THE SAS and other Australian forces sent to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban suffered severe side effects from the anthrax vaccine, according to confidential Defence documents.
"HMAS Darwin has 251 personnel, 97 completed an adverse reaction pro forma - giving an adverse reaction rate of 38 per cent," says the email, written by Colonel Stephan Rudzki. "I'm not sure what is going on, but there appears to be a problem with the UK (anthrax) vaccine."
The program was halted after up to 75 per cent of troops - including the elite SAS - fell ill after receiving the injection. The decision to halt the anthrax program was not made public at the time.

Here, then, is my outline of a 7-step process of creating a full-blown currency crisis.
Step 1. Nobody notices or pays attention that the dollar is falling.
Step 2. Folks wake up, but they either don't care or rationalize dollar weakness as a good thing.
Step 3. The central banks now know they have a problem, but the bankers think the market will obey them. It will, for a while. (This is the step we have now reached and what emerged at the G7 meeting.)
Step 4. The dollar now tests everyone's resolve by resuming its decline. The currency markets will not respond to jawboning by finance ministers.
Step 5. In this step, the finance ministers are forced to take action. (Think about it. Even if they'd stated that they wanted the dollar to go up, nothing either explicit or implied indicates they'll do anything about what's happening. That will come next.) When they do take action, the market will do what they want -- but only for a while.
Step 6. The ministers take some additional action, but it won't be enough, and the currency markets won't do what the ministers want.
Step 7. Finally, we'll have a full-blown crisis, and that will be the end game.


O?Neal is author of ?Defense of Marriage Act,? legislation that proposes a referendum on a constitutional amendment that would define a marriage as a union between one man and one woman.
But -- whoops -- it looks like O'Neal is a drunk and a lecher who talks about marriage as a ploy, to get close enough to squeeze strangers' butts.


I can give you one clear example where we were told to follow the party line, where I was told directly. I worked North Africa, which included Libya. I remember in one case, I had to rewrite something a number of times before it went through. It was a background paper on Libya, and Libya has been working for years to try and regain the respect of the international community. I had intelligence that told me this, and I quoted from the intelligence, but they made me go back and change it and change it. They?d make me delete the quotes from intelligence so they could present their case on Libya in a way that said it was still a threat to its neighbors and that Libya was still a belligerent, antagonistic force.

I can give you one example of how the talking points were altered. We were instructed by Bill Luti, on behalf of the Office of Special Plans, on behalf of Abe Shulsky, that we would not write anything about Iraq, WMD or terrorism in any papers that we prepared for our superiors except as instructed by the Office of Special Plans. And it would provide to us an electronic document of talking points on these issues. So I got to see how they evolved.
It was very clear to me that they did not evolve as a result of new intelligence, of improved intelligence, or any type of seeking of the truth. The way they evolved is that certain bullets were dropped or altered based on what was being reported on the front pages of the Washington Post or The New York Times.

We knew. We knew from many years of both high-level surveillance and other types of shared intelligence, not to mention the information from the U.N., we knew, we knew what was left [from the Gulf War] and the viability of any of that. Bush said he didn?t know.
The truth is, we know [Saddam] didn?t have these things. Almost a billion dollars has been spent ? a billion dollars! ? by David Kay?s group to search for these WMD, a total whitewash effort. They didn?t find anything, they didn?t expect to find anything.

The last reason of the neocon conversion, the switch Saddam Hussein made in the Food for Oil program, from the dollar to the euro. He did this, by the way, long before 9/11, in November 2000 ? selling his oil for euros. The oil sales permitted in that program aren?t very much. But when the sanctions would be lifted, the sales from the country with the second largest oil reserves on the planet would have been moving to the euro. So one of the first executive orders that Bush signed in May [2003] switched trading on Iraq?s oil back to the dollar.

It's a bitter pill for the Bush administration to swallow, but democracy means that the bad guys should have a fair chance at winning.


Chicago Police officers infiltrated five protest groups in 2002 and launched four other spying operations in 2003 -- actions that civil rights activists are calling outrageous.

While the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) refused to consider human trials during the Clinton administration, the Bush administration reopened the possibility of using the tests. Many scientists and ethicists have argued that such research never is justified.

Ahhnuld has stated repeatedly that if the state legislature won't go along with his reactionary "feed the rich and starve the rest" agenda, he will take his proposals directly to the people, in the form of ballot initiatives. Of course, the catch is that Schwarzenegger's backers control the vote counting, so the Plastic Man is free to propose any sort of reprehensible ballot initiative, secure in the knowledge that 'the people,' come election day, will vote it into law. And Team Ahhnuld, with the full support of the media, can claim that it is only giving the people what they want.

Schwarzenegger's raw assertion of executive power ... sent a clear message that he can govern without lawmakers' cooperation, a political reality that could leave the Legislature marginalized ... Schwarzenegger demonstrated that he is not afraid to confront, diminish and, if necessary, humble the Legislature in pursuit of a popular agenda.

What Team Ahhnuld is doing on the state level is the very same thing that Team Bush is doing on the national level: taking advantage of deliberately created budgetary crises to rob massive amounts of money from other programs and funnel it into the creation and maintenance of a high-tech police state.
Schwarzenegger concluded his appearance with the following appeal: "Let's all work together. And please continue selling my projects and selling my philosophy and the different things we're going to get out there."
One final note on Ahhnuld the Barbarian: did anyone else notice that it seemed rather odd to use the State of the Union speech as a forum to condemn the use of steroids in professional sports? Am I the only one who interpreted that as a truly bizarre attempt to distance Bush from Schwarzenegger?

In an apparent attempt to downplay the internal Iraqi dynamics sparking ongoing attacks, the Bush administration has been blaming al-Qaeda for much of the violence.

The Iraqi police have corrected their initial statement that "foreigners" were behind the assault in Fallujah Saturday. The Associated Press noted that "U..S. and Iraqi officials have made conflicting reports on who carried out the attack." U.S. officials insist the attack was carried out by non-Iraqis.

U.S. war planners clearly saw the 17-page letter as confirmation that their strategy for pacifying Iraq, particularly the so-called ''Sunni Triangle'', was working.

U.S. authorities in Iraq have awarded more than $400 million in contracts to a start-up company that has extensive family and, according to court documents, business ties to Ahmed Chalabi, the Pentagon favorite on the Iraqi Governing Council.

Soon after this security contract was issued, the company started recruiting many of its guards from the ranks of Chalabi's former militia, the Iraqi Free Forces, raising allegations from other Iraqi officials that he was creating a private army.

Secret commissions paid to pro-Saddam middlemen by western oil firms found their way into George Galloway's anti-sanctions drives

"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition,
it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures,
until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear."
--Harry S. Truman,