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More Bush Theatrics, Lies and Diversionary Tactics.

Bush now brags how his illegal "Domestic Surveillance Program" has stop a 9/11 type of attack on a building in Los Angles in 2002.

We all know that President George Walker Bush is an Arrogant Self Centered person who would have never have missed the oppertunity to brag about stopping an alledged terrorist attack as soon as he would have alledgedly stopped it back in 2002.

Therefore we must concider this story of President George Walker Bush and his administration alledgedly stopping a terrorist attack in Los Angles in 2002 to be the LIE that it is.

It is nothing more then a cheap attempt to misinform and disinform and mislead the public just like his lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Irac and Afganastan which he used to as his reason for illegally committing acts of Genicide and War Crimes in the Middle East just so he could try to gain control of one of the Worlds Largest Oil Supplies for his Oil Company buddies and himself.

Afganistan still will not allow anyone to drill for oil in their country.

Sp4MP B.T. Army Veteran
Jackson, MIchigan

Unhappy and Spurned Secret Valentines send unauthorized political St. V-Day Chocolates to VP Cheney?

2006 St. Valentine's Day Massacre Code Red Alert issued by Cheney the Dick's Homeland Security Office of Political Schemes and Propaganda Media Scams ;
(Is that a PS Cheney's got PMS alert?):

Call the FBI?
No wait call your Bookie for odds and get estimates of which side will prevail!

Since the VP and Prez by law may leak to the Media any classified information they want ----will Dick and his home boys be able to reframe, spin and thus control the message to the Citizen Forrest Gumps?

Or will those Nasty Media Terrorists and their Unauthorized Pissed OFF, pissed ON Intel Leakers win the 'hearts and minds' of the Citizen Gumps?

Let's send to Denmark for Chocolates and call that magazine Editor in Denmark and ask for some political CARTOONS on this and ----

then beat Cheney's PS-PMS warroom crew to the planned script by getting some Christian Right Supporters & Flag wrapped Patriots out to protest the cartoons, the media and the Intel leakers on the FOX news tonight!!!!
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Exclusive Democracy Now streaming Interview:

Murray Waas on How Cheney "Authorized" Libby to Leak Classified Information

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/10/1433252
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Cheney 'Authorized' Libby to Leak Classified Information
By Murray Waas
The National Journal
Thursday 09 February 2006

http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2006/0209nj1.htm
-----------------------------
And WAPO too for more and related stories....

Ex-CIA Official Faults Use of Data on Iraq
Intelligence 'Misused' to Justify War, He Says By Walter Pincus

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/09/AR2006020902418.html

and

Friday, February 10, 2006;
"Libby Testified He Was Told To Leak Data About Iraq"
by Carol D. Leonnig

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2006/02/09/AR2
----------------------------------
Also see Che's previous post from the Wayne Madsen Report

http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/
-----------------------
and my previous post

Cheney Spearheaded Effort to Discredit Wilson By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t Report
Thursday 09 February 2006

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020906J.shtml
--------------------------

Happy V-Day Weekend Mr. Cheney....we hope to see you again on the PBS News Hour soon!

otherside123.blogspot.com
www.onlinejournal.com
www.takingaim.info
www.waynemadsonreport.com
Cheney Authorized Libby to Disclose Classified Documents

Once upon a time, a former agent of Italian military intelligence named
Rocco Martino, who had had some experience in the African country of Niger, came into possession of some forged, fraudulent documents.
These alleged Iraqi purchases of yellowcake uranium in 1999. In fact, the signatures were of Nigerien officials who had been in power a decade earlier, in the late 1980s.
So they were clumsy forgeries. Martino passed them on to the Italian magazine Panorama, which passed them to the US embassy.
Tantalizingly, President George W. Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, has an indirect connection to Italian intelligence.
Rove's chief adviser on Iran policy is Neoconservative wildman and notorious warmonger Michael Ledeen,
who has a longstanding connection to the darker corners of Italian intelligence.
Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney heard of the alleged uranium purchase.
Cheney asked George Tenet to look into the allegation.
The issue went to the Directorate of Operations secret unit on counter-proliferation. Among the field officers there was Valerie Plame Wilson, who had spent her life fighting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction under cover of a dummy corporation.
Valerie Plame Wilson was married to former US Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, who had served bravely as acting ambassador in Iraq in 1990, and when threatened by Saddam he showed up to a press conference wearing a hanging noose instead of a necktie. President George H. W. Bush highly praised him.
Joe Wilson had not only served in Iraq, he also had been ambassador to the West African countries of Gabon and Sao Tome, and spoke fluent French. Plame Wilson brought up the possibility of sending him as a private citizen to look into the plausibility of the report that Saddam had bought Nigerien uranium.

He went, and soon saw that the uranium industry in Niger was actually under the control of French companies and was strictly monitored.
There was no possibility of corrupt Nigerien officials selling it off under the table.

A separate military mission led by Marine General Carlton Fulford, Jr, deputy commander of the United States European Command (EUCOM), went to Niger the same month, February 2002.
Fulford quickly came to the same conclusion as Wilson, that it was implausible that al-Qaeda or anyone else could secretly buy uranium from Niger.

Wilson came back and wrote a report for Tenet, expecting that Tenet would pass it on to the high officials of the Bush administration.

Wilson was amazed when the Niger uranium story was put into Bush's State of the Union address.

Then Libby

wanted Secretary of State Colin Powell to make allegations about Saddam and al-Qaeda before the United Nations Security Council. Powell was also pressed by someone to bring up the Niger uranium story.

Powell is said to have exclaimed, "I'm not reading this bullshit!"

Libby appears to have been a big influence on the speech Powell gave, almost every detail of which was inaccurate, and at which United Nations officials who heard it openly laughed.
After the war, Wilson wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times in which he revealed his mission and again called into question the Bush administration assertion that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program.

Cheney was extremely upset by Wilson's op-ed. He saw it as an allegation that he had personally sent Wilson and then ignored Wilson's report. Or at least that was the spin. But Wilson had said no such thing in the article. He simply said that Cheney had asked Tenet to look into the story, which Cheney probably did.

Cheney was afraid that if the American public became convinced that there had been no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the war effort would collapse, along with all those billions of no-bid uncompetitive contracts for Halliburton.

Cheney, it has now come out, then authorized Libby to leak the classified 2002 National Intelligence Estimate to the press.

The NIE, which may have been produced under pressure from Cheney himself, had incorrectly suggested that Iraq was only a few years from having a nuclear weapon. In fact, Iraq did not have an active weapons program at all after the early 1990s when it was dismantled by the UN inspectors. The pre-war NIE in any case was just old bad intelligence, which was contradicted by David Kay's team on the ground in post-war Iraq, which just wasn't finding much.

Libby now began telling reporters that Wilson's wife was a CIA operative, itself classified information, since she was an undercover operative.
Karl Rove engaged in the same routine. Apparently Cheney, Rove and Libby (and Bush?) believed that Wilson's credibility would be undermined if the Washington press corps could have it intimated to them that his story was a CIA plant.
Robert Novak used the information given him by the White House staff to out Valerie Plame Wilson as an undercover operative. Her career was ruined. All her contacts in the global South were burned, and their lives put in danger. The CIA's careful project combating weapons of mass destruction collapsed.
The same administration that alleges it should be able to listen to our phone calls at will for national security purposes deliberately undermined US security for petty political purposes, making us all much less safe.
The likelihood is that the crimes of Bush, Cheney, Libby and Rove so far revealed are only the tip of the iceberg.

otherside123.blogspot.com
www.onlinejournal.com
www.takingiam.info

At least 18 states debate bills allowing health care workers to withhold treatment from anyone they want

www.unknownnews.org
by Rob Stein, Washington Post

Jan. 30, 2006

More than a dozen states are considering new laws to
protect health workers who do not want to provide care
that conflicts with their personal beliefs, a surge of
legislation that reflects the intensifying tension between
asserting individual religious values and defending
patients' rights.

About half of the proposals would shield pharmacists
who refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control and
"morning-after" pills because they believe the drugs cause abortions. But many are far broader measures that would shelter a doctor, nurse, aide, technician or other employee who objects to any therapy. That might include in-vitro fertilization, physician-assisted suicide, embryonic stem cells and perhaps even providing treatment to gays and lesbians.

Because many legislatures have just convened, advocates on both sides are predicting that the number debating such proposals will increase. At least 18 states are already considering 36 bills.

"It's already a very hot issue," said Edward R. Martin Jr. of the Americans United for Life, who is advising legislators around the country pushing such bills. "I think it's going to get even hotter, for lots of reasons and in lots of places."

The flurry of political activity is being welcomed by conservative groups that consider it crucial to prevent health workers from being coerced into participating in care they find morally repugnant -- protecting their "right of conscience" or "right of refusal."

"This goes to the core of what it means to be an American," said David Stevens, executive director of the Christian Medical & Dental Associations. "Conscience is the most sacred of all property. Doctors, dentists, nurses and other health care workers should not be forced to violate their consciences."

The swell of propositions is raising alarm among advocates for abortion rights, family planning, AIDS prevention, the right to die, gays and lesbians, and others who see the push as the latest manifestation of the growing political power of social conservatives.

"This is a very significant threat to patients' rights in the United States," said Lois Uttley of the MergerWatch project, who is helping organize a conference in New York to plot a counterstrategy. "We need to protect the patient's right to use their own religious or ethical values to make medical decisions."

Both sides agree that the struggle between personal beliefs and professional medical responsibilities is likely to escalate as more states consider approving physician-assisted suicide, as embryonic stem cell research speeds forward and as other advances open more ethical fault lines.

"We are moving into a brave new world of cloning, cyborgs, sex selection, genetic testing of embryos," Stevens said. "The list of difficult ethical issues involving nurses, physicians, research scientists, pharmacists and other health care workers is just continuing to increase."

Most states have long had laws to protect doctors and nurses who do not want to perform abortions from being fired, disciplined or sued, or from facing other legal action. Conflicts over other health care workers emerged after the morning-after pill was approved and pharmacists began refusing to fill prescriptions for it. As a result, some lost their jobs, were reprimanded or were sanctioned by state licensing boards.

That prompted a number of states to consider laws last year that would explicitly protect pharmacists or, alternately, require them to fill such prescriptions.

The issue is gaining new prominence this year because of a confluence of factors. They include the heightened attention to pharmacists amid a host of controversial medical issues, such as the possible over-the-counter sale of the Plan B morning-after pill, embryonic research and testing, and debates over physician-assisted suicide and end-of-life care after the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case.

"There's an awful lot of dry kindling in the room," Martin said.

At least seven states are considering laws that would specifically protect pharmacists or pharmacies.

"Every other day, I hear from pharmacists who are being threatened or told they have to sign something that says they are willing to go along with government mandates," said Francis J. Manion of the American Center for Law & Justice, which is fighting an Illinois regulation implemented last year requiring pharmacies to fill all prescriptions, which led to a number of pharmacists being fired. "The right to not be required to do something that violates your core beliefs is fundamental in our society."

Opponents say such laws endanger patients by denying them access to legal drugs, particularly morning-after pills, which must be taken quickly. They say women often must go from pharmacy to pharmacy to get those prescriptions filled.

"Women all over the country are being turned away from obtaining valid and legal prescriptions," said Jackie Payne of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. "These kinds of laws would only make the situation worse. It's shameful." Planned Parenthood is supporting efforts in at least six states to pass laws requiring pharmacists to fill all prescriptions.

At least nine states are considering "right of refusal" bills that are far broader. Some would protect virtually any worker involved in health care; others would extend protection to hospitals, clinics and other health care facilities. Some would protect only workers who refuse to provide certain health services, but many would be far more expansive.

At least five of the broad bills would allow insurance companies to opt out of covering services they find objectionable for religious reasons. A sixth state, Pennsylvania, is considering a bill designed for insurers.

"These represent a major expansion of this notion of right of refusal," said Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization that studies reproductive health issues and is tracking the legislation. "You're seeing it broadening to many types of workers -- even into the world of social workers -- and for any service for which you have a moral or religious belief."

Supporters say the laws are necessary, given the rapidly changing nature of medical research and care.

"We live in a culture where more and more people are on opposite sides of these basic issues," said Manion, who has represented an ambulance driver who was fired after she refused to take a patient to a hospital for an abortion, a health department secretary who was not promoted after she objected to providing abortion information, and a nurse who was transferred after she refused to provide morning-after pills.

Opponents fear the laws are often so broad that they could be used to withhold health services far beyond those related to abortion and embryos.

"The so-called right-to-life movement in the United States has expanded its agenda way beyond the original focus on abortion," Uttley said. "Given the political power of religious conservatives, the impact of a whole range of patient services could be in danger."

Doctors opposed to fetal tissue research, for example, could refuse to notify parents that their child was due for a chicken pox inoculation because the vaccine was originally produced using fetal tissue cell cultures, said R. Alto Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin.

"That physician would be immunized from medical malpractice claims and state disciplinary action," Charo said.

Advocates for end-of-life care are alarmed that the laws would allow health care workers and institutions to disregard terminally ill patients' decisions to refuse resuscitation, feeding tubes and other invasive measures.

"Patients have a right to say no to CPR, to being put on a ventilator, to getting feeding tubes," said Kathryn Tucker of Compassion and Choice, which advocates better end-of-life care and physician-assisted suicide.

Others worry that health care workers could refuse to provide sex education because they believe in abstinence instead, or deny care to gays and lesbians.

"I already get calls all the time from people who have been turned away by their doctors," said Jennifer C. Pizer of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, who is representing a California lesbian whose doctor refused her artificial insemination. "This is a very grave concern."

Valentine Chocolates without a Box No Big Deal, Pentagon Says

Intelligence Analysis is like dots of chocolate waiting to be boxed, Forrest!

For V-Day 2006, DefSeX Rummy sends tons of unboxed Valentine chocolates to soothe and dissuade the Forrest Gump Citizens of the World...

"Everyone accused the government of not connecting the dots," Rumsfeld continued. "So here they are trying to connect the dots, and someone looks on it and says, oh, my goodness gracious. Isn't that terrible? You're collecting information on people in the United States."

--------------------------------------------------
Meanwhile...Investigative Journalist Jason Lepold breaks V-Day Massacre Cabal news and tells the Citizen Forrest Gump of the World what our DOD SeX Sweetheart Rummy won't...

That back in 2003...VP Cheney and his buddies were busily misreading dots, bullying low level Intel folks at Langley and connecting dots that had no business being connected all well they were collecting information on certain key people in the United States...

And goodness gracious Rummy, back then, VP Cheney's little Office Cupids, to include National Security Advisor Hadley and "Turdblossom Rove" were data-mining questionable intelligence and preparing their quivers of special valentine poison arrows for Mr. Cheney's latest heart-throb and object of obsessive devotion: Ambassador Joseph Wilson...as well as Secret Valentine former United Nations weapons inspector David Albright...

That naughty American Terrorist Ambassador Joe Wilson III and the UN creeps were a terrorizing poor Richard's heart and jeopardizing the NeoCon's Valentine dance date with Saddam....

But now... all tricky Dick's whorses and all the Prez's men can't box the Valentine Chocolates again...

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Cheney Spearheaded Effort to Discredit Wilson

"The officials work or had worked in the State Department, the CIA and the National Security Council in a senior capacity and had direct knowledge of the Vice President's campaign to discredit Wilson.
In interviews over the course of two days this week, these officials were urged to speak on the record for this story. But they resisted, saying they had already testified before a grand jury investigating the leak of Wilson's wife, covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, and added that speaking out against the administration and specifically Vice President Cheney would cause them to lose their jobs and subject their families to vitriolic attacks by the White House.
The officials said they decided to speak out now because they have become disillusioned with the Bush administration's policies regarding Iraq and the flawed intelligence that led to the war.
They said their roles, along with several others at the CIA and State Department, included digging up or "inventing" embarrassing information on the former Ambassador that could be used against him, preparing memos and classified material on Wilson for Cheney and the National Security Council, and attending meetings in Cheney's office to discuss with Cheney, Hadley, and others the efforts that would be taken to discredit Wilson.
A former CIA official who has worked in the counter-proliferation division, and is familiar with the undercover work Wilson's wife did for the agency, said Cheney and Hadley visited CIA headquarters a day or two after Joseph Wilson was interviewed on CNN."
[More at Source:@: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020906J.shtml]

I give this post by William Arkin three "huh?"s

He says that, "the Pentagon has been quick to apologize for its post 9/11 overreach....Ever since I worked with NBC News in December to first report the existence of Pentagon databases that were tracking domestic demonstrations and anti-military activity, the Defense Department has moved quickly to review the TALON force protection reporting system that it instituted in 2003. "

But we learn from The Christian Science Monitor that somewhere else inside the Pentagon, *new and better* ways to trash the Fourth Amendment are already under way:

"The US government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for ..." something.

Today, "patterns of terrorist activity." Tomorrow, it could be turned against right-wingers. Or Mormons. Or philatelists. To proceed:

"The core of this effort is a little-known system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE). ...A major part of ADVISE involves data-mining - or "dataveillance," as some call it. It means sifting through data to look for patterns...."

And of course, the genius of this technology explains why I get mailings in Spanish to recruit me to both the Democratic and Republican leadership council (i.e., $1,000 and up donors). Anyway:

"What sets ADVISE apart is its scope. It would collect a vast array of corporate and public online information - from financial records to CNN news stories - and cross-reference it against US intelligence and law-enforcement records.... The key is not merely to identify terrorists, or sift for key words, but to identify critical patterns in data that illumine their motives and intentions, he wrote in a presentation at a November conference in Richland, Wash. For example: Is a burst of Internet traffic between a few people the plotting of terrorists, or just bloggers arguing?..."

Erk. "Critical patterns in data?" Like is it coming from Islamabad or Abilene? This is just beyond stupid. The problem is what everyone who does database work knows:

"Indeed, even data that look anonymous aren't necessarily so. For example: With name and Social Security number stripped from their files, 87 percent of Americans can be identified simply by knowing their date of birth, gender, and five-digit Zip code"

So, in other words, even if Bush is, like Brutus, an honorable man, what of who follows?

ADVISE violates Fourth Amendment rights. As 'Lectric Law Library (www.lectlaw.com/def/f081.htm) puts it:

""The ill that the Fourth Amendment prevents is not merely the arbitrariness of police discretion to single out individuals for attention, but also the unwarranted domination and control of the citizenry through fear of baseless but 'evenhanded' general police searches....The essence of that protection is a prohibition against some modes of law enforcement because the cost of police intrusion into personal liberty is too high, even though the intrusion undoubtedly would result in an enormous boon to the public if the efficient apprehension of criminals were the sole criterion to be considered."

The ADVISE program is precisely the sort of harassment that the Declaration of Independence listed as one of a long train of abuses, and it is impossible to believe that the Founders would have been impressed by the arguments in its behalf being made by the people in the Administration who thought that Orwell wrote political science rather than fiction.

So... could William Arkin reduce my "huh?" level, please?

Charles of Mercury Rising
www.phoenixwoman.blogspot.com

"Over time, this collection mushroomed and led to abuse of the Constitutional rights of our citizens. Eventually, DoD intelligence personnel were using inappropriate clandestine and intrusive means to collect information on the legitimate political positions and expressions of U.S. persons, accumulating that information in a nationwide data bank, and sharing that information with law enforcement authorities".
That is from the ATSD-IO web site describing what happened back in the 60s and early 70s that led to the Church Committee hearings but it could just as well be a story from this week. And at that time our only threat was thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at our cities while today we have to fear a handful of people with box cutters so it's easy to see why things have spiralled out of control so much faster this time.

Newsweek reporter Michael Hirsh is calling for "more Big Brother" and praising the not-so-defunct Total Information Awareness (now called project Topsail) .
He starts and ends making great and accurate anti-Bush points, criticizing ineffective post-9/11 reforms and concluding that the the millitary-industrial-congressional-research "beast" has too much intertia going for it for anyone to really change things... except for Bush. And Bush won't because drastic (if effective) change is political poison to the Rove strategery of hyping the "long war" scenarios.

However, in the middle of his screed, he claims the fix for those ills is to sort of think "outside" the box. And guess by "box" he means the Bill of Rights and personal privacy and autonomy. He seems to want to wholly embrace a TIA worldview which I think would lead to an even WORSE outcome (ie police state) than the road we are headed down now of eventually bearing another terror attack on US soil.

Read it here and decide for yourself if this guy is really that nuts, or really that scared to want to jump on the datamining/TIA bandwagon.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11238800/site/newsweek/

we also need a clear-headed citizenry supported by their own government....

tell the citizens that the us military is being used to protect foreign investments in the united states.....Saudi owns the land mass equivalent to Massachusetts? How much does Germany own? How much does Japan own....

why don't united states citizens have a future.....why are they giving their rights away to foreign investors while dying to support those investments? eh?!

why don't you cut them in on the deal and let them know the connection between events and why we're doing them....

pull the plug on the asshole being able to say "there's a war on" and make him support the united states not his oil interests....

is there any bush presence in the oil futures market.....

make them pay you for your lives and your childrens....the country is successful because of you....they are trying to cut you out of the profits.

No Big Deal, Pentagon Says.

Cheap Theatrics By Donald Rumsfeld.

They are nothing more then an attempt to keep himself from being Impeached for High Treason along with his buddies President George Walker Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, the Congressional Committee of 8 and Attorney General Alberto Gonzalles.

It will not work Donald.
Good intensions or not. There is NO good excuse for breaking the Law. You have AIDED the terrorists in getting away with there terrorist acts/crimes which is an act of HIGH TREASON on your part.

You broke the Law and did the Crime also and you must all do the TIME.

("No Big Deal, Pentagon Says
Oh my goodness, Donald Rumsfeld, says. Well-meaning, honest mistakes: "no big deal."
That's how the Secretary of Defense describes his Department's own admission to Congress that the Pentagon "inappropriately" collected information on anti-war and anti-military protestors in the United States.")

Your cheap attempt at an in your face appoligy is NOT excepted.

But thank you Donald for the very public admission that the "domestic Surveillance Program" was in fact "inappropriately" done.

Sp4MP B.T. Army Veteran
Jackson, Michigan

otherside123.blogspot.com
www.onlinejournal.com
www.takingaim.info

Bush Balkanizes the world

By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Contributing Writer

Paradoxically, Bush & Company's relentless push for world hegemony seems to be Balkanizing the world, that is, splintering countries, regions, even zip codes, into smaller units, which are more hostile to each other though ethnically more homogenous.

Additionally, this push is having the same effect in the United States, breaking it into red and blue states, a division beyond traditional North-South divisions. What's more voting districts are being split into religious, ethnic, racial, and economic sectors as well, creating the specter of Balkanization.

This leads me to wonder if there isn't some law of political physics at work. That the more a dominating nation presses for hegemony, the more the pressure produces a breaking point, scattering nations (states) into smaller units, in essence, undoing a nation as it does an empire, as painful the deconstruction as the creation of either.

If this seems like I'm thinking too hard, this notion occurred to me after watching Far From War: Chechnya, the Endless War. This moving documentary, directed by Gustavo Cortes, poignantly chronicles that region's mayhem. The film's descriptive copy reads . . .

Dubbed "the silent war of the 21st century," the conflict between Russia and rebels in the breakaway republic of Chechnya is put into perspective by Moscow Chechens in Gustavo Cortés's documentary. More than 200,000 Chechens fled to Moscow after the recent war broke out. This migration was but one in a long series of horrific events visited on the Chechens for centuries. Despite discrimination from Russians and apathy from the international community, Moscow Chechens are banding together and here speak out regarding their plight.

In the film, older Chechen men tell of the 1940s, during WW II, when Joseph Stalin deported 400,000 of their people from Russia to the freezing terrain of Kazakhstan. Many perished from the extreme cold and miserable living conditions. Stalin claimed that the Chechens had been collaborating with the Germans, contrary to the fact that thousands of Chechens, including the film survivors, had fought against the Germans in WW II.

These Chechens of the 1940s thought of themselves as loyal, patriotic citizens, though Stalin and perhaps Russia thought of them as a Muslim minority, a conflict that went back to the 18th century. The Chechens return to Russia in the 1950s did not settle the centuries-old conflict, especially not their declaration of independence from the motherland in 1991 as the Soviet Union was crumbling. It brought us to the murders of this decade.

Admittedly, this is a thumbnail sketch of the Chechen situation and hostilities. Chechnya and its people are examples of the larger phenomenon of world Balkanization. An even larger, more transcendent notion comes from the lips of the Chechen woman who narrates the documentary of her homeland and her life.

Though her two children and two of her sisters survived the most recent hostilities, she lost her husband, parents, cousins, friends, neighbors, home, savings and more: a spiritual and emotional locus. Her words are to the effect (and I'm paraphrasing), that after all of this fighting over political ideas there are so many who have been killed -- so many dead that the world of the survivors has also been destroyed. So, one goes on blankly, knowing nothing has changed, including the violence and especially the pointless dying.

Those feelings etched out of the pain of one human being, etched out of the political machinations of history, reverberate these days around the world.

I see that plump-faced woman, tears rolling down her cheeks, a bottomless well of sadness in her eyes. And I see the face of the world, the eternal mother unable to control her own destiny or vulnerability to human beings.

I see that face in Palestine or Iraq, Afghanistan or the Sudan. At home in New Orleans, New York, or in a brown-black race riot in a county jail in Castaic, California; or in a hawk-dove San Joaquin Valley Community, reported in "The Valley's Not So Civil War" in the February 5, 2006, Los Angeles Times. The fractionating of racial, religious, political, even intellectual groups (for instance faux students spying on so-called dissident college teachers) produces hateful pockets in US communities, even as the surge to world hegemony gets meaner, more out of control.

We find these expressions of Balkanization throughout America, from our largest cities to our smallest bible-thumping towns. Each with their right and wrong side of the tracks, right, left, ultra right, far left, and mean-spirited boosters.

And I'm brought back always to the warnings of that Chechen woman. And always in the film's background are the smoldering buildings, scattered corpses, tanks rolling over the fractured landscape like prehistoric beasts, jets soaring overhead and firing at will; explosions wrecking buildings, landscapes; landmines wrecking limbs and torsos of children, women, men, animals.

Not a Pretty Picture, Macro or Micro.

And what the film brings, too, is a constant barrage of images: soldiers and citizens running from each other, firing on each other, grappling mano a mano or with the abstract force of bunker busters, engaged in one atavistic grimace to dominate and not be dominated. It is an unhinged humanity, we see. And I must say that a great deal of that unhinging began on 9-11, when the Bush administration committed, I believe, a false-flag attack on America, thereby engendering a reason to attack Afghanistan, to illegally attack Iraq, and now to plan to attack Iran.

In continuing this march, we Balkanize old alliances and gamble with the stability of the world. One instance is Iran's creating an oil bourse, using the euro as an oil-trading mechanism. Among others, Venezuela's central banks will use euros to service oil demand as well, which will undermine the value of the already shaky dollar.

As we know, China holds over $200 billion in US cash, Japan even more. China you could say owns the exchange deficit and is really loaning money to the US. This, as the US sags under its debt load. If these countries turned on us further, we'd be in deadly trouble. With each grasp of ours to control some other nation, cracks are made in political tectonic plates. The shifts can be devastating.

Again at home, by illegally spying on citizens and insisting that illegality is a presidential power, by enacting the USAPATRIOT Act, by waging war on contrived evidence, we Balkanize pieces of America, creating those who blindly support and those who consciously resist.

We fractionate into smaller, angrier social groups, each demanding their way: conservative Christians, pro Israeli Zionists, pro-lifers, the not so subtle racist cabal that allowed New Orleans to drown.

In short, our government's PNAC (Project for the New American Century) agenda of world domination takes precedence over serving the basic needs of our people: education, health care, Social Security, infrastructure, the advancment of science, the preservation of the environment, and the development of sustainable energy sources. All this is subjugated for our budget's hugest line item: defense, which is mostly offense. And thus we are a nation whose too-long standing armies turned, as Washington warned, to building empire.

It is as William Butler Yeats wrote in the first stanza of his poem, The Second Coming . . .

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

And so, when do we hear that Chechen woman's voice, warning that domination and retaliation are a death-dealing cycle? When do we really see its effects, even when shown them on a home television screen or larger-than-life movie screen, or in real life, scripted by history?

Who knows, perhaps it's our lot to be caught in this cycle, nature's way of thinning the herd. Perhaps not. Perhaps there is a way of transcending it through consciousness or simple compassion. And if not, when the Big Bang is made on earth, will it Balkanize us like so many dead stars in the borderless night. Till then, peace, please, peace.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer living in New York. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.

you're being sold something...

like a radio jingle....

"see the USA in a Chevrolet"

oh, they don't even have those anymore do they? where'ld they go...used to be during the 50's the GNP of GMC was greater than all of Europe....planning?

there's a war on to destroy your ability to tell the truth when you hear it, it's called "framing"

we're protecting you from terrorists, that's why we had to lower your social security medical payments by $30 bucks a month....right....

and that's why we can't let you shop in canada or mexico for those same drugs....terrorism....

us against them.....but the us is the affluents and the "thems" is you...

and you're the ones taking the bullets in this sham...a framing war, believe them you pay, and they spend, make them accountable and they pay too....

perhaps there's portions that are necessary, there is certainly danger in primitives having control of a natural resource that moves nations....maybe we should be making moves towards acquiring another form of energy propellant...

but the short timers, the thoughtless with their fingers on the pulse of the "OIL BASED ECONOMY," they want the focus on OIL..

do the bushes own any oil investments?

and the male vote? It's easy to move weak men, talk sexy, or warrior-like

like you've got your big boys saying, fightin's good, it makes me feel strong, and powerful....you ought to, you got enough nuke clear war heads to destroy the world...

but isn't it really about making sure that the oil market is predictable? and they get paid

oh well, as long as you say "war on terror" even if it's bullshit....

if enough people hear it, they assume it's true....this is the land of 30 second attention span, being led by a chimpanzee right?

there is no war on terror....

our borders are completely undefended, that's an effing fact....

4.5 million ILLEGAL ALIENS a year, you'd think that at least 2 or 3 could set off some M-80's or something wouldn't you?

how many chicanos do you see working in fairfax, or in college park, near embassy row or in takoma, or in dc proper....

and you really need to get this, I don't care so much that they're coming in, it's just that IF ANYONE ELSE WANTED TO THEY COULD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

NO ONE IS DOING ANYTHING ABOUT IT....

IT's FRAUD!!!!!!!!!!!

THAT's what the 9/11 Commission report said.

war powers:

IT GIVES the affluent THE RIGHT TO DO ANYTHING THEY WANT AND SAY IT's BECAUSE OF THE WAR!!!

Look at the patriot act, is it patriotic?

or is it the rape of the Bill of Rights...

Halliburton detention camps, $385 million homeland security dollars given to Halliburton subsidiary to establish them....who's going into them, you, your aunt? the chinese? the middle easterners, the jews, the lame, do they have ovens in them?

make them pay you, for backing their business deals...

not ship your effing jobs to korea, russia, india, indonesia, thailand....anywhere else where labor is cheaper and oversight doesn't exist....

make 'em pay to support their investments rather than rolling over to get your tummies rubbed when someone says the word

"patriotic!," while they stick a bully club up your butt...

No big surprise.

Just another example of this administration thinking it is above the law and the Constitution.

This is what happens when you elect people to government who do not believe in government.

Try reporting the news instead of spreading propganda.
For instance:
The military has made statements like "the base will close in 2010 if the Department of Defense does not find it a new mission".
This kind of statement in line with what we now know about the domestic spying programs leads on to consider the very real fact that the 'real' motive for the domestic spying program is to fund these military installations (black holes), rather than find terrorists.
Where there is money, there is corruption.

By the way, here is a talkin point for you:
http://aimpoints.hq.af.mil/display.cfm?id=8140&printer=yes