The merger of Yukos and Sibneft was to be Khodorkovsky's prize achievement, creating Russia's first truly international oil giant that could compete with Western companies such as ExxonMobil and BP. A merged YukosSibneft would be the world's fourth-largest private oil producer and had attracted interest from ExxonMobil in a possible purchase of part of the Russian company.
Since then, the Russian government's campaign against Khodorkovsky has severely damaged Yukos: About 40 percent of its stock has been frozen by prosecutors, its oil field licenses are under investigation, and it has lost more than a quarter of its market value.

mr ed -along the lines of the kacko/kobe/kurrency/kharles konspiracy spekulation, add Khodorkovsky. first the arrest, and now the merger. and that ugly oil word keeps moling.

ive been wondering for days why the ohio shootings havent been called 'sniper' attacks. 10 shootings or something and noone is using the sniper word! extraordinary. not to mention that there hasnt been any real media about it anyway. the poor sniper is prolly pissed at not getting enuff attention. keeping it quiet seems like a genius move by the media. i dont understand it. perhaps the cia has a fukking monopoly on the word.

even the dc sniper is very suspicious, and the trial a civil rites abomination.

im wondering about why im suffering from hyperclarity. i feel like i can see thru steel. i cant help feeling that it isnt realted to me being isolated. is the brain so cool that it can sharpen skills that easily? plasticity indeed.

" Further suspicions were subsequently raised by the discovery that Mr Badat has worshipped at the Finsbury Park mosque and one in Brixton where Shoebomber and Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 11 September "20th hijacker", were fellow worshippers. "
this is shameless. this poor kid. imagine one day u were living your life, a normal day, la di da, and then u get dragged into this bullshit. all of a sudden u are complicit in 911 and lumped with some idiot who thought a match would be a good idea on a plane. its such a crime. and they say they found 'some' explosives - i bet u it was something dual-purpose. like Draino. and they found 'hundreds of documents'. thats all the media said. "documents" - the reports didnt even bother insinuating that they might be 'terrorist' documents, or 'koran' documents, or fukking canola oil.

this poor man. this poor world.




With American markets shut for Thanksgiving, traders focused on a string of negative news on the dollar. including yesterday's report in The Independent that the leading financiers George Soros and Warren Buffett had taken "short positions".

We must act, even if the threat is nonexistent – because of the potential danger. If "self-defense" consists of necessary "preemption," then what would happen if we started acting on this Bushian principle domestically? After all, killers, robbers, and rapists don't announce their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike. Why not just jail them before they have a chance to commit a crime? This principle, if applied within the U.S., would lead straight to totalitarian rule. Applied abroad, it means perpetual war.

For the President to constantly invoke 9/11 is to focus on the single greatest failing of his adminstration: after all, it happened on his watch. Not a single person has been fired, demoted, or otherwise held responsible for letting 19 terrorists slip through our fingers and deliver a devastating blow from which we are still reeling.

“Attacking Afghanistan would be uncertain. WOLFY worried about 100,000 American troops bogged down in mountain fighting in Afghanistan six months from then. In contrast, Iraq was a brittle, oppressive regime that might break easily. It was doable. He estimated that there was a 10 to 50% chance Saddam was involved in the September 11 terrorist attacks. The US would have to go after Saddam at some time if the war on terrorism was to be taken seriously.”
Thus, a hypothetical 10 percent chance that Saddam was linked to the September 11 hijackers was sufficient to invade and capture all of Iraq.


After the administration committed itself to invading Afghanistan, the Pentagon sent over a two-star general to present a slide show to Bush on options to bring down the Taliban. As Woodward notes, “One slide about potential operations in Afghanistan was labeled ‘Thinking Outside the Box — Poisoning Food Supply.’ The National Security Council staff in charge of putting on the show for Bush “almost gagged” and reminded National Security Council advisor Connie Rice that ‘the US doesn“t know how to do this, and we’re not allowed. It would be a chemical or biological attack, clearly banned by treaties the US had signed.”

Woodward related one of his witticisms from an October 2001 press briefing: “‘We are not running out of targets, Afghanistan is,’ Rumfeld joked a few days into the bombing campaign.”

Bush administration officials relished the adulation the president received after September 11. Bush went to New York City to throw out the first ball of Game 3 of the 2001 World Series and the crowd went wild. Woodward notes, “Watching from owner George Steinbrenner’s box, Karl Rove thought, ‘It’s like being at a Nazi rally.’” Rove later told Woodward how the war on terrorism would be judged by the public: “Everything will be measured by results. The victor is always right. History ascribes to the victor qualities that may or may not actually have been there. And similarly to the defeated.”


And when CIA counterterrorism chief Cofer Black visited Moscow shortly after September 11 to work out arrangements with the Russians for whacking Afghanistan, and a Russian official warned him that, if the United States went into Afghanistan, “You’re really going to get the hell kicked out of you,” Black replied, “We’re going to kill them. We’re going to put their heads on sticks. We’re going to rock their world.”

Woodward tells of a religious prayer meeting on February 5, 2002, attended by 25 men — including three different Special Forces units and CIA paramilitary teams. After a prayer and the invocation of September 11, one of the attendees — speaking for the group — pledged, “We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of our great nation.”

And yet Rumsfeld, in a speech at the Pentagon on the one-month anniversary of September 11, condemned the terrorists:
“The will to power, the urge to dominion over others ... makes the terrorist a believer not in the theology of God, but the theology of self and in the whispered words of temptation: ‘ye shall be as gods.’ In targeting this place, then, and those who worked here, the attackers, the evildoers correctly sensed that the opposite of all they were, and stood for, resided here.”

I've long known that FOX is the most corrupted, in terms of partisanship, being, virtually, a propaganda arm of the far right, conservatism and the Bush administration. But i also see NBC and ABC as leaning more to the right and center. So it's come down to CBS being, while not being anything close to liberal, the most likely network to be fair and balanced, occasionally covering the right's perspective and sometimes the left's.
The point is, it seems, that if they could, FOX would BE the culture police, the arbiters of what would be acceptable, no, what would be ALLOWED.

Corn argues that much of the fault belongs to the mainstream media, which is loath to call any president a liar. (For instance, The New York Times directed its "feisty, liberal columnist" Paul Krugman to not use the word "lie" when addressing Bush's proposals during the campaign.)

Pfiffner has also offered a classification of Presidential lies. There are those that are wrong but understandable, those that are serious breaches of the public trust, and those that, he contends, are most loathsome -- lies of policy deception.

we wouldn't like that.