Tall Tales

I promised myself to post no more blogs until I'd finished a long article on the dog genome for the Bark, but I couldn't resist this story from today's L.A. Times about the U.S. military paying to plant stories in the Iraqi media. Why not advertise? Hire the world's top ad agencies to sell the Iraqi people on the wonderful new democracy we're creating for them from the barrel of a gun emerging from a dense cloud of white phosphorus smoke.

Data Mine This...

"So we cheated and we lied and we tested
"And we never failed to fail, it was the easiest thing to do." Stephen Stills, "Southern Cross."

Stills, of course, laments lost love, but everytime I hear those lines, I think of the Bushbuckers. That should be their motto, especially the Bushbucker in Chief.

Despite their repeated incompetence--or maybe because of it--I read the report by Walter Pincus in today's Washington Post, "Pentagon Expanding Its Domestic Surveillance," with a mixture of anger, amusement and absurdist resignation. After all, Pentagon spooks were involved in sculpting the scant information on Iraq into a justification for war, knowing everything they reported was wrong. Their counterparts in the FBI can't find the anthrax mailer. The CIA is best equipped, it appears, for torturing people held in secret prisons in order to obtain confessions known to be fabricated. As to 9/11/2001--what can one say--that the intelligence agencies appear collectively to have had everything but last names, flight numbers and dates. In that light, what should one make of the Pentagon's expansion of its capacity for domestic spying, especially through the [un]poetically named Counterintelligence Field Activity. The agency's computer programs will sweep the web and our email into Pentagon databanks, where they will languish until time comes to cherry pick the information to justify another war--say, against Syria--or another secret arrrest, extraordinary rendition, and torture.

That's what passes for the clandestine war on "terriors." It is a sham. There is no evidence that increased funding and personnel has improved or will improve the quality of the information the intelligence agencies disseminate--that is, they might be able to gather every byte of data in the world, but they can't properly analyze or report it. Increased funding and personnel appear primarily to increase the capacity of these agencies for mischief, corruption and incompetence. Throwing more and more money at them is the equivalent of throwing more money at the missile defense system in the hope it will suddenly work. It's not happening.

Incompetent or not, the more profound question is why we should permit the military to spy on American citizens within our borders. But in asking that, I realize it's a false question. We. the people, are not being given the opportunity to approve this invasion of our rights. It is being imposed from above by a crew of Bushbuckers who, during their nearly five years in power--yes, only 5, they have 3 more, mein gott--"have never failed to fail."

Pesticides and Parkinson's

Maria Cone of the L.A. Times examines the link between exposure to chemicals in the environment, especially pesticides, and Parkinson's Disease. It's an issue of interest to me because of my Parkinson's, and I have no doubt that, as the story says, exposure to certain chemicals in certain quantities can trigger or help trigger Parkinson's in some people. Look at someone who's been spraying pesticides for twenty or thirty years, and you'll see how bad that shit is, and then recall the number of times your own home was sprayed or you gave a flea bath or dip to the dog. Pesticides are intended to kill; little wonder then that they also affect people.

I don't mean to belittle this research. The people doing it have been voices in the wilderness for too long. But there is not much news here, either; vague statements about percentages and speculation about multiple chemical assaults at various timess substitutes for hard science. Throw the speculation, however informed, away and what's left is a plea for more money for more research--a lot more--and not just about the role of toxic chemicals in Parkinson's. We need to learn why and how people react so differently to the same environmental insult--and that brings us to genetics, which this article tends to downplay, if not ignore.

Far from showing how much we know, stories like this one reveal our ignorance of the way the brain works and way genes interact with the environment. They also show how industry invariably looses its "biostitutes" (biologist + prostitute) to pick studies apart rather than to join the search for truth. The result is "politicized science" in which people stake out and tenaciously defend their intellectual turf instead of engaging in the free inquiry that is the sine qua non not just of science but of all critical thinking.

Still, short of any compelling evidence to the contrary, I'll blame the (Un)Intelligent Designer for Parkinson's and all other debilitating diseases. The dude clearly has a sick sense of humor and a malevolent spirit, to have turned these things loose.

White Phosphorus, Take 4

Back to incendiary chemicals. Jeff Marley, who blogs "World Opinion Roundup" for the Washington Post, picks up on the now suppressed, by Blair, Daily Mirror report of a Bushbucker threat to bomb al-Jazeera headquarters in Qatar --who said the U.S. hasn't been targeting journalists in Iraq--and a more comprehensive citation for the Defense Intelligence Agency communique from April 1991 on white phosphorus. I went looking on Gulflink, a DOD site maintained by the Special Assistant for Gulf War Illnesses, and found among the declassified documents posted there, this investigation into whether Saddam and his troops used "chemical weapons to suppress the Shiia rebellion in southern Iraq after the Gulf War [March to April 1991] and if US forces were exposed to these agents as a result of any such use." The document cited by Marley and others, including me in "Take 3," deals with chemical weapons use against Kurds to the north.

The investigation itself--A Case Narrative Close-Out Report, submitted May 10, 2000 by the special assistant--was called inclusive, although elsewhere the report says that both the CIA and DIA independently ruled out Iraqi use of chemical weapons against its own people following Gulf War I--got that Cheney/Bush? Of interest here are several statements in Part II. Investigation, A. Scope: "What constitutes a chemical weapon is outlined in the Chemical Weapons Convention and includes toxic chemicals and their precursors (defined in accompanying schedules), munitions and devices specifically designed to deliver those chemicals, and equipment specifically designed for use directly in connection with the employment of such munitions. The toxic chemicals include nerve agents, such as sarin, soman, and VX; blister agents like mustards and lewisite; and other less well known agents. However, the difference between these chemical warfare agents and other substances not classified as chemical warfare agents (e.g., white phosphorous and napalm) is largely technical and legalistic [italics added]."

Part of the reason for that, we are told, is that it is often difficult to tell what caused a wound. Thus, "Blisters result from exposure to blister chemical warfare agents as well as contact with acids and incendiaries such as napalm and white phosphorus."

The mainstream American media have been spending an inordinate amount of time trying to protect their Bushy partners in disinformation and wondering whether they are becoming obsolete. Certain editors have attacked blogs even while their reporters continue to present nothing but the Bushy line. They need to cover stories like the threat against al-Jazeera, the targeting of journalists, and the use of white phosphorus as a lethal weapon--that they don't seems partly to do with journalistic jingoism, the belief that foreign journalists can't possibly be better than American reporters--guess again. Like many bloggers, I do this in free time I don't have, with virtually no financial resources. Yet, for now, these important stories are being best covered by bloggers with help from a few large media outlets, like, in this case, the Washington Post. If the mainstream media falters, the way GM has, it will be because it has become enamored of its own voice pontificating and forgotten how to find and present the facts.

(Un)Intelligent Design, Again

A friend sent me this notice that faculty at the University of Kansas department of religious studies have decided to call (Un)Intelligent Design by its proper name and will offer for the Spring 2006 term a course, "Special Topics In Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and other Religious Mythologies." At least there is one bastion of light and reason remaining in the state where the board of education, eager to prove the case for (un)intelligence, has redefined science to allow for proof by the supernatural, by which one must assume they mean faith. Now, the religion department under Paul Mirecki has determined to call this bit of pseudo-science by its proper name---"Intelligent Design" = "Mythology." Now (Un)Intelligent Design's creators and defenders are squirming and protesting because the last thing they and their "theory"can tolerate is proper naming. Improper naming thrives on ignorance, superstition, and confusion. Proper naming brings clarity and right order.

White Phosphorus, Take 3 Think Progress » Exclusive: Classified Pentagon Document Described White Phosphorus As ‘Chemical Weapon’

This wee tidbit from Think Progress appears to say that when it comes to deciding whether white phosphorus is a chemical weapon or a particularly foul incendiary weapon--when used against people rather than as a smoke screen or target marker--that Pentagon likes to have it both ways. If used by our "enemies" against our friends WP is a WMD, a proscribed chemical weapon, but used by us against our enemies it is a venerable incendiary device. What changes, of course, is not the chemical structure of whie phosphorus but our relationship to it and all it represents--recognizing, or course, that humans fire the rounds.

I don't care whether white phosphorus is classed as a chemical weapon or an incendiary device or any other euphemysemeemweapon, because in essence, its use as a weapon intended to kill and maim is beyond the pale. I seem to recall an old adage that goes like this: If you adopt the tactics and methods of your enemy in order to defeat him, you also defeat yourself, for you are then your own enemy.

White Phosphorus, Take 2

The New York Times weighs in on the use of white phophorus in Iraq with a story by Scott Shane, "Defense of Phosphorus Use Turns into Damage Control," that is, sadly, pathetic, even by the Times' degraded standards for covering weapons use and possession in Iraq. The article spends most of its ink attacking the Italian television documentary, which at this point is the equivalent of bashing a dead cockroach, since that program's faults were exposed after its first airing, and bemoaning the subsequent "public relations" failures of the Bushies, as they first denied, then admitted (kind of), then effectively said, well, we in fact outed ourselves, but don't worry we were careful. Shane doesn't deal with the issue of civilian casualities. (For a more complete discussion, scroll down to my November 19 entry, "The Fire This Time.") Of "shake and bake" artillery bombardments, employing both white phosphorous and high explosves to flush out and kill guerilla fighters in Fallujah, Shane says nothing. Nor does he mention how white phosphorus was reserved for "lethal missions," according to an account in the Army's own Field Artillery Magazine. No, as Shane and the Times tell it the use of white phosophorus as a weapon wasn't as problematic as the subsequent bungling of the response to the Italian documentary. Shane cites an unnamed State Department official, who would not comment for the record but who "privately" dubbed the Bushies' response to the white phosphorus report "a public relations failure." (What is the Times policy on anonymous sources?")

"Public relations, indeed: The use of white phosphorus raises concerns because people can't forget the searing image of the Vietnamese girl running naked down the road, in flames....Death by fire, disfigurement by fire are terrifying to most sentient creatures, even among us fire dependent humans--and maybe that is because we are fire dependent. White phosphorus is nasty; the Times should look again.

"What It Is Now"

The title of this blog comes from Mark Knopfler, "What It Is," from Sailing to Philadelphia, but today it's Bob Graham, former Senator from Florida and chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, telling what it is in an op-ed--"What I Knew Before the Invasion"--for the Washington Post. He chaired the Intelligence Committtee during the run-up to the vote that Bush claims authorized his going to war with Iraq--as opposed to an outright declaration of war presumably--and to keep it short, Graham says that the Bushies cooked the books, showing members of Congress and the public unclassified intelligence briefings that led to the conclusion that Saddam Hussein was a growing menace. The classified material, he says, was laced with doubts and caveats. Moreover, Graham says: "In February 2002, after a briefing on the status of the war in Afghanistan, the commanding officer, Gen. Tommy Franks, told me the war was being compromised as specialized personnel and equipment were being shifted from Afghanistan to prepare for the war in Iraq -- a war more than a year away." Privy to those classified briefings, Graham voted against the war. His colleagues in Congress should have been more vigilant. But I think Graham should have been less the good scout and told people the hidden truth in plain English. His service now is to expose Bushy's new lie--that everyone had the same "intelligence reports" he had.

The L.A. Times's Bob Drogin and John Goetz produce the goods on Curveball, the primary source for the Bushies claims about Saddam's capacity for producing WMD, especially biological weapons. Curveball's handlers in the German intelligence agency, BND, repeatedly warned the Bushies that their man's information was highly suspect and that Curveball himself was "'not a psychologically stable guy,'" according to Drogin and Goetz. Their exhaustive investigation revealed, they say, "that U.S. bungling in the Curveball case was worse than official reports have disclosed." In essence, the non-reality based Bushies ignored evidence provided by UN weapons inspectors and anyone else that Curveball was wrong. Surprise.

Drogin and Goetz don't say it, but when you add a compliant press, lazy and frightened Congress and public to the mix, you get ignominy, torture, white phosphorus, wasted lives, one nation in ruins and another bankrupted economically and morally.

The Fire This Time

White phosphorus, Willy Pete, WP. It's weaponized to burst into dense smoke spewing yellow flames when exposed to oxygen--meaning air--and it burns hot enough to melt flesh. We didn't use it in Fallujah in November 2004, when we pretended to drive the insurgents out--no matter what that Italian television network RAI says. Wait, we did use it, but only to create smoke to conceal our stealth movement through those narrow, twisted streets. No, we did use it in the other way, too, and, in fact--take that you Italians--we're so honest we even reported it ourselves. We used it on insurgents, not civilians. We know that because all of the 300,000 or so civilians had left before we rolled in. We told 'em to leave, anyway, and if close to 100,000 remained and some of them got burned--well, shit happens. WP is not banned by any international treaty that we signed, not that we pay any mind to treaties. It's not like we firebombed the whole place or anything, although maybe we should have.

White phosphorus is a waxy solid which burns easily and is used in chemical manufacturing and smoke munitions. Exposure to white phosphorus may cause burns and irritation, liver, kidney, heart, lung, or bone damage, and death. White phosphorus has been found in at least 77 of the 1,416 National Priorities List sites identified by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). From the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. For a good history and disquisition on phosphorous, see this Denver Univeristy site. It's nasty.

The Independent today has a fine review article, taking the U.S. and Britain to task for using incendiary bombs (M 77s), cluster bombs, and white phosphorus [Note: The military and most of the American press use "phosphorous," but "phosphorus" is the preferred spelling] in Iraq, especially white phosphorus. The March-April 2005 Field Artillery Magazine carries a bare bones account of the use of WP in Fallujah in November 2004, and the shells weren't fired just to blow smoke.

"WP proved to be an effective and versatile munition," report Captain James T. Cobb, First Lieutenant Christopher A. LaCour, and Sergeant First Class William H. Hight. "We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE [high explosives]. We fired 'shake and bake' missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out." Elsewhere, they talk of reserving WP for "lethal missions."

Lethal, indeed: weaponized white phosphorus ignites when exposed to air and burns until it consumes itself or is deprived of oxygen. It sticks like superglue to skin and basically melts its victim down to the bone unless they find a way to suffocate it. It will "steal your face right off your head." (The Grateful Dead, "He's Gone.") The phosphorus pentoxide in the smoke becomes a heat producer when it encounters moisture and thus can damage eyes, lungs, nasal passages.

Arguably, when used for "lethal missions," WP becomes a chemical weapon, a WMD, the very thing the Bushbuckers started the war to find and eradicate. The Pentagon disputes that, of course, saying that WP is ever and always an incendiary weapon. For legal purposes the distinction is important--the use of chemical weapons would violate international law--but whatever it is technically and legally, practically it is nasty shit, intended to inflict pain, suffering, and death. Ethically and morally, the use of WP against people is unjustifiable.

Cobb, LaCour, and Hight say that they encountered no civilians in their southern sector, and we can believe them, but there were civilians in Fallujah, and they were exposed to white phosphorus. We don't do torture. We don't use chemical weapons. Except when we do, and whether we are signatory to the appropriate treaties or not matters less than that we have become worse than our enemies. Because we have stooped to the level of hatred, oppression, violence, and torture of our worst enemy, we will never defeat them. We can only hope to hold the people who order the use of these weapons and these abuses accountable for their crimes.

Their Hypocrisy, Again

A wee update, because Dick Cheney, at least in the eyes of the Washington Post's Dan Froomkin, is the administration's "biggest attack dog"--not to mention the speculation that he is also Bob Woodward's source on Vallery Plame (rejected in today's Wall Street Journal). I think calling Cheney any kind of dog is an insult to dogs, but granting the metaphor, I'll say that he most closely resembles the fell war dogs the Spanish unleashed on Native Americans during the Conquest. Those creatures attacked, killed, and maimed men, women, and children. There are even reports of Spaniards feeding captives to their dogs. The legacy of that abuse lingered for generations and affected the non-use and use of dogs in the American military, as I show--not to be self-promoting--in A Dog's History of America.

Now, back to Cheney's attack, from November 17. The Bushbuckers are at it again with Bushy and Dickie double-teaming the Democrats criticizing their abuse of intelligence prior to invading Iraq, as if Republicans weren't doing the same. Cheney, the man with the different agenda, who couldn't be bothered to protest the Vietnam War or fight in Vietnam, or do anything but serve Dick Cheney's lust for power, declared the charges, reports the Washington Post and virtually every other media source, "reprehensible." Bold talk from a man who can't reveal why he wanted to go to war or the names of the people who helped design his energy policy or what he and the Hypocrite in Chief really knew about planned terrorist attacks prior to 9/11--and typically twisted in logic. What's reprehensible are wars of aggression. What's reprehensible is torture. What's reprehensible is fearmongering. What's reprehensible is lying about your reasons for war. What's reprehensible is repeatedly putting the same troops in harm's way because you know your war is so unpopular that were you to implement a draft, you would face a popular uprising on your own shores; what's reprehensible is designing communities to waste energy.

And while I'm lodging my protest, let me ask what is democratic about an election in which people vote not for individual candidates but for slates or one in which huge percentages vote to approve a constitution they have never read, simply because their imam tells them to?

Their Endless Hypocrisy

Sometimes--I should say, often--it helps to get the news from abroad, like reading this evening how Rummie, that Antediluvian Bushbucker who doubles as Secretary of Offense, declared that the current mess in Iraq is all Bill Clinton's fault [registration for the Guardian may be required], because between puffs on that cigar dipped in Monica Lewinsky's vagina, Mr. Bill endorsed the notion that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the U.S. That's true, but Rummie and the other Bushbuckers aso need to remember that Bubba did not invade Iraq and start torturing people. These bushbucking hypocrites are the worst kind of cowards, as I've said brfore and will doubtless repeat; they lack even the courage of their nonconvictions.

No, this dog has erred: the Bushbuckers are devoid even of nonconvictions. Why else would they suddenly pretend to be following the lead of Bubba, whom, while he was in office, they considered worse than the Great Satan.

CIA Torture Chambers

Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz reviews the flap over Dana Priest's report last week in the Washington Post on the CIA's secret torture chambers. The right attacks her and the Post for having printed the story, as if it were an act of betrayal and compares the unnamed official who leaked the information to Priest to Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, and possibly others who outed Valerie Plame. Kurtz cites specifically the ethically challenged bombast William Bennett, who demands outrage and punishment. Problem is these eejits are barking up a false equivalency. The people who outed Valerie Plame committed a crime as part of an effort to supppress the truth and continue to hoodwink the American people about the reasons for war. The sources on torture chambers revealed the existence of places where people kept without any legal rights are brutalized in apparent violation of U.S. law, international law, and basic human rights. (Apparent is operative: see, among others, Jane Mayer's "A Deadly Interrogation" in the November 14 New Yorker.) Well, the hypocritical right is, by definition, irrational.

The left, Kurtz says--here, he is pursuing a false dichotomy--attacks the Post for not naming the countries hosting these torture chambers. The Post and Priest offered mumbo jumbo arguments for not doing so--protecting those nations from attack primary among them. But the arguments don't wash. The countries were named by the Financial Times and other publications. More to the point, why should the Post protect anyone involved in these activities? It has long been a favorite tactic of torturers to work in anonymity because their filthy work can't stand the light, so illuminate them.

Trouble

When the Hypocrite in Chief, the Bushbucker himself, starts accusing his "[domestic] opponents"--the foreign ones are rotting without trial or even knowledge of what they are alledged to have done--of "trying to rewrite" history and being treacherously untrue to their nonconvictions, not to mention traitors to the troops and the Bushbucker, it is time to duck and cover. The Hypocrite in Chief asserts that the Congress had access to the same "intelligence" he received and that intelligence agencies around the world endorsed the view that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and was seeking to make or obtain nuclear weapons. That last bit of intelligence was leaked to Judith Miller at the New York Times, which ran her scoop on the front page, and the Bushbuckers then proclaimed that the Times, that notorious liberal rag, was itself reporting on the Sadman's evil. There was more.

But the Bushbuckers were making reality and intelligence reports match their desire and to deny that now is simply to perpetrate the lie. Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus attempt to set the record straight in the Washington Post by observing ever so politely that, in fact, Congress didn't have access to the same "intelligence" the top Bushbuckers did. Of course, the Bushbuckers also forced a vote right before the 2002 midterm elections, which guaranteed that weak-kneed Democrats like John Kerry and John Edwards would vote for war. And many Democrats and Republicans simply didn't read what was available. Why bother? Paul Wellstone was dead by then--at whose hand?--and there was no one else to mount an articulate campaign against the Bushbucker's perfidy. Robert Byrd tried, but he was a voice in the wilderness, burdened by his past. The opposition in the House and Senate agreed to be defeated by the majority. Like Bob Graham of Florida, they hemmed and hawed but finally did not break ranks--thus, Graham has never revealed what he learned from the intelligence committee investigating the attacks on 9/11/2001, because that information is classified, and he's a good trooper.

Well, the time is long past when that lame excuse works. The Bushies didn't just manipulate intelligence, they also fabricated it--the link between al Qaeda and Saddan Hussein and Iraq's nuclear weapons program, to name two. They engaged in the worst sort of fear mongering, and they lied repeatedly about what was happening--that inspections weren't working, when, in fact, they were. In Bushworld, inspections weren't working because the inspectors failed to find the promised WMD. In the Sunday, November 13, Washington Post, John Edwards takes a significant step forward and admits that he was wrong to vote for the war, and that, had he known the evidence was cooked, he never would have done so.

More significant, he argues for a change of "strategy," and here's where the Hypocrite in Chief shows his true ignorance. The Bushbucker doesn't begin to understand that it is possible and sometimes necessary to change one's approach to a problem or a war. Bushbucker lacks the imagination and knowledge to that. All he can do is stay the course, which in this case means stumbling around in the lightless void that his mind, while Cheney and Rumsfeld attempt to shape Iraq to their dystopic vision.

Their Hypocrisy

Of the Bushbuckers it must be said--to paraphrase Val Kilmer memorably playing Doc Holliday in the otherwise immemorable Tombstone: "Their hypocrisy knows no bounds." On November 7, the L.A. Times reported on a warning sent by the IRS to All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena that it risked losing its tax exempt status because on October 31, 2004, its former rector, Reverend George F. Regas, delivered a sermon denouncing the war of aggression in Iraq. The church's lawyers are careful, but I need not be. This threat is clearly another Bushbucker attempt to stifle free speech. The Bushbuckers are the same crew, after all, who happily court right wing churches, where the preachers sermonize and pass out Republican literature and, in some cases, cast out political apostates, meaning non-Bushbuckers. This politicization of the IRS surpasses anything Nixon achieved, yet it arouses barely a whimper. Bravo, boys and churls who rule the union. Once again, you have distinguished yourselves as craven hypocrites. Party on.

There's more. Cheney's no hypocrite on the matter of torture--he endorses it, as Dana Priest reported in the November 7 Washington Post, but the chief Bushbucker himself excels at hypocrisy, claiming in Panama--notice how he went to a country Poppy beat up on to get some good press on trade--that the U.S. doesn't torture, but it needs to maintain its secret torture chambers and maximum flexibility--that is the ability to torture. That must be why he's working so hard through Cheney to get Congress to amend its act reiterating that torture is not permitted in or by Americans in order to allow appropriate exceptions--not that the Bushbuckers would ever use them--or to drop it completely.

The WP reports today, November 8, that the ethically challenged Senate Majority leader Bll Frist and Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert are calling for an investigation into who leaked information on those secret CIA torture chambers to the WP--better to ask why the paper played along and withheld the locations of those prisons. The dynamic duo claim that release of the information harmed U.S. interests. If it did, bravo. U.S. interests should not lie in the torture of prisoners; rather, those practices are antithetical to all we putatively stand for because they make us no better than the people we claim to be fighting and they serve as a rallying point--rightfully so--for those who do hate America. But Frist and Hastert can't be expected to know that; they lack the brains.

The great irony here is that a lot of the information on those CIA torture chambers might have come from a Republican senator or staffer, according to CNN, citing Trent Lott. Indeed, there are Republicans, like South Carolina's Lindsey O. Graham, who recognize that the existence of those secret prisons is the real scandal--see the Washington Post again. They need to be shut down and the people who set them up--including the Bushbuckers who approved them--prosecuted.

Meanwhile, what about Syria? In his blog--Early Warning--for November 7, the Washington Post's William M. Arkin discusses the status of Pentagon plans for invading Syria. It's just a cross border jaunt, after all, and now the Bushbuckers can hang it on the UN's investigation of Syrian involvement in the assassination last February of Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri. Bushbucker needs another diversion, fast, and Syria is the easiest target. Be prepared.

America the Ignorant

The Kansas Board of Education has decided to teach that the theory of evolution is "controversial" because DNA, among other biological entities, cannot be explained through natural processes alone--in other words to teach (un)intelligent design without using that phrase, presumably because they lack courage of their nonconvictions. In doing so the board has alligned itself with the Taliban and other reactionary fundamentalists, who prefer fantasy to truth--or, let us say, the quest for truth and understanding. My modest proposal is that since genetics cannot be explained through reference to natural processes alone, the ranchers and farmers of Kansas be forbidden to grow or raise any plant or animal that has been subject to genetic manipulation. That's because the scientists doing the manipulating can't possibly know what they are doing, unless the (un)intelligent designer tells them. Indeed, the only exception allowed is if the scientist can certify and prove that the (un)intelligent designer has spoken to them and directed their work, step by step.