The Little Dictator: "I did not have relations with that man."

"The trouble with most folks isn't so much their ignorance, as knowing so many things that ain't so." : Josh Billings - [Henry Wheeler Shaw] (1818-1885) American humorist and lecturer

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Intelligence, Policy,and the War in Iraq
Paul R. Pillar
From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006

Summary: During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, writes the intelligence community's former senior analyst for the Middle East, the Bush administration disregarded the community's expertise, politicized the intelligence process, and selected unrepresentative raw intelligence to make its public case.

PAUL R. PILLAR is on the faculty of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. Concluding a long career in the Central Intelligence Agency, he served as National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005.


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"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -­ kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervour ­- with the cry of grave national emergency. Always, there has been some terrible evil at home, or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.": General Douglas MacArthur - (1880-1964) WWII Supreme Allied Commander of the Southwest Pacific, Supreme United Nations Commander 1957

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Changing The Winds Of Surveillance
by E. J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post
Bush, Cheney and Rove put national security below their goals of increasing presidential power and winning elections.

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"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it: Milton Mayer - Excerpt from pages 166-73 of "They Thought They Were Free" First published in 1955
Read Article Here

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Jack And Dubya

"I did not have relations with that man." Track the e-mails contradicting President Bush's claim he doesn't know Jack Abramoff.


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"A radical is one who speaks the truth." : Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr. - Congressman, father of famous aviator - June 15, 1957

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'New populists' vs. the West
Some might call it the axle of anti-American populism.
With linchpins in Tehran on one end and Caracas on the other, a new brand of international populism is rising by fanning flames of division between Western powers and the "powerless" of the developing world.


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Number Of Iraqi civilians Slaughtered In America's War 100,000 +

Number of U.S. Military Personnel Slaughtered (Officially acknowledged) In Bush's War 2264

The War in Iraq Costs $239,472,694,470 See the cost in your community

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Thursday, 9 February 2006
Senate Republicans Screw Veterans Again
Caught this post on BobGeiger.com:
What in the world is Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist going to do with those wacky Democrats? Don’t they understand that war is supposed to make America’s richest people more wealthy and not actually make them sacrifice for the war effort?

Despite Senate Democrats spending much of 2005 getting shot down by the GOP majority as they attempted to secure funding for active military, Veterans and first responders, Senators Christopher Dodd (D-CT) and Jack Reed (D-RI) decided to take another kick at the can last week.


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Government without Representation:
A Call to Action :
By Charles Sullivan
Regimes such as the Bush cabal have always plagued America They are a recurring cancer that pervades every cell of society. They recur because we are treating symptoms, not underlying causes.

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Army Effort to Enlist Hispanics Draws Recruits, and Criticism

As Sgt. First Class Gavino Barron, dressed in a crisp Army uniform, trawls the Wal-Mart here for recruits, past stacks of pillows and towers of detergent, he is zeroing-in on one of the Army's "special missions": to increase the number of Hispanic enlisted soldiers. Not all Latinos, though, are in step with the military's recruitment goals. In some cities with large Hispanic populations, the focus on recruitment has polarized Latinos, prompting some to organize against recruiters and to help immigrants learn their rights.


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