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Preview: Hamfatter @ Camden Proud Galleries 31st July

Then watch the stunningly named Hamfatter perform on Dragon's Den, and receive an investment of £75,000 from entrepreneur Peter Jones in exchange for 30% of their earnings. Much of the money was supposedly earmarked for PR, but we suspect they might be getting rather a lot of free publicity right now anyway.

So if, like Peter Jones, you were impressed by Hamfatter and want to hurl fistfuls of cash at their smug faces the Cambridge-based indie-popsters, head down to Camden's Proud Galleries next Thursday where they'll be performing their first London gig since the show. Doors are at 7pm and tickets cost £6 from here.

Image courtesy of SiFu Renka's photostream, under a Creative Commons License.

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Digitas launches second agency in India

She has worked in the verticals of telecom, insurance, charity/fund raising, financial services, FMCG, education and IT sectors, both as an entrepreneur as well as organization lead.

Previously, Saroja served as head of OgilvyOne, South, where she was awarded major international awards, including the Cannes Direct, Echo and Asian Effie's, for the most effective and innovative direct marketing campaign for her work on a Telecom brand. Among her many strengths, she has a proven track record of accomplishment in building brands and forging and maintaining meaningful client relationships.

Announcing the setting up of the agency, Digitas Global CEO Alan Rutherford, said: "We entered India earlier this year as Solutions | Digitas. A second agency under the Digitas brand banner allows a stronger focus on the southern markets."

Saroja "We hope to be able to offer meaningful solutions to clients looking at holistic and comprehensive way of reaching their customers". more

"Fuel prices are denting profits," says transport entrepreneur

No wonder courier entrepreneur Kate Lester is fuming.

"Fuel now constitutes 40 per cent of most firms’ vehicle operating costs," says Lester, who founded Guildford-based courier company Diamond in 1992.

"There are 3,500 courier companies in this country. Competition is tough so we can’t put prices up. Instead, we have to squeeze our profit margins.

"We’re lucky. We saw it coming," she says. "We’ve diversified into other areas – such as storage and passport services – and we always try to ‘co-load’. If we’ve got a one-way delivery to Manchester, we’ll hook up with another courier to arrange return work."

Lester says that her £1.2m turnover will remain "static" in the next financial year. more

Latest How Do I Find Out About Medical Uniform Business News

Obama's candid, uh, conversation with House Republicans and how to ... - Los Angeles Times

Some of you also joined Democrats in supporting a Credit Card Bill of Rights and in extending unemployment ... what I stated at the State of the Union, I've proposed a new jobs tax credit for small business. And here's how it would work.

Briefly: Jan. 30 - Abington Mariner

PLYMOUTH – American Legion Post 40 and Ducks Unlimited will hold an ice fishing derby from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 30, at the Legion lodge on Federal Furnace Road in Plymouth. The entrance fee is $10 per angler. Monetary prizes will be ...

Full text: Obama vs House Republicans - Financial Times

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Please, everybody be seated. Thank you. Thank you, John, for the gracious introduction. To Mike and Eric, thank you for hosting me. Thank you to all of you for receiving me. It is wonderful to ...

Overnight News Digest (Detroit after the Auto Show edition) - DAILY KOS

Welcome to Overnight News Digest, where the regular crew informs and entertains you with tonight's top stories from the nation and the world. Tonight's top story comes from Reuters. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The economy grew at its fastest pace in more ...

Transcript and video of President Obama's debate with House ... - Chicago Sun-Times

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is a transcript of the exchange between President Obama and the House Republicans Friday afternoon. The video above shows the meeting in its entirety. Number two, to you, Mr. President, was that door was always open. And we hope ...

Remarks by President Obama to the Republican Retreat - St. Petersburg Times

The White House provided this transcript of President Barack Obama's remarks to Republican members of Congress at a GOP gathering in Baltimore on Friday. The question-and-answer session was also transcribed. THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. Thank you very ...

Obama Debates with Republicans at GOP House Retreat - Politics Daily

[*] OBAMA: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, John, for the gracious introduction. To Mike and Eric, thank you for hosting me. Thank you to all of you for receiving me. It is wonderful to be here. I want to also acknowledge Mark Strand, the ...

Straight Talk - RedState

Do you support negotiating with Russia for deep reductions down to 1,000 or fewer weapons in our arsenals? Do you support the larger vision of taking practical steps to reach the elimination of nuclear weapons? I’m going to assume from the title of ...

January 2010 - Weblogs.baltimoresun.com

Ravens coach John Harbaugh usually doesn't like to answer big-picture questions. But he made an exception recently when a reporter asked what he would like people to remember about the 2009 season. “I think people see what they see, and I think if ...

General Assembly 2010 - Weblogs.baltimoresun.com

In a year when lawmakers seem to have their minds focused only on the budget and the election, Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller sounded optimistic about legislation introduced Tuesday to legalize medical marijuana. (The Sun’s Kelly Brewington ...

Resolved Question: Will the Healthcare Bill become law?

The public option has been replaced by the Medicare Buy in, but both are terrible ideas, and the American public is slowly figuring it out. Yes, more people would be covered, but no Medicare could not stay solvent, so the coverage would be short, theoretical, and non-existent. The bill in its current form drives down payments to doctors so much that very very few doctors will be taking new Medicare patients, and they will treat their old Medicare patients at a loss out of professional integrity, so all their other patients will have to pay more to keep the doctor's office in business. This bill, will increase the out of pocket healthcare costs for all but a few. Those few are the poorest of the poor and the sickest of the sick, and the most uninsurable Americans. To give them some small benefit beyond what they get now, the whole rest of the country will be greatly impoverished, and taxed more, and given rationed Medicare, and gipped out of the Medicare they've paid for, waited for, and earned -- so that a really sick uninsurable 55 year old can get "coverage". That person is already treated at our County hospitals. If the government were actually serious about giving that person more care, the could mobilize the uniformed public health service corps to operate medical service centers. But no, the way of community organizers is to try to do it by socialism. The problem is that USA is not a socialist nation. So, every day that goes by where Reid doesn't have his 60 votes, the Healthcare bill becomes 2% less likely to ever happen. If the GOP can stall it till the end of January, it's dead meat. Too many Americans will have awakened to to contents, and intent, and the personal consequences of this bill to them. If something is going to add to the deficit, harm 90% of Americans, raise costs, raise taxes, and create rationed care for fully entitled Medicare beneficiaries that paid in all their working lives, then why do it? Only socialists and extremists would want to foist such a thing on their fellow citizens. Mainly, people want to be left alone, and this bill isn't going to leave anybody alone. If you like clipboard people, this bill is for you, cause they will be coming, you'll never be rid of them or get any peace, or have any freedom. 2% less likely every day it's delayed -- and it doesn't matter why it's delayed. If it's not signed by the end of January, it will never be signed, and a terrible black cloud will be lifted from the personal prospects of most Americans. Senator Leiberman seems to be the one who speaks for the national interest in this matter. He says if the Medicare Buy in is in the final bill when it comes to the floor, he won't vote for it. You can't add 30 million people to Medicare, which is already broke, and take away $400 Billion, and expect the program to add up. Sen Judd Gregg seems to see this too. I think Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins will see it. It looks like about 55 votes for the bill right now, prior to the scoring by CBO. Reid is on the run. He's lost his footing. He's in retreat. Now it's up to the GOP to hammer this vlctory home, make it Obama's Waterloo, make it the precursor to a blowout election year in 2010 in which all Dems are swept out of office, even Barney Frank, and Chris Dodd. America will find its way out of this miasmal swamp of socialist confusion and break free into the bright sunshine of liberty, freedom, and the American Way! What do you think? That is my question on which I seek knowledge by your answers. more

Resolved Question: Is it legal for college bookstores to overcharge students on required supplies?

Is this just business or is it illegal? In the course I am taking, we are required to purchase certain supplies for the course, uniforms, medical supplies, etc. We are required to have these items. The vendor, a medical supply store, is one mile from the campus. The medical supply store is open to the public and these exact same supplies or 40-50% cheaper in the store than on campus. The college bookstore handles all financial aid transactions and also all cash transactions for the books, supplies, uniforms, etc for the campus. The bookstore officials sent out an email saying that if the medical supply store allowed cash paying students to purchase their supplies at the store, the medical supply store would be dropped as an approved vendor. How can this be legal? No contract was signed between the store and the bookstore/college. All students are required to purchase these required items from the bookstore. This purchase is made at a 40-50% increase. Does this not fall under some type of monopoly law or price discrimination law? Next thing, they will say that I cannot go to Walmart to purchase my pen and paper. Is this legal or just business? more

Resolved Question: Can the misuse of mace from police be considered brutality/unnecessary use of force?

just looking for some advice on what to do about this unfair situation... I was out on the town having fun with friends in tempe az around the closing time of bars (2 am) was not drunk but nicely buzzed, as i just got off a short while before from my security job, so i didn't have much time to drink... long story shortened... i was walking down the sidewalk and noticed a pregnant female approx 21-25 years of age, stumbling and bumping into a near by business straight ahead of me, as i got closer there was alot of cops around but no yelling or fighting or any kind of activity, i helped her up and asked if she was ok, as i said this i noticed the bottom half of a police officers uniform and then i get sprayed in the face. it was so sudden and so painful i couldn't even see what the officer looked like who did it. I asked several officers including the srgt on scene, who was responsible for this and what the reason was for this kind of force, they continued to tell me i didn't need to know that information and was advised to go home immediately "or else". was not offered medical treatment and had to walk a few miles in search for a place to rinse my eyes including a long walk home as i did not have my rides phone number yet and she was advised to leave the scene as well... the effect which lasted for almost a full week, was burning eyes and even got rashes under my lower eye lids and on my arms that burned like crazy as well. have talked to the commander and she is now being very polite and trying to justify what happened but never really could... Do i have a case for possible lawsuit to get this officer suspended or possibly compensation for missing work and almost losing my job for having to call in? thanks for reading! my father told me to call the ACLU but before i do that, i need the peoples advise, any and all will be greatly appreciated!! more

Voting Question: How can we sell our MEDICAL SCRUBS?

HELLO EVERYONE! WE ARE TRYING TO SELL OUR SCRUBS FOR HUGE DISCOUNTED PRICE! PLS. FORWARD IT TO ANYONE WHO HAS A MEDICAL BUSINESS. WE SELL LAB UNIFORMS TOO!! CAN ANYONE GIVE ME SUGGESTIONS ON HOW WE CAN SELL OUR SCRUBS??? more

Resolved Question: what should I wear for an interview?

Is it better to wear business attire or nice looking scrubs( general uniform for medical professionals) on an interview for a position as a Medical Assistant? Would I not be "looking the part" if I go in business type clothing?Thanks for the helpful tips. I have an interview tomorrow and am not wearing scrubs. more

Resolved Question: History Eassy On World War II?

Okay. I need someone's help..like REAL bad. My essay is HORRIBLY structured. and I need a lot of help. please.. 20 Years after “The War to End All Wars” has ended, (Which was hardly the case), World War II Emerged. From 1939 – 1945, Canada had contributed to the successful outcome of the war, from Canada’s Home Front, to the major battles of Italian Champaign, Dieppe and Day of Deliverance. Canada has sacrificed thousands, and helped millions, to take on Germany and Adolf Hitler, thus ending the tragic World War II. Canada had truly participated fully in the winning outcome of World War II. Not only the government policies of Canada had taken a share of the won, but to the home front as well, the women who took on men’s roles had changed lifestyles, children even taking on responsibilities. We have shown great intelligent by Canada providing us at Training camps for all nations for example, Britain and America in Oshawa Ontario, including Camp X and The British PM Muelle Chamberlain. With the soldiers we have lost in the Battles of Italian Champaign, and D-Day, no nation should ever say that we did not do as much effort as any other nation in World War II. Throughout World War II, women and children has made a Major effort to help with the war going on (The Home Font). Naturally, women had played an important role in the war. In fact Government Policies also had them start on everything. Not only did women support the injured soldiers of ours, and other nations. Women had become nurses, serving behind the front lines, and they had PUSHED, there way to be accepted in the military service. By the end of the war, Canadian women in uniform numbered 50 000, and another 4 500 women were in medical services. They were never sent in front line combat, in fact they did essential work, working as radio operators and guiding back airplanes and ships form battle missions. Some had even become welders, armourers, or worker in armed forces headquarters. Women took over farms, and helped keep farm alive, in business, at the same time making crops and food to contribute the food to the war for armies. Women had taken on men roles, and proving themselves. Without “Women’s Roles” there would not be surviving soldiers from serious injuries. Government policies has asked for women, children, and other elderly that could not go fight in the war to save food, and save anything to save for the war. The community has taken on different numbers of jobs to specify support the war, Canada had become an industrial power. During World War II, the government introduced Victory Bonds, the money going straight to the war economy, these victory bonds were Highly encouraged. Training in secretly is what “Camp X” was for, and learning how to fly and become a pilot, you have to go to the British PM Muelle Chamberlain. Camp X was established Saturday December 6, 1941, training people from different nations in North America. It was built on the shores of Lake Superior to train allied agents in the technique of secret war fair. Camp X was run by British officers, and a Canadian director thus also training women, and men. If fact we had also trained the French Resistance workers in spying, weaponry, and sabotage. Yugoslavia were sent into their homeland, where they destroyed trains, roads, and major things. Camp X was successful, and sad to have saved a large number of lives. Other American, Britain, and Canadians who have not gone to ether Camp X or the war was sent to “British PM Muelle Chamberlain”. British PM Muelle Chamberlain had trained 135, 000 pilots from 40 different allied nations to learn to fly. We had supplied not only our military, but other nations also in the Training Camp. Us supplying 80.64% of the recruits. Australia 11.28% and New Zealand 8.08%. Canada has a perfect environment, and space for this training camp. Without the 2 Training Camps, most soldiers would have been dead. Camp X had save many soldiers from facing a horrific death. The Italian Campaign was Canada’s first major ground participation in the Second World War in Europe and cost 25,264 casualties, 5,900 of them fatal, over its course which, at its highest peak, saw over 76,000 Canadians serving in Italy. Not only was this one of the major battles, Canada had played a role in Day of Deliverance. (D-Day). A year before the D-Day landings in Normandy, there were the Allied invasions Italy. Canada played a major role in the Allies' first breach of Hitler's "Fortress Europe" in 1943 and 1944. Canadian soldiers defeated Hitler’s German Army but had a price to pay. The Italian Campaign, a shocking battle that cost roughly about 6,000 Canadian lives. July 10, 1943 though a bad stormy weather, the biggest invasion in history, had arrive the boot of Italy. As we see in this Canadian Army Newsreel, the Allies reach the shores of Sicily at dawn, and Canadians walk ashore unopposed. Allies had pushed there way into Hitler’s Fortresses. So fourth, a(I don't even have a concluding paragraph :( ...BECAUSE I DON"T KNOW HOW OT WRITE ONE! more

Resolved Question: Why is it ok for paramedics to smoke in an ambulance?

I was walking down the street and I saw an ambulance drive by. It didnt have its sirens on or anything. It just was at a red light. Anyway, there was a patient in it and he was laying in the back with a tube on his chest and had a breathing gas mask on his face. Those paramedics were young. One was a very cute chick in tight black pants in her medical uniform and the other one was a young guy in the passenger seat and they took turns driving and they switched seats and the whole time, I SAW A CIGARATTE IN HER MOUTH!!! THAT ONE PARAMEDIC CHICK WAS SMOKING IN THE AMBULANCE!!!!!!! AND TALK ABOUT BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH!!! I was just in SHOCK! Not only that, but she WAS SMOKING NEAR TOXIC STUFF AND NEAR THE PATIENT!!!!! SMOKE BLEW NEAR THE PATIENT AND I WAS JUST IN SHOCK WITH MY HEART RACING THAT I DIDNT EVEN KNOW WHAT TO SAY ABOUT THAT! I just wanted to pretend that I didnt see that but I saw what happened with my own eyes and was amazed. I got a good glimpse of the whole thing too on what they looked like and that they were really smoking. I was just disguisted by the whole thing of how they could get away with that and whats worse is her boss may let her get away with it even on the job!!! Isnt that so hyprocritical?!!! Paramedics or anyone in the health field are such morons!!!! and big time hyprocrites!!!!!! Its like they expect u to do whats best for someones health when rushing the victim to the hospital but the paramedics themselves set a bad example!!!!! AND I BET U ANY MONEY THAT GIRL SMOKING WILL BE THE NEXT VICTIM TO RIDE IN THE AMBULANCE WHEN SHE GETS AN ASTHMA ATTACK OR HAS PROBLEMS WITH HER LUNGS!!!! It would serve her right for smoking. Im not saying I wish anything bad would happen to her thinking negative thoughts about her deserving to die. Im just saying it will teach her a lesson. So my question is should I say anything to her and tell her how stupid she is? and what is she thinking? Thats real smart! or should I just mind my own business and look in shame with my head disguisted in embarassment? THIS IS A BIG ISSUE! Its not like someone we are talking about just smoking in general, THIS IS A PARAMEDIC WE ARE TALKING ABOUT HERE SMOKING ON DUTY!!!!!!!! THATS JUST ABSURB!!! WHAT SHOULD I DO ABOUT THIS? I dont think those paramedics should get away with it and especially not get away with harming the victim breathing second hand smoke near him. and if I wanted to socialize with them, I WOULD FEEL ODD AND HAVE EMBARASSMENT BECAUSE THEY WOULD ALREADY KNOW IM THINKING ITS WRONG THAT THEY ARE SMOKING AND I want to find A MORE NATURAL WAY to PUT THEM ON THE SPOT THAT WONT BE WEIRD with me approaching them. and not being nosy. Do you agree with me people? I need everyones opinion of what they would do if they witnessed that? would you mind your own business or do something about it with reporting them to human resources? That is something paramedics should know better to smoke anyway!! and need to learn the hard way. I sure as hell wouldnt want to be the victim in their ambulance around smoke! lol! even if i didnt have a choice, I rather die than put up with paramedics smoking! more

Resolved Question: Why is it ok for paramedics to smoke in an ambulance?

Resolved Question: any business name ideas?

Anyone has any ideas on a name I can give a business/store that will sell medical uniforms? more

Resolved Question: Can an off-duty police officer working private security stop traffic to allow cust. to turn into business?

To further clarify... Off duty Police Officers (Police uniformed), working private security for a medical clinic's parking deck entrance (non-emergency) are stopping legally flowing traffic to allow the clinics customers to make illegal turns into the parking deck? more

Resolved Question: Sims 2 Open for Business?

Upon opening a business and browsing possible work uniforms for my employees, I noticed that there were uniforms that fall under the medical category, such as scrubs, lab coats, etc. However, when I was purchasing stuff for my business, I noticed that there was nothing to buy that would be appropriate in a medical setting, such as a hospital or clinic. Is it possible to build some kind of medical facility? Any help would be appreciated. more

Resolved Question: ok obama supporters what has he done?

don't say he is for "change" whatever that means here is some of what hillary has done She serves on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee; the Environment and Public Works Committee; the Special Committee on Aging; and she is the first New Yorker ever to serve on the Senate Armed Services Committee. - After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Senator Clinton worked with her colleagues to secure the funds New York needed to rebuild. - In 2004, Senator Clinton was asked by the Department of Defense to serve as the only Senate member of the Transformation Advisory Group to the Joint Forces Command. She has visited troops in Iraq and Afghanistan; at Fort Drum in New York, home of the 10th Mountain Division; and at Walter Reed Military Hospital to learn first hand the challenges facing American combat forces. She is an original sponsor of legislation that expanded health benefits to members of the National Guard and Reserves. - In the Senate, she has continued her work for children and families by leading efforts to ensure the safety of prescription drugs for children, with legislation now included in the Pediatric Research Equity Act; working to strengthen the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which increased coverage for children in low income working families; and helping schools address environmental hazards. - Senator Clinton continues to work to increase access to health care. She authored legislation that has been enacted to improve recruitment and retention of nurses, to improve quality and lower the cost of prescription drugs, and to protect our food supply from bioterrorism. She sponsored legislation to increase America’s commitment against Global AIDS, and is now leading the fight for expanded use of information technology in the health care system to decrease administrative costs and reduce medical errors. - To encourage business expansion, Senator Clinton co-sponsored legislation enacted in 2004 to extend tax credits to communities in regions designated as Renewal Communities. - Senator Clinton has spoken clearly about the importance of protecting our constitutional rights, respecting such landmark Supreme Court decisions as Roe v. Wade. - Strongly committed to making sure that every American has the right to vote in fair, accessible and credible elections – and that every vote must be counted, Senator Clinton introduced the Count Every Vote Act of 2005, to provide a verified paper ballot for every vote cast in electronic voting machines; set a uniform standard for provisional ballots, and require the Federal Election Assistance Commission to issue standards that ensure uniform access to voting machines and election personnel in every community. -She voted for what she felt was right at the time; she did not vote "present" 136 times.just as i thought nothing great speaker more

Resolved Question: What would be the reason that this physician´s office would be searched by the FBI?

Federal officials spent much of Tuesday taking documents from Bloomington offices belonging to Dr. Kamal Tiwari, a local anesthesiologist. So far, no information has been released as to the reason for the investigation. Around 8:30 a.m., Federal Bureau of Investigation agents swarmed Tiwari’s medical practice at 2920 McIntyre Drive. Uniformed Bloomington police officers were eventually posted outside the office, where they prevented anyone from entering. An FBI agent was also posted at a rear entrance to the medical office. By Tuesday afternoon, a handwritten sign on the door said the office was closed and directed anyone who needed help to “go to the hospital.” Bloomington police cars were also seen outside Tiwari’s Pain Management Center business office at 2400 Cota Drive. Throughout the morning and afternoon, a Budget moving van was loaded with several boxes taken from the building, while a uniformed Bloomington police officer stood nearby. more

Resolved Question: Do your employees wear uniforms or work clothes like Dickies?

We are in the linen service business. My parents run the day and I run the overnight production. There is no production in the daytime. We mainly do sheets, towels, table clothes, some other white items like lab coats. We want to get into work clothes like Dickies, cook's clothing and maybe medical scrubs. We own the stuff. Your labels are encoded so we know who it belongs to. Say you are renting 50 queen sized sheets for beds in your motel. After about 150 washes, they will look pretty beat and we will replace them. If they end up ripped or stained, we may bill you for them, pro-rated. This works for us and our customers. Now with lab coats, we have only two styles of lab coat and they come in S to XXL. Pretty simple. Your firm needs so many of particular size or style. But uniforms need to get back to a specific person. Do your employees own the uniforms? Are they obligated to use your laundry service? I'm trying to get a feel for the market before we leap into it. Thanks more

Resolved Question: I am looking for an apparel ( medical scrubs)manufacturer in china ? Anyone?

Entrepreneur in the US, and looking to get into the wholesale business of medical uniform scrubs. Please contact me at premo_90066@yahoo.com. more

Resolved Question: Any marketing major out there?

Family is starting a business selling medical uniforms. How can I market this product out there? What are some great strategies? more

Resolved Question: Jews of Iraq? What about them?

Of course I thought I knew it all back then. I was young, idealistic, and more than willing to put my life at risk for my convictions. It was 1947 and I wasn't quite 18 when the Iraqi authorities caught me for smuggling young Iraqi Jews like myself out of Iraq, into Iran, and then on to the Promised Land of the soon-to-be established Israel. I was an Iraqi Jew in the Zionist underground. My Iraqi jailers did everything they could to extract the names of my co-conspirators. Fifty years later, pain still throbs in my right toe-a reminder of the day my captors used pliers to remove my toenails. On another occasion, they hauled me to the flat roof of the prison, stripped me bare on a frigid January day, then threw a bucket of cold water over me. I was left there, chained to the railing, for hours. But I never once considered giving them the information they wanted. I was a true believer. My preoccupation during what I refer to as my "two years in hell" was with survival and escape. I had no interest then in the broad sweep of Jewish history in Iraq even though my family had been part of it right from the beginning. We were originally Haroons, a large and important family of the "Babylonian Diaspora." My ancestors had settled in Iraq more than 2,600 years ago-600 years before Christianity, and 1,200 years before Islam. I am descended from Jews who built the tomb of Yehezkel, a Jewish prophet of pre-biblical times. My town, where I was born in 1929, is Hillah, not far from the ancient site of Babylon. The original Jews found Babylon, with its nourishing Tigris and Euphrates rivers, to be truly a land of milk, honey, abundance-and opportunity. Although Jews, like other minorities in what became Iraq, experienced periods of oppression and discrimination depending on the rulers of the period, their general trajectory over two and one-half millennia was upward. Under the late Ottoman rule, for example, Jewish social and religious institutions, schools, and medical facilities flourished without outside interference, and Jews were prominent in government and business. As I sat there in my cell, unaware that a death sentence soon would be handed down against me, I could not have recounted any personal grievances that my family members would have lodged against the government or the Muslim majority. Our family had been treated well and had prospered, first as farmers with some 50,000 acres devoted to rice, dates and Arab horses. Then, with the Ottomans, we bought and purified gold that was shipped to Istanbul and turned into coinage. The Turks were responsible in fact for changing our name to reflect our occupation-we became Khalaschi, meaning "Makers of Pure." I did not volunteer the information to my father that I had joined the Zionist underground. He found out several months before I was arrested when he saw me writing Hebrew and using words and expressions unfamiliar to him. He was even more surprised to learn that, yes, I had decided I would soon move to Israel myself. He was scornful. "You'll come back with your tail between your legs," he predicted. About 125,000 Jews left Iraq for Israel in the late 1940s and into 1952, most because they had been lied to and put into a panic by what I came to learn were Zionist bombs. But my mother and father were among the 6,000 who did not go to Israel. Although physically I never did return to Iraq-that bridge had been burned in any event-my heart has made the journey there many, many times. My father had it right. I was imprisoned at the military camp of Abu-Greib, about 7 miles from Baghdad. When the military court handed down my sentence of death by hanging, I had nothing to lose by attempting the escape I had been planning for many months. It was a strange recipe for an escape: a dab of butter, an orange peel, and some army clothing that I had asked a friend to buy for me at a flea market. I deliberately ate as much bread as I could to put on fat in anticipation of the day I became 18, when they could formally charge me with a crime and attach the 50-pound ball and chain that was standard prisoner issue. Later, after my leg had been shackled, I went on a starvation diet that often left me weak-kneed. The pat of butter was to lubricate my leg in preparation for extricating it from the metal band. The orange peel I surreptitiously stuck into the lock on the night of my planned escape, having studied how it could be placed in such a way as to keep the lock from closing. As the jailers turned to go after locking up, I put on the old army issue that was indistinguishable from what they were wearing-a long, green coat and a stocking cap that I pulled down over much of my face (it was winter). Then I just quietly opened the door and joined the departing group of soldiers as they strode down the hall and outside, and I offered a "good night" to the shift guard as I left. A friend with a car was waiting to speed me away. Later I made my way to the new state of Israel, arriving in May, 1950. My passport had my name in Arabic and English, but the English couldn't capture the "kh" sound, so it was rendered simply as Klaski. At the border, the immigration people applied the English version, which had an Eastern European, Ashkenazi ring to it. In one way, this "mistake" was my key to discovering very soon just how the Israeli caste system worked. They asked me where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. I was the son of a farmer; I knew all the problems of the farm, so I volunteered to go to Dafnah, a farming kibbutz in the high Galilee. I only lasted a few weeks. The new immigrants were given the worst of everything. The food was the same, but that was the only thing that everyone had in common. For the immigrants, bad cigarettes, even bad toothpaste. Everything. I left. Then, through the Jewish Agency, I was advised to go to al-Majdal (later renamed Ashkelon), an Arab town about 9 miles from Gaza, very close to the Mediterranean. The Israeli government planned to turn it into a farmers' city, so my farm background would be an asset there. When I reported to the Labor Office in al-Majdal, they saw that I could read and write Arabic and Hebrew and they said that I could find a good-paying job with the Military Governor's office. The Arabs were under the authority of these Israeli Military Governors. A clerk handed me a bunch of forms in Arabic and Hebrew. Now it dawned on me. Before Israel could establish its farmers' city, it had to rid al-Majdal of its indigenous Palestinians. The forms were petitions to the United Nations Inspectors asking for transfer out of Israel to Gaza, which was under Egyptian control. I read over the petition. In signing, the Palestinian would be saying that he was of sound mind and body and was making the request for transfer free of pressure or duress. Of course, there was no way that they would leave without being pressured to do so. These families had been there hundreds of years, as farmers, primitive artisans, weavers. The Military Governor prohibited them from pursuing their livelihoods, just penned them up until they lost hope of resuming their normal lives. That's when they signed to leave. I was there and heard their grief. "Our hearts are in pain when we look at the orange trees that we planted with our own hands. Please let us go, let us give water to those trees. God will not be pleased with us if we leave His trees untended." I asked the Military Governor to give them relief, but he said, "No, we want them to leave." I could no longer be part of this oppression and I left. Those Palestinians who didn't sign up for transfers were taken by force-just put in trucks and dumped in Gaza. About four thousand people were driven from al-Majdal in one way or another. The few who remained were collaborators with the Israeli authorities. Subsequently, I wrote letters trying to get a government job elsewhere and I got many immediate responses asking me to come for an interview. Then they would discover that my face didn't match my Polish/Ashkenazi name. They would ask if I spoke Yiddish or Polish, and when I said I didn't, they would ask where I came by a Polish name. Desperate for a good job, I would usually say that I thought my great-grandfather was from Poland. I was advised time and again that "we'll give you a call." Eventually, three to four years after coming to Israel, I changed my name to Giladi, which is close to the code name, Gilad, that I had in the Zionist underground. Klaski wasn't doing me any good anyway, and my Eastern friends were always chiding me about the name they knew didn't go with my origins as an Iraqi Jew. I was disillusioned at what I found in the Promised Land, disillusioned personally, disillusioned at the institutionalized racism, disillusioned at what I was beginning to learn about Zionism's cruelties. The principal interest Israel had in Jews from Islamic countries was as a supply of cheap labor, especially for the farm work that was beneath the urbanized Eastern European Jews. Ben Gurion needed the "Oriental" Jews to farm the thousands of acres of land left by Palestinians who were driven out by Israeli forces in 1948. And I began to find out about the barbaric methods used to rid the fledgling state of as many Palestinians as possible. The world recoils today at the thought of bacteriological warfare, but Israel was probably the first to actually use it in the Middle East. In the 1948 war, Jewish forces would empty Arab villages of their populations, often by threats, sometimes by just gunning down a half-dozen unarmed Arabs as examples to the rest. To make sure the Arabs couldn't return to make a fresh life for themselves in these villages, the Israelis put typhus and dysentery bacteria into the water wells. Uri Mileshtin, an official historian for the Israeli Defense Force, has written and spoken about the use of bacteriological agents. According to Mileshtin, Moshe Dayan, a division commander at the time, gave orders in 1948 to remove Arabs from their villages, bulldoze their homes, and render water wells unusable with typhus and dysentery bacteria. Acre was so situated that it could practically defend itself with one big gun, so the Haganah put bacteria into the spring that fed the town. The spring was called Capri and it ran from the north near a kibbutz. The Haganah put typhus bacteria into the water going to Acre, the people got sick, and the Jewish forces occupied Acre. This worked so well that they sent a Haganah division dressed as Arabs into Gaza, where there were Egyptian forces, and the Egyptians caught them putting two cans of bacteria, typhus and dysentery, into the water supply in wanton disregard of the civilian population. "In war, there is no sentiment," one of the captured Haganah men was quoted as saying. My activism in Israel began shortly after I received a letter from the Socialist/Zionist Party asking me to help with their Arabic newspaper. When I showed up at their offices at Central House in Tel Aviv, I asked around to see just where I should report. I showed the letter to a couple of people there and, without even looking at it, they would motion me away with the words, "Room No. 8." When I saw that they weren't even reading the letter, I inquired of several others. But the response was the same, "Room No. 8," with not a glance at the paper I put in front of them. So I went to Room 8 and saw that it was the Department of Jews from Islamic Countries. I was disgusted and angry. Either I am a member of the party or I'm not. Do I have a different ideology or different politics because I am an Arab Jew? It's segregation, I thought, just like a Negroes' Department. I turned around and walked out. That was the start of my open protests. That same year I organized a demonstration in Ashkelon against Ben Gurion's racist policies and 10,000 people turned out. There wasn't much opportunity for those of us who were second class citizens to do much about it when Israel was on a war footing with outside enemies. After the 1967 war, I was in the Army myself and served in the Sinai when there was continued fighting along the Suez Canal. But the cease-fire with Egypt in 1970 gave us our opening. We took to the streets and organized politically to demand equal rights. If it's our country, if we were expected to risk our lives in a border war, then we expected equal treatment. We mounted the struggle so tenaciously and received so much publicity that the Israeli government tried to discredit our movement by calling us "Israel's Black Panthers." They were thinking in racist terms, really, in assuming the Israeli public would reject an organization whose ideology was being compared to that of radical blacks in the United States. But we saw that what we were doing was no different than what blacks in the United States were fighting against-segregation, discrimination, unequal treatment. Rather than reject the label, we adopted it proudly. I had posters of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela and other civil rights activists plastered all over my office. With the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the Israeli-condoned Sabra and Shatilla massacres, I had had enough of Israel. I became a United States citizen and made certain to revoke my Israeli citizenship. I could never have written and published my book in Israel, not with the censorship they would impose. Even in America, I had great difficulty finding a publisher because many are subject to pressures of one kind or another from Israel and its friends. I ended up paying $60,000 from my own pocket to publish Ben Gurion's Scandals: How the Haganah & the Mossad Eliminated Jews, virtually the entire proceeds from having sold my house in Israel. I still was afraid that the printer would back out or that legal proceedings would be initiated to stop its publication, like the Israeli government did in an attempt to prevent former Mossad case officer Victor Ostrovsky from publishing his first book. Ben Gurion's Scandals had to be translated into English from two languages. I wrote in Hebrew when I was in Israel and hoped to publish the book there, and I wrote in Arabic when I was completing the book after coming to the U.S. But I was so worried that something would stop publication that I told the printer not to wait for the translations to be thoroughly checked and proofread. Now I realize that the publicity of a lawsuit would just have created a controversial interest in the book. I am using bank vault storage for the valuable documents that back up what I have written. These documents, including some that I illegally copied from the archives at Yad Vashem, confirm what I saw myself, what I was told by other witnesses, and what reputable historians and others have written concerning the Zionist bombings in Iraq, Arab peace overtures that were rebuffed, and incidents of violence and death inflicted by Jews on Jews in the cause of creating Israel. The Riots of 1941 If, as I have said, my family in Iraq was not persecuted personally and I knew no deprivation as a member of the Jewish minority, what led me to the steps of the gallows as a member of the Zionist underground? To answer that question, it is necessary to establish the context of the massacre that occurred in Baghdad on June 1, 1941, when several hundred Iraqi Jews were killed in riots involving junior officers of the Iraqi army. I was 12 years of age and many of those killed were my friends. I was angry, and very confused. What I didn't know at the time was that the riots most likely were stirred up by the British, in collusion with a pro-British Iraqi leadership. With the breakup of the Ottoman Empire following WW I, Iraq came under British "tutelage." Amir Faisal, son of Sharif Hussein who had led the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman sultan, was brought in from Mecca by the British to become King of Iraq in 1921. Many Jews were appointed to key administrative posts, including that of economics minister. Britain retained final authority over domestic and external affairs. Britain's pro-Zionist attitude in Palestine, however, triggered a growing anti-Zionist backlash in Iraq, as it did in all Arab countries. Writing at the end of 1934, Sir Francis Humphreys, Britain's Ambassador in Baghdad, noted that, while before WW I Iraqi Jews had enjoyed a more favorable position than any other minority in the country, since then "Zionism has sown dissension between Jews and Arabs, and a bitterness has grown up between the two peoples which did not previously exist." King Faisal died in 1933. He was succeeded by his son Ghazi, who died in a motor car accident in 1939. The crown then passed to Ghazi's 4-year-old son, Faisal II, whose uncle, Abd al-Ilah, was named regent. Abd al-Ilah selected Nouri el-Said as prime minister. El-Said supported the British and, as hatred of the British grew, he was forced from office in March 1940 by four senior army officers who advocated Iraq's independence from Britain. Calling themselves the Golden Square, the officers compelled the regent to name as prime minister Rashid Ali al-Kilani, leader of the National Brotherhood party. The time was 1940 and Britain was reeling from a strong German offensive. Al-Kilani and the Golden Square saw this as their opportunity to rid themselves of the British once and for all. Cautiously they began to negotiate for German support, which led the pro-British regent Abd al-Ilah to dismiss al-Kilani in January 1941. By April, however, the Golden Square officers had reinstated the prime minister. This provoked the British to send a military force into Basra on April 12, 1941. Basra, Iraq's second largest city, had a Jewish population of 30,000. Most of these Jews made their livings from import/export, money changing, retailing, as workers in the airports, railways, and ports, or as senior government employees. On the same day, April 12, supporters of the pro-British regent notified the Jewish leaders that the regent wanted to meet with them. As was their custom, the leaders brought flowers for the regent. Contrary to custom, however, the cars that drove them to the meeting place dropped them off at the site where the British soldiers were concentrated. Photographs of the Jews appeared in the following day's newspapers with the banner "Basra Jews Receive British Troops with Flowers." That same day, April 13, groups of angry Arab youths set about to take revenge against the Jews. Several Muslim notables in Basra heard of the plan and calmed things down. Later, it was learned that the regent was not in Basra at all and that the matter was a provocation by his pro-British supporters to bring about an ethnic war in order to give the British army a pretext to intervene. The British continued to land more forces in and around Basra. On May 7, 1941, their Gurkha unit, composed of Indian soldiers from that ethnic group, occupied Basra's el-Oshar quarter, a neighborhood with a large Jewish population. The soldiers, led by British officers, began looting. Many shops in the commercial district were plundered. Private homes were broken into. Cases of attempted rape were reported. Local residents, Jews and Muslims, responded with pistols and old rifles, but their bullets were no match for the soldiers' Tommy Guns. Afterwards, it was learned that the soldiers acted with the acquiescence, if not the blessing, of their British commanders. (It should be remembered that the Indian soldiers, especially those of the Gurkha unit, were known for their discipline, and it is highly unlikely they would have acted so riotously without orders.) The British goal clearly was to create chaos and to blacken the image of the pro-nationalist regime in Baghdad, thereby giving the British forces reason to proceed to the capital and to overthrow the al-Kilani government. Baghdad fell on May 30. Al-Kilani fled to Iran, along with the Golden Square officers. Radio stations run by the British reported that Regent Abd al-Ilah would be returning to the city and that thousands of Jews and others were planning to welcome him. What inflamed young Iraqis against the Jews most, however, was the radio announcer Yunas Bahri on the German station "Berlin," who reported in Arabic that Jews from Palestine were fighting alongside the British against Iraqi soldiers near the city of Faluja. The report was false. On Sunday, June 1, unarmed fighting broke out in Baghdad between Jews who were still celebrating their Shabuoth holiday and young Iraqis who thought the Jews were celebrating the return of the pro-British regent. That evening, a group of Iraqis stopped a bus, removed the Jewish passengers, murdered one and fatally wounded a second. About 8:30 the following morning, some 30 individuals in military and police uniforms opened fire along el-Amin street, a small downtown street whose jewelry, tailor and grocery shops were Jewish-owned. By 11 a.m., mobs of Iraqis with knives, switchblades and clubs were attacking Jewish homes in the area. The riots continued throughout Monday, June 2. During this time, many Muslims rose to defend their Jewish neighbors, while some Jews successfully defended themselves. There were 124 killed and 400 injured, according to a report written by a Jewish Agency messenger who was in Iraq at the time. Other estimates, possibly less reliable, put the death toll higher, as many as 500, with from 650 to 2,000 injured. From 500 to 1,300 stores and more than 1,000 homes and apartments were looted. Who was behind the rioting in the Jewish quarter? Yosef Meir, one of the most prominent activists in the Zionist underground movement in Iraq, known then as Yehoshafat, claims it was the British. Meir, who now works for the Israeli Defense Ministry, argues that, in order to make it appear that the regent was returning as the savior who would reestablish law and order, the British stirred up the riots against the most vulnerable and visible segment in the city, the Jews. And, not surprisingly, the riots ended as soon as the regent's loyal soldiers entered the capital. My own investigations as a journalist lead me to believe Meir is correct. Furthermore, I think his claims should be seen as based on documents in the archives of the Israeli Defense Ministry, the agency that published his book. Yet, even before his book came out, I had independent confirmation from a man I met in Iran in the late Forties. His name was Michael Timosian, an Iraqi Armenian. When I met him he was working as a male nurse at the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Abadan in the south of Iran. On June 2, 1941, however, he was working at the Baghdad hospital where many of the riot victims were brought. Most of these victims were Jews. Timosian said he was particularly interested in two patients whose conduct did not follow local custom. One had been hit by a bullet in his shoulder, the other by a bullet in his right knee. After the doctor removed the bullets, the staff tried to change their blood-soaked cloths. But the two men fought off their efforts, pretending to be speechless, although tests showed they could hear. To pacify them, the doctor injected them with anesthetics and, as they were sleeping, Timosian changed their cloths. He discovered that one of them had around his neck an identification tag of the type used by British troops, while the other had tattoos with Indian script on his right arm along with the familiar sword of the Gurkha. The next day when Timosian showed up for work, he was told that a British officer, his sergeant and two Indian Gurkha soldiers had come to the hospital early that morning. Staff members overheard the Gurkha soldiers talking with the wounded patients, who were not as dumb as they had pretended. The patients saluted the visitors, covered themselves with sheets and, without signing the required release forms, left the hospital with their visitors. Today there is no doubt in my mind that the anti-Jewish riots of 1941 were orchestrated by the British for geopolitical ends. David Kimche is certainly a man who was in a position to know the truth, and he has spoken publicly about British culpability. Kimche had been with British Intelligence during WW II and with the Mossad after the war. Later he became Director General of Israel's Foreign Ministry, the position he held in 1982 when he addressed a forum at the British Institute for International Affairs in London. In responding to hostile questions about Israel's invasion of Lebanon and the refugee camp massacres in Beirut, Kimche went on the attack, reminding the audience that there was scant concern in the British Foreign Office when British Gurkha units participated in the murder of 500 Jews in the streets of Baghdad in 1941. The Bombings of 1950-1951 The anti-Jewish riots of 1941 did more than create a pretext for the British to enter Baghdad to reinstate the pro-British regent and his pro-British prime minister, Nouri el-Said. They also gave the Zionists in Palestine a pretext to set up a Zionist underground in Iraq, first in Baghdad, then in other cities such as Basra, Amara, Hillah, Diwaneia, Abril and Karkouk. Following WW II, a succession of governments held brief power in Iraq. Zionist conquests in Palestine, particularly the massacre of Palestinians in the village of Deir Yassin, emboldened the anti-British movement in Iraq. When the Iraqi government signed a new treaty of friendship with London in January 1948, riots broke out all over the country. The treaty was quickly abandoned and Baghdad demanded removal of the British military mission that had run Iraq's army for 27 years. Later in 1948, Baghdad sent an army detachment to Palestine to fight the Zionists, and when Israel declared independence in May, Iraq closed the pipeline that fed its oil to Haifa's refinery. Abd al-Ilah, however, was still regent and the British quisling, Nouri el-Said, was back as prime minister. I was in the Abu-Greib prison in 1948, where I would remain until my escape to Iran in September 1949. Six months later-the exact date was March 19, 1950-a bomb went off at the American Cultural Center and Library in Baghdad, causing property damage and injuring a number of people. The center was a favorite meeting place for young Jews. The first bomb thrown directly at Jews occurred on April 8, 1950, at 9:15 p.m. A car with three young passengers hurled the grenade at Baghdad's El-Dar El-Bida Café, where Jews were celebrating Passover. Four people were seriously injured. That night leaflets were distributed calling on Jews to leave Iraq immediately. The next day, many Jews, most of them poor with nothing to lose, jammed emigration offices to renounce their citizenship and to apply for permission to leave for Israel. So many applied, in fact, that the police had to open registration offices in Jewish schools and synagogues. On May 10, at 3 a.m., a grenade was tossed in the direction of the display window of the Jewish-owned Beit-Lawi Automobile Company, destroying part of the building. No casualties were reported. On June 3, 1950, another grenade was tossed from a speeding car in the El-Batawin area of Baghdad where most rich Jews and middle class Iraqis lived. No one was hurt, but following the explosion Zionist activists sent telegrams to Israel requesting that the quota for immigration from Iraq be increased. On June 5, at 2:30 a.m., a bomb exploded next to the Jewish-owned Stanley Shashua building on El-Rashid street, resulting in property damage but no casualties. On January 14, 1951, at 7 p.m., a grenade was thrown at a group of Jews outside the Masouda Shem-Tov Synagogue. The explosive struck a high-voltage cable, electrocuting three Jews, one a young boy, Itzhak Elmacher, and wounding over 30 others. Following the attack, the exodus of Jews jumped to between 600-700 per day. Zionist propagandists still maintain that the bombs in Iraq were set off by anti-Jewish Iraqis who wanted Jews out of their country. The terrible truth is that the grenades that killed and maimed Iraqi Jews and damaged their property were thrown by Zionist Jews. Among the most important documents in my book, I believe, are copies of two leaflets published by the Zionist underground calling on Jews to leave Iraq. One is dated March 16, 1950, the other April 8, 1950. The difference between these two is critical. Both indicate the date of publication, but only the April 8th leaflet notes the time of day: 4 p.m. Why the time of day? Such a specification was unprecedented. Even the investigating judge, Salaman El-Beit, found it suspicious. Did the 4 p.m. writers want an alibi for a bombing they knew would occur five hours later? If so, how did they know about the bombing? The judge concluded they knew because a connection existed between the Zionist underground and the bomb throwers. This, too, was the conclusion of Wilbur Crane Eveland, a former senior officer in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), whom I had the opportunity to meet in New York in 1988. In his book, Ropes of Sand, whose publication the CIA opposed, Eveland writes: In attempts to portray the Iraqis as anti-American and to terrorize the Jews, the Zionists planted bombs in the U.S. Information Service library and in synagogues. Soon leaflets began to appear urging Jews to flee to Israel. . . . Although the Iraqi police later provided our embassy with evidence to show that the synagogue and library bombings, as well as the anti-Jewish and anti-American leaflet campaigns, had been the work of an underground Zionist organization, most of the world believed reports that Arab terrorism had motivated the flight of the Iraqi Jews whom the Zionists had "rescued" really just in order to increase Israel's Jewish population." Eveland doesn't detail the evidence linking the Zionists to the attacks, but in my book I do. In 1955, for example, I organized in Israel a panel of Jewish attorneys of Iraqi origin to handle claims of Iraqi Jews who still had property in Iraq. One well known attorney, who asked that I not give his name, confided in me that the laboratory tests in Iraq had confirmed that the anti-American leaflets found at the American Cultural Center bombing were typed on the same typewriter and duplicated on the same stenciling machine as the leaflets distributed by the Zionist movement just before the April 8th bombing. Tests also showed that the type of explosive used in the Beit-Lawi attack matched traces of explosives found in the suitcase of an Iraqi Jew by the name of Yosef Basri. Basri, a lawyer, together with Shalom Salih, a shoemaker, would be put on trial for the attacks in December 1951 and executed the following month. Both men were members of Hashura, the military arm of the Zionist underground. Salih ultimately confessed that he, Basri and a third man, Yosef Habaza, carried out the attacks. By the time of the executions in January 1952, all but 6,000 of an estimated 125,000 Iraqi Jews had fled to Israel. Moreover, the pro-British, pro-Zionist puppet el-Said saw to it that all of their possessions were frozen, including their cash assets. (There were ways of getting Iraqi dinars out, but when the immigrants went to exchange them in Israel they found that the Israeli government kept 50 percent of the value.) Even those Iraqi Jews who had not registered to emigrate, but who happened to be abroad, faced loss of their nationality if they didn't return within a specified time. An ancient, cultured, prosperous community had been uprooted and its people transplanted to a land dominated by East European Jews, whose culture was not only foreign but entirely hateful to them. The Ultimate Criminals Zionist Leaders. From the start they knew that in order to establish a Jewish state they had to expel the indigenous Palestinian population to the neighboring Islamic states and import Jews from these same states. * Theodor Herzl, the architect of Zionism, thought it could be done by social engineering. In his diary entry for 12 June 1885, he wrote that Zionist settlers would have to "spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country." * Vladimir Jabotinsky, Prime Minister Netanyahu's ideological progenitor, frankly admitted that such a transfer of populations could only be brought about by force. * David Ben Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, told a Zionist Conference in 1937 that any proposed Jewish state would have to "transfer Arab populations out of the area, if possible of their own free will, if not by coercion." After 750,000 Palestinians were uprooted and their lands confiscated in 1948-49, Ben Gurion had to look to the Islamic countries for Jews who could fill the resultant cheap labor market. "Emissaries" were smuggled into these countries to "convince" Jews to leave either by trickery or fear. In the case of Iraq, both methods were used: uneducated Jews were told of a Messianic Israel in which the blind see, the lame walk, and onions grow as big as melons; educated Jews had bombs thrown at them. A few years after the bombings, in the early 1950s, a book was published in Iraq, in Arabic, titled Venom of the Zionist Viper. The author was one of the Iraqi investigators of the 1950-51 bombings and, in his book, he implicates the Israelis, specifically one of the emissaries sent by Israel, Mordechai Ben-Porat. As soon as the book came out, all copies just disappeared, even from libraries. The word was that agents of the Israeli Mossad, working through the U.S. Embassy, bought up all the books and destroyed them. I tried on three different occasions to have one sent to me in Israel, but each time Israeli censors in the post office intercepted it. British Leaders. Britain always acted in its best colonial interests. For that reason Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour sent his famous 1917 letter to Lord Rothschild in exchange for Zionist support in WW I. During WW II the British were primarily concerned with keeping their client states in the Western camp, while Zionists were most concerned with the immigration of European Jews to Palestine, even if this meant cooperating with the Nazis. (In my book I document numerous instances of such dealings by Ben Gurion and the Zionist leadership.) After WW II the international chessboard pitted communists against capitalists. In many countries, including the United States and Iraq, Jews represented a large part of the Communist party. In Iraq, hundreds of Jews of the working intelligentsia occupied key positions in the hierarchy of the Communist and Socialist parties. To keep their client countries in the capitalist camp, Britain had to make sure these governments had pro-British leaders. And if, as in Iraq, these leaders were overthrown, then an anti-Jewish riot or two could prove a useful pretext to invade the capital and reinstate the "right" leaders. Moreover, if the possibility existed of removing the communist influence from Iraq by transferring the whole Jewish community to Israel, well then, why not? Particularly if the leaders of Israel and Iraq conspired in the deed. The Iraqi Leaders. Both the regent Abd al-Ilah and his prime minister Nouri el- Said took directions from London. Toward the end of 1948, el-Said, who had already met with Israel's Prime Minister Ben Gurion in Vienna, began discussing with his Iraqi and British associates the need for an exchange of populations. Iraq would send the Jews in military trucks to Israel via Jordan, and Iraq would take in some of the Palestinians Israel had been evicting. His proposal included mutual confiscation of property. London nixed the idea as too radical. El-Said then went to his back-up plan and began to create the conditions that would make the lives of Iraqi Jews so miserable they would leave for Israel. Jewish government employees were fired from their jobs; Jewish merchants were denied import/export licenses; police began to arrest Jews for trivial reasons. Still the Jews did not leave in any great numbers. In September 1949, Israel sent the spy Mordechai Ben-Porat, the one mentioned in Venom of the Zionist Viper, to Iraq. One of the first things Ben-Porat did was to approach el-Said and promise him financial incentives to have a law enacted that would lift the citizenship of Iraqi Jews. Soon after, Zionist and Iraqi representatives began formulating a rough draft of the bill, according to the model dictated by Israel through its agents in Baghdad. The bill was passed by the Iraqi parliament in March 1950. It empowered the government to issue one-time exit visas to Jews wishing to leave the country. In March, the bombings began. Sixteen years later, the Israeli magazine Haolam Hazeh, published by Uri Avnery, then a Knesset member, accused Ben-Porat of the Baghdad bombings. Ben-Porat, who would become a Knesset member himself, denied the charge, but never sued the magazine for libel. And Iraqi Jews in Israel still call him Morad Abu al-Knabel, Mordechai of the Bombs. As I said, all this went well beyond the comprehension of a teenager. I knew Jews were being killed and an organization existed that could lead us to the Promised Land. So I helped in the exodus to Israel. Later, on occasions, I would bump into some of these Iraqi Jews in Israel. Not infrequently they'd express the sentiment that they could kill me for what I had done. Opportunities for Peace After the Israeli attack on the Jordanian village of Qibya in October, 1953, Ben Gurion went into voluntary exile at the Sedeh Boker kibbutz in the Negev. The Labor party then used to organize many buses for people to go visit him there, where they would see the former prime minister working with sheep. But that was only for show. Really he was writing his diary and continuing to be active behind the scenes. I went on such a tour. Ben Gurion's Scandals by N.Giladi How the Haganah and Mossad eliminated Jews. Available in our BookstoreWe were told not to try to speak to Ben Gurion, but when I saw him, I asked why, since Israel is a democracy with a parliament, does it not have a constitution? Ben Gurion said, "Look, boy"-I was 24 at the time-"if we have a constitution, we have to write in it the border of our country. And this is not our border, my dear." I asked, "Then where is the border?" He said, "Wherever the Sahal will come, this is the border." Sahal is the Israeli army. Ben Gurion told the world that Israel accepted the partition and the Arabs rejected it. Then Israel took half of the land that was promised to the Arab state. And still he was saying it was not enough. Israel needed more land. How can a country make peace with its neighbors if it wants to take their land? How can a country demand to be secure if it won't say what borders it will be satisfied with? For such a country, peace would be an inconvenience. I know now that from the beginning many Arab leaders wanted to make peace with Israel, but Israel always refused. Ben Gurion covered this up with propaganda. He said that the Arabs wanted to drive Israel into the sea and he called Gamal Abdel Nasser the Hitler of the Middle East whose foremost intent was to destroy Israel. He wanted America and Great Britain to treat Nasser like a pariah. In 1954, it seemed that America was getting less critical of Nasser. Then during a three-week period in July, several terrorist bombs were set off: at the United States Information Agency offices in Cairo and Alexandria, a British-owned theater, and the central post office in Cairo. An attempt to firebomb a cinema in Alexandria failed when the bomb went off in the pocket of one of the perpetrators. That led to the discovery that the terrorists were not anti-Western Egyptians, but were instead Israeli spies bent on souring the warming relationship between Egypt and the United States in what came to be known as the Lavon Affair. Ben Gurion was still living on his kibbutz. Moshe Sharett as prime minister was in contact with Abdel Nasser through the offices of Lord Maurice Orbach of Great Britain. Sharett asked Nasser to be lenient with the captured spies, and Nasser did all that was in his power to prevent a deterioration of the situation between the two countries. Then Ben Gurion returned as Defense Minister in February, 1955. Later that month Israeli troops attacked Egyptian military camps and Palestinian refugees in Gaza, killing 54 and injuring many more. The very night of the attack, Lord Orbach was on his way to deliver a message to Nasser, but was unable to get through because of the military action. When Orbach telephoned, Nasser's secretary told him that the attack proved that Israel did not want peace and that he was wasting his time as a mediator. In November, Ben Gurion announced in the Knesset that he was willing to meet with Abdel Nasser anywhere and at any time for the sake of peace and understanding. The next morning the Israeli military attacked an Egyptian military camp in the Sabaha region. Although Nasser felt pessimistic about achieving peace with Israel, he continued to send other mediators to try. One was through the American Friends Service Committee; another via the Prime Minister of Malta, Dom Minthoff; and still another through Marshall Tito of Yugoslavia. One that looked particularly promising was through Dennis Hamilton, editor of The London Times. Nasser told Hamilton that if only he could sit and talk with Ben Gurion for two or three hours, they would be able to settle the conflict and end the state of war between the two countries. When word of this reached Ben Gurion, he arranged to meet with Hamilton. They decided to pursue the matter with the Israeli ambassador in London, Arthur Luria, as liaison. On Hamilton's third trip to Egypt, Nasser met him with the text of a Ben Gurion speech stating that Israel would not give up an inch of land and would not take back a single refugee. Hamilton knew that Ben Gurion with his mouth had undermined a peace mission and missed an opportunity to settle the Israeli-Arab conflict. Nasser even sent his friend Ibrahim Izat of the Ruz El Yusuf weekly paper to meet with Israeli leaders in order to explore the political atmosphere and find out why the attacks were taking place if Israel really wanted peace. One of the men Izat met with was Yigal Yadin, a former Chief of Staff of the army who wrote this letter to me on 14 January 1982: Dear Mr. Giladi: Your letter reminded me of an event which I nearly forgot and of which I remember only a few details. Ibrahim Izat came to me if I am not mistaken under the request of the Foreign Ministry or one of its branches; he stayed in my house and we spoke for many hours. I do not remember him saying that he came on a mission from Nasser, but I have no doubt that he let it be understood that this was with his knowledge or acquiescence.... When Nasser decided to nationalize the Suez Canal in spite of opposition from the British and the French, Radio Cairo announced in Hebrew: If the Israeli government is not influenced by the British and the French imperialists, it will eventually result in greater understanding between the two states, and Egypt will reconsider Israel's request to have access to the Suez Canal. Israel responded that it had no designs on Egypt, but at that very moment Israeli representatives were in France planning the three-way attack that was to take place in October, 1956. All the while, Ben Gurion continued to talk about the Hitler of the Middle East. This brainwashing went on until late September, 1970, when Gamal Abdel Nasser passed away. Then, miracle of miracles, David Ben Gurion told the press: A week before he died I received an envoy from Abdel Nasser who asked to meet with me urgently in order to solve the problems between Israel and the Arab world. The public was surprised because they didn't know that Abdel Nasser had wanted this all along, but Israel sabotaged it. Nasser was not the only Arab leader who wanted to make peace with Israel. There were many others. Brigadier General Abdel Karim Qasem, before he seized power in Iraq in July, 1958, headed an underground organization that sent a delegation to Israel to make a secret agreement. Ben Gurion refused even to see him. I learned about this when I was a journalist in Israel. But whenever I tried to publish even a small part of it, the censor would stamp it "Not Allowed." Now, in Netanyahu, we are witnessing another attempt by an Israeli prime minister to fake an interest in making peace. Netanyahu and the Likud are setting Arafat up by demanding that he institute more and more repressive measures in the interest of Israeli "security." Sooner or later I suspect the Palestinians will have had enough of Arafat's strong-arm methods as Israel's quisling-and he'll be killed. Then the Israeli government will say, "See, we were ready to give him everything. You can't trust those Arabs-they kill each other. Now there's no one to even talk to about peace." Conclusion Alexis de Tocqueville once observed that it is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth. Certainly it has been easier for the world to accept the Zionist lie that Jews were evicted from Muslim lands because of anti-Semitism, and that Israelis, never the Arabs, were the pursuers of peace. The truth is far more discerning: bigger players on the world stage were pulling the strings. These players, I believe, should be held accountable for their crimes, particularly when they willfully terrorized, dispossessed and killed innocent people on the altar of some ideological imperative. I believe, too, that the descendants of these leaders have a moral responsibility to compensate the victims and their descendants, and to do so not just with reparations, but by setting the historical record straight. That is why I established a panel of inquiry in Israel to seek reparations for Iraqi Jews who had been forced to leave behind their property and possessions in Iraq. That is why I joined the Black Panthers in confronting the Israeli government with the grievances of the Jews in Israel who came from Islamic lands. And that is why I have written my book and this article: to set the historical record straight. We Jews from Islamic lands did not leave our ancestral homes because of any natural enmity between Jews and Muslims. And we Arabs-I say Arab because that is the language my wife and I still speak at home-we Arabs on numerous occasions have sought peace with the State of the Jews. And finally, as a U.S. citizen and taxpayer, let me say that we Americans need to stop supporting racial discrimination in Israel and the cruel expropriation of lands in the West Bank, Gaza, South Lebanon and the Golan Heights. more

Resolved Question: What are the secrets Inside Israel's prisons ?!?

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/shart... Detainees are blindfolded and kept in blackened cells, never told where they are, brutally interrogated and allowed no visitors of any kind. Dubbed 'the Israeli Guantanamo,' it's no wonder facility 1391 officially does not exist. M, who serves in the Intelligence Corps reserves, remembers the first time he was sent to do guard duty at Camp 1391. Before climbing to the top of the observation tower he received an explicit order from the responsible officer: "When you're on the tower you look straight ahead only, outside the base, and to the sides. What happens behind you is none of your business. Do not turn around." M., of course, couldn't resist the temptation and occasionally snuck a look behind him. From atop the tower he saw the double fence surrounding the camp, enclosing a compound ruled by trained attack dogs; the jeep that patrols inside the two fences; the vehicles utilized by the members of the unit who man the base; and especially the large concrete structure, dating from the British Mandate period, when it was used by the British police, and which now bears a description that carries an aura of mystery: Israel's secret detention facility. Some of the people who were interviewed for this article dubbed the camp "the Israeli Guantanamo." There are in fact certain points of resemblance between the American detention camp in Cuba and the Israeli site, mainly in relation to the legal questions that hover over them and the gnawing doubt about whether they are consistent with the values of democracy. In terms of the exotic, though, we lag far behind. Whereas the watchtowers of the Guantanamo facility look out over the aquamarine waters of the Caribbean Sea, the secret prison in Israel is situated by the side of a completely ordinary road in the heart of a bustling region in the center of the country. A narrow, tree-lined road ascends to the camp, and inside it looks like any other army base: barracks, mess hall, workshop to repair vehicles. Even the guards are not the best the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have available. The guard towers and the patrols are manned, for the most part, by graduates of the IDF's general basic training program, who "never carried out an assault against anything," as one of them put it. "As always with us, there's a lot of hoo-ha, but behind it is the usual army chaos," an officer who served at the base says ironically. What really surrounds Camp 1391, more than physical protection, is an entrenched wall of silence. Since the 1980s, when the facility was moved from a more southerly location to its present site, the Israeli authorities have made every effort to keep its very existence secret. And even now that its existence has been revealed, the state refuses to answer the many questions of the world and of the Israeli public: Where is the facility? Who is being held there, why, and for how long? Were they tried before being locked up in Camp 1391, or are they awaiting trial? What are their conditions of incarceration? In every other lockup in Israel the answers to these and many other questions are open and amenable to external, legal, public and international review. As far as is known, the 1391 site is the only detention facility whose detainees don't know where they are. If they ask, the warders may answer, "on the moon," or "in outer space," or "outside the borders of Israel." It is also the only detention facility that the state prevents the International Red Cross from visiting. Nor, as far as can be ascertained, have Knesset members ever visited the place, and many of the politicians who have been asked about it in the past few weeks said they had never heard of it - including some who have held senior positions in the government, such as Prof. David Libai, who was justice minister in the government of Yitzhak Rabin and a member of the ministerial committee that deals with the secret services: "I will not say a single word about the subject, for the simple reason that I am not familiar with it. This is the first time I have ever heard about such a thing." If a former justice minister doesn't know about it, a disturbing question arises: who does? Dan Meridor, another former justice minister and chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, is aware of the facility's existence: "I'm not sure there's anything wrong here," he says. "I remember that as a minister and as one who dealt with intelligence matters, I visited every place I wanted to and everything was always open to me. I know about the existence of this facility, but I was never there - apparently because I never asked to visit it. I don't want to bandy words about, because I am not familiar with the subject in depth. There are many complex questions of human rights involved here." Do you think it's right that in the State of Israel there is a facility in which people don't know where they are, nor do their families or lawyers? "No. If there are people who are incarcerated incommunicado, that doesn't seem right to me." According to attorney Dan Yakir, the legal adviser of the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), "A secret detention facility contradicts basic principles of every democracy - transparency and public supervision over the governmental authorities. And those principles are especially important in relation to the deprivation of freedom - which is one of the most severe infringements of human rights. The existence of a lockup like this gives rise to a double concern: first, of secret arrests and `disappearances' of people; and second, an abuse of power, unfair treatment, violence and torture." As will be seen, attorney Yakir's concerns are well founded. Stepson of army intelligence Camp 1391 is an Israel Defense Forces facility. Agents of the Shin Bet security service and other security branches visit the site and since the start of the intifada have apparently made greater use of it than in the past, but the facility belongs to the IDF. One of the reasons for the wall of secrecy that surrounds it is the fact that it is located in the center of a military base that belongs to one of the secret units of the Intelligence Corps - Unit 504 (according to foreign sources the unit's name has recently been changed). Unit 504 gathers intelligence by means of the human factor - "humint." Most of its work is done by using agents outside Israel. The officers in the unit, which is not large, are known as katamim (acronym for "officers for special tasks") and undergo two-track training. Some of them handle agents and the others - former members of the unit say they are those whose skills the system isn't wild about - are directed to the hakshabim track (interrogators of prisoners). The unit commander is an officer with the rank of colonel. The attitude toward the unit is characterized by duality: on the one hand, this is a small, seemingly elitist unit, which carries out sensitive missions; on the other hand, as one of the unit's members says, "We are the stepson of army intelligence. Sometimes you look at some of the officers and you ask yourself whether these are the standards the IDF assigns to these posts." The same individual adds, "There is also a problem about the impact of long-term service on their mental state. To be an interrogator you have to start out with some kind of scratch on the brain. But the handlers, too - after a time they also start to be handlers in their private life. You see it in their attitude toward women, with the family, even in the interaction between the people in the unit." Along with operational successes, which have naturally remained far from the public eye, the names of some of the unit's members have been linked to dubious affairs in recent years. One of the unit's commanders became criminally entangled because of a romantic affair. Another accidentally discharged his pistol during a meeting with the command personnel. Jean-Pierre Elraz, who last year was accused of murdering Yitzhak Kvartatz, the security coordinator of Kibbutz Manara, is a former member of the unit (and afterward served in the Shin Bet); so is Major Yosef Amit, who was convicted of aggravated espionage and contact with a foreign agent. During the IDF's 18-year presence in Lebanon, the members of Unit 504 were especially active across Israel's northern border. To this day the Lebanese press occasionally runs stories about the arrest and trial of local agents who operated in the service of Unit 504. In November 1998, a Lebanese court convicted no fewer than 57 citizens of collaborating with Israel via the unit. The penalty for this offense: death. The unit's extensive activity in Lebanon placed Camp 1391 at the center of affairs. It became the entry gate to Israel for Lebanese, especially those who were suspected of membership in Hezbollah, who were transferred to the southern side of the border. Some of them were captured in battle, others were abducted at Israel's initiative. The most famous of the abductees are Sheikh Abd al Karim Obeid, who was seized in 1989, and Mustafa Dirani, who was brought by force to Israel in 1994. The helicopter in which members of Sayeret Matkal, the ultra-elite reconnaissance unit, took Obeid from his home in the town of Jibsheet, took him directly to the gates of Camp 1391. The next time Obeid left the camp - apart from medical checks and to appear in court when his detention was extended - was 13 years later. Last summer Obeid and Dirani were moved to Ashmoret prison, near Kfar Yona in the Netanya area. However, well-known anti-Israel activists such as Obeid and Dirani are not the only abductees who have been thrown into Camp 1391. When the soldiers of Sayeret Matkal entered Obeid's house in the dead of night they encountered a few other people, too, among them some of Obeid's relatives and his bodyguard. Hashem Fahaf, then about 20, who happened to visit the sheikh that day to receive his blessing and decided to stay overnight, was especially unlucky. The soldiers bundled him into the helicopter, too. He spent the next 11 years incarcerated in Israel, initially in Camp 1391 and afterward in Ayalon Prison in Ramle. During this entire period he was not tried or accused of any crime. In the first years of his incarceration, Israel denied he was in the country and refused him any contact with the outside world. In April 2000, Fahaf, by now 31, was released by order of the Supreme Court. Together with him another 18 Lebanese, who according to the official version were being held as "bargaining chips" for the missing air force navigator Ron Arad, were also released. The group included two men who had been kidnapped and brought to Israel when they were teenagers aged 16 and 17, as well as Ghasan Dirani, a relative of Mustafa Dirani, who developed catatonic schizophrenia during his incarceration in Israel. At one stage or another, all of them were held in Camp 1391. Inside the facility In aerial photographs of the area in which Camp 1391 is located - as is the case with aerial photos of other security-sensitive sites in the country - the facility and the large building in its center are nonexistent. Most maps of Israel also do not cite the facility, though on a few maps of the Nature and National Parks Protection Authority, it is marked by means of a letter, with no further explanation. There is no sign on the main road directing the curious to the camp. After we drove around the base a couple of times and stopped a bit to take pictures, a security vehicle was sent out to follow us for a few kilometers. At the first opportunity, two armed and surly security men got out of the vehicle and barraged us with questions. Anyone entering the camp has to negotiate two iron gates draped with barbed wire. The first gate closes after the visitor enters and only then does the second gate open. The detention and interrogation section is located not far from the mess hall. A person who served on the base recalls with a smile that a poster spelling out the main points of the Geneva Convention hung on one of the walls of the dining hall. The cells proceed along a corridor; they abut one another but are separated by thick concrete walls. The detainees can communicate by knocking on the walls, "and they often shout to one another," relates an officer who served in the facility. "That is forbidden, but we didn't always have the energy to deal with it." The detainees are led into the facility blindfolded, to prevent them from knowing where they are. Their personal effects are taken from them, as are their clothes and they are given blue pants and a blue shirt. The cells are pretty much identical, though there are two levels of detainees: those who are in the middle of being interrogated, who get the worst cells and worst conditions; and those whose interrogation has been completed. Two of the cells are relatively large (2.5 x 4 meters), have reasonable lighting and running water, and are therefore called the "villas" by the prisoners. Sheikh Obeid shared one of the "villas" with two Lebanese detainees. Two of the solitary confinement cells are considered the worst of the lot. They are 1.25 x 1.25 meters in size, almost completely dark, and the walls are painted black or red. The differences between the other cells are largely insignificant, expressed mainly in the form of a few basic rights that are accorded to those whom the system no longer has any reason to subject to psychological pressure. The doors of the cells are made of heavy steel, with a small crack - which can be opened only from the outside - being the only opening to the outside world. The cells measure about 2 x 2 meters and are made entirely of concrete on the inside. There are no windows or any source of external light. Abutting one of the walls is a concrete platform that serves as a bed, with a mattress and a blanket on it. On the wall opposite is an orifice, a kind of pipe through which water flows, but the tap is controlled by soldiers outside the cell. Below the water source is a hole in the floor that the detainees use to relieve themselves. That, it turns out, is a privilege. In some of the cells, apparently those used for detainees under interrogation, there is no place at all to go to the toilet: the prisoners have to use a large plastic bucket, which is emptied only once every few days. There are ventilation openings in the upper part of the cells, but the main testimony to their existence is the noise they make when they are turned on. A lamp protected by heavy glass casts a dim light 24 hours a day. The detainees have no way to tell night from day. Most of the cells are also under supervision by means of cameras that send the images via closed-circuit television. The majority of the prisoners are incarcerated alone, though some of the cells have two concrete platforms and in some cases hold two prisoners. The detainees receive the same food the soldiers get. Three times a day, soldiers open the door, bring in a dish and then close the door. The procedure is that before the soldier enters he knocks at the door, at which point the detainee must place a black sack on his head and turn around with his hands raised. The warders, members of the Military Police who are seconded to the facility, are not armed. Weapons may not be introduced into the facility, to prevent a situation in which one of the prisoners might seize a warder's weapon. The warders are only allowed to open the cell doors in pairs. Once a day the detainees - those whose interrogation has ended - are allowed out for one hour in a small inner courtyard of sand and vegetation. The conditions of imprisonment, says a person who served in the facility, are relatively reasonable. Similarly, attorney Zvi Rish, the lawyer of Obeid, Dirani and many of the other Lebanese who were incarcerated in the facility in the 1990s, confirms that his clients had no special complaints about the conditions - referring only to the period after their interrogation had ended. What goes on during the interrogation process is another story altogether, one that sheds light on one of the darker corners of Israel. Let George do it On Friday evening, July 28, 1989, the adrenaline was coursing through Camp 1391. In a well-planned operation, Sayeret Matkal succeeded in grabbing Sheikh Obeid from his bed in the town of Jibsheet, about eight kilometers north of the Israeli border. Obeid was considered a spiritual authority in Hezbollah, but despite the high hopes, his abduction did not further the search for Ron Arad, who had been missing since his plane was downed over Lebanon three years earlier. Soldiers who served in the facility at the time say that in the course of time they developed good relations with prisoner no. 801260. They taught him Hebrew - he reached an impressive level of fluency in the language - and he taught them Arabic. Obeid is described as the spiritual mentor of the prisoners and even of the warders. "With him everything was done quietly and with restraint, with grace and decorum. Even the warders treated him almost like `your honor the rabbi,'" recalls an officer who served at the facility. In May 1994 an honorable guest joined the order of the Lebanese prisoners at Camp 1391: Mustafa Dirani. He was another bargaining chip from whom Israel hoped to extract information about Ron Arad, or even to exchange for Arad, but he, too, proved a disappointment. Many months of planning preceded the abduction of Dirani, who was head of the security division in the Shi'ite movement Amal, and as such had been responsible for holding Ron Arad for about two years. A few days before he was seized and brought to Israel, the interrogators of Unit 504 were given all the intelligence material that had been collected about him. When he arrived at the facility there was a feeling of an imminent breakthrough. In the first days of the interrogation all the ranking members of the defense establishment turned up at the facility - prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, the chief of staff, the director of Military Intelligence and officials from the Mossad espionage agency and the Shin Bet. Dirani's interrogation began seconds after he was grabbed. In special cases interrogators from Unit 504 accompany a force that operates across the lines, with the aim of taking advantage of the abductee's initial shock. The interrogation continued in the vehicle that brought Dirani to his cell in Camp 1391 and then for the next five weeks continuously around the clock. The chief interrogators were the unit commander, career and reservist personnel - the latter were mobilized especially for the mission -and above all a major who introduced himself as George. George, who is now 43 and lives in a small community in the center of the country, is dark with cropped hair, brown eyes and a solid body. He is considered one of the unit's toughest interrogators. The relationship that developed between George and Dirani was the stuff of quite a few newspaper headlines. It will continue to engage the courts during the years to come. Still pending in Tel Aviv District Court is a suit filed by Dirani against the State of Israel and Major George concerning two incidents in which Dirani says he was subjected to sexual abuse. In the first case George called in four of the soldiers who were doing guard duty in the facility and one of them allegedly raped Dirani at George's orders. In another case, Dirani says in the suit, George himself inserted a wooden stick into his rectum. The court will have to decide whether these events occurred. A perusal of the affidavits that have been submitted to the court, testimonies of officers and soldiers who served in the facility and evidence given by other detainees who were there paints a picture of a horrific routine in the interrogation rooms of Camp 1391. Within the framework of that routine the interrogators of Unit 504 have no compunctions about making use of extreme measures in order to extract information - information that in a large percentage of the cases was not in their possession. "I know that it was customary to threaten to insert a stick," says T.N., an interrogator at the facility, in testimony he gave to Military Police investigators. "The intention was that the stick would be inserted if the subject did not talk ... I remember one case when something in that style was done ... George was interrogating one of the prisoners ... He called in S. and me. We came into the room and S. dropped his pants and remained in his underwear or he made clicking noises with his belt as though he was opening it ... S. did this during the interrogation, when George told [the prisoner] that he would be raped in the *** ... I remember for certain that the situation was threat of rape ... "I want to add about that prisoner that he arrived in the room naked, handcuffed and with his head covered. S. and I were in the room and one of us led him around the room and the other held the stick next to his rear end, with provocation and threat, that because he had been caught lying the stick would be shoved up his ***. When I say the stick was moved around next to his rear end, the idea was to touch his bottom with the stick and maybe even to shove it next to the rectum so he would think we were really going to stick it in." Dirani's complaint, along with other testimonies about what was going on in the interrogation rooms of Camp 1391, opened a Pandora's box in the army. George's line of defense was clear: The system, he said, abandoned me; everything I did was done with authority and authorization. Everyone knew, everyone gave their backing, and now everyone denies it all. To reinforce his case, George brandishes a petition that was signed by about 60 reserve officers and soldiers of the unit, in which they say it is wrong for George to have to pay a personal price for using working methods that were standard in the unit for many years. What, according to George, did he in fact do with authority and authorization? He denied the rape and the abuse with the stick, but confirmed many details that were reported by Dirani and other prisoners. For example, the fact that they often stood naked while being interrogated. The State of Israel also denied the rape charge in its response to Dirani's suit, though in the legal hearings the representative of the State Attorney's Office, Yael Tennenbaum, confirmed that "within the framework of a Military Police investigation the suspicion arose that an interrogator who questioned the complainant threatened to perform a sexual act on the complainant." The denial notwithstanding, George was dismissed from the career army, in which he had served for nearly 20 years, by order of the IDF's judge advocate general. He claimed the system was trying to silence him and the episode and filed a petition to the High Court of Justice to be reinstated into service. The petition was rejected. Today George sits at home, declining to talk about the case. But stains that will not soon be erased continue to hover in the skies above Camp 1391. Another example is the testimony of Ahmed Ali Banjek, a Lebanese citizen who was brought to Israel and interrogated in the facility on suspicion of smuggling an anti-helicopter missile into the former Israeli security zone in southern Lebanon. Banjek was convicted on the basis of his confession but afterward submitted an affidavit to the military court in Lod stating that the confession had been extracted under torture. He said he had been beaten with a wooden stick between the legs, forced to sit on a wooden stick until it penetrated into his body, made to drink coffee mixed with ashes from cigarettes and force-fed with large amounts of onions and water. In a rare judgment, the military court in Lod, under the president of the court, Lieutenant Colonel Elisha Caspi, found in April 1998 that "a certain doubt remains as to whether it can be asserted with the certainty required in a criminal trial that his statement was made by the defendant and signed by him." In other words, the court did not reject Banjek's account of the horrors that occurred in the interrogation rooms of Camp 1391, and he was released. CONTINUED http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/shart... trassID=14&sbSubContrassID=0&l... A black hole (2 of 2) The new population Since Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon more than three years ago, and certainly since the eruption of the intifada in September 2000, the unit has actively employed agents among the Palestinians in the territories, an area that until then was the almost exclusive preserve of the Shin Bet. Along with the change in the character of the unit's activity, the population that is now brought to the facility has also changed. As far as is known, in the past the main, though not the only, occupants of the facility were citizens of foreign countries - a term that does not include the inhabitants of the Palestinian Authority. They included Lebanese who were captured or abducted and brought to Israel, Iraqis who defected from Saddam's army and hoped to find political asylum in Israel, and there are also stories about an Iranian or two who were held at the facility in the past. In the past year, and perhaps in earlier stages of the intifada as well, Palestinians too were incarcerated there at times. The most senior of them, as far as is known, is Marwan Barghouti, who was interrogated at the facility for a few days. "Barghouti sat on the same chair you are now sitting on," the interrogators said to one of the Palestinian detainees and made fun of the modest dimensions of the famous prisoner - "his legs didn't even reach the floor." The fact that Palestinians were being held at the secret facility was revealed almost by chance in legal discussions between the state and Hamoked - Center for the Defense of the Individual, a Jerusalem-based human rights organization. Hamoked, which helps Palestinians locate relatives who have been arrested by Israel, wanted to know what happened to Muatez Shahin, who was arrested last October 5 at his home in the village of Salfit, near Nablus in the West Bank. The IDF control center replied that "he is not on any list." After Hamoked and Shahin's relatives petitioned the High Court of Justice, the state referred them in its response to a policeman at the Kishon detention facility. However, when they contacted the policemen they were told that "Shahin is being held in a secret facility that is annexed to the Kishon facility." With that response they went back to the court and argued that the law and a series of legal precedents oblige the state to inform a detainee and his family of his exact place of incarceration. The case of Shahin was the first in a growing list of Palestinians who "disappeared" as though they had been swallowed up by the earth. Through the veteran attorney Lea Tsemel, Hamoked continued to press the state for answers - which arrived in bits and pieces. Yes, the representatives of the State Prosecutor's Office finally told the court, the state operates a facility whose name and location are security secrets. The state attorneys went on to say that even though the facility belonged to the army, the Palestinians had been interrogated there by the Shin Bet. However, the facility "served the Shin Bet only temporarily, this being due to a shortfall in places of detention ... Recently, though, the situation changed and it was decided that the Shin Bet no longer needs to make use of the facility in which the petitioners were held as a detention facility, and accordingly [the Shin Bet] removed from the facility the detainees it was holding there." However, within weeks of this statement to the court, Odit Corinaldi-Sirkis, a senior deputy to the state prosecutor, stated that the facility had been revived: "I wish to inform you," she wrote on June 4 to attorney Lea Tsemel, "that since our responses were submitted the circumstances have changed, and the security people have informed us that detainees are currently being held at facility 1391." A few days later, in her response to the court, the representative of the State Prosecutor's Office added more details: In the past five years "only a few detainees" were held at the facility, but because of the shortfall in places of detention in the wake of Operation Defensive Shield, in April 2002, the Shin Bet had made use of the facility, holding residents of the territories there for brief periods during their interrogation. Now [two months ago] a few detainees were being held there. The court was also told that the facility had been subjected to a review to ascertain the conditions in it, and according to the State Prosecutor's Office it met the accepted criteria in the facilities of the Prisons Service. Hamoked was not satisfied with this response. What began as an attempt to locate a few detainees soon became a matter of legal and democratic principle: What is the legal authority for operating the facility? Is the fact that its location and name are secret, and that it is not open to external, public and international review consistent with the letter of the law? The state, by the way, submitted to the court an interesting document, according to which then defense minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer on April 16, 2002, signed an order declaring facility 1391 to be a military prison. Even if this document makes it legal to imprison people at the site, what does it say about the legality of the activity that was carried out there in all the years that preceded Ben-Eliezer's action? The answers to all these questions will have to be provided by the High Court of Justice, which is scheduled to take up the issue next month. It's very difficult to get substantive comments about facility 1391 from officials in the political, security or even legal spheres. A great many politicians, some of them with a rich security background, refused to say anything. Amnon Shahak, who was the director of Military Intelligence at the time of Sheikh Obeid's abduction, and later chief of staff, and was at one point briefly a candidate for prime minister, says he is "not interested in commenting on the subject." Oren Shahor, the chief intelligence officer at the beginning of the 1990s and today a program presenter on radio and television, says, "I can't help you with that." MK Zahava Gal-On (Meretz), who has put in a request to visit the site but has yet to receive a reply, says, "The fact that such a facility exists, whose location no one knows formally, is one of the signs of totalitarian regimes and of the Third World. It is inconceivable that detainees do not know where they are and that their relatives and lawyers don't know, either; that under the auspices of the army, the State of Israel is violating elementary rights of detainees. Even prisoners have rights. There are international conventions. It is inconceivable that the state abducts people and that there is no review or supervision. I visited all the interrogation facilities of the Shin Bet and there was no problem. So what's the problem here?" One big garbage pail Raab Bader, a 38-year-old accountant who is married and the father of two, was arrested last December at his work place - an engineering consultancy firm in Nablus. At 9:30 A.M. soldiers arrived at his office, but he wasn't there at the time. When he got back, he decided to wait for the soldiers, and they returned in the afternoon and took him away. His wife says he waited for them because he was convinced he had done nothing wrong and wasn't worried. She adds that he was asked by his interrogators about his ties with wanted individuals. Today he is in administrative detention - arrest without trial - at Ofer Camp near Ramallah. As he has not been brought to trial, it is very difficult to know what he is suspected of. What follows are extensive excerpts from his testimony about the 42 days he spent at facility 1391. He have the testimony to attorney Lea Tsemel on June 12 at Ofer Camp: "I was arrested on December 10, 2002. After being interrogated by the Shin Bet for 31 days in Petah Tikva, I was taken to a secret military facility. Those who took me there wore army uniforms. "I was blindfolded and black glasses were placed on top of the blindfold to prevent me from seeing anything. I was handcuffed and shackled. Soldiers sat me down on the floor of the car and the soldiers then covered me with a black cloth. I couldn't see a thing the whole time and I was kept on the floor of the car for the entire long trip. "I spent about 40 days at that place according to my count. I was never told the name of the place or where I was. I received different replies to my many questions. Sometimes I was told or they hinted that we were in Atlit, someone said Acre Prison, one interrogator said a 'submarine,' and many times the answer was that we were in 'space' or 'outside the borders of Israel.' " .... There are two types of solitary confinement cells that I got to know. At first, for the first 11 days - according to the count I tried to keep - I was held in the worst of the solitary confinement cells. By my measurement, the cell is 120 centimeters wide (a bit wider than a mattress) and about 2.5 meters long. There is a damp mattress (all the mattresses are always damp) on a platform about 30 centimeters high and there are damp blankets. The blankets have a terrible smell; the mattress, too. There is a large black plastic garbage pail in the room, a small pitcher for water, and a rag. "The room is completely black. All the walls are painted black, and I never saw the ceiling. When I looked up, I saw only darkness. Light of candle brightness penetrates weirdly from one side of the room, from a device that seems to be almost above the ceiling, and the light is filtered through three thick pieces of glass. The light in the room is so faint and illuminates such a small part of the room that if I had had a book it would have been totally impossible to read it. You can hardly see a thing. "Of course the room has no windows. You can't tell whether it is day or night or when day becomes night. I had no way to know when it was time for prayers, I could only guess. "There are one or two pipes in the ceiling, which are apparently for ventilation. I say apparently, because I could never ascertain where there was ventilation. Most of the time and in all the solitary confinement cells I felt I didn't have enough oxygen, and sometimes I thought I was about to pass out. "I spent many days in that solitary confinement cell and in others like it, and hour after hour I would talk to myself and feel that I was going crazy, or find myself laughing to myself. I would sit on the mattress, get up and walk around in a circle, and sit down again. The only thing that kept me sane was thinking about my wife and children. "What sets this solitary confinement cell apart from the others is the fact that it has no toilet facilities and no source of water ... I remember the first time I had to relieve myself. I thought about what to do, and in the end I removed my underpants, placed them on the floor, relieved myself into them, tied them up and threw them into the garbage pail. The pail remained with me in the cell as it was. On other occasions I had to stand on my toes so I could aim my droppings into it and not tip it over onto myself. "I myself did not wash during all these days and no one offered me a chance to wash. Of course I did not brush my teeth or wash my face. Three times a day they brought a little water in a pitcher into the cell. "On my ninth day in this stinking cell, when one of the soldiers had to come in or take me out, he almost threw up and rushed out of the cell. As usual, I stood against the wall with my head covered by a black cloth. He called another soldier and they made arrangements and plans for removing the garbage pail. They told me drag it. I told them I couldn't do that while blindfolded, and I dragged it but it was too heavy and I couldn't get it out of its niche. So they agreed to remove the blindfold and let me drag the garbage pail out the door, and then they blindfolded me again and one of the soldiers grabbed my shirt and pulled me while I was still dragging the stinking pail. "They led me to another solitary confinement cell, made me enter it with the pail and told me to empty it into the hole of the 'Turkish toilet' [a hole in the floor] in that cell. The soldiers were in control of water outside the cell, and as I emptied the pail they turned on a powerful jet of water and I and my clothes were dirtied. "They made me wash the pail. I demanded to wash myself and I told them I was a worshiper but I would not be able to pray while I was dirtied with excrement. That was the first time I saw running water there. I spoke so angrily that they agreed to let me wash myself. I asked for a towel and one of the soldiers went to my cell and brought the rag, which had an unbearable stench. "I asked for a new set of clothes and for a real towel but I didn't get them. All the behavior of the soldiers was coarse and filled with threats, and this time again they threatened that if I didn't use the opportunity I was being given I would not get another. I undressed as they watched through the opening and made insulting comments. I stood naked under a hole in the concrete from which water emerged. The soldiers turned on the water but didn't let me enjoy it for even five minutes and then shut it off from the outside. "It was winter and cold, but I had no choice other than to put the soiled clothes on my wet body, and I was taken back with the sack on my head and an empty pail into the stinking cell. I stayed there for another two days. "After spending 11 days there I was upgraded to a cell with a Turkish lavatory. That isn't really a higher level, because the soldiers control the water no matter what and they decide when to supply it ... After I got to this cell I was given the chance to shower once a day. The way the shower works: a soldier declares the possibility of showering. I have to undress as the soldier watches through the crack in the door. When I am naked I have to stand above the toilet hole and pin myself against the wall so that the soldier will turn on the water of the 'shower.' The water comes from one hole in a concrete protrusion that is about 15 to 20 centimeters from the wall and about 1.5 meters from the floor. To get flowing water you have to stand right against the wall and wait for the water. "I declare that the soldiers never turned on the water for more than five minutes. They can control whether the water is hot or cold and they make use of that as they please ... To illustrate the soldiers' control of the water, I will tell you that one time I had soaped myself and the soldiers decided to shut off the water. I yelled, I pounded on the door and after my shouts and demands the soldier acceded and turned on freezing water. "Everyone knew about these conditions. Obviously the soldiers who did guard duty at the cell knew. So did the paramedic who saw me every day and the doctors who saw me once or twice a week. Of course all the interrogators, to the last of them, knew about it and apparently gave the orders for it. The paramedic and the doctors, who I would have expected would be compassionate men of medicine, saw me day after day in the same clothes, without underpants, smelled the stench that came off me day after day and said nothing, as though this is the way of the world. "The interrogators truly suffered from the way I smelled. The interrogator Yoni had to suffer my stench day after day. I remember that one day Yoni approached me and looked as though he was about to pass out. He said 'Rihtak hara' [You smell like ****] and told me I had to finish the interrogation. Many times, when the questioning was over, he and the other interrogators would say, 'Arja listal al hara' [Go back to the **** pail]. "When I was in Yoni's interrogation room he would turn on the air conditioner right over me. It was winter and cold, and many times I told him I was cold, but he went on doing it. I understand why, because my smell was intolerable. "It's also clear that the judges could know, too, if they bothered to ask why people who are filthy and stinking are brought before them. For my two remands in custody I was brought from that facility to the Kishon Prison (Jalama). When I was brought before a judge after 22 days in the facility I complained to him, I showed him my undershirt and I told him that when I was arrested it was white and now it was yellow, and I told him I had no underpants. I asked him to smell me and told him that I couldn't wash without a towel and clean clothes. The lawyer who was there told me that the judge told the soldiers to give me clothes. "That night, at about 11 P.M., in the facility, they brought me clothes that were used but clean. They didn't bring a towel. When I asked for a towel in the days that followed I always got the same answer: 'Quiet.' "During the whole period I was given food in the cell and made to eat sitting down. The food arrives on a fairly small dish. Three meals a day. The food was tastier than in the Shin Bet interrogation division in Petah Tikva. The problem was with the cleanliness. In the filthy solitary cell the soldiers would place the portion of food on the garbage pail, and in the second cell they put the food right on the toilet. Once I went on a hunger strike because of that and I refused to eat the food and complained to the Shin Bet agent, but no one was the least impressed. I did not get any hot drinks other than once in a while insipid tea that I had to spill out. I lost 14 kilograms during my stay there. "There is no opening to the light or the sun and no daily walk. There is no possibility of getting a prayer book." more

Resolved Question: Liberals are followers and Bush is a leader. Its better to be right than popular?

President Bush's Accomplishments Abortion & Traditional Values 1. Banned Partial Birth Abortion — by far the most significant roll-back of abortion on demand since Roe v. Wade. 2. Reversed Clinton's move to strike Reagan's anti-abortion Mexico Policy. 3. By Executive Order (EO), reversed Clinton's policy of not requiring parental consent for abortions under the Medical Privacy Act. 4. By EO, prohibited federal funds for international family planning groups that provide abortions and related services. 5. Upheld the ban on abortions at military hospitals. 6. Made $33 million available for abstinence education programs in 2004. 7. Supports the Defense of Marriage Act — and a Constitutional amendment saying marriage is between one man and one woman. 8. Requires states to conduct criminal background checks on prospective foster and adoptive parents. 9. Requires districts to let students transfer out of dangerous schools. 10. Requires schools to have a zero-tolerance policy for classroom disruption (reintroducing discipline into classrooms). 11. Signed the Teacher Protection Act, which protects teachers from lawsuits related to student discipline. 12. Expanded the role of faith-based and community organizations in after-school programs. Budget, Taxes & Economy 1. Signed two income tax cuts, one of which was the largest dollar-value tax cut in world history. 2. Supports permanent elimination of the death tax. 3. Turned around an inherited economy that was in recession, and deeply shocked as a result of the 9/11 attacks. 4. Is seeking legislation to amend the Constitution to give the president line-item veto authority. 5. In process of permanently eliminating IRS marriage penalty. 6. Increased small business incentives to expand and to hire new people. 7. Initiated discussion on privatizing Social Security and individual investment accounts. 8. Killed Clinton's "ergonomic" rules that OSHA was about to implement; rules would have shut down every home business in America. 9. Passed tough new laws to hold corporate criminals to account as a result of corporate scandals. 10. Reduced taxes on dividends and capital gains. 11. Signed trade promotion authority. 12. Reduced and is working to ultimately eliminate the estate tax for family farms and ranches. 13. Fight Europe's ban on importing biotech crops from the United States. 14. Exempt food from unilateral trade sanctions and embargoes. 15. Provided $20 million to states to help people with disabilities work from home. 16. Created a fund to encourage technologies that help the disabled. 17. Increased the annual contribution limit on Education IRA's from $500 to $2,000 per child. 18. Make permanent the $5,000 adoption tax credit and provide $1 billion over five years to increase the credit to $10,000. 19. Grant a complete tax exemption for prepaid or college tuition savings plans. 20. Reduced H1B visas from a high of 195,000 per year to 66,000 per year. Character & Conduct as President 1. Changed the tone in the White House, restoring HONOR and DIGNITY to the presidency. 2. Has reintroduced the mention of God and faith into public discourse. 3. Handled himself with enormous courage, dignity, grace, determination, and leadership in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 hijackings and anthrax attacks. He almost single-handedly held this country together during those searing days: Just three days after the attacks, in his address at the National Cathedral, the President reassured the nation when he said: "War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder. This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger. This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way, and at an hour, of our choosing." On Friday, September 14, 2001, President Bush visited Ground Zero. Standing on a crushed and burned fire engine atop the smoldering pile at Ground Zero, he put his arm around a retired firefighter who had volunteered to help, and began speaking to the crowd. Rescue workers shouted that they could not hear him. Someone handed him a small American flag and bullhorn. The President spontaneously shouted: "I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." The crowd roared with cheers and chants of "USA! USA! USA!" Then he raised that American flag and rallied a nation. Education & Employment Training 1. Signed the No Child Left Behind Act, delivering the most dramatic education reforms in a generation (challenging the soft bigotry of low expectations). The very liberal California Teachers union is currently running radio ads against the accountability provisions of this Act. 2. Announced "Jobs for the 21st Century," a comprehensive plan to better prepare workers for jobs in the new millennium by strengthening post-secondary education and job training, and by improving high school education. 3. Is working to provide vouchers to low-income students in persistently failing schools to help with costs of attending private schools. (Blocked in the Senate.) 4. Requires annual reading and math tests in grades three through eight. 5. Requires states to participate in the National Assessment of Education Progress, or an equivalent program, to establish a national benchmark for academic performance. 6. Requires school-by-school accountability report cards. 7. Established a $2.4 billion fund to help states implement teacher accountability systems. 8. Increased funding for the Troops-to-Teachers program, which recruits former military personnel to become teachers. Environment & Energy 1. Killed the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty. 2. Submitted a comprehensive Energy Plan (awaits Congressional action). The plan works to develop cleaner technology, produce more natural gas here at home, make America less dependent on foreign sources of energy, improve national grid, etc. 3. Established a $10 million grant program to promote private conservation initiatives. 4. Significantly eased field-testing controls of genetically engineered crops. 5. Changed parts of the Forestry Management Act to allow necessary cleanup of the national forests in order to reduce fire danger. 6. Part of national forests cleanup: Restricted judicial challenges (based on the Endangered Species Act and other challenges), and removed the need for an Environmental Impact Statement before removing fuels/logging to reduce fire danger. 7. Killed Clinton's CO2 rules that were choking off all of the electricity surplus to California. 8. Provided matching grants for state programs that help private landowners protect rare species. Defense & Foreign Policy 1. Successfully executed two wars in the aftermath of 9/11/01: Afghanistan and Iraq. 50 million people who had lived under tyrannical regimes now live in freedom. 2. Saddam Hussein is now in prison. His two murderous sons are dead. All but a handful of the regime's senior members were killed or captured. 3. Leader by leader and member by member, al Maida is being hunted down in dozens of countries around the world. Of the senior al Qaeda leaders, operational managers, and key facilitators the U.S. Government has been tracking, nearly two-thirds have been taken into custody or killed. The detentions or deaths of senior al Qaeda leaders, including Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, the mastermind of 9/11, and Muhammad Atef, Osama bin Laden's second-in-command until his death in late 2001, have been important in the War on Terror. 4. Disarmed Libya of its chemical, nuclear and biological WMD's without bribes or bloodshed. 5. Continues to execute the War On Terror, getting worldwide cooperation to track funds/terrorists. Has cut off much of the terrorists' funding, and captured or killed many key leaders of the al Qaeda network. 6. Initiated a comprehensive review of our military, which was completed just prior to 9/11/01, and which accurately reported that ASYMMETRICAL WARFARE capabilities were critical in the 21st Century. 7. Killed the old US/Soviet Union ABM Treaty that was preventing the U.S. from deploying our ABM defenses. 8. Has been one of the strongest, if not THE strongest friend Israel has ever hand in the U.S. presidency. 9. Part of the coalition for an Israeli/Palestinian "Roadmap to Peace," along with Great Britain, Russia and the EU. 10. Pushed through THREE raises for our military. Increased military pay by more than $1 billion a year. 11. Signed the LARGEST nuclear arms reduction in world history with Russia. 12. Started withdrawing our troops from Bosnia, and has announced withdrawal of our troops from Germany and the Korean DMZ. 13. Prohibited putting U.S. troops under U.N. command. 14. Paid back UN dues only in return for reforms and reduction of U.S. share of the costs. 15. Earmarked at least 20 percent of the Defense procurement budget for next-generation weaponry. 16. Increased defense research and development spending by at least $20 billion from fiscal 2002 to 2006. 17. Ordered a comprehensive review of military weapons and strategy. 18. Ordered a review of overseas deployments. 19. Ordered renovation of military housing. The military has already upgraded about 10 percent of its inventory and expects to modernize 76,000 additional homes this year. 20. Is working to tighten restrictions on military-technology exports. 21. Brought back our EP-3 intel plane and crew from China without any bribes or bloodshed. Globalization & Internationalism 1. Challenged the United Nations to live up to their responsibilities and not become another League of Nations (in other words, showed the UN to be completely irrelevant). 2. Killed U.S. involvement in the International Criminal Court. 3. Told the United Nations we weren't interested in their plans for gun control (i.e., the International Ban on Small Arms Trafficking Treaty).* 4. The only President since the founding of the UN to essentially tell that organization it is irrelevant. He said: "The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations, and a threat to peace. Iraq has answered a decade of UN demands with a decade of defiance. All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?" We all know the outcome and the answer. 5. Told the Congress and the world, "America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country." Government Reform 1. Improved government efficiency by putting hundreds of thousands of jobs put up for bid. This weakens public-sector unions and cuts undeserved pay raises. 2. Initiated review of all federal agencies with the goal of eliminating federal jobs (completed September 2003) in an effort to reduce the size of the federal government while increasing private sector jobs. 3. Led the most extensive reorganization the Federal bureaucracy in over 50 years: After 9/11, condensed 20+ overlapping agencies and their intelligence sectors into one agency, the Department of Homeland Security.* 4. Ordered each agency to draft a five-year plan to restructure itself, with fewer managers. 5. Converted federal service contracts to performance-based contracts wherever possible so that the contractor has measurable performance goals. Health 1. Strengthen the National Health Service Corps to put more physicians in the neediest areas, and make its scholarship funds tax-free. 2. Double the research budget of the National Institutes of Health. 3. Signed Medicare Reform, which includes: A 10-year privatization option. Prescription drug benefits: Prior to this reform, Medicare paid for extended hospital stays for ulcer surgery, for example, at a cost of about $28,000 per patient. Yet Medicare would not pay for the drugs that eliminate the cause of most ulcers, drugs that cost about $500 a year. Now, drug coverage under Medicare will allow seniors to replace more expensive surgeries and hospitalizations with less expensive prescription medicine. More health care choices: As President Bush stated, "…when seniors have the ability to make choices, health care plans within Medicare will have to compete for their business by offering higher quality service [at lower cost]. For the seniors of America, more choices and more control will mean better health care. These are the kinds of health care options we give to the members of Congress and federal employees. What's good for members of Congress is also good for seniors. New Health Savings Accounts: Effective January 1, 2004, Americans can set aside up to $4,500 every year, tax free, to save for medical expenses. Depending on your tax bracket, that means you'll save between 10 to 35 percent on any costs covered by money in your account. Every year, the money not spent would stay in the account and gain interest tax-free, just like an IRA. These accounts will be good for small business owners, and employees. More businesses can focus on covering workers for major medical problems, such as hospitalization for an injury or illness. At the same time, employees and their families will use these accounts to cover doctors visits, or lab tests, or other smaller costs. Some employers will contribute to employee health accounts. This will help more American families get the health care they need at the price they can afford. Homeland Security, Border Enforcement & Immigration 1. *See Government Reform above. Under President Bush's leadership, America has made an unprecedented commitment to homeland security. 2. Has CONSTRUCTION in process on the first 10 ABM silos in Alaska so that America will have a defense against North Korean nukes. Has ordered national and theater ballistic missile defenses to be deployed by 2004. 3. Announced a 9.7% increase in government-wide homeland security funding in his FY 2005 budget, nearly tripling the FY 2001 levels (excluding the Department of Defense and Project BioShield). 4. Before DHS was created, there were inspectors from three different agencies of the Federal Government and Border Patrol officers protecting our borders. Through DHS, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) now consolidates all border activities into a single agency to create "one face at the border." This not only better secures the borders of the United States, but it also eliminates many of the inefficiencies that occurred under the old system. With over 18,000 CBP inspectors and 11,000 Border Patrol agents, CBP has 29,000 uniformed officers on our borders. 5. The Border Patrol is continuing installation of monitoring devices along the borders to detect illegal activity. 6. Launched Operation Tarmac to investigate businesses and workers in the secure areas of domestic airports and ensure immigration law compliance. Since 9/11, DHS has audited 3,640 businesses, examined 259,037 employee records, arrested 1,030 unauthorized workers, and participated in the criminal indictment of 774 individuals. 7. Since September 11, 2001, the Coast Guard has conducted more than 124,000 port security patrols, 13,000 air patrols, boarded more than 92,000 vessels, interdicted over 14,000 individuals attempting to enter the United States illegally, and created and maintained more than 90 Maritime Security Zones. 8. Announced the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), an internet-based system that is improving America's ability to track and monitor foreign students and exchange visitors. Over 870,000 students are registered in SEVIS. Of 285 completed field investigations, 71 aliens were arrested. 9. This week, the US-VISIT program began to digitally collect biometric identifiers to record the entry and exit of aliens who travel into the U.S on a visa. Together with the standard information, this new program will confirm compliance with visa and immigration policies. 10. Eliminated INS bureaucratic redundancies and lack of accountability. 11. Split the Immigration and Naturalization Service into two agencies: one to protect the border and interior, the other to deal with naturalization. 12. Signed the workplace verification bill to prevent hiring of illegal aliens. 13. Established a six-month deadline for processing immigration applications. 14. Information regarding nearly 100% of all containerized cargo is carefully screened by DHS before it arrives in the United States. Higher risk shipments are physically inspected for terrorist weapons and contraband prior to being released from the port of entry. Advanced technologies are being deployed to identify warning signs of chemical, biological, or radiological attacks. Since September 11, 2001, hundreds of thousands of first responders across America have been trained to recognize and respond to the effects of a WMD attack. Judiciary & Tort Reform 1. Is urging federal liability reform to eliminate frivolous lawsuits. 2. Killed the liberal ABA's unconstitutional role in vetting federal judges. The Senate is supposed to advise and consent, not the ABA. 3. Is nominating strong, conservative judges to the judiciary. 4. Supports class action reform bill which limits lawyer fees so that more settlement money goes to victims. Politics 1. His leadership resulted in Republican gains in the House and Senate, solidifying Republican control of both houses of Congress and the presidency. 2. Signed an EO enforcing the Supreme Court's Beck decision regarding union dues being used for political campaigns against individual's wishes. Second Amendment 1. Ordered Attorney General Ashcroft to formally notify the Supreme Court that the OFFICIAL U.S. government position on the 2nd Amendment is that it supports INDIVIDUAL rights to own firearms, and is NOT a Leftist-imagined "collective" right. 2. Signed TWO bills into law that arm our pilots with handguns in the cockpit. 3. Currently pushing for full immunity from lawsuits for our national gun manufacturers. 4. *See Globalization & Internationalism. Traditional Values, Compassion & Volunteerism 1. Endorses and promotes "The Responsibility Era." President Bush often speaks of the necessity of personal responsibility and civic volunteerism. He said, "In a compassionate society, people respect one another and take responsibility for the decisions they make in life. My hope is to change the culture from one that has said, if it feels good, do it; if you've got a problem, blame somebody else — to one in which every single American understands that he or she is responsible for the decisions that you make; you're responsible for loving your children with all your heart and all your soul; you're responsible for being involved with the quality of the education of your children; you're responsible for making sure the community in which you live is safe; you're responsible for loving your neighbor, just like you would like to be loved yourself." 2. Started the USA Freedom Corps, the most comprehensive clearinghouse of volunteer opportunities ever offered. For the first time in history, Americans can enter geographic information about where they want to get involved, such as state or zip code, as well as areas of interest ranging from education to the environment, and they can access volunteer opportunities offered by more than 50,000 organizations across the country and around the world. 3. Established the The White House Office and the Centers for the Faith-Based and Community Initiative — located in seven Federal agencies. The faith-based initiative supports the essential work of these important organizations. The goal is to make sure that grassroots leaders can compete on an equal footing for federal dollars, receive greater private support, and face fewer bureaucratic barriers. Work focuses on at-risk youth, ex-offenders, the homeless and hungry, substance abusers, those with HIV/AIDS, and welfare-to-work families. 4. The White House released a guidebook fully describing the Administration's belief that faith-based groups have a Constitutionally-protected right to maintain their religious identity through hiring — even when Federal funds are involved. 5. Issued an EO implementing the Supreme Court's Olmstead ruling, which requires moving disabled people from institutions to community-based facilities when possible. 6. Increased funding for low-interest loan programs to help people with disabilities purchase devices to assist them. 7. Revised the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Section 8 rent subsidies to disabled people, permitting them to use up to a year's worth of vouchers to finance down payments on homes. HUD has started pilot programs in 11 states. 8. Committed US funds to purchase medicine for millions of men, women and children now suffering with AIDS in Africa. 9. Heeding the words of our own Declaration of Independence, the president laid out the non-negotiable demands of human dignity for all people everywhere. On January 29, 2002, he said, "No nation owns these aspirations, and no nation is exempt from them. We have no intention of imposing our culture. But America will always stand firm for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity." As stated by the President, they are a virtual manifesto of conservative principles: Equal Justice Freedom of Speech Limited Government Power Private Property Rights Religious Tolerance Respect for Women Rule of Law more

Resolved Question: Are employers allowed to give pre-employment nicotine and pregnancy tests along with drug and alcohol tests?

I am an employer. I am implementing a drug and alcohol testing policy similar to CFR 49 for Commercial Drivers License Holders. None of my employees have CDLs nor are they required to have one for my company. I just use CFR 49 rules as model for how I do drug and alcohol testing as well as yearly DOT medical exams. Everything is more uniform that way. Anyway, if you are planning on answering my question asking why I want to do this, do not bother answering. I am looking for the answer to this question. The question is am I allowed to give pre-employment and random nicotine and pregnancy testing? The reason for the nicotine is because I wish to not employ smokers. In my state, this is legal. For pregnant women, the reason is because the type of business I run, pregnant women cannot work in. Please do not ask why. It is not safe for a pregnant woman to work in this environment, per OSHA. Just answer my question. Is it ok and/or legal for me to do these tests?RE: Pregnancy Test I understand this may considered to be discrimination. The reason for this has nothing to do with the fact that I do not want to higher pregnant women. I honestly do not care if they are. My only problem is pregnant women cannot work for me because being pregnant does not allow them to perform the job functions we require. I have hired women in the past then, having to let them go on leave, sometimes paid leave, for a very long time being I cannot fire them because it is discrimination. I mean, I have a girl I hired that worked for us for 5 weeks then we found out she was pregnant. We put her paid leave. 11 months later, she just had the baby, she is still on paid leave, and not able to return because her doctor says she is having complications from the pregnancy and she should not work at this time. The doctor said may be 3 more months. I know disability come into play somewhere but I hope you understand why I am looking to implementing this.Also, if a women comes to work for me then later becomes pregnant, its not a problem. I mean, I do what I can. But if I could weed out girls that may be pregnant who are aware or not when applying, it could make my workplace a lot easier on not having to replace someone all the time.RE: WhatYourKidding response I don't want to hire them cause they cost me money and makes it hard for my business to succeed. I thought I already made that clear. How is it lying? I don't want to hire them because I want to run a successful business with a consistent workforce. I feel its only discrimination if I do not want to high them because I do not like them for one reason or another. I'm not prejudice. Once again, thought I was clear. Sorry for wanting to run a successful business where my turnover rate is low. Your right, I don't 10 pregnant women on the payroll who aren't working while I am also paying other employees to take their place while they are on leave. I'm sorry, is this wrong? Kinda not want to go bankrupt in this terrible economy. more

Resolved Question: Are employers allowed to give pre-employment nicotine and pregnancy tests along with drug and alcohol tests?

Resolved Question: Why do libs avoid President Bush's Accomplishments?

Resolved Question: Is this why the libs hate BUSH?

President Bush's Accomplishments Spotted at Rightnation.us and GOPUSA.com reprinted here for your pleasure. I encourage people who support Bush to learn how effective our President has been, and liberals ought to browse this too. Just remember, the liberal media can't cover up the truth of his accomplishments. The Bush Administration 2001-2004 Abortion & Traditional Values 1. Banned Partial Birth Abortion — by far the most significant roll-back of abortion on demand since Roe v. Wade. 2. Reversed Clinton's move to strike Reagan's anti-abortion Mexico Policy. 3. By Executive Order (EO), reversed Clinton's policy of not requiring parental consent for abortions under the Medical Privacy Act. 4. By EO, prohibited federal funds for international family planning groups that provide abortions and related services. 5. Upheld the ban on abortions at military hospitals. 6. Made $33 million available for abstinence education programs in 2004. 7. Supports the Defense of Marriage Act — and a Constitutional amendment saying marriage is between one man and one woman. 8. Requires states to conduct criminal background checks on prospective foster and adoptive parents. 9. Requires districts to let students transfer out of dangerous schools. 10. Requires schools to have a zero-tolerance policy for classroom disruption (reintroducing discipline into classrooms). 11. Signed the Teacher Protection Act, which protects teachers from lawsuits related to student discipline. 12. Expanded the role of faith-based and community organizations in after-school programs. Budget, Taxes & Economy 1. Signed two income tax cuts, one of which was the largest dollar-value tax cut in world history. 2. Supports permanent elimination of the death tax. 3. Turned around an inherited economy that was in recession, and deeply shocked as a result of the 9/11 attacks. 4. Is seeking legislation to amend the Constitution to give the president line-item veto authority. 5. In process of permanently eliminating IRS marriage penalty. 6. Increased small business incentives to expand and to hire new people. 7. Initiated discussion on privatizing Social Security and individual investment accounts. 8. Killed Clinton's "ergonomic" rules that OSHA was about to implement; rules would have shut down every home business in America. 9. Passed tough new laws to hold corporate criminals to account as a result of corporate scandals. 10. Reduced taxes on dividends and capital gains. 11. Signed trade promotion authority. 12. Reduced and is working to ultimately eliminate the estate tax for family farms and ranches. 13. Fight Europe's ban on importing biotech crops from the United States. 14. Exempt food from unilateral trade sanctions and embargoes. 15. Provided $20 million to states to help people with disabilities work from home. 16. Created a fund to encourage technologies that help the disabled. 17. Increased the annual contribution limit on Education IRA's from $500 to $2,000 per child. 18. Make permanent the $5,000 adoption tax credit and provide $1 billion over five years to increase the credit to $10,000. 19. Grant a complete tax exemption for prepaid or college tuition savings plans. 20. Reduced H1B visas from a high of 195,000 per year to 66,000 per year. Character & Conduct as President 1. Changed the tone in the White House, restoring HONOR and DIGNITY to the presidency. 2. Has reintroduced the mention of God and faith into public discourse. 3. Handled himself with enormous courage, dignity, grace, determination, and leadership in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 hijackings and anthrax attacks. He almost single-handedly held this country together during those searing days: Just three days after the attacks, in his address at the National Cathedral, the President reassured the nation when he said: "War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder. This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger. This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way, and at an hour, of our choosing." On Friday, September 14, 2001, President Bush visited Ground Zero. Standing on a crushed and burned fire engine atop the smoldering pile at Ground Zero, he put his arm around a retired firefighter who had volunteered to help, and began speaking to the crowd. Rescue workers shouted that they could not hear him. Someone handed him a small American flag and bullhorn. The President spontaneously shouted: "I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." The crowd roared with cheers and chants of "USA! USA! USA!" Then he raised that American flag and rallied a nation. Education & Employment Training 1. Signed the No Child Left Behind Act, delivering the most dramatic education reforms in a generation (challenging the soft bigotry of low expectations). The very liberal California Teachers union is currently running radio ads against the accountability provisions of this Act. 2. Announced "Jobs for the 21st Century," a comprehensive plan to better prepare workers for jobs in the new millennium by strengthening post-secondary education and job training, and by improving high school education. 3. Is working to provide vouchers to low-income students in persistently failing schools to help with costs of attending private schools. (Blocked in the Senate.) 4. Requires annual reading and math tests in grades three through eight. 5. Requires states to participate in the National Assessment of Education Progress, or an equivalent program, to establish a national benchmark for academic performance. 6. Requires school-by-school accountability report cards. 7. Established a $2.4 billion fund to help states implement teacher accountability systems. 8. Increased funding for the Troops-to-Teachers program, which recruits former military personnel to become teachers. Environment & Energy 1. Killed the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty. 2. Submitted a comprehensive Energy Plan (awaits Congressional action). The plan works to develop cleaner technology, produce more natural gas here at home, make America less dependent on foreign sources of energy, improve national grid, etc. 3. Established a $10 million grant program to promote private conservation initiatives. 4. Significantly eased field-testing controls of genetically engineered crops. 5. Changed parts of the Forestry Management Act to allow necessary cleanup of the national forests in order to reduce fire danger. 6. Part of national forests cleanup: Restricted judicial challenges (based on the Endangered Species Act and other challenges), and removed the need for an Environmental Impact Statement before removing fuels/logging to reduce fire danger. 7. Killed Clinton's CO2 rules that were choking off all of the electricity surplus to California. 8. Provided matching grants for state programs that help private landowners protect rare species. Defense & Foreign Policy 1. Successfully executed two wars in the aftermath of 9/11/01: Afghanistan and Iraq. 50 million people who had lived under tyrannical regimes now live in freedom. 2. Saddam Hussein is now in prison. His two murderous sons are dead. All but a handful of the regime's senior members were killed or captured. 3. Leader by leader and member by member, al Maida is being hunted down in dozens of countries around the world. Of the senior al Qaeda leaders, operational managers, and key facilitators the U.S. Government has been tracking, nearly two-thirds have been taken into custody or killed. The detentions or deaths of senior al Qaeda leaders, including Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, the mastermind of 9/11, and Muhammad Atef, Osama bin Laden's second-in-command until his death in late 2001, have been important in the War on Terror. 4. Disarmed Libya of its chemical, nuclear and biological WMD's without bribes or bloodshed. 5. Continues to execute the War On Terror, getting worldwide cooperation to track funds/terrorists. Has cut off much of the terrorists' funding, and captured or killed many key leaders of the al Qaeda network. 6. Initiated a comprehensive review of our military, which was completed just prior to 9/11/01, and which accurately reported that ASYMMETRICAL WARFARE capabilities were critical in the 21st Century. 7. Killed the old US/Soviet Union ABM Treaty that was preventing the U.S. from deploying our ABM defenses. 8. Has been one of the strongest, if not THE strongest friend Israel has ever hand in the U.S. presidency. 9. Part of the coalition for an Israeli/Palestinian "Roadmap to Peace," along with Great Britain, Russia and the EU. 10. Pushed through THREE raises for our military. Increased military pay by more than $1 billion a year. 11. Signed the LARGEST nuclear arms reduction in world history with Russia. 12. Started withdrawing our troops from Bosnia, and has announced withdrawal of our troops from Germany and the Korean DMZ. 13. Prohibited putting U.S. troops under U.N. command. 14. Paid back UN dues only in return for reforms and reduction of U.S. share of the costs. 15. Earmarked at least 20 percent of the Defense procurement budget for next-generation weaponry. 16. Increased defense research and development spending by at least $20 billion from fiscal 2002 to 2006. 17. Ordered a comprehensive review of military weapons and strategy. 18. Ordered a review of overseas deployments. 19. Ordered renovation of military housing. The military has already upgraded about 10 percent of its inventory and expects to modernize 76,000 additional homes this year. 20. Is working to tighten restrictions on military-technology exports. 21. Brought back our EP-3 intel plane and crew from China without any bribes or bloodshed. Globalization & Internationalism 1. Challenged the United Nations to live up to their responsibilities and not become another League of Nations (in other words, showed the UN to be completely irrelevant). 2. Killed U.S. involvement in the International Criminal Court. 3. Told the United Nations we weren't interested in their plans for gun control (i.e., the International Ban on Small Arms Trafficking Treaty).* 4. The only President since the founding of the UN to essentially tell that organization it is irrelevant. He said: "The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations, and a threat to peace. Iraq has answered a decade of UN demands with a decade of defiance. All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?" We all know the outcome and the answer. 5. Told the Congress and the world, "America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country." Government Reform 1. Improved government efficiency by putting hundreds of thousands of jobs put up for bid. This weakens public-sector unions and cuts undeserved pay raises. 2. Initiated review of all federal agencies with the goal of eliminating federal jobs (completed September 2003) in an effort to reduce the size of the federal government while increasing private sector jobs. 3. Led the most extensive reorganization the Federal bureaucracy in over 50 years: After 9/11, condensed 20+ overlapping agencies and their intelligence sectors into one agency, the Department of Homeland Security.* 4. Ordered each agency to draft a five-year plan to restructure itself, with fewer managers. 5. Converted federal service contracts to performance-based contracts wherever possible so that the contractor has measurable performance goals. Health 1. Strengthen the National Health Service Corps to put more physicians in the neediest areas, and make its scholarship funds tax-free. 2. Double the research budget of the National Institutes of Health. 3. Signed Medicare Reform, which includes: A 10-year privatization option. Prescription drug benefits: Prior to this reform, Medicare paid for extended hospital stays for ulcer surgery, for example, at a cost of about $28,000 per patient. Yet Medicare would not pay for the drugs that eliminate the cause of most ulcers, drugs that cost about $500 a year. Now, drug coverage under Medicare will allow seniors to replace more expensive surgeries and hospitalizations with less expensive prescription medicine. More health care choices: As President Bush stated, "…when seniors have the ability to make choices, health care plans within Medicare will have to compete for their business by offering higher quality service [at lower cost]. For the seniors of America, more choices and more control will mean better health care. These are the kinds of health care options we give to the members of Congress and federal employees. What's good for members of Congress is also good for seniors. New Health Savings Accounts: Effective January 1, 2004, Americans can set aside up to $4,500 every year, tax free, to save for medical expenses. Depending on your tax bracket, that means you'll save between 10 to 35 percent on any costs covered by money in your account. Every year, the money not spent would stay in the account and gain interest tax-free, just like an IRA. These accounts will be good for small business owners, and employees. More businesses can focus on covering workers for major medical problems, such as hospitalization for an injury or illness. At the same time, employees and their families will use these accounts to cover doctors visits, or lab tests, or other smaller costs. Some employers will contribute to employee health accounts. This will help more American families get the health care they need at the price they can afford. Homeland Security, Border Enforcement & Immigration 1. *See Government Reform above. Under President Bush's leadership, America has made an unprecedented commitment to homeland security. 2. Has CONSTRUCTION in process on the first 10 ABM silos in Alaska so that America will have a defense against North Korean nukes. Has ordered national and theater ballistic missile defenses to be deployed by 2004. 3. Announced a 9.7% increase in government-wide homeland security funding in his FY 2005 budget, nearly tripling the FY 2001 levels (excluding the Department of Defense and Project BioShield). 4. Before DHS was created, there were inspectors from three different agencies of the Federal Government and Border Patrol officers protecting our borders. Through DHS, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) now consolidates all border activities into a single agency to create "one face at the border." This not only better secures the borders of the United States, but it also eliminates many of the inefficiencies that occurred under the old system. With over 18,000 CBP inspectors and 11,000 Border Patrol agents, CBP has 29,000 uniformed officers on our borders. 5. The Border Patrol is continuing installation of monitoring devices along the borders to detect illegal activity. 6. Launched Operation Tarmac to investigate businesses and workers in the secure areas of domestic airports and ensure immigration law compliance. Since 9/11, DHS has audited 3,640 businesses, examined 259,037 employee records, arrested 1,030 unauthorized workers, and participated in the criminal indictment of 774 individuals. 7. Since September 11, 2001, the Coast Guard has conducted more than 124,000 port security patrols, 13,000 air patrols, boarded more than 92,000 vessels, interdicted over 14,000 individuals attempting to enter the United States illegally, and created and maintained more than 90 Maritime Security Zones. 8. Announced the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), an internet-based system that is improving America's ability to track and monitor foreign students and exchange visitors. Over 870,000 students are registered in SEVIS. Of 285 completed field investigations, 71 aliens were arrested. 9. This week, the US-VISIT program began to digitally collect biometric identifiers to record the entry and exit of aliens who travel into the U.S on a visa. Together with the standard information, this new program will confirm compliance with visa and immigration policies. 10. Eliminated INS bureaucratic redundancies and lack of accountability. 11. Split the Immigration and Naturalization Service into two agencies: one to protect the border and interior, the other to deal with naturalization. 12. Signed the workplace verification bill to prevent hiring of illegal aliens. 13. Established a six-month deadline for processing immigration applications. 14. Information regarding nearly 100% of all containerized cargo is carefully screened by DHS before it arrives in the United States. Higher risk shipments are physically inspected for terrorist weapons and contraband prior to being released from the port of entry. Advanced technologies are being deployed to identify warning signs of chemical, biological, or radiological attacks. Since September 11, 2001, hundreds of thousands of first responders across America have been trained to recognize and respond to the effects of a WMD attack. Judiciary & Tort Reform 1. Is urging federal liability reform to eliminate frivolous lawsuits. 2. Killed the liberal ABA's unconstitutional role in vetting federal judges. The Senate is supposed to advise and consent, not the ABA. 3. Is nominating strong, conservative judges to the judiciary. 4. Supports class action reform bill which limits lawyer fees so that more settlement money goes to victims. Politics 1. His leadership resulted in Republican gains in the House and Senate, solidifying Republican control of both houses of Congress and the presidency. 2. Signed an EO enforcing the Supreme Court's Beck decision regarding union dues being used for political campaigns against individual's wishes. Second Amendment 1. Ordered Attorney General Ashcroft to formally notify the Supreme Court that the OFFICIAL U.S. government position on the 2nd Amendment is that it supports INDIVIDUAL rights to own firearms, and is NOT a Leftist-imagined "collective" right. 2. Signed TWO bills into law that arm our pilots with handguns in the cockpit. 3. Currently pushing for full immunity from lawsuits for our national gun manufacturers. 4. *See Globalization & Internationalism. Traditional Values, Compassion & Volunteerism 1. Endorses and promotes "The Responsibility Era." President Bush often speaks of the necessity of personal responsibility and civic volunteerism. He said, "In a compassionate society, people respect one another and take responsibility for the decisions they make in life. My hope is to change the culture from one that has said, if it feels good, do it; if you've got a problem, blame somebody else — to one in which every single American understands that he or she is responsible for the decisions that you make; you're responsible for loving your children with all your heart and all your soul; you're responsible for being involved with the quality of the education of your children; you're responsible for making sure the community in which you live is safe; you're responsible for loving your neighbor, just like you would like to be loved yourself." 2. Started the USA Freedom Corps, the most comprehensive clearinghouse of volunteer opportunities ever offered. For the first time in history, Americans can enter geographic information about where they want to get involved, such as state or zip code, as well as areas of interest ranging from education to the environment, and they can access volunteer opportunities offered by more than 50,000 organizations across the country and around the world. 3. Established the The White House Office and the Centers for the Faith-Based and Community Initiative — located in seven Federal agencies. The faith-based initiative supports the essential work of these important organizations. The goal is to make sure that grassroots leaders can compete on an equal footing for federal dollars, receive greater private support, and face fewer bureaucratic barriers. Work focuses on at-risk youth, ex-offenders, the homeless and hungry, substance abusers, those with HIV/AIDS, and welfare-to-work families. 4. The White House released a guidebook fully describing the Administration's belief that faith-based groups have a Constitutionally-protected right to maintain their religious identity through hiring — even when Federal funds are involved. 5. Issued an EO implementing the Supreme Court's Olmstead ruling, which requires moving disabled people from institutions to community-based facilities when possible. 6. Increased funding for low-interest loan programs to help people with disabilities purchase devices to assist them. 7. Revised the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Section 8 rent subsidies to disabled people, permitting them to use up to a year's worth of vouchers to finance down payments on homes. HUD has started pilot programs in 11 states. 8. Committed US funds to purchase medicine for millions of men, women and children now suffering with AIDS in Africa. 9. Heeding the words of our own Declaration of Independence, the president laid out the non-negotiable demands of human dignity for all people everywhere. On January 29, 2002, he said, "No nation owns these aspirations, and no nation is exempt from them. We have no intention of imposing our culture. But America will always stand firm for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity." As stated by the President, they are a virtual manifesto of conservative principles: Equal Justice Freedom of Speech Limited Government Power Private Property Rights Religious Tolerance Respect for Women Rule of Law ________________________________________ TOPICS: Business/Economy; Constitution/Conservatism; Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Editorial; Foreign Affairs; Government; Miscellaneous; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections; War on Terror KEYWORDS: bushlegacy; bushrecord; georgewbush; gwb2004 ________________________________________ 1 posted on 03/12/2004 4:23:27 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife [ Post Reply | Private Reply | View Replies ] ________________________________________ To: Cincinatus' Wife Bush is our President. He fixed our country. He brought back family values. He made us strong in the face of danger. He is looing out for my childrens education. He has reduced my income tax. That's why he gets my vote. 2 posted on 03/12/2004 4:43:46 AM PST by EQAndyBuzz (60 Senate seats changes the world!! Bury Kerry in 04!) [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies ] ________________________________________ To: Cincinatus' Wife someone one point to the Medicare section and the savings accounts, someone scream at the conservatives who cry about drugs and point out $28,000 for ulcer surgery vs $500 for medicine; Medical Savings Accounts as a way to have larger deductibles and more patient responsibility. THESE ARE CONSERVATIVE PROGRAMS!! Newt was all over TV praising this program one week after they passed it but RUSH who is a headline reader has gotten it wrong and cost Bush 10 points in the polls. 3 posted on 03/12/2004 4:53:54 AM PST by q_an_a [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies ] ________________________________________ To: Cincinatus' Wife Bookmark for future reference 4 posted on 03/12/2004 5:05:46 AM PST by Semper Vigilantis (1 democrat + 1 democrat = 5 opinions, 6 tax increases, 2 more welfare programs & 0 solutions.) [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies ] ________________________________________ To: Cincinatus' Wife wide open borders that allow narco terrorists al qaeda and chi coms open easy access to CONUS? 5 posted on 03/12/2004 5:26:59 AM PST by joesnuffy (Moderate Islam Is For Dilettantes) [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies ] ________________________________________ To: Cincinatus' Wife Abortion & Traditional Values 1. Banned Partial Birth Abortion — by far the most significant roll-back of abortion on demand since Roe v. Wade. 2. Reversed Clinton's move to strike Reagan's anti-abortion Mexico Policy. 3. By Executive Order (EO), reversed Clinton's policy of not requiring parental consent for abortions under the Medical Privacy Act. 4. By EO, prohibited federal funds for international family planning groups that provide abortions and related services. 5. Upheld the ban on abortions at military hospitals. 6. Made $33 million available for abstinence education programs in 2004. 7. Supports the Defense of Marriage Act — and a Constitutional amendment saying marriage is between one man and one woman. 8. Requires states to conduct criminal background checks on prospective foster and adoptive parents. 9. Requires districts to let students transfer out of dangerous schools. 10. Requires schools to have a zero-tolerance policy for classroom disruption (reintroducing discipline into classrooms). 11. Signed the Teacher Protection Act, which protects teachers from lawsuits related to student discipline. 12. Expanded the role of faith-based and community organizations in after-school programs. Budget, Taxes & Economy 1. Signed two income tax cuts, one of which was the largest dollar-value tax cut in world history. 2. Supports permanent elimination of the death tax. 3. Turned around an inherited economy that was in recession, and deeply shocked as a result of the 9/11 attacks. 4. Is seeking legislation to amend the Constitution to give the president line-item veto authority. 5. In process of permanently eliminating IRS marriage penalty. 6. Increased small business incentives to expand and to hire new people. 7. Initiated discussion on privatizing Social Security and individual investment accounts. 8. Killed Clinton's "ergonomic" rules that OSHA was about to implement; rules would have shut down every home business in America. 9. Passed tough new laws to hold corporate criminals to account as a result of corporate scandals. 10. Reduced taxes on dividends and capital gains. 11. Signed trade promotion authority. 12. Reduced and is working to ultimately eliminate the estate tax for family farms and ranches. 13. Fight Europe's ban on importing biotech crops from the United States. 14. Exempt food from unilateral trade sanctions and embargoes. 15. Provided $20 million to states to help people with disabilities work from home. 16. Created a fund to encourage technologies that help the disabled. 17. Increased the annual contribution limit on Education IRA's from $500 to $2,000 per child. 18. Make permanent the $5,000 adoption tax credit and provide $1 billion over five years to increase the credit to $10,000. 19. Grant a complete tax exemption for prepaid or college tuition savings plans. 20. Reduced H1B visas from a high of 195,000 per year to 66,000 per year. Character & Conduct as President 1. Changed the tone in the White House, restoring HONOR and DIGNITY to the presidency. 2. Has reintroduced the mention of God and faith into public discourse. 3. Handled himself with enormous courage, dignity, grace, determination, and leadership in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 hijackings and anthrax attacks. He almost single-handedly held this country together during those searing days: Just three days after the attacks, in his address at the National Cathedral, the President reassured the nation when he said: "War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder. This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger. This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way, and at an hour, of our choosing." On Friday, September 14, 2001, President Bush visited Ground Zero. Standing on a crushed and burned fire engine atop the smoldering pile at Ground Zero, he put his arm around a retired firefighter who had volunteered to help, and began speaking to the crowd. Rescue workers shouted that they could not hear him. Someone handed him a small American flag and bullhorn. The President spontaneously shouted: "I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." The crowd roared with cheers and chants of "USA! USA! USA!" Then he raised that American flag and rallied a nation. Education & Employment Training 1. Signed the No Child Left Behind Act, delivering the most dramatic education reforms in a generation (challenging the soft bigotry of low expectations). The very liberal California Teachers union is currently running radio ads against the accountability provisions of this Act. 2. Announced "Jobs for the 21st Century," a comprehensive plan to better prepare workers for jobs in the new millennium by strengthening post-secondary education and job training, and by improving high school education. 3. Is working to provide vouchers to low-income students in persistently failing schools to help with costs of attending private schools. (Blocked in the Senate.) 4. Requires annual reading and math tests in grades three through eight. 5. Requires states to participate in the National Assessment of Education Progress, or an equivalent program, to establish a national benchmark for academic performance. 6. Requires school-by-school accountability report cards. 7. Established a $2.4 billion fund to help states implement teacher accountability systems. 8. Increased funding for the Troops-to-Teachers program, which recruits former military personnel to become teachers. Environment & Energy 1. Killed the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty. 2. Submitted a comprehensive Energy Plan (awaits Congressional action). The plan works to develop cleaner technology, produce more natural gas here at home, make America less dependent on foreign sources of energy, improve national grid, etc. 3. Established a $10 million grant program to promote private conservation initiatives. 4. Significantly eased field-testing controls of genetically engineered crops. 5. Changed parts of the Forestry Management Act to allow necessary cleanup of the national forests in order to reduce fire danger. 6. Part of national forests cleanup: Restricted judicial challenges (based on the Endangered Species Act and other challenges), and removed the need for an Environmental Impact Statement before removing fuels/logging to reduce fire danger. 7. Killed Clinton's CO2 rules that were choking off all of the electricity surplus to California. 8. Provided matching grants for state programs that help private landowners protect rare species. Defense & Foreign Policy 1. Successfully executed two wars in the aftermath of 9/11/01: Afghanistan and Iraq. 50 million people who had lived under tyrannical regimes now live in freedom. 2. Saddam Hussein is now in prison. His two murderous sons are dead. All but a handful of the regime's senior members were killed or captured. 3. Leader by leader and member by member, al Maida is being hunted down in dozens of countries around the world. Of the senior al Qaeda leaders, operational managers, and key facilitators the U.S. Government has been tracking, nearly two-thirds have been taken into custody or killed. The detentions or deaths of senior al Qaeda leaders, including Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, the mastermind of 9/11, and Muhammad Atef, Osama bin Laden's second-in-command until his death in late 2001, have been important in the War on Terror. 4. Disarmed Libya of its chemical, nuclear and biological WMD's without bribes or bloodshed. 5. Continues to execute the War On Terror, getting worldwide cooperation to track funds/terrorists. Has cut off much of the terrorists' funding, and captured or killed many key leaders of the al Qaeda network. 6. Initiated a comprehensive review of our military, which was completed just prior to 9/11/01, and which accurately reported that ASYMMETRICAL WARFARE capabilities were critical in the 21st Century. 7. Killed the old US/Soviet Union ABM Treaty that was preventing the U.S. from deploying our ABM defenses. 8. Has been one of the strongest, if not THE strongest friend Israel has ever hand in the U.S. presidency. 9. Part of the coalition for an Israeli/Palestinian "Roadmap to Peace," along with Great Britain, Russia and the EU. 10. Pushed through THREE raises for our military. Increased military pay by more than $1 billion a year. 11. Signed the LARGEST nuclear arms reduction in world history with Russia. 12. Started withdrawing our troops from Bosnia, and has announced withdrawal of our troops from Germany and the Korean DMZ. 13. Prohibited putting U.S. troops under U.N. command. 14. Paid back UN dues only in return for reforms and reduction of U.S. share of the costs. 15. Earmarked at least 20 percent of the Defense procurement budget for next-generation weaponry. 16. Increased defense research and development spending by at least $20 billion from fiscal 2002 to 2006. 17. Ordered a comprehensive review of military weapons and strategy. 18. Ordered a review of overseas deployments. 19. Ordered renovation of military housing. The military has already upgraded about 10 percent of its inventory and expects to modernize 76,000 additional homes this year. 20. Is working to tighten restrictions on military-technology exports. 21. Brought back our EP-3 intel plane and crew from China without any bribes or bloodshed. Globalization & Internationalism 1. Challenged the United Nations to live up to their responsibilities and not become another League of Nations (in other words, showed the UN to be completely irrelevant). 2. Killed U.S. involvement in the International Criminal Court. 3. Told the United Nations we weren't interested in their plans for gun control (i.e., the International Ban on Small Arms Trafficking Treaty). 4. The only President since the founding of the UN to essentially tell that organization it is irrelevant. He said: "The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations, and a threat to peace. Iraq has answered a decade of UN demands with a decade of defiance. All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?" We all know the outcome and the answer. 5. Told the Congress and the world, "America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country." Government Reform 1. Improved government efficiency by putting hundreds of thousands of jobs put up for bid. This weakens public-sector unions and cuts undeserved pay raises. 2. Initiated review of all federal agencies with the goal of eliminating federal jobs (completed September 2003) in an effort to reduce the size of the federal government while increasing private sector jobs. 3. Led the most extensive reorganization the Federal bureaucracy in over 50 years: After 9/11, condensed 20+ overlapping agencies and their intelligence sectors into one agency, the Department of Homeland Security. 4. Ordered each agency to draft a five-year plan to restructure itself, with fewer managers. 5. Converted federal service contracts to performance-based contracts wherever possible so that the contractor has measurable performance goals. Health< 1. Strengthen the National Health Service Corps to put more physicians in the neediest areas, and make its scholarship funds tax-free. 2. Double the research budget of the National Institutes of Health. 3. Signed Medicare Reform, which includes: A 10-year privatization option. Prescription drug benefits: Prior to this reform, Medicare paid for extended hospital stays for ulcer surgery, for example, at a cost of about $28,000 per patient. Yet Medicare would not pay for the drugs that eliminate the cause of most ulcers, drugs that cost about $500 a year. Now, drug coverage under Medicare will allow seniors to replace more expensive surgeries and hospitalizations with less expensive prescription medicine. More health care choices: As President Bush stated, "…when seniors have the ability to make choices, health care plans within Medicare will have to compete for their business by offering higher quality service [at lower cost]. For the seniors of America, more choices and more control will mean better health care. These are the kinds of health care options we give to the members of Congress and federal employees. What's good for members of Congress is also good for seniors. New Health Savings Accounts: Effective January 1, 2004, Americans can set aside up to $4,500 every year, tax free, to save for medical expenses. Depending on your tax bracket, that means you'll save between 10 to 35 percent on any costs covered by money in your account. Every year, the money not spent would stay in the account and gain interest tax-free, just like an IRA. These accounts will be good for small business owners, and employees. More businesses can focus on covering workers for major medical problems, such as hospitalization for an injury or illness. At the same time, employees and their families will use these accounts to cover doctors visits, or lab tests, or other smaller costs. Some employers will contribute to employee health accounts. This will help more American families get the health care they need at the price they can afford. Homeland Security, Border Enforcement & Immigration 1. *See Government Reform above. Under President Bush's leadership, America has made an unprecedented commitment to homeland security. 2. Has CONSTRUCTION in process on the first 10 ABM silos in Alaska so that America will have a defense against North Korean nukes. Has ordered national and theater ballistic missile defenses to be deployed by 2004. 3. Announced a 9.7% increase in government-wide homeland security funding in his FY 2005 budget, nearly tripling the FY 2001 levels (excluding the Department of Defense and Project BioShield). 4. Before DHS was created, there were inspectors from three different agencies of the Federal Government and Border Patrol officers protecting our borders. Through DHS, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) now consolidates all border activities into a single agency to create "one face at the border." This not only better secures the borders of the United States, but it also eliminates many of the inefficiencies that occurred under the old system. With over 18,000 CBP inspectors and 11,000 Border Patrol agents, CBP has 29,000 uniformed officers on our borders. 5. The Border Patrol is continuing installation of monitoring devices along the borders to detect illegal activity. 6. Launched Operation Tarmac to investigate businesses and workers in the secure areas of domestic airports and ensure immigration law compliance. Since 9/11, DHS has audited 3,640 businesses, examined 259,037 employee records, arrested 1,030 unauthorized workers, and participated in the criminal indictment of 774 individuals. 7. Since September 11, 2001, the Coast Guard has conducted more than 124,000 port security patrols, 13,000 air patrols, boarded more than 92,000 vessels, interdicted over 14,000 individuals attempting to enter the United States illegally, and created and maintained more than 90 Maritime Security Zones. 8. Announced the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), an internet-based system that is improving America's ability to track and monitor foreign students and exchange visitors. Over 870,000 students are registered in SEVIS. Of 285 completed field investigations, 71 aliens were arrested. 9. This week, the US-VISIT program began to digitally collect biometric identifiers to record the entry and exit of aliens who travel into the U.S on a visa. Together with the standard information, this new program will confirm compliance with visa and immigration policies. 10. Eliminated INS bureaucratic redundancies and lack of accountability. 11. Split the Immigration and Naturalization Service into two agencies: one to protect the border and interior, the other to deal with naturalization. 12. Signed the workplace verification bill to prevent hiring of illegal aliens. 13. Established a six-month deadline for processing immigration applications. 14. Information regarding nearly 100% of all containerized cargo is carefully screened by DHS before it arrives in the United States. Higher risk shipments are physically inspected for terrorist weapons and contraband prior to being released from the port of entry. Advanced technologies are being deployed to identify warning signs of chemical, biological, or radiological attacks. Since September 11, 2001, hundreds of thousands of first responders across America have been trained to recognize and respond to the effects of a WMD attack. Judiciary & Tort Reform 1. Is urging federal liability reform to eliminate frivolous lawsuits. 2. Killed the liberal ABA's unconstitutional role in vetting federal judges. The Senate is supposed to advise and consent, not the ABA. 3. Is nominating strong, conservative judges to the judiciary. 4. Supports class action reform bill which limits lawyer fees so that more settlement money goes to victims. Politics 1. His leadership resulted in Republican gains in the House and Senate, solidifying Republican control of both houses of Congress and the presidency. 2. Signed an EO enforcing the Supreme Court's Beck decision regarding union dues being used for political campaigns against individual's wishes. Second Amendment 1. Ordered Attorney General Ashcroft to formally notify the Supreme Court that the OFFICIAL U.S. government position on the 2nd Amendment is that it supports INDIVIDUAL rights to own firearms, and is NOT a Leftist-imagined "collective" right. 2. Signed TWO bills into law that arm our pilots with handguns in the cockpit. 3. Currently pushing for full immunity from lawsuits for our national gun manufacturers. 4. *See Globalization & Internationalism. Traditional Values, Compassion & Volunteerism 1. Endorses and promotes "The Responsibility Era." President Bush often speaks of the necessity of personal responsibility and civic volunteerism. He said, "In a compassionate society, people respect one another and take responsibility for the decisions they make in life. My hope is to change the culture from one that has said, if it feels good, do it; if you've got a problem, blame somebody else — to one in which every single American understands that he or she is responsible for the decisions that you make; you're responsible for loving your children with all your heart and all your soul; you're responsible for being involved with the quality of the education of your children; you're responsible for making sure the community in which you live is safe; you're responsible for loving your neighbor, just like you would like to be loved yourself." 2. Started the USA Freedom Corps, the most comprehensive clearinghouse of volunteer opportunities ever offered. For the first time in history, Americans can enter geographic information about where they want to get involved, such as state or zip code, as well as areas of interest ranging from education to the environment, and they can access volunteer opportunities offered by more than 50,000 organizations across the country and around the world. 3. Established the The White House Office and the Centers for the Faith-Based and Community Initiative — located in seven Federal agencies. The faith-based initiative supports the essential work of these important organizations. The goal is to make sure that grassroots leaders can compete on an equal footing for federal dollars, receive greater private support, and face fewer bureaucratic barriers. Work focuses on at-risk youth, ex-offenders, the homeless and hungry, substance abusers, those with HIV/AIDS, and welfare-to-work families. 4. The White House released a guidebook fully describing the Administration's belief that faith-based groups have a Constitutionally-protected right to maintain their religious identity through hiring — even when Federal funds are involved. 5. Issued an EO implementing the Supreme Court's Olmstead ruling, which requires moving disabled people from institutions to community-based facilities when possible. 6.Increased funding for low-interest loan programs to help people with disabilities purchase devices to assist them. 7. Revised the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Section 8 rent subsidies to disabled people, permitting them to use up to a year's worth of vouchers to finance down payments on homes. HUD has started pilot programs in 11 states. 8. Committed US funds to purchase medicine for millions of men, women and children now suffering with AIDS in Africa. 9. Heeding the words of our own Declaration of Independence, the president laid out the non-negotiable demands of human dignity for all people everywhere. On January 29, 2002, he said, "No nation owns these aspirations, and no nation is exempt from them. We have no intention of imposing our culture. But America will always stand firm for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity." As stated by the President, they are a virtual manifesto of conservative principles: Equal Justice Freedom of Speech Limited Government Power Private Property Rights Religious Tolerance Respect for Women Rule of Law more

Resolved Question: 02302500 Law,ethics and medicine penn foster sorry to ask again for the answers thank you?

1. Which one of the following statements is not correct? A. Laws have developed from our sense of ethics. B. Medical ethics and medical laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. C. Our sense of ethics strives for the greatest good for humanity. D. Ethical standards are usually more strict than the laws. 2. Which one of the following physicians violates medical ethics? A. A physician reports another physician who's presently using cocaine. B. A physician disconnects the respirator of a brain-dead patient who has written a living will. C. A physician performs an abortion on a married woman without consent from her husband. D. A physician tells the parents of a 15-year-old drug addict that she's pregnant. 3. Euthanasia, organ transplants, and genetic engineering are all issues dealing with A. malpractice. B. the Hippocratic Oath. C. bioethics. D. negligence. 4. Which answer best describes the relationship between the following words: duty, derelict, direct cause, damage? A. Contractual agreement B. Proof of negligence C. Points of civil law D. Four Ds of misdemeanors 5. A contract is best defined as a(n) A. tort. B. enforceable promise. C. civil law. D. exchange of something of value. 6. What is abandonment? A. Leaving the office before seeing all of your patients B. Discontinuing patient care without telling the patient C. Refusing treatment to a patient in an emergency situation D. Treating a patient without written consent 7. Which answer best describes the public duties of a physician? A. Making patients aware of their rights B. Using adequate knowledge, skill, and care C. Making correct diagnoses, effecting recovery for patients, possessing the maximum amount of education. D. Reporting communicable diseases, preparing birth and death certificates, controlling access to drugs 8. A doctor removes the wrong limb from a patient. This is an example of which kind of malpractice claim? A. Non compos mentis B. Respondeat superior C. Res ipsa loquitur D. Subpoena duces tecum 9. Mr. Reed has called the doctor's office to find out the results of his wife's pregnancy test. What is the correct procedure? A. After you verify that Mr. Reed is who he claims to be, you give him the results. B. Tell him you have the results, but he'll have to speak to the doctor. C. Tell him that you don't release patient information to others. D. Ask him if his wife knows he's calling. 10. A physician provides emergency care at the scene of an automobile accident. Which act protects this physician from lawsuits? A. Good Samaritan Act B. Medical Practice Act C. Controlled Substance Act D. Uniform Anatomical Gift Act 11. What is it called when a patient voluntarily accepts a known danger? A. Implied consent B. Contributory negligence C. Assumption of risk D. General liability 12. A person who is incapable of providing his or her informed consent is considered A. negligent. B. incompetent. C. emancipated. D. derelict. 13. Which of the following information would be considered to be in the public domain? A. Patient A was shot during a street fight. B. Patient B has a venereal disease. C. Patient C has AIDS. D. Patient D has a mental illness. 14. Ms. Walsh has called to request that her medical record be transferred to another doctor. What do you do? A. Advise her that she must stop by to sign a release. B. Ask her why she's unhappy with her present doctor. C. Verify her identity and forward the record to the other doctor. D. Forward the record even though she has a large outstanding bill. 15. Which one of the following statements is true? A. Emancipated minors aren't legally allowed to give their own informed consent. B. A competent adult patient can't refuse treatment if that treatment is needed to prevent death. C. A patient can withdraw his or her consent at any time. D. Informed consent must be indicated by a written or oral agreement. 16. At lunch in the hospital cafeteria, a small group of medical office staff is discussing the lifestyle of a patient who has recently tested positive for HIV. You know for a fact they're wrong. What do you do? A. Tell them. They should know the truth. Besides, you aren't violating the patient's right to privacy and confidentiality since you all work for the same doctor. B. Tell the patient. He has the right to know what others are saying. C. Don't get involved. It's none of your business-the staff has the right to talk about anything when they're off duty. D. Say nothing about whether they're wrong or right, but tell them they're violating a patient's right to privacy and confidentiality, if they continue, inform your supervisor. 17. What is Roe v. Wade? A. A law that provides legal protection for physicians who provide emergency care B. A law that forbids physicians to prescribe drugs for known drug addicts C. A U.S. Supreme Court decision that gives women the right to an abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy D. A U.S. Supreme Court decision that gives women the right to an abortion at any time during pregnancy 18. Because of a doctor's negligence, Mr. Jones is unable to work. What kind of compensation is Mr. Jones entitled to? A. Contributory compensation B. General compensation C. Reciprocal compensation D. Special compensation 19. Which one of the following statements about AIDS is not correct? A. ARC usually comes before AIDS. B. AZT is a treatment for AIDS. C. AIDS only affects homosexuals and drug users. D. AIDS is transmitted through sexual intercourse. 20. Denial, anger, bargaining, and acceptance are all recognized stages of A. chronic disease. B. depression. C. eugenics. D. dying. more

Resolved Question: 9/11 Coincidences?

The Coincidence Theorists Guide to 9/11 That governments have permitted terrorist acts against their own people, and have even themselves been perpetrators in order to find strategic advantage is quite likely true, but this is the United States we're talking about. That intelligence agencies, financiers, terrorists and narco-criminals have a long history together is well established, but the Nugan Hand Bank, BCCI, Banco Ambrosiano, the P2 Lodge, the CIA/Mafia anti-Castro/Kennedy alliance, Iran/Contra and the rest were a long time ago, so there's no need to rehash all that. That was then, this is now! That Jonathan Bush's Riggs Bank has been found guilty of laundering terrorist funds and fined a US-record $25 million must embarrass his nephew George, but it's still no justification for leaping to paranoid conclusions. That George Bush's brother Marvin sat on the board of the Kuwaiti-owned company which provided electronic security to the World Trade Centre, Dulles Airport and United Airlines means nothing more than you must admit those Bush boys have done alright for themselves. That George Bush found success as a businessman only after the investment of Osama's brother Salem and reputed al Qaeda financier Khalid bin Mahfouz is just one of those things - one of those crazy things. That Osama bin Laden is known to have been an asset of US foreign policy in no way implies he still is. That al Qaeda was active in the Balkan conflict, fighting on the same side as the US as recently as 1999, while the US protected its cells, is merely one of history's little aberrations. The claims of Michael Springman, State Department veteran of the Jeddah visa bureau, that the CIA ran the office and issued visas to al Qaeda members so they could receive training in the United States, sound like the sour grapes of someone who was fired for making such wild accusations. That one of George Bush's first acts as President, in January 2001, was to end the two-year deployment of attack submarines which were positioned within striking distance of al Qaeda's Afghanistan camps, even as the group's guilt for the Cole bombing was established, proves that a transition from one administration to the next is never an easy task. That so many influential figures in and close to the Bush White House had expressed, just a year before the attacks, the need for a "new Pearl Harbor" before their militarist ambitions could be fulfilled, demonstrates nothing more than the accidental virtue of being in the right place at the right time. That the company PTECH, founded by a Saudi financier placed on America's Terrorist Watch List in October 2001, had access to the FAA's entire computer system for two years before the 9/11 attack, means he must not have been such a threat after all. That whistleblower Indira Singh was told to keep her mouth shut and forget what she learned when she took her concerns about PTECH to her employers and federal authorities, suggests she lacked the big picture. And that the Chief Auditor for JP Morgan Chase told Singh repeatedly, as she answered questions about who supplied her with what information, that "that person should be killed," suggests he should take an anger management seminar. That on May 8, 2001, Dick Cheney took upon himself the job of co-ordinating a response to domestic terror attacks even as he was crafting the administration's energy policy which bore implications for America's military, circumventing the established infrastructure and ignoring the recommendations of the Hart-Rudman report, merely shows the VP to be someone who finds it hard to delegate. That the standing order which covered the shooting down of hijacked aircraft was altered on June 1, 2001, taking discretion away from field commanders and placing it solely in the hands of the Secretary of Defense, is simply poor planning and unfortunate timing. Fortunately the error has been corrected, as the order was rescinded shortly after 9/11. That in the weeks before 9/11, FBI agent Colleen Rowley found her investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui so perversely thwarted that her colleagues joked that bin Laden had a mole at the FBI, proves the stress-relieving virtue of humour in the workplace. That Dave Frasca of the FBI's Radical Fundamentalist Unit received a promotion after quashing multiple, urgent requests for investigations into al Qaeda assets training at flight schools in the summer of 2001 does appear on the surface odd, but undoubtedly there's a good reason for it, quite possibly classified. That FBI informant Randy Glass, working an undercover sting, was told by Pakistani intelligence operatives that the World Trade Center towers were coming down, and that his repeated warnings which continued until weeks before the attacks, including the mention of planes used as weapons, were ignored by federal authorities, is simply one of the many "What Ifs" of that tragic day. That over the summer of 2001 Washington received many urgent, senior-level warnings from foreign intelligence agencies and governments - including those of Germany, France, Great Britain, Russia, Egypt, Israel, Morocco, Afghanistan and others - of impending terror attacks using hijacked aircraft and did nothing, demonstrates the pressing need for a new Intelligence Czar. That John Ashcroft stopped flying commercial aircraft in July 2001 on account of security considerations had nothing to do with warnings regarding September 11, because he said so to the 9/11 Commission. That former lead counsel for the House David Schippers says he'd taken to John Ashcroft's office specific warnings he'd learned from FBI agents in New York of an impending attack - even naming the proposed dates, names of the hijackers and the targets - and that the investigations had been stymied and the agents threatened, proves nothing but David Schipper's pathetic need for attention. That Garth Nicolson received two warnings from contacts in the intelligence community and one from a North African head of state, which included specific site, date and source of the attacks, and passed the information to the Defense Department and the National Security Council to evidently no effect, clearly amounts to nothing, since virtually nobody has ever heard of him. That in the months prior to September 11, self-described US intelligence operative Delmart Vreeland sought, from a Toronto jail cell, to get US and Canadian authorities to heed his warning of his accidental discovery of impending catastrophic attacks is worthless, since Vreeland was a dubious character, notwithstanding the fact that many of his claims have since been proven true. That FBI Special Investigator Robert Wright claims that agents assigned to intelligence operations actually protect terrorists from investigation and prosecution, that the FBI shut down his probe into terrorist training camps, and that he was removed from a money-laundering case that had a direct link to terrorism, sounds like yet more sour grapes from a disgruntled employee. That George Bush had plans to invade Afghanistan on his desk before 9/11 demonstrates only the value of being prepared. The suggestion that securing a pipeline across Afghanistan figured into the White House's calculations is as ludicrous as the assertion that oil played a part in determining war in Iraq. That Afghanistan is once again the world's principal heroin producer is an unfortunate reality, but to claim the CIA is still actively involved in the narcotics trade is to presume bad faith on the part of the agency. Mahmood Ahmed, chief of Pakistan's ISI, must not have authorized an al Qaeda payment of $100,000 to Mohammed Atta days before the attacks, and was not meeting with senior Washington officials over the week of 9/11, because I didn't read anything about him in the official report. That Porter Goss met with Ahmed the morning of September 11 in his capacity as Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has no bearing whatsoever upon his recent selection by the White House to head the Central Intelligence Agency. That Goss's congressional seat encompasses the 9/11 hijackers' Florida base of operation, including their flight schools, is precisely the kind of meaningless factoid a conspiracy theorist would bring up. It's true that George HW Bush and Dick Cheney spent the evening of September 10 alone in the Oval Office, but what's wrong with old colleagues catching up? And it's true that George HW Bush and Shafig bin Laden, Osama's brother, spent the morning of September 11 together at a board meeting of the Carlyle Group, but the bin Ladens are a big family. That FEMA arrived in New York on Sept 10 to prepare for a scheduled biowarfare drill, and had a triage centre ready to go that was larger and better equipped than the one that was lost in the collapse of WTC 7, was a lucky twist of fate. Newsweek's report that senior Pentagon officials cancelled flights on Sept 10 for the following day on account of security concerns is only newsworthy because of what happened the following morning. That George Bush's telephone logs for September 11 do not exist should surprise no one, given the confusion of the day. That Mohamed Atta attended the International Officer's School at Maxwell Air Force Base, that Abdulaziz Alomari attended Brooks Air Force Base Aerospace Medical School, that Saeed Alghamdi attended the Defense Language Institute in Monterey merely shows it is a small world, after all. That Lt Col Steve Butler, Vice Chancellor for student affairs of the Defense Language Institute during Alghamdi's terms, was disciplined, removed from his post and threatened with court martial when he wrote "Bush knew of the impending attacks on America. He did nothing to warn the American people because he needed this war on terrorism. What is...contemptible is the President of the United States not telling the American people what he knows for political gain," is the least that should have happened for such disrespect shown his Commander in Chief. That Mohammed Atta dressed like a Mafioso, had a stripper girlfriend, smuggled drugs, was already a licensed pilot when he entered the US, enjoyed pork chops, drank to excess and did cocaine, was closer to Europeans than Arabs in Florida, and included the names of defence contractors on his email list, proves how dangerous the radical fundamentalist Muslim can be. That 43 lbs of heroin was found on board the Lear Jet owned by Wally Hilliard, the owner of Atta's flight school, just three weeks after Atta enrolled - the biggest seizure ever in Central Florida - was just bad luck. That Hilliard was not charged shows how specious the claims for conspiracy truly are. That Hilliard's plane had made 30-round trips to Venezuela with the same passengers who always paid cash, that the plane had been supplied by a pair of drug smugglers who had also outfitted CIA drug runner Barry Seal, and that 9/11 commissioner Richard ben-Veniste had been Seal's attorney before Seal's murder, shows nothing but the lengths to which conspiracists will go to draw sinister conclusions. Reports of insider trading on 9/11 are false, because the SEC investigated and found only respectable investors who will remain nameless involved, and no terrorists, so the windfall profit-taking was merely, as ever, coincidental. That heightened security for the World Trade Centre was lifted immediately prior to the attacks illustrates that it always happens when you least expect it. That Hani Hanjour, the pilot of Flight 77, was so incompetent he could not fly a Cessna in August, but in September managed to fly a 767 at excessive speed into a spiraling, 270-degree descent and a level impact of the first floor of the Pentagon, on the only side that was virtually empty and had been hardened to withstand a terrorist attack, merely demonstrates that people can do almost anything once they set their minds to it. That none of the flight data recorders were said to be recoverable even though they were located in the tail sections, and that until 9/11, no solid-state recorder in a catastrophic crash had been unrecoverable, shows how there's a first time for everything. That Mohammed Atta left a uniform, a will, a Koran, his driver's license and a "how to fly planes" video in his rental car at the airport means he had other things on his mind. The mention of Israelis with links to military-intelligence having been arrested on Sept 11 videotaping and celebrating the attacks, of an Israeli espionage ring surveiling DEA and defense installations and trailing the hijackers, and of a warning of impending attacks delivered to the Israeli company Odigo two hours before the first plane hit, does not deserve a response. That the stories also appeared in publications such as Ha'aretz and Forward is a sad display of self-hatred among certain elements of the Israeli media. That multiple military wargames and simulations were underway the morning of 9/11 - one simulating the crash of a plane into a building; another, a live-fly simulation of multiple hijackings - and took many interceptors away from the eastern seaboard and confused field commanders as to which was a real hijacked aircraft and which was a hoax, was a bizarre coincidence, but no less a coincidence. That the National Military Command Center ops director asked a rookie substitute to stand his watch at 8:30 am on Sept. 11 is nothing more than bad timing. That a recording made Sept 11 of air traffic controllers' describing what they had witnessed, was destroyed by an FAA official who crushed it in his hand, cut the tape into little pieces and dropped them in different trash cans around the building, is something no doubt that overzealous official wishes he could undo. That the FBI knew precisely which Florida flight schools to descend upon hours after the attacks should make every American feel safer knowing their federal agents are on the ball. That a former flight school executive believes the hijackers were "double agents," and says about Atta and associates, "Early on I gleaned that these guys had government protection. They were let into this country for a specific purpose," and was visited by the FBI just four hours after the attacks to intimidate him into silence, proves he's an unreliable witness, for the simple reason there is no conspiracy. That Jeb Bush was on board an aircraft that removed flight school records to Washington in the middle of the night on Sept 12th demonstrates how seriously the governor takes the issue of national security. To insinuate evil motive from the mercy flights of bin Laden family members and Saudi royals after 9/11 shows the sickness of the conspiratorial mindset. Le Figaro's report in October 2001, known to have originated with French intelligence, that the CIA met Osama bin Laden in a Dubai hospital in July 2001, proves again the perfidy of the French. That the tape in which bin Laden claims responsibility for the attacks was released by the State Department after having been found providentially by US forces in Afghanistan, and depicts a fattened Osama with a broader face and a flatter nose, proves Osama, and Osama alone, masterminded 9/11. That at the battle of Tora Bora, where bin Laden was surrounded on three sides, Special Forces received no order to advance and capture him and were forced to stand and watch as two Russian-made helicopters flew into the area where bin Laden was believed hiding, loaded up passengers and returned to Pakistan, demonstrates how confusing the modern battlefield can be. That upon returning to Fort Bragg from Tora Bora, the same Special Operations troops who had been stood down from capturing bin Laden, suffered a unusual spree of murder/suicides, is nothing more than a series of senseless tragedies. Reports that bin Laden is currently receiving periodic dialysis treatment in a Pakistani medical hospital are simply too incredible to be true. That the White House went on Cipro September 11 shows the foresightedness of America's emergency response. That the anthrax was mailed to perceived liberal media and the Democratic leadership demonstrates only the perversity of the terrorist psyche. That the anthrax attacks appeared to silence opponents of the Patriot Act shows only that appearances can be deceiving. That the Ames-strain anthrax was found to have originated at Fort Detrick, and was beyond the capability of all but a few labs to refine, underscores the importance of allowing the investigation to continue without the distraction of absurd conspiracy theories. That Republican guru Grover Norquist has been found to have aided financiers and supporters of Islamic terror to gain access to the Bush White House, and is a founder of the Islamic Institute, which the Treasury Department believes to be a source of funding for al Qaeda, suggests Norquist is at worst, naive, and at best, needs a wider circle of friends. That the Department of Justice consistently chooses to see accused 9/11 plotters go free rather than permit the courtroom testimony of al Qaeda leaders in American custody looks bad, but only because we don't have all the facts. That the White House balked at any inquiry into the events of 9/11, then starved it of funds and stonewalled it, was unfortunate, but since the commission didn't find for conspiracy it's all a non issue anyway. That the 9/11 commission's executive director and "gatekeeper," Philip Zelikow, was so closely involved in the events under investigation that he testified before the the commission as part of the inquiry, shows only an apparent conflict of interest. That commission chair Thomas Kean is, like George Bush, a Texas oil executive who had business dealings with reputed al Qaeda financier Khalid bin Mafouz, suggests Texas is smaller than they say it is. That co-chair Lee Hamilton has a history as a Bush family "fixer," including clearing Bush Sr of the claims arising from the 1980 "October Surprise", is of no concern, since only conspiracists believe there was such a thing as an October Surprise. That FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds accuses the agency of intentionally fudging specific pre-9/11 warnings and harboring a foreign espionage ring in its translation department, and claims she witnessed evidence of the semi-official infrastructure of money-laundering and narcotics trade behind the attacks, is of no account, since John Ashcroft has gagged her with the rare invocation of "State Secrets Privilege," and retroactively classified her public testimony. For the sake of national security, let us speak no more of her. That, when commenting on Edmond's case, Daniel Ellsberg remarked that Ashcroft could go to prison for his part in a cover-up, suggests Ellsberg is giving comfort to the terrorists, and could, if he doesn't wise up, find himself declared an enemy combatant. I could go on. And on and on. But I trust you get the point. Which is simply this: there are no secrets, an American government would never accept civilian casualties for geostrategic gain, and conspiracies are for the weak-minded and gullible.Here is where you can see this with links for every statement: http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2004/08/coincidence-theorists-guide-to-911.html A good 9/11 truth movement website: http://truthmove.org/What are your thoughts on these "coincidences"?What is the "Cole's Notes version"? more

Resolved Question: Do you believe in coincidences?

The Coincidence Theorists Guide to 9/11 That governments have permitted terrorist acts against their own people, and have even themselves been perpetrators in order to find strategic advantage is quite likely true, but this is the United States we're talking about. That intelligence agencies, financiers, terrorists and narco-criminals have a long history together is well established, but the Nugan Hand Bank, BCCI, Banco Ambrosiano, the P2 Lodge, the CIA/Mafia anti-Castro/Kennedy alliance, Iran/Contra and the rest were a long time ago, so there's no need to rehash all that. That was then, this is now! That Jonathan Bush's Riggs Bank has been found guilty of laundering terrorist funds and fined a US-record $25 million must embarrass his nephew George, but it's still no justification for leaping to paranoid conclusions. That George Bush's brother Marvin sat on the board of the Kuwaiti-owned company which provided electronic security to the World Trade Centre, Dulles Airport and United Airlines means nothing more than you must admit those Bush boys have done alright for themselves. That George Bush found success as a businessman only after the investment of Osama's brother Salem and reputed al Qaeda financier Khalid bin Mahfouz is just one of those things - one of those crazy things. That Osama bin Laden is known to have been an asset of US foreign policy in no way implies he still is. That al Qaeda was active in the Balkan conflict, fighting on the same side as the US as recently as 1999, while the US protected its cells, is merely one of history's little aberrations. The claims of Michael Springman, State Department veteran of the Jeddah visa bureau, that the CIA ran the office and issued visas to al Qaeda members so they could receive training in the United States, sound like the sour grapes of someone who was fired for making such wild accusations. That one of George Bush's first acts as President, in January 2001, was to end the two-year deployment of attack submarines which were positioned within striking distance of al Qaeda's Afghanistan camps, even as the group's guilt for the Cole bombing was established, proves that a transition from one administration to the next is never an easy task. That so many influential figures in and close to the Bush White House had expressed, just a year before the attacks, the need for a "new Pearl Harbor" before their militarist ambitions could be fulfilled, demonstrates nothing more than the accidental virtue of being in the right place at the right time. That the company PTECH, founded by a Saudi financier placed on America's Terrorist Watch List in October 2001, had access to the FAA's entire computer system for two years before the 9/11 attack, means he must not have been such a threat after all. That whistleblower Indira Singh was told to keep her mouth shut and forget what she learned when she took her concerns about PTECH to her employers and federal authorities, suggests she lacked the big picture. And that the Chief Auditor for JP Morgan Chase told Singh repeatedly, as she answered questions about who supplied her with what information, that "that person should be killed," suggests he should take an anger management seminar. That on May 8, 2001, Dick Cheney took upon himself the job of co-ordinating a response to domestic terror attacks even as he was crafting the administration's energy policy which bore implications for America's military, circumventing the established infrastructure and ignoring the recommendations of the Hart-Rudman report, merely shows the VP to be someone who finds it hard to delegate. That the standing order which covered the shooting down of hijacked aircraft was altered on June 1, 2001, taking discretion away from field commanders and placing it solely in the hands of the Secretary of Defense, is simply poor planning and unfortunate timing. Fortunately the error has been corrected, as the order was rescinded shortly after 9/11. That in the weeks before 9/11, FBI agent Colleen Rowley found her investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui so perversely thwarted that her colleagues joked that bin Laden had a mole at the FBI, proves the stress-relieving virtue of humour in the workplace. That Dave Frasca of the FBI's Radical Fundamentalist Unit received a promotion after quashing multiple, urgent requests for investigations into al Qaeda assets training at flight schools in the summer of 2001 does appear on the surface odd, but undoubtedly there's a good reason for it, quite possibly classified. That FBI informant Randy Glass, working an undercover sting, was told by Pakistani intelligence operatives that the World Trade Center towers were coming down, and that his repeated warnings which continued until weeks before the attacks, including the mention of planes used as weapons, were ignored by federal authorities, is simply one of the many "What Ifs" of that tragic day. That over the summer of 2001 Washington received many urgent, senior-level warnings from foreign intelligence agencies and governments - including those of Germany, France, Great Britain, Russia, Egypt, Israel, Morocco, Afghanistan and others - of impending terror attacks using hijacked aircraft and did nothing, demonstrates the pressing need for a new Intelligence Czar. That John Ashcroft stopped flying commercial aircraft in July 2001 on account of security considerations had nothing to do with warnings regarding September 11, because he said so to the 9/11 Commission. That former lead counsel for the House David Schippers says he'd taken to John Ashcroft's office specific warnings he'd learned from FBI agents in New York of an impending attack - even naming the proposed dates, names of the hijackers and the targets - and that the investigations had been stymied and the agents threatened, proves nothing but David Schipper's pathetic need for attention. That Garth Nicolson received two warnings from contacts in the intelligence community and one from a North African head of state, which included specific site, date and source of the attacks, and passed the information to the Defense Department and the National Security Council to evidently no effect, clearly amounts to nothing, since virtually nobody has ever heard of him. That in the months prior to September 11, self-described US intelligence operative Delmart Vreeland sought, from a Toronto jail cell, to get US and Canadian authorities to heed his warning of his accidental discovery of impending catastrophic attacks is worthless, since Vreeland was a dubious character, notwithstanding the fact that many of his claims have since been proven true. That FBI Special Investigator Robert Wright claims that agents assigned to intelligence operations actually protect terrorists from investigation and prosecution, that the FBI shut down his probe into terrorist training camps, and that he was removed from a money-laundering case that had a direct link to terrorism, sounds like yet more sour grapes from a disgruntled employee. That George Bush had plans to invade Afghanistan on his desk before 9/11 demonstrates only the value of being prepared. The suggestion that securing a pipeline across Afghanistan figured into the White House's calculations is as ludicrous as the assertion that oil played a part in determining war in Iraq. That Afghanistan is once again the world's principal heroin producer is an unfortunate reality, but to claim the CIA is still actively involved in the narcotics trade is to presume bad faith on the part of the agency. Mahmood Ahmed, chief of Pakistan's ISI, must not have authorized an al Qaeda payment of $100,000 to Mohammed Atta days before the attacks, and was not meeting with senior Washington officials over the week of 9/11, because I didn't read anything about him in the official report. That Porter Goss met with Ahmed the morning of September 11 in his capacity as Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has no bearing whatsoever upon his recent selection by the White House to head the Central Intelligence Agency. That Goss's congressional seat encompasses the 9/11 hijackers' Florida base of operation, including their flight schools, is precisely the kind of meaningless factoid a conspiracy theorist would bring up. It's true that George HW Bush and Dick Cheney spent the evening of September 10 alone in the Oval Office, but what's wrong with old colleagues catching up? And it's true that George HW Bush and Shafig bin Laden, Osama's brother, spent the morning of September 11 together at a board meeting of the Carlyle Group, but the bin Ladens are a big family. That FEMA arrived in New York on Sept 10 to prepare for a scheduled biowarfare drill, and had a triage centre ready to go that was larger and better equipped than the one that was lost in the collapse of WTC 7, was a lucky twist of fate. Newsweek's report that senior Pentagon officials cancelled flights on Sept 10 for the following day on account of security concerns is only newsworthy because of what happened the following morning. That George Bush's telephone logs for September 11 do not exist should surprise no one, given the confusion of the day. That Mohamed Atta attended the International Officer's School at Maxwell Air Force Base, that Abdulaziz Alomari attended Brooks Air Force Base Aerospace Medical School, that Saeed Alghamdi attended the Defense Language Institute in Monterey merely shows it is a small world, after all. That Lt Col Steve Butler, Vice Chancellor for student affairs of the Defense Language Institute during Alghamdi's terms, was disciplined, removed from his post and threatened with court martial when he wrote "Bush knew of the impending attacks on America. He did nothing to warn the American people because he needed this war on terrorism. What is...contemptible is the President of the United States not telling the American people what he knows for political gain," is the least that should have happened for such disrespect shown his Commander in Chief. That Mohammed Atta dressed like a Mafioso, had a stripper girlfriend, smuggled drugs, was already a licensed pilot when he entered the US, enjoyed pork chops, drank to excess and did cocaine, was closer to Europeans than Arabs in Florida, and included the names of defence contractors on his email list, proves how dangerous the radical fundamentalist Muslim can be. That 43 lbs of heroin was found on board the Lear Jet owned by Wally Hilliard, the owner of Atta's flight school, just three weeks after Atta enrolled - the biggest seizure ever in Central Florida - was just bad luck. That Hilliard was not charged shows how specious the claims for conspiracy truly are. That Hilliard's plane had made 30-round trips to Venezuela with the same passengers who always paid cash, that the plane had been supplied by a pair of drug smugglers who had also outfitted CIA drug runner Barry Seal, and that 9/11 commissioner Richard ben-Veniste had been Seal's attorney before Seal's murder, shows nothing but the lengths to which conspiracists will go to draw sinister conclusions. Reports of insider trading on 9/11 are false, because the SEC investigated and found only respectable investors who will remain nameless involved, and no terrorists, so the windfall profit-taking was merely, as ever, coincidental. That heightened security for the World Trade Centre was lifted immediately prior to the attacks illustrates that it always happens when you least expect it. That Hani Hanjour, the pilot of Flight 77, was so incompetent he could not fly a Cessna in August, but in September managed to fly a 767 at excessive speed into a spiraling, 270-degree descent and a level impact of the first floor of the Pentagon, on the only side that was virtually empty and had been hardened to withstand a terrorist attack, merely demonstrates that people can do almost anything once they set their minds to it. That none of the flight data recorders were said to be recoverable even though they were located in the tail sections, and that until 9/11, no solid-state recorder in a catastrophic crash had been unrecoverable, shows how there's a first time for everything. That Mohammed Atta left a uniform, a will, a Koran, his driver's license and a "how to fly planes" video in his rental car at the airport means he had other things on his mind. The mention of Israelis with links to military-intelligence having been arrested on Sept 11 videotaping and celebrating the attacks, of an Israeli espionage ring surveiling DEA and defense installations and trailing the hijackers, and of a warning of impending attacks delivered to the Israeli company Odigo two hours before the first plane hit, does not deserve a response. That the stories also appeared in publications such as Ha'aretz and Forward is a sad display of self-hatred among certain elements of the Israeli media. That multiple military wargames and simulations were underway the morning of 9/11 - one simulating the crash of a plane into a building; another, a live-fly simulation of multiple hijackings - and took many interceptors away from the eastern seaboard and confused field commanders as to which was a real hijacked aircraft and which was a hoax, was a bizarre coincidence, but no less a coincidence. That the National Military Command Center ops director asked a rookie substitute to stand his watch at 8:30 am on Sept. 11 is nothing more than bad timing. That a recording made Sept 11 of air traffic controllers' describing what they had witnessed, was destroyed by an FAA official who crushed it in his hand, cut the tape into little pieces and dropped them in different trash cans around the building, is something no doubt that overzealous official wishes he could undo. That the FBI knew precisely which Florida flight schools to descend upon hours after the attacks should make every American feel safer knowing their federal agents are on the ball. That a former flight school executive believes the hijackers were "double agents," and says about Atta and associates, "Early on I gleaned that these guys had government protection. They were let into this country for a specific purpose," and was visited by the FBI just four hours after the attacks to intimidate him into silence, proves he's an unreliable witness, for the simple reason there is no conspiracy. That Jeb Bush was on board an aircraft that removed flight school records to Washington in the middle of the night on Sept 12th demonstrates how seriously the governor takes the issue of national security. To insinuate evil motive from the mercy flights of bin Laden family members and Saudi royals after 9/11 shows the sickness of the conspiratorial mindset. Le Figaro's report in October 2001, known to have originated with French intelligence, that the CIA met Osama bin Laden in a Dubai hospital in July 2001, proves again the perfidy of the French. That the tape in which bin Laden claims responsibility for the attacks was released by the State Department after having been found providentially by US forces in Afghanistan, and depicts a fattened Osama with a broader face and a flatter nose, proves Osama, and Osama alone, masterminded 9/11. That at the battle of Tora Bora, where bin Laden was surrounded on three sides, Special Forces received no order to advance and capture him and were forced to stand and watch as two Russian-made helicopters flew into the area where bin Laden was believed hiding, loaded up passengers and returned to Pakistan, demonstrates how confusing the modern battlefield can be. That upon returning to Fort Bragg from Tora Bora, the same Special Operations troops who had been stood down from capturing bin Laden, suffered a unusual spree of murder/suicides, is nothing more than a series of senseless tragedies. Reports that bin Laden is currently receiving periodic dialysis treatment in a Pakistani medical hospital are simply too incredible to be true. That the White House went on Cipro September 11 shows the foresightedness of America's emergency response. That the anthrax was mailed to perceived liberal media and the Democratic leadership demonstrates only the perversity of the terrorist psyche. That the anthrax attacks appeared to silence opponents of the Patriot Act shows only that appearances can be deceiving. That the Ames-strain anthrax was found to have originated at Fort Detrick, and was beyond the capability of all but a few labs to refine, underscores the importance of allowing the investigation to continue without the distraction of absurd conspiracy theories. That Republican guru Grover Norquist has been found to have aided financiers and supporters of Islamic terror to gain access to the Bush White House, and is a founder of the Islamic Institute, which the Treasury Department believes to be a source of funding for al Qaeda, suggests Norquist is at worst, naive, and at best, needs a wider circle of friends. That the Department of Justice consistently chooses to see accused 9/11 plotters go free rather than permit the courtroom testimony of al Qaeda leaders in American custody looks bad, but only because we don't have all the facts. That the White House balked at any inquiry into the events of 9/11, then starved it of funds and stonewalled it, was unfortunate, but since the commission didn't find for conspiracy it's all a non issue anyway. That the 9/11 commission's executive director and "gatekeeper," Philip Zelikow, was so closely involved in the events under investigation that he testified before the the commission as part of the inquiry, shows only an apparent conflict of interest. That commission chair Thomas Kean is, like George Bush, a Texas oil executive who had business dealings with reputed al Qaeda financier Khalid bin Mafouz, suggests Texas is smaller than they say it is. That co-chair Lee Hamilton has a history as a Bush family "fixer," including clearing Bush Sr of the claims arising from the 1980 "October Surprise", is of no concern, since only conspiracists believe there was such a thing as an October Surprise. That FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds accuses the agency of intentionally fudging specific pre-9/11 warnings and harboring a foreign espionage ring in its translation department, and claims she witnessed evidence of the semi-official infrastructure of money-laundering and narcotics trade behind the attacks, is of no account, since John Ashcroft has gagged her with the rare invocation of "State Secrets Privilege," and retroactively classified her public testimony. For the sake of national security, let us speak no more of her. That, when commenting on Edmond's case, Daniel Ellsberg remarked that Ashcroft could go to prison for his part in a cover-up, suggests Ellsberg is giving comfort to the terrorists, and could, if he doesn't wise up, find himself declared an enemy combatant. I could go on. And on and on. But I trust you get the point. Which is simply this: there are no secrets, an American government would never accept civilian casualties for geostrategic gain, and conspiracies are for the weak-minded and gullible.go to http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2004/08/coincidence-theorists-guide-to-911.html for links for every statement made here. http://truthmove.org more

Resolved Question: Do you believe in coincidences?

The Coincidence Theorists Guide to 9/11 That governments have permitted terrorist acts against their own people, and have even themselves been perpetrators in order to find strategic advantage is quite likely true, but this is the United States we're talking about. That intelligence agencies, financiers, terrorists and narco-criminals have a long history together is well established, but the Nugan Hand Bank, BCCI, Banco Ambrosiano, the P2 Lodge, the CIA/Mafia anti-Castro/Kennedy alliance, Iran/Contra and the rest were a long time ago, so there's no need to rehash all that. That was then, this is now! That Jonathan Bush's Riggs Bank has been found guilty of laundering terrorist funds and fined a US-record $25 million must embarrass his nephew George, but it's still no justification for leaping to paranoid conclusions. That George Bush's brother Marvin sat on the board of the Kuwaiti-owned company which provided electronic security to the World Trade Centre, Dulles Airport and United Airlines means nothing more than you must admit those Bush boys have done alright for themselves. That George Bush found success as a businessman only after the investment of Osama's brother Salem and reputed al Qaeda financier Khalid bin Mahfouz is just one of those things - one of those crazy things. That Osama bin Laden is known to have been an asset of US foreign policy in no way implies he still is. That al Qaeda was active in the Balkan conflict, fighting on the same side as the US as recently as 1999, while the US protected its cells, is merely one of history's little aberrations. The claims of Michael Springman, State Department veteran of the Jeddah visa bureau, that the CIA ran the office and issued visas to al Qaeda members so they could receive training in the United States, sound like the sour grapes of someone who was fired for making such wild accusations. That one of George Bush's first acts as President, in January 2001, was to end the two-year deployment of attack submarines which were positioned within striking distance of al Qaeda's Afghanistan camps, even as the group's guilt for the Cole bombing was established, proves that a transition from one administration to the next is never an easy task. That so many influential figures in and close to the Bush White House had expressed, just a year before the attacks, the need for a "new Pearl Harbor" before their militarist ambitions could be fulfilled, demonstrates nothing more than the accidental virtue of being in the right place at the right time. That the company PTECH, founded by a Saudi financier placed on America's Terrorist Watch List in October 2001, had access to the FAA's entire computer system for two years before the 9/11 attack, means he must not have been such a threat after all. That whistleblower Indira Singh was told to keep her mouth shut and forget what she learned when she took her concerns about PTECH to her employers and federal authorities, suggests she lacked the big picture. And that the Chief Auditor for JP Morgan Chase told Singh repeatedly, as she answered questions about who supplied her with what information, that "that person should be killed," suggests he should take an anger management seminar. That on May 8, 2001, Dick Cheney took upon himself the job of co-ordinating a response to domestic terror attacks even as he was crafting the administration's energy policy which bore implications for America's military, circumventing the established infrastructure and ignoring the recommendations of the Hart-Rudman report, merely shows the VP to be someone who finds it hard to delegate. That the standing order which covered the shooting down of hijacked aircraft was altered on June 1, 2001, taking discretion away from field commanders and placing it solely in the hands of the Secretary of Defense, is simply poor planning and unfortunate timing. Fortunately the error has been corrected, as the order was rescinded shortly after 9/11. That in the weeks before 9/11, FBI agent Colleen Rowley found her investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui so perversely thwarted that her colleagues joked that bin Laden had a mole at the FBI, proves the stress-relieving virtue of humour in the workplace. That Dave Frasca of the FBI's Radical Fundamentalist Unit received a promotion after quashing multiple, urgent requests for investigations into al Qaeda assets training at flight schools in the summer of 2001 does appear on the surface odd, but undoubtedly there's a good reason for it, quite possibly classified. That FBI informant Randy Glass, working an undercover sting, was told by Pakistani intelligence operatives that the World Trade Center towers were coming down, and that his repeated warnings which continued until weeks before the attacks, including the mention of planes used as weapons, were ignored by federal authorities, is simply one of the many "What Ifs" of that tragic day. That over the summer of 2001 Washington received many urgent, senior-level warnings from foreign intelligence agencies and governments - including those of Germany, France, Great Britain, Russia, Egypt, Israel, Morocco, Afghanistan and others - of impending terror attacks using hijacked aircraft and did nothing, demonstrates the pressing need for a new Intelligence Czar. That John Ashcroft stopped flying commercial aircraft in July 2001 on account of security considerations had nothing to do with warnings regarding September 11, because he said so to the 9/11 Commission. That former lead counsel for the House David Schippers says he'd taken to John Ashcroft's office specific warnings he'd learned from FBI agents in New York of an impending attack - even naming the proposed dates, names of the hijackers and the targets - and that the investigations had been stymied and the agents threatened, proves nothing but David Schipper's pathetic need for attention. That Garth Nicolson received two warnings from contacts in the intelligence community and one from a North African head of state, which included specific site, date and source of the attacks, and passed the information to the Defense Department and the National Security Council to evidently no effect, clearly amounts to nothing, since virtually nobody has ever heard of him. That in the months prior to September 11, self-described US intelligence operative Delmart Vreeland sought, from a Toronto jail cell, to get US and Canadian authorities to heed his warning of his accidental discovery of impending catastrophic attacks is worthless, since Vreeland was a dubious character, notwithstanding the fact that many of his claims have since been proven true. That FBI Special Investigator Robert Wright claims that agents assigned to intelligence operations actually protect terrorists from investigation and prosecution, that the FBI shut down his probe into terrorist training camps, and that he was removed from a money-laundering case that had a direct link to terrorism, sounds like yet more sour grapes from a disgruntled employee. That George Bush had plans to invade Afghanistan on his desk before 9/11 demonstrates only the value of being prepared. The suggestion that securing a pipeline across Afghanistan figured into the White House's calculations is as ludicrous as the assertion that oil played a part in determining war in Iraq. That Afghanistan is once again the world's principal heroin producer is an unfortunate reality, but to claim the CIA is still actively involved in the narcotics trade is to presume bad faith on the part of the agency. Mahmood Ahmed, chief of Pakistan's ISI, must not have authorized an al Qaeda payment of $100,000 to Mohammed Atta days before the attacks, and was not meeting with senior Washington officials over the week of 9/11, because I didn't read anything about him in the official report. That Porter Goss met with Ahmed the morning of September 11 in his capacity as Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has no bearing whatsoever upon his recent selection by the White House to head the Central Intelligence Agency. That Goss's congressional seat encompasses the 9/11 hijackers' Florida base of operation, including their flight schools, is precisely the kind of meaningless factoid a conspiracy theorist would bring up. It's true that George HW Bush and Dick Cheney spent the evening of September 10 alone in the Oval Office, but what's wrong with old colleagues catching up? And it's true that George HW Bush and Shafig bin Laden, Osama's brother, spent the morning of September 11 together at a board meeting of the Carlyle Group, but the bin Ladens are a big family. That FEMA arrived in New York on Sept 10 to prepare for a scheduled biowarfare drill, and had a triage centre ready to go that was larger and better equipped than the one that was lost in the collapse of WTC 7, was a lucky twist of fate. Newsweek's report that senior Pentagon officials cancelled flights on Sept 10 for the following day on account of security concerns is only newsworthy because of what happened the following morning. That George Bush's telephone logs for September 11 do not exist should surprise no one, given the confusion of the day. That Mohamed Atta attended the International Officer's School at Maxwell Air Force Base, that Abdulaziz Alomari attended Brooks Air Force Base Aerospace Medical School, that Saeed Alghamdi attended the Defense Language Institute in Monterey merely shows it is a small world, after all. That Lt Col Steve Butler, Vice Chancellor for student affairs of the Defense Language Institute during Alghamdi's terms, was disciplined, removed from his post and threatened with court martial when he wrote "Bush knew of the impending attacks on America. He did nothing to warn the American people because he needed this war on terrorism. What is...contemptible is the President of the United States not telling the American people what he knows for political gain," is the least that should have happened for such disrespect shown his Commander in Chief. That Mohammed Atta dressed like a Mafioso, had a stripper girlfriend, smuggled drugs, was already a licensed pilot when he entered the US, enjoyed pork chops, drank to excess and did cocaine, was closer to Europeans than Arabs in Florida, and included the names of defence contractors on his email list, proves how dangerous the radical fundamentalist Muslim can be. That 43 lbs of heroin was found on board the Lear Jet owned by Wally Hilliard, the owner of Atta's flight school, just three weeks after Atta enrolled - the biggest seizure ever in Central Florida - was just bad luck. That Hilliard was not charged shows how specious the claims for conspiracy truly are. That Hilliard's plane had made 30-round trips to Venezuela with the same passengers who always paid cash, that the plane had been supplied by a pair of drug smugglers who had also outfitted CIA drug runner Barry Seal, and that 9/11 commissioner Richard ben-Veniste had been Seal's attorney before Seal's murder, shows nothing but the lengths to which conspiracists will go to draw sinister conclusions. Reports of insider trading on 9/11 are false, because the SEC investigated and found only respectable investors who will remain nameless involved, and no terrorists, so the windfall profit-taking was merely, as ever, coincidental. That heightened security for the World Trade Centre was lifted immediately prior to the attacks illustrates that it always happens when you least expect it. That Hani Hanjour, the pilot of Flight 77, was so incompetent he could not fly a Cessna in August, but in September managed to fly a 767 at excessive speed into a spiraling, 270-degree descent and a level impact of the first floor of the Pentagon, on the only side that was virtually empty and had been hardened to withstand a terrorist attack, merely demonstrates that people can do almost anything once they set their minds to it. That none of the flight data recorders were said to be recoverable even though they were located in the tail sections, and that until 9/11, no solid-state recorder in a catastrophic crash had been unrecoverable, shows how there's a first time for everything. That Mohammed Atta left a uniform, a will, a Koran, his driver's license and a "how to fly planes" video in his rental car at the airport means he had other things on his mind. The mention of Israelis with links to military-intelligence having been arrested on Sept 11 videotaping and celebrating the attacks, of an Israeli espionage ring surveiling DEA and defense installations and trailing the hijackers, and of a warning of impending attacks delivered to the Israeli company Odigo two hours before the first plane hit, does not deserve a response. That the stories also appeared in publications such as Ha'aretz and Forward is a sad display of self-hatred among certain elements of the Israeli media. That multiple military wargames and simulations were underway the morning of 9/11 - one simulating the crash of a plane into a building; another, a live-fly simulation of multiple hijackings - and took many interceptors away from the eastern seaboard and confused field commanders as to which was a real hijacked aircraft and which was a hoax, was a bizarre coincidence, but no less a coincidence. That the National Military Command Center ops director asked a rookie substitute to stand his watch at 8:30 am on Sept. 11 is nothing more than bad timing. That a recording made Sept 11 of air traffic controllers' describing what they had witnessed, was destroyed by an FAA official who crushed it in his hand, cut the tape into little pieces and dropped them in different trash cans around the building, is something no doubt that overzealous official wishes he could undo. That the FBI knew precisely which Florida flight schools to descend upon hours after the attacks should make every American feel safer knowing their federal agents are on the ball. That a former flight school executive believes the hijackers were "double agents," and says about Atta and associates, "Early on I gleaned that these guys had government protection. They were let into this country for a specific purpose," and was visited by the FBI just four hours after the attacks to intimidate him into silence, proves he's an unreliable witness, for the simple reason there is no conspiracy. That Jeb Bush was on board an aircraft that removed flight school records to Washington in the middle of the night on Sept 12th demonstrates how seriously the governor takes the issue of national security. To insinuate evil motive from the mercy flights of bin Laden family members and Saudi royals after 9/11 shows the sickness of the conspiratorial mindset. Le Figaro's report in October 2001, known to have originated with French intelligence, that the CIA met Osama bin Laden in a Dubai hospital in July 2001, proves again the perfidy of the French. That the tape in which bin Laden claims responsibility for the attacks was released by the State Department after having been found providentially by US forces in Afghanistan, and depicts a fattened Osama with a broader face and a flatter nose, proves Osama, and Osama alone, masterminded 9/11. That at the battle of Tora Bora, where bin Laden was surrounded on three sides, Special Forces received no order to advance and capture him and were forced to stand and watch as two Russian-made helicopters flew into the area where bin Laden was believed hiding, loaded up passengers and returned to Pakistan, demonstrates how confusing the modern battlefield can be. That upon returning to Fort Bragg from Tora Bora, the same Special Operations troops who had been stood down from capturing bin Laden, suffered a unusual spree of murder/suicides, is nothing more than a series of senseless tragedies. Reports that bin Laden is currently receiving periodic dialysis treatment in a Pakistani medical hospital are simply too incredible to be true. That the White House went on Cipro September 11 shows the foresightedness of America's emergency response. That the anthrax was mailed to perceived liberal media and the Democratic leadership demonstrates only the perversity of the terrorist psyche. That the anthrax attacks appeared to silence opponents of the Patriot Act shows only that appearances can be deceiving. That the Ames-strain anthrax was found to have originated at Fort Detrick, and was beyond the capability of all but a few labs to refine, underscores the importance of allowing the investigation to continue without the distraction of absurd conspiracy theories. That Republican guru Grover Norquist has been found to have aided financiers and supporters of Islamic terror to gain access to the Bush White House, and is a founder of the Islamic Institute, which the Treasury Department believes to be a source of funding for al Qaeda, suggests Norquist is at worst, naive, and at best, needs a wider circle of friends. That the Department of Justice consistently chooses to see accused 9/11 plotters go free rather than permit the courtroom testimony of al Qaeda leaders in American custody looks bad, but only because we don't have all the facts. That the White House balked at any inquiry into the events of 9/11, then starved it of funds and stonewalled it, was unfortunate, but since the commission didn't find for conspiracy it's all a non issue anyway. That the 9/11 commission's executive director and "gatekeeper," Philip Zelikow, was so closely involved in the events under investigation that he testified before the the commission as part of the inquiry, shows only an apparent conflict of interest. That commission chair Thomas Kean is, like George Bush, a Texas oil executive who had business dealings with reputed al Qaeda financier Khalid bin Mafouz, suggests Texas is smaller than they say it is. That co-chair Lee Hamilton has a history as a Bush family "fixer," including clearing Bush Sr of the claims arising from the 1980 "October Surprise", is of no concern, since only conspiracists believe there was such a thing as an October Surprise. That FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds accuses the agency of intentionally fudging specific pre-9/11 warnings and harboring a foreign espionage ring in its translation department, and claims she witnessed evidence of the semi-official infrastructure of money-laundering and narcotics trade behind the attacks, is of no account, since John Ashcroft has gagged her with the rare invocation of "State Secrets Privilege," and retroactively classified her public testimony. For the sake of national security, let us speak no more of her. That, when commenting on Edmond's case, Daniel Ellsberg remarked that Ashcroft could go to prison for his part in a cover-up, suggests Ellsberg is giving comfort to the terrorists, and could, if he doesn't wise up, find himself declared an enemy combatant. I could go on. And on and on. But I trust you get the point. Which is simply this: there are no secrets, an American government would never accept civilian casualties for geostrategic gain, and conspiracies are for the weak-minded and gullible."wegottagetoutofthisplace," the democrats are just as guilty as the republicans on this one. they are trying to cover up just as much as the republicans. Sandy Berger, for instance...obviously helping save BJ Clinton's ass. more

Resolved Question: I want to make my own uniforms form scratch, what machines do u recommend. What are prices?

I really want to start a business but I'm a little clueless about how material is made and what sewing machines give the best result. My main goal is making medical uniforms from scratch. more

Resolved Question: How big is Choice Point? How many companies have they bought? Does it smell like Monopoly?

ChoicePoint is an Alpharetta, Georgia-based company that sells information in three markets--insurance, business and government, and marketing. According to a recent quarterly statement filed at the Security and Exchange Commission, ChoicePoint sells: "claims history data, motor vehicle records, police records, credit information and modeling services...employment background screenings and drug testing administration services, public record searches, vital record services, credential verification, due diligence information, Uniform Commercial Code searches and filings, DNA identification services, authentication services and people and shareholder locator information searches...print fulfillment, teleservices, database and campaign management services..." ChoicePoint has managed to attain a large share of the commercial data broker (CDB) market with strategic purchases of other businesses. Since its spinoff from Equifax in 1997, ChoicePoint has acquired a number of information collection and processing companies. These include: National Data Retrieval, Inc., a provider of public records information; List Source, Inc., d/b/a Kramer Lead Marketing Group, a marketing company in the life and health insurance and financial services markets; Mortgage Asset Research Institute, Inc., a mortgage fraud monitoring company; Identico Systems, LLC, a customer identity verification company; Templar Corporation; insuranceDecisions, Inc., an insurance industry claims administration company; Bridger Systems, Inc., a USA PATRIOT Act compliance company; CITI NETWORK, Inc. d/b/a Applicant Screening and Processing, a tenant screening company; TML Information Services, Inc., a provider of motor vehicle reports; Drug Free, Inc., a drug testing company; National Drug Testing, Inc., a drug testing company; Application Profiles, Inc., a background check company; Informus Corporation; a company enabling ChoicePoint to offer products online; Tyler-McLennon, Inc., a background screening company; ChoicePoint Direct Inc., formerly known as Customer Development Corporation, a database marketing company; EquiSearch Services, Inc.; DATEQ Information Network, Inc., an insurance underwriting services company; Washington Document Service, Inc., a court record retrieval service; DataTracks Technology, Inc., a public record information company; DataMart, Inc., a database software company; Statewide Data Services, Inc; NSA Resources, Inc., a drug testing company; DBT Online, Inc., a public record services provider; RRS Police Records Management, Inc., a provider of police reports and related services; VIS'N Service Corporation; Cat Data Group, LLC; Drug Free Consortium, a drug testing company; BTi Employee Screening Services, Inc., an employee pre-screening services company; ABI Consulting Inc., a drug screening company; Insurity Solutions, Inc., an insurance rating company; National Medical Review Offices, Inc.; Bode Technology Group, Inc., a DNA identification company; Marketing Information & Technology, Inc., a direct marketing company; Pinkerton's, Inc., a preemployment screening company; Total eData Corporation, an e-mail database company; L&S Report Service, Inc., a provider of police records; Resident Data, Inc., a residential screening services provider; Vital Chek Network, Inc., a provider of vital records; Accident Report Services, Inc., a provider of police records; Programming Resources Company, insurance software company; Professional Test Administrators, Inc., a drug testing company; CDB Infotek, a seller of public records; Medical Information Network, LLC, an online physician verification service; and Rapsheets.com, an online provider of criminal records data. more

Resolved Question: How big is ChoicePoint? How big you have to be to become a monopoly?

Resolved Question: Bush a true orator?

"We look forward to hearing your vision, so we can more better do our job. That's what I'm telling you." —George W. Bush, Gulfport, Miss., Sept. 20, 2005 "If it were to rain a lot, there is concern from the Army Corps of Engineers that the levees might break. And so, therefore, we're cautious about encouraging people to return at this moment of history." —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Sept. 19, 2005 "Listen, I want to thank leaders of the — in the faith — faith-based and community-based community for being here." —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Sept. 6, 2005 "So please give cash money to organizations that are directly involved in helping save lives — save the life who had been affected by Hurricane Katrina." —George W. Bush, Washington D.C., Sept. 6, 2005 "I can't wait to join you in the joy of welcoming neighbors back into neighborhoods, and small businesses up and running, and cutting those ribbons that somebody is creating new jobs." —George W. Bush, Poplarville, Miss., Sept. 5, 2005 "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." —George W. Bush, to FEMA director Michael Brown, who resigned 10 days later amid criticism over his job performance, Mobile, Ala., Sept. 2, 2005 (Listen to audio; read more stupid quotes about Hurricane Katrina) "We've got a lot of rebuilding to do. First, we're going to save lives and stabilize the situation. And then we're going to help these communities rebuild. The good news is -- and it's hard for some to see it now -- that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch." (Laughter) --George W. Bush, touring hurricane damage, Mobile, Ala., Sept. 2, 2005 "My thoughts are, we're going to get somebody who knows what they're talking about when it comes to rebuilding cities." —George W. Bush, on rebuilding New Orleans, Biloxi, Miss., Sept. 2, 2005 "Americans should be prudent in their use of energy during the course of the next few weeks. Don't buy gas if you don't need it." —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Sept. 1, 2005 "It's totally wiped out. ... It's devastating, it's got to be doubly devastating on the ground." —George W. Bush, turning to his aides while surveying Hurricane Katrina flood damage from Air Force One , Aug. 31, 2005 "The best place for the facts to be done is by somebody who's spending time investigating it." —George W. Bush, on the probe into how CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity was leaked, Washington D.C., July 18, 2005 "I'm looking forward to a good night's sleep on the soil of a friend." —George W. Bush, on visiting Denmark, Washington D.C., June 29, 2005 "I was going to say he's a piece of work, but that might not translate too well. Is that all right, if I call you a 'piece of work'?" —George W. Bush to Jean-Claude Juncker, prime minister of Luxembourg, Washington, D.C., June 20, 2005 "The relations with, uhh — Europe are important relations, and they've, uhh — because, we do share values. And, they're universal values, they're not American values or, you know — European values, they're universal values. And those values — uhh — being universal, ought to be applied everywhere." —George W. Bush, at a press conference with European Union dignitaries, Washington, D.C., June 20, 2005 "You see, not only did the attacks help accelerate a recession, the attacks reminded us that we are at war." —George W. Bush, on the Sept. 11 attacks, Washington, D.C., June 8, 2005 "And the second way to defeat the terrorists is to spread freedom. You see, the best way to defeat a society that is — doesn't have hope, a society where people become so angry they're willing to become suiciders, is to spread freedom, is to spread democracy." —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., June 8, 2005 "It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of — and the allegations — by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble — that means not tell the truth." —George W. Bush, on an Amnesty International report on prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay, Washington, D.C., May 31, 2005 (Listen to audio) "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." —George W. Bush, Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005 (Listen to audio) "We discussed the way forward in Iraq, discussed the importance of a democracy in the greater Middle East in order to leave behind a peaceful tomorrow." —George W. Bush, Tbilisi, Georgia, May 10, 2005 "I think younger workers — first of all, younger workers have been promised benefits the government — promises that have been promised, benefits that we can't keep. That's just the way it is." —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., May 4, 2005 "It means your own money would grow better than that which the government can make it grow. And that's important." —George W. Bush, on what private accounts could do for Social Security funds, Falls Church, Va., April 29, 2005 "I can only speak to myself." —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., April 28, 2005 "It's in our country's interests to find those who would do harm to us and get them out of harm's way." —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., April 28, 2005 "We expect the states to show us whether or not we're achieving simple objectives — like literacy, literacy in math, the ability to read and write." —George W. Bush, on federal education requirements, Washington, D.C., April 28, 2005 "He understands the need for a timely write of the constitution." —George W. Bush, on Prime Minister Iyad Allawi of Iraq, Washington, D.C., April 28, 2005 "Well, we've made the decision to defeat the terrorists abroad so we don't have to face them here at home. And when you engage the terrorists abroad, it causes activity and action." —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., April 28, 2005 "But Iraq has — have got people there that are willing to kill, and they're hard-nosed killers. And we will work with the Iraqis to secure their future." —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., April 28, 2005 "I appreciate my love for Laura." —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., April 20, 2005 "We have enough coal to last for 250 years, yet coal also prevents an environmental challenge." —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., April 20, 2005 "Part of the facts is understanding we have a problem, and part of the facts is what you're going to do about it." —George W. Bush, Kirtland, Ohio, April 15, 2005 "I'm going to spend a lot of time on Social Security. I enjoy it. I enjoy taking on the issue. I guess, it's the Mother in me." —George W. Bush, Washington D.C., April 14, 2005 "We look forward to analyzing and working with legislation that will make — it would hope — put a free press's mind at ease that you're not being denied information you shouldn't see." —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., April 14, 2005 "I want to thank you for the importance that you've shown for education and literacy." —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., April 13, 2005 "I understand there's a suspicion that we—we're too security-conscience." —George W. Bush, Washington D.C., April 14, 2005 "If they pre-decease or die early, there's an asset base to be able to pass on to a loved one." —George W. Bush, on Social Security money held in private accounts, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, March 30, 2005 [I'm] occasionally reading, I want you to know, in the second term." —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., March 16, 2005 "In this job you've got a lot on your plate on a regular basis; you don't have much time to sit around and wander, lonely, in the Oval Office, kind of asking different portraits, 'How do you think my standing will be?'" —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., March 16, 2005 "In terms of timetables, as quickly as possible — whatever that means." —George W. Bush, on his time frame for shoring up Social Security, Washington D.C., March 16, 2005 "I like the idea of people running for office. There's a positive effect when you run for office. Maybe some will run for office and say, vote for me, I look forward to blowing up America. I don't know, I don't know if that will be their platform or not. But it's -- I don't think so. I think people who generally run for office say, vote for me, I'm looking forward to fixing your potholes, or making sure you got bread on the table." —George W. Bush, on elections in the Middle East, Washington, D.C., March 16, 2005 "I repeat, personal accounts do not permanently fix the solution." —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., March 16, 2005 "This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table." —George W. Bush, Brussels, Belgium, Feb. 22, 2005 "If you're a younger person, you ought to be asking members of Congress and the United States Senate and the president what you intend to do about it. If you see a train wreck coming, you ought to be saying, what are you going to do about it, Mr. Congressman, or Madam Congressman?" —George W. Bush, Detroit, Mich., Feb. 8, 2005 "Because the — all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those — changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be — or closer delivered to what has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the — like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate — the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those — if that growth is affected, it will help on the red." —George W. Bush, explaining his plan to save Social Security, Tampa, Fla., Feb. 4, 2005 "You work three jobs? … Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that." —George W. Bush, to a divorced mother of three, Omaha, Nebraska, Feb. 4, 2005 (Listen to audio) "After all, Europe is America's closest ally." —George W. Bush, Mainz, Germany, Feb. 23, 2005 "Because he's hiding." —George W. Bush, responding to a reporter who asked why Osama bin Laden had not been caught, aboard Air Force One, Jan. 14, 2005 "I'm also mindful that man should never try to put words in God's mouth. I mean, we should never ascribe natural disasters or anything else to God. We are in no way, shape, or form should a human being, play God." —George W. Bush, ABC's 20/20, Washington D.C., Jan. 14, 2005 "I want to appreciate those of you who wear our nation's uniform for your sacrifice." —George W. Bush, Jacksonville, Fla., Jan. 14, 2005 "I speak plainly sometimes, but you've got to be mindful of the consequences of the words. So put that down. I don't know if you'd call that a confession, a regret, something." —George W. Bush, speaking to reporters, Washington, D.C., Jan. 14, 2005 "Who could have possibly envisioned an erection — an election in Iraq at this point in history?" —George W. Bush, at the white House, Washington, D.C., Jan. 10, 2005 "We need to apply 21st-century information technology to the health care field. We need to have our medical records put on the I.T." —George W. Bush, Collinsville, Ill., Jan. 5, 2005 "I believe we are called to do the hard work to make our communities and quality of life a better place." —George W. Bush, Collinsville, Ill., Jan. 5, 2005 Read More Bushisms • Bushisms from 2004 • Bushisms from 2003 • Bushisms from 2002 • Bushisms from 2001 • Bushisms from 2000 Got a Bushism? Email it to politicalhumor.guide@about.com Are You An Expert on Bushspeak? Take the Bushisms Quiz -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Email This Page to a Friend | Subscribe to Newsletter -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From Daniel Kurtzman, Your Guide to Political Humor. FREE Newsletter. Sign Up Now! Sponsored Links Anti-Bush Merchandise Posters, Bumper Stickers & More Daily Blog & News Roundup www.bushmark.com George W. Bush Are You Happy Bush Won? Vote & Win a Free Razr Phone bush.peel.com Look Alikes Nationwide Music-TV-Movies-Political Stage Show-Meet & Greet www.besserentertainment.com George W Bush Humor Videos, bloopers, songs, jokes, & hilarious cartoons. 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Resolved Question: How big is Choice Point? How many companies have they bought? Does it smell like Monopoly?

Resolved Question: How big is ChoicePoint? How big you have to be to become a monopoly?

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