From a Friend

This is from the friend who left this in the comments.

Ain't nothing like mandatory evacuation. This really
sucks! Oh well, what can you do. Billy and I and
Billy's entire family (that has been living with us
for a month by the way)are trucking it up to south Ark.
tomorrow. Hopefully we will only be there till Sunday.
(let's pray)

Take care,
Angel

BTW: Just heard\read they are expecting Rita to turn into a Cat 4 storm.

I am back

I am back. Sorry I was gone so long. During my respite on this blog, I saw several interesting things.

I saw "Whistler: Art for Art's Sake", a truck that was caught on fire, and a rear axel of an 18-wheeler in the middle of the I-55 bridge over the Mississippi river.

I also read this article today: Hurricane Watch for Real Estate. I am wary of anyone saying there is a housing bubble and that is going to burst.

"To top it off, we are hardly preparing ourselves for the inevitable category 4 or 5 hurricane when housing prices do come down. Just ask those who actually lived through the stock market crash of 1987 and the ensuing savings and loans debacle, which caused a real estate depression in the early 1990s. Memo to those who didn't own property then: prices went down, not up."

Housing is fundamentally different than other investments because you live in it. I also have read numbers that say prices stayed level, but did not go down. Now they could have stayed level - not counting inflation, which means the "real" value dropped. So I do not know whose numbers are correct.

The magnitude of Katrina will certainly be felt, though claiming that it can begin a housing bust might be a little extreme. Though if you are thinking about buying a house, you could try to catch the housing market when it is down. It would seem that if you believed that a housing bubble was imminent, it could be worth they money to wait 2 years before buying a house in some cases.

The money that is lost is the money spent on rent and the money lost on a higher interest rate.

The money saved would be the value you saved on the house and the money saved on a lower interest rate (You had more money to put down on the house, so you got a lower interest rate.)

If the housing bubble was a sure thing, that could be a smart strategy to try.

cube

Digging your own hole

Fallout shelters may again become fashionable as the United States releases its latest version of the Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations. It contains a number of ways that nuclear weapons could be used preemptively, even against countries or non-state actors that don't possess nuclear weapons of their own. Additionally, the US has pulled out of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty as the Pentagon continues to request funding for new nuclear weapons programs. Five years ago it was generally agreed that nuclear weapons should never be used again, and their only purpose was to deter other countries from using theirs, in support of the Mutually Assured Destruction theory. I don't see how our recent behavior could do anything but start a new arms race and make any country not closely allied with the US speed up efforts to secure their own nuclear arsenal.

Abra-Kaaa-Dabra

Vanishing Point: How to disappear in America without a trace

I will read this and comment on the quality of it later on.

via Project Nothing

UPDATE: The writer at project nothing stopped really paying attention where the writer said hang out in biker bars. I stopped believing it when I read that you should hang out at gay bars. Then as of yesterday I caught a link from another source (Survival blog , sorry they do not have permalinks) Tim May's FuKit, in which the author also suggested hanging out in gay bars. Which I think both of the authors do state the point that you should not follow your regular habits if you are going to disappear. I guess I could make myself go to a gay bar if my life depended on it, but I would have to be in dire need of vanishing. Neither of those articles really gave me the info I wanted.

Then I found this book some how, "How to Be Invisible: The Essential Guide to Protecting Your Personal Privacy, Your Assets, and Your Life". This book supposedly gives you a step by step guide to disappearing.


cube

WTF?

So I learn that Google has a blog searcher thingy. (Via riding sun)

So as any good blogger I put the URL of my blog in. Second hit is this.

"Have read my first academic article about blogs! And it was interesting the entire time. This is such a great topic. It's called "Political Blogs and the Bloggers Who Blog Them: Is the Political Blogosphere an Echo Chamber?" The author, Kevin Wallsten, studies a random-ish sample (random-ish because there is no master list of blogs, and no official definition of a "political" blog) of the relatively unpopular blogs written by ordinary citizens for a small audience. He compares their posts with media stories during 2004 to see whether these bloggers are acting as an "echo chamber," just focusing on the stories that the media promotes as important." Here is the important part.

"One of the fun things about this study is that you can actually visit the blogs he studied, most of which are still in operation, such as AgnostoLibertarianTechnoGeek, Sandcastles and Cubicles, Vulgar Boatman, and George in Denver."

I was part of an academic study. Shouldn't I get compensated for my work as a part of a double blind study.

cube

One man's relief effort

Here is one man's relief effort. If you have read one thing about the hurricane, this is what you must read.

Daybreak, up and at 'em. Spent most of the day clearing debris in Biloxi and Gulfport. The deuce makes a pretty good plow when you use a compact car turned sideways as a plow blade."

The older man waves. He's definitely waving at me. I hesitantly wave back. Caramba! It's George Bush! I really don't think stopping here would be a good idea. I turn right, around a huge pile of debris, and get out of Dodge. I feel like I just narrowly avoided disaster."


Up at dawn, coffee in belly, fire up the deuce, wave goodbye. Turn off the deuce, stagger in house, first time I sat on the throne in 7 days. Lots of blood, that's probably not a good thing. Can you say Too Much Information! Pop some more painkillers, fire up the deuce, wave goodbye, hit the road - Round 2."

Please pass this around.

cube

Democrat's worse nightmare...

...Has just come true.

Source:""Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government and to the extent the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility," Bush said during a joint news conference with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani."

So what are the dems going to criticize him for now. He is going to start an investigation, that panel is going to build a timeline (like the 9-11), and that panel is going to find out who did what, where they did it, and what they knew when they did it. Seeing how democrats were in charge of two out of the three levels which could have possibly responded to the hurricane, it looks like they would get hammered more in that investigation than anyone else.

I think the democrats overplayed their hand when they called for an investigation, there are too many eyes and different media outlets to allow them to get escape blame on this one. Admittly, the blame will be placed on local or state level democrats, but still that hurts the party in those areas.

cube

Gun sales are up but that is not all

Here Say Uncle confrims that gun sales up. Though according to JC Refuge, who works in the prepardness industry, guns are not the only things that are selling.

cube

Mixed Signals

Below is a release found on whitehouse.gov describing how the war in Iraq is supporting the War on Terror. The release is interrupted by discussion of each point.

10 WAYS THE LIBERATION OF IRAQ SUPPORTS THE WAR ON TERROR
1. With the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, Iraq is no longer a state sponsor of terror. According to State Department reports on terrorism, before the removal of Saddam's regime, Iraq was one of seven state sponsors of terror.
That very State Department report says that Iraq was providing aid to only two types of terrorist organizations. One type attacked Iran (which we supported for over a decade) and the other provided money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Saudi Arabia and several other nations were also implicated in this. Suspiciously absent from the list was Afghanistan. They have not been on State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism at any point since 1993.

2. Saddam Hussein's regime posed a threat to the security of the United States and the world.
Iraq did not have any weapons capable of reaching the United States. This fact has never been disputed.

3. Saddam Hussein would not uphold his international commitments, and now that he is no longer in power, the world is safe from this tyrant. The old Iraqi regime defied the international community and seventeen UN resolutions for twelve years and gave every indication that it would never disarm and never comply with the just demands of the world.
George W. Bush has not upheld his international commitments. We have backed out of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, the antiballistic missle ban, and have refused to participate in the International Criminal Court.

4. A senior al Qaida terrorist, now detained, who had been responsible for al Qaida training camps in Afghanistan, reports that al Qaida was intent on obtaining WMD assistance from Iraq. According to a credible, high-level al Qaida source, Usama Bin Laden and deceased al Qaida leader Muhammad Atif did not believe that al Qaida labs in Afghanistan were capable of manufacturing chemical and biological weapons, so they turned to Iraq for assistance. Iraq agreed to provide chemical and biological weapons training for two al Qaida associates starting in December 2000.
This could be a valid concern, although no biological weapons labs were found operating in Iraq. So it's a moot point. It's the same as saying that al Qaida is seeking death rays from alines.

5. Senior al Qaida associate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi came to Baghdad in May 2002 for medical treatment along with approximately two dozen al Qaida terrorist associates. This group stayed in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq and plotted terrorist attacks around the world.
Zarqawi became involved with al Qaida after the US invasion in Iraq. But I will concede that apprehending him is a step in the right direction.

6 A safe haven in Iraq belonging to Ansar al-Islam -- a terrorist group closely associated with Zarqawi and al Qaida -- was destroyed during Operation Iraqi Freedom. In March 2003, during a raid on the compound controlled by the terrorists in northeastern Iraq, a cache of documents was discovered, including computer discs and foreign passports belonging to fighters from various Middle East nationalities.
Most evidence points to large numbers of terrorists moving to Iraq since our invasion, so we have actually mulitplied whatever problems previously existed.

7. The al Qaida affiliate Ansar al-Islam is known to still be present in Iraq. Such terrorist groups are now plotting against U.S. forces in Iraq.
I don't see how the existence of a terrorist organization is a bonus for us. If we had wiped one out or captured one maybe, but allowing it to remain is not worth a point.

8. Law enforcement and intelligence operations have disrupted al Qaida associate Abu Musab Zarqawi's poison plotting in France, Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Russia. The facilities in Northern Iraq, set up by Zarqawi and Ansar al-Islam were, before the war, an al Qaida's poisons/toxins laboratory.
This contradicts the State Department report that terrorists from Iraq were only attcking Iran and Israel. But we have definitely introduced never before seen levels of terrorist activity within Iraq.

9. Abu Musa Zarqawi, the al Qaida associate with direct links to Iraq, oversaw those responsible for the assassination of USAID officer Laurence Foley in Amman, Jordan last October.
Had we caught Zarqawi, I would count this as a valid point, but since we haven't, and our efforts have actually increased the size and activitiy of his organization, no points.

10. Saddam Hussein's Iraq provided material assistance to Palestinian terrorist groups, including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, HAMAS, and the Palestine Islamic Jihad, according to a State Department report. This included paying the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, according to testimonials from Palestinians and cancelled checks. Also, according to State Department reports, terrorist groups the Iranian Mujahedin-e-Khalq and the Abu Nidal organization were protected by the Iraqi regime protected by the Iraqi regime.
Mentioned about three times by now. This makes America safer how? And which has helped Israel more, the withdrawl from Gaza or the Iraq war?

So, basically, Bush gets one point. The rest of his points are saying that Iraq was continuing the policies we endorsed in the 1980s, and Zaqarwi came there for medical treatment. While those may be reasons to want to start a war, they are not points of how we are achieving victory.

Black refugees ask if Utah will really accept them

This was the funniest article I have seen about the relocation effort (because that is what it is turning out to be).

"So far the local community has welcomed the refugees with open arms, although they say they face an adjustment to life in Utah, stronghold of the socially conservative Mormon Church."

If "accept" them means allowing them throw Mardi Gras parties, buy liquor after 3 pm, or even wear shorts before lunch, I doubt they will. If accepting them means putting them to work caring for their many children from multiple wives, then probably so. Those black folks have no idea what they are getting into. I doubt hiphop is sold in the music stores.

Funniest line had to be chris rock "George Bush hates midgets."

cube

Less important genocide

In Rwanda, in 1994, 800,000 people were killed in less than three months. Did we help them? Oh, but that was the Clinton administration, right? The morally upstanding Bush administration will help people wherever it is needed. Because they wield "moral authority". What about Sudan? One year ago, the White House acknowledged that genocide was taking place in Darfur. At least 400,000 people have been killed, and up to 2 million displaced by violence. And this isn't over the course of 20 years like the Iraq situation. This is happening right now. West Africa has been a proven haven for terrorists. Osama Bin Laden operated there for years before going to Afghanistan. Why isn't the Sudan a priority? Why did we attack Iraq instead? If we are interested in promoting democracy, personal freedom, and safe living conditions for all people, then why don't we go where we can do the greatest good? Or maybe it isn't about that.

Iraq Conclusions

From the below articles, I think we can all see several things.

1) The reasons given for starting a war with Iraq were later proven to be false.
2) This war has been one of the costliest wars in America's history, adjusted for inflation.
3) America not only maintained diplomatic ties with Iraq during its genocidal attacks against its own people, but our government actually provided support. This should defeat any claims of our "moral authority" and our concern for the Iraqi people.
4) America was instrumental in Saddam's rise to power in Iraq.

Note that none of these articles is new. I believe the newest one is over a year old. None of these articles come from the "fringe liberal left wing". The sources are the Washington Post, United Press International, CBS, and the United States Senate.

Another Old Iraq Article

This one is from CBS, and only one year old. I can see how this breaking news has not yet reached some people.

CIA Blasted For Iraq Intel Flaws
WASHINGTON, July 9, 2004


The key U.S. assertions leading to the 2003 invasion of Iraq — that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and was working to make nuclear weapons — were wrong and based on false or overstated CIA analyses, a scathing Senate Intelligence Committee report released Friday asserts.

"We would not have authorized that war with 75 votes if we knew what we
know now," said Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the committee's ranking Democrat.

Intelligence analysts fell victim to "group think" assumptions that Iraq had weapons that it did not, concludes a bipartisan report. Many factors contributing to those failures are ongoing problems within the U.S. intelligence community — which cannot be fixed with more money alone, it says.

In Britain, an inquiry into the quality of British intelligence on Iraqi weapons will publish its report on July 14. The inquiry, headed by Lord Butler, a retired civil service chief, aims to establish why there is such a glaring gap between "intelligence gathered, evaluated and used by the government" and the lack of evidence on the ground in Iraq.

Sen. Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican who heads the Senate committee, told reporters that assessments that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and could make a nuclear weapon by the end of the decade were wrong.

"As the report will show, they were also unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence," he said.

"This was a global intelligence failure."

Rockefeller said: "Tragically, the intelligence failures set forth in this report will affect our national security for generations to come. Our credibility is diminished. Our standing in the world has never been lower. We have fostered a deep hatred of Americans in the Muslim world, and that will grow. As a direct consequence, our nation is more vulnerable today than ever before."

The report repeatedly blasts departing CIA Director George Tenet, accusing him of skewing advice to top policy-makers with the CIA's view and elbowing out dissenting views from other intelligence agencies overseen by the State or Defense departments. It faults Tenet for not personally reviewing President George W. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, which contained since-discredited references to Iraq's attempts to purchase uranium in Africa.

White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, traveling with President Bush on a campaign trip Friday, said the committee's report essentially "agrees with what we have said, which is we need to take steps to continue strengthening and reforming our intelligence capabilities so we are prepared to meet the new threats that we face in this day and age."

Tenet has resigned and leaves office Sunday.

Intelligence analysts worked from the assumption that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was seeking to make more, as well as trying to revive a nuclear weapons program. Instead, investigations after the Iraq invasion have shown that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had no nuclear weapons program and no biological weapons, and only small amounts of chemical weapons have been found.

Analysts ignored or discounted conflicting information because of their assumptions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the report says.

"This 'group think' dynamic led Intelligence Community analysts, collectors and managers to both interpret ambiguous evidence as conclusively indicative of a WMD program as well as ignore or minimize evidence that Iraq did not have active and expanding weapons of mass destruction programs," the report concludes.

Such assumptions also led analysts to inflate snippets of questionable information into broad declarations that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, the report says.

For example, speculation that the presence of one specialized truck could mean an effort to transfer chemical weapons was puffed up into a conclusion that Iraq was actively making chemical weapons, the report says.

Analysts also concluded that Iraq had a mobile biological weapons program based mainly on the since-discredited claims of one Iraqi defector code-named "Curve Ball," it says. American agents did not have direct access to Curve Ball or his debriefers, but the source's information was expanded into the conclusion that Iraq had an advanced and active biological weapons program, the report says.

Before the war, British Prime Minister Blair was adamant that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

"What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, that he continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons," he wrote in a foreward to a September 2002 intelligence dossier, used by the government as it built its case for war.

According to British press reports, the inquiry will conclude that intelligence claiming that Iraq could launch chemical weapons on 45 minutes' notice — known to be from a single source — was vague and poorly sourced.

The British government has declined to comment.

More Iraq

This is a UPI article (also from 2003) describing the CIA's role in Saddam's climb to power. Note that Qassim and Kaseem are not diffrent people, it is just spelling variations.

Exclusive: Saddam key in early CIA plot
By Richard Sale
UPI Intelligence Correspondent
Published 4/10/2003 7:30 PM


U.S. forces in Baghdad might now be searching high and low for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, but in the past Saddam was seen by U.S. intelligence services as a bulwark of anti-communism and they used him as their instrument for more than 40 years, according to former U.S. intelligence diplomats and intelligence officials.

United Press International has interviewed almost a dozen former U.S. diplomats, British scholars and former U.S. intelligence officials to piece together the following account. The CIA declined to comment on the report.

While many have thought that Saddam first became involved with U.S. intelligence agencies at the start of the September 1980 Iran-Iraq war, his first contacts with U.S. officials date back to 1959, when he was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad tasked with assassinating then Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim.

In July 1958, Qasim had overthrown the Iraqi monarchy in what one former U.S. diplomat, who asked not to be identified, described as "a horrible orgy of bloodshed."

According to current and former U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Iraq was then regarded as a key buffer and strategic asset in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. For example, in the mid-1950s, Iraq was quick to join the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact which was to defend the region and whose members included Turkey, Britain, Iran and Pakistan.

Little attention was paid to Qasim's bloody and conspiratorial regime until his sudden decision to withdraw from the pact in 1959, an act that "freaked everybody out" according to a former senior U.S. State Department official.

Washington watched in marked dismay as Qasim began to buy arms from the Soviet Union and put his own domestic communists into ministry positions of "real power," according to this official. The domestic instability of the country prompted CIA Director Allan Dulles to say publicly that Iraq was "the most dangerous spot in the world."

In the mid-1980s, Miles Copeland, a veteran CIA operative, told UPI the CIA had enjoyed "close ties" with Qasim's ruling Baath Party, just as it had close connections with the intelligence service of Egyptian leader Gamel Abd Nassar. In a recent public statement, Roger Morris, a former National Security Council staffer in the 1970s, confirmed this claim, saying that the CIA had chosen the authoritarian and anti-communist Baath Party "as its instrument."

According to another former senior State Department official, Saddam, while only in his early 20s, became a part of a U.S. plot to get rid of Qasim. According to this source, Saddam was installed in an apartment in Baghdad on al-Rashid Street directly opposite Qasim's office in Iraq's Ministry of Defense, to observe Qasim's movements.

Adel Darwish, Middle East expert and author of "Unholy Babylon," said the move was done "with full knowledge of the CIA," and that Saddam's CIA handler was an Iraqi dentist working for CIA and Egyptian intelligence. U.S. officials separately confirmed Darwish's account.

Darwish said that Saddam's paymaster was Capt. Abdel Maquid Farid, the assistant military attach� at the Egyptian Embassy who paid for the apartment from his own personal account. Three former senior U.S. officials have confirmed that this is accurate.

The assassination was set for Oct. 7, 1959, but it was completely botched. Accounts differ. One former CIA official said that the 22-year-old Saddam lost his nerve and began firing too soon, killing Qasim's driver and only wounding Qasim in the shoulder and arm. Darwish told UPI that one of the assassins had bullets that did not fit his gun and that another had a hand grenade that got stuck in the lining of his coat.

"It bordered on farce," a former senior U.S. intelligence official said. But Qasim, hiding on the floor of his car, escaped death, and Saddam, whose calf had been grazed by a fellow would-be assassin, escaped to Tikrit, thanks to CIA and Egyptian intelligence agents, several U.S. government officials said.

Saddam then crossed into Syria and was transferred by Egyptian intelligence agents to Beirut, according to Darwish and former senior CIA officials. While Saddam was in Beirut, the CIA paid for Saddam's apartment and put him through a brief training course, former CIA officials said. The agency then helped him get to Cairo, they said.

One former U.S. government official, who knew Saddam at the time, said that even then Saddam "was known as having no class. He was a thug -- a cutthroat."

In Cairo, Saddam was installed in an apartment in the upper class neighborhood of Dukki and spent his time playing dominos in the Indiana Caf�, watched over by CIA and Egyptian intelligence operatives, according to Darwish and former U.S. intelligence officials.

One former senior U.S. government official said: "In Cairo, I often went to Groppie Caf� at Emad Eldine Pasha Street, which was very posh, very upper class. Saddam would not have fit in there. The Indiana was your basic dive."

But during this time Saddam was making frequent visits to the American Embassy where CIA specialists such as Miles Copeland and CIA station chief Jim Eichelberger were in residence and knew Saddam, former U.S. intelligence officials said.

Saddam's U.S. handlers even pushed Saddam to get his Egyptian handlers to raise his monthly allowance, a gesture not appreciated by Egyptian officials since they knew of Saddam's American connection, according to Darwish. His assertion was confirmed by former U.S. diplomat in Egypt at the time.

In February 1963 Qasim was killed in a Baath Party coup. Morris claimed recently that the CIA was behind the coup, which was sanctioned by President John F. Kennedy, but a former very senior CIA official strongly denied this.

"We were absolutely stunned. We had guys running around asking what the hell had happened," this official said.

But the agency quickly moved into action. Noting that the Baath Party was hunting down Iraq's communist, the CIA provided the submachine gun-toting Iraqi National Guardsmen with lists of suspected communists who were then jailed, interrogated, and summarily gunned down, according to former U.S. intelligence officials with intimate knowledge of the executions.

Many suspected communists were killed outright, these sources said. Darwish told UPI that the mass killings, presided over by Saddam, took place at Qasr al-Nehayat, literally, the Palace of the End.

A former senior U.S. State Department official told UPI: "We were frankly glad to be rid of them. You ask that they get a fair trial? You have to get kidding. This was serious business."

A former senior CIA official said: "It was a bit like the mysterious killings of Iran's communists just after Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in 1979. All 4,000 of his communists suddenly got killed."

British scholar Con Coughlin, author of "Saddam: King of Terror," quotes Jim Critchfield, then a senior Middle East agency official, as saying the killing of Qasim and the communists was regarded "as a great victory." A former long-time covert U.S. intelligence operative and friend of Critchfield said: "Jim was an old Middle East hand. He wasn't sorry to see the communists go at all. Hey, we were playing for keeps."

Saddam, in the meantime, became head of al-Jihaz a-Khas, the secret intelligence apparatus of the Baath Party.

The CIA/Defense Intelligence Agency relation with Saddam intensified after the start of the Iran-Iraq war in September of 1980. During the war, the CIA regularly sent a team to Saddam to deliver battlefield intelligence obtained from Saudi AWACS surveillance aircraft to aid the effectiveness of Iraq's armed forces, according to a former DIA official, part of a U.S. interagency intelligence group.

This former official said that he personally had signed off on a document that shared U.S. satellite intelligence with both Iraq and Iran in an attempt to produce a military stalemate. "When I signed it, I thought I was losing my mind," the former official told UPI.

A former CIA official said that Saddam had assigned a top team of three senior officers from the Estikhbarat, Iraq's military intelligence, to meet with the Americans.

According to Darwish, the CIA and DIA provided military assistance to Saddam's ferocious February 1988 assault on Iranian positions in the al-Fao peninsula by blinding Iranian radars for three days.

The Saddam-U.S. intelligence alliance of convenience came to an end at 2 a.m. Aug. 2, 1990, when 100,000 Iraqi troops, backed by 300 tanks, invaded its neighbor, Kuwait. America's one-time ally had become its bitterest enemy.

Copyright © 2001-2004 United Press International

US Policy towards Iraq

The US backed Saddam's takeover in Iraq because the previous ruler, General Abdel-Karim Kassem, had pulled out of the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact and legalized the Communist Party. The CIA saw this as a dangerous swing in the Cold War and supported the Ba'ath Party in their bid to control the country.

As for weapons of mass destruction and terrorists, we have not found any weapons of mass destruction. Even the White House has admitted that they are not here. We have also not found any facilities used to produce WMDs, and none of the UN weapons inspectors supported our charges about WMDs. And there have been no substantiated links between Saddam and Al Qaeda. I know that conservatives love to claim that these things exist, but after controlling Iraq for three years, where is the evidence?

The following Washington Post article further delves into our relationship with Iraq.

U.S. Had Key Role in Iraq Buildup
Trade in Chemical Arms Allowed Despite Their Use on Iranians, Kurds

By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 30, 2002; Page A01

High on the Bush administration's list of justifications for war against Iraq are President Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons, nuclear and biological programs, and his contacts with international terrorists. What U.S. officials rarely acknowledge is that these offenses date back to a period when Hussein was seen in Washington as a valued ally.

Among the people instrumental in tilting U.S. policy toward Baghdad during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war was Donald H. Rumsfeld, now defense secretary, whose December 1983 meeting with Hussein as a special presidential envoy paved the way for normalization of U.S.-Iraqi relations. Declassified documents show that Rumsfeld traveled to Baghdad at a time when Iraq was using chemical weapons on an "almost daily" basis in defiance of international conventions.



In the Kurdish village of Halabjah in northern Iraq on March 20, 1988, a father holds his baby. Both were believed killed by an Iraqi chemical attack.

The story of U.S. involvement with Saddam Hussein in the years before his 1990 attack on Kuwait -- which included large-scale intelligence sharing, supply of cluster bombs through a Chilean front company, and facilitating Iraq's acquisition of chemical and biological precursors -- is a topical example of the underside of U.S. foreign policy. It is a world in which deals can be struck with dictators, human rights violations sometimes overlooked, and accommodations made with arms proliferators, all on the principle that the "enemy of my enemy is my friend."

Throughout the 1980s, Hussein's Iraq was the sworn enemy of Iran, then still in the throes of an Islamic revolution. U.S. officials saw Baghdad as a bulwark against militant Shiite extremism and the fall of pro-American states such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and even Jordan -- a Middle East version of the "domino theory" in Southeast Asia. That was enough to turn Hussein into a strategic partner and for U.S. diplomats in Baghdad to routinely refer to Iraqi forces as "the good guys," in contrast to the Iranians, who were depicted as "the bad guys."

A review of thousands of declassified government documents and interviews with former policymakers shows that U.S. intelligence and logistical support played a crucial role in shoring up Iraqi defenses against the "human wave" attacks by suicidal Iranian troops. The administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous items that had both military and civilian applications, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague.

What makes present-day Hussein different from the Hussein of the 1980s, say Middle East experts, is the mellowing of the Iranian revolution and the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait that transformed the Iraqi dictator, almost overnight, from awkward ally into mortal enemy. In addition, the United States itself has changed. As a result of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, U.S. policymakers take a much more alarmist view of the threat posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

U.S. Shifts in Iran-Iraq War

When the Iran-Iraq war began in September 1980, with an Iraqi attack across the Shatt al Arab waterway that leads to the Persian Gulf, the United States was a bystander. The United States did not have diplomatic relations with either Baghdad or Tehran. U.S. officials had almost as little sympathy for Hussein's dictatorial brand of Arab nationalism as for the Islamic fundamentalism espoused by Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. As long as the two countries fought their way to a stalemate, nobody in Washington was disposed to intervene.

By the summer of 1982, however, the strategic picture had changed dramatically. After its initial gains, Iraq was on the defensive, and Iranian troops had advanced to within a few miles of Basra, Iraq's second largest city. U.S. intelligence information suggested the Iranians might achieve a breakthrough on the Basra front, destabilizing Kuwait, the Gulf states, and even Saudi Arabia, thereby threatening U.S. oil supplies.

To prevent an Iraqi collapse, the Reagan administration supplied battlefield intelligence on Iranian troop buildups to the Iraqis, sometimes through third parties such as Saudi Arabia. The U.S. tilt toward Iraq was enshrined in National Security Decision Directive 114 of Nov. 26, 1983, one of the few important Reagan era foreign policy decisions that still remains classified. According to former U.S. officials, the directive stated that the United States would do "whatever was necessary and legal" to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran.

The presidential directive was issued amid a flurry of reports that Iraqi forces were using chemical weapons in their attempts to hold back the Iranians. In principle, Washington was strongly opposed to chemical warfare, a practice outlawed by the 1925 Geneva Protocol. In practice, U.S. condemnation of Iraqi use of chemical weapons ranked relatively low on the scale of administration priorities, particularly compared with the all-important goal of preventing an Iranian victory.

Thus, on Nov. 1, 1983, a senior State Department official, Jonathan T. Howe, told Secretary of State George P. Shultz that intelligence reports showed that Iraqi troops were resorting to "almost daily use of CW" against the Iranians. But the Reagan administration had already committed itself to a large-scale diplomatic and political overture to Baghdad, culminating in several visits by the president's recently appointed special envoy to the Middle East, Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Secret talking points prepared for the first Rumsfeld visit to Baghdad enshrined some of the language from NSDD 114, including the statement that the United States would regard "any major reversal of Iraq's fortunes as a strategic defeat for the West." When Rumsfeld finally met with Hussein on Dec. 20, he told the Iraqi leader that Washington was ready for a resumption of full diplomatic relations, according to a State Department report of the conversation. Iraqi leaders later described themselves as "extremely pleased" with the Rumsfeld visit, which had "elevated U.S.-Iraqi relations to a new level."

In a September interview with CNN, Rumsfeld said he "cautioned" Hussein about the use of chemical weapons, a claim at odds with declassified State Department notes of his 90-minute meeting with the Iraqi leader. A Pentagon spokesman, Brian Whitman, now says that Rumsfeld raised the issue not with Hussein, but with Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz. The State Department notes show that he mentioned it largely in passing as one of several matters that "inhibited" U.S. efforts to assist Iraq.

Rumsfeld has also said he had "nothing to do" with helping Iraq in its war against Iran. Although former U.S. officials agree that Rumsfeld was not one of the architects of the Reagan administration's tilt toward Iraq -- he was a private citizen when he was appointed Middle East envoy -- the documents show that his visits to Baghdad led to closer U.S.-Iraqi cooperation on a wide variety of fronts. Washington was willing to resume diplomatic relations immediately, but Hussein insisted on delaying such a step until the following year.

As part of its opening to Baghdad, the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the State Department terrorism list in February 1982, despite heated objections from Congress. Without such a move, Teicher says, it would have been "impossible to take even the modest steps we were contemplating" to channel assistance to Baghdad. Iraq -- along with Syria, Libya and South Yemen -- was one of four original countries on the list, which was first drawn up in 1979.

Some former U.S. officials say that removing Iraq from the terrorism list provided an incentive to Hussein to expel the Palestinian guerrilla leader Abu Nidal from Baghdad in 1983. On the other hand, Iraq continued to play host to alleged terrorists throughout the '80s. The most notable was Abu Abbas, leader of the Palestine Liberation Front, who found refuge in Baghdad after being expelled from Tunis for masterminding the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro, which resulted in the killing of an elderly American tourist.

Iraq Lobbies for Arms

While Rumsfeld was talking to Hussein and Aziz in Baghdad, Iraqi diplomats and weapons merchants were fanning out across Western capitals for a diplomatic charm offensive-cum-arms buying spree. In Washington, the key figure was the Iraqi chargé d'affaires, Nizar Hamdoon, a fluent English speaker who impressed Reagan administration officials as one of the most skillful lobbyists in town.

"He arrived with a blue shirt and a white tie, straight out of the mafia," recalled Geoffrey Kemp, a Middle East specialist in the Reagan White House. "Within six months, he was hosting suave dinner parties at his residence, which he parlayed into a formidable lobbying effort. He was particularly effective with the American Jewish community."

One of Hamdoon's favorite props, says Kemp, was a green Islamic scarf allegedly found on the body of an Iranian soldier. The scarf was decorated with a map of the Middle East showing a series of arrows pointing toward Jerusalem. Hamdoon used to "parade the scarf" to conferences and congressional hearings as proof that an Iranian victory over Iraq would result in "Israel becoming a victim along with the Arabs."

According to a sworn court affidavit prepared by Teicher in 1995, the United States "actively supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure Iraq had the military weaponry required." Teicher said in the affidavit that former CIA director William Casey used a Chilean company, Cardoen, to supply Iraq with cluster bombs that could be used to disrupt the Iranian human wave attacks. Teicher refuses to discuss the affidavit.

At the same time the Reagan administration was facilitating the supply of weapons and military components to Baghdad, it was attempting to cut off supplies to Iran under "Operation Staunch." Those efforts were largely successful, despite the glaring anomaly of the 1986 Iran-contra scandal when the White House publicly admitted trading arms for hostages, in violation of the policy that the United States was trying to impose on the rest of the world.

Although U.S. arms manufacturers were not as deeply involved as German or British companies in selling weaponry to Iraq, the Reagan administration effectively turned a blind eye to the export of "dual use" items such as chemical precursors and steel tubes that can have military and civilian applications. According to several former officials, the State and Commerce departments promoted trade in such items as a way to boost U.S. exports and acquire political leverage over Hussein.

When United Nations weapons inspectors were allowed into Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, they compiled long lists of chemicals, missile components, and computers from American suppliers, including such household names as Union Carbide and Honeywell, which were being used for military purposes.

A 1994 investigation by the Senate Banking Committee turned up dozens of biological agents shipped to Iraq during the mid-'80s under license from the Commerce Department, including various strains of anthrax, subsequently identified by the Pentagon as a key component of the Iraqi biological warfare program. The Commerce Department also approved the export of insecticides to Iraq, despite widespread suspicions that they were being used for chemical warfare.

The fact that Iraq was using chemical weapons was hardly a secret. In February 1984, an Iraqi military spokesman effectively acknowledged their use by issuing a chilling warning to Iran. "The invaders should know that for every harmful insect, there is an insecticide capable of annihilating it . . . and Iraq possesses this annihilation insecticide."

Chemicals Kill Kurds

In late 1987, the Iraqi air force began using chemical agents against Kurdish resistance forces in northern Iraq that had formed a loose alliance with Iran, according to State Department reports. The attacks, which were part of a "scorched earth" strategy to eliminate rebel-controlled villages, provoked outrage on Capitol Hill and renewed demands for sanctions against Iraq. The State Department and White House were also outraged -- but not to the point of doing anything that might seriously damage relations with Baghdad.

"The U.S.-Iraqi relationship is . . . important to our long-term political and economic objectives," Assistant Secretary of State Richard W. Murphy wrote in a September 1988 memorandum that addressed the chemical weapons question. "We believe that economic sanctions will be useless or counterproductive to influence the Iraqis."

Bush administration spokesmen have cited Hussein's use of chemical weapons "against his own people" -- and particularly the March 1988 attack on the Kurdish village of Halabjah -- to bolster their argument that his regime presents a "grave and gathering danger" to the United States.

The Iraqis continued to use chemical weapons against the Iranians until the end of the Iran-Iraq war. A U.S. air force intelligence officer, Rick Francona, reported finding widespread use of Iraqi nerve gas when he toured the Al Faw peninsula in southern Iraq in the summer of 1988, after its recapture by the Iraqi army. The battlefield was littered with atropine injectors used by panicky Iranian troops as an antidote against Iraqi nerve gas attacks.

Far from declining, the supply of U.S. military intelligence to Iraq actually expanded in 1988, according to a 1999 book by Francona, "Ally to Adversary: an Eyewitness Account of Iraq's Fall from Grace." Informed sources said much of the battlefield intelligence was channeled to the Iraqis by the CIA office in Baghdad.

Although U.S. export controls to Iraq were tightened up in the late 1980s, there were still many loopholes. In December 1988, Dow Chemical sold $1.5 million of pesticides to Iraq, despite U.S. government concerns that they could be used as chemical warfare agents. An Export-Import Bank official reported in a memorandum that he could find "no reason" to stop the sale, despite evidence that the pesticides were "highly toxic" to humans and would cause death "from asphyxiation."

The U.S. policy of cultivating Hussein as a moderate and reasonable Arab leader continued right up until he invaded Kuwait in August 1990, documents show. When the then-U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, April Glaspie, met with Hussein on July 25, 1990, a week before the Iraqi attack on Kuwait, she assured him that Bush "wanted better and deeper relations," according to an Iraqi transcript of the conversation. "President Bush is an intelligent man," the ambassador told Hussein, referring to the father of the current president. "He is not going to declare an economic war against Iraq."

"Everybody was wrong in their assessment of Saddam," said Joe Wilson, Glaspie's former deputy at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, and the last U.S. official to meet with Hussein. "Everybody in the Arab world told us that the best way to deal with Saddam was to develop a set of economic and commercial relationships that would have the effect of moderating his behavior. History will demonstrate that this was a miscalculation."

My generation

My generation is being defined by tragedy before my very eyes.

9-11, Afghan and Iraq wars, bombings in England and Spain, Tsunami, and Katrina. The ways in which these tragedies are going to affect my generation, will probably be innumerable. I am sure that other generations have experienced similar things, but the past experiences of earlier generations do not matter to the present generation.

In my opinion, death is what devalues life. When there are very few deaths from any number of causes (disease, war, or accidents), death becomes the abnormal. This causes us to value life more dearly. Once death becomes common place, life becomes less valued. A couple more disasters and I am afraid that my generation might value life just a little less than the one before it.

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Our own problem

The Iraqi Constitution post generated so many responses that I wanted to address it again. First, while I am not defending Saddam, you cannot hold him accountable for each death that occurred in his country while he was in office. Anyone that wants to attribute "4 million in mass graves" should provide some link to back that up. Also, let us not forget that the US helped put Saddam in power, and supported him throughout the 1980s, when all of these genocidal acts were occuring. America sold him most of his weapons. I also thought it was funny that Iraqis killed by American forces in Desert Storm were attributed to Saddam instead of the US. My main point is that we did not go to Iraq to "help people". No one talked about "moral authority" three years ago. We went to Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction (we found none) and shut down terrorist training camps (we found none of those either). We are now stuck in one of the most expensive wars in the history of our country, and have announced our intention to abandon any sense of international law. To blame any of this on the UN, the Iraqi people, or anyone but our own government is stupid.

Preparedness - Options

One of the underestimated advantages of being prepared is that preparedness it gives you options.

For example,

""What do you say, I'm a survivor," John Carolan says with a laugh, thinking of the reality TV show. "Hey, give me the million bucks now."

How long can Carolan and the others hold out?

Hackett has enough gas and food for a month. Carolan says they have weeks' worth of food and bug repellent, and he will siphon gas from left-behind cars to keep his electricity going.

"Everything we have is in our homes. With the lawlessness in this town, are you going to walk away from everything you built?" Carolan says. "A lot of people think we're stupid. They say, 'Why did you stay?' I say, 'Why didn't you stay?'"" (emphasis mine)

Well Carolan, let me attempt to answer that questions for you. At least some of the people were not able to stay because they were not prepared. Their only option was to leave when everyone else did. You on the other hand had options and you still have you house. Your neighbors should pay for the time you spent protecting their house while they were gone. My hat goes off to you and your neighbor Hackett

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Food for thought

A friend brought up the question of what are they going to do if the refugees do not want to go back home. Are they going to force them to leave? What happens if the 10,000 people in the Huston dome say they like Texas better anyways?

The funniest thing I heard yesterday, was an reader emailed into fox news to request that fox stop calling the people displaced by the hurricane refugees. The definition of refugees is "one that flees; especially : a person who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecution" according to the web version of Webster.

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Preparedness - Sun Oven II

In my earlier sun oven post, I described the basic use of the sun oven and some possible advantages.

It took me about an hour to build the cardboard base. It was a little harder than I thought, if you are going to build one from cardboard, I would suggest that you get the largest single piece you can, as it will aid the overall structure stability of you oven. It took me around 30 mins to duct tape the foil to my cardboard base. This is where you will find out if you built you oven strongly, because the foil adds a bit of weight. I would suggest handling the foil inside, in low light conditions, or with sunglasses on.

I placed my bowl of oatmeal on the oven at 1:55 pm. It jumped up to around 110 degrees Fahrenheit very quickly. I checked it a little before 4:00 pm and my oven was at a whooping 140 degrees Fahrenheit. I stopped my experiment around 5:00 having topped off around 145 degrees Fahrenheit. I tried it with a cover and without one and it did not seem to make much of a difference.

Water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit and bringing water to a boil is adequate for disinfection. I believe form my limited tests that if you could bring large amounts of water to boil it could be very useful to have a large sun oven. I would consider a large amount of water a days supply for a person or an entire family. If you could do it for an entire family at once it could be very useful. In a permanent survival situation a child could be placed in charge of watching the water to see when it boiled and could go tell an adult. I do not think it would be much use for cooking because of the time involved. You would also have to live in an area with enough sunlight, which you can compensate for sunlight by using a larger area to collect the sunlight. Another advantage is that you can make many of them and sell them and novelty items or use them to barter with when necessary.

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