The 11 o'clock News

LOST is "Trading Places"

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Trading Places, Familiar Faces, Worn Out Places

Come on, admit it, we're all LOST and con-FUSED. So it's time to acknowledge that J.J., Damon et al are quite the clever writers. But I have one small suggestion: change the name to "Trading Places."

For X-ample in "The Incident" we find:

- Jacob brings people to the island to test them - similar to the Duke brothers testing nature vs. nature in trading places of Winthorpe and Valentine.
- The antagonist - Jacob's nemesis was hiding in plain sight since the first act, trading places with the dead.
- Protagonist Jack trading places from a man of science to a man of faith, believing it's his destiny to save the LOST by presumably blowing up the EMF breach with a "small plutonium bomb."
- Bernard and Rose trading places with Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden (assuming they made it safely to the cave before Jack blew the breach)
- and those other references to the great John Landis movie, "Trading Places," such as Jack and Sawyer putting up their Dukes before the Incident, Sawyer telling Kate they have to drink their OJ.

If those "Trading Places" references are deliberate, perhaps the writers are telling us the destiny of LOST is OJ futures, as in Sun in a Bottle, as in Fusion. Hence, the LOST con-Fusion nuke scenario:

Assume Jughead Jack succeeded in eliminating the EMF breach and the Swan Hatch, which changes the alternate timeline that brought down flight 815, and in season 6 they all arrived safely in LA, perhaps he merely succeeds in trading places , replacing a small misery on an island with a greater one by bringing a fusion nuke in a suitcase that Mr, Paik smuggled on flight 815. If so, then Jack's destiny is our destiny and we are all LOST and con-FUSED. (NB: LOST is in the eye of the beholder; check out the HD screencap of Jack's eye in the trailer for Season 6 and compare the image of the mushroom cloud with the mushroom cloud in the background of the "Destiny Calls" LOST poster.)

BTW - If the "Trading Places" storyline plays out, I'm betting Jack (Louis Winthorpe), Dez (Coleman) and conman Sawyer (Billy Ray Valentine) will turn the tables on the evil Mr. X (John Locke) and Mr. X "ends up" with the gorilla.

AND IF LOST is "Trading Places", perhaps the terrorist FUSION suitcase nuke on flight 815 was not destined for LA but New York City. (NYC is also where Mr. Paik's gold rolex was sold to a pawn shop -a possible trigger for the suitcase nuke). If so, perhaps the statue that Il-ana refers to is not the four-toed foot where Jacob wove his yarn but the one in New York City: the Statue of Liberty. (honestly, does a foot really constitute a statue? If Il-ana had said, "what lurks beneath the ruins of the statue".....)

I thinking those clever LOST writers are pulling the ol’ Statue of Liberty play on US. Consider the interesting names and numbers that can be found on LOST that connect with the Statue of Liberty, New York and 9-11:

-- The LOST numbers 4-8-15-16-23-42 could refer to retired Yankee (Bronx) "Bombers,

-- "Jughead" referred to a retired Yankee H-bomb,

-- Gerald DeGroot wrote a book on the Manhattan Project

-- New York was the site of the greatest terrorist attack in the US on 9-11.

Perhaps the scene of "Charlie" warning Hurley under the mushroom-cloud shaped tree at the insane asylum was symbolic, and "they need you" may refer to US all.

Then there are the curious names of the Dharma Stations:

The Flame – a reference to the Statue of Liberty torch,

The Pearl – the “gem of the ocean” as in Columbia, the gem of the ocean. "Columbia" was a common poetic nickname for the United States of America in the 18th and 19th centuries and Lady Liberty was the symbol.

The Staff - (also known as Aaron's Rod) used by Moses and a shepherd to guide his flock.
Jack: (when he read the article about the Yankees beating his Boston Red Sox) "Damn A-Rod."

The Lamp Post - a lighthouse, which was the Statue of Liberty’s function

The Swan – the name of the small island in Paris where another Statue of Liberty stands.

And there is the Swan code - DI9FFTR731 – a possible reference to 9-11 (7+3+1)?

(On the beach Juliet told Jack when he was trying to contact the freighter, ” “Why don’t you try another number – 9-1-1?”)

And if New York City had a missile defense system like the Arrow, perhaps the World Trade Center would still be standing today. (excluding "Fringe") But it wouldn't stop a suitcase nuke.

Wouldn't it be ironic that Jack uses a fission nuke to course correct their way off the island, only to create a bigger disaster with a fusion nuke?

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Familiar Faces: It appears Jacob's Nemesis found the "loophole" to kill Jacob by trading faces with the deceased John Locke, and that Nemesis is probably the Smoke Monster, because the "Evil John Locke" once pulled a curious Clarke Kent disappearing act before the Smoke Monster appeared, (Clarke Kent and Superman could never be in the same place at the same time) and that Nemesis also traded faces with the deceased Christian Shephard, who tricked Claire to go back with him to the cabin, leaving little Aaron behind. (doesn't little Aaron look like a youthful Jacob?)

So, if Nemesis planned to get John Locke to become Leader of the Others, have Ben kill him, allowing Ben to regain the role of Leader, which put Ben in the sole position to kill Jacob, the big question is: what is the ultimate goal of Nemesis, who appears to have had it with US in this Mad, Mad World?

Worn out places:

"All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places, worn out faces
No tomorrow, no tomorrow"


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N3N1MlvVc4

Deconstructing Dick Cheney

“Deconstruction  -  a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself.  Its apparently-solid ground is no rock, but thin air."

It was Dick being a Dick to the bitter end in the neo-con bunker yesterday.  He began:

"It's pretty clear the president served in the Senate and not in the House or Representatives because, of course, in the House, we have the five minute rule," Cheney said.

He's retired. What's the rush?  Were the Russians on their way to the bunker?

Dick's comment did reveal his not-so-hidden contempt for the office of the president, including George, and his awareness of time, which may be running out on him to be a free man.

Dick continued:

CHENEY: I first came to AEI after serving at the Pentagon, and departed only after a very interesting job offer came along. I had no expectation of returning to public life, but my career worked out a little differently. Those eight years as vice president were quite a journey, and during a time of big events and great decisions, I don't think I missed much.

Translation: "I  shot an old man in the face and destroyed our democracy."

CHENEY: Being the first vice president who had also served as secretary of defense, naturally my duties tended toward national security.  I had the advantage of being a vice president content with the responsibilities I had, and going about my work with no higher ambition. Today, I'm an even freer man. Your kind invitation brings me here as a private citizen - a career in politics behind me, no elections to win or lose, and no favor to seek.

Translation:   Except, "Please don't extradite me to old Europe."

Cheney:  The responsibilities we carried belong to others now. And though I'm not here to speak for George W. Bush, I am certain that no one wishes the current administration more success in defending the country than we do.

Translation:  "George doesn't speak to me anymore."

Cheney:  Right now there is considerable debate in this city about the measures our administration took to defend the American people. Today I want to set forth the strategic thinking behind our policies. I do so as one who was there every day of the Bush Administration -who supported the policies when they were made, and without hesitation would do so again in the same circumstances.

Translation: "I authorized tortured, I authorize torture, I would still authorize torture."

CHENEY: The point is not to look backward. Now and for years to come, a lot rides on our President's understanding of the security policies that preceded him.

Translation:  "PLEASE don't extradite me to Old Europe."

CHENEY: Our administration always faced its share of criticism, and from some quarters it was always intense. That was especially so in the later years of our term, when the dangers were as serious as ever, but the sense of general alarm after September 11th, 2001 was a fading memory. Part of our responsibility, as we saw it, was not to forget the terrible harm that had been done to America … and not to let 9/11 become the prelude to something much bigger and far worse.

Translation:  "Like losing the House, the Senate, the Presidency..."

CHENEY: 9-11 caused everyone to take a serious second look at threats that had been gathering for a while, and enemies whose plans were getting bolder and more sophisticated.

Translation:  "We didn't and look what happened."

Cheney: 9-11 made necessary a shift of policy, aimed at a clear strategic threat - what the Congress called "an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States." From that moment forward, instead of merely preparing to round up the suspects and count up the victims after the next attack, we were determined to prevent attacks in the first place."

Translation: "Blame the FBI for 9-11."

CHENEY: Everyone expected a follow-on attack, and our job was to stop it. We didn't know what was coming next, but everything we did know in that autumn of 2001 looked bad.

Translation:  So I hid in my undisclosed location.

Cheney: This was the world in which al-Qaeda was seeking nuclear technology, and A. Q. Khan was selling nuclear technology on the black market. We had the anthrax attack from an unknown source. We had the training camps of Afghanistan, and dictators like Saddam Hussein with known ties to Mideast terrorists.

Translation: This was a world I helped create.

CHENEY: These are just a few of the problems we had on our hands. And foremost on our minds was the prospect of the very worst coming to pass - a 9/11 with nuclear weapons.

Translation: "I' had to come up with something to  avoid being blamed for that "problem" on 9-11."

CHENEY: To make certain our nation country never again faced such a day of horror, we developed a comprehensive strategy, beginning with far greater homeland security to make the United States a harder target.

Translation: WTF?

As noted by McClatchy: " It is important to note that Cheney said the Bush administration "moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and their sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks. He however didn’t point out that Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenant, Ayman al Zawahri, remain at large nearly eight years after 9/11 and that the Bush administration began diverting U.S. forces, intelligence assets, time and money to planning an invasion of Iraq before it finished the war in Afghanistan against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

CHENEY: We did all of these things, and with bipartisan support put all these policies in place. It has resulted in serious blows against enemy operations … the take-down of the A.Q. Khan network … and the dismantling of Libya's nuclear program.

Translation: "...after we outed Valerie Plame Wilson."

According to Sibel Edmonds, "The ring is headed by Pakistani nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan, and includes Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency, as well as Turkish and Israeli representatives. The official is said to tell a member of the ring that a company the ring wants to do business with -Brewster Jennings & Associates-  is a CIA front company. Brewster Jennings & Associates is a front for Valerie Plame Wilson, who will later be outed as a CIA officer in 2003, and possibly other operatives.

CHENEY: It's required the commitment of many thousands of troops in two theaters of war, with high points and some low points in both Iraq and Afghanistan - and at every turn, the people of our military carried the heaviest burden. Well over seven years into the effort, one thing we know is that the enemy has spent most of this time on the defensive - and every attempt to strike inside the United States has failed.

Translation: "What you don't know - and what I won't tell you - is that none of these "attempts" could hurt you."

CHENEY: So we're left to draw one of two conclusions - and here is the great dividing line in our current debate over national security. You can look at the facts and conclude that the comprehensive strategy has worked, and therefore needs to be continued as vigilantly as ever. Or you can look at the same set of facts and conclude that 9/11 was a one-off event - coordinated, devastating, but also unique and not sufficient to justify a sustained wartime effort. Whichever conclusion you arrive at, it will shape your entire view of the last seven years, and of the policies necessary to protect America for years to come.

Translation: Iraq - 9-11, Iraq 9-11, Iraq 9-11

CHENEY: The intelligence officers who questioned the terrorists can be proud of their work and proud of the results, because they prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people.

Translation: The CIA's OIG report that there is no evidence to support Dick's wild claims must have based not on solid ground but thin air. Dick also denied there was any connection between the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and the abuse of detainees at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, which he blamed on "a few sadistic guards ... in violation of American law, military regulations and simple decency." However, a bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report in December traced the abuses at Abu Ghraib to the approval of the techniques by senior Bush administration officials, including former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ’a few bad apples’ acting on their own," said the report issued by Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and John McCain, R-Ariz. "The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality and authorized their use against detainees."

CHENEY:  I might add that people who consistently distort the truth in this way are in no position to lecture anyone about "values."

Translation:  Exactly.

Mo Dowd, Please Copy and Paste This:

By Chris Hedges

"The embrace by any society of permanent war is a parasite that devours the heart and soul of a nation. Permanent war extinguishes liberal, democratic movements. It turns culture into nationalist cant. It degrades and corrupts education and the media, and wrecks the economy. The liberal, democratic forces, tasked with maintaining an open society, become impotent. The collapse of liberalism, whether in imperial Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire or Weimar Germany, ushers in an age of moral nihilism. This moral nihilism comes is many colors and hues. It rants and thunders in a variety of slogans, languages and ideologies. It can manifest itself in fascist salutes, communist show trials or Christian crusades. It is, at its core, all the same. It is the crude, terrifying tirade of mediocrities who find their identities and power in the perpetuation of permanent war. 

It was a decline into permanent war, not Islam, which killed the liberal, democratic movements in the Arab world, ones that held great promise in the early part of the 20th century in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iran. It is a state of permanent war that is finishing off the liberal traditions in Israel and the United States. The moral and intellectual trolls—the Dick Cheneys, the Avigdor Liebermans, the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads—personify the moral nihilism of perpetual war. They manipulate fear and paranoia. They abolish civil liberties in the name of national security. They crush legitimate dissent. They bilk state treasuries. They stoke racism. 

“War,” Randolph Bourne commented acidly, “is the health of the state.” 

In “Pentagon Capitalism” Seymour Melman described the defense industry as viral. Defense and military industries in permanent war, he wrote, trash economies. They are able to upend priorities. They redirect government expenditures toward their huge military projects and starve domestic investment in the name of national security. We produce sophisticated fighter jets, while Boeing is unable to finish its new commercial plane on schedule. Our automotive industry goes bankrupt. We sink money into research and development of weapons systems and neglect renewable energy technologies to fight global warming. Universities are flooded with defense-related cash and grants, and struggle to find money for environmental studies. This is the disease of permanent war. 

Massive military spending in this country, climbing to nearly $1 trillion a year and consuming half of all discretionary spending, has a profound social cost. Bridges and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Trillions in debts threaten the viability of the currency and the economy. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick and the unemployed are abandoned. Human suffering, including our own, is the price for victory. 

Citizens in a state of permanent war are bombarded with the insidious militarized language of power, fear and strength that mask an increasingly brittle reality. The corporations behind the doctrine of permanent war—who have corrupted Leon Trotsky’s doctrine of permanent revolution—must keep us afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear means that we will be willing to give up our rights and liberties for security. Fear keeps us penned in like domesticated animals.

Melman, who coined the term permanent war economy  to characterize the American economy, wrote that since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. The military-industrial establishment is a very lucrative business. It is gilded corporate welfare. Defense systems are sold before they are produced. Military industries are permitted to charge the federal government for huge cost overruns. Massive profits are always guaranteed. 

Foreign aid is given to countries such as Egypt, which receives some $3 billion in assistance and is required to buy American weapons with $1.3 billion of the money. The taxpayers fund the research, development and building of weapons systems and then buy them on behalf of foreign governments. It is a bizarre circular system. It defies the concept of a free-market economy. These weapons systems are soon in need of being updated or replaced. They are hauled, years later, into junkyards where they are left to rust. It is, in economic terms, a dead end. It sustains nothing but the permanent war economy. 

Those who profit from permanent war are not restricted by the economic rules of producing goods, selling them for a profit, then using the profit for further investment and production. They operate, rather, outside of competitive markets. They erase the line between the state and the corporation. They leech away the ability of the nation to manufacture useful products and produce sustainable jobs. Melman used the example of the New York City Transit Authority and its allocation in 2003 of $3 billion to $4 billion for new subway cars. New York City asked for bids, and no American companies responded. Melman argued that the industrial base in America was no longer centered on items that maintain, improve, or are used to build the nation’s infrastructure. New York City eventually contracted with companies in Japan and Canada to build its subway cars. Melman estimated that such a contract could have generated, directly and indirectly, about 32,000 jobs in the United States. In another instance, of 100 products offered in the 2003 L.L. Bean catalogue, Melman found that 92 were imported and only eight were made in the United States.

The late Sen. J. William Fulbright described the reach of the military-industrial establishment in his 1970 book “The Pentagon Propaganda Machine.” Fulbright explained how the Pentagon influenced and shaped public opinion through multimillion-dollar public relations campaigns, Defense Department films, close ties with Hollywood producers, and use of the commercial media. The majority of the military analysts on television are former military officials, many employed as consultants to defense industries, a fact they rarely disclose to the public. Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general and military analyst for NBC News, was, The New York Times reported, at the same time an employee of Defense Solutions Inc., a consulting firm. He profited, the article noted, from the sale of the weapons systems and expansion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan he championed over the airwaves.

Our permanent war economy has not been challenged by Obama and the Democratic Party. They support its destructive fury because it funds them. They validate its evil assumptions because to take them on is political suicide. They repeat the narrative of fear because it keeps us dormant. They do this because they have become weaker than the corporate forces that profit from permanent war. 

The hollowness of our liberal classes, such as the Democrats, empowers the moral nihilists. A state of permanent war means the inevitable death of liberalism. Dick Cheney may be palpably evil while Obama is merely weak, but to those who seek to keep us in a state of permanent war, it does not matter. They get what they want. Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote “Notes From the Underground” to illustrate what happens to cultures when a liberal class, like ours, becomes sterile, defeated dreamers. The main character in “Notes From the Underground” carries the bankrupt ideas of liberalism to their logical extreme. He becomes the enlightenment ideal. He eschews passion and moral purpose. He is rational. He prizes realism over sanity, even in the face of self-destruction. These acts of accommodation doom the Underground Man, as it doomed imperial Russia and as it will doom us. 

“I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect,” the Underground Man wrote. “And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something.”

We have been drawn into the world of permanent war by these fools. We allow fools to destroy the continuity of life, to tear apart all systems—economic, social, environmental and political—that sustain us. Dostoevsky was not dismayed by evil. He was dismayed by a society that no longer had the moral fortitude to confront the fools. These fools are leading us over the precipice. What will rise up from the ruins will not be something new, but the face of the monster that has, until then, remained hidden behind the facade."

Groucho Marx - I read in the newspapers they are going to have 30 minutes of intellectual stuff on television every Monday from 7:30 to 8. to educate America. They couldn't educate America if they started at 6:30.

Dick Cheney - Agent Provocateur

In my latest screenplay, "Outhouse," a hostile government intelligence operation, which is headed by an agent provocateur in the White House who eventually becomes Vice President, succeeds in luring a bumbling presi-dense into a quagmire in the Middle East that weakens the military, cripples the economy, while radicalizing Middle Eastern youths for easy recruitment by al-Qaeda terrorists.  Considering Gene Hackman for the role of the mole.  Of course, the character has no-no similarity to that Agent Provocateur Dick Cheney, whose actions prove the old saying "truth is stranger than fiction." 

"From the Outhouse to the White House" -  Let US assume that the Bumbling Bushies were not incompetent and were instead undone by a brilliant espionage operation.  Having completed his mission to destroy  US, what would an agent provocateur do next?   He would offer his services to the highest bidder.  If Dick's recent actions are telling, the highest bidder was the DNC.

Not content with luring US into a military quagmire, Dick is reducing the Republican Party to the level of influence of the Green Party.   Dick is luring key Republicans such as Family Values Nuts Gingrich to accept Rush Limbaugh as their leader and to reject moderates like Jeb Bush and Colin Powell.  Cheney, who had five deferments himself to get out of going to Vietnam, would rather follow someone  who has had three divorces and a drug problem (who also avoided Vietnam because of a boil on his ass) than a four-star general who spent his life serving his country.

Why would Dick do this?  Perhaps Dick's present objective is to sabotage the Bush Dynasty.... for good.

“Bush 41 cares about decorum and protocol,” said an official in Bush I. “I’m sure he doesn’t appreciate Cheney acting out. He is giving the whole party a black eye just as Jeb is out there trying to renew the party.”

But that is the point.  While presi-dense Bush admired Cheney’s brass, even he grew increasingly skeptical of him, the more he learned about foreign policy himself.  There were even reports of Bush  doing a funny Cheney imitation and that it dawned on him that Cheney and Rummy represented a scofflaw, paranoid Nixon cell within his White House.

“Toward the end, 43 was just as confused as anybody about what makes Cheney tick,” said a Bush family loyalist.

Some believe Dick is crazy, that he has no coherent foreign policy viewpoint,  doesn’t fathom that his illegal invasion of Iraq unbalanced that part of the world, empowered Iran and was a force multiplier for Muslims who hate America.  

Others believe Dick is an agent provocateur who is crazy...like a fox.

Pelosi: In like a lion, out like a lamb

What has happened to our Lion Nancy Pelosi?   In 2002, Nancy stood up and told the country the truth about the shear madness of American Psycho Dick Cheney's (Hannibal Lechter) plan to invade Iraq:

" I rise in opposition to the resolution on national security grounds. The clear and present danger that our country faces is terrorism. I say flat out that unilateral use of force without first exhausting every diplomatic remedy and other remedies and making a case to the American people will be harmful to our war on terrorism. .... We are risking the cooperation that we have from over 60 nations of having their intelligence and their cooperation in fighting this war on terrorism. Another cost is to our economy. The markets do not like war. They do not like the uncertainty of war. Our economy is fragile as it is. The President has spoken. In his speech the other night, he talked about rebuilding Iraq's economy after our invasion. We have problems with our own economy. We must focus on building our own economy before we worry about Iraq's economy after we invade Iraq. So when we go in, the occupation, which is now being called liberation, could be interminable and so could the amount of money, unlimited that it will cost, $100-, $200 billion.  If we resolve this issue diplomatically, we can show our strength as a great country, as a great country. Let us show our greatness. Vote no on this resolution."    I am woman, hear me roar....

But now reconcile that lion with the little lamb who has been confronted with serious implications of her passive acquiescence about waterboarding.  What was her response when she had the chance to demand an accounting from the executive branch?   Silence.

Pelosi sheepishly claims she was told only that "waterboarding might be used and that it had been approved by the Bush Justice Department as legal."   But then we find in Politico that  Pelosi aide Michael Sheehy, along with Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., were informed by the CIA five months later that Zubaydah had been subjected to specific “enhanced” methods including waterboarding.  Pelosi admits to possessing that information, but according to one of her aides, after Harman’s letter questioning the practice received “no response” from the CIA, “there was nothing more that could be done.”  Silence.

Silent Spring:  After coming in like a lion, Nancy went out like a lamb, acquiescing to the Cheney cover-up of unpleasant truths in the treatment of prisoners.  Pelosi, and the rest of the sheep, contributed to the betrayal of the ideal of public accountability that is the bedrock of our system of governance. 

Perhaps if Pelosi and the rest could have heard their screams, we would not suffer the Silence of the Lambs:

Dick Cheney:  And what did you see, Nancy? What did you see?
Nancy: Lambs. The lambs were screaming.
Dick: They were slaughtering the spring lambs?
Nancy: And they were screaming.
Dick: And you ran away?
Nancy: No. First I tried to free them. I... I opened the gate to their pen, but they wouldn't run. They just stood there, confused. They wouldn't run.
Dick: But you could and you did, didn't you?
Nancy: Yes. I took one lamb, and I ran away as fast as I could.
Dick: Where were you going, Nancy?
Nancy: I don't know. I didn't have any food, any water and it was very cold, very cold. I thought, I thought if I could save just one, but... he was so heavy. So heavy. I didn't get more than a few miles when the sheriff's car picked me up.
Dick: What became of your lamb, Nancy?
Nancy: They killed him.

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Dick: Well, Nancy- have the lambs stopped screaming?

Getting to the Truth About Waterboarding

David Corn's Mother Jones article suggests someone is not telling the truth about a missing State Department memo on the legality of torture (i.e.  waterboarding ).

"On April 21, Philip Zelikow, who was counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during the Bush administration, revealed on Foreign Policy's "Shadow Government" blog that he wrote a memo in 2005 disputing the conclusions of Bush Justice Department lawyers that torture was legal. The existence of such a memo was a surprise. But Zelikow also disclosed that the "White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo."

This story is not over. Zelikow tells Mother Jones that he doesn't know for sure who in the White House ordered the suppression of his memo, but he says that his "supposition at the time" was that the office of Vice President Dick Cheney was behind the cover-up. In an email exchange with Mother Jones, Zelikow notes that Cheney's office did not have the authority to request that his memo be deep-sixed: "They didn't run the interagency process. Such a request would more likely have come from the White House Counsel's office or from NSC staff." But that request did not reach him in written form. "It was conveyed to me, and I ignored it," Zelikow recalls. But he suspected that Team Cheney was probably behind it.

Let US kill two birdbrains with one stone - use waterboarding to get to the truth about waterboarding.

Waterboard Dick to get him to confess his involvement in the missing torture memo caper.  If Dick confesses, then waterboarding works.  If it kills Dick, then waterboarding works.

Erie Collarbomber Suspect Still "Crazy" After All These Years

If only Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong was "crazy" enough to commit suicide, then Mary Beth Buchanan could finally declare the Erie collar bomb case closed.  But Crazy Marj just won't cooperate.  And now she apparently has convinced some mental health "expert" that she isn't so crazy that she can't stand trial.

And Crazy Marj even has Brian Wells' sister believing that she is innocent. At a brief recess at Monday's competency hearing, Jean Heid, Brian's sister told Diehl-Armstrong that she believed her to be not guilty in Brian Wells' death.

"The real killers are still out there," Jean said before being forcefully removed from the courtroom by U.S. Marshals.

The Powers That Be Says Marj Not Crazy:  (Erie Times reports: although Crazy Marj had been diagnosed with a bipolar disorder, mental health expert Dr. Leslie Powers testified that she did not see the defendant display symptoms that would meet the criteria during four months of observation at a federal prison in Texas. Powers acknowledged under cross-examination that there is no cure for bipolar disorder and said she could not discount past diagnoses. She told U.S. District Judge Sean McLaughlin that people diagnosed with bipolar disorder can be in remission for months. Powers diagnosed Diehl-Armstrong as having a borderline personality disorder with narcissistic and paranoid traits but said that does not mean she is incompetent.

"Diehl-Armstrong can be loud, obnoxious and arrogant and believes she is all-knowing, but those are features of her personality, not a mental illness", Powers said. (NB:  Most Americans would describe Dick Cheney the same way, and he certainly is not mentally ill--delusional -- but not mentally ill.)

Meanwhile, her defense psychiatrist testified that Crazy Marj does have bipolar disorder along with the personality disorder and is incompetent to stand trial because she cannot cooperate with her attorney.  Diehl-Armstrong has complained about her attorney, Thomas Patton, saying he is involved in a conspiracy against her.

"He wants to bury me in an insane asylum," she yelled (Perhaps Crazy Marj isn't so crazy)

Defense psychiatrist Dr. Robert Sadoff, who has been involved with Diehl-Armstrong's criminal matters for years, said she is a "very complex person." 

"While she is very bright, he said, she is also hurting her case by not cooperating with Patton. (who won't allow her to defend herself)  She insists, Sadoff said, that she knows best how to defend her case.  Replacing Patton with another attorney may help, Sadoff said, but he also felt she was likely to have problems with any attorney."

At a hearing last July, McLaughlin sided with defense witnesses and found Diehl-Armstrong incompetent. He ordered that she undergo treatment in hopes that she would become competent. McLaughlin is not expected to rule on her competence for some time. 

Perhaps this will allow Crazy Marj more time to "commit suicide" , thereby save the Government the bother of having to prove her guilt in court.   (Hey, it worked for the Anthrax "investigation", right?)

Not calling it Swine Flu is Putting Lipstick on a Pig

In his weekly address, the president referred to the virus crisis by its scientific name, H1N1, and avoided the more commonly used "swine flu."  Some analysts have blamed swine flu panic for a steep drop in pork prices this week.  The World Health Organization said it will stop using the term "swine flu" to avoid confusion.  The virus got its nickname because it originated in pigs. But it has now mutated into a form that passes easily between people. Obama noted in his Saturday address that the contagion has nothing to do with animals. 

Nothing?

Not according to scientists who have traced the genetic lineage of the new H1N1 swine flu to a strain that emerged in 1998 in U.S. factory farms.  The  Swine flu spread and mutated at an alarming rate.  Experts warned then that a pocket of the virus would someday evolve to infect humans, perhaps setting off a global pandemic.

The new findings challenge recent protests by pork industry leaders and U.S., Mexican and United Nations agriculture officials that industrial farms shouldn’t be implicated in the new swine flu, which has killed up to 176 people and on Thursday was declared an imminent pandemic by the World Health Organization.

“Industrial farms are super-incubators for viruses,” said Bob Martin, former executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Animal Farm Production, and a long-time critic of the so-called “contained animal feeding operations.”

As Wired.com reported on Tuesday;

" geneticists studying the composition of viruses taken from swine flu victims described it as the product of a DNA swap between North American and Eurasian swine flu strains.

On Wednesday, Columbia University biomedical informaticist Raul Rabadan added new information on the virus’ family history in a posting to ProMed, a public health mailing list. His description paralleled that of other researchers who had analyzed the new strains, but with an extra bit of detail. Six of the genes in swine flu looked to be descended from “H1N2 and H3N2 swine viruses isolated since 1998.”

Experts contacted by Wired.com agreed with Rabadan’s analysis. For researchers who track the evolution of influenza viruses, the news was chilling.

H3N2 — the letters denote specific gene variants that code for replication-enhancing enzymes — is the name of a hybrid first identified in North Carolina in 1998, the tail end of a decade which saw the state’s hog production rise from two million to 10 million, even as the number of farms dropped. H3N2 originated in a relatively benign swine flu strain first identified in 1918, but had absorbed new genes from bird and human flus.

These new genes provided replication advantages that allowed the hybrid to permeate densely packed pig farms whose inhabitants were routinely shipped across the United States. That rapid replication rate also increased the chances of strains evolving in ways that allowed them to evade hog immune systems.

Within a year, exposures topped 90 percent in several heartland states. A retrospective news account in Science said that “after years of stability, the North American swine flu virus had jumped on an evolutionary fast track.”

At the genetic level, the years that followed remain a mystery — hog flus are poorly monitored, compared to human influenza. But eventually an H3N2 spawn merged with a strain of Eurasian pig flu, producing the swine flu variant that’s now infecting humans.

At an environmental level, the conditions which shaped H3N2 and H1N2 evolution, and increased the variants’ chances of taking a human-contagious form, are well understood. High-density animal production facilities came to dominate the U.S. pork industry during the late 20th century, and have been adopted around the world. Inside them, pigs are packed so tightly that they cannot turn, and literally stand in their own waste.

Diseases travel rapidly through such immunologically stressed populations, and travel with the animals as they are shuttled throughout the United States between birth and slaughter. That provides ample opportunity for strains to mingle and recombine. An ever-escalating array of industry-developed vaccines confer short-term protection, but at the expense of provoking flu to evolve in unpredictable ways.

The Pew commission concluded that this system created an “increased chance for a strain to emerge that can infect and spread in humans.” Scientists and public health experts have said the same thing for years, in even starker terms.

In 2003, the American Public Health Association called for a ban on contained animal feeding operations. One year later, St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital virologist Richard Webby, one of the original chroniclers of H3N2’s emergence, called the U.S. swine population “an increasingly important reservoir of viruses with human pandemic potential.” United States Department of Agriculture researcher Amy Vincent reportedly said that vaccine-driven evolution created a “potential for pandemic influenza emergence in North America.”

If Team Obama is in denial about the root of the Swine Flu problem, there isn't enough lipstick in the world.....

The 11th Commandment - Thou Shall Not Torture...ever...like never

If there was a need for the 11th Commandment, a good candidate would be: "Thou shall not torture."

Why is another commandment necessary, you ask?   Well, it appears some TRUE BELIEVERS seem to think some un-Christian behavior is acceptable - like TORTURE -  if it's not explicitly stated as sinful.  Of course, general sinful behavior against another person should be covered under the Golden Rule - do unto others as you would want them to do to you. But the fact that some of the most faithful failed to discern that torture constituted bad behavior, much less a violation of our laws, suggests another commandment is necessary.  What is most disturbing about the revelations of the Bush torture program is the role that  Mormons played to  create the moral crisis of this country, as revealed by David R. Irvine, commissioned in the U.S. Army Reserve as a strategic intelligence officer in 1967 and retired as a brigadier general. He taught prisoner of war interrogation and military law for 18 years for the Sixth United States Army Intelligence School.

"Although the decisions which put us in the grim business of torture, body-snatching, extraordinary renditions, making people disappear, indefinite confinement without charges and warrantless wiretapping were made by the president and vice president, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints served as helpful enablers.  Not only did they provide the legal architecture, they provided the "scientific" patina for the plunge into the barbaric business of torture.

Take Latter-day Saint Timothy E. Flanigan, deputy White House counsel, who, along with David Addington, John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, and Jim Haynes comprised the secretive "War Council" of lawyers -- a self-appointed group having virtually no experience in law enforcement, military service.

---

Together, they were the brain trust that devised the legal cover that Vice President Dick Cheney needed to work his will. They secretly crafted the warrantless surveillance program which allowed the National Security Agency to intercept telephone calls and e-mails to and from American citizens within the United States. They secretly devised the Bush military commissions, which were essentially kangaroo courts and legally insufficient to satisfy the minimal adjudicatory standards required under the Geneva Conventions, which, as provided by the Constitution and Congress, constitute the supreme law of the land. They secretly conspired to ignore the law and frame interrogation techniques around the methods of the Spanish Inquisition, the Soviet KGB and Chairman Mao.

Flanigan once told his LDS ward congregation that it was gratifying "to work in a White House where every day was begun with prayer." In 2005, prior to his rejection by the Senate to be Gonzales' deputy attorney general, Flanigan was asked whether waterboarding, mock executions, physical beatings and painful stress positions were off-limits. "[It] depends on the facts and circumstances... ." He went on: "'Inhumane' can't be coherently defined."    

BYU law school graduate Jay S. Bybee was the assistant attorney general directing the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel. At the instigation of Addington and Yoo, Bybee issued official legal opinions that redefined the crime of torture to make it all but impossible to commit. Barbarity was not torture unless it created pain equal to death or organ failure. A newly-declassified Bybee memorandum lists 10 previously top-secret interrogation techniques approved for use by the CIA, including waterboarding.

Incredibly, Bybee seems to have been unaware that the United States had prosecuted waterboarding as a war crime after World War II. In 2003, before his role in authorizing U.S. torture was known, Bybee was given a lifetime judicial appointment on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Had his role in torture been known, it is unlikely he would have been confirmed.

Two devout Mormons also engineered the more grisly wet work. Because the CIA lacked personnel in 2001 with interrogation expertise, the agency turned to two psychologists, James E. Mitchell and John B. Jessen, who had worked with the Air Force's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape programs. Neither had an intelligence or interrogation background or had experience with Muslim terrorists, but, according to the FBI, they had experience in designing, testing, implementing and monitoring torture techniques that were illegal in the United States and elsewhere in the civilized world.

These two were responsible for "reverse-engineering" the SERE program -- which was intended to toughen American pilots against torture (and the false confessions it had produced in the Korean War) -- and they built the CIA's surreal secret interrogation program around the same brutal coercion that had successfully forced American POWs to lie to their North Korean and Chinese captors. In other words, they assumed that the very brutality which had forced American soldiers to lie would magically force a Muslim terrorist to tell the truth, even if he had to be waterboarded 183 times.

Mitchell advised that suspects must be treated like dogs in a cage. "It's like an experiment, when you apply electric shocks to a caged dog, after a while, he's so diminished, he can't resist." The Mitchell/Jessen methodology became the basis for prisoner treatment at Guantanamo, Bagram, CIA secret prisons and Abu Ghraib. It involved isolation, sensory deprivation, disorientation, nudity, sexual humiliation, waterboarding, painful stress positions, withholding food and medical treatment, extended sleep deprivation and subjection to temperature extremes. These were used singly and, more commonly, in combination with one another.

Retired Air Force Col. Steve Kleinman, a former SERE instructor and interrogator, says of Mitchell and Jessen: "I think they have caused more harm to American national security than they'll ever understand."

But it must have been okay because the victims weren't Christians, right?

Condescending Rice: “No Dear, You’re Wrong”

Condi Rice is at it again, sending false alarms to US, exaggerating the threat posed by al Qaeda, warning it posed a greater threat to the US than Nazi Germany.  In a YouTube moment, Condescending Rice belittled a Stanford student who dared questioned the Bush administration’s war crimes, “you should do your homework.” If only Miss Mushroom Cloud had followed her own advice….

 Q:  Even in World War II, as we faced Nazi Germany -- probably the greatest threat that America has ever faced -- even then..

 RICE:  With all due respect, Nazi Germany never attacked the homeland of the United States.

 Q:  No, but they bombed our allies..

RICE:. Just a second. Three thousand Americans died in the Twin Towers  and the Pentagon.

 Q:  500,000 died in World War II, and yet we did not torture the prisoners of war.

 Twisting the facts of the Bush War Crimes into a pretzel that could have choked George W. Bush or a Monty Python, Miss Mushroom responded:

RICE:  And we didn't torture anybody here either. Alright?

Q:  We tortured them in Guantanamo Bay.

RICE:  No, no dear, you're wrong. Alright. You're wrong. We did not torture anyone. And Guantanamo Bay , by the way, was considered a model "medium security prison" by representatives of the Organization of Security and Cooperation who went there to see it. Did you know that?

Q:    Were they present for the interrogations?

 RICE:  No. Did you know that the Organization -- just answer me -- did you know that the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe said Guantanamo was a model medium security prison?

Q: How are we supposed to continue promoting America as this guiding light of democracy and how are we supposed to win hearts and minds in the world as long as we continue with these actions?

RICE:  Well, first of all, you do what's right. That's the most important thing -- that you make a judgment of what's right. 

So if WE decide it is right, then it IS right?  If we can grade our own answers as RIGHT,  how would Miss Mushroom Cloud grade her performance other than perfect?  Well, let US do some homework:

ITEM:   In Sept. 2002, when Rice marketed the Bush war policy by pushing her fantasy world that the warning on Iraqi nuclear weapons might well be a “mushroom cloud” over America, her president was highly vulnerable on charges of having done nothing about terrorism warnings before 9/11, Rice claimed the Clinton administration left behind no “comprehensive strategy to fight al-Qaida.”  

 Grade:  “F” as in flatly false. The “comprehensive” strategy document was declassified in April 2004 along with its cover memorandum, dated exactly four days after Bush became president and Rice the national security adviser (both documents have been posted on the website of the National Security Archive). Contrary to Rice’s assertion that “big pieces were missing, like an approach to Pakistan” the section in the strategy proposal on Pakistan is three pages long.

ITEM:  Rice has asserted that she was focused on the threat posed by AQ, which now she says was greater than that posed by Nazi Germany.

Grade:  “F” as is fantasy.  It is a matter of record that the post of White House counter-terrorism czar, then occupied by Richard Clarke, was downgraded by excluding this official from the National Security Council Deputies Committee, contrary to Rice’s assertion that Clarke was not demoted. Even the subject of terrorism was demoted—from the NSC Principals Committee to that of the deputies. It was Clarke who pressed for a strategic choice, and Rice who kicked the can down the road. She consigned this initiative to the bureaucratic wonderland of policy reviews, and further watered it down by dividing proposals among different reviews, no longer comprehensive in any meaningful sense.

ITEM:  Fighting terrorism was a priority for the Bush Administration.

Grade:  “F” as in “full of it”.   Attorney General John Ashcroft zeroed out proposals to up the FBI’s counter-terrorism budget. The priorities were clearly not terrorism.  In State of Denial, journalist Bob Woodward reveals that on July 10, 2001, Tenet showed the urgency, bringing his senior counter-terrorism official to the White House to brief Rice. In his 9/11 Commission testimony Tenet recounted that he had warned Rice of signs of a near-term al-Qaida effort at multiple simultaneous attacks against U.S. targets, facilities, or interests, intended to inflict mass casualties. According to Woodward, Tenet felt he had been brushed off at the July 10 meeting, but executed a Rice instruction to take the same information to Rumsfeld and Ashcroft. Asked for her reaction, Rice spoke of a “supposed” briefing until records put its occurrence beyond dispute. Rice said it is “incomprehensible” that she would have ignored.

Ah, now we are getting somewhere.   Rice’s failure to appreciate the impending danger demonstrated she had not done her homework on AQ was because she was focusing on her major assignment - preparing the country for war in Iraq. 
 
Condescending Rice’s refusal to come clean with the Stanford student is consistent with her past performance, a readiness to distort the facts, a trait that is unacceptable for a Stanford  student and hardly desirable in a secretary of state.  What is incomprehensible is that Stanford  can believe that having Rice as its face to the world will inspire confidence in the institution.

While Rice may disagree with President Obama that enhanced interrogation she approved was torture, more Stanford students should tell their misinformed teacher, "No dear, you're wrong."