Today's funfilled news articles
-->(you can erase this) but i thought i'd just let everyone know that charlie sheen fuckin rocks... :)
After Over 40,000 Votes, 84% Support Sheen
Prison Planet.com | March 26 2006
At time of press Showbiz Tonight's CNN poll shows 84% support Charlie Sheen's comments on 9/11. This figure is rising and we expect it to go higher before the poll closes.
Click here to vote yes and support Charlie Sheen.
Iraqis killed by US troops ‘on rampage’
London Times / Hala Jaber and Tony Allen-Mills | March 26 2006
THE villagers of Abu Sifa near the Iraqi town of Balad had become used to the sound of explosions at night as American forces searched the area for suspected insurgents. But one night two weeks ago Issa Harat Khalaf heard a different sound that chilled him to the bone.
Khalaf, a 33-year-old security officer guarding oil pipelines, saw a US helicopter land near his home. American soldiers stormed out of the Chinook and advanced on a house owned by Khalaf’s brother Fayez, firing as they went.
Khalaf ran from his own house and hid in a nearby grove of trees. He saw the soldiers enter his brother’s home and then heard the sound of women and children screaming.
“Then there was a lot of machinegun fire,” he said last week. After that there was the most frightening sound of all — silence, followed by explosions as the soldiers left the house.
Once the troops were gone, Khalaf and his fellow villagers began a frantic search through the ruins of his brother’s home. Abu Sifa was about to join a lengthening list of Iraqi communities claiming to have suffered from American atrocities.
According to Iraqi police, 11 bodies were pulled from the wreckage of the house, among them four women and five children aged between six months and five years. An official police report obtained by a US reporter for Knight Ridder newspapers said: “The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 people.”
The Abu Sifa deaths on March 15 were first reported last weekend on the day that Time magazine published the results of a 10-week investigation into an incident last November when US marines killed 15 civilians in their homes in the western Iraqi town of Haditha.
The two incidents are being investigated by US authorities, but persistent eyewitness accounts of rampaging attacks by American troops are fuelling human rights activists’ concerns that Pentagon commanders are failing to curb military excesses in Iraq.
The Pentagon claims to have investigated at least 600 cases of alleged abuse by American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to have disciplined or punished 230 soldiers for improper behaviour. But a study by three New York-based human rights groups, due to be published next month, will claim that most soldiers found guilty of abuse received only “administrative” discipline such as loss of rank or pay, confinement to base or periods of extra duty.
Of the 76 courts martial that the Pentagon is believed to have initiated, only a handful are known to have resulted in jail sentences of more than a year — notably including the architects of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison.
Most other cases ended with sentences of two, three or four months. “That’s not punishment, and that’s the problem,” said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch, which is compiling the study with two other groups.
“Our concern is that abuses in the field are not being robustly investigated and prosecuted, and that they are not setting an example with people who cross the line,” said Sifton. “There is a clear preference by the military for discipline with administrative and non-judicial punishments instead of courts martial. That sends the message that you can commit abuse and get away with it.”
Yet the evidence from Haditha and Abu Sifa last week suggested that the Pentagon is finding it increasingly difficult to dismiss allegations of violent excesses as propaganda by terrorist sympathisers.
It was on November 19 last year that a US marine armoured vehicle struck a roadside bomb that killed a 20-year-old lance-corporal. According to a marine communiqué issued the next day, the blast also killed 15 Iraqi civilians and was followed by an attack on the US convoy in which eight insurgents were killed.
An investigation by Time established that the civilians had not been killed by the roadside bomb, but were shot in their homes after the marines rampaged through Haditha. Among the dead were seven women and three children.
One eyewitness told Time: “I watched them shoot my grandfather, first in the chest and then in the head. Then they killed my granny.”
A Pentagon inquiry has reportedly confirmed that the civilians were killed by marines. But it said the deaths were the result of “collateral damage” and not, as some villagers alleged, murder by marines taking revenge for the death of their comrade. The case has been handed over to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service to determine if the rules of war were broken.
In Abu Sifa last week, Khalaf’s account was corroborated by a neighbour, Hassan Kurdi Mahassen, who was also woken by the sound of helicopters and saw soldiers entering Fayez’s home after spraying it with such heavy fire that walls crumbled.
Mahassen said that once the soldiers had left — after apparently dropping several grenades that caused part of the house to collapse — villagers searched under the rubble “and found them all buried in one room”.
“Women and even the children were blindfolded and their hands bound. Some of their faces were totally disfigured. A lot of blood was on the floors and the walls.”
Khalaf said he had found the body of his mother Turkiya with her face unrecognisable. “She had been shot with a dumdum bullet,” he claimed.
While many allegations of US atrocities have later turned out to be exaggerated or false, the Abu Sifa incident was supported by hospital autopsy reports that said all the victims had died from bullet wounds. A local Iraqi police commander — supposedly co-operating with US forces — confirmed that the bodies had been found with their wrists tied.
The US military put the number of civilians killed at four: two women, a child and a man. A spokesman said troops had gone to the house in response to a tip that a member of Al-Qaeda was there. The terrorist was found and arrested. The spokesman insisted that coalition forces “take every precaution to keep civilians out of harm’s way” and that it was “highly unlikely” that the Abu Sifa allegations were true.
Some villagers were quoted as confirming that an Al-Qaeda member was visiting the house. “But was my six-month-old nephew a member of Al-Qaeda?” asked Khalaf. “Was my 75-year-old mother also from that organisation?” While the Pentagon is investigating the incident, the soldiers involved remain on active duty.
Sifton acknowledged that human rights activists needed to distinguish between cases of detainee abuse — invariably carried out in cold blood — and incidents that occur on a dangerous and volatile battlefield.
“We are not unsympathetic to the stresses of battlefield situations,” he said. “There’s a saying in the military that it’s better to be judged by 12 (a jury) than be carried by six (coffin-bearers). We would hesitate to second-guess a soldier’s reactions under fire. But there’s a limit to how much leniency you can give troops because of the fog of war. You can’t give the US military a free pass.”
He added: “If they are pissed off because a buddy got killed and they want revenge, that’s a violation of the rules of war.”
Senior officers have argued that insurgents are targeting the civilian population in order to blame coalition forces, and that troops are trained to take all reasonable precautions to prevent civilian casualties while defending themselves against attack.
The problem for the Pentagon is that every new incident involving civilian deaths triggers a new wave of anti-American fervour.
Last week Jalal Abdul Rahman told this newspaper about the death in January of his 12- year-old son Abdul. It was a Sunday evening and father and son were driving home after buying a new game for the boy’s PlayStation.
They were a few hundred yards from their home in the Karkh neighbourhood of Baghdad when — according to Rahman — US forces opened fire on the car, killing Abdul.
Soldiers approached the car and told Rahman he had failed to stop when ordered to do so. Rahman said he had never heard an order to stop. The soldiers searched the car and, as they departed, they threw a black body bag on the ground.
“They said, ‘This is for your son,’ and they left me there with my dead son,” he added.
Rahman claimed he had had nothing to do with the insurgency until that moment. “But this is America, the so-called guardian of humanity, and killing people for them is like drinking water. I shall go after them until I avenge the blood of my son.”
Additional reporting: Ali Abdul Rahman, Abu Sifa, and Hamoudi Saffar and Ali Rifat, Baghdad
Hoon orders peers to accept ID cards
Commons leader Geoff Hoon has warned peers to stop blocking the government's plans for all passport applicants to be given identity cards.
The House of Lords has repeatedly voted against the proposal, which is backed by MPs.
Mr Hoon told Sky News the "constant battle" must end and that peers should accept the will of the Commons.
Opposition peers say cards should be voluntary, as pledged in the Labour general election manifesto.
National register
The Identity Cards Bill returns to the Lords this week, after MPs voted in its favour for a fourth time last Tuesday.
The bill would compel anyone getting a passport from 2008 to also have an ID card and have their details added to the national identity register.
The government says this means cards are still voluntary, but opposition parties claim it makes them compulsory "by stealth".
In theory, the bill could keep "ping-ponging" between the houses until an agreement is reached, or ministers override the Lords using the Parliament Act.
Westminster insiders predict the government might force an all-night sitting on Wednesday to test the will of peers.
Mr Hoon said: "I accept under present arrangements they are entitled to use the procedures in the way that they have.
"But it's always been recognised, indeed said to be a convention of the constitution, that once a government puts into its manifesto a particular proposal, then the House of Lords would not stand in the way of that proposal becoming law.
"That's one of the problems we have with ID cards. We set that out clearly in the manifesto last May - it was voted for by the British public.
"It seems to me right now that the House of Lords should accept the will of the elected chamber - the House of Commons - and recognise that those people in the House of Commons, elected by a majority, set out in their manifesto that this should become law and now the House of Lords should give way."
Mr Hoon said talks would need to be held between all political parties to discuss House of Lords reform, but added he did not want to see "a benign second chamber".
'A senior police officer was called at the Lord's Test match and told you have shot the wrong guy'
London Telegraph / Ben Leapman | March 26 2006
Flashback: De Menezes Shooting: All the facts point to a cover up
A senior Scotland Yard officer was allegedly telephoned at the Ashes Test match at Lord's to be told that police had just shot dead an innocent man in the aftermath of the failed 21/7 terrorist bombings, according to documents seen by the Sunday Telegraph.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Yates was said to have been told on Friday, July 22 - within hours of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in London - that the Brazilian man had no connection with terrorism.
If the account is true, it increases the pressure on Sir Ian Blair, the embattled Metropolitan Police Commissioner, who insists that he did not know until the following day - Saturday, July 23 - that the wrong man had been shot.At the centre of the row is the controversial officer Brian Paddick, also a deputy assistant commissioner at the Met. Internal force documents describe how Mr Paddick said to a broadcast journalist last month: "An officer of the same rank as me was rung off-duty at the cricket match and told, 'You have shot the wrong guy'."
Now facing an investigation into alleged unauthorised disclosure of confidential information, Mr Paddick insists he was merely passing on a rumour, not stating fact.
But the row over events following the de Menezes shooting, focusing on who knew what and when, threatens to tear Scotland Yard apart and undermine Sir Ian's leadership irreparably. He stands to lose his job if an inquiry by the Independent Police Complaints Commission finds that he knew the same day that the wrong man had been killed.
Yesterday, Scotland Yard confirmed that a senior officer had attended day two of the England v Australia match on Friday, July 22 and named him as Mr Yates, of the Met's specialist crime directorate. He was on leave, despite the terrorist emergency.
Mr Yates, 48, is regarded as a rising star of Scotland Yard. His previous role on the Met's SCD6 team - dubbed the Celebrity Squad, for its investigations into the rich and famous - pitched him into high profile cases, including briefing the Royal Family on the prosecution of Paul Burrell, the former butler of Diana, Princess of Wales.
A Met spokesman said that Mr Yates, who has visited the de Menezes family in Brazil, had testified to the IPCC that he was unaware on the Friday that the man shot at Stockwell had been innocent. However, the documents show that Mr Paddick still suspects that senior Met officers knew on Friday that the mistake had been made.
Mr Paddick, 47, Britain's most senior openly gay police officer, sprang to prominence when, as bor-ough commander for Lambeth, he pioneered a "softly-softly" approach to cannabis that became a blueprint for national policy. It marked him out as a rising star, but it also made him enemies.
Now in charge of the Met's territorial policing division, he stood alongside Sir Ian after the July 7 bombings to appeal for calm. Two weeks later came the failed bombing attempt of July 21.
Police marksmen hunting the failed bombers followed Mr de Menezes, 27, and shot him dead at about 10am on July 22. That afternoon at 4pm, Sir Ian told the media that the shooting was "directly linked" to the anti-terrorist operation.
However, the following day at 5pm, Scotland Yard admitted that its officers had made a terrible mistake. After a complaint from the de Menezes family, the IPCC - already investigating the shooting - opened a separate inquiry into the commissioner's conduct.
According to the documents, Mr Paddick was telephoned by a journalist on St Valentine's Day this year while on duty. Snippets of the conversation were overheard by a junior colleague who, fearing that rules had been broken, reported the matter to the Met's internal affairs division.
During the conversation on his mobile phone, Mr Paddick let slip two key pieces of information that could land him, as well as his boss, in trouble. He revealed for the first time that he had recently made a statement to the IPCC's inquiry into the commissioner's conduct. And, without naming Mr Yates, he gave an account of the alleged call to the cricket match.
It was not until March 16 that the public learnt that Mr Paddick had given evidence to the IPCC. The news emerged when the BBC home affairs correspondent, Margaret Gilmore, told viewers that an unnamed senior Met officer had told investigators that a member of staff in the commissioner's private office believed that the wrong man had been killed within six hours of the shooting.
Later, it was suggested that Mr Paddick had given the IPCC the names of two senior officers who were said to have known on the day. Both are understood to have been called before the IPCC: one denied the charge while the other gave equivocal evidence.
The response from Scotland Yard was swift and brutal: "We are satisfied that whatever the reasons for this suggestion being made, it is simply not true." The rebuttal was so damning that Mr Paddick went to his lawyers to discuss the possibility of suing his employer for libel.
In a statement defending the charge of making an unauthorised disclosure, Mr Paddick does not claim he was misquoted but maintains his only mistake was in being too open with the journalist.
He defends his decision to pass on the cricket match information by describing it as a "rumour", of which some in the media were already aware, in order to deflect the journalist away from the content of his statement to the IPCC. "I should perhaps have merely stated that I was unaware that any other senior officers knew on the Friday - but this was untrue."
Scotland Yard said of the cricket allegation: "John Yates made a statement to the IPCC making it clear that he did not know an innocent person had been shot at Stockwell Tube station on that day."
Student Member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth Shot Dead
Minneapolis A man shot in the head in the Uptown area of Minneapolis on Saturday night died late Sunday night at Hennepin County Medical Center.
Michael Zebuhr, 25, was a Ph.D. student at Clemson University in South Carolina. He was enrolled in the bioengineering program. He dreamed of working at NASA someday.
He was from Buckhannon, W.Va. and was a 2005 graduate of Davis and Elkins College, a private Presbyterian School in Elkins, W.Va. Officials there said he received B.S. degrees there in chemistry and math. They said he was a student leader as well as a member of the school’s ski team.
Friends and family said Zebuhr also loved mountain biking, math and science.
Zebuhr was shot in the head in the 3100 block of Girard Avenue South around 10 p.m. Saturday.
Police said Zebuhr was walking to a parked car with family members, when robbers approached them and demanded his mother’s purse. She gave it to the gunmen without any resistance. One of the men then shot Zebuhr.
Lt. Lee Edwards of the Minneapolis Police Department said, “Within a half hour of the incident, we had already had six homicide investigators or six officers with homicide experience already working this thing.”
Police tried to reassure the community on Tuesday the crime would not go unpunished.
Minneapolis Police Chief, William McManus said, “I want to assure everyone that this crime is an aberration, this is not the norm for around here.”
Police are hoping for a break in the case. Several security cameras were pointed in the direction where the shooting happened and police are now reviewing those tapes.
“This is just an unspeakable event, an unspeakable tragedy that unfortunately occurred right in front of the young man’s mother and sister,” McManus said.
Other community leaders shared their disgust and vowed to find Zebuhr’s murderer.
Minneapolis City Council Member Ralph Remington said, “This is an unspeakable brutality. These people will be caught and we will be on top of it.”
Zebuhr’s organs were donated to patients in need.
Anyone with more information is asked to call Minneapolis Police at 612-692-8477.
Neocons Commence World War Three
In Bushzarro world, the invasion and occupation of Iraq was first about Saddam’s illusory weapons of mass destruction, and then in lieu of actually finding any weapons the excuse shifted to altruism, a mawkish desire to bestow democracy on benighted Iraqis (who pretty much pioneered civilization 12,000 years ago as Mesopotamians and didn’t need any help from the neocons). In fact, the invasion had nothing to do with either of these things, as some of us said in late 2002, about the time the Straussian neocons began making serious noise about invading Iraq and killing thousands of people.
Instead, the invasion of Iraq was all about destroying Iraqi society and nationalism. It was a coup de grâce delivered after twelve years of brutal, immoral, sadistic, and medieval sanctions designed to break the Iraqis down. It has everything to do with defeating secular Arab nationalism and in this respect the occupation (and destruction) of Iraq is an Israeli project. Both Syria and Lebanon loom large on the Straussian neocon hit list precisely because they represent Arab nationalism. Syrian thinkers such as Constantin Zureiq, Zaki al-Arsuzi and Michel Aflaq formulated pan-Arab ideology and Aflaq and al-Arsuzi were key figures in the establishment of the Arab Ba’ath (Resurrection) Party. Since the 1980s, the Israelis and their neocon allies in the United States have work diligently to replace pan-Arab nationalism with Islamic fanaticism.
According to retired Delta Force Command Sergeant Major Eric Haney, the United States has “fomented civil war in Iraq” and has “probably fomented internecine war in the Muslim world between the Shias and the Sunnis…. I think Bush may well have started the third world war, all for their own personal policies,” Haney will tell the Los Angeles Daily News tomorrow, Raw Story reports.
Back in November, 2003, Leslie Gelb, “an influential man who, until recently, presided over the very important Council of Foreign Affairs, a think tank that brings together the CIA, the secretary of state and big shots from U.S. multinational corporations,” writes Michel Collon, proposed breaking Iraq into three ethnically distinct balkanized mini-states as an effective way to “weaken resistance,” a continuation and amplification on the old British “divide and rule” technique used to great effect in Ireland, India, Pakistan, and elsewhere (see Gelb’s The Three-State Solution, New York Times, 25 November 2003). It is an idea pushed long and hard by the Israelis, as proposed in Oded Yinon’s A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties. “Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon,” Yinon wrote. It is precisely “inter-Arab confrontation” initiated through false flag provocative operations occurring currently in Iraq.
Former Delta Force Command Sergeant Major Eric Haney did not say the Israelis and the Straussian neocons are behind the “civil war” in Iraq—instead he declared the “personal policies” of the Bush administration have started World War Three, a process well underway. Of course, if we read the neocon literature and take what they say at face value, the “war against terrorism,” promised to last decades if not more than a hundred years, is in fact a “clash of civilizations,” or perpetual warfare based on cultural and religious identity. “The most realistic response to terrorism is for America to embrace its imperial role,” the neocon Max Boot famously declared. Of course, the “imperial role” suggested by Boot translates into extending authority over foreign entities, especially Arab foreign entities. As Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer have recently documented, foreign policy in the United States is essentially an extension of the Israeli determination to undermine and balkanize Arab neighbors at any cost, especially if that cost is borne out by benighted American tax-payers propagandized to believe they face a long-term Islamic “fascist” threat.
Report Osama Bin Laden's Sons in Iran
Comment: How conveniant, just as we're about to drop a carpet of bombs on the country.
U.S. intelligence officials believe that part of Osama bin Laden's family has now moved to Iran, which is playing host to an ever growing contingent of al-Qaida members.
The Iran-based branch of bin Laden's clan includes three of the terror mastermind's sons, according to the Los Angeles Times. Several of bin Laden's wives and other relatives are suspected of being there as well, U.S. officials told the paper.
The bin Laden information was gathered through the use of electronic eavesdropping and satellite surveillance that can monitor the daily movements of designated individuals.
Beyond the bin Ladens, however, Iran is playing host to an increasing number of al-Qaida operatives - a development that has U.S. intelligence fearing a burgeoning alliance with the terror group.
"Iran is becoming more and more radicalized and more willing to turn a blind eye to the al-Qaida presence there," a U.S. counter-terrorism official told the Times.
Proof the Bible is True
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