PBS Now interviews Haj Ali, the man under the hood in the infamous image above, a local mayor picked up in a sweep and tortured. "99% of the people brought in are innocent, but with all the insults and torture, it makes them ready to do just about anything." (story) .   .   . Iraq War Cost (JavaScript Error) More details: click here. .   .   .

King Gyanendra's coup has precipitated a humanitarian crisis in Nepal, according to the UN.

Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen... "Palpatine, who is really Darth Sidious, manipulates the Senate and enlists the Jedi Council's patriotism to "defend" the Republic against a "separatist" army that he secretly directs. The purpose of the orchestrated war is to erode liberty in the name of security. The naive Jedi catch on too late and are decimated. The Republic falls." Is Bush a Sith Lord? by Paul Craig Roberts

Update: 6/15- Mukhtaran Bibi released... (following Kristoff's piece in the times)... Musharref still holds her passport...(latest 6/19)

"I even take the position that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged... But it is blindingly clear that judges have no greater capacity than the rest of us to decide what is moral." -Supreme Court Justice Scalia at a Harvard gathering.(...ref)

Dorm: Clothing Optional "There's an exhibitionist part of me. If I feel the need to take off my pants, I take my pants off. It's kind of cool that there is a place you can do that." (NYT ... and here)

U.S. World's Leading Incarcerator 1 of 138 US residents is resident in jail or prison, as of June 2004. More than 12% of black males in their late twenties are in jail (as opposed to 1.7% for same-age whites). The US has once again the world's highest incarceration rate, at 726 per hundred thousand; England is 142, and China 118. France is 91, and Japan is 58 per hundred thousand. (article)

Darwin Student Survey A majority of US students do not believe evolution is a scientific theory... (see full size survey chart)

unretouched photo

Homeland in Security "April 25, Gregory Despres (in photo above) arrived at a U.S.-Canadian border station carrying a homemade sword, a hatchet, a knife, brass knuckles and a bloody chainsaw . U.S. customs agents confiscated the weapons and fingerprinted Despres. Then they let him into the United States. The following day, a gruesome scene was discovered in Despres' hometown of Minto, New Brunswick: The decapitated body of a..." (.continue)

"A tormenting thought: as of a certain point, history was no longer real. Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality..." -Elias Canetti

"My view is that Fox News is a propaganda outlet of the Republican Party and that I don't comment on Fox News." Dr. Dean, Chicago, 6/12 "Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices." Voltaire

Introducing The DREAD New supergun from Trinamic Technologies, can deliver a stream of custom projectiles at 120,000 rounds per minute, one third of an inch apart, with no recoil. This seems to be more of a targeted demolition engine; or a crowd decapitation device. Yet another testament to the genius confluence of the free-market and the free-fire zone... (story and quicktime)

Amnesty Names "High-Level Torture Architects"
Calls on all governments to investigate and, if warranted, arrest and prosecute Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Tenet, Feith, Miller, Sanchez and others
"We have documented that the use of torture and ill treatment is widespread and that the US government is a leading purveyor and practitioner of this odious human rights violation...
"The refusal of the US government to conduct a truly independent investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and other detention centers is tantamount to a whitewash, if not a cover-up, of these disgraceful crimes...
"The government's investigation must climb all the way to the top of the military and civilian chain of command...
"If the US government continues to shirk its responsibility, Amnesty International calls on foreign governments to uphold their obligations under international law by investigating all senior US officials involved in the torture scandal. And if those investigations support prosecution, the governments should arrest any official who enters their territory and begin legal proceedings against them...
"Foreign governments that are party to the Geneva Conventions and/or the Convention against Torture... have a legally binding obligation to exercise what is known as universal jurisdiction over people accused of grave breaches of the Conventions. Governments are required to investigate suspects and, if warranted, to prosecute them or to extradite them to a country that will. Crimes such as torture are so serious that they amount to an offense against all of humanity and require governments to investigate and prosecute people responsible for those crimes- no matter where the crime was committed...
"Amnesty International's list of those who may be considered high-level torture architects includes Donald Rumsfeld... Douglas Feith... George Tenet, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Major General Geoffrey Miller, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez..."
Amnesty International Statement, May 25, 2005

Truth to Power
"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies."
British MP George Galloway blasts the Senate committee... article / transcript /audio excerpt /video link
audio interview by Thom Hartmann

The Downing St. Memo
Here's The Memo in pdf - and here in html
Sign the Conyers Letter on the Downing St. Memo
June 12: already over 500,000 signatures (ref)
This story is growing as it's ramifications sink in... Follow the logic: War crime numero uno is the premeditated invasion of another country which posed no threat. Iraqi troops were not menacing our borders, nor did Iraq have any means of attacking America by sea or air. In order not to be war criminals, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld needed to conjure a comparable "imminent threat" to claim justification for a pre-emptive attack. The supposed convergence of Saddam's stockpiles of WMD and his alleged contacts with Al Qaeda provided the scenario. After the invasion and occupation, once it was clear there never were any WMD, or contacts with Al Quaeda, the Bush administration claimed to have been misled by faulty intelligence, but insisted they'd acted in good faith. The significance of the Downing St. Memo is that it puts the lie to the 'faulty intelligence' alibi; they had decided to invade Iraq, facts and intelligence would be "fixed" to create support for this objective. There it is, clear as day, in a top-secret eyes-only minutes of a meeting of Blair, Jack Straw et al, where the head of MI6, Dearlove, summarized the situation in Washington, from where he had just returned. This is the 'smoking gun' which underpins and assembles all the fragmentary reports we have had over the last two years. So Bush made a deceitful case to Congress, asking them to 'trust' him, though he knew he was lying, in an official request for war authorization in Oct 2002? Uh-oh. Can you hear the "i" word?...

Latest news and documents: AfterDowningStreet.org
Also: DowningStreetMemo.com

Sign the Conyers Letter on the Downing St. Memo
June 12: already over 500,000 signatures (ref)
Rep. Conyers: Mens Rea and WMD
"Abundant evidence now exists in the public domain to convict George W. Bush of the crime of the century... This memo is the mother of all smoking guns... Why isn't Bush in the dock?"- Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, once Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. (article)
June 12- New memo leaked: "... since regime change was illegal it was 'necessary to create the conditions" which would make it legal.'" (story...)

Memogate Hearings Scheduled for June 16 in Washington
On Thursday June 16, 2005, Rep. John Conyers, Jr., Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, and other Democratic Members will hold a Democratic hearing to hear testimony concerning the Downing Street Minutes and the efforts to cook the books on pre-war intelligence..."(story) - watch/listen live online at C-Span.org (CSpan3). (To be reshown Friday 8pm est on CSpan2)

Google news search "impeachment + Bush"

Into the embarrassed media silence on the DSM came the revelation of the identity of Deep Throat, and memories of the dramatic exposures of executive branch wrongdoing which led to Nixon's resignation under threat of impeachment. Rumsfeld and Cheney worked for Nixon. That's where these two unbearable know-it-alls met and became trusted neo-con plotter buddies. Maybe they're squirming a little, what with the historical resonance and all. Have you seen Gordon Liddy on his FOX talk show denouncing Deep Throat? Amazing... Liddy was the lead burglar in the Watergate, in case you've forgotten. (Chuck Colson too! More at Newsday)
In this regard, don't miss Frank Rich: "Don't Follow the Money"

Iraq: Election Honeymoon Very Over
FOX News Sunday : "[Can] the Bush administration fairly be criticized for failing to level with the American people about how long and difficult this commitment will be?"
Condoleeza Rice: "The administration, I think, has said to the American people that it is a generational commitment to Iraq." (story)
Really! I remember something quite different... for example:
"...my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators... I think it will go relatively quickly...weeks rather than months." Vice President Dick Cheney, 3/16/03
"It is unknowable how long that conflict will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months." Sec.Def. Donald Rumsfeld, 2/7/03

Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) of the Foreign Relations Committee told U.S. News and World Report: "Things aren't getting better; they're getting worse. The White House is completely disconnected from reality. It's like they're just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we're losing in Iraq."

The insurgency strengthens, more killings, bombings, abductions, executions... the US press wonders who the insurgents are, and what they want. The Times notes that some Sunnis are fighting against a Shiite Iraq; some Baathist Sunnis want to destabilize the situation in preparation for a Baathist coup. A few mention rage against a brutal occupation. From Fallujah to Ramadi to Quaim, and at hundreds of checkpoints and house sweeps, heavy-handed destruction, murderous indifference to innocents and friends alike, trigger-happy troops, and demented abuse of muslims in the American Gulag have us "Losing Hearts and Minds"... or put differently, made us enemies faster than we can kill them. In this aspect, our troops are "part of the problem" ("US Is Its Own Worst Enemy in Iraq" Robert Scheer, LATimes). . . (see Army Report: Vicious Circle)

What's especially not mentioned is the announced motivation of the pan-islamic jihad and AlQaeda: to tie the US down in Iraq and keep it bleeding, so no other muslim countries can be invaded. A variation of Bush's 'we're fighting them in Iraq so we won't have to fight them here'. For these, Iraq as it is now is a perfect growth medium for the jihadist ideology of a pan-islamic unified front against western crusaderism.
Here, for example, is a video released by a resistance group in Iraq, a rousing call to arms, replete with a swelling music track.

Risk of Civil War Spreads Fear Across Nation LAT 5/29

"Everyone is an 'insurgent' over there," the photographer told me. "That's another label with no meaning. Everyone is against the Americans. There is a $250,000 bounty on the head of every Westerner over there, mine too, while I was there. The Americans working the oil industry over there are the dumbest, most racist jackasses I've ever seen in my life. That's the American face on this thing, and the Iraqi people see it."(story)

"Bin Laden does not want U.S. troops out. He wants to suck America in deeper in order to create revolutionary insurgency throughout the Middle East.The Bush administration is moronic enough to oblige bin Laden... "The neoconservatives are the greatest threat America has ever faced and they control the Office of the President, the Office of the Vice President, the Department of State, the Department of Defense, and the police-state apparatus known as 'Homeland Security.'... Any day now, the neocons may orchestrate a scenario that will suck the U.S. into a wider war that America has no possibility of winning. If the American people had the slightest sense of their danger, they would demand immediate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and accountability for the liars who orchestrated the ill-fated U.S. invasion." (article)
Paul Craig Roberts, John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury.

No Child Left Behind- Dragooning on the Rise
The No Child Left Behind Act requires schools to give Army Recruiters information on the children.
But recruiters had to "stand down" on May 19, due to mounting concerns about illegal practices employed to dragoon more young people into the services; one mother charges the Army with kidnapping her son. (story).
One mom's harrowing nightmare with recruiters: "When Marine Recruiters Go Way Beyond the Call" (Susan Paynter, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

The administration's "decapitation" attack on Newsweek seems to have stalled, now that The Red Cross has gone public with a report it made to the Bush administration which mentioned Koran desecration already years ago (story). The pentagon itself has admitted to Koranic desecration incidents, but only in a press release at 7:30 pm on the Friday evening before Memorial Day weekend. The whole fluff-up looks in retrospect like a choreographed distraction from the Downing St. Memo, combined with a sucker trap for Newsweek.

"With respect, who made you the editor of Newsweek? Do you think it's appropriate for you, at that podium, speaking with the authority of the President of the United States, to tell an American magazine what they should print?" ABC 's journalist to Scott McClellan, White House press briefing May 17 (transcript).

PBS and NPR under republican attack, Moyers first to go
(PBS)...(NPR). Here's Bill Moyers' stirring speech at the National Conference of Media Reform

BBC's extraordinary documentary of the roots of terror and counterterror, "The Power of Nightmares" has been shown at Cannes to rave reviews. Watch it here online.

A new Army report leaked to the Times details appallling cruelty and abuse of innocents at Bagram in Afghanistan. Afghan President Karzai, 'shocked', has called for "very, very, strong action" against the abusers. (story)

Last Best Chance
Warren Buffet joins Ted Turner, former Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn, Tom Brokaw, the heads of the 9/11 Commission in backing and presenting the-made for-TV thriller "Last Best Chance", to communicate to the public the threat of loose nukes and nuclear terrorism (story).

Apocalypse Soon Robert S MacNamara "believes the United States must no longer rely on nuclear weapons as a foreign-policy tool. To do so is immoral, illegal and dreadfully dangerous." (story).
Related:
Cronkite: Media Failing on Nuclear Stories.
Nuclear Renaissance By Jonathan Schell
"U.S. and NATO nuclear policies are immoral, dangerous and destructive..."- Robert Strange MacNamara, at a conference May 24. (story)

More Checkpoint Madness
The near killing of Guliana Sgrena , the freed Italian hostage, and the killing of her savior Nicolai Calipari, by a mobile patrol working for US Ambassador Negroponte, just at the moment of national jubilation over her release, shocked and angered the Italian nation. It marked the effective end of a "coalition' beyond the US and the UK. Berlusconi's government lost the following local elections, and he has resigned to form a new government. A US 'investigation' cleared the US troops of any wrong-doing; the Italians refused to sign on; they have released their own report. The car is now being examined in Italy; Italian courts may bring homicide charges against the US troops involved.
May 2: "A Serious Diplomatic Incident"
The Creature Walks Among Us... La Mia Verita, by Giuliana Sgrena
The same day, US troops killed a Bulgarian coalition soldier; Bulgaria will likely withdraw it's forces. Last month, it was a brigadier general and deputy commander of the Iraqi army, western Al Anbar province, who was shot dead by US troops at a checkpoint, because he was out after the curfew. and so it goes...

Meanwhile, returning marines are speaking out about the lack of equipment and manpower provided them and the deadly consequences. (story, NYT)

Hold the Bolton
Latest: Washington Post reports sudden progress on non-proliferation issues with Bolton gone: "Without the hard-charging Bolton around, the Bush administration not only has moved to reconcile with Russia over nuclear threat reduction but also has dropped its campaign to oust the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and made common cause with European allies in offering incentives to Iran to persuade it to drop any ambitions for nuclear weapons." (story)
June 20- Bolton support weakening... Bush considers 'recess appointment' putting Bolton at the UN until 2007..

The most Dubious nomination yet, John Bolton to the UN, has mercifully been put on hold after an upwelling of reports of unsavory and destructively egotistical behavior. One description stuck well, a bit of bureaucratise now widely familiar: Bolton is a "kiss-up, kick-down kind of guy". But it's more than that. In November 2000 he stormed the pollworkers in Florida: "I'm with the Bush-Cheney team and I'm here to stop the count". And as we know, he did. Cheney later told the American Enterprise Institute that Bolton deserved "anything he wants" in the Bush-Cheney administration. In his next role as Under Secretary of State for Arms Control, his second in command reported, "He was absolutely clear that he didn't want any more arms control agreements, he didn't want any negotiating bodies. He just cut it off." Bolton nearly sabotaged the Libya deal, until he was kept out of it by Powell and Straw. He did sabotage the North Korea talks and the Iran talks for a while, until once again being excluded from those too. He bullied and threatened intelligence analysts who disagreed with his extravagant WMD claims- as in Iraq. He scuttled a protocol to the international ban on biological weapons. One would have thought he considered his job to be the control of proliferating arms-control agreements. Latest: The Non Proliferation Treaty Conference has collapsed in failure; The Bush administration had renegged on earlier agreements. Bolton had ignored the whole affair. (story)
Bolton is one of the hard-core armchair warriors of this administration; he joined the reserves - "I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy"). Bolton is Cheney's Bullyman, and now the point man for the Secret Manipulator's not-so-secret intention to either domesticate the UN as an American Tool, or neuter it altogether. The code word for this plan is "UN reform". Bolton: "There is no United Nations. ... When the United States leads, the United Nations will follow. When it suits our interests to do so, we will do so. When it does not suit our interests, we will not." Bolton holds to a novel definition of diplomacy: the clear communication of US demands.
Hopefully his nomination will be withdrawn in favor of someone who thinks the UN is a good idea, who would prefer accurate intelligence, is not only capable of 'diplomatic' behavior, but actually knows what 'diplomacy' means- to the rest of the world..
(references, story, NYT)
Here's the Bolton quote video clip.

Latest: Stop John Bolton- while there's still time... Sign the senate letter at StopJohnBolton.com

The Washington Post reports: "...Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told her senior staff she was disappointed about the stream of allegations and said she did not want any information coming out of the department that could adversely affect the nomination, said officials speaking on the condition of anonymity." (story)
Gosh, isn't that, uh, illegal?

No sooner had a US Army investigation cleared pentagon brass of any wrongdoing in the widespread torture and sexual-sadism scandals than Rumsfeld shows up with Dolly Parton at the Grand Ole Opry to celebrate. Human Rights Watch is calling for a special prosecutor.
Dolly, meanwhile, is "reassuring fans she and Sandra Bullock did not lock lips in the movie 'Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous,' after sparking outrage among Christian groups." (story, WCOL Columbus)

Exit Memo
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Laurie Garrett quit Newsday, and denounced the "sad arc of greed" in the corporate news ownership. "I have been in 47 states of the USA since 9/11, and I can attest to the horrible impact the deterioration of journalism has had on the national psyche. I have found America a place of great and confused fearfulness." (story)
Interview with Ms. Garrett on Democracy Now
see also FAIR's How Power Shapes the News

"A venal and self-important Washington establishment combined with a globalized corporate mentality have brought an end to America's rising living standards. America's days as a superpower are rapidly coming to an end. Isolated by the nationalistic unilateralism of the neoconservatives who control the Bush administration, the US can expect no sympathy or help from former allies and rising new powers."- The Coming End of the American Superpower by Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, once Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review.

In cased you missed it on cable here are those clips of Bill Maher et al on Gannongate: (click down here and download 16 mb quicktime file to disk).

This is Dr. W. David Hager, Christian anti-abortion activist ob-gyn, and "an aggressive advocate for the political agenda of the Christian right", who was appointed to the FDA's Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs in 2002 by George Bush. Dr. Hager has successfully prevented emergency contraception from being sold over the counter and distribution of RU-486. In his book "As Jesus Cared for Women," Hager writes, "Even though I was trained as a medical specialist, it wasn't until I began to see how Jesus treated women that I understood how I, as a doctor, should treat them."
Apparently his ex-wife, hearing yet more sanctimonious public posturing from Hager, decided to expose the dark underside of this crusader for "family values". Linda Davis, ex- Linda Hager, told The Nation that "he anally raped her from 1995 to the time of their divorce -- after 32 years of marriage -- in 2002... He had extramarital affairs, pressured her to let him videotape them having sex, and paid her to perform sexual acts she hated, like oral sex and sodomy. When she developed narcolepsy, he began sodomizing her against her will while she slept."   (story, The Nation)

The Washington Post covers the first hearing of the Commission on Federal Election Reform: "...the academics, advocacy group leaders and politicians invited to testify yesterday provided a dizzying list of electoral problems that might make some wonder how any ballots were counted in November." (story)

"we find that there were massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio. In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio...." download the House Judiciary Ohio Report

"Europe has become a giant laboratory for rethinking humanity's future. In many respects, the European Dream is the mirror opposite of the American Dream. While the American Dream emphasizes unrestrained economic growth, personal wealth, and the pursuit of individual self-interest, the European Dream focuses more on sustainable development, quality of life, and the nurturing of community." -Jeremy Rifkin: The European Dream (website) (at Amazon)

Critical Choices
Another 80 billion dollar request for Iraq this week. That brings us to, ah, let's see.. 300 Billiion, in two years? That's over 12 billion per month. Wow.
When FDR created the Tennessess Valley Authority, and ultimately some 200,000 jobs, this was seen as utterly radical, a socialist make-work program and was hotly contested by conservatives. Of course the result was that America led the world in engineering infrastructure and industry for the next 50 years. The same for the arts- when the WPA was created, America was an arts backwater. By the fifties New York was the world's art capital; American artists and collectors would lead and dominate the world's art scene well into the 90's. I don't know what those 200,000 jobs cost the Federal Government in the thirties, but I did a little math here and I think it's pretty illuminating.
Imaginine that instead of making war on Iraq, we had decided to better use the money to stimulate our own country's health and development, Let's say I'm in charge of the budget. The budget is 12 billion a month. Let's say we are going to create jobs; not just jobs, but good jobs; I mean not burger flipping no-future jobs, but jobs which themselves are training for further endeavor, and which reward not only the individual in their doing, but the society in they're being done.
Lets say we'll fund job grants for a year for about 30,000 dollars. We've got 12 billion for 400,000 job grants to give per month, so here we go:

First month:
100,000 fully funded yearlong sabbaticals for selected high school teachers, to travel and study.
100,000 one year grant to fund new high school teachers from promising members of graduating classes
100,000 grants to promising students of islamic culture and language, to study and travel abroad
100,000 grants to selected foreign students, to study and travel in the US

2nd month:
100,000 grants to fund promising individuals in science and engineering research
100,000 grants to fund promising students for one-year work study program in the sciences or engineering
100,000 artists and performers grants to travel and study one year abroad
100,000 grants international to help fund the building of democratic institutions where needed

3rd month:
OK, I'm just reeling this off... now I'd like to give 400,000 families a grant to cover a downpayment on a first home- an interest free loan with a 3 year repayment delay. (With 21 months of this still to go, I'd like to do this one pretty frequently.)

You get the idea... do this for 24 consecutive months, and you have an enormous revitalization of our society and culture and economy, and real progress toward peace and understanding in the world... all for the price of the Iraq War, without the thousands of casualties and destroyed families and homes.
Think about it. The future is up to us.

Back to Reality...

U.S. is World's Leading Incarcerator
Yet another feather in our national hat
1 of 138 US residents is resident in jail or prison, as of June 2004. More than 12% of black males in their late twenties are in jail (as opposed to 1.7% for same-age whites). The new figures "push the US's rate of incarceration to a startling 726 per 100,000- maintaining the US status as the world's leading incarcerator (England -142, China -118, France -91, Japan -58, Nigeria -31)." - (story, Justice Policy Institute)

Aux Armes, Citoyens...
Following a rash of gun massacres in the US, a ban on guns? No, a drive to legalize carrying concealed weapons! (story)

One Shot, One Kill, No Remorse, I Decide
The jesuit Marquette University, after canceling an 'Adopt a Sniper' fund-raiser, is denounced as "ultra-liberal" by the College Republicans... (story)

Meanwhile, a senior Marine General who commanded forces in Iraq told a San Diego forum recently, "Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling... You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil... You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."(story, NYT)

Maximum Pain is the Aim
The US military is funding development of a weapon that delivers a bout of excruciating pain from up to 2 kilometers away. Pulsed Energy Projectiles (PEPs), fire a laser pulse that generates a burst of expanding plasma when it hits something solid, like a person, knocking them off their feet and causing extreme pain and temporary paralysis. (story)

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