqi government is tantamount to promoting security, peace and friendship in that country," Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying.

September 15, 2006
More politics. If McCain or Powell gave a damn they'd have stopped Bush sooner.
McCain, Powell deliver blows to Bush proposal on detainees
WASHINGTON — A Republican-controlled Senate committee dealt a blow to President Bush's national-security agenda Thursday, approving a bill that would give terrorism detainees more legal rights than the administration wanted.

The rebuke capped a day of bruising political combat in which Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., released a letter from Colin Powell, the president's former secretary of state, warning against Bush's proposal to allow more extreme methods of interrogating detainees.

September 15, 2006
An Impeachable Offense
The Geneva Conventions can't be revised by Congress.
The president goes to Capitol Hill to lobby for torture
He wants permission to interrogate those detainees with abusive practices that in the past have included induced hypothermia and "waterboarding," or simulated drowning. And it wants the right to try such detainees, and perhaps sentence them to death, on the basis of evidence that the defendants cannot see and that may have been extracted during those abusive interrogation sessions.

September 14, 2006
Hillary and Bill were right. We need national healthcare.
Most forgo buying own U.S. health insurance
CHICAGO (Reuters) -- Nine out of 10 Americans who tried to buy their own health insurance failed, either because the price was too steep or because they were denied coverage due to a current medical problem, a study said on Thursday.

September 13, 2006
More GOP cherrypicking.
Media ownership study ordered destroyed
WASHINGTON - The Federal Communications Commission ordered its staff to destroy all copies of a draft study that suggested greater concentration of media ownership would hurt local TV news coverage, a former lawyer at the agency says.

September 15, 2006
Some more GOP lies - cherrypicking.
IAEA says Congress report on Iran's nuclear capacity is erroneous
The UN's nuclear watchdog has attacked the US Congress for what it termed an "erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated" report on Iran's nuclear programme.

The report, titled Recognising Iran as a Strategic Threat, was written by Fredrick Fleitz, a CIA operative on secondment to the US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton. Mr Fleitz and Mr Bolton were involved in constructing the arguments in favour of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Mr Fleitz is writing a report about North Korea for Mr Hoekstra's committee.

September 14, 2006
Animal-welfare organizers charged as terrorists
"The case is a product of the converging of the 'war on terrorism' with the Internet age and the interest of companies in managing activists,' said Lee Hall, legal director for Friends of Animals.

September 13, 2006
British musicians no longer fly to US
Cellists, violinists, and French horn players are loath to consign their instruments, often antiquities worth millions of dollars, to cavalier baggage handlers and the rough-and-tumble conditions of the aircraft hold.

As a result, hundreds of musicians in Britain are complaining that the measures designed to thwart terrorists are in fact punishing virtuosos with nothing more malicious in mind than a Saint-Saëns solo.

September 13, 2006
More war crimes committed by Israel.
Over 1.2 million cluster bombs dropped on Lebanon
JERUSALEM (AFP) - Israel's army dropped more than 1.2 million cluster bombs into Lebanon during the month-long conflict, according to an Israeli army officer.

The unnamed officer described his unit's use of the controversial bomblets during Israel's 34-day offensive against Hezbollah guerrillas as "crazy and monstrous", the liberal Haaretz newspaper reported Wednesday.

"We covered entire villages with cluster bombs," the newspaper quoted the commander as saying.

September 13, 2006
Security Analysis of the Diebold Voting Machin
Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss. We have constructed demonstration software that carries out this vote-stealing attack.

September 13, 2006
Novak: Armitage is a liar
First, Armitage did not, as he now indicates, merely pass on something he had heard and that he "thought" might be so. Rather, he identified to me the CIA division where Mrs. Wilson worked, and said flatly that she recommended the mission to Niger by her husband, former Amb. Joseph Wilson.

Second, Armitage did not slip me this information as idle chitchat, as he now suggests. He made clear he considered it especially suited for my column.

September 12, 2006
Rule #1: never trust a republican.
NY Times blasts ABC 9/11 Fiction
It was especially disturbing that Tom Kean, co-chairman of the 9/11 commission and a former Republican governor of New Jersey, was willing to lend his prestige to this ill-considered project. Mr. Kean served as a senior consultant to the miniseries and has repeatedly defended it in public, even as several Democratic members of the commission criticized its distortions. Mr. Kean has said he will give his payment to charity, but that does not undo the damage done to the aura of bipartisanship that has surrounded the commission's work. And it has not defused concerns that Mr. Kean did it in part to help his son, who is the Republican candidate for Senate in a close race in New Jersey.

September 12, 2006
Before Bush's war in Iraq there was only one bin Laden. Now there are thousands. Who supports terrorism? The GOP.
Rep. Boehner: Dems protect terrorists
"I listen to my Democratic friends and I wonder if they're more interested in protecting the terrorists than protecting the American people," House Majority Leader John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, told reporters.

October 2006 issue
Republican Buckley: Give power to Democrats
This glum aperçu has been much with me as we move into the home stretch of the 2006 mid-term elections and shimmy into the starting gates of the 2008 presidential campaign. With heavy heart, as a once-proud—indeed, staunch— Republican, I here admit, behind enemy lines, to the guilty hope that my party loses; on both occasions.

September 12, 2006
Voters riding a blue wave
The poll found 43 percent of voters identified themselves as Democrats while a little more than a quarter of the voters identified themselves as Republicans. The 17 percentage point difference ranks among the most polarized partisan spreads in more than 16 years of Tribune surveys taken prior to an election day

September 2006
They forgot to say it's based on known lies. Also students should be required to read the entire 9/11 Report
Scholastic Teaches Media Deception ABC's 911
This program is highly controversial because:

• 1. As a docudrama, it contains imagined scenes that some of the political figures who lived through the period say are misleading and inaccurate.
• 2. It is an emotional portrayal of a period leading up to one of the searing events of our time—one which I personally witnessed first-hand from our Scholastic offices (less than a mile from the World Trade Center site). Several of our employees' family members died in the attack.
• 3. It is being broadcast in a period just before the 2006 elections. A major election issue is the relationship between terrorism, the war in Iraq, and other conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan. As such, The Path to 9/11 is viewed by some as political and partisan.

September 13, 2006
65 Torture victims' bodies found
Police have recovered the bodies of 65 men dumped on streets in Baghdad, it was reported today.

The discovery sparked fears that civil war in the Iraqi capital was escalating, with Sunni Arab and Shia Muslim death squads undeterred by a month-long security crackdown throughout the city.

Police said the victims had been tortured and shot before their bodies were left in mostly Sunni Arab neighbourhoods.

September 13, 2006
An Impeachable Offense
What law did they use to spend our money on right wing tripe.
Lawsuit Says Gov't Funds Christian Goals
The Northwest Marriage Institute received $97,750 last year from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, according to the lawsuit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court.

On its Web site, the institute quotes several Bible verses, including one that urges wives to win over their husbands with a "quiet spirit." It also says wives should serve their husbands and make them happy as a way of honoring God.

September 12, 2006
The CDC says it exists.
VA study doubts Gulf War syndrome
Even though U.S. and foreign veterans of the 1991 war report more symptoms of illness than do soldiers who didn't serve in the Persian Gulf, there is no such thing as Gulf War syndrome, according to the Veterans Affairs-sponsored report released Tuesday.

September 11, 2006
In Feb. of 2006 the Zogby poll showed 90% of US soldiers believed Saddam did 9/11. We need educated soldiers not indoctrinated idiots.
For US soldiers, Iraq is still about 9/11
"You can say he wasn't supporting (terrorism) but I believe he was. The Senate may say there's no evidence ... but you can support terrorism just in a passive way by not expelling them," he said with an intense look in his fierce blue eyes.

"I feel we are here for a good reason, whether Saddam was involved in 9/11 or not."

September 2006
Every contrived piece of nonsense they dream up is headline news.
Five Years After 9/11: Drop the War Metaphor
For a few hours after the towers fell on 9/11, administration spokesmen referred to the event as a "crime." Indeed, Colin Powell argued within the administration that it be treated as a crime.

But the crime frame did not prevail in the Bush administration. Instead, a war metaphor was chosen: the "War on Terror."

September 12, 2006
Revelations of no WMDs in Iraq show deception, incompetence at work
"So if the CIA said to you [in 2003] 'Saddam does not have weapons of mass destruction, his chemical and biological have been degraded, he has no nuclear program under way,' you'd still have invaded Iraq?"

Yes, Cheney said.

In other words, Iraqi WMD weren't the reason we went to war, they were merely the excuse that Cheney and his colleagues needed to scare up public support. That's a relevant piece of information as Americans try to decide how much faith they can put in this administration.

Scheid, who is about to retire, was a colonel with U.S. Central Command in 2002, helping to plan the invasion of Iraq. According to Scheid, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld banned Pentagon officials from planning for a post-war military occupation, to the point that he warned officers that "he would fire the next person" who talked about the need to prepare for an occupation.

September 12, 2006
Bush has created or 3x more debt than all the presidents from Washington through Carter combined.
White House says deficits not a problem in short run
Persistent budget and current account deficits are not a problem in the short run, top White House economic adviser Edward Lazear said Tuesday...the federal budget deficit "is actually in pretty good shape" in historic terms. Lazear said the current account deficit is not sustainable at the current levels.

September 11, 2006
The GOP has already become the minority party.
Homeland Security Arrests Journalist
Though not just yet. Fatherland Security has informed me that television producer Matt Pascarella and I have been charged with unauthorized filming of a "critical national security structure" in Louisiana.

On August 22, for LinkTV and Democracy Now! we videotaped the thousands of Katrina evacuees still held behind a barbed wire in a trailer park encampment a hundred miles from New Orleans. It's been a year since the hurricane and 73,000 POW's (Prisoners of W) are still in this aluminum ghetto in the middle of nowhere. One resident, Pamela Lewis said, "It is a prison set-up" -- except there are no home furloughs for these inmates because they no longer have homes.

September 1, 2006
The GOP has already become the minority party.
Number of Republicans Declines
Just 31.9% of American adults now say they're affiliated with the GOP.

The number of Democrats has grown slightly, from 36.1% at the beginning of the year to 37.3% now.

Those who claim to be unaffiliated have increased to 30.8% this month. That's the highest total recorded since Rasmussen Reports began releasing this data in January 2004.

September 10, 2006
Key scientists leave Centers for Disease Control
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.Critics say the agency is changing to a top-down management style that stifles science and that new layers of bureaucracy are being created that make agency operations more cumbersome.

The most visible sign of potential trouble at CDC is the loss of more than a dozen high-profile leaders and scientists since 2004. By the end of this year, all but two of the directors of CDC's eight primary scientific centers will have left the Atlanta-based federal agency.

September 11, 2006
The real axis of evil that destroyed America
Five years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the United States of America lies beaten, battered and defeated - not by an enemy of extremists who hide in caves in Afghanistan but by its own government and leaders who sold out their nation for power and politics.

Osama bin Laden and his minions did not destroy America when hijacked airliners slammed into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and an empty field. They simply provided the spark to ignite nothing less than a coup to take over the United States government, a coup staged by a group of traitorous men and women who swore to uphold the Constitution but, instead, set about to dismantle that hallowed document and destroy the freedoms that once defined a great nation.

September 11, 2006
Oliver Stone hints at film tackling 9-11 'conspiracy
"There is a great story in a movie, a conspiracy by a group of people in the American administration who have an agenda and who used 9-11 to further that agenda," he told journalists while in Moscow as part of a world tour to promote his latest movie.

There could be a "fascinating project (on) what happened after September 11," the director said at his packed press conference on the fifth anniversary of the attacks, wearing a light blue, open shirt and dark jacket.

September 11, 2006
American Airlines Threatens Legal Action Over ABC's 'Path to 9/11'
ABC's airing of its "Path to 9/11" docudrama last night has drawn its first lawsuit threat, and the surprise is that it's coming not from angry Democrats but from an "outraged" American Airlines.

The warning depicted in the movie actually popped up when Mr. Atta went to board a plane from Maine to Boston, not in Boston, and the airline wasn't American. Pre-9/11, warnings issued were to ensure that bags of last-minute passengers traveled with them.

September 11, 2006
Put simply, they're adapting. Our generals can't.
Losing the War on Terror
Why Militants Are Beating Technology Five Years After Sept. 11.

In Iraq, according to a recent Pentagon study, attacks by insurgents jumped to 800 per week in the second quarter of this year -- double the number in the first quarter. Iraqi casualties have increased by 50 percent. The organization al-Qaeda in Iraq has spawned an array of new guerrilla tactics, weapons and explosive devices that it is conveying to the Taliban and other groups.

September 11, 2006
U.S. Has Life Expectancy Gaps as Wide as 20 Years
The life expectancy of Asian women was 86.7 years and for black men living in high-risk urban areas, it was 68.7 years, according to a national study in today's PLoS Medicine online. Hawaii led 50 states and Washington, D.C., with life expectancy of 80 years, while D.C. ranked last, with 72 years.

September 11, 2006
An Impeachable Offense
The CIA breaks the law and we pay their bills.
Worried CIA Officers Buy Legal Insurance
CIA counterterrorism officers have signed up in growing numbers for a government-reimbursed, private insurance plan that would pay their civil judgments and legal expenses if they are sued or charged with criminal wrongdoing, according to current and former intelligence officials and others with knowledge of the program.

September 11, 2006
Marine Intelligence says the war is unwinnable
Situation Called Dire in West Iraq
The chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq recently filed an unusual secret report concluding that the prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there, said several military officers and intelligence officials familiar with its contents.

September 10, 2006
An Impeachable Offense
Bush lied when he said Abu abuse was isolated.
FBI, CIA Dispute Use of Torture
The events that unfolded at the safe house over the next few weeks proved to be fateful for the Bush administration. Within days, Mr. Zubaydah was being subjected to coercive interrogation techniques — he was stripped, held in an icy room and jarred by earsplittingly loud music — the genesis of practices later adopted by some within the military, and widely used by the Central Intelligence Agency in handling prominent terrorism suspects at secret overseas prisons.

September 9, 2006
An Impeachable Offense
Rockefeller: Bush Duped Public On Iraq
But after 2 1/2 years of reviewing pre-war intelligence behind closed doors, the lead Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, Sen. John Rockefeller of West Virginia, who voted for the Iraq War, says the Bush administration pulled the wool over everyone's eyes.

"The absolute cynical manipulation, deliberately cynical manipulation, to shape American public opinion and 69 percent of the people, at that time, it worked, they said 'we want to go to war,'" Rockefeller told CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson. "Including me. The difference is after I began to learn about some of that intelligence I went down to the Senate floor and I said 'my vote was wrong.'"

September 18, 2006 issue
CIA Secret Definition of Civil War
A counterterror official indicated the CIA definition was more "subtle," and alluded to the existence of identifiable factions fighting the government and of "no go" areas in which government forces had no sway.

September 10, 2006
Before the Iraqi war OPEC was begging from $22 a barrel oil. The purpose of war is to keep oil prices high.
OPEC ministers no longer forecast prices in the mid-$20s
While OPEC ministers no longer forecast prices in the mid-$20s, they still talk about a sustainable price in the $50 to $55 range -- well below current market levels.

Iraq's production has been trimmed by about 800,000 barrels a day by the continuing mayhem there.

Every $10 drop in the price of crude oil knocks about 25 cents off the price of a gallon of gasoline.

September 10, 2006
General calls for 2,000 more troops
WARSAW -- NATO forces are meeting more resistance than anticipated in southern Afghanistan, an alliance general said yesterday.

He said at least 2,000 more troops were needed to quell the insurgency.

September 10, 2006
62,006 killed in the 'war on terror'
The "war on terror" - and by terrorists - has directly killed a minimum of 62,006 people, created 4.5 million refugees and cost the US more than the sum needed to pay off the debts of every poor nation on earth.

If estimates of other, unquantified, deaths - of insurgents, the Iraq military during the 2003 invasion, those not recorded individually by Western media, and those dying from wounds - are included, then the toll could reach as high as 180,000.

September 8, 2006
Two advisors said the show was inaccurate. Kinda like WMD, ABC let them make it up.
F.B.I. Agents Question Accuracy of 9/11 Series
Two retired F.B.I. agents said today that they had rejected advisory roles on the disputed ABC mini-series, "The Path to 9/11," because of concerns about the program's accuracy.

September 8, 2006
An Impeachable Offense
Journalists or paid propagandist?
10 Miami journalists take pay from U.S. government
At least 10 South Florida journalists, including three from El Nuevo Herald, received regular payments from the U.S. government for programs on Radio Martí and TV Martí, two broadcasters aimed at undermining the communist government of Fidel Castro. The payments totaled thousands of dollars over several years.

September 8, 2006
Apparently these Evangelicals think it's okay to lie.
Discover the Secret Right-Wing Network Behind ABC's 9/11 Deception
Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11's director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to "transform Hollywood" in line with its messianic vision.

A week later, ABC hosted LFF co-founder Murty and several other conservative operatives at an advance screening of The Path to 9/11. (While ABC provided 900 DVDs of the film to conservatives, Clinton administration officials and objective reviewers from mainstream outlets were denied them.)

September 7, 2006
Why is it so hard to stop hating gays?
Ban on gay rabbis may be lifted
Rabbi Jerome Epstein, executive vice president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, says a committee of scholars who interpret Jewish law for the movement will likely loosen the prohibition when they vote in December.

At the same time, Epstein expects the scholars will endorse a policy aiming to keep more traditional congregations within the fold. Synagogues that believe Jewish law bars same-sex relationships still will be able to hire rabbis who share their view.

September 8, 2006
NATO took over on July 31, 2006 and since then all hell has broken loose.
NATO: Afghan force 'needs more troops'
Nato's leaders have urged member countries to provide reinforcements to help in its campaign against Taleban guerrillas in southern Afghanistan.

The commander of British forces in Afghanistan has meanwhile said combat there is more intense than in Iraq.

September 8, 2006
An Impeachable Offense
Also, McCain has joined the pro-torture fascist camp.
Bush Wants Interrogation Methods Rejected by Military
Many of the harsh interrogation techniques repudiated by the Pentagon on Wednesday would be made lawful by legislation put forward the same day by the Bush administration. And the courts would be forbidden from intervening.

But the new legislation would interpret "outrages upon personal dignity" relatively narrowly, adopting a standard enacted last year in an amendment to the Detainee Treatment Act proposed by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona. The amendment prohibits "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" and refers indirectly to an American constitutional standard that prohibits conduct which "shocks the conscience."

September 8, 2006
European watchdog calls for clampdown on CIA
The head of Europe's human rights watchdog yesterday called for monitoring of CIA agents operating in Britain and other European countries, after President George Bush's admission that the US had detained terrorist suspects in secret prisons.

September 7, 2006
Lady Thatcher said 'there were no facts supporting war.'
Middle East proves undoing of U.K.'s Blair
To paraphrase a former Blair slogan, he tried to be tough on terrorism, tough on the causes of terrorism. Blair sees what he calls an "arc of extremism" stretching out across the Middle East and touching countries far outside that region as the root cause of terrorism and not, as others here have argued, a byproduct.

September 6, 2006
Top military leaders: new strategy is desperately needed
In hopes of furthering that debate, this week I asked more than a dozen top Army and Marine Corps generals - active duty and retired, dissidents and administration loyalists - to address what we should do now in Iraq.

All of them agreed that America's strategy and tactics in Iraq have failed, and that President Bush's policy of "staying the course" in Iraq isn't likely to produce anything but more frustration, more and greater problems for the United States in a dangerous world, and more and bloodier surprises for the 135,000 American troops in Iraq.

September 7, 2006
Reasons for war never change, excuses must.
Excuses For War in Iraq
But then we shifted the war to Iraq, because they had WMD's which posed an imminent threat to the United States.

But no WMD's were found, so it turns out we actually went to war to overthrow Saddham Hussein and bring freedom to Iraq, thereby Accomplishing the Mission.

But the Mission wasn't actually Accomplished, so the reason we were in Iraq was to put down insurgents from reclaiming the country.

But the actual, real reason we're fighting Iraqi insurgents is to make the country the shining Road Map to Peace in the Middle East.

September 8, 2006
With certainty there are no conservatives in government.
GOP Brings Home the Bacon
The current fiscal year 2007 appropriation for Health-Labor-HHS-Education includes some $500 million in "earmarks," which is political code for "pork." The 1,712 projects feature pork spending and special favors for incumbents in 422 out of 435 House districts and doesn't include additional pork added by Senators.

September 5, 2006
The 911 Report told us years ago there was no link, but conservatives never believed this truth.
Senate Report: No Link Between al-Qaeda and Saddam
Released Friday, the report discloses for the first time an October 2005 CIA assessment that before the war, Saddam's government "did not have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind eye toward" al-Qaida operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or his associates

September 8, 2006
An Impeachable Offense
Halliburton is corrupt.
Whistle-Blower Slams Halliburton for services never provided to U.S. troops
Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root charged millions to the government for recreational services never provided to U.S. troops in Iraq, including giant tubs of chicken wings and tacos, a widescreen TV, and cheese sticks meant for a military Super Bowl party, according to a federal whistle-blower suit unsealed Friday.

Instead, the suit alleges, KBR used the military's supplies for its own football party.

September 5, 2006
Republicans believe something that's not true and that's why they still support the war.
Zogby: 65% of Republicans Still Think Saddam did 911
"Most Republicans said it was right for the U.S. to expand the war on terrorism by attacking Iraq, that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 terror attacks, and that they believe the government should have the right to conduct searches of personal property and telephone conversations to find terrorists. Most Democrats disagree on every point."

September 7, 2006
ABC thought it could make points with right wingers by lying about 911 - but at what cost?
Furious Bill Clinton : "Path to 911
September 7, 2006 -- WASHINGTON - A furious Bill Clinton is warning ABC that its mini-series "The Path to 9/11" grossly misrepresents his pursuit of Osama bin Laden - and he is demanding the network "pull the drama" if changes aren't made.

September 6, 2006
An Impeachable Offense
9/11 Loans: "every small business. . .became eligible to participate."
The Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee sharply criticized the Bush administration's primary terrorism relief loan program, saying it was so loosely managed that "conceivably every small business in the country became eligible to participate."

The findings substantiate an Associated Press investigation last year that found government-backed Sept. 11 recovery loans went to small companies that weren't hurt by the attacks and didn't even know they were getting help designated for terror victims.

September 6, 2006
An Impeachable Offense
The government and the military lied.
August Death Total in Baghdad Morgue Triples
Violent deaths in August was just revised upwards to 1535 from 550, tripling the total. But this means that a much-publicized drop-off in violence in August – heralded by both the Iraqi government and the US military as a sign that a new security effort in Baghdad was working -- apparently didn't exist.

September 9, 2006
Surveillance Bill Dead, Sen. Specter Worthless
"The president has basically said: I'll agree to let a court decide if I'm breaking the law if you pass a law first that says I'm not breaking the law," Feingold said. "That won't help re-establish a healthy respect for separation of powers. It will only make matters worse.

September 6, 2006
An Impeachable Offense
Violation of the Geneva Conventions
Bush admits CIA secret prisons
GEORGE BUSH admitted yesterday for the first time that terror suspects had been held in secret CIA prisons outside US borders, saying that they were now being transferred to Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba, where he hoped that they would be tried for war crimes.