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Mike Wallace interview on 60 Minutes of Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: Iranian Leader Opens Up Ahmadinejad Speaks Candidly With Mike Wallace About Israel, Nukes, Bush.

Mike Wallace was VERY disrespectful. Maybe it was not such a good idea to have a Jew interview the Iranian president. If I were Les Moonves, CEO of CBS, I would be thinking about firing Wallace for his lack of professionalism. However, Les Moonves is a Jew, also. They are both disposed by their culture to be sworn enemies of Iran. There should have been a statement on the show about the conflict of interest.

I am against violence of any kind. However, that said, I thought that the Iranian president was quite a reasonable man.

Oh, and as per the "wipe Israel off the map" comments, that's a much worse mistranslation. He never used any language even close to that. He talked about his hope that the "occupying regime" would fall, akin to how the Shah fell, Saddam fell, and the Soviet Union fell. His speech was completely passive (didn't discuss any involvement from Iran) and spoke nothing of harm to the people in the state of Israel.

Oh, and as per the "wipe Israel off the map" comments, that's a much worse mistranslation. He never used any language even close to that. He talked about his hope that the "occupying regime" would fall, akin to how the Shah fell, Saddam fell, and the Soviet Union fell. His speech was completely passive (didn't discuss any involvement from Iran) and spoke nothing of harm to the people in the state of Israel.

Hopefully some of you caught his interview with Mike Wallace on 60 minutes yesterday... If not, here is a transcript -

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/08/09/60minute s/main1879867.shtml

Ahmadinejad++
Wallace--

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/01/19/earlysho w/living/ConsumerWatch/main667690.shtml

Ah yes, that's an unforgettable quote from the Enron documentary.

Here's a quote from a CBS article from Jan 2004:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/06/01/eveningn ews/main620626.shtml
" "He just f---s California," says one Enron employee. "He steals money from California to the tune of about a million."
"Will you rephrase that?" asks a second employee.
"OK, he, um, he arbitrages the California market to the tune of a million bucks or two a day," replies the first.
The tapes, from Enron's West Coast trading desk, also confirm what CBS reported years ago: that in secret deals with power producers, traders deliberately drove up prices by ordering power plants shut down. "

Cancel your land line and get a cell phone (and remember to put a text-messaging block on it). You won't receive ANY telemarketing calls.

And you'll also be screwed in case of a power failure, when celluar towers lose power. POTS is amazingly reliable, running on batteries for a long time. (Of course, for best results you'll need an old-school wired phone - pick one up at Goodwill.)

*Shrug*. My country has been targetted by Islamic terrorists for about two decades. They are backed by a Chinese/US/Saudi Arabia supported, armed and funded nuclear power. The Islamic terrorists already have nukes. Believe me, it really can't get worse from where I sit.

http://www.kashmir-information.com/Terrorism/
https://lists.cs.columbia.edu/pipermail/ornet/2002 -June/004544.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_Kashmir
http://www.kashmirherald.com/january2002/kashmirte rrorismupdate.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10958641/
http://www.brookings.edu/views/op-ed/fellows/beher a_20020525.htm
http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/publication/faultlin es/volume16/Article1.htm
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/pakistan/nuke/index. html
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/10/12/terror/m ain648733.shtml
http://www.indiadaily.com/editorial/1577.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_and_weapons_ of_mass_destruction
http://www.parapundit.com/archives/000575.html
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040104-102921-916 6r.htm

And you think I worry about teeny little things like giving nukes to Lebanon forcing Israel to openly declare its nuclear status? I suspect you need to learn a little bit more about the rest of the world.

I believe the AP dispatch you point to is wrong.

Every other story I've been able to find on it says the soldiers were captured in northern Israel. For example, this, from the generally pro-palestinian UK Guardian:

"The crisis began on June 25 when Hamas-linked militants in the Gaza Strip carried out a cross-border attack on a military outpost in Israel, killing two soldiers and capturing one. Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas joined the fray in July, attacking a military patrol on the border in northern Israel, killing three soldiers and capturing two. Both Hamas and Hezbollah have said the two attacks were not related."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-59 58249,00.html

Or this, from CBS News:

"The fighting began when Hezbollah kidnapped the soldiers in a cross-border raid."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/07/17/ap/world /mainD8ITT2L02.shtml

The New York Times:

"The president was referring to the Hezbollah militants who on Wednesday took two Israeli soldiers hostage and killed eight others in a cross-border attack from Lebanon."

I note that the AP dispatch was the first reporting the capture, when things were still obviously a little confused. The Israelis hadn't even confirmed the abduction at the time it was written. Also, note that the dispatch's first and second paragraphs are somewhat contradictory.

    - AJ

reason stands that their children will have even better health to look forward to

What ever you do, do NOT get a loan from Sallie Mae. SLM Corporation, the backers of Sallie Mae loans is a very profitable company that would love for you to sign on the bottom line. They give kick backs to universities to sign you up. They are also well connected in DC - better than credit card companies. As a consequense, you cannot get out of one of their loans if you experience a hardship - not even credit card do that to you.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/05/05/60minute s/main1591583_page2.shtml

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/14/business/14salli e.html?ex=1310529600&en=7536d00984c03b89&ei=5088&p artner=rssnyt&emc=rss

The Continental Congress regularly received quantities of intercepted British and Tory mail. On November 20, 1775, it received some intercepted letters from Cork, Ireland, and appointed a committee made up of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Johnson, Robert Livingston, Edward Rutledge, James Wilson and George Wythe "to select such parts of them as may be proper to publish." The Congress later ordered a thousand copies of the portions selected by the Committee to be printed and distributed. A month later, when another batch of intercepted mail was received, a second committee was appointed to examine it. Based on its report, the Congress resolved that "the contents of the intercepted letters this day read, and the steps which Congress may take in consequence of said intelligence thereby given, be kept secret until further orders."

Although Greenpeace still opposes all nuclear power -- a Google search for them showed a victim of Chernobyl, with no mention of the less-glamorous pollution you cite -- one of the group's founders has called nuclear "an environmentally sound and safe choice." As I understand it the nuclear plant designs have improved considerably over the last few decades; I'd rather live near a newly-built nuke plant than near a coal plant.

Re: environmentalists opposing wind power, I recently saw an article about this. One argument they made was that the windmills would kill birds -- can't use a power source that harms any living thing in any way! Worse, it just so happens that Sen. Ted Kennedy opposes a wind farm that would spoil the view from his mansion. It's not even a reasonable aesthetic complaint -- the windmills are neat-looking. "More than 17 government agencies" are involved in the permiting process.

I've been a long-time fan (and a stock-holder) of the company. Their software-quality has slipped noticably during the years. Their web-pages contain horribly broken HTML at times, with the bug existing for many months until it finaly goes away and the same browser no longer has a problem.

Their "message boards" (attached to each article) are some times either completely inaccessible, or have features missing — the "recommendations", for example, were broken for a couple of weeks recently. Someone must've been on vacation...

The stock dropped over 20% two days ago, because their software-writing was not fast enough for the new advertising model(s). They must do something, or Google will eat them alive...

You're Getting A Dell

You misspelled "You're going to Hell".

Well, that's not how it is ending up. Given that the cost of education in (time and money) is increasing beyond the amount that can be paid, offshoring is being used primarily to replace high quality domestic workers with those who have low initial cost but higher costs in having the proper people do it afterwards to clean up.

Businesses will react accordingly. Its a case-by-case basis, some jobs that were offshored are being returned to the states, but that doesn't mean that offshoring is altogether bad. Eventually businesses will figure what can be offshored and what can't.
Is it bad when companies adopt Linux, it is the very essence of global collaboration and low cost adoption. Think of all the "high quality" proprietary OS programming job opportunities that are lost each year because of Linux. The economic advantage, however, is that companies don't need to pay for a proprietary OS to create products. The lower barrier to entry means more new products which means new jobs.

You must be joking if the newer products out there have any resemblance to "quality" - Lenovo's machines are using less durable materials, Dell's laptops have models that explode, and HP's status gone down to a "ink revenue station" seller that's about to get the problems of NCR's Nyberg generation (Hurd) all over it.

First, laptop batteries have been exploding for years. Things should be good enough for their application. Mission critical systems shouldn't be buying Dell computers, at the same time average home users don't necessarily need to pay extra to have raid 5 storage, and uninterrupted power. Personally I don't want to pay twice as much for a computer that lasts twice as long. Technology changes so rapidly that when my computer fails, I would be able to get something far more powerful at a cheaper price. There are situations where quality is of essence, and there are product makers who supply to that market.

Whatever opportunities I'm seeing, you seem to want to keep out of reach of displaced workers and those in states (read:the Rust Belt) have unfavorable economic situations.

The rust belt is getting car jobs again from honda and Toyota, since Japanese automakers are finding it cheaper to produce in those areas. Such areas also are benefitting from the high cost of living in other areas of the countries like California.

When you have merit blind, subsidized access(by redirection of existing subsidy) education, maybe I can see there being practical opportunity.

i do agree widespread investment in education is key to longterm success. The way to gain maximimum advanatage of lower cost of goods and services is to have a developed workforce able to create new value added opportunities.

Offshoring as it is done now is a large mistake in need of a complete overhaul.

It's the same as it's been done for hundreds of years, with the same complaints by displaced workers. Unless you're a poor displaced cobbler or weaver, the result has been a significant improvement in lifestyle.

Said suburbians buy SUVs as steel security blankets — being in a big vehicle that's high off the ground gives them a sense of safety. That's an illusion, of course, but American carmakers have always relied on illusions to sell their products.

AFAIK, it hasn't been used on a national scale, but the EBS has been activated over 20,000 times at the local level since 1975 (http://www.fcc.gov/eb/eas/FCC-94-288.pdf). I've heard tornado alerts over the system several times in my life, and frankly getting it via cell phone text message would be an asset.

Here's a couple articles on the subject in the event you were honestly wondering.

The Emergency Alert System (EAS) page
National Alert System In Disarray
The Partnership for Public Warning

Facts that can be found in the above links:

President Truman established CONELRAD in 1951.
President Kennedy established the EBS in 1963.
President Clinton established the EAS in 1995.
Clinton Administration updated the EAS to all digital in 1996.
President Bush began procedures to amend the EAS rules to include Digital Media Technologies on November 3, 2005.

With all due respect, you're spreading FUD, not FACTS.

A Lodi, Calif., man convicted of supporting terrorism for attending an al-Qaida training camp in Pakistan three years ago. His father pleaded guilty to charges of lying to customs agents about smuggling money to finance the terrorist training.

The FBI learned of the plot from someone the defendants tried to recruit, authorities said. The FBI then arranged for an informant of Arabic descent to pass himself off as an al-Qaida operative.

Batiste met several times in December with the informant and asked for supplies and $50,000 to help him build an "Islamic Army," the indictment said.

Officials described the group as a distinct threat to national security and, at the same time, as something akin to the gang that couldn't think straight.

For the most part, authorities framed the case as one against a "homegrown cell" of terrorists and said the seven could have inflicted great harm.

According to the indictment, Batiste, 32, called his men "soldiers" in an "Islamic Army" that would wage a "full ground war."

He said he wanted to "kill all the devils that we can," officials said, and that he wanted most of his group to attend al-Qaida training.

Here are a couple more for you:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/07/28/national /main712548.shtml
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4697365.stm
http://www.muhajabah.com/otherscondemn.php
http://www.cair-net.org/html/911statements.html

Umm...

I'm not quite sure where Enron fits in there but certainly they were not the only companies messing with the market, and in the end it was the regulators' fault for allowing the market to be messed with in the first place.

LOL!

Where do the Enron Traders who were taped by the Snohomish Public Utility fit into this?

I think it's funny how you start off your argument claiming the problem was not enough deregulation, and then you end it by blaming the regulators for not regulating enough.

You sound like a Republican... can't tell the difference between his head and his ass.

http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/01/25/enron.suicid e/
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/04/10/eveningn ews/main505845.shtml

Hahaha! You can't stop the conspiracy theory!! Poor old Vice Chairman Clifford Baxter had integrity and didn't like the what went down at Enron.. guess it got to him back in 2002.. and he killed himself. Just before investigators could speak with him.

Hehehehehee!!

P.S. I'm convinced there's a conspiracy surround why no one had mentioned this yet..

They are also pretty much unregulated - they are not a credit bureau, so they do not fall under these regulations.

http://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs6b-SpecReports.h tm#6 and http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/21/eveningn ews/consumer/main619029.shtml for more

They are also pretty much unregulated - they are not a credit bureau, so they do not fall under these regulations.

http://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs6b-SpecReports.h tm#6 and http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/21/eveningn ews/consumer/main619029.shtml for more

Let me see if I get this straight...

1. Man gets property broken into more than once
2. Man installs camera and warning signs on property to thwart future break-ins
3. Cops arrive at man's house on unrelated issue to talk to 15-year old son
4. Man is uncooperative and cops try to get into the house by sticking foot in door
5. After refusing entry, cops promise to return with a warrant
6. Man reminds cops that there is a camera recording them at the doorstep
7. Man reports abusive officers to precinct with videotape in hand to prove it
8. Man is arrested for 'wiretap fraud', a felony in the US of A.

Let's parallel that with another person we all know so well:

1. Holding over 300 prisoners in Guantanamo Bay prison without charging them with a crime for years on end
2. Ok'd the illegal NSA wiretap over 30 times, and would do it again. After 5 years of monitoring every single Internet packet, they are exposed and hide the details under the guise of 'State Secrets'.
3. 5+ years of bank data was secretly funneled and reviewed without a warrant or subponea
4. Signed over 750 Signing Statements, more than double the number of ALL PREVIOUS PRESIDENTS combined
5. Advocated, financed and supported the torture of innocent people in the name of 'national security', and tries to pass a signing statement to legalize torture.
6. Funded an illegal war to depose the leader of Iraq, so we could use Iraq as a base from which to stage a local air strike against Iran and Syria for oil. Doing daddy's work, apparently.
7. Lost $9 BILLION dollars in Iraq, then halts the investigation into it.
8. Openly stated that the Constitution is ...just a goddamn piece of paper, and continues to violate it every day.
9. ...and dozens more.

Tell me why again, this one citizen, who is protecting his property (yes, he's been verbally abusive to the cops before, but verbal abuse is not a felony or a crime, in fact, unless you directly threaten the safety of the officers or someone else) is arrested, and this unqualified, election-rigging, law-breaking "individual" is still allowed to run this country into the ground?

The other ironic point to this madness, is that the current rhetoric is that this country is 'safer now than it has ever been'. However, the truth is that this country is now more unstable, partisan, fractured than it has ever been.

There have only been TWO terrorist attacks on domestic soil by foreign terrorists in the last 40 PRESIDENTS.. and get this:

1. Both attacks occurred were under Bush presidency (Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. 10 years later)
2. Both attacks occurred at the Twin Towers (basement on the first attack, from the air on the second attack)
3. Both attacks resulted in an immediate deployment to Iraq shortly after (Desert Storm, War in Iraq)
4. Both attacks resulted in the goal of removing Saddam Hussein from power (second one deemed successful)
5. Both attacks implicated Iraqis in the scandal (Saudi's attacked TT, not Iraqis)
6. Both ended up in senseless wars where thousands of innocent soldiers died

The end is near for the Bush regime, thanks to 5 states now signing onto the Articles of Impeachment to get this dropout out of office. Now if we cou

You know, there was a time when doing that sort of thing was called treason...

Maybe if this administration was a little more well-liked they'd be able to convince people that the leaking of it's shortcomings and bastardization of the law(s) of the land was a real threat. As it stands, the only thing these leaks are doing is proving to your average American that, hey, Bush really is the bastard the ultra-liberals decried him as in the first place.

No one is forcing this on you, IT IS AN OPTION FOR PEOPLE WHO NEED IT.

I can see, if you think that's the case, why you'd think I sound a little crazy. But please read up on states that are passing laws expressly lining things up to permit only the sale of such guns once the technology becomes "adequate." Maryland's last governor (here in my state) also launched such an initiative. Just keep watching - it's not pretty.

Was this some kind of cosmic blast that blew out the space instruments and blasted waves across the extent of the entire Pacific Ocean?

It seems very odd that the same day the Hubble went off-line
(due to a possible 'strike by cosmic radiation' or a 'memory corruption event due to energetic particle bombardment')
that the global satellite imagery went off-line for the entire day ( at http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/tropic/tropic.html )( due to a 'power failure that kept it from retrieving images from its memory')
and massive waves caused by a storm more than 3,000 kilometres away washed away homes, hotels and restaurants along the coastline of Central America. The barrage began Sunday the 18th, and the waves weren't beginning to weaken until Tuesday afternoon.

Heavy surf was pounding the Pacific Coast from Chile to California -
A FREAKISHLY POWERFUL storm far off in the South Pacific propelled huge swells to the Americas, causing a surge of waves that battered homes and beachfront businesses from Peru to Mexico.
Several hundred people were evacuated in at least eight countries.
The waves resulted from a particularly intense low
pressure system several hundred miles off New Zealand that caused
hurricane force winds and rare snowfall at sea level. Masses of water were shoved eastward, creating UNUSUALLY big waves when the swells hit the Americas.

http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2006/06/20/ central-america.html

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/20/ap/world /mainD8IC743G1.shtml

April 21, 1976, the Supreme Court reversed the judgment of the Fifth Circuit in United States v. Miller, holding that the bank depositor had no legitimate expectation of privacy in the contents of checks and deposit slips since the documents were not confidential communications, but rather were negotiable instruments voluntarily conveyed to the bank. Moreover, the Court ruled that the fourth amendment does not prohibit a third party from obtaining information and conveying it to the government.

Again, it would be nice if not only /. posters would research the relevant law before they accuse the President of trampling civil rights, but it would also be nice if the NY Times, the Post, and all the other liberal MSM's would do some legal research as well.

Someone may wish to inform congress of this fact because several congressmen, including one quoted in the fair and ballanced (tm) Fox News article you link to below.

If you are going to be such a smartass that you won't even read a byline, I can't help you. The article was an AP story carried by Fox. AP is of course left-leaning (by American political standards). The reality is that several congressmen who are on their respective intel committees did call the newspapers asking them not to run the story (I actually saw this on a news report). Remember that these congressmen are sworn not to divulge what they have been briefed on, so they can't just come out and confirm the stories!

There is not just a conern about "your money's privacy" there is a concern about your and my privacy in total. Levying a tax is not the same as snooping through your financial transactions and it's very prejudicial to suggest otherwise. These two things are apples and oranges.

Again, if you can't see the irony in placing a privacy right (nowhere articulated in the Constitution) above the very property right the privacy concerns (clearly articulated in the Constitution) then I can't help you. That the left distrusts the government completely, except to take away and redistribute my property is another irony that you may fail to grasp.

And I seriously think that there is a large segment of conservative America that honestly thinks that Bush has to trample our civil rights to defend us. Bush was give temporary emergency powers in the wake of 9/11. They've had FIVE YEARS to put the legal structures in place to carry out these kinds of investigations legally. Hell, there was even a special court setup for this sot of thing PRIOR to 9/11 that rarely ever turned down warrant requests. Why is it that court warrants and REAL congressional oversight were acceptable and effective for every president we've elected prior to this one

You assume that everyone agrees with you about the "trampling" of our civil rights. What exact program are you referring to that didn't exist in some shape or form prior to 9/11? I think if you look at Echelon (which CBS News and all the MSM have conveniently forgotten about now that Bush is President) you'll see that the government was doing this back when it was Governor Bush. As for the Patriot Act, that merely took existing tools that law enforcement has used for decades and applied it to intelligence.

As far as warrants go, the Fourth Amendment doesn't say all searchs have to have warrants, just that searches not be unreasonable. I'll bet the framers would be all for intercepting the international calls of enemies of the Republic without warrants (the Clinton adminstration actually did searches without warrants, in the FBI spy case). Perhaps liberals believe that we would need a warrant to listen to a call Adolf Hitler made to agents in America in 1944? This is a war, not a law enforcemn

p.s. 31% figure comes from this CBS report:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/06/16/health/m ain623412.shtml

You keep your universities and other institutions from being petri dishes full of festering militant Islamo-fascism that occasionally ships people like Mohammad Atta (who spent his time in Europe organizing, recruiting, meeting, and arranging finances in advance of killing several thousand US citizens and no small number or Europeans) right through your own financial and legal system and straight over here, or back into the frey of proto-democracies in the middle east.

Out of curiosity, and do you really think the international banking operations in the EU don't monitor and report to your own law enforcement, intel, and counter-terrorism agencies on international money transfers, especially to and from known terrorist supporters?

Are you that naive? No, I didn't think so. You're just grinding the usual blunt, directionless, anti-American axe. How about we transfer $10k back and forth between us, and you can speculate on whether or not your own government will know it happened, and attempt to correlate that transaction against all of your credit card purchases and travel?

Maybe now they can find the missing 2.3 trillion dollars and maybe the Defense Department's Office of the Inspector General will finally be able to improve the pentagons accounting standards

May I remind the Slashdot readers that, in the time of Galileo, the "scientific consensus" was that the Earth is the center of the solar system (or is that the universe?)
It wasn't the scientific consensus, it was the allowed consensus - if you deviated, you got the Inquisition on your a**. Something similar is being attempted in the US - if you deviate from the political position on climate change, your reports are being altered, or you are being told not to discuss your findings.

"This would be the digital equivalent of a drive-by shooting," said Maynor.

I'm going to break my response into multiple posts because the first one is so long.

The US doesn't torture prisoners. What you're doing is changing the meaning of the word "torture" to cover anything other than keeping them in a 5 star hotel and saying "please" and "thank you" every 5 seconds.

An interesting assertion. This flies flat in the face of pretty much all evidence that's come to light so far. You know, I've stayed in some pretty crappy motels, but I've never had the kind of "service" detainees have had in the care of US forces.

On August 1st 2002, Alberto Gonzalez sent a memo to the President about the use of torture in interrogation of prisoners. In this document, torture defined extremely narrowly. Physical torture is defined as physical punishments that would result in severe physical impairment, organ failure, or death and psychological torture is defined as only acts with threaten the above to the interogated or to a third party and the use of drugs to alter the senses or the personality of the detainee. (You can find more torture documents here.)

This, interestingly, does not cover many of the acts that went on at Abu Ghraib. Beatings that don't cause organ failure, severe impairment, or death don't count as torture under this. Electric shocks don't count as torture under this. Sexual humilation and rape doesn't count as torture under this. Hanging people in stress positions for hours doesn't count as torture under this. Having a prisoner parade around nude and covered in feces doesn't count as torture under this. You can find many images of the abuse on the Wikimedia Commons. Be warned, due to the sexual molestation involved, most of these images are not really safe for work.

Any sane person would consider these acts as having stepped beyond interrogation techniques and into torture.

Of course, even by these harsh and extremist standards, torture went on under US forces. Manadel al-Jamadi was beaten to death in the hands of soldiers at Abu Ghraib. That certainly counts as an interrogation method that leads to "organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."

Prisoner abuse by US forces in the "War on Terror" didn't start in Iraq, though. There were actually several deaths of detainees under US control in Bagram in Afghanistan.

Beyond that, you have Guantanamo Bay prison. The abuses of detainees at Guantanamo either haven't been as severe as those at Bagram and Abu Ghraib, or they've been kept a better secret. There have been numerous prisoners beaten (though not to death), and there is a lot of use of stress positions to cause pain and suffering to coerce prisoners as reports of treats that violated even Gozalez's standards to the family members of detainees. The tactics there that are publicly known are a lot softer than those at other facilities, but are certainly harsher than what's tolerated at prisons in US land, but there are a few things that have gotten out that suggest that some of the accusations of former inmates have some substance.

In one chilling account, Sean Baker, a soldier who served in the 438th Military Police was asked to pretend to be a resistant detainee in a training exercise in 2003. Other guards who were not aware he wasn't a detainee came in a began suffocating and beating him. The beatings did not stop with the codeword for the exercise and only stopped when he yelled that he was a soldier and they found his fatigues under the orange prisoner jumpsuit. Unfortunately, by then the head trauma led to traumatic brain injury and a discharge f

You are SERIOUSLY overestimating both the intelligence of the average screener and Mr. Harper's public visibility. We're on Slashdot; lots of privacy geeks here, and I'm sure not 0.1 percent of us knew who Jim Harper was (not to mention that the DHS has a privacy commitee). I know I didn't know him.

Now, remember this story?. If the kind of conspiracy you are expounding were true, don't you think it would have been a lot easier to ID Senator Ted Kennedy than freakin' Jim "Nobody you'd know" Harper?

Well, according to this interview (on the 3rd page) with Charles R. Jenkins, who spent 40 years in North Korea,

Pelley asked Jenkins what amazed him the most about the world since he left it in 1965.

He had never laid a hand on a computer, much less been on the Internet. He told 60 Minutes he was surprised there were so many women in the Army, that there were black policemen, and, as he put it, you can't smoke anywhere anymore.

Jenkins says he had been told about the historic landing of men of the moon. "I was told that by the Koreans, one of the officers. They wouldn't say what country, but they said, 'Una handa la'... some country landed on the moon."

So apparently, smoking bans are as shocking as landing on the moon :)

But seriously, what is it with people saying, "oh, things are no different now than they ever were?" Yes, women wore pants in armament factories, some people had tattoos and piercings, and there was some race mixing going on - but to pretend that there has been no cultural change since the early 20th century is rather shallow.

It is taking a binary absolutist position on social issues, and saying that "Since some people did X, therefore the whole culture was like that back then". A better issue is to look at cultural acceptance levels, which tend to have a analog scale of acceptability or "respectability".

To take women wearing pants, they were taken up as part of work uniforms long ago, but was not generally seen in general public until some subcultures adopted it in the 50's, and then the 60's created widespread adoption of the fashion, at least in the U.S.

If all pieces of mail delivered to Congressmen went through such a procedure, the mail would be useless.

My point exactly.

Citations:

Is my mail is being irradiated? Currently only mail to the White House, Congressional offices, and federal government offices in the 202-205 Zip Code exchanges is being irradiated. Irradiation is taking place at facilities in Ohio and New Jersey.

http://www.epa.gov/radiation/sources/mail_irrad.ht m

From that source, it does look like the irradiation is being done in Ohio and New Jersey, now.

The irradiation of Congressional mail beginning in November 2001 followed the detection of anthrax spores in 16 Congressional offices. It represented the first use of the irradiation process to eradicate anthrax spores from the mail delivery system. Beginning in January 2002, when the United States Postal Service began delivering irradiated mail to Congressional offices, the Office of Compliance became aware of numerous employee complaints of adverse health symptoms apparently caused by contact with irradiated mail, including headaches, nausea, nose bleeds, rashes, eye and skin irritation and similar symptoms.

http://www.compliance.gov/reports-studies/irradiat edmail/irradiatedmail_07-02.html

It would seem that Congressional Staff is less than thrilled...

The MSM ran some articles about mail irradiation a few years ago. For instance, Congress takes new steps to minimize mail risk or Irradiated Mail A Possible Health Risk.

Of course, the best evidence for me is that when I asked a staffer last week about the best way to get a copy of an article to my Congressman, she gave me his home fax (I've got a pretty good relationship with him) and said, "Of course, you know that you never want to mail something, right?"

He is however, a theoretical physicist who tends be more like rambo in the aspects of blowing away baddies and being versed in the use of high-tech weaponry. Not exactly your typical specimen of geekdom.

Who would be the best actor for the scientist cross hero role? I'm voting for Will Peterson, but I doubt they'd transition him from TV to movie. Mark Harmon might also be a decent choice, though I tend to find that he falls more towards military image than scientific... and Peterson has a better 'look' for the Gordon Freeman, if a little extra bulk.

unless Bush knew that certain reports were in fact not true or if he was intentionally trying to mislead people

And you call that "the nature of intelligence".

There's no arguing with that.

That's nothing LANAL Labs has ~ 100 miles of road dedicated to it. Someone decided in their devine wisdom to engineer the road such that for 80 of the 90 miles it's on sandstone, not a major problem--- if it weren't on the edge of a ~80 dgree cliff (not quite perpendicular to the raveen that the roads takes you to the labs runs along). Now this is fairly bad. Also add: it's a 4 lane road two directions. A free way. High Rad rating. A valcanic trench ~20 miles of a valcando's. Mix in a few fision power plants, and I'd say that's definatly a recipe for disaster-wich it has been. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/08/eveningn ews/main672516.shtml. I want to know what asshat decided: YEAH, lets place nuclear expirments right on a ---love making fault zone ---WTF were you people thinking!

Maybe healthy astronauts never die from acceleration, but civilians in simulations haven't all been so fortunate.

Penalties like these have been levied against corporate officers or otherwise arranged by the SEC several times. For example, lifetime bans for Al Dunlap of Sunbeam and Sam Waksal of ImClone. Frank Quattrone had a lifetime securities industry ban but that was overturned when his conviction was overturned.

"they'll sell the higher speeds and a select group of corrupt individuals in the government will get a kickback of the revenue and hide it away in their freezers "

I don't know what she wore, but she listens to the Beatles and Rolling Stones on her iPod. I don't know about you, but I'm going to vote for the candidate that likes to "shake things up."

"Why bother interviewing the reporter to find out his anon source? just look up his call records for the last couple of weeks and they can find out for themselves."

According to this http://editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_d isplay.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002503697

The USA today story that started all this was somwhat flawed. They claimed that Verison, Bellsouth and AT&T were handing over all these phone records. Verison and Bellsouth have now denied that they were ever asked by the NSA for this stuff so that just leaves AT&T but all they say is that they assist the govt. within the law and wouldn't comment on the NSA charges.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/05/18/national /main1633040.shtml

Bellsouth demands a retraction and USA Today just says they are going to "take a closer look" into their story.

i'd like to note that in no way i said that :)
what i meant was that using small steps one can soon transfer into another. and exactly small steps are dangerous, because most people don't object to each small change, but they would object loudly if all these changes were introduced in a single bundle.

imagine all the restrictions and gov power raisings that have taken place over last, let's say, 15 years. now imagine them happening all at once.

i'm not trying to say that nothing like that haven't happened before - but that was done in secrecy and bringing that out to daylight could be dangerous to those who performed different acts. now, we have a german man that is trying to sue for being held for 4 months and tortured in a secret american prison in europe. (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/12/06/terror/ main1099246.shtml and other sources).
now, that could hardly get worse in public, could it ? of course it could...

Judge T.S. Ellis declined to even consider the merits of his case, agreeing with the governments claim that letting the case proceed would compromise national security, saying, private interests must give way to the national interest in preserving state secrets.
http://www.airamericaradio.com/node/2079

wtf ? at which point has the world become so soft that even when things like that come to our knowledge it is considered normal ?
both jefferson & franklin are overcited, but weren't they right ?

AP) Police in seven European countries struck Tuesday at a sophisticated child abuse and pornography ring dubbed "Shadowz Brotherhood," arresting 50 people and seizing computer equipment, CD-ROMs and videos, authorities said.

Police described the images created and distributed by the group as some of the most shocking they had ever seen. Members of the ring allegedly broadcast live pictures of abuse on the Internet and posted images of children, including babies, being sexually abused and tortured.

"In terms of the kind of material they are posting and allowing access to, it's the worst group I have ever encountered," said Detective Chief Supt. Len Hynds of Britain's National High-tech Crime Unit, which coordinated a yearlong investigation with the European police organization Europol.

I wouldn't suggest you go looking for it.

This "pedophilia in the internet" meme is actually more disgusting than adults having sex with children.

If you really believe that, your values put you in a very tiny minority, and near some very unsavory people.

Because a true pedophile can only harm a limited number of people, whereas the people who keep bringing the fear of pedophiles are the meanest evil bastards one can find in the world.

This guy had hundreds of pictures, which means hundreds of victims:

TALLAHASSEE - Attorney General Charlie Crist today announced the arrest of a Clay County convicted sex offender for violating his probation. Authorities arrested Robert Reed, a registered sex offender since 1999, after receiving a tip that he had child pornography on his computer and was distributing it over the internet. The case will be prosecuted by the Attorney General's Office of Statewide Prosecution.

A joint investigation by the Attorney General's CyberCrime Unit, the FBI Cyber Crime Task Force and the Florida Department of Corrections Probation and Parole Services revealed that Reed, 26, placed pornographic videos on the internet and made them available to others online. A search of Reed's computer was conducted, unearthing hundreds of images of child pornography. Reed was arrested by officers with Probation and Parole Services.

Children for sale documents an enormous problem.

The FBI documents an enormous problem:

Dr. Hernandez concluded that 76 percent of the child pornographers or travelers (those who travel or intend to travel interstate for the purpose of having sex with a minor) who participated in his study admitted to having committed contact sex crimes which went undetected by the criminal justice system. These offenders had an average of 30.5 child sex victims each. In fact, this group of offenders admitted to having molested a combined total of 1,433 victims without ever having been detected. That is not 1,433 more offenses - - it is 1,433 more victims. If you factor in the number of times they offended against each individual victim, the number would be significantly higher. In addition, while Dr. Hernandez' study lumped child pornographers and travelers in the same category, his data shows that the number of undetected sex crimes was significantly higher for child pornographers than it was for travelers. In short, child pornographers, who consisted of 49 of the 62 subjects, were responsible for the vast majority of the 1,433 victims reported for that group.

History has repeatedly demonstrated that you cannot open a door to censorship, because once you have it, who will

At 50 to 60 death per day (numbers from Alawi quote) the Iraqi internal strife exceeds the average death toll of the 15 years Lebanon civil war of an estimated 100,000. Go ahead, I know you can do the math yourself.

They wanted to bring the country into a civil war with the Golden Mosque bombings and related attacks, they have failed.

What news sources are you consuming? The amount of violence in Iraq certainly qualifies as low intensity civil war by any conventional measure. And the situation has been continuously deteriorating. Denying this will just set us up for a colossal failure. Even Alawi who has been the US most favorite Iraqi politician (not counting Chalabi) has said as much. Now even Basra is starting to come unglued. A trend that started last year when militias infiltrated the police force is now playing out. A development that was entirely predictable when the US failed to unarm and disband the Shia militias while dissolving the old Iraqi army (probably the worst blunder of the whole occupation saga - and there have been so many!).

The Basra security situation is very bad news.

Sorry my friend, but I will certainly take the former Iraqi PM's assement over yours. You may want to check out some broader spectrum of news sites to protect yourself from falling for spin.