LowerCaseRepublican

The Palestinians needed a leader and all they got was an Arafat. Desperate people do desperate things. When backed into a corner, people do crazy s***. I'm sure you've read about the revolt of the 12th sonderkommando during WW II. The Jews in the camp saw no way to save their lives so they sacrificed them to do as much damage as they could to their enemy. When you get Ariel Sharon committing, as you admitted, an atrocity like Sabra and Shatila, it's no f***ing wonder somebody wants to strap on a bomb and f*** s*** up. I'm not condoning what they do, but I certainly understand what happened to make a person f***ing snap like that.

We're not funding them and rebuilding their infrastructure. It's neo-colonialism at its finest. We're preventing them getting self government and making sure we get Ahmed Chalabi (our handpicked boy) in power. And what happened to the Iraqi oil paying for the war? It must be weird having the conservative doublethink going on: I mean giving all Iraqis quality education and health care is common sense but to suggest the same for Americans is outright socialism.

Nuke, read executive order W199I. Bush stopped all investigation of Islamic potential hijackers and the bin Laden family. It was used by Clinton but Bush Jr. effectively killed all investigations with that order. The United States is not the bastion of freedom that we all believe it is. In fact, it's quite antithetical to that. We hear stories about Saddam gassing his own people and we Americans believe that our government would never do something so evil as attack our own people. Don't make me giggle and fall out of the chair. According to former State Department member, William Blum, and the US Army, the US Army has admitted that "between 1949 and 1969, 239 populated areas from coast to coast were blanketed with various organisms during tests designed to measure patterns of dissemination in the air, weather effects, dosages, optimum placement of the sources and other factors." Testing over such areas was supposedly suspended after 1969, but there is no way to be certain. Open air spraying even continued at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Here's a list of the places the US government sprayed with dangerous bacterias. Watertown NY area & Virgin Islands: 1950, the Army used aircraft and homing pigeons to drop turkey feathers dusted with cereal rust spores to contaminate oat crops to prove that a "cereal rust epidemic" could be spread as a biological warfare weapon. San Francisco Bay area: Sept. 20-27 1950, 6 experimental biological warfare attacks from the US Army. It began on a ship where the Army used bacillus globugii and serratia marcescens, at one point creating a cloud about two miles long as the ship traveled slowly along the shoreline of the bay. One of the stated objectives of the operation was to study "the OFFENSIVE (emphasis mine) possibilities of attacking a seaport city with a biological warfare aerosol" from offshore. Beginning on September 29, patients at Stanford University's hospital in San Francisco were found to be infected with serratia marcescens. This type of infection had never before been reported at the hospital. Eleven patients became infected and one died. According to a report submitted to a Senate committee by a professor of microbiology at State University of New York at Stony Brook: "an increase in the number of serratia marcescens can cause disease in a healthy person and...serious disease in sick people." Between 1954 and 1967, other tests were carried out in the bay area including some with a base of operations at Fort Kronkhite in Marin County. Minneapolis: 1963, 61 releases of zinc cadmium sulfide in four sections of the city involving massive exposure of people at home and children in school. The substance was later described by the EPA as "potentially dangerous because of its cadmium content" and a former Army scientist, writing in the professional journal "Atmosphere Environment", in 1972, said that cadmium compounds, including zinc cadmium sulfide, are "highly toxic and the use of them in open atmospheric experiments presents a human health hazard." He stated that symptoms produced by exposure to zinc cadmium sulfide include lung damage, acute kidney inflammation and fatty degeneration of the liver. St. Louis: 1953, releases of zinc cadmium sulfide over residential, commercial and downtown areas, including the Medical Arts Building, which presumably contained a number of sick people whose illnesses could be aggrevating by inhaling toxic particles. Washington DC area: 1953, aerial spraying of zinc cadmium sulfate mixed with lycopodium spores from a height of 75 feet. Areas sprayed include the Monocacy River Valley and Leesberg, Virginia...30 miles from the capital. In 1960, the Army conducted 115 open air tests of zinc cadmium sulfate near Cambridge, Maryland. Earlier in the 1960s, the Army covertly disseminated a large number of bacteria in Washington's National Airport to evaluate how easy it would be for an enemy agent to scatter smallpox through the entire country by infecting air passengers. The bacterium used, bacillus subtilis, is potentially harmful to the infirm and the elderly, whose immune system is impaired, and to those with cancer, heart disease or a host of other ailments according to a professor of microbiology at the Georgetown University Medical Center. A similar experiment was carried out at the Washington Greyhound bus terminal. Sometime during Richard Nixon's time in office, the Army "assassinated" him with germs via the White House air conditioning system. At a building used by the Food and Drug Administration surreptitiously placed a (supposedly harmless) colored dye into the water system. Whether anyone suffered harm from drinking a certain quantity of the water is not known. Florida: 1955, the CIA conducted at least one open air test with whooping cough bacteria around the Tampa Bay area. The number of whooping cough cases in Florida from 339 and one death in 1954 to 1080 and 12 deaths in 1955. The Tampa Bay area was one of three places that showed a sharp increase in 1995. Savannah, Georgia and Avon Park, Florida: 1956-58, The Army, wishing to test "the practicality of employing aedes aegeypti mosquitos to carry a biowarfare agent", released over hundreds of thousands, if not millions of this mosquito which can be a carrier of yellow fever and dengue fever, both dangerous diseases. The Army stated that the mosquitos were uninfected but prominent scientists said that, for several reasons, the experiment was not without risk and was a "terrible idea." The actual effects on the targeted population will probably never be known. New York City: 1956, a CIA-Army team sprayed New York streets and Holland and Lincoln Tunnels using trick suitcases and a car with a dual muffler. June 6-10, 1966, The Army report of this test was called "A Study of the Vulnerability of Subway Passengers in New York City to Covert Attack with Biological Agents". Trillions of bacillus subtilis variant niger were released into the subway system during rush hours. One method was to use light bulbs filled with the bacteria; those were unobtrusively shattered at sidewalk level on subway ventilating grills or tossed onto the roadbeds inside the stations. Aerosol clouds were momentarily visible after the release of bacteria from the light bulbs. The report noted that "When the cloud engulfed people, they brushed their clothing, looked up at the grating apron and walked on." The wind of passing trains spread the bacteria along the the tracks; in the same time it took for two trains to pass, the bacteria were spread from 15th Street to 58th Street. It will never be known how many people later became ill from being unsuspecting guinea pigs but the United States Army exhibited not the slightest interest in this question. Chicago: 1960s, the Chicago subway system was the scene of a similar Army experiment. Stockyards: November 1964-January 1965, The Army conducted aerosol tests over stockyards in Texas, Missouri, Minnesota, South Dakota, Iowa and Nebraska using "anti-animal non biological stimulants". It's not clear why stockyards were chosen or what effect this might have had on the meat consumed by the public. Nuremburg: The International Military Tribunal at Nuremburg, Germany 1946-1949, revealed many details of the Nazi medical experiments on involuntary subjects, leading the judges to create a set of principles known as the Nuremburg Code...a bill of rights for people participating in medical experimentation. The Code's first tenet states: "The voluntary consent of the subject is absolutely essential." Very shortly thereafter, the US Army-CIA testing program began and although the tests, of course, were nowhere near as grotesque as those of the Nazis, and the subjects of the tests were not humans as such, but rather the behavior of certain substances in the air, the fact remains that the testers knew that untold numbers of humans were being directly contaminated and none of the reports of the tests mentions a word about obtaining the consent of any of these humans. If the testers did not "know" that the contaminating substances were potentially dangerous it can only be because they didn't investigate this question, which is saying the same thing as they didn't know because they didn't WANT to know. Face to Face Human Experimentation: For the human experimentation, the various government agencies appear to have chosen as their subjects primarily those who had the least political clout, such as servicemen and women, conscientious objectors, prison inmates, blacks, the poor, mentally retarded, the elderly, the young, mental patients..."It's a little cockail. It'll make you feel better." Helen Hutchinson recalled the doctor telling her in July 1946, during a visit to the Vanderbilt University Hospital Prenatal Clinic. It didn't make her feel better at all. It contained radioactive iron. She was one of 829 people to receive various amounts of the potion over a two year period. Both Hutchinson and the daughter she carried went on to suffer a lifetime of strange ailments. Hutchinson's hair fell out at one point, she suffers from pernicious anemia and she is highly sensitive to sunlight. Her daughter, now grown, suffers from an immune system disorder and skin cancer. In 1999, the American public might have learned something. When it was disclosed the government organization in Los Alamos National Labratory was going to release a strain of bacteria into the atmosphere to test new biowarfare detectors, the public outcry against it stopped it from happening. One resident said at the public hearing: "If the bacteria is so safe, why don't you release it into the office of some one in Washington DC?" source: Rogue State by William Blum OPERATION NORTHWOODS Dating back to our destruction of the USS Maine to get involved in the Spanish American War to making up the fight at the Gulf of Tonkin to get involved in Vietnam, the United States has been pretty good at making up events to get anger up so high that the government can do whatever the hell it wants. In 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff badly wanted an excuse for us to invade Cuba. So, they created "Operation Northwoods". Code named Operation Northwoods, the plan, which had the written approval of the Chairman and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war. Among the actions recommended was "a series of well coordinated incidents to take place in and around" the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This included dressing "friendly" Cubans in Cuban military uniforms and then have them "start riots near the main gate of the base. Others would pretend to be saboteurs inside the base. Ammunition would be blown up, fires started, aircraft sabotaged, mortars fired at the base with damage to installations." The suggested operations grew progressively more outrageous. Another called for an action similar to the infamous incident in February 1898 when an explosion aboard the battleship Maine in Havana harbor killed 266 U.S. sailors. Although the exact cause of the explosion remained undetermined, it sparked the Spanish-American War with Cuba. Incited by the deadly blast, more than one million men volunteered for duty. Lemnitzer and his generals came up with a similar plan. "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," they proposed. There seemed no limit to their fanaticism: "We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington," they wrote. "The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). . . . We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized." Bombings were proposed, false arrests, hijackings: *"Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government." *"Advantage can be taken of the sensitivity of the Dominican [Republic] Air Force to intrusions within their national air space. 'Cuban' B-26 or C-46 type aircraft could make cane burning raids at night. Soviet Bloc incendiaries could be found. This could be coupled with 'Cuban' messages to the Communist underground in the Dominican Republic and 'Cuban' shipments of arms which would be found, or intercepted, on the beach. Use of MiG type aircraft by U.S. pilots could provide additional provocation." *"Hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft could appear to continue as harassing measures condoned by the Government of Cuba." Among the most elaborate schemes was to "create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner en route from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight." They even stated that after the attack "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation." Seizing on this indignation, they could easily get support for whatever programs they wanted to install. Northwoods was a highly popular program and the only reason it was not used was thanks to President Kennedy. So, it can be seen that the US government has absolutely no qualms whatsoever about killing its own people as long as the deaths allow them to further their political agenda. source: http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/northwoods.html 1993 WTC ATTACK On February 26, 1993, the World Trade Center was hit with a truck bomb that killed 6 people. The FBI and US government claimed they had no idea that radical Islamic terrorists could commit such an attack. But is that the truth? But a Dec. 15, 1993 Chicago Tribune article states that it was an FBI informant that built the bomb that was used. Even the New York Times stated on Oct. 28, 1993: "Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast. The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an F.B.I. supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad Salem, should be used, the informer said. The account, which is given in the transcript of hundreds of hours of tape recordings that Mr. Salem secretly made of his talks with law-enforcement agents, portrays the authorities as being in a far better position than previously known to foil the February 26th bombing of New York City's tallest towers." source: http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/P...OK/wtcbomb.html So, the FBI helped to cook the bomb used in 1993 that killed 6 Americans! They knew it was going to happen and they didn't do a damn thing. 9/11: THE NEW PEARL HARBOR?! On the morning of 9/11, I'm sure all heard the similarities to the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. Oddly enough, this is quite accurate since the historical community has found proof showing FDR knew about the impending Japanese attack and allowed our soldiers to die. The Project for a New American Century, the right wing neo-conservative hawkish organization, has many of its founding members in the current Bush administration (Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Bush's brother Jeb). The strategic transformation of the US military into an imperialistic force of global domination would require a huge increase in defense spending, PNAC said in 1997. The process of transformation, the plan said, is likely to be a long one, absent some catestrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor. American Free Press asked Christopher Maletz, assistant director of the PNAC about what was meant by the need for a new Pearl Harbor. They needed more money to up the defense budget for raises, new arms, and future capabilities, Maletz said. Without some disaster or catastrophic event neither the politicians nor the military would have approved, Maletz said. THIS IS IN 1997. After September 11, 2001, Congress quickly allocated $40 billion to fund the war on terrorism shortly after 9-11. It was a 12% increase from the last budget to defense. Similar significant increases in defense spending are planned for 2003 (to $365 billion) and 2004 (to at least $378 billion) in line with the PNAC plan. Is it weird or convenient that the time when a group who believes there must be a new Pearl Harbor to create their imperialist vision comes into power that less than a year later we have the worst terrorist attack on American soil? Given the fact that the US Army/CIA/US government doesn't give a damn about its citizens (as can be seen from my previous evidence), it is feasible that 9/11 could have been orchestrated so their vision of imperialism and power could be introduced without anger, but rather support from the American citizenry.. There are numerous questions about 9/11. In 1995, the US government found out about an Al Qaeda plot to use planes as bombs that would target the White House, CIA HQ, Pentagon, WTC and other targets. It was called "Project Bojinka". In 1993, international intelligence agents put together a report called "Terrorism 2000", that detailed how planes could be used as bombs at national landmarks...and it especially named the WTC. But we had no idea? In 1996, Clinton had an opportunity to apprehend Osama bin Laden when the Sudanese government offered to turn him over. He refused. This goes into 2000 when Bush signed executive order W199I. This effectively killed any and all CIA/FBI investigation into Al Qaeda and terrorism. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, Bush PREVENTED the investigation of terrorists and this prevention allowed 9/11 to occur. (source: http://www.propagandamatrix.com/W199I.gif) The United States disregarded the NUMEROUS intelligence references from other countries about imminent attacks and the attacks occurred. Check out the Prison Planet link for a ton of sources sorted by topic if you would like more information. The links are from conservative, liberal and mainstream press so it's not biased. These sites go into great detail about how suspicious stock activity was found on Sept. 7. Somebody, DeutscheBank won't name who, made a lot of money buying American and United stock and selling it right before the crash. http://www.propagandamatrix.com/911_redux.html The 19 9-11 Questions That Nobody Is Asking! http://www.prisonplanet.com/911.html Resources Showing how Bush/Clinton Allowed 9/11 to Take Place and Took Steps to Make Sure It Happened Given all this information, it makes sense to question the intentions of the government using this attack to cause a radical increase in defense spending, the passage of the Orwellian named PATRIOT Act which greatly eviscerated the Constitution and Bill of Rights and their new internment camps at Guantanamo Bay for anyone they consider to be a terrorist. If PATRIOT II passes, the government will be able to put people in preventative detention without a lawyer or trial and be able to execute them in military tribunals. Police state, anyone? Lusitania or Reichstag fire? You decide.

All religious fundamentalism needs to be stopped. Christian fundamentalism here looking to stifle free thinkers with putting creation back in schools, a Constitution amendment codifying their own biases etc. Israeli Zionist fundamentalism promoting ethnic ghettos of Palestinians. (I know you won't agree I4E, but it's fundamentalism that's promoting the whole expansion etc.) I'm for an Israeli state there too but I don't think the wall should be built encroaching on Palestinian lands. If they want to build it, build it along the Green Line instead of going for a land grab. Islamic fundamentalists that want to blow people up. I wonder how easy it would be for them to get recruits if the US didn't bomb the hell out of their countries for no damn good reason and then cause them to see their families get slaughtered as a result. Keeping the world in economic disparity and creating an environment of hate by blowing up their family members feeds into anti-American sentiment for those people. Like I've said before...many of the countries like Pakistan are in dire straits economically so madrasas are opening everywhere to take the schoolkids in and it's there where they get inculcated to attack us. If we use more than our .01% in foreign aid, we could *gasp* help them create good public schools so the madrasas would be forced to shut down since the main reason people send their kids there is because they can get fed and taught in a classroom with desks and learning supplies, even though the message that they are being taught is unsound.

Perhaps you haven't seen www.conservativesagainstbush.com

And Iraq being a major threat to the US wasn't a huge Chicken Little instillation of fear into the American public so we could get oil? Jeebus H. Christpunchers...Hey Nuke, where are all those tons of WMD that according to Powell and Rumsfeld, we knew they had and knew exactly where they were at? That's a war crime Nuke. What WMD did she have? I see a dead civilian but no WMD. Here's some WMD -- no wait, that's just another dead civilian. Nuke, read the Nuremburg Tribunal results...PRE-EMPTIVE WARFARE IS A WAR CRIME. The US has now endorsed a Nazi doctrine of warfare. Slaughtering civilians is a war crime. Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it. --Mark Twain

Nuke, I tend to doubt that they were even fired upon. Given the history of the Army lying, I have a very difficult time believing that they were fired upon. Few soldiers report crimes, because they don't want to jeopardize their Army careers. The journalist who broke the story quotes one colonel's statement that the assault "made no sense for a defeated army to invite their own death. ... It came across as shooting fish in a barrel. Everyone was incredulous." At some 25,000 words and exhaustive itself by the standards of magazine journalism, Hersh's article exhumes all four investigations and portrays them as whitewashes. Hersh even depicts internal skepticism about the vigor of the investigations and about why the Army decided not to press its investigation further. "They'd just won a war and didn't want to s*** in their mess kit," a retired major general is quoted as saying. One investigator, Warrant Officer Willie Rowell, told Hersh that, "he felt that he and his fellow-investigators had established that, at best, only two rounds were fired by Iraqi forces at the ... platoon on the morning [of the massacre], but regardless of his and the others' doubts about McCaffrey, he said, the Dinkel investigation 'came up with nothing that would have won a trial.'" He added, "If you're a two-star general, you can do whatever you want to do, under the confusion of war."

Insults. Wow, Nuke. I figure you'd have a better defense. I didn't know cold blooded amoral murderers had apologists.

Nuke, not all troops are liars. I am saying there is a contingent that commit atrocities and lie about them. With the photgraphic, forensic and ballistic evidence, it's pretty much a solid case that it was a huge war crime that McCaffrey perpetrated.

http://www.thememoryhole.org/unacceptable-target.htm Is that a village of women and kids? Where's the napalm?

A lot of the troops that perpetrated My Lai lied too. Luckily there were people with balls like Hugh Thomson to call them out on it and make them tell the truth.

Yes...and the Army has never lied before. Nuke, they said My Lai never happened either and tried to cover that up. When an organization is known for murdering women, children and civilians in a slaughter or even making up attacks (Gulf of Tonkin, anyone?) then I tend not to believe a damn word they have to say.

"Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many...It's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?" --Barbara Bush on "Good Morning America"...yes, this is the mother of the boy moron running our country. Or Nuke...how about "Bring 'em on!"

What about Saudi torturing or Cambodian torturing or Bangladesh, Brazil, Ecuador, Ghana, Honduras, India, Jordan, Lebanon, Mexico, Peru, the Philippines or South African torture and murder? Oh wait, the US government sells them the torture devices. Silly me, I forgot. United States companies are exporting millions of dollars worth of equipment known to be used for torture, including selling devices to 12 countries where the US State Department says that the use of torture is "persistent", according to a new report by Amnesty International. In doing so, the administration of US President George W Bush, which approves the sales, is violating the spirit of its own export policy, adds the report that was released on Tuesday. In 2002, US exports of electro-shock weapons and restraints that can be used for torture amounted to US$14.7 million and $4.4 million respectively, adds the 85-page report titled "The Pain Merchants". And Nuke, if we want to get technical about who let Saddam do all those horrible crimes, then why don't you yell at Reagan and Rumsfeld FOR GIVING HIM THE TOXINS AND MONEY AND WEAPONS to commit those crimes and f***ing shake his hand smiling after he did it! The CIA had been in cahoots and open (now admitted) contact with Saddam and the Baathists since the 1960s. We openly supported Saddam and Iraq. In 1982, the Reagan Administration took Iraq off its list of countries alleged to sponsor terrorism, making it eligible to receive high-tech items generally denied to those on the list. Conventional military sales began in December of that year. Representative Samuel Gejdenson, Democrat of Connecticut, chairman of a House subcommittee investigating "United States Exports of Sensitive Technology to Iraq," stated in 1991: "From 1985 to 1990, the United States Government approved 771 licenses for the export to Iraq of $1.5 billion worth of biological agents and high-tech equipment with military application. [Only thirty-nine applications were rejected.] The United States spent virtually an entire decade making sure that Saddam Hussein had almost whatever he wanted. . . . The Administration has never acknowledged that it took this course of action, nor has it explained why it did so. In reviewing documents and press accounts, and interviewing knowledgeable sources, it becomes clear that United States export-control policy was directed by U.S. foreign policy as formulated by the State Department, and it was U.S. foreign policy to assist the regime of Saddam Hussein." Here's a list of all the toxins, chemicals and poisons we gladly sold Saddam in the 1980s and what American companies provided him with them. http://www.progressive.org/0901/anth0498.html Nuke, why don't you tell us about the US war crimes of Gulf War I...you know the 24th Infantry Division and Barry McCaffrey murdering Iraqis 2 days after the cease fire was signed. The "highways of death" are the two Kuwaiti roadways, littered with remains of 2,000 mangled Iraqi military vehicles, and the charred and dismembered bodies of tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers, who were withdrawing from Kuwait on February 26th and 27th 1991 in compliance with UN resolutions. U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. "It was like shooting fish in a barrel," said one U.S. pilot . . . On the inland highway to Basra is mile after mile of burned, smashed, shattered vehicles of every description - tanks, armored cars, trucks, autos, fire trucks, according to the March 18, 1991, Time magazine. On the sixty miles of coastal highway, Iraqi military units sit in gruesome repose, scorched skeletons of vehicles and men alike, black and awful under the sun, says the Los Angeles Times of March 11, 1991. While 450 people survived the inland road bombing to surrender, this was not the case with the 60 miles of the coastal road. There for 60 miles every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments. No survivors are known or likely. The cabs of trucks were bombed so much that they were pushed into the ground, and it's impossible to see if they contain drivers or not. Windshields were melted away, and huge tanks were reduced to shrapnel. "Even in Vietnam I didn't see anything like this. It's pathetic," said Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer. This one-sided carnage, this racist mass murder of Arab people, occurred while White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater promised that the U.S. and its coalition partners would not attack Iraqi forces leaving Kuwait. This is surely one of the most heinous war crimes in contemporary history.

Tomorrow, I helped organize a memorial vigil for the campus. Not only of the military but also for the numerous civilians...many of whom get forgotten in war. **Note** these pages of photos are not for people with weak stomaches http://www.albasrah.net/images/war_crimes/index.htm http://www.robert-fisk.com/iraqwarvictims_page1.htm I'm not posting those to politicize this debate, just more fully encompass the memorial to the innocent civilians who lost their lives along with the military deaths because a human life is a life is a life.

All religious fundamentalists need to be stopped. The extreme right wing Christians with the gay marriage amendment, Islamic extremists and the Jihad and Zionist extremists with the insanity of their policy in Israel. Gotta go with Doug Stanhope when he said: "It's all these dogs*** mind control religions that start all these wars in the f***ing first place. You will never ever ever hear on the news: '200 Atheist rebels were killed after sustaining heavy shelling from the Agnostic stronghold in the North'."

The Zodiac killer.

Tex, don't forget the amount of rapes being reported. http://www.denverpost.com/cda/article/prin...1913069,00.html

Supply shortages like the lack of basic body armor being provided to the troops in Iraq? I know that because before he died, a Marine in my hometown had to have his parents buy and ship him body armor. Or I'm sure you mean the veterans' benefits cuts that Bush signed for. Or maybe you're referencing how Bush has opposed full medical benefits for National Guardsmen and reservists, despite sending them to his oil war. Or maybe you're referencing how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are going to be BANKRUPT by October because Bush doesn't want to ask Congress for more money until after the election (Jan/Feb). Nuke, I didn't know that giggling lying thieving murderers had apologists.

Nuke, when Rush says that detox is something everybody should go through the first day he gets back on the air then that's a big problem. But conservatives telling the truth in the media? Don't make me laugh and fall off the goddamn chair I'm sitting in. "Oh, you're one of the sodomites. You should only get AIDS and die, you pig. How's that? Why don't you see if you can sue me, you pig. You got nothing better than to put me down you piece of garbage? How have got nothing to do today, go eat a sausage and choke on it." -Michael Savage "God says, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.'" -Ann Coulter "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity!" -Ann Coulter "It is true that if you are poor and can't afford a good lawyer, your odds of going to prison skyrocker. But you know what? Tough." -Bill O'Reilly "They're a bunch of gutless, spineless cowards." -Sean Hannity Also, perhaps you've heard of SpinSanity www.spinsanity.org It's a site that fact checks books and comments by right and left wingers. Oddly enough, they tear apart the right wing books with things like facts being made up (looking at Hannity) and events occuring in the wrong year (yeah, go Coulter!) When you have Coulter saying that a Silver Star awardee is not a patriot because he dared to call Bush out about his lack of military service or putting him in commercials with bin Laden in order to win a Congressional election for the Republicans is deeply sickening. Or when you get Michael Savage calling the 3rd world "turd world nations". When there is a Republican in the White House waging pointless wars against dictators, the left is supposed to be silent and fellate the President. But it's perfectly alright for the Reich Wing to call out Clinton and smear him while he had troops in the s***. The hypocrisy of the right wing is insane. And the NY Times and Washington Post are liberal? BWHAHAHAHAHA. **cough cough catches breath** BWHAHAHAHA. They're at least as "fair and balanced" as FOX. It's a provable fact that 6 companies own the major US media and they have owners who are huge donators to the Republican party because they get things like tax cuts in return. If the media was so liberal then why did Donahue, Arnett etc. get fired? If they were so liberal then shouldn't they have been given a raise? And what about the Reagan miniseries. If the media is so liberal then shouldn't that have been aired and the MoveOn.org ad would have made the Super Bowl etc. And Nuke, most conservatives are uninformed about a lot of issues. When you actually *gasp* do the research and find out things, people become more leftist. Look at the studies on capital punishment...as people find out that it's actually not a deterrant then support drastically decreases. Rush, Dr. Laura, O'Reilly et al. prey on suckers. So does Moore at times. They spout their propaganda and people lap it up. Not that every word out of their mouths are lies but they have a tendancy to lie like douchebags at times if it suits whatever point they are trying to make. If f***ing Americans would get off their ass and inform themselves about stuff instead of being like, for example, those lazy ass poor people! I don't wanna give them my money! They should actually find out that the vast majority of people on welfare have jobs and work full time and actually have graduated from high school. It's US corporations like Wal-Mart etc. paying them s*** wages with no benefits that they can't make it and with the downward move of wages in this country (if the jobs even stay in the US anymore) more people are getting f***ed.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid...ain_1&printer=1 Republican Sen. John McCain allowed a glimmer of hope Wednesday for Democrats fantasizing about a bipartisan dream team to defeat President Bush

SS2K4, read the chapter of Mein Kampf on war propaganda. http://www.hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/mkv1ch06.html And the Goebbels photo wasn't a knock at Bush because there's no equivalence between Bush and Hitler. I concede that especially because Hitler fought on the front lines and won the popular vote but I digress. It's fitting to discuss Goebbels with our mass media: "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State." It's a condemnation of the mass media conglomeration going on and the fellating of the Bush administration is just a byproduct of such conglomeration. And fascism is not just Hitler's Reich...Fascist Italy, Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal, Papadopoulos's Greece, Pinochet's Chile, and Suharto's Indonesia. It was easiest to post the Goebbels photo since he is one of the most synonymous people with the idea of government propaganda outside of Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf.

It's a picture of Goebbels, the propaganda minister.

Tex and MrEye, this is from Free Press Media Reform: "The past two decades have seen the number of major corporations which dominate movies, music, cable, radio, newspapers, books, magazines, the Internet and TV dwindle from 50 to less than two dozen, with much of the control concentrated in fewer than ten massive conglomerates. The largest firms today do well over ten times the business of the largest media firms of the late 1980s. The result is a cartel-like arrangement in which a few closely-linked industry giants call the shots to maximize profits by reducing competition and lowering risk. Fueling this shift is corporate-sponsored "deregulation" as well as the government's collapsing commitment to antitrust prosecution. While enriching investors, these changes have impoverished democracy. The public is viewed as consumers by the media rather than informed and engaged citizens." "Unfortunately, radio is much the same. The state of radio today is dire: perhaps nothing has devastated the diversity of voices heard on our nation's airwaves than the Telecommunications Act of 1996. With its relaxation of ownership caps, the number of radio station owners decreased by 34 percent even as the number of commercial radio stations increased by 5.4 percent. Dramatic changes have ensued indeed: in 1996, the largest radio-station owning entities owned fewer than 65 stations; today, one Clear Channel owns upwards of 1,200. Proponents of such a policy shift claim this has resulted in more efficient and effective operations by allowing broadcasting companies to take advantage of economies of scale." There are also a few really good books on the subject: The Media Monopoly - Ben Bagdikian Rich Media, Poor Democracy - Robert McChesney Our Media, Not Theirs - Robert McChesney Manufacturing Consent - Noam Chomsky http://www.cjr.org/tools/owners/ - I did a Google search for it about media ownership. It's pretty common knowledge that a lot of the owners of these media monoliths are fairly conservative and that this has a great effect on the news that we hear. Concentration of the mass media only serves to be antithetical to democracy. Media reform is not even like a left vs right issue. Like Orwell said "If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they don't want to hear." Having a more diverse set of opinions in the mass media can only serve to promote democratic discourse.

http://salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/03/1...p/index_np.html A high-ranking military officer reveals how Defense Department extremists suppressed information and twisted the truth to drive the country to war. A old but fitting quote: "Like all members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher ups. This is typical with everyone in military service. I spent 33 years and 4 months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a rackateer, a gangster for capitalism." Major General Smedley Butler USMC