USB - United States Of Bush (page 2)

Half-drunk on power, and half drunk on delusion, USB President Bush imagines that he is planting the flag of liberty in Iraq.

• President Bush's opening statement at his news conference on Wednesday was striking for what it left out: any mention of the 31 Americans who died overnight in the crash of a Marine helicopter in Iraq, the largest number of American deaths in a single incident since the war began.
• Mr. Bush instead focused on his long-term goal of "ending tyranny in our world," and then cast the Iraqi election coming Sunday as part of a march of freedom around the globe. He said that if he had told the reporters in the room a few years before that the Iraqi people would be voting, "you would look at me like some of you still look at me, with a kind of blank expression."

• When the president was asked to define what a "credible" turnout in Iraq would be, he quickly side-stepped, saying only, "The fact they're voting in itself is successful."

On Iraq policy, Mr. Bush has sought this week to rise above the daily bad news - insurgents vowed this week to cut off the heads of Iraqis and their children if voters went to the polls - and to put a positive stamp on an election that could be disrupted by insurgent attacks on Sunday and set the tone for the next four years.

But, spies complicate the matter of retaliating for the rest of the world. As it is the American Military must be broken especially in Iraq, but the Defense Secretary's operations put even presumed American civilians at risk. Because these spies mostly pose as civilians. Unfortunately, this line of thinking leads to just the conclusion that Osama Bin Laden came to.)

The Pentagon, expanding into the CIA's historic bailiwick, has created a new espionage arm and is reinterpreting U.S. law to give Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld broad authority over clandestine operations abroad, according to interviews with participants and documents obtained by The Washington Post.

The previously undisclosed organization, called the Strategic Support Branch, arose from Rumsfeld's written order to end his "near total dependence on CIA" for what is known as human intelligence. Designed to operate without detection and under the defense secretary's direct control, the Strategic Support Branch deploys small teams of case officers, linguists, interrogators and technical specialists alongside newly empowered special operations forces.

Military and civilian participants said in interviews that the new unit has been operating in secret for two years -- in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places they declined to name. According to an early planning memorandum to Rumsfeld from Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the focus of the intelligence initiative is on "emerging target countries such as Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia, Philippines and Georgia." Myers and his staff declined to be interviewed.

The Strategic Support Branch was created to provide Rumsfeld with independent tools for the "full spectrum of humint operations," according to an internal account of its origin and mission. Human intelligence operations, a term used in counterpoint to technical means such as satellite photography, range from interrogation of prisoners and scouting of targets in wartime to the peacetime recruitment of foreign spies. A recent Pentagon memo states that recruited agents may include "notorious figures" whose links to the U.S. government would be embarrassing if disclosed.

• 55% of Americans believed God created humans in their present form,
• 27% believed in evolution guided by God and
• only 13% believed God was not involved in human evolution.

  And 65% backed teaching creationism alongside evolution.

The US Occupation's boot on the face of Iraq - nay, of civilization itself.

LONDON - U.S.-led forces, using Iraq’s ancient city of Babylon as a military base, have caused “substantial damage” to one of the world’s most renowned archaeological treasures, a British Museum report said. Babylon was the capital of ancient Babylonia, an early civilization that existed from around 1,800 BC until 600 BC.

• Lord Redesdale, the head of Britain’s all-party parliamentary archaeological group, told the Guardian he was horrified. “Outrage is hardly the word, this is just dreadful. “These are world sites. Not only is what the American forces are doing damaging the archaeology of Iraq, it’s actually damaging the cultural heritage of the whole world.”
• U.S. military commanders set up a base in Babylon in April 2003, just after the invasion to topple Saddam Hussein, and handed it over to a Polish-led force five months later. “This is tantamount to establishing a military camp around the Great Pyramid in Egypt or around Stonehenge in Britain,” Curtis said in the report. In the report, Curtis described the decision to set up a base in the area as “regrettable.”

• U.S. and Polish military vehicles had crushed 2,600-year-old pavements in the city, a cradle of civilization and home to one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
• Archaeological fragments were used to fill sand bags, it added.
• John Curtis, keeper of the museum’s Ancient and Near East department, invited to visit Babylon by Iraqi antiquities experts, also said he had found cracks and gaps made by people who had apparently tried to gouge out the decorated bricks forming the famous dragons of the city’s Ishtar Gate.
• Large areas of the site were covered in gravel, the report said, brought in from outside which was compacted and sometimes chemically treated to make helipads and car parks.

• "All non-governmental organizations, either domestic or international, with hidden agendas coming here with humanitarian purposes but instead proselytizing, this is what we do not like," said Dien Syamsuddin, secretary-general of the Indonesian Council of Ulemas, or religious scholars.
• "This is a reminder. Do not do this in this kind of situation," Syamsuddin said. "The Muslim community will not remain quiet. This a clear statement, and it is serious."
• Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim nation, and Aceh is particularly conservative.

• The group told The Associated Press on Thursday it had dropped the idea.

• Iraq provides terrorists with "a training ground, a recruitment ground, the opportunity for enhancing technical skills," said David B. Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats.
• "There is even, under the best scenario, over time, the likelihood that some of the jihadists who are not killed there will, in a sense, go home, wherever home is, and will therefore disperse to various other countries."

Before the U.S. invasion, the CIA said Saddam Hussein had only circumstantial ties with several al Qaeda members. Osama bin Laden rejected the idea of forming an alliance with Hussein and viewed him as an enemy of the jihadist movement because the Iraqi leader rejected radical Islamic ideals and ran a secular government.

"At the moment," NIC Chairman Robert L. Hutchings said, Iraq "is a magnet for international terrorist activity."

• President Bush has frequently described the Iraq war as an integral part of U.S. efforts to combat terrorism.
• But the council's report suggests the conflict has also helped terrorists by creating a haven for them in the chaos of war.

The report also says the emergence of China and India as new global economic powerhouses "will be the most challenging of all" Washington's regional relationships. It also says that in the competition with Asia over technological advances, the United States "may lose its edge" in some sectors.

According to a report in the Roanoke (Virginia) Times, a man who was introduced as Boraq Sagdiyev from Kazakhstan — in reality a Cohen character named Borat (this is the format of the Ali G Show - to use dubious means to get access) — appeared at the rodeo over the weekend after organizers agreed to have him sing the national anthem.

• After telling the crowd
• he supported America’s war on terrorism,
• he said,
• “I hope you kill every man, woman and child in Iraq, down to the lizards ...
• And may George W. Bush drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq.”
• He then sang a garbled version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

It is not the first time Cohen has wooed controversy with his show, which airs on HBO. In one episode last year, Borat sang an anti-Semitic song called “Throw the Jew Down the Well” at a country music bar, prompting protests from the Anti-Defamation League.

• Still, the official said the Defense Department planned to hold hundreds of them indefinitely, without trial, out of concern that they continue to pose a threat to the United States and cannot safely be sent to their home countries.

Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales seen here at his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing, seems to be telling the committee - "This is how I want to slap them till they are brown and blue."

WASHINGTON – Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., told Gonzales that policies he supported or helped formulate "have been used by the administration, the military and the CIA to justify torture and Geneva Convention violations by military and civilian personnel."

To emphasize his elevation and growing clout, Attorney general nominee Alberto Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary committee "I will no longer represent only the White House. I will represent the United States of America and its people. I understand the difference between the two roles."

"America's troops and citizens are at greater risk" because of administration policies that are "tantamount to torture," said Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the panel's top Democrat. Even as they grilled him on administration policy on terror suspects, Democrats on the panel were generous in praising the man who would be the nation's first Hispanic attorney general.

At the White House, presidential spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush had "full trust" in Gonzales and hoped the Senate would "move forward quickly." Gonzales' nomination was widely expected to be confirmed by the GOP-led Senate.

A 1994 law, which is a joke in its actual implementation, is supposed to impose harsh penalties on those convicted of torturing prisoners. Also, Gonzales was the Ideological Architect Of Bush Administration "policy" of violating the Geneva Conventions. His work protects the American officials in Iraq, Gitmo, Afghanistan, etc. who have indulged whole-heartedly in torture from being exposed to the federal War Crimes Act - a 1996 law that carries the death penalty.

The Army Reserve is a force of 200,000 part-time soldiers who opted not to sign up for the active-duty Army but can be mobilized from their civilian lives in times of national need. About 52,000 Army Reserve soldiers are on active duty, with 17,000 in Iraq and 2,000 in Afghanistan, the Army said. The Army Reserve has provided many military police, civil affairs soldiers, medics and truck drivers for the wars.

• Helmly referred to “potential ‘sociological’ damage” to the all-volunteer military by paying inducements of $1,000 extra per month to reservists who volunteer to remobilize. “We must consider the point at which we confuse ’volunteer to become an American Soldier’ with 'mercenary,”’ Helmly said.

Helmly said military leaders had rebuffed his proposals for change. The memo’s purpose was to inform Schoomaker of the Army Reserve’s “inability — under current policies, procedures and practices governing mobilization, training and reserve component manpower management — to meet mission requirements” for the two wars, Helmly wrote.

The Pentagon, maintaining higher-than-expected troop levels after failing to anticipate that a bloody guerrilla war would follow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s ouster in 2003, has relied heavily on Army Reserve and Army National Guard soldiers. These part-time troops comprise about 40 percent of the U.S. force in Iraq. Some reservists and families have complained about frequent and lengthy tours in war zones, inferior equipment and scant notice before being pressed into service.