Goodbye Howard Dean and I thank you !
It was a welcome change to have a candidate for president with integrity and candor. It was also a welcome change to have a candidate for president that would give his wife rhododendron and bicycle rides for gifts. Someone with the integrity to put humanity and family forward as a prime virtue by practicing such... not preaching "family values" as show. It was time to have someone in the limelight who could differentiate between patriotism and demagoguery, someone believing in human and nation's rights, someone more interested in making our country a better place than building an empire.
I would have been proud to have had you as president... but am glad to have had you as a candidate..
Thursday, February 19, 2004
Tuesday, February 17, 2004
Just read a scary article in Harper's on our WMD entitled When Killing Just Won't Do
Such wonders as :
Acoustic Bullets: High-power, very low-frequency waves emitted from one- to two-meter antenna dishes. Results in blunt-object trauma. Effects range from discomfort to death.
Infrasound: Very low-frequency sound that can travel long distances and easily penetrate most buildings and vehicles. Long-wavelength sound creates biophysical effects: nausea, loss of bowels, disorientation, vomiting, internal-organ damage, or death may occur. By 1972 an infrasound generator had been built in France. When activated it made the people in range sick for hours.
Genetic Alteration: The act of changing genetic code to create a desired less-than-lethal but long-term disablement effect, perhaps for generations, thereby creating a societal burden.
As long as our tax dollars continuing funding such research, it is no wonder that our country is seen as evil. What are we, as a nation, doing??
Such wonders as :
Acoustic Bullets: High-power, very low-frequency waves emitted from one- to two-meter antenna dishes. Results in blunt-object trauma. Effects range from discomfort to death.
Infrasound: Very low-frequency sound that can travel long distances and easily penetrate most buildings and vehicles. Long-wavelength sound creates biophysical effects: nausea, loss of bowels, disorientation, vomiting, internal-organ damage, or death may occur. By 1972 an infrasound generator had been built in France. When activated it made the people in range sick for hours.
Genetic Alteration: The act of changing genetic code to create a desired less-than-lethal but long-term disablement effect, perhaps for generations, thereby creating a societal burden.
As long as our tax dollars continuing funding such research, it is no wonder that our country is seen as evil. What are we, as a nation, doing??
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
America's Empire of Bases
By Chalmers Johnson
As distinct from other peoples, most Americans do not recognize -- or do not want to recognize -- that the United States dominates the world through its military power. Due to government secrecy, our citizens are often ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the planet. This vast network of American bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire -- an empire of bases with its own geography not likely to be taught in any high school geography class. Without grasping the dimensions of this globe-girdling Baseworld, one can't begin to understand the size and nature of our imperial aspirations or the degree to which a new kind of militarism is undermining our constitutional order.
Our military deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other nations. To dominate the oceans and seas of the world, we are creating some thirteen naval task forces built around aircraft carriers whose names sum up our martial heritage -- Kitty Hawk, Constellation, Enterprise, John F. Kennedy, Nimitz, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, John C. Stennis, Harry S. Truman, and Ronald Reagan. We operate numerous secret bases outside our territory to monitor what the people of the world, including our own citizens, are saying, faxing, or e-mailing to one another.
Our installations abroad bring profits to civilian industries, which design and manufacture weapons for the armed forces or, like the now well-publicized Kellogg, Brown & Root company, a subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation of Houston, undertake contract services to build and maintain our far-flung outposts. One task of such contractors is to keep uniformed members of the imperium housed in comfortable quarters, well fed, amused, and supplied with enjoyable, affordable vacation facilities. Whole sectors of the American economy have come to rely on the military for sales. On the eve of our second war on Iraq, for example, while the Defense Department was ordering up an extra ration of cruise missiles and depleted-uranium armor-piercing tank shells, it also acquired 273,000 bottles of Native Tan sunblock, almost triple its 1999 order and undoubtedly a boon to the supplier, Control Supply Company of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and its subcontractor, Sun Fun Products of Daytona Beach, Florida.
By Chalmers Johnson
As distinct from other peoples, most Americans do not recognize -- or do not want to recognize -- that the United States dominates the world through its military power. Due to government secrecy, our citizens are often ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the planet. This vast network of American bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire -- an empire of bases with its own geography not likely to be taught in any high school geography class. Without grasping the dimensions of this globe-girdling Baseworld, one can't begin to understand the size and nature of our imperial aspirations or the degree to which a new kind of militarism is undermining our constitutional order.
Our military deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other nations. To dominate the oceans and seas of the world, we are creating some thirteen naval task forces built around aircraft carriers whose names sum up our martial heritage -- Kitty Hawk, Constellation, Enterprise, John F. Kennedy, Nimitz, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, John C. Stennis, Harry S. Truman, and Ronald Reagan. We operate numerous secret bases outside our territory to monitor what the people of the world, including our own citizens, are saying, faxing, or e-mailing to one another.
Our installations abroad bring profits to civilian industries, which design and manufacture weapons for the armed forces or, like the now well-publicized Kellogg, Brown & Root company, a subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation of Houston, undertake contract services to build and maintain our far-flung outposts. One task of such contractors is to keep uniformed members of the imperium housed in comfortable quarters, well fed, amused, and supplied with enjoyable, affordable vacation facilities. Whole sectors of the American economy have come to rely on the military for sales. On the eve of our second war on Iraq, for example, while the Defense Department was ordering up an extra ration of cruise missiles and depleted-uranium armor-piercing tank shells, it also acquired 273,000 bottles of Native Tan sunblock, almost triple its 1999 order and undoubtedly a boon to the supplier, Control Supply Company of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and its subcontractor, Sun Fun Products of Daytona Beach, Florida.
Saturday, February 07, 2004
Secret Obsessions at the Top
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: February 7, 2004 New York Times
"When a country's capital is in the grip of hard-line ideologues who demand a certain kind of intelligence, they'll get it. The result is an intelligence failure. And, more fundamentally, it's a political failure by the top leaders themselves.
So to me, the administration's recent effort to blame the intelligence community for the Iraq mess is as misleading as the drive to war itself. Nothing the C.I.A. did was as harmful as the way administration officials systematically misled Americans about the incomplete and often contradictory mountain of intelligence.
For example, in September 2002 the Defense Intelligence Agency issued a still-classified report saying "there is no reliable information" on whether Iraq had chemical weapons. Yet in the same month Donald Rumsfeld was telling a House committee the opposite: "We do know that the Iraqi regime currently has chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, and we do know they are currently pursuing nuclear weapons."
I've been canvassing people in the intelligence community, and one person at D.I.A. tells me: "I never saw anything that justified the idea that Saddam was an immediate threat, or that we knew with certainty what he had. Everything I saw was laced with `possibles' and `probables'; in fact, what I saw about those aluminum tubes, for instance, seemed to me to leave the impression that they probably were not nuclear-related."
Lt. Col. Dale Davis, a former Marine counterintelligence officer now at the Virginia Military Institute, says he hears from his former intelligence colleagues that top officials "cherry-picked the intel for the most damning, and often least reliable, tidbits and produced alarming conclusions — the 45-minute chemical attack scenario, the African uranium and the Al Qaeda connection. The C.I.A. never supported these assertions."
Another person with long experience in military intelligence put it this way: "Everyone knew from the start that there was no smoking gun and the assessment was based on speculation, anecdote and outdated information, not current evidence. We didn't have the `humint' [human intelligence] capability to confirm anything one way or the other."
The administration could have been truthful, saying that the intelligence about W.M.D. was incomplete but alarming — and that in any case Saddam was a monster. Instead, officials from the president down warned us that unless we went to war, we risked a mushroom cloud at home.
That was worse than an intelligence failure. That was dishonesty."
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: February 7, 2004 New York Times
"When a country's capital is in the grip of hard-line ideologues who demand a certain kind of intelligence, they'll get it. The result is an intelligence failure. And, more fundamentally, it's a political failure by the top leaders themselves.
So to me, the administration's recent effort to blame the intelligence community for the Iraq mess is as misleading as the drive to war itself. Nothing the C.I.A. did was as harmful as the way administration officials systematically misled Americans about the incomplete and often contradictory mountain of intelligence.
For example, in September 2002 the Defense Intelligence Agency issued a still-classified report saying "there is no reliable information" on whether Iraq had chemical weapons. Yet in the same month Donald Rumsfeld was telling a House committee the opposite: "We do know that the Iraqi regime currently has chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, and we do know they are currently pursuing nuclear weapons."
I've been canvassing people in the intelligence community, and one person at D.I.A. tells me: "I never saw anything that justified the idea that Saddam was an immediate threat, or that we knew with certainty what he had. Everything I saw was laced with `possibles' and `probables'; in fact, what I saw about those aluminum tubes, for instance, seemed to me to leave the impression that they probably were not nuclear-related."
Lt. Col. Dale Davis, a former Marine counterintelligence officer now at the Virginia Military Institute, says he hears from his former intelligence colleagues that top officials "cherry-picked the intel for the most damning, and often least reliable, tidbits and produced alarming conclusions — the 45-minute chemical attack scenario, the African uranium and the Al Qaeda connection. The C.I.A. never supported these assertions."
Another person with long experience in military intelligence put it this way: "Everyone knew from the start that there was no smoking gun and the assessment was based on speculation, anecdote and outdated information, not current evidence. We didn't have the `humint' [human intelligence] capability to confirm anything one way or the other."
The administration could have been truthful, saying that the intelligence about W.M.D. was incomplete but alarming — and that in any case Saddam was a monster. Instead, officials from the president down warned us that unless we went to war, we risked a mushroom cloud at home.
That was worse than an intelligence failure. That was dishonesty."
Friday, February 06, 2004
THE LIES THAT BIND US TO IRAQ
by Robert Scheer
"The central sickness of human history is the notion that the ends justify the means, and it has disastrously gripped political movements from left to right, and from the secular to the religious. It is axiomatic that immoral means will inevitably corrupt the noblest of ends, as has been displayed from the fatal hubris of the Roman Empire down through the genocidal policies of the last century's nationalists, communists and colonialists, and on through the suicide bombers of today.
Yet this profoundly immoral posture has been embraced by President Bush in justifying his pre-emptive war against Iraq, even when the much-touted Iraqi threat proved at best to be based on inexcusable ignorance and at worst to be impeachable fraud. The undemocratic means employed by Bush -- misinforming the public, Congress and the United Nations -- are now somehow to be justified by the ends of "building democracy" in Iraq. This is a daunting challenge that the American people never signed on for and which seems as elusive a goal today as a year ago. "
by Robert Scheer
"The central sickness of human history is the notion that the ends justify the means, and it has disastrously gripped political movements from left to right, and from the secular to the religious. It is axiomatic that immoral means will inevitably corrupt the noblest of ends, as has been displayed from the fatal hubris of the Roman Empire down through the genocidal policies of the last century's nationalists, communists and colonialists, and on through the suicide bombers of today.
Yet this profoundly immoral posture has been embraced by President Bush in justifying his pre-emptive war against Iraq, even when the much-touted Iraqi threat proved at best to be based on inexcusable ignorance and at worst to be impeachable fraud. The undemocratic means employed by Bush -- misinforming the public, Congress and the United Nations -- are now somehow to be justified by the ends of "building democracy" in Iraq. This is a daunting challenge that the American people never signed on for and which seems as elusive a goal today as a year ago. "
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)