World Forums

CQ

We're From The Government -- We're Here To Move You

The Supreme Court has ruled that cities can seize property under eminent domain, even if that property has been put to productive use and maintained properly, for commercial as well as public use as long as one can stretch an argument about "public use" to its breaking point. In a 5-4 decision, SCOTUS upheld the confiscation of private homes in New London, CT, so that the city could build a new facility for Pfizer Labs:

In a 5-4 decision, the court upheld the ability of New London, Conn., to seize people's homes to make way for an office, residential and retail complex supporting a new $300 million research facility of the Pfizer pharmaceutical company. The city had argued that the project served a public use within the meaning of the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution because it would increase tax revenues, create jobs and improve the local economy.
A group of homeowners in New London's Fort Trumbull area had fought the city's attempt to impose eminent domain, arguing that their property could be seized only to serve a clear public use such as building roads or schools or to eliminate blight. The homeowners, some of whom had lived in their house for decades, also argued that the public would benefit from the proposed project only if it turned out to be successful, making the "public use" requirement subject to the eventual performance of the private business venture.

The Fifth Amendment also requires "just compensation" for the owners, but that was not an issue in the case decided today because the homeowners did not want to give up their property at any price.


Unsurprisingly, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority that they had deferred to legislative action in this case, a position with which Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer agreed. However, the other four justices argued -- correctly, in my opinion -- that eminent domain should not be used to transfer property from one private owner to another. The power of the government should not overrule the private marketplace unless the land goes for a specific public -- i.e., not private -- use. Not surprisingly, the court relied on a 1954 Warren Court decision which broadened the term "public use" to include blighted areas that required public funds for urban renewal.

This does a tremendous injustice to the property owners of New London and everywhere in the United States. This puts the entire notion of property rights into jeopardy. Now cities can literally force people off their land in order to simply increase their tax base, which is all that New London accomplished in this smelly manuever.

I recall the words of Mark Twain, who famously lost a copyright case involving a bootleg publication of one of his novels despite having the law clearly on his side. (Unfortunately, I cannot find the reference -- perhaps a CQ reader can locate it.) Upon his loss, he remarked that since the judge was so cavalier with Twain's property, Twain planned to offer the Judge's house up for sale -- and if he got a good enough offer, he might let the buyer take the contents as well.

Can anyone come up with a good use for Justice Stevens' house? A bowling alley or a Bennigans, anything that improves the tax base for his community? We could urge its confiscation under eminent domain and perhaps put in a Mark Twain Museum instead. Now that would be justice.

UPDATE II: CQ reader bRight and Early found the Twain reference here. And because I could only dream of even approaching Twain's gift for prose, here's the original from the master himself:

It does look as if Massachusetts were in a fair way to embarrass me with kindnesses this year. In the first place, a Massachusetts judge has just decided in open court that a Boston publisher may sell, not only his own property in a free and unfettered way, but also may as freely sell property which does not belong to him but to me; property which he has not bought and which I have not sold. Under this ruling I am now advertising that judge's homestead for sale, and, if I make a good a sum out of it as I expect, I shall go on and sell out the rest of his property.
Brilliant, of course. The entire letter, in fact, is a masterpiece of sarcasm from one of America's most accomplished practitioners of the art.


Chicago Boyz

Good Day to be a Politically Connected Developer

Shannon Love

The Supreme Court today ruled that encouraging economic development by seizing one private individual's property and handing it over to a second private individual was a Constitutionally valid interpretation of the 5th Amendment's takings clause.

Traditionally, eminent domain meant exclusively the taking of private land for uses that were explicitly public, such as creation of roads, parks, military bases, etc. The seized land became public property. As of today, you only own your home until the State determines that somebody else could put it to better economic use. At any time, based on some consultant's economic analysis, the State can force you to sell your property to another private individual at a price the State sets.

This ruling will open up the flood gates for the raping of the property rights of the little people. Large politically connected developers will be able to get the government to seize properties they desire, for bargain basement prices. Politicians eager for campaign donations and tax revenues will gladly cooperate. Heck, developers will be able to use just the threat of seizure by eminent domain to drive down prices.

Screw flag burning. The Congress needs to offer an amendment to return eminent domain to its original meaning. Our system of land property is the foundation of our economic system. Without secure property rights the economy will collapse. I can say without any hyperbole that this one ruling has the potential to do more long-term damage than any other Supreme Court ruling of the last 100 years. It will destroy property rights, corrupt government and lead to the politicization of virtually every real-estate development.

I'm writing my state and federal representatives and I encourage you to do the same.

The Washington Post

A Party Without Ideas
Charles Krauthammer
Friday, June 24, 2005

What has happened to the Democrats over the past few decades is best captured by the phrase (coined by Kevin Phillips) "reactionary liberalism." Spent of new ideas, they have but one remaining idea: to hang on to the status quo at all costs.

This is true across the board. On Social Security, which is facing an impending demographic and fiscal crisis, they have put absolutely nothing on the table. On presidential appointments -- first, judges and now ambassador to the United Nations -- they resort to the classic weapon of southern obstructionism: the filibuster. And on foreign policy, they have nothing to say on the war on terrorism, the war in Iraq or the burgeoning Arab Spring (except the refrain: "Guantanamo").


A quarter-century ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted how it was the Republicans who had become a party of ideas, while the Democrats' philosophical foundation was "deeply eroded." But even Moynihan would be surprised by the bankruptcy in the Democrats' current intellectual account.

Take trade and Central America. The status quo there is widespread poverty. The Bush administration has proposed doing something about it -- a free-trade agreement encompassing five Central American countries plus the Dominican Republic.

It's a no-brainer. If we have learned anything from the past 25 years in China, India, Chile and other centers of amazing economic growth, it is that open markets and free trade are the keys to pulling millions, indeed hundreds of millions, of people out of poverty. The Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) is a chance to do the same for desperately poor near-neighbors.

You would think this treaty would be a natural for Democrats, who have always portrayed themselves as the party with real sympathy for the poor -- in contradistinction to Republicans, who have hearts of stone if they have any at all. The Democratic Party has always seen itself as the tribune of the oppressed of the Third World and as deeply distressed by the fact that "the United States by far is the stingiest nation in the world for development assistance or foreign aid," to quote Jimmy Carter, former Democratic president, current Democratic saint.

You would think, therefore, that Democrats would be for CAFTA. Not so. CAFTA is in great jeopardy because Democrats have turned against it. Whereas a decade ago under President Bill Clinton, 102 House Democrats supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, that number for CAFTA is down to 10 or less. In a closed-door meeting this month, reports Jonathan Weisman of The Post, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi put heavy-handed pressure on all congressional Democrats to observe party discipline in killing the treaty.

Arguing free trade is particularly tiresome because it is the only proposition in politics that is mathematically provable. It was proved by British economist David Ricardo in 1817 that even if one country is more efficient in producing two items, trade between two countries based on the relative efficiency of production is always beneficial to both countries.

Mathematics does not change, but calculations of political expediency do. After all, it was the Democrats who, when Central America was aflame in the 1980s, argued strenuously against Ronald Reagan's muscular approach of supporting the government of El Salvador and the anti-communist revolutionaries in Nicaragua. Democrats voted time and again against Reagan's policy because, they claimed, it ignored the root causes of the widespread discontent in Central America, namely poverty and hunger.

Their alternative? Economic help, not guns. In 1983, when Reagan made a speech asking for support for El Salvador's embattled government, Sen. Chris Dodd delivered a nationally televised response on behalf of the Democratic Party in which he called Reagan's policy a failure and demanded instead that we deal with the underlying economic and social conditions: "We must restore America's role as a source of hope and a force for progress in Central America. . . . We must hear the cry for bread, and schools, work and opportunity that comes from campesinos everywhere in this hemisphere."

There is no better way to bring bread, work and opportunity to the campesinos of Central America than with markets and free trade. To his credit, Dodd supports CAFTA, which represents precisely the kind of deployment of soft power that he advocated on behalf of his party 22 years ago. Today, however, his party has overwhelmingly abandoned his -- and its own professed -- ideals.

Eighty percent of goods from these countries are already entering the United States duty-free, so CAFTA would have a minimal impact on the United States. It would, however, have a dramatic impact on these six neighbor countries -- countries that Democrats used to care about. Or so they said.

STUPIDEST. OP-ED. EVER.

By Michelle Malkin · June 23, 2005

Ever wonder what it takes to get onto the New York Times op-ed page? Ever wonder what it takes to get into the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard?

Read this ridiculous piece of tripe on the Times op-ed page from KSG/Harvard student Fatina Abdrabboh.


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/23/opini ... oref=login

Power Line

You Want Property Rights Defended?

Yesterday's outpouring of concern in the conservative half of the blogosphere over the Supreme Court's decision in the Kelo case was striking, and, to those who recognize the importance of property rights, heartening. If you are concerned about the steady erosion of property rights, you should be very glad that the Senate has confirmed Judge Janice Rogers Brown to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Because Judge Brown is one of the most eloquent and vigorous defenders of property rights on the contemporary scene. One of Brown's decisions that the Left tried to characterize as "out of the mainstream" was her dissent, while on the California Supreme Court, in a case called San Remo Hotel v. City and County of San Francisco. The case involved a restriction that the City of San Francisco placed on the owners of residence hotels that sought to convert to tourist hotels. The right to convert the use of the property was conditioned on the owner's creation of an equal number of low-income residence units, or payment of a special tax to underwrite the City's creation of low-income housing. Thus, the cost of supplying low-income housing within the City was shifted away from the taxpayers generally to a few hundred hotel owners, and the special levy was enforced by otherwise barring the hotel owners from putting their property to its most economic use. Justice Brown found the City's scheme to be both an uncontitutional taking and a violation of a California statute guaranteeing the right to convert such hotels.

Here is how Justice Brown began her dissent:

Americans are a diverse group of hard-working, confident, and creative people molded into a nation not by common ethnic identity, cultural legacy, or history; rather, Americans have been united by a dream—a dream of freedom, a vision of how free people might live. The dream has a history. The idea that property ownership is the essential prerequisite of liberty has long been “a fundamental tenet of Anglo-American constitutional thought.” (Ely, The Guardian of Every Other Right (1998) p. 43.) “Indeed, the framers saw property ownership as a buffer protecting individuals from government coercion. Arbitrary redistribution of property destroyed liberty, and thus the framers hoped to restrain attacks on property rights.” (Ibid.) “Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist” (6 The Works of John Adams, Discourses on Davila (1851 ed.) p. 280), because property and liberty are, upon examination, one and the same thing.
Private property is in essence a cluster of rights inuring to the benefit of the owner, freely exchangeable in accordance with the terms of private agreements, and recognized and protected by common consent. In the case of real property, this cluster of rights includes the right to exclude persons from certain physical space. In the case of intellectual property, it may include the right to employ a valuable method or process to the exclusion of others. In other words, private property represents zones of individual sovereignty—regions of autonomy within which we make our own choices.

But private property, already an endangered species in California, is now entirely extinct in San Francisco. The City and County of San Francisco has implemented a neo-feudal regime where the nominal owner of property must use that property according to the preferences of the majorities that prevail in the political process—or, worse, the political powerbrokers who often control the government independently of majoritarian preferences. Thus, “the lamb [has been] committed to the custody of the wolf.” (6 The Works of John Adams, supra, at p. 280.) San Francisco has redefined the American dream. Where once government was closely constrained to increase the freedom of individuals, now property ownership is closely constrained to increase the power of government. Where once government was a necessary evil because it protected private property, now private property is a necessary evil because it funds government programs.


The Kelo decision seems to have struck a nerve. Driving home from the airport this afternoon, I listened to Joe Soucheray, one of the most popular local talk show hosts in America, talking about the decision, which he views as more important than any other recent controversy. He expressed the view that we all woke up this morning in a different country as a result of a decision which holds, in essence, that the government's right to higher tax revenues is paramount over the citizens' rights as property owners. If there is a popular resurgence in understanding of, and support for, property rights, the Democrats may regret the day when they abandoned their filibuster of Judge Brown.

Don't worry, Old Glory can take the heat
June 26, 2005

BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

The House of Representatives passed a constitutional amendment on flag burning last week, in the course of which Rep. Randy ''Duke'' Cunningham (Republican of California) made the following argument:

''Ask the men and women who stood on top of the Trade Center. Ask them and they will tell you: Pass this amendment."

Unlike Congressman Cunningham, I wouldn't presume to speak for those who died atop the World Trade Center. For one thing, citizens of more than 50 foreign countries, from Argentina to Zimbabwe, were killed on 9/11. Of the remainder, maybe some would be in favor of a flag-burning amendment; and maybe some would think that criminalizing disrespect for national symbols is unworthy of a free society. And maybe others would roll their eyes and say that, granted it's been clear since about October 2001 that the federal legislature has nothing useful to contribute to the war on terror, and its hacks and poseurs prefer to busy themselves with a lot of irrelevant grandstanding with a side order of fries, but they could at least quit dragging us into it.

And maybe a few would feel as many of my correspondents did last week about the ridiculous complaints of ''desecration'' of the Quran by U.S. guards at Guantanamo -- that, in the words of one reader, ''it's not possible to 'torture' an inanimate object.''

That alone is a perfectly good reason to object to a law forbidding the "desecration" of the flag. For my own part, I believe that, if someone wishes to burn a flag, he should be free to do so. In the same way, if Democrat senators want to make speeches comparing the U.S. military to Nazis and the Khmer Rouge, they should be free to do so. It's always useful to know what people really believe.

For example, two years ago, a young American lady, Rachel Corrie, was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza. Her death immediately made her a martyr for the Palestinian cause, and her family and friends worked assiduously to promote the image of her as a youthful idealist passionately moved by despair and injustice. ''My Name Is Rachel Corrie,'' a play about her, was a huge hit in London. Well, OK, it wasn't so much a play as a piece of sentimental agitprop so in thrall to its subject's golden innocence that the picture of Rachel on the cover of the Playbill shows her playing in the backyard, age 7 or so, wind in her hair, in a cute, pink T-shirt.

There's another photograph of Rachel Corrie: at a Palestinian protest, headscarved, her face contorted with hate and rage, torching the Stars and Stripes. Which is the real Rachel Corrie? The "schoolgirl idealist" caught up in the cycle of violence? Or the grown woman burning the flag of her own country? Well, that's your call. But because that second photograph exists, we at least have a choice.

Have you seen that Rachel Corrie flag-burning photo? If you follow Charles Johnson's invaluable Little Green Footballs Web site and a few other Internet outposts, you will have. But you'll look for it in vain in the innumerable cooing profiles of the "passionate activist" that have appeared in the world's newspapers.

One of the big lessons of these last four years is that many, many beneficiaries of Western civilization loathe that civilization -- and the media are generally inclined to blur the extent of that loathing. At last year's Democratic Convention, when the Oscar-winning crockumentarian Michael Moore was given the seat of honor in the presidential box next to Jimmy Carter, I wonder how many TV viewers knew that the terrorist ''insurgents'' -- the guys who kidnap and murder aid workers, hack the heads off foreigners, load Down's syndrome youths up with explosives and send them off to detonate in shopping markets -- are regarded by Moore as Iraq's Minutemen. I wonder how many viewers knew that on Sept. 11 itself Moore's only gripe was that the terrorists had targeted New York and Washington instead of Texas or Mississippi: ''They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, D.C. and the plane's destination of California -- these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!"

In other words, if the objection to flag desecration is that it's distasteful, tough. Like those apocryphal Victorian matrons who discreetly covered the curved legs of their pianos, the culture already goes to astonishing lengths to veil the excesses of those who are admirably straightforward in their hostility.

If people feel that way, why protect them with a law that will make it harder for the rest of us to see them as they are? One thing I've learned in the last four years is that it's very difficult to talk honestly about the issues that confront us. A brave and outspoken journalist, Oriana Fallaci, is currently being prosecuted for ''vilification of religion,'' which is a crime in Italy; a Christian pastor has been ordered by an Australian court to apologize for his comments on Islam. In the European Union, ''xenophobia'' is against the law. A flag-burning amendment is the American equivalent of the rest of the West's ever more coercive constraints on free expression. The problem is not that some people burn flags; the problem is that the world view of which flag-burning is a mere ritual is so entrenched at the highest levels of Western culture.

Banning flag desecration flatters the desecrators and suggests that the flag of this great republic is a wee delicate bloom that has to be protected. It's not. It gets burned because it's strong. I'm a Canadian and one day, during the Kosovo war, I switched on the TV and there were some fellows jumping up and down in Belgrade burning the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack. Big deal, seen it a million times. But then to my astonishment, some of those excitable Serbs produced a Maple Leaf from somewhere and started torching that. Don't ask me why -- we had a small contribution to the Kosovo bombing campaign but evidently it was enough to arouse the ire of Slobo's boys. I've never been so proud to be Canadian in years. I turned the sound up to see if they were yelling ''Death to the Little Satan!'' But you can't have everything.

That's the point: A flag has to be worth torching. When a flag gets burned, that's not a sign of its weakness but of its strength. If you can't stand the heat of your burning flag, get out of the superpower business. It's the left that believes the state can regulate everyone into thought-compliance. The right should understand that the battle of ideas is won out in the open.

That's interesting, because we had much the same debate here in Norway a couple of years ago. By the letter of the law, the torching of the flag of a foreign country was illegal. That law had not been applied in decades when it was brought back to life after a comedian torched flags on national TV. Both the comedian and the CEO of TV2 were charged with disrespecting the flag and national symbol of a foreign country and risked upto a year in prison. However, the court case ended in acquittal, as the court threw out the old law banning flag burning on the grounds that the law was in violation of the article of freedom of expression in the European Convention on Human Rights.

Flag burning. Really this issue gets dragged up every several years since 1988, when Scalia wrote the majority opinion upholding the freedom of expression to burn the US flag. It won't pass muster in the Senate again. It's too debatable to be worthy of a Constitutional amendment.

As for the property ruling case, this is one issue that I find hard to agree with the majority. There is an inherent tension built into the government's eminent domain powers, but this ruling extended in one direction. One would hope market pressures and a vigilant citizenry would curb abuses and restrict government's right to take a person's property for someone else's personal gain, regardless of perceived benefits to the public.

[Somehow, if that Italian agent hadn't been killed at the Bagdad airport checkpoint, the following story probably wouldn’t have seen the light of day.]

SCROLL ALERT

Italy charges CIA agents
In rare act by ally, officials seek arrests of U.S. agents in kidnapping of imam who allegedly was tortured in Egypt

By John Crewdson, Tom Hundley and Liz Sly, Tribune correspondents. Tom Hundley reported from Milan, and Liz Sly from Rome
Published June 25, 2005
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nati ... 4457.story

WASHINGTON -- Four days before Osama Nasr Mostafa Hassan vanished into the thin Italian air, three middle-aged American visitors checked into the $300-a-night Milan Hilton on Via Luigi Galvani.

The Americans, a man and two women, might have been tourists or fashion buyers, the hotel's usual foreign clientele. The U.S. passports and visa cards, the driver's licenses, even the frequent-flyer IDs they presented to the desk clerk were genuine enough.

Only the names on those documents were bogus. So was their shared corporate address, a non-existent company with a post office box in Washington.

According to Italian authorities, there was a reason for all the cloak-and-dagger business: The three Americans really were spies, the last-arriving members of a covert action team assigned to snatch Hassan off the street and ship him back to Egypt, where he would later say he was brutally tortured.

On Thursday an Italian judge issued arrest warrants charging two of the three Americans and 11 of their colleagues with illegally detaining Hassan, a fundamentalist Muslim preacher better known in Milan's Islamic community as Abu Omar.

The move was no less extraordinary for coming from a country whose prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is one of the few European leaders who support the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq and which has contributed 3,000 troops to that effort.

Current and retired CIA officers, none of whom agreed to be quoted by name, said they could not remember one of their own having been charged abroad with a crime other than espionage, and certainly not in a country friendly to the U.S.

Although the CIA refuses to talk about the Milan abduction or even acknowledge that it occurred, documents obtained by the Tribune clearly link the intelligence agency with the identities, addresses and cell phones used by several of the American operatives.

The existence of the CIA's supersecret abduction squads has come to light since the events of Sept. 11, 2001, although the agency's practice of snatching suspected criminals abroad goes back at least to the Reagan administration.

Congressional Democrats have called for a public inquiry into the practice of covert abductions, which the CIA euphemistically terms "extraordinary rendition," and have introduced legislation that would ban what they term the "outsourcing of torture" to other countries such as Egypt.

News reports and human-rights organizations have identified at least 33 suspected terrorists who have been "rendered" by the U.S. since Sept. 11. Unnamed intelligence officials have been quoted as putting the number over the past two decades at closer to 100.

Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazief, whose country has received more renditions than any other, recently told a group of Tribune reporters and editors that he was aware of "60 or 70" cases in which U.S. agents have seized Egyptian nationals abroad and flown them to Egypt.

In most of the known renditions, suspects have been arrested by local authorities in such countries as Indonesia, Sweden and Macedonia before being handed over to the CIA.

Even when such arrests are made purely at the behest of the U.S.--"there are arrests, and then there are arrests," a senior American intelligence official said with a laugh--they technically absolve the CIA of responsibility for unlawful seizure.

In the case of Abu Omar, the absence of any prior arrest has left the CIA open to kidnapping charges. Indeed, the police in Milan, who had been tapping Abu Omar's telephone, were as surprised as his wife and friends by his sudden disappearance.

When they learned he was gone, the puzzled police opened a missing-person investigation.

The key sleuth

Armando Spataro, the Milan prosecutor who requested the warrants, said the names of those accused, which have not been made public, were taken from the passports and other documents used at hotels and car rental agencies in Milan.

None of the databases accessible by the Tribune contains any indication that individuals with those names have ever had a spouse, a residence, an employer, a driver's license, a telephone, a mortgage, a credit history or a family--in short, none of the things typically associated with real people.

Spataro, who gained his reputation by prosecuting the Mafia in Italy, said in a telephone interview Friday that he believed most of the names were probably not the true identities of the accused kidnappers

Spataro's investigators, however, have pictures of the suspects taken from photocopies of their passports made by hotels. He intends to ask the U.S. government to help him identify the suspects, none of whom is believed to still be in Italy.

"We have a convention for mutual cooperation with the U.S. in criminal matters," Spataro said in a recent interview. "I will ask them to identify some people, and I will ask them to interrogate [the suspects], because I don't believe they will surrender them to Italy voluntarily."

Italy is part of an agreement under which any member of the European Union can arrest and extradite someone wanted by another member country, and Spataro expressed some optimism the suspects would be found if they are in Europe and are still using the same names.

"They will become fugitives in Italy but also in all the other countries" of the European Union, he said.

On Monday, Italy will issue the arrest warrants through the European police agency, Europol, and the international police agency, Interpol.

While Italy also has extradition treaties with the U.S., Spataro did not directly address the question of whether he planned to ask the U.S. Justice Department to act on any of the suspects who might be in the U.S.

In at least one instance, the U.S. has extradited an American citizen to a European country--Germany--to stand trial in a criminal case.

Spataro dismissed suggestions that Abu Omar's abductors, who like many CIA officers working abroad may have been posing as American diplomats, might enjoy diplomatic immunity from criminal prosecution.

"If we have evidence of their involvement in kidnapping, there is no immunity for that," he said.

Posing as diplomat

A senior official with the prosecutor's office, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that one of those accused was a CIA officer posing as a U.S. diplomat in Milan at the time of Abu Omar's abduction.

The official said that the diplomat was well known as the CIA's representative in Milan and that the dozen other suspects charged had been in cell phone contact with him during their stay in Milan.

The diplomat is believed to have left Italy, and his whereabouts are unknown. Several U.S. telephone numbers listed in his name were unanswered or disconnected on Friday.

In all, Spataro asked the court for warrants on 19 people. But the Italian judge, Chiara Nobili, refused his requests for warrants on three men and three women on the basis that they had been brought to Milan only to help monitor Abu Omar's movements before the abduction and might not have known the reason for the surveillance.

A prosecution official said Spataro plans to appeal the judge's decision and hopes to obtain the six arrest warrants next week.

The Italian court also issued a warrant for the arrest of Abu Omar. The 103-page document consists mostly of transcripts of conversations picked up by police wiretaps and microphones before his abduction. Prosecution sources said the warrant was sought principally in hope of forcing Egypt to return Abu Omar to Milan.

The Egyptian government has ignored two formal diplomatic requests, sent last year through the Italian Justice Ministry, asking for confirmation that Abu Omar is in Egypt and an explanation of how and why he entered Egypt.

Spataro also is seeking permission to interview Abu Omar's mother, his two brothers, his sister and a prominent lawyer, all of whom are believed to be living in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria.

"We asked the Egyptian authorities for their cooperation, but they haven't responded," Spataro said.

The Egyptian Embassy in Washington has declined to respond to repeated requests from the Tribune for similar information.

Costly web of intrigue

Judging from the information gleaned by Spataro's investigators, the abduction of Abu Omar on the afternoon of Feb. 17, 2003, was an elaborate and expensive operation.

The 18 people brought into the city for the operation spent at least $150,000 at the Marriott, Hilton, Sheraton and Westin hotels, according to documents obtained by the Tribune.

According to their U.S. passports, several of the first CIA operatives to arrive, and who apparently were used to track Abu Omar's comings and goings, were of late middle age, suggesting they might have been posing as retired Americans on holiday.

Nearly all gave post office boxes as their home or business addresses.

Those names and addresses are linked to what appears to be a CIA network of dozens of post office boxes in the Washington area with hundreds of names attached.

Hotel records show that several of the 13 suspects visited Milan in early January and then left, suggesting that the abduction operation was put on hold at the beginning of 2003.

The first to return, on Feb. 1, 2003, was a 33-year-old woman with a Hispanic-sounding name whose passport said she was a native of Florida. She was joined two days later by six other alleged team members and five more the day after that.

They included a 64-year-old man whose passport said he had been born in Alaska, a 57-year-old woman whose passport said she had been born in Florida and a 50-year-old man whose U.S. passport said he had been born in the former Soviet republic of Moldova.

The Moldovan-born man listed his U.S. employer's address as a post office box in Arlington, Va., across the Potomac River from Washington.

His name is linked, via a half-dozen post office boxes in the Washington and Boston areas, to a Massachusetts company, Premier Executive Transport Services, that until last year was the nominal owner of a Gulfstream executive jet spotted at the scene of post-Sept. 11 "renditions" in Pakistan and Sweden.

Before checking into the Sheraton's Room 814, the man also left the hotel's front desk a Virginia telephone number. When the Tribune first began making inquiries, the number was answered "Coughlin Enterprises" by an operator who described the company as a "management consulting" firm.

According to the operator, the company's owner, a man she identified as Robert Coughlin, was unavailable.

"He's in and out a lot, but he always checks his messages," she said.

The next day, a different operator who answered the same number identified the company's owner as "Rosemarie Coughlin," who she said was similarly unavailable.

Neither Coughlin ever returned a reporter's telephone calls. The operators have since been replaced by an anonymous answering machine.

Most of the aircraft known to have been used in CIA renditions are executive jets, such as Gulfstreams or Learjets, that are either owned by the agency through front companies like Premier Executive Transport or chartered for upward of $5,000 an hour.

Several planes shown by FAA records to have visited Afghanistan or the CIA's training facility at Camp Peary, Va.--destinations not normally accessible by private corporate aircraft--are registered to companies with names like Rapid Air Transport, the Path Corp. and Braxton Management Services, with mailing addresses in Nevada, Montana and Delaware.

The plane that carried Abu Omar to Cairo was not a CIA aircraft but a chartered Gulfstream owned by Phillip H. Morse, a multimillionaire Florida businessman and a co-owner of the world champion Boston Red Sox.

Morse confirmed to the Boston Globe in March that he charters his plane to the CIA and other clients when it is not being used for Red Sox business. But Morse said he knew nothing about the uses to which the intelligence agency had put the plane.

The Globe quoted Morse saying he was "stunned" by an earlier Tribune report that the Gulfstream, with the usual Red Sox decals missing from its fuselage and tail, had been present at the Cairo airport at the time Abu Omar arrived in the early hours of Feb. 18, 2003.

Moving on their prey

Abu Omar's abduction began on a busy street in broad daylight, as he was walking to a mosque that has been identified as a center of radical fundamentalist activity.

The startled imam was hustled inside a parked white van that, according to a passerby, drove away at high speed, followed closely by another vehicle.

The baffled police, who had been keeping tabs on Abu Omar, had no idea where he had gone, although it seemed unlikely that he would have run away from his wife and friends in a country where he had been living lawfully.

Abu Omar was granted political asylum by the Italian government after arriving in Milan in 1997, apparently on the grounds that his membership in a radical Egyptian Islamic organization, Jamaat al Islamiya, which he had joined as a university student, left him at risk for political persecution if he returned home.

Inspector Bruno Megale, the chief of Milan's police anti-terrorism unit that learned a great deal about the structure and functioning of radical Islamic cells in Italy from the wiretap on Abu Omar's phone, began the investigation into his disappearance by collecting the numbers of all the cell phones in use in the area where he disappeared.

Megale and his investigators looked first for phones that had moved across the Italian cellular network in the direction of Aviano, the site of a large joint U.S.-Italian air base some 175 miles from Milan, where Abu Omar's abductors had put him aboard a Learjet Model LJ-35 that was using the call sign "SPAR 92."

SPAR is short for Special Air Resources, a military airlift service that uses Learjets and other executive-style jets to transport senior military officers and civilian VIPs.

Abu Omar was a VIP of sorts, and at 6:20 p.m. on Feb. 17, SPAR 92, with Abu Omar aboard, departed from Aviano and headed to an air base at Ramstein, Germany, where Abu Omar was moved to the Red Sox Gulfstream.

At 8:31 P.M. the Gulfstream took off and turned southeast, headed for Cairo, where it arrived in the early hours of Feb. 18.

Records showed that the phones singled out had also been in use at a number of Milan hotels in the weeks preceding the abduction. When the hotel registers were scoured, police learned that a few of the operatives, including the Moldovan-born man, had given the hotels their cell phone numbers

In all, 17 cell phones were identified as belonging to members of the abduction team. Records showed numerous calls among the team members and several others that proved interesting: to a U.S. Air Force colonel at Aviano, to the American Consulate in Milan and to four numbers in northern Virginia, where the CIA headquarters is.

One of those numbers is listed to a man in Ashburn, Va., who has the same name as one of the names used by the CIA operatives in Milan and who apparently registered at a Milan hotel using his real name. A message left on the man's answering machine was not returned Friday.

After 14 months, a call

Fourteen months after Abu Omar disappeared without a trace, the telephone rang in his Milan apartment. His wife, whom Abu Omar married after moving to Italy, still had no clue what had become of her husband.

Now she was astounded to hear him explaining that he had just been released from an Egyptian prison, reportedly after a ruling by an Egyptian judge that he was not a terrorist threat.

The police in Milan had continued tapping his telephone in his absence. While their tape recorders turned, Abu Omar told his wife he had been held incommunicado in Egypt since being grabbed off the street in Milan.

During that call and in a later conversation with another Egyptian imam in Milan, Mohammed Reda, whose cell phone was also tapped, Abu Omar said he had been tortured by the Egyptian security service.

According to Reda's account of that conversation, published in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, Abu Omar "underwent terrible tortures" after arriving in Cairo.

"He told me that the initial seven months were very tough," Reda said. "They hit him day and night. They made him listen to sounds at full blast, which was the reason why his hearing was impaired.

"They closed him in a sort of sauna and then in a refrigerator cell, causing him dire pain, as if his bones were shattered. They hung him head downward, applying electrodes onto his most sensitive parts, including his genitals. The electric shocks made him become incontinent. He could not walk."

The Milan police concluded that Abu Omar's account hadn't been invented for their benefit, because it evidently hadn't occurred to him that his telephone was still being tapped. Among his requests to his wife was that she erase the hard drive on his computer before it fell into the hands of the police.

Shortly after his telephone conversations with his wife and Mohammed Reda, Abu Omar was rearrested by Egyptian authorities. He has not been heard from since.

See also: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nati ... 2584.story

Chicago Boyz

Eminent Domain Stunt?

Recently, a report has been circulating all over the blogosphere that Justice David H. Souter, one of the Justices that voted in the majority in Kelo vs. New London, may soon fall victim to the ruling. The press release from Freestar Media seems tongue-in-cheek:

Press Release

For Release Monday, June 27 to New Hampshire media
For Release Tuesday, June 28 to all other media

Weare, New Hampshire (PRWEB) Could a hotel be built on the land owned by Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter? A new ruling by the Supreme Court which was supported by Justice Souter himself itself might allow it. A private developer is seeking to use this very law to build a hotel on Souter's land.

Justice Souter's vote in the "Kelo vs. City of New London" decision allows city governments to take land from one private owner and give it to another if the government will generate greater tax revenue or other economic benefits when the land is developed by the new owner.

On Monday June 27, Logan Darrow Clements, faxed a request to Chip Meany the code enforcement officer of the Towne of Weare, New Hampshire seeking to start the application process to build a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road. This is the present location of Mr. Souter's home.

Clements, CEO of Freestar Media, LLC, points out that the City of Weare will certainly gain greater tax revenue and economic benefits with a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road than allowing Mr. Souter to own the land.

The proposed development, called "The Lost Liberty Hotel" will feature the "Just Desserts Café" and include a museum, open to the public, featuring a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in America. Instead of a Gideon's Bible each guest will receive a free copy of Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged."

Clements indicated that the hotel must be built on this particular piece of land because it is a unique site being the home of someone largely responsible for destroying property rights for all Americans.

"This is not a prank" said Clements, "The Towne of Weare has five people on the Board of Selectmen. If three of them vote to use the power of eminent domain to take this land from Mr. Souter we can begin our hotel development."

Clements' plan is to raise investment capital from wealthy pro-liberty investors and draw up architectural plans. These plans would then be used to raise investment capital for the project. Clements hopes that regular customers of the hotel might include supporters of the Institute For Justice and participants in the Free State Project among others.

# # #

Logan Darrow Clements
Freestar Media, LLC

Phone 310-593-4843
logan@freestarmedia.com
http://www.freestarmedia.com

The fax request to Chip Meany reads as follows:

day, June 27, 2005

Mr. Chip Meany
Code Enforcement Officer
Town of Weare, New Hampshire
Fax 603-529-4554

Dear Mr. Meany,

I am proposing to build a hotel at 34 Cilley Hill Road in the Town of Weare. I would like to know the process your town has for allowing such a development.

hough this property is owned by an individual, David H. Souter, a recent Supreme Court decision, "Kelo vs. City of New London" clears the way for this land to be taken by the Government of Weare through eminent domain and given to my LLC for the purposes of building a hotel. The justification for such an eminent domain action is that our hotel will better serve the public interest as it will bring in economic development and higher tax revenue to Weare.

I understand it your town has five people serving on the Board of Selectmen. Therefore, since it will require only three people to vote in favor of the use of eminent domain I am quite confident that this hotel development is a viable project. I am currently seeking investors and hotel plans from an architect. Please let me know the proper steps to follow to proceed in accordance with the law in your town.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Logan Darrow Clements
Freestar Media, LLC

Something seems out of sorts here, so I decided to investigate a little bit. First of all, what is Justice Souter's relationship to the Town of Weare?

DAVID HACKETT SOUTER was born in Melrose, Massachusetts, September 17, 1939, the only child of Joseph A. Souter and Helen Hackett Souter. Although he lived with his parents in Massachusetts, Souter spent much of his youth, including most summers, at his maternal grandparents’ farmhouse in Weare, a small New Hampshire town twenty miles southwest of Concord, the state capital.

After his grandparents had passed away, Souter, age eleven, and his family moved to the farmhouse. His father was a banker with the New Hampshire Savings Bank in Concord. He died in 1976, but Souter's mother still lives near the family farmhouse in a retirement community.

Souter has called Weare, which borders Hopkinton Lake, "a town large in geography [and] small in population," where everybody "knew everybody else’s business or at least thought they did. And we were, in a very true sense, intimately aware of other lives. We were aware of lives that were easy and lives that were very hard." It is, indeed, a typical small town in rural New England, still governed by a town meeting. Souter learned many "lessons in practical government" by sitting in the back bench of the Weare Town Hall and watching the town meetings.

A quick Google map of the given address shows, indeed, that such an address exists. Moreover, once you zoom out a bit on the map, you'll see that it is indeed not far from Hopkinton Lake.

Returning to the press release, I was intrigued by this Logan Darrow Clements character. Who is he? A Google search revealed that he was a candidate for California Governor in the 2003 recall race which catapulted Arnold Schwarzenegger to the forefront of state politics. A report by Hank Willow for Hollywood Investigator describes Clements as "a self-described Objectivist and admirer of philosopher Ayn Rand", whose Atlas Shrugged figures not only on his campaign site, but as part of his request to Chip Meany.

Who is Chip Meany? A reference to him was made in meeting minutes of the Weare Board of Selectmen on 21 June 2004. He is also the current Building Inspector of the Town of Weare's Building Department. The information given by Freestar Media as Mr. Meany's fax number is, indeed, correct.

All of this, so far, is publicly available information. Given all this, as well as the fact that the instigator is located in California, across the continent from New Hampshire, I would conclude that the press release is probably a publicity stunt by Logan Darrow Clements, designed to bring attention to what many feel is an egregious ruling on the part of Justice Souter in Kelo vs. New London.

The Wall Street Journal
Peggy Noonan

Conceit of Government
Why are our politicians so full of themselves?

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

What's wrong with them? That's what I'm thinking more and more as I watch the news from Washington.

A few weeks ago it was the senators who announced the judicial compromise. There is nothing wrong with compromise and nothing wrong with announcements, but the senators who spoke referred to themselves with such flights of vanity and conceit--we're so brave, so farsighted, so high-minded--that it was embarrassing. They patted themselves on the back so hard they looked like a bevy of big breasted pigeons in a mass wing-flap. Little grey feathers and bits of corn came through my TV screen, and I had to sweep up when they were done.

This week comes the previously careful Sen. Barack Obama, flapping his wings in Time magazine and explaining that he's a lot like Abraham Lincoln, only sort of better. "In Lincoln's rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat--in all this he reminded me not just of my own struggles."

Oh. So that's what Lincoln's for. Actually Lincoln's life is a lot like Mr. Obama's. Lincoln came from a lean-to in the backwoods. His mother died when he was 9. The Lincolns had no money, no standing. Lincoln educated himself, reading law on his own, working as a field hand, a store clerk and a raft hand on the Mississippi. He also split some rails. He entered politics, knew more defeat than victory, and went on to lead the nation through its greatest trauma, the Civil War, and past its greatest sin, slavery.

Barack Obama, the son of two University of Hawaii students, went to Columbia and Harvard Law after attending a private academy that taught the children of the Hawaiian royal family. He made his name in politics as an aggressive Chicago vote hustler in Bill Clinton's first campaign for the presidency.

You see the similarities.

There is nothing wrong with Barack Obama's résumé, but it is a log-cabin-free zone. So far it also is a greatness-free zone. If he keeps talking about himself like this it always will be.
Mr. Obama said he keeps a photographic portrait of Lincoln on the wall of his office, and that "it asks me questions."

I'm sure it does. I'm sure it says, "Barack, why are you such an egomaniac?" Or perhaps, "Is it no longer possible in American politics to speak of another's greatness without suggesting your own?"

Even so sober an actor as Bill Frist has gotten into the act. This is the beginning of his Heritage Foundation speech yesterday:


You might have been wondering these last few months: Why would a doctor take on an issue like the judicial confirmation process? About 10 years ago, I set aside my medical career to run for the Senate. But I didn't set aside my compassion. I didn't set aside my character. And I sure as heck didn't set aside my principles. I got into politics for the same reason I got into medicine. I wanted to help people. And I wanted to heal. I just felt that, in politics, I could help and heal more than one patient at a time.

I admire Bill Frist, but can you imagine George Washington referring in public, or in private for that matter, to his many virtues? In normal America if you have a high character you don't wrestle people to the ground until they acknowledge it. You certainly don't announce it. If you are compassionate, you are compassionate; if others see it, fine. If you hold to principle it will become clear. You don't proclaim these things. You can't, for the same reason that to brag about your modesty is to undercut the truth of the claim.

And there are the Clintons. There are always the Clintons. The man for whom Barack Obama worked so hard in 1992 showed up with his wife this week to take center stage at Billy Graham's last crusade in New York. Billy Graham is a great man. He bears within him deep reservoirs of sweetness, and the reservoirs often overflow. It was embarrassing to see America's two most famous political grifters plop themselves in the first row dressed in telegenic silk and allow themselves to become the focus of sweet words they knew would come.
Why did they feel it right to inject a partisan political component into a spiritual event? Why take advantage of the good nature and generosity of an old hero? Why, after spending their entire adulthoods in public life, have they not developed or at least learned to imitate simple class?

How exactly does it work? How does legitimate self-confidence become wildly inflated self-regard? How does self respect become unblinking conceit? How exactly does one's character become destabilized in Washington?

The Supreme Court this week and last issued many rulings, and though they were on different issues the decisions themselves had at least one thing in common: They seemed to reflect a lack of basic human modesty on the part of many of the justices. Many are famously very old, and they have been together as a court for a very long time. One wonders if they have lost all understanding of how privileged they are to have lifetime sinecures of power and authority. Do they have any sense anymore of common human wisdom, of the normal human arrangements by which Americans live?

Maybe a lot of them aren't bothering to think. Maybe Ruth Bader Ginsburg is no longer in the habit of listening to arguments but only of watching William Rehnquist, and if he nods up and down she knows to vote "no," and if he shakes his head she knows to vote "yes." That might explain some of the lack of seriousness in the decisions. Local government can bulldoze Grandma's house because it's in the way of a future strip mall that will add more to the tax base? The Ten Commandments can appear on public land but not in a courthouse, but Moses, who received the Ten Commandments can appear in the frieze of the House but he'll be sandblasted off the Supreme Court? Or do I have that the other way around?

What are they doing? All this hair splitting, this dithering, this cutting and pasting--all this lack of serious and defining principle. All this vanity.

Perhaps Justice Ginsburg or Justice Stevens will retire soon and write a memoir: Like Jefferson I held to principle, and like Lincoln I often lacked air conditioning. But in my intellectual gifts I've always found myself to be more like Oliver Wendell Holmes . . .


What is in the air there in Washington, what is in the water?
What is wrong with them? This is not a rhetorical question. I think it is unspoken question No. 1 as Americans look at so many of the individuals in our government. What is wrong with them?

BWAAAAA - HAHHAHHAAAA!!!!!!!


Troops' Silence at Fort Bragg Starts a Debate All Its Own

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/30/polit ... 0&emc=eta1

".....Terry Moran, an ABC News White House correspondent, said on the air on Tuesday night that the FIRST TO CLAP appeared to be A WOMAN WHO WORKS AT THE WHITE HOUSE, arranging events. Some other reporters had the same account, but Captain Earnhardt and others in the back of the room say the applause was STARTED BY A GROUP OF OFFICERS..."



*Says alot when you can't even get paid cheerleaders to clap for you...

CQ

The Dumbest Controversy Ever

The New York Times eats up several column inches on what has to be the pettiest controversy of recent memory -- The Case Of The Missing Applause. As I remarked during my live blog, the lack of reaction to George Bush's speech appeared planned, as Bush spoke at a more rapid pace than normal, without the usual politician pauses that these addresses have. Carl Cameron confirmed immediately afterwards that the audience had been told to hold off on any reaction.

Apparently no one else thought to check that out, at least at the NY Times, which results in this David Sanger report:

So what happened to the applause?
When President Bush visits military bases, he invariably receives a foot-stomping, loud ovation at every applause line. At bases like Fort Bragg - the backdrop for his Tuesday night speech on Iraq - the clapping is often interspersed with calls of "Hoo-ah," the military's all-purpose, spirited response to, well, almost anything.

So the silence during his speech was more than a little noticeable, both on television and in the hall. On Wednesday, as Mr. Bush's repeated use of the imagery of the Sept. 11 attacks drew bitter criticism from Congressional Democrats, there was a parallel debate under way about whether the troops sat on their hands because they were not impressed, or because they thought that was their orders.


Not only was that apparent from the moment that Bush walked into the auditorium -- the troops stood at attention, and didn't utter a peep when Bush had them sit -- but as I noted, his delivery made it obvious that he planned on no interruptions. The Fort Bragg soldiers maintained the discipline requested by their officers and the White House. Yet somehow this has become an embarrassment for the Bush administration:

Republicans moved quickly to respond to what was becoming a significant embarrassment.
Capt. Tom Earnhardt, a public affairs officer at Fort Bragg who participated in the planning for the president's trip, said that from the first meetings with White House officials there was agreement that a hall full of wildly cheering troops would not create the right atmosphere for a speech devoted to policy and strategy.

"The guy from White House advance, during the initial meetings, said, 'Be careful not to let this become a pep rally,' " Captain Earnhardt recalled in a telephone interview. Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, confirmed that account.


If the same soldiers had greeted Bush with wild cheers and hoo-ahs, or had repeatedly interrupted the speech with cheers, we'd be hearing that the White House had secretly arranged that reception. Instead, we now have Clapgate, which doesn't have nearly the fun that such a monicker might suggest, where the big question is who initiated the applause that followed the one line where Bush told the nation that we would stay in the fight to the finish.

Well, this certainly qualifies as a national emergency. Can we say, "Slow News Day"?

If any of the soldiers at Fort Bragg has information on what happened, please e-mail me from your military e-mail accounts before the conspiracy theorists spin this into a passive mutiny against the current Commander-In-Chief. I guarantee readers that within 24 hours, that's exactly how this meme will be spun in the more radical corners of the political arena.

"Carl Cameron confirmed immediately afterwards that the audience had been told to hold off on any reaction....."

Carl Cameron...?

Come on, Leo...Surely you could offer up a better source to that than Cameron.....say....Geraldo? OH MY OH MY THE IRONY!!!! I LOVE IT!!!!

I actually have to wipe the spittle from my "cretin" mouth to breathe it's so fucking funny!!!!!! I can't believe you were DUMB ENOUGH to do a paniced-damage-controll search on google for an article to refute mine and you didn't even know who the author was basing his story on...

You mean THIS CARL CAMERON, Leo?

"......investigators suspect that the Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the [Sept. 11] attacks in advance, and not shared it."

LMFAO!!!!!

I JUST HIT THE TRIFECTA ON YOUR ASS!!!

I'm only sorry that this forum is so slow on action and that not many will see the dumb-ass that you are in this moment.....

But thanks anyway, bud....you made my day! And you know you just gave me a gift that keeps on giving.....

Did you try to sound coherent and witty? Try again, dezerast:)

.......OWNED, SERVED, ENSLAVED, HUMBLED, AND MY BITCH.....

Oh my, oh my...I just put it on your ass so hard, I can't believe you're sitting down at this moment!!!!!

You do know that your new name around here will be "Carl" for a while, don'tcha?

Can't you speak English, inferior? I'm not exactly familiar with the ghettospeak.

Take your time, read some books...The next one would be your second, right? The first one was Michael Moore's "Ghetto boys can't think..." or something:)

Do you really think your racist (or whatever you justify it to be) counter-attacks will minimize your idiocy?


Leo:

The reason your fuck-up is so golden to me is because YOU KNOW it will forever be your moment of self-recognition of a horse's ass JUST BETWEEN ME AND YOU. Whether or not anyone noticed your display of the truest of your own nature matters little.....forever YOU KNOW that I know, and I will always be able to call you a "phony" regarding anytyhing that actually involves insight to truth.

You're exposed. Lost. Defeated. Denying and pathetic.

I would love to glow in the moment, but reality beckons for the souls and families of 1,700 (and counting) due to your "informed sources".

I'll be reminding you from time-to-time of your latest source of information...so watch what you say unless you want to be exposed as the ignorant dumbass that you are on a daily basis.

Just remember...Carl Cameron.....the guy that started the Israeli-9/11 connection - YOUR guy.......

Do you really think your racist (or whatever you justify it to be) counter-attacks will minimize your idiocy?


Leo:

The reason your fuck-up is so golden to me is because YOU KNOW it will forever be your moment of self-recognition of a horse's ass JUST BETWEEN ME AND YOU. Whether or not anyone noticed your display of the truest of your own nature matters little.....forever YOU KNOW that I know, and I will always be able to call you a "phony" regarding anytyhing that actually involves insight to truth.

You're exposed. Lost. Defeated. Denying and pathetic.

I would love to glow in the moment, but reality beckons for the souls and families of 1,700 (and counting) due to your "informed sources".

I'll be reminding you from time-to-time of your latest source of information...so watch what you say unless you want to be exposed as the ignorant dumbass that you are on a daily basis.

Just remember...Carl Cameron.....the guy that started the Israeli-9/11 connection - YOUR guy.......

dezerast

I have no idea who Carl Cameron is and don't care to know. I also don't give a damn about your schizophrenia.

All I know is that your fellow dimwits found it important to talk about the lack of applause among American soldiers at Ft.Bragg.

That I think was really funny.

Now, enjoy your fellow pederasts, raymondo-degenerates and ghetto inferiors and be reminded, for the umpteenth time, that you're trying to reach beyond your depth, all in vain. I know you're desperately trying to score some point, any point, but you just can't. Keep trying though, piece of drek:)

Leo

"I have no idea who Carl Cameron is and don't care to know."

You just posted a story with him as the key source. You shouldn't have been in such a hurry.

Oh yeah....I didn't have to "reach" for anything. I would never take the credit for something that you did all by yourself(;-)

ghettorast

You're trying again to sound witty. Wit isn't something fedayeens are famous for. Lose yourself, scum:)

National Review

According to reports, Oprah Winfrey was denied entry to Hermès in Paris because, as one employee said, they had been “having a problem with North Africans.” Miss Winfrey does not look North African; she looks like the slaves they used to hold. What she should have done, in our opinion, is buy Hermès on the spot.


LOL

Carl

"...You're trying again to sound witty"

Like I said, I'd never take credit away from something you did all by yourself(;-)

justin

Get this straight, though being straight is foreign to you:

The paper of Manhattan buggers tried to get George Bush and failed again, miserably so.

You may recycle your own inferiority till the end of time, it still is irrelevant.

Bugger off, snoopy dog visionary:)

Carl Cameron.

'nuff said.

Bush's Soviet state
by William Rivers Pitthttp://smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=22046
It's funny in an awful sort of way. The defining events of the last fifty years all centered around the Cold War and the eventual demise of the Soviet system. Toward the end of the Soviet regime, their government was often forced to grossly overstate the size of grain harvests or the preparedness of their military in order to maintain an illusion of strength and order. In other words, intelligence and facts were fixed around the policy. In essence, fixing the facts became the policy.

Self-deception was piled upon self-deception. Rather than address the systemic problems within the nation, the Soviet regime chose instead to massage the illusions until the problems became too huge to overcome. Pretending everything was fine became the chosen course of action, and the state's ability to manufacture a pleasing reality became a perfect circle of inaction and delusion. By the time the tanks rolled and the Wall fell, the deal had already gone down.

Sound familiar?



There has been a lot of noise lately in the news media about the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, and whether Bush advisor Karl Rove was the button-man who brought her down. Press coverage of this issue has been unexpectedly tenacious. White House spokesman Scott McClellan has been leaving his podium after press conferences lately with fresh bite marks all over his ankles and legs. The intensity of the pursuit on this issue has a lot to do with Times reporter Judy Miller. Like her, hate her, respect her or disdain her, but one thing is clear: The White House press corps is bird-dogging this story with alacrity be