“The soldiers are doing strange things in Fallujah,” said one of my contacts in Fallujah who just returned. He was in his city checking on his home and just returned to Baghdad this evening... ...He told me he has watched the military use bulldozers to push the soil into piles and load it onto trucks to carry away. This was done in the Julan and Jimouriya quarters of the city, which is of course where the heaviest fighting occurred during the siege, as this was where resistance was the fiercest. “At least two kilometers of soil were removed,” he explained, “Exactly as they did at Baghdad Airport after the heavy battles there during the invasion and the Americans used their special weapons.” He explained that in certain areas where the military used “special munitions” 200 square meters of soil was being removed from each blast site... ...“They went around to every house and have shot the water tanks,” he continued, “As if they are trying to hide the evidence of chemical weapons in the water, but they only did this in some areas, such as Julan and in the souk (market) there as well.”

Rage and fury has gripped this tsunami-hit tiny Hindu village in India's southern Tamil Nadu after a group of Christian missionaries allegedly refused them aid for not agreeing to follow their religion... ...Jubilant at seeing the relief trucks loaded with food, clothes and the much-needed medicines the villagers, many of who have not had a square meal in days, were shocked when the nuns asked them to convert before distributing biscuits and water. Heated arguments broke out as the locals forcibly tried to stop the relief trucks from leaving. The missionaries, who rushed into their cars on seeing television reporters and the cameras refusing to comment on the incident and managed to leave the village. Disappointed and shocked into disbelief the hapless villagers still await aid. "Many NGOs (volunteer groups) are extending help to us but there in our village the NGO, which was till now helping us is now asking us to follow the Christian religion. We are staunch followers of Hindu religion and refused their request. And after that these people with their aid materials are leaving the village without distributing that to us," Rajni Kumar, a villager said.

Records show that over the past 50 years the average amount of sunlight reaching the ground has gone down by almost 3% a decade. It's too small an effect to see with the naked eye, but it has implications for everything from climate change to solar power and even the future sustainability of plant photosynthesis.

Am I offended by Prince Harry wearing a swastika at a fancy dress party? Not one bit. I'm offended by the fact we're living in an increasingly fascist world--and that barely anyone notices. I'm offended by the people who ARE fascists--not those who dress up as them. That's the real outrage--offence at the image, not the reality...

...The very act of being offended by Prince Harry's antics--while being oblivious to REAL fascism--is an admission of moral bankruptcy and total ignorance of the highest order.

And that's the danger--a completely twisted and inverted sense of right and wrong, warped by decades of state-worship and mind control (read public education).

But it gets worse. Even supposed freedom-lovers are losing the plot and falling under the fascist spell. It's as if there is a latent human yearning, a fascist gene, for the type of world such a political arrangement can achieve. So much so, that previously sound-minded individuals lose control of their faculties, leap into jackboots and start goose stepping!

"Public acceptance of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is well below the 50% mark, a fact of considerable concern to many scientists," Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of The Gallup Poll, observed today. He noted that given three alternatives, only 35% say that evolution is well-supported by evidence. The same number say evolution is one of many theories and not well supported by evidence. Another 29% say they don't know enough about it to say.

Almost half of Americans (45%) believe that human beings "were created by God essentially as they are today (that is, without evolving) about 10,000 years ago," acccording to Gallup's poll.

US-led troops using the ancient Iraqi city of Babylon as a base have damaged and contaminated artifacts dating back thousands of years in one of the most important archeological sites in the world, the British Museum said yesterday.

Military vehicles crushed a 2,600-year-old brick pavement, for example, and archeological fragments, including broken bricks stamped by King Nebuchadnezzar II around the same time, were scattered across the site, a museum report said.

The dragons at the Ishtar Gate were marred by cracks and gaps where someone tried to remove their decorative bricks, the paper said.

John Curtis, keeper of the British Museum's Near East department, who was invited by Iraqis to study the site, also found that large quantities of sand mixed with archeological fragments have been taken from the site to fill military sandbags.

''This is tantamount to establishing a military camp around the Great Pyramid in Egypt or around Stonehenge in Britain," Curtis said in the report.

The number of Arabic linguists discharged from the military for violating its "don't ask, don't tell" policy is higher than previously reported, according to records obtained by a research group.

The group contends the records show that the military — at a time when it and U.S. intelligence agencies don't have enough Arabic speakers — is putting its anti-gay stance ahead of national security.

Between 1998 and 2004, the military discharged 20 Arabic and six Farsi speakers, according to Department of Defense data

According to Chas Freeman, former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia and head of the independent Middle East Policy Council, Mr Bush recently asked Mr Powell for his view on the progress of the war. "We're losing," Mr Powell was quoted as saying. Mr Freeman said Mr Bush then asked the secretary of state to leave.

Bush's supporters demand lock-step consensus that Bush is right. They regard truthful reports that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and was not involved in the September 11 attack on the US--truths now firmly established by the Bush administration's own reports--as treasonous America-bashing.

As well, Bovard is interpreted as throwing cold water on the feel-good, macho, Muslim butt-kicking that Bush's invasion of Iraq has come to symbolize for his supporters. "People like you and Michael Moore," one irate reader wrote, "is (sic) what brings down our country."

I have received similar responses from conservatives, as, no doubt, have a number of other writers who object to a domestic police state at war with the world.

In language reeking with hatred, Heritage Foundtion TownHall readers impolitely informed me that opposing the invasion of Iraq is identical to opposing America, that Bush is the greatest American leader in history and everyone who disagrees with him should be shot before they cause America to lose another war. TownHall's readers were sufficiently frightening to convince the Heritage Foundation to stop posting my columns.

Bush's conservative supporters want no debate. They want no facts, no analysis. They want to denounce and to demonize the enemies that the Hannitys, Limbaughs, and Savages of talk radio assure them are everywhere at work destroying their great and noble country.

In the ranks of the new conservatives, however, I see and experience much hate. It comes to me in violently worded, ignorant, and irrational e-mails from self-professed conservatives who literally worship George Bush. Even Christians have fallen into idolatry. There appears to be a large number of Americans who are prepared to kill anyone for George Bush.

The Iraqi War is serving as a great catharsis for multiple conservative frustrations: job loss, drugs, crime, homosexuals, pornography, female promiscuity, abortion, restrictions on prayer in public places, Darwinism, and attacks on religion. Liberals are the cause. Liberals are against America. Anyone against the war is against America and is a liberal. "You are with us or against us."

This is the mindset of delusion, and delusion permits of no facts or analysis. Blind emotion rules. Americans are right and everyone else is wrong. End of the debate.

That, gentle reader, is the full extent of talk radio, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, National Review, the Weekly Standard, and, indeed, of the entire concentrated corporate media, where non-controversy in the interest of advertising revenue rules...

...American liberals called the Brownshirts "conservative," because the Brownshirts were obviously not liberal. They were ignorant, violent, delusional, and they worshipped a man of no known distinction. Brownshirts' delusions were protected by an emotional force field. Adulation of power and force prevented Brownshirts from recognizing the implications for their country of their reckless doctrines....

Like Brownshirts, the new conservatives take personally any criticism of their leader and his policies. To be a critic is to be an enemy. I went overnight from being an object of conservative adulation to one of derision when I wrote that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a "strategic blunder."

One of the problems with so-called light entertainment today is that somehow, amid all the gaudy special effects, people tend to lose track of simple things, like story and meaning. They stop noticing the moral lessons the director is trying to push. Yet these things matter.

By now it's grown clear that George Lucas has an agenda, one that he takes very seriously. After four "Star Wars" films, alarm bells should have gone off, even among those who don't look for morals in movies. When the chief feature distinguishing "good" from "evil" is how pretty the characters are, it's a clue that maybe the whole saga deserves a second look.

Just what bill of goods are we being sold, between the frames?

Elites have an inherent right to arbitrary rule; common citizens needn't be consulted. They may only choose which elite to follow.

"Good" elites should act on their subjective whims, without evidence, argument or accountability.

Any amount of sin can be forgiven if you are important enough.

True leaders are born. It's genetic. The right to rule is inherited...

...Lucas defends his elitist view, telling the New York Times, "That's sort of why I say a benevolent despot is the ideal ruler. He can actually get things done. The idea that power corrupts is very true and it's a big human who can get past that."

In other words a royal figure or demigod, anointed by fate. (Like a billionaire moviemaker?)

   

''The Guard'', Arno Breker (nazi artist)

Mr. Incredible has an incredible family resemblance.

When a taxi which does not notice the US troops blocks their path, the American in the lead vehicle hurls a plastic bottle full of water on to its roof and the driver mounts the grass traffic circle. A truck receives the same treatment from the lead Humvee. "Go back," shouts the rear gunner, staring at us through shades. We try desperately to turn into the jam.

Yes, the Russians would probably have chucked hand grenades in Kabul. But here were the terrified "liberators" of Baghdad throwing bottles of water at the Iraqis who are supposed to enjoy an American-imposed democracy on 30 January...

...Round the corner, I discover the reason for the jam: Iraqi cops are fighting off hundreds of motorists desperate for petrol, the drivers refusing to queue any longer for the one thing which Iraq possesses in Croesus-like amounts - petrol.

Ali G star Sasha Baron Cohen took a prank too far at an American rodeo – and was nearly lynched by angry locals.

Cohen, posing as his Kazakhstani journalist character Borat, insulted people in Salem, Virginia, telling them that their President drank blood, and singing a mangled version of the American national anthem.

“If he had been out there a minute longer, I think someone would have shot him,” said local Robynn Jaymes.

Cohen convinced organisers that he was filming a documentary about America. He told them he supported the war on terrorism and said: “I hope you kill every man, woman and child in Iraq, down to the lizards.

“And may George W Bush drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq.”

Then he asked if he could show his appreciation by singing the Star Spangled Banner. His version ended with the words “your home is the grave”.

Cohen’s rendition of the much-loved anthem was loudly booed by the crowd.

Earlier today while I was in the al-Adhamiya district of Baghdad the US base there was mortared 8 times...

...Funny that everyone lately is talking about how calm it is here in Baghdad…expecting things to grow so much worse as the election approaches. If this is calm...

Calm looks like the military not releasing the number of times each day they are attacked…at last count this was around 70 per day that they admitted to...which means it is probably more.

It also looks like a van with four bank guards being destroyed, burning the men to death; it looks like another US soldier being killed in al-Anbar province (read-Fallujah), four Iraqi soldiers being killed in Samarra, and Iraqi soldiers in Duluiya slaughtering three Iraqi civilians in their car at a checkpoint. In addition, in Hiyt, west of Ramadi, two US military vehicles were destroyed in a rocket attack. In Haqlaniya, also west of Ramadi, a roadside bomb detonated near a patrol, destroying two more US military vehicles. No word yet on casualities from either attack, although witnesses reported watching helicopters evacuating bloody soldiers from the attack scene near Hiyt.

Both of these locations are in the vicinity of Fallujah.

Calm looks like mortars and gunfire everyday, sporadically around Baghdad. Calm looks like two vehicle bombs in Mosul today, one a suicide van bomb that killed an unknown number of civilians when it missed a US convoy, the other a suicide car bomb that killed two Iraqi soldiers.

Bush is nearing his Tet moment. After the Jan. 30 elections, he will have three options. Persevere in a no-win war with 150,000 U.S. troops bleeding indefinitely until America turns on him, his policy and his party. Send in tens of thousands of fresh U.S. troops to crush the insurgency as we undertake a years-long program of training Iraqis to defend their own democracy. Third, find an honorable exit, and leave Iraq to the Iraqis.

Anthrax Ice Cream!

''If anyone gets too close to us we fucking waste them. It’s kind of a shame, because it means we’ve killed a lot of innocent people.'' This came from a British reporter, traveling with American forces, writing for the respected magazine The Economist. Few American embeds have passed along a quote like that, and I wonder why.

In another passage, the Economist embed observes that bystanders to an ambush are liable to be killed by Marines, who sometimes hide near the body of a dead insurgent and kill whoever comes to collect it. According to that same Marine lieutenant, commenting on the general situation in Iraq: ''It gets to the point where you can’t wait to see guys with guns, so you start shooting everybody. It gets to the point where you don’t mind the bad stuff you do.''

The embed (whose work, like most in the magazine, appears without a byline) points out that the Americans are superb fighting machines, but at peacekeeping or policing “they are often inept.” He mentions an 18-year-old Texan in Mosul who, confronted by jeering school kids, shot canisters of buckshot at them, then explained: ''It’s not good, dude, it could be fatal, but you gotta do it.''

Then there are the soldiers who seem to enjoy kicking down doors and calling the Iraqi women they find ''Bitch.''

The (US) soldiers are increasingly nervous and ready to fire. Almost imperceptibly their discipline is fraying. One of the ironies for Westerners trying to reduce the dangers in Iraq by blending in, however partially, is that as the war worsens, they run an increased risk of attack from both sides. This is the danger that Iraqis face as well. If there is any relief in leaving the airport road and entering the deadly slow-moving traffic within the city, it is that at least the American patrols are less present...

..The truth is that however vicious or even sadistic the insurgents may be, they are acutely aware of their popular base, and are responsible for fewer unintentional "collateral" casualties than are the clumsy and overarmed American forces. Rhetoric aside, this is not a war on terror but a running fight with a large part of the Iraqi people. It is a classic struggle between the legions of a great power and the resistance of a native population. It is infinitely wider and deeper than officials can admit. And the United States is on the way to losing it...

...Even short of the killing we have done, we have broken down their doors, run them off the roads, swiveled our guns at them, shouted profanities at them, and disrespected their women—all this hundreds or thousands of times every day. We have dishonored them publicly, and within a society that places public honor above life itself.

Mark Fiore's best ever: Foreign Aid! If you're like me you lie awake at night worrying about where the Western Regimes will find the billions of dollars for the brown skinned tsunami victims. Worry no more, my friends...there IS a solution: They're not going to give them any! Anyone been to BAM, Iran recently??? Oh, yeah - forgot about them...heh heh.

The United States is planning to buy hundreds of millions of bullets from Taiwan in the first such deal as its supplies are running low after wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a report said Thursday.

Citing Taiwanese military sources, the United Evening News said Washington had made the request to acquire some 300 million 5.56-millimeter bullets for rifles for an estimated two billion Taiwan dollars (62.5 million US).

Over the past year, there has been evidence enough that our whole project in Iraq is hopelessly flawed, that our Western armies - when they are not torturing prisoners, killing innocents and destroying one of the largest cities in Iraq - are being vanquished by a ferocious guerrilla army, the like of which we have not seen before in the Middle East. My own calculations - probably conservative, because there are many violent acts that we are never told about - suggest that in the past 12 months, at least 190 suicide bombers have blown themselves up, sometimes at the rate of two a day. How does this happen? Is there a suicide-bomber supermarket, an off-the-shelf store? What have we done to create this extraordinary industry?...

...And American troops are sending home increasingly terrible stories of the wanton killing of civilians by US forces in the towns and cities of Iraq. Here, for example, is the evidence of ex-marine staff sergeant Jimmy Massey, testifying at a refugee hearing in Canada earlier this month. Massey told the Canadian board - which had to decide whether to give refugee status to an American deserter from the 82nd Airborne - that he and his fellow marines shot and killed more than 30 unarmed men, women and children, including a young Iraqi who got out of his car with his arms up.

Fallujans are suspicious of outsiders, so I found it surprising when Nihida Kadhim, a housewife, beckoned me into her home. She had just arrived back in the city to check out her house; the government had told the people three days earlier that they should start going home. She called me into her living room. On her mirror she pointed to a message that had been written in her lipstick. She couldn't read English. It said: "Fuck Iraq and every Iraqi in it!"

"They are insulting me, aren't they?" she asked.

I left her and walked towards the cemetery. I noticed the dead dogs again. I had been told in Baghdad by a friend of mine, Dr Marwan Elawi, that the Baghdad Hospital for Infectious Diseases admits one case of rabies every week. The problem is that infected dogs are eating the corpses and spreading the disease.

As I was walking by the cemetery, I caught the smell of death coming from one of the houses. The door was open and the first thing I saw was a white car parked in the driveway and on top of it a launcher for an RPG.

I went inside, and the sound of the rain on the roof and the darkness inside made me very afraid. The door was open, all the windows were broken and there were bullet holes running down the hall to a bathroom at the end - as if the bullets were chasing something or somebody. The bathroom led on to a bedroom and I stepped inside and saw the body of a fighter.

The leg was missing, the hand was missing and the furniture in the house had been destroyed. I couldn't breathe with the smell. I realised that Tariq wasn't with me, and I panicked and ran. As I got out of the house I saw a white teddy bear lying in the rain, and a green boobytrap bomb.

Some of the worst fighting took place here in the centre of the city, but there was no sign of the 1,200 to 1,600 fighters the Americans said they had killed. I had heard that there was a graveyard for the fighters somewhere in the city but people said that most of them had withdrawn from the city after the first week of fighting. I needed to find one of the insurgents to tell me the real story of what had happened in the city. The Americans had said that there had been a big military victory, but I couldn't understand where all the fighters were buried.

A partial list of methods of torture recently reported (or reported yet again) would include: detainees chained hand and foot to the floor in a fetal position for up to 24 hours without food or water and left to lie in their own fecal matter; detainees beaten and kicked while hooded; paraded naked around a courtyard while photos were being snapped; left in extreme hot or cold temperatures for extended periods; wrapped in an Israeli flag while loud rap music played and strobe lights flashed; or possibly even having fingernails torn out; placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees' ear openings; sleep deprivation; partial strangulation; death threats during interrogation; the use of dogs to force frightened prisoners to urinate; the holding of wires from an electric transformer to a detainee's shoulders, so that the man "danced as he was shocked"; mock drowning or "waterboarding"; mock executions of Iraqi juveniles; severely burning a detainee's hands by covering them in alcohol and igniting them; holding a pistol to the back of a detainee's head while another Marine takes a picture; fake (and real) acts of sexual assault and sodomy; being hit with rifle butts; suffering electric shocks and immersion in cold water; being beaten to death. These and other crimes against very specific humanity have taken place from Guantanamo to Iraq, Afghanistan to the CIA's secret prisons around the world.

With no fanfare, the U.S. House has passed a controversial doomsday provision that would allow a handful of lawmakers to run Congress if a terrorist attack or major disaster killed or incapacitated large numbers of congressmen...

...a majority of the congressmen able to show up at the House would be enough to conduct business, conceivably a dozen lawmakers or less...

...The circumstances include ``natural disaster, attack, contagion or similar calamity rendering Representatives incapable of attending the proceedings of the House.''...

...Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.), one of few lawmakers active on the issue, argued the rule change contradicts the U.S. Constitution, which states that ''a majority of each (House) shall constitute a quorum to do business.

''Changing what constitutes a quorum in this way would allow less than a dozen lawmakers to declare war on another nation,'' Baird said.

If you're ticketed by Green Bay police, you'll get more than a fine. You'll get fingerprinted, too. It's a new way police are cracking down on crime.

If you're caught speeding or playing your music too loud, or other crimes for which you might receive a citation, Green Bay police officers will ask for your drivers license and your finger. You'll be fingerprinted right there on the spot. The fingerprint appears right next to the amount of the fine.

FRITZ STERN, a refugee from Hitler's Germany and a leading scholar of European history, startled several of his listeners when he warned in a speech about the danger posed in this country by the rise of the Christian right. In his address in November, just after he received a prize presented by the German foreign minister, he told his audience that Hitler saw himself as "the instrument of providence" and fused his "racial dogma with a Germanic Christianity."

"Some people recognized the moral perils of mixing religion and politics," he said of prewar Germany, "but many more were seduced by it. It was the pseudo-religious transfiguration of politics that largely ensured his success, notably in Protestant areas."

Dr. Stern's speech, given during a ceremony at which he got the prize from the Leo Baeck Institute, a center focused on German Jewish history, was certainly provocative. The fascism of Nazi Germany belongs to a world so horrendous it often seems to defy the possibility of repetition or analogy. But Dr. Stern, 78, the author of books like "The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology" and university professor emeritus at Columbia University, has devoted a lifetime to analyzing how the Nazi barbarity became possible. He stops short of calling the Christian right fascist but his decision to draw parallels, especially in the uses of propaganda, was controversial.

"When I saw the speech my eyes lit up," said John R. MacArthur, whose book "Second Front" examines wartime propaganda. "The comparison between the propagandistic manipulation and uses of Christianity, then and now, is hidden in plain sight. No one will talk about it. No one wants to look at it."

Army Cpl. Tim Ngo survived a grenade attack in Iraq. He's had more trouble back home enduring stares and insults directed at the plastic helmet he wears to protect his brain while he recovers.

It wasn't as bad when he was at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where helmets are fairly common. But in Minnesota, 20-year-old Ngo, of Vadnais Heights, couldn't walk down the street or go to a mall without drawing whispers, said his mother, Hong Wyberg. "People would stare and point," she said. "Not just kids, but adults."...

...The helmet made him unwilling center of attention at places like sporting events at his alma mater, White Bear Lake Area High School.

"I just don't like it. You have to realize, I'm 20. I'm conscious of my looks," Ngo said.

In one of the most painful episodes, students at a school dance referred to him behind his back as "helmet head," he said. In another, a woman in a Brainerd restaurant pointed and talked openly about Ngo as if he couldn't hear her.

Ngo wears the helmet because shrapnel shattered part of his skull. A single fall or bump could kill him. So until surgeons can replace the damaged area with a permanent plate, he has to wear the headgear whenever he's standing.

President Leonid Kuchma on Monday ordered the foreign and defense ministries to develop a plan for withdrawing Ukraine's troops from Iraq within months, his office said.

Ukraine, whose 1,650 troops are the fourth-largest contingent in the U.S.-led operation in Iraq, previously expressed intentions to withdraw this year, but Kuchma's order speeds up the apparent timetable.

The deputy police chief of Baghdad, Brigadier Amer Ali Nayef and his son, Lt. Khalid Amer, were assassinated in Baghdad's south Dora district today. Their car was gunned down while driving to work this morning. This is the second senior Iraqi official to be assassinated in less than a week. Just last Tuesday, gunmen assassinated the governor of Baghdad, Ali al-Haidari, along with six of his bodyguards.

But the details on the killing of the governor from an eyewitness escaped the news. The convoy was hit by a well coordinated attack. There were two groups of fighters who manned cigarette stands which line the streets of Baghdad, awaiting the governor. In addition, there were gunmen on the tops of nearby shops…the convoy was attacked, and the governors car escaped…only to be chased down by a car full of gunmen who finished the job. The only civilians who were shot were hit by the random firing from the governor’s guards.

The demolition of Fallujah continues. Two of my sources inside the city, who live in different neighborhoods, report that the military is now burning homes. Apparently, they are finding booby traps, so they are piling furniture up in the homes, dousing it with fuel, and burning it.

Nevertheless, another Marine was killed there today.

   

The death toll was climbing. The extent of the damage and disease was so widespread it was a matter of speculation. The degree of human suffering was beyond any measure.

And there was the "Today" show's Ann Curry, emoting obsequiously among the survivors.

She told us about one woman who watched her daughter be swept away by the roiling waters of the tsunami. The woman, Ann reported, was "inconsolable."

Then, Ann reached out and gave the woman an awkward hug. After, the woman was still weeping.

That's how "inconsolable" the woman was. A hug from Ann Curry couldn't make everything better.

Oh, the humanity!

Over on "Good Morning America," Diane Sawyer was walking among the ruins, looking very sad, but stylish in a white linen pantsuit. It was billed as Diane's journey to the disaster zone. We saw Diane surveying the damage from a chopper. We saw her pausing to look at rubble. Diane looked as depressed as an extra from a Paxil commercial.

That's how bad this disaster is. Diane Sawyer had to go there, and it made her sad.