Letter Never Sent

Nader calls Bush `dictator’: DEFEATED IN 2000, HE DENIES CANDIDACY ALLOWED GOP TO TRIUMPH:

The war in Iraq developed instead, he said, from “a messianic militaristic determination turned by a closed mind, facilitated by a cowering Congress and opposition Democrat Party and undeterred by a `probing’ press.”

Bush is acting “in effect as a selected dictator,” Nader told the Mercury News in an interview Friday. The president has not listened to any of the many retired admirals, generals and foreign-policy experts who have warned against the war, Nader said. And the stated reasons for going to war “have either been disproved or greatly distorted,” he said.

Even so, I’m not surprised. Many of the Mormons and devoutly religious people I’ve known have had this brainwashed, stepford wife attitude. We live in a nation of the walking dead and the half-alive. Overworked, sleep deprived, senses and minds dulled. Wake up!

I wouldn’t normally find this very newsworthy just for my own personal reasons, but I wanted to point out how they tried to pin this to that Ricci guy who had a brain hemorrage and died in jail. So, I’m glad the Smart girl has been found, but this just goes to show how ‘justice’ is often delivered by zealous prosecutors and police, on the backs of the hapless and innocent. Shame.

Police earlier had focused on 48-year-old handyman, Richard Ricci, calling him “a possible suspect. He was later imprisoned for a parole violation stemming from burglary charges related to the Smart family. Ricci died in the Utah State Prison August 30, 2002, when he was taken off life support following a brain hemorrhage three days earlier.

I have to wonder if he did indeed even take anything from the Smarts. Authorities can often find laws that have been broken and will even go so far to plant evidence.

1. Ashcroft Unveils DNA Proposal: Which political donors are gonna get the fat contracts for this jobby job?
2. Drug habits die hard: Cocaine and amphetamine drug users struggle with the residual effects of their drug habits for up to a year after going cold turkey – much longer than previously reported.
3. Cool art, via Metafilter
4. ‘Superbomb’ Video Will Be Sent to Scare Iraq: I’m upset. You mean we’re not using nucular bombs to shed innocent blood anymore?
5. US Secretly Urged Israelis to Walk Out of Peace Talks
6. Movie Men Add Special Effects to Media War
7. Bush apologizes to Afghan leader Karzai: Interesting timing considering Afghanistan’s puppet president has been talking to Russian officials and diplomats. If Afghanistan’s government came out against the Iraq war it would be a huge black eye for the American war establishment.

When the Germans were the ones we were supposed to revile during WWI and WWII government propagandists changed hamburgers into Salisbury steak, sauerkraut into ‘liberty cabbage’, German measles into ‘liberty measles’, and liverwurst into ‘liberty sausage’. Germans became huns. It was necessary to the war machine to foster hatred and mistrust of anything foreign, so that when you saw or heard anything German your mind would close up and your brain would go into a paroxysm of fear.

This is happening now to the French because their government is opposing our government’s movement towards war. Americans are peace-loving and independent yet we allow our emotions to be swayed by slander and emotional appeals and insults against the French people? Now the French, who helped us against the British empire during our seminal moment, are our sworn enemies? Now they are ‘smelly, cheese-eating, surrender monkeys’? This only makes Americans look like uneducated assholes and does nothing to build support for American interests if that’s what you’re after. To this end, our ship of fools in Congress has passed a ‘symbolic’ measure to rename French fries “freedom fries.” When will the Orwellian irony stop? I’d like one bottle of Victory gin please.

1. Markets threatened by ‘new world disorder’: A study by Lehman Brothers’ chief economist John Llewellyn says that regardless of who backs any action there is a one in 10 chance of an ‘open-ended conflagration’ which would lead to a Viet nam war-sized bill for the US, ‘equivalent to 12 per cent of contemporary GDP’, or $1.2 trillion.
2. Bush Sr warning over unilateral action: Mr Bush Jr, who is said never to forget even relatively minor slights, has alarmed analysts with the way in which he has allowed senior Administration figures such as Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, aggressively to criticise France and Germany.
3. Why was Richard Perle meeting with Adnan Khashoggi?
4. Frist yanks poll from web site after blaming anti-war results on “hackers”
5. Supreme Court to hear police questioning case revising landmark Miranda decision
6. Danger of super germs is immediate, doctors say
7. China Moves Away From Communist System
8. Kids’ viewing of TV violence linked to aggression as adults

1. The Independent: US prepares to use toxic gases in Iraq: The convention bans the use of these toxic agents in battle, not least because they risk causing an escalation to full chemical warfare. This applies even though they can be used in civil disturbances at home: both CS gas and pepper spray are available for use by UK police forces. The US Marine Corps confirmed last week that both had already been shipped to the Gulf.

   It is British policy not to allow troops to take part in operations where riot control agents are employed. But the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has asked President Bush to authorise their use. Mr Bush, who has often spoken of “smoking out” the enemy, is understood to have agreed.

2. Pentagon: Reporters leave Iraq now: She and other Pentagon officials stopped short of urging news organizations to pull their 250 reporters out of Iraq’s capital, but they repeatedly cautioned that they cannot count on a “heads-up” from the Pentagon to evacuate the city before war begins.

   Pentagon officials believe that in addition to being killed or injured by hundreds of cruise missiles and smart bombs expected to rain down on Baghdad, reporters risk being targeted for murder by Saddam’s troops or captured to be used as human shields.

3. Revealed: US dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq war: Secret document details American plan to bug phones and emails of key Security Council members: Details of the aggressive surveillance operation, which involves interception of the home and office telephones and the emails of UN delegates in New York, are revealed in a document leaked to The Observer.

   The disclosures were made in a memorandum written by a top official at the National Security Agency – the US body which intercepts communications around the world – and circulated to both senior agents in his organisation and to a friendly foreign intelligence agency asking for its input.

   The memo describes orders to staff at the agency, whose work is clouded in secrecy, to step up its surveillance operations ‘particularly directed at… UN Security Council Members (minus US and GBR, of course)’ to provide up-to-the-minute intelligence for Bush officials on the voting intentions of UN members regarding the issue of Iraq. This is incredibly fucked up.

4. Via RobotWisdom weblog Mortimer Adler’s Syntopicon: