From June, US Customs and Border Patrol will take a fingerprint scan of international travellers exiting the United States from Detroit, while the US Transport Security Administration will take fingerprint scans of international travellers exiting the United States from Atlanta.
Biometric technology such as fingerprint scans has been used by US Customs and Border Patrol for several years to gain a biometric record of non-US citizens entering the United States.
But under the Bush Administration, a plan was formulated to also scan outgoing passengers.
Michael Hardin, a senior policy analyst with the US-Visit Program at the United States Department of Homeland Security told a Biometrics Institute conference today that the DHS will use the data from the trial to “inform us as to where to take [exit screening] next.”
“We are trying to ensure we know more about who came and who left,” he said. “We have a large population of illegal immigrants in the United States - we want to make sure the person getting on the plane really is the person the records show to be leaving.”
The original exit scanning legislation planned by the Bush administration stipulated that airlines would be responsible for conducting the exit fingerprints.
But after much protest, Hardin said the new Obama administration re-considered this legislation two weeks ago and is “not as sold that private sector should be agency for exit fingerprints.”
“The new administration feels that perhaps it is more appropriate that Government should take that role.”
An Ohio man arrested for mowing unkempt grass at a public park said he just wanted to make his city look nice. John Hamilton said he took control of the situation because the grass in Sandusky’s Central Park was about a foot high.
According to a police report, a witness said Hamilton was blowing grass onto the sidewalk and shredding trash in the park that had not been picked up.
Police said they arrested 48-year-old Hamilton after he refused to stop mowing and charged him with obstructing official business and disorderly conduct.
City Manager Matt Kline called the arrest unfortunate and said he understands Hamilton’s frustration. Kline said budget cuts have left Sandusky understaffed for seasonal maintenance work.
An openly-gay, teenage boy was just voted "Prom Queen" at Los Angeles' Fairfax High School in a campaign that began as a stunt -- but ended up spurring discussion on the campus about gender roles and teen popularity.
Sergio Garcia, 18, was crowned queen Saturday night at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.
"I feel invincible," Garcia said in his tiara and charcoal-gray tuxedo.
A few days earlier, he gave a speech that won over some cynics and led to an ovation and his unlikely victory.
"At one time, prom may have been a big popularity contest where the best-looking guy or girl were crowned king and queen," Garcia told a gymnasium full of seniors. "Things have changed and it's no longer just about who has the most friends or who wears the coolest clothes. I'm not your typical prom queen candidate. There's more to me than meets the eye."
Garcia assured the crowd he wouldn't wear a dress on prom night.
"I will be wearing a suit," he said. "But don't be fooled, deep down I am a queen."
The school, which sits at the end of the rows of chic shops on Melrose Avenue and was once attended by members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, has long been a haven for students who would be considered outcasts at many schools.
Garcia said he saw fliers advertising the prom and the election, and they didn't specify that the queen must be a girl. He thought the role would suit him better than prom king.
"I don't wish to be a girl," he told the Los Angeles Times. said. "I just wish to be myself."
Senior class president Vanessa Lo said she and many other students were initially against the idea but were won over by Garcia's speech and became convinced he wasn't just an attention-seeking clown.
"It just goes to show how open-minded our class is," Lo said.
Seventeen-year-old Unique Payne called the speech "great" and said she voted for Garcia "because I support the gay community."
Other students weren't as happy, and suggested many voted for Garcia just to see the spectacle of two boys dancing together at the prom.
"I'm not really happy about that," said 17-year-old Juan Espinoza. "He should've run for prom king."
41-year-old East Boston man is charged with groping an undercover cop who was riding the T as a decoy to catch thieves grabbing cell phones from riders, but he caught another kind of suspect’s attention instead.
According to a Transit Police report, the undercover officer was standing on a platform at the Dudley MBTA station watching for thieves Tuesday afternoon when a man later indentified by police as Ricardo Lopez approached him and said, “How are you, papa?”
Lopez then allegedly stared at the officer’s groin area, smiled and said: “I want that, papa,” according to the police report.
When the officer asked Lopez to step away from the busy station and tried to interview him, Lopez told him: “I want that (expletive), papa” and then grabbed the officer’s groin, according to the report.
Lopez was charged with indecent assault and battery. He was arraigned yesterday in Roxbury Municipal Court and released on $500 cash bail. He was ordered to stay away from the Dudley MBTA station. Lopez’s attorney could not be reached for comment.
A paramedic could face charges after a scuffle with a state trooper that was caught on cell phone camera.
It happened Sunday near Paden in Okfuskee County. That’s about 70 miles southwest of Tulsa.
Kenyada Davis’ mother was being transported in the ambulance and recorded the incident on his cell phone camera. “This highway patrolman pulled over my mom’s ambulance because he was mad we didn’t pull over and he’s trying to arrest the EMT from taking my mother to the hospital,” Davis is seen saying on the recording.
Davis continues to record as first, one trooper can be seen talking to one of the paramedics. A couple of minutes later, another trooper is seen confronting another paramedic and attempting to arrest him. The paramedic can be seen shoving the trooper at which time the scuffle breaks out.
Maurice White, Jr. is the critical care paramedic seen in the video. In a statement, White says the trooper was upset because the ambulance driver didn’t yield when the trooper approached from behind. White says the ambulance driver, Paul Franks, didn’t see the trooper.
The trooper pulled Franks over and was going to write a citation for failure to yield, but White says he tried to tell them they were on an emergency call and needed to take the patient to the hospital and that’s when the trooper attempted to arrest White for obstructing an officer.
A brief struggle followed, at which point the trooper grabbed White by the throat. Davis’ cell phone captured this incident on video. White says the trooper later told him they could continue on to the hospital, but that he would be under arrest once they got there. White was never arrested, but says troopers told him he should be prepared to turn himself in if a warrant was issued.
The district attorney in Okfuskee County is expected to take a look at the video and may file charges as soon as this week
A pharmacy employee who shot and killed a suspected robber, now faces murder charges.
D.A. David Prater has charged Jerome Ersland with murder for the shooting at the reliable Pharmacy last Tuesday.
This is absurd. The DA admits the shooting was justified as self-defense, but wants to charge the guy with murder because he pulled the trigger too many times?
I have been there; when you get attacked adrenaline flows and you go into survival mode. Guys who are on Angel Dust can and do get right back up after being shot just once. Emptying the clip is a reasonable thing to do under the circumstances. Most of the comments seem to agree with this.
American Scofflaw With budget deficits soaring and President Obama pushing a trillion-dollar-plus expansion of health coverage, some Washington policymakers are taking a fresh look at a money-making idea long considered politically taboo: a national sales tax.
Originally, a national sales tax was floated as a replacement for the income tax, given the dubious issue of the ratification of the 16th Amendment.
But in this case, and typical of the government, they are talking about having a sales tax IN ADDITION TO the income tax.
And forget about health care or anything else offered as the justification; the fact is that the US Government is deeply in debt, and since government cannot earn any of their own money, inevitably, they must take it from you.
I mean, look at the last 6 months alone. The Federal Government has loaded an additional $100,000 in tax debt onto every US tax payer; money they are expected to pay back in the coming years for which they will receive no services at all. Nothing. Nada. Zip.
Government has become a black hole into which your life's blood is being sucked, and it will not stop until you stop it.
As unemployment among tech workers increases with the recession, the U.S. government is raising broad questions as part of a federal case over H-1Bs about the connection of visa fraud to the unemployment of IT workers
Behind that fraudulent displacement of American workers lies an uncomfortable fact; the foreign workers are often more qualified.
The reason is simple. American schools have been transformed from centers of learning teaching science and engineering into political indoctrination centers promoting various agendas such as gay awareness, multiculturalism, intelligent design, and of course, human-caused global warming.
As a result, American workers are highly educated in totally useless areas, while lagging behind the rest of the industrialized world in the basic skills needed to compete in a modern technological marketplace.
American Scofflaw The police, instead of fighting crime, will be looking for opportunities to confiscate assets.
We had a case like that a few years back in California, in which the police coveted a pricey piece of real estate and decided that if they raided it and found any marijuana plants growing on it, they could confiscate the property under the civil forfeiture laws and balance their departmental budget.
They did not have any evidence against the property owner, of course, but assumed that it would be "likely" to find a marijuana plant on property that large just from a seed dropped by a smoker.
So they raided the place, and the property owner, not aware that the guys in black were cops, tried to defend his home and was killed.
No marijuana was found anywhere on the property.
Folks, what they are talking about here is pillage, where an occupying armed force simply takes what it wants from the population. They may proclaim it just and legal under the rules they make up for themselves, but it is still pillage.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld . . . warned that videos and photos yet to come could further inflame worldwide outrage...
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told reporters, "The American public needs to understand we're talking about rape and murder here.
We're not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience." Remember, the government is not just withholding images of torture. It is withholding images of rape and murder, including - apparently - the sodomy of boys.
A former prosecutor from New Jersey has pleaded guilty to charges related to his running a brothel in Manhattan.
Paul Bergrin of Morganville, N.J., pleaded guilty on Monday to misdemeanor conspiracy to promote prostitution in exchange for three years probation and a $50,000 money forfeiture.
Manhattan Justice Thomas Farber will sentence Bergrin on Sept. 15. The 53-year-old defendant remains free on $100,000 bail.
Bergrin is a former prosecutor in Essex County, N.J., and with the federal government. He was accused of taking control of the NY Confidential escort agency which had been created by his client Jason Itzler.
Itzler was sentenced in January 2007 to three years in prison.
Before Monday's guilty plea, Bergrin had faced felony money laundering charges and could have received up to 25 years in prison.
A: Iran is developing a power plant only. You - and your science advisors - understand, without question, that the level of enrichment of the uranium is far lower for running a power plant than what is needed to build a nuclear weapon. The enrichment the Iranians are doing , as inspected by the IAEA, is completely consistent with that which is necessary for a power plant, not building a weapon.
B. Thereis no good time for the Israelis (supported, or course, by the US) to go to war with Iran.
And sir, you very well know the reason for this. In terms of strike by anyone on Iran, this issue is the 6,000 lb gorilla, sitting on the Steinway in the living room.
That factor, sir, is Russia.
What precisely are Medvedev, Putin, and the Duma going to do when they see their 7th largest trading partner attacked? Nothing?
Sir, I am not a betting person; but I wouldn't bet, for one second, that the Russian reaction to just such a scenario would be "nothing".
Threats against the nation's judges and prosecutors have sharply increased, prompting hundreds to get 24-hour protection from armed U.S. marshals. Many federal judges are altering their routes to work, installing security systems at home, shielding their addresses by paying bills at the courthouse or refraining from registering to vote. Some even pack weapons on the bench.
The problem has become so pronounced that a high-tech "threat management" center recently opened in Crystal City, where a staff of about 25 marshals and analysts monitor a 24-hour number for reporting threats, use sophisticated mapping software to track those being threatened and tap into a classified database linked to the FBI and CIA.
"I live with a constant heightened sense of awareness," said John R. Adams, a federal judge in Ohio who began taking firearms classes after a federal judge's family was slain in Chicago and takes a pistol to the courthouse on weekends. "If I'm going to carry a firearm, I'd better know how to use it."
In a detailed investigation of South Carolina’s Inspiration Network, the Charlotte Observer reports that the network’s on-air promises that viewers can obtain prosperity and “God’s debt cancellation” by donating $200 or more have made its CEO David Cerullo a wealthy man and his cable network “one of the world’s fastest growing Christian broadcasters.”
With a salary that in 2007 amounted to $1.52 million, Cerulla is “the best-paid leader of any religious charity” and earns far more than CEOs of larger non-profits, such as Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network. An additional $600,000 was paid in 2007 to his wife and children.
Last year, Cerullo’s network had a budget of nearly $80 million, half derived from donations, much of which is going into building the “City of Light” in northern Lancaster County, SC. According to the Observer, “Taxpayers are also helping to pay for it. Eager to bring jobs to a county with 19 percent unemployment, South Carolina offered the network incentives worth up to $26 million to land the campus — a deal that has been questioned by economic development experts.”
Wall Watchers, a watchdog group which monitors religious charities, has called Cerullo’s salary “outrageous” and issued “a ‘donor alert’ to caution people against giving to the Inspiration Networks.” The Observer notes that “IRS rules prohibit nonprofits from paying ‘unreasonable compensation’ to officials. But the agency examines the returns of fewer than 8,000 of the 1.8 million tax-exempt organizations each year.”
Carullo, who has a business degree from Oral Roberts University, insists that his salary should be compared with that of CEOs at cable networks such as CNN. He says his board of directors offered him even more but he turned it down because “I am blessed beyond my imagination. … I don’t need it.”
This is not the first time that the Cerullo family’s interrelated operations have come under scrutiny. David Cerullo’s father, Morris Cerullo, was indicted for tax evasion in California in 2005 — although the charges were dismissed by a Bush-appointed judge on grounds of prosecutorial error — and was sued in 2000 by two former employees who alleged that the elder Cerullo used donations for personal profit.
On that earlier occasion, one of the plaintiff’s lawyers explained that “[Morris] Cerullo purports to have first met God at the age of eight. Since then, his life has apparently been one unbelievable experience after another. He says he was led out of a Jewish orphanage by two angelic beings; transported to heaven for a face-to-face meeting with God; has the ability to predict the future; can heal the sick; and has told audiences when they look at him they ‘are looking at God.’”
Oprah Winfrey called it the "greatest love story" she'd ever had on her show. The love story was so touching, that Hollywood is even making a movie about it.
Herman Rosenblat received international attention for his tale about being a hungry little boy in a Nazi concentration camp who was thrown apples every day by a little girl named Roma, on the other side of the fence.
Years later, according to the story, Rosenblat met that same girl on a blind date in New York City and proposed to her on the spot.
The only problem was, Rosenblat's story, which he and his wife had been telling for 13 years, was a lie.
Six weeks ago Holocaust scholars proved that it was physically impossible for prisoners to approach the fence at the concentration camp where Herman was kept and that Roma's family was actually 200 miles away at the time.
It's graduation season all across the country. Thousands of students spent years to get their bachelors, masters and doctoral degrees.
However, many people have bought phony diplomas. In Part 1 of our Taking Action Investigation, WHNT NEWS 19 showed you how fake degrees have infiltrated the enlisted ranks of the U.S. Army.
Now, our investigation reveals this breach of trust goes all the way to the top civilian ranks at Huntsville's Redstone Arsenal.
The fake degree is in the hand of a key essential leader at the U.S. Army's Aviation and Missile Command, AMCOM. The bogus diplomas are against policy, put a person's integrity in question, and make them a potential target for blackmail.
As Director of Readiness for the Army's Aviation and Missile Command, Chris Oleyte carries the weight of America's missile defense readiness on his shoulders. He's also carrying other baggage
American Scofflaw This proves what I have been saying all along. The government can have all these systems watching us, reading our emails, scanning our computers, listening to our phone calls ... but there is just to much data for them to make any sense of at all.
The spying is just to scare us into not talking with each other about what has been going on.
By Paul McNamara As noted here just yesterday, you can be put at risk of identity theft in more ways than a person can count, say merely by applying for unemployment benefits in New Jersey or buying a car in Colorado.
Add winning the lottery in Texas to the list. ... And this tale has the added bonus of showing once again why everyone so loves their state bureaucrats.
A former Texas lottery worker was arrested while training for a new job Tuesday - his fourth with the state - and charged with illegally "possessing" personal information on 140 lottery winners and employees, including their names and Social Security numbers.
Joseph Mueggenborg was still working for the Lottery Commission in 2007 when he allegedly took the information, which was discovered last year on a state computer at the Comptroller of Public Accounts where he later was employed. He was fired and the information was turned over to criminal investigators.
And while that investigation continued, Mueggenborg would not be allowed within a Texas-sized county of any state resident's personal data, right? Well ...
When arrested Tuesday, however, the computer analyst was training for yet another job, at the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation. Travis County prosecutor Jason English said it was "concerning" that the man was still working for the state after being fired by the comptroller.
Concerning. That's certainly one word for it.
Those of you who just can't get enough of these data breach stories should subscribe to the Open Security Foundation's DataLossDB mailing list.
Years ago, before browsers when the internet was still mostly usenet, there was a sudden flood of really gross and poor quality porn (just because it is an adult movie is no excuse for crappy film making) poured into wholly inappropriate newsgroups on usenet. There are specific areas of usenet for adult material but these pictures were being posted in placing like cooking groups, and the political groups.
The regular usenet readers asked the posters to confine their adult materials to the appropriate groups, and the porn posters came back with this lame claim that the first amendment gave them the right to post their porn in every single usenet news group.
I began to smell a huge rate here, and already having learned what the US government was like I started digging and sure enough the flood of porn was coming through various US Government and military sites. And sure enough, one month after the flood of porn showed up on usenet, Senator Exon introduced his amendment to the telecommunications act calling for government control and censorship of the internet, and making any obscenity on the internet a felony. Senator Exon took to the floor and showed his "Blue" book, a blue binder filled with the very images that had flooded usenet for the preceding weeks. And no sooner had the bill passed than the flood of porn ended as if a switch had been thrown.
So, if someone is flooding YouTube with porn, then it is an attempt to revive a call for government control of internet content. So, you need to ask, Que Bono. Who wants the internet brought under censorship.
A group of teens randomly beat and robbed a 29-year-old man Thursday night who had just gotten off the train and was walking home, police said.
“It is alarming to us,” Abington Police Chief David Majenski said. “This individual had no relation, no known connection between these people and the victim.”
Four teens were arrested after the attack and face charges of unarmed robbery, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and receiving stolen property.
Majenski said the victim had gotten off the train from work shortly after 8 p.m. and was walking home with his backpack when he was attacked by four people.
“Four individuals walking passed by him, turned back around and assaulted him,” Majenski said. “They pushed him to the ground, kicked him, beat him and then took his backpack.”
Officers found what appeared to be an abandoned vehicle parked on Walnut Street and discovered it had been reported stolen from Brockton on May 13.
The fire department responded and treated the victim at the scene, the chief said.
“There was bruising on his face. He had been beaten up pretty good,” Majenski said.
As officers fanned out, looking for the suspects, four teens matching the attackers’ descriptions were spotted by officer Marc Poirier by Wal-Mart, he said.
When the officer turned his cruiser around, one of the suspects ran off but was later caught by Sgt. Scott Saccoach.
Matthew Brian Richard, 17, of 199 Court St., Brockton, and Robert Smith, 17, of 9 Henry St., Brockton, were charged with unarmed robbery, assault and battery were a dangerous weapon and receiving stolen property, a motor vehicle.
Two 16-year-old boys will face similar charges in Juvenile Court.
Charlie the cat can scale the walls of his master's home in Denny, near Falkirk, Scotland, to sneak indoors via the upstairs balcony door.
The ginger and white tomcat grips onto the sheer pebbledash surface to make his vertical ascent.
His owner Hannah Smith said she discovered her mischievous pet's talent when she let him out of the front door downstairs, only for him to reappear indoors moments later.
The seven-year-old cat's gravity-defying skills have since become a regular sight, earning him the nickname "Spider-cat" among bemused neighbours.
Miss Smith said: "Charlie miaows at the front door to be let out. So we let him out but no sooner is he let out than he wants back in.
"But if no one hears him at the front door, he wanders round to the back of the buildings to find the balcony. He then climbs up to the balcony to get back in.
"So Charlie really goes out the front door and in the back door."
She added: "I got him as a wee kitten and out of the litter Charlie was the one that looked most mischievous and I liked that about him. He's certainly lived up to his reputation.
"I think it is totally incredible how Charlie is able to climb up a roughcast wall. I've seen cats climb trees but I've never seen a cat climb a wall. It's amazing."
The Department of Defense paid former Halliburton subsidiary KBR more than $80 million in bonuses for contracts to install electrical wiring in Iraq in 2007-2008. The award payment was for the very work that resulted in the electrocution deaths of US soldiers, according to Department of Defense documents revealed today in a Senate hearing. More than $30 million in bonuses were paid months after the death of Sgt. Ryan Maseth, a highly decorated, 24-year-old Green Beret, whose January 2008 electrocution death has been classified by DoD investigators as a “negligent homicide.” Maseth’s death had originally been labeled an “accident.” All of the bonuses were paid to KBR after DoD investigators had officially expressed concerns about the quality of KBR’s electrical work.
This information was revealed at a hearing of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. According to the committee’s chair, Sen. Byron Dorgan, the rewards KBR received under its LOGCAP contract were supposed to be for work of the “highest quality” with “no deficiencies” or problems. Dorgan said KBR’s work was “shoddy” and “unprofessional.” Some 18 US soldiers have died since 2003 as a result of KBR’s “shoddy work,” according to Sen. Frank Lautenberg. KBR/Halliburton, the “former” company of Dick Cheney, has been the single largest corporate beneficiary of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It continues to operate globally on US government contracts.
Anyone who has ever wasted good money on a clunker only to drop the transmission 15 minutes after leaving the car-lot, knows the feeling. It's like a swift-kick in the groin followed by weeks of fist-pounding rage. It's called buyer's remorse; "Gawd, I wish I hadn't bought that piece of dogshite!" There are probably a lot of former-Obama supporters feeling that same agonizing sense despair now that President Rainbow has done an about-face on every campaign promise he made. So much for "truth in advertising", eh?
What a disaster. Did anyone know it was gonna be this bad? For the record; I didn't vote for Obama because I didn't like the way he backpedaled on wiretapping and because he promised to escalate the war in Afghanistan. (Like everyone else who voted for Ralph Nader; I got loads of grief for it) But that doesn't mean I didn't want Obama to succeed. I did. The country is in too big a mess NOT to hope that he would succeed. But now...?
Let's just forget about the fact that Obama never lifted a finger to stop Israel's two week rampage through Gaza which killed 1,100 unarmed civilians and destroyed much of the critical infrastructure. And let's give him a pass for equivocating on Iran, Georgia, missile defense in East Europe, Cuba, NAFTA, FISA, torture, war crimes, the Employee free Choice Act (EFCA) and any other issue that's important to liberals, progressives, leftists or anyone else who eats with a fork or walks on two legs. And let's excuse Obama for stepping up the air war in Afghanistan even though another 140 Afghan villagers were blown to bits 10 days ago while sitting in their schools, sleeping in their beds or having dinner with their families. (After all, Obama did say he was sorry, didn't he?) But now Obama is backing off on his promise to withdrawal troops from Iraq in 16 months. And, now he's planning to restore Bush's kangaroo courts (Military tribunals) for prisoners at Guantanamo who've never even been formally charged with a crime! And, now, he's threatening to hold some prisoners indefinitely in the U.S. without trial. (http://news.antiwar.com/2009/05/14/obama-mulls-indefinite-detention-without-trial-for-detainees/)
I don't know about you, but I believe that America is based on the idea that every man has certain basic rights, and the most fundamental of all those rights is the right to know why the state has thrown your ass in jail. That's numero uno! It's called habeas corpus and the whole judicial system rests on that one foundation stone. People like Obama, who don't believe in habeas, shouldn't even call themselves "American" in my book because they don't believe in the underlying principles.
The next five years will determine what the U.S, will look and be like, for the next fifty years. After Bush undermined the government’s revenue base by handing out $3.5 trillion in corporate tax breaks, he started a couple of wars that have, to date, cost an estimated $2.4 trillion. Factor in taxpayer hand outs of a few more trillions to the banks, and the republicans have finally realized their long term goal – breaking the U.S. Government.
The day will come when a state is so broke it will ask the corporate banks for help. The help will be conditional of course. The state will be forced to privatize its government functions, which will involve the elimination of all social programs. All of its resources, natural or industrial, will be handed over to corporate management. Americans will have paid the corporations to dictate the terms by which they live.
Even today, corporations are buying up water all over the planet, and in the not so distant future if a populace wants this essential element of life they will have to jump through a few hoops to get it. Finally, freedom and the human need for independence will die with a whimper, not a bang.
American Scofflaw What Netanyahu has really told Obama is that Obama has until the end of the year to convince the US population to support a war in Iran, or Israel will just start one for us.
Barack Obama's first innovation in the White House is visible even before one enters the Oval Office: a large wooden slide on the lawn for the president's daughters. In the office, Obama put two statues, of former president Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. This is his message - a commitment to liberty, human rights, equality and opportunity. But also to the use of power, when there is no other choice.
Obama speaks much more than his predecessor, George W. Bush. He smiles less. When Benjamin Netanyahu spoke, Obama watched him closely. They both prepared note cards before the meeting. Obama's contained long, typed lines; Netanyahu's had short lines in felt-tip pen.
Their meeting proceeded according to expectations. The president displayed reserved friendship, covering over the deep differences between the two leaders' positions. As expected, Netanyahu described the meeting as "very good and friendly," while Obama praised the prime minster publicly for his political skills and awareness of history, saying he believed Netanyahu would make "strategic decisions for Israel's security" during his term.
Things go missing. It's to be expected. Even at the Pentagon. Last October, the Pentagon's inspector general reported that the military's accountants had misplaced a destroyer, several tanks and armored personnel carriers, hundreds of machine guns, rounds of ammo, grenade launchers and some surface-to-air missiles. In all, nearly $8 billion in weapons were AWOL.
Those anomalies are bad enough. But what's truly chilling is the fact that the Pentagon has lost track of the mother of all weapons, a hydrogen bomb. The thermonuclear weapon, designed to incinerate Moscow, has been sitting somewhere off the coast of Savannah, Georgia for the past 40 years. The Air Force has gone to greater lengths to conceal the mishap than to locate the bomb and secure it.
On the night of February 5, 1958 a B-47 Stratojet bomber carrying a hydrogen bomb on a night training flight off the Georgia coast collided with an F-86 Saberjet fighter at 36,000 feet. The collision destroyed the fighter and severely damaged a wing of the bomber, leaving one of its engines partially dislodged. The bomber's pilot, Maj. Howard Richardson, was instructed to jettison the H-bomb before attempting a landing. Richardson dropped the bomb into the shallow waters of Warsaw Sound, near the mouth of the Savannah River, a few miles from the city of Tybee Island, where he believed the bomb would be swiftly recovered.
The Pentagon recorded the incident in a top secret memo to the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. The memo has been partially declassified: "A B-47 aircraft with a [word redacted] nuclear weapon aboard was damaged in a collision with an F-86 aircraft near Sylvania, Georgia, on February 5, 1958. The B-47 aircraft attempted three times unsuccessfully to land with the weapon. The weapon was then jettisoned visually over water off the mouth of the Savannah River. No detonation was observed."
Soon search and rescue teams were sent to the site. Warsaw Sound was mysteriously cordoned off by Air Force troops. For six weeks, the Air Force looked for the bomb without success. Underwater divers scoured the depths, troops tromped through nearby salt marshes, and a blimp hovered over the area attempting to spot a hole or crater in the beach or swamp. Then just a month later, the search was abruptly halted. The Air Force sent its forces to Florence, South Carolina, where another H-bomb had been accidentally dropped by a B-47. The bomb's 200 pounds of TNT exploded on impact, sending radioactive debris across the landscape. The explosion caused extensive property damage and several injuries on the ground. Fortunately, the nuke itself didn't detonate.
The search teams never returned to Tybee Island, and the affair of the missing H-bomb was discreetly covered up. The end of the search was noted in a partially declassified memo from the Pentagon to the AEC, in which the Air Force politely requested a new H-bomb to replace the one it had lost. "The search for this weapon was discontinued on 4-16-58 and the weapon is considered irretrievably lost. It is requested that one [phrase redacted] weapon be made available for release to the DOD as a replacement."
There was a big problem, of course, and the Pentagon knew it. In the first three months of 1958 alone, the Air Force had four major accidents involving H-bombs. (Since 1945, the United States has lost 11 nuclear weapons.) The Tybee Island bomb remained a threat, as the AEC acknowledged in a June 10, 1958 classified memo to Congress: "There exists the possibility of accidental discovery of the unrecovered weapon through dredging or construction in the probable impact area. … The Department of Defense has been requested to monitor all dredging and construction activities."
But the wizards of Armageddon saw it less as a security, safety or ecological problem, than a potential public relations disaster that could turn an already paranoid population against their ambitious nuclear project. The Pentagon and the AEC tried to squelch media interest in the issue by a doling out a morsel of candor and a lot of misdirection. In a joint statement to the press, the Defense Department and the AEC admitted that radioactivity could be "scattered" by the detonation of the high explosives in the H-bombs. But the letter downplayed possibility of that ever happening: "The likelihood that a particular accident would involve a nuclear weapon is extremely limited."
In fact, that scenario had already occurred and would occur again.
Forget the battlefield radios, the combat PDAs or even infantry hand signals. When the soldiers of the future want to communicate, they’ll read each other’s minds.
At least, that’s the hope of researchers at the Pentagon’s mad-science division Darpa. The agency’s budget for the next fiscal year includes $4 million to start up a program called Silent Talk. The goal is to “allow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis of neural signals.” That’s on top of the $4 million the Army handed out last year to the University of California to investigate the potential for computer-mediated telepathy.
Before being vocalized, speech exists as word-specific neural signals in the mind. Darpa wants to develop technology that would detect these signals of “pre-speech,” analyze them, and then transmit the statement to an intended interlocutor. Darpa plans to use EEG to read the brain waves. It’s a technique they’re also testing in a project to devise mind-reading binoculars that alert soldiers to threats faster the conscious mind can process them.
The project has three major goals, according to Darpa. First, try to map a person’s EEG patterns to his or her individual words. Then, see if those patterns are generalizable — if everyone has similar patterns. Last, “construct a fieldable pre-prototype that would decode the signal and transmit over a limited range.”
The military has been funding a handful of mind-tapping technology recently, and already have monkeys capable of telepathic limb control. Telepathy may also have advantages beyond covert battlefield chatter. Last year, the National Research Council and the Defense Intelligence Agency released a report suggesting that neuroscience might also be useful to “make the enemy obey our commands.” The first step, though, may be getting a grunt to obey his officer’s remotely-transmitted thoughts.
American Scofflaw MOUNTAIN HOME - The world outside Idaho got a little bit smaller Wednesday, as four F-15SG fighter jets flown from St. Louis by the Royal Singapore Air Force landed between rainstorms at Mountain Home Air Force Base.
Greeted by a cheering crowd of more than 100 military personnel from both Singapore and the U.S., the four jets are the first of as many as 10 that will call the airbase home for at least the next 20 years.
More than 300 active-duty and support personnel will make up the 428th Fighter Squadron and train alongside American pilots as part of a partnership between the two countries - though they will not fly on missions.
U.S. Air Force representatives haven't allowed interviews yet with the Singaporean pilots and crews. But Lt. Col. Keith Gibson, the training squadron's U.S. commander, said U.S. officials have high hopes for the program.
"The base is very excited to work with the RSAF because this partnership provides important combat readiness training for our Singapore partners, and fulfills the need to train as a team in a multi-national force structure," Gibson said.
As many as 2,000 active-duty personnel from Singapore may live and work on the base over the life of the program. The squadron will be officially activated at a May 18 ceremony at the base.
At a Senate hearing this past week, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, rallied to the defense of ex-President George W. Bush's torture techniques by implicitly endorsing the Spanish Inquisition's brutal treatment of Jews, Muslims, Protestants and other alleged heretics from the 15th to 17th centuries.
"One of the reasons these techniques have been used for about 500 years is that they work," Graham said on May 13 in the latest Republican justification of Bush's authorization of tactics such as forced nudity, sleep deprivation, painful stress positions and the near-drowning of waterboarding.
In a normal world, one might have expected national outrage over a prominent U.S. senator speaking favorably of the Spanish Inquisition, which pioneered innovations in torture that encompass many of the techniques's including the water torture now known as waterboarding ' that Bush used against "war on terror" detainees at the start of the 21st Century.
Beyond the inhumanity of the Inquisition, there is the troubling fact that the torture tactics did "work" only in the sense that they extracted many false confessions and got victims to implicate other individuals who were, in turn, persecuted, tortured and put to death for their religious beliefs.
But Graham's praise for the efficacy of the Inquisition's torture tactics passed largely unnoticed -- and without any perceptible criticism -- in the American news media. The Washington Post article on the Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing didn't even mention Graham's extraordinary remark; a brief New York Times article about the hearing mentioned it only in passing.
Remarkably, too, Graham is still considered a Republican "moderate" regarding Bush's "war on terror" policies, who was cited favorably by White House press secretary Robert Gibbs on May 15 in connection with Graham's sponsorship of a less draconian version of the Military Commissions designed to try and punish detainees held at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Plus, in contrast to the quiet acceptance of Graham's views on the Inquisition's torture tactics, the Washington news media flew into near hysteria over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's tortured explanations of what she knew about Bush's torture policies.
The multiple deployments and stop-loss orders are taking their toll, and intelligent people understand this.
But the pressure the military feels to prevent people like Russell from leaving a war theatre, knowing full well that he should not be there (fingers crossed that he wouldn't unravel emotionally until he left active duty status), is very clear evidence that US's military misadventures have stressed many of our troops to well beyond the breaking point.
In order to achieve Obama's muscular, militarily-enforced foreign policy objectives, we may well see the re-institution of the draft on Obama's watch.
I wouldn't bet against that, at this point.
No one talks about the US Causalities in public. So far, the official numbers are:
4295 US Soldiers dead 30,182 US Soldiers wounded 320,000 Vets Have Brain Injuries 18.8 suicides per 100,000 US Soldiers
CNN reports: ”Every day, five U.S. soldiers try to kill themselves. Before the Iraq war began, that figure was less than one suicide attempt a day. 2,100 soldiers tried to commit suicide in 2007.“
These numbers do NOT include: Greencard Soldiers, Contractors, CIA and other agents, and of course the soldiers form the other countries. It’s also deeply realistic that there are many “hidden causalities”, non-reported deaths of Soldiers.
Students from 19 states yesterday filed a class-action lawsuit seeking hundreds of millions of dollars from California officials for charging them significantly more than illegal aliens pay to attend state-run colleges.
The 42 plaintiffs say California state lawmakers and the University of California board of regents knowingly violated a federal law enacted in 1996 that says any state that offers discounted in-state tuition to its illegal aliens must provide the same lower rates to all U.S. citizens.
California has a "unique" statute barring discrimination on the basis of geographic origin, said lead attorney Michael J. Brady.
Some students in the University of California system could be eligible for as much as $300,000 in total damages, he said.
The plaintiffs' attorneys say the lawsuit was filed in a state court in Yolo County on behalf of about 60,000 U.S. citizens who have paid out-of-state tuition to attend public higher-education institutions in California since 2002.
Mr. Brady said out-of-state students are paying $20,000 more than illegal aliens per year to attend schools in the University of California system. In the California state university system, the difference is $11,000 per year.
"And in the community college system in California, which has a total of 1.5 million students, the tuition differential is $6,000 a year," he said.
Mr. Brady and fellow counsel Kris W. Kobach, a law professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, announced their litigation at a press conference in Sacramento.
California and Kansas are among eight states that have laws granting lower in-state tuition rates to illegal aliens who qualify as in-state residents.
Critics say those state laws violate a federal statute, which took effect in 1998, that says any state that offers discounted in-state tuition rates at public colleges to illegals living in the state must provide the same lower rates to all U.S. citizens who attend. The legislation was sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith, Texas Republican, and Sen. Alan K. Simpson, Wyoming Republican.
Mr. Brady said California officials knew their tuition law that took effect in 2002 was unfair and illegal.
"Former Governor Gray Davis initially vetoed it, saying it violated federal law and that it would cost California $65 million [in damages]," Mr. Brady said. "He sent it back to the state Legislature with that warning, but they re-enacted the same law," which Mr. Davis eventually signed.
Mr. Brady said administrators of the University of California system also recognized that the state law was invalid, and they refused to implement it unless they were "given immunity." As a result, he said, California lawmakers enacted an "immunity statute," which says that if the state tuition law is declared illegal or unconstitutional, schools in the University of California system would not be held liable for retroactive tuition differences.
For now, let’s just call it a nonspecific, even remote, sense of dread – like the foreboding that often accompanies the first bark of an approaching thunderstorm: hardly an irrational unease, but often a harbinger of nothing worse than a dusting of rain.
Just a sense of unease — yeah, that’s what we’ll call it — for now.
It isn’t that Barack Obama hasn’t been liberal enough for my tastes. He hasn’t, but that’s not what’s unnerving me. It isn’t that he’s starting to break some of his most important campaign promises to the progressive base of the Democratic Party. He’s doing that certainly; but, no, that’s not the source of my unease either. It isn’t even that his administration seems to be placing a higher priority on protecting the pirates of the financial industry than on defending the rights of ordinary workers. They do seem to be doing that and yeah it’s awful, but once again it isn’t what’s scaring me.
No, what’s scary is how often — and in such a short time — he’s simply been wrong — dead wrong. And what’s even more disconcerting is how often this wrongness has been the result of his growing tendency to default to inside the Beltway status quo thinking. Time after time, faced with a choice between new directions and conventional wisdom, Obama has been taking the conventional route.
But the scariest thing of all is Obama’s growing default to the Military/Beltway Complex on Iraq and Afghanistan. Did you hear we’re going to win the war in Afghanistan? We’re going to kick us some Taliban butt and bring peace, capitalism and democracy to the region. No outside force in history has ever had much luck in trying to pacify this tragic but fiercely independent nation, but apparently we’re going to do it. And what’s more, we’re going to do it while at the same time carrying Iraq and Pakistan on our shoulders.
When I think about this ever increasing expansion of our military presence in Afghanistan, I can’t help but hear the echoes of LBJ in Vietnam. He was a president who wanted desperately to pursue other priorities: to do great things; to build a Great Society. But he found himself increasingly sucked into an intractable war he could never win. And just like Obama, he marched into this hell armed to the teeth with the wisdom of the finest minds conventional thinking had ever produced.
As a strong supporter of the president, it pains me to say this, but Barack Obama is dancing with disaster: a potential catastrophe born of a refusal to truly embrace the change he’s come to represent. He is doing much that’s good, but the good can so easily be swallowed up and destroyed by the bad. It isn’t too late to put things right, but the signs that he is willing to do what’s needed have so far been frighteningly few.
American Scofflaw Obama is simply an infinitely more telegenic and intellectually gifted "pitch man" for precisely the same agenda we got from the Bush Republicans; nothing more, nothing less.
Which is why I wouldn't bet against Obama re-instituting the draft before the end of his first term in office. The military requirements for the campaigns he's signed up for cannot possibly be met with an all-volunteer army, and draft boards have already been set up, very quietly, across this country.
The National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAA), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), will pay $2.6 million in U.S. tax dollars to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly on the job.
Dr. Xiaoming Li, the researcher conducting the program, is director of the Prevention Research Center at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit.
The grant, made last November, refers to prostitutes as "female sex workers"--or FSW--and their handlers as "gatekeepers."
"Previous studies in Asia and Africa and our own data from FSWs [female sex workers] in China suggest that the social norms and institutional policy within commercial sex venues as well as agents overseeing the FSWs (i.e., the 'gatekeepers', defined as persons who manage the establishments and/or sex workers) are potentially of great importance in influencing alcohol use and sexual behavior among establishment-based FSWs," says the NIH grant abstract submitted by Dr. Li.
"Therefore, in this application, we propose to develop, implement, and evaluate a venue-based alcohol use and HIV risk reduction intervention focusing on both environmental and individual factors among venue-based FSWs in China," says the abstract.
The research will take place in the southern Chinese province of Guangxi.
Guangxi is ranked third in HIV rate among Chna's provinces--and is a place where the sex business is pervasive, Li said.
“The purpose of the project is to try and develop an intervention program targeting HIV risk and alcohol use,” Li told CNSNews.com. “So basically, it’s an alcohol and HIV risk reduction intervention project."
The researcher outlined three components of the intervention program in the abstract for the project:
“(1) gatekeeper training with a focus on changing or enhancing the protective social norms and policy/practice at the establishment level; (2) FSW (female sex workers) training with a focus on the acquisition of communication skills (negotiating, limit setting) and behavioral skills (e.g., condom use skills, consistent condom use); and (3) semi-annual boosters to reinforce both social norms within establishments and individual skills,” wrote Li.
The doctor said the heart of the study involves “a community-based cluster randomized controlled trial among 100 commercial sex venues in Beihai, a costal tourist city in Guangxi.”
"We anticipate that the venue-based intervention program will be culturally appropriate, feasible, effective and sustainable in alcohol use and sexual risk reduction among FSWs," says the NIH grant abstract.
Li said his study is being done in China rather than the U.S. because prostitution occurs with alcohol use in the United States like it does in China, Americans will be able to benefit from the project’s findings.
“We want to get some understanding of the fundamental role of alcohol use and HIV risk,” he said. “We use the population in China as our targeted population to look at the basic issues. I think the findings will benefit the American people, too.”
Li said minimal research has been conducted on the link between alcohol use and prostitution as it relates to HIV.
“Alcohol has been a part of the commerce of sex for many, many years. Unfortunately, both global-wise (and) in the United States, very few researchers are looking at the complex issue of the inter play between alcohol and the commerce of sex,” he told CNSNews.com.
The grant is one of several “international initiatives” sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.
Ralph Hingson, director of epidemiology and prevention research at NIAA, told CNSNews.com, “There are many Americans who travel to China each year and they should be made aware of the HIV problem.”
Hingson said that Americans will be able to apply the studies findings to the American situation because 1.2 million Americans are currently living with HIV.
Li’s research includes exploration, development, implementation and evaluation. Currently, the project stands at the exploration stage, which the doctor expects to last 18 months.
“The first phase is kind of an exploratory study just trying to get a good understanding of the phenomena in the population of female sex workers in China. The second phase is the program development,” the professor told CNSNews.com.
Phase two will be based on the first year of the study and on “field observations,” he added. The third phase will be the implementation and evaluation of the program.
“Prostitution is illegal in China but it exists in China," Li told CNSNews.com, “but the Chinese government and the society’s attitude towards prostitution is complicated.”
According to Li, there may be as many as 10 million female prostitutes in China with the majority raging from teenagers to those in their 20s.
“We see a lot of governmental initiatives in China, like 100 percent condom distribution promotion programs, so they deliver condoms in those (prostitution) venues," he added.
“The global literature indicates an important role of alcohol use in facilitating HIV/AIDS transmission risk in commercial sex venues where elevated alcohol use/abuse and sexual risk behaviors frequently co-occur,” Li wrote when introducing the project last November.
"We expect that the intervention will improve protective normative beliefs and institutional support regarding alcohol use and HIV protection,” he added.
The NIH proposal hypothesizes that the program will decrease "problem drinking and alcohol-related sexual risk" among prostitutes that participate.
"We hypothesize that the venue-based intervention will change and enhance the protective social norms and institutional policies at the establishment level and such enhancement, accompanied by individual skill training among FSWs, will demonstrate a sustainable effect within commercial sex establishments in decreasing problem drinking and alcohol-related sexual risk, increasing consistent and correct condom use, and reducing rates of HIV/STD infection among FSWs," says the NIH abstract.
Debt is a problem created out of thin air by compounded interest.
We have a banking system which is actually a pyramid scheme. Money is created out of thin air when a loan is made. But the moment that loan money is created, MORE money is owed than is in existence! As long as an ever-widening pool of borrowers can be found, the economy grows, creating enough new money to cover the old interest. When new borrowers cannot be found, and old borrowers stop borrowing more, the whole system starts to collapse, forcing the people to wage wars of conquest to loot the needed funds from other unoffending nations.
It was reported on Tuesday that Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal will be taking over command of US forces in Afghanistan, pending Senate approval.
McChrystal is presently director of the Joint Chiefs staff, but from September 2003 to August 2008, he headed the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which oversees such elite units as the Army's Delta Force and the Navy SEALs.
Famed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh recently described the JSOC as an "executive assassination wing" controlled for many years by the office of former Vice President Dick Cheney.
Speaking to a University of Minnesota audience in March, Hersh called JSOC "a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. ... They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. ... Congress has no oversight of it. ... It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on."
Although McChrystal's efforts with JSOC were not widely reported at the time, Newsweek did run a brief article on him in June 2006:
No one would have mentioned his name at all if President George W. Bush hadn't singled him out in public. Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, West Point '76, is not someone the Army likes to talk about. He isn't even listed in the directory at Fort Bragg, N.C., his home base. That's not because McChrystal has done anything wrong—quite the contrary, he's one of the Army's rising stars—but because he runs the most secretive force in the U.S. military. That is the Joint Special Operations Command, the snake-eating, slit-their-throats "black ops" guys who captured Saddam Hussein and targeted Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi.
JSOC is part of what Vice President Dick Cheney was referring to when he said America would have to "work the dark side" after 9/11. To many critics, the veep's remark back in 2001 fostered his rep as the Darth Vader of the war on terror and presaged bad things to come, like the interrogation abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. But America also has its share of Jedi Knights who are fighting in what Cheney calls "the shadows." And McChrystal, an affable but tough Army Ranger, and the Delta Force and other elite teams he commands are among them. ...
Rumsfeld is especially enamored of McChrystal's "direct action" forces or so-called SMUs—Special Mission Units—whose job is to kill or capture bad guys, say Pentagon sources who would speak about Special Ops only if they were not identified. But critics say the Pentagon is short-shrifting the "hearts and minds" side of Special Operations that is critical to counterinsurgency—like training foreign armies and engaging with locals.
McChrystal, however, may not be quite as much of a white knight as Newsweek made him out to be. A far less flattering impression of him is given by an Esquirearticle which ran at the same time as the Newsweek piece. This article details revelations by a military interrogator, "Jeff," about the use of torture "at a secret camp used by Task Force 121, the ultimate Special Ops team, the elite titanium tip of Donald Rumsfeld's spear."
It was a point of pride that the Red Cross would never be allowed in the door, Jeff says. This is important because it defied the Geneva Conventions, which require that the Red Cross have access to military prisons. "Once, somebody brought it up with the colonel. 'Will they ever be allowed in here?' And he said absolutely not. He had this directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon that there's no way that the Red Cross could get in--they won't have access and they never will. This facility was completely closed off to anybody investigating, even Army investigators."
Given Task Force 121's history, that was a remarkable promise. Formed in the summer of 2003, it quickly became notorious. By August the CIA had already ordered its officers to avoid Camp Nama. Then two Iraqi men died following encounters with Navy Seals from Task Force 121--one at Abu Ghraib and one in Mosul--and an official investigation by a retired Army colonel named Stuart Herrington, first reported in The Washington Post, found evidence of widespread beatings. "Everyone knows about it," one Task Force officer told Herrington. Six months later, two FBI agents raised concerns about suspicious burn marks and other signs of harsh treatment. Then the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency reported that his men had seen evidence of prisoners with burn marks and bruises and once saw a Task Force member "punch [the] prisoner in the face to the point the individual needed medical attention."
Fred Kaplan at Slate and Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish have already noted Task Force 121's involvement in harsh interrogations and General McChrystal's apparent protection of the abuses. Hopefully, these questions about McChrystal will not be overlooked during his confirmation hearings.
This week, the health care lobby scored a cunning propaganda victory by feigning interest in fixing the perennial rip-off we call a health care system.
With much fanfare, Big Health trotted out a six-month old "promise" -- a toothless, non-binding pledge lacking any specifics -- to make various nips and tucks that would slow the rate at which health costs grow to "only" 4.7 percent annually. It was hailed by the Obama administration and many observers as a breakthrough in the battle for reform.
Until recently, the health care industry has been dead-set on preserving a disastrous but profitable status quo (The U.S. spends close to twice as much per person on care than other wealthy countries, and gets consistently poorer results; among residents of 30 rich countries polled by Gallup, Americans came in 18th in terms of satisfaction with their care). But now the "disease care" industry is portraying itself as an agent of change. Fearful of a growing movement towards real, substantive reform, it's trying to co-opt the process under the guise of "getting a seat at the table." That they've given up, for now, their oppositional stance is what has so many tongues wagging about the significance of the proposal.
But it's nothing new -- "voluntary" codes of conduct, self-regulation and industry-driven initiatives for the private sector to address complex policy issues have long been a standard tactic for heading off real regulation and deeper systemic reforms. The Brookings' Institution's Henry Aaron, a former official in the Carter administration told the New York Times that when he heard of the proposal, "I had a Rip van Winkle moment, as if I had fallen asleep in 1977 and woke up again this morning.” According to the Times, Carter's pledge to do something about out-of-control health care costs "prompted the industry to undertake a short-lived 'voluntary effort.'” The growth of health care costs also slowed briefly after Bill Clinton's failed attempt to fix the system.
American Scofflaw The Pentagon is intentionally underreporting US casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a recent report by veterans' advocacy group Veterans for Common Sense.
In Afghanistan, says the Pentagon, 403 US troops have been killed since 2001, and 1,342 have been wounded.
Thus, the Pentagon's public accounting gives the impression that there have been less than 32,000 casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But documents obtained by Veterans for Common Sense through Freedom of Information Act requests reveal the number of casualties to be much higher.
According to these documents, as of June 30, 2007, US casualties in Afghanistan totaled closer to 7,500 (killed, wounded, injured, and medically evacuated). In Iraq, the total is almost 58,000.
Altogether, the report shows that US casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq, between 2001 and June 30, 2007, total 65,278. There is a difference between the Pentagon's publicized casualty reports and reality of almost 34,000.
In the month of June alone, despite a surge ordered by President Bush last January to crack down on the civil war in Iraq, total US casualties mounted to over 1,660 killed, wounded, and medically evacuated.
Veterans for Common Sense attributes the discrepancy to the Pentagon's refusal to include medically evacuated troops for injuries and illnesses in its "wounded" reports.
The purpose of this new distinction is to lower the numbers in Pentagon casualties reports in order to give the impression that "progress" in the war is being made and that harm to US forces inflicted in the war zone is far lower than reality, states Veterans for Common Sense.
These revelations come on the heels of another recent Veterans for Common Sense report indicating that about 180,000 war veterans have filed disability claims with the Department of Veterans' Affairs since 2001.
In a dramatic and high-profile reversal for his young administration, President Barack Obama is seeking to block the release of 44 photographs depicting abuse of detainees in U.S. military custody in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Justice Department had already agreed to release the photos by May 28 in response to a lawsuit, but Obama is shifting course.
This is a huge mistake.
Obama is now seen to be waffling, not decisive. Obama is seen as bowing down before Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham.
Contrary to the GOP position, releasing these photos does not weaken national security. The actions DEPICTED in the photos endanger national security by creating enemies of this country and convincing those enemies that it is far better to die in battle than to be captured alive.
The photos are an embarrassment. and by withholding them, Obama is not only obstructing justice, he is an accessory after-the-fact in war crimes.
In the end, by withholding these photos (and the rest of the evidence), it leaves the rest of the world free to assume (probably correctly) that far worse things were done to prisoners than just waterboarding.
Iraq in flames, Washington an object of disgust. What to do? At this pivotal moment, CNN and Fox News are tipped off to a clip of an American citizen being beheaded. The victim is a 26-year-old idealist from Pennsylvania, Nick Berg. Despite the perpetrators being masked, the vile deed is deemed the work of al-Qaeda.
The clip was first "discovered" on an Islamic website in Malaysia. Its Arabic title reads "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi shown slaughtering an American". al-Zarqawi is a 38-year-old Jordanian militant who fled to Iraq in 2001 after reportedly losing a leg in a US missile strike. al-Zarqawi's face is widely known and he credits himself with the deed, so why a mask?
The timing of the video was brilliant for the West. Media pundits judged the crime a deeper evil than the systemic torture of innocent Iraqis. But some people sensed a rat. But if it was not al-Qaeda, who? Surely not Uncle Sam. That's too dark, even for the CIA.
While this video shows a human body having its head chopped off, it does not necessarily portray an act of murder. Berg's headless body was found dumped on a Baghdad roadside on Saturday, May 8.
Advertisement Advertisement
Three days later, the "live beheading" clip was uploaded from London to the Malaysian website http://www.al-ansar.biz. The statement in the video is signed with al-Zarqawi's name, dated May 11. After Fox News and CNN had downloaded the video, it disappeared from the site.
As no autopsy is available, little is known about the state of the body. No time of death, no forensic analysis. On April 6, a month before the discovery of the corpse, Berg had been released from custody. But whose custody?
Dan Senor, adviser to the US Presidential Envoy in Iraq, has said Berg was never held by the Americans. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the Coalition's deputy head of operations, claimed he was in the custody of Iraqi police from March 24 to April 6. However, the Iraqi police chief, Major-General Mohammed Khair al-Barhawi, told Associated Press "the Iraqi police never arrested the slain American".
Berg's family are certain his jailers were the US military. His father, Michael, had been told so by the FBI. He has produced an email from a US consular official in Baghdad, Beth Payne, confirming that his son was in the hands of the US. (Later, another official said this was an error.) On April 5 in the Philadelphia office of the US Supreme Court, the Berg family had launched an action against the US military for false imprisonment. The following day, Berg was released.
The issue of custody is significant; in his final moments on screen Berg is wearing an orange jumpsuit of the kind familiar from Guantanamo Bay. The official reasons for Berg's arrest were "lack of documentation" and "suspicious activities". He carried sensitive electronic equipment for which he lacked documents. In custody, he was visited three times by the FBI. Such interviews are bound to have been recorded but no transcripts have been produced.
After his release, Berg travelled to Baghdad and the $30-a-night Al-Fanar Hotel. A fellow hotel guest told Newsday that Berg recounted how Iraqi police had quickly handed him to US authorities in Mosul and that he had been held the entire time in a jail where his guards were US soldiers.
Berg was in Baghdad to win contracts for his family firm, Prometheus Methods Tower Service, a provider of communications facilities. He often "worked at night on a tower in the neighbourhood of Abu Ghraib", according to The New York Times.
The family last heard from him on April 9, when he said he was planning to leave Iraq via Kuwait as soon as it was safe. Berg was last seen walking with his bags the following day, apparently hoping to find his way through the turmoil engulfing the city and make it to the border.
On March 7, 2004, two weeks before his arrest in Mosul, an "enemies list" had been posted on a conservative website, FreeRepublic.com. The list was compiled from signatories to an anti-war petition, and its implied purpose was to encourage readers to harass those it named.
Berg's father was on that list, as was the family firm, Prometheus. This information may well have triggered the arrest of Berg in Iraq.
Berg's politics are not clear. His father, Michael, has described his son as a "staunch supporter" of US President George Bush. Friends said Nick believed he could help rebuild Iraq "one radio tower at a time". According to The New York Times, he was attracted to the Hebrew concept of tikkun olam - healing the world through social action.
The first few seconds of the video shows Berg sitting on a white plastic chair in an orange jumpsuit. He speaks directly to the camera in a relaxed way: "My name is Nick Berg ... I have a brother and sister, David and Sara. I live in Philadelphia." His white chair is identical to those in the photographs of the Abu Ghraib prison tortures, but such chairs are probably common in Iraq. It is highly likely that this segment is edited from the interrogation of Berg during his 13 days of custody.
In the next scene, Berg is sitting on the floor with five masked figures standing behind him. We do not see the figures enter. Berg looks lifeless, though his body appears to make slight movements. A man reads a lengthy Arabic statement in a passionless monotone. He is identified as "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi", a Jordanian associate of Osama bin Laden who is tied to dozens of terrorist acts.
Yet a leaflet recently circulated in Falluja, by no means a reliable source, claims that al-Zarqawi was killed in the Sulaimaniya mountains of northern Iraq during a US bombing. A US military report last month has claimed al-Zarqawi was killed in the bombing of Falluja.
Also, the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, has said that al-Zarqawi was fitted with a prosthetic leg in a Baghdad hospital, yet the tape shows no evidence of a limp. CNN staff familiar with al-Zarqawi's voice have been quoted as saying the voice does not sound like his.
Among the many curiosities raised on the web about the fanatical five are:
· They are well-fed, fidgety, and reveal glimpses of white skin.
· Their Arabic is heavily accented (Russian, Jordanian, Egyptian).
· An aside in Russian had been translated as "do it quickly".
· One character wears wears bulky white tennis shoes.
· The man on the far left stands in the familiar "at ease" military posture.
· The men's scarves are worn and tied by people who "haven't a clue", says conspiracy theorist Hector Carreon, like actors in Hollywood movies.
None of this proves a grand conspiracy, but it does raise questions. In the final segment of the tape, Berg is thrown to the ground, but doesn't move. During the decapitation, starting at the front of the throat, there is little sign of blood. The scream is wildly out of sync, sounds female, and is obviously dubbed.
Dr John Simpson, executive director for surgical affairs at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, told Ritt Goldstein of the Asia Times, "I would have thought that all the people in the vicinity would have been covered in blood, in a matter of seconds ... if it [the video] was genuine".
Simpson agrees with other experts who find it highly probable that Berg had died before his decapitation.
But there is still the problem of Berg's slight body movements while sitting on the floor, before the beheading. According to a blogger (internet diarist), Nick Possum, "this footage was subsequently modified frame by frame to make Berg's body move very occasionally". Apparently, this can be achieved with "commonly available software". [http://www.brushtail.com.au/nick_berg_hypothesis.html]
Possum believes "the available evidence surrounding the case suggests that it was a 'black operation' by US psychological warfare specialists ... to provide the media with a moral relativity argument to counter the adverse publicity over torture at Abu Ghraib". The use of FBI footage in the opening sequence, if confirmed, suggests the involvement of high-level US Government operatives.
I do not know who killed Nick Berg, or how he died. But there's something fishy about this video.
In the end, the question is: who killed Nick Berg, and why?
MOUNTAIN HOME - The world outside Idaho got a little bit smaller Wednesday, as four F-15SG fighter jets flown from St. Louis by the Royal Singapore Air Force landed between rainstorms at Mountain Home Air Force Base.
