DCF is the Jebworld agency that led the fight to "save" Teri Schiavo, the brain-dead white woman, while actively trying to kill an abused, abandoned black girl. Read this horror story -- and get acquainted with your next president.
",0]);D(["ce"]);D(["ms","3730"]);//-->Jeb Bush Strikes Moral Tone at Georgia Convention.
DCF is the Jebworld agency that led the fight to "save" Teri Schiavo, the brain-dead white woman, while actively trying to kill an abused, abandoned black girl. Read this horror story -- and get acquainted with your next president.
According to the official FBI complaint (PDF), accused bomb-maker Faisal Shahzad received training in a camp in Waziristan, Pakistan.
Waziristan has been a long-held target of US forces, because it is close to the Afghan-Pakistan border and within reach of Kandahar and Kabul. A Taliban stronghold, it has been a prime target for drone strikes.
Over the past 18 months, Pakistan's army has conducted major offensives in six of the seven tribal agencies that border Afghanistan. But the seventh agency -- North Waziristan -- has been left alone. In part, that is because it is home to the Afghan Taliban networks of Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who have close relations with the military and the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI). It has also been left alone for good tactical if not poor strategic reasons -- the army has struck deals with the Pakistani Taliban in North Waziristan not to attack Pakistani forces. Until recently, these deals have held.
That paragraph right there just convinced this long-time ambivalent-about-the-Afghan-war-woman that we need to yank ourselves out of there sooner, rather than later.
There can be no progress in Afghanistan if the ISI are going to let the Pakistani Taliban thrive in Waziristan. The Pakistani Taliban are far more lethal than the Afghan Taliban, and are much more directly involved in the ongoing violence in that region. The only reason in my mind to even make an effort in Afghanistan was to deal with the Pakistani Taliban before they made a move to overthrow the current government and take control of Pakistan's nuclear weapons.
If the ISI is avoiding Waziristan to coddle the Pakistani Taliban, we're wasting our time and have been. If Rashid is to be believed, we're chasing after will o' the wisps there.
The area is the hub of so many terrorist groups and so much terrorist plotting and planning that neither the CIA nor the ISI seems to have much clue about what is going on there. A year ago, the Pakistan Taliban under Baitullah Mehsud ran a semi-disciplined terrorist movement from the tribal areas that bombed and killed Pakistanis with dastardly methodicalness. Mehsud was killed last year in a U.S. drone strike. What is left is anarchy, as groups and splinter groups and splinters of splinters operate from North Waziristan with no overall control by anyone, not even Jalaluddin Haqqani.
Gosh, sounds like an opportunity to capitalize on weakness. What exactly seems to be the problem here?
Punjabi extremist groups that were once trained by the military to fight Indian forces in Kashmir have splintered from their mother groups and operate out of North Waziristan in alliance with the Pashtun Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda. Inexplicably, one of these Punjabi groups last week executed Khalid Khawaja, a former ISI officer known for his sympathy for al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Who killed Khawaja and why is still a huge mystery. Was it a case of terror eating its own?
It looks to me like he was trying to make the effort look like home-grown terror, too. The fertilizer, gasoline, fireworks combo sounds a lot like Timothy McVeigh's flavor of destruction, doesn't it? Of course, it's easy enough to get the ingredients, too. The FBI complaint makes that chillingly clear.
The FBI complaint raises more questions for me than it answers. Did Shahzad become a US citizen in order to commit an act of terrorism? How did he present himself as a candidate for citizenship? Given that he traveled back to Pakistan after gaining citizenship for the sole purpose of training to blow the smithereens out of some US target which turned out to be Times Square, perhaps it isn't border-crossing people Arizona should fear as much as the ones who actually have their papers.
According to James McKiley Jr. of the Times, the Oklahoma legislature voted today to overturn vetoes of both laws. The first, a similar form of which was struck down by Oklahoma courts last year, requires "a doctor or technician to set up the monitor where the woman can see it and describe the heart, limbs and organs of the fetus. No exceptions are made for rape and incest victims." This is already invasive — Dionne Scott of the Center for Reproductive Rights calls it "the most extreme ultrasound requirement in the country."
The second law, however, is even more disturbing. Basically, it protects doctors from being sued if they decide not to tell patients that their fetus has birth defects. Writes McKinley, "The intent of the bill is to prevent parents from later suing doctors who withhold information to try to influence them against having an abortion."
Just take a minute to digest that. In Oklahoma, it's now legal to keep health information from patients in order to make their reproductive decisions for them. Of course, the doctors who perform prenatal tests won't be raising the children born to the prospective parents they treat. And yet those doctors can have a say — through subterfuge — in whether those parents choose to give birth or not. Now that this has passed, it's tempting to wonder what information Oklahoma doctors will get to lie about next. Perhaps they could tell teen girls that condoms spread AIDS. Or maybe just convince women that they're not actually pregnant until it's too late for an abortion. The possibilities are endless!
All in the deluded notion that somehow they are saving innocent potential babies, they are forcing actual living, breathing American citizens to submit without choice an invasive procedure before she can exercise her legal right to determine what she wants to do with her body. And no exception for rape or incest. It's victimizing those women all over again.
“It is extremely disappointing that the Oklahoma legislature insists on passing a law that is so clearly unconstitutional and so detrimental to women in the state,” said Stephanie Toti, staff attorney in the U.S. Legal Program of the Center for Reproductive Rights. “The state has already spent the last two years defending this abortion restriction and several others—without success. Another round in the courts won’t change our strong constitutional claims against the law, it will only waste more of Oklahoma taxpayers’ time and money.”
The Center argues that the ultrasound requirement profoundly intrudes upon a patient’s privacy and is the most extreme ultrasound law in the country. The law forces a woman to hear information that she may not want to hear and that may not be relevant to her medical care. It also dangerously discounts her abilities to make healthy decisions about her own life by forcing her to hear information when she's objected. In addition, the statute interferes with the doctor-patient relationship—potentially damaging it—by compelling doctors to deliver unwanted speech.
A new report from the New America Foundation states that one of every three people killed in the U.S.'s not-so-secret drone war in Pakistan is a civilian. The report also discloses that none of the strikes in 2009 targeted Bin Laden, and that they have had little impact on the Taliban's ability to plan operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan. To the contrary, the drone strikes serve as a powerful recruiting tool for the Taliban and al Qaeda.
Our study shows that the 114 reported drone strikes in northwest Pakistan from 2004 to the present have killed between 830 and 1,210 individuals, of whom around 550 to 850 were described as militants in reliable press accounts, about two-thirds of the total on average. Thus, the true civilian fatality rate since 2004 according to our analysis is approximately 32 percent.
The authors note that the rapidly escalating use of drones by the Obama Administration far exceeds the rate of use by the Bush Administration, with 2009's 51 strikes exceeding the total number of strikes under the entire Bush Administration.
Forget "is our children learning?", the only thing that's clear to me is that our government is NOT learning. We are creating yet another front of radicalized people who hate us and who have nothing left to lose to fight us.
Early last year, Senator John Ensign contacted a small circle of political and corporate supporters back home in Nevada — a casino designer, an airline executive, the head of a utility and several political consultants — seeking work for a close friend and top Washington aide, Douglas Hampton.
He’s a competent guy, and he’s looking to come back to Nevada. Do you know of anything?” one patron recalled Mr. Ensign asking.
The job pitch left out one salient fact: the senator was having an affair with Mr. Hampton’s wife, Cynthia, a campaign aide. The tumult that the liaison was causing both families prompted Mr. Ensign, a two-term Republican, to try to contain the damage and find a landing spot for Mr. Hampton.In the coming months, the senator arranged for Mr. Hampton to join a political consulting firm and lined up several donors as his lobbying clients, according to interviews, e-mail messages and other records. Mr. Ensign and his staff then repeatedly intervened on the companies’ behalf with federal agencies, often after urging from Mr. Hampton.
While the affair made national news in June, the role that Mr. Ensign played in assisting Mr. Hampton and helping his clients has not been previously disclosed. Several experts say those activities may have violated an ethics law that bars senior aides from lobbying the Senate for a year after leaving their posts...read on
Usually when a tragedy strikes like a cyclone or a hurricane, one would think that Laura Bush would flash the face of being compassionate to all the suffering people instead of an attack dog politician. Wouldn't there have been a better time to criticize the government?
When a country run by a despotic and isolationist regime is laid low by a massive natural disaster, the diplomatic thing to do is to respond with a show of compassion. Not kick 'em when they're down.
More than 22,000 people have died in the staggering devastation caused by this weekend's cyclone in Burma. But when First Lady Laura Bush made her first-ever visit to the White House briefing room yesterday, to talk about what's going on in that country, it was not to deliver a message of goodwill.
Rather than announce the launch of a massive relief effort that could take advantage of a rare diplomatic opening, the first lady instead tossed insults at Burma's leaders, blamed them for the high death toll, and lashed out at their decision to move forward with a constitutional referendum scheduled for this Saturday.
The traditionally issue-averse first lady's concerns about the Burmese junta and its abuses of human rights date back several years, and she's been particularly outspoken since last fall.
But why respond to a catastrophe with such hostility? The awkward timing, as it turns out, may have had something to do with an event entirely unrelated to the cyclone.
"I'm going to leave tomorrow for Crawford, for Jenna's wedding, and I wanted to be able to make a statement about Burma before I left," the first lady told reporters.
At least 1,000 residents of the central Somali town of Dusamareb have held a protest against a deadly US attack.
The missile strike on Thursday killed the leader of a group which the US links to al-Qaeda. At least 10 others died when a house in the town was hit.
One of the protest organisers said people feared further strikes by US forces on the town.[..]
In Dusamareb, people protested against Thursday's US strike, shouting slogans such as "Down with the Bush administration".
One of the organisers, Abdirasak Moalim Ahmed, told the Associated Press news agency: "Our town has been severely affected by the recent US attack and still we fear because planes continue to fly over our city."[..]
Al-Shabab, which the US says is linked with al-Qaeda, controls parts of central and southern Somalia.
The group says it is a purely Somali movement and denies involvement with al-Qaeda.
Is anyone else suspicious of the ease in which the Bush administration paints any and all Islamist movements under the umbrella of "al Qaeda"? Fool the American people once, shame on you. Try to fool the American people over and over and over....
Capital Eye: Desperate to get of the hook for their serial lawlessness, the telephone utility industry spent at least $31.4 million lobbying in 2007.
Needlenose: What if they built a "Rule of Law Complex" and nobody came?
BOT! The blood thinning drug Heparin has been recalled due to contamination. FDA inspectors last week found quality-control problems at the Chinese factory, a facility the agency had never before inspected - in violation of its own rules.
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