The “moon and star party” was part of a lesson on the solar system for the home-schoolers, who were both making and setting up telescopes. At about 7:45 p.m., the sky had not yet darkened enough for their observation — but they got a startling, and impressive, bonus.

A ball of flame rocketed across the twilight sky, racing east to west before vanishing somewhere over Long Island Sound.

“It was huge,” Kim Swan said. “It was really large, and it was white and yellow with green around the edges. It was really beautiful.”

People from throughout the region, and as far away as Maine, began calling police and fire departments Sunday night with reports of a multicolored object traveling from east to west at high speed. The Coast Guard put out an alert to look for an airplane that had possibly crashed near the Thimble Islands in Branford while police and firefighters were dispatched to reports that airplanes had crashed at Rocky Neck State Park in East Lyme and South Windham.

The Old Saybrook amateur astronomers, as space aficionados like to say, were not alone.

People called local fire and police stations to report a plane and flashes of green or orange flames in the sky, said John Mincey, a petty officer with the U.S. Coast Guard's Long Island Sound office.

What everyone saw at about the same time, however, was neither a UFO, a plane in the throes of crashing, or an errant satellite.

What they saw were meteors, possibly from the Lyrid meteor shower, which was scheduled to be visible to the naked eye between April 20 and April 25.

It took about an hour for local emergency officials, town leaders, air tower operators at the region's airports, and state and federal emergency crews to figure that out. Although callers never reported a plane being down, emergency officials could not immediately rule out that possibility, said John Harland, a U.S. Coast Guard duty officer at the Long Island Sound office.

Eventually, at the Federal Aviation Administration's New England division, experts checked with Tweed and Groton-New London airports and metropolitan airports along the seaboard, and determined that no aircraft was unaccounted for , said Holly Baker, an FAA spokeswoman. [...]

At the Long Island Sound office, Mincey and Harland likewise heard no reports of distress from callers. Within the hour, one of the Coast Guard's own vessels confirmed what emergency workers were only too happy to hear: the debris lighting up the night sky belonged to the tails of meteors.

Mystic Seaport Planetarium supervisor Donald Treworgy said the eyewitness reports indicate that what people saw was a meteor.

“A fireball is the term that people often use to describe an exceptionally bright meteor,” he said. “It could be a piece of space junk but the military keeps close tabs on those types of things.”

He said the color of the meteor depends on what it is made of and said they sometimes leave a trail.

“I didn't see it. I wish I had,” he said.

Sarah Porter of Stonington described a white ball with a red tail and said it did not appear to be a plane to her. People described the meteor has having a whole spectrum of different colors.

“It was so close it looked like it was going to hit Stonington Point,” she said.

Louise Brown of Stonington said it was not traveling level like an airplane but shooting down toward the Earth's surface.

Treworgy said that meteors often look like they are much closer than they really are.

Jana Noyes Dakota of Mystic said she was on Long Hill Road in Groton when she saw it.

She said the blue green irridescent object was traveling very fast and then suddenly stopped and disappeared from the sky. She said it made no sound.

“It was pretty cool,” she said.

Swan said her daughter, Kelsey, heard a hissing sound just before the meteor shot past

“It looked a lot closer than any others that I've seen,” said Sally Faulkner of Old Saybrook, who was at the Swans' house. “There was a definite, fiery streaming path. You could really see that it was a flaming thing, and that made it seem much closer.”

Kim Swan said the group knew the fireball was not an airplane or a missile because of its shape and its velocity. But for several seconds after the meteor disappeared, she said, they waited to hear it land. They didn't hear anything.

“My first thought was, ‘Was that a meteor?' ” Swan said. “Then I was waiting for a boom because it was big. ... I'm still wondering where it touched down. I'm still thinking in the Sound, if no one on Long Island has said they have a hole or a big fire.”

“There was a big gasp and a big, ‘Did you see that?' everybody in a chorus,” Faulkner said. “Here we were to look at the night sky and we never thought we'd have such a spectacular sight. Those are the things you read about but don't often get to see.”

If you've got something to hide in Washington, the best place to bury it is in the federal budget. The spending plan that President Bush submitted to Congress this year contains 2,000 pages that outline funding to safeguard the environment, protect workers from injury and death, crack down on securities fraud and ensure the safety of prescription drugs. But almost unnoticed in the budget, tucked away in a single paragraph, is a provision that could make every one of those protections a thing of the past.

The proposal, spelled out in three short sentences, would give the president the power to appoint an eight-member panel called the "Sunset Commission," which would systematically review federal programs every ten years and decide whether they should be eliminated. Any programs that are not "producing results," in the eyes of the commission, would "automatically terminate unless the Congress took action to continue them."

The administration portrays the commission as a well-intentioned effort to make sure that federal agencies are actually doing their job. "We just think it makes sense," says Clay Johnson, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, which crafted the provision. "The goal isn't to get rid of a program -- it's to make it work better."

In practice, however, the commission would enable the Bush administration to achieve what Ronald Reagan only dreamed of: the end of government regulation as we know it. With a simple vote of five commissioners -- many of them likely to be lobbyists and executives from major corporations currently subject to federal oversight -- the president could terminate any program or agency he dislikes. No more Environmental Protection Agency. No more Food and Drug Administration. No more Securities and Exchange Commission. [...]

Without many of those programs, however, American consumers, workers and investors would be left to the mercy of business. "This is potentially devastating," says Wesley Warren, who served as a senior OMB official in the Clinton administration. "In short order, this could knock out protections that have been built up over a generation." [...]

The man behind the sunset commission is Clay Johnson, the most influential member of Bush's inner circle whom you've never heard of. The two Texans have been close friends since 1961, when they met as fifteen-year-olds at Andover prep school and later roomed together for four years at Yale. When Bush was elected governor of Texas in 1994, he put the buddy he calls "Big Man" -- Johnson is six feet four -- in charge of all state appointments. Johnson, a former executive at Neiman Marcus and Frito-Lay, refers to Americans as "customers" and is partial to Chamber of Commerce bromides such as "We're in the results business." He is also partial to giving corporate lobbyists a direct role in gutting regulatory protections. One of his first acts in Texas was to remove all three members of the state environmental-protection commission and replace them with a former Monsanto executive, an official with the Texas Beef Council and a lawyer for the oil industry. Overnight, a commission widely respected for its impartiality became a "revolving door between the industry lobby and government," says Jim Marston, the senior attorney in Texas for the nonprofit organization Environmental Defense.

Johnson continued his anti-regulatory efforts in the early days of the Bush presidency, when he helped place industry champions in positions throughout the government. As director of OMB, an obscure but powerful arm of the White House, he has implemented a "Program Assessment Rating Tool" to evaluate federal programs and cut funding to those that are "not getting results." In reality, though, Johnson uses PART to slash government efforts that don't fit the administration's political agenda. This year's budget eliminates twenty percent of the programs that were rated most effective, including efforts to improve the environment and education, and increases funding for programs that received the lowest possible rating -- including an attempt to reduce the number of poor people claiming a low-income tax credit.

The evaluations "are based on the whims of White House budget bean counters," says Gary Bass, executive director of the nonpartisan OMB Watch. "These are meaningless numbers that do nothing but back up preordained political conclusions."

The Sunset Commission would go even further. The panel -- which will likely be composed of "experts in management issues," according to one senior OMB official -- will enable the administration to terminate entire government programs that protect citizens against injury and death. Consider what America might look like if Reagan had wielded such an anti-regulatory ax twenty years ago. Abolishing the EPA would have increased air pollution, causing tens of thousands of children to develop chronic respiratory diseases. Terminating the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration would have eliminated many protections we now take for granted -- including air bags, child safety seats and automatic seat belts. And getting rid of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration would have forestalled workplace regulations that have prevented illnesses among millions of farmworkers.

Even if such regulations remain on the books, eliminating entire agencies would leave no one to enforce them. "And if there's no cop on the beat, who's going to follow the law?" says J. Robert Shull, senior policy analyst at OMB Watch.

The first hint of Bush's plan to create a commission surfaced only weeks after he won re-election last November. At an economic conference convened by Treasury Secretary John Snow, one panel member made the case for inserting a sunset provision into existing regulations. Such a move would "shift the burden of proof onto the regulations and require us to demonstrate that they're still needed," said Susan Dudley, director of regulatory studies at the Mercatus Center, a free-market think tank based in Washington, D.C.

It's fitting that the first public mention of Bush's plan came from Mercatus. The center's "regulatory studies program" was founded by Wendy Gramm, the wife of former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm and the woman Reagan called "my favorite economist." As a senior official at OMB under the Gipper, Gramm fought hard to eliminate federal regulations. Her most notorious victory came in 1992 when, as chair of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, she pushed through a measure exempting companies that trade in energy derivatives from regulation, following an intense lobbying campaign by Enron. Gramm resigned from the commission and accepted a seat on the Enron board of directors, where she was paid $1.85 million and received donations from the company to support Mercatus. Enron, meanwhile, used its exemption from federal oversight to engage in its infamous accounting fraud that destroyed the company and bankrupted investors.

But such dangers of eliminating regulations have done nothing to slow Bush's drive for a sunset commission. Given its political gains last November, the administration is optimistic about winning approval in Congress. "The stars and the planets are aligned," Johnson recently declared, citing the solid Republican majority in Congress and the need to curb the soaring federal deficit.

But there may be a stumbling block. The commission not only threatens the environment and public health -- it would also violate the constitutional separation of power between Congress and the executive branch, enabling the president to dismantle programs created by lawmakers. "Under the administration's proposal, Congress would relinquish its constitutional power to legislate," says Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California who has been the commission's most vocal opponent. "Power would be consolidated in the executive branch, and the legislative role would be emasculated." [...]

Our government is treating us the way exterminators treat vermin. We are ruled by people who mask evil ideology with the artful use of language, so an advertising slogan is in order.

"Roaches check in, but they don't check out."

The United States government is now proposing that the roach treatment be meted out to American humans who want to visit Canada, Mexico, Panama and Bermuda. These countries currently do not require visiting Americans to have passports.

The United States can't force these nations to change their laws, so they are changing ours. The Department of State is proposing that Americans returning from these countries be required to have passports in order to re- enter the United States. We'll be able to check in, but not check out without letting Uncle Sam know where we have been.

When the President was asked about the new travel proposals he feigned both ignorance and concern:

"When I first read that in the newspaper, about the need to have passports, for particularly the day crossings that take place – about a million, for example in the state of Texas – I said, 'What's going on here?'"

Bush added that finger prints may be used "to serve as a so-called passport for daily traffic." Assuming this statement has any bearing in reality, a big leap to be sure, the President is proposing that we should all be finger printed like criminals. Bush once joked that a dictatorship wouldn't bother him, as long as he was the dictator. His wish has come true.

Not only will Americans require passports to travel everywhere, but beginning in 2007 our passports will have Radio Frequency Identity (RFID) chips embedded inside them. Any RFID reader, not just those used by customs officials, can be used to find all the information contained on a passport. That means our personal information is not secure from identity thieves, kidnappers, terrorists, or nosy individuals. Why would an administration that claims to make us more secure actually make us less so?

"Unfortunately, there is only one possible reason: The administration wants surreptitious access themselves," wrote security technologist Bruce Schneier in the October 4, 2004 International Herald Tribune. "It wants to be able to identify people in crowds. It wants to surreptitiously pick out the Americans, and pick out the foreigners. It wants to do the very thing that it insists, despite demonstrations to the contrary, can't be done."

The story gets even worse. Tom Ridge, former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, recently became a board member of Savi Technology. Savi supplies RFID technology to the military. Will Savi and Tom Ridge make money from the imminent embedding of RFID chips in our passports? It is as likely as Dick Cheney and Halliburton making money in Iraq. The Bush doctrine of enriching cronies and keeping the population under control is alive and well.

The writing has been on the wall for some time now. We fight back as well as we can but big brother keeps getting bigger. Is it time to throw in the towel? Should we take our passports with their tracking devices and get out of Dodge before sundown?

Most progressives have muttered at one time or another that they would leave the country if Bush won again. Well, he did and it is as bad as we feared. The future isn't looking a lot brighter and the attacks have become more brazen.

People who call themselves Christians speak of a legislative "nuclear option" meant to end the Senate filibuster and silence critics of the powerful. Even religious leaders have happily adopted the language of violence and death.

Their latest target is the judiciary. Even Republican appointees are not safe from their wrath. Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy is one of the five who voted to put George W. Bush in office. It didn't do him much good with the Christian right.

One Edwin Vieira, an alleged expert on constitutional law and a right wing crazy, accused Kennedy of upholding "Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law." He also had this to say about the Reagan appointee:

"He (Stalin) had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty, No man: no problem."

Joseph Stalin, the man who ruled an officially atheist nation, is now the darling of the Christian right. Anyone who dispatched their enemies ruthlessly is now their idol. When conservative jurists are fair game for violent threats from the Christian right, don't bother seeking sanctuary in a church. Just pack your bags.

This nation is on a runaway train with insane people at the controls. We will end up in Crazyland, forever in debt, without social security, with RFID chips embedded in our foreheads. At a certain point it will be too late to jump. We may not have reached that point yet, but the train is not slowing down.

NEW YORK, - Five US Muslims sued the US Department of Homeland Security, accusing the US border agents of rights violation and racial profiling.

The suit, filed in US District Court on Wednesday, April 20, named Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff among four defendants in what the New York Civil Liberties Union called a case of profiling, according to Reuters on Thursday, April 21.

The three men and two women said the agents who detained them as they returned from an Islamic conference in Canada violated their rights, held them, along with dozens of other US Muslims.

They added that they were interrogated, photographed and fingerprinted against their will in December 2004.

The lawsuit alleges that the plaintiffs, who were later released without charge, were singled out after telling customs officials they had attended a "Reviving the Islamic Spirit" conference in Toronto.

The suit does not seek monetary damages, but asks for a declaration that the government action was unlawful, an injunction against further enforcement of such policies and practices and erasing from all federal databases of information obtained from the plaintiffs, Reuters reported.

The annual conference draws thousands of Muslims from Canada, the United States and overseas, AFP said.

A May 2004 report released by the US Senate Office Of Research concluded that Arab Americans and the Muslim community in the US have taken the brunt of the Patriot Act and other federal powers applied in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Amnesty International said that racial profiling by US law enforcement agencies had grown over the past years to cover one in nine Americans, mostly targeting Muslims.

‘Most Humiliating'

Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union which is helping represent the plaintiffs, condemned what she described as the "over-zealous and counter-productive ethnic and religious profiling" encouraged by government security policies in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

"They are engaging in profiling," said Lieberman, adding that "the government detained people because they attended a conference that was perfectly legal, exercising their basic rights."

None of the citizens who were detained had done anything unlawful, nor were they charged with any unlawful act," Lieberman told reporters.

"You don't lose your rights when you're a Muslim. You don't lose your rights when you cross a border, and you certainly don't lose your rights by attending a religious conference," she added.

One of the plaintiffs, Sawsaan Tabbaa, an orthodontist from Buffalo in New York, said the experience at the border crossing "was the most humiliating I have ever gone through."

"It was unbelievable. I am proud of being American but I couldn't believe my eyes something like this could happen."

Tabbaa said she had refused to be digitally fingerprinted on the grounds that she had done nothing wrong, but was physically forced into compliance.

"I started sobbing like a kid," she said.

At the time of the incident, numerous press reports quoted Customs and Border Protection (CBP) spokeswoman Kristie Clemens as claiming the government had "credible information" that Islamic conferences were being used to promote and fund terrorist activities.

On Wednesday, Clemens said she was unable to comment on a specific case that was the subject of a lawsuit, but added that the "priority mission" of the CBP was to "prevent terrorists” and their weapons entering the country.

"As we continue to pursue this mission, we will continue to work with all communities to protect the freedoms of all Americans," she said.
Islamic leaders vehemently deny the charges.

Tabbaa's son, Hassan Shibley, 18, said the border guards had initially insisted they were picked "at random ", but when he entered the processing room he saw that all the occupants were Muslim.

"It was like I was walking into my local mosque," Shibley said.

Lieberman, whose organization filed the suit along with the American Civil Liberties Union and Council on American-Islamic Relations, said there was nothing about the RIS conference to raise suspicions.

"If the government has suspicions about criminal activities they have every right and indeed the obligation to go after those suspicions," Lieberman said.

"This is a case of rounding up the usual suspects in derogation of their rights and in derogation of all of our liberties."

A recent nation-wide poll, conducted by the Cornell University, showed that at least 44 percent of the Americans backs curbing Muslims' civil rights and monitoring their places of worship.

Israeli officials have expressed dismay that BBC reporter Orla Guerin, who has come under sharp attack for what some perceive as an anti-Israeli bias in her coverage, will receive an MBE honor from the British government for "outstanding service to broadcasting."

Diaspora Affairs Minister Natan Sharansky, who last year wrote a formal letter of complaint to the BBC over Guerin's coverage, said it is a pity that the absence of anti-Semitism was not a criterion for the award.

If it were, he said, Guerin would not be receiving the honor. The MBE stands for Member of the British Empire, one of a number of honors issued each year by the queen.[...]

According to the Sunday Times, the 38-year-old Guerin will be presented the award by Baroness Symons, the minister of state for the Middle East in the British Foreign Office. According to this report, Guerin, who has spent 10 years reporting from war-torn countries, was to receive the honor last year, but the ceremony was postponed so she could report from Ramallah on Yasser Arafat's funeral.

In addition to Jerusalem, she has also reported from Kosovo, Grozny, Moscow, and the Basque country.

One Israeli official, who responded to the news by saying he was "shocked," said Guerin is among the most anti-Israeli journalists reporting from Israel today.

According to this official, granting her an award fits into a pattern that began in 2003 when the United Kingdom's Political Cartoon Society awarded Dave Brown of the Independent its "cartoon of the year" award for a cartoon he drew depicting a naked Ariel Sharon biting off the bloodied head of a Palestinian child.

"It seems if you are anti-Israel, you will get an award," the official said.

Last year, in response to one of Guerin's dispatches about Israel's capture of a mentally challenged 16-year-old would-be suicide bomber, Sharansky wrote the BBC that it employs a "gross double standard to the Jewish state" that smacks of anti-Semitism.

Sharansky protested that Guerin, in her report, portrayed the event as "Israel's cynical manipulation of a Palestinian youngster for propaganda purposes." He said this "reveals a deep-seated bias against Israel. Only a total identification with the goals and methods of the Palestinian terror groups would drive a reporter to paint Israel in such an unflattering light instead of placing the focus on the bomber and the organization that recruited him."[...]

In his letter, Sharansky quoted Guerin as describing to viewers how the IDF "paraded the child in front of the international media," then "produced" the child for reporters, "posed" him a second time for the cameras, and then "rushed him back into a jeep."

Likewise, the Evening Standard, which interviewed Guerin in 2003, wrote that she "questioned Israel's claim to be a democracy, compared its press freedom with Zimbabwe's, and accused its officials of paranoia."

Israeli soldiers stand accused this weekend of 'lying' and tampering with evidence in an attempt to obstruct an inquiry by military prosecutors into the death of British film-maker James Miller, according to internal army documents seen by The Observer.

A 79-page report by the chief lawyer of the Israeli army's southern command into the shooting of Miller in the Gaza Strip details how soldiers questioned over the killing changed earlier testimonies. The version of events offered by the soldier originally implicated in the shooting, identified only as Second Lieutenant H, were so contradictory that his accounts were described in the report as coming 'full circle'.

'Evidence shows that Second Lieutenant H heard his soldiers lying in their testimonies during the investigation, and unfortunately did not mention that fact to his commanders, that his soldiers are giving them details that are not true,' the report says.

In addition, the report alleges the barrel of the rifle understood to have been used in the shooting two years ago was changed. Rifles submitted as part of the investigation could not have been those used in the shooting because it was 'impossible' that bullets found at the scene in Rafah belonged to the weapons surrendered, adds the report.

'It is important to point out that during the investigation a concern was raised, based on intelligence information, that some of the soldiers later changed the barrel they used during the event with a different barrel,' it continues.

Concern over a possible cover-up is underlined by the disappearance of videotapes that would have been recorded by the army's observation system and may have filmed Miller's death. Despite several attempts to locate them, the tapes from 3 May 2003 have never been found. The report's contents, disclosed here for the first time, come days after the Israeli advocate general announced he would appeal against a decision to acquit the officer of charges of misuse of his weapon. He was never charged with the killing after the Israeli army's judge advocate general said that there was insufficient evidence.

Released on 7 April, the report was circulated to all senior Israeli Defence Force commanders, including the chief of staff.

Although the report stops short of recommending the suspect should face criminal charges, its catalogue of highly damaging revelations will tarnish the reputation of the Israeli army in the Occupied Territories.

The high-profile case of Miller has become a source of increasingly strained diplomatic tension between the Israel authorities and the British government. Last Sunday, Miller won a Bafta award for his film following the lives of Palestinian children during the intifada. He was shot just after 11pm on the last day of filming Death in Gaza .

The 34-year-old, who was wearing journalist insignia and waving a white flag when he was shot in the neck, was targeted as he emerged from the home of a Palestinian family in the Rafah refugee camp. Initially, Israeli troops claimed they had come under fire, accounts now disproven. Radio conversations from the day confirm that Israeli soldiers knew there were journalists in the area.

'By allowing vital evidence to be tampered with, the Israeli army was complicit in my son's murder,' said Miller's father, Geoffrey.

The report says that all the soldiers interviewed changed their testimonies from accounts given to an earlier inquiry by the military police. [...]

By contrast, army lawyers said all journalists and Palestinian witnesses interviewed gave reliable accounts. [...]

The report goes on to cast suspicion upon the army's entire chain of command. Senior officers assumed without question that the soldiers when questioned were telling the truth. Attempts to explain the contradictions were based on assumptions that 'they were confused because of the fighting,' the report concludes.

April 24, 2005 - Pentagon whores, you can't from now on keep on lying about your casualties in Iraq and continue to hide to your people the real losses, the Iraqi resistance is inflicting to the US beastly invader army. The world over knows that you are crippled in the land of the Two rivers. The Iraqi resistance hunt down your army rabble, day and night in Iraq. Your poor soldiers are morally devastated. They don't want to be killed and to fight for idol Zion wars.

US citizens, the Bush administration and their corporate media in their cushy studios and with their big salaries, are ready to rage wars all over the world until the last... US soldier. They are hiding from you what is really happening in Iraq. The situation is not at all improving. The resistance controls Iraq. The US mercenary army is hiding in bunkers and don't dare get into the street in Iraq. All Iraq. The Iraqi puppet government exists only on TV screens. It controls nothing. The US is spending billions of US tax payers to guard these traitors, who don't sleep even the night in Baghdad but in Kuwait or Jordan, while your fellow citizen soldiers are getting killed, for what ?

US citizens and US youth, you have to know the truth of what is going on in Iraq. You, mothers, fathers and beloved of US soldiers in Iraq, do something ! The US army is in real trouble. You must do everything now to save your youth from Iraq inferno. The news from Baghdad are extremely bad for the occupiers. The so called new US trained Iraqi militias are frightened rats and don't dare face the Iraqi fighters, who are defending their homes, land and honor from Bush, Rumsfield, Cheney, Kissenger racketeers and murderers.

US citizens, if only you spoke or you read another language, and here I am not talking about learning Arabic, Hindi or Urdu, but another language than English, let's say French, you would have a completely different vision of what is going on in Iraq. You would rebel and curse Bush media lying machines. You would discover with horror the death and misery which are awaiting your people in Iraq. Again the situation is not improving at all. Bush is lying again. He is lying and your sons and daughters are getting killed for his lies and for his petrol clan.

Read, rather listen to what a European leading Secret Service says about US casualties in Iraq. Let me tell you just what is going on in the news here in France. France is a democracy. France is Christian. France is culturally closer to the US than the Iraqis. I don't really imagine the US using napalm and chemical weapons against the French population, but knowing the racist behavior of the US army during its short history, even innocent women and children are victims of their sadistic behavior, and are killed in holy shrines and churches.

Yes I was talking about the US lies, about their losses and casualties. This week the French satirical weekly magazine "Le Canard Enchainé" known to be the best informed and with close connection with the French secret services talks with irony, and mockery and scoffs at the Pentagon official US casualty figures in Iraq. The satirical newspaper quoting French secret services, announces in large letters that the Pentagon is lamenting at least 240 tanks and some 79 bomber jets plus hundreds of helicopters and unmanned aircrafts destroyed or brought down by the Iraqi Resistors. Imagine the US cannon fodder killed, wounded and maimed in these losses, multiply them by at least a crew of let's say four personnel and you will be horrified with the numbers of the US casualties. Then you will discover the Pentagon whores lies talking about only 1500 killed soldiers since the beginning of the aggression against Iraq.

The "Canard Enchainé" affirms that through some talks with their US counterparts, or through special secret services known practices, the French experts from the Directorate of the Military Intelligence discovered a highly extravagant, according to the weekly magazine own terms, toll of the US losses in Iraq. Since the beginning of the US war in Afghanistan three years ago and specially since the US aggression against Iraq, the US army lost not less than 240 heavy armored Abram M1 and Bradley tanks, plus some 79 combat jets, plus many transport aircrafts, not to mention the many, very many knocked down helicopters.

The "Canard Enchainé" also quoting French military intelligence said that this toll will continue rising for the current year 2005 and for the coming years according to general Richard Cody the US deputy chief of staff. The French magazine also jested at the optimistic humor of the Bush circle which is trying whatever they can to trumpet that the situation is improving. It is not. The US generals have lately presented a new salty bill to the Congress amounting 8 billion dollars to repair these technological military marvels, again according to the terms of the French magazine. The Canard Enchainé also reveals that another Pentagon document intercepted by the French Military analysts belonging to the ministry of defense general Secretariat uncovered imbelievable figures of the cost of the US war in Iraq. Up to now some 159 billion dollars have been spent for invading and occupying Iraq, and this is not to mention the extra 80 billions agreed upon and voted for the war against terror and for internal security. In Afghanistan the US are squandering 5 billions dollars a month, while President Kharzai controls a tiny area of only one square mile in Kabul.

The French newspaper added that the Pentagon speaks more willingly about dollars than about US human losses in Iraq. The weekly magazine went on saying that in Paris and in many European capitals, everybody suspects the US staff of concealing the real figures of the US killed, wounded and maimed for life soldiers. Not to mention the alarming degradation of the US army moral due to depression and to the frequency of their missions.

The Canard Enchainé mocked Donald Rumsfield saying, that this chap doesn't seem to care a damn about his army, adding that this war against Iraq is fragilising and breaking down dangerously the US army. Rumsfield, says the Canard Enchainé, is planning another four years of occupying Iraq. He even asked Think Tanks institutions to come with new ideas, solutions and plans. One of the plans is to involve the NATO in Iraq. But Rummy is dreaming said the French Newspaper mockingly.

According to the French analysts any solution will be extremely costly and not a single option will open an honorable exit for the US from Iraq.

This is what a European very well informed magazine says about the US quagmire in Iraq. The Iraqis and the world over know about the real state of the US aggressors in Mesopotamia. Until when the Pentagon whores will continue to laugh at themselves and at the US people. In the meantime the Resistance mill is turning at high, very high speed indeed mincing more mercenary US army heads.

God bless Iraq. God bless Iraq. God bless Iraq and the Iraqi resistance which humiliated and is about to defeat the filthy US Zionist hydra in Mesopotamia, land of revelation, cradle of civilization. Iraq the smiling mouth of Arabity and Islam.

When Tony Blair published his notorious 2002 "dossier" which falsely claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, Downing Street also produced an Arabic version - which contained significant deletions and changes in text that substantially altered its meaning.

A translation carried out for The Independent on Sunday reveals for the first time that several references to UN sanctions were cut from the Arabic text. On one page, the words "biological agents" were changed to read "nuclear agents". Arab journalists who reported on the dossier culled their information from the Arabic version - unaware that it was not the same as the English one.

While there is evidence of sloppiness in the translation - a 2001 Joint Intelligence Committee assessment of Iraqi nuclear ambitions is rendered as 2002 - many of the changes were clearly deliberate, apparently in an attempt to make the dossier more acceptable as well as more convincing to an Arab audience. At the time, the US and Britain were trying to convince Arab Gulf states that Saddam Hussein still represented a major threat to them - in the hope of seeking their support for the 2003 invasion - while the Arab world was enraged at the disastrous effects UN sanctions had on child mortality in Iraq.

In the "Executive Summary" at the start of the English edition, readers in Arabic were reminded that Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons against Iran and his own people before the 1991 Gulf War. But the fact that he had admitted this after the Gulf War was deleted, along with the fact that he agreed to give up his WMD. The apparent intention was to convince Arabs that Saddam remained an imminent threat.

In some cases, too, the Arabic text was hardened to remove any doubts that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.

The alteration of "biological agents" - biologia in Arabic - to nuclear (la-nawawiya in Arabic) is obviously deliberate, and may reflect the belief that an Arab audience would be more fearful of nuclear weapons than biological agents. References to "damaged" Iraqi factories have been changed to "destroyed" (tadmir in Arabic), giving the impression that US and British air strikes in 1991 were more accurate than in fact they were.

On Iraq’s nuclear programme, the English version of the dossier says that two research reactors were "bombed" in 1991. In the Arabic, the two reactors are described as "destroyed".

BAGHDAD : At least 23 people died and more than 80 were wounded Sunday in a series of bomb attacks near a mosque in Baghdad and outside a police academy in the north of the country, security officials said.

Amid the violence, Islamabad said a Pakistani hostage held since two weeks had been released, while in Washington controversial politician Ahmed Chalabi said delays in forming a government were playing into the hands of insurgents.

Two explosions Sunday evening in a mixed Shiite-Sunni district of the Iraqi capital apparently targeted an area close to the Shiite Hussayniah al-Beit mosque, killing 16 and wounding 50.

"A bomb exploded and, when people ran out near the Hussayniah al-Beit mosque, a car driven by a suicide bomber ploughed into them," an interior ministry official said.

Earlier, two suicide car bombs went off outside a police academy in Tikrit, killing at least seven people and wounding 37. Police casualties accounted for five of the dead, police and hospital sources said.

The mosque bombing was the latest in a series of attacks on Shiites, with a suicide car bomb exploding outside another Shiite mosque during weekly prayers on Friday, killing nine people and leaving 26 wounded.

The majority Shiites won control of parliament in January 30 elections, while the Sunni Arab minority, which dominated the ousted regime of Saddam Hussein and all previous Iraqi governments, largely boycotted the poll.

The insurgency that has raged in Sunni areas since Saddam's ouster in 2003 has seen a growing resort to sectarian attacks.

Militants loyal to Al-Qaeda's Iraq frontman Abu Musab al-Zarqawi claimed responsibility for the twin Tikrit attacks in an Internet statement, the authenticity of which could not be verified. [...]

"Not long ago a senior official in one of the world's largest oil companies told me that he wakes up every morning fearful that he will turn on his bedside television set and see reports of a coup in Saudi Arabia."

and (my emphasis of his careful wording):

"Few observers of the Middle East scene are actually taking a good hard look at the situation in Saudi Arabia and examining coolly the terrifying scenarios, one of which might ensue. Some believe that there is a real danger that extremist religious figures will seize power in Saudi Arabia and establish an 'Al-Qaida state' in Riyadh. Others note that the national identification of large numbers of the country's population with the Saudi entity is feeble and that their main attachment is tribal or local-regional. Thus, a revolutionary situation might cause the disintegration of the state and the creation of parallel regimes in various regions of the kingdom.

In a visit to the United States two weeks ago, I was told by several well-informed observers that should one of the more severe scenarios come to pass, the United States will have no choice but to deepen its presence in the Middle East. To that end, it will have to renew the draft, to ensure that there are enough forces to deal with developing situations in countries like Saudi Arabia."

An attack on Iran just causes problems for the Americans without really addressing the issue of total control of the world's oil that appears to be mad Cheney's ultimate goal. The Iran attack would cost a fortune, go on for years, result in the deaths of thousands of Americans, and might even fail. After the debacle of the lies about Iraq and the disastrous American occupation, it would be very hard for the Bush Administration to make a case for it. On the other hand, if Israel and/or the United States were to stage a fake 'coup' in Saudi Arabia - a bit of made-for-TV bafflegab blown up into a full armed insurrection by the disgusting American media, together with claims that 'al Qaeda' now controls the American oil supply - American troops could have full control of the country in a matter of days, without having to interrupt the flow of oil. Americans run the security apparatus of Saudi Arabia, and can almost certainly remotely render useless any defense mechanisms which have been supplied by American arms contractors. The Saudi rulers are essentially helpless.

Due to the 'instability' in the Middle East ("in countries like Saudi Arabia"), the Bush Administration would then have full authority to call a draft, and the same instability would serve just as well as another terrorist attack in removing the malaise that has now settled over Bush's presidency (the last time we heard of problems in Bush's Presidency was in early September 2001). The new political capital could be used by Bush to propel his planned take-over of the American social security system by Wall Street. The price of oil would go up, benefiting Bush's oil friends, but not too much as to be a political problem (Americans will accept just about anything if it is framed as being part of fighting the 'war on terror' by keeping al Qaeda from taking over Saudi Arabia). Saudi rulers and clerics would be bundled off to the new statelet around Mecca and Medina - a new country completely unthreatening to Israel, having neither arms nor money - and the rest of the country, including all the oil fields, would be run from Washington and Tel Aviv.

I think all the talk about Iran, including Sharon's much publicized show-and-tell map show presented to Bush in Crawford - no doubt with maps of every orphanage, bomb shelter, baby formula factory, pharmaceutical plant, and Chinese embassy in Iran, but with no maps of the well hidden Iranian scientific labs - may be a trick to hide the real goal. Don't forget Laurent Murawiec. Once Saudi Arabia goes, Iran is not a problem.

Halevy spends a lot of the rest of the article trying to weasel out of the terms of the 'road map', but also leaves this gem:

" It was none other than Martin Indyk, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, who not long ago raised the idea of establishing an American trusteeship regime in the areas of the Palestinian Authority, if it should turn out that the Palestinians are not ripe for self-rule. That arrangement would require an American operational military presence along Israel's border with the Palestinian territories."

That might explain the recent reports of the presence of significant numbers of American troops in Israel. American troops would save Israel the messy problem of being the concentration camp guards for the bantustans - for excellent analyses of Sharon's most recent plans, see here and here and here - that Sharon is obviously attempting to create by dividing the Palestinians into small enclaves divided by the expanding settlements.