“We don’t do [ Iraqi ] body counts.” — General Tommy Franks, US Central Command
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IRAQ WAR CO$T
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u.s. dead the coffins iraqi casualties |
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"Ashcroft says he wants to take more time off... to spend more time with the voices in his head."— Jay Leno
"My favorite part of the Republican debate was when Chris Matthews asked, 'Who
does not believe in evolution?' Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee and
Tom Tancredo all raised their paw. They said they do not believe in
evolution. Then they said the biggest threat to America is religious
radicals living in the Dark Ages."
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"Attorney General John Ashcroft told Congress they shouldn't be asking him about the legality of
the war until the war is over. And there's precedent for that— I think it's called the
Nuremberg Trials."
— Jay Leno
The U.S. is putting together a constitution for Iraq. Why don’t
we just give them ours? Think about it. It was written by very smart people, it’s served us
well for over 200-years, and besides, we’re not using it anymore.”
"Unique among the nations, America recognized the source of our character as being godly and eternal,
not being civic and temporal. And because we have understood that our source is eternal, America has
been different. We have no king but Jesus."
"Attorney General John Ashcroft told Congress they shouldn't be asking him about the
legality of the war until the war is over. And there's precedent for that — I think
it's called the Nuremberg Trials."
"I believe that God wants me to be president."
"We need common-sense judges who understand our rights were derived from God. And those are the kind of judges I intend to put on the bench."
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IN GOD'S NAME?
"There is no such thing as separation of church and state in the Constitution. It is a lie of the Left
and we are not going to take it anymore." Pat Robertson, host and founder of the daily Christian talk show, "The 700 Club," for nearly 40 years, a conservative Presidential candidate, and founder of the two million member Christian Coalition, has been the source of extremely controversial remarks ranging from advocating the politcal assassination of Hugo Chavez, to advocating the detonation of a nuclear bomb in Washington D.C. While outlandish, hateful, and often laughable remarks are a common characteristic of religious right leaders, Robertson's stand out both because of their particularly aggressive tone and because his remarks go further than just the last row of the local megachurch. Since 1966 Robertson has hosted the daily Christian talk show "The 700 Club." In 2004, the show averaged a daily audience of 863,000. That is 100,000 viewers more than CNN receives during its primetime programming, and more than three times the number of people who tune into MSNBC during the same timeslot. Robertson uses his show and its influence to unabashedly promote the religious right's agenda. Below find some of the finer examples of Robertson's vision of God, women, liberals and the state of our nation.
The Gospel According To Pat:
"You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this,
that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist. I can
love the people who hold false opinions but I don't have to be nice to them."
"I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship of
a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife,
and that's the way it is, period."
"The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political
movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy
capitalism and become lesbians."
"I think 'one man, one vote,' just unrestricted democracy, would
not be wise. There needs to be some kind of protection for the minority which the white people
represent now, a minority, and they need and have a right to demand a protection of their rights."
"Many of those people involved with Adolf Hitler were Satanists, many of them were homosexuals--the two
things seem to go together."
"Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical
Christians. It's no different. It is the same thing. It is happening all over again. It is the
Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians.
Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today.
More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history."
"Homosexuals want to come into churches and disrupt church services and throw blood all around and try
to give people AIDS and spit in the face of ministers."
"The National Organization for Women is saying that in order to be a woman, you've got to be a lesbian."
"Maybe we need a very small nuke thrown off on Foggy Bottom (the State Department) to shake
things up."
"I think George Bush has the favor of heaven He's a godly man. He prays on a daily basis. He wants to
do what's right before the Lord, and I think God has honored him."
"Well, the Lord has some very encouraging news for George Bush... What I heard is that Bush is now
positioned to have victory after victory and that his second term is going to be one of triumph, which is
pretty strong stuff. ...He'll have Social Security reform passed. He'll have tax reform passed. He'll have
conservative judges on the courts. And that basically he is positioned for a series of dramatic victories
which I hope will hearten him and his advisers. They don't have to be timid in this matter because the
wind is blowing at his back, and he can move forward boldly and get results."
"But I do know that there are going to be vacancies on the Supreme Court, and I think, as far as I can tell,
on the circuit courts. The Democrats have filibustered a number of wonderful people, a black woman,
a Hispanic immigrant, etc-- brilliant lawyers, and the Republicans need to break that filibuster.
And if they call it the nuclear option-- constitutional option, whatever it is -- get those people
confirmed. But the Supreme Court has got to change. They have asserted power never given them under the
constitution, and we've got to get back to constitutional democracy, which is what our country was built
on."
"Lord, give us righteous judges who will not try to legislate and dominate this society. Take control,
Lord! We ask for additional vacancies on the court."
"You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if [Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela]
thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole
lot cheaper than starting a war... We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has
come that we exercise that ability. We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know,
strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then
get it over with."
"Wait a minute, I didn't say 'assassination.' I said our special forces should, quote, "take him out,"
and "take him out" can be a number of things including kidnapping. There are a number of ways to take
out a dictator from power besides killing him."
"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God,
you just rejected Him from your city… And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin,
if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your
city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there."
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9/11 Commission Hearing April 13, 2004 Ashcroft Rejected Counterterrorism Fund Request On 9/10/01 A report said Acting FBI Director Thomas Pickard had briefed Ashcroft on terrorist threats in late June and July 2001. "After two such briefings, the attorney general told him he did not want to hear this information anymore," the report quoted Pickard as saying.
On May 10, 2001, the department issued guidance for developing the fiscal year 2003 budget that
made reducing the incidence of gun violence and
illegal drugs
priority objectives.
Thomas Pickard told us he made an appeal to Attorney General Ashcroft for
further counterterrorism enhancements not included in this budget proposal. On September 10,
the attorney general rejected that appeal."
Ashcroft told the panel in a previous private session that he had assumed the FBI was doing what
it needed to do to avert any threats. Ashcroft acknowledged that, in retrospect, this was a
dangerous assumption," the report said. |
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Ashcroft's Connection to Abu Ghraib
[McCotter] resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the entire time. McCotter later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal justice system. In Utah, in addition to the death of the mentally-ill inmate, Mr. McCotter also came under criticism for hiring a prison psychiatrist whose medical license was on probation and who was accused of Medicaid fraud and writing prescriptions for drug addicts. Mr. McCotter, 63, is director of business development for Management & Training Corporation, a Utah-based firm that says it is the third-largest private prison company, operating 13 prisons. In 2003, the company's operation of the Santa Fe jail was criticized by the Justice Department and the New Mexico Department of Corrections for unsafe conditions and lack of medical care for inmates. No further action was taken. McCotter reports he left Abu Ghraib after training the guards and cutting the ribbon at the opening ceremony last September. When Mr. Ashcroft announced the appointment of the team to restore Iraq's criminal justice system last year, including Mr. McCotter, he said, "Now all Iraqis can taste liberty in their native land, and we will help make that freedom permanent by assisting them to establish an equitable criminal justice system based on the rule of law and standards of basic human rights." In an interview with an online magazine, Corrections.com, last January, Mr. McCotter recalled that of all the prisons in Iraq, Abu Ghraib "is the only place we agreed as a team was truly closest to an American prison. They had cell housing and segregation." Nationwide, during the last quarter century, over 40 state prison systems were under some form of court order, for brutality, crowding, poor food or lack of medical care, said Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group in Washington that calls for alternatives to incarceration. In a 1999 opinion, Judge Justice wrote of the situation in Texas, "Many inmates credibly testified to the existence of violence, rape and extortion in the prison system and about their own suffering from such abysmal conditions." According to one prison official, "In some jurisdictions in the United States there is a prison culture that tolerates violence, and it's been there a long time." This culture has been made worse by the quadrupling of the number of prison and jail inmates to 2.1 million over the last 25 years, which has often resulted in crowding, he said. The problems have been compounded by the need to hire large numbers of inexperienced and often undertrained guards, Mr. Riveland said. Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr., a guard at one of Pennsylvania's most heavily secured death row prisons, was accused by his former wife of violent behavior. Graner is the guard who purportedly was romantically involved with Lynndie England and got her pregnant. Here's what his ex-wife had to say about him: Graner married Staci Dean in 1990, after she had become pregnant with the first of their two children. Their marriage ended in 2002 in a bitter divorce. Police were called to the home in March 2001, after the couple had separated. In Fayette County court papers, Staci Graner, who has since remarried and declined to be interviewed, reported that her husband came into the room where she was sleeping and yanked her head by the hair, banged her head against a wall, and tried to throw her down the steps. Criminal charges were not filed.
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FROM: THE DAILY MIS-LEAD
ASHCROFT'S RECORD OF LYING TO CONGRESS ABOUT 9/11
With Attorney General John Ashcroft testifying before the 9/11 Commission
today, a quick analysis of his previous statements shows he has repeatedly
lied to Congress about the Bush Administration's counterterrorism record.
Specifically, when questioned by Congress in 2002 about why he tried to
de-prioritize and slash funding for counterterrorism before 9/11, Ashcroft
resorted to dishonest denials — even in the face of budget documents that
proved he was not telling the truth.
For instance, in testimony before the House of Representatives, Ashcroft
said that before 9/11, his "number-one goal" at the Justice Department "was
the prevention of terrorist acts" and that he immediately "began to shape
the department and its efforts in that respect" (1).
But according to the
Washington Post, internal Administration documents from before 9/11 "show
that Ashcroft ranked counterterrorism efforts as a lower priority than his
predecessor did" (2).
The documents "indicate that before Sept. 11,
Ashcroft
did not give terrorism top billing in his strategic plans for the Justice
Department, which includes the FBI. A draft of Ashcroft's 'Strategic Plan'
from Aug. 9, 2001, does not put fighting terrorism as one of the
department's seven goals, ranking it as a sub-goal beneath gun violence and
drugs."
Ashcroft tried to blame his negligence of counterterrorism on the previous
Administration, telling Congress that "the five-year plan that had been put
in place by my predecessor didn't mention counterterrorism" (3). But
according to the New York Times, "the plan issued by Attorney General Janet
Reno in 2000 said the Justice Department would have to devote more
attention and resources to terrorism, citing sophisticated computer and bomb-making
technology and the 'emerging threats of chemical, biological, radiological
and nuclear weapons'" (4).
Ashcroft has even been dishonest about events after 9/11, telling Congress
that when the Administration was writing the emergency counterterrorism
funding bill after the attacks, the FBI "came to me with a $670 million
request, and we counseled them to take that to $1.1 billion" (5).
But
according to the Washington Post, "In the early days after the Sept. 11,
2001, attacks, the Bush White House cut by nearly two-thirds an emergency
request for counterterrorism funds by the FBI... The document, dated Oct.
12, 2001, shows that the FBI requested $1.5 billion in additional funds to
enhance its counterterrorism efforts with the creation of 2,024 positions.
But the White House Office of Management and Budget cut that request to
$531
million" (6).
Ashcroft "cut the FBI's request for items such as computer
networking and foreign language intercepts by half, cut a cyber-security
request by three quarters and eliminated entirely a request for
'collaborative capabilities.'"
Sources:
Visit
Misleader.org for more about Bush Administration distortion
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