Imagine, if you will, that you are on trial, in the state of Virginia, facing charges of having committed a specific, single act of homicide. And imagine that prosecutors repeatedly call witnesses to the stand to obtain testimony about other murders committed in other states by another perpetrator -- and then they declare you responsible for those crimes.

Imagine also that on the very week that your non-sequestered jury is seated, a movie is aired on cable television that portrays you as the perpetrator of more than a dozen brutal murders in seven states.

And why, you may wonder, has he not been charged with any of the other homicides? For the rather obvious reason that the state has no case. In fact, prosecutors don't even have a case to support the one murder charge that Muhammad is facing. So they have decided to pursue a rather creative legal strategy: they have taken the nearly nonexistent evidence that they have managed to gather/manufacture to support the single murder charge, and they have combined that with dubious bits and pieces of evidence that allegedly link the defendant to a dozen other uncharged murders, and then they have topped the whole thing off with a thick coating of gratuitously graphic, emotionally-charged testimony.
The trial unexpectedly shut down the next day due to a purported power outage that apparently affected only the courthouse.

Muhammad's ex-wife, with whom he has had a stormy relationship marked by bitter custody battles, recently relocated to the DC area to take a job at, of all places, John Ashcroft's Justice Department.

At one point, Moose pleaded with the suspects to call police on the phone number that had supposedly been left behind in a message from the sniper. No one in the media bothered to ask why, if the number was in fact left by the sniper, the police were now imploring the suspect to call them on that number. Did the sniper leave the police their own phone number, just in case they might have forgotten it?

Until last year, John Allen Muhammad was known as John Allen Williams. He changed his name just in time, it appears, for the media to be able to portray him as some sort of Islamic fundamentalist. But just eleven years ago, Williams served in the Gulf War, demonstrating that he apparently had no reservations about participating in a brutal assault upon a predominantly Islamic nation.


oct 02
The American people, promised a quick and painless war, will listen attentively as Washington patiently explains what went wrong:
"Unfortunately, we are facing a situation that, while taken into consideration in the planning of this war, everyone falsely assumed that we would not have to face. We all knew, of course, that Saddam was a monster, but no one really wanted to believe that even a madman like him would sacrifice hundreds of thousands of his own people to protect his troops. But that is exactly what he has chosen to do. And in doing so, he has also put American servicemen in harm's way. But America will not lose its resolve. To the contrary, the manner in which Hussein has chosen to wage this war illustrates just how important it is for America to rid the world of this menace once and for all."
That is approximately the line that will be sold to the American people, and many will find comfort in such words: "It's not our fault that 'enemy' civilians are being slaughtered on a scale not seen since the Vietnam War.

The San Francisco Bay Area was the only region in the state where a majority voted against the recall.
mjr ed - god bless sf

The US government acknowledges that Uzbekistan’s secret police “use torture as a routine investigation technique,” but it still funds the organisation to the tune of $80 million. Uzbekistan has great geo-strategic significance and is seen as an important ally of the US in the so-called war on terror. American aid to Uzbekistan tripled to $500 million last year.

The Times’ characterization of the new US plan as “tossing” power to the Iraqis is part of a disingenuous campaign by the administration and the media to create the illusion that the Bush administration is on the verge of extricating itself from the Iraqi morass by ceding authority to a new provisional government.

Washington is preparing to utilize combined detachments of US troops, newly trained Iraqi paramilitaries and the militias of the collaborationist groups to carry out a killing spree along the lines of the infamous Operation Phoenix in Vietnam. This is the real content of what has been dubbed “Iraqification.”

Nor is there any reason to believe that the UN’s formal assumption of political oversight would dampen nationalist resistance. For most Iraqis, such a transfer would amount to putting lipstick on the pig, providing an international cover for a continuing US occupation.

The problem with US intelligence was not that it was faulty, but that it was falsified.

The newspaper’s foreign affairs columnist, Thomas Friedman, spent the months leading up to the war as well as the seven months since providing every conceivable justification and alibi for the conquest and occupation of Iraq. He has lied with abandon, apparently not noticing that his assertions in one column contradicted those in another. Thus he wrote prior to the invasion that the war was justified by America’s need to control Iraqi oil, and declared in the war’s aftermath that it had nothing to do with oil. He claimed in one of his pre-war screeds that military action was justified by Iraqi development of WMD—which he proposed to uncover through the abduction of Iraqi scientists—and declared in a post-war piece that the failure to find WMD was besides the point, because it was really a “war of choice” to spread democracy.



Powell condemned the British-French-German resolution for not having “trigger mechanisms” for intervention against Iran, a country with 65 million people.

Undersecretary of State for Non-Proliferation and Arms Control John Bolton declared it was “simply impossible to believe” the IAEA’s conclusion that no proof existed of a nuclear weapons program.

Those who aren't completely corrupt can't compete with those who are.

The only sin is losing. In the context of the United States, we can pin down the exact moment when this predation finally completely took over the Republican Party, and thus the whole country. It was on November 22, 2000, exactly three years ago, when the 'Brooks Brothers Riot' - the use of violence by Republican Party operatives under the direction of James Baker to disrupt the vote recount in Florida - formally ended any pretense that politics was a game played by rules, and thus completely changed the United States forever.