Doc Farmer Reviews Fahrenheit 9/11

Doc Farmer sucks it in and goes to see Michael Moore's bullshit movie. I feel for you Doc. (Makes note to buy Doc some strong antiseptic soap for Christmas.) Here is Doc's review. - Sailor



The Lies of Michael Moore in ''Fahrenheit 9/11''

Written by Doc Farmer
Wednesday, June 30, 2004


A half-truth is the worst kind of lie.

I’ve been getting a lot of guff from some of the lib/dem/soc/commie participants on the ChronWatch Forum for daring to comment on the movie, '''Fahrenheit 9/11,''' without seeing it. My view was that if you could smell a large pile of manure, you didn’t have to jump into it to experience it. However, that did little to satisfy them. '''Coward!''' they cried.

Moreover, I didn’t want to spend my hard-earned money to fatten up an already bloated man who is, by his own words, a terrorist sympathizer. Moore has called Islamofascists ''patriots'' in the past, and has praised those who slaughter and terrorize in the name of their own putrid political and social agenda.

Nevertheless, I went to see the movie today. I’ve just returned from the theater.

I feel like I need a shower.

Michael Moore spends two tortuous hours spinning half-truths, supposition, perverted imaginings, and out-and-out lies across the screen, polluting the celluloid it inhabits, and the theater it pervades. Moore apparently was upset that his movie didn’t get a PG-13 rating so that kids could see it. Considering the ''liberal'' use of the F-word in one segment of the film, and the horrific images of war interspersed with film of the high government officials in tie and tails, I would have given it an X.

Moore is a modern-day Leni Riefenstahl, with all the evil politics but without the talent. It is propaganda, (im)pure and simple(istic). Moore tugs at the heartstrings, makes racist comments about the enlistment practices of the military, and stands at a street corner like a Harkonnen baron without the suspensor units, accosting congressmen to have their children enlist and volunteer for Iraq. He posits his own form of neo-fascism, supporting his lib/dem/soc/commie brethren (who are far closer to the Nazi political structure than are the rep/cons), and dares to quote George Orwell in reference to George Bush, when it is Moore himself who is far more representative of the communist body politic.

He spends two painful hours and barely mentions the attacks of 9/11 themselves. Oh, at the beginning of the film you’ll hear the planes, the crashes, the cries. However, you’ll not see them for the screen is black. You’ll see people looking up, with tears and disbelief. You’ll see papers floating down from the skies. But he can’t show you the actual planes slamming into the buildings, and the lives extinguished by the hate of Islamofacist terrorists, might draw away from his main point--blaming Dubya.

What you’ll see instead, if you’re dumb enough to waste your money on this cinematic diarrhea, is a long, drawn out, badly structured hate-fest against the president and the fact that he actually won the election in 2000. Yes, he’s apparently still ticked off about that. Gore lost, and in every INDEPENDENT recount save one, Gore still LOST. Bush WON. Get over it already, Michael!

But no, that would be too simple. It would be too gracious. While it can be argued that Moore may be simple in the head (or at least simplistic in his political world-view), grace seems to be [/i][b]way [/b][/i]out of his league.

He tries to link Dubya to the bin Laden family, but only one of whom, to my direct knowledge, is a terrorist. The bin Laden clan is rather large, and is generally respected in the building industry of the Middle East. They’ve done nothing to earn his enmity, and yet he immediately assumes that if one is guilty they’re all guilty, plus anyone associated with them. That’s racist and wrong; but then, Moore’s a lib/dem/soc/commie, so he can’t possibly be a racist, can he?

Perhaps he’s not a racist when he talks about mainly black kids joining the military, only for financial reasons. To me, that is Moore trying to represent blacks as less patriotic, and only interested in the money. Blaming Dubya for the poverty in the nation, showing run-down parts of Flint (the city's Chamber of Commerce must love Michael Moore!) and interviewing a rather non-representative group of teenagers about joining the military. Of course, he's ignoring the fact that the figures prove that military enlistment is pretty much in line with the overall racial make-up of our nation. No, facts like that are inconvenient, so he just forgets them. That, to my mind, is a lie.

And here’s a strange item. He disses Dubya for having a financial relationship with Carlyle Group, but seems conveniently to forget his very own connection with Lowes Theaters who is showing his 24-frame-per-second fib-fest, a company connected to Carlyle. In addition, of course, what kind of a hate-Dubya movie would it be without the constant references to Halliburton? Moore, quit dancing around and making baseless accusations. Provide documented evidence, not documentary dross.

He promotes military desertion in this movie. He tugs at the heartstrings, showing a family who lost a son in Iraq. He shows no sympathy for the family's loss except where it will help him blame Dubya.

Folks, this is not a documentary. It’s a hot, steaming load of male bovine excrement the size of a small planet. Lie upon half-truth upon supposition upon guesswork upon pure political evil. It is hyperbole exploded in cinema-verite ]minus the ''verity.'' It is ''let’s hate America''' in a greasy package. It’s scum made by scum, and produced as nothing more than a campaign ad against a sitting president. It sucks more than a black hole in a galactic core.

What I found most disturbing, however, was not the mere content of this cinematic sewage. It was the fact that people were actually applauding this filth, cheering Michael Moore, while heckling the commander in chief with a chorus of ''F-You'' expletives as his visage crossed the screen.

People actually believed that what Moore was saying was true. That’s the greatest danger, and my greatest disappointment. Perhaps it proves what Moore said in an interview in the United Kingdom, where he declared that Americans are possibly the ''dumbest people on the planet.'' That would certainly seem to fit the general description of the average viewer of a Moore movie.

I saw ''The Passion of the Christ'' and didn’t flinch at the violence, because I knew from whence it was based. I’ve seen an autopsy. I’ve viewed the beheadings of innocents on the web. However, none of that ever made me feel like throwing up.

''Fahrenheit 9/11'' did.

If the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is dimwitted enough to give this cinematic piece of filth even so much as a nomination for an Oscar, I strongly recommend that the viewing public boycott these political southpaws, their movies, their merchandising, their award shows, and the horse they rode in on.

Of course, the lib/dem/soc/commie sycophants and editors and movie critics and other assorted morons will extol Moore, this walking glob of cholesterol, and give him awards from Hollyweird to Froggyland to Timbuktu. All because they like the lies he spouts, and don’t give a flying fig about inconvenient things--like the truth.



As to Mr. Moore, he is probably the richest liar in the country right now. But he didn’t get a penny from me for watching this obscenity on film. I bought a ticket for ''Shrek 2,'' and just walked into the theater that was presenting Moore's two-hour filth-fest instead.

If you folks are planning to see ''Fahrenheit 9/11,'' do the same thing I did, with one difference. Buy the ticket for ''Shrek 2,'' and then watch it instead of Moore’s putrid palaver.


About the Writer: Doc Farmer is a writer and humorist who is also a moderator n ChronWatch's Forum. He formerly lived in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, but now resides in Indiana. Doc receives e-mail at docfarmer9999@yahoo.co.uk.

Source

Bad ACTors

JOHN FUND ON THE TRAIL

Bad ACTors
If Dems want honest elections, why did a Soros-backed group hire criminals to get out the vote?

Monday, June 28, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
OpinionJournal.com

When the Associated Press last week turned up evidence that America Coming Together, an anti-Bush group funded by $5 million from financier George Soros, had hired dozens of felons to go door-to-door and register voters in Florida, Missouri and Ohio, the defensive fire from ACT was swift and predictable.

First, ACT claimed it hadn't employed violent felons. Then when the AP reported that ACT employees included people convicted of assault and sex offenses, the group admitted it might also have hired felons in 14 other battleground states. It also promised to fire anyone guilty of "violent or other serious offenses." In some cases it won't have to; four felons it hired in Missouri have already gone back to prison, including one for endangering the welfare of a minor.

That's one reason the Missouri Department of Corrections banned ACT from its list of potential employers for parolees in halfway houses. Noting that the felons would have to handle driver's license information and telephone numbers as part of the voter-registration process, the department concluded that "from a public safety standpoint, we didn't want offenders to be in a situation where they would be handling that information."





ACT also denied that it is violating federal election laws that prohibit it from engaging in partisan activity on behalf of the Kerry campaign, even though its Web site says it is "laying the groundwork to defeat George W. Bush and elect Democrats." Its roster of staffers is chock full of Democratic operatives with close ties to Mr. Kerry. Just this month, ACT staffer Rodney Shelton left to join the Kerry campaign as its Arkansas state director. At the same time, former Kerry campaign manager Jim Jordan has joined ACT. Federal law forbids any coordination between ACT and the Kerry campaign, but is impossible to enforce.
Ellen Malcolm, ACT's president, says the attacks on her group represent an attempt "to distort and play politics with this situation, to attempt to disrupt ACT and our grassroots activities." But in light of the felon scandal, ACT's activities now merit closer scrutiny, because they may be making the problem of our sloppy voter rolls worse. The Federal Election Commission found in 2002 that 12% of all registered voters nationally were "inactive voters," and thus subject to possible misuse by having someone else vote in their name. In Missouri, a swing state George W. Bush narrowly won in 2000, ACT bought at least $40,000 worth of voter lists from the state's Democratic Party and then paid 75 canvassers between $8 and $12 an hour to go door-to-door and sign up new voters. Since January, they have signed up 12,000 new voter registrations in St. Louis alone.

The St. Louis Election Board reports that about three quarters of ACT's registrations were valid, but trusting any numbers they put is a perilous exercise. St. Louis is one of several American cities in which registered voters outnumber residents of voting age. State Auditor Claire McCaskill, a Democrat, issued a scathing report on the Election Board's procedures last month. It found that nearly 10%, or 24,000, of the city's voters were "questionable." The report tabulated 4,405 dead people, 2,242 felons, 1,453 people voting from vacant lots and 15,963 also registered somewhere else in Missouri or Illinois. At least 935 of the felons, or some 40%, had apparently cast a ballot in a recent election.

"You have felons registering felons who then commit another felony by casting an illegal vote," says Missouri's Sen. Kit Bond, who co-authored the 2002 Help America Vote Act to start the process of cleaning up the nation's voter rolls. He was motivated by the chaotic Election Day of 2000 in which the Gore campaign sued to keep the polls open in St. Louis on the grounds people had been denied the right to vote. Their "plaintiff," Robert D. Odom, turned out to be dead. An aide to a Democratic congressman with the same last name was then substituted as the plaintiff, but then it was discovered that he had successfully voted earlier that day. A St. Louis judge nonetheless ordered the polls kept open, and they were for 45 minutes until a higher court overruled her.

Ms. McCaskill, the state auditor, has concluded the St. Louis Election Board is beyond fixing. She says it needs "local control and direct accountability" and suggests control of it be transferred directly to the mayor. Gov. Bob Holden, a fellow Democrat, agrees.





Reform may finally be in the cards in St. Louis, but at least a dozen other major U.S. cities, ranging from Philadelphia to Miami, also need a complete housecleaning. In 2001, the Palm Beach Post concluded that more than 5,600 people voted in Florida even though they appeared to perfectly match names on a list of suspected felons who were barred from voting. A smaller number of people were also mistakenly listed on voter rolls as being felons when they were not.
But anyone who combats vote fraud or questions the accuracy of voter rolls is likely to come in for abuse. When the Miami Herald won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the rampant absentee ballot fraud in that city's 1998 mayoral election, the Pulitzer jury noted it had been subject to "a public campaign accusing the paper of ethnic bias and attempted intimidation." Local officials in several states who've tried to purge voter rolls of felons and noncitizens have been hit with nuisance lawsuits alleging civil-rights abuse. It's no surprise that many rolls remain clogged with voter deadwood.

A generation ago, the existence of insidious poll taxes and other forms of voter intimidation represented a real threat to free and fair elections. But those problems have receded, only to be replaced by old-fashioned ballot rigging.

We now send teams of election observers to countries such as Venezuela, Cambodia and Albania, where fraud has been rampant. The mess in St. Louis and other cities should prompt us to consider having some election observers in our own backyard. Surely the right to vote includes an equal right not to have that ballot diluted by nonexistent or ineligible voters.

Read All About It!!

I know some of you may be saying that the Sailor is really beating a dead horse on the matter of bias in the media. That may be so, but I do believe people need to know that the so called "Mainstream" media, the group that many people depend on to provide them with the information they need to form their opionons on who will best lead this country, is a biased as it can be. James Glassman goes into some detail on this subject. He also delves into how the left has deluded itself into the reasons for it's recent defeats. - Sailor


Read All About It!!

By James K. Glassman Published 06/29/2004
Tech Central Station

The headline on my copy of a touted new survey by the Pew Research Center read, "Press Going Too Easy on Bush."

Now there's a story!

It was late May, and the media had spent the past three months celebrating vicious antagonists of the administration like Richard Clarke, trashing not only George Bush himself but also practically all of his policies and key advisors: Rumsfeld, Rice, Ashcroft, Wolfowitz.

It was odd, I thought, that under these circumstances the public would think the press was going easy on the President.

Then I read the report.

The opiners described in that headline weren't average Americans. They were members of the press corps itself. The Pew study found that 55 percent of national journalists believed that "press treatment of Bush was not critical enough." Only 8 percent thought it was "too critical."

The public, however, had the opposite view: 24 percent thought the press was going too easy on Bush; 34 said it was too tough.

The press and the public remain, in the words of the Media Research Center, "worlds apart."

This split has been visible ever since a groundbreaking article 23 years ago in AEI's Public Opinion magazine. In it, academics Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman presented results of a careful study of media elites. They discovered that from 1964 to 1976, 81 percent of journalists voted for the Democratic Presidential candidate.

A later survey by Freedom Forum found that 89 percent of Washington-based reporters voted for Bill Clinton in 1992 and only 7 percent for George H. W. Bush. Meanwhile, 59 percent viewed the 1994 Republican "Contract with America" as a "campaign ploy," while just 3 percent called it a "serious reform proposal." The public disagreed, and the GOP captured the House for the first time in four decades.

Today, the media and the public are drifting even farther apart. In the new Pew study, 34 percent of national journalists describe themselves as "liberal," compared with 22 percent in 1995. Only 7 percent of reporters say they are conservative at present. For the general public, the results are again reversed: 33 percent of Americans call themselves conservatives; 20 percent, liberals.

On social issues, the gap is even wider. For example, the national press states by a margin of 91 percent to 6 percent that "belief in God is not necessary to be moral." The general public says, to the contrary, that belief in God is necessary, by a margin of 58 percent to 40 percent.

The Pew study appeared the same week as a new book by David Brock titled "The Republican Noise Machine: The Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy." Brock's book comes on the heels of "What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and News," by Eric Alterman, and "Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth," by Joe Conason.

This fantasy that the Left gets a raw deal from the national press is broadly shared by journalists. Incredibly, Pew found that only 2 percent of the national press corps identified CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, or National Public Radio as liberal -- though 69 percent leapt to call FOX News conservative.

But, in one hopeful sign, many in the press understand that the New York Times is increasingly a journal of liberal advocacy, not the "newspaper of record." Among national journalists, 20 percent identify the Times as liberal, while only 4 percent attach that label to the Washington Post.

In their commentary on the Pew study, executives of the Committee of Concerned Journalists and the Project for Excellence in Journalism suggested, "The fact that journalists are more likely to see a conservative tilt in the news than a liberal one...could be a sign of liberal bias."

No kidding. In recent years the Left has convinced itself that its defeats have been caused by FOX News and conservative talk radio shows distorting national opinion. The truth is that thanks to growing public skepticism of broadcast and print journalism that is often openly biased, and new access to direct news sources through the Internet, people are making up their own minds.

That's the big new media story of the last decade: "Americans Tune Out Biased Press, Form Own Views." Read all about it!

Senate Decorum and the Vice President's F-Bomb

My friend, Doc Farmer, takes the Vice President to task on using the "F" word on the Senate floor. I agree with the VP on Leahy, but I do see Doc's point. - Sailor


Senate Decorum and the Vice President's F-Bomb
Written by Doc Farmer
Wednesday, June 30, 2004


I seem to be in a rather odd minority today. A conservative thinker who isn’t excusing Vice President Richard Cheney’s unleashing of a rather strong invective--the BIG one--against Sen. Patrick Leahy (Lib/Dem/Soc/Commie – VT) on the floor of the Senate.

My rep/con colleagues say that since the Senate wasn’t in session, His Veepness wasn’t technically breaking the rules. This is probably true. My colleagues say that Leahy is an annoying little twerp who attacks people at the drop of a hat, lies like a Clinton, and was fully deserving of a good tongue-lashing by Cheney. This is also true. They claim that Leahy and his lib/dem/soc/commie co-conspirators constantly lie, prevaricate, fabricate, and fill that august chamber with deep, fetid layers of male bovine excrement. Of this, there can be no doubt whatsoever.

None of which excuses Mr. Cheney.

I’m neither a prude nor a saint, folks. I’ve been known to swear. At more than a stubbed toe, I might add. My editor has had some wonderful times re-wording my prose, especially when I’m discussing ''blasted'' lawyers. In my misspent youth, I would listen to George Carlin and his ''seven deadly words.'' In fact, I knew these words by heart and in order. When you’re 17, it’s a sort of a status thing. Especially when going to a Catholic school, I might add...

Nevertheless, even I know when to swear and when not to. I try my best not to swear in front of my kids (although an occasional hell or damn [/i]will[/i] escape). I don’t use the ''big guns'' at the office, and certainly not in mixed company. I don’t scream obscenities in a house of worship. I don’t address royalty with the phrase ''how’s it hangin’?'' – especially the elderly dowager types. I may [b][/i]think[/i][/b] it, but I don’t [b][/i]say[/i][/b] it.

And I don’t use such words as Mr. Cheney did. In any case, not in a place as hallowed (in a secular sense) as our Capitol Building.

This is the where I have the problem.

Now, I have a lot of admiration for Mr. Cheney. He’s been in public service for a lot of years, and he’s an honorable man. He is a good vice president and if--God forbid--the worst ever happened, he’d make a good president as well. Personally, I would hope that he would not run in this presidential campaign – not because I dislike him, but because I do have concerns about his health.

However, an honorable man should own up to wrongs he’s done and apologize for them. He had the opportunity to admit openly that he said ''the word'' on the Senate floor and say he was sorry--not necessarily to Sen. Leahy, but at least that he chose that venue to curse like that.

When Neil Cavuto was interviewing Mr. Cheney on Friday, he played it coy. He didn’t come out and say, ''Yes, I told Leahy to (bleep) off '' or whatever he said. He sidestepped the question. He gave an answer worthy of Slick Willie. He did everything but ask for a definition of ''is.'' Moreover, Cavuto (to his detriment) let this evasion pass. He didn’t follow through as aggressively as perhaps he could have. He didn’t pin the vice president to the mat in a journalistic half-nelson, as his mainstream media, Dubya-hatin' brethren might have done.

Maybe Mr. Cavuto was being ''fair and balanced,'' or he was just trying to be deferential to a high government official. As much as I admire his style and his work, I sincerely hope that it was the former and not the latter.

Oddly enough, the mainstream media (see also: lib/dem/soc/commie-based sedition mongers) have not been braying for the vice president’s blood. This is quite unusual, considering most reporters’ treatment of Trent Lott, Newt Gingrich, et al. Normally the pundits and politicos would be screaming at the top of their lungs, spraying vitriol like a squadron of commie crop dusters, in a no-holds-barred scorched earth campaign in support of John Kerry’s running mate (whomever that might be). Perhaps the media knows what kind of a jerk Leahy is, and decided that Cheney’s F-bomb was the lesser of the available evils.

I’m a bit surprised, however, that the Kerry campaign is not capitalizing on Cheney’s verbal [/i]faux pas[/i]. Of course, if it did, Kerry’s spin-doctors would have to answer for the rather solicitous use of the term by their own candidate in Rolling Stone magazine and other interviews. As well as other articles and his own website.

However, just because the other guy is worse doesn’t mean that Mr. Cheney’s actions are excusable. Understandable, perhaps, but hardly tolerable.

When President Reagan, God rest his soul, was in the Oval Office, the story goes that he never removed his jacket. He knew that some places are worthy of respect. He knew that some places belonged not to him, but were entrusted to him by the nation.

And so, Mr. Vice President, I would respectfully ask you to apologize to America for using such a term on the Senate floor. You might not have broken the rules, strictly speaking, but you did break the sanctity of America’s legislative cathedral. Whether Sen. Leahy was fully deserving of the term, America was not deserving of the disregard shown.



About the Writer: Doc Farmer is a writer and humorist who is also a moderator on ChronWatch's Forum. He formerly lived in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, but now resides in Indiana. Doc receives e-mail at docfarmer9999@yahoo.co.uk.

Source

Iraq Sovereignty Handover Completed

Iraq Sovereignty Handover Completed



By Andrew Marshall

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq (news - web sites)'s occupying powers formally transferred sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government on Monday -- two days earlier than expected -- to try to thwart guerrilla attacks, officials said.


Reuters correspondent Alistair Lyon, who was at the ceremony, said it was attended by Paul Bremer, the outgoing U.S. governor of Iraq, and top Iraqi government officials.


In Istanbul, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari confirmed plans to bring the handover forward.


"I believe that we will challenge these terrorists, criminals, Saddamists and anti-democratic forces by bringing even the date of the handover forward," Zebari told reporters after meeting British Prime Minister Tony Blair (news - web sites).


Although an interim Iraqi government led by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi will have "full sovereignty," according to a U.N. Security (news - web sites) Council resolution on the handover earlier this month, there are important constraints on its powers.


It is barred from making long-term policy decisions and will not have control over more than 160,000 foreign troops who will remain in Iraq. The government has the right to ask them to leave -- but has made clear it has no intention of doing so.


Guerrillas have mounted a series of bloody attacks this month aimed at disrupting the handover, and several foreign hostages have also been seized over the past week.


HOSTAGE CRISIS


On Sunday, the Arabic-language satellite channel Al Jazeera broadcast footage of a blindfolded U.S. Marine, whose captors said they would kill him unless Iraqi prisoners were released.


"A Marine assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force has been absent from his unit since June 21," a U.S. statement said. "However, Naval Criminal Investigative Services cannot confirm that Corporal Wassef Ali Hassoun has been taken hostage."


Militants have already seized three Turks (news - web sites) and a Pakistani contractor, in a new spate of kidnappings ahead of the handover.


Fighters loyal to al Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said on Saturday they were holding the Turks and would behead them within 72 hours unless Turks stopped working with U.S. forces.


The threats have cast a shadow over President Bush (news - web sites)'s visit to Turkey for the NATO (news - web sites) summit on Monday and Tuesday.


Turkey and Pakistan are not part of the U.S.-led occupation force in Iraq but many nationals work as drivers, cooks, cleaners and support staff for U.S. troops.


Turkey refused to bow to the kidnappers' demands, saying it had been "fighting terrorist activity for more than 20 years."


Zarqawi's group beheaded a South Korean hostage last week after Seoul rejected a demand to withdraw its forces from Iraq, and last month decapitated a U.S. captive.


Zarqawi has also claimed responsibility for a series of bloody attacks, most recently a wave of suicide bombings and armed assaults in five cities on Thursday that killed more than 100 Iraqis and three U.S. soldiers.


On Sunday a C-130 transport aircraft was hit by small arms fire after takeoff from Baghdad airport. One person was wounded and later died, the U.S. military said.

Several explosions also rang out in central Baghdad as guerrillas aimed mortars at the "Green Zone" compound housing the U.S.-led administration's headquarters. One mortar killed two boys playing near the Tigris river, doctors said.

A separate rocket attack on a U.S. base in Baghdad killed an American soldier. At least 630 U.S. soldiers have been killed in action in Iraq since the start of the war last year.

Bush camp hits back at Kerry with a quip

Looks like the poodle and his coalition of the "wild eyed" are whining and moaning over this Bush internet ad. Too bad for them. Seems they can dish it out, but cannot take it. - Sailor

Bush camp hits back at Kerry with a quip
By Bill Sammon
THE WASHINGTON TIMES


President Bush's re-election campaign is ridiculing what it calls "John Kerry's coalition of the wild-eyed," which includes filmmaker Michael Moore and former Vice President Al Gore.
The campaign has compiled a collection of video clips featuring angry Democrats and over-the-top ads by MoveOn.org, a liberal advocacy group, to showcase what it calls the "rage" of the left.

The resulting Internet ad, which is posted on the campaign's Web site, is dubbed "The Faces of John Kerry's Democratic Party: The Coalition of the Wild-eyed."
Taking a page from the political playbook of Mr. Moore, whose anti-Bush movie, "Fahrenheit 9/11," opened nationwide on Friday, the Bush campaign has edited together the most strident sound bites from those who support Mr. Kerry, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts.
"How dare they drag the good name of the United States of America through the mud of Saddam Hussein's torture prison," exclaims an angry Mr. Gore at the beginning of the ad.
Viewers then see a clip from a MoveOn.org ad showing Adolf Hitler basking in the adulation of Nazis who cry "sieg heil." An image of Mr. Bush's raising his right hand to take the oath of office is made to look as though he is saluting the German dictator.
"What were war crimes in 1945," the ad says, "is foreign policy in 2003."
Next comes a montage of angry exhortations from former Democratic presidential candidates Howard Dean and Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri. Mr. Moore is shown being booed at the Academy Awards for accusing the president of "sending us to war for fictitious reasons."
After more shots of Mr. Gore railing against Mr. Bush and MoveOn.org likening him to Hitler, the ad shows Mr. Kerry using an expletive to describe Mr. Bush's domestic policies.
"This is not a time for pessimism and rage," the ad concludes as the image of Mr. Kerry gives way to one of Mr. Bush. "It's a time for optimism, steady leadership and progress."
On Thursday, the day of the ad's release, Mr. Kerry disputed the notion that he is a pessimist.
"This nation is destined to think big and dream big, and it's time America had a president who once again will look toward a future of discovery with hope and confidence," he said.
"I've offered an economic agenda focused on high-tech, high-wage job growth," he added. "It is an optimistic agenda for prosperity."
Kerry campaign spokesman Mary Beth Cahill called on Republicans to remove the ad saying that "the use of Adolf Hitler by any campaign, politician or party is simply wrong."
But the Bush-Cheney campaign team refused.
"We're using the video from MoveOn.org to show our supporters the type of vitriolic rhetoric being used by the president's opponents and John Kerry's surrogates," spokesman Scott Stanzel said.
Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman also noted that the ad did not encompass all the president's detractors.
"A strong member of the coalition of the wild-eyed, America Coming Together, hired convicted felons to register voters," he said. "In Ohio, it has been discovered that a murderer and a rapist are part of this effort."
According to Mr. Mehlman, the effort is yet another example of the "rage" against Mr. Bush. Republican strategists are increasingly convinced that the political phenomenon of "Bush hatred" ultimately will backfire on Mr. Kerry.
"John Kerry himself got carried away," Mr. Mehlman said, "attacking former President Reagan and claiming to be more committed to reducing the size of government than was President Reagan."
He was referring to Mr. Kerry's calling the late president a "big spender who ran up the nation's deficit." Speaking to donors at a San Francisco fund-raiser Wednesday, Mr. Kerry added: "I don't recall vetoes of major appropriations bills."
A disclaimer was added to the start of the Web spot over the weekend to explain that the video contains "remarks made by and images from ads sponsored by Kerry supporters." The disclaimer accuses Mr. Kerry of failing to denounce those making Hitler comparisons.
According to the Bush team, no one typifies the "coalition of the wild-eyed" more than Mr. Moore. Liberal columnist Christopher Hitchens has criticized Mr. Moore for "a film that bases itself on a big lie."
"To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability," he wrote in the online magazine Slate. "Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness."
Former President George Bush has called Mr. Moore a "slimeball" and said the film was "a vicious personal attack" on his son.
White House spokesman Dan Bartlett told ABC on Friday that the documentary is "outrageously false" and not "based upon any facts."
"Mr. Moore has made it a habit of his not to pay attention to facts. And he comes from a very extreme ideology," Mr. Bartlett said. "He's outside the mainstream."
Republicans said the examples of Bush hatred have continued to proliferate in recent days.
"Al Gore delivered another gravely false attack on the president," Mr. Mehlman said. "Another member of the coalition, [Democratic National Committee] Chairman Terry McAuliffe, embraced Michael Moore."
Mr. Mehlman said he would have no response to Mr. Moore's film but said, "The question is how Senator Kerry is going to respond to it."

See the ad here

Captive US marine faces execution in Iraq

Monday 28 June 2004, 1:23 Makka Time, 22:23 GMT


US marine Hassoun Ali is one ot two captives under threat


A US marine captured by a purported Iraqi resistance group is to be decapitated unless certain prisoners held in occupation prisons are released.


In a video broadcast by Aljazeera on Sunday, the Islamic Retaliation Movement/Armed Resistance Wing said US marine Hassoun Wassef Ali would be beheaded if detainees in US-led occupation prisons were not freed.

The group claims to have taken Ali - of Pakistani origin - captive after "infiltrating a US military base in Iraq".

The video received by Aljazeera shows a kneeling blindfolded moustached man in camouflage military garb. A hand holding a long sword is seen standing behind Ali.

Just hours earlier, an unidentified group of purported Iraqi fighters threatened to behead a Pakistani driver working for a US-occupation contractor within three days.

The captors also urged Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to shut down his country's embassy in Iraq.

Captive details

The second captive was named as Yusuf Amjad, an employee of US contractor Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR).


Video sent to Aljazeera included
proof of marine's identity

KBR is a subsidiary of the giant Halliburton company which was once headed by US Vice President Dick Cheney.

Like other contractors for the US-led occupation, it has suffered mounting attacks on its staff.

"This man was taken after an attack on a US base in Balad," said one of the masked fighters on a tape obtained by Al-Arabiya.

"You must release our prisoners held near the US base in Balad, in Dujail, in Yathrib, in Samarra and near Abu Ghraib. You have three days from the date of this recording and after that we will behead him. We have warned you."

The news not told - Care to read about an American hero in Iraq?

It has always been the Sailor's contention that the liberal news media is more concerned about defeating the President then they are concerned about what helps America in this war against terror. Jack Kelly's article give more credence to the Sailor's view. - Sailor


Jack Kelly: The news not told
Care to read about an American hero in Iraq?
Sunday, June 27, 2004
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

In the Washington Post's story Wednesday about the beheading of South Korean hostage Kim Sun Il, reporters Jackie Spinner and Anthony Faiola assert: "Kim's death appeared almost certain to broaden opposition in South Korea to the country's already unpopular involvement in Iraq."


Spinner and Faiola did not provide any evidence for why they thought the brutal murder was "almost certain to broaden opposition ..." There was a good reason for this. It wasn't true. The Asia Times reported on the same day that "the execution has galvanized the people, pushing many into the deployment camp. Preliminary surveys indicate a more than 20 percent jump in the number of respondents who now support the government's plans [to send 3,000 soldiers to Iraq]."

Spinner and Faiola were too busy spinning to report the facts.

On June 18, Russian President Vladimir Putin disclosed that the Russian intelligence services had, after 9/11, "received information that officials from Saddam's regime were preparing terrorist attacks in the United States and outside against the U.S. military and other interests."

This was significant. The SVR (the current name by which the KGB goes) and the GRU (Russian military intelligence) had excellent sources within the Iraqi Mukhabarat, which they had helped train.

The Post-Gazette ran the Putin story on the front page, above the fold, where it belonged. But we were an exception. ABC's "World News Tonight" mentioned the story briefly, but both CBS and NBC said nothing about Putin's remarkable disclosure. CNN also made no mention of it in its evening newscasts, according to the Media Research Center. The New York Times and the Washington Post buried the story on inside pages.

The Los Angeles Times said in a story Monday that "[9/11] Commissioners Sunday repeated that they did not see evidence of collaboration between al-Qaida and Iraq."

This is what Commissioner John Lehman actually said on NBC's "Meet the Press": "The Clinton administration portrayed the relationship between al-Qaida and Saddam's intelligence services as one of cooperating in weapons development. There's abundant evidence of that ... President Clinton justified his strike on the Sudan 'pharmaceutical' plant because it was thought to be manufacturing VX gas with the help of the Iraqi intelligence service.

"Since then, that's been validated. There has been traces of EMPTA [a precursor chemical for manufacturing VX, a deadly nerve agent] that comes straight from Iraq, and this confounds the Republicans, who accused Clinton of doing it for political purposes [the cruise missile strike took place on the eve of Monica Lewinsky's grand jury testimony]. But it confirms the cooperative relationship, which were the words of the Clinton administration, between al-Qaida and Iraqi intelligence."

For more than a month now, the news media have been filled with stories about the soldiers who perpetrated the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. People who get their news from ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, The New York Times and The Washington Post can be forgiven if they think the only soldiers in Iraq are Pvt. Lynndie England and Spc. Charles Graner. When is the last time you read a story about an American hero in Iraq?

I'm going to tell you about Pvt. Dwayne Turner, a medic with the 101st Airborne Division, because it's unlikely you will read about him anywhere else.

A year ago April, Turner's unit came under grenade and small arms attack about 30 miles south of Baghdad. Though he was wounded with shrapnel in both legs in the initial attack, Turner repeatedly exposed himself to hostile fire to drag wounded soldiers to shelter and to provide them with medical attention. He was shot twice more while treating 16 men, two of whom would have died were it not for his heroism. "No one is going to die on my watch," he said. He was awarded the Silver Star, the third highest decoration for valor.

You hear about the Englands and the Graners, but not about the Turners. Minneapolis Star-Tribune columnist James Lileks asked several liberal friends if they'd rather have Osama bin Laden captured and Bush re-elected, or Bush defeated and Osama still at large. They all said they'd prefer to have Bush defeated. That's a choice many in the news media made long ago.



Jack Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio (jkelly@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1476).

1,000 Hits

Early today, the blog had it's 1,000th hit. I thank everyone who has paid me a visit. Please do not be shy and do add your comments.

Thanks once again! - Sailor

Bill Clinton, Al Gore and the Iraq - al-Qaeda Connection

It seems that Bill Clinton has suddenly come up with a case of selective amnesia. He claimed yesterday that he had never seen any evidence linking Iraq and al-Qaeda. Let me refresh your memory Billy.

June 25, 2004

Clinton first linked al Qaeda to Saddam

By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

The Clinton administration talked about firm evidence linking Saddam Hussein's regime to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network years before President Bush made the same statements.

The issue arose again this month after the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States reported there was no "collaborative relationship" between the old Iraqi regime and bin Laden.

Democrats have cited the staff report to accuse Mr. Bush of making inaccurate statements about a linkage. Commission members, including a Democrat and two Republicans, quickly came to the administration's defense by saying there had been such contacts.

In fact, during President Clinton's eight years in office, there were at least two official pronouncements of an alarming alliance between Baghdad and al Qaeda. One came from William S. Cohen, Mr. Clinton's defense secretary. He cited an al Qaeda-Baghdad link to justify the bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.

Mr. Bush cited the linkage, in part, to justify invading Iraq and ousting Saddam. He said he could not take the risk of Iraq's weapons falling into bin Laden's hands.

The other pronouncement is contained in a Justice Department indictment on Nov. 4, 1998, charging bin Laden with murder in the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.

The indictment disclosed a close relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam's regime, which included specialists on chemical weapons and all types of bombs, including truck bombs, a favorite weapon of terrorists.

The 1998 indictment said: "Al Qaeda also forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in the Sudan and with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group Hezbollah for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States. In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the government of Iraq."

Shortly after the embassy bombings, Mr. Clinton ordered air strikes on al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and on the Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.

To justify the Sudanese plant as a target, Clinton aides said it was involved in the production of deadly VX nerve gas. Officials further determined that bin Laden owned a stake in the operation and that its manager had traveled to Baghdad to learn bomb-making techniques from Saddam's weapons scientists.

Mr. Cohen elaborated in March in testimony before the September 11 commission.

He testified that "bin Laden had been living [at the plant], that he had, in fact, money that he had put into this military industrial corporation, that the owner of the plant had traveled to Baghdad to meet with the father of the VX program."

He said that if the plant had been allowed to produce VX that was used to kill thousands of Americans, people would have asked him, " 'You had a manager that went to Baghdad; you had Osama bin Laden, who had funded, at least the corporation, and you had traces of [VX precursor] and you did what? And you did nothing?' Is that a responsible activity on the part of the secretary of defense?"


Remember now Billy? You used this link as part of your justifcation for missile strikes. You also used this intelligence as part of your regime change document. Yo, Al Gore, where were you when all this was going on? Inventing the Internet? Being sung to sleep by that union song? Maybe you were off harvesing that tobacco crop.

Now the question becomes were they lying then or are they lying now to help the poodle?

One other thing Al, you really need to seek some professional help. You are becoming more and more fanatical as time goes on. Face it, you lost in 2000. Were you able to have won your home state of Tennessee, you would be President. What a disaster that would have been, considering the state of your mental health. - Sailor

VietNam and Iraq......Quagmires?

For months now we have heard that Iraq is another VietNam, a quagmire. We have also been exposed to Johnny 'the poodle' Kerry's testimony before a Senate Committee investigating the war in Southeast Asia.

Let's go back in time. In 1961 The US and the Republic of VietNam sign an economic and military treaty. In 1962, just after the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy Administration began to focus on halting the spread of communism. That focus narrows to South VietNam. This started with sending groups of advisors to Viet Nam to assist the South VietNamese army in containing the Viet Cong. Kennedy also engineered the coup that brought down the Diem government in the fall of 1963. Lyndon Johnson in 1964 used the questionable Gulf of Tonkin Incident to persuade the Congress to give him virtually unlimited power to defend US forces in Southeast Asia.

Johnson then began the escalation of the VietNam war by committing US military forces to putting down the Viet Cong and North VietNamese invasion of the South. The turning point of the war was the 1968 Tet Offensive. While it was a major military defeat for the Viet Cong and North VietNamese, the American media, led by Walter Cronkite, in face of the facts, turned the Tet Offensive into a victory for the Viet Cong and the North (sound familliar?). General Giap of the North in his published papers, clearly states it was a major defeat. Johnson and his Defense Secratary McNamara, micromanaged the war, ( at one point in time Johnson is said to have stated, that the US military could not bomb an outhouse in VietNam without his OK). This and Johnson's failure to Vietnamize the war effort are some of many reasons why VietNam became a quagmire. (Note to the poodle; This was Johnson's war, not Nixon's that you were "protesting" The poodle's rant before the Senate Select Committee will be the subject of another blog post in the future). Twelve years and some 56,000 plus American deaths later, US participation in VietNam ended.

Let's fast forward to 2003. US forces invade Iraq and in less then 3 months the Iraqi military was defeated. Work begins on planning the turn over of Free Iraq to the Iraqis. On 30 June 2004, just over a year from the begining of hostilities, the new Iraqi government will take control of Iraq, with the endorsement of the UN. The left has decried this as a unilateral action on the part of the US. They convenietly forget the some 45 nations have and continue to provide assistance to the US on one level or another. 14 months as opposed to some 12 years is hardly a quagmire. US forces will likely stay in Iraq for another 2 or so years. Again a far cry form the 12 years we were in VietNam. Strategically, the posting of US forces in Iraq will help considerably in the War on Terror and give the US a base of operations should Syria or Iran become a military issue in the future.

In closing it seems the left is trying to convince the American people that Iraq is the new Vietnam, solely for the purpose of defeating President Bush come this November. As Iraq takes control of their own destiny, you can expect that attacks in Iraq by terrorists and former saddam loyalists to increase and the wild eyed rantings of the left to become more shrill. Iraq is hardly the quagmire the left so desperately wanted.

Your comments, pro or con are encouraged.

Sailor

Spelling, typos and grammar corrected per my favorite teacher. - Sailor

Facts Inconvenient for the NY Times

Just adding some more fuel to the fire, showing how the NY Times no linger prints facts, just anti Bush propaganda. The NY Times has become an arm of the DNC propaganda machine. - Sailor

Polygraphing rumors


By Joel Mowbray


To a number of civilian employees at the Pentagon, a New York Times story on June 3 came as quite a jolt: Some of them apparently already had been polygraphed as part of an investigation into Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi.
But it never happened. Nearly three weeks later, it appears that the implicated civilian employees at the Pentagon have not been polygraphed.

And the Times is unapologetic in the face of substantial evidence that it got the story wrong.
As you may surely remember, Iraqi Governing Council member and longtime U.S. ally Ahmed Chalabi was all over the news late last month and early this month for allegedly passing classified information to Iran. According to various news accounts, an Iranian intelligence agent in Baghdad supposedly cabled Tehran to inform officials that Mr. Chalabi had tipped them off that the United States had cracked their code — a message sent using the same cracked code.
The Times scored a significant scoop, running the details of the code scandal on page one on June 2. The following day, the paper of record had the scoop of the follow-up, reporting that the FBI had started polygraph examinations on a "small number" of civilian employees at the Pentagon.
Common knowledge inside the Beltway is that the Times' story identification of the "small number" of "civilian employees" was a thinly veiled reference to people working for Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz or in the policy shop, headed by Undersecretary Douglas Feith. (Most in that group are political appointees and were hawks on Iraq.)
The practical result was a smear of State's and CIA's political enemies — Mr. Chalabi and the Pentagon's hawks. That's undoubtedly the exact outcome for which the Times' sources hoped.
In fairness to the Times, it appears that the FBI has initiated some sort of investigation, including limited use of polygraph testing — but on people who were based in Baghdad.
The June 3 article, however, makes no such allowance and, in fact, is quite clear in identifying polygraphed employees as being "at the Pentagon." The lead sentence is unambiguous in announcing, "Federal investigators have begun administering polygraph examinations to civilian employees at the Pentagon."
Further down in the article, readers are informed that "officials familiar with the investigation say that they are ... likely to interview senior Pentagon officials." Three weeks later, it appears that has yet to happen — but the taint from the smear lingers.
The Times didn't simply get the story wrong, though. It breached basic codes of journalism ethics.
Reading the June 3 article leaves one with the conclusion that the Pentagon did not dispute the polygraph story. Nowhere in the piece is there even a reference to the Pentagon's side of the story.
That doesn't mean that Pentagon officials agreed with the Times' reporting, however. They did not, and quite strenuously at that.
Mr. Johnston made one call to the Pentagon at 8:30 p.m. the night before the story ran, and it wasn't even to someone in the Office of Public Affairs. According to the person with whom he spoke, it was only intended as a "head's up," not as a call seeking comment.
The Pentagon official, though, informed Mr. Johnston that no one in his shop had been polygraphed and that he had been asking all day and found no indication that a civilian employee in another shop had been, either. Mr. Johnston's response was telling: "That's notgoodenough." (Reached for comment, Mr. Johnston did not deny saying this.)
With even a minimal amount of digging, either Mr. Johnston or Mr. Risen could have unearthed a denial of the polygraphing story.
Since the rumors of an investigation had been circulating for days at that point, and buzz about polygraphing had grown quite noticeable by early June 2, senior Defense Department officials and press officers sought in earnest to determine if anyone in Washington had, in fact, been polygraphed.
Following that effort, the results were circulated as talking points, which were available to reporters. The most relevant excerpt: "No senior Department of Defense official is the target of any investigation with respect to Ahmed Chalabi. To the best of our knowledge, no official at the Pentagon has been polygraphed or told to expect to be polygraphed in the Chalabi investigation."
While Mr. Johnston may not have been satisfied that the answer he received constituted a denial, The Washington Post was comfortable printing a very similar statement. Immediately after citing the polygraphing allegation — on June 3, the same day as the Times story — The Post article continued, "But senior officials at the Pentagon said they knew of no one there who had been interviewed by the FBI or who had been requested to submit to an interview."
With nearly three weeks of hindsight, it appears the Times unfairly tarnished the good names of a relatively small number of public servants. Granted, the paper didn't claim guilt, but charges of polygraphing have an undeniable impact on public perception.
Even if a correction runs eventually, it will probably be too little. It will certainly be too late. But that's if it ever runs at all. Knowing the Times, there's little cause for optimism.

Joel Mowbray occasionally writes for The Washington Times.

The Unfortunate Side of Outsourcing

My friend, Doc Farmer, has another timely article for us. This one is on the human side of outsourcing. - Sailor




The Unfortunate Side of Outsourcing
Written by Doc Farmer
Wednesday, June 23, 2004


Everybody’s talking these days about the dangers and ''crisis'' of outsourcing jobs overseas. Of course, OUTsourcing actually generates more INsourcing, hence a positive result for our economy. But you’ll never hear that from the mainstream media commentators, unless of course they’re talking about a certain ketchup manufacturer....

However, there’s a part of outsourcing that people rarely speak of openly, but which can have devastating social consequences.

Recently, IBM Global Services decided to outsource to India 60 Information Technology (IT) jobs from the Fort Wayne, Indiana, job market. This will be done to streamline support and, of course, to save money for Lincoln National Life Insurance Company, my very first employer. As I understand it, none of the people whose jobs have been ''outsourced'' will actually be fired. They will, instead, be absorbed into the company, doing other jobs.

Hence the devastating social consequences.

You see, these are IT people we’re talking about here. They’re not like normal people at all.

Before any of you IT people start sending me threatening e-mail messages in Klingon, I’m an IT guy myself. Have been for close to three decades. I know from whence I speak.

IT people watch ''Dune'' a lot. We get into heated arguments over which is better--the David Lynch version or the SciFi Channel version. We don’t actually get into fist fights over it, though. More like sissy-slapping fights. It’s rather embarrassing to watch, unless you’ve got money on the outcome.

IT people also memorize Star Trek. Every version. Original Series, Next Gen, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, and the movies. We can tell you how warp drive works--in mind-numbing detail. For hours and hours on end. Without noticing that the objects of our lecture (i.e. normal people) are being bored into a coma.

IT people listen to techno, despite the fact that it was never cool in the first place. IT people have acne well into our 40s. IT people set up their Windows effects to use themes, sounds, and images from Babylon 5, Farscape, and the Hot Babes of CNBC.

IT people can’t do football pools or baseball pools very well, because we have absolutely no idea how these games are played. We know three-dimensional chess, Fizbin, Qatisqat, Parisi’s Squares and Triad, but basketball is only interesting to us if played by topless Vulcan chicks. Oh, yeah, and you’ll note we still use ''chicks'' as an honorific for the ladies. But only because we know they’ll never hear us use it. Because ladies won’t get within spitting distance of us if at all possible. For us, sexual harassment is when a marginally passable female walks by one of our team and doesn’t throw up. That’s Geek-Speak for a marriage proposal.

IT people live in their own little world. Moreover, it’s a nice place, for the greater part. Flashing lights, technobabble, database subschemas, code reviews, and the smell of tin-core solder and flat Mr. Pibb. We dream in hexadecimal. We tell jokes in binary (which takes a LONG time). We have long and drawn out debates about the proper location of the comma, the nesting of the code, how to fancy up the comment boxes, or how to rewire a Cray supercomputer with paperclips and leftover pizza.

IT people think ''X-Files'' is a documentary.

Now, consider putting a group of 60 of these geeks, nerds, and social wieners into a normal office environment. Picture it in your mind, if you would. Not a pretty picture, eh? Geeks invading your cubicle space with Far Side cartoons that crowd out your beloved Dilbert. Nerds hanging around the coffee machine, calling it Raktajino and conversing in Minbari.

Now, IT people have a much-needed place in our society, so I’m not dissing them out of hand. I’m simply recognizing the truth about our particular subgenus. Sure, we’re about as socially adept as a bowl of grits, but we do good work. IT people keep the information superhighway humming. We keep your networks buzzing. We fix your broken hardware, upgrade your sagging software, and save you from the ''Blue Screen of Death.'' We ask only that we be allowed to do our work, be given regular doses of black coffee and Krispy Kremes, and collect our Stargate SG-1 memorabilia in peace.

But it’s kinda hard to do that when we’re forced to do--ick!--normal work.

So you mighty potentates of the boardrooms, you CEOs bent on squeezing a penny so hard that poor George’s eyes pop out, spare a thought for us poor IT people before you ship our jobs off to Never-Never-Land. You might save a little bit of money by sending IT jobs overseas. But you’ll be causing mountains of aggravation for your IT people, and fear into the hearts of your normal staff as well.

One more thing to consider. India has an ancient and beautiful culture. Do you really want to turn those poor, innocent, unsuspecting folks into IT people?

~~~~~oo0oo~~~~~

Doc Farmer, when not translating IBM technical manuals into Klingon or building functional tricorders, can be reached watching his B5 and DS9 DVDs at DocFarmer9999@yahoo.co.uk.

Critics are Still Confusing Proof and Evidence

John Tabin brings more information to the table on the al-Qaeda/Iraq links. Since none of this information helps the poodle, do not expect to see it in the New York Times. The Times still believes there was no link. Of course, the poodle has jumped on that, but I think that taste in his mouth is his own shoe leather. - Sailor


Critics are Still Confusing Proof and Evidence

By John Tabin Published 06/22/2004
Tech Central Station


"PANEL FINDS NO QAEDA-IRAQ TIE," shouted the front page of the New York Times last Thursday. This wasn't supported by the facts of the story -- the 9/11 panel had found no solid evidence of Iraqi cooperation with al Qaeda "in attacks against the United States" -- not that there was no "tie" at all between the two. But the headline reflected what seems to be the consensus in the press, that former terrorism czar Richard Clark had it right: as Clarke put it on March 21, "there's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever."


Clark didn't say that evidence of an Iraq-al Qaeda link was unpersuasive, or conflicted with other evidence; he said there was no evidence at all. This has become the conventional wisdom. It is wrong.



Stephen Hayes demonstrates as much in his new book, The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America. Building on his reporting on the topic for the Weekly Standard, this volume examines the evidence surrounding the longstanding relationship between radical Islamist terror and the Iraqi regime. In the 80s, Saddam was already hosting and training terrorist from the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, enemies of his rival Baathist dictator Hafez al Assad (and breeding ground for a number of future al Qaeda cell leaders). By the 90s, the "secular" Baathist regime frequently spoke in the Islamist vocabulary of jihad and infidels. The newly cordial relations between those who'd seemed ideologically incompatible was more than rhetorical. Quoting Hayes at length:



"Iraqi intelligence documents from 1992 list Osama bin Laden as an Iraqi intelligence asset. Numerous sources have reported a 1993 nonaggression pact between Iraq and al Qaeda. The former deputy director of Iraqi intelligence now in U.S. custody says that bin Laden asked the Iraqi regime for arms and training in a face-to-face meeting in 1994. Senior al Qaeda leader Abu Hajer al Iraqi met with Iraqi intelligence officials in 1995. The National Security Agency intercepted telephone conversations between al Qaeda-supported Sudanese military officials and the head of Iraq's chemical weapons program in 1996. Al Qaeda sent Abu Abdallah al Iraqi to Iraq for help with weapons of mass destruction in 1997. An indictment from the Clinton-era Justice Department cited Iraqi assistance on al Qaeda "weapons development" in 1998. A senior Clinton administration counterterrorism official told the Washington Post that the U.S. government was "sure" Iraq had supported al Qaeda chemical weapons programs in 1999. An Iraqi working closely with the Iraqi embassy in Kuala Lumpur was photographed with September 11 hijacker Khalind a Mihdhar en route to a planning meeting for the bombing of the USS Cole and the September 11 attacks in 2000. Satellite photographs showed al Qaeda members in 2001 traveling en masse to a compound in northern Iraq financed, in part, by the Iraqi regime. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, senior al Qaeda associate, operated openly in Baghdad and received medical attention at a regime-supported hospital in 2002. Documents discovered in postwar Iraq in 2003 reveal that Saddam's regime harbored and supported Abdul Rahman Yasin, an Iraqi who mixed the chemicals for the 1993 World Trade Center attack-- the first al Qaeda attack on U.S. soil."



The book examines each of these pieces and many more in detail. Hayes has a bevy of sources, some of them secret or based on classified reporting -- including the Feith memo that he reported on last year, which many TCS readers will remember. But he relies mostly on "open sources" -- unclassified government reports, court documents, news media, and anything else that anyone with an internet connection can find.



It's the nature of intelligence that much of what he reports is uncertain. Hayes is for the most part careful not to oversell his case -- he never claims a sponsorship or command-and-control relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, for example, only that the relationship between the two was more extensive and more dangerous than many are willing to acknowledge.



But the uncertainty of the intelligence remains a favored line of attack for Hayes's critics. At a roundtable on the book at the American Enterprise Institute earlier this month, former CIA analyst Judith Yaphe emphasized that intelligence reports are not always true or complete, and that in some cases other reporting says the opposite of what Hayes concludes. To underscore the point, David Corn of The Nation asked from the audience how, if we discount one piece of intelligence, can we believe another?



But this, Hayes responds, confuses proof and evidence. Hayes notes in his book the uproar over the failure to "connect the dots" to stop the 9/11 attacks, where the evidence amounted to "a high level of intelligence 'chatter,' ... an internal FBI memo about suspicious activities at flight schools in Phoenix, a report out of Minnesota about a Middle Eastern man with a bizarre interest in airplanes, and unspecific CIA reporting about forthcoming al Qaeda attacks." All of this was much thinner than the evidence surrounding the Iraq-al Qaeda connection. And that makes the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime that much harder to regret.



John Tabin is a Baltimore-based writer whose website is JohnTabin.com.

Admit You Were Wrong and Politically Biased!!

Looks like more then a few people are looking foolish about now. The NY Times, The poodle and some others. In their rush to condemn the President on the Iraq War, they went off without putting their brains in gear before speeding away. I am demanding that the New York Times, the poodle and all the rest publically admit the error of their ways and apologize. Mind you, I am not going to hold my breath waiting. The temperature in Hell will need to get some what below zero before that will happen - Sailor


June 21, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Zelikow Report
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
New York Times

ASHINGTON — "Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie" went the Times headline. "Al Qaeda-Hussein Link Is Dismissed" front-paged The Washington Post. The A.P. led with the thrilling words "Bluntly contradicting the Bush Administration, the commission. . . ." This understandably caused my editorial-page colleagues to draw the conclusion that "there was never any evidence of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. . . ."

All wrong. The basis for the hoo-ha was not a judgment of the panel of commissioners appointed to investigate the 9/11 attacks. As reporters noted below the headlines, it was an interim report of the commission's runaway staff, headed by the ex-N.S.C. aide Philip Zelikow. After Vice President Dick Cheney's outraged objection, the staff's sweeping conclusion was soon disavowed by both commission chairman Tom Kean and vice chairman Lee Hamilton.

"Were there contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq?" Kean asked himself. "Yes . . . no question." Hamilton joined in: "The vice president is saying, I think, that there were connections . . . we don't disagree with that" — just "no credible evidence" of Iraqi cooperation in the 9/11 attack.

The Zelikow report was seized upon by John Kerry because it fuzzed up the distinction between evidence of decade-long dealings between agents of Saddam and bin Laden (which panel members know to be true) and evidence of Iraqi cooperation in the 9/11 attacks (which, as Hamilton said yesterday, modifying his earlier "no credible evidence" judgment, was "not proven one way or the other.")

But the staff had twisted the two strands together to cast doubt on both the Qaeda-Iraq ties and the specific attacks of 9/11: "There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda also occurred after bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship." Zelikow & Co. dismissed the reports, citing the denials of Qaeda agents and what they decided was "no credible evidence" of cooperation on 9/11.

That paragraph — extending doubt on 9/11 to all previous contacts — put the story on front pages. Here was a release on the official commission's letterhead not merely failing to find Saddam's hand in 9/11, which Bush does not claim. The news was in the apparent contradiction of what the president repeatedly asserted as a powerful reason for war: that Iraq had long been dangerously in cahoots with terrorists.

Cheney's ire was misdirected. Don't blame the media for jumping on the politically charged Zelikow report. Blame the commission's leaders for ducking responsibility for its interim findings. Kean and Hamilton have allowed themselves to be jerked around by a manipulative staff.

Yesterday, Governor Kean passed along this stunner about "no collaborative relationship" to ABC's George Stephanopoulos: "Members do not get involved in staff reports."

Not involved? Another commission member tells me he did not see the Zelikow bombshell until the night before its release. Moreover, the White House, vetting the report for secrets, failed to raise an objection to a Democratic bonanza in the tricky paragraph leading to the misleading "no Qaeda-Iraq tie."

What can the commission do now to regain its nonpartisan credibility?

1. Require every member to sign off on every word that the commission releases, or write and sign a minority report. No more "staff conclusions" without presenting supporting evidence, pro and con.

2. Set the record straight, in evidentiary detail, on every contact known between Iraq and terrorist groups, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's operations in Iraq. Include the basis for the Clinton-era "cooperating in weapons development" statement.

3. Despite the prejudgment announced yesterday by Kean and Democratic partisan Richard Ben-Veniste dismissing Mohammed Atta's reported meeting in Prague with an Iraqi spymaster, fairly spell out all the evidence that led to George Tenet's "not proven or disproven" testimony. (Start with www.edwardjayepstein.com.)

4. Show how the failure to retaliate after the attack on the U.S.S. Cole affected 9/11, how removing the director of central intelligence from running the C.I.A. would work, and how Congress's intelligence oversight failed abysmally.

5. Stop wasting time posturing on television and get involved writing a defensible commission report.



9/11 panel: New evidence on Iraq-Al-Qaida
By Shaun Waterman
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor
Published 6/20/2004 5:27 PM


WASHINGTON, June 20 (UPI) -- The commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks has received new information indicating that a senior officer in an elite unit of the security services of deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein may have been a member of al-Qaida involved in the planning of the suicide hijackings, panel members said Sunday.

John F. Lehman, a Reagan-era GOP defense official told NBC's "Meet the Press" that documents captured in Iraq "indicate that there is at least one officer of Saddam's Fedayeen, a lieutenant colonel, who was a very prominent member of al Qaida."

The Fedayeen were a special unit of volunteers given basic training in irregular warfare. The lieutenant colonel, Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, has the same name as an Iraqi thought to have attended a planning meeting for the Sept. 11 attacks in January 2000, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The meeting was also attended by two of the hijackers, Khalid al Midhar and Nawaf al Hamzi and senior al-Qaida leaders.

Lehman said that commission staff members continued to work on the issue and experts cautioned that the connection might be nothing more than coincidence.

"Shakir is a pretty common name," said terrorism analyst and author Peter Bergen, "and even if the two names refer to the same person, there might be a number of other explanations. Perhaps al-Qaida had penetrated Saddam's security apparatus."

Analysts say the Fedayeen was not an intelligence unit, but an irregular militia recruited from clans loyal to the regime in the capital, in Saddam's hometown of Tikrit and in the surrounding Tigris valley area. Michael Eisenstadt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank set up by the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, described them to United Press International last year as "thugs and bumpkins."

He said the Fedayeen were "at the low end of the food chain in the security apparatus, doing street level work for the regime."

Nevertheless, the revelation seems sure to stoke the controversy over the extent of links between al-Qaida and Saddam's regime, links that were cited by the Bush administration as a justification for the invasion of Iraq.

On Wednesday, the commission published a staff statement saying that contacts between the regime and al-Qaida "do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship" and that, "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaida cooperated on attacks against the United States."

Critics of the Bush administration seized on the comments as evidence that the White House had sought to mislead Americans about the relationship between Saddam and al-Qaida.

President Bush's likely Democratic opponent, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said the president need to give "a fundamental explanation about why he rushed to war for a purpose it now turns out is not supported by the facts."

Both Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, however, continued to stress that the links were extensive. Cheney hinted that the commission did not have all the facts, telling one interviewer that he "probably" had access to intelligence commission staff and members had not seen.

Sunday, Lehman acknowledged that, "the vice president was right when he said he may have things that we don't yet have. And we are now in the process of getting this latest intelligence."

Democratic panel member Richard Ben-Veniste agreed that the panel should study any more recent intelligence, "If there is additional information, we're happy to look at it, and we think we should get it."

Lehman added that the row illustrated the political minefield the commission was trying to tiptoe through in an election year when the focus of their inquiry is such an explosive issue. "We're under tremendous political pressures. Everything we come out with, one side or the other seizes on in this election year to try to make a political point on," he said.

He pointed out that the Clinton White House had made the same charges the current administration did about the danger that Iraq might pass chemical or biological weapons to al-Qaida. Those charges, he said, formed the basis for the missile strikes against alleged terrorist targets in Sudan in August 1998. "The Clinton administration portrayed the relationship between al-Qaida and Saddam's intelligence services as one of cooperating in weapons development," he said.

Commission Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, played down the differences between the commission's view and that of the administration. "When you begin to use words like 'relationship' and 'ties' and 'connections' and 'contacts,'" he told ABC's "This Week," "everybody has a little different view of what those words mean. But if you look at the core statements that we made ... I don't think there's a difference of opinion with regard to those statements.

"If there is, it has to be spelled out to me. "

Chairman Thomas Kean, meanwhile, stressed that the staff statement released Wednesday did not represent the settled view of the whole commission: "These staff reports have come along every now and then in connection with our public hearings. These staff reports are interim documents. The commission, for instance, does not get involved, the members, in the staff reports. When we do the report itself, that will be a product of the entire commission."

He added that there much more evidence of links between al-Qaida and Iran or Pakistan than Iraq, and pointed out that, "Our investigation is continuing. We're not finished yet."

The commission's two days of meetings last week marked their final public gatherings. They are to deliver a final report by July 26. Congress formed the commission to look into possible U.S. intelligence failures prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in which some 3,000 people were killed after the hijacking of four jetliners than crashing the aircraft into buildings in New York and Washington and in rural Pennsylvania.

--

(Please send comments to nationaldesk@upi.com.)

Happy Father's Day

Happy Father's Day! Take a bow fellas! - Sailor

Al-Qaida-Iraq interaction strengthens case for war

We have all seen the big broughaha the NY Times and other liberal biased press has made over the 9/11 Commission's report on the al-Qaeda/Iraq connection. They still did not understand that the report showed significant contact between the two. - Sailor



Al-Qaida-Iraq interaction strengthens case for war




Robert Robb
Arizona Republic columnist
Jun. 20, 2004 12:00 AM


The report by the 9/11 commission staff on al-Qaida, released Wednesday, has been widely reported and spun as rebuking the Bush administration's case for war with Iraq.

Fairly considered, that's not true.

In the first place, the Iraq part of the report was just one paragraph in a 12-page document. This was not a thorough examination of the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida.

The report has been frequently characterized as finding that there was no "link" between Iraq and al-Qaida.

What the report actually says is that Osama bin Laden sought space to set up training camps and help in gaining weapons from Saddam Hussein and that there are reports of contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida.

It then goes on to say that the contacts "do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship," and that the staff has "no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaida cooperated on attacks against the United States."

The Bush case for war was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was a threat to give them to terrorists who would use them against the United States.

While no caches of biological or chemical weapons have been found in Iraq, the evidence is that Saddam was trying to maintain a standby capability to produce them.

So, Saddam wanted to produce WMD and, according to the staff report, bin Laden sought Saddam's assistance with weapons.

That's not much of a rebuke of Bush's case for war, properly understood.

There is evidence of even greater and more disturbing interaction between Saddam and al-Qaida. The reporting of Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard has been indispensable in bringing forth a fuller picture of the relationship for public examination.

The commission staff said that bin Laden sought Saddam's help in 1994. But according to Hayes' exhaustive and seemingly highly sourced reporting, the interaction wasn't a point in time but an ongoing process of mutual exploration.

Al-Qaida was interested in Iraqi assistance in bomb-making and biological and chemical weapons. And Iraq was exploring the extent to which al-Qaida could be leveraged to achieve its goals, such as stirring up Muslim opposition to U.N. sanctions.

Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the leading terrorist in Iraq today, set up operations in the country while Saddam was still in power. In his presentation to the United Nations, Colin Powell described Zarqawi as "an associate and collaborator" of bin Laden. Recently, observers have been depicting him as more of an independent operator than that.

Regardless, Zarqawi, who initially set up shop presumably with Saddam's approval, has asked for al-Qaida's help in disrupting postwar Iraq.

With respect to the 9/11 attacks, the most cautious position is that asserted by the staff report: no evidence of direct Iraqi involvement. Even President Bush has said as much.

However, there is at least some suspicion that an Iraqi operative attended a 2000 al-Qaida planning meeting in Malaysia, at which the 9/11 attacks are thought to have been discussed. And that he served as an escort to two future 9/11 hijackers who certainly attended.

In response to the spin from the report, President Bush reasserted that there was a "relationship" between Saddam and al-Qaida.

Based upon publicly available evidence, that's too strong a conclusion, although a more modest one than the Clinton administration made in seeking bin Laden's indictment in 1998. According to that indictment, there was "an understanding" between al-Qaida and Iraq: no attacks in exchange for assistance in weapons development.

The more precise way to put it is that there was, at a minimum, a troubling degree of interaction between al-Qaida and Saddam's Iraq.

What has really been blown apart isn't Bush's case for war, but one of the main arguments against it: that bin Laden wouldn't seek or accept Saddam's help because of their theological and political differences. Even the 9/11 commission staff reports that bin Laden did, indeed, seek such assistance.

I continue to believe that the war was an unwise deepening of American involvement in Middle Eastern geopolitics, when extraction from them is the surer path to improved security.

But what has been learned postwar about the interaction between Saddam and al-Qaida, fairly considered, actually makes the administration's case for war stronger, not weaker.

Reach Robb at robert.robb@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8472. His column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Putin's warning

Both of these articles are from The Washington Times. The first is an editorial on Putin's revelation that Russian intelligence had warned America about saddam's plans. The second is the actual article detailing what Putin revealed. - Sailor

Putin's warning
Published June 19, 2004

While political foes cast aspersions on his decision to oust Saddam Hussein, President Bush yesterday received support from an unlikely party: Russian President Vladimir Putin. Yesterday, Mr. Putin casually delivered a political bombshell, saying that prior to the war, he warned that Saddam's cohorts might be planning a terrorist attack against the United States.
"After September 11, 2001, and before the start of the military operation in Iraq, the Russian special services -- the intelligence service -- received information that officials from Saddam's regime were preparing terrorist attacks in the United States and outside it against the U.S. military and other interests," Mr. Putin said during a visit to Kazakhstan. He added that Mr. Bush personally thanked a Russian intelligence official for the information. Mr. Putin did not provide any details of the plot or say whether al Qaeda or any other terrorist group was involved. But his remarks serve to strengthen the case for Mr. Bush's decision to go to war to drive Saddam from power.
The Russian leader's comments are particularly significant given Moscow's close, longstanding relationship with Saddam and its staunch opposition to the war. From the early 1970s until the U.S.-led invasion last year, Russia was one of the Ba'athist regime's leading arms suppliers, and Russian and Iraqi intelligence worked closely together. As a former head of the KGB, Mr. Putin doubtless has extensive experience working closely with senior Iraqi intelligence officials.
Mr. Putin's comments are but the latest evidence of Saddam's involvement in harboring and supporting terrorists. Abul Abbas, who murdered American vacationer Leon Klinghoffer during a hijacking in the mid-1980s, was captured by coalition forces in Iraq (and died several months ago). Abu Musab al Zarqawi, an al Qaeda-linked terrorist wanted for his involvement in directing the insurgency in Iraq, received medical treatment in Baghdad after he was injured in the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan in early 2002. Saddam's stipends of $25,000 each to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers are well-known.
Moreover, Saddam had no moral compunctions about terrorism against Americans. In 1993, for example, he attempted to assassinate the first President Bush during a visit to Kuwait. His regime played host to Abdul Yasin, a fugitive wanted in connection with the February 1993 World Trade Center attack, which killed six persons and wounded nearly 1,000.
We look forward to learning more from Mr. Putin about Saddam's terrorist plots against America prior to the war. For now, Mr. Putin's statement strengthens Mr. Bush's case that allowing Saddam to remain in power would have posed a danger to the United States.




Putin Says Russia Gave U.S. Intel on Iraq

By BAGILA BUKHARBAYEVA
Associated Press Writer
Jun 19, 2:00 AM EDT

ASTANA, Kazakhstan (AP) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday his government warned Washington that Saddam Hussein's regime was preparing attacks in the United States and its interests abroad - an assertion that appears to bolster President Bush's contention that Iraq was a threat.

Putin emphasized that the intelligence didn't cause Russia to waver from its firm opposition to the U.S.-led war last year, but his statement was the second this month in which he has offered at least some support for Bush on Iraq.

"After Sept. 11, 2001, and before the start of the military operation in Iraq, the Russian special services ... received information that officials from Saddam's regime were preparing terrorist attacks in the United States and outside it against the U.S. military and other interests," Putin said.

"Despite that information ... Russia's position on Iraq remains unchanged," he said in the Kazakh capital, Astana, after regional economic and security summits. He said Russia didn't have any information that Saddam's regime had actually been behind any terrorist acts.

"It's one thing to have information that Saddam's regime is preparing terrorist attacks, (but) we didn't have information that it was involved in any known terrorist attacks," he said.

Putin didn't elaborate on any details of the alleged plots or mention whether they were tied to al-Qaida. He said Bush had personally thanked one of the leaders of Russia's intelligence agencies for the information but that he couldn't comment on how critical it was in the U.S. decision to invade Iraq.

In Washington, a U.S. official said Putin's information did not add to what the United States already knew about Saddam's intentions.


The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Putin's tip didn't give a time or place for a possible attack.

Bush alleged Thursday that Saddam had "numerous contacts" with al-Qaida and said Iraqi agents had met with the terror network's leader, Osama bin Laden, in Sudan.

Saddam "was a threat because he had terrorist connections - not only al-Qaida connections, but other connections to terrorist organizations," Bush said.

However, a commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks reported this week that while there were contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq, they did not appear to have produced "a collaborative relationship."

Also Thursday, a top Russian diplomat called for international inspectors to resolve conclusively the question of whether Iraq had any weapons of mass destruction.

"This problem must be resolved ... because to a great extent it became the pretext for the start of the war against Iraq," the Interfax news agency quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Yuri Fedotov as saying. He said such a finding would allow the U.N. Security Council to "finally close the dossier on Iraqi weapons."

In the wake of the invasion of Iraq, Putin sharply rebuked the United States for going to war despite opposition within the U.N. Security Council and said the threat posed to international security by the war was greater than that posed by Saddam.

But Putin's relationship with Bush is warm by the accounts of both leaders, and last week he said he has no patience for those who criticize Bush on Iraq.

"I don't pay attention to such publications," Putin said of media criticism of Bush at the end of the Group of Eight summit in the United States, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency.

Putin said opponents who criticize Bush on Iraq "don't have any kind of moral right. ... They conducted exactly the same kind of policy in Yugoslavia."

Russia vehemently opposed the NATO bombing attacks on Yugoslavia in 1999, which the United States pushed for under President Clinton.

Russia 'warned U.S. about Saddam'

This will have the liberal media in Spin City. Even in this article, CNN tries to spin things to have it appear to look bad for the President. We all need to remember that Vladimir was opposed to the Iraq war, but still felt compelled to make this public. The liberals/socialists/communists, democrats and the poodle will be beside themselves trying to explain this away. The poodle is losing more and more issues. Look for desperation tactics to come soon. - Sailor.

Russia 'warned U.S. about Saddam'



MOSCOW, Russia (CNN) -- Russian intelligence services warned Washington several times that Saddam Hussein's regime planned terrorist attacks against the United States, President Vladimir Putin has said.

The warnings were provided after September 11, 2001 and before the start of the Iraqi war, Putin said Friday.

The planned attacks were targeted both inside and outside the United States, said Putin, who made the remarks during a visit to Kazakhstan.

However, Putin said there was no evidence that Saddam's regime was involved in any terrorist attacks.

"I can confirm that after the events of September 11, 2001, and up to the military operation in Iraq, Russian special services and Russian intelligence several times received ... information that official organs of Saddam's regime were preparing terrorist acts on the territory of the United States and beyond its borders, at U.S. military and civilian locations," Putin said.

He said the information was given to U.S. intelligence officers and that U.S. President George W. Bush expressed his gratitude to a top Russian intelligence official.

"This information was indeed passed on through our partner channels to our American colleagues and, moreover, President Bush had an opportunity and used this opportunity to personally thank the leader of one of the Russian special services for this information, which he considered to be very important," Putin said.

Putin made his comments in response to a question from reporters seeking clarification on similar statements leaked by an unnamed intelligence officer in a dispatch by the Interfax news agency.

Russia opposed the invasion of Iraq and Putin said Friday the information did not effect its stance on the war.

He said there were international norms and procedures that weren't observed regarding "the use of force in international actions."

Regarding how the information might have been related to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Putin said, "Whether or not this was sufficient basis to state the United States was acting within the boundaries of self-defense, well, I don't know. This is a separate issue."

The United States, meanwhile, never mentioned the Russian intelligence in its arguments for going to war.

Hours after Putin spoke, Bush addressed troops at Fort Lewis in the U.S. state of Washington, but he didn't react to the Russian leader's remarks.

He repeated his position that Saddam's regime was a threat to the world and that dangers it posed were the grounds for the invasion last year.

"This is a regime which gave cash rewards to families of suicide bombers. This is a regime that sheltered terrorist groups," Bush said.

He also cited Musab Abu al-Zarqawi, the wanted insurgent in Iraq suspected of many terrorist bombings in Iraq, as an "al Qaeda associate."

Asked about Putin's remarks, U.S. National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack said, "We don't typically comment on intelligence matters. We do have an excellent record of cooperation in the war on terror with the Russian government. And a big part of the cooperation is information and intelligence sharing."

Putin's comments come two days after members of a U.S. commission looking into the September 11 attacks found there was "no collaborative" relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

The panel also found "no credible evidence" that Iraq was involved in the September 11 terrorist attacks carried out by al Qaeda hijackers.

Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, have strongly disputed suggestions that the commission's conclusions contradict statements they made in the run-up to the Iraq war about links between Iraq and al Qaeda.

Cheney said Thursday the evidence is "overwhelming" that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam's regime. He said media reports suggesting that the 9/11 commission has reached a contradictory conclusion were "irresponsible." (Full story)

Bush, who has said himself that there is no evidence Iraq was involved in 9/11, sought to explain the distinction Thursday.

The president said that while the administration never "said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated" with Iraqi help, "we did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda."

"The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda [is] because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda," Bush said. (Full story)

In the lead-up to the Iraq war, Bush made stronger statements alleging cooperation between Iraq and al Qaeda.

In a October 2002 speech he said, "Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases."

The 9/11 commission's report said bin Laden "explored possible cooperation with Iraq during his time in Sudan, despite his opposition to (Saddam) Hussein's secular regime."

It says the contact was pushed by the Sudanese, "to protect their own ties with Iraq," but after bin Laden asked for space in Iraq for training camps, "Iraq apparently never responded."

The report also said, "There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda also occurred after bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship."

CNN Moscow Bureau Chief Jill Dougherty contributed to this report.