The source, who was speaking from a location outside Iraq and outside Jordan, said Saddam fled because he feared he had been betrayed by his intelligence chief.

Scott Blacklin, Vice President of Jefferson Waterman International (JWI), has warned Polish business representatives that the political promises made by the Bush administration concerning the reconstruction of Iraq "...cannot be implemented."

Reina wrote that "the roots of [Fox's] day-to-day on-air bias are actual and direct. They come in the form of an executive memo" written by John Moody, the network's vice president for news, and "distributed electronically each morning, addressing what stories will be covered and, often, suggesting how they should be covered. To the newsroom personnel responsible for the channel's daytime programming, The Memo is the bible. If, on any given day, you notice that the Fox anchors seem to be trying to drive a particular point home, you can bet The Memo is behind it. The Memo was born with the Bush administration, early in 2001, and, intentionally or not, has ensured that the administration's point of view consistently comes across on [Fox]....
"For instance, from the March 20th memo: 'There is something utterly incomprehensible about [U.N. Secretary-General] Kofi Annan's remarks in which he allows that his thoughts are 'with the Iraqi people.' One could ask where those thoughts were during the 23 years Saddam Hussein was brutalizing those same Iraqis. Food for thought.' Can there be any doubt that the memo was offering not only 'food for thought,' but a direction for the FNC writers and anchors to go? Especially after describing the U.N. Secretary General's remarks as 'utterly incomprehensible'?....

"One day this past spring, just after the U.S. invaded Iraq, The Memo warned us that anti-war protesters would be 'whining' about U.S. bombs killing Iraqi civilians and suggested they could tell that to the families of American soldiers dying there. Editing copy that morning, I was not surprised when an eager young producer killed a correspondent's report on the day's fighting — simply because it included a brief shot of children in an Iraqi hospital....

Av Westin, a longtime ABC news executive who is now executive director of the National Television Academy, examined Reina's letter and said: "Nothing about this surprises me. The uniform smirks and body language that are apparent in Fox's reports throughout the day reflect an operation that is quite tightly controlled. The fact that young and inexperienced producers acquiesce to that control by pulling stories is further evidence that nonjournalistic forces are at work in that newsroom.

"Time after time I watched what management's politics did to the young anchors. As they near the time to get their own show, the hair gets blonder and the bias gets clearer."

But at Fox, if my boss wasn't warning me to "be careful" how I handled the writing of a special about Ronald Reagan ("You know how Roger [Fox News Chairman Ailes] feels about him."), he was telling me how the environmental special I was to produce should lean ("You can give both sides, but make sure the pro-environmentalists don't get the last word.")

Sometimes, this eagerness to serve Fox's ideological interests goes even beyond what management expects. For example, in June of last year, when a California judge ruled the Pledge of Allegiance's "Under God" wording unconstitutional, FNC's newsroom chief ordered the judge's mailing address and phone number put on the screen.

``The potential conflict of interest is readily apparent when a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence receives $100,000 in a real or sham business deal with a foreign agent or a person with extensive foreign contracts at the same time the Senate is investigating possible lapses in national security,'' said Kent Cooper, the former head of government's public disclosure office for federal candidates.


MOSCOW, Nov 7 (AFP) - Men clad in camouflage shut down the Moscow offices of the Soros Foundation early Friday just days after US billionaire financier George Soros publicly criticized the jailing of Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

The U.S. airlines suffered severe losses following the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington D.C., compounding the effects of an already weak economy. American Airlines, which ranks number one among all airlines using U.S. airports to transit between foreign countries, lost about $5.3 billion during the past two years, and more than $1.04 billion in the first quarter of 2003 alone. In the second quarter, its losses were reduced to $75 million, but that included a cash payment
from the U.S. government (that is to say, from the taxpayers) of $358 million as a federal subsidy.


More than a scary close-up look at the raw mechanics of a power grab, the film is also a cautionary examination of the use of television to deceive and manipulate the public. The attempt to seize control never would have gotten off the ground without the fervent support of Venezuela's five private television stations, all politically aligned with oil interests that had hounded Mr. Chávez from the moment he took office. The only television station sympathetic to Mr. Chávez was the state-run channel, whose signal was immediately cut by the new government.


The independent commission said it was ``especially dismayed'' by incomplete document production on the part of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, the part of the Defense Department responsible for protecting North American airspace.

If every last soldier pulled out of the Gulf tomorrow and a sovereign government came to power, Iraq would still be occupied: by laws written in the interest of another country; by foreign corporations controlling its essential services; by 70% unemployment sparked by public sector layoffs.
Any movement serious about Iraqi self-determination must call not only for an end to Iraq's military occupation, but to its economic colonisation as well.
How can such an ambitious goal be achieved? Easy: by showing that Bremer's reforms were illegal to begin with. They clearly violate the international convention governing the behaviour of occupying forces, the Hague regulations of 1907 (the companion to the 1949 Geneva conventions, both ratified by the United States), as well as the US army's own code of war.

On September 19, Bremer enacted the now infamous Order 39. It announced that 200 Iraqi state companies would be privatised; decreed that foreign firms can retain 100% ownership of Iraqi banks, mines and factories; and allowed these firms to move 100% of their profits out of Iraq. The Economist declared the new rules a "capitalist dream".

In case the CPA was still unclear on this detail, the US army's Law of Land Warfare states that "the occupant does not have the right of sale or unqualified use of [non-military] property". This is pretty straightforward: bombing something does not give you the right to sell it. There is every indication that the CPA is well aware of the lawlessness of its privatisation scheme. In a leaked memo written on March 26, the British attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, warned Tony Blair that "the imposition of major structural economic reforms would not be authorised by international law".

According to a growing number of international legal experts, that means that if the next Iraqi government decides it doesn't want to be a wholly owned subsidiary of Bechtel and Halliburton, it will have powerful legal grounds to renationalise assets that were privatised under CPA edicts.

The only way out for the administration is to make sure that Iraq's next government is anything but sovereign. It must be pliant enough to ratify the CPA's illegal laws, which will then be celebrated as the happy marriage of free markets and free people. Once that happens, it will be too late: the contracts will be locked in, the deals done and the occupation of Iraq permanent.

Which is why anti-war forces must use this fast-closing window to demand that the next Iraqi government be free from the shackles of these reforms. It's too late to stop the war, but it's not too late to deny Iraq's invaders the myriad economic prizes they went to war to collect in the first place.

But Bush let Rumsfeld have his way, at least initially. Last month, in a slap at Rumsfeld, Bush tapped trusted National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to coordinate postwar operations in Iraq. Don't expect her to dictate to Rumsfeld. He is a pro at infighting and isn't about to be Bush's whipping boy.


And then there's that intriguing Bush demand for a revolution in undemocratic Iran. Sure, Iran is a theocratic state (a necrocracy, I suspect), but the morally impressive President Mohamed Khatami, repeatedly thwarted by the dictatorial old divines, was democratically elected - and by a far more convincing majority than President George Bush Jr in the last US presidential elections.

Yet most people get their news from major network and cable television stations that are less likely to scrutinize events involving the Fortune 500 companies that pay for expensive TV ads, speakers said.

The script put words into the mouth of Reagan - like these about Aids sufferers: "They that live in sin shall die in sin" (what he actually said was: "Maybe the Lord brought down this plague", because "illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments"). Gillespie called on CBS to pull the series or flash a warning on screen every 10 minutes that it was make-believe. CBS promptly crumpled, pulling the show from the network schedule. Leslie Moonves, the CBS president, abased himself with abject apologies.

mred - i turned to fox to get their spin on the latest riyadh bombings - and there was nothing on... instead they showed a story about a hepA outbreak at some chain called cheechies or some such - but all the footage was of mcdonalds... which wasnt even mentioned in the story. perhaps theres a stock-trading strategy based on who is being pilloried on faux

Some true-life scenes: Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (calling it "humiliating to the South"), and ran for governor of California in 1966 promising to wipe the Fair Housing Act off the books. "If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house," he said, "he has a right to do so." After the Republican convention in 1980, Reagan travelled to the county fair in Neshoba, Mississippi, where, in 1964, three Freedom Riders had been slain by the Ku Klux Klan. Before an all-white crowd of tens of thousands, Reagan declared: "I believe in states' rights".

Reagan consolidated the Southern strategy that Nixon formulated in response to the civil rights movement. It is this Republican party that has created the radically conservative Southern presidency of Bush. When Bush's candidacy was threatened in the Republican primaries of 2000, he rescued himself by appearing at Bob Jones University and wrapping himself in support of the preservation of the Confederate emblem on the South Carolina state flag.

faux: some guy called mcphereson (admins finance guy in iraq?) on faux "the looting did more damage than the war"

Haley Barbour, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee and the third-biggest lobbyist in Washington, was elected governor of Mississippi. He had campaigned at an event sponsored by the Council of Concerned Conservatives, an overtly racist group and successor organisation to the White Citizens' Council, which led opposition to civil rights in the 1960s. In his lapel, Barbour wore a pin of the Mississippi state flag, a matter of controversy because of its incorporation of the Confederate flag. On election night, even before he was announced as the winner, Barbour received a congratulatory telephone call from Bush. Look away, Dixieland.

mred - faux just apologised for running the mcdonalds footage (perhaps 30 mins later?) "we ran the wrong footage"- but then immediately had 'mcdonalds corp has a beef' story - with mcdonalds 'taking issue' with a dictionary (websters?) definition of mcjobs... smells smells smells

Johnson, an Army specialist, belonged to the same 507th Maintenance Company as Lynch. Unlike Lynch, Johnson fought to stave off their Iraqi captors. Like Lynch, she sustained serious injuries.

African American suspicions of a racial double standard were reinforced last month when it was revealed that Johnson, a Panamanian American who was shot in both ankles, will get only 30 percent of her monthly pay in disability benefits. Lynch, who had a head injury and broken bones in her arm, leg, thighs and ankle, will get 80 percent disability.


Why would Americans spend billions of dollars and suffer thousands of casualties in Iraq to possibly aid in the creation of a political concept in countries most of them have never even heard of, especially when crooked voting machines and the efforts of the Supreme Court mean that this concept of 'democracy' clearly doesn't exist in the United States?

Just as an example of the nuttiness of the speech, Bush somehow manages to criticize Iran for its lack of democracy while praising Saudi Arabia for its progress. Saudi Arabia is an utter dictatorship, with absolutely no freedom of expression and a slight promise of some local government democracy. Iran has a democratically elected leader in a fair election, something the United States can't even boast about, and an extremely lively level of political debate. In contrasting these two countries in Bush's speech we have a clear example of how Americans use the terms 'democracy' and 'freedom' as political weapons to achieve American geopolitical goals which have nothing to do with democracy or freedom.
The only way we will ever see the "establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East" is if the Iraqi people kill a lot of Americans, something which, to the credit of the Iraqis, they are endeavoring to do.

"This is to remind the town that we have teeth and claws and we will use them." The Americans also fired mortars and U.S. jets dropped at least three 500-pound bombs around the crash site. The Americans essentially threw a temper tantrum, scaring a group of people who had nothing to do with the attack in a fit of collective punishment, and dropping some big bombs in frustration.

At least Richard Nixon came into office recognizing that somehow or other, the U.S. had to figure a way out of Vietnam

That leaves only the option of a citizens’ movement. Back in the spring, before the invasion of Iraq, the peace movement was ahead of the curve, staking out a politically unpopular position. Now, I’m afraid it has fallen behind.

The sections on "stereotyping," "racial and gender tension," "harassment behavior," and "mentoring," were completely blacked out. Asked if employees felt free to "express differences that may be due to different cultural backgrounds," 83 percent of white men and 73 percent of white women said yes. Only 56 percent of men of color and 42 percent of women of color said yes.
With all these deletions, it was no surprise that all nine pages of "Recommendations" were blacked out. Hear no problem, see no problem, solve no problem.

Faulting the president for a lack of military effectiveness in Iraq sets a media tone that could be partly stilled, at least temporarily, by any number of military maneuvers. A U.S. missile attack on Iran or Syria, on the pretext that "terrorists" are entering Iraq from across the borders, could provide a new round of red-white-and-blue euphoria.

And about the novel I can never finish, If God Were Alive Today: The hero, the standup comedian on Doomsday, not only denounces our addiction to fossil fuels, with the pushers in the White House. Because of overpopulation, he is also against sexual intercourse. His name is Gil Berman, and he says to audiences like this one, “I am a flaming neuter. I am as celibate as at least 50 percent of the heterosexual Roman Catholic clergy. Celibacy is not a root canal, and it is so cheap and convenient. Talk about safe sex! You don’t have to do or say anything afterwards, because there is no afterwards.”

Gil Berman goes on: “When my tantrum, which is what I call my TV set, waves boobs in my face, and tells me that everybody but me is going to get laid tonight, and this is a national emergency, so I’ve got to rush out and buy pills or a car or a folding gymnasium I can hide under my bed, I laugh like a hyena. I know and you know there are millions upon millions of good Americans, present company not excepted, who aren’t going to get laid tonight.

In response, Bush last month announced a new presidential commission on transition to democracy in Cuba and said his administration would crack down on travel to the island, which he said encourages "an illicit sex trade."

"Now we know that no other President of the United States has ever lied so baldly and so often and so demonstrably ... The presumption now has to be that he's lying any time that he's saying anything."

Only in America do we use the word 'politics' to describe the process so well: 'Poli' in Greek meaning 'many' and 'tics' meaning 'bloodsucking creatures'

A major problem in Bush’s (the first )early history is his whereabouts on November 22, 1963. Bush, who must be one of the few Americans alive at the time who professes not to remember where he was that fateful day, is suspected by many of having played a key role in the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas. Bush appears to have been a friend of George de Mohrenschildt, a significant figure in Lee Harvey Oswald’s life in the period in which he allegedly purchased a rifle and a pistol. According to FBI records, Bush contacted the Bureau on the day of the assassination to report having recently overheard one James Parrott speak of plotting to kill the president in Houston.

“The mosaic of BCCI connections surrounding Harken Energy may prove nothing more than how ubiquitous the rogue bank’s ties were, “ the Wall Street Journal noted. “But the number of BCCI-connected people who had dealings with Harken---all since George W. Bush came on board---likewise raises the question of whether they mask an effort to cozy up to a presidential son.” [Source: Ibid]

One indication of the role of criminal conduct in S&L losses was the workings of just one New York figure, Mario Renda, who worked in conjunction with the Mob, according to a sworn federal deposition.[Source: 123-6, 302] Renda brokered as much as $5 billion per year in deposits into 130 S&Ls across the county, all of which failed.[Source: Jonathan Kwitny, “How Bush’s Pals Broke the Banks,” The Village Voice, 10/20/1992, p. 27] As Kwitny noted, “many of these deposits were made on the specific condition that the S&Ls would lend money out to borrowers Renda would recommend, who turned out to be local Mafia people or strangers from out-of-state.”[Source: Ibid.]

What did Neil Bush do in 1985 after he became a director of the Silverado Banking, Savings & Loan Association that went bust three years later at a cost to taxpayers of at least $1.6 billion? Among other improprieties involving “some of the worst kinds of conflicts of interest” according to federal regulators, he admits that he failed to list his business relationship on a conflict-of-interest form when he got a $100,000 loan from a developer who was a partner in his oil company. That was after he helped approve more than $100 million worth of loans to that business partner. When he wrote “None” on that form, he actually was dependent on one of the thrift’s biggest borrowers for the entire $75,000 annual salary that was his main source of income. “I know it sounds a little fishy,” he admitted when he testified that the loan was not to be repaid unless JNB Exploration was successful, which it wasn’t. What it was, he said in one of the classic understatements of our time, “was an incredibly sweet deal.” One bemused expert observed that it “may have been the first completed loan in financial history in which the creditor defaulted.”

Shortly before the 1988 election, when the regulators wanted to close Silverado, a call came from Washington to delay that action for 45 days—until after election day. After George Bush was elected, an order was issued to close the bank.

Neil Bush was unceremoniously dumped from a Denver amateur tennis tournament for cheating this year after he and his doubles partner signed up to play opponents ranked much below their skill level. The president’s son, rated 5.5 on a 10-point U.S. Tennis Association scale, entered to compete in the 4.5 category. Their opponents, after getting slaughtered, protested and Bush was disqualified

In 1986, the year after he successfully lobbied HHS to allow Recarey’s Medicare business to grow ultimately to a total of $1 billion, Jeb Bush’s small real estate firm received $75,000 from Recarey’s HMO for the purpose of finding it a new headquarters.[Source: Wall Street Journal, 8/9/1988, p. A1; Newsday, 10/3/1988, p. 4] Bush said that the payment was unrelated to his lobbying for Recarey. [Source: Ibid.] But Bush never did actually locate a headquarters for IMC, and the record suggests that the HMO had already selected the headquarters it ultimately moved into when it hired Bush.[Source: Newsday, 10/3/1988, p. 4] Jeb confirmed that he received $75,000 from Recarey without closing any real estate deals.[Source: Ibid.]

Jeb’s defaulted loan from Broward Federal Savings and Loan in Sunrise, Florida transpired as follows.[Source: Washington Post, 10/15/1990, p. A24.] On February 1, 1985, Broward Federal loaned $4,565,000 to real estate developer J. Edward Houston, secured only by Houston’s personal guarantee. The same day, a company headed by Houston turned around and loaned the same amount to a partnership of Jeb Bush and Miami real estate developer Armondo Codina for them to buy a five-story building in Miami’s financial district.

Curiously, the Bush-Codina partnership was required to repay the loan from Houston “only as, if and to the extent that the cash flow from the building was sufficient to support those payments.” In fact, Bush and Codina made no payments at all on the loan prior to the final default settlement. In 1987 Houston defaulted on the $4.5 million Broward Federal loan, and the S&L sued both him and the Bush-Codina partnership. In an unusual settlement with the FDIC, Bush and Codina were obligated to repay just $500,000 of the loan and got to keep the building in the Miami financial district that collateralized the loan.

The word from Baghdad is that U.S. administrator Paul Bremer has asked for a substantial boost in U.S. troop strength. The request has been denied by the Pentagon."

mr ed - im sure rummy sed that he hadnt had a single request for more troops

Claus von Clausewitz describes in his classic work "On War" (first published in 1832) that any "attack which does not lead to peace must necessarily end up as a defense. It is thus the defense itself that weakens the attack. Far from this being idle sophistry, we consider it to be the greatest disadvantage of the attack that one is eventually left in a most awkward defensive position."

Please keep in mind (while reading the following about the Project for the New American Century-PNAC) that JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs) Zionist extremists (both Christian and Jewish) like Richard Perle and Dick Cheney are also associated with PNAC as we know that the Iraq invasion/occupation was for Israel and oil:

The PNAC blueprint refers to key allies such as the UK as “the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership”.
It describes peacekeeping missions as “demanding American political leadership rather than that of theUN”. It says “even should Saddam pass from the scene”, US bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently... as “Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has”. It spotlights China for “regime change”, saying “it is time to increase the presence of American forces in SE Asia”.

It also hints that the US may consider developing biological weapons “that can target specific genotypes [and] may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool”.
mr ed - sars?

Finally – written a year before 9/11 – it pinpoints North Korea, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the creation of a “worldwide command and control system”.

One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek, May 20 2002).

And in November 2001 the US airforce complained it had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly enough (Time Magazine, May 13 2002).

mr-ed - heres an article that kind of describes my concerns about the world - the 'war' is part of a plan.
i never really bought the 'war for oil' story - despite compelling evidence. i think its more likely to be something along the lines of 'war for my friends, who happen to have oil interests'. i think the idea of war4oil is too generous - it suggests that at least they have the (economic) interest of the 'west' at heart.


But for over a year the CDC has told state health officials to be prepared to vaccinate all their residents against smallpox within 10 days if a terrorist attack ever unleashed the deadly virus.
He praised Florida for storing some of its vaccine allotment in every county for even faster local access.

mr ed - this is fucking scary - either the americans are planning to unleash smallpox, or a vaccination provider is a generous donor to the republican party... i hope/expect its the latter. i note that florida has been particularly prepared. im not a bioterrorism expert but id have to think that smallpox is just one of many possible biological threats, so either 'they know' or they just wanna sell some vaccine...

DR. DAN LUCEY: This is our least safe vaccine. It has the worst side effects. So it's quite likely that we will have severe, life-threatening effects and probably some deaths due to the smallpox vaccination.

Near the top of their list of fears is smallpox; the disease has killed hundreds of millions of people worldwide -- about a third of those infected -- over the past several thousands years.

mred - ha ha. "over the past several thousands years. "

Dr. Anthony Fauci, who heads the National Institute of Allergic and Infectious Diseases, says there's already enough on hand to vaccinate every American.

Now, the Bush administration is debating the specifics of a controversial "pre-attack" vaccination plan. As things stand now, the proposal would encourage a core group of health care workers and emergency responders to be vaccinated voluntarily; they could then minister to the first victims of an attack and help to vaccinate others.

DR. JULIE GERBERDING: We could also consider going wider with that and including all health care personnel and all first responders such as police, and firemen, and HAZMAT teams, and so forth in that response group, and that would be up to about 10 million people in the United States that fall into those categories.

SUSAN DENTZER: Eventually, says Gerberding, the government may even allow members of the general public to receive the vaccine voluntarily, to protect themselves against a bioterrorist threat.

Historically, for every one million people vaccinated against smallpox, about 900 had side effects. Fifteen of those were life threatening; one or two resulted in death. But the smallpox vaccine has not been administered routinely in the U.S. for nearly three decades. And in the interim, lots of things have changed.

SUSAN DENTZER: That could place as much as a third of the U.S. population at risk of adverse reactions from the vaccine.

DR. PAUL OFFIT: We need to understand that if we immunize 500,000 people, in fact the risks of this vaccine may outweigh its benefits.

SUSAN DENTZER: Dr. Paul Offit is a pediatric infectious disease expert at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia. He also sits on a vaccine advisory committee to the CDC. That panel recently endorsed the plan to vaccinate the roughly half million health care workers against smallpox, but Offit was the sole member of the committee to vote no.
SUSAN DENTZER: Offit argues that these risks are so real that no large-scale vaccination plan should move forward.

WILLINGHAM: Why do we, what seems to be all of a sudden, have a need to vaccinate against an organism that is supposedly eradicated from the world?

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: To protect our citizens in the aftermath of September 11, we are evaluating old threats in a new light. Our government has no information that a smallpox attacks is imminent, yet it is prudent to prepare for the possibility that terrorists who kill indiscriminately would use diseases as a weapon.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: I'm ordering that the military and other personnel who serve America in high-risk parts of the world receive the smallpox vaccine.
mr ed - if someone wanted to release small pox anywhere, theyd prolly do it at jfk

DR. JULIE GERBERDING: We have asked the public health system to be able to immunize the people in this country within a ten-day window of time if we needed to.

TERENCE SMITH: Dr. Fauci, I noticed the President said while he would do it, he was not going to have his family or his staff do it.
DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Right.
TERENCE SMITH: So there's some decision making going on right there.
DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Right. But the rationale that the President gave for himself being vaccinated, that he said very clearly, as commander in chief of our armed forces, I will not ask my troops to be vaccinated in the sense of actually ordering them to be vaccinated-- this is the military, this wasn't not a voluntary program. He said given that, I feel that I, myself, would be vaccinated.

mr ed - the risks must be pretty fukking hi

But he has warned the White House the extra 250 million doses at around $8 each (£5.50) could cost four times the department's entire bio-terrorism budget.

House Majority Leader Dick Armey tells CBS News he did it to keep vaccine-makers from going out of business under the weight of mounting lawsuits

Critics say the Bush family and the administration have too many ties to Eli Lilly. There's President Bush's father, who sat on the company's board in the 1970's; White House budget director Mitch Daniels, once an Eli Lilly executive; and Eli Lilly CEO Sidney Taurel, who serves on the president's homeland security advisory council.

At least one hospital in Washington state is declining to participate in a national campaign to vaccinate health workers against smallpox, state officials have confirmed, and more than a dozen other hospitals say they have not decided whether to ask workers to be immunized.

The real wild card in smallpox immunizations, health experts say, is the vastly increased number of people with impaired immune systems — perhaps 100 times that of the late 1960s.

The vaccine is not without its own risks. About 15 of every 1 million people vaccinated for the first time will face life- threatening complications. As many as three would likely die, said John Agwunobi, secretary of the Florida Department of Health.

Gov. Jeb Bush is *considering* being inoculated during the second phase of the Florida plan, when some 400,000 ``first responders'' - police, firefighters and emergency medical workers - will be offered the vaccine in the coming months.
``It is pretty likely he would visit the affected area in the event of an attack,'' said Elizabeth Hirst, the governor's press secretary.

mred(i think i must have completely lost my gourd)

ive just kind of looked into this smallpox thing

if i havent lost my mind, then either
a) the authorities are considering unleashing smallpox, or
2) a vaccination provider is a generous donor to the republican party... i hope/expect its number b
c) (theres always a c)

i note that florida has been particularly prepared. thanks jebediah (sic).

im not a bioterrorism expert but id have to think that smallpox is just one of many possible biological threats. either 'they know' or they just wanna sell some vaccine...

i mention it mostly for young d's benefit - u mite wanna look into it in advance. if a) is true, then u mite wanna get vaccinated in advance. if b) is true, then u defintely dont wanna get vaccinated in advance, and u mite even question it if the vaccination order goes out. gwb sez he got the shot, but his family wont, and jeb is 'considering' it, and doctors/hospitals are most uncomfortable about.

something smells funny

i sound like a complete fucking lunatic - but im *positive* (bookies never say such things) that these people are fukking evil, and i really cant think of anything outside the realm of possibilites that they would consider in the normal course of things. my mind isnt sufficiently expansive to imagine what they mite do if they were painted into a corner.



The sense of uneasiness that has permeated American society in the last two months has also led to some "disturbing data" about what's happening here, Mullins said. "Since Sept. 11 domestic violence has increased significantly. Child abuse, sexual assault, suicides and inpatient treatment at hospitals all have increased."

That will be helpful if, as he predicts, President Bush's war on terrorism proceeds and succeeds.
"When Bush said all (terrorists) he meant all of them." After bin Laden and his top associates are taken out, the U.S. government will likely turn its attention to other international terrorist groups like the Shining Path operating in South America. "The third tier will be the militias, the Klan, and the left-wing folks in this country."

An unprecedented array of US intelligence professionals, diplomats and former Pentagon officials have gone on record to lambast the Bush administration for its distortion of the case for war against Iraq. In their view, the very foundations of intelligence-gathering have been damaged in ways that could take years, even decades, to repair.

Between them, the two dozen interviewees reveal how the pre-war intelligence record on Iraq showed virtually the opposite of the picture the administration painted to Congress, to US voters and to the world.

As the former CIA analyst Ray McGovern argues with particular force, the traditional role of the CIA has been to act as a scrupulously accurate source of information and analysis for presidents pondering grave international decisions. That role, he said, had now been "prostituted" and the CIA may never be the same. "Where is Bush going to turn to now? Where is his reliable source of information now Iraq is spinning out of control? He's frittered that away," Mr McGovern said. "And the profound indignity is that he probably doesn't even realise it."

including Colin Powell's powerful presentation to the United Nations Security Council on 5 February. Of that pivotal speech, Mr McGovern says in the film: "It was a masterful performance, but none of it was true."