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  • America’s Political Red Light District
    12 January 2005 par (Open-Publishing)

    By Wayne Besen
    Conservative commentator Armstrong Williams is embroiled in a scandal where the Bush administration paid him $240,000 to promote No Child Left Behind. Democrat Rep. George Miller, who is on the House Education Committee, said the arrangement using taxpayer’s money was “probably illegal.” When Williams said he represented values, we never knew he meant the value of his bank account.
    As someone who has met the slippery Williams, I’m not the slightest bit surprised that he (…)

  • Troops: Suicide or Prison better than returning to Iraq
    12 January 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    1 comment

    Three recent stories (Jan 05) highlight just how bad Iraq is- that some soldiers would rather go to prison or die than return to the carnage that is the US occupation. A 19-year-old US Marine committed “suicide by cop” rather than return to Iraq.
    Raya was finally gunned down as he ran towards a group of officers, and apparently reached for a second weapon.
    Julia Cortez Raya told the newspaper that her son served in Fallujah.
    She said: “He came back different.”
    Marine Lance Cpl. (…)

  • Investigate Alleged Violations of Law in Fallujah Attack
    12 January 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    2 comments

    At the beginning of their recent attack on Fallujah, U.S. Marines and Iraqi National Guard troops stormed Fallujah General Hospital, closing it to the city’s wounded and confiscating cell phones from the doctors. A senior officer told The New York Times the hospital was "a center of propaganda."
    Interviews with hospital personnel (which had revealed the extent of civilian casualties in an aborted April invasion) would not be a problem this time.
    As the invasion proceeded, air strikes (…)

  • Iraq, torture? Not if cheerleaders do it, lawyer claims
    12 January 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    7 comments

    By Jenny Booth
    Forcing naked Iraqi prisoners to pile themselves in human pyramids was not torture, because American cheerleaders do it every year, a court was told today.
    A lawyer defending Specialist Charles Graner, who is accused of being a ringleader in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, argued that piling naked prisoners in pyramids was a valid form of prisoner control.
    "Don’t cheerleaders all over America form pyramids six to eight times a year. Is that torture?" said Guy (…)

  • War Crimes Rountable- Who is really responsible for Abu Ghraib?
    12 January 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    5 comments

    War Crimes Roundtable
    As the Abu-Ghraib prison scandal began to pierce through the public consciousness, Contributing Editor Mark LeVine brought together four leading experts on international and American constitutional law to explore the implications of the scandal and the larger issue of the violations of international and American law that have become part of the fabric of the US-led occupation of Iraq.
    The extent of the daily violations of international law, including systematic war (…)

  • Why I Refused a 2nd Deployment to Iraq
    11 January 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    7 comments

    First a brief forward from POAC co-editor Jack Dalton. I received an email a few moments ago from Kevin’s wife Monica. In it she has told me a total of 22 people in Sgt Benderman’s unit have refused to deploy to Iraq. 17 have gone AWOL and 2 have attempted suicide. The status of the remaining 3 is unknown at this time. We at the POAC fully support the decision to refuse deployment to Iraq which has been made by Sgt Benderman, and the others in his unit.
    I am Sgt Kevin Benderman and: (…)

  • Election Challenge: Dem vs. Repub arguments & facts
    11 January 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    5 comments

    The first two arguments in the Senate over the vote challenge highlight the arguments perfectly: while the Democrats have facts, all that the Republicans have is name calling. Didn’t we learn better than that...in Kindergarten? They call us conspiracy theorists insisting their was no evidence of manipulation, however had they done their homework and read Conyer’s report they would know better.
    From the Excecutive Summary of Conyer’s 102 page report (pdf) on Ohio:
    "We have found (…)

  • John Kerry conceded early to spend time with Arnold Schwarzenegger
    11 January 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    3 comments

    The Last Man To Concede...
    By Sheila Samples
    On November 3, just hours after Democratic vice-presidential hopeful John Edwards made a national announcement that he and John Kerry were not going to concede until all the votes were counted, Kerry grabbed the spotlight and conceded — before all the votes were counted.
    Kerry took the money and ran. Seems he couldn’t stick around because he and the missus were spending Christmas at a holiday extravaganza in Sun Valley as personal guests of (…)

  • "We the People Do Not Concede"- Election Stolen by Network of Fraud
    11 January 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    26 comments

    Election Crime Scene-2004 "We the People Do Not Concede"
    By Carol Sterritt
    John Kerry did not lose the electoral votes in Florida. They were stolen.
    Nor did he lose the electoral votes in Ohio. They were stolen as well.
    And with these two states being a rigged game, suspicions multiply. Suspicion falls especially hard upon the supposed three and a half million votes that Bush now claims as the popular vote margin.
    Across the nation, at least 400,000 people used voter hotlines to (…)

  • Congress passes ’doomsday’ plan- ethics rule changes were diversion
    11 January 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    6 comments

    WASHINGTON - With no fanfare, the U.S. House has passed a controversial doomsday provision that would allow a handful of lawmakers to run Congress if a terrorist attack or major disaster killed or incapacitated large numbers of congressmen.
    "I think (the new rule) is terrible in a whole host of ways - first, I think it’s unconstitutional,’’ said Norm Ornstein, a counselor to the independent Continuity of Government Commission, a bipartisan panel created to study the issue. ``It’s a very (…)