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Friday, February 24, 2006 |
Telegraph: "The confusion within the Government over Britain's attitude to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp deepened yesterday when Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, compared it to a Soviet-style 'gulag'."
Public opinion is obviously forcing the Labour government to change its attitude, at least its wording.
Bush and Blair have brilliantly done Bin Laden's work for him: "There never was a 'terrorist threat' to western civilisation or democracy, only to western lives and property. The threat becomes systemic only when democracy loses its confidence and when its leaders are weak, as now. Terror attacks are for the police. For George Bush and Blair to demand a 'long war' against Bin Laden and, by implication, a long suppression of civil liberty is ludicrous. Western civilisation is not some simpering weakling that cowers before a fanatic's might, pleading for leaders to protect it by all means, however illegal. It has been proof against Islamic expansionism since the 17th century. It is not at risk.
The American president and the British prime minister have spent half a decade exploiting Bin Laden for political ends, in thrall to their security/industrial complex. They have relied on terrifying their electorates with new and bloodcurdling threats, with what Runciman calls 'spook politics'."
DerSpiegel: "The new pictures from Abu Ghraib provide the most recent evidence: America's moral bank account is empty - and it has lost the image wars. The entire Muslim world no longer trusts the world's most powerful nation.
America has forfeited its aura as a global power. It will be a long time before the United States will be able once again to claim moral superiority. America has inadvertently, but consistently, inflamed the clash of cultures."
Craig Murray: "Now that information is starting to come out about the hundreds of CIA rendition flights in UK airspace, at least scores refuelling at UK airports, the government's refusal to give details to MPs of CIA flights landing at military airports is an appalling denial of democracy.
If parliament and the courts allow Straw and Blair to get away with this foul abuse, then the rule of law is finished and we no longer live in a democracy."
12:14:13 PM 
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SaltLakeWeekly: "Much of the job of destroying America's WMD stockpile took place in Utah's west desert at the Deseret Chemical Depot, 12 miles south of Tooele. In March 2005, the depot celebrated its milestone destruction of the millionth VX-filled munition. The date of the announcement coincided nicely with a worldwide celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, when more than 150 countries pledged to never again make weapons of mass destruction.
But something else was going on that March in the west desert that has some questioning the United States' dedication to nonproliferation. Over at the U.S. Army's Dugway Proving Grounds - the chemical depot's Tooele County neighbor - procurement officers quietly placed orders for a system of bacteria-growing fermentors that would have made Saddam salivate.
According to government solicitation, the order called for four fermentors with a total capacity of producing nearly 3,500 liters of bacteria and the possibility of another five fermentors in the future.
The order didn't detail what Dugway wanted to grow, but at the same time, the secretive Army base put out feelers for a second set of fermentors and contractors willing to make 1,500-liter batches of a benign strain of anthrax called Sterne.
While the fermentors were ostensibly ordered for production of a nonlethal strain of anthrax, they could easily be used to produce vast quantities of the lethal strain as well.
The U.S. biodefense build-up began one month after the 9/11 attacks, when envelopes containing anthrax were mailed to Congress and Bush requested $1.5 billion in counter-bioterrorism funding.
The anthrax in the letters almost certainly came not from international terrorists, but from a U.S. biodefense laboratory. While the perpetrator was never found, investigators determined the powder was a militarized anthrax strain developed at Fort Deitrick, in Maryland."
11:44:58 AM
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CapitolHillBlue: "Secret Service agents guarding Vice President Dick Cheney when he shot Texas lawyer Harry Whittington on a hunting outing two weeks ago say Cheney was 'clearly inebriated' at the time of the shooting.
One agent at the scene has been placed on administrative leave and another requested reassignment this week. A memo reportedly written by one agent has been destroyed, sources said Wednesday afternoon.
Cheney has a long history of alcohol abuse, including two convictions of driving under the influence when he was younger.
If Cheney was legally drunk at the time of the shooting, he could be guilty of a felony under Texas law and the shooting, ruled an accident by a compliant Kenedy County Sheriff, would be a prosecutable offense."
That would explain the delay in notifying the police of the accident; Cheney had to be sober first.
11:30:55 AM
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Yahoo: "After the booming 1990s when incomes and stock prices were soaring, this decade has been less of a thrill ride for most American families.
Average incomes after adjusting for inflation actually fell from 2001 to 2004, and the growth in net worth was the weakest in a decade, the Federal Reserve reported Thursday.
Average family incomes, after adjusting for inflation, fell to $70,700 in 2004, a drop of 2.3 percent when compared with 2001.
Economists said the weakness in the most recent period was understandable given the loss of 2.7 million jobs from early 2001 through August of 2003, when the country was struggling with sizable layoffs caused by the recession, the terrorist attacks and corporate accounting scandals.
The gap between the very wealthy and other income groups widened during the period."
"A Democratic report by the ranking Democrat on the House Rules Committee, Louise Slaughter (D-NY), declares that Republican ties to lobbyists have cost millions of Americans access to basic social services, RAW STORY has learned.
The report, available here, blames lawmakers' ties to lobbyists - who, they say, make an average of $650,000 a year.
'Contractors and corporations have purchased access to a government that is supposed to belong to the people,' the Democrats write."
11:24:10 AM
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