ManselReport

The Black Jails of Afghanistan

2009-11-29T03:39:00.003-06:00

“The black jail was the most dangerous and fearful place,” said Hamidullah, a spare-parts dealer in Kandahar who said he was detained there in June. “They don’t let the I.C.R.C. officials or any other civilians see or communicate with the people they keep there. Because I did not know what time it was, I did not know when to pray.”

The New York Times reports, KABUL, Afghanistan — An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates, sometimes for weeks at a time, without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to human rights researchers and former detainees held at the site on the Bagram Air Base.

The site, known to detainees as the black jail, consists of individual windowless concrete cells, each illuminated by a single light bulb glowing 24 hours a day. In interviews, former detainees said that their only human contact was at twice-daily interrogation sessions."

The articles goes on to say, "The jail’s operation highlights a tension between President Obama’s goal to improve detention conditions that had drawn condemnation under the Bush administration and his stated desire to give military commanders leeway to operate. While Mr. Obama signed an order to eliminate so-called black sites run by the Central Intelligence Agency in January, it did not also close this jail, which is run by military Special Operations forces."

This action taken by President Obama, strange as it was, was much reported on. It was a centerist way of saying that he wants to keep his military commanders happy. It couldn't have been written any better by Aaron Sorkin. Let's face it all is not well in an Obama administration but it is miles, ok, thousands of miles better than what a Bush administration was. But all these acts of torture will come back to haunt us and it probably already has.

Chris Mansel

Free From Hostile Invaders

2009-11-26T21:35:00.002-06:00

The New York Times publishes this ominoius photo today. The story speaks of the re-surgence on the Taliban in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, President Obama is considering a troop surge of 40,000 troops. In the american mindset it seems an obscene act. But for a moment consider the opinion of many Iraqi's who wish we had never toppled Saddam. They agree he was a ruthless dictator but they clearly state they were better off then than they are now in their country. They get no argument there.

Thge stories coming out of Afghanistan say that the Taliban will force their way into homes, towns etc and take what they want. They will kill and plunder and their is nothing anyone can do about it. Doesn't this sound familiar? Perhaps it would have been better if the English, Columbus, Vikings would have never laned on these shores we call home? Acts of genocide up for discussion? A comparison?

What state was Afghanistan in before we came in looking for Osama Bin Laden? Would it have been in the state its in now if we had just gone into Afghanistan and not into Iraq? We'll never know.

Chris Mansel

The Dobbs Campaign

2009-11-24T20:05:00.004-06:00

The New York Times is reporting that Lou Dobbs, you remember him right? CNN's former answer to Fascism, is mulling a run for governor of New Jersey as an "intermediary" step for a presidential run.

As my good friend Bob Kincaid says, "Get out the bucket of lye..."

Let's imagine a campaign rally for Mr. Dobbs.

Spokesman: (dressed in a Tucker Carlson hoodie) Okay, Tea Baggers you guys need to group up over here and did you remember your signs that say, NO Medicine for the Indigent?" Ok, good. Now, minutemen...No, locked and loaded is not a good cheer at the beginning but after the speech feel free to chant it outside.

Tea bagger: Is Mr. Dobbs going to mention the money we could save on Healthcare by using organs taken from the illegals shot by the minuetmen?

You can just imagine.

Chris Mansel

Conflcied and Taking His Time

2009-11-21T18:41:00.002-06:00

The Washington Post is reporting that America, lo, a certian section of Minnesota is conflicted over the war in Afghanistan. Well, welcome to the game. With the question of 40,000 more troops looming over the political head of President Obama, which the New York Times says he is taking his time in deciding, the troops avoiding roadside bombs meanwhile don't have the luxury of being conflicted. Nor do they have the convience of "taking their time".

Private John Doe, report for you're 4th tour of Afghanistan on January 11, 2010.

Gee, I don't know Lt. I'm kinda conflicted and I would like to take my time.

Private Doe, you will serve X amount of time in Levenworth.

Meanwhile, the events of Washington go merrily on as Private Doe is no longer conflicted. He is, rather decidely focused upon each waking moment of his new sentence he is now serving.

Chris Mansel

The State of the Union: Molly Ivins

2009-11-21T07:01:00.000-06:00

The Diocese Vs The Rule of Law

2009-11-21T05:27:00.002-06:00

If it wasn't enough to simply move them around the country or the world from one place of oppurtunity to another, pay anything to prevent a trial, the Catholic Church's subjects are going through the court system to at least offer support for some of their own who have sexually abused children. Perhaps they should produce some Public Service Announcements with famous Catholics. No? Rats leave the sinking ship in times of crisis? - Chris Mansel

WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) -- The Catholic Diocese of Wilmington is obligated to pay retirement benefits to six priests who are confirmed pedophiles, church officials argued in a bankruptcy court filing seeking permission to keep making the payments.

After filing for Chapter 11 protection last month, the diocese agreed not to make payments to priests accused of sexual abuse without court approval. That agreement was made after objections were raised by attorneys for alleged abuse victims who now sit on a creditors committee.

In a filing submitted late Thursday, attorneys for the diocese now seek authorization to provide pensions, housing costs and medical coverage to six confirmed child abusers. They cited an obligation to care for retired clergy, including priests dismissed from public ministry and facing laicization, or defrocking.

"Only the Vatican has the power to laicize clergy," the diocese said. "Thus, while several priests have been dismissed from the public ministry and have laicization proceedings pending against them, for the time being they remain clergy whom the debtor supports, and must continue to support."

(laicize -to remove the clerical character or nature of; secularize: to laicize a school; to laicize the office of headmaster. - Dictionary.com)

Beck to the Future

2009-11-21T05:05:00.003-06:00

It was just after dawn when Glenn Beck strolled back into his New Canaan, Conn. home. He had just spent almost an entire night listening to a tape of his television show at top volume with a gun across his lap and threatening anyone within shouting range to ask him to turn it down. Occassionly firing into the air and cursing the name of Obama as only a devout christian who has many followers can do, Beck, now inside his home reaches for his copy of the current Rush Limbaugh newsletter and performs an unspeakable act.

Chris Mansel

American Prosthesis

2008-03-17T01:09:00.000-05:00

Part 1

Hospital tile and a sense of responsibility, that's what hit me when I first walked into a Veteran's hospital. I had been in triage situations in combat and hospital ships, Army hospitals in Germany, but this was different. This is the place where politicians come to be photographed and soldiers to be ignored. Any time day or night you can walk down the hallways and see blood trickling onto the floor or hear a voice crying out for help. After a while you start to wonder if all of the missing limbs aren't gathered somewhere in a room in the hospital, perhaps on another floor waiting to be reissued to another body.

It's not like the recruiting letters say, it's not like the news footage will show you. There are some who do want to return to battle but only to return to their buddies who they have fought beside for what seemed like an eternity, and there are some who want to go back and kill something, anyone. Their minds are twisted from fatigue and now their bodies deformed by gunfire or an explosion sit and drool staring at the television screen. They are never photographed with a visiting dignitary, that traffic is led away from the more troublesome rooms.

On my first visit there I saw a young Army private fall out of his room into the hallway screaming as his prosthetic limb gave way. He hit the floor hard and he swung his crutch at anyone who tried to help him up. He was crying uncontrollably. He started to shake and couldn’t stop his anger until another patient, a young black man with the lower half of his arm missing got down on the floor and took hold of him and held him as best he could until he calmed down. For a few minutes they were both cussing and yelling. The sounds they made went through the walls and out into the open, through the pressure built in the interstate by the hospital and into the neighborhoods they grew up in that would never except them back in the shape their mangled bodies were in now.

Napoleon Bonaparte said, "Go Sir, and don't forget that the world was made in six days. You can ask me for anything you like, except time." Strange words from a ruthless dictator but most of the patients in Veteran's Hospitals are here suffering from the words of ruthless dictators in one way or another. One day while touring the hospital and interviewing soldiers I came upon a young man who had lost his right arm and both legs. His demeanor was about what you'd expect. He greeted me with, "What in the hell are you and what in the hell do you want?"

I told him how sorry I was that he was in the condition he was in and I only wanted to ask him some questions. He snapped back, "Any goddamn answers you could want got blown off with my legs, man!" I backed out of the room quietly and started back down the hallway and heard him shouting back at me, "Hey, you giving up that easy, you just ain’t got it man, just ain't got it!" I stuck my head back in his doorway and he threw a glass of water at me just missing my head.

"Incoming!" He laughed loudly.

I said, "So I guess you want to talk, huh?"

His eyes cut through me as I entered the room; the rage in his voice was troubling
But it could be understood. He looked at my clothes and back up to my eyes and said, “Ever been there?”

I answered back, “Yea, four weeks ago as a matter of fact.”

“Four weeks ago…” He let the words fill the room before he spoke again. Embedded?

“No, we were doing freelance work.”

He lowered his brow, “We? You had someone else with you? Couldn’t handle it on you own?”

“Not exactly, my partner was there with me. He’s in town right now just not with me right now.”

“What he didn’t want to come in here and look at us?”

“What do you think?” I asked him this with a look to let him know the answer. We seemed to have wandered off the subject but I figured I would just let him talk. He was quiet for a few minutes and when he finally spoke again it wasn’t about my partner.

“You get hit, or Blackwater tuck you in at night like a good little mama’s bitch?”

I told him the story of Jack Random and myself and the family we helped to escape the private security forces, about the major and the redneck Army guy. He didn’t seem surprised.

He smiled and smiled a sad smile, “You think that was anything special?”

He reached down and lifted his blanket and scratched at his hip so nonchalantly that I don’t think he even realized he was doing it. The scar he revealed was hideous. I could tell he hadn’t been to long in recovery. I had seen wounds in his state before and I could tell that he had still to see several stages of draining of the wound which meant a few more times in surgery which meant more mental strain on his already fragile ego.

“Questions, like what questions? How I got my legs blown off, my arm, what? Tell me?” He asked impatiently.

I replied that I was curious about his experiences with his fellow soldiers and Iraqi civilians. I explained that I didn’t write for any major publication and I didn’t have an agenda.

He faced away from me and all the color went away from his face and said, “Well, I don’t know what to tell you man, I’m dead, just dead.” Tears began streaming down his face in a continuous flow to a point where they would not stop. He took a gun that I didn’t see and put it in his mouth and looked around the room and I thought he was going to pull the trigger. I jumped up from my chair and he fell out of the bed and I screamed: I just couldn’t help it. His face twisted with rage. I jumped back against the wall as several orderlies came to the door quickly and he took the gun out of his mouth and yelled for them to shut the fucking door.

His eyes were directly at me now and he put the gun back in his mouth and I must have gone pale because the orderlies at the small glass window in the door disappeared for a moment and came back with an older man who I guessed was a doctor I hadn’t seen before. He held up a piece of paper that had written on it a short message, “Do you have any medical conditions?”

For a moment I forgot about my safety and concerned myself with that short note. Here across from me sat a young man who had lost both his legs and one of his arms in the service of his country who now had a gun in his mouth and all they were worried about were getting sued by a journalist.

Saliva began to pour out of his mouth and the tears stopped. I felt so sorry for him but I was afraid to say anything. I had been in situations similar to this before and I had learned from experience to allow the individual to calm themselves down in their own time.

Outside the door I could hear the rustling and panic in the hallway. I could sense the sirens, the news vans, and every cliché you’ve ever seen. This was after all a Veteran’s Hospital in Washington D. C., the nation’s capital. The home of whoredom and the constant leaking ship of news that forever set sail on the putrid waters of suffering that wouldn’t for a second pass an opportunity to cover a story like this. I wondered to myself if the young man had thought past putting the gun in his mouth, if he had organized in his mind what he wanted to say or if he was so traumatized he could even see past the door of the room in his mind or with his eyes.

For a moment I looked over at him and he took the gun out of his mouth. He started to say something and raised the gun back up to his lips and squeezed the trigger a little, my eyes were so focused on his finger I could hardly breathe. But then he took the gun away from his mouth and rested it against the side of his head and said one word, “Gunship.”

There was a loud banging on the door and a voice from the other side said, “Marine you have a hostage in there, you’re a hostile force! Relinquish that weapon!” The Marine screamed out, “Perkins get the fuck away from here before I shoot you instead, asshole.”

As I watched this terrified young man, and he was young, barely over the age of twenty, I thought that grace be beguiled then it is a dishonor to the living and to the dead. The room quieted down again, almost instantly. There was an eerie silence and in the hallway as well. I wondered what kind of circus was going on outside this small room but mainly I was focused on the young man across from me, I wasn’t as much worried about my life as I was this young man getting the help he needed, surely a healthily young man wouldn’t be holding a gun to his head or in his mouth.

He spoke sooner than I thought he would, and as he began to speak there were knocks at the door which he ignored. I honestly don’t know if he heard them or not.

“If you line up three marine snipers and tell them to aim at the kneecaps of three Iraqi’s standing in the middle of twelve other Iraqi’s by the fourth shot you can be sure that only one weapon if that will be aimed at the spot where shots are coming from. There’s more danger there defending these fuckers from themselves than there is checking out for your buddy beside you.”

He looked at the floor and followed an imaginary spot across the wall up to the door to the small glass window and put the gun back in his mouth. He did this slowly and I knew then he wasn’t serious about shooting himself, I had seen this kind of hysteria before in a standoff with a police officer in Georgia. Maybe he would feel more comfortable having someone to speak through, especially in this situation. After all this was Washington and they didn’t take to having their Military Industrial Establishment being bad mouthed in print. I could vouch for that personally.

One thing that started to occur to me was the fact that this had to be exploding across the screen of CNN by now taking the attention away from the Presidential campaign and Jack had to be somewhere outside trying to get in. I had no idea if my name had been released or if he knew I was involved but he did know I was coming here today. It wasn’t too long ago we had escaped a shootout in Iraq but this was different, Jack would be running towards the weapon in question.

- Chris Mansel

Hughes, Not The Rudd & Eat My Slug, This Is The Highway

2008-03-13T23:45:00.001-05:00

Hughes, Not The Rudd

Speculation begins around Dupont Circle whether or not the beast known as Karen Hughes will in fact become just another political causality when the Bush administration leaves office or if she will like Henry Kissinger re-surface on the arm of other administrations, wailing her fetishes, hooded and leathered, beating human flesh like a riveter on the good ship death.

Eat My Slug, This Is The Highway

Tracking legislation in Washington is not unlike watching a snail as it inches slowly across the interstate. The silent whine of the yellow divider you’d expect from the center line is unheard. Cars whiz by as deals are made inside closets supplied readily with glory holes, oxygen tanks and cameras, the kind you use in most surgeries that have revolutionized the term day surgery. Yes, the American Medical Association has a say in illicit sex in enclosed places as well.

- Chris Mansel

The Year of 2008

2008-03-12T02:18:00.000-05:00

In position to stroll across the book of horrors once again, the Republican Party dreams of placing another beast of loyal stride atop the wavering blood flag. The White House fills with a stench not yet experienced since William Howard Taft’s corpse was paraded through across the Senate floor by a few drunken representatives with ties to organized crime.

Bandar Bush, his defense stock gaining in blood certificate guarantee, sits atop a fortune large enough to purchase the publishing rights of the Koran in virginal blood, flies in and out of the U.S. smuggling plans for more terrorist’s attacks on U.S. soil in lieu of a Democratic win in the 2008 presidential run.

Sooner than later it will come to the surface that Think Tanks are covert and are nothing more than shadow operations that enable U.S. citizens to retire from public office and advise and funnel funds to governments that occupy positions in the so-called axis of evil. If conservatives resign from these organizations with any kind of regularity the axe will drop, especially if the Democrat’s have possession of the White House and the House and Senate.

Perhaps in 2008 it will be necessary to obtain a background check on your local elected official to decide whether or not to cast your vote. With that information in hand you will be in the interesting position of whether or not to share.

Could it be that the Vietcong are dressed as Islamic Fundamentalists? General Westmoreland constantly observed in 1968 that we had the enemy on the run; compare that staggering miscommunication with, “Mission Accomplished.” Saddam warned that when the fight went door to door and street to street…. The Tet offensive in Iraq will be coordinated with attacks in Iran and Syria as well as bombings in the United States.

- Chris Mansel

McCain: Let The Fires Burn Cold

2008-03-11T02:33:00.003-05:00

There is evidence that McCain has been on the campaign trail too long. He showed up at a Mexican wedding in Polk, Arkansas with a Ukulele stuck in his belt and asked if he could sit in with the band.
He next offered to round up several dogs in the neighborhood and tried to jump start a gas grill with an old Zippo lighter General George Marshall had once given him in a drunken stupor as McCain had harassed the General over an embarrassing incident in the cloak of a Washington watering hole. Buying silence with fire is how they used to do it in the old days.
McCain in order to prove his barbecuing skills stripped off his shirt to reveal a tattoo of a pyramid of cord wood being lit by a chimpanzee while two Huey helicopters hovered overhead, the caption read, “Those of us who kill, also cook, skin, and die.” At one time the words were more legible but McCain is beginning to show his age and the injections to heighten his biceps didn’t help either.

- Chris Mansel

Psychology For The Herd

2008-03-10T01:41:00.001-05:00

The New Liberty will run the gauntlet of chemical weapons fire and the term jihad will re-appear across the screens of CNN as a moralist term.

Defend violence and you become more than part of the problem, you become the act itself, a preemptive strike against the reader. Civil disobedience is not violence and it takes a disruptive mind to take the conversation in that direction.

I wonder how many times in this country the authorities have discovered a body that has starved to death in a warm room?

- Chris Mansel

Official, handful, Disorganized

2008-03-09T12:46:00.000-05:00

“Disposed under distress, the reason for being involved in the…” The rest of the words on the page were blacked out. You could make any excuse for this you wanted but the C.I.A. would do anything to protect its secrets and would kill any number of random citizens to overturn the Freedom of Information Act.

The following statement was uncovered in the garbage bin outside the Oval office during a past administration, “Quotas must be maintained and enumerated. Belching a surplus will only go to obtain a derivative of the kind of justice that is self-defeating.” What would the C.I.A. do what such a statement if it actually existed? And could you convince them it actually did exist?

“The numbers according to the South America Report on Malnutrition has yet to pass the censor and needs to be reviewed before being passed on to other governmental bodies as well as the Washington Times.” Okay, I confess that one is a little too easy to pick out but the more ridiculous the more believable?

- Chris Mansel

Capricorn One Comes To Pakistan

2007-11-05T22:18:00.001-06:00

With the current chaos in Pakistan the world is in an uproar and rightly so. Aid is considered to be cut off in official press releases while you can imagine phone tag s being played and jokes are being made,

Bush Administration official: “Oh yea, aid is being cut off, we’ll rip off real quick so it’ll only hurt for a minute and then give you another one. (laughs) Hey, by the way, next time you bomb Bhutto, try putting it inside the damn bus will ya?”

CNN ran a slightly offensive infomercial this evening with the same revolving 15 second bit of footage playing over and over with talking heads going on and on… What it all boils down to is the Bush administration, like that of Nixon in the 1960’s will support and aid any acts of dirty pool or assassination, period. Take that to the bank, Karl Rove or not.
Official press core were present to capture the arrests and beatings of protestors, well dressed protestors and in a country where the phone lines were reportedly down, Internet reports are still getting out along with video and still photography. All that is missing is is an official Fox News banner flying over the crowd and war torn, grizzled Fox security in their khaki vests keeping the truth victimized for us across the border.

- Chris Mansel

An Observation from poet/activist Jake Berry

2007-10-18T00:41:00.000-05:00

It is worth remembering that although the Greeks invented democracy. They couldn't hold on to it. It kept sliding into tyranny. It had the effect of turning Plato against it. The Romans made it work for a while, but that was before they became an empire. Empires are wealthy but unwieldy. Difficult to control. So many people scattered across so much space. It's impossible to know what is happening, especially with a democratic form of government. The drift is toward greater centralization of power. China is discovering that along with greater autonomy comes broader, and more clandestine, forms of corruption. They have tried dictatorship and now free markets. Either way the country is too big to manage very efficiently. During Mao's campaigns of terror and during the Bush regime's crackdown on civil rights post 9/11 there were brief periods where the oppositions were silenced. Very quickly, however, the voice of dissent begins to rise again.

In a small state, a city state say, the voice of dissent can be expressed directly in the form of town meetings. The debate is open and free. As long as there is no shortage of essential resources all is well, but when shortages come, and they always will, people abandon equanimity. Wealth concentrates. Under a series of administrations where false shortages generated by large scale capitalism have not been called to task a sense of desperation permeates the entire culture. A philosophy of immediate consumption becomes the driving ethic of the entire society. Grab what you can now because tomorrow it will all be gone. Becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy? Or the secret fear that it will do so fans the flames of desperation. Under these circumstances it is easy to convince the populace that wars must be fought, resources must be secured at any cost. Empire. In the end the people wish they'd left the whole thing alone. The earth is plentiful, but can not bear the imposition of global empires and those that lie outside the empire will strike out against it. We may protest from inside, but it will do no good until the protest reaches all levels of society, even those with enormous wealth. There is a bit of protest on that level, a shadow of it in that Obama has been able to raise so much money, but even if he had a chance to win he's already made so many compromises that he'd would walk into the job as empire maintenance and nothing more.

- Jake Berry

Rendition

2007-10-17T03:50:00.001-05:00

Attacked with a knife, stripped and hustled away. No, this isn't a crime in Central Park, it's the U.S. governement in action. Trail by jury? Jury of your peers? Wiretapping? Defending the right to torture? Those weren't campaign promises, they were carried out after taking office. So who on the campaign trail will take the law into their hands the worst in your opinion?

- Chris Mansel

Plague: Democracy?

2007-10-16T02:38:00.000-05:00

It happens all over the world, a relief worker will work tirelessly, to the point of exhaustion and those they are helping will become so concerned with the health of the relief worker and forget about their own suffering and offer their water or food. It is in moments like this that the true beauty of existence shines through. I have read tireless of aid workers in impossible situations, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Sudan, Darfur and it never ceases to amaze me just how much suffering mankind can inflict upon itself. It is almost like Osiris hisself has crawled out of the book of life, the lone child of the book of Revelation and from the ribs of the beast spread suffering so thick in the form of a plague called democracy.

- Chris Mansel

For He So Loved The World

2007-10-15T23:37:00.000-05:00

How broad a chapter is written when considering the suffering of the Iraqi civilians? Troops returning from iraq complain that too little is being reported of the good they are doing in Iraq. The personal contact they are affecting is lost in the horriffic savagery of the war it is true but the same was true in the Vietnam War. We need to do more to aid these returning veterans as they spend there small amount of time home before retunring again and again to the war zone.

- Chris Mansel

"Low he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so,
Pity me?"

- Robert Browning, Epilogue To Asolando

This Poison Sun

2007-10-14T00:40:00.000-05:00

a rural baptism, in a war zone
an I.V. of clear liquid will do
quarantining in a Sunni neighborhood
an Iraqi who is HIV positive
hooded and detained, white blood cells
retracting like concertina wire
the Marine charged to watch over the detainees
sits with a pistol in his mouth
repeatedly trying to kick off his boot
under a poison sun

- Chris Mansel

Candidate

2007-10-12T01:31:00.000-05:00

That one unadulterated singular voice this country needs in political office is not out there and it is certainly not running for presidential office. It takes more than speaking truth to power. It takes more than standing up for what you believe in. Who among us believes there is one politician who thinks beyond the passing of the resolution or law about the body count that will later ensue a month down the road, a year? Who in office speaks of change and follows it, pursues it? A sound bite does not a well thought out conversation make.

We need a President who believes in peace for the Palestinian people and who believes that the Israelis do engage in acts of terror. We need a President who believes in peace for the people of Tibet and a return of His Holiness the Dalia lama to his homeland instead of his stay in exile. We need a President who will finally pardon Leonard Peltier. I don't see anyone on the campaign trail offering anything close to this.

- Chris Mansel

Blackwater

2007-10-10T02:30:00.001-05:00

There are hammers in the wheel well this evening and as the road passing by underneath at a high rate of speed the swinging goes on. You don't have to be on the road to the airport in Baghdad to know that the situation is out of control. These days the gangs of america run through the day lit streets of another country heavily armed and funded by the occupying force shooting indiscrimately.
My short story J. R. and I in Iraq (posted on this blog as well as jazzmanchronicles.blogspot.com) tells the story of two correspondents gettng caught in the middle of a wave of gunfire on unarmed civilians by a private armed security force who might as well be named Blackwater. I wrote this story in December of 2006 and currently there is strong debate over just such an event having taken place. Who will handle the out of control gunmen of Blackwater? Who will sop the U.S. government who obviously has no problem with their tactics? The My Lai massacre didn't stop the Vietnam War, and niether will the secret bombing of Iran/Cambodia.

- Chris Mansel

"...all the rockers on the roads and all the boots in the streets.

- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

"Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere."

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

End of the Bush Years

2007-10-08T19:44:00.000-05:00

The expiration date for the cold hard truth of the Bush administration will be in the form of a small bag of mushrooms that descend from a cloud of well wishers in the press room. Whoever is the Press spokesman at the time will peel off their clothes and start ramming their hips into the C-SPAN cameras, champagne will flow into the hoof-like boots custom made in Germany for the more elite of the conservatives who wore through the Reagan years, their true blue blood still intact as well their bigotry not dismayed with the previous years of breakthroughs in the democratic racial divide.

Yes, the end of the Bush years will come suddenly and with great flourish as some will be sacrificed as the Bush library will be constructed no doubt somewhere in Dallas, Texas since the president plans to move there after he leaves office so he can guard his official papers with a team of lawyers not seen before since Ed Meese protected his collection of pornography in Circuit Court.

- Chris Mansel

Flashing The Hash At The Watergate Parts 1-6

2007-10-05T20:58:00.000-05:00

Part One:

Television news crews surround the steps of the courthouse as Scooter Libby begins a slow walk to his car after another day of testimony. Down the street looking like a moth eaten turtle in a helmet of burnt hair sits Karl Rove slipping rounds into an eighteen shot clip. Cursing quietly under his breath Rove ponders erratically the choice of taking out the cause of the spotlight on him or empty the clip into his face.

Jack Random and I were strolling by having recently relocated to Virginia to research a book on terror warnings, bank defaults and their ties to the white supremacist movement. I noticed Rove slamming his weapon into the dash of the car and just as I leveled the camera lens Rove hit the accelerator and sped down the street in reverse. The press up the street hardly took notice having heard the sounds of violence in the streets of Washington before.

Scooter Libby made his way out of the courthouse to his car. The press following and asking questions but not expecting any response. Like prison guards watching the monotony of inmates coming and going they hardly notice when a guard is attacked and the alarm doesn’t sound but the alarm will sound for Rove soon enough.

We tracked him to the Watergate Hotel and down the stairs into a conference room. Jack stood by the door with a high-powered microphone to eavesdrop on whatever was going on. I questioned the hotel staff tipping those on the lowest rungs of the pay scale and threatening with expulsion those who never got their hands dirty. Jack captured the goods and came back out to the car to play back the tape and as he hit rewind secret service agents surrounded the car. We showed our hands and they drew their weapons. Exiting the vehicle we were asked for identification. Some time ago we had made two press I.D.’s that showed we worked for the Washington Times that is owned by the Rev. Sun Yung Moon, a name that would open any door in the city of Washington, certainly the beltway. As we were held against the car we noticed Libby driving by in a taxi and exiting into the Watergate.

Part two

Fear looks like hope in the tall grass and that’s where we were, two inches of steel surrounded by a hard durable casing, the smell of cordite, and the kind of smell you recognize that the weapon has been recently fired. Secret Service agents who when they surround someone begin chattering on their communication devices and slamming themselves in place. They took a few minutes to analyze the fake identifications we showed them and slowly there was a look of recognition in the lead agents face. If I didn’t know better I thought the c*cksucker was going to drop to the street and begin his prostrations. I noticed a scar behind his right ear and Jack saw it too. It was the mark of a true believer, a West Pointer. Somewhere along the line he had been burned by something, he had known the smell of human flesh being singed into an emblem.

A huge crowd had gathered around us, a crowd of civilians. The agents knew he had to save face so he immediately started ordering his agents to make way for us and reducing the citizenry to a mass of insecurities. Their violent wand of intimidation about no cameras or questions led those around us to believe we were important. I could sense the onlookers squinting their eyes and trying to remember what we looked like so as to be able to identify us if we ever showed up on the news.

After the melee Jack retrieved the recorder from the car and we quickly made our way into the Watergate. Slamming into a booth in the bar we began to listen back to the tape.

We knew we had to try and hunt up Libby but first we wanted to hear what we had managed to capture on tape. The following is what we were able to transcribe.

Two or three agents will be enough.
The word is out on the limos and Duke (Cunningham) has f*cked that for us.
Hell we could get some pickup for that matter. If anyone can operate a shifter on the column it’s a hooker.
How much you think it would take to get the old Arab to squat over Durbin and piss?

Part three

In the bar we met up with a photographer who had been staying at the Watergate at the behest of the manager of the hotel in order to photograph the renovation. He was paid a flat fee and given a room at the end of a hallway on the first floor. He explained to us that more than once he had been accosted by the Secret Service for what they describe as “loitering with intent.” He explained that he had overheard some of the recording and with a smile added that maybe we might be interested in some of the photographs he had taken around the hotel. Something in the way he said this made us believe that there was something more to these photos. He opened the satchel in front of him and we joined him in his booth.

The photographs were amazing. Some were of the hospital staff in compromising situations, photos of the restoration included the construction workers smoking pot and generally laying around on the job out of sight of the hotel surveillance system. As we looked Jack asked if he had anything more official, and with that question he lit up and turned towards the back of the collection to reveal covert photos of the Secret Service removing stuff from hotel rooms. In one of the photos a Secret Service agent carries a life-size sex doll made into an exact replica of G. Gordon Liddy. In another, an agent was holding a drunken Scooter Libby against the wall while he awaited the elevator.

Jack leapt to his feet and stormed over to the bar and grabbed at the phone to make a call. The bartender came down the bar and said something to Jack that I didn’t hear and Jack screamed, “If you’re mother was in this kind of situation you’d be on this side of the bar asshole!” The bartender who had seen many crazed looks like the one in Jack’s eyes (many from politicians) sulked back down to his newspaper.

“News desk! Hey. Mike! What would you do for a photograph of Scooter Libby being sodomized by an agent?”

The photographer looked at Jack and back down at the photograph and then to me.

“Well, you know the darkroom can do many things but these days a fraud can be spotted right away.”

I told him that it didn’t matter if the story was true or the photograph genuine. As long as it existed and was leaked in the right way it would show up on the news and get picked up by the wires.

I added, “If bullshit was the ration card of power the entirety of Washington would be bent over backwards digging corn.”

Part four

As we left the bar we saw a group of Secret Service agents running to the salon located in the Watergate. We followed behind them to see a drunken Scooter Libby rubbing mud on his face and screaming about a free facial. Karl Rove was standing across the room talking into his cell phone. The Secret Service stormed into the room and Libby twirled the chair around at them and grabbing the terrified makeup attendant he started spitting on her neck and rubbing it in and screaming in a voice reminiscent of Truman Capote, “Isn’t it pretty, isn’t it pretty!”

The agents tackled the lady and Libby and began kicking them both. Rove sat down at the front desk and began flipping through the call caddy and copying down the names. One agent turned to secure the area and noticed us photographing the scene. The agent grimaced and started toward us but he slipped in the blood pouring from the woman’s forehead.

We ran down the hallway and were almost out of the hotel when Jack suggested we head for the conference room Rove had just left. We ran across the lobby and through the door. Down the stairs we met by a cleaning crew. We flashed our I.D.’s and took the garbage bag from them for inspection. They could have cared less why we needed it or for our identifications.

Back in the car I eased into traffic as Jack fished through the bag. He began laughing hysterically when he found a list of congressmen who had participated in the Duke Cunningham hooker scandal. Rove had the names circled and beside several of the names were amounts of money and personal phone numbers. One name in particular hit us more than others: Matt Drudge.

Part five:

Any member of the press core will tell you that if you shove the head of a baby into an airsickness bag and pop the bag immediately you will completely unsettle anyone near you. The mother will confess immediately every cock she had ever sucked and whether or not she saw what she had seen and testified what she had testified to in a case against a politician. This has been done in the case against the Bush administration. We saw the tale and we were there to report it.

Jack Random and I armed with cameras, starkly open and brutal honesty, we traveled to the tomb of the unknown soldier where we had been told Karl Rove held private conversations as tourists watched two guys in dress uniform flip around rifles in peace time and during war. Rove would appear we had learned with a hat pulled down over his misshapen ears. So there we sat waiting for Rove to appear when we noticed a representative from the Fox network we had photographed once on the balcony of a hotel in Maryland. He watched as he exposed him self to a group of Catholic priests. The Priests stood motionless in the tourist bus windows.

Waiting for Karl Rove had gotten to be a favorite pastime for Jack and I. We would sometimes pay someone to tip off the Secret Service that he had seen a photograph of one of them transporting illegal aliens into the streets of San Antonio and watch as the agent shoved the tipster against the wall. We didn?t do it too often as it usually cost us a couple thousand dollars and once it took the promise of an introduction to a certain celebrity who enjoyed urine in more than a relieving manner.

As Jack listened again to the tape from the hotel I saw a couple of tourists taking a few steps backwards. I watched closely as two agents opened one of the men’s shirts to reveal a listening device. I grabbed the camera from around Jack’s neck as he cussed me loudly. The agent took notice of Rove arriving in a sedan flanked by two women.

The man with the listening device made an attempt to punch the agent in the face and the agent was beating him senseless immediately. Every tourist eyes went right away to the noise. Rove and the two women made their way past the tomb to section thirteen of Arlington National Cemetery. As they walked we strolled quietly by the violent outburst of several agents now subduing the individual. By the time we were in the wet grass of the cemetery they had the man down to his underwear.

Part six:

Once Karl Rove had hit a stopping point in his mind he shoved the two women into the wet grass and began taking photographs of them. As they writhed in some kind of illicit blessing of Ronald Reagan, Rove began kicking at them in his sock feet. Agents had circled the area and had re-directed tourists away. As we tried to inch closer and closer we noticed a startled Juan Williams, the regular Fox news contributor getting out of a SUV. One thing was unusual however: the SUV had diplomatic plates.

Jack and I at seeing Juan Williams stood up and walked gingerly towards the scene. We had had several conversations in secret with Williams and whenever he saw us around town he would begin trembling, as he had been a bit too honest for his parties good. He had detailed one night how the party had during the 2000 election attempted to impregnate several Gore staffers by force.

We knew that if we could get a photo of Williams alongside Karl Rove kicking two half undressed women in Arlington National Cemetery we could get Williams to open up about the tree house in the White House as he has been long rumored to be the one with the apple in his mouth.

Rove was in ecstasy. He didn't get the warning that Williams was approaching as agents had told him. As the women were beginning to scream now, the agents didn't notice us either. As we got closer we could hear Rove's ranting, "We'll call this HR 666! Yea, take that Bay Buchanan betrayer of the chair!" The harder Rove kicked the women the louder they would chant, "Four more years, four more years."

- Chris Mansel

J.R. and I in Iraq (parts 1 thru 10)

2007-10-02T19:59:00.000-05:00

This piece was originally published on Jack Random's blog jazzmanchronicles.blogspot.com

Part one

Jack Random and I burst into Iraq like a widow at a train station all out of quarters for the condom machine for that last ride to New Jersey for the High school reunion. The White House press office kept offering us our own poppy fields in the hills of Afghanistan if we just wouldn't go to Iraq. After breaking the story of Karl Rove and the Washington sex trade they would do anything to keep us away from the story. We were determined and even thought to go thru the wilds of Pakistan but why muddle in with the retreat of the Taliban, we end up in their clutches soon enough we were wagering.

Anyway, we hit the Iraq oil fields to the sight of an American truck broke down. Roadside bombs it was said weren't going off near the oil fields anymore since it was common knowledge the Americans would be out of the country in force by the end of 2007. The George Baker plan had just hit amazon.com and all of Beirut we had read over the wires had ordered a copy and soon all of Iraq would be reading it through the black market. Once again Ed Meese would be popular among those who killed for pleasure.

The drivers of the two trucks both U.S. military soldiers were cursing at the four Iraqi members of the police who had driven by earlier and had took off quickly and laughed at the two of them stranded. One of the soldiers wanted to go off and shoot the Iraqi police and the other had for weeks left on the most recent one year tour in country. When we asked them about the term "boots on the ground" they responded with as much hate and vigor as they had when we asked about the Iraqi police.

"Boots on the ground, goddamn! I tell you what the boots on the ground think about this f-cking war, there's too much blood, too much Iraqi blood and too much American blood, and not enough old blue blood from any red states!" The soldier kicked the front of the truck violently and looked back at us quickly, "Just why are you here anyway? I don't see no boots on the ground here between you two."

We reassured the two soldiers that we wanted to report an honest portrayal of what was going on in Iraq. The other soldier who had remained quiet for most of the time spoke up, "Let me tell you something. We were on a patrol about a month ago maybe two. A roadside bomb goes off and these Iraqi troops start firing at one another, ripping each other apart and we have to mop it up. How long have we been here and we are getting killed every day. Sometimes I just want to start shooting and I don't honestly give a shit what I hit."

Part two

How many screams did you hear until you knew they were coming from someone you could identify as someone other than yourself? That's a question you need to ask yourself when you have spent any time in a war zone.

Here we were in a war zone and as soon as we arrived we noticed that the poppy had followed here from the shores of America, from the rocky cliffs of Afghanistan. We investigated the cities amidst the sound of automatic gunfire and saw parents in the desert grip of drug addiction dealing with the unthinkable loss of three children in one day. We saw one child get his legs torn apart as visiting dignitaries bid farewell to the high security fences of Halliburton's white table cloths on CNN and its high rise bleachers. The grimace of Donald Rumsfeld quoting the words real or imagined from a wounded soldier at Walter Reed hospital.

In the days of slavery the crowd were treated to question and answer sessions between the seller and the slave. The slave was usually being judged by the crowd as to their build or visual strength so the Q&A were usually for the delight of the crowd and so in Iraq are the questions to Iraqi civilians as weapons are put in their faces by privately hired security, militia anywhere else in the world, or if you like insurgents in Iraq if it were not for the tax form they can produce given six months notice. We ran into these thugs several times and had our lives threatened until we lied and said we were with some government agency we made up on the spot. This never ceased to amazed us as it always pumped them up more in their blood lust and obscene patriotism for the red in the flag.

On American television the obsession is with crime scene investigation and forensics. There are no investigations to speak of in a war zone, especially not in Iraq. For instance, if you wanted to dig a mass grave and hide it with any education it wouldn't be too difficult, after all it is a desert region. This can work to the benefit of both sides in any war. Body counts make for headlines a soldier said once, just draw a line straight to the head, and you'll usually find more than one.

Part three

Dodge City, that's what the Marine's called the area we were in. One marine, so young he shaved once or at least twice a week whether he needed it or not had already killed three people. When I asked whether or not they were insurgents or civilians he just answered, "Well, one was shooting back and the others weren't, but screw'em man. I say arm yourself, shit we're MWA bitch, Marines with attitude!" Raised on MTV this white marine was born in Tennessee and had served a tour in the KKK while still in high school he told me before I even asked where he was from. When I asked him how he liked serving alongside other Marines he laughed and spit at the burning sand.

"You want to know what I think about all these highly esteemed people of color? They're all marines ain't they?" Then he laughed and patted his weapon and slapped it down to his side and saluted me and added, "You think nobody fragged anybody since Vietnam?"

How bad an epidemic racial strife between soldiers serving in Iraq was we might never know. Jack had secured an interview with a Major and was coming back across the camp and looked worried. As he walked he looked around, his head looking this way and that the way someone does before they tell you a secret or avoid someone they do not want to see. In the soundtrack in my head I instantly heard "Peace Frog" by the Doors. I don't know why these things always occur to me but they do. I remember a time in Chicago when I was covering a story on the heated talks betwen labor and management and War's "Spill That Wine" hit me all of a sudden and within minutes violence broke out and I spent the night in a jail cell fighting for my life.

Jack got over to me and his voice was quiet which was unlike him in so many ways. "This Major I went to talk to just got a call about an ambush of civilians. They were targeted by security forces." I looked around now because I wanted to be the first to get there and because the security forces always have friends serving in just about every platoon in Iraq and many after their tour is up will join private security to cash in.

I asked Jack, "How do we get there?"

Jack replied, "That's just it, the guy that called him while I was sitting there is his brother, and his nephew was in charge of the group that opened fire. I just got out of the office before the crazy bastard could call a corporal to detain me."

I looked around and as far as I could see were Marines with weapons at the ready, well trained and loyal to their commanding officer, the chain of command. I stood to scout a method of transportation, a friendly ride to anywhere other than where we were and saw the Marine from Tennessee. I turned to Jack and looked back at the racist marine and I thought I might have a plan. Shit it worked in Hollywood.

-----------------

Author's Note: (Before beginning to write this next installment I see this excerpt from the New York Times, and I am constantly reminded that the ugliest of man often occurs to me and as I see through their eyes it makes me want to close mine. I had no idea of this report before I wrote about the racist Marine but I am not surprised as human nature often tends to lean toward that line from Apocalypse Now that quotes Abraham Lincoln, you know the one, "Sometimes the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature and good does not always triumph." I don't see any good in this, after all where can there be good in starting out to shoot someone because of thier skin color?)

"Lance Corporal Woods is black. He smoked in the darkness and said it has been a topic of conversation in his unit, Mobile Assault Platoon Five. "Valdez and me talked about that," he said. "He's Hispanic. He said, 'Man, I'm going to paint my skin darker, man.' That's what he said. And the next day he got shot."

"I hate this place," he said..."Out here, it really makes you love your country. I love my country, man. I love my country. I didn't hate my country before, man. But I had some problems with it."

"The United States of America," he said. "That sounds like heaven right now."

C.J. Chivers, "Marine Unit and Iraqis Fend Off Attacks and Boredom," NY Times, 7 December 2006.

Part Four

Jack and I came up with a plan. Racists are notoriously patriotic, reference most of America's history, governmental and citizenry for evidence of this, and certianly ignorant, so Jack approached the marine from Tennessee playing the role of a C.I.A. agent.

Jack approached the racist marine who was kicking at the sand and aiming his weapon at the horizon.

"Hey, you hear about that American got shot in Fallujah yesterday?"

The marine looked around and then looked Jack up and down. He didn't take but a second or two to size up Jack. "Yeah, terrible shot that guy, took'em two."

Jack laughed, "Yeah well, what are you gonna do, poor training."

They both laughed and Jack shot me a worried and disgusted look.

Jack went on, "Say, John Russell, C.I.A., in country to take care of some loose ends. Not saying we need some help but always looking for some willing participants, those who can be covert and keep their goddamn mouth shut. It's below the radar of course." Then Jack snatched the weapon from the racist marine's hands so fast he told me later it scared even him, "So, you got the balls to pull the trigger without caring where the rounds land or are you just another weekend faggot here till your wife fucks the whole town back home?"

The racist Marine stood up and drew a knife and said, "I'm an American, ever since 9/11 I wanted to do what was necessary for my country to fight terrorism!"

Jack didn't break a sweat and went back after him, throwing the weapon to the ground, "Since 9/11? What were you doing before that? Working in a conveinence store and cheating on your mother? Real American? Shit!"

The racist Marine was livid now and was ready to open fire on anyone. Jack knew he was ready and in less than five minutes.

Jack said, "Ok,you're what we need. What we need right now is a humvee. Think you can get one here and I mean now Marine?"

The Marine flashed a shit-eating grin, "Before you know it!."

Part five

Driving through the wasteland that has become Iraq you pray you'll run into an arms dealer and you'll also pray he'll have some legs and a few hands, some teeth and eyes. You hope he'll start the bidding with a request for just a drop of water to pour atop the loaves and fishes he has brought to feed the warring tribes as they sit down and start to calmly discuss the atrocity that is unfolding on american television that has been unbelieved so far on Al Jezerra. Maybe you'll cringe when he says offhandly that he was kept out of Rwanda because the prosthetics he had brought along couldn't make it through customs years before the tightened security of 9/11. But then again in Iraq as in many other war zones in modern times the dust will get in your eyes and you'll be able to blame the blurred lines of aggression, of morality, on the weather and the politics of plurality, the obscenity of greater good, on something in your eye. but to the racist marine Jack was dealing with it was something eaten away at his soul a long time ago. Not a speck of dust introduced at the factory but a giant ball of hatred either beaten or lovingly enthralled upon a young boy who before he knew hot to hate was taught that one man was better simply by the color of his skin and it was unfortunate for his fellow Marines and the citizens of Iraq that this individual was not weeded out and was armed and set loose in a war zone. A casualty is a number in any year whether it contains an election or not, and in Iraq as well in America the news was not good.

Then almost as if on cue came the Marine from Tennessee behind the wheel of a Humvee. In the distance came a mortar attack, it's the sound you'll never forget if you ever hear it once. The entire camp reacted at once. The Major that Jack had interviewed came out of his command post and was scanning the desert for the action. Marines were running for their companies and there was hollering all around us. The Marine from Tennessee seemed unfazed. In Jack he saw a direct line to the killing and he was not about to be tied down to waiting for orders and seeing whether or not he would see action that day.

The Humvee came to a sudden stop in front of Jack as he tried not to jump out of his skin. The Marine jumped out and started counting the clips for his M16. "Gotta go get some, just a mortar, maybe just a few of'em!"

Jack was still keeping an eye out for the Major who hadn't discovered us just yet. But we had a problem. Jack was on one side of the camp and I was on the other and in the middle was the Major and a camp in a frenzy stocked full of Marines with posters of Osama Bin Laden with supermodels taking a dump on his face and handdrawn pictures of Bin Laden on diaylsis being tied down to an electric chair repeatedly.

Just as Jack and I were about to lock eyes across the camp and exchange a voiceless means of communication we had managed to develop in some of the world's worst hot spots, an incendiary device went off inside of the camp and the mess tent went up in flames. The explosion was minimal but sent a surge further into the camp as another mortar landed about a hundred yards away from the camp.

Jack grabbed the Marine from Tennessee and screamed, "What are you boy a Dixie Chick or Daniel Boone? Get in there and get some!" Pointing at the spot whers the mortars landed he got the Marine's attention and he raced off to where Jack had pointed. Jack seized the moment and jumped behind the wheel of the Humvee. Dodging troops who were running for the mess hall more from curiousity than anything, Jack skirted the perimeter and made his way to me and I jumped in the open driver's side and we were off. Speeding down the only road out of the camp that wasn't being hit by mortars we were on our way to the site of an ambush knowing all along that a marine Colonel knew who we were and that we knew that he was related in more than one way to the incident.

The words of the racist marine rung in my ears, "You think no one has fragged anybody since Vietnam?"

Part six

Moving around in Iraq you can be reminded of the image of James Cagney's famous line, "Top of the world ma!" But only if you look at it from the ant's point of view. Imagine the ant as an insurgent. Yeah, top of the world but the top has a hole in it and it goes all the way to the bottom. The bottom branches out and comes up to a point and resembles a volcano. But rather than resemble the fiery furnance of the first Gulf War, (the image of the Iraqi oil fields graced all manner of media around the world) but now the volcano is purging blood, oozing limbs and the mangled childhoods of burnt and homeless Iraqi children.

How do you approach a crime scene in a war zone? How do you make your way through a maze of distraught family members who are rushing around helpless to the carnage of their family members having been shot by officially licensed gunmen by the government who has invaded their country. If you are a reporter you make it clear to all those who are around that you are a reporter, a correspondent, and are not armed. If the privately armed security force is still present you make it damn clear that you are american, but you also make it clear that you are someone more important than you are. You impress upon them that it wouldn't be so good to open up on you and you pray like a virgin on her wedding night that their cell phone batteries have gone dead and haven't gotten a call from a particular Marine major.

As we sped away we could see in the distance black smoke billowing out of a building in the distance. Ahead of us in a pickup two Iraqis were shifting around nervously in the seat and as we came alongside them they shot a nervous glance at us until they realized we were not U.S. soldiers but they could not know if we were not private sercurity forces, who in some circles have been called cowboys. There was even a rumor in command circles of a Taliban website that referred to the "cowboys" being displaced in Iran, not unlike the way american forces were moving across the Cambodian border in Vietnam. As we rode alongside the truck for what seemed like two minutes the Iraqi in the passenger seat raised a pistol up to eye level and aimed at my head. I yelled for Jack to speed up and Jack hit the gas and we sped along as four shots bounced off of our Humvee.

I yelled over to Jack, "I hate to ask a stupid question but how much gas do we have?"

Jack answered, "As far as I know we've got enough to get to the site of the ambush but what do you think about ditching this Humvee?"

I thought for a minute and asked, "I don't know, something bothers me about that shit back at the camp. How the hell do you lob mortars at a camp and miss by a hundred yards and manage to hit with a fragmentation grenade? How the fuck do you explain the physics of that one?"

Now Jack looked worried, "You think the frag was a cover to get at me?"

"Well Jack, you did hear the phone call..."

Part seven

As we approached the scene of the ambush the humvee took fire. Families were gathered over the wreckage of what were once bodies. If you have ever seen footage on television of men and women in some third world backwater holding one another and crying uncontrollably and waving their arms at the cameras and pointing at the bodies then you didn't smell the bodies burning. You didn't see the casual way the network cameraman replaced the film in his camera and began taking photos again like the carnage was just another stop on the way to the Pulitzer. He knows that he will be back in another watering hole soon enough.

In Iraq it's not like in Vietnam. You didn't just hop aboard a C-140 and then grab a Huey out to a shithole to scrap about to the shit. In Iraq the shit was the day of Tet, every single day. Thanks to a foreign policy of "Bring 'em on." One thing Jack and I could never figure out was why they called the area where the american troops where located the Green Zone. The only thing we came up with was when we interviewed the civilians in Iraq and they all responded with the same word, "Halliburton."

Halliburton had funded this attack. Private security forces had opened fire on innocent men, women, and children.

We turned around and around, Jack turning the humvee against the shooting and slammed the front across the curb of the highway. Both sliding out of the driver's side, we were still taking fire.

Jack screamed out, "You see where it's coming from?"

I was caught, frozen in the moment. I was watching a woman as she caressed the head of a boy. As she lifted his head up to her lips I could see that half of his head had been shot away. Blood had caked around his nostrils and from there, there was nothing. Somewhere on the bloody street his bloody mouth had been torn violently from him. As rounds exploded all around her she wept uncontrollably. While others ran for cover and Jack and I tried to save our lives she was shot through the heart while mourning the loss of this child.

Jack gripped my shoulder, "You see where it's coming from?"

I was shocked back into consciousness when a shot knicked my wrist and sent blood shooting across my hand. Before I had a chance to cuss or holler I looked up and noticed an Iraqi man wearing a black handkerchief aiming at my head from across the street. I jumped up instantly and grabbed Jack and jumped into the pool of blood in the grass by the front wheel.

The Iraqi man fired just as I jumped and just missed me. Jack cussed as I crushed all of my body weight on top of him, sending him face first into the bloody grass. We rolled and came up for air just as a car bomb exploded up the street.

The news cameraman crawled over to us, "Either one of you journalists?"

Jack and I looked at each other, I responded, "Now just what in the hell does that matter now?"

The cameraman didn't bat an eye, "I thought you might get my film to the network office, my cell is fubar."

I stared at the cameraman a moment and said, "Oh sure, yeah, we'll get it there, no problem."

He answered, "Great, tell'em about ten or twelve dead maybe more, I'm going after the car bomb."

The cameraman made his way crawling on his belly through the bloody grass in the direction of the explosion.

Jack smiled as he watched me open the film canister and expose the yellow film to the flames not three feet away from us. I handed the film to Jack and he tossed it in. We weren't going after the car bomb, we were going after the truth and fame and glory didn't have any role in this tragedy.

Part eight

The only human right you have in Iraq these days outside the idling engine of a military transport plane is just that, you are a human at that moment. But step out of the plane into the dusty air and you are the margin for victory, a landslide on the abacus. Translate that into political capitol and you are the means to an end, the straw on the camel's back that like a dowser's wand leads the way to the oil, damn the body count, this is war. Damn men, stiff upper lip and all, this is economics.

It's hard to keep a global ledger in mind when you are bleeding on an Iraqi street. It's even more difficult when you are in the grass which is much cooler but is covered not only in your blood but the blood of children and the twisted metal of automobiles and weapons. Any weapons in a firefight can be a weapon of mass destruction when paint is tearing and flicking away into your eyes, remember that if you ever find yourself hunted by the military of your own country in a foreign land.

The car bomb exploded again as best we could figure as there was another explosion almost right away. One thing you will never understand if you are ever in Iraq is the term, Improvised Explosive Device. That description alone brings to mind Timothy McVeigh going into a Wal-Mart and buying a few items and coming out with two shopping bags and some d cell batteries. There is nothing improvised about any of these devices, nothing thrown together on a whim. It's not like the Vietcong rushed down from the jungles of North Vietnam with just some nails and fertilizer and had to first find a rental truck or take flying lessons. Read back through the reports from Iraq when Saddam was in power and there weren't any I.E.D.'s being exploded. Create the demand and journalists will recoil only slightly before rushing in and that was where we were, rushing in on our bellies.
I looked up and noticed the Iraqi man with the black handkerchief had taken off his disguise and had exposed his american features. I grabbed my camera and shot a few stills of him reloading. Using the second explosion as cover the famalies who had been caught out in the open ran to cover as shots sprayed the streets like vipers snipping at their heels. I grabbed Jack and pulled his face over to mine, his look of confusion moved to anger as he noticed the american.

Jack whispered to me, "Dirty son of a bitch!"

Looking around us we noticed the famalies had made it to cover and one man was waving us over to the door of a storefront.

I grabbed Jack by the shoulder and notioned to him, "We got to make it, the bastard knows we're here."

As soon as I seriously allowed myself to consider running across a street being riddled with gunfire I instantly thought to myself, "You're a journalist and this asshole is trying to make you a soldier!"

I choked back fear and crippling anxiety and slinging blood from my hand onto the street I darted across the street with Jack alongside me. We made it just as the entire front of the building erupted in flames and smoke as a grenade was shot into the street in front of the wall. Once inside the man and his family motioned for us to follow them. As we made our way through the store the man stooped for a moment and stopped to pick up the body of a woman who had been shot. The bullet had gone clear through her skull and glass had sprayed her face, scarring it horribly. Jack and I each grabbed a leg and with the man we made our way to a vehicle outside.

We searched the roofs for private security forces but saw none, evidently they hadn't planned ahead and this gave us pause. We were at least 45 minutes late to the scene and this was as far as they had gotten. What had stopped them? What had we missed? Somehow we had to find out if they had suffered any casualities and we had to ask our saviors here what had happened but first we had to reach a safe distance.

Part nine

If you took the weight of the ocean that erupts in pain at the slightest breeze from across the world and threw it at a child and then took notes on the impact you'd see before your very eyes what war can do. Those notes would be the propaganda you could use to turn the tide on the floor of the U.S. congress and that propaganda could sustain any rationale of turmoil or loss or life. Sound irrational? In the young year of 2007 the political landscape of the world has become the wall that mankind has been backing up towards since the beginning of time. The spear flies through the eye of the storm, through its splendour and blue skies, through the calm and bereft moment of wreckage only to land as the clouds begin to darken and the rains re-approach from the east.

There is no soundtrack on the ground, "boots on the ground" as they say. No combat photographer in khaki has a camera crew following him or her around making sure they are captured in the right light as they help the wounded child to safety or as they seduce the Catholic missionary in the dimming light of the battlefield. War is ugly, it is obscene and the sounds you hear are the screams and the sounds of gunfire, the recoil. If you listen close enough you can hear the gunman next to you change his field of vision, not because you have spent so much time together in a war zone or in that distinct battle but for the fact that your senses are so heightened that your fears are leaping so far from your skin they erupt like the ocean with the slightest breeze from the gunman's movement from across the room.

Jack and I had been in many situations before where our lives were in danger and we had been in situations where we were so compelled into an idea that as we moved along with the story we ached for adventure or excitement.

On the campaign trail, following presidential candidates we would often sneak away from the subject and do what the industry calls a "human interest" story. You've read that line before and wondered what that means. It's not slice of life or inspirational as you might think. A hardened newspaper or wire service editor will call it a story about a nobody, a worthless sidebar or whatever he can come up with at the moment until it gets picked up or noticed. Then you are gold.

For instance we did a story once on a midnight shooting about a woman who was shot two blocks away from a hotel where a candidate was staying. It was a parallel piece. We mirrored their movements. As the candidate was taking the stage and fluffing out his speech she was being struck by the first shot. As the candidate told the first of many jokes in his speech the cartilage in her leg exploded and severed the nerve in her leg and she began to bleed uncontrollably.

When the story was presented the next day we were attacked from one end of the country to the next for sensationilizing the candidates visit to that dear city. We were told directly not to come back. This was the way we felt as we raced ahead of a grenade in Iraq in the back of a car with a family who's only thought earlier that day was survival.

As we each grabbed a leg and the man cradled her head we hurried as best we could out the back of the house. The noise was unbelievable. We could hear the private security forces shouting in english behind us. I was bleeding and all I could think about was their safety and Jack's and going back out the front of the house and somehow returning fire with whatever I could find. I had been shot at before by americans in my own country but not in Iraq. These were criminals, government sponsored thugs who were sure to get away with murder if we didn't do our job.

As we got outside the man's family was cowering in the front of the car mindful that we had to get the now deceased matron of the family into the backseat. I've never helped to put a dead body into a small car, especially one that I had to ride in also. I looked up and Jack's expression was of hurt and anger. He was quiet which was unlike him in a situation of stress but I was aware that he was focused.

As we got her into the car the man noticed that my hand was bleeding. In poor english he took me by the bicep and said, "Wait, here."

He reached into the backseat and tore a piece from the old woman's dress and wrapped it around my hand and tied it there. I couldn't move I was so struck by what he had done. Tears sudenly and immediately streamed down my face. The man padded me on the arm and shook Jack's hand and motioned us into the backseat of the car.

I looked at Jack and he looked at me. I couldn't do it and neither could he. There was no way we could crawl inside on top of the woman even if it meant that we would be shot at any minute. That was the difference between people like this man and his family, people like Jack and myself and the people who were terrorizing this country from both sides. We were good at heart and could not and would not break the simple and fundamental means of life that make us who we are.

We motioned for him to get in the car and go. He tried and tried to get us to get in but we said no.

Jack stammered, "No, take your family and go! Go! Go!"

As we watched the man drive away his son turned around in the front seat and watched us with no expression. I don't think he had any idea what was taking place but it saddened me to know that this boy would remember it all some day. War is no place for a child.

Part ten

In the final stage of the Gulf War, American troops engaged in a ground assault on Iraq, which like the air war, encountered virtually no resistance. With victory certain and the Iraqi army in full flight, U.S. planes kept bombing the retreating soldiers who clogged the highway out of Kuwait City. A reporter called the scene "a blazing hell...a gruesome testament....To the east and west across the sand lay the bodies of those fleeing."

- Howard Zinn, Introduction to the book, "Target Iraq: What The News Media Didn't Tell You" by Norman Solomon and Reese Erlich.

To date almost 35,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq.* You can't stand them end to end as the old saying goes because a good number of them are not all there anymore. Have you seen what these so-called improvised explosive devices do to the legs of a child? You wouldn't see it on American television because it just isn't shown. If you have a sateilite you might catch a glimpse of it on Al Jazeera but that has been dismissed as propaganda so you would just flip away to something else.

As Jack and I watched the man and his family drive away from his home, the dead woman's body in the backseat, we had a pretty good idea what a roadside bomb could do to a body. We had a damn good idea what an american grenade could do to an Iraqi woman of about 70 to 75 years of age. In the front of the house we could hear the radio traffic, it was american military signal. The nearby camp, the one we had just left, was mopping up a recent attack.

It was just a year before that I had seen a reporter from The Sunday Times get decapitated in Jerusalem in an attack that didn't officially happen during an official visit by the British government while he was riding in a car that I was almost riding in. Every time I watched a car drive away without me in it I had horrible feelings, like a waking nightmare where the monster crawls up from under the bed and begins assembling the ropes strand by strand and explaining why he is here to kill me.

My worst fears were soon upon me as Jack and I searched intensely for an escape route out of the situation we had volunteered for. It was a small stretch of houses and there was not a lot of room to hide if the security forces came looking for us which they were sure to do. They had "skin in the game" to quote a terribly inept phrase of the last century. As the car made its dusty way along the cratered field it came under fire. Jack saw a hole under the house two doors down we could escape through and was pulling me in that direction but just like when I watched the lady gripping the body of the boy in the street before I was frozen in horror. Jack slapped me twice and kicked me in the leg, shouting, "They're coming through the house, damn it come on!"

As we shriveled our way under the house and into a pathway that led up and into the next house over (a pathway which must have been created to escape what I don't know but it was convenient to us), the security forces came through to where we had been standing and on their radios directed the fire on the car the man and his family were trying to escape in.

Up and into the next house which had been abandoned due to the shelling and bombing, Jack and I ran to the front window and saw American military racing to the front of the house. It would be a few moments before they would organize and attempt to secure the area. It was now or never.

We bolted out of the door and ran into the street and turning the corner we ran into a pack of Iraqi civilians who were just as shocked to see us as we were to see them. A man who must have owned the house we came out of screamed at us in English for leaving the door open, "They will tear the place apart, asshole!"

We had to reach a vantage point to keep in view of what was going on but not so close as to remain in the line of fire or identification. In the streets of Iraq this is almost as impossible as in the jungles of Thailand or Laos when you are two American journalists sprayed with blood and shaking in fear.

- Chris Mansel

Castigation Repetition

2007-10-02T01:17:00.000-05:00

At a Denny's just outside of Pittsburgh, Pa. the now retired Donald Rumsfeld sits scowling in his small glass of ice water and carving a swastika into the table top with a large bowie knife. His security personnel, now trained and used to dealing with such circumstances peel off three one hundred dollar bills and push them into the hand of the dumbfounded manager. Repeatidly cussing the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Law and the media attacks on Blackwater, a company that Rumsfeld supposedily owns a great deal of interest. After all, someone like Rumsfeld would be well aware that death pays.

- Chris Mansel

Burma

2007-09-30T20:55:00.001-05:00

Watching a report tonight on FrontLine's website, courtesy of PBS on Burma:State of Fear was deeply troubling. A Father who lives deep in the jungle talks of government troops coming to burn his village and in the fire he sees a hand and realizes the hand belongs to his son. He says, "I realize that my son has left me his palm." The palm of his son's hand is all he has amid the terrible destruction. He recounts his story for the camera and you get a deep gnawing in your stomach that says I wish I could help.

Sanctions are the usual tactic used by governments and it is widely known that these sort of plans usually end up hurting those they should help. Forces that seek to hurt the innocent are hardly ever living in bleak conditions when they carry out acts of genocide.

Pursue organizations like Human Rights Watch and write letters and give if you can. Keep them in your prayers and thoughts. SHort of going to Burma you can go in your heart.

- Chris Mansel

J.D. Salinger on the Campaign Trail

2007-09-20T21:48:00.000-05:00

In a garden, somewhere in America, perhaps taking a break from a private drive cross-country J. D. Salinger could accidentally pass by camers covering a political campaign and as the cameras turn to catch workers leaving a plant to shake hands with a politican, they will miss the solemn man in the passenger seat.

Imagine the fury of the television reporters who can actually remember Catcher In The Rye, or the ones who read about the shooting. Quick calls to confirm, but is it bigger than the O.J. story? Who will play Salinger as he flees the camera crews and the helicopters? Is Jason Robards still alive?

- Chris Mansel

National No Hire List

2007-07-31T21:03:00.000-05:00

As we all know there is a No Fly List and a Terror Watch List, but is there an Unofficial National No Hire List? Corporations who give to largely Conservative causes could very well orchestrate such a list. A quick Internet search of a listing made available by the same government who illegally monitored phone calls of americans could very easily make this information available. Sound extreme, not possible? When was the last time you dreamed up something that would never happen and then saw it come true with amazing accuracy?
Here is a simple theory of how it could work. The key corporations that have not been caught red-handed by the Justice department for corruption, the multi-National, Billion dollar conglomerates make a call and ask for a better way to screen who they hire and just happen to mention that their contributions could go the other way. Right away someone in the Bush administration quickly decides to make that personal information available without said company having to pay for background checks. Sound like the kind of thing that would never happen? Think again.

- Chris Mansel

Personal and Political

2007-07-31T06:32:00.000-05:00

The personal and the political, up to a few years ago I thought they were seperate but I see that now they are both as constant as life itself. One chance at life? Well, one chance politically sure but for reincarnation the textbooks change all the time.

The personal, your own space is invaded not only by terrorism and your safety but by the necessary means of survival and if you don't think that political is the load bearing wall of that despair then the house you live in, your own skin is not your own.

The political is the air you breathe and the air you are breathing, like the chemicals inside the body can kill. Not slowly over time but on contact and in the cruelest of ways. Elections are to the working man what the Atlantic voyage used to be to the wealthly. You set out with the best hopes and intentions and half-way into it you realize that something is terribly wrong and you never had any control in the process to be begin with. The sharks will come calling in both instances.

- Chris Mansel

The Libby Sanction - Part Three

2007-07-28T03:45:00.000-05:00

James Baker, a man even who if he was on a witness list wouldn't have to appear, strolled into the White House through that mysterious exit we all have heard of but have never seen and up an elevator to karl Rove's office and sat down in an overstuffed chair and waited for Rove to finish a call to I. Scoter Libby in Havana.

Rove: Scooter, I am telling you food rations cans washing up on the beach don't interest me. What I want to know about is the job you were sent down there to do.

Libby: (Whose voice appears over the speaker phone) I have a couple of guys here who say they can do the job but they want more money and a few eccentric demands that will need attention.

Rove: How eccentric?

Libby: They say if Cuba is to be a walled off compound for detainees they would like the right to arrest and torture the citizens of Cuba as they see fit.

Rove: I don't see a problem with that.

Libby: Also, they would like the residents of Miami who continue to stir up trouble against Cuba in the american media to be deported back to Cuba, especially the singer from the Miami Sound Machine.

Rove: That is no problem either, she has strong Hollywood connections. I think she can supported the Gonzalez kid to stay here so we can get Fox on that angle. Good work, I'll call you back in a little bit.

Rove hangs up the phone and looks across his desk to Baker who is smiling broadly. Rove smiles, "Don't say it James, just another chance to get back at Hollywood, why not. You'd do it if you weren't such a chicken shit."

Baker slaps his leg and returns back at Rove, "Well you know Karl, chickens lay and shit and provide substance and all they require is a little scratch, we negioators have to settle for the spoils of the soil."

- Chris Mansel

Chewing A Dull Blade or Ed Meese Advancing In Tripoli

2007-07-26T02:36:00.000-05:00

Back in the 1980's when Ed Meese was put in charge of investigating pornography and ended up escaping to the Virgin Islands with two yachts of papers and reel to reel tapes to transfer to videotape,a cache he still owns and controls but has since moved to his compound for Better Boys in South Carolina. It's fruitless to mention that Meese would show up at the office at odd hours and kick open a container at random and get undressed and start hollering at the cleaning staff to wash him. There have been rumors through the beltway that say that Meese has in his possession footage of every major porn star that has committed suicide since the late seventies. So it's no shock to find out that on occasion that Meese will send packages off to those countries considered in the Axis of Evil to earn some extra cash.

Like the ibogaine incident of the 1972 campaign, there is a rumor that Meese will contribute in a rough way to the downfall of Mitt Romney. The drug, Dioscorea which Romney has been abusing for some years now has become well known through the inner world of Conservative movers and shakers and to a degenerate like Meese it is too good to be true. Meese in his drugged out mind has become convinced that in the holiest of holy in the state of Utah the Mormon Church has the completely mummified body of Margaret Mead and he wants it.

Romney who began using Dioscorea to bulk up for his political life and to sexualize his libido has become addicted. The problem is drug use is frowned on by the Mormon Church and if he is found out the religion he is supporting in a run for the White House will out him and his political life will be over.

Meese who comes from a family that owned a surprising amount of stock in Syntex a German pharmaceutical company during World War II, and who secretly was an active particpant in the research of Masters and Johnson, along with other Congressional celebs, keeps a leather bound copy of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 with him at all times. Referring to it at campaign stops during his political tenure he would amuse himself at the punishment listed for abuse of the Act while he flaunted every known narcotics law he could.

- Chris Mansel

Former State Official And a Priest Arrested Over Genocide

2007-07-24T21:57:00.000-05:00

Catholic Information Service for Africa (Nairobi) NEWS

24 July 2007 Posted to the web 24 July 2007

A former government administrator and a Catholic priest sought for their alleged roles in the 1994 genocide were arrested Friday in France.

The prefect of Gikongoro in southern Rwanda in 1994, Laurent Bucyibaruta, is accused of massacres of Tutsis in his prefecture. He lived in Aube in North-Eastern France.

Fr Wenceslas Munyeshyaka was, for his part, priest at the Sainte-Famille Parish in Kigali. The prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) based in Arusha, Tanzania, alleges that he took part in the massacres of refugees in his parish and also committed rape. He has been residing in northern France.

According to Hirondelle News Agency, the two men were indicted by the ICTR in 2005 but it was only last month that their indictments were revealed.

The ICTR Prosecutor would like them to be tried in France. The ICTR president, Dennis Byron, recently designated a chamber to examine this motion filed by the prosecutor.

But the Rwandan government and associations of survivors have declared that they will not cooperate with French courts if the two men are tried in France.

Kigali accuses Paris of having played a part in the genocide of Tutsis by politically and militarily supporting the former Hutu regime. Rwanda broke off diplomatic ties with France in November 2006 after a French investigating judge issued arrest warrants against persons close to current President Paul Kagame.

The Rwandese Justice Minister Tharcisse Karugarama said "the best solution for us would be to see him sent back to Rwanda to serve his sentence", referring to Fr Munyeshyaka.

According to the Catholic missionary news agency MISNA, the justice minister stressed that Fr Munyeshyaka had been sentenced to a life jail term in absentia by a Rwandese court last year. The minister defined the arrest of the priest "as a step we appreciate, though too late".

Copyright © 2007 Catholic Information Service for Africa. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).

Blood on the Canvas

2007-07-23T23:23:00.000-05:00

Joseph Mallord William Turner. Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps. 1810-1812. Oil on canvas, 4 feet, 9 1/2 inches x 7 feet, 9 1/2 inches.

There was a great documentary tonight on Public Television on the works of J. M. W. Turner's work. I hadn't thought about his work for a long time and I was reminded of its intensity and sheer brillance. Looking at this painting depicting Hannibal's Armies I can easily draw a line between our troops and the coming storm, the symbolic black cloud to come. Forced against a cliff with the blackness drawing ever near where are they to turn but to a campaign voiced by the voiceless. But what of the victims and innocent bystanders in the way?

- Chris Mansel

Campaign 2008, AIDS IN AFRICA

2007-07-22T23:13:00.000-05:00

When Africa has been removed from every campaign speech and the statistics that were favored in front of the cameras, and a few million more have died while a few thousand more have been fed and transported to applaud and pat ballons around the room at two major party conventions maybe a new photo-op will arise and a new round of commercials with squinting eye celebs, ministers, and politicans will grace our televisions. When?
The numbers roll off the tongue like the bodies reduce to dust into the ground. It's easy to write that sentence and hit the space bar and go on but the horror in which it fills me with, the same strangeness that escaped the American media recently when the nation of Rwanda did away with the DEATH PENALTY and it got no mention even in any of the so-called LIBERAL blogs who care oh so much with their advertising rates in place next to their hearts and souls. The bodies aren't placed in the ground along party lines.

- Chris Mansel

Trade Winds

2007-07-22T02:18:00.000-05:00

it is opening like a cavern erecting in a mist
like a missile that was programmed to just miss
where the tribes of david were abraham's
on the road to damascus to bethlehem

election year in the midwest see the signs
see the faded ribbon under the tailgates shine
where are the flags stuck pinted upside down
when was the last shot fired without a sound

there's a coat hanger under the wheel
keys stuck down into the driver's side glass still
this car it still won't roll without the oil
you can't steal the driver without his soul

chorus:

the only incentive I need to burn
the only reason I need to turn
is shipped home uncovered on the trade winds
no sanctions can ever overcome

- Chris Mansel

Tribal Sufferings on American Highways

2007-07-21T02:03:00.000-05:00

Bleak understandings as the country spirals off camera. The sermon hasn'tbeen heard and the traffic camera that caught the beheading transferred the image to the hovering news helicopter by mistake and the family of the victim is now doing public service two mile markers down for smashing the front door of the station. They found out by changing the channel moments after the news crew burst into their small apartment. Strange enough to be true, horrifiic. Campaign donors disguised as pederasts are moving through the lobbies of the some of the finest hotels in our country. Their influence can be utilized by both parties and the controling interest is transferred through newsprint and passable spanish.

The kitchen staff of any Hilton Hotel on the east coast of america in the sixties and seventies could name for you any underage starlet who moved through the steam of vegetables and noodles to the arms of donors and politicians. It would always be on a reserved floor, the button you couldn't push because the elevator operator, a tired and jaded African-American who had seen it and heard it wouldn't allow you to under threat of subpoena or violence.

The largest expose of our times has still not been written. The dark paths cut across the streets, highways and yards of New Hampshire for the last fifty years in this time of information. One can imagine databases on every resident of New Hampshire auctioned off every four years for the price of first born. Places like Sugar Grove in West Virginia who listen to every phone call in America and every email and blog entry like this one house individuals that if they were to ever truly speak on the record would certianly be admitting to highs crimes against humanity.

The watch fiends of this new century are spoiled like jackels at a Revelation book signing in the Cambodian jungle. Fear emanates from these narrow passages and our childrens children will lie across the ditches of hell to keep the peace while the jackels nip at their heels. Our only hope is to move to the country and give them the cities.

- Chris Mansel

Terror In The Campaign's Heartland

2007-07-19T03:52:00.000-05:00

Louder than the explosion in New York today from a steam pipe bursting was the constant thungdering of hooves, once described as the hungry feet of th emedia thrusting themselves headlong into vast jars of hair jel and full length mirrors. It could be terrorism they all excitedily murmured, it could be, it could be! You could almost hear them cry out in ecstasy, "This is how Paula Zahn got her start at CNN!"

Wolf Blitzer on CNN stumbled over the words in his ear piece more than usual as information zoomed into the Situation Room at a snails pace as he quickened our pulse with a glorious wave of the papers in his hand not yet before seen since Edward R. Murrow removed his cigarette from his mouth at the beginning of each broadcast, and you just knew that somewhere a comatose Larry King would have to be shook awake and informed of his whereabouts and informed that no, Regis was not harmed and yes, he would have to peer endlessly into the camera and yes, Anderson Cooper would ask better questions.

But the only question anyone wanted to ask at Fox News was did the Clintons cause this? Somewhere over Newport, Rhode Island Joe Biden was informed and demanded the plane crash land near a television studio. Mitt Romney clutched his wife and begged her not to expose his early experiences with those zany Mormon hijinks and exploding toilets. Obama knew that this could be tied to his admitted drug abuse by the Fox Network and John Edwards wife refused to halt and interview where she was bashing Hillary Clinton when informed that people were in peril, but hey, it's a campaign and we should all play along, after all, we're only voters and only so many of us can live in New Hampshire and matter. So shut up and vote then get out of the way, I think I saw that on a bumper sticker next to Nixon's name once.

- Chris Mansel

Dinner at the White House

2007-07-18T02:28:00.000-05:00

Dinner at the White House is the usual fair these days, Tex-Mex per the President's instructions instead when ti comes to the Vice President's plate. No, it's not a special diet for his bad heart. No you are way off base. He feeds like a mongrel dog. He has ben known to get up on the table and kick over rare bottles of wine and urinate on Kings and Queens, once biting the tear stricken face of a White House photographer for snapping a quick snapshot of his slurping.

Hide the ring in the cake and whoever gets the ring has good luck? Not at the White House. At the White House you hid a small bit of microfilm that when held up to the light reveals the body of Bill Clinton being burned alive in the killing fields of Cambodia. Six times this year alone Vice President Dick Cheney has gotten it and six times there have been large bombings in Iraq.

Last year on Vice president Cheney's birthday the entire menu came from the first Nordic cookbook printed in 1616. It has been said that the first time the President ate a meal prepared from this cookbook was at his grandfather Prescott's house. After dinner everyone retired to the White House screening room to watch The Boys From Brazil starring Gregory Peck.

- Chris Mansel

Gun Control, Campaign 2008

2007-07-16T01:18:00.000-05:00

Have you heard anyone on the campaign trail say anything about Gun Control? No, I am not talking about whether or not you can control a gun long enough to kill someone so we are shipping you off to Iraq and oh by the way, your wife who is pregnant we're going to cut her benefits and call her a whore if she doesn't do everything we say in front of the Fox cameras if they come calling. No, I mean controlling the ownership and sale of dangerous guns. No?

Ok, just checking.

- Chris Mansel

The John McCain Straight Talk Winnebago Express

2007-07-15T01:39:00.000-05:00

Due to a constant lack of funds the Straight Talk Express has been reduced to the Straight Talk Winnebago. John McCain can be seen kicking the totally modern sofa attached to the completely life-like modern kitchen at all hours of the night and going on and on about the Trilateral Commission and why New Hampshire shouldn't be first on the ballot in Atlanta and taking yet another whiff of a bottle he keeps in his jacket pocket.

Staffers have taken to ducking their heads and looking out the smal but cramped opening used to drive the Straight Talk Express Winnebago and sighing quietly and gazing on sunny days as John Edwards staff drives by and moons them. Only last week Hillary Clinton and Ron Paul armed with two 24 count roll packages of toilet paper each were seen headed towards the Straight Talk Express Winnebago and chuckling madly.

These are the times that try loyality and cramped bathroom conditions.

- Chris Mansel

The Libby Sanction - Part Two

2007-07-12T02:18:00.000-05:00

I. Scooter Libby turns around in his room and stops in front of his window overlooking the two streets below. He strolled four steps ahead to the window and looking down he noticed the three security guards positioned on the corners in plain sight as to notify those who would pass that an important man was top be protected. Later in the day he would start interviewing men who would be involved in the possible assassination of Castro. He dialed his satelite phone and reached the answering service for Karl Rove. he had been instructed to check in several times a day. The voice that answered instructed Libby to hold a few moments. he turned back around and watched as one of the young maids was bent over the toilet and as she cleaned it Libby kicked at her heels and laughed to hisself. He felt like a tyrant, a drug lord secure in a mountiantop resort in a foreign land. Rove came on the line.

Rove: Scooter?

Libby: First day and I'll meet with the first group later on this afternoon.

Rove: Don't give any pertinent information away. Remember the plan.

Libby: What is this I see in the press online, I am still the goddamn focus of the Democrats! Just how many car bombs does it take to get attention away from this trial?

Rove: I don't think you understand your role in this Scooter. You slid out under the door and like a rat you left the ship and you'll stay gone until you're needed back.

Libby: So now I'm a rat? I could have been a rat you know?

Rove: Think about where you are Scooter, remember Fredo? The Madam phone numbers came out today and Flynt is kicking at the door so soon enough the shit will be flying in all directions. It'll be quiet soon enough, now shut up and do your job.

With that the line went dead and Libby lowered the phone down to his side. Suddenly the heat of Havana didn't seem so hellish but did seem claustrophobic.

- Chris Mansel

The Libby Sanction

2007-07-09T01:36:00.000-05:00

Scooter landed in Havana and was driven quickly to the Hotel Plaza where a room goes for seventy dollars a night. The front of the Hotel comes to a point and overlooks neptuno and Zulueta streets, a good place to take a shot at someone and that is why Libby is in Havana. No Libby hasn't got the balls to take the shot but he has the authority to speak on behalf of Vice President Dick Cheney. The plan is simple. Find a witting accomplice to assassinate Castro and cooperate with the incoming president Fred Dalton Thompson to open trade and lift the embargo to Cuba and use the sudden influx of cash to fund the new far right-wing agenda and use the country as a storage depot for detainees.

Scooter immediately after arriving in his room summoned his security team to find him as many young maids to service what will soon become White House South as he sets up shop. Over the bathtub he hangs a photo of Vince Foster to remind himself that like the Roman legend tells us, "All glory is fleeting."

- Chris Mansel

The Exhumation of John Steinbeck

2007-07-08T04:47:00.000-05:00

last night John Steinbeck told me in a dream
he would have made a movie of The Grapes of Wrath himself
if only he could have found a way to made blood
look gray in black and white

We talked about war and how it left the young
at the mercy of the old and how after a while
those that were younger couldn't tell the difference
between the two, then he talked about how his son
had covered the war in Vietnam

then I realized we were talking about all wars
and that blood is not in black and white

- Chris Mansel

Unclean

2007-07-05T01:42:00.000-05:00

Computers hum and charts that were once three dimensional are printed onto large graph paper and delivered to the office of the Vice President. These charts bypass the office of the Secretary of Defense and contain information about the movements of Bin Laden and his body guards as they move across the border of Pakistan and travel under the protection of private security forces to the shores of Europe. A special meeting arranged to be spearheaded by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will discuss possible organized attacks of american soil in the next year to spark voter turnout in the U.S. presidential election.

An independent force to be reckoned with, the office of the Vice President has become the underlying exhausting line of demarcation in all things military. The wars fought in this century aren't fought on a standard front nor or they waged in a conventional way. The myth of a situation room in the White House where a President waltzs in and makes a decision and everyone snaps to are gone. War is not conventional of course, and no longer shall the government be allowed to rule outside the arm of corporations who can and do negoiatiate their punishment when breaking the law so blanantly it shames even their future generations.

Nigeria, the front of a war that officially doesn't exist like Afghanistan has taken victims like a thunderstorm reaching down to the ground with no notice. The winds pick up and debris is thrown around and the rain is sudedenly horizontal. Victims, people who will soon be victims run for shelter and some do not run soon enough. In a war they are called collateral damage but in a freak weather incident they are categorized as victims. Ecology mixed with Meterology and you have the narrow margin to understand and evaluate the losses. In a war, the type of war that goes under the radar, you must first understand the singular force of voilence and its seducing fear and power and in those three vices is the world of politics.

- Chris Mansel

Burn The Carcass At Half-Mast

2007-07-04T02:28:00.000-05:00

As I. Scooter Libby's plane dips its wing in triumpant as it leaves american waters and heads into the darkness towards Havana, the nation can rest well and awake to celebrate its nation's holiday this fourth of July and know that the stable environment once enjoyed in the nations capitol has been wretched onto the floor of a DC-10 as storm clouds gather at 5,000 feet.

Personal power unchecked in the Nixon administration and fueled by the confusion and wrath of a bitter jungle battle in Vietnam sent plumbers to jail and testimony to the floor of the house. Once determined and clear headed journalists to the parking garages of the collected unconscious of american public that now shriek at staffers for more oily residue over thier person as they await not a better tee time but a better table at the hanging.

Libby now downing a few drinks and stroking the side of his laptop and composing emails to the editor of the Washington Times shrugs off a call from Fred Dalton Thompson who wants him to consult on his campaign of dirty tricks before it has officially kicked in. Thompson said, "Surely, Scooter, surely you gotta know a few Puerto Ricans who slobbered over Bill in a steak house john somewhere in Virginia." Scruples run deep for Scooter who enjoys connections straight up the biker chain to Dick Cheney and down to Rupert Murdoch.

- Chris Mansel

American I.E.D.'s

2007-06-30T00:35:00.001-05:00

Burn the wheel and roll it over the graves, exhaust the I.E.D.'s but wait is this american soil? How far into the future can this be? How far off? Would the N.R.A. arm themselves against their own? Would they seek the resources of Mexico in a state of crisis? What brought terror to our shores in 2001? As Noam Chomsky says, read the public record. The public record is scary enough, like any theory built on video evidence the rest isn't too difficult to amass. Sure you'll be called a bunch of scary names and maybe even drived off to an abandoned warehosue and shot full of something you couldn't even pronounce even if you were a registered Republican (but wait some of them don't believe the cover story) but it's ok, really it is, you're not alone.

But like I asked at the beginning how far off are I.E.D.'s from the american shores? When was the last time you read your Civil Rights history? Seriously, know your history. IT MIGHT DO YOU SOME GOOD.

- Chris Mansel

Obituaries In The Passing Lane

2007-06-27T23:34:00.000-05:00

How long have I been dead? You could theorize that I was never born. I was born after the Tet offensive in Vietnam, during the protests against the war in Vietnam, in a time of assainations, and in during this time we were supplying weapons and training the very countries we would fight later in the so-called global war on terror. Has my generation had a chance to grow in a time of peace? If you think there has been any extended time of peace at all during the time of the late sixties till present day war in Iraq then you are sadly naive and it is that kind of naive voter who throws america into the line of fire.

Turn your back on Afghanistan and you process the executions of american soldiers in iraq at an alarming rate. To try and out last, to try and kill off an idea, an idea based on religion has never worked nor will it ever work. To surround yourself with the same kind of fervor you are fighting against sends the signal of immenient disaster.

- Chris Mansel

Don't You Ever Get Downtown

2007-06-26T23:34:00.000-05:00

A sad day at the Gtes of Hell as Dick Cheney and Henry Kissinger have died on the same day. The devil addresses the two men and tells them the sad news. He only has enough space that day for one more soul to torment. If they go up to heaven they will have to share a bed with Bill Clinton and have breakfest served to them in bed each morning for eternty by a scantily clad Gloria Steinman.

So it is left to Kissinger and Cheney to prove which of them is the worst person. They are allowed to use props and if they are drawn into a corner they can use the call a friend feature. In the end Cheney's pictures of Iraqi children being burned alive are no match for the twenty seven dump trucks of documents Kissinger has driven in and the witness testimonies. He even offers to call several now deceased dictators and one in particular, a small man named Uncle Ho standing next to the gate with his arms folded against his chest who works in the kitchen.

Cheney must return to earth for another life as Ann Coulter BDSM partner without the use of his arms and legs and a liberal streak a country mile wide.

- Chris Mansel

U.S. to Sign Investment Treaty (with Rwanda)

2007-06-25T15:43:00.000-05:00

East African Business Week (Kampala) NEWS
25 June 2007
Posted to the web 25 June 2007

By Daniel Karibwije Kigali

The office of the U.S. trade representative and the U.S. department of state announced recently that the United States and Rwanda have begun formal negotiations toward a Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT).

A statement from from the United States Trade Representative (USTR) Office based in Washington DC, said this will strengthen investor protection and encourage the continuation of market-oriented reforms in Rwanda.

The statement added that Rwanda will become more competitive in trade with the inflow of the much needed investment finance.

"Foreign direct investment can be a powerful tool to stimulate economic development, even in the least developed economies, where government is committed to protect and encourage such investment," said deputy U.S. Trade Representative Mr. Karan Bhatia.

"The Rwandan government has opened its economy, improved the business climate, and is capturing the attention of a growing number of U.S. companies. We believe that a U.S -Rwanda Bilateral Investment Treaty can help to enhance the confidence of current and prospective U.S. investors in Rwanda and, ultimately, help promote the new investment that is essential to Rwanda's future."

US-Rwanda trade was valued at US$21 million in 2006, up 22% over 2005.

U.S. imports from Rwanda were valued at $8.9 million in 2006, up 41% from 2005, and consisted mainly of coffee and tungsten ores.

Rwanda has shown a growing interest in using its eligibility under the African Growth and Opportunity Act to increase and diversify exports to the United States.

In the past few years, Rwandan firms, with assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), have undertaken partnerships with U.S. retailers Macy's and Starbucks for trade in fine basketwork and specialty coffee, respectively. U.S. exports to Rwanda totaled $12 million in 2006, up 11% from 2005.

The assistant secretary of state for economic, energy, and business affairs Mr. Daniel S. Sullivan said, "An investment treaty would complement the progress Rwanda has already made on economic reform. It would demonstrate Rwanda's commitment to an open investment policy and deepen our economic relationship. A high quality investment treaty would also set a very positive example for others in the region."

Mr. Bhatia and assistant secretary Sullivan were speaking at an event at USTR to mark the start of the BIT negotiations. Rwandan Ambassador Mr. James Kimonyo also spoke at the event. Representatives of USTR's Trade Advisory Committee on Africa and several leading U.S. companies that are involved in Rwanda, or considering work there, also attended the event.

The negotiations with Rwanda are the first bilateral investment treaty talks with a sub-Saharan African country in nearly a decade.

The prospective treaty would help to improve the environment for U.S. investment in Rwanda, thereby supporting the Central African country's efforts to attract the capital it needs to accelerate economic development and tackle poverty.

Bilateral investment treaties are one of many tools that the Administration is using to help reform-minded African countries. The African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), Trade and Investment Framework Agreements, and U.S. trade capacity building assistance are also helping African countries to grow their economies through increased trade.

The BIT negotiations will continue over the coming weeks. USTR and the State Department co-lead U.S. bilateral investment treaty negotiations.

Bilateral investment treaties are legally binding treaties that provide significant legal protections for investors and investments in BIT partner countries.

The U.S. BIT program encourages the adoption of market-oriented domestic policies that treat private investment in an open, transparent, and non-discriminatory way.

These protections have special importance in developing countries, where BITs help to increase investor confidence and thereby facilitate foreign investment and enhance economic growth.

Copyright © 2007 East African Business Week. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).

Gumen Occupy Nigerian Oil Installation

2007-06-22T04:22:00.000-05:00

AFX News Limited 6/18/2007
URL: http://www.rigzone.com/news/article.asp?a_id=46579

Unidentified gunmen have occupied an oil pipeline switching center in Nigeria and are preventing local workers and security forces from leaving, company officials said Monday.

Some two dozen Nigerian workers and soldiers are being held after the attack Sunday on a flow station in southern Bayelsa state, Italian energy giant Eni Spa said in a statement. No injuries were reported, it said.

The company statement didn't say if crude output had been curtailed and a spokesman in Nigeria had no information on the attack. Government officials weren't immediately available for comment. Eni operates in Nigeria through its Agip subsidiary.

The grievances of the gunmen weren't known. Troops clashed last week with gunmen in the area, leaving several fighters dead.

Nearly two years of spiraling violence in the oil-producing southern Niger Delta have cut Nigeria's crude output by about one quarter, sending oil prices higher in overseas markets.

New President Umaru Yar'Adua has said the crisis is one of the most-pressing matters he faces and a top militant leader was released on bail last week, marking a breakthrough in the conflict pitting militants against security forces.

The militants are pressing for more government-controlled oil-industry funds for their region, which remains desperately poor despite its vast natural bounty.

But their stepped-up attacks have helped degrade overall security conditions in the vast region of creeks and swamps and criminal gangs who kidnap foreigners now operate with apparent impunity. Some 200 foreign workers in the region have been kidnapped since December 2005, including more than 100 this year alone.

In addition, tension over local grievances -- such as a community accusing an oil company of failing to make good on promises of financial help -- sometimes results in attacks or kidnappings.

Nigeria is Africa's biggest oil producer and one of the top overseas suppliers to the United States.

Copyright 2007 AFX News Limited. All Rights Reserved.

On Account Of

2007-06-21T00:21:00.000-05:00

Translate the Constitution into any language on earth and I am sure more than a few laws would have to be re-written. Imagine the section on liberty being translated into some of the little known langusages of the amazon and suddenly life inside our borders change dramatically. Imagine the right to free speech being changed into the right to listen. Imagine having to try and explain why you need amendments in the first place.

- Chris Mansel

Listening Posts

2007-06-21T00:18:00.000-05:00

Iraq, the grim reminder of foreign policy based upon a racist ideal. When in history has hate ever ended without overwhelming bloodshed of innocent lives? The war in Iraq is based upon more than oil, more than greed, read through the rhethoric and you'll find a despair. There is no Lombardiesque speech underlying the message. When you see an interview with those in the Bush administration, the true believers that are still in the emploiy, you can sense that even in their cultish period of determination there is a craziness bleeding through, an ominous aftermath you can see in the eyes of the true believer. You can almost see how they will fall. You can almost hear the screams at the Fox Network, "W is Great, W is Great!" The voices echoing down into the street just before they dispense another report of misinformation.

- Chris Mansel

"Kick out the jams Kissinger Baby!" - George W. Bush

2007-06-17T00:59:00.000-05:00

President appears to be boarding Air Force One until you realize the blip reflecting against the metal building across the tarmac. Could it be a GOP reunion of the Capricorn One landing or Weapons of Mass Destruction anniversary of some sorts? No, its just another beer run to the Crawfrd, Texas ranch and isn't it time for it? I mean seriously citizens of the United STates the man lost his watch that was given to his grandfather by the great Karl Rove idol Nazi propaganda Minister Himmler. So cut the guy a little slack.

So he is flying coach to Crawford, Texas and tasting those wonderful nuts we all love on the great airline that is Southwest. He'll land in Houston and have to take a range rover from there but it'll be stocked with beer and the interior is done up in one of those pants suits Condi wears so just draw your own mental picture ok?

Enough said.

- Chris Mansel

Private Airfield Request Denied Blackwater Pilot Wanted Moyock Field

2007-06-16T02:47:00.000-05:00

By DAVID MACAULAY Staff Writer
Friday, June 15, 2007

A Blackwater USA pilot's plans to build a private airfield was grounded this week after his neighbors complained about the proposal.
During their meeting Tuesday, the Currituck Planning Board unanimously rejected Phill Bragg's proposed airstrip on Summit Farm Trails in Moyock. The airfield would have been within sight of property owned by Blackwater USA, Bragg's employer.
Bragg also is apparently involved with PigMasters, a North Carolina-based barbecue firm. On its Web site, Bragg's vintage biplane is jokingly referred to as PigMasters' "corporate jet."
Currituck Chief Planner David Webb had recommended approval of Bragg's request for a special use permit for a 1,400-foot-long grass airstrip with two hangars. But only on the condition that the airfield would not be used for commercial activities.
Bragg, who currently lives in Shawboro, said he intended to build a home on the lot and to live there.
"The lot is a 16-acre lot and it's on the end," he said. "There won't be any overflight of residences," he said, pointing out that his airplane would be flying over Blackwater's property.
"This is a very small grassroots-type operation with little or no impact. It's not a noisy endeavor," he said.
Bragg said his antique biplane is a hobby.
"It's like having a sailboat tied up on your dock if you live on the water," he said. "If you're a pilot, it's nice to walk out into your backyard and have a grass strip."
But half-a-dozen residents who showed up at the Planning Board meeting weren't satisfied with Bragg's assurances.
While conceding he wouldn't be conducting business, they pointed to his involvement with PigMasters, a company that organizes private functions. Residents said Bragg might use the airstrip to fly in guests for parties.
"My concern is that this gentleman is in a club, something like flying pigs," said Warren Wilgus, who lives on Oxford Road.
"They go out and they have barbecue roasts. This house here could be one of the main meeting places for them landing. There's no restrictions on the number of aircraft. They could be having a big old party."
Neighbors were also suspicious of why Bragg had applied for a permit for two hangars, if he only owns one aircraft.
Mike Colter of Summit Farms Trail, said he was concerned about fuel storage on the site.
"A special use permit for a privately owned airstrip will open (things) up for more general aviation owners," he said.
Colter also wasn't satisfied with Bragg's pledge to restrict his flight pattern.
"Years from now as the area gets developed he'll be flying over more people," he said.
Drew McIntyre, who is building a home nearby on Oxford Road, said his reason for coming to the subdivision was "for peace and quiet."
"An airplane is an airplane. I cannot imagine getting up in the morning and listening to an aircraft taking off and landing in this nice area," he said.
Sherry Motes, of Summit Farm Trails, questioned why Bragg couldn't instead fly from Currituck Regional Airport, about eight miles away in Maple.
After the hearing, Bragg said he was taken aback by the level of opposition. He said didn't want to do anything to offend his neighbors.
The Planning Board then voted to reject Bragg's request for a special use permit.
The board also agreed to revisit the county's limited rules on private airfields.

Find this article at: http://www.dailyadvance.com/news/content/news/stories/2007/06/15/0614DMcurrpilot.html

Bush in Albania

2007-06-12T02:50:00.000-05:00

President Bush received a huge welcome in Albania recently which puzzled me until I got a look at the national flag, it resembles the two headed beast that is Bush and Cheney. Ahh, now it all makes sense.

Country Scraps Death Penalty

2007-06-11T23:10:00.000-05:00

The Monitor (Kampala) NEWS
10 June 2007

By Arthur AsiimweKigali

Rwanda's parliament voted late on Friday to abolish the death penalty, a move that should clear the way for suspects in the 1994 genocide to be extradited back to Rwanda.
Rwanda says many of the remaining suspects accused of involvement in the killings of 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and Hutu moderates are at large in Europe, North America and West Africa.
Many countries refuse to extradite criminal suspects to nations that practise capital punishment or torture. Forty-five legislators voted to scrap the death penalty and replace it with life imprisonment, and five abstained.
The remaining 30 members of the assembly were absent. Survivors of the slaughter welcomed the decision, noting that the death penalty had existed in Rwandan law before the genocide. "It didn't deter people from picking up machetes to slaughter their fellows -- that's why we are not bothered by its removal," said Theodore Simburudali, president of the Ibuka genocide survivors' group.
The new legislation could also encourage the transfer of war crimes suspects being held at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), in the Tanzanian town of Arusha.
Frustrated at the slowness of ICTR proceedings, Rwanda wants suspects transferred to face trial at home. The court, which has a huge backlog, is due to be closed in 2008.

Copyright © 2007 The Monitor. All rights reserved. Distributed by All
Africa Global Media (allAfrica.com).

Graying The Grave

2007-06-06T23:07:00.000-05:00

I've seen conviction end as much as ocupation but then I grew up reading the history I knew I would see repaeted by my own government. The decadence of human life is just another counter clockwise down the drain and this comes from someone who recently spent some time in New Orleans. As Joseph Conrad wrote, "This is the worst of trying to tell..."

It's like a peasant confronting someone with a guilter's tan, his account wouldn't be complete without the confrontation and assault of the senses. The satelite rolls off the levee and smashes into traffic, and while traffic refuses to move to allow the ambulance through, the victim swelters in the New Orleans heat amid the despair and suicides. Where are the buses now that the water has receded?

During the Vietnam War Buddhist monks immolated themselves in protest of the war, perhaps in this country such an action, perhaps less extreme should be approached during a sanitary broadcast of a morning show amid the unblinking, barking on cue crowd of onlookers holding signs representing the names of hometowns. Just how far is it from Bay New Orleans to the Tonkin Gulf anyway?

- Chris Mansel

Bagosora Case - Lawyers Close Arguments

2007-06-05T22:30:00.000-05:00

New Times (Kigali) NEWS
5 June 2007

By Felly Kimenyi Kigali

The high profile trial involving notorious former Director of Cabinet in the ministry of defence during the Genocide, Col. Theoneste Bagosora, was finally concluded after 408 trial days at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). In his closing remarks, the ICTR chief prosecutor, Boubakar Jallow said that Bagosora, together with his three co-accused were entirely responsible for all the atrocities committed by the Ex-FAR during the genocide.
His co-accused are; Gen. (Rtd) Gratien Kabiligi, former Chief of Military Operations in the Rwandan Armed Forces; Lt. Col. (Rtd) Anatole Nsengiyumva, former Commander of the Gisenyi Military Operational Sector; and Maj. Aloys Ntabakuze, former Commander of the Para-commando Battalion.
During his May 28 closing argument, Jallow told the judges that the quartet held immense power and authority during the genocide and they later used their power and influence to plan, order, direct and incite the Genocide that claimed over one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
He said that the four former military leaders were responsible for ordering the killing of moderate leaders, including former Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, who was killed a day after the plane carrying former president Juvenal Habyarimana crashed.
Maj. Bernard Ntuyahaga is on trial in Belgian capital Brussels for leading the mob that killed Uwilingiyimana together with her security detail of 10 Belgian para-troopers.
The Military 1 trial as it is commonly known at the Tanzania-based tribunal has been going on for almost five years putting 72 people on the witness stand, among who was Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, who was commandant of the United Nations Assistance Mission to Rwanda, (UNAMIR).
The jury did not set the day when the verdict would be pronounced, but Dr Tim Gallimore, the ICTR prosecution spokesman, recently said that the verdict may be pronounced later this year because of the length the trial took during the proceedings.
Bagosora and his co-accused are jointly charged with conspiracy to commit genocide, genocide or in the alternative complicity in genocide, crimes against humanity, and serious violations of the Geneva Conventions and the Second Additional Protocol (war crimes).
In his arguments, Jallow did not suggest a sentence for the accused but if found guilty, the counts to which they are accused carry life imprisonment which is the highest sentence the UN tribunal can give.
The tribunal was established by a UN security council and has so far rendered 32 judgments, five of which are acquittals.
Among the judgments rendered is one for former Prime Minister Jean Kambanda who pleaded guilty to spearheading Genocide and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Currently he is serving his sentence in a Malian prison.
The ICTR mandate is expected to expire in December 2008 and proceedings on first instance and appeals are scheduled to have been completed by 2010.
Rwanda is tipped as the potential candidate to receive cases that will not have been completed by this time.

Copyright © 2007 New Times. All rights reserved. Distributed by All Africa Global Media (allAfrica.com).

The Right Wing Colonoscopy (The Polyps, The Scars, The Gas, Oh My)

2007-06-04T23:29:00.000-05:00

While the right-wing immortalizes Fred Dalton Thompson and now pisses on the mere distant memory of McCain and the ol' straw boys round the bucket, they sight Thompson's height at 6'6 except for ol' puppy blood himself Robert Novak who in his column cited Thompson at 6'7. Now you can draw your own conclusion why Novak cared to give Thompson that extra inch, but pardon the pun, I'll take a stab at it.... Maybe Novak has a thing for sailors like Genet or Capote and after seeing Thompson in that movie as an Admiral (rear admiral?) he just got overwhelmed? Seriously, James carville's bald head wasn't enough for Novak, niether was Tucker Carlson's cute little bow tie so who knows maybe Novak has been waiting for just such an event since Fred Dalton Thompson kicked country rag-o-muffin Lorrie Morgan to the curb.

- Chris Mansel

Chalk Marks In A Greasy Wind

2007-06-02T21:30:00.000-05:00

Recently the President pounded his chest and demanded that he was the president! This must have been a rude awakening for Vice President Dick Cheney who immediately kicked off the maggot covered quilt from his legs and stomped across his personal office to the red line that connects him directly to the office of Karl Rove. They briefly exchanged words while the maggots made their way to an 8 by 10 glossy photo of Fred Dalton Thompson applying sun tan lotion to the bald head of the late Strom Thurmond.

- Chris Mansel

Is Killer Storm Taking Its Toll?

2007-06-02T21:11:00.001-05:00

June 2, 4:22 pm by Mary Foster

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - The bodies are no longer being dragged from houses and buildings toppled by Hurricane Katrina, but nearly two years later many in the medical community think the storm is still killing.
Storm survivors are dying from the effects of both psychological and physical stress, from the dust and mold still in dwellings to financial problems to fear of crime, health experts and officials say.
"There is no doubt in my mind that Katrina is still killing our residents," Orleans Parish coroner Dr. Frank Minyard said this week.
"People with pre-existing conditions that are made worse by the stress of living here after the storm. Old people who are just giving up. People who are killing themselves because they feel they can't go on," Minyard said.
Some say an in-depth federal analysis is needed, despite a new state report that found no significant increase in deaths in the New Orleans area from January 2006 through June 2006. The state Department of Health and Hospitals is still compiling figures for the last six months of 2006.
Dr. Raoult Ratard, the state epidemiologist, said "the only slight increase" in deaths was in the first three months of 2006 in Orleans Parish.
But New Orleans medical officials say that jump, from 11.3 per 1,000 deaths to 14.3 per 1,000, - a leap of more than 25 percent - was anything but slight. Moreover, the report doesn't take into account evacuees who died while away from the city and were returned for burial.
"Our death rate was already high, that's huge," said Dr. Kevin Stephens Sr., director of the New Orleans Health Department.
Some New Orleans doctors questioned the accuracy of the population figures used to determine the death rate, saying they might have been too high. DHH secretary Dr. Fred Cerise said he was comfortable with the population data, which he said came from the Census Bureau and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The city was abandoned after Katrina struck Aug. 29, 2005, and many people did not begin returning until mid-2006.
The official death tolls in New Orleans stands at about 1,100. State health officials said deaths have not been listed as Katrina-related since the end of 2005, except for bodies found under storm wreckage. But Minyard said he believes the hurricane is still behind many deaths.
Dr. Ronald Kessler, professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School and head of a group that has monitored 3,000 exiled Katrina survivors, said reconstructing an individual's mental and physical state before death might help in determining exact causes of death.
"There are high rates of mental health problems among the survivors and previous research has found that mental disorders are predictors of earlier death rates," Kessler said. "So putting the two together in New Orleans is not surprising."
Local mental health professionals say they are encountering more people with psychological problems.
"We're seeing triple the number of people with mental health problems as we were before Katrina," said Leah Hedrick, social worker at Ochsner Hospital. "Depression, suicidal, anxiety, abuse of drugs and alcohol, and along with that comes a lot more physical problems."
Many storm-damaged hospitals are not operating fully, and that could help explain why other health facilities are seeing more patients.
Another possible sign that there are more deaths are paid death notices in The Times-Picayune. Before Katrina, the newspaper usually printed about a page daily. Now, three and four pages are not uncommon.
Stephens analyzed the death-notice pattern before and after the storm and said he believes it confirms more local people are dying.
His study will be published this month in the Journal of Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, the American Medical Association's new publication on disaster management.
Many church congregations scattered after Katrina, and their bulletins that carried death notices may not be publishing.
But Stephens discounted that as a possible explanation for why the newspaper is receiving more death notices. Before Katrina, he said, it was routine to place death notices in both the newspaper and outlets such as church newsletters.
Minyard believes the medical community's different observations reach the same conclusion, and one day will be proven correct.
"Years from now when they talk about post-traumatic stress, New Orleans after Katrina will be the poster child," he said.

Fred Dalton Thompson Vs. Al Gore

2007-06-01T23:48:00.001-05:00

Coming to a soup kitchen television that just happens to be bolted to the wall...Fred Dalton Thompson Vs. Al Gore, the televised debate, winner take all. You heard it here first.

- Chris Mansel

Rove Linked to Prosecution of Ex-Alabama Governor

2007-06-01T23:20:00.000-05:00

Friday, Jun. 01, 2007
By Adam Zagorin/Washington

In the rough and tumble of Alabama politics, the scramble for power is often a blood sport. At the moment, the state's former Democratic governor, Don Siegelman, stands convicted of bribery and conspiracy charges and faces a sentence of up to 30 years in prison. Siegelman has long claimed that his prosecution was driven by politically motivated, Republican-appointed U.S. attorneys.
Now Karl Rove, the President's top political strategist, has been implicated in the controversy. A longtime Republican lawyer in Alabama swears she heard a top G.O.P. operative in the state say that Rove "had spoken with the Department of Justice" about "pursuing" Siegelman, with help from two of Alabama's U.S. attorneys.
The allegation was made by Dana Jill Simpson, a lifelong Republican and lawyer who practices in Alabama. She made the charges in a May 21 affidavit, obtained by TIME, in which she describes a conference call on November 18, 2002, which involved a group of senior aides to Bob Riley, who had just narrowly defeated Siegelman in a bitterly contested election for governor. Though Republican Riley, a former Congressman, initially found himself behind by several thousand votes, he had pulled ahead at the last minute when disputed ballots were tallied in his favor. After the abrupt vote turnaround, Siegelman sought a recount. The Simpson affidavit says the conference call focused on how the Riley campaign could get Siegelman to withdraw his challenge.
According to Simpson's statement, William Canary, a senior G.O.P. political operative and Riley adviser who was on the conference call, said "not to worry about Don Siegelman" because "'his girls' would take care of" the governor. Canary then made clear that "his girls" was a reference to his wife, Leura Canary, the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Alabama, and Alice Martin, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama.
Canary reassured others on the conference call — who also included Riley's son, Rob, and Terry Butts, another Riley lawyer and former justice of the Alabama supreme court — that he had the help of a powerful pal in Washington. Canary said "not to worry — that he had already gotten it worked out with Karl and Karl had spoken with the Department of Justice and the Department of Justice was already pursuing Don Siegelman," the Simpson affidavit says. Both U.S. attorney offices subsequently indicted Siegelman on a variety of charges, although Leura Canary recused herself from dealing with the case in May 2002. A federal judge dismissed the Northern District case before it could be tried, but Siegelman was convicted in the Middle District on bribery and conspiracy charges last June.
William Canary called the allegations "outrageous" and "the desperate act of a desperate politician." Terry Butts said, "I do not recall this telephone conversation — this whole story must have been created by a drunk fiction writer." A White House spokesman told TIME that since the case of former Governor Siegelman remained before the courts, it would have no comment.
Rob Riley said, "I do not recall making the statement attributed to me." He added: "Neither I nor anyone on our campaign staff have been involved...in a conspiracy to bring a criminal case against Don Siegelman." Lewis Frankling, who prosecuted Siegelman, said he did confer on several occasions with Justice Dept. officials in Washington, but that "nobody ordered me to bring this case, and we handled it just like any other."
Canary was appointed by President George H. W. Bush to serve in the White House as special assistant for intergovernmental affairs, and then named chief of staff of the Republican National Committee. Later in the 1990's he also worked closely with Karl Rove in a successful series of campaigns to get Republicans elected to Alabama's state courts.
In an interview with TIME, Simpson confirmed that the "Karl" cited in her sworn statement was Karl Rove. "There's absolutely no question it was Karl Rove, no doubt whatsoever," she said. She also said she has phone records to back up the date and duration of her phone calls.
Though Simpson's legal work primarily involved research for companies seeking federal government contracts, she says she also did "opposition research" on Siegelman as a volunteer in Riley's campaign in 2002. A lifelong G.O.P. supporter, she says she has long been friendly with Riley's son, Rob Riley, whom she met at the University of Alabama and worked with on various legal cases.
In her interview with TIME, Simpson said the participants in the conference call expressed growing concern that Gov. Siegelman would refuse to give up his challenge to the vote count. According to Simpson, Rob Riley said, "Siegelman's just like a cockroach, he'll never die, what are we going to do?" At that point Canary offered reassurance by citing Rove's news from Justice Department.
Simpson said she had long been troubled by the conference call conversation, and even consulted an official of the Alabama State Bar Association to determine whether she could disclose it publicly without violating her obligations as a volunteer working for the Riley campaign. She was told, she said, that she was free to speak of the matter.
Simpson said she grew more concerned about the matter after Siegelman's conviction last June. She says she told several friends about the conference call ; one of them, Mark Bollinger, a former aide to a Democratic attorney general in Alabama and in the Alabama Bureau of Investigation, has given his own affidavit, obtained by TIME, swearing that Simpson had told him of the conference call and Rove's alleged statements.
The federal investigation of Siegelman culminated in a criminal prosecution that became public not long after Siegelman announced that he would run again for governor of Alabama in 2006. Partly because of the investigation, Siegelman failed in his bid for the Democratic nomination.
Siegelman, together with former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy, was convicted on bribery and conspiracy charges and faces sentencing June 26. Lawyers for Siegelman and Scrushy told TIME they were considering whether to use Simpson's affadavit in expected motions to dismiss charges against their clients, or in some other phase of what is likely to be a protracted appeals process.
Siegelman was convicted of appointing Scrushy to a hospital regulatory board in exchange for a $500,000 contribution to a campaign for a state lottery to fund education. Defense lawyers have argued that Siegelman drew no personal financial benefit from Scrushy's donation to the lottery campaign, and they note that Scrushy had served on the hospital regulatory board under three previous governors, before Siegelman reappointed him. The reappointment, they have argued, offered little of value to Scrushy except more work.

Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1627427,00.html

Drug To The Bottom Of The Shore

2007-05-31T23:05:00.000-05:00

Death is everywhere and even our Generals don't know how many of our troops have died. It is uncovered the conditions our troops are suffering in at Walter Reed and lo and behold two long years later it hits the television news and something gets down about it and then comes the campaign season. Photo-ops with the wounded, W.H. Auden wrote, "The stars are wounded; the animals will not look." Need I say more?

- Chris Mansel

Severed Head Left At Doorstep Of Mexican Daily

2007-05-29T23:34:00.000-05:00

By E&P Staff Published: May 29, 2007 5:30 PM ET

CHICAGO - The severed head of a municipal official was left at the door of the offices of the Villahermosa, Mexico, daily Tabasco Hoy this weekend, the press freedom group National Center for Social Communications (CENCOS) reported Tuesday. Mexico City-based CENCOS said shortly after midnight on May 26, two pickup trucks drove up to the front of the newspaper's offices, and a man dressed in black emerged from one of the vehicles carrying a white cooler. He placed it at the main door of the building, saying to guards, "they've sent you this." The guards immediately contact the police, who discovered the head of Terencia Sastré Hidalgo, a municipal official in the nearby town of Nacajuca in where seven alleged drug traffickers were arrested last month.

Sastré Hidalgo was abducted at his home May 24 by armed men. His headless body was later found with a note reading, "This happened to me for making an anonymous call to the authorities."Tabsco Hoy Editorial Director Hector Tapia said the incident was an act of intimidation aimed not only at his paper, but all news organizations. The paper has asked Mexican president Felipe Calderón and Tabasco state Gov. Andrés Granier Melo to send protection for its staff.

Newspapers in Mexico are confronting an escalating wave of violence and intimidation from drug gangs. Last week, the big media company that owns Cambio Sonora in the northwestern city of Villahermosa shut the daily down "temporarily" after a second grenade attack on its offices in a month. The paper has not reopened.

E&P Staff (letters@editorandpublisher.com)

Massacred Villagers Found Dead in Their Beds

2007-05-29T15:51:00.000-05:00

UN Integrated Regional Information Networks NEWS
28 May 2007

Posted to the web 28 May 2007

Kinshasa - Seventeen villagers who died in a brutal attack by suspected Rwandan rebels in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) were killed in their beds, the United Nations Mission in Congo (MONUC) said.
The attackers had escaped by the time a UN military patrol arrived in Walungu sector on the morning of 27 May, said Maj Gabriel de Brosses, a MONUC spokesman. Another 12 bodies were found in surrounding forests, said Samuel Zungrana, a spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Bukavu.
"A group of 12 armed men suspected to be Rwandan fighters entered three small villages where they attacked and killed 17 villagers," the spokesman said on 28 May. "Almost all the victims were found in their beds. The fighters used sticks, machetes and other light weapons and the wounded are villagers who managed to flee."
The arrival of the UN peacekeepers, he added, prevented further massacres as fighters fled.
About 29 people were severely wounded and 12 kidnapped during the 27 May attack on Kanyola village, 50km east of Bukavu (administrative centre of South Kivu province), Constatin Charondagwa, a civil society activist in Bukavu told IRIN.
"The attackers were from the Front démocratique pour la libération du Rwanda [FDLR]," Charondagwa added.
The FDLR is made up of Rwandan fighters who were accused of involvement in the genocide that killed at least 800,000 Rwandans in 1994, and have since been active in the forests of eastern DRC.
A report by CNN said the killers left notes with the bodies saying the attack was in retaliation against recent Congolese armed forces operations directed against them.
Clashes between the FDLR and DRC army have occurred in South Kivu, displacing thousands of people. Last week, MONUC reported that thousands more had been newly displaced, forcing them to seek refuge along the border between North and South Kivu.
In a separate report, OCHA said murder, torture, arbitrary detention and looting were devastating civilians in growing numbers in the region.
According to OCHA, continuing clashes between militias and government forces had displaced 260,000 people in the past six months. As a result, the humanitarian situation in the North Kivu province, in particular, was deteriorating.
Eighty-five percent of MONUC's 17,000 peacekeepers and military observers are deployed in this volatile region.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations ]

Copyright © 2007 UN Integrated Regional Information Networks.

All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).

The President and The Arab Strap

2007-05-29T14:52:00.000-05:00

So before you get the idea that this is the normal John F. Kennedy or Bill Clinton tag line. Marilyn Monroe or Monica, no. This isn't even Karen Hughes and her paisley hooded tarantula swap spit weekend O bliss, no this is the President letting his hair down with a little of the old "let me see what an Arab woman truly goes through" and so it is arranged away from the media as these things sometimes are.

The President is tied to a replice of a cruise missile in the middle of a room in the basement of the White House while three Arab woman are led in. The women are covered head to toe as is the traditional style except they were trained in a bunker near Quantico and were first tried out on former CIA director George Tenat.

While the President adjusts himself and remembers he can't spit easily in his restraints and mask one of the women reads him the Koran, another spits at him and the other stones him for having an illicit affair with the aforementioned Karen Hughes and lusting after Condi Rice. This goes on for one hour until the President is called away to go to Arlington National cemetery. Soldiers armed with bayonets are watched closely by Secret service as canons are fired out of respect for the fallen. As The President begins to speak those famalies who can't control their tears or their anger are lead off to the waiting arms of unmarked vans, not unlike the three Arab women.

- Chris Mansel

Gavels and The Echoes Down The Drain

2007-05-27T22:45:00.000-05:00

"First blood for oil, now a minimum wage for maximum blood. Aren't the American people giving enough blood for this war without having to give more to have a wage increase?"

- Dennis Kucinich

If you are serving in our armed forces and are on a street sprayed with bullets in New Orleans, Iraq or in Beirut, or if you have someone who you care about who is essentially working to stand on a bread line, i.e. mininum wage, this latest push in Washington should so offend you as to suggest an uprising on the level that should dwarf the sit-ins during the anti-war movement in the 1960's.
Kucinich says is true and horrifically so. What is the price of an american life? You'll hear that question alot in this debate until you realize that illegal aliens can also serve in our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and then you reconsider tieing it to Immigration or maybe you don't. If you have seen anyone shot in front of you, if you have ever seen anyone lying wounded you would have noticed that the blood was red, it's all red for everyone so extinguish any racist notion you may have and let's consider the question at hand.
As I said earlier in another post, the mininum wage is NOT a living wage. It is no where in the ballpark, not on the same street. Hell it doesn't even live in the same part of town usually unless the employee is allowed to stay there in the back on a cot several nights a week. In the past ten years or so the Democratic party has lossened its rein on reality, a few have slipped through and spoke truth to power but on the whole it cannot be counted on. Check the voting record and see who votes for this new agreement of "mininum wage for maximum blood" and see who really is representing you and then have the guts to do something about it.

- Chris Mansel

The Glass Half-Broken or Half-Spilled

2007-05-27T18:57:00.001-05:00

I'm not a red stater or a blue stater so I categorically deny your attempt to place me in a catagory invented by the mainstream media. When I watch the horriffic news and slaughter of innocent lives around the world I do not under any means interpret what I am seeing by which state I am living in.

I'm not a flag waver unless you include waving the white flag upside down in an unfailing symbol of protest for those who cannot speak for themselves. I am unable to travel to every nation on earth where indigenous people are being destroyed along with their homes by forces more powerful than them so I write what I can and in doing so I wave the white flag and in doing so it waves upside down in a symbol of chaos, of protest and of peace.

I'm not someone who will only get my news from american nightly news. I will not take the news I hear at its surface truth. I will read on further. I will read the International press and I will discern what I believe to be true. I will call a news photo into question if I see it more than once over more than one byline as has happened more than once.

I'm a dissenting opinion, a dissenting writer and a quoter of facts and I stand by those who have fallen and those who stood up. I believe if you take a history textbook in the United States and hold it up and shake it the truth may come tumbling out but it will never find its way into a classroom the way it needs to be. The truth begins at home.

- Chris Mansel

Jeb & Joe

2007-05-27T18:55:00.000-05:00

If you're under the hideous impression that national politics can get no worse then contemplate a Jeb Bush/Joe Leiberman ticket thrusting itself off from a Battle carrier parked just off Palm Beach while its crew members are forced to carry out their duties amidst the whims of the right wing press.

Navy Lt. - Sir, another reporter is crawling in and out of the missile firing station naked and screaming about the undiscovered amendments of the constitution hidden in Paris Hilton's cell phone.
Admiral - Jesus, not again. See if you can coax Hannity out with a copy of the dead and dismembered in Iraq.

Imagine Joe Lieberman trying for at least a few hours to get into one of those flight suits.

Imagine Jeb Bush beating or having beaten up every reporter who covered his daughter arrested for drugs and having their bodies buried at sea.

- Chris mansel

The Lords of Discipline and The Mothers of Invention

2007-05-26T09:00:00.000-05:00

Imagine a multi-ethnic Green Zone, forces united in freedom, much less fries all banded together in blood and torutre cartoons, american and Iraqi, all having to show their I.D. cards to prove thier americanism.

Imagine a rash of wild fires now dying out in Florida and Georgia now that Jerry Falwell has been put into the ground. Never mind the fact that one of his own was armed with bombs. But that story went away as fast as it arrived didn't it? Just how fast did the minor White House spokesman hit the Interstate when the bombs were discovered? How much ground can a post mortem on the truth cover? Imagine that much fire following Falwell into the already sulfur stinking smell of hell.

Imagine the photographs of the Democratic leadership backing off of the Iraq plan so fast they fall head first into one another's asses so far as to breed new dwarfs of entitlements. Just imagine.

- Chris Mansel

Dance Band Adrift in The Heart of Darkness

2007-05-25T16:47:00.001-05:00

Many Democrat and republican candidates are out today campaigning on the rise of the mininum wage and some are even going on and on by reflecting on how it will benefit the middle class. Someone please break through the rope line and please explain that if you are working for mininum wage you are not middle class, unless that is if you are working on a 72 hour day while they work a four or even three day work week.

Hey congressman how many votes did you miss on the floor while shoveling down that last rubber chicken?

Hey Joe Biden it is true that a full surrender is on the table in Iraq if you promise not to make an 8th trip to the green zone? Is it true they are calling you Baghdad Joey?

Hey Hillary is it true you promised a staffer in Iowa to erase a parking ticket for the frequency the media is operating on so you can monitor calls in or out of the press bus? Or was that Rommney? Maybe it was McCain, well you all voted for the war didn't you?

Is it true Lou Dobbs has a silencer he keeps in his metal boot just in case he is called away to his shed in Arizona?

- Chris Mansel

Villagization in the Bush Era

2007-02-01T19:56:00.000-06:00

Escalation or surge, look those words up in the dictionary and apply them to the situation in Iraq, to the re-deplyment of National Guard troops, compare that fact to the complete avoidance of regular troops stationed around the world in spots Germany and you begin to get a picture of the terminology, you get an idea of the american economy becoming more and more local as skilled technicans are re-located to repeat tours in what could be certian death. Edmund Burke wrote, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." But what is the opposite of that quote? For bad men to do their worst? For good men to encourage or to only do what is required by law? When is force required to stop the abhorrence of evil? In Iraq it is whenever you are fired upon if it is humanly possible. If you can run, you run. Held to a higher standard is one way we describe our fighting men and women. That is one way we describe our means of waging war. All of that ended more or less with the waging of the current war in Iraq and the Bush administration. Still we hold our troops to a higher standard but who will hold their superiors to that same level of achievement? Quoting from The Nation magazine, Senator Edward Kennedy said, "Says Kennedy, "It seems to me that we are at a time of a major escalation into a civil war, that's what the proposal of a surge is really about. This president is going to escalate the American presence and escalate the whole Iraqi war. This is a major mistake and a major blunder. If there's one thing that the election was about last fall was sending a very clear message to Congress and to the president that the American people want accountability. They want a change in direction on Iraq, they want accountability, and they want people to stand up and be counted." I think all Americans no matter what their party or belief want accountability, they want finally to be told the truth. Countless times history has proven that if the man in office would have just told the truth, if he would have just leveled with the nation things would have been better. This is one of those times. This Gulf of Tonkin was not an attack on the Twin Towers in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001. This Gulf of Tonkin was created out of thin air not long after taking office in the year 2000 or before, we may never know. Several U.S. Presidents have stood by and watched as genocides have occured, atrocities, and wholesale slaughters. An escalation of 20,000 troops into a nation as unstable as Iraq will undoubtly be a wholesale slaughter and it will not occur fifty years down the road Mr. President when we're all dead, but soon. - Chris Mansel Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Two places to go till the Mansel Report returns

2006-12-27T22:15:00.000-06:00

visit jazzmancronicles.blogspot.com for more of my writing,

jazzmanchronicles.blogspot.com

and listen to the Bob Kincaid show which is archived at

whiterosesociety.org

Ed Bradley

2006-11-09T14:15:00.000-06:00

Kissinger Dairies

2006-10-09T01:11:00.000-05:00

Kissinger Dairies 3

Henry Kissinger: Dick, I heard about your call with Woodward…bullshit, was that the best you could do?

Dick Cheney: I simply don’t want to discuss it Henry, this little lap dog who we had on a leash has turned on us when he smelled the change in power in the wind.

Henry Kissinger: You should know better than to tell anything to a lap dog Dick. They rub it on their paw and rub it on their ass and pretty soon every other dog in the neighborhood will come get a whiff. Why do you think President Johnson kept such a tight rein on the media coming out of Vietnam? Just because you have a handle on Fox, ABC doesn’t mean you are controlling the message.

Dick Cheney: The media is a thorn in the side of any administration.

Henry Kissinger: But bullshit? Have you been talking to Novak again?

Dick Cheney: He does help in coordinating the message.

- Chris Mansel

The Kissinger Dairies

2006-10-08T00:02:00.000-05:00

The Kissinger Dairies 1

Henry Kissinger: Mr. President, a few instant messages are nothing to be concerned about. During Vietnam we didn’t have personal computers, the Vietnamese were there for the taking. But this was of course a time when we had sandals on the ground. (laughs)

President Bush: Shit Henry, sandals. (laughs) Is that why McNamara made so many trips over there back then?

Henry Kissinger: McNamara had a taste for the darker flesh of the service help in the Carville Hotel Mr. President; it wasn’t too far from the embassy. A page’s throw if you will.

- Chris Mansel

The Kissinger Dairies 2

Henry Kissinger: As I told you on the phone Karl these are the glass shards President Nixon used to threaten John Dean into going along to get along.

Karl Rove: Is the price the same as before, two hundred thousand?

Henry Kissinger: Yes, the same as when I sold you the drunken scrabbling of a man who contemplated selling weapon secrets to Mao for a visit to a work camp in the north of China.

I'm Afraid To Leave The House

2006-10-05T05:21:00.000-05:00

Checked my email the other day
Newt was asking if I swung his way
Went to take my garbage out
Trent Lott was calling me out
Robert Novak hid on my lawn
He sang a limerick and carried on
I called the cops and he stumbled on

I’m afraid to leave the house
What if Sean Hannity is hiding out?
What if Rush Limbaugh spikes my drink?
Oliver North gives me a wink

Pat Robertson via satellite calls for prayers
While children drink Ovaltine and stare
What if Bill O’Reilly kneads his dough?
On a pay per view Nickelodeon show
What if Ann Coulter Tricks or Treats
Can the Patriot Act keep her at arm’s length?

I’m afraid to leave the house
What if Sean Hannity is hiding out?
What if Rush Limbaugh spikes my drink?
Oliver North gives me a wink

- Chris Mansel

Honesty In American Politics?

2006-09-27T23:26:00.000-05:00

What would America do with an honest to god politician? One that would admit in front of his or her voting public that they actually use speech writers and would take them up on the platform with them.

My fellow citizens of (fill in state here) I am here today to talk to you about the pressing problem of (fill in pressing problem here) that is crippling our state. Now these speech writers of mine and with some help from myself have come up with a speech I think you will find helpful. We’re going to present some ideas here today to try and open a dialogue. What does that mean? Well, we’re going to give the newspapers something to write about and the television news something to fill their airtime with. What does this mean to you? You’ll vote whichever way you were going to already, oh maybe we’ll change a few minds but really most of you have made your minds up already.
Now we’ve picked Roy here out of the speechwriters because Roy looks the best on camera. I didn’t write very much of this speech so I am not going to stand up here and take the credit for these ideas. But being an outside event Roy and I will take off our jackets, these expensive suit jackets here and roll up our sleeves because we want to look sympathetic to all of you hardworking voters out there.

Roy begins the speech but not one newspaper writes about the speech or television station includes a sound bite of the speech just the remarks of the candidate. Now, would this kind of candor make it in American politics, probably not? You can’t be completely honest in politics, not and get away with it.

- Chris Mansel

Wal-Mart To Shrink Options For New Hires Health Care

2006-09-27T11:06:00.000-05:00

By Ylan Q. Mui and Amy JoyceWashington Post Staff WritersWednesday, September 27, 2006; D03

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is scaling back the health-care plans available to new employees, sparking fresh criticism over whether the giant retailer is providing adequate coverage to its workers.
As of Jan. 1, the company will offer new hires only two health benefits packages in which the monthly premium can be as low as $11 but the deductible can reach $6,000, according to documents provided to The Washington Post by Wake-Up Wal-Mart, a union-backed group.
The company's two other benefit plans, which have lower deductibles, will no longer be offered to new employees. However, the plans will remain available to current employees who choose to renew their coverage.
Wal-Mart spokesman Dan Fogleman said yesterday that he expected the change to save most employees money. He said a review of the company's health-benefits plans showed most had opted for a package with a monthly premiums between $70 and $100, and a $350 deductible, but that more than half never paid that much.
That drove the decision to require new hires to sign up for Wal-Mart's new plans that have lower monthly payments but higher deductibles. The option known as the "value plan" starts at $11 per month for employee coverage in some markets and has a $1,000 deductible. The "freedom plan" starts at about $17 per month for employee coverage but has a deductible of $3,000 and the option to create a health savings account. The cheapest monthly cost for an employee and his or her spouse is $38 with a deductible of $6,000.
"We've done the math on this, and we have a pretty good understanding of what this is going to mean," Fogleman said. "Most associates are going to come out better on this."
Wake-Up Wal-Mart disagrees. It has accused the company of depressing wages and benefits, forcing many of its workers to seek public health care.
"Wal-Mart is cruelly hurting its employees, cutting health-care options and shifting costs on to the American taxpayer," said Paul Blank, campaign director for Wake-Up Wal-Mart.
Paul Fronstin, director of health research and education at the Employee Benefit Research Institute, said the new Wal-Mart changes look "pretty standard." But he noted that a biweekly increase in a surcharge from $50 to $75 for spouses who have access to other medical coverage seemed high.
"There is always shifting going on, and it tends to be modest at best. It might be that way here as well," he said.
Fogleman said that about 615,000 employees are covered by the company, about 47 percent of its workforce, and Wal-Mart is working to expand that number.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

White House Bars Hurricane Report

2006-09-26T17:31:00.000-05:00

White House said to bar hurricane report

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer
45 minutes ago

The Bush administration has blocked release of a report that suggests global warming is contributing to the frequency and strength of hurricanes, the journal Nature reported Tuesday. The possibility that warming conditions may cause storms to become stronger has generated debate among climate and weather experts, particularly in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster.
In the new case, Nature said weather experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — part of the Commerce Department — in February set up a seven-member panel to prepare a consensus report on the views of agency scientists about global warming and hurricanes.
According to Nature, a draft of the statement said that warming may be having an effect.
In May, when the report was expected to be released, panel chair Ants Leetmaa received an e-mail from a Commerce official saying the report needed to be made less technical and was not to be released, Nature reported.
Leetmaa, head of NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in New Jersey, did not immediately respond to calls seeking comment.
NOAA spokesman Jordan St. John said he had no details of the report.
NOAA Administrator Conrad Lautenbacher is currently out of the country, but Nature quoted him as saying the report was merely an internal document and could not be released because the agency could not take an official position on the issue.
However, the journal said in its online report that the study was merely a discussion of the current state of hurricane science and did not contain any policy or position statements.
A series of studies over the past year or so have shown an increase in the power of hurricanes in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, a strengthening that many storm experts say is tied to rising sea-surface temperatures.
Just two weeks ago, researchers said that most of the increase in ocean temperature that feeds more intense hurricanes is a result of human-induced global warming, a study one researcher said "closes the loop" between climate change and powerful storms like Katrina.
Not all agree, however, with opponents arguing that many other factors affect storms, which can increase and decrease in cycles.
The possibility of global warming affecting hurricanes is politically sensitive because the administration has resisted proposals to restrict release of gases that can cause warming conditions.
In February, a NASA political appointee who worked in the space agency's public relations department resigned after reportedly trying to restrict access to Jim Hansen, a NASA climate scientist who has been active in global warming research.
___
On the Net
News@Nature.com: http://www.nature.com/news
Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.

Noam Chomsky Eager To Meet Venezuela's Chavez

2006-09-23T03:18:00.000-05:00

Author Chomsky eager to meet Venezuela's Chavez
Fri Sep 22, 6:50 PM ET

Author Noam Chomsky, whose three-year-old book shot to the top of the Amazon.com bestseller list after Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez touted it at the United Nations, reportedly said he would like to meet Chavez.
"I would be happy to meet him," said Chomsky according to the New York Times.
The American author told the Times he received "10,000 e-mails" after Chavez recommended his 2003 book "Hegemony or Survival" in remarks before the United Nations General Assembly.
Chavez made headlines this week for railing against US "imperialism" in the eyebrow-raising speech.
Chomsky, 77, told the newspaper he would not use the same words -- "alcoholic," "sick man" and "tyrant" -- that Chavez used to describe President George W. Bush.
But he said he understood where the Venezuelan president was coming from.
"The Bush administration backed a coup to overthrow his government," Chomsky said. "Suppose Venezuela supported a military coup that overthrew the government of the United States? Would we think it was a joke?"
The leftist author, a linguistics scholar and longtime critic of US foreign policy, told the Times he is "quite interested" in Chavez's policies and finds many of them "quite constructive."

Copyright © 2006 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AFP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Agence France Presse.

Mexico Is Haven For U.S. Pedophile Priests

2006-09-20T23:47:00.000-05:00

Mexico is haven for U.S. pedophile priests: group
Wed Sep 20, 5:52 PM ET

Weak law enforcement and compliant Church authorities make Mexico a haven for U.S. pedophile priests fleeing justice, a victims' group said on Wednesday.
The Survivors' Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, which helped bring a lawsuit this week against two of North America's top cardinals, said it knows of 46 mostly U.S. priests hiding out south of the border.
"Mexico has really become a secure place because here judicial authorities don't track them down and nothing happens," said group spokesman Eric Barragan.
The U.S. Catholic Church has been tarnished by a pedophile priest scandal that erupted in Boston in 2002 and spread to almost every diocese in the nation.
Several U.S. Catholic priests have been prosecuted, multimillion dollar payouts have been made to scores of pedophile victims and church files revealed that some bishops repeatedly transferred priests accused of abusing minors to other parishes rather than reporting them to police.
Barragan said Mexican pedophile priests, to a lesser degree, often flee to the United States.
His U.S.-based group helped filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles on Tuesday that accused Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles and Mexico City's Cardinal Norberto Rivera of allowing a priest wanted for multiple sex abuse to flee California for Mexico.
Rivera is Mexico's most senior Catholic clergyman and was mentioned as an outsider candidate last year to succeed Pope John Paul II.
The suit was brought by Mexican former altar boy Joaquin Aguilar, 25, who says he was raped by Catholic priest Nicolas Aguilar in Mexico in 1994.
It claims that Mahony facilitated Father Aguilar's flight to Mexico in 1988, when a U.S. warrant was issued for his arrest, without notifying law enforcement in Los Angeles.
Prosecutors were investigating allegations that he had abused more than 20 boys in the Los Angeles archdiocese.
Mahony's spokesman, Tod Tamberg, said the conspiracy charge was "preposterous and without foundation" and the Mexico City archdiocese said Rivera "feels at ease because there was no cover up."
SNAP said it had hired private investigators who tracked down Aguilar to rural southern Mexico where he has been saying Mass at a convent and three different parishes and living out of his car with no fixed address.

Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon.

Supporting The Worker, Their Life Is Yours

2006-09-17T04:10:00.000-05:00

I think this country is paying a desperate price to continually side with Israel in every decision in the Middle East. To do so seems to suggest that that the people of Palestine are second-class citizens, and we know something about bigotry in this country. We didn’t invent it but we have done our best to export it in un-search containers.
The fence built between Israel and Palestine mirrors the fence being demanded on the floor of the Congress between the U.S. and Mexico. Palestinians cross over into Israel to work everyday and without that work force Israel would be desperate for help. Without the help of illegal labor the U.S. would be crippled except the U.S. is too ignorant to realize this.
To side with labor does not make you a Socialist or a Communist. To side with labor makes you a realist and a realist more often than not understands the importance of a living wage. Union jobs in this country were torn from locked doors by blood and skin. Sweat is what makes the grass grow not blood as the old saying goes. If Jesus was a carpenter like the stories suggest I don’t imagine he would let his customers set the price. Jesus would have been a union carpenter, he would have walked a picket line and he would have prayed for those refusing to care for the worker.
Where is the union in the Holy land? A land so set upon its religious belief, a land so rigid in its procedure, a land so stiff in its process of retribution. Does a Palestinian receive the same pay of that of an Israeli worker? You’ll never hear any mention of that fact in the American media, ever. Can you imagine a Palestinian Tom Joad sleeping in the shadow of the fence separating these two lands as rockets crisscross over head, his small fire to keep warm drawing automatic fire, his companions using the fence as a wailing wall because they cannot cross over until daylight. Sticking their prayers into the barbed wire wondering if their scarred hands will become infected, wondering if their job will become obsolete with tonight’s bombing.
If you want to truly understand unemployment and what it is like to be homeless try to do it in a war zone. Refugee status is sometimes preferred to suddenly being awakened in your home and having to run off into the darkness as in the case of a writer I heard from once through a website I write for. The writer lived in Rwanda and one night during the genocide that took place there he was awakened by screams and he and his family got up and ran out of their house and ran off literally into the darkness. I don’t know if he survived or not. To the best of my knowledge we never heard from him again. This would have been different if he were in a refugee camp? No, not really? In Darfur the y are firing into refugee camps. There are no jobs, there are no unions, and there are barely any relief workers. Are refugees illegal aliens? Should we build a fence around them?
To be on the side of the workers of the world is to support life itself it is just that simple.

- Chris Mansel

When Speculation Grows Hoarse

2006-09-15T03:37:00.000-05:00

Screeching at the top of a hypodermic is where any decent writer should be, in a hospital bed overlooking a battlefield where swans have been de-flowered by Mexican mice. Where the august storms have blown dust into the military tribunal parking spaces that have just been crushed under the tracks of tanks. The body of three star generals nailed in full uniform to gurneys awaiting cross-examination.

- Chris Mansel

Ann Richards Passes

2006-09-15T02:39:00.000-05:00

Former Governor of Texas Ann Richards has passed. A vocal opponet of the Bush family she served her state well. In another time she would have been described as, “a broad” and it would have been a term of endearment. She was tough and she did not back down from a fight, ever. She will be missed.

- Chris Mansel

Rwandan sentenced to 25 years for role in 1994 genocide

2006-09-12T16:13:00.000-05:00

ARUSHA, Tanzania (AP) -- A U.N. tribunal Tuesday convicted a former Rwandan military commander of genocide and crimes against humanity for his role in the 1994 genocide and sentenced him to 25 years in prison.
Lt. Col. Tharcisse Muvunyi's troops were behind the "systematic killing" of at least 140 students and Red Cross workers, Judge Asoka de Silva told the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
"We have no reason to doubt that Muvunyi had no knowledge of these killings," the judge said. He added that Muvunyi incited hatred and oversaw roadblocks set up by his troops where Tutsis were separated from Hutus before being executed.
Some 500,000 minority Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were slaughtered in the genocide.
Muvunyi, whose six years in detention while awaiting trial will be counted against his sentence, showed no emotion as the sentence was read. His lawyer, Taylor Williams, said he would appeal.
Muvunyi was chief of military operations in Butare province at the height of the genocide. Some 100,000 people were killed in Butare alone during the 100-day slaughter, chief prosecutor Hassan Jallow had told the court based in Arusha, Tanzania.
Earlier Tuesday, a former Rwandan mayor, Jean Mpambara, was acquitted by the court of having any role in the genocide.
Mpambara, who was arrested in 2001 living in a Tanzanian refugee camp, was accused of having led massacres in Rusumo, in southeastern Kibungo province, on the border with Tanzania, where more than 5,000 Tutsi civilians were killed.
Judge Jai Ram Redyy told the tribunal the prosecution had failed to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that Mpambara was involved in the 1994 genocide.
Prosecutor Hassan Jallow said prosecutors would study the ruling before deciding to appeal.
Mpambara is the fourth person to be set free by the tribunal since its establishment 12 years ago by the U.N. Security Council.
The tribunal has so far rendered 29 judgments, and trials are on going for another 27 suspects. The U.N. has set a deadline of 2008 to complete all the cases before the tribunal.

Copyright 2006 Reuters. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Two New Rumors

2006-09-10T23:02:00.000-05:00

Everybody is talking about impeaching the president, why don’t we cumquat him or give him the banana? Impeach sounds a little too nice.

Bush and Paris Hilton in a new poll were the only two people in the country who thought that a standing O stood for being entered from behind.

- Chris Mansel

Southwest Virginia family and A&G Coal settle in 3-year-old's death

2006-09-08T23:04:00.000-05:00

A judge's notes indicate a $3 million settlement in the case of a boy killed below a strip mine.
By Tim Thornton

APPALACHIA -- The second anniversary of Jeremy Davidson's death passed without clamor last month. So did the conclusion of a lawsuit against the people Jeremy's family blames for the toddler's death.
Local activists didn't mark the anniversary because they didn't get the family's blessing. Judge Tammy McElyea ordered the lawsuit's settlement agreement sealed, but her handwritten notes in the case file say the Davidsons got $3 million to compensate for their son's death. They had asked for $26.5 million.
The 3-year-old died in an Aug. 20, 2004, incident that attracted international news coverage. He was asleep in his bedroom while Kelly Robinson and Jimmy Ray Vanover widened a haul road on A&G Coal's strip mine above his house. Vanover was operating a front-end loader. Robinson, who was running a bulldozer, told Virginia Division of Mines, Minerals and Energy investigators that no one told him there were houses below where he was working.
The road they were working on wasn't meant to be a haul road. It was built in 1983 as part of a mined land reclamation project. Robinson and Vanover were making the road wider, so it could accommodate the 18-wheeled trucks that haul loads of coal from the site.
When the original road was built, a rock rolled off the site and crashed through the back of the Freewill Baptist Church. Now it's called the Looney Creek Memorial Baptist Church. It sits next door to the Davidson place.
Two years ago, about 2:30 a.m. during Robinson and Vanover's shift, another rock rolled off the site and into the Davidson house 649 feet below.
The half-ton boulder crashed through the back wall of the Davidsons' double-wide, through two interior walls and came to rest at 7-year-old Zachary Davidson's bed.
But first it rolled though Jeremy's room. The toddler's parents and brother found him on the floor -- Arvil Cross, a neighbor, said he had been knocked through the floor -- with his head wedged in his bed frame. He had a broken arm, a broken leg and a broken neck. There was a wound on his head where it had slammed into the floor.
His parents tried to revive the boy until rescue workers arrived. It didn't do any good.
"They never spent another night there," Cross said. "I don't reckon they've ever been back up in this holler."
Cross, who fills his retirement by running a lawn-care business, was mowing his own yard Wednesday. He said people don't talk about the tragedy much anymore.
"It's died down a whole lot," he said.
The lot next to the Looney Creek Memorial Baptist Church is virtually empty now. Scraps of a foundation mark where the Davidsons' house used to stand. A work crew hauled it away about six weeks ago, Cross said. Weeds are already reclaiming the bare dirt that used to be under the house.
"We heard A&G Coal bought it out and was going to turn it into offices or something," Cross said. "But you hear anything."
Larry Bush, a former miner and mine inspector, is a member of Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards, the local anti-mountaintop removal mining group. On Wednesday evening, Bush met with representatives of Mountain Justice Summer, a group that's battling mountaintop removal across the southeastern coalfields.
They met at Mountain Links, a resource center Mountain Justice Summer is setting up on Appalachia's Main Street. The group is setting up a nonprofit organization that will rent three offices from United Mine Workers of America Local 1607, with permission to use the union's meeting room when they need to.
It's a dingy space with vintage office furniture and ceiling tiles stained varying yellowish, grayish shades of drab. But it gives the group a presence downtown.
Mountain Justice Summer came to the town of Appalachia shortly after Jeremy's death to march in protest. They marched again on the first anniversary.
The family didn't have anything to do with the first two marches. The would-be organizers of this year's aborted march couldn't find the Davidsons to ask them about it.
"Just out of respect for the family we didn't do anything," he said about plans to commemorate the anniversary.
Like Cross, Bush said talk about the Davidsons' tragedy has quieted.
"It's probably still on people's minds but they're not saying anything," said Bush, who was surprised to hear the lawsuit has been settled and disturbed that it took so long. "It was drawn out, I think, to let public sentiment die down."
It took nearly two years, three judges and two trial dates to resolve the case. It went through an unsuccessful mediation and competed for time with the General Assembly and the flood of gambling cases coming out of Appalachia. Terry Kilgore, one of the Davidsons' attorneys, represents the area in the House of Delegates. McElyea expects to hear at least some of the gambling cases.
The original list of defendants included A&G Coal, the company operating the mine; Matt Mining, which holds the permit to mine; Penn Virginia Operating Co. and Penn Virginia Resource Partners, which own the land and the mining rights; and eight A&G Coal employees. By the end, Matt Mining and the Penn Virginia companies had been dismissed.
The Davidsons' original aim for $26.5 million was reduced by the shrinking defendants' list and by Virginia law. Their attorneys had asked for $350,000 in punitive damages from each defendant. Virginia law limits punitive damages to $350,000 in total.
The prospect of criminal charges in the case disappeared long ago. The civil case has been settled.
But there's at least one hearing left. Virginia's Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy fined A&G Coal $15,000 for what the DMME called "gross negligence" related to the incident. That was the legal limit at the time, but the case moved the General Assembly to toughen the law. A similar event now could cost a company $210,000.
But A&G officials argued the $15,000 fine was too steep. They appealed the fine and now that the civil case is settled, the process of scheduling that hearing can begin.
Mike Abbott, spokesman for the mine department, said Thursday that he didn't know when that hearing will be scheduled.
The road that leads past the former Davidson home site, past A&G's mine and over Black Mountain into Kentucky is a Virginia Byway. According to the Virginia Department of Transportation Web site, those byways reveal "a side of the Commonwealth that is uncommon and enlightening. Each byway leads to scenes of natural beauty and places of historical and social significance."
From a switchback curve on Black Mountain Wednesday night, the A&G mine was marked by small groupings of lights, flickering like campfires as haze settled into the hollows and a full moon hung overhead.
The steady hum of machinery, punctuated by backup warning beepers, mingled with the night insects' sounds as crews continued to mine coal on the diminishing ridge above where Jeremy Davidson used to live.

Army Unleashes Military Offensive in Darfur UN

2006-09-04T01:46:00.000-05:00

Integrated Regional Information Networks NEWS

September 1, 2006
El Fasher

Sudanese government forces have recaptured the rebel-held town of Um Sidir near El Fasher, capital of North Darfur State, raising fears that a major new offensive has started in the region, observers said on Friday.
The rebels, who have held the town for some months, have vowed to try to take back the town, an important stronghold, which the government forces overran on Thursday afternoon.
"Six days ago, a bombing campaign started in the area north of El Fasher that lasted a couple of days," a rebel source in Darfur said. "It seems to have been an attempt to soften up resistance in the area and to allow government troops to move in."
The offensive is unfolding despite Thursday's United Nations Security Council resolution authorising the deployment of UN peacekeepers in the western Sudanese region.
Large swathes of territory in North Darfur are under the control of the National Redemption Front (NRF), a new alliance of rebels who did not sign the 5 May Darfur Peace Agreement. In Darfur, local observers have confirmed that a string of villages, including Abu Sakin, Kulkul, Sayah and Turra, approximately 35 km northwest of El Fasher, had been attacked from the air on Monday.
On the same day, 30 vehicles of the Sudanese armed forces entered Abu Sakin and another 40 vehicles took Kulkul, pushing rebel forces out of the area. Government troops then moved further northwards, towards Um Sidir.
"The Sudanese army is creating a buffer zone north of El Fasher to prevent direct attacks on the capital," the observer said. "It seems that the Sudanese forces met relatively little rebel resistance; they simply moved away."
Unconfirmed reports indicated that the rebel NRF was moving southwards with as many as 50 vehicles into the area of Korma and Tawilla, west of El Fasher.
On Thursday this week, the United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution that calls for a gradual transition from the under-funded and under-equipped African Union (AU) mission in Darfur to a stronger UN protection force. The AU force has been unable to prevent widespread abuses against civilians.
But the deployment of a UN force of 17,500 troops and 3,300 civilian police depends on consent from the Sudanese government, which has rejected calls for a UN force in Darfur. It has instead proposed its own protection plan, which involves deploying another 10,500 Sudanese government troops to "consolidate the security situation". Military cargo planes have been arriving every night in El Fasher with troop reinforcements.
"This [UN] resolution will be meaningless unless member states get Sudan to agree to a UN force," Peter Takirambudde, Africa director of Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. "While the Security Council was debating this resolution on Monday, the Sudanese military was dropping bombs on rebel-held villages, with predictable consequences for civilians."
Since the government and one of the three main rebel factions signed the 5 May agreement, fighting has escalated between signatories and the rebel groups that refused to sign. As many as 50,000 more people have been displaced across the region since May, while nine humanitarian aid workers were killed and 20 vehicles hijacked in July.
"Insecurity is at its highest level since 2004, access at its lowest levels since that date and we may well be on the brink of a return to all-out war," the Emergency Relief Coordinator and Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Jan Egeland, warned the UN Security Council on Monday.
The World Health Organization has reported that 40 percent of the population in North Darfur State are not receiving health care, while vaccinations have dropped from 90 percent in 2005 to a mere 20 percent in 2006. According to the World Food Programme, 470,000 people across Darfur did not receive their monthly rations in July.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations ]

How We Leave The Beaten In The Well

2006-09-02T00:44:00.000-05:00

How We Leave The Beaten In The Well

A vengeful act born out of necessity, a scholar’s translation born of prejudice and ending in legislation. The vengeful act originating from the ancient text those that are parasitic and agitated who have enjoyed and profited from these acts can and will suffer the growth of this industry. No matter your belief system, the margin to discredit has been abscessed. If you have grown to accept death in front of you, on television, death by the hundreds, by the thousands, by the millions then you are as guilty as the text, as guilty as the translator? The act of killing was easy to learn and easy to teach and so history has been translated into every language known to man and woman. Now, every man and woman not only knows how to kill but accept it.
We leave the body in the well and wait for it to rain? We leave the body in the well because we want someone to find it? The body was already dead? Pre-destined? In terms of political reality it really doesn’t matter. How many wars have been started in your lifetime and what was the body count? But wait, you’re not dead yet. So while you await your death you’ll have to keep a steady count, concentrate now.

- Chris Mansel

The Busted Windshield of American Politics

2006-08-23T03:20:00.000-05:00

Paranoid behavior is the root of a collapsing ego. At one time all you had to do was the word communist and everyone knew where the conversation was going but then came the McCarthy hearings and suddenly there was a line in the sand. But these days the native response is to acquaint any conversation in terms of religious doctrine. So as it says in the Koran, “…your lord is not heedless of what you do.” So as you drive whatever metal implement into whom ever you are arguing with know that your actions have consequences like legislation but karma for want of a better word can not be amended.

- Chris Mansel

Reports From The Bunker

2006-08-22T19:15:00.000-05:00

I’ve heard that Condi Rice’s per Diem includes a small plastic baggie of salted fruit and a dispenser of face lotion easily allowed on Air Force One.

The Secret Service agents say her thrust is all-wrong but she pays for the room. They really can’t keep the earpieces in when she is going on the downbeat but it’s a good duty.

George Bush is upset that Cindy Sheehan bought some property adjacent to his in Crawford, Texas. What he is upset about the most is that she used the money from the insurance policy from her dead son to buy something. Now the Washington press core is in shock that the President now wants to enlist his daughters into military service because he has his eye on some property in Havana.

The FBI has set up a scenario in case there is a problem with John Mark Karr. A crime scene negotiator has been placed on call. The negotiator is none other than Clay Aiken.

The armed suspect arrested yesterday at the University of Virginia campus it has been discovered was asking passersby if they knew the home address of Don Blankenship because he was running low on ready cash.

After hearing of the dinner John Mark Karr enjoyed on his flight the focus will now be off fava beans and will now be on Prawns?

Prawns?

2006-08-22T01:56:00.000-05:00

After hearing of the dinner John Mark Karr enjoyed on his flight the focus will now be off fava beans and will now be on Prawns?

- Chris Mansel

The Bob Kincaid Speaking Tour

2006-08-01T19:31:00.000-05:00

The Liberal Sandbox comes to Harvard University!

Soldiers From 2 Koreas Exchange Fire - Associated Press

2006-08-01T00:39:00.000-05:00

Soldiers from North Korea and South Korea exchanged fire along their border overnight, but no one was hurt, a South Korean military official said Tuesday.

The shooting happened shortly before sunset when North Korean soldiers fired two bullets toward a South Korean guard post in the eastern part of the Demilitarized Zone, said Maj. Kim Tae-hoon of the Joint Chiefs of Staff office.

South Korean soldiers immediately fired back six rounds, Kim said.

The motive for the initial shots from the North was unclear, and the communist country has made no comment about them, Kim said.

The U.N. Military Armistice Commission, which supervises the cease-fire that ended the 1950-53 Korean War, will ask the North for an explanation of the incident, Kim said. The war did not end with a peace treaty, meaning the two Koreas are still technically in a state of conflict.
The two sides occasionally exchange fire across their land border and at sea.

Last October, North Korean soldiers fired a tracer bullet toward South Korean soldiers along the eastern part of the border and South Korea fired back, according to the South Korean military.
Navies of the two Koreas fought deadly skirmishes off their west coast in 1999 and 2002.
The latest incident came amid tensions over the North's recent missile launches, which prompted the U.N. Security Council to pass a resolution barring U.N. member states from missile-related dealings with the North.

The communist regime has been in a protracted standoff with the U.S. and other countries over its nuclear weapons program. It has boycotted six-way talks on its nuclear program because of U.S. financial sanctions over the North's alleged counterfeiting and money laundering.
North Korea agreed in September to abandon its nuclear program in return for security guarantees and aid, but no progress has been made to implement that accord.

More Rumors

2006-07-28T15:19:00.000-05:00

When I recently saw Bill Clinton speaking on behalf of Joe Lieberman it hit me, the only way Lieberman can win the nomination is if every pedophile pollster in Connecticut starts driving a Hybrid.

Condi Rice is going to perform in Japan at the piano. The press entourage has taken to calling this Condi trip the Bukkate Express. You’ll never see Madeline Albright pulling up her double hemmed skirt up on a crowded bus for some drunken day laborers.

President Bush in his high school yearbook was voted most likely to go down on something that might choke him, but no one had any idea it would be a pretzel.

- Chris Mansel

Rumors

2006-07-21T01:44:00.000-05:00

There is a rumor going around Washington that Karen Hughes has trained a miniature toy poodle to feed her raw liver. The story suggests an elaborate process aboard Air Force One particularly during campaign stops in rural areas.

Ann Coulter now shrugging off the plagiarism scandal has developed a Nicole Brown Simpson fixation and is chasing around every ex-jock politician she can find who can handle a knife despite crippling arthritis.

George Bush it is said is dismissing the label of Cowboy Politics and has set his sights on the exploits of John Voight in Midnight Cowboy and is remaking himself into a stud with the help of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and several of Condi Rice’s chatty girlfriends. A cover photo for Vanity Fair has been scheduled for the first of November.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert is in Bethesda Naval Hospital with cellulites. Apparently all that intense research into stem cells has taken their toll on Hastert. Reportedly the cellulites have been located ironically in his navel and amongst the dellulitis there has been found an embedded microphone with a serial number traced back to Joe Lieberman.

George Bush Sr., the first lord of the skulls was present at the funeral of Ken Lay. Recent reports have suggested that Ken Lay has faked his death but that rumor was put to rest when Bush Sr. dove into the coffin with lay for a photo opportunity as Barbara Bush while wearing a pin that said you can’t bury my beautiful mind took the flowers from the casket and shoved what she could into her pockets.

Katie Couric has sent out a decree saying she will not go into war zones. The head leaning, calf-exposing, morning after pill saleswoman Couric has come under the radar of Internet candor. Exposing her breasts to illegal Mexican workers who were mending the catacombs at Blackrock, otherwise known as CBS headquarters, the workers were inhabited by anecdotes Couric has yet to publish under the ghostwritten book entitled, “Let Your Thighs Be Your Guide.”

- Chris Mansel

Tales More Sinister

2006-07-09T01:26:00.000-05:00

(Dedicated to Bob Kincaid, my political mentor)

The Inquisition was more than a hearing on the hill, more than an evening beating pollsters stupid with fuel bills and credit card receipts. No, it was the preset for the rule of law we now enjoy and watch its prejudicial heresay construct a means of governing that could have leveled the Vatican back when the rape of young boys was seen as a means to an end.
Brutality then and now is where we are, the glory of terrorizing civilians on a par with the cardinals undressing in pools of smoldering steel to garner the praise of attrition. Property or the names of those willing to engage in the vilest of activities as to shame the Marquis De Sade himself into retiring to Venice and taking up yachting. Heretics they called those who sought the truth whether it be religion or political truth. These days however we have the Patriot Act and we have that gnarled up bunny rabbit of the Down Syndrome George W. Bush. A man who would have donned a robe before the Yale society even existed. He would have marched around more than the figure of an owl set aflame among the likes of Ronald Reagan and Walter Cronkite.
These days the Inquisition is carried out on the Internet where a priest in Wisconsin can email a pedophile in the roofing business about a certain public toilet on a local highway. The internet provider complicit but not served papers under the right orderly law of freewill and crude public scrutiny, the same kind of thinking that allows the profit motive of corporations to disallow knowledge of information in their own quarterly stock report if they have taken the time to lobby and grovel in an office twice the size of your living room.
The Patriot Act owes as much to brief orders of martial law as it does the Thousand Year Reich and its view of emblems in storefront windows. It’s a cruel and dumb world we live in they would have you to believe but the same ignorance that will drive dedicated television viewers to the polls will also draw and tenderize their hindquarters to the fire and lose the ability to criticize the coals.

- Chris Mansel

Ape Your Own Skin

2006-07-06T00:02:00.000-05:00

Sad is the day when Ken Lay is laid away or so Vice President Dick Cheney led reporters to believe. Once in the vice president’s residence he began to crush his scrotum in a top desk drawer. Screaming at the top of his lungs, “Soft on crime, soft on crime!” His wife swigging from a bottle of rare moonshine sent to her by a man in Malaysia who had sent a raving review of her soft-core porn novel in old English text demurrers, “ Dick, slap that old cock all you want it won’t bring back your little bitch. Maybe if you screwed me once in a while rather than humping the American dream with your whore Rove.” She turns to walk back up the stairs by the front entrance and added, “Karl called earlier and said Gitmo was going to turn into a turkey shoot.”

- Chris Mansel