Enhanced Interrogation Techniques

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Mit Romney, the born-again Reagan
manicured and selling snake-oil
torture, by any other name, is still torture
the fear – a ticking time bomb
the tacky heart – the killer…
Tammy Baker is heard from from her death bed
on the very day of Falwell’s death accuses him
of stealing her and Jimmy Baker’s followers
who stole Billy Graham’s?
Not to worry, Rich Fat Cats
what you do unto others
will be done unto you
Not to worry, Compassionate Liberals
what you forgive others
will be forgiven you
Oh 18 top presidential candidates
who will deal with the devil
speak like a charismatic angel
promise security where there is none
it is
the nature of enslaved peoples
to revolt(.)

Bush’s Iraqi Puppet, Khalaf, Axes Photographing Bombings

?&!!@?

“Abdel Karim Khalaf, said this weekend that Iraq’s government decided to bar news photographers and cameramen from the scene of bombings.

If it was decided “this weekend” why did this announcement wait until today (Tuesday)?

“The order was aimed at preventing journalists from inadvertently tampering with evidence needed for investigations, protecting the privacy and human rights of those wounded and keeping insurgents and militias from keeping track of their success rate, Khalaf said.”

And who protects the human rights of those killed or maimed by the bombings – and the rights of their families and friends to know what happened to them?

“He denied that the new regulation was aimed at curtailing press freedoms, saying other countries have similar restrictions.”

Whatever “other countries” Khalaf is referring to ARE curtailing press freedoms(.)

What happens to a top when spun? Before it winds down it runs out of control.

the whole world is awaiting George’s departure……

by David Michael Jackson

I’ll remember the arrogance of power
I cannot find one reason to kill
a million Vietnamese
and 49,000 of my generation.
I cannot find a reason for that wall in Washington
I cannot find a single domino after all these years.
we argue that chaos will surely come if we leave.
and what is our definition of chaos,
little water and electricity
fear
bombs in the street,
in the market
death squads
smart bombs with collateral damage,
invaders kicking doors
kicking doors.
We must not cut and run.
I’m not,
I’ll stay right here
beside my comfortable
symbolic fire,
no sir
not gonna cut and run,
not me.
My sarcasm overcomes me
I throw myself across the room.
I hit the wall.
I throw ol’ T.S. against the other wall.
He who had his wife arrested in a restaurant,
had her committed,
went to Harvard
never visited.
This is the man we say
set our pace.
We
accepted his wasteland.
Do I dare to eat an apple?
Cast him off
let him drift away
on the ripples of
a new poetry

Hannity vs. Geraldo

of the War Between the Roses
Hannity sees the thorns
Geraldo sees the roses

Which is greater
God’s laws or Man’s laws
and WHO’S God anyway?
when “God’s laws” create genocide
for the non-believers
whether they dress in suits and ties
or flowing robes and sandals
Mans Laws Only
are able to defrock genocide
collateral dammage or what-so-ever dubbed
it is the genocide of Roses
no matter how many hot houses contain them
no matter what shield that bears them
the Biblical God commanded man
to follow man’s laws (i.e. Caesar)
and He never said
to make God’s law the law of the land.
He left secular laws up to mankind
Armageddon was a prophecy not a prediction
all depending on whether we learn
to treat all others
as we wish to be treated
even a snake
refusing to shed it’s outer skin
will implode.

Hope and A Little Joy

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deer fish i so not want to be tired
back to visits never seeming to end
there was a little joy for mother today
Giraldo Rivera
put a face on the suffering parents and children
our media keeps calling “illegals”
and offered this face of suffering especially to
Lou Dobbs
There are TWO distinctions between
Christians
no matter which of the 630 different sects
one claims membership in –
One distinct direction is
excusing themselves of compassion’s virtue
in the face of
what is currently on the books of
American Immigration Laws
While the other distinction is
compassion – even
while the senators debate
while the representatives haggle
and the president follows suit
spinning wheels, spinning words,
spinning time
till something else takes center stage
believing enough of we the people
are fickle minded and easily distracted
Few are called
but many are needed
fish full of mercury
cards
all cards
staring out the looking glass
do you hear the pouting in Shawn Hanity’s voice?
or the authority in Lou Dobbs’?
body language DOES speak louder than words Bill O’Reilly
Why are the cameras not turned on the women
around the world who stood
stood up for peace at one p.m.
their time, where ever they live
circling the earth’s 24 hour cycle

call it the return of the roses.

Pick A Pair of Dark Horses

🙂

put ’em in yer pocket
save ’em fer election 2008
fer example
Ron Paul and Jesse Jackson
pick an independent party name
like Rainbow Partners
where no one is more equal than any other
we’ve been down on the farm and we’ve seen Pariè
are we ready now to set ourselves free?
The only free election we can have
is instant zapping political advertising
make political contenders do something news worthy
to obtain exposure to voters
who are all too distracted by mud whizzing
O say, can’t you see…
those wealthy politicians fists full of money
losing all their power
with a simple zap
from we the people’s remote control.

body piercing

!

first the Christians
then the sun dancers
now our children
of course body piercing is painful
as are tattoos
why do you ask?
they Know the math

America has 12 times the population of Iraq
(25 million vs. 300 million)
650,000 (and still counting) innocent Iraqis killed
equates to what it would feel like in America
if SEVEN MILLION, 800 THOUSAND
innocent Americans were killed
“Tell me how does it feel”
and one million Iraqi refugees
equates to 12 million American refugees
but look: 12 million Mexican refugees
who can not scrape out a living in Mexico
due to something like WTO and NAFTA

they Know the truth
ask yourselves why
baggy cloths and body art
music and language a world apart
better yet ask why the straight world
feels repulsed by what they see
all they are saying…
is this generation in positions of power
has dirty-stenchy-deadly-math

Now THAT’S repulsive!

18 Missing Inches in New Orleans

By Greg Palast

Since the initial release of Armed Madhouse in June 2006, much has changed in America.

The Department of Homeland Security, after a five-year hunt for Osama, finally brought charges against… Greg Palast.

As America crawled toward the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attack, Homeland Security charged me and my US producer Matt Pascarella with violating the anti-terror laws.

Don’t you feel safer?

And I confess: we’re guilty.

On August 22, 2006, we were videotaping Katrina evacuees still held behind barbed wire in a trailer park encampment a hundred miles from New Orleans. It had been a year since the hurricane and 73,000 POW’s (Prisoners of Dubya) were still in mobile home Gulags. I arranged a surreptitious visit with Pamela Lewis, one of the unwilling guests of George Bush’s Guantanamo on wheels. She told me, “It’s a prison set-up” – except there are no home furloughs for these inmates because they no longer have homes.

You can’t film there. FEMA is part of Homeland Security and its camps are off limits to cameras. We don’t want Osama to know he can get a cramped Airstream by posing as a displaced Black person.

To give a sense of the full flavor and smell of Kamp Katrina, we wanted to show that this human parking lot, with kids and elderly, is close by Exxon Petroleum’s Baton Rouge refinery. The neighborhood goes by the quaint sobriquet, “Cancer Alley.”

So we filmed it. Uh, oh. The refinery, is a CAVIP, “Critical Asset and Vulnerable Infrastructure Point.” Apparently, you can’t film a CAVIP.More…

As to the bust: The positive side for me as a reporter was that I got to see Bush’s terror-trackers in action. I should note that it took the Maxwell Smarts at Homeland Security a full two weeks to hunt us down. And we’re on television.

Frankly, Matt and I were a bit scared that, given the charges, we wouldn’t be allowed on a plane into New York for the September 11 commemoration. But what scared us more is that we were allowed on the plane.

Once I was traced, I had a bit of an other-worldly conversation with my would-be captors. Detective Frank Penantano of Homeland Security told me, “This is a ‘Critical Infrastructure’ … and they get nervous about unauthorized filming of their property.”

Well, me too, Detective. In fact, I’m very nervous that extremely detailed satellite photos of this potential chemical blast-site can be downloaded from maps.google.com.

Detective Penantano, in justifying our impending arrest, said, “If you remember, a lot of people were killed on 9/11.”

Yes, I remember “a lot” of people were killed. So I have this suggestion, Detective – and you can pass it on to Mr. Bush: Go find the people who killed them.

18 Missing Inches

Before the Big Bust, we learned a little more about how New Orleans drowned. Given my line of work, I’m not shocked at much. Yet, this one got to me.

“By midnight on Monday the White House knew. Monday night I was at the state Emergency Operations Center and nobody was aware that the levees had breeched. Nobody.”

The charges were so devastating – the White House’s withholding from the state police the information that the city was about to flood – that from almost any source, I simply would have dismissed it. But this was not just any source. The whistleblower was Dr. Ivor van Heerden, deputy chief of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Studies Center, and the chief technician advising the state on saving lives during Katrina.

That Monday night, August 29, 2005, the sleepless crew at the state Emergency Operations Center, directing the response to Hurricane Katrina, were high-fiving it, relieved that Katrina had swung east of New Orleans, sparing the city from drowning.

They were wrong. The Army Corps, FEMA and White House knew for critical hours that the levees had begun to crack, but withheld the information for a day and night. The delay was deadly.

Van Heerden explained that levees don’t collapse in a single bang. First, there’s a small crack or two, a few feet wide, which take hours to burst open into visible floodways.

Had the state known New Orleans’ bulwark was failing, they would have shifted resources to get out those left in the danger zone.

Van Heerden: FEMA knew on 11 o’clock on Monday that the levees had breeched. At 2pm they flew over the 17th Street Canal and took video of the breech.

Question: So the White House wouldn’t tell you that the levees had breeched?

Van Heerden: They didn’t tell anybody.

Question: And you’re at the Emergency Center?

Van Heerden: I mean nobody knew. Well, the Corps of Engineers knew. FEMA knew. None of us knew.

The prevarications continued all week.

Van Heerden said, “I went to the Governor’s on Tuesday night and I said this, ‘There’s a lot more breeches than one.’ They said, “Whatever you need, go find out.’ I got in an airplane, I flew. I counted 28 breeches.”

The White House had good reason, or at least political and financial reasons, to keep mum. A hurricane is an act of God, but catastrophic levee failure is an act of the Administration. Once the federal levees go, evacuation, rescue and those frightening words – responsibility and compensation – become Washington’s. Van Heerden knew that “not an act of God, but catastrophic failure of the levee system” would mean that, at least, “these people must be compensated.”

Not every flood victim in America gets the Katrina treatment. In 1992, storms wiped out 190 houses on the beach at West Hampton Dunes, home to film stars and celebrity speculators. The federal government paid to completely rebuild the houses, which, hauled in four million cubic feet of sand to restore the tony beaches, and guaranteed the home’s safety into the coming decades – after which the “victim’s” homes rose in value to an average $2 million each.

But in New Orleans, instead of compensation, 73,000 have been sentenced to life in FEMA’s trailer-parks in Louisiana. Even more are displaced to other states. I asked van Heeerden about the consequences of the White House’s failures, the information about the levee being just one of a list.

“Well, fifteen hundred people drowned. That’s the bottom line.”

But why did the levees fail at all if the hurricane missed the city? The professor showed me a computer model indicating the levees were a foot and a half too short – the result of a technical error in the Army Corp of Engineer’s calculation of sea level when the levees were built beginning in the 1930s.

And the Bush crew knew it. Long before Katrina struck, the White House staff had sought van Heerden’s advice on coastal safety. So when the professor learned of the 18-inch error, he informed the White House directly. But this was advice they didn’t want to hear. The President had already sent the levee repair crew, the Army Corp of Engineers, to Afghanistan and Iraq.

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Greg Palast is author of Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans – Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild, released this week by Penguin. Get it here.

For more information on the Armed Madhouse tour and for a podcast of 18 Missing Inches read by ‘On With Leon’s’ Dr. Wilmer Leon go to www.GregPalast.com