~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

hmmm

http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle.jhtml?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyID=3199615§ion=news

Pizza products without tomato sauce, cheese or bread crust can still be sold as pizza under new government regulations, the U.S. Agriculture Department says... The USDA said it would also significantly reduce the minimum meat requirements in products labelled "pizza with meat." Products now only have to contain two percent cooked meat or three percent raw, instead of the previously required 12 percent cooked or 15 percent raw.

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hmmmmm

http://www.unknownnews.net/0806-1.html

ATLANTIC CITY — Last year's bookbags now are obsolete at Atlantic City High School. The school — labeled a "persistently dangerous" school this week under federal law — has a new policy: All backpacks, bookbags and tote bags will have to be made of transparent plastic. New bags will be available at the school store.

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HMMMMMMMMMMMMM

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0332/lee.php

The Bush administration is actively seeking to gag or punish social service organizations that challenge the party line on such matters as health care for poor children and HIV prevention, according to a new report... Unpleasant consequences... include audits of federal-funds spending and reviews of content, such as workshop literature. "If you disagree with the administration on ideological grounds, they're going to come down with a hammer. This has huge implications for the free flow of speech in this country," says Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, itself a nonprofit, which released the report last week as part of its 20-year-old mission to monitor White House budget and spending decisions.

...Virtually every imaginable social cause—civil liberties, reproductive rights, affirmative action, accessible health care—relies on a lifeline of nonprofit advocates, fundraisers, and service providers. Since nonprofits operate on a tax-exempt basis and often receive government funding, they have always been subject to federal oversight and are forbidden from engaging in electoral politics. Under George W. Bush, however, oversight has quietly morphed into ideologically motivated intimidation and censorship, according to OMB Watch's review of some dozen specific conflicts.

...In perhaps the clearest example of the report's claims of squashed dissent, Bush's Health and Human Services Department (HHS) threatened advocates of the nonprofit Head Start—including parents and teachers of poor children—with monetary sanctions or even prosecution for speaking out against a presidential proposal.

...[the dept of health and human services a.k.a.] HHS began its apparent policing of protest a year earlier, when it audited over a dozen AIDS service organizations after they publicly shamed the administration at a July 2002 AIDS conference in Barcelona... Conservative members of Congress immediately demanded that HHS review the nonprofits' spending of federal funds in Spain. HHS complied.

...OMB Watch also reveals that groups currently applying for federal grants to provide humanitarian relief in Iraq are required to advertise the U.S. government's generosity. Presumably, any criticism of Bush administration policy would be considered to send the opposite message.

...Most squarely in the administration's sights are groups that deal progressively and explicitly with sex education. One of them, Stop AIDS... has been audited twice by HHS and forced to submit program materials for review by the HHS subsidiary Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)... The government letter threatens a "disallowance or discontinuation of federal funding" if Stop AIDS continues to use language the administration believes promotes sexual activity... The fight with Washington has forced Stop AIDS to consult with legal counsel, something many resource-strapped nonprofits worry about having to do.

...Meanwhile, a December 2002 letter from the federal government to groups dealing with HIV prevention and sex education abroad admonished that "all operating units should ensure that USAID-funded programs and publications reflect appropriately the policies of the Bush administration."

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happiness pie

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/08/20030801-3.html

Office of the Press Secretary, August 1, 2003, Remarks by the President After Meeting With His Cabinet.

THE PRESIDENT: We had a good Cabinet meeting, talked about a lot of issues. Secretary of State and Defense brought us up to date about our desires to spread freedom and peace around the world. And the economics team of Secretary Snow, Evans and Chao, who have been traveling the country, reported back that there's a positive feeling in America about our economy.

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http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/04/1059849348168.html

The Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and his deputy, Richard Armitage, have indicated to the White House that they intend to step down, even if President George Bush is re-elected in 2005... Dr Rice and the Deputy Defence Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, were the leading candidates to replace Mr Powell, sources said.

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blame television: from the n.y.times transcript of bush's rose garden press conference

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/30/politics/30BUSH-TEXT.html?pagewanted=print&position=

"First of all, let me - quick history, recent history. The stock market started to decline in March of 2000. Then the first quarter of 2001 was a recession. And then we got attacked 9/11. And then corporate scandals started to bubble up to the surface, which created a lack of confidence in the system. And then we had the drumbeat to war. Remember on our TV screens, I'm not suggesting which network did this, but it said march to war every day from last summer till the spring. March to war, march to war, that's not a very conducive environment for people to take risks when they hear march to war all the time. And yet our economy is growing. ..... What I'm telling you is is that we had a lot of obstacles to overcome." -bush

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blame television some more

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/08/20030801-3.html

Office of the Press Secretary, August 1, 2003. Remarks by the President After Meeting With His Cabinet

"...As the economy kind of got going again, the enemy attacked us. September the 11th had a significant impact on our economy. And then we discovered some of our corporate CEOs forgot to tell the truth, and that affected confidence. And then as you may remember, Tom, we had the steady drumbeat to war. As I mentioned in my press conference the other day, on our TV screens there was a -- on some TV screens -- there was a constant reminder for the American people, "march to war." War is not a very pleasant subject in people's minds, it's not conducive for the investment of capital." -bush

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q.e.d.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/947146.asp?0cv=KB20

Aug. 1 — Over a catfish sandwich and a Coke in the Raleigh-Durham airport, I learned how the United States ends a war. Above the bar, a long array of televisions, maybe eight or ten of them, broadcast silent sports-network images of tennis matches and stock car races. Only one was tuned to a closed-caption news channel.

THIS WAS 10 weeks ago, in the middle of May, and it was obvious to any of us who’d covered Iraq that more than 100,000 Americans were still there, still in harm’s way. Serious harm. So why, I asked the woman tending bar, was nobody watching? “Well,” she said, in one of those charming drawls where almost every sentence sounds like a question, “during the war, all these TVs were on news all the time? And you know, people would watch it and just kind of feel depressed, like, and down? And then President Bush landed on that aircraft carrier?” She waited for me to nod, like I might not have seen it. I did. “And the very next day, the boss called up and said we could put all these TVs back on ESPN.”

The war had ended, in other words, because on May 1 President George W. Bush made a thoroughly choreographed display of announcing it was over. And the American people believed him because they wanted to.

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http://davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr40.html

There have been many attempts made, by both the legal and mental health communities, to define "insanity." But it seems to me that that term can be most succinctly defined as: "a disconnection from reality." ...Most of the people that I know are, without question, insane. Most of my relatives are insane. Most of my friends are insane. Most of the people that I work with are insane. Damn near everyone in the country is at least mildly insane. A very large majority are moderately to severely insane. And according to polls, at least a third are stark raving mad.

...I'm talking about people who believe that 'weapons of mass destruction' have been uncovered in Iraq.

...The functionally insane also believe that Iraqis were among the hijackers who allegedly commandeered the planes on September 11, 2001.

...One of the more bizarre ideas that seems to have recently taken root in the minds of the functionally insane is that the question of whether the Bush administration lied to the American people during the selling of the Iraq war hinges entirely on a mere 16 words inserted into the State of the Union Address.

...Another strange belief that has taken hold is that if Team Bush... suddenly announces that a band of its great and noble warriors have slain the sons of the evil one, then it must be true.

About the only thing that seems to be required for a fallacious fact to take root in the minds of the functionally insane is for a known liar in Washington and/or the media to have authoritatively uttered it. It matters not if the fallacious fact is later retracted and/or completely discredited. It matters not if the fallacious fact represents a brazen rewriting of history just weeks after that history was recorded. And it matters not if belief in the fallacious fact requires belief in a whole host of other fallacious facts that are internally inconsistent and completely lacking in logic.

...The walls, meanwhile, get a little bit higher. Can you see them yet?

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another brick.

http://www.unknownnews.net/0803-1.html

Washington has admitted the existence of a list, possibly hundreds or even thousands of names long, of people it deems worthy of special scrutiny at airports. The list had been kept secret until its disclosure last week by the new US agency in charge of aviation safety, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). And it is entirely separate from the relatively well-publicised "no-fly" list, which covers about 1,000 people believed to have criminal or terrorist ties that could endanger the safety of their fellow passengers.

The strong suspicion of such groups as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is suing the government to try to learn more, is that the second list has been used to target political activists who challenge the government in entirely legal ways... The ACLU says a list kept by security personnel at Oakland airport ran to 88 pages. [and so on.]

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the horse's mouth.

http://www.counterpunch.com/gagnon08042003.html

August 4, 2003 - By BRUCE GAGNON: On July 28 I was returning home after two days of speaking in Louisville, Kentucky. While in the Louisville airport, after having just received my boarding pass, I got a call on my cell phone from a reporter with the Columbus Post-Dispatch (Ohio) who wanted my comments about the Global Network's position on NASA's "Project Prometheus"--the nuclear rocket to Mars.

The interview lasted 10 minutes... Immediately after finishing the interview I bought a newspaper and headed for the airport security screening line and my boarding gate. Just as I entered the line two policemen asked if I was Bruce Gagnon. They then directed me to follow them to the other end of the airport and would only say that I had been overhead making dangerous statements. Amazingly they knew my name and had a copy of my boarding pass. All of this within 12 minutes after checking in at the airport.

As we walked to their office I racked my brain to understand what I might have said and to whom! Once inside the police inner sanctum I was questioned by three cops who wanted by name, my ID, my reason for being in Louisville, where I had spoken, to whom had I spoken. Then they informed me that I had been overheard talking about bombs and contamination. They searched my bag and one officer found my copy of the constitution and asked if I always carried it with me. I told him "Yes, you never know when you might need it."

It took me a moment to realize that someone must have heard my statements to the reporter about the nuclear rocket. So I explained the situation to them. Luckily I had remembered the name of the reporter and I gave that to them as well. One of the cops then called information and got the number for the Columbus newspaper and called the reporter. He verified that I had just spoken to him about bombs and contamination and suggested they let me go... They then ran a national ID check on me to make sure I was not on some terrorist wanted list. Then they let me go and I headed for my gate.

I still made my plane but as I was boarding one of the cops stood by the door at the gate to make sure I got on the plane. (...Bruce K. Gagnon is coordinator of Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space based in Brunswick, ME.)

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another horse.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/hardman/hardman13.html

David Socha, a 17-year-old on his way to Hawaii from Paxton, Massachusetts, was arrested last week in Boston and charged with a felony for having a note in his gym bag which read: "[Expletive] you. Stay the [expletive] out of my bag you [expletive] sucker. Have you found a [expletive] bomb yet? No, just clothes. Am I right? Yea, so [expletive] you."

According to WCVB, he was charged with "making a terrorist threat."

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another brick.

http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20030731/BUSINESS03/107310108

Employers who allow swearing and sexual references in the workplace could find themselves in, well, "blankety-blank" trouble with the federal government. Policies prohibiting foul language and swearing were recommended by leaders of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s district office in Cleveland who spoke to 150 human resources managers, union representatives, and legal aid workers at a seminar in downtown Toledo yesterday. "If you can’t find words more expressive, you might not have the intellect to work here" is the phrase district director Michael Fetzer said he has used with violators.

...Mr. Fetzer said the best way for managers to solve many problems is to take the whole department into a short training session, even though only one person in the group has violated standards. "It reminds everyone that management cares about the issue," he said.

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nothing, no nothing, stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

http://www.counterpunch.com/plummer08042003.html

Next week, a special commission created by President Bush will present him with a final report on "articulating a proposed vision for the future of the United States Postal Service." That vision includes the idea that no person should be able to mail a letter without the USPS and their pals in Homeland Security knowing about it.

According to PostalWatch, the Final Report of the President's Commission on the United States Postal Service will include the Final Recommendations of a number of Subcommittees, including this gem from the Technology Challenges and Opportunities Subcommittee: "The Subcommittee believes that a more secure system could be built using sender identified mail. The Subcommittee recommends that the Postal Service, in coordination with the Department of Homeland Security, explore the use of sender identification for every piece of mail, commercial and retail."

...This special Presidential Commission is pushing for the legal abolishment of the right to correspond anonymously. Yet this nation's very Constitution was founded on anonymous correspondence -- the Federalist Papers, which swayed public opinion in favor of its ratification, were authored under the pseudonym "Publius" by John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison.

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just because you're paranoid...

http://www.nbc4.tv/news/2382198/detail.html

LOS ANGELES -- A federal judge sentenced a 20-year-old man on Monday to a year in prison for creating an anarchist Web site with links to sites on how to build bombs... [Sherman] Austin must also pay a $2,000 fine and will be prohibited from using a computer without probation approval for three years. He also will be barred from associating with anyone from a group that "espouses physical force as a means of change," Wilson said. [note: this means you must do complete audits of every site you link to - or else - and complete background checks on anyone with whom you associate - or else. unless, of course you are an anti-abortion or white-supremacy activist --mrs.h]

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you may take a peek at sherman austin's web site - perhaps his skin color and hairstyle, combined with his clear artilculations, had something to do with... nah.

http://www.raisethefist.com/index1.html

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and now, back to our regularly-scheduled war

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/030811/usnews/11saudi.htm

Last week President Bush insisted that he would not declassify 27 pages of a congressional report on the 9/11 attacks that detail, sources say, Saudi government support for the hijackers. Two hours later, Prince Saud Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, urged the president to release the material. The prince told reporters: "We do not seek, nor do we need, to be shielded." ..."They would not be asking for this to be released if they knew what was in it," says an official who has read the Saudi section. "There is so much more stuff about Saudi government involvement, it would blow people's minds."

Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, a Democratic presidential candidate who co-chaired the congressional inquiry, is blunt... Without referring to the Saudis by name, he told U.S. News [that]... "scores" of contacts occurred between 9/11 hijackers and operatives of "foreign" officials. "They were not rogue agents," he says, but "were being directed by persons of significant responsibility within the government."

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http://www.bayarea.com/mld/cctimes/news/6453764.htm

Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi said the U.S.-led war on terror has strengthened al-Qaida because Muslims have perceived the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as aggression against Islam and attempts to spread American influence.

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http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20030804-121425-6485r.htm

Officials at Walter Reed Army Medical Center are referring some outpatients to nearby hotels because casualties from operations in Afghanistan and Iraq have overloaded the hospital's convalescence facility... Walter Reed spokesman Jim Stueve... said Walter Reed is referring about 20 patients or their relatives to hotels each day... The Army hospital and its convalescence facility, Mologne House, are at maximum occupancy capacity, with 96 percent of their outpatient beds filled with war wounded... "We haven't been average here for well over a year. We've been really busy. They've been rolling in here real regular," Mr. Stueve said... President Bush declared an end to major combat in Iraq on May 1.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1011692,00.html

US military casualties from the occupation of Iraq have been more than twice the number most Americans have been led to believe because of an extraordinarily high number of accidents, suicides and other non-combat deaths in the ranks that have gone largely unreported in the media. Since May 1, when President George Bush declared the end of major combat operations, 52 American soldiers have been killed by hostile fire, according to Pentagon figures quoted in almost all the war coverage. But the total number of US deaths from all causes is much higher: 112. The other unreported cost of the war for the US is the number of American wounded, 827 since Operation Iraqi Freedom began. Unofficial figures are in the thousands. About half have been injured since the president's triumphant appearance on board the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln at the beginning of May. Many of the wounded have lost limbs. The figures are politically sensitive.

...According to a Gallup poll, 63% of Americans still think Iraq was worth going to war over, but a quarter want the troops out now, and another third want a withdrawal if the casualty figures continue to mount... The erosion of public confidence is likely to continue... Military observers say it is unusual, even in a "low-intensity" guerrilla war such as the situation seen in Iraq, for non-combat deaths to outnumber combat casualties.

...Wounded American soldiers continue to be flown back to the US at a relentless rate, in twice-weekly transport flights to Andrews air force base near Washington. Hospital staff are working 70- or 80-hour weeks, and the Walter Reed army hospital in Washington is so full that it has taken over beds normally reserved for cancer patients to handle the influx, according to a report on CBS television. Meanwhile, at the nearby national naval medical centre in Bethesda, new marine injuries are delivered almost daily by a medical plane known as the Nightingale... According to Lieutenant-Colonel Allen DeLane, who is in charge of the airlift of the wounded into Andrews air base... "Since the war has started, I can't give you an exact number because that's classified information, but I can say to you over 4,000 have stayed here at Andrews, and that number doubles when you count the people that come here to Andrews and then we send them to other places like Walter Reed and Bethesda, which are in this area also," Col DeLane told National Public Radio.

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http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/03/1059849280373.html

The United States Army has dispatched a team of medical experts to Iraq to investigate a serious outbreak of pneumonia among US troops, with two dead and more than 100 ill. Lieutenant-General James Peake, the army's surgeon general, has sent a team of six to Iraq and two more doctors to Landstuhl Regional Medical Centre in Germany, where some of the troops were treated after being flown from Iraq, officials said on Friday. Army Medical Command spokeswoman Lyn Kukral said: "It is pneumonia. The question is: what is the cause? You've got a healthy population and a young population [of US troops], and you have two soldiers who have died, and that's a concern."

...The troops who have come down with pneumonia were geographically dispersed and came from different military units. The cases also occurred periodically over five months rather than all at once.

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http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030805-063415-2857r

WASHINGTON, Aug. 6 (UPI) -- The Army will consider whether the anthrax or other vaccine could be causing a cluster of pneumonia cases among soldiers in Iraq and southwestern Asia, an official said Wednesday.

...Last year's anthrax vaccine study, printed in the May 2002 issue of Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety, found that the vaccine was the "possible or probable" cause of pneumonia among two soldiers, according to George Washington's Sever. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services convened the group, called the Anthrax Vaccine Expert Committee, which studied 602 reports of possible reactions to the vaccine among nearly 400,000 troops who received it... In addition to identifying pneumonia and flu-like symptoms among troops who received the vaccine, the group also looked at four other cases of potentially serious reactions, including severe back pain and two soldiers who had sudden difficulty breathing in a possible allergic reaction to the vaccine.

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http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/news/20030803p2a00m0dm015000c.html

[Japanese] psychiatrists are likely to accompany Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) units to Iraq to help troops deal with combat stress in the event of Japan dispatching its forces to support the postwar reconstruction of the country, the Mainichi has learnt... Defense Agency sources said providing mental support is essential because GSDF members are likely to suffer great mental stress seeing people killed in action. In the worst-case scenario, this could result in a reign of confusion throughout the ranks. Troops operating in locations where security is poor may also suffer mentally if required to stay there long term.

...According to the Pentagon, combat stress is a "natural result" of soldiers being faced with danger in tough conditions. American units are accompanied by teams of psychiatrists, psychotherapists and social workers and are able to receive care in the frontline... A study in Canada showed that about 10 percent of Canadian troops that have participated in the country's peacekeeping operations developed post-traumatic stress disorders.

...Tokyo has insisted that GSDF troops will not be deployed in a combat zone but the U.S. forces occupying Iraq have recently announced that it is impossible to draw a line between combat zones and non-combat zones in the country.

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capture the flag in iraq

6:52 PM 8/4/2003http://www.prolog.net/webnews/wed/cm/Qiraq-us-saddam-sons.Rvkq_Da3.html

AWJA, Iraq, Aug 3 (AFP) - Tempers flared as the two Iraqi flags covering the earthen graves of Saddam Hussein's slain sons were stolen in the night under the noses of US soldiers guarding the cemetery in the fallen dictator's birthplace.

"Nobody here would have done such thing. It is the Americans who have done that," said Walid Jassem, the local grocer in a village where most people claim allegiance to Saddam's family and were showered with luxury during his 24 years in power. The idea of US soldiers here in this bastion of the old regime burned the hearts of some. The fact they guarded the graves of Saddam's male heirs was positively blasphemous. "I have not gone there and will not go there as long as the soldiers are there," Jassem fumed.

The hard brown dirt where the bodies lay was now marked by bricks, as the Americans controlled traffic to the cemetery where the bodies had been laid to rest in a low-key ceremony Saturday that US troops barred onlookers from joining. US soldiers searched cars Sunday as they left the grounds and said they had seen no one remove the Iraqi flags.

...The corpses of Uday and Qusay, and the latter's 14-year-old son Mustafa, were transported by US helicopter to Tikrit, 175 kilometers (110 miles) north of Baghdad, by helicopter Saturday morning and then transferred to Awja... The leading cleric in neighboring Tikrit cancelled a memorial service for Uday and Qusay under pressure from the chief of Saddam's tribe. The decision came after Sheikh Yehya Ibrahim al-Attawi met one of the leaders of Saddam's tribe on Sunday. "Mahmud al-Nada told me this morning that US forces do not want any gathering. There will be no memorial service" for Uday and Qusay, Attawi said.

A memorial service for Monday had been advertised all over Tikrit, but Saddam's family backed down, in what may have been a condition imposed by the Americans for Uday, Qusay and Mustafa, to be buried Saturday in Awja. Attawi hammered the Americans for tightly controlling the mourning of Uday and Qusay that the coalition fears could become a rallying point for Saddam supporters. "They have promised to bring us democracy but this is no democracy. They are afraid of any gathering. They suspect everyone. They behave very badly. This is our country," the cleric said.

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http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/nation/6448908.htm

A new Pentagon recruiting ad campaign... aims to persuade more parents to see the military as a winning option for their children. Parents matter because, as their children's' ultimate guidance counselors, they usually can make or break the deals that recruiters want their offspring to sign. Most parents today, however, view military service as a last resort, according to a 2002 Pentagon survey, far behind options such as continuing school and finding a job. The exceptions tend to be parents... who've served in uniform themselves, and their numbers are shrinking in these days of a downsized, all-volunteer military.

Growing parental bias, or even just ignorance of the military, threatens to compound the military's -- and especially the Army's -- difficulties... Services stretched thin by duty in Iraq and Afghanistan could soon be stretched even thinner. Of the Army's 491,000 soldiers, some 368,000 are now deployed in 120 foreign nations... "It is important that we educate American adults about the values and competencies that can be gained through service," [i.e., their children's military service -mrs.h] said David Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, who announced the new $10,000,000.00 recruiting campaign.

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http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2003-08-03-ashcroft_x.htm

Following the release of a new tape said to be from al-Qaeda, Attorney General John Ashcroft warned Sunday of a "very real potential" for attack by Osama bin Laden's terrorism network... Ashcroft told ABC's This Week that it "signals to us that the war is still under way, that al-Qaeda still has the same intentions toward the United States that it did when it unleashed its savage attack" on Sept. 11.

...The attorney general also defended the Patriot Act [currently undergoing congressional revision] as an important terrorism-fighting tool.

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whose press? condi's press.

http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh080403.shtml

Condi Rice is a press corps icon. According to the White House, Rice failed to read the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, and therefore didn’t know about State’s objections to uranium-from-Africa. She also didn’t know the CIA’s thoughts on this matter, we are told. But when she appeared on last Wednesday’s NewsHour, [host] Gwen Ifill didn’t mention these awkward matters. This morning we learn that Rice is next in line to replace Colin Powell at State.

Because Rice is a press corps icon, there is no attempt—repeat that, none—to hold her work to normal standards... Let’s review a previous howler which the press almost wholly ignored. On May 15, 2002, CBS News reported that President Bush had been warned about possible al Qaeda hijackings on August 6, 2001. The Washington Post reported the story on May 16... On May 16, Rice held a press briefing; she insisted that no one could have envisioned the events of September 11. “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people…would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile,” Rice said.

Rice’s remark was surpassingly odd. No one could have predicted use of a hijacked plane as a missile? In fact, ever since September 11, news reports had mentioned earlier warnings about that very sort of activity... Rice couldn’t imagine planes used as missiles? Rice hadn’t read last October’s NIE? Wouldn’t you think that actual journalists would want to ask about such matters?

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condi condi

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/05/1060064192647.html

August 6 2003 - The United States will tell Israel that recently approved loan guarantees may be reduced in proportion to the amount Israel spends on a new security fence [a.k.a. 25-ft. concrete wall -mrs.h] and on Jewish settlements. The National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, is expected to tell senior officials in the Government of the Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, that the US will not provide resources that will help Israel implement a policy Washington opposes.

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condi condi condi. it should be a verb.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=325944&contrassID=2&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y

August 06, 2003 - U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice yesterday told Dov Weisglass, the prime minister's bureau chief, that deducting the cost of the separation fence [a.k.a.25-ft concrete wall -mrs.h] from U.S. loan guarantees is not on the agenda.

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http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=UUFGJD2WPYBUWCRBAEOCFFA?type=worldNews&storyID=3210572

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath told his Israeli counterpart in a meeting on Sunday that he would urge militant groups to extend a temporary truce if Israel implemented its part of a "road map" to peace. But his proposal was rejected by Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom who demanded the Palestinian Authority (PA) dismantle the "terror infrastructure" in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including the disarming of militant groups.

...Israel has expressed reservations about a three-month truce declared by Palestinian militant groups on June 29, saying it is no substitute to the dismantling of "terror groups." It accuses militants of using the lull of the cease-fire to rearm... Palestinian officials warn of a civil war if they crack down against militant groups and say the most effective way of halting violence in a 34-month-old uprising for independence is if Israel implements its part of the peace plan. It was not immediately clear whether militant groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad would agree to extend the cease-fire. They have threatened to call off the truce unless Israel releases all 6,000 Palestinian prisoners in its jails.

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http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=ourWorldNews&storyID=3209807

AL-DHAHRIYEH - Palestinians, especially in the arid southern West Bank, ration and improvise to offset water shortages aggravated by Israel's closure of their area, imposed after suicide bombings.Arduous, roundabout routes inflate delivery prices for people already impoverished by the closure that, along with worsening drought, has highlighted a long unequal contest to control water that is central to Middle Eastern conflict.

Israel takes 80 percent of the West Bank's mountain aquifer, one of two major renewable water sources in the territory it seized in a 1967 war. The other source, the Jordan River dividing the West Bank from Jordan, is dominated by Israel for nearby Jewish farms... "Occupation has played a big role in inequality. Israel should be concerned, for if Palestinians lack sufficient water to improve their lives, they will lack the will to uphold peace agreements," said Yehezkel Lein, water expert at B'tselem, an Israeli group monitoring human rights in occupied territories.

Israeli forces erected dirt-and-rock barricades at junctions between village roads and highways earlier in the 33-month-old uprising to prevent all but localized movement by Palestinians... An army spokesman said Palestinians could deliver water on through-roads with prior security clearance. Tanker drivers said they had been held up at checkpoints even with such passes. A B'tselem study found Palestinians' water consumption under the closure had fallen to half the minimum recommended by the World Health Organization.

In a 2002 study, PASSIA, an independent Palestinian think- tank, said Israeli settlement policy had been guided in part by the imperative of securing control over high-yield aquifers. It said a now overshadowed interim peace deal entrenched such dominance in 1995 by granting each Jewish settler a water quota six times over that for Palestinians in the West Bank. A new World Bank report says a security fence [a.k.a. a 25-foot concrete wall -mrs.h] Israel is building across Palestinian farmland atop the mountain aquifer may disrupt access to wells critical to olive and citrus groves.

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okay, so you don't believe me that the 'fence' is a wall. so here is a brief review.

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/nation/6444059.htm

QALQILYA, West Bank - You don't expect to hear American poetry paraphrased on the West Bank. But come to Qalqilya, where a network of Israeli fences, trenches, roadblocks, and a massive concrete wall pens in the local Palestinian population and you'll hear variations on a theme by Robert Frost. "Something there is that doesn't love a wall, / That wants it down," the poet wrote and residents say in a variety of ways.

From her white-stone porch entwined with roses on Qalqilya's western edge, Nuhaila Oweinat, 39, faces the 25-foot high, watchtower-studded wall that stands 100 yards from her home. "This wall will not prevent anything. The people who want to do anything [to attack Israel] will still get in," she said. "The only way [to peace] is reconciliation." But the wall, intended to stretch for 230 miles in rough vicinity of the Green Line separating Israel from the West Bank, is going up.

...Qalqilya, a town of 45,000 Palestinians on the border between the West Bank and Israel, has just one exit, through a heavily guarded Israeli military checkpoint where residents can wait for hours in the blazing sun and be turned back at a soldier's whim. Because traveling is so difficult, says Oweinat, she hasn't been outside her town since the start of the intifadah uprising almost three years ago.

...The fence is "very massive, and very expensive, and everything points to the possibility that in future negotiations Israel will say, 'Everything west of the fence should be annexed to Israel,' " says Yehezkel Lein, a researcher with the Israeli human-rights group B'Tselem.

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http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/05/1060064182996.html

August 6 2003 - Israeli troops have detained 47 foreign and Israeli activists, who tried to block the construction of a security barrier through Palestinian land in the West Bank. The pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement said it held a sit-in protest at Masha village near Qalqilya in the West Bank to prevent the barrier - part wall and part fence with razor wire - from cutting into a Palestinian family's property... The International Solidarity Movement said the group included 41 foreigners and six Israelis.

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end times madness. living dead on the loose in india.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/world/canada/6427505.htm

LUCKNOW, India - As far as the government is concerned, they're dead - and they're not at all happy about it. Calling themselves "the Living Dead," two dozen people held a last rites Hindu ceremony outside the State Assembly to draw attention to their plight. All say unscrupulous relatives fraudulently had them declared dead in order to steal their property. They've been struggling for years to get the government to rectify their official standing... The "living dead," having been cheated out of their property, cannot afford to pay bribes or even legitimate fees to get their cases dealt with. Lal Bihari, president of the Association of the Living Dead, estimated 35,000 people in Uttar Pradesh state have been wrongly certified as dead.

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how bout them living-dead voters? from new zealand

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00065.htm

According to election industry officials, electronic voting systems are absolutely secure, because they are protected by passwords and tamperproof audit logs. But the passwords can easily be bypassed, and in fact the audit logs can be altered. Worse, the votes can be changed without anyone knowing, even the County Election Supervisor who runs the election system.

...When I found that Diebold Election Systems had been storing 40,000 of its files on an open web site, an obscure site, never revealed to public interest groups, but generally known among election industry insiders, and available to any hacker with a laptop, I looked at the files. Having a so-called security-conscious voting machine manufacturer store sensitive files on an unprotected public web site, allowing anonymous access, was bad enough, but when I saw what was in the files my hair turned gray. Really. It did.

The contents of these files amounted to a virtual handbook for vote-tampering: They contained diagrams of remote communications setups, passwords, encryption keys, source code, user manuals, testing protocols, and simulators, as well as files loaded with votes and voting machine software. [see article for detailed analysis - if you like gray hair -mrs.h]

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supporting the troops

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,93469,00.html

NEW YORK — Online voting, once considered science fiction, will become a reality when the Department of Defense employs its Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment next year. The SERVE program will allow as many as 100,000 uniformed service members and overseas citizens to cast their ballots in the presidential primaries and general election... American servicemen and women will be able to vote from virtually anywhere in the world, provided they have access to a Windows-based computer with Internet capabilities.

The $22,000,000.00 project comes on the heels of the controversial 2000 presidential election, in which significant numbers of military voters' ballots were disqualified because they lacked postmarks.

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oh reeeealllly

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/04/politics/campaigns/04DEMS.html?pagewanted=print&position=

For the past two and a half years, after all, a fairly consistent 38 percent of respondents in The New York Times/CBS News Poll have said that Mr. Bush was not legitimately elected president.

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http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/breaking_news/6439280.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A close aide to Saddam Hussein says the Iraqi dictator did in fact get rid of his weapons of mass destruction but deliberately kept the world guessing about it an effort to divide the international community and stave off a U.S. invasion. The strategy, which turned out to be a serious miscalculation, was designed to make the Iraqi dictator look strong in the eyes of the Arab world, while countries such as France and Russia were wary of joining an American-led attack. At the same time, Saddam retained the technical know-how and brain power to restart the programs at any time. Both Pentagon officials and weapons experts are considering this guessing-game theory.

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http://www.prolog.net/webnews/wed/av/Qiraq-us-prison.RAg1_Da4.html

ABU GHARIB, Iraq, Aug 4 (AFP) - US-led coalition forces are currently detaining 5,000 Iraqi prisoners, General Janis Karpinski of the US army's military police said Monday. The 5,000 include several categories: prisoners of war, common criminals and security detainees... Security detainees include those having launched politically-motivated attacks against Iraqis or the coalition, said Colonel Mark Warren, the US military's top legal advocate in Iraq. Karpinski said 205 foreign nationals were currently being detained in the prisons, although she refused to give their nationalities.

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http://www.majority.com/news/prison.html

ABU GHRAIB, Iraq -- Once one of Iraq's notorious prisons where Saddam Hussein had political prisoners tortured and hanged, Abu Ghraib has become a makeshift jail at the heart of the U.S. military's struggle to give Iraqis a new sense of justice.

About 500 Iraqis are detained here and, like detainees in U.S. prison camps across Iraq, none has been allowed family visits. Only one out of 10 has been allowed to see a lawyer... The detainees are penned in tents behind rolls of razor wire. On some days, the camp roasts under a midday sun that produces temperatures as high as 130 degrees... "We had extraordinary concerns about using a facility with this kind of reputation," said Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who oversees the detention of prisoners in Iraq. "But it was the facility with the largest capacity capability, and we had no other options." The much larger problem, U.S. officials acknowledge, is ensuring Iraqi detainees are afforded basic legal rights.

...As of Monday, 5,000 people were being held by U.S.-led coalition forces. About 200 detainees are Iraqi prisoners of war... About a fourth of the prisoners held in Iraq are "security detainees," accused of committing politically motivated crimes... The rest [about 3,550 folks -mrs.h] are Iraqis charged with civil crimes ranging from curfew violations to weapons charges to murder. In many instances, those detainees have yet to be brought to an Iraqi court for a preliminary appearance, according to the human-rights group Amnesty International. In many other cases, civilians charged with crimes and held by the U.S. have been brought before an Iraqi judge who has set bail, but bail rulings have been ignored by U.S. forces.

...The U.S. also has not devised a way for Iraqi families to learn where relatives are in custody, said Said Boumedouha of Amnesty International... Iraqi families simply go from prison to prison, hoping to find their relatives.

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things = tough all over

http://www.prolog.net/webnews/wed/be/Qus-iraq-oil.Rqh2_Da5.html

The price of restoring Iraq's oil and gas industry is about $1,140,000,000.00 dollars and rising amid sabotage and looting, according to a detailed, official plan received Tuesday. The bulk of the costs -- $652,000,000.00 in total -- was related to two major contracts already put out to tender.

...The plan was drawn up by officials of the Iraqi Ministry of Oil, Coalition Provisional Authority, the US Army Corps of Engineers and contractor Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR).

...Last month, the US Army Corps of Engineers said it would issue one contract for rebuilding the fields in the north of Iraq and another for the south, each worth from $500,000.00 to a maximum of $500,000,000.00. The work is open to US and eligible foreign companies, replacing a controversial no-bid contract doled out to KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton -- a company run by US Vice President Dick Cheney from 1995 to 2000. The Army Corps of Engineers had come under fire over its granting of the Iraqi oil contract on March 8 to KBR without putting it out to tender.

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http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/133581_du04.html

The Pentagon and United Nations estimate that U.S. and British forces used 1,100 to 2,200 tons of armor-piercing shells made of depleted uranium during attacks in Iraq in March and April -- far more than the estimated 375 tons used in the 1991 Gulf War. U.S. tanks, Bradley fighting machines, A-10 attack jets and Apache helicopters routinely used depleted uranium rounds, but in the recent war, the ammunition was used in and near heavily populated areas, not just in the desert.

...Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., has introduced legislation requiring the U.S. government to conduct studies of DU's effects on health and the environment, and cleanup of DU contamination in the United States. The bill, co-sponsored by 23 other Democrats, remains in committee.

...In June, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer conducted tests at six sites from Basra to Baghdad, and found elevated levels of radiation at all of them. One destroyed tank near Baghdad was 1,500 times more radioactive than normal background radiation. Another was 1,400 times more radioactive than background.

To get additional evidence that DU was used on these tanks, the P-I used swabs of cloth to gather samples of residue from the blackened bullet holes on two tanks on the outskirts of Baghdad, and from the black ash on a tank in Kut. Bruce Busby, radiation safety officer for Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle analyzed the swabs. Although stressing that far more sophisticated equipment and tests are required to positively identify DU and precisely measure contamination levels, he was able to determine that the swabs had elevated levels of radioactive contamination, consistent with DU.

...The Pentagon has sent mixed signals about the effects of depleted uranium, saying there have been no known health problems associated with the munition. At the same time, the military acknowledges the hazards in an Army training manual, which requires that anyone who comes within 25 meters of any DU-contaminated equipment or terrain wear respiratory and skin protection, and says that "contamination will make food and water unsafe for consumption."

According to the Army Environmental Policy Institute, holding a spent DU round would expose a person to about 200 mrem per hour. That's a level of radiation equivalent to receiving eight chest X-rays per hour, said Tom Carpenter, director of the Government Accountability Project's Nuclear Oversight Campaign. That's also twice the annual radiation exposure limit allowed by the Washington state.

...The April issue of New Scientist magazine reported that Alexandra Miller, a radiobiologist with the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Bethesda, Md., has discovered the first direct evidence that radiation from DU can damage chromosomes.

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http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/military/20030805-9999_1n5bomb.html

American jets killed Iraqi troops with firebombs – similar to the controversial napalm used in the Vietnam War – in March and April as Marines battled toward Baghdad. Marine Corps fighter pilots and commanders who have returned from the war zone have confirmed dropping dozens of incendiary bombs near bridges over the Saddam Canal and the Tigris River. The explosions created massive fireballs.

"We napalmed both those (bridge) approaches," said Col. Randolph Alles in a recent interview. He commanded Marine Air Group 11, based at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station, during the war. "Unfortunately, there were people there because you could see them in the (cockpit) video.

...During the war, Pentagon spokesmen disputed reports that napalm was being used, saying the Pentagon's stockpile had been destroyed two years ago... What the Marines dropped, the spokesmen said yesterday, were "Mark 77 firebombs." They acknowledged those are incendiary devices with a function "remarkably similar" to napalm weapons. Rather than using gasoline and benzene as the fuel, the firebombs use kerosene-based jet fuel, which has a smaller concentration of benzene.

..."I used it routinely in Vietnam," said retired Marine Lt. Gen. Bernard Trainor, now a prominent defense analyst. "I have no moral compunction against using it. It's just another weapon." And, the distinctive fireball and smell have a psychological impact on troops, experts said. "The generals love napalm," said Alles, who has transferred to Washington. "It has a big psychological effect."

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http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/05/1455235

This week marks the 58th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, and 150 top U.S. officials and defense contractors will quietly meet in Omaha Nebraska to develop plans for the U.S. to expand its nuclear arsenal. The meeting was supposed to be top secret. The list of attendees hasn’t been released. Rumor has it that Vice President Dick Cheney will be in attendance. A man often compared to Dr. Strangelove, Keith Payne will be there. There are expected to be no advocates for nuclear disarmament. The agenda of the meeting is also unknown but observers say the attendees are expected to begin rewriting the country’s nuclear policy. Calls to resume nuclear testing are expected. So are calls to build a new generation of nukes.

[amy goodman of the radio program 'democracy now' interviewed] Greg Mello, director of the Los Alamos Study Group which monitors arms labs.

AMY GOODMAN: ...Can you talk about Keith Paine?

GREG MELLO: Keith Paine wrote an article in 1980, I think the title was, Why Not Victory. There he suggested that the United States might be able to absorb losses of 20 million dead in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union... He has been very active in think tank circles that are close to the Bush administration. The National Institute for Public Policy (NIP) - I think he is or was the president. I haven't kept up whether he is in government, in Mr. Rumsfeld's shop at this moment, or gone back to NIP. In any case our best information is he is going to be there... His coauthors of that 1980 article in are the Bush administration as well. People that were on the margins at one time are now very central in policy making .

AMY GOODMAN: So, what are your plans for this week, how did you discover that this meeting was taking place at Stratcom?

GREG MELLO: a document kind of fell into our hands. We can't take a lot of credit forit. It wasn't one of the documents that you struggle for a year to get. It just kind of fell out of the sky.

We would like to know who exactly is going to be there. We'd like to know what exactly is the agenda. We'd like to know what are the socalled prereads, the material circulated to the committee members, and what will be the outcome of this meeting, and how will it be applied in the decision-making process. All of this is hard to pry out, and I'm afraid that one of the things that makes it more difficult is that the Democratic opposition to these nuclear weapons policies is not firm enough. People are most of the Democrats are a little passive about this. Perhaps because they don't understand how dynamic this process is. And how many of the cards in the deck already are in the hands of those who would proceed with testing, with development of these weapons.

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http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?pid=870

One of the great illusions of the second nuclear age is that the small-scale proliferators out there in the Third World are unconnected to us... But the world is actually a single, bizarrely interlocked nuclear system. If the Koreans go nuclear, then the Japanese go nuclear, then the Chinese upgrade their arsenal, then the Indians respond, which leads the threatened Pakistanis to do more of the same, and then the knowledge -- and possibly weaponry or crucial material -- floating out there descends on some other would-be-nuclear power.

...Here's the strangest thing about these weapons: no matter how our weapons labs "modernize" and streamline and "miniaturize" them, they will still be quite useless as policy-makers... What they are good for is vengeance and nothing more. When you try, for instance, to imagine either Iran or Israel using such weapons as policy, or for that matter India and Pakistan, not to speak of the U.S. and Russia, you descend into madness. What policy is there, after all, post-obliteration. What could Pakistan's foreign policy be, after Karachi was gone? You tell me.

...To make matters more worse, every decade the materials for such weapons get cheaper and the knowledge of how to use them becomes more widespread... With this in mind I leave you with a fascinating piece by Oliver Burkeman from a June issue of the Guardian on two young men, hired by the US government in 1964 (we're talking four decades ago) to see if they could design an atomic bomb that would work from only what was publicly known at the time. And guess what, they succeeded. This "Nth country project" was designed to test the limits of proliferation. It's turned out, though they only had a hint of this then, that there are none.

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this is from the abovementioned burkeman article

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4697417,00.html

"The goal of the participants should be to design an explosive with a militarily significant yield," read the "operating rules", unearthed by the nuclear historian Dan Stober in a recent study of the project published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences. "A working context for the experiment might be that the participants have been asked to design a nuclear explosive which, if built in small numbers, would give a small nation a significant effect on their foreign relations."

...[In 1964, nuke-naive designers Dobson and Selden] faced one key decision, Dobson says: whether to design a gun-style bomb, like the one dropped on Hiroshima, that used a sawn-off howitzer to crash two pieces of fissile material together, or a more complex implosion bomb, like that dropped on Nagasaki. By now they were beginning to enjoy the challenge, so they went for the harder, more impressive option.

...Eventually, towards the end of 1966, two and a half years after they began, they were finished. "We produced a short document that described precisely, in engineering terms, what we proposed to build and what materials were involved," says Selden. "The whole works, in great detail, so that this thing could have been made by Joe's Machine Shop downtown."

Agonisingly, though, at the moment they believed they had triumphed, Dobson and Selden were kept in the dark about whether they had succeeded. Instead, for two weeks, the army put them on the lecture circuit... Finally, after a valedictory presentation at Livermore attended by a grumpy Edward Teller, they were pulled aside by a senior researcher, Jim Frank. "Jim said, 'I bet you guys want to know how it turned out,'" Dobson recalls. "We said yes. And he told us that if it had been constructed, it would have made a pretty impressive bang." How impressive, they wanted to know. "On the same order of magnitude as Hiroshima," Frank replied.

"It's kind of a depressing thing to know, that it could be that easy," Dobson says. "...It was one thing to work on a project which was hopefully going to illuminate the decision makers so they could see that weapons were easily designed... It was a rather different thing to go in and say, 'OK, for example, let's make a thermonuclear device that's only four inches in diameter.' That's an acceleration of the arms race, and I didn't really want to do that."

Einstein was famously said to have commented that if he had only known that his theories would lead to the development of the atom bomb, he would have been a locksmith. Dave Dobson, having designed one, got a job as a teacher.

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adventures in troop support

http://www.macon.com/mld/macon/news/6466129.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp

FORT CARSON, Colo. - People posing as Army casualty notification officers have contacted the families of five soldiers deployed to Iraq in an apparent fraud attempt. The suspects contacted the families by telephone and went to their doors in Army uniforms, said Maj. Joe Golden, rear detachment commander for the 3rd Brigade Combat Team. The suspects told the families they had important news about their loved ones but asked to first see documents such as Social Security cards and birth and marriage certificates. One of the impersonators asked for a check for $300. "This is not the way we do business," said Golden, adding the Army would never ask for that kind of information. None of the families fell for the ruse, said Capt. Bren Workman.

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the updates, the updates, the updates.

http://billmon.org/archives/000426.html

"[Al Gore] believes that only the right people ought to get tax relief. I don't think that's the role of the president -- to pick -- "you're right, and you're not right." I think if you're going to have tax relief, everybody ought to get it." - George W. Bush, Third Presidential Debate, October 17, 2000

"The tax code is unfair for people at the bottom end of the economic ladder. If you're a single mother making $22,000 a year today, and you're trying to raise two children, for every additional dollar you earn you pay a higher marginal rate on that dollar than someone making $200,000, and it's not right, so I want to do something about that." - George W. Bush, Third Presidential Debate, October 17, 2000

"A last-minute revision by House and Senate leaders in the tax bill that President Bush signed today will prevent millions of minimum-wage families from receiving the increased child credit that is in the measure, say Congressional officials and outside groups." - Tax Law Omits $400 Child Credit for Millions, New York Times, May 28, 2003

"Q: So why did the White House conferees agree to drop these 11.9 million children from this benefit? Mr. Fleischer: Well, there were many decisions that were made that represented compromises in order to get something done." - Ari Fleischer, [White House] Press Conference, May 29, 2003

"Soon the mail carrier will be delivering the checks that we promised to the American people." - George W. Bush, Speech At Philadelphia Financial Management Service Facility, July 24, 2003

"About 6.5 million families won't receive a check because they didn't pay enough in income taxes in 2002 to qualify for the tax credit." - Managing Your Money, USA Today, July 28, 2003

"On Friday, the House of Representatives recessed until September with the debate over those lower-income families still unresolved." - No Child Tax Credit for Working Poor, Hispanic Business, July 28, 2003