When will it end, I had intended to have more with this post but I want to bring up something else which is a show on HBO ( HACKING DEMOCRACY ) please people you need to watch and not only watch it but tell others about this. Once again don't believe me see for yourself do your homework this affects you, your family all of us and here we are at the eve of another election please stand up and be counted, make your voice heard do not let them steal yet another election out from under us. We The People should mean something to us all, lets make it mean something once more, vote go out in droves, in mass, make it so they can not steal away our votes again.

New York Times: "Rigged voting in Louisiana? Say it ain’t so. But it’s not shocked-shocked you feel watching this; it’s genuine shock. As the drama proceeds, adducing more evidence for the unreliability of the voting machines than can possibly be explored here, you might also feel flattened. Computers count around 80 percent of votes in America. The marketing director for Diebold, Mark Radke, who defends both the company and its chief executive ... talks in maddening doublespeak and wears the arched-eyebrow expression of a silent-movie fiend. His Nixon-era nondenial denials turn the stomach.

Boston Herald -- Grade: A -- "The thought of watching a documentary on possible voting fraud may sound as appealing as, say, a PBS special on mushroom farming (say, is it pledge week yet?), but "Hacking Democracy" (tonight at 9) unravels like a "24" episode...

TV Guide: Shocking HBO Film Rocks the Voting Process -- shocking revelations about the vulnerability of the software and hardware. Baltimore Sun: The premium cable channel hits it out of the park again with "Hacking Democracy", a timely and chilling look at alarming problems in the way our votes are counted. It is hard to imagine any network or cable channel offering a documentary this season that is more important to the civic life of the nation -- let alone one that is so compelling and ultimately moving. For links to these and dozens more reviews, go to Google News -- http://news.google.com/nwshp?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&tab=wn&q= -- and enter the search term "Hacking Democracy" What Black Box Voting hopes will result from this film: More citizen involvement, and in the short term, citizen oversight through use of video cameras and public records for the Nov. 7 election. For tips on how to oversee and gather evidence on Nov. 7, use the Citizens Tool Kit: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/toolkit.html

Now Europe Targets Bloggers As Terrorists
UK, EU crackdown on "spreading propaganda," mirrors U.S. assault on Internet freedom

Bush administration efforts to infiltrate, misdirect, regulate and pollute the Internet with Neo-Con propaganda, as well as their openly stated agenda to target American bloggers as terrorists, is now being aped by the British government across the pond as well as other major European countries.
Home Secretary John Reid met with ministers from the six largest European Union countries and, according to a BBC report, "agreed to work together to make the internet a "more hostile" place for terrorists."
How will they accomplish this? By initiating a crackdown on people who use the Internet to "spread propaganda." The very website you are now reading would be considered propaganda by these neo-fascists- no matter the fact that the criminal syndicates Bush and Blair front for are the most deceitful progenitors of lurid propaganda since the third reich.
The purge also aims to use the Internet and other media to target young audiences with state approved indoctrination PR spin on how the war on terror is really not about imperial hegemony and crushing liberties at home.
Reid himself is no stranger to the strong arm tactics of despots, a former hardcore Stalinist, member of the Scottish Communist Party and an alcoholic bully with a penchant for thumping people in the face - he could also become the next Prime Minister.
The British government's paranoid fear of anyone "spreading propaganda" that could compete with their own is perhaps one of the reasons why they outlawed the right to protest under the 2005 Serious and Organized Crimes Act. Now Brits are only allowed to protest against the government with the government's permission - in other countries they would call that a police state and in others besides - like Zimbabwe or China - it's the de rigueur of tyranny.
Similarly, the Glorification of Terror legislation is so broadly defined that disagreeing with the government's "official explanation" of a terrorist event could be seen as enemy propaganda.
The only remaining outlet for the groundswell of dissent in opposition to the Neo-Fascist takeover of the west is the Internet, and it keeps these jack-booted bastards awake at night to think you can sit in front of your computer and broadcast your outrage to the four corners of the earth on a whim.
The fact that the U.S. government demanded access to the Google search queries of around 150 million Internet active Americans under the umbrella of the NSA eavesdropping program (recall the surveillance trucks in V For Vendetta that tuned into home conversations) proves that the elite are deliriously nervous about the last remaining outpost of freedom and its potential to influence change.

In addition, the European Union has moved to completely regulate Internet freedom. The first step is the introduction of licensing laws where you would be required to register, pay tax and only receive permission to operate a website if your material didn't violate the broad ranging "hate speech" laws legislated by the EU - win hich criticizing the EU itself is deemed "hate speech."
The development of "Internet 2" is also designed to create an online caste system whereby the old Internet hubs would be allowed to break down and die, forcing people to use the new taxable, censored and regulated world wide web. If you're struggling to comprehend exactly what the Internet will look like in five years unless we resist this, just look at China and their latest efforts to completely eliminate dissent and anonymity on the web.
Last week we highlighted similar efforts in the U.S. to mobilize resources in the war on terror to target bloggers as terrorist sympathizers and propagandists.
The White House has made it perfectly clear that it will target American citizens for propagating information harmful to the interests of the U.S. government and classify them as enemy combatants. This is codified in sub-section 27 of section 950v. of the Military Commissions Act of 2006.
Bush's own strategy document for "winning the war on terror" identifies "conspiracy theorists," meaning anyone who exposes government corruption and its lies about major domestic and world events, as "terrorists recruiters," and vows to eliminate their influence in society.
In a speech given last Monday, Homeland Security director Michael Chertoff identified the web as a "terror training camp," through which "disaffected people living in the United States" are developing "radical ideologies and potentially violent skills."
Chertoff has pledged to dispatch Homeland Security agents to local police departments in order to aid in the apprehension of domestic terrorists who use the Internet as a political tool.
A program on behalf of CENTCOM is also underway to infiltrate blogs and message boards to ensure people, "have the opportunity to read positive stories,"presumably about how Iraq is a wonderful liberated democracy and the war on terror really is about protecting Americans from Al-CIAda.

With no intention to coerce or to offend, once again I am on my soapbox; but this time I need you to spread the word as well.
I can only reach but so many people with email and my blog, and I know that we do not see eye to eye on every occasion-however, it is necessary for the truth to be told.
As it stands now, an anonymous accuser may point a finger at any upstanding citizen of the United States of America and call him or her a terrorist; and if this claim is heard, that citizen may very well be taken into custody and interrogated with no probable cause beyond the word of the accuser. The accusers themselves may remain anonymous, and never be confronted by the accused. In direct violation of Habeas Corpus, even if no claim is filed and no charges brought to court, the accused may be held indefinetly, anywhere in the world, without proof or due process. There are no guarantees that the accusers are truthful, with good intention, or accusing with the hope of providing a safer community.
If this congressional act allows those with malicious intent or personal vendetta a chance to unlawfully and unconstitutionally imprison their enemies - and/or those who would speak against the totalitarian administration that has gripped our once-free nation - we as a people have no choice but to fight for our freedoms, as granted by our founding fathers. I have read the Constitution personally; I can speak with full confidence to the fact that it needs no interpretation. Anyone who tries to dictate our freedoms to us is most likely attempting to shield our freedoms from us. The only answer to this situation is to read the Constitution for ourselves, and to assert our rights as free American citizens.

A basic overview of the new bill:

The Cheney-Specter Bill (S. 2453) will make warrantless domestic spying permanently legal!Bill Includes warrantless eavesdropping of all communications, and the data mining and profiling of every U.S. citizen.If war is declared, warrantless searches of all homes and businesses will be legal.In effect, the legal concept of "probable cause" will be eliminated from the Constitution.Call and fax your Senators now, and tell them "NO" on S. 2453.

After Pat's Birthday
By KEVIN TILLMAN
It is Pat's birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice... until we get out.
Much has happened since we handed over our voice: Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can't be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.
Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.
Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few "bad apples" in the military. Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet. It's interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.
Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.
Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.
Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.
Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.
Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.
Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.
Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.
Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.
Somehow torture is tolerated.
Somehow lying is tolerated.
Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense. Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.
Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.
Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.
Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.
Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.
Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.
Somehow this is tolerated.
Somehow nobody is accountable for this. In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people. So don't be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity. Most likely, they will come to know that "somehow" was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.
Luckily this country is still a democracy.
People still have a voice.
People still can take action.
It can start after Pat's birthday.
Brother and Friend of Pat Tillman,
Kevin Tillman

To enforce the lies of the present, it is necessary to erase the truths of the past.

You Can't make this *&%$ up, who is in charge? who is running the show? or better yet who has our backs?. If you or I were to attempt what these people have got away with we would be under the jail, but that's what happens to the average person who go's to work every day trying to make ends meet and take care of the family but all the wild doing it the right way. We all of us are not perfect trust me this I know but the thing is this for the most part, most of us would rather give up some creature comforts if it meant we could all have a decent life, but these people take greed to a new level, power to the next level. How much can one man need, don't get me wrong I like nice things as much as anyone this is not just wanting a good life this is pinky and the brain and I'll let you figure out who's who. It must be nice to be one of the good old boys, when I was in the army I was told what buddies do for one another, well I never had a buddie and it seems to me these guys are as thick as , hell they are.




October 18, 2006
Report Spells Out Abuses by Former Congressman
By MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON, Oct. 17 — Former Representative Randy Cunningham pressured and intimidated staff members of the House Intelligence Committee to help steer more than $70 million in classified federal business to favored military contractors, according to a Congressional investigation made public on Tuesday.
The investigation found that Mr. Cunningham, a California Republican who is serving an eight-year prison sentence for bribery, repeatedly abused his position on the committee to authorize money for military projects, often over the objections of staff members who criticized some of the spending as wasteful.
The inquiry also found that despite numerous “red flags” about the propriety of a particular contract for work on a controversial Pentagon counterintelligence program, committee staff members for three years “continued to accept and support Mr. Cunningham’s growing requests for this project.”
Mr. Cunningham resigned from Congress in November after pleading guilty to accepting more than $2 million in bribes from military contractors. His plea was mainly related to his activities as a member of the House Appropriations Committee.
The investigation’s report lays out for the first time how Mr. Cunningham maneuvered within the classified world of the Intelligence Committee to win secret contracts for two friends, Brent R. Wilkes and Mitchell J. Wade, both contractors.
Lawyers for Mr. Cunningham and Mr. Wade declined to comment on the report. A lawyer for Mr. Wilkes was traveling outside the country.
The report is another embarrassment for Congressional Republicans, who, three weeks before Election Day, are trying to contain the damage from accusations that former Representative Mark Foley, Republican of Florida, made sexually explicit remarks in e-mail messages to Congressional pages. The report on Mr. Cunningham was made public by Representative Jane Harman of California, the senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee.
Ms. Harman’s action drew a rebuke from Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the committee, who called the release “disturbing and beyond the pale.”
In an interview, Ms. Harman said Tuesday that the public had a right to see the conclusions of the inquiry, which was led by Michael Stern, an outside special counsel, and completed in May. She said she had been pushing for months for the committee to produce an unclassified version of the report.
“I thought it would be out in early August,” she said, “well ahead of the election season.”
Only the five-page executive summary of the report was released. The full 59-page report remains classified.
Several crucial witnesses, including Mr. Cunningham, Mr. Wilkes and Mr. Wade, were not interviewed for the investigation.
Mr. Cunningham’s positions on both the Intelligence Committee and the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee gave him an advantage in obtaining classified spending provisions called earmarks.
In theory, the Intelligence Committee is supposed to authorize classified expenses before the Appropriations Committee puts them into military spending bills. But in practice, the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee has sometimes originated classified earmarks on its own, and the Intelligence Committee depends on the appropriators for its spending requests. By serving on both panels, Mr. Cunningham had influence over the entire classified budget process.
The inquiry found no evidence that staff members of the Intelligence Committee had profited or expected to profit from Mr. Cunningham’s dealings. It also concluded that committee staff members had been suspicious of Mr. Wade and “disinclined to provide him any favorable treatment.”
At the same time, committee staff members repeatedly acceded to Mr. Cunningham’s demands to steer money to Mr. Wade’s company, MZM Inc. The report describes how Mr. Cunningham worked to gain support within the Intelligence Committee for a program run by MZM at the Counterintelligence Field Activity agency of the Pentagon.
The counterintelligence program has been criticized by civil liberties groups, which say it authorizes military officials to spy on Americans under the guise of protecting domestic military bases.
But as a result of a “corrupt conspiracy” between Mr. Cunningham and Mr. Wade, the inquiry found, the Intelligence Committee’s ability to monitor the counterintelligence program effectively “appears to have been seriously impeded.”
The report cited Mr. Wilkes’s close friendship with Kyle Foggo, formerly a top administrator at the "More articles about the Central Intelligence Agency." "http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/
central_intelligence_agency
/index.html?inline=nyt-org"> Central Intelligence Agency, who helped manage the agency’s dealings with contractors. The inquiry found that Mr. Foggo also worked with Intelligence Committee staff members, including Brant G. Bassett, a former C.I.A. officer, on classified projects relating to the management of the agency.
Mr. Bassett and Mr. Foggo provided Intelligence Committee members with “trinkets” to win favor for their efforts, including a carpet displaying the words “Global War on Terror.” The report said it was not clear whether these activities violated any regulation or law, but it recommended further inquiry.
The report suggested that Mr. Foggo, who is under investigation by federal authorities in San Diego for his dealings with Mr. Wilkes on a logistics contract, might be facing a broader inquiry than had been known. It said the investigation of Mr. Foggo also involved “several large contracts” managed by an unidentified contractor, who attended a dinner in June 2003 with Mr. Foggo and Mr. Wilkes at the Capital Grille here.
Mr. Foggo’s lawyer, Mark J. MacDougall, declined to comment.
David Johnston and David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting.



Judge Revokes Lay's ConvictionRuling Rankles Enron Workers, Investors
By Carrie JohnsonWashington Post Staff WriterWednesday, October 18, 2006;
A federal judge in Houston yesterday wiped away the fraud and conspiracy conviction of Kenneth L. Lay, the Enron Corp. founder who died of heart disease in July, bowing to decades of legal precedent but frustrating government attempts to seize nearly $44 million from his family.
The ruling worried employees and investors who lost billions of dollars when the Houston energy-trading company filed for bankruptcy protection in December 2001. It also came more than a week after Congress recessed for the November elections without acting on a last-ditch Justice Department proposal that would have changed the law to allow prosecutors to seize millions of dollars in investments and other assets that Lay controlled.
With the judge's order, Lay's conviction on 10 criminal charges will be erased from the record. "The indictment against Kenneth L. Lay is dismissed," U.S. District Judge Simeon T. Lake III wrote in a spare, 13-page order.
Legal analysts said Lake's ruling closely hewed to a long-held doctrine called abatement, which allows a conviction to be vacated if defendants die before they are able to exercise their right to appeal. Courts typically rule that defendants' constitutional rights to challenge their convictions outweigh other considerations, and the law hesitates to punish the dead, the analysts said.
Samuel J. Buffone, a Washington-based lawyer for Lay, said the family was pleased with the ruling. "As far as we're concerned, this is the last step," Buffone said. "It's as if the indictment never occurred."
But governance experts said Lay's name forever will be linked with the era's most complex and far-reaching corporate fraud.
"A lot of lives were ruined, both the perpetrators' and the victims,' " University of Tennessee corporate governance expert Joseph V. Carcello said. "This happened on his watch. Even if he's not legally culpable, he's culpable as a manager."
Regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission still may pursue their civil case against Lay's estate, but their task will be more difficult because they can no longer introduce the fact of his conviction and instead must prove again, in a resource-intensive trial, that he broke the law. The SEC case has been stayed pending resolution of the status of Lay's criminal conviction. The agency's five commissioners must decide in the weeks to come whether to proceed against Lay's estate.
The court ruling shifts the spotlight onto former Enron chief executive Jeffrey K. Skilling, 52, who is to be sentenced Monday on 19 fraud, conspiracy and false-filings charges. Skilling, Lay's protégé and fellow defendant, handled day-to-day operations at Enron until his resignation in the summer of 2001 and faces more than two decades in prison.
Skilling is the sole survivor from Enron's top management ranks and the one most likely to pay a heavy price for his decision to vigorously fight the charges against him. Earlier this month, Skilling laid out several avenues for appeal, including jury bias, faulty instructions by the judge and what he called overreaching by prosecutors that infringed on his constitutional rights.
Former finance chief Andrew S. Fastow, whom Skilling has painted as the man most responsible for the company's downfall, pleaded guilty to two conspiracy charges and gave damaging testimony against his onetime patrons. A separate federal judge in Houston last month sentenced him to six years in prison, a 40 percent reduction from the seemingly iron-clad deal his defense team had struck with the government. The leader of an Enron employees group later called the benefit to Fastow "a slap in the face."
The lead plaintiffs in a separate shareholder lawsuit against former Enron executives and other advisers accused of helping the company conceal its financial problems already have said they intend to focus their attentions not on Lay's family, but on investment banks with deeper pockets.
Days before Lay's death, prosecutors had filed court papers seeking to extract $43.5 million from his financial holdings, including $6 million in a recently matured investment and at least $1.5 million more that Lay used to cover part of the mortgage on a luxury apartment in Houston. The government said it intended to set aside the money in a special fund for Enron investors and employees. Now, federal prosecutors are seeking to hold Skilling responsible for Lay's share, over Skilling's objections.
Separately yesterday, lawyers for the Lay family asked the court to release a $5 million bond that had been secured by the homes of several of Lay's five children. Federal prosecutors at the Enron Task Force declined to comment.
"Today's ruling does not change the fact that Mr. Lay was found guilty after a four-month jury trial and a separate bench trial," Justice Department spokesman Bryan Sierra said. "We will continue to pursue all remedies available for restitution on behalf of the victims of the fraud at Enron."
Lay, 64, collapsed in a rental home near Aspen, Colo., about a month after a Houston jury found him guilty of conspiring to mislead employees and investors about Enron's mounting financial problems. His death unleashed vicious criticism on the Internet and prompted conspiracy theories that were dispelled by a coroner's report and sheriff's deputies.
A man accustomed to flying in private jets and mingling with the Bush family, foreign diplomats and owners of professional sports teams, Lay was brought low by a widening scandal after disclosures that Enron had disguised billions of dollars in debt and manufactured revenue. He told the jury at his trial earlier this year that he was in the hole $250,000 after years of spending lavishly on homes, vacations and his five children.
Federal prosecutors baited Lay into displaying a short temper and a flair for micromanagement on the witness stand, and pounced when Lay could not explain why he sold more than $77 million in Enron shares back to the company in the months before its demise.
In recent weeks, Lay's family paid an undisclosed sum to settle a smaller civil case filed by former Enron employees over their pension and retirement funds.
Ken Horton, a former Enron manager who was laid off alongside thousands of others in December 2001, said he had steeled himself for the conviction to be extinguished after word of Lay's death three months ago. But Horton, who pegged his retirement and savings plan losses in the six-figure range, expressed "great" concern that he and former colleagues would never be made whole financially. Horton said he has received only $4,000 to date.
"If I got 10 cents on the dollar, I would be elated," Horton said.

Double Standards? take a good look at the stories below and tell me what you see, me I see a lot of what is wrong with this administration and it's allies. We have to take matters into our own hands, vote these people out of office they work for us lets remind them and those who will be coming after them. Make them accountable for their actions, if they where to be held to the same standards that we are held to there would be no one there.



Gunning Down Itemad Ismail Abu Mo'ammar
Just Another Mother Murdered
By ALISON WEIR
Almost no one bothered to report it. A search of the nation's largest newspapers turned up nothing in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Chicago Sun-Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Houston Chronicle, Tampa Tribune, etc.
There was nothing on CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, PBS, NPR, Fox News. Nothing.
The LA Times, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Associated Press each had one sentence, at most, telling about her. All three left out the details, the LA Times had her age significantly off, and the Washington Post reported that she had been killed by an Israeli tank shell.
It hadn't been a tank shell that had killer her, according to witnesses. It had been bullets, multiple ones, fired up close.
Neighbors report that Israeli soldiers had been beating her husband because he wasn't answering their questions. Foolishly or valiantly, how is one to say, the 35-year-old woman had interfered. She tried to explain that her husband was deaf, screamed at the soldiers that her husband couldn't hear them and attempted to stop them from hitting him. So they shot her. Several times.
Her name was Itemad Ismail Abu Mo'ammar.
She didn't die, though. That took longer. It required her life to flow out of her in the form of blood for several hours, as Israeli soldiers refused to allow an ambulance to transport her to help. Her husband and children could do nothing to save her.
Finally, after approximately five hours, an ambulance was allowed to take her to a hospital, where physicians were able to render one service: pronounce her dead, a few days before the commencement of Ramadan, a season of family gatherings much like the Christmas season for Americans. She left 11 children. None of this was in the Washington Post story, which had reported her death in one half of one sentence.
Her husband's brother, who lived in the same house, was also killed. He was a 28-year-old farmer.
Why did this all happen? The family lived behind a resistance fighter wanted by Israel. They were simply "collateral damage" in a failed Israeli assassination/kidnapping operation.
All together, five Palestinians were killed that day. The other three were young shepherds killed in another area, two 15 years old and one 14, who seem to have simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Gaza.
None of this was reported in most of America's news media, and so the American public never learned about a mother bleeding to death in front of her children, or young shepherds being blown to pieces. Apparently, it just wasn't newsworthy.
A Case Study of "Good" News Coverage
The Washington Post at least mentioned these deaths, so perhaps those who care about journalistic standards should laud the Post for its coverage.
And yet, the Post in its short report got so much so wrong.
In addition to misreporting Itemad's cause of death and omitting critical facts, the Post's story portrayed the entire context incorrectly, telling readers that these five deaths had broken a period of "relative calm."
The fact is that while it was true that in the previous six months not a single Israeli child had been killed by Palestinians, during this period Israelis had killed 75 Palestinian young people, including an 8-month-old and several three-year-olds.
I phoned the Post and spoke to a foreign editor about the need to run a correction, providing information on Itemad's murder. The editor said that she would pass this on to their correspondent (who is based in Israel), but explained that it was "impossible for him to go to Gaza." When I disagreed, she amended the "impossible" to "very difficult." She neglected to mention that the Post has access to stringers in Gaza available to check out any incident the editors deem important.
Next, I wrote a letter to the paper containing the above information. Happily, the Post letters department apparently checked it out and decided it was a good letter. They sent an email informing me that they were considering my letter for publication and needed to confirm that I was the one who had written it, and that I had not sent the information elsewhere.
I replied in the affirmative, we exchanged a few more messages, and everything appeared on target. Normally, when publications contact you in this way, your letter is published shortly thereafter. I waited in anticipation. And waited.
It is now almost two weeks after their report, and I have just been informed that the paper has decided not to print my letter. The Post has apparently determined that there is no need to run a correction.
I think I understand.
Although the Washington Post's statement of principles proclaims, "This newspaper is pledged to minimize the number of errors we make and to correct those that occur... Accuracy is our goal; candor is our defense," the American Society of Newspaper Editors clarifies these ethical requirements: corrections need only be printed when the error of commission or omission is "significant."
And, after all, these were only Palestinians, and it was just another mother dead.
Alison Weir is Executive Editor of If Americans Knew, which has produced in-depth studies and illustrative videos on American news coverage of Israel-Palestine.



From the New York Times
October 8, 2006
Castro Foe With C.I.A. Ties Puts U.S. in an Awkward Spot
By MARC LACEY
EL PASO, Oct. 6 — Thirty years ago, long before liquids and gels were restricted on airliners, a tube of Colgate toothpaste may have brought a plane down from the sky.
Cubana Airlines Flight 455 crashed off the coast of Barbados on Oct. 6, 1976, killing all 73 people aboard. Plastic explosives stuffed into a toothpaste tube ignited the plane, according to recently declassified police records.
Implicated in the attack, but never convicted, was Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban exile who has long sought to topple the government of Fidel Castro.
Today, Mr. Posada, 78, is in a detention center in El Paso, held on an immigration violation while the government tries to figure out what to do with him. His case presents a quandary for the Bush administration, at least in part because Mr. Posada is a former C.I.A. operative and United States Army officer who directed his wrath at a government that Washington has long opposed.
Despite insistent calls from Cuba and Venezuela for his extradition, the administration has refused to send him to either country for trial.
Intensifying the problem is that Mr. Posada, who was arrested last year in Miami after sneaking into the country, may soon go free because the United States has been reluctant to press the terrorism charges that could keep him in jail.
That prospect has brought a hail of criticism of the Bush administration for holding a double standard when it comes to those who commit terrorist acts.
“The fight against terrorism cannot be fought à la carte,” said José Pertierra, a Washington lawyer who is representing the government of Venezuela in its effort to extradite Mr. Posada. “A terrorist is a terrorist.”
The Bush administration has stopped short of prosecuting him as a terrorist, however, even though the Justice Department called him as much this week. In papers filed in federal court in El Paso on Thursday, it described him as “an unrepentant criminal and admitted mastermind of terrorist plots and attacks on tourist sites.”
Instead, Mr. Posada faces immigration charges, as the Bush administration tries its best to deport him somewhere else, where he would walk free.
Few countries seem willing to take him. So far, Canada, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Panama have all turned down American requests to take Mr. Posada, who denies that he bombed the plane but who is linked to the case in declassified C.I.A. and F.B.I. files.
“Who would want him?” asked one lawyer close to the case, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified because of the delicacy of the litigation. “Wherever he goes there will be intelligence agents from a variety of nations following him, not to mention hit squads.”
Two countries do want Mr. Posada: Venezuela, where he is wanted for blowing up the plane, and Cuba, where he is viewed as an enemy of the state who has repeatedly tried to assassinate Mr. Castro.
An immigration judge has ruled that Mr. Posada may be subject to torture in those two countries. But because no other country has stepped forward, and because he has not been officially deemed a terrorist by the American government, a federal judge recommended last month — coincidentally on Sept. 11 — that Mr. Posada be released.
The Bush administration is now invoking a law that bars the release of an illegal immigrant who poses adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States. That tack has placed it in the awkward position of, in effect, having to call Mr. Posada a terrorist even as it refuses to charge him as one.
Mr. Posada has longstanding links to American intelligence agencies, and his colorful past helps to explain why this is not a garden variety terrorism case. One immigration judge involved in the proceedings described them as being “not unlike one of Robert Ludlum’s espionage thrillers.”
A former sugar chemist and exterminator in Cuba, Mr. Posada has been working in the shadows to carry out a policy not unlike the one Washington has advocated over the decades — the removal of Mr. Castro.
“How can you call someone a terrorist who allegedly committed acts on your behalf?” asked Felipe D. J. Millan, Mr. Posada’s El Paso-based lawyer. “This would be the equivalent of calling Patrick Henry or Paul Revere or Benjamin Franklin a terrorist.”
Mr. Posada received military training in the United States and worked for the C.I.A. as far back as the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. He played a role in supplying the contras in Nicaragua. He has admitted, but subsequently denied, involvement in a string of bombings of Cuban tourist facilities.
By the time the Cubana Airlines plane exploded, Mr. Posada was no longer in the employ of the C.I.A. But records show that he may have notified his former bosses that a bomb was going to be set off on a plane shortly before it happened.
Venezuela and Cuba staged events on Friday, the 30th anniversary of the airplane bombing, where Mr. Bush was condemned for his government’s failure to turn over Mr. Posada. A billboard posted outside the United States Interest Section in Havana features the image of Mr. Bush, Mr. Posada and Hitler." "http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/adolf_hitler/index.html?inline=nyt-per">Hitler.
Some of the anger directed at the Bush administration’s handling of the case originates closer to home. Roseanne Nenninger Persaud, whose 19-year-old brother, Raymond, was one of the passengers who perished, recently wrote a letter to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales urging him to brand Mr. Posada a terrorist.
“It feels like a double standard,” Ms. Nenninger, who was born in Guyana but has since become an American citizen, said in a telephone interview from New York. “He should be treated like bin Laden. If this were a plane full of Americans, it would have been a different story.”
A majority of the victims were Cubans, including the entire Olympic fencing team, which was returning from a competition in Venezuela. Guyanese and North Koreans made up most of the other passengers.
“Luis Posada Carriles is a terrorist, but he’s our terrorist,” said Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive at cles about George Washington University" , which has been unearthing documents on Mr. Posada’s case. “The historical baggage that he brought with him when he sneaked into the U.S. has created this dilemma for the Bush administration.”
Getting out of jail has not been a problem for Mr. Posada in the past. In Venezuela, where he was held in the prison bombing, he had associates bribe a guard and he walked out dressed as a priest in 1985. In Panama, where he was implicated in a plot to kill Mr. Castro during a visit there, the departing president pardoned him in 2004.
He appears headed for release again, this time from a nondescript holding center ringed by barbed wire near El Paso’s airport.
Mr. Posada’s cloak-and-dagger past — his aliases, his fake passports, his life on the run through Latin America — is over, insists his Miami-based lawyer, Eduardo R. Soto.
In fact, even before Mr. Castro fell ill and ceded power to his brother, Mr. Posada declared his campaign to topple the Cuban leader by force to be over. <BR>“The Cuban government is in a very deteriorated condition, inexorably reaching its end, and I sincerely believe that nothing would help to go back to the past with sabotage campaigns,” Mr. Posada said.
Mr. Posada’s case has eerie parallels with the case of Orlando Bosch, an associate who has also been accused of playing a role in the bombing. The administration of Mr. Bush’s father released Mr. Bosch from prison in 1990, a step praised by many in Florida’s Cuban community. Now 80, he lives outside Miami.
Mr. Posada is two years younger and in failing health, partly the result of a 1990 assassination attempt against him. His application to become a United States citizen has been rejected by the government, but Mr. Posada, who is a naturalized Venezuelan citizen, is pursuing the matter on appeal.
Mr. Soto says Mr. Posada wants to devote whatever time he has left in life to members of his family who live in South Florida, and to a hobby he picked up years ago in prison — painting.
“Mostly nature scenes,” Mr. Soto said. “He’s seen a lot of those.”

This is BS no matter how you look at it and as a parent and one who had a child selected to go to DC at one point, this is past appalling I'm not going to lie in my opinion his ass has a vacancy sign on it and in the words of Red Foreman my foot is looking for a new home.


October 1, 2006
G.O.P. Aides Knew in Late ’05 of E-Mail
By CARL HULSE and RAYMOND HERNANDEZ

WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 — Top House Republicans knew for months about e-mail traffic between Representative Mark Foley and a former teenage page, but kept the matter secret and allowed Mr. Foley to remain head of a Congressional caucus on children’s issues, Republican lawmakers said Saturday.
The exchanges began with what Republicans now describe as an “overfriendly” e-mail message from Mr. Foley to the unidentified teenager.
But news reports about the exchanges led to the disclosure of e-mail correspondence with other former pages in which the discussions became more and more sexually explicit. Shortly after he was confronted by ABC News on Friday about the subject, Mr. Foley, who represented a south Florida district, resigned from the House.
The revelations set off a political upheaval, with Democrats and some Republicans calling for a full investigation of Mr. Foley’s conduct and whether House leaders did enough to look into it. Members of the Republican leadership sought Saturday to detail how they had handled the case in an effort to defuse the situation, even as it was emerging as an issue in Congressional races.
Among those who became aware earlier this year of the fall 2005 communications between Mr. Foley and the 16-year-old page, who worked for Representative Rodney Alexander, Republican of Louisiana, were Representative John A. Boehner, the majority leader, and Representative Thomas M. Reynolds of New York, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. Mr. Reynolds said in a statement Saturday that he had also personally raised the issue with Speaker J. Dennis Hastert.
“Despite the fact that I had not seen the e-mails in question, and Mr. Alexander told me that the parents didn’t want the matter pursued, I told the speaker of the conversation Mr. Alexander had with me,” Mr. Reynolds said.
In a chronology of the episode released later on Saturday, the speaker’s office said Mr. Hastert did not recall any such discussion and had no previous knowledge of the matter. “While the speaker does not explicitly recall this conversation, he has no reason to dispute Congressman Reynolds’ recollection that he reported to him on the problem and its resolution,” the statement said.
The statement, issued after senior aides, the House clerk and legal advisers huddled for much of Saturday in the Capitol, said senior staff members in the speaker’s office first learned of the e-mail messages from Mr. Alexander’s office in the fall of 2005 and took steps to investigate.
Aides to the speaker and other Congressional Republican leaders said the messages, which an Alexander aide described to them as “overfriendly,” were much less explicit than the others that came to light after ABC News first disclosed the e-mail correspondence with Mr. Alexander’s page. The aides said Mr. Alexander’s office, at the request of the page’s family, did not show them copies of the messages. In those messages, sent after Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Foley asked about the well-being of the boy, a Monroe, La., resident. He wrote: “How are you weathering the hurricane. . .are you safe. . .send me a pic of you as well.” The page sent the note to a former colleague, describing it as “sick.”
In another message, Mr. Foley wrote, “What do you want for your birthday coming up. . .what stuff do you like to do.”
The e-mail exchanges that came to light after the first news reports were far more graphic. When he was confronted about them on Friday, Mr. Foley resigned. Republican leaders said they had not known about the other e-mail correspondence.
“No one in the speaker’s office was made aware of the sexually explicit text messages which press reports suggest had been directed to another individual until they were revealed in the press and on the Internet this week,” the statement from Mr. Hastert’s office said.
Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers said Saturday that Congress and the public deserved a full report on Mr. Foley’s dealings with the pages, who are high school students who serve as runners and perform other duties. The lawmakers said there should also be an inquiry into the leadership’s knowledge of his activities and its response.
“Anyone who was involved in the chain of information should come forward and tell when they were told, what they were told and what they did with the information when they got it,” said Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York. Mr. King called it a “dark day” for Congress and said, “We need a full investigation.”
Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, said any leader who had been aware of Mr. Foley’s behavior and failed to take action should step down. “If they knew or should have known the extent of this problem, they should not serve in leadership,” Mr. Shays said.
On Saturday night, the House Republican leadership issued a statement that characterized the communications between Mr. Foley and the former House pages as “unacceptable and abhorrent.”
“It is an obscene breach of trust,” the statement said. “His immediate resignation must now be followed by the full weight of the criminal justice system.”
The statement, from Mr. Hastert, Mr. Boehner and the majority whip, Roy Blunt, asked the board that oversees pages “to undertake a full review of the incident and propose additional safeguard measures.”
The leaders also said they had asked for specific rules governing the communications and contacts between pages and lawmakers and called for creation of a toll-free number for pages and their parents to report concerns.
Besides the leaders, other lawmakers and Congressional officers who served on the board that oversaw the page program were aware of the e-mail messages, though the Democratic lawmaker who serves on the board, Representative Dale E. Kildee of Michigan, said Saturday that he had never been informed.
According to lawmakers and the speaker’s office, the page who received the e-mail forwarded the one in which Mr. Foley, 52, asked for his picture, to a colleague in Mr. Alexander’s office, repeatedly calling it “sick” and saying it “freaked me out.”
Mr. Alexander called the boy’s parents, who, Republican leaders said Saturday, told him they did not want to pursue the matter but wanted Mr. Foley to stop.
Mr. Alexander’s office also contacted staff members in Mr. Hastert’s office for guidance on what to do and, according to the speaker’s account, his aides put Mr. Alexander’s staff in contact with the clerk of the House, who oversees the page program. The clerk, who at the time was Jeff Trandahl, referred the matter to Representative John Shimkus, the Illinois Republican who is the chairman of the House Page Board, in late 2005, a spokesman for Mr. Shimkus said.
Mr. Trandahl and Mr. Shimkus confronted Mr. Foley, who insisted he was simply acting as a mentor to the former page, officials said. He assured them nothing inappropriate had occurred.
“They asked Foley about the e-mail,” the speaker’s statement said. “Congressman Shimkus and the clerk made it clear that to avoid even the appearance of impropriety and at the request of the parents, Congressman Foley was to immediately cease any communication with the young man.”
The leadership had other possible avenues for investigating the e-mail messages beyond questioning Mr. Foley, including an inquiry by the ethics committee or even the Capitol police. But aides said that while the contents of the messages are disturbing in hindsight, they did not set off alarms initially.
On Saturday, Mr. Shimkus’ spokesman, Steve Tomaszewski, said, “Obviously Foley lied about the other e-mails.”
Mr. Tomaszewski said Mr. Shimkus would not comment on any other conversations he had with House leaders about the matter because it was referred to the ethics committee by a vote of the House on Friday. A spokesman for Mr. Alexander did not respond to telephone and e-mail messages.
Kevin Madden, a spokesman for Mr. Boehner, said Saturday that Mr. Boehner had had a “brief, nonspecific” conversation about the subject with Mr. Alexander in the spring but that he could not recall with certainty whether he had discussed it with other leaders.
Democrats moved quickly to criticize Mr. Reynolds, who while overseeing House campaigns nationally is facing the potential of a serious challenge from Jack Davis, a wealthy businessman who has vowed to spend at least $2 million of his own money in the contest. “Tom Reynolds had a moral obligation to protect our children,” said Curtis Ellis, a spokesman for Mr. Davis.
Carl Forti, a spokesman for Mr. Reynolds, said the congressman became aware of contact between Mr. Foley and the young page this past spring, when Mr. Alexander brought it to his attention. Mr. Forti said that Mr. Alexander had told Mr. Reynolds of an e-mail exchange between Mr. Foley and the page, but that he did not show Mr. Reynolds the e-mail messages and their contents.
Strategists for both parties said it was too early to tell what impact the episode might have on Congressional elections now five weeks away but said at a minimum it could lower the already dismal public view of incumbents and discourage conservative voters.
It directly affected the race for the seat of Mr. Foley — the third Republican to resign this year under a cloud. Tim Mahoney, the Democrat who had been running an uphill and barely watched race against Mr. Foley, used the new attention to his campaign on Saturday to accuse the Republican leadership of covering up for him.
“It’s now clear from all the reports coming in from across the country that the Republican leadership team has been well aware of this problem with the pages for well over a year,” Mr. Mahoney said at a campaign stop at Palm Beach International Airport. “It looks to me that it was more important to hold onto a seat and to hold onto power than to take care of our children.”
At the Justice Department, an official said that no investigation was under way but that the agency had “real interest” in examining the circumstances to see if any crimes were committed.
Several of Mr. Foley’s former colleagues demanded a criminal inquiry.
Representative Robert E. Cramer, an Alabama Democrat who was co-chairman with Mr. Foley of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, condemned Mr. Foley’s actions as “shocking and disturbing.”
“Anyone, including Foley, involved in this type of behavior should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Mr. Cramer said.


They say he used the screen name Maf54 on these messages provided to ABC News.

Maf54: You in your boxers, too?Teen:
Nope, just got home. I had a college interview that went late.
Maf54: Well, strip down and get relaxed.
Another message:
Maf54: What ya wearing?
Teen: tshirt and shorts
Maf54: Love to slip them off of you.
And this one:
Maf54: Do I make you a little horny?
Teen: A little.Maf54: Cool.

The language gets much more graphic, too graphic to be broadcast, and at one point the congressman appears to be describing Internet sex.
Federal authorities say such messages could result in Foley's prosecution, under some of the same laws he helped to enact.
"Adds up to soliciting underage children for sex," said Brad Garrett, a former FBI agent and now an ABC News consultant. "And what it amounts to is serious both state and federal violations that could potentially get you a number of years."
Foley's resignation letter was submitted late this afternoon, and he left Capitol Hill without speaking to reporters.
In a statement, he said he was "deeply sorry" and apologized for letting down his family and the people of Florida.
But he made no mention of the Internet messages or the pages.
One former page tells ABC News that his class was warned about Foley by people involved in the program.
Other pages told ABC News they were hesitant to report Foley because of his power in Congress.
This all came to a head in the last 24 hours. Yesterday, we asked the congressman about some much tamer e-mails from one page, and he said he was just being overly friendly. After we posted that story online, we began to hear from a number of other pages who sent these much more explicit, instant messages. When the congressman realized we had them, he resigned.

Click here to read an exclusive 2003 Internet exchange between Congressman Foley and a former congressional page, according to the young man. Warning: sexually explicit language, reader discretion advised.

Click here to read more Internet exchanges between Foley and former congressional pages


October 1, 2006
Democrats Assail G.O.P. for Silence on Foley
By BRIAN KNOWLTON International Herald Tribune

WASHINGTON, Oct. 1. — Democrats expressed outrage today that Republican leaders had waited nearly a year to tell them about e-mails between Representative Mark Foley and a former teenage page, allowing the Florida Republican during that time to remain head of the Congressional caucus on children’s issues.
“This should be investigated objectively. I think the Democratic leadership should have been told 10 months ago,” Representative Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, said in a letter to the House Ethics Committee that it was “abhorrent” that House Republican leaders had known of Mr. Foley’s contacts with the page for a number of months “and that apparently no action was taken to protect these underage children,” Reuters reported. Ms. Pelosi said it was vital that the committee immediately question House Republican leaders under oath.
Mr. Foley, 52, resigned from the House shortly after being confronted Friday by ABC News about the exchanges. Other, more sexually explicit correspondence between Mr. Foley and other former pages emerged over the weekend.
This touched off a political upheaval, particularly after disclosures that top House Republicans knew for months about the original message traffic with the 16-year-old former page but kept it secret, while Mr. Foley remained head of the missing and exploited children’s caucus in Congress.
The House voted Friday to refer the matter for investigation by the House Ethics Committee. Some Republicans joined Democrats in calling for a fuller investigation of Mr. Foley’s dealings with pages — high school students who run errands and perform other duties — and of the leadership’s response.
Strategists for both parties said the scandal at a minimum could lower the already-dismal public view of incumbents and discourage conservative voters. It directly affected the race for Mr. Foley’s seat in south Florida. His name will remain on the ballot against Tim Mahoney, a Democrat, who had been running an uphill race.
Republicans, jolted by the matter, worked furiously to allay the damage from a moral issue that some termed a “gut punch.”
Dan Bartlett, the White House counselor, called the allegations “shocking” and said today on the ABC News program “This Week” that President Bush had only recently been informed about the e-mails. Bartlett, however, said he saw no need for an investigation outside Congress, saying the Ethics Committee was “the best place for this investigation to go forward.”
One prominent Democrat, Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania, also favored an internal investigation — but only if done “very quickly,” before the elections. “It’s outrageous,” he told ABC News today. “It really makes me nervous that they look like they tried to cover it up.”
Among Republican leaders who learned earlier this year of the fall 2005 communications between Mr. Foley and the page, who worked for Representative Rodney Alexander, Republican of Louisiana, were Representative John A. Boehner, the majority leader, and Representative Thomas M. Reynolds of New York, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. Mr. Reynolds said Saturday that he had personally raised the issue with Speaker J. Dennis Hastert.
“ The speaker’s office said Saturday that Mr. Hastert did not recall any such discussion and had no previous knowledge of the matter, but had “no reason to dispute Congressman Reynolds’ recollection.”
Aides to the speaker and other Congressional Republican leaders said the initial e-mail messages were much less explicit than the others that came to light after ABC News first disclosed the correspondence with Mr. Alexander’s page.
House Republican leaders issued a statement on Saturday characterizing the communications between Mr. Foley and the former House pages as “unacceptable and abhorrent,” and “an obscene breach of trust.”