Meet the U.S.

[Nakharar]

http://www.drugpolicy.org/flash/felon/

 

Michael Moore's entertaining but lousy "documentary" Fahrenheit 911 had something similar to this. They don't need to resort to such tactics. They've got the elections in their backpocket anyway.

[Stormig]

What a mess...

 

FBI shuts down 20 antiwar web sites: an unprecedented act of Internet censorship

By our correspondent

13 October 2004

Back to screen version | Send this link by email | Email the author

 

The US government move to shut down nearly two dozen antiwar, anti-globalization web sites on October 7 is an unprecedented exercise of police power against political dissent on the Internet. The World Socialist Web Site denounces the attack on the Indymedia sites and demands a halt to all such attempts at suppressing political criticism of the US government.

 

The shutdown was carried out by Rackspace, a US-based web-hosting company with offices in San Antonio, Texas, and greater London, in response to an order from the FBI requiring it to turn over two of its British servers that were hosting dozens of Indymedia sites. There are conflicting accounts of the legal process, with Indymedia attributing the order to a US federal district court, while the Electronic Freedom Foundation, which is supplying legal representation to the group, describes it as a “commissioner’s order” directly from the FBI itself.

 

At least 20 national web sites, including those for Brazil, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Uruguay were taken down when the hard drives for the servers were given to the FBI. Most of the sites were restored to service by the end of the weekend, but they may have lost significant digital content because of the removal of the hardware.

 

The seizure appeared to be politically timed. It came just one week before the start of the third session of the European Social Forum (ESF), a large gathering of antiwar and anti-globalization activists, scheduled to take place in London October 15-17. The ESF was to be broadcast live via streaming video on many of the Indymedia sites.

 

The FBI said the action was taken at the request of Italian and Swiss authorities, under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, which provides for cooperative efforts by various national police agencies against international terrorism, kidnapping and money laundering. According to a statement issued by the web-hosting firm, “Rackspace is acting as a good corporate citizen and is cooperating with international law enforcement authorities.”

 

The invocation of such a treaty against a group of left-wing web sites with no link to any form of terrorism is an outrageous smear. Indymedia was formed in 1999 to provide live on-the-spot coverage of the anti-globalization protests in Seattle. It has expanded into a worldwide network of 140 locally based sites that provide extensive coverage of political activities that are frequently blacked out by the corporate-controlled media.

 

According to a statement issued by the Indymedia network, the group was asked by the FBI last month to remove a story posted on one its member sites about Swiss undercover police. The story included photographs of two secret police officers who had acted as agents provocateurs during anti-globalization protests last year outside the G-8 summit meeting in Evian, France. The FBI conceded that the posting of this information did not violate any US law, and Indymedia did not take down the information.

 

The two policemen had engaged in violent actions in the center of Geneva, the Swiss city adjacent to Evian, where most of the anti-globalization protests took place. These provocations became the pretext for police attacks on peaceful demonstrators. The Indymedia report gave the names and addresses of the undercover cops as well as their photographs.

 

Indymedia said it could not be sure that the FBI action was related to the Swiss police exposure “since the order was issued to Rackspace and not to Indymedia.” Two other possible motives have been suggested: one relating to the politics of Italy, the other relating to the US elections.

 

According to some Internet reports, the federal prosecutor for the Italian city of Bologna, Marina Plazzi, has begun an investigation of Indymedia for possible “support of terrorism,” claiming a link between the group and attacks on Italian soldiers in the Iraqi city of Nasiriya last November. Plazzi claims to have contacted the FBI as well as the Italian Department of Justice.

 

Several leaders of the neo-fascist National Alliance party have demanded the outright shutdown of Indymedia, including Alessandra Mussolini, granddaughter of the fascist dictator. National Alliance leader Gianfranco Fini is the deputy prime minister in the coalition government headed by billionaire Silvio Berlusconi, and a fervent supporter of Italian participation in the occupation of Iraq.

 

According to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), which condemned the Indymedia shutdown, this action may be related to a court case heard September 30 in San Jose, California, against some Indymedia activists who helped expose security flaws in the electronic voting machines that will be used by tens of millions of voters in the November 2 US elections.

 

Aidan White, general secretary of the IFJ, declared, “We have witnessed an intolerable and intrusive international police operation against a network specializing in independent journalism.... The seizing of computers and the high profile nature of this incident suggest that someone wanted to stifle these independent voices in journalism.”

 

A representative of the US-based Electronic Freedom Foundation said, “The Constitution does not permit the government unilaterally to cut off the speech of an independent media outlet, especially without providing a reason or even allowing Indymedia the information necessary to contest the seizure.”

 

Reporters Without Borders, an international group defending freedom of the press, also condemned the seizure of computer equipment in an open letter to David Blunkett, the British Home Secretary. The letter declared: “This intervention is the responsibility of the British authorities because it relates to a hosting company operating on their territory. Closure of websites is a serious step, the reasons for which should definitely be made public.”

 

 

 

This intervention by American police to shut down antiwar web sites has been widely reported in Europe, with accounts carried in the British Guardian and Independent and by the French news agency Agence France-Presse, among others. But nothing has appeared as yet in the American mass media. This silence only underscores the role of the American corporate media as the accomplice of the Bush administration’s attacks on democratic rights, both at home and abroad.

 

The suggested connection between the Indymedia shutdown and the US elections is especially significant. At the September 30 court hearing in northern California, federal judge Jeremy Fogel ruled in favor of two Swarthmore College students and the Online Policy Group, an Internet service provider that hosts an Indymedia site, in their suit against Diebold Election Systems, a leading manufacturer of electronic touch-screen voting machines.

 

The two students had web-posted internal Diebold company memos describing flaws in the software of the voting machines that would permit vote rigging and alteration of vote totals. The Online Policy Group was a party to the suit because it served as the Internet service provider for the San Francisco Bay Area Indymedia web site, which posted a link to the memos.

 

Diebold had brought lawsuits against several other groups that posted the memos, but the two students, active in the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons, filed a civil suit against Diebold claiming that it had unfairly used provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

 

Judge Fogel ruled that Diebold had violated provisions in the act that make it illegal to knowingly misuse copyright law to stifle free speech. He ordered the giant manufacturer to pay damages as well as court costs and lawyers’ fees.

 

 

 

 

 

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Copyright 1998-2004

World Socialist Web Site

All rights reserved

[Anileve]

At times like this I wish I was blessed with complete indifference. And then we wonder why America is despised throughout the world, it's freaking vile!

 

COCA-COLA CRIMES!!!!

 

Vending machines throughout some of NYU's main buildings were wrapped in caution tape and plastered with the (fake) blood-spattered obituaries of those who have died as a result of Coca-Cola's policies. The Coke company is notorious for its abuse of union organizers, but the corporation refuses to acknowledge what is happening in the Columbia bottling plants. Today's action was a part of an ongoing campaign to get Coke products off of NYU's campus, and is part of a larger campaign to stop Coca-Cola's crimes in Columbia. The students hope that by cutting Coke off from the University market they will send a strong message to the company: their acts of violence and oppression will not go unnoticed. Activists are targeting Coke as a step toward holding all multinationals accountable for thier actions.

 

http://www.killercoke.org/crimes-isidro.htm

 

There is mounting evidence that American companies are complicit in the persecution of trade unionists at their Colombian operations. In the case of the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Carepa, where Isídro Segundo Gil was murdered, the union Sinaltrainal argues that Coca-Cola knowingly stood by and allowed the plant's manager to bring in paramilitaries to destroy the union. The workers at the Carepa plant had been asking both Coca-Cola and its bottler, Bebidas y Alimentos, to intervene on their behalf for two months before Isídro Segundo Gil's murder. The plant manager, Ariosto Milan Mosquera had announced publicly that he had asked the paramilitaries to destroy the union. His declaration had been followed by a series of death threats from the paramilitaries, which had prompted the union to send letters to both Coca-Cola and Bebidas y Alimentos asking that they intervene to secure their workers' safety. And this was not the first time that threats against workers had been carried out. Just two years before, in 1994, the paramilitaries had killed two trade unionists at the same plant. It should have surprised no one when two and a half months after the union's plea for help, Isídro Segundo Gil was murdered and the union busted.

 

Because of the involvement of US-based companies like Coca-Cola and Drummond Co. in the persecution of Colombia's trade unions, Colombian labor activists have issued an urgent appeal for solidarity from the people of the United States. Some have already begun to answer that call. The United Steel Workers, along with the Center for International Labor Rights, are focusing their efforts on an innovative new strategy to hold these corporations accountable in US courts. Using the Alien Torts act, which allows non-citizens to file federal lawsuits against US citizens and companies for crimes committed abroad, they have filed two lawsuits on behalf of Colombia's trade unions and the families of the murdered trade unionists. The first lawsuit charges Coca-Cola, Bebidas y Alimentos, and Panamerican Beverages, with complicity in the campaign of murder and intimidation being waged against unionists at Coca-Cola bottling facilities throughout Colombia. The second lawsuit charges Drummond with responsibility for the murders of Valmore Lacarno Rodríguez, Víctor Hugo Orcasita Amaya, and Gustavo Soler Mora.

 

http://henningcenter.berkeley.edu/gateway/columbia.html

From now on it's Pepsi all the way.

[Anileve]

Reign of terror at Colombian Coca-Cola plant

--------------------------------------------

 

By Jason Webb

 

BOGOTA -- Hours after they gunned down Isidro Segundo Gil, paramilitaries

broke into the office of the local union representing workers at a

Coca-Cola bottling plant in northern Colombia and set their headquarters

on fire, witnesses say.

 

The paramilitaries followed up the murder and arson -- which are described

in a sealed Colombian criminal investigation seen by Reuters -- by calling

a meeting of workers inside the plant, located in the northern Colombian

town of Carepa. During the session, the workers were told to resign from

their union by that afternoon or risk a bullet.

 

Gil's killing is the most chilling incident described in a lawsuit filed

in a Miami district court in July whose allegations of abuses by

management at locally owned Coca-Cola Co. bottling plants in Colombia have

embarrassed the U.S. soft drink giant. The suit alleges that management at

plants throughout Colombia used paramilitaries to crush unions with a

terror campaign of threats, kidnap and murder.

 

In recent years, large parts of Colombia have fallen under the sway of

paramilitaries -- illegal right-wing militias funded by businessmen and

ranchers tired of blackmail and the threat of kidnap by left-wing

guerrillas.

 

Gil, general secretary of the local union at the plant operated by the

Bebidas y Alimentos de Uraba company, was murdered on Dec. 5, 1996.

According to the findings of the official criminal investigation, two men

on a motorbike came to get him at work where he was manning the bottling

factory's gate.

 

They asked for him by name before shooting him four times in the head and

then six times in the chest and testicles as he lay on the ground near a

big Coca-Cola sign.

Later in December, Sinaltrainal -- an abbreviated version of the Spanish

name for the National Food Industry Workers' Union -- received 43 typed

resignations, all with the same wording, from its members at Carepa. Other

workers fled the town and some are still in hiding.

 

Investigation cleared plant manager

 

According to the investigation case file -- which is still officially

sealed -- the plant manager and another senior worker admitted in

testimony that paramilitaries had entered company premises, but said they

were afraid to do anything about it. Other plant officials testified that

they knew that paramilitaries had threatened unionized workers.

 

While finding that paramilitary forces were responsible for Gil's killing,

the assailants were never caught and the inquiry cleared two plant

officials of soliciting the murder in a bid to stamp out the union.

 

The ``paras'' as they are known locally, have a tendency to regard unions

as guerrilla fronts, and respond accordingly.

 

At least 112 Colombian unionists were killed in 2000, according to Amnesty

International. After 37 years of guerrilla war, Colombia is locked into a

vicious circle of violence and there are 25,000 killings here every year.

The owner of the Carepa plant, a U.S. citizen, was named as a defendant in

the U.S. suit, together with the largest Coca-Coca bottler in Colombia,

Panamerican Beverages, Inc. (Panamco), and the Coca-Cola Company itself.

The United Steelworkers of America and the International Labor Rights Fund

filed the case on behalf of Gil's estate and Sinaltrainal.

 

The Sinaltrainal union no longer has an office in Carepa.

 

Gil's alleged killers could not talk. At least one of the suspects was

himself put to death just two months after carrying out the hit --

apparently the work of other paramilitaries one night when he was on his

way to a cabaret show.

 

But even if the Carepa plant managers' defense of fear is true, they

surely should have at least told the police, argues Gil family lawyer

Pedro Mahecha: ``Even though they knew about the threats against the

workers and the presence of known paramilitaries on company premises, we

don't know of any complaints made by the company to the authorities.''

 

 

Worker in hiding due to threats

 

One former Carepa worker who declined to be named told Reuters that the

paramilitaries tried to kill him after murdering Gil. He has lived in

hiding for the past four years, with his wife and two daughters. Every

once and a while, he says, the paramilitaries track him down and he has to

move on again to another town.

 

``I had just got to work and I was in the warehouse working when I heard

the first shot. I looked and Isidro was crumpling. I was the first to get

to where he was lying, but when I got there he was already dead,'' he

said.

 

"After they killed Isidro, a few days later the same guys held a meeting

with some company workers and told them that it had been them who burned

down the union office, that it had been them who killed Isidro and that

from then on they wouldn't answer for the lives of anyone who talked about

the union.

 

``Then, after that, they began to show up in the company, in groups of

three of four. They'd hang around inside the company looking at what was

going on and what wasn't going on, as if they were company workers,'' he

said.

 

The Carepa bottler, which has a Coca-Cola licensing agreement, belongs to

investors including U.S. citizen, and old Colombia hand, Richard Kirby,

currently a resident of Florida.

 

Kirby's lawyer, William McCaughan, said that neither the businessman --

who is a former Panamco president -- nor his son, also called Richard and

named in the lawsuit, had anything to do with paramilitaries or with the

murder. He said they had hired managers to run the plant, which they

oversaw from afar.

 

``The son has to my knowledge never ever been there and the father was

there one time many years ago,'' McCaughan told Reuters by telephone from

the United States.

 

Panamco firmly denied having any links to paramilitaries and said it might

sue those making accusations relating to its plants. Panamco bottles Coke

for about 95 percent of Colombia, and the U.S. soft drink giant has a

minority share holding in its main shareholder, Panamerican Beverages.

 

But Sinaltrainal says that five of its members at Coca-Cola bottling

plants have been killed since 1984, three of them during contractual

negotiations.

 

In another recent incident, a worker at a Panamco bottling plant in Cucuta

said he was kidnapped by armed men who told him to stop making trouble for

Coca-Cola.

 

 

Coca-Cola says has nothing to do with incidents

 

A spokesman for Coca-Cola in Colombia, Pablo Largacha, said in a statement

that the U.S. firm denied any wrongdoing in the war-torn country. He added

that Coca-Cola was concerned by the allegations of abuses, but did not

believe its bottlers had been involved.

 

This is not the first time that Coca-Cola has been embarrassed by alleged

abuses at its bottling plants. The U.S. company withdrew a bottling

agreement from a plant in Guatemala in the early 1980s after international

labor activists protested the murder of three local union leaders in a row

and an attack made against a fourth.

 

Sinaltrainal's national president, Javier Correa, says there is a pattern

of harassment at Coca-Cola bottling plants around Colombia. He says he

often receives death threats.

 

``I am always getting threats over the phone at my house. The last time

they left a message saying 'We're going to cut you up,' and they turned on

a chain saw,'' he said at the union's headquarters in Bogota.

 

Chain saws have been used in some of the most horrific mass killings

carried out by the paramilitaries -- whose regular massacres of suspected

guerrilla collaborators have spread fear through much of Colombia's

countryside.

 

Much of the paramilitaries' brutality can be traced back to the 1980s,

when Colombia's cocaine lords started financing their own paramilitary

gangs.

 

Recent investigations have exposed links between paramilitaries and

sectors of the army, but President Andres Pastrana has made an effort to

break this connection.

 

Correa said most workers for Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia were

now non-unionized subcontractors.

 

At the Carepa plant, the union had presented a formal request to negotiate

working conditions with the company at the end of November 1996.

Sinaltrainal says that, under Colombian law, the last day for the company

to reply was Dec. 5 -- the same day Gil was killed.

 

Copyright 2001 Reuters

[Stormig]

Thank goodness I don't drink soft drinks. Goodness knows what might be in them.

[skhara]

Yes, I've read this quote in a book before. Just goes to say that US policy never changed with the change in government (from Clinton to Bush), the only difference being the bluntness of the latter and not bothering with giving the Europeans a sense that they are also included in the decision making circle - essentially thats what the EU has been complaining about, not US policy, but the fact it is no longer consulted.

style_images/master/snapback.png

 

 

In that case support Bush to pit Europe against the US. It is much worse to have more nations support injustice.

[Harut]

http://www.theworld.org/content/10256.wma

[Nakharar]

BUSH'S TOXIC CAMPAIGN MIX: GOD, COUNTRY AND PERPETUAL FEAR

 

By Arianna Huffington

 

Leave no sucker punch unthrown. That seems to be the scorched earth mantra of the GOP campaign as it heads into the final rounds. But if you're thinking these guys can't go any lower, guess again. George Bush doesn't just have his head buried in the sand — he's let his integrity sink below sea level, as well.

 

The latest dirty blows are a contemptible one-two combination with which Team Bush has portrayed John Kerry as both the enemy of God and, if not exactly the ally of al-Qaida, then at least the terrorists' candidate of choice. To hear them tell it, a vote for Kerry is a vote against God and Country. Talk about hitting way, way below the belt.

 

Let's start with God.

 

It was revealed last week that the Republican Party has sent out an incendiary mass mailing warning that, if elected, "liberals" (and I'll give you one guess which presidential candidate that includes) will try to — I kid you not — ban the Bible.

 

The full-color flyer features a picture of the Bible with the word "Banned" stamped across it, and a photo of a man, on bended knee, placing a wedding band on the hand of another man, accompanied by the word "Allowed."

 

Clearly, Bush and the GOP have taken their Bible-thumping ways to a whole new level: Now they're using the Good Book to try to bash in the skulls of their opponents.

 

This "God is on our side" attack is all the more outrageous because it's not coming from some shadowy 527 committee that Bush can publicly — albeit disingenuously — distance himself from but, rather, from deep in the heart of the Bush-run Republican National Committee. The president's team has undoubtedly "approved this message."

 

They've also used the official Georgewbush.com campaign website to attack Kerry, a Catholic, as being "Wrong for Catholics", while an RNC website, KerryWrongForCatholics.com, slams him for not being loyal enough to the Pope. We've certainly come a long way since another JFK had to assure voters in 1960 that he wouldn't take orders from the Vatican.

 

The idea that Kerry and the Democrats are anti-Bible and that Bush has a hot line to The Man Upstairs is both offensive and patently absurd. One look at the latest statistics showing the rise in the number of Americans living in poverty proves that Republicans — who, contrary to their claims, do not hold a copyright on the Bible — have grotesquely perverted its core teachings.

 

As Rev. Jim Wallis, the editor of Sojourners magazine, told me: "It's a bitter irony: these people accuse Democrats of wanting to ban the Bible, then proceed to utterly ignore the vast majority of its contents when it comes to questions of social justice, war and peace, and protecting the environment."

 

Perhaps the holy rollers in the Bush camp should crack open a Bible and see what it has to say about caring for the poor (Matthew 25:40), caring for the Earth (Genesis 2:15), and caring for human rights (Genesis 1:27). I've got a hunch Jesus wouldn't be too thrilled with Bush's first term.

 

And while they're acquainting themselves with the Book they purport to defend, the Bushies might also want to have a look at John 8:32 to see what it has to say about the moral imperative of telling the truth. Instead, they are doing everything in their power to convince nervous voters that a vote for John Kerry is a vote for another 9/11. It's the latest vile twist in the Bush-Cheney "all fear, all the time" campaign strategy, and the last desperate gasp of an administration utterly clueless about how to actually win the war on terror.

 

The fear-mongering has been relentless and revolting — bottoming out with a sewer-level attack ad put together by a 527 largely financed by a pair of longtime Bush-backers. The TV spot shows pictures of Osama bin Laden, 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, the Chechen school murderers, and the Madrid train bombings and asks: "These people want to kill us. Would you trust Kerry up against these fanatic killers?"

 

Somewhere — and I don't think it's heaven — Lee Atwater is smiling.

 

And lest you think this line of attack doesn't have the Karl Rove seal of approval, just look at the long line of Bush surrogates lining up to parrot the "al-Qaida wants Kerry to win" talking point — including Sen. Orrin Hatch, the increasingly embarrassing House Speaker Dennis Hastert, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, and the hatchet-man-in-chief, Dick Cheney. They've all been echoing Hatch's claim that terrorists "are going to throw everything they can between now and the election to try and elect Kerry."

 

What's next, a photo of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi sporting a Kerry-Edwards campaign button?

 

This "terrorists for Kerry" routine is as laughable as it is loathsome. Why in the world would the terrorists want to get rid of George Bush? He is their dream president, after all: a man who has alienated our allies, isolated us and united the Muslim world against us.

 

The president's preemptive invasion of Iraq has been such a boon to al-Qaida that the British ambassador to Italy called him the terrorist organization's "best recruiting sergeant." Even Bush's good buddy, Pakistani President Musharraf (a guy who can't afford to share W's delusions when it comes to matters of security), said last week that the war in Iraq has made the world "more dangerous" and "further complicated" the war on terror.

 

Of course, the spinmeisters in the Bush camp would rather you never hear any of this, which is why they've been so quick to smear as unpatriotic anyone painting a less than rosy picture of Iraq — going so far as to imply that Kerry, by merely questioning the president's policies, has given aid and comfort to our enemies.

 

What a load of gutless garbage. As Thomas Jefferson made clear, "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism." But Bush can't seem to grasp that this country is too strong to be endangered by the truth — and that, indeed, hiding the truth, the hallmark of his administration, is what is making us weaker and less secure.

 

I know the president hates to read, but with the debates looming, maybe he should dust off his library card and brush up on his American history. And on the Bible.

 

© 2004 ARIANNA HUFFINGTON.

DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

Edited October 29, 2004 by Nakharar

[Nakharar]

Op-Ed Columnist: Casualties of Faith

 

October 21, 2004

By MAUREEN DOWD

 

 

WASHINGTON

 

When I was little, I was very good at leaps of faith.

 

A

nun would tape up a picture of a snow-covered mountain peak

on the blackboard and say that the first child to discern

the face of Christ in the melting snow was the holiest. I

was soon smugly showing the rest of the class the

"miraculous" outline of that soulful, bearded face.

 

But I never thought I'd see the day when leaps of faith

would be national policy, when the fortunes of America hung

on the possibility of a miracle.

 

What does it tell you about a president that his grounds

for war are so weak that the only way he can justify it is

by believing God wants it? Or that his only Iraq policy now

- as our troops fight a vicious insurgency and the dream of

a stable democracy falls apart - is a belief in miracles?

 

Miracles make the incurious even more incurious. People who

live by religious certainties don't have to waste time with

recalcitrant facts or moral doubts. They do not need to

torture themselves, for example, about dispatching American

kids into a sand trap with ghostly enemies and without the

proper backup, armor, expectations or cultural training.

 

Any president relying more on facts than faith could have

seen that his troops would be sitting ducks: Donald

Rumsfeld's experiment - sending in a light, agile force

(more a Vin Diesel vehicle than a smart plan for Iraq) -

was in direct conflict with the overwhelming force needed

to attempt the neocons' grandiose scheme to turn Iraq into

a model democracy.

 

J.F.K. had to fight the anti-papist expectation that his

Oval Office would take orders from heaven. For W., it's a

selling point. Some right-wing Catholics want John Kerry

excommunicated, while evangelicals call the president a

messenger of God. "God's blessing is on him," the TV

evangelist Pat Robertson says, adding, "It's the blessing

of heaven on the emperor."

 

Mr. Bush has shown all the evangelical voters who didn't

like his daddy that he gets, as Mr. Robertson puts it, "his

direction from the Lord."

 

When Paula Zahn asked the televangelist Tuesday whether Mr.

Bush, as a Christian, should admit his mistakes, Mr.

Robertson said he'd warned a self-satisfied Bush about

Iraq: "The Lord told me it was going to be (a) a disaster,

and ( messy."

 

Mr. Robertson said, "He was the most self-assured man I

ever met." Paraphrasing Mark Twain, he said Mr. Bush was

"like a contented Christian with four aces. He was just

sitting there, like, I'm on top of the world, and I warned

him about this war. ... And I was trying to say, Mr.

President, you better prepare the American people for

casualties. 'Oh, no, we're not going to have any

casualties.' "

 

W., it seems, really believes he's the one. President Neo.

(And his advisers are disciples. That's why Condi Rice so

willingly puts aside her national security duties to spread

the Bush gospel in swing states, and why Karen Hughes raced

to impugn Mr. Robertson's veracity after he described his

chilling encounter with W.)

 

W.'s willful blindness comes from mistakenly assuming that

his desires are God's, as if he knows where God stands on

everything from democracy in Iraq to capital-gains tax

cuts.

 

As Lincoln noted in his Second Inaugural Address about the

Civil War, one can't speak for God: "The Almighty has His

own purposes."

 

Mr. Bush didn't just ignore Mr. Robertson's warning - he

ignored his own intelligence experts, who warned before the

war that an invasion of Iraq would spur more support for

political Islam and trigger violent conflict, including an

insurgency that would drive Baathists and terrorists

together in a toxic combination.

 

As Michael Gordon wrote in his Times series this week on

blind spots in the strategy to secure Iraq, the Bush crew

engaged in an astonishing series of delusions: assuming

they could begin a withdrawal of troops 60 days after

taking Baghdad; enabling the insurgency to flourish;

abolishing the Iraqi military and putting American lives at

risk; misreading the obvious reaction to an American

occupation of a Muslim country.

 

C.I.A. officials were so clueless they wanted to sneak

hundreds of small American flags into Iraq before the war

started so grateful Iraqis could wave them at their

liberators. The agency planned to film that and

triumphantly beam it to the Arab world.

 

The president has this strange notion that his belief in

God means detailed and perfect knowledge of everything that

God wants. He may wish to keep his head stuck in the Iraqi

sand, but he may discover that the Almighty has His own

purposes.

 

E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/21/opinion/...7b85e31c0312331

[Nakharar]

Op-Ed Contributor: When the Personal Shouldn't Be Political

 

November 8, 2004

By GARY HART

 

Kittredge, Colo. — If America has entered one of its

periodic eras of religious revival and if that revival is

having the profound impact on politics that is now

presumed, to participate in a discussion of "faith" one

must qualify oneself.

 

I was raised in the Church of the Nazarene, an evangelical

denomination founded a century ago as an offshoot of

American Methodism, which, the church founders believed,

had become too liberal. I graduated from Bethany Nazarene

College, where I met and married my wife, who was also

brought up in the church. I then graduated from the Yale

Divinity School as preparation for a life of teaching

religion and philosophy.

 

The Nazarene Church abhorred drinking, smoking, dancing,

movies and female adornment, believed in salvation through

being "born again" and in sanctification as a second act of

grace, and resisted most popular culture as the devil's

work. In doctrine and practice, it was much more

evangelical than fundamentalist.

 

A neglected thread of church doctrine was the social gospel

of John and Charles Wesley, the great reformers of late

18th-century Methodism. The Wesley brothers preached

salvation through grace but also preached the duty of

Christians, based solidly on Jesus' teachings, to minister

to those less fortunate. My political philosophy springs

directly from Jesus' teachings and is the reason I became

active in the Democratic Party. Finally, in the

qualification-to-speak category, I will seek to pre-empt

the ad hominem disqualifiers. I am a sinner. I only ask for

the same degree of forgiveness from my many critics that

they were willing to grant George W. Bush for his

transgressions.

 

As a candidate for public office, I chose not to place my

beliefs in the center of my appeal for support because I am

also a Jeffersonian; that is to say, I believe that one's

religious beliefs - though they will and should affect

one's outlook on public policy and life - are personal and

that America is a secular, not a theocratic, republic.

Because of this, it should concern us that declarations of

"faith" are quickly becoming a condition for seeking public

office.

 

Declarations of "faith" are abstractions that permit both

voters and candidates to fill in the blanks with their own

religious beliefs. There are two dangers here. One is the

merging of church and state. The other is rank hypocrisy.

Having claimed moral authority to achieve political

victory, religious conservatives should be very careful, in

their administration of the public trust, to live up to the

standards they have claimed for themselves. They should

also be called upon to address the teachings of Jesus and

the prophets concerning care for the poor, the barriers

that wealth presents to entering heaven, the blessings on

the peacemakers, and the belief that no person should be

left behind.

 

If we are to insert "faith" into the public dialogue more

directly and assertively, let's not be selective. Let's go

all the way. Let's not just define "faith" in terms of the

law and judgment; let's define it also in terms of love,

caring, forgiveness. Compassionate conservatives can

believe social ills should be addressed by charity and the

private sector; liberals can believe that the government

has a role to play in correcting social injustice. But both

can agree that human need, poverty, homelessness,

illiteracy and sickness must be addressed. Liberals are not

against religion. They are against hypocrisy, exclusion and

judgmentalism. They resist the notion that one side or the

other possesses "the truth" to the exclusion of others.

There is a great difference between Cotton Mather and John

Wesley.

 

There is also the disturbing tendency to insert theocratic

principles into the vision of America's role in the world.

There is evil in the world. Nowhere in our Constitution or

founding documents is there support for the proposition

that the United States was given a special dispensation to

eliminate it. Surely Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator.

But there are quite a few of those still around and no one

is advocating eliminating them. Neither Washington, Adams,

Madison nor Jefferson saw America as the world's avenging

angel. Any notion of going abroad seeking demons to destroy

concerned them above all else. Mr. Bush's venture into

crusaderism frightened not only Muslims, it also frightened

a very large number of Americans with a sense of their own

history.

 

The religions of Abraham all teach a sense of personal and

collective humility. It was a note briefly struck very

early by Mr. Bush and largely abandoned thereafter. It

would be well for those in the second Bush term to ponder

that attribute. Whether Bush supporters care or not, people

around the world now see America as arrogant,

self-righteous and superior. These are not qualities of any

traditional faith I am aware of.

 

If faith now drives our politics, at the very least let's

make it a faith of inclusion, genuine compassion, humility,

justice and accountability. In the words of the prophet

Micah: "He hath shown thee, O man, what is good. What doth

the Lord require of thee, but to do justly and to love

mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" And, instead of "O

man," let's insert "O America."

 

Gary Hart, the former Democratic senator from Colorado, is

the author, most recently, of"The Fourth Power: A Grand

Strategy for the United States in the 21st Century.''

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/08/opinion/...9d4b14293465bb6

 

 

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[DominO123]

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/2004votefraud.html

[Stormig]

From "Information Clearing House" -

 

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war. War settles nothing: Dwight David Eisenhower - 34th president of the United States, 1890-1969

 

=

 

I find war detestable but those who praise it without participating in it even more so: Romain Rolland

 

=

 

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own: Aldous Huxley - English novelist and critic, 1894-1963

 

=

 

Only the winners decide what were war crimes.: Gary Wills - Author

[Anileve]

I find war detestable but those who praise it without participating in it even more so: Romain Rolland

style_images/master/snapback.png

I abhor people of that sort. I also don't believe that any war is a just war, even a defensive kind. If people were capable of placing their pride on the side and the commoners would actually question why they are fighting for. Stormi, do you know much about the Fed? Now that's a very fascinating territory to explore. The Fed has been known to finance both sides at war, while the young men and women fought to death thinking their government is protecting their interests. The only way a corrupt government remains in power is because the people allow it to, if they don't rebel there can really never be any real progression even if they are liberated by someone else. The mentality will still be ingrained because it didn't evolve due to a natural course, because someone else decided to take a short cut. There are other ways to help the less fortunate ones, a liberating war is not one of them.

[Stormig]

"The Fed"? Please elaborate.

[Anileve]

"The Fed" - the root of all evil. I am sure you are familiar with The Federal Reserve. After I finish my spy novel I am diving into this:

 

Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country

 

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0671675567.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg

 

Recently I've become fascinated by the machination and the history of a supposedly "Federal" institution. I have got to get to the bottom of this or my life will have no meaning.

[Stormig]

Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there? And I tell you this morning that he's in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this: Lt Gen William Boykin, speaking of G. W. Bush, New York Times, 17 October 2003

 

=

 

God gave the savior to the German people. We have faith, deep and unshakeable faith, that he was sent to us by God to save Germany. Hermann Goering, speaking of Hitler

 

=

 

A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side: Aristotle

 

=

 

International law? I better call my lawyer; he didn't bring that up to me; George W. Bush, 12 December 2003

[Stormig]

ARE AFGHANS BEING POISONED BY ANTI-DRUG EFFORT?

 

Residents of Kunar and Nangarhar blame aerial eradication of opium poppies

for an outbreak of illness, and the government promises to investigate.

 

By Hayatullah Gaheez in Jalalabad and Amanullah Nasrat in Kabul

 

Omardin, a farmer in the Pacheeragam district in Nangarhar province, pointed

to the contents of a black plastic bag. Inside, he said, was a substance he

claimed was sprayed from an airplane as part of a drug-eradication effort in

the country.

 

He said his son has been made ill by the chemicals.

 

"I never even bothered to grow poppy, but because of the Americans, my

God-given only son is sick," he said, shaking with anger. "His skin is sore

and his body aches."

 

As his eyes welled up with tears, Omardin vowed, "If my son dies, I will

join the Taleban, and I will kill as many Americans as I can find."

 

Omardin is not the only person who believes that foreigners - perhaps the

Americans - are spraying opium crops with herbicides here as part of a

counter-narcotics programme.

 

Eyewitnesses in the eastern provinces of Nangarhar and Kunar have reported

seeing aircraft spraying poppy fields. Doctors in the region, meanwhile,

said the sudden outbreak of skin diseases and respiratory ailments are due

to a mysterious chemical they have so far been unable to identify.

 

Afghan government officials have promised to investigate these claims. Jawed

Ludin, spokesman for Afghan president Hamed Karzai, denies that the

government authorised such aerial spraying in the Khogiani and Shinwari

districts of Nangarhar. An official delegation is now studying soil samples

taken from poppy fields in the area.

 

Afghanistan is the world's biggest producer of opium, accounting for

three-quarters of global output. According to newly-released United Nations

statistics, opium cultivation in 2004 increased by 64 per cent over the

previous year.

 

Worried that Afghanistan may be evolving into a "narco-mafia" state, the

United States, Europe and the United Nations have pledged to get tough on

the opium trade. But the US military has insisted that its forces are not

involved in crop eradication.

 

"US troops are not involved are not involved in eradication, which would

include the spraying of poppy fields which we do not do," US military

spokesman Major Mark McCann told Agence France-Presse last week.

 

A US embassy spokesperson in Kabul declined to comment, saying questions on

the subject could be asked in an upcoming press conference.

 

Last month, however, the US Drug Enforcement Administration, DEA, announced

that it had joined with the State Department and the Department of Defence

in developing a new Counternarcotics Implementation Plan for Afghanistan.

Under the programme, the DEA announced that it will assist in destroying

clandestine labs and seizing precursor chemicals, raw opium, and opiate

stockpiles.

 

To achieve that, the DEA said it is expanding its presence in Afghanistan by

permanently stationing additional special agents and intelligence analysts

in the country to enhance Afghanistan's counternarcotics capacity.

 

In addition, the DEA announced it would deploy foreign advisory and support

teams to Afghanistan early next year to provide guidance and conduct

bilateral investigations that will identify, target, and disrupt illicit

drug trafficking organisations.

 

These teams, the agency said, will help with the destruction of existing

opium storage sites, clandestine heroin processing labs, and precursor

chemical supplies.

 

US law enforcement agencies such as the DEA and the FBI already maintain a

sizable presence in Afghanistan

 

Haji Din Mohammad, the governor of Nangarhar province, is convinced that

aerial eradication is already under way and that the United States is behind

it. At a recent press conference, he said, "The crops were eradicated, and

farmers have seen big planes flying over the fields and spraying."

 

And in a separate press conference, General Mohammad Daoud, deputy interior

minister in charge of counter-narcotics characterised aerial eradication as

"illegal."

 

Asked about official US denials of their involvement in such a programme,

Din Mohammad said, "They control the airspace, and no plane can fly over

Afghanistan without their permission."

 

Local residents blame the Americans for an outbreak of illness.

 

Sayed Asadullah, 47, a resident of Kaga district, Nangarhar province, showed

a reporter a dozen children between the ages of 10 and 14 who complained of

severe body aches.

 

Abed, 11, said, "A few days after the chemicals were sprayed, I found I had

a sore throat and this terrible ache."

 

Mohammad Sediq, 14, said his throat was hoarse from the substance sprayed on

the fields.

 

"Ever since I ate some spinach from our field next to the opium field, I've

had a sore throat," he said.

 

"It is all the result of the Americans' chemicals," said Asadullah.

 

Others blamed the crop spraying for the death of livestock.

 

A resident of Asmar district, Konar province, said 14 of his animals had

died. "We took all our sick animals to the veterinarian, but he couldn't do

anything," he said.

 

Dr Abdul Ghafoor, the veterinarian who examined the animals, said they were

suffering from serious respiratory problems. Ghafoor told IWPR he suspected

the animals were suffering from a form of chronic asthma caused by

inhalation of poisonous chemicals.

 

"This kind of disease is rare in Afghanistan," he said.

 

Several doctors in the region also blamed exposure to chemicals for the

outbreak of various illnesses among their human patients.

 

Dr Samiullah Akbari, an ear, nose and throat specialist, said, "Those

chemicals are insecticides for destroying crops. If human beings ingest

them, they cause very bad stomach ailments."

 

Dr Abdullah Momand, who specialises in treating skin diseases, said the

cases of skin irritation were "undoubtedly" caused by contact with a

chemical agent.

 

Momand was pessimistic about the ability of Afghan medicine to deal with the

outbreak.

 

"To tackle these illnesses would require a huge amount of money," he said.

"Treatment is difficult in Afghanistan, and the preventive care patients

need cannot be found in these clinics."

 

Hayatullah Gaheez is a freelance writer in Jalalabad. Amanullah Nasrat is an

IWPR staff reporter in Kabul.

[Stormig]

"An American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein – and the replacement of the radical Baathist dictatorship with a new government more closely aligned with the United States would put America more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans.": David Frum, speachwriter for USA president, George W Bush:

 

 

=

 

"For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.": Paul Wolfowitz, USA Deputy Defence Secretary in an interview in the July 2003 issue of magazine Vanity Fair

 

=

 

"The US and other Western governments turned a blind eye to Amnesty International reports of widespread human rights violations in Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and ignored Amnesty International's campaign on behalf of the thousands of unarmed Kurdish civilians killed in the 1988 attacks on Halabja. Once again, the human rights record of a country is used selectively to legitimize military actions." Amnesty International

 

===

[ED]

Has anybody noticed in this holyday season cities like Denver and Boston had gone great lengths excluding Jesus or Christianity by taking out of contexts?

But!!

Just yesterday in front of the white house they led the first candle of menorah

for Hanukah,! and no uproar about it what so ever. This is just simply amazing, I became convinced this nation has been taken over and everyone is asleep, first it was exclusion of prayers from public schools, then 10 commandments, now Christmas, what’s next Christians have no right to ring the Sunday church bell because it disturbs some other religious persons peace?

 

Welcome to security buffer zone of Israel

Edited December 8, 2004 by Edward

[skhara]

I became convinced this nation has been taken over and everyone is asleep,

 

Not everyone.

[Anileve]

Has anybody noticed in this holyday season cities like Denver and Boston had gone great lengths excluding Jesus or Christianity by taking out of contexts?

But!!

Just yesterday in front of the white house they led the first candle of menorah

for Hanukah,! and no uproar about it what so ever. This is just simply amazing, I became convinced this nation has been taken over and everyone is asleep, first it was exclusion of prayers from public schools, then 10 commandments, now Christmas, what’s next Christians have no right to ring the Sunday church bell because it disturbs some other religious persons peace?

 

Welcome to security buffer zone of Israel

style_images/master/snapback.png

I don't like any religious holidays observed as national holidays.

[Anonymouse]

I abhor people of that sort. I also don't believe that any war is a just war, even a defensive kind. If people were capable of placing their pride on the side and the commoners would actually question why they are fighting for. Stormi, do you know much about the Fed? Now that's a very fascinating territory to explore. The Fed has been known to finance both sides at war, while the young men and women fought to death thinking their government is protecting their interests. The only way a corrupt government remains in power is because the people allow it to, if they don't rebel there can really never be any real progression even if they are liberated by someone else. The mentality will still be ingrained because it didn't evolve due to a natural course, because someone else decided to take a short cut. There are other ways to help the less fortunate ones, a liberating war is not one of them.

style_images/master/snapback.png

 

You are sounding more like me. Scary.

[Anonymouse]

Not everyone.

style_images/master/snapback.png

 

I am to guess that the blood lusting exhibited by the Bush junta is somehow appealing to many who indeed are asleep. Do people believe this war will solve their problems? The morally unambigious Manichean "good and evil" concepts as perpetuated by the neo-con hawks of PNAC, coupled with the "clash of civilizations" bromide is not sufficient reason to launch wars and disrupt the lives of other peoples. The U.S. has already lost the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, because as any good military general knows, you do not declare war on a tactic. America is a State entity, confronting an amorphous non-State entity, "terrorism" "Al Qeada". Thus, States in general cannot combat a non-State entity, known as "terrorism". The French learned this in Algeria, the Russians in Afghanistan, but apparently America didn't learn this in Vietnam.

Edited December 19, 2004 by Anonymouse

[skhara]

I am to guess that the blood lusting exhibited by the Bush junta is somehow appealing to many who indeed are asleep. Do people believe this war will solve their problems? The morally unambigious Manichean "good and evil" concepts as perpetuated by the neo-con hawks of PNAC, coupled with the "clash of civilizations" bromide is not sufficient reason to launch wars and disrupt the lives of other peoples. The U.S. has already lost the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, because as any good military general knows, you do not declare war on a tactic. America is a State entity, confronting an amorphous non-State entity, "terrorism" "Al Qeada". Thus, States in general cannot combat a non-State entity, known as "terrorism". The French learned this in Algeria, the Russians in Afghanistan, but apparently America didn't learn this in Vietnam.

style_images/master/snapback.png

 

I quoted Edward and he mentioned nothing of the war in Iraq. The US isn't confronting "terrorism".

[Anonymouse]

I quoted Edward and he mentioned nothing of the war in Iraq.  The US isn't confronting "terrorism".

style_images/master/snapback.png

 

I see, but the fiasco in Iraq is vaguely included under the amorphous titled of "terrorism", whatever that means.