Did you know that the military won't cover the cost of abortion, even if the servicewoman has been raped? But the military does cover the cost of cosmetic surgery, including breast implants, nose jobs, and liposuction!

A ban on military abortions forces soldiers who become pregnant while serving overseas to seek abortions at private clinics and to pay for the procedure themselves, making it difficult and costly to end a pregnancy. Worse yet, the ban leaves women serving in countries where abortion is illegal - like Iraq and Afghanistan - nowhere to turn, effectively depriving them of freedom of choice.

Fill out the form to add your name to a petition asking Congress to lift the ban.

The Bush campaign has set up a network of Web sites to carry instant analysis of tonight's debate.

The "Debate Feed" will provide the GOP spin in real time to as many as 5,000 conservative Web outlets, according to Wired News. "Our rapid response effort is based on the premise that no attack or no misstatement will go unchallenged," Michael Turk, director of the Internet campaign, told the Web site. A "war room" is outfitted with 15 computers and two TVs, monitored by two dozen staffers, ready to send out a Republican response or comment, Wired added.

The Kerry campaign is not so well organized. It has e-mailed supporters who work with local newspapers and media, telling them the Kerry campaign will provide a response after the debate, Wired reported.

Several high-profile FBI investigations, in which substantial progress have been made, may well have been put on hold by the Bush administration for political reasons. That is, it has been alleged to me that the White House may have leaned on the FBI-- not to drop the investigations but to postpone some key arrests until after the November elections.

Iraqi President Ghazi al-Yawir strongly protested US air strikes against Iraqi cities, comparing them to Israeli tactics in Gaza and branding them a form of "collective punishment." Collective punishment was a Nazi tactic during World War II, and was forbidden as a tool to occupying powers in the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. Al-Yawir's condemnation of the US use of the tactic is the strongest to date from a high-level Iraqi politician. The comments seem likely to create a diplomatic crisis, and bode ill for Bush administration plans to pursue a scorched earth campaign against Fallujah and other cities in al-Anbar province in November. Al-Yawir is from a Sunni tribal background.

David Stabb narrows the field of dead non-Christians to this: "Do you believe that Jewish, Muslim, agnostic and other American soldiers who have not accepted Jesus as their personal savior and that have been killed in Iraq will be allowed into Heaven?"

From Sarah: "Would you say that the life of an American is worth more, less, or about the same as the life of an Iraqi?"

King asks, "How do you respond to terrorists who have said they want you to win?"

Bob Goodsell inquires, "Your father said that people who disclose the identities of CIA agents are the most insidious of traitors. One of these traitors has been operating in your administration for over a year now. Why haven't you done anything about it?"

...And, finally, the Rude Pundit's favorite question, Ian asks, simply, eloquently, of the President:
"What is the moral of My Pet Goat?"

There will be more next week, before the next debate, so keep the questions coming to rudepundit@yahoo.com.

I am now and have been for years a firm advocate of developing a system to limit the people who can vote in this country. We need to find a way to restrict the number of people who can vote. If we don’t weed out the chaff soon it may well be too late.

Don’t give me that “democracy” nonsense. In spite of what you hear from your government school teacher, your leftist college professor, or that smiling talking head on television, we are not a democracy. Never were. Weren’t supposed to be. You won’t find the word “democracy” in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States or in any constitution of any of the 50 States. There’s a reason for that. Our founding fathers hated the idea of democracy. They knew that a government of majority rule would dissolve into a tyranny of plunder and chaos.

...Welfare recipients. Those who depend on government forced income redistribution should stay at home on election day and enjoy the fruits of plunder.

...For those of you who do believe strongly that everyone should be able to vote, I have an alternate proposal. President Calvin Coolidge once said that “The business of America is business.” Let’s put that concept to work at the voting booth. Let’s treat America like a business and make every American a shareholder. Shareholders get to vote their shares at the shareholder’s meeting every two years.

Did I say shares? Plural? Yup. Just as with any business corporation, not everyone has the same number of shares.

His thesis: that the rich should have more voting power than the poor...

Don’t you just love it? The people who actually fuel our economy with their hard work and attention to decisions will get a greater voice in the direction our country takes! What a concept!

Yes, what an anti-Democratic, fascist corruption fueling and blatantly treason fraught concept...This is the very pit of hell suggested by Bush's "Ownership" society. Them as own make the rules for them to own. And fuck the rest. There is the right wing agenda of the Bush administration, portrayed in black and white. How conservative can you get ... harkening back to the days of male landowners having the franchise, and the rest bowing to their will.

Just how do you acquire shares in America, Inc.? Well, you have one share issued to you just by virtue of your being a citizen. You buy additional shares by paying income taxes. Sounds intriguing, doesn’t it?

U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Texas Speaker Tom Craddick quickly distanced themselves from a GOP political action committee this week after a state grand jury indicted three of the group's consultants.

But a Houston Chronicle review of documents from civil lawsuits and government databases involving Texans for a Republican Majority show DeLay and Craddick were kept abreast of the PAC's operations and were personally involved in the committee's fund-raising activities.

...In the wake of the felony indictments returned Tuesday, though, DeLay and Craddick describe a hands-off relationship with TRMPAC.

"I had no idea what they were doing," Craddick said.

DeLay said, "I was not involved in the day-to-day operations of TRMPAC ... I raised money for them and made appearances for them when they had fund-raisers."

...A flier for [a] fund-raiser featuring Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris listed the "TRMPAC Board" as being headed by DeLay. "Corporate Contributions are Welcome."

...DeLay's daughter and personal political consultants ran TRMPAC. DeLay was on the board of advisers and was the featured guest at fund-raisers.

The grand jury — under the direction of Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle, a Democrat — indicted John Colyandro, TRMPAC's executive director; Jim Ellis, the executive director of DeLay's leadership committee Americans for a Republican Majority; and Warren RoBold, a fund-raising consultant for both political committees. Eight corporations also were indicted.

The indictments accuse the men and corporations of violating a state law banning the use of corporate or labor-union donations to influence the outcome of a candidate's election. They have denied wrongdoing.

President Bush, accused by Democrats of shirking his duty in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War, wrote that he had "inadequate time" to meet future reserve commitments in his November 1974 letter of resignation, which was released Wednesday.

The letter was released by the White House on the eve of the first presidential debate, in Miami on Thursday, between Bush and his Democratic challenger, John F. Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran.

In the one-page "Tender of Resignation," Bush hand-wrote the following reason for resigning: "Inadequate time to fullfill [sic] possible future commitments."

The document does not address the controversy over gaps in his service in the Air National Guard in the 1970s.

The U.S. television networks planning live coverage of the presidential debates said on Wednesday they would disregard ground rules set by the two campaigns to control camera shots of the candidates.

And the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates, which is not a party to the agreement, said it could not be expected to enforce strictures on network coverage of the four debates.

At issue are rules that bar the networks from airing "cutaway" shots of either Republican President Bush or Democratic challenger John Kerry while they are waiting their turn to speak during the debates.

If this restriction had been enforced in the past, it would have censored the heavy sighs and disapproving expressions of Vice President Al Gore during the 2000 debates or the shot of Bush's father glancing at his watch during a 1992 debate with Bill Clinton and Ross Perot.

The rules, signed by the managers of the two campaigns, also prohibit the cameras from panning to members of the audience during the question-and-answer periods.

...In addition, all four broadcast journalists chosen as moderators for the debates -- Charles Gibson of ABC and Bob Schieffer of CBS, and Jim Lehrer and Gwen Ifill of the Public Broadcasting Service -- have refused to sign the 32-page agreement governing conduct of the events.

"That's an agreement between the candidates. It's not an agreement between the moderators, who are independent journalists," said Frank Fahrenkopf, Republican co-chairman of the debate commission.

He also said the commission has declined to sign the document on grounds that doing so would jeopardize the tax-exempt, nonpartisan status that allows his group to sponsor the debates.

The Russian government has approved the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, clearing the way for parliament to vote on ratification of the pact.

...The United States has rejected the pact, but it would have enough support to take effect if Russia ratifies it.

Asked if he thought Bush were smart, Kerry said: "Absolutely. He's a very clever debater. ... He's president. Anybody who doubts that somebody who isn't smart as president doesn't know what it's all about."

Saying that "democracy abhors undue secrecy," a federal court today struck down an entire Patriot Act provision that gives the government unchecked authority to issue "National Security Letters" to obtain sensitive customer records from Internet Service Providers and other businesses without judicial oversight. The court also found a broad gag provision in the law to be an "unconstitutional prior restraint" on free speech.

Since filing the case, the ACLU has labored under a broad gag order under which the government sought at every turn to censor even the most innocuous, non-sensitive information about the case. (The ACLU created a special web page to display the types of information it was forced to ask the court to disclose publicly, online at www.aclu.org/gagorder)

"This is a landmark victory against the Ashcroft Justice Department’s misguided attempt to intrude into the lives of innocent Americans in the name of national security," said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero. "Even now, some in Congress are trying to pass additional intrusive law enforcement powers. This decision should put a halt to those efforts."

U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft said on Thursday the Bush administration was likely to appeal against a U.S. District Court ruling that part of the Patriot Act was unconstitutional.

The wealth Byzantium had at it's height remains incomprehensible, the wealth of Western Europe still to this day can count the spoils stolen from the pillage from Constantinople around 900 AD, and civic treasures in European cities are often remnants of art stolen and transported piece by piece from Constantinople. The empire was so strong that after they recaptured their capital with virtually all it's wealth stolen it stood for almost 500 more years, slowly crumbling behind walls.

These walls I refer to are not just physical. They had built up walls of smugness and pride from centuries of being the most wealthy, most cultured, most educated, most worldly, most Christian people. They felt that they were the society and empire of God on Earth, their fall could only be followed by Christ's return. After all, Constantine himself built their capital; time and hard work made it the jewel of Christianity never equalled before nor to this day. This gave them an arrogance that never faded even as the the Turks killed off all resistance and found, along side this pride, abject poverty in a society that mustered all it's resources for it's millitary protection and it's final stand.

I was thinking about corporate responsibility and how there isn't any and I stumbled into a kind of scarry idea. We all know that corporations have all the rights of people with no illnesses, no death awaiting them, nothing to punish them for wrong doings, no fear of jail time, maybe an occassional fine. A lawyer may represent a corporation in a legal proceeding, but since that corporation is not a human it doesn't have to be in court....

...Law started and remains as a non-human entity with all the fickle preferences of a Greek God or demon. Selective enforcement may be random like some traffic tickets or intentionally biased like arresting black kids selling weed to white kids and letting the white kids drive off, or pulling over black motorists instead of white.

The failure of this nation starts where the Democrats and Republicans agree. Every pot hole you bounce over this winter, thank your representative for the tax cut. Every dead soldier, every child in poverty, every new asthma case: thank your representative, Democrat or Republican.

A conclusion is what you or I arrive at after a thought process and weighing the facts and principles, but for the fundamentalist a conclusion is drawn up from a set of preconceptions that are in service to a goal.

We're at a point where the lack of reasoning on the part of the right is useless to even look at. It is circular, void of any basis in the real world, and just plain stupid. We must instead look at their goals. Endless war, no science, no civil rights, no consumer protection, no cross-cultural understanding, no truth, no accoutability.

As it stands now, "extraordinary rendition" is a clear violation of international law--specifically, the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Degrading and Inhuman Treatment. U.S. law is less clear. We signed and ratified the Convention Against Torture, but we ratified it with some reservations. They might create a loophole that allows us to send a prisoner to Egypt or Syria or Jordan if we get "assurances" that they will not torture a prisoner--even if these assurances are false and we know they are false.

Last month Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Congressman, introduced a bill that would clearly outlaw extraordinary rendition. But Markey only has 22 cosponsors, and now the House leadership is trying to legalize torture outsourcing--and hide it in the bill implementing the 9/11 Commission Report.

Rice spokesman Sean McCormack says, "I cannot in any way comment on classified matters, the existence or nonexistence of findings."..."In the final analysis, we have adopted a policy that we will not try to influence the outcome of the upcoming Iraqi election by covertly helping individual candidates for office."

A senior U.S. official hinted that, under pressure from the Hill, the Administration scaled back its original plans. "This was a tough call. We went back and forth on it in the U.S. government. We consulted the Hill on this question ... Our embassy in Baghdad will run a number of overt programs to support the democratic electoral process," as the U.S. does elsewhere in the world.

Some of what we think will be GW Bush's talking points during the debates:
- 9/11 changed everything
- Saddam used weapons against his own people!
- If I have to choose between taking the word of a madman and protecting the 'Merican people, I choose the 'Merican people everytime.
- The world is better off without Saddam in power
- I inherited a recession
- He's gonna raise taxes
- We're turnin' the corner
- Mixed messages embolden the terrists/hurt our troops
- Saddam refused to let the inspectors in
- Changin' his position

[F]or all their squabbling on the campaign stump, both presidential candidates actually share a common commitment to Iraq -- and have many of the same long-term goals. They have both pledged to keep U.S.troops in Iraq for years, acknowledging that a modicum of stability is a prerequisite for leaving. They have both identified rebuilding the Iraqi army as the key to an eventual exit strategy.

"It is getting worse," agreed an Army staff officer who served in Iraq and stays in touch with comrades in Baghdad through e-mail. "It just seems there is a lot of pessimism flowing out of theater now. There are things going on that are unbelievable to me. They have infiltrators conducting attacks in the Green Zone. That was not the case a year ago."

... Reports from Iraq have made one Army staff officer question whether adequate progress is being made there.

"They keep telling us that Iraqi security forces are the exit strategy, but what I hear from the ground is that they aren't working," he said. "There's a feeling that Iraqi security forces are in cahoots with the insurgents and the general public to get the occupiers out."

He added: "I hope I'm wrong."

[12/10/03] Plans to deploy the first battalion of Iraq's new army are in doubt because a third of the soldiers trained by the U.S.-led occupation authority have quit, defense officials said Wednesday.

[12/13/03] Faced with the desertion of nearly half the new Iraqi army, the U.S. military is thinking about raising the pay scale for Iraqi soldiers as it trains more to join the force, the commander of U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq said Saturday.

[5/7/04] U.S. Marines last week disbanded the controversial Al-Fallujah Brigade after it became clear that brigade members were actively assisting militants in the city, international media has reported. The brigade was formed in April in an effort to bring an end to weeks of intense fighting between U.S. forces and militants opposed to the occupation.

[9/26/04] The man chosen to lead the Iraqi National Guard in a province in the so-called Sunni triangle has been arrested by U.S. forces on the suspicion that he has ties to insurgent fighters, a U.S. Army spokesman said.

If matching presidential candidates to their positions on basic issues were like a "Jeopardy!" category, most Americans wouldn't earn a single dollar.

More than half of those polled by the National Annenberg Election Survey didn't know President Bush alone favors allowing private investments of some Social Security money. Nearly as many didn't know that only Democratic candidate John Kerry proposes getting rid of tax breaks for the overseas profits of U.S. companies.

Importing drugs from Canada? That's a Kerry issue, but nearly half either didn't know or thought Bush also supported changing federal law to allow for drug imports from Canada.

Making abortions more difficult to obtain? Nearly one-third of those surveyed didn't know Bush alone supports more restrictions on abortion.

Eliminating the tax on estates? Two-thirds didn't know that's a Bush proposal.

After two years of presidential campaigning and hundreds of millions of dollars in political ads, many voters remained clueless about those and other policies, according to the survey.

Less than four months before planned national elections in Iraq, attacks against U.S. troops, Iraqi security forces and private contractors number in the dozens each day and have spread to parts of the country that had been relatively peaceful, according to statistics compiled by [Kroll Security International,] a private security firm working for the U.S. government.

...Attacks over the past two weeks have killed more than 250 Iraqis and 29 U.S. military personnel, according to figures released by Iraq's Health Ministry and the Pentagon. A sampling of daily reports produced during that period by Kroll Security International for the U.S. Agency for International Development shows that such attacks typically number about 70 each day. In contrast, 40 to 50 hostile incidents occurred daily during the weeks preceding the handover of political authority to an interim Iraqi government on June 28, according to military officials.

...On maps included in the reports, red circles denoting attacks surround nearly every major city in central, western and northern Iraq, except for Kurdish-controlled areas in the far north. Cities in the Shiite Muslim-dominated south, including several that had undergone a period of relative calm in recent months, also have been hit with near-daily attacks.

...In number and scope, the attacks compiled in the Kroll reports suggest a broad and intensifying campaign of insurgent violence that contrasts sharply with assessments by Bush administration officials and Iraq's interim prime minister that the instability is contained to small pockets of the country.

The Kroll reports are based on nonclassified data provided by U.S.-led military forces, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, private security companies working in Iraq and nongovernmental organizations. The reports, which Kroll has refused to distribute to journalists, were provided to The Post by a person on the list to receive them.

After his speech to a joint meeting of Congress on Thursday, Allawi described Baghdad as "very good and safe." In fact, during the period for which security reports were available, the number of attacks in the capital averaged 22 a day.

On Wednesday, there were 28 separate hostile incidents in Baghdad, including five rocket-propelled grenade attacks, six roadside bombings and a suicide bombing in which a car exploded at a National Guard recruiting station, killing at least 11 people and wounding more than 50.

More attacks have been reported in the northern cities of Mosul, Samarra and Tikrit over the past two weeks than in Fallujah and Ramadi, two areas of frequent fighting in Anbar.

Military officials contend, however, that does not mean the restive areas west of Baghdad -- the area known as the Sunni Triangle -- are no longer insurgent strongholds. The likely explanation, the officials said, is that U.S. Marines stationed in Anbar have sharply reduced their patrolling, making them less vulnerable to roadside attacks.

The security situation has grown so dire that many of the few remaining nongovernmental aid organizations left in Iraq are making plans to withdraw. The United Nations, which was supposed to help organize the national elections, has just 30 employees in the country, all of whom are quartered in the U.S.-controlled, fortified Green Zone.

... "When we leave home, we never know if we're going to return home alive or not," said Mohammed Kadhim, a taxi driver.

I’ve been thinking about the ‘Ownership Society’ for a few days and getting madder and madder at the intolerance, arrogance, and sheer brutality of it.

...I suppose I should be used to it by now: balancing the budget on our backs, scheming to take every possible advantage of us, the attitude from owners that they’re such paragons of virtue we ought to be willing to work for them for nothing and consider it a privilege, the invisibility, the lack of respect, and the daily fight to get through another week. I should be but I’m not. I admit it: I’m not less angry in my old(er) age, I’m more angry.

...For 25 years I have watched our lives go from bad to worse to awful, experienced the shrinking of our presence in society from near-invisible to practically-invisible to ‘What? Are you still here? I thought you were dead.’ I have seen the gains we made with sweat and blood—literally—washe d away in a sea of anti-labor rhetoric. Saddest of all, I have seen way too many of us buy into that rhetoric and sign on to a movement that we refuse to understand, despite all the signs and signals, is dedicated to our destruction.

......I was talking union at the shop one day a couple of years ago—which I used to do a lot, to the point where many ran when they saw me coming—and one of the guys said to me that he would never join a union because he’d be ‘stuck with it’ forever....

...There’s nothing wrong with dreaming. What was wrong was that he wasn’t even rich yet and he already saw protecting workers as something separate from that dream and a barrier to it. He was a worker himself, yet he saw other workers as his natural enemies; a union was a bunch of them banding together to take away from him what he didn’t even have yet, scheming what and how much they would steal as soon as he managed to acquire…something.

That’s what makes Bush’s sales pitch so powerful—and so dangerous. First they convinced us that we all want to be owners; then they convinced us that we all could be owners if we’d just stop wasting our time demanding frivolous luxuries like fair wages, affordable housing, and protection from the powerful. We, too, could be rich if we stood on our own two feet and stopped expecting the government to do ‘everything’ for us. And now they’re trying to convince us that society itself is based on ‘ownership’; that if we don’t ‘own’ something, we’re not really Americans and we don’t really count. So they, philanthropists that they are, are going to arrange it so we can ‘own’ things, like debts and the responsibility to pay all the taxes corporations are ducking.

The invidiousness of this concept is almost beyond words.

Bush and his corporate cronies are actually Molochite devotees, servants to the belief that Greed is the highest emotion, and the acquisition of ‘things’ is the only measure of achievement. Moloch recognizes no human values, praises no human qualities, shows pity for no one and remorse for nothing. He is a single, simple force—he Takes. He is that in all of us that urges the virtues of unchecked selfishness whenever our generosity would have a price that would be hard to pay....

...Now I’ve identified the enemy. The enemy isn’t Bush or Cheney or Ashcroft or Chao or Norquist or DeLay. The enemy is the shadowy figure behind and above all of them, the cold stone of a dead idol in which we’ve invested massive power because messy, chaotic, undisciplined Life scares us but doesn’t move the stone.

All of which is an astoundingly long-winded way of saying that this site is going to stop assuming the war is metaphorical and start treating it like it’s a real shooting war—which it is. Thus ‘Dispatch From the Trenches’—messages from and for The Front where the battles are being fought and the troops are doing the dying.

...I think hope (remember ‘hope’?) is a function of the belief that things can change for the better, but also the result of active resistance to and rejection of anything and anyone who tries to take that hope away by closing off options and rigidly defining what’s an ‘acceptable’ response. Anger is a key part of that half of Hope. You need focused anger to resist and resist and resist again.

Welcome to the Resistance.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 27 - The same intelligence unit that produced a gloomy report in July about the prospect of growing instability in Iraq warned the Bush administration about the potential costly consequences of an American-led invasion two months before the war began, government officials said Monday.

The estimate came in two classified reports prepared for President Bush in January 2003 by the National Intelligence Council, an independent group that advises the director of central intelligence. The assessments predicted that an American-led invasion of Iraq would increase support for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society prone to violent internal conflict.

One of the reports also warned of a possible insurgency against the new Iraqi government or American-led forces, saying that rogue elements from Saddam Hussein's government could work with existing terrorist groups or act independently to wage guerrilla warfare, the officials said. The assessments also said a war would increase sympathy across the Islamic world for some terrorist objectives.

President Bush has acknowledged a "miscalculation'' about the virulency of the insurgency that would rise against the American occupation, though he insisted that it was simply an outgrowth of the speed of the initial military victory in 2003.

"While maintaining security is a primary concern, we are also very concerned about minimizing collateral damage and putting the innocent residents of eastern Baghdad at risk," [ Lt. Col. Jim Hutton] said. "The enemy shows no concern for the Iraqi people." source

An exclusive report from Knight Ridder's Washington Bureau, which has gained much renown for war-related scoops in the past year, revealed Saturday that U.S. and multinational forces and Iraqi police are killing twice as many Iraqis, most of them civilians, as attacks by insurgents. The statistics were compiled by the Iraqi Health Ministry and obtained exclusively by Knight Ridder. Iraqi officials said about two-thirds of the Iraqi deaths were caused by the U.S. side and police; the remaining third died from insurgent attacks. source

For a supposedly impromptu debate, this one has already been almost totally scripted. The two sides have dickered over just about everything--a rule preventing candidates from quizzing each other directly, the height of the podiums, you name it. When President Bush and Sen. John Kerry walk onto the stage at the University of Miami in Coral Gables on Thursday, they will even know what kind of pen and notepad they can use. The scripted cordiality even extends as far as the opening-bell handshake.

Below the surface, there are actually many similarities in the candidates' worldviews. "Kerry and Bush really buy into a larger consensus about what America's role in the world should be and what the implication and meaning of 9/11 was," says [ Boston University foreign policy Prof. Andrew] Bacevich. It quickly becomes less of a debate about where America should go than how it should get there. "

The first malicious codes to exploit security flaws in Microsoft Windows' handling of jpeg image files has appeared on internet newsgroups.

The trojan is embedded in Jpegs that, once downloaded and viewed, allow hackers to gain control of the user's PC.

Microsoft acknowledged the vulnerability and issued a security patch earlier this month but at the time no viruses exploiting the flaw had been seen.

Online newsgroup access provider Easynews found the trojan code in pictures posted to its site earlier this week.

The current situation poses little risk of a major virus attack because the code cannot replicate itself and spread.

But a more serious way to exploit the flaw has also been posted on Bugtraq, a site that tracks and reports flaws in major software products. According to security software provider Finjan, the new method would allow the hacker to take over an end user's PC simply by having them browse a web page that contains the malformed image file using Internet Explorer.

BOSTON (AP) - Dr. John E. Mack, the Harvard Medical School professor of psychiatry...has died.

Mack was struck and killed by an alleged drunken driver in London on Monday while attending the T.E. Lawrence Society Symposium in Oxford, England, according to a release on the John E. Mack Institute Web site. He was 74.

...Mack was born in New York City. He earned an undergraduate degree from Oberlin College in 1951 and his medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 1955. He served in the U.S. Air Force from 1959-61.

...Mack's early work focused on clinical explorations of dreams, nightmares and teen suicide and how world perception affects relationships. He advocated a move away from materialism in Western culture, blaming it for the Cold War and global ecological problems. --AP

"He was a restless, highly creative man who was many-sided," said Robert Jay Lifton, the psychiatrist and author, who was a longtime friend of Dr. Mack's. They worked together in the antinuclear movement, a longstanding concern of Dr. Mack's, and in the application of psychological approaches to the study of history.

"He was as sensitive to others' needs as anyone I've known," Lifton said in a telephone interview from his Cape Cod home.

A Cambridge resident, Dr. Mack founded the psychiatric department of Cambridge Hospital. He was certified as a practitioner of both child and adult psychoanalysis. His early research interests in psychology included dreams, nightmares, and teenage suicide.

...In 1983, he founded the Center for Psychology and Social Change, which this year became the Mack Center. He published about 150 scholarly articles. Among the 11 books he wrote or collaborated on are "Nightmares and Human Conflict" (1970) and, with Holly Hickler, "Vivienne: The Life and Suicide of an Adolescent Girl" (1981).

...In 1990, Dr. Mack began his research on people who say they have encountered extraterrestrials. He held that such encounters were real, though probably more spiritual than physical in character. His work drew widespread attention in 1994 with the publication of a best-selling book, "Abduction."

That year, Harvard Medical School appointed a special faculty committee to review Dr. Mack's clinical care and clinical investigation of his subjects. After a 15-month process, the committee declined to take any action against him.

Dr. Mack eventually interviewed some 200 individuals who said they had encounters with extraterrestrials. Although he was subjected to widespread ridicule because of his work, Dr. Mack saw it as a unique opportunity to study spiritual or transformational experience, a theme that ran through much of his earlier work.

...He published another book on the subject, "Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters," in 1999.

..."No one has been able to come up with a counter-formulation that explains what's going on," Dr. Mack said in a 1992 Globe interview in which he discussed his view of alien encounters. "But if people can't be convinced that this is real, that's OK. All I want is for people to be convinced that there's something going on here that is not explainable."

Links have been discovered between senior American military officials and the failed coup plot in Equatorial Guinea that has left Sir Mark Thatcher facing trial in South Africa.

Theresa Whelan, a member of the Bush administration in charge of African affairs at the Pentagon, twice met a London-based businessman, Greg Wales, in Washington before the coup attempt. Mr Wales has been accused of being one of its organisers, but has denied any involvement.

...The regime of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema in...Equatorial Guinea has accused the US of backing the plot, but the Pentagon denies supporting it. US officials say it was Mr Wales who made all the approaches to them.

"Contractors are here to stay in supporting US national security objectives overseas," [said Ms. Whelan]. They were cheaper, and saved the use of US forces in peacekeeping and training.

...She added: "The US can be supportive in trying to ameliorate regional crises without necessarily having to put US troops on the ground, which is often a very difficult political decision. Sometimes we may not want to be very visible."...

The Obiang regime has complained that the US did not warn it of the coup plot, although it received intelligence from South Africa.

The February 19 plan is said to have been aborted after a hired aircraft broke down. The plotters then acquired an old former US Air National Guard Boeing, built to a military specification, that was flown over from Kansas with a crew from Florida for a second coup attempt. But the seller, the US firm Dodson Aviation, says there was no US government involvement in the deal.

Both the US and Britain have extensive oil interests in Equatorial Guinea which, in the words of one US official, is "the new Kuwait".

North Korea says it has turned the plutonium from 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods into nuclear weapons to serve as a deterrent against increasing U.S. nuclear threats and to prevent a nuclear war in northeast Asia.

Warning that the danger of war on the Korean peninsula "is snowballing," Vice Foreign Minister Choe Su Hon provided details Monday of the nuclear deterrent that he said North Korea has developed for self-defense.

He told the U.N. General Assembly's annual ministerial meeting that Pyongyang had "no other option but to possess a nuclear deterrent" because of U.S. policies that he claimed were designed to "eliminate" North Korea and make it "a target of preemptive nuclear strikes.''

...South Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Soo-hyuck said in late April that it was estimated that eight nuclear bombs could be made if all 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods were reprocessed. Before the reprocessing, South Korea said it believed the North had enough nuclear material to build one or two nuclear bombs.

The State Department official said he hadn't seen Choe's comments but noted that the Bush administration has long believed that North Korea has at least one or two nuclear weapons. The official, asking not to be identified, said the North Koreans also have made a number of conflicting statements about how far along their weapons development programs have come.

"Showing none of the alarm about the North's growing arsenal that he once voiced regularly about Iraq," said the daily, Mr Bush "opened his palms and shrugged" when asked about intelligence reports indicating that North Korea may now have the fuel to produce six or eight nuclear weapons.

The US met with the clerical leadership in Fallujah (the first official acceptance of their civic leadership), offering many millions of dollars in reconstruction money to repair the infrastructure that had been virtually demolished in the April attacks - on the condition that (1) the guerrillas were disowned and disarmed, (2) the US was allowed to mount patrols within the city, and (3) the clerics pledged loyalty to the central government. There were no negotiations to speak of, because the clerics rejected all three conditions.

Immediately after the collapse of the non-negotiations, the US initiated almost daily bombing of various neighborhoods in Fallujah. The cover story has been that they are bombing "safe houses" used by terrorists associated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and that no other people are present during the attacks. But hospitals report daily that the vast majority of the casualties are civilians. It is clear to everyone but the US public that the attacks are designed to persuade the people of Fallujah to abandon their support of the rebellion. To add a further element of threat to the equation, the US has repeatedly announced that it would soon reinvade the city, and during the second week of September even announced on loudspeakers that the residents of certain areas should evacuate because of a pending attack. This was a bluff. US military officials admitted to American reporters that they are waiting until after the November elections in the United States.

Fallujah and Sadr City are both more typical than Samarra and less promising for the Americans. The initial effort to identify and work with some local leaders has failed, leading the Americans to terror tactics against the local population. These have not worked in the past in either location, and there is no sign of this latest iteration working. It seems apparent that the Americans will wait until after the US elections to activate a more aggressive and more destructive second phase, aimed at terrorizing the population into submission.

Perhaps the greatest success of the new strategy thus far is a negative one. The havoc and destruction wreaked by the terror bombing and invasion of Tal Afar generated a strong reaction from Turkey, a ripple of outrage in Iraq and the Middle East, and no protest at all in Europe or the United States. The less severe, but still brutal, attacks in Sadr City and Fallujah have generated almost no complaints or declarations of solidarity. This is a stark contrast to the April battle in Fallujah, which generated worldwide denunciations, and the siege of Najaf, which threatened to mobilize the international Shi'ite community.

What the US may have gained, therefore, is the apathy of the world to escalating violence against Iraqi civilians. This, more than the success or failure of these individual campaigns, may lay a foundation for the massive offensives that the US military appears to be preparing for in the period just after the US elections in November. The world is fully aware of the ability of the US Air Force to level even a very large city, using 2,000-pound (900-kilogram) bombs delivered in great numbers by carrier-based aircraft. The calibrated increases in the destructiveness of US air attacks over the past few months appears to have numbed local and international outrage, a condition that allows for further escalation and many more casualties.

...[E]ven the most ferocious Iraqi resistance may not be sufficient to deter the coming November offensive. The Iraqis need and deserve the support of the international community; the best (and least destructive) deterrent against this impending onslaught would be the threat of uncontrollable worldwide protest should the US attempt to level either Fallujah or Sadr City.

Overthrown Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who was arrested by US forces last December, reportedly plans to run as a candidate in the Iraqi elections scheduled for January 2005.

Saddam's lawyer Giovanni di Stefano told Denmark's B.T. newspaper that Saddam decided during one of their discussions that he would declare his candidacy for the elections.

Stefano said that there was no law that prevented Saddam from appearing on the ballot. He added that Saddam hopes to regain his presidency and palaces via the democratic process.

...Stefano remarked that a recent Gallup poll indicates that 42 percent of the Iraqi people want their former leader back.

The insistence by interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and many U.S. officials that foreign fighters are streaming into Iraq to battle American troops runs counter to the U.S. military's own assessment that the Iraqi insurgency remains primarily a home-grown problem.

In a U.S. visit last week, Allawi spoke of foreign insurgents "flooding" his country, and both President Bush and his Democratic challenger, Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry, have cited these fighters as a major security problem.

But according to top U.S. military officers in Iraq, the threat posed by foreign fighters is far less significant than American and Iraqi politicians portray. Instead, commanders said, loyalists of Saddam Hussein's regime — who have swelled their ranks in recent months as ordinary Iraqis bristle at the U.S. military presence in Iraq — represent the far greater threat to the country's fragile 3-month-old government.

...U.S. military officials said the core of the insurgency in Iraq was — and always had been — Hussein's fiercest loyalists, who melted into Iraq's urban landscape when the war began in March 2003. During the succeeding months, they say, the insurgents' ranks have been bolstered by Iraqis who grew disillusioned with the U.S. failure to deliver basic services, jobs and reconstruction projects.

It is this expanding group, they say, that has given the insurgency its deadly power and which represents the biggest challenge to an Iraqi government trying to establish legitimacy countrywide.

"People try to turn this into the mujahedin, jihad war. It's not that," said one U.S. intelligence official. "How many foreign fighters have been captured and processed? Very few."

...U.S. military officials said Iraqi officials tended to exaggerate the number of foreign fighters in Iraq to obscure the fact that large numbers of their countrymen have taken up arms against U.S. troops and the American-backed interim Iraqi government.

Even after the impeachment sideshow, an event that solidified my belief in the lethal, fascistic nature of the modern Republican party, I was not fully prepared for the no holds barred approach they would take in this situation.

It is what led me to the point at which I am able to say without any sense of restraint or caution that I would put NOTHING past them --- even a staged terrorist attack. This is because every time I think they have some limits, they prove me wrong. As the old saying goes, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice...won't get fooled again....

Gore and his team knew that the Republicans would fight with everything they had, but they still maintained some faith in the legal system to require basic fairness in something this important. And, even the most cynical of us thought that the egos of the Supreme Court justices would never allow them to make a purely partisan decision because history would remember them as whores.

If I had any political idealism left it died on the day that Antonin Scalia stopped judges from counting votes in Florida.

This article shows that fix was in from the beginning.

--Digby

The al-Qaida network has been decimated at top levels since bin Laden last appeared on television three years ago, Powell said. He said that bin Laden "is not showing himself in a way that he can be captured."

"It does have the capacity to regenerate itself," Powell said of al-Qaida. But any future leaders are not as accomplished nor as experienced as "those who have been taken out" in the U.S. campaign that overthrew the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the subsequent hunt for al-Qaida operatives, Powell said in an Associated Press interview.

"I don't know where he is," Powell said. "I don't know his state of health. I believe he is still alive, but I can't prove that. He clearly is in hiding and he is on the run."

US Secretary of State Colin Powell has said that Washington continues to remain clueless about the whereabouts of Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, especially in the Tora Bora Hills of Afghanistan.

More than 120,000 hours of potentially valuable terrorism-related recordings have not yet been translated by linguists at the FBI, according to a Justice Department investigation.

The report, by the department's inspector-general, found the FBI still did not have the capacity to translate all the terrorism-related material from wiretaps and other intelligence sources, and that the influx of new material had outpaced the bureau's resources.

The report comes as officials in the Bush Administration raise concerns about a terrorist attack before the November 2 presidential elections and as new intelligence indicates that Osama bin Laden is still alive and most likely hiding with other senior al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports from Kuwaiti sources that the destruction visted on Najaf by the US assault on the Sadrists in August is far more extensive than usually realized. Ali al-Mu'min, who is with a humanitarian organization, said that ordinary activities were still at a standstill in Najaf, which seemed substantially depopulated, and that vast swathes of its buildings and homes had been destroyed.

The report is supported by the following email I received from Europe:

. . The Najafi guy living at my house got a phone call from Najaf on Saturday. Hotel Nejef and Hotel "Imam Ali" (newly built in 2002) were flattened by American cruise missiles during these last Sadrist months. Sadrist snipers were said to be the reason . . . Rajul Street, B's childhood "hood" is rubble. Old, culturally, historically valuable buildings and surroundings like bazaar environment areas, several hundred years old, are rubble and dust.

The Valley of Peace, this huge churchyard is littered with cluster bomb cans - unexploded. Someone should dig in to that fact.

Time Magazine reports that the Bush administration had had a plan to use the Central Intelligence Agency to funnel money to candidates it favored in the forthcoming Iraqi elections. The rationale given was that Iran was bankrolling its own candidates.

This plan was apparently derailed in part by the intervention of Democratic Minority Leader in the House, Nancy Pelosi, who remonstrated with National Security Adviser Condaleeza Rice about it.

So, the "cover story" of forestalling "Iranian influence" doesn't hold water. Bush just wanted to buy himself an election, in the Bush tradition. (Bush's grandfather Prescott, a US senator, probably made much of the pile on which he ran by investing in Nazi companies).

At least four people have been killed in the latest US onslaught on the Iraqi city of Falluja overnight.

Ten others were injured on Tuesday as US warplanes again bombed Falluja, targeting the area of al-Askari and the industrial neighbourhoods near the main highway east of the city, Iraqi journalist Husain al-Shammari told Aljazeera.

The US military said it had "conducted a precision strike", destroying a building believed to be the hideout for followers of al-Qaida-linked Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The army has been at pains to discredit consistent reports from doctors and residents that women and children have been killed or wounded in repeated air strikes on Falluja in the recent weeks.Aljazeera article

Meanwhile, fresh strikes have been launched on the Baghdad suburb of Sadr City overnight. On Monday, up to five people were killed and 46 wounded when US warplanes bombed parts of the suburb.

You know things are really going downhill in Iraq, when the Bush speech-writers have to recycle his old speeches. Listening to him yesterday, one might think he was simply copying and pasting bits and pieces from the older stuff. My favorite part was when he claimed, "Electricity has been restored above pre-war levels..." Even E. had to laugh at that one. A few days ago, most of Baghdad was in the dark for over 24 hours and lately, on our better days, we get about 12 hours of electricity. Bush got it wrong (or Allawi explained it to incorrectly)- the electricity is drastically less than pre-war levels, but the electricity BILL is way above pre-war levels. Congratulations Iraqis on THAT!! Our electricity bill was painful last month. Before the war, Iraqis might pay an average of around 5,000 Iraqi Dinars a month for electricity (the equivalent back then of $2.50) - summer or winter. Now, it's quite common to get bills above 70,000 Iraqi Dinars... for half-time electricity.

[Judge] Kennedy had spent years on the bench as a juvenile and family-court judge, during which time he had developed a strong interest in aiding abused children. In the early 1980s he had helped to start the Children's Trust Fund of Alabama, and he later established the Corporate Foundation for Children, a private, nonprofit organization. At the time of the race he had just served a term as president of the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect. One of Rove's signature tactics is to attack an opponent on the very front that seems unassailable. Kennedy was no exception.

Some of Kennedy's campaign commercials touted his volunteer work, including one that showed him holding hands with children. "We were trying to counter the positives from that ad," a former Rove staffer told me, explaining that some within the See camp initiated a whisper campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile.

..."What Rove does," says Joe Perkins, "is try to make something so bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the hardship. Mark is not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin', tobacco-chewin', pickup-drivin' kind of guy. He is a small, well-groomed, well-educated family man, and what they tried to do was make him look like a homosexual pedophile. That was really, really hard to take."

During a question and answer session, a young man demanded to know why Kerry voted to give Bush authority to attack Iraq but voted against an $87 billion appropriation bill to support the war effort there.

"Is that the kind of thing he would do as president?," the man asked.

Heinz Kerry sharply asked the man whether he had read the legislation that was voted on.

When he said no, she told him that Kerry had supported $60 billion in military appropriations for Iraq, but would not vote for the full $87 billion because he considered it a "blank check." Kerry was one of 11 Democrats to vote against the bill.

"And we knew they'd already given Haliburton millions in no-bid contracts," she snapped, referring to the company formerly led by Vice President Dick Cheney.

"If you want to say (Kerry) flip-flopped, just say so, don't try to hide," Heinz Kerry scolded.

[S]ome basic international requirements for a fair election are missing in Florida.

The most significant of these requirements are:

• A nonpartisan electoral commission or a trusted and nonpartisan official who will be responsible for organizing and conducting the electoral process before, during and after the actual voting takes place...

• Uniformity in voting procedures, so that all citizens, regardless of their social or financial status, have equal assurance that their votes are cast in the same way and will be tabulated with equal accuracy...

It was obvious that in 2000 these basic standards were not met in Florida, and there are disturbing signs that once again, as we prepare for a presidential election, some of the state's leading officials hold strong political biases that prevent necessary reforms.

...Four years ago, the top election official, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, was also the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney state campaign committee. The same strong bias has become evident in her successor, Glenda Hood, who was a highly partisan elector for George W. Bush in 2000. Several thousand ballots of African Americans were thrown out on technicalities in 2000, and a fumbling attempt has been made recently to disqualify 22,000 African Americans (likely Democrats), but only 61 Hispanics (likely Republicans), as alleged felons.

...Florida's governor, Jeb Bush, naturally a strong supporter of his brother, has taken no steps to correct these departures from principles of fair and equal treatment or to prevent them in the future.

It is unconscionable to perpetuate fraudulent or biased electoral practices in any nation. It is especially objectionable among us Americans, who have prided ourselves on setting a global example for pure democracy.

Paul R. Pillar, the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, sat down Tuesday night in a large West Coast city with a select group of private citizens. He was not talking off the cuff. Relying on a multi-paged, single-spaced memorandum, Pillar said he and his colleagues concluded early in the Bush administration that military intervention in Iraq would intensify anti-American hostility throughout Islam. This was not from a CIA retiree but an active senior official.

...For President Bush to publicly write off a CIA paper as just guessing is without precedent. For the agency to go semi-public is not only unprecedented but shocking. George Tenet's retirement as director of Central Intelligence removed the buffer between president and agency.

Through most of the Bush administration, the CIA high command has been engaged in a bitter struggle with the Pentagon. CIA officials refer to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Undersecretary Douglas Feith as ''ideologues.'' Nevertheless, it is clear the CIA's wrath has now extended to the White House. Bush reduced the tensions a little on Thursday, this time in a joint Washington press conference with Allawi, by saying his use of the word "guess" was "unfortunate."

The CIA is...supposed to be a resource -- not a critic -- for the president.

Modern history is filled with intelligence bureaus turning against their own governments, for good or ill. In the final days of World War II, the German Abwehr conspired against Hitler.

[The Transportation Safety Administration] recently acknowledged that a Federal Air Marshall, unable to fly for weeks when his name was mistakenly put on the "no-fly" list, was in fact not a threat, and removed his name from the list.

[T]he spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may commence persecutor, and better men be his victims. It can never be too often repeated, that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest, and ourselves united. From the conclusion of this war we shall be going down hill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will remain on us long, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion.

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia - 1784

A federal appeals court on Monday revived a lawsuit seeking a paper trail for Florida's new touchscreen voting machines with only five weeks left before the presidential election.

The court told a federal judge to reopen the case affecting the 15 Florida counties that use voting machines that don't create paper copies.

Three judges from the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that the judge improperly decided not to get involved in the lawsuit filed by Rep. Robert Wexler, a Florida Democrat.

A state appeals court ruled last month that a paper trail of ballots was not required, ruling that voters are not guaranteed "a perfect voting system."

[T]he media's infatuation has a distinct odor of the deathbed about it — not for the blogosphere, which has a commercially bright future, but for the idea of blogging as a grass-roots challenge to the increasingly sanitized "content" peddled by the Time Warner-Capital Cities-Disney-General Electric-Viacom-Tribune media oligopoly.

...I've watched the commercialization of this culture of dissent with growing unease. When I recently decided to take a long break from blogging, it was for a mix of personal and philosophical reasons. But the direction the blogosphere is going makes me wonder whether I'll ever go back.

...Even as it collectively achieves celebrity status for its anti-establishment views, blogging is already being domesticated by its success. What began as a spontaneous eruption of populist creativity is on the verge of being absorbed by the media-industrial complex it claims to despise.

In the process, a charmed circle of bloggers — those glib enough and ideologically safe enough to fit within the conventional media punditocracy — is gaining larger audiences and greater influence. But the passion and energy that made blogging such a potent alternative to the corporate-owned media are in danger of being lost, or driven back to the outer fringes of the Internet.

Thanks very much for linking to One Simple Question: Over two hundred bloggers posted entries about The Question!

I'm writing to you today to ask you unite on Monday by posting a fresh link to great news. Today, the "Bush Bounty" increased by $6000!

That's right: In addition to the now $2300 reward now offered by The World's Shortest Blog, an anonymous sponsor has stepped up to offer an additional $6000 if the question is televised and answered! That's a potential $8300 payoff!

Thanks to this new "Answer Bounty" -- we have one chance to make this One Simple Question newsworthy.

Please join in linking to The World's Shortest Blog and the $6000 Answer Bounty tomorrow, Monday, Sept. 26.

If everyone links on one day, we may propel The Question to the #1 on Blogdex -- and conceivably earn attention in the mainstream media. This is something that right-wingers coordinate very well; conservatives trumpet in unison very effectively. But thanks to your previous support for One Simple Question, we have over two hundred left-leaning bloggers who can join together in one voice -- right now, when it's needed most.

We have the power to beat the right at their own game.

Please help! We can make the question mainstream by standing united on Monday!

Thanks to all... Let's Boot Bush!

John

Many of President George W. Bush's assertions about progress in Iraq -- from police training and reconstruction to preparations for January elections -- are in dispute, according to internal Pentagon documents, lawmakers and key congressional aides on Sunday.

Bush touted preparations for national elections in January, saying Iraq's electoral commission is up and running and told Americans on Saturday that "United Nations electoral advisers are on the ground in Iraq."

... "The framework for it (free and fair elections) hasn't even been set up. The voter registration lists aren't set. There have to be hundreds of polling places, hundreds of trained monitors and poll watchers. None of that has happened," Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State for President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, told ABC's "This Week."

He said nearly 100,000 "fully trained and equipped" Iraqi soldiers, police officers and other security personnel are already at work, and that would rise to 125,000 by the end of this year.

...[Pentagon] documents show that of the nearly 90,000 currently in the police force, only 8,169 have had the full eight-week academy training. Another 46,176 are listed as "untrained," and it will be July 2006 before the administration reaches its new goal of a 135,000-strong, fully trained police force.

Six Army battalions have had "initial training," while 57 National Guard battalions, 896 soldiers in each, are still being recruited or "awaiting equipment." Just eight Guard battalions have reached "initial (operating) capability," and the Pentagon acknowledged the Guard's performance has been "uneven."

Training has yet to begin for the 4,800-man civil intervention force, which will help counter a deadly insurgency. And none of the 18,000 border enforcement guards have received any centralised training to date, despite earlier claims they had, according to Democrats on the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee.

They estimated that 22,700 Iraqi personnel have received enough basic training to make them "minimally effective at their tasks," in contrast to the 100,000 figure cited by Bush.

... The White House defended its figures, and a senior administration official defined "fully trained" as having gone through "initial basic operations training."

"While maintaining security is a primary concern, we are also very concerned about minimizing collateral damage and putting the innocent residents of eastern Baghdad at risk," [ Lt. Col. Jim Hutton] said. "The enemy shows no concern for the Iraqi people."

U.S. jets pounded suspected Shiite militant positions in the Baghdad slum of Sadr City on Monday, killing at least five people and wounding 46....

Residents said explosions lit up the night sky for hours before dawn. Mangled vehicles, debris and shards of glass littered the streets.

Dr. Qassem Saddam of the Imam Ali hospital in Sadr City said five people were killed and 40 were wounded — including 15 women and nine children. source

US warplanes bombed Fallujah again on Sunday, more than once, attempting to strike at a meeting of Monotheism and Holy War downtown. The US struck three times in 24 hours. Hospital officials said they received 8 dead and 22 wounded, including women and children. Residents asserted that many victims remained buried under the rubble. source

Lax oversight of weapons exports opens the door for adversaries to get their hands on lethal missiles, assault guns and components for larger weapons systems, sources say.

Homeland Security agents recently have uncovered plots to divert night-vision lenses to Iran, fighter-jet parts to China, grenade launchers to Colombian guerrillas, nuclear triggers to Pakistan, and more.

And despite internal warnings, government-sanctioned sales worth more than $10 billion a year continue spreading more weapons worldwide.

... Tens of thousands of arms deals aren't fully reviewed, nor are weapons inspected abroad as required under the U.S. Arms Control Export Act to prevent diversion or misuse.

When government officials do review arms deals, they find increasing problems - including diversions to at least one criminal and several hostile nations. Nearly one in five arms deals checked last year - 76 out of 413 - had such problems.

...Consider the case of Stinger shoulder-launched missiles - which the United States supplies to at least 17 countries, including Egypt, Israel, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Experts agree that if any U.S. weapon must be controlled, this is it.

... The Defense Department office responsible "does not know how many Stingers have been sold overseas," it said. "Records on the number and destination of Stingers sold overseas are incomplete, unreliable and largely in hard-copy form."

...A Defense Department spokesman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Army has sent out 237 this year and is in the process of sending 249 more. He declined to say where.

...Today, more and more countries - from booming East Asia to the volatile Middle East - are seeking advanced items for their arsenals.

And the United States is by far the world's leading arms supplier, with annual industry sales topping $300 million and government sales topping $13 billion last year - a figure expected to reach $13.8 billion this year, government data show.

In Colorado, some 300 companies are registered to export military technology - mostly dual-use items that have commercial as well as military uses. The State Department lists 4,000 companies nationwide. Names are kept secret.

"You can't control technology," said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Larry Farrell, president of the National Defense Industrial Association. "There are going to be weapons. There are going to be people who wish other people trouble."

..."You can't control technology," said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Larry Farrell, president of the National Defense Industrial Association. "There are going to be weapons. There are going to be people who wish other people trouble."

Senior Bush administration officials defended the status quo. U.S. small arms "have not been the weapons that end up in the hands of child soldiers," said Lincoln Bloomfield, assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs. And accelerated sales since Sept. 11, 2001, will help in the war on terrorism, he said. "Most of the major arms exports the U.S. does are to armed forces who are going to do things we want them to do."

"We have seen an increase in anti-Americanism in the Muslim world. We'll not deny this," Powell said on ABC's "This Week." "But I think that that will be overcome in due process because what the Muslim world will see . . . is that in Afghanistan, 10 million people who have registered to vote will vote on the ninth of October and bring in place a freely elected president.

"And I think we're going to do the same thing in Iraq if we stay the course, if we defeat this insurgency," Powell said.

He acknowledged that "yes, it's getting worse, and the reason it's getting worse is that they are determined to disrupt the elections."

..."For the elections to have complete credibility and stand the test of international scrutiny, I think what we have to do is to give all the people of Iraq an opportunity to participate," Powell told "Fox News Sunday." "Just as we would have difficulty with partial elections here in the United States . . . I think it has to be throughout the country."

The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat one after another until they pass into commonplace but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed forever, it may be thrown back for centuries....It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth has any inherent power...of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application of legal or even of social penalty will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either. The real advantage which truth has consists in this: When an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times. But in the course of ages, there will generally be found persons to rediscover it until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favorable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand subsequent attempts to suppress it.

[W]henever it appears that a danger is imminent or an institution has been profaned beyond redemption or some vice has half-devoured the nation, there arises (with the reliability of a law and without great operators and when the evil can still be cured) the men and systems that can avoid ruin. They appear, do what they have to do, and drop from sight. And it also appears that a condition of this law is that the evil has to be extreme, as if the prosperous peoples never decide to change direction or perturb their habits until the reality is so dire that it is impossible to ignore. This was the law affirmed by the election of Grover Cleveland. The evil was grave. The Republicans entrenched in power cynically abused it. They subverted the integrity of the vote and the press. They mocked the spirit of the Constitution through partisan legislation, copied the tactics of tyrants, used overseas wars to deflect attentions from their actions. Who had a chance to compete against them, defeat them? If elections are won by the force of money, if the Republicans have a free hand with the national coffers . . . But a wave rose up that no one saw forming on the margins (and no one knows how it came, breaking over the heads of all the ambitious and illustrious politicians of the nation) despite the anger of the members of his own Democratic Party, despite time-proven practices and conceits, and landed in the White House a man just a little more than barely known, a tough but humble man fit for the task of fearlessly and patiently reforming the corrupt government. The wave brought Cleveland. Up close, you see that that the change has not been essential or durable, but circumstantial and like a proof. An eruption proving it can be done. The eruption of a fistful of men, a fistful of vulnerable people, nothing more than that, gave victory to Cleveland. A thousand votes less among 10 million voters and the President would have been an impure and sinister man, a brilliant sophist. He would have been Blaine.

American troops have arrested a senior commander of the U.S.-trained Iraqi National Guard for alleged ties to insurgents, underscoring the obstacles toward building a strong Iraqi security force capable of taking over from U.S. troops and restoring stability to the country.

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF JOE REPUBLICAN

Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with water to prepare his morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards. With his first swallow of water, he takes his daily medication. His medications are safe to take because some stupid commie liberal fought to ensure their safety and that they work as advertised.

All but $10 of his medications are paid for by his employer's medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance - now Joe gets it too.

He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs. Joe's bacon is safe to eat because some girly-man liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.

In the morning shower, Joe reaches for his shampoo. His bottle is properly labeled with each ingredient and its amount in the total contents because some crybaby liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained.

Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some environmentalist wacko liberal fought for the laws to stop industries from polluting our air.

He walks on the government-provided sidewalk to subway station for his government-subsidized ride to work. It saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees because some fancy-pants liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.

Joe begins his work day. He has a good job with excellent pay, medical benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some lazy liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Joe's employer pays these standards because Joe's employer doesn't want his employees to call the union.

If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed, he'll get a worker compensation or unemployment check because some stupid liberal didn't think he should lose his home because of his temporary misfortune.

It is noontime and Joe needs to make a bank deposit so he can pay some bills. Joe's deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because some godless liberal wanted to protect Joe's money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the Great Depression.

Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae-underwritten mortgage and his below-market federal student loan because some elitist liberal decided that Joe and the government would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his lifetime. Joe also forgets that in addition to his federally subsidized student loans, he attended a state funded university.

Joe is home from work. He plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive. His car is among the safest in the world because some America-hating liberal fought for car safety standards to go along with the tax-payer funded roads.

He arrives at his boyhood home. His was the third generation to live in the house financed by Farmers' Home Administration because bankers didn't want to make rural loans.

The house didn't have electricity until some big-government liberal stuck his nose where it didn't belong and demanded rural electrification.

He is happy to see his father, who is now retired. His father lives on Social Security and a union pension because some wine-drinking, cheese-eating liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn't have to.

Joe gets back in his car for the ride home, and turns on a radio talk show. The radio host keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. He doesn't mention that the beloved Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Joe enjoys throughout his day. Joe agrees: "We don't need those big-government liberals ruining our lives! After all, I'm a self-made man who believes everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have."

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, September 21, 2004

KFAR Shut Down by the FBI

Knoxville First Amendment Radio (KFAR 90.9 FM) has been highly critical of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) over the course of the station’s 3-year history, challenging TVA’s nuclear power program and its burning of coal mined in Mountain Top Removal operations. KFAR is the only voice on the Knoxville airwaves that has consistently spoken out on important issues like the war in Iraq and nuclear weapons production in Oak Ridge. KFAR broadcasts over 15 independent news programs each week which are not available through any other source in Knoxville, and it is the only local radio station owned and operated by regular citizens.

At roughly 10:00 am on Wednesday, September 15, three federal agents from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Atlanta offices, accompanied by three US Marshals, broke into the KFAR radio station in South Knoxville and confiscated all of its equipment, knocking Knoxville's community voice off the air. According to the affidavit of FCC agent Eric Rice, the FCC was acting on complaints from FBI Special Agent Joe Clark and from David Icove, an employee of the TVA police, also on special assignment with the FBI.

KFAR broadcasts at 100 watts, about the same amount of power as what’s in the average light bulb. KFAR’s equipment exceeds all FCC requirements and does not interfere with the signal of any other radio station. Yet KFAR was shut down by the coordinated efforts of at least three federal agencies: the FCC, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and TVA, with the help of US Marshals. Each of these agencies has dedicated substantial staff time and money to shutting down a station with less power than a light bulb.

...Supporters of KFAR are organizing demonstrations, petition drives, benefits and other events to defend their radio station. Dates and information about these events are available at www.kfar.org.

Knoxville First Amendment Radio KFAR 90.9FM. has been raided and equipment confiscated only 3o minutes after the premier of a scheduled weekly 'The Axis of Good' broadcast that discusses the Venezuelan democratization process and its relevance at the Latin American and International levels.

Bolivarian Circles International member Jesus Rivas had introduced his program saying that "many progressive and liberal minded people ask about the (Venezuelan) process ... reliable information on topics or interest regarding the process is difficult to obtain in the United States of America ... especially in English ... so the radio show in English aimed to discuss all types of alternates with Venezuelan music."

Jesus Rivas' show, which admittedly has a modest audience, is exactly the kind of grassroots communication that the current US Bush 2 administration does not want between the citizens of the US and Venezuela. But, in a curious pretext, US FCC authorities acted precipitously on a spurious claim that KFAR 90.9FM was interfering with other frequencies and alleged that the radio station was broadcasting a higher wattage than permitted.

Radio KFAR has denied the accusation and instead draws attention to the fact that the raiding order was signed by an FBI operative known to broadcast personnel and it is possible that the FBI was monitoring KFAR's broadcast when they decided to take prevent transmission.

That clown in the White House you think is such a straight-talking good old boy you'd like to have a beer with is selling you and your grandchildren down the river.

His latest tax breaks and economic policies will cost $3.6 trillion. Which will of course further increase the record deficits, a plan which is of course designed to cut off the oxygen of Medicare and Social Security. Better get your kids in medical school or basketball camp or the movie business right away so they can afford to support you in your old age.

But what's worse is that his REAL pals are making out like bandits. Under "everyman" Bush's regime, most of his Fortune 500 homies pay little or no taxes, and some even paid negative taxes, i.e. Bush gave them some of your money.

So, yeah, go have a beer with Dubya. Expect to pick up the tab, though.

Amid growing concern that Israel might launch a pre-emptive strike against Iran's budding nuclear program, the United States is moving ahead with the transfer to Israel of 5,000 heavy, precision-guided bombs, including 500 "earth-penetrating" 2,000-pound bombs designed for use against underground facilities.

The $319 million arms transfer, proposed by the Bush administration June 1, went ahead after Congress took no action during its 30-day review period, Jose Ibarra, a spokesman for the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, said Wednesday. The deal is being financed from this year's $2.16 billion military assistance grant to Israel.

The transfer also includes 2,500 2,000-pound Mark-84 bombs, 500 1,000-pound Mark-83 bombs, 1,500 500-pound Mark-82 bombs and live fuses. All the bombs are being fitted with the Joint Direct Air Munitions (JDAM) kit which uses inertial guidance and beacons from U.S. military Global Positioning Satellites for deadly accuracy.

"That's an arsenal for war," said Joseph Cirincione, senior associate for non-proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

... Jay Greer, an official at the State Department's political-military bureau, which oversees arms sales and transfers, said giving the weapons to Israel "will in our view enhance U.S. national security and foreign policy interests and help maintain Israel's qualitative military edge in the region."

Asked whether the transfer makes sense amid the growing confrontation over Iran's nuclear program, Greer said, "I can't talk about that."

The Defense Department has until Oct. 4 to explain why 60 detainees held at Gitmo for nearly three years without being charged should not be released, a federal judge ordered yesterday.

A Saudi national held for nearly three years at Guantanamo Bay as an "enemy combatant," but who was never charged with a crime, will be flown home by this weekend. The Justice Department refused to discuss the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi except to say he was being released because "he no longer poses a threat," according to The Washington Post.

Espionage charges against Syrian-born U.S. airman Ahmad Halabi were dropped yesterday in exchange for his guilty plea on four lesser charges, The Washington Post reports. The is the third time in recent months the government has withdrawn "security-related" charges against a serviceman stationed at Guantanamo Bay, according to the Post.

The Justice Department won't acknowledge whether federal rules demanding airline passengers show identification before flying even exist, according to court documents filed with a federal appeals court Monday. The Bush administration told the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that air-travel security initiatives are a matter of national security and therefore should not be available for public inspection. The Justice Department documents were lodged in response to a lawsuit brought by Oakland, Calif., resident John Gilmore, who sued the government and airlines. Gilmore, a Libertarian who made millions as a founding employee of Sun Microsystems, wants to see the law that he says violates his rights to assemble freely. The government had requested that it file its case under seal, but on Sept. 10 the court ordered it open for public inspection.

The Navy said today it has filed assault and other criminal charges against three more of its elite SEAL commandos in connection with probes of prisoner abuse in Iraq, The Associated Press reported. The three, whose names were not released, are in addition to four SEALs charged Sept. 2 with assault and other alleged offenses in connection with the death of a prisoner last November. At the time of the reported abuse, all seven were members of SEAL Team-7, a counterterrorist group that sometimes operated in Iraq with CIA officers. It is based at Coronado, Calif., and reports to the Naval Special Warfare Command in San Diego.

US warplanes, tanks and artillery units struck the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah [Saturday], killing at least eight people and wounding 15...

CAT Stevens was deported from the United States because of a spelling error, with American officials confusing the former pop star with a man with a similar name on a "no-fly" list, Time magazine reported today.

...Time, in its online edition, quoted aviation sources with access to the "no-fly" list as saying there was no entry on the list under the name Yusuf Islam, but there was a Youssouf Islam listed.

Because Islam's name was spelled Yusuf on his passport, said the sources, he was allowed to board a plane in London bound for the United States.

Worsening security, legal complexities and the lack of an Iraqi lawyer willing to represent Saddam Hussein make it impossible for the ousted dictator and 11 others to stand trial any time soon, a U.S. official involved with the tribunal said Friday.

While refusing to provide a possible date for the trials, the official all but dismissed a recent statement by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi that they could start as early as October.

The official, briefing foreign reporters on condition of anonymity, did not rule out the possibility the trials may not begin for another year - or more.

"The likelihood of trials in the near future is remote," the official said.

It was the second time this week that U.S. and Iraqi officials differed over legal issues.

Leaders of a south-east Afghanistan tribe have told its members they must vote for Hamid Karzai in presidential polls or their houses will be burned.

The decision, which was made by 300 elders of the Terezay tribe, was broadcast by radio in Khost province.

...A tribal leader, Mubarak Shah, told the BBC that if tribal members did not vote their houses would be burned and they would not be allowed to attend local weddings and funerals.

...Militants from the Taleban, who are active in the same area, have repeatedly threatened to kill people who do vote in next month's election.

A Karzai spokesman refused to condemn the announcement.

However, he did urge Afghans not to turn to violence during the campaign.

Although the storm compromised AHNC facilities -– shingles torn from roof, backyard fence flattened, loss of all utilities -– the staff considered themselves lucky because of the widespread devastation all around.

In other words, Casa Casey is built like a brick outhouse. It has survived Erin, Opal, Ivan and lesser storms.

Much of the rest of the Redneck Riviera from Mobile, Ala., to Panama City, Fla., now resembles the domestic economic accomplishments and foreign policy of the Bush administration. But things will get better; the President keeps saying so.

Dubya came through the area Sunday, and some of the local right-wing faithful described it like the Second Coming.

Many other area residents, however, would have preferred to see another Salvation Army food and comfort station established or an additional load of generators arriving. Actually, a few would have preferred a dose of food poisoning to the glad-handing and “God bless yous” offered by the Commander in Chief.

The economy of northwest Florida is shattered....But let’s look at the bright side...On the mainland, roofs will be replaced and the construction of new subdivisions will continue unabated, even though road infrastructure already lacked to support the population growth of the past decade.

The poverty rate and the quality of public education in places like Pensacola and Mobile will continue to be ranked among the worst in their respective states, let alone the nation.

And local politics will continue to be dominated by born-again Republicans who espouse God, guns and lower taxes while their communities decline.

There was a very turbulent period in the 80s in Central America. It was a time when Reagan was doing his best to combat outbreaks of communism in the region, mostly by trashing the rule of law in the US and by arming the countries and people we are now fighting in the Middle East. (The enemy of my enemy is my friend until I am forced to blow his brains out.) Jimmy Carter, before Reagan, was no great hero in any of this either.

Anyway, for some of us older ladies and laddies, the phrase "liberation theology" may still be kicking around in our age-addled brains. The Holy See in Rome was none too pleased with liberation theology, as I recall, because it upset the delicate balance between being a strong leader of the Roman Catholic Church and pushing your nose up various world leaders' butts. Liberation theology is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary (my favorite dictionary, by the way--yes, some of us have favorite dictionaries) as: "A school of theology, especially prevalent in the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America, that finds in the Gospel a call to free people from political, social, and material oppression."

Archbishop Oscar Romero practiced liberation theology. You should read his sermons to see where this tough, gentle, decent man was coming from. As I said, he was not popular with the home boys in Rome. To quote one article about the archbishop, "There was a storm of accusations and attacks from certain prelates against the archbishop. Among other things he was accused in May 1979, in a document signed by several bishops and sent to Rome, of inciting 'the class struggle and revolution' by his pastoral activities." His little church was considered a threat to the El Salvadoran government and he was assassinated in 1980.

...This was also a period when the expression "desaparecido" became widely known. The expression refers to people who "disappear", never to be seen or heard from again. In other words, they were murdered, and usually after being tortured. It was the time when death squads roamed Central America, torturing and killing enemies of whichever dictator they happened to serve.

Which brings us full circle and back to current events. There was a US Ambassador to Honduras who has often been accused of having helped set up the Honduran Death Squads and supporting the Nicaraguan death squads. He is currently George Bush's US Ambassador to Iraq. His name is John Negroponte.

The administration and most of the mainstream press are billing the tax package passed by Congress yesterday as a "middle class tax-cut." The reality is that the new law is more of the same: tax cuts that benefit the rich and, in many cases, exclude the neediest families.

An analysis from the Urban Institute-Brookings Tax Policy Center shows that the middle 20 percent of earners "will receive an average tax cut of $162 in 2005 from this legislation." The top fifth of earners, however, "will get an average tax cut of $1,317." As a result, the top fifth will receive two-thirds of all benefits.

The bill excluded a provision that would have extended the child tax credit to four million low-income families who currently don't qualify.[5] Extending eligibility to these families would have cost $4 billion. Meanwhile, conservatives included $12 billion in tax cuts for corporations.

The Sept. 11 attacks were given the code name "Operation Holy Tuesday" and precisely planned at an al Qaeda meeting in Malaysia chaired by terror mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in January 2000...

The purpose of the three-day secret terror conference, which was monitored by the Malaysian secret police at the CIA's request, was to discuss details of how the hijackers should train and hide in the United States and how the attacks should be carried out.

...Mohammed was in charge of the Malaysia meeting and told some of the other terrorists there the targets would include the World Trade Center and the date of the attacks would be Sept. 11, 2001...

This is why "Executive Orders" are so prevalent now. The Executive Branch has control -- via Executive Orders -- over just about all the U.S. Government departments and branches, some of which were created by executive order. That's not to mention all the "special committees" shown itemized in the big box at the bottom.

As a 1998 insightmag.com article discusses, sure, Congress holds the purse strings and can fund or defund any of these branches underneath the Executive. But an Executive Order can overrule Congress, and if Congress tries to overrule the Executive Order, the President can veto, which would require a two-thirds vote in Congress to override.

The authors of the U.S. Constitution did in fact envision a strong, singular Executive, but the income tax enacted to pay for World War I has subsequently blown up the federal government to the point where now the President directs a legion of millions of federal employees and contractors. This upsets the balance of power envisioned by the Constitution framers, where the Judicial and Legislative branches (now meager in comparison to the Executive) were supposed to have kept the Executive in check.

CBS News said yesterday that it had postponed a "60 Minutes" segment that questioned Bush administration rationales for going to war in Iraq.

...CBS said last night that the report on the war would not run before Nov. 2.

"We now believe it would be inappropriate to air the report so close to the presidential election," the spokeswoman, Kelli Edwards, said in a statement.

...According to the Newsweek report, the "60 Minutes" segment was to have detailed how the administration relied on false documents when it said Iraq had tried to buy a lightly processed form of uranium, known as yellowcake, from Niger. The administration later acknowledged that the information was incorrect and that the documents were most likely fake.

...The CBS statement followed a report in the online edition of Newsweek that described the frustration of CBS News reporters and producers who said the network had concluded that it could not legitimately criticize the president because of the questions about the National Guard report.

Jeanne follows hurricanes Charley and Frances, which battered the Florida peninsula, and Ivan, which pounded the Florida Panhandle, though its eye made landfall on the Alabama coast.

Those earlier storms have compounded the possible problems from Jeanne because the ground is already saturated and many structures have been weakened by wind, rain and storm surge, said Ben Nelson, a state meteorologist.

...Jeanne has taken a curious and sometimes devastating path since developing in the Caribbean east of Puerto Rico on September 13.

After striking Puerto Rico as a tropical storm, Jeanne became a hurricane for the first time September 16, as it approached the Dominican Republic.

As it moved over the island of Hispanola, which contains the Domincian Republic and Haiti, the storm weakened to a tropical depression. Then it stalled and strengthened between Haiti and the Bahamas, triggering flooding in Haiti that killed more than 1,200 people.

Jeanne started moving again, crossing the southeastern Bahamas and heading north into the Atlantic, and the storm looked like it would fade away. But the storm made an unexpected clockwise loop, became a hurricane again on Monday and began a slow march west toward Florida.

The latest proposed legislation -- "Tools to Fight Terrorism Act of 2004" (S. 2679) -- would increase the government’s powers to secretly obtain personal records without judicial review and limit judicial discretion over the use of secret evidence in criminal cases. It would also eliminate important foreign intelligence wiretapping safeguards and allow the use of secret intelligence wiretaps in immigration cases without notice or an opportunity to suppress illegally acquired evidence.

The legislation would also grant the Department of Justice expanded administrative subpoena power -- the authority to seize records and compel testimony in terrorism cases without prior review by a court or grand jury. This would erode already diminished judicial oversight, and would allow access to confidential records without individual suspicion of wrongdoing.

Furthermore, this legislation would expand the use of the death penalty -- a step that would hurt efforts to coordinate anti-terrorism activities and extraditions with those countries that oppose capital punishment.

Let's open this up: send your ideas for a single debate question to ask Bush that you think would devastate him or his campaign. The best will be posted next week. Send to rudepundit@yahoo.com.

The Rude Pundit

Amid escalating violence in Iraq and a reported withdrawal of the New Zealand contingent, the top US commander has signalled a striking reversal of policy and acknowledged more US troops are needed in Iraq.

American legal investigators have discovered evidence of abuse, torture and rape throughout the US-run prison system in Iraq. A Michigan legal team meeting with former detainees in Baghdad during an August fact-finding mission gathered evidence supporting claims of prisoner abuse at some 25 US-run detention centers, most of them so far not publicly mentioned as being embroiled in the Iraq torture scandal.

"That list was something that we came back with -- we only knew of three prisons going there," investigator Mohammed Alomari told The NewStandard, referring to the few detention centers in Iraq where concerns over treatment of prisoners have already been raised publicly.

...Some of the plaintiffs allege US captors committed severe abuses against them as recently as this summer, challenging the widely-held assumption that the military has put an end to the violations.

US artillery and aircraft pounded sectors of the Iraqi rebel city of Fallujah, sending up clouds of smoke, residents said.

The smoke shrouded the southeastern industrial zone, which houses mainly metal and mechanical workshops, as residents charged that US forces had lobbed artillery into the area.

Within minutes, the artillery fire was followed by an air strike on the Shuhada district in southern Fallujah.

Condoms are ineffective in the fight against AIDS. Abortion increases the risk of breast cancer. An emergency contraceptive, recommended as safe and effective by two independent scientific advisory panels, is not approved for over- the-counter status in the United States.

These are just a few of the positions the current US administration has taken, in each case ignoring scientific evidence to the contrary. It arrived at these conclusions by either disbanding scientific advisory committees or packing them with candidates selected for political, rather than scientific, reasons. It has restricted federal scientists’ ability to talk freely with the media and with their colleagues. Most recently, it announced that the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would determine which federal researchers can participate in scientific panels of the World Health Organization (WHO).

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is burning up money and ammunition so fast in Iraq that it has prematurely had to dip into a $25 billion emergency fund: "If the additional money were not available this month, armed services either would have to cut other programs to shift money to the war or face the prospect of new troops going to battle without sufficient body armor, armored Humvees and other protective gear." The war is costing about $1 billion a week.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf on Thursday ruled out sending troops to help restore stability in Iraq, rebuffing pleas from the Iraqi interim government and the United States.

"As far as Pakistan is concerned, our domestic environment is not conducive. It continues to be not conducive. We cannot be seen as an extension of the present forces there," Musharraf said.

On Iran, which Washington accuses of developing nuclear weapons, Musharraf said: "Whatever Iran is doing is in its own affair."

He added: "Iran needs to deliberate over whatever their internal situation on the nuclear front is, and take their own actions."

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Thursday raised the possibility that some areas of Iraq might be excluded from elections scheduled for January if security could not be guaranteed.

"If there were to be an area where the extremists focused during the election period, and an election was not possible in that area at that time, so be it. You have the rest of the election and you go on. Life's not perfect," Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee

Both Bush and Allawi affirmed on Thursday that elections would be held as promised. Donald Rumsfeld, whose uncontrollable mouth is sometimes useful insofar as he lets the truth slip, said that elections might not be possible in all the provinces. Allawi minimized the violence, saying that it was confined to 3 of Iraq's 18 provinces. This assertion is simply untrue, and is anyway misleading because Baghdad is one of the three Allawi had in mind! Could an election that excluded the capital, with at least 5 million inhabitants, be considered valid?

I made the present security-challenged provinces red, and those that saw recent heavy fighting purple. I ask you if this looks like the problems are in "3 of 18 provinces," or whether it looks to you like elections held only in the white areas (as Donald Rumsfeld seems to envision) would produce a legitimate government:

The Allawi/ Rumsfeld logic, moreover, presumes that the guerrilla resistance is only able to disrupt the elections in the Sunni Arab provinces. But they have repeatedly demonstrated an ability to strike all over the country. If a long line of prospective voters were standing in Nasiriyah in the south, do you seriously think the guerrillas couldn't manage to direct some rocket-propelled grenade fire at them? Set off a car bomb?

The real reason for the current plan to raze Fallujah in November or December is the hope that doing so will dramatically reduce the operational capability of the guerrillas.

Relying on Free Republic losers to "fact-check" the media is like relying on the proverbial roomful of typing monkeys, except with somewhat more feral howling and feces-flinging.

[UPDATE: Re: the laws of logic failing all around us, I think that drastic action is required. I feel like our ancestors must have felt when, suddenly, in the middle of the day, the Sun appeared to be consumed by a black disc, plunging the world into darkness. Is this the end? they wondered. Has the universe come off its clockwork, and is it now hurtling madly to apocolypse and entropy? Well, is it? I don't know the answer, and neither did they, but they sure knew the solution - BLOOD SACRIFICE. I'm not saying this will necessarily work, but it's worth a try, at least. Tomorrow, in the mystick silvered light of autumn's gloaming, at the central plaza at The Mall of America, we will slaughter Dan Rather.]

I saw your website . You are a sad sack of shit. Bush is going to win.

Bill07407@aol.com

Over the last year the number of insurgents in Iraq has quadrupled. Attacks on U.S. troops are up 100% since last winter. Major Iraqi cities such as Fullujah have become havens for insurgents and are completely inaccessible to U.S. troops. Security situations have stalled reconstruction - Iraq still has less electricity than they did before the war. Even some Bush administration officials have acknowledged that elections planned for January may have to be delayed.

The U.S. military said they launched an operation overnight aiming to ''disband and disarm'' militia loyal to the rebel Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and open way for reconstruction projects in the city.

The Thursday attacks followed a day of fierce clashes between American troops and fighters loyal to al-Sadr.

U.S. warplanes and helicopters roared overhead and residents said loud explosions could be heard for hours. Militia fighters returned fire with machine guns, they said.

An American Bradley fighting vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and caught fire, according to a U.S. military report.

...Iraqi doctors said one person was killed and 12 were injured, many of them children.

The Senate has voted overwhelmingly to confirm the nomination of Representative Porter Goss, a Florida Republican, as director of central intelligence.

A HOAX bomb found in the hold of a Virgin Blue Boeing 737 and mistakenly taken into a Sydney Airport terminal on Monday, was placed on the airline after it landed.

Authorities investigating who planted the "bomb", a toilet roll with a fireworks sparkler attached, also believe the incident was a stunt.

Transport Minister John Anderson said yesterday he could not rule out a member of a union being responsible.

"At the very least you'd have to say this is not an action by a terrorist," he told Sydney radio station 2UE. "It was plainly designed to look like a bomb.

A U.S. Homeland Security official Brian Doyle would only say Mr. Islam is on the lists because of "activities that could be potentially linked to terrorism."

Yusuf Islam was on his way to US for the release of a DVD of the 1976 Majikat Tour, his last American concert tour before his conversion to Islam. He was also going to appear at the opening of the US branch of his Small Kindness charity.

Peace Train and Angel of War are now available on a pay-per-download basis through Liquid Audio. Proceeds from the downloads will help provide emergency aid for children in Iraq.

Download Peace Train & Angel of War.

You can download the songs from the Liquid.com web site in either Windows Media or Liquid Audio format... Here.

Site visitors and fans alike will no doubt have heard about today's news that Yusuf Islam has been refused entry into the US. As yet we have no specific information from the US immigration authorities as to why he was not allowed to enter the country. What we can say, however, is that he will be shocked and angered at being associated with anyone who commits acts of violence. He has vehemently and consistently criticized terrorist acts and has always advocated peace through his songs and his extensive humanitarian relief work. He has travelled many times to the US, most recently two months ago on a visit with his record company. Any suggestion therefore that he poses a security risk due to alleged connections with terrorist activities is totally denied as it is simply wrong. We are seeking further details so that we can challenge the decision to refuse him entry. When we have more information we will be able to comment further. We feel certain that this matter will be resolved soon.

What would America look like if it were in Iraq's current situation? The population of the US is over 11 times that of Iraq, so a lot of statistics would have to be multiplied by that number.

Thus, violence killed 300 Iraqis last week, the equivalent proportionately of 3,300 Americans. What if 3,300 Americans had died in car bombings, grenade and rocket attacks, machine gun spray, and aerial bombardment in the last week? That is a number greater than the deaths on September 11, and if America were Iraq, it would be an ongoing, weekly or monthly toll.

And what if those deaths occurred all over the country, including in the capital of Washington, DC, but mainly above the Mason Dixon line, in Boston, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco?

What if the grounds of the White House and the government buildings near the Mall were constantly taking mortar fire? What if almost nobody in the State Department at Foggy Bottom, the White House, or the Pentagon dared venture out of their buildings, and considered it dangerous to go over to Crystal City or Alexandria?

What if all the reporters for all the major television and print media were trapped in five-star hotels in Washington, DC and New York, unable to move more than a few blocks safely, and dependent on stringers to know what was happening in Oklahoma City and St. Louis? What if the only time they ventured into the Midwest was if they could be embedded in Army or National Guard units?

...What if the Air Force routinely (I mean daily or weekly) bombed Billings, Montana, Flint, Michigan, Watts in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Anacostia in Washington, DC, and other urban areas, attempting to target "safe houses" of "criminal gangs", but inevitably killing a lot of children and little old ladies?

What if, from time to time, the US Army besieged Virginia Beach, killing hundreds of armed members of the Christian Soldiers? What if entire platoons of the Christian Soldiers militia holed up in Arlington National Cemetery, and were bombarded by US Air Force warplanes daily, destroying thousands of graves and even pulverizing the Vietnam Memorial over on the Mall? What if the National Council of Churches had to call for a popular march of thousands of believers to converge on the National Cathedral to stop the US Army from demolishing it to get at a rogue band of the Timothy McVeigh Memorial Brigades?

What if there were virtually no commercial air traffic in the country? What if many roads were highly dangerous, especially Interstate 95 from Richmond to Washington, DC, and I-95 and I-91 up to Boston? If you got on I-95 anywhere along that over 500-mile stretch, you would risk being carjacked, kidnapped, or having your car sprayed with machine gun fire.

Iraqi officials in charge of rebuilding their country's shattered and decrepit infrastructure are warning that the Bush administration's plan to divert $3.46 billion from water, sewage, electricity and other reconstruction projects to security could leave many people without the crucial services that generally form the backbone of a stable and functioning democracy.

Under the plan, which was proposed last week and would require approval by Congress, the money would pay for training and equipping tens of thousands of additional police officers, border patrol agents and Iraqi national guardsmen in an attempt to restore order to a land where lawlessness and violence have replaced Saddam Hussein's repression since the American-led invasion last year.

...But the move comes as a grievous disappointment to Iraqi officials who had already seen the billions once promised them tied up for months by American regulations and planning committees, consumed by administrative overhead and set aside for the enormous costs of ensuring safety for the workers and engineers who will actually build the new sewers, water plants and electrical generators. Of the $18.4 billion that Congress approved last fall for Iraq's reconstruction, only about $1 billion has been spent so far.

...The decision to shift the money, which had been earmarked for rebuilding everything from roads and bridges to telecommunications and the outdated equipment pumping oil, appears to signal an abandonment of the administration's original plan for putting Iraq back on its feet as a functioning nation.

President Bush's push to create individual investment accounts in the Social Security system would hand financial services firms a windfall totaling $940 billion over 75 years, according to a University of Chicago study to be released today.

Bush has expressed strong support for allowing workers to divert some of their Social Security taxes to accounts that could be invested in stocks and bonds. But he has never embraced a specific proposal to revamp Social Security, even after his own Social Security Commission presented him with three reform options.

Sen. John F. Kerry plans to use the paper, by economist Austan Goolsbee, as he campaigns in Florida today, hoping to open a new line of attack against Bush. The Democratic presidential nominee is expected to say that Bush's Social Security plan is a sop to Wall Street donors, who are among the Bush campaign's biggest financial backers.

It appears that the NRC [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] has given a contract to Wackenhut Corporation to supply teams to try to infilitrate our nuclear power plants in an effort to determine how well we our prepared against a potential terrorist attack. The problem? Wackenhut also provides the private police forces that guard almost half of our nuclear power plants. Wanna bet that attacks on the 30 plants that Wackenhut protects are all thwarted?

You don't even have to predict. We already know that Wackenhut has cheated on the test. The DOE inspector general did an independent investigation of the "force on force" exercises and found that the results were "tainted and unreliable."

Three men with close ties to U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay were indicted on Tuesday along with eight companies for illegal fund-raising activities in a political action committee formed by the powerful Texan.

Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle told reporters the investigation, not yet finished, had uncovered ominous behavior by the group.

"What has emerged is the outline of an effort to use corporate contributions to control representative democracy in Texas," he said.

DeLay told reporters in his House leadership office the indictments showed the Texas investigation "isn't about me" and said he knew of no wrongdoing. He admitted helping TRMPAC raise money, but said "I wasn't involved in the day-to-day operations."

For the second time in two years, President Bush on Tuesday defended the invasion of Iraq before the U.N. General Assembly and appealed to other countries to join the United States in spreading "freedom" and "human dignity" in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in a pointed rebuke, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned that countries that hoped to instill the rule of law must first abide by it themselves.

...Annan insisted that "every nation that proclaims the rule of law at home must respect it abroad." Although the secretary-general did not name the United States, to the scores of world leaders listening in the vaulted chamber, the target of his comments was obvious.

"Those who seek to bestow legitimacy must themselves embody it," he said, "and those who invoke international law must themselves submit to it."

A highly classified National Intelligence Estimate assembled by some of the government's most senior analysts this summer provided a pessimistic assessment about the future security and stability of Iraq. Contents of the report were recently made public.

On Tuesday, though, Bush said the CIA was "just guessing" when it said in the report that Iraq was in danger of slipping into civil war.

"The CIA laid out several scenarios. It said that life could be lousy, life could be OK, life could be better," the president said during a photo session with Allawi. "And they were just guessing as to what the conditions might be like."

"Top 10 Bush Tax Proposals"

Delivered by John Kerry on David Letterman

10. No estate tax for families with at least two US presidents.

9. W-2 Form is now Dubya-2 Form.

8. Under the simplified tax code, your refund check goes directly to Halliburton.

7. The reduced earned income tax credit is so unfair, it just makes me want to tear out my lustrous, finely groomed hair.

6. Attorney General Ashcroft gets to write off the entire U.S. Constitution.

5. Texas Rangers can take a business loss for trading Sammy Sosa.

4. Eliminate all income taxes; just ask Teresa to cover the whole damn thing.

3. Cheney can claim Bush as a dependent.

2. Hundred-dollar penalty if you pronounce it "nuclear" instead of "nucular."

1. George W. Bush gets a deduction for mortgaging our entire future.

Why did it take so long for the Bush campaign to agree on a debate schedule?

"The big hang-up was George Bush wanted to get life lines, you know, so he could call somebody. " - John Kerry, appearing this morning on "Live With Regis and Kelly."

The hot rumor in New York political circles has Roger Stone, the longtime GOP activist, as the source for Dan Rather's dubious Texas Air National Guard "memos."

The irony would be delicious, since Rather became famous confronting President Nixon, in whose service a very young Stone became associated with political "dirty tricks."

Reached at his Florida home, Stone had no comment.

Only about 60 percent of reservists ordered to report to Fort Jackson have reported so far, Army officials said.

...Most of those who have not reported are seeking exemptions from active duty or delays in reporting, he said.

Those who have not reported or applied for a delay or exemption will be considered deserters if they do not show up within seven days of the date they were told to report for duty, Masters said.

"We are going to go the extra mile to work with people," he said. "But if they don't report, the Army will track them down."

...The Army said 5,600 individual reservists were being recalled to active duty; 4,500 were to report to Fort Jackson.

Keep in mind when reading this, that the man being interviewed is no two-bit internet conspiracy buff.

Stanley Hilton was a senior advisor to Sen Bob Dole (R) and has personally known Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz for decades. This courageous man has risked his professional reputation, and possibly his life, to get this information out to people.

The following is from his latest visit to Alex Jones' radio show.

..."This (9/11) was all planned. This was a government-ordered operation. Bush personally signed the order. He personally authorized the attacks. He is guilty of treason and mass murder." --Stanley Hilton

Alex Jones interview of Stanley Hilton, attorney for 911 taxpayers' lawsuit.

SH: The hijackers we retained and we had a witness who is married to one of them. The hijackers were U.S. undercover agents. They were double agents, paid by the FBI and the CIA to spy on Arab groups in this country. They were controlled. Their landlord was an FBI informant in San Diego and other places.

..We are suing them under the Constitution for violating Americans' rights, as well as under the federal Fraudulent Claims Act, for presenting a fraudulent claim to Congress to justify the bogus Iraq boondoggle war, for political gains. And also, under the RICO statute, under the Racketeering Corrupt Organization Act, for being a corrupt entity. And I've been harassed personally by the chief judge of the federal court who is instructing me personally to drop this suit, threatened to kick me off the court, after 30 years on the court. I've been harassed by the FBI. My staff has been harassed and threatened. My office has been broken into and this is the kind of government we are dealing with.

...Our case is alleging that Bush and his puppets Rice and Cheney and Mueller and Rumsfeld and so forth, Tenet, were all involved not only in aiding and abetting and allowing 9/11 to happen but in actually ordering it to happen. Bush personally ordered it to happen. We have some very incriminating documents as well as eye-witnesses, that Bush personally ordered this event to happen in order to gain political advantage, to pursue a bogus political agenda on behalf of the neocons and their deluded thinking in the Middle East. I also wanted to point out that, just quickly, I went to school with some of these neocons. At the University of Chicago, in the late 60s with Wolfowitz and Feith and several of the others and so I know these people personally. And we used to talk about this stuff all of the time. And I did my senior thesis on this very subject - how to turn the U.S. into a presidential dictatorship by manufacturing a bogus Pearl Harbor event. So, technically this has been in the planning at least 35 years.

AJ: That's right. They were all Straussian followers of a Nazi-like professor. And now they are setting it up here in America. Stanley, I know you deposed a lot of people and you've got your $7 million dollar lawsuit with hundreds of the victim's families involved.

SH: 7 billion, 7 billion

U.S. officials detained singer Cat Stevens on Tuesday and will return him to Great Britain today, because he is now listed on an official terrorist "watch list."

Federal officials say a plane bound for Washington from London was diverted to Maine because passenger Yusuf Islam -- formerly known as pop singer Cat Stevens -- showed up on the U.S. watch list.

The flight had already taken off when the match was made between the passenger and the watch list. That's according to the Transportation Security Administration.

The plane was met by federal agents at Maine's Bangor International Airport, where sources say Islam was questioned by the FBI and Immigration officials.

...Islam is a peace activist who has criticized the war in Iraq.

He has also criticized terrorist acts by Muslims, including the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the deadly school seizure early this month in Beslan, Russia.

...A Homeland Security spokesman says Islam will be put on the first available flight out the country.

Homeland Security Department spokesman Dennis Murphy identified the passenger as Islam. "He was interviewed and denied admission to the United States on national security grounds,'' Murphy said.

CALIFORNIA LOBBYIST'S PESKY PESTICIDE PAST

A former farm lobbyist will become California's top pesticide regulator, despite complaints from environmentalists. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed Mary-Ann Warmerdam, who worked for the California Farm Bureau Federation from 1981 to 2001, to head the state's Department of Pesticide. Warmerdam currently is a lobbyist for Pacific Gas & Electric. The Los Angeles Times reports that in August nine environmental groups wrote Schwarenegger questioning the appointment to top pesticide regulator of someone who worked two decades for "an organization that has a long tradition in California of fighting efforts to protect public health and the environment from pesticide use."

SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, September 20, 2004

THE PROBLEM WITH POLLS

"Something has methodologically gone awry when polls are swinging about this wildly," writes David Price, about presidential campaign polling. "We Americans simply don't answer our phones like we used to." Because of caller ID and cell phones, "those profiled as being most prone to answering phone surveys tend to be: (more) White, (more) older, and (more) male." The Wall Street Journal reports that how likely (as opposed to registered) voters are identified may also skew results. "Those models tend to [tilt to] a little older, a little more white, a little more affluent and a little more Republican voters," said GOP pollster Bill McInturff.

SOURCE: CounterPunch, September 20, 2004

THE ECHO CHAMBER BEHIND THE NEWS BEHIND THE MEMOS

The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth's PR firm, Creative Response Concepts, "used right-wing blogs and news sites to turn a CBS report casting doubt on President George W. Bush's National Guard service into a potential black eye for both the network and the Democrats." CRC client Cybercast News Service "called typographical experts, got them on the record that these papers were fishy, and posted a story"; "immediately" contacted Matt Drudge; and worked with the Media Research Center "to push the story into the mainstream press." The Los Angeles Times reports that the first forgery charge "did not come from an expert in typography," but from "an Atlanta lawyer with strong ties to conservative Republican causes."

SOURCE: PR Week (sub. req'd.), September 17, 2004

IRAQ: HOPING TO SPIN THE INSURGENTS AWAY

"The U.S. government is soliciting proposals for an 'aggressive' and comprehensive PR and advertising push in Iraq to convey military and diplomatic goals to Iraqis and gain their support." The contract will be with the Multi National Corps-Iraq; British PR firm Bell Pottinger did similar work for MNC-I's predecessor, the Coalition Provisional Authority. The campaign will include "outreach to various segments of Iraqi society" and setting up a "Rebuttal Cell," to "immediately and effectively" challenge "reports that unfairly target the Coalition or Coalition interests." The PR plan contrasts with news of a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate that "spells out a dark assessment of prospects for Iraq."

SOURCE: O'Dwyer's PR Daily (sub. req'd.), September 16, 2004

CHANGING THE SUBJECT, FOR FUN AND ELECTORAL PROFIT

George Bush "has succeeded in making more Americans see the war in Iraq as part of the broader war on terrorism," reports the Wall Street Journal. Republican pollster Bill McInturff agrees: "The Bush campaign has worked hard, really hard, for months, to make terrorism and security the issue of the election, and as usual, they've done it with enormous discipline." The plan, says McInturff, is "moving people off of stuff that's disadvantageous to Bush." Kerry could undercut Bush's backing by offering a different approach to Iraq, but, says McInturff, "so far the Kerry answer to that is not compelling."

SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2004

I realize this web page will be addressing two audiences: those of you who read this page before the rapture and those of you who read it after the rapture. My focus here will be on those who have found this page after the rapture of the Church. For anyone reading this material before the pre-trib rapture, I highly recommend that you ponder the negative consequences of being left behind and seriously consider committing your life to Jesus if you have not done so already.

During the next few years, a world leader--whom the Bible calls the Antichrist--will arise. At first, he will seem like the most benevolent leader who has ever held office. However, by the end of the tribulation, he will easily put the likes of Hitler and Stalin to shame. Because the lies of the Antichrist and false prophets will be so pervasive, you will need to assume that everything you read and hear in the mass media is tainted doctrine.

Democratic presidential challenger John Kerry said President Bush has a secret plan to call up more National Guard and Reserve troops immediately after the election, an allegation that the Bush campaign called "false and ridiculous."

Kerry issued the charge while campaigning Friday in Albuquerque, as he criticized the president of glossing over a worsening conflict in Iraq.

"He won't tell us what congressional leaders are now saying, that this administration is planning yet another substantial call-up of reservists and Guard units immediately after the election," Kerry said. "Hide it from people through the election, then make the move."

Rep. John Murtha, D-Penn., ranking member on the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee and a former Marine who served in Vietnam, said he had learned through conversations with Pentagon officials that beginning in November, "the Bush administration plans to call up large numbers of the military Guard and Reserves, to include plans that they previously had put off to call up the Individual Ready Reserve."

A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Chris Rodney said, "There is no force increase that is expected."

The Army is on target to rotate into Iraq the same number of soldiers who will be leaving over the next six months, and all National Guard and Reserve units that are expected to be mobilized for the next rotation have been notified, Rodney said.

Kerry's "conspiracy theory ... is completely irresponsible," Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said. "John Kerry didn't launch this attack when he spoke to the National Guard because he knows they know it is false and ridiculous."

"With all due respect to the president, has he turned on the evening news lately? Does he read the newspapers?" Kerry said. "Does he really know what's happening? Is he talking about the same war that the rest of us are talking about?"