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SADDAM SENTENCED TO BE PRESIDENT OF IRAQ

Angry Hussein Demands Retrial

A court in Baghdad today found former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to serve a life term as President of Iraq.

With the nation of Iraq on the brink of civil war, Saddam’s judge said that being forced to serve as President of Iraq was the stiffest sentence he could hand down.

“Your crimes are unspeakable, and this punishment fits those crimes,” said Judge Raouf Abdel Rahman.

The moment Saddam heard his sentence, the angry former dictator leapt to his feet and demanded a retrial.

Saddam’s lawyer, former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark, said that he would appeal the sentence at the World Court in The Hague: “Being forced to serve as President of Iraq is cruel and unusual punishment, and is most certainly in violation of the Geneva Convention.”

But the mood was markedly different in the offices of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who immediately began packing up his things and said he was “totally stoked” about handing over the presidency of Iraq to Saddam.

When asked how he planned to celebrate the abrupt end to his term in office, Mr. Talabani said, “I’m going to Disneyland!”

At the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld praised Saddam’s sentence and said that the long-elusive solution to the war in Iraq had finally been found.

“To those who have said that we had no exit strategy, all I can say is, mission accomplished,” Secretary Rumsfeld said.

Elsewhere, President Bush mourned the passing of Don Knotts, calling the actor “a great American and a role model for me personally.”

Borowitzreport.com

By Shane Harris, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Thursday, Feb. 23, 2006

A controversial counter-terrorism program, which lawmakers halted more than two years ago amid outcries from privacy advocates, was stopped in name only and has quietly continued within the intelligence agency now fending off charges that it has violated the privacy of U.S. citizens.

It is no secret that some parts of TIA lived on behind the veil of the classified intelligence budget.

Research under the Defense Department’s Total Information Awareness program — which developed technologies to predict terrorist attacks by mining government databases and the personal records of people in the United States — was moved from the Pentagon’s research-and-development agency to another group, which builds technologies primarily for the National Security Agency, according to documents obtained by National Journal and to intelligence sources familiar with the move. The names of key projects were changed, apparently to conceal their identities, but their funding remained intact, often under the same contracts.

It is no secret that some parts of TIA lived on behind the veil of the classified intelligence budget. However, the projects that moved, their new code names, and the agencies that took them over haven’t previously been disclosed. Sources aware of the transfers declined to speak on the record for this story because, they said, the identities of the specific programs are classified.

Two of the most important components of the TIA program were moved to the Advanced Research and Development Activity, housed at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., documents and sources confirm. One piece was the Information Awareness Prototype System, the core architecture that tied together numerous information extraction, analysis, and dissemination tools developed under TIA. The prototype system included privacy-protection technologies that may have been discontinued or scaled back following the move to ARDA.

A $19 million contract to build the prototype system was awarded in late 2002 to Hicks & Associates, a consulting firm in Arlington, Va., that is run by former Defense and military officials. Congress’s decision to pull TIA’s funding in late 2003 “caused a significant amount of uncertainty for all of us about the future of our work,” Hicks executive Brian Sharkey wrote in an e-mail to subcontractors at the time. “Fortunately,” Sharkey continued, “a new sponsor has come forward that will enable us to continue much of our previous work.” Sources confirm that this new sponsor was ARDA. Along with the new sponsor came a new name. “We will be describing this new effort as ‘Basketball,’ ” Sharkey wrote, apparently giving no explanation of the name’s significance. Another e-mail from a Hicks employee, Marc Swedenburg, reminded the company’s staff that “TIA has been terminated and should be referenced in that fashion.”

Sharkey played a key role in TIA’s birth, when he and a close friend, retired Navy Vice Adm. John Poindexter, President Reagan’s national security adviser, brought the idea to Defense officials shortly after the 9/11 attacks. The men had teamed earlier on intelligence-technology programs for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which agreed to host TIA and hired Poindexter to run it in 2002. In August 2003, Poindexter was forced to resign as TIA chief amid howls that his central role in the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980s made him unfit to run a sensitive intelligence program.

It’s unclear whether work on Basketball continues. Sharkey didn’t respond to an interview request, and Poindexter said he had no comment about former TIA programs. But a publicly available Defense Department document, detailing various “cooperative agreements and other transactions” conducted in fiscal 2004, shows that Basketball was fully funded at least until the end of that year (September 2004). The document shows that the system was being tested at a research center jointly run by ARDA and SAIC Corp., a major defense and intelligence contractor that is the sole owner of Hicks & Associates. The document describes Basketball as a “closed-loop, end-to-end prototype system for early warning and decision-making,” exactly the same language used in contract documents for the TIA prototype system when it was awarded to Hicks in 2002. An SAIC spokesman declined to comment for this story.

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Complete article at:

http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2006/0223nj1.htm
or

http://tinyurl.com/jq6dw

By Stephen Pizzo, News for Real. Posted February 27, 2006.

Bushonomics has been the most destructive set of economic policies to hit Americans since Herbert Hoover. No, wait. That understates the problem.

So, how are you doing? No, I mean really, how are you doing — you and your family? Are you feeling prosperous, living the American dream? Are you on course for a secure retirement and with smooth going as you sail off into the sunset?

American families saw their real incomes fall 2.3 percent from 2001, according to a Federal Reserve survey of consumer finances released Thursday.

Bush will, of course, blame these negative figures on a “recession we inherited” (Translation: Blame Clinton) and being “attacked on 9/11.” (Translation: Blame the terrorists.)

I wonder how many years have to pass before those excuses ring as hollow as they are?

Simply put, Bushonomics has been the most destructive set of economic policies to hit Americans since Herbert Hoover. No, wait. That understates the problem. Thanks to this administration we are all now stuck in a race between two looming catastrophes: an economic collapse or an ecological collapse. Who knows, it even might be a draw.

Oh sure, you say, “There he goes again! Mr. Repent-The-End-Is-Near.”

Well, you tell me. Let’s just look at the gauges on our economic dashboard and see what they tell us. The Federal Reserve study released Thursday provides us with the most current readings. “This is a tremendously detailed, comprehensive look at the American family’s balance sheet and it ain’t pretty,” said Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.

Read “Paying employers not to end pensions” and “Paying for retirement.”

All of which are among the reasons I continue to believe we are living in the final months of a fool’s economic paradise.

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Complete article at:

http://www.alternet.org/story/32754/

Now, Pentagon officials say there’s not a single Iraqi battalion capable of fighting on their own without coalition support. Freedom’s still on the march, though. Unfortunately, it’s marching backwards

http://tinyurl.com/qzraf

From: Poacnewsletter