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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/26/politics/26CND-BUSH.html?ex=1062948669&ei=1&en=83400b4aa261788b

Aug. 26 - President Bush defended his policy on Iraq today, declaring that the United States had struck a blow against terrorism in overthrowing the government of Saddam Hussein. And Mr. Bush said the United States might carry out other pre-emptive strikes... "We've adopted a new strategy for a new kind of war,'' Mr. Bush said, to loud applause. "We will not wait for known enemies to strike us again. We will strike them in their camps or caves or wherever they hide, before they hit more of our cities and kill more of our citizens.''

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this is from the hospital at Ein el-Hilweh, the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, pop. about 44,133

http://www.antiwar.com/rep/dstar5.html

Lying in a hospital bed, 8-year-old Hanine Shehadeh looks with confused eyes at the dialysis machine that is connected to her body... Like 60 other Palestinians who suffer from kidney failure, Hanine has to undergo dialysis three times a week at the Hamshari Hospital’s dialysis department, or face certain death. The United States government closed down a US-based Arab association that was financed by an American citizen of Palestinian origin, Hussein Tabari. Tabari has been transferring $10,000 monthly to the dialysis section through the association since 1996.

The dialysis section at the hospital, which is part of the Palestinian Red Crescent, has stopped receiving its patients, aged between 7 and 83 years, starting Monday due to the lack of funds. The 61 patients cannot afford to pay for the dialysis sessions since the cost of each session ranges from $90 to $100 and each patient needs at least two sessions per week.

...Patients staged a sit-in outside the hospital Monday and called on international humanitarian organizations to come to their aid. Protesters raised banners reading: “Have diabetes and dialysis patients become terrorists in the eyes of President Bush?” and, “We say to the US administration that we are patients and we need treatment. We are not terrorists.”

...The chief of the dialysis department at the hospital, Ahmad Jandawi, urged all local and international humanitarian associations to swiftly act on behalf of the patients at the hospital, especially since the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) will not cover any of the department’s expenses, adding that any Lebanese patient can get a dialysis treatment for free at the expense of the Health Ministry. Jandawi said the department receives patients from all refugee camps in Lebanon, and that 600 dialysis sessions take place monthly at the hospital.

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http://www.newsinsider.org/seal/frankensteins_in_the_pentagon.html

Just a few weeks [ago]..., a DARPA (which stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)-sponsored conference was held in Washington, DC, that showcased the latest love child of the Bush Pentagon: military bioengineering... The title of the conference was: 'Harvesting Biology for Defense Technology,' while the subheading of the section on human 'bioengineering' was entitled, rather ominously, in light of the military's history, 'Enhancing Human Performance.'

...How does the Bush DARPA seek to 'enhance' human performance? In a kinder, gentler administration, the solution would be better training, better food, better pay, more leave time, and greater use of stress-reducing duty rotations. But this is not a kinder, gentler -or even rational- administration.

...Here are some examples of DARPA 'Human-enhancing' schemes:

The 'Brain Interface Program' is the most lavishly funded of nearly all the DARPA bioengineering efforts (the project has been given $24,000,000.00 for the next two years). It is aimed at developing ways to 'integrate' soldiers into machines -literally- by wiring them (remotely or directly) to their planes, tanks, or computers. An implantable brain chip is now under development in this sick program, which has already proudly demonstrated how rats can be turned into living robots through the manipulation of stimulus-response signals in the brain via electrodes. The Pentagon hopes to use these pathetic, 'modified' creatures (you should see the photos)... in mine clearance.

...Enhancement efforts at the Brain Interface Program are now progressing nicely. The chief Frankenstein of the project, one Alan S. Rudolph, now wants to be able to transmit images or sound directly into the brains of rats -and of course, later, soldiers...or prisoners of war.

...The 'Metabolic Dominance and Engineered Tissue' program is aimed at being able to artificially pump up soldier endurance and muscle strength.

The 'Persistence in Combat' program is a bizarre self-treatment scheme which would include pain-reducing and blood-stopping devices and techniques soldiers would apply to their own wounds -even moderately severe ones- thereby bypassing the need for a medic and enabling a soldier to keep fighting.

...The 'Continuous Assisted Perfomance' program hopes to find biotechnological ways (implants, metabolic manipulation, etc) to make it possible to push exhausted soldiers on without loss of performance for up to seven days without sleep.

... What is truly chilling is that these technologies, in essence, are seeking to turn our soldiers into human fighting machines, sacrificing their autonomy and, very likely, long-term quality of life for short term military savings -savings that will go right into the pockets of the government's beloved defense contractors.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50108-2003Aug26.html

"Black," or classified, programs requested in President Bush's 2004 defense budget are at the highest level since 1988, according to a report prepared by the independent Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. The center concluded that classified spending next fiscal year will reach about $23,200,000,000.00 of the Pentagon's total request for procurement and research funding. When adjusted for inflation, that is the largest dollar figure since the peak reached during President Ronald Reagan's defense buildup 16 years ago.

..."It's puzzling. It sets the mind to wondering where the money's going and what sort of politically controversial things the administration is doing because they're not telling anybody," said John E. Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org... Some black spending in the Pentagon budget is designated for code-named programs such as the Army's "Tractor Rose" and the Navy's "Retract Larch." But sources said some names may be accounting fictions that do not stand for actual programs. Other classified spending is accounted for under such bland headings as "special activities." Officials at the Pentagon and in Congress declined to comment on the center's report.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/26/opinion/26KRUG.html?pagewanted=print&position=

Last week a quietly scathing report by the inspector general of the Environmental Protection Agency confirmed what some have long suspected: in the aftermath of the World Trade Center's collapse, the agency systematically misled New Yorkers about the risks the resulting air pollution posed to their health. And it did so under pressure from the White House.

...A draft E.P.A. report released last December conceded that 9/11 had led to huge emissions of pollutants. In particular, releases of dioxins — which are carcinogens and can also damage the nervous system and cause birth defects — created "likely the highest ambient concentrations that have ever been reported," up to 1,500 times normal levels.

...Why was crucial information withheld from the public? The report mentions "the desire to reopen Wall Street and national security concerns."

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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=437483

Oxfam has removed its international workers from Iraq because of security problems, the charity said yesterday... The charity had been working towards providing the Iraqi people with clean water, mainly in southern Iraq. "It means our programme is suspended considerably. What we are calling for is to try to address the security situation as an urgent issue," [Brendan Cox, spokesman for the organisation] said.

"The security situation that we are experiencing, the Iraqi people are also having to live with. It's not just the western agencies who are finding it hard, it's also the Iraqis. It's insecurity from looting to criminal actions to the terrorist activities."

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http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vplar13d3411892aug13,0,5863692.story

Ordinarily, our boats patrolled Vietnam's rivers in pairs. But on this night we had several teams operating together as we launched the Pentagon's latest ingenious scheme for winning the war in the Mekong Delta.

The concept was simple enough: instead of surprising people with conventional gunfire during raids, the boats would first set the houses and buildings on fire with bows and arrows... Of course, the flimsy huts burned like matchbooks, leaving the families homeless and destitute. The next day, civil action teams of GIs would arrive bearing sheets of corrugated tin for new roofs and bags of rice to help the villagers get started again.

There would also be bars of Dial soap and clothing from church groups in the states. I remember a particular time when, with the fires still smoldering in the stultifying heat of a Delta morning, the teams distributed boxes of heavy sweaters. I'm sure the church folks back home felt good about their gifts. But we shared with the villagers a sense of absolute mystification at a policy that would burn down people's homes in the middle of the night, then give them tin and soap and sweaters to rebuild their lives.

Our government called it "pacification..." What I remember most from those nights are the faces - and the eyes... Mostly I remember the men, who, if they hadn't slipped away when the mess began, would be taken by the American troops for interrogation. Usually, several young soldiers would throw the man down while yelling the few Vietnamese phrases they knew... Eventually a "pacification" team member would come along and question the man in Vietnamese... He would be yelled at, cursed at, and sometimes spit on. Many times he would be kicked and punched.

...Then you would see it. In the eyes. The clean, white fury of men who have been reduced to abject humiliation and powerlessness in front of their families. The hatred in their eyes would be as pure as any you would ever see. It would last forever. You would never forget it.

I saw those eyes again the other day on the evening news. A group of young American soldiers, sent by their government to go house to house in a sweltering Baghdad suburb, had kicked in a door and rousted a family. The children were terrified, crying. The mother was furious, screaming. The eyes of the GIs were filled with confusion and shame at what they were being made to do by their government.

And the father, down on the ground in front of his house with a kid from Arkansas or Detroit or California standing on his neck, showed in his eyes the kind of white-hot hatred that will take a thousand years to extinguish... We did not win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people because we occupied their country while we burned down their homes and killed them and brutalized and abused them. We will not win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people by wrecking their towns and cities, destroying their homes, terrorizing their families and humiliating their men. Incredibly, we have again become an occupying army.

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http://www.counterpunch.org/ali08262003.html

August 26, 2003 - A Cororner's Viewpoint

Everyday, women mill about crying outside the courtyard of Baghdad's Institute of Forensic Medicine at Bab al Muadam Square... Coroners have to work overtime these days to keep up with the stream of bodies that comes through the everyday. Five coroners distributed along the five benches of the morgue are barely able to keep up. More than ten corpses lay around in the room as if they were in an abattoir, with chairs for students to study the place and the events taking place there. About 10 autopsies a day are completed here as partially decomposed bodies pile up on autopsy tables and along the office floors awaiting final approval for burial. From the outside, the smell of the room is enough to make one retch; inside the stench is simply overwhelming.

"Neither during the war nor during the previous two wars has this happened," said Dr. Qais Hassan Salman, a specialist in forensic medicine at the Institute. "The number of dead is absolutely unbelievable, and I'm just speaking of Baghdad alone. God knows what's happening elsewhere." ...This year's records mark more than a doubling in violent deaths. "The number of deaths that need proper autopsy now is absolutely unbelievable and I just speak of Baghdad," says Dr Salman, "God knows what is happening in other provinces."

...Dr. Faiq Ameen Bekir, director of the Institute, emphasized that the number of deaths has risen noticeably since the end of the war, especially cases of shooting deaths or explosions of unexploded cluster bombs. In the past, however, the number of gunshot death cases was far smaller compared with the large numbers now. In June of this year, 626 people died from bullet wounds; in July the number was 734. In contrast, there were only about 50 homicides per month in New York City in 2002.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44591-2003Aug25.html

...On the Bush '04 campaign's new Web site, there is a "photo gallery" feature for each of the president's policy priorities. In the "compassion" photo gallery, 16 ]of the 20 shots feature Bush [posing] with non-white faces (the other four are studies of Bush). By contrast, all 16 of the photos in the "environment" gallery display what appear to be white complexions.

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http://www.counterpunch.org/bigwood08232003.html

Scientists are expressing alarm about the relationship between the application of a common weed killer to food crops and the resultant proliferation of potentially toxic fungal moulds in the harvest. Monsanto's popular product Roundup, which contains a chemical called glyphosate, is alleged to increase the size of colonies of the fungus Fusarium, a genus of often very toxic moulds that occurs naturally in soils and occasionally invades crops, but usually held in check by other microbes. If true, these allegations not only call into question the world's number one weed killer, but they also jeopardize the world's acceptance of Monsanto's flagship line of genetically-engineered "Roundup Ready" crops.

...Dr. [Robert] Kremer's ongoing research deals with the effect of glyphosate-fusarium relationship on soybeans, not just regular soybeans, but "Roundup Ready" soybeans also. [Kremer is a soil scientist at the University of Missouri.] Monsanto has been producing a series of genetically-engineered "Roundup Ready" seed stock for various crops including, cotton, soybean, wheat and corn to be used exclusively with their successful glyphosate weedkiller Roundup. "Roundup Ready" crops are themselves unaffected by the Roundup weedkiller, which will kill all any competing plants such as weeds in the same area.

...Dr. Kremer found that in his "Roundup Ready" soybean experiments that "Glyphosate seems to stimulate Fusarium in the roots area of the plants," to such a degree that he considers the elevation of Fusarium levels to be glyphosate's "secondary mode of action."

...If Roundup increases Fusarium levels, then "Roundup Ready" crops that use Roundup as a weed killer could become potential disasters, increasing Fusarium levels in the soil to such critical levels it could produce an epidemic and move from field to field throughout a wide area... Fusarium contamination of cereals, such as the Fusarium Head Blight (FHB) in wheat and barley... has been responsible for serious crop losses. About a fifth of the wheat crop in Europe every year is lost to FHB and in Michigan during 2002 it was estimated that 30-40% of the crops were destroyed by the infestation.

...Fusarium epidemics on cereals can have even worse effects: a Fusarium epidemic of cereals was considered responsible for thousands of deaths in Russia during the 1940s and more recently in 2001, it caused a series of deadly birth defects among tortilla-eating Mexican-Americans in Brownsville, Texas.

...The Fusarium fungus can produce a range of toxins that are not destroyed in the cooking process such as vomitoxin, which as its name suggests, usually produces vomiting and not death, to the more lethal compounds which include fumonisin, which can cause cancer and birth defects to the very lethal chemical warfare agent fusariotoxin, more often referred to as T2 toxin.

...Sanho Tree, the director of the Institute for Policy Studies Drug Policy Project commented about using a chemical that produces a banned micro-organism: "The US has supplied tens of thousands of gallons Roundup to the Colombian government for use in aerial fumigation of coca crops. We have been using a fleet of crop dusters to dump unprecedented amounts of high-potency glyphosate over hundreds of thousands of acres... Now we are learning that a possible side-effect of this campaign could be the unleashing of a Fusarium epidemic in Amazon basin. The drug war has tried in vain to keep cocaine out of people's noses, but could result instead in scorching the lungs of the earth."

Because of the glyphosate-Fusarium link, Canada's National Farmers Union is already opposing the introduction of genetically-engineered "Roundup Ready" wheat, and this issue shows no signs of going away. Time will only tell if Monsanto will be able to "fix" the problems of their "Roundup Ready" crops with more genetic engineering- this time to control Fusarium--or will their top weed killer and flagship line of "Roundup Ready" crops be rejected by today's farmers?

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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/22/national/22AIR.html?pagewanted=print&position=

After more than two years of internal deliberation and intense pressure from industry, the Bush administration has settled on a regulation that would allow thousands of older power plants, oil refineries and industrial units to make extensive upgrades without having to install new anti-pollution devices, according to those involved in the deliberations.

The new rule... would constitute a sweeping and cost-saving victory for industries, exempting thousands of indus trial plants and refineries from part of the Clean Air Act. The acting administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency could sign the new rule as soon as next week, administration officials have told utility representatives.

The exemption would let industrial plants continue to emit hundreds of thousands of tons of pollutants into the atmosphere and could save the companies millions, if not billions, of dollars in pollution equipment costs, even if they increase the amounts of pollutants they emit.

...Officials said that Marianne Horinko, the acting administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, would probably sign the rule before Labor Day. It would go into effect shortly thereafter, without further review or public comment. The only way to stop it would be through court action.

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http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2003/35/we_531_07.html

Tons of additional air pollutants permitted to be released by 2020 under Bush's "Clear Skies" plan: 42,000,000

Estimated number of premature deaths that will result: 100,000

Number of members of the 63-person energy advisory team Bush convened early in his administration who did not have ties to corporate energy interests: 1

Amount that energy team members gave to Republican candidates in the 2000 election: $8,000,000.00

Estimated acres of public land the administration announced in April it will open to logging, road building, and mining: 220,000,000

Acreage of California and Texas, combined: 267,000,000

Amount at which the EPA historically valued each human life when conducting economic analyses of proposed regulations: $6,100,000.00

Amount the EPA considers each person worth as of 2003: $3,700,000.00

Sources: Center for Responsive Politics, Clear the Air, Department of the Interior, Earthjustice, General Accounting Office, League of Conservation Voters, National Park Service, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

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http://www.reuters.com/printerFriendlyPopup.jhtml?type=healthNews&storyID=3311013

Thirty-one cents of every dollar spent on health care in the United States pays administrative costs -- nearly double the rate in Canada, according to a new comparison that sees colossal bureaucratic waste in the American system... Americans spend $752 more per person per year than Canadians on medical administrative costs alone, according to the study by investigators from Harvard University and the Canadian Institute for Health Information that was published in this week's New England Journal of Medicine.

The team, led by Steffie Woolhandler of Harvard, said a large sum of money might be saved in the United States if administrative costs could be trimmed by implementing a Canadian-style, single-payer health care system... Woolhandler and co-author David Himmelstein, also of Harvard and a founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, added that if the United States adopted a Canadian-style system, the savings would likely pay for coverage for the more than 41 million Americans without health insurance.

The study found overhead costs for U.S. insurance companies -- mostly for underwriting and advertising -- ate up 11.7 cents of every health care dollar, compared to 1.3 cents for Canada's government-run system... The study found that after certain exclusions, administration accounted for 31 percent of health care expenditures in the United States and 16.7 percent in Canada. The estimates do not include the advertising costs of drug companies or hospitals, health care industry profits, or the value of patients' time spent on paperwork.