"It is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence ofAlmighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits,and humbly to implore his protection and favors."
-- George Washington
(Thanksgiving Proclamation, 3 October 1789)Reference: George Washington: A Collection, W.B. Allen, ed. (543)
If America is to survive, it is eventually going to have to choose national security over political correctness. Shahin has complained that he was “humiliated” and that the way the imams were treated was “terrible.” Indeed. It is terrible. It is terrible that he and the other imams who were taken off the plane, as well as other Islamic leaders in America, have allowed those who commit violence in the name of their religion to do so unimpeded and unchallenged. It is terrible that these and other Islamic scholars have responded only with vilification when asked about the teachings of their faith that promote violence, instead of with honest dialogue and attempts to reform those teachings. It is terrible that, if they were indeed removed from the plane for praying, they are among those who have allowed their religion to become so associated with violence that American citizens on an airplane become alarmed at the sight of Islamic prayer.Amen, brother, amen.
A general reply, for the record
A pre-Thanksgiving miscellany:
- Islam is not a race. One does not become a racist by opposing the jihad ideology.
- I do not wish to drive all Muslims into the sea.
- I have never said that the only good Muslim is an ex-Muslim.
- I have never said that Muslims want to kill all Jews and Christians.
- I do not single out the jihadist interpretation of Islam and anoint it as the only legitimate interpretation. As I have pointed out many times, all the orthodox sects and schools of jurisprudence teach violent jihad. I would love to highlight mainstream peaceful Islamic sects that are regarded as orthodox by other Muslims. Unfortunately, such sects do not exist. Courageous sincere individual reformers are deeply appreciated and to be applauded, but they are just that -- individuals.
- It is false that by pointing out how jihadists use the Qur'an and Islamic teaching, I am encouraging and legitimizing those jihadists or pushing moderate Muslims to become jihadists. In fact, they do not listen to me. More importantly, it is incumbent upon moderates to refute the jihad ideology if they can. But if I can find holes in the moderates' presentations, jihadists will find ten more. And so those moderate constructions will prove useless to do what must be done: convincing Muslims to be peaceful.
- Tabari says Aisha was nine when Muhammad consummated his marriage with her. That he says more about Aisha doesn't mean that somewhere he contradicts this assertion.
- "Apologist" is not a pejorative term. It means a defender of a faith. And when apologists say something, this doesn't mean that no one else says it.
- Word has gone out that I support unrestricted immigration from Muslim countries, with adjustment only to screen for active jihadists. This is false.
- Comments here are unmoderated. If you think I support the sentiments expressed in one, please establish that with quotations from my own writings.
- I did not add the section of my FAQ about the need to "remain true to our principles of freedom and equality of rights and dignity for all" in response to critics who claimed that I wanted to subvert those principles. In fact, that has been part of the FAQ since the site began in October 2003.
I'm all for any airline that muzzys are boycotting. Just watch -- it'll be the only terror-free airline!Omar Shahin calls for boycott of US Airways
Omar Shahin, one of the imams removed from the plane, has links to Osama bin Laden and Hamas. "Five clerics removed from US Airways fly back to Phoenix," by Martiga Lohn for Associated Press, with thanks to Twostellas:MINNEAPOLIS (AP) -- Six Muslim clerics who were refused tickets by US Airways booked a flights back home Tuesday on another airline, but it still wasn't clear what led to their removal from their original flight.
The imams had attended a conference in Minneapolis of the North American Imams Federation, said Omar Shahin of Phoenix, president of the group, who was one of those removed from the flight. Three of them said their normal evening prayers in the airport terminal before boarding the Phoenix-bound plane, he said.
"They took us off the plane, humiliated us in a very disrespectful way," Shahin said after the incident on Monday night.
The next morning Shahin called for Muslims and non-Muslims to boycott US Airways unless the company changes its ways. "They know what they have to do, they have to be fair and just with everybody," he said....Airport spokesman Patrick Hogan said some witnesses said some of the imams made anti-American comments about the war in Iraq before boarding the flight, and that some of the men asked for seat belt extensions even though a flight attendant thought they didn't need them.
"There were a number of things that gave the flight crew pause," Hogan said. It wasn't immediately possible to verify whether the passengers who reported suspicious activity witnessed it themselves.
Shahin said Tuesday that three members of the group prayed in the terminal before the six boarded the plane, although on Monday night he said they had prayed on the plane. They entered the aircraft individually, except for one member who is blind and needed a guide, Shahin said. Once on the plane, the six did not sit together, he said.
"We did nothing" on the plane, Shahin said Tuesday.
Shahin said no one from the airline asked the six to leave, but when police arrived, the group complied....
US Airways Group Inc. issued a statement saying it was interviewing crew members and ground workers to find out more about what happened.
"We are always concerned when passengers are inconvenienced and especially concerned when a situation occurs that causes customers to feel their dignity was compromised. We do not tolerate discrimination of any kind," the airline said.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations planned to file a complaint, said CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper.
"Because, unfortunately, this is a growing problem of singling out Muslims or people perceived to be Muslims at airports, and it's one that we've been addressing for some time," Hooper said.
Watch for the criminalization of investigations of Muslims in airports.
Give thanks we live in America, land of the free, home of the brave, where the media's elite journalists can leak top-secret information with impunity, win Pulitzer Prizes, cash in on lucrative book deals, routinely insult their readership and viewership, broadcast enemy propaganda, turn a blind eye to the victims of jihad, and cast themselves as oppressed victims on six-figure salaries.Not a long article, but well worth the read, especially the stuff about all the islamic governments and their intolerance.
God bless the U.S.A.
"Both of those individuals, of course, would be disastrous for us for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is their position on immigration, which is to open the border," Tancredo told WND in an exclusive interview. "I will do everything I can – whether I'm a candidate for president or just as a member of Congress – I will do everything I can to make sure those two names are not the only options that people have."
'Wal-Mart retreat from 'gay' agenda not enough
'Campaigners still plan 'information explosion' at retailer's stores Friday
Posted: November 22, 20065:00 p.m. EasternBy Bob Unruh© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com
Group wants to save Wal-Mart from pro-homosexual activists
Campaigners say they plan to hold their "information explosion" at Wal-Mart stores Friday even though the company has signaled a retreat from its support of the radical homosexual agenda.
"We continue to encourage men and women, dads and moms, grandpas and grandmas, Christians from every walk of life to call on Wal-Mart to change its course and return to traditional family values and the biblical principles that made it great," said a statement today from Flip Benham, who is working on the http://www.wnd.com/redir/r.asp?http://www.savewalmart.com/ outreach."We are not a protest. We are a proclamation that Jesus Christ is Lord! We are calling an 'old friend' back to its godly roots. Wal-Mart can be saved and so can America," he said.
Wal-Mart's announced policy changed this week prompted the American Family Association to cancel a boycott called for Friday and Saturday.The change, according to Mona Williams, vice-president for communications at Wal-Mart, will have the company evaluating on a case-by-case basis its support for outside groups.
Many have criticized the company's decision to join the National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce and contribute $25,000 to its operating budget, as well as a $60,000 contribution to another homosexual organization to sponsor a conference.
November 10, 2006
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Best Buy Bans Use of Merry Christmas In Advertising
Best Buy has announced they will be using "Happy Holidays" this coming Christmas shopping season, and they will not be using "Merry Christmas."
Dawn Bryant, a spokeswoman at Best Buy Co. Inc., says their advertising will not be using the term "Merry Christmas." "We are going to continue to use the term holiday because there are several holidays throughout that time period, and we certainly need to be respectful of all of them," Bryant said. Click here for reference article.
While many other retailers have decided to return to the traditional "Merry Christmas", Best Buy will not be among them. Best Buy considers the use of "Merry Christmas" to be disrespectful.
But while Best Buy, the largest consumer electronics company in the nation, will not be mentioning Christmas, they sure do want the shopping dollars from those who remember the Reason for the season.
Sincerely,
Donald E. Wildmon, Founder and Chairman
American Family Association
Take Action
Send an e-mail to Best Buy telling them of your disappointment at their decision to ban Christmas in their advertising. (You may receive an auto-reply. If so, that is ok. Don't worry about it, your e-mail has been received.)
Forward this to your friends and family so they can learn of Best Buy's decision.
Here's my email to Chairman Schulze (feel free to borrow any and all you want!):Dear Chairman Schulze,
Just a note to let you know I am deeply disappointed in your decision to ban the word Christmas in your "Christmas" promotions. I ask you to reconsider. If, however, you still refuse to use Christmas I will be shopping elsewhere.
I find it deeply disrespectful to CHRISTIANS that you refuse to recognize the very reason that your company's sales spike during December. It's NOT ramadan. It's NOT Channukah. It's NOT Kwaanza.
It's the date to celebrate the birth of Christ, our lord and savior.
Good luck to your company if you decide to disrespect the very culture that built your business.
The Press at War
What ever happened to patriotic reporters?
BY JAMES Q. WILSON
Monday, November 6, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
We are told by careful pollsters that half of the American people believe that American troops should be brought home from Iraq immediately. This news discourages supporters of our efforts there. Not me, though: I am relieved. Given press coverage of our efforts in Iraq, I am surprised that 90% of the public do not want us out right now.
Between Jan. 1 and Sept. 30, 2005, nearly 1,400 stories appeared on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening news. More than half focused on the costs and problems of the war, four times as many as those that discussed the successes. About 40% of the stories reported terrorist attacks; scarcely any reported the triumphs of American soldiers and Marines. The few positive stories about progress in Iraq were just a small fraction of all the broadcasts.
When the Center for Media and Public Affairs made a nonpartisan evaluation of network news broadcasts, it found that during the active war against Saddam Hussein, 51% of the reports about the conflict were negative. Six months after the land battle ended, 77% were negative; in the 2004 general election, 89% were negative; by the spring of 2006, 94% were negative. This decline in media support was much faster than during Korea or Vietnam.
Naturally, some of the hostile commentary reflects the nature of reporting. When every news outlet struggles to grab and hold an audience, no one should be surprised that this competition leads journalists to emphasize bloody events. To some degree, the press covers Iraq in much the same way that it covers America: it highlights conflict, shootings, bombings, hurricanes, tornadoes, and corruption.
But the war coverage does not reflect merely an interest in conflict. People who oppose the entire war on terror run much of the national press, and they go to great lengths to make waging it difficult. Thus the New York Times ran a front-page story about President Bush's allowing, without court warrants, electronic monitoring of phone calls between overseas terrorists and people inside the U.S. On the heels of this, the Times reported that the FBI had been conducting a top-secret program to monitor radiation levels around U.S. Muslim sites, including mosques. And then both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times ran stories about America's effort to monitor foreign banking transactions in order to frustrate terrorist plans. The revelation of this secret effort followed five years after the New York Times urged, in an editorial, that precisely such a program be started.Virtually every government official consulted on these matters urged that the press not run the stories because they endangered secret and important tasks. They ran them anyway. The media suggested that the National Security Agency surveillance might be illegal, but since we do not know exactly what kind of surveillance is undertaken, we cannot be clear about its legal basis. No one should assume that the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires the president to obtain warrants from the special FISA court before he can monitor foreign intelligence contacts. Though the Supreme Court has never decided this issue, the lower federal courts, almost without exception, have held that "the Executive Branch need not always obtain a warrant for foreign intelligence surveillance."
Fighting Shariah
By Diana West
August 25, 2006What President Bush should say to us, Part 2.
Last week in this space, I presented the first half of the speech President Bush should give to re-direct the war on terror. Here is the second half:At home, the line of defense is clear. It is our border. My new strategy calls on us to think of our border as more than just a line on a map. We need to see the border as a cultural line also, a defining line of freedom against proponents of Shariah, which, I cannot emphasize enough, poses a direct threat to our founding principles of liberty and equality. It is that simple. There is a crucial military component to the anti-Shariah defensive, which I will outline momentarily. But without taking civil precautions at the border, even a decisive military victory abroad could be nullified by non-violent means at home.
How? Through largely unregulated immigration of peoples from "Shariah states" — those regions whose governing traditions derive, wholly or in some important part, from the edicts of Islam. If such an influx continues, Islamic law will be accommodated, adopted and even legislated, at least in some jurisdictions, according to majority will. We know this to be true because such a "Shariah shift" is already transforming what sociologists call post-Christian Europe into an increasingly Islamic sphere. If we do not want to see such changes here, we must act. Accordingly, I am asking Congress to amend our laws to bar further Islamic immigration, beginning with immigration from Shariah states.
This, the most crucial domestic component of my anti-Shariah program, will undoubtedly be regarded as the most controversial because it necessitates making a definitive judgment against the laws promulgated by Islam, a religion. This may appear to go against our cherished tradition of religious tolerance, not to mention good manners. But if the laws promulgated by Islam directly threaten freedom of conscience, freedom of expression and religion, women's rights, and key concepts of equality — and they do — it is a sign of intellectual rigor mortis not to say so. And I do say so, but, again, not to launch a transformative military or cultural offensive against Islam, but to initiate the mobilization of a defensive movement to prevent the Islamization of American law and liberty.
And what about Iraq? Thanks to American-led coalition troops, a Ba'athist dictatorship has been dismantled, and Iraq is a parliamentary democracy under a new constitution. It is a matter of increasing significance, however, that this new constitution, ratified by the people of Iraq, enshrines Islamic law above all. This means that when the new Iraq joined the ranks of democratic nations, it simultaneously joined the ranks of Shariah states. This may help explain widespread Iraqi sympathy for Hezbollah, for example, the Iranian-supported Shi'ite terrorist group that not only attacks American and Israeli interests, but also seeks the expansion of Shariah. It also begs the question about long-term American support: How, in the war on terrorism, can we uphold a partner that feels solidarity with terrorists?
We cannot — certainly not as a realistic war strategy to safeguard the liberty of the Free World. Once, I saw the war that began on September 11 as dividing the world between those countries that were with us, and those that were against us. I have now come to define the crisis, both cultural and military, as occurring between the Free World and the Shariah World. The centrality of Shariah in Islam is not something Americans can or should try to change. But it is not something we can ignore, either.
With this centrality in mind, our goals in the Middle East should change from, in effect, promoting Shariah-democracy to preventing the export of Shariah and terrorism to advance Shariah. Accordingly, I have directed our military to formulate a plan to redeploy American troops from Iraq's cities, where they have been operating at great risk to attain stability for the Iraqi government, to bases in the north. From there, they may assist as needed in our mission to neutralize the terrorism — and Shariah — exporting capabilities of freedom's enemies in the region. These would include nuke-seeking Iran and Syria, without whose support Hezbollah would not exist, and Saudi Arabia, from whose coffers comes global jihad.
What we call the war on terror now moves into a more focused phase, which better defines our mission and makes it more attainable. The road ahead is long and difficult, but our next steps are clear.
God bless the United States.
Teaching Johnny about IslamI highly recommend Paul Sperry's book "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington" -- very, very scary stuff.
By Paul Sperry
Investor's Business Daily November 7, 2006
In our brave new schools, Johnny can't say the pledge, but he can recite the Quran. Yup, the same court that found the phrase "under God" unconstitutional now endorses Islamic catechism in public school.
In a recent federal decision that got surprisingly little press, even from conservative talk radio, California's 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled it's OK to put public-school kids through Muslim role-playing exercises, including:
Reciting aloud Muslim prayers that begin with "In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful . . . ."
Memorizing the Muslim profession of faith: "Allah is the only true God and Muhammad is his messenger."
Chanting "Praise be to Allah" in response to teacher prompts.
Professing as "true" the Muslim belief that "The Holy Quran is God's word."
Giving up candy and TV to demonstrate Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting.
Designing prayer rugs, taking an Arabic name and essentially "becoming a Muslim" for two full weeks.
Parents of seventh-graders, who after 9-11 were taught the pro-Islamic lessons as part of California's world history curriculum, sued under the First Amendment ban on religious establishment. They argued, reasonably, that the government was promoting Islam.
But a federal judge appointed by President Clinton told them in so many words to get over it, that the state was merely teaching kids about another "culture."
So the parents appealed. Unfortunately, the most left-wing court in the land got their case. The 9th Circuit, which previously ruled in favor of an atheist who filed suit against the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, upheld the lower court ruling.
The decision is a major victory for the multiculturalists and Islamic apologists in California and across the country who've never met a culture or religion they didn't like - with the exception of Western civilization and Christianity. They are legally in the clear to indoctrinate kids into the "peaceful" and "tolerant" religion of Islam, while continuing to denigrate Judeo-Christian values.
In the California course on world religions, Christianity is not presented equally. It's covered in just two days and doesn't involve kids in any role-playing activities. But kids do get a good dose of skepticism about the Christian faith, including a biting history of its persecution of other peoples. In contrast, Islam gets a pass from critical review. Even jihad is presented as an "internal personal struggle to do one's best to resist temptation," and not holy war.
The ed consultant's name is Susan L. Douglass. No, she's not a Christian scholar. She's a devout Muslim activist on the Saudi government payroll, according to an investigation by Paul Sperry, author of "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington." He found that for years Douglass taught social studies at the Islamic Saudi Academy just outside Washington, D.C. Her husband still teaches there.
So what? By infiltrating our public school system, the Saudis hope to make Islam more widely accepted while converting impressionable American youth to their radical cause. Recall that John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban," was a product of the California school system. What's next, field trips to Mecca?
This case is critical not just to our culture but our national security. It should be brought before the Supreme Court, which has outlawed prayer in school. Let's see what it says about practicing Islam in class. It will be a good test for the bench's two new conservative justices.
Minnesota sends first Muslim to Congress
08 Nov 2006MINNEAPOLIS, Nov 7 (Reuters) - Voters elected a black Democrat as the first Muslim in Congress on Tuesday after a race in which he advocated quick U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and made little mention of his faith.
Keith Ellison, a 43-year-old lawyer and state representative, defeated two rivals, television networks said, to succeed retiring Democrat Martin Sabo in a seat that has been held by Democrats since 1963.
Voter fraud charges still tripping up voting rights group
ANDREW WELSH-HUGGINS
Associated PressAn advocacy group that registered more than a million voters two years ago is facing new allegations of voter fraud and sloppy work just weeks before crucial midterm elections.
Philadelphia's municipal voter registration office has rejected about 3,000 cards submitted by ACORN - the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now - since April because of missing information or invalid addresses.
Denver County election officials forwarded about 200 cards to the secretary of state's office after finding similar handwriting on signatures.
In Ohio, election officials in three of the state's largest counties have cited problems with hundreds of voter registration cards. ACORN is accused of submitting cards with nonexistent addresses, forged signatures and, in one case, for someone who died seven years ago.
"In my opinion, there's a lot of words but little action in terms of fixing the problem," said Matt Damschroder, elections board director in Franklin County, Ohio.
ACORN, which has about 220,000 members nationally, registered 1.2 million people to vote in 2004 and is running voter registration drives in 17 states this year.
The nonprofit group dispatches workers and volunteers to poor neighborhoods, gas stations, courthouses and other places to sign up new voters.
Although it is nonpartisan, ACORN recruits new voters in heavily Democratic poor and minority neighborhoods. The group says those areas are the most underrepresented in the political process. Republicans are among ACORN's loudest critics, while Democrats largely support its work. In July, Hillary Rodham Clinton, a potential 2008 Democratic presidential candidate, addressed the group's national convention in Columbus.
Democrats hope to regain control of the U.S. House and narrow or erase the GOP majority in the Senate on Nov. 7.
ACORN was accused of fraud in 2004 in Ohio, Florida, Minnesota, North Carolina and Virginia, and in 2003 in Missouri.
Prosecution is rare, though, and federal lawsuits against the group were dismissed in Florida. ACORN says it's working to reduce problems, and officials promise to fire any worker found committing fraud.
"We'll continue to personally encourage people to register to vote and exercise their franchise, and we're going to continue to stand up for people's voter rights," said Kevin Whelan, a spokesman for the New Orleans-based group.
Such statements do little to appease critics. Even groups supporting the organization's efforts question why fraud allegations keep cropping up.
"They're sort of their own worst enemy," said Bill Faith, who directs Ohio's largest homeless advocacy group and shares many of ACORN's goals.
"They want low-income people to register to vote but because of the kind of problems that come from their program, it provokes a reaction from the Legislature that actually makes it harder to run such programs," Faith said.
The Denver Election Commission says it's been unsuccessful in working with ACORN to reduce problems with voter registration cards. Colorado officials had investigated similar concerns about the group's registration cards two years ago.
ACORN says it meets regularly with election officials to address concerns.
"We hold our workers to a very high standard, we ensure they make every vote count, and we're going to continue to do that work," said Ben Hanna, head organizer in Colorado.
Ohio prosecutors are looking at almost 400 cards that the Franklin County elections board says included already registered voters or listed the wrong address.
The Franklin elections board is also looking at hundreds of other ACORN cards with alleged irregularities. The Hamilton County board is concerned about errors and missing information on hundreds of ACORN cards, while problems with about a dozen cards were reported in Summit County.
ACORN is continuing its largely successful legal campaign to reduce voting obstacles for the poor.
In September, a federal judge in Ohio threw out a requirement that individuals who register voters - instead of groups - must turn in the completed forms, in a lawsuit brought by ACORN and other voting rights groups.
ACORN won a preliminary victory Thursday in a similar suit against Georgia's voter registration laws. It won a similar case in Washington state this year and in Maryland last year.
ACORN Is A Bad Seed
Something’s rotten in the state of New Mexico, and Ohio, and Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and Florida, and…
ACORN says it is a community group, but it is really a multi-million-dollar, multinational conglomerate. Its political agenda is driven by a relative handful of anti-corporate activists. ACORN spends millions of dollars to promote economic policies (like raising the minimum wage), but has admitted that it doesn't always want to abide by them. ACORN advocates for workers' rights and runs two unions, but has in the past fought its own employees' efforts to form a union.
ACORN's history makes for pretty interesting reading. The Clinton Administration found that ACORN was misspending government grants designed to help counsel the poor. Although it seeks minimum wage increases in cities and states across the country -- ACORN sued the state of California to get out of paying its own employees the state minimum wage.
ACORN's practices have corrupted our political process as well. It has engaged in questionable election activities for years—stretching back even to the organization's founding years in Arkansas . In recent years, as its political power has increased, so have instances of fraud.
In the past few years, it has been investigated for election fraud in at least a dozen states. Want examples?
In Florida, ACORN employees filed a false voter registration form for 68-year-old former St. Petersburg Democratic mayor Charles Schuh – amazingly, they registered him as a 30-year-old Republican woman. In Ohio, ACORN and its affiliate Project Vote submitted registration cards that had the highest rate of errors for any voter registration group. In Colorado, two ex-ACORN employees were convicted of turning in false registrations. The list goes on.
Just last year, in an effort to put a wage initiative on the ballot in Albuquerque, New Mexico, ACORN employee's forged thousands of fraudulent signatures . The group is involved in initiative efforts in a half-dozen states this year. How many thousands of signatures will they forge to forward their agenda?
It's time to send a message to ACORN. It is time to end the corruption.
ACORN’s Voter Fraud in Ohio is Part of Larger Pattern
New report shows ACORN has been linked to voter fraud in 12 states including Ohio 8/11/06,
Washington, DC –ACORN’s recent run-in with the Franklin County elections board for allegedly turning in falsified voter registration cards is only the latest in a long-standing pattern of dubious elections practices. ACORN employees have been accused of submitting bogus voter registration cards and forging signatures on ballot initiatives in 12 states since 2004.
In addition to Ohio, ACORN employees have been accused of illegal elections practices in New Mexico, Florida, Colorado, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Virginia among others. Here are just a few examples of ACORN’s pattern and practice of fraud associated with their campaigns:
Florida—When ACORN led a ballot initiative to raise Florida’s minimum wage in 2004, a Florida Department of Law Enforcement spokesman said ACORN was “singled out” among suspected voter registration groups because it was “the common thread” in the agency’s investigations from one end of the state to the other. One blatant example of voter fraud includes registering 68-year-old Charles Shuh, a former Democratic mayor of St. Petersburg, as a 30-year-old female Republican.
New Mexico—In an effort to put a wage initiative on the ballot in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 2005 ACORN employees forged thousands of fraudulent signatures. Following their voter registration drive in 2004, a state Representative stated that ACORN was “manufacturing voters” throughout New Mexico.
Ohio—This is not the first time ACORN has been accused of shady practices in Ohio. In Cuyahoga County in 2004, ACORN and its affiliate Project Vote submitted registration cards that had the highest rate of errors for any voter registration group.
“Once again ACORN is using any means necessary to fool the public into supporting its radical political agenda,” said Mike Flynn, EPI’s director of legislative affairs. “ACORN’s decades of questionable elections practices and outright deceit extending throughout a dozen states prove this group is more about advancing its political agenda than about helping the community.”
To see an example of the fraudulent signatures ACORN submitted for their ballot initiative to raise Albuquerque’s minimum wage or to read the report “Rotten ACORN: America’s Bad Seed,” go to www.RottenACORN.com.
The Acorn Indictments
A union-backed outfit faces charges of election fraud.
Friday, November 3, 2006 12:01 a.m. ESTSo, less than a week before the midterm elections, four workers from Acorn, the liberal activist group that has registered millions of voters, have been indicted by a federal grand jury for submitting false voter registration forms to the Kansas City, Missouri, election board. But hey, who needs voter ID laws?
We wish this were an aberration, but allegations of fraud have tainted Acorn voter drives across the country. Acorn workers have been convicted in Wisconsin and Colorado, and investigations are still under way in Ohio, Tennessee and Pennsylvania.
The good news for anyone who cares about voter integrity is that the Justice Department finally seems poised to connect these dots instead of dismissing such revelations as the work of a few yahoos. After the federal indictments were handed up in Kansas City this week, the U.S. Attorney's office said in a statement that "This national investigation is very much ongoing."
Let's hope so. Acorn officials bill themselves as nonpartisan community organizers merely interested in giving a voice to minorities and the poor. In reality, Acorn is a union-backed, multimillion-dollar outfit that uses intimidation and other tactics to push for higher minimum wage mandates and to trash Wal-Mart and other non-union companies.Operating in at least 38 states (as well as Canada and Mexico), Acorn pushes a highly partisan agenda, and its organizers are best understood as shock troops for the AFL-CIO and even the Democratic Party. As part of the Fannie Mae reform bill, House Democrats pushed an "affordable housing trust fund" designed to use Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac profits to subsidize Acorn, among other groups. A version of this trust fund actually passed the Republican House and will surely be on the agenda again next year.
Acorn and its affiliates have pulled some real stunts in recent years. In Ohio in 2004, a worker for one affiliate was given crack cocaine in exchange for fraudulent registrations that included underage voters, dead voters and pillars of the community named Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy and Jive Turkey. During a Congressional hearing in Ohio in the aftermath of the 2004 election, officials from several counties in the state explained Acorn's practice of dumping thousands of registration forms in their lap on the submission deadline, even though the forms had been collected months earlier.
"You have to wonder what's the point of that, if not to overwhelm the system and get phony registrations on the voter rolls," says Thor Hearne of the American Center for Voting Rights, who also testified at the hearing. "These were Democratic officials saying that they felt their election system in Ohio was under assault by these kinds of efforts to game the system."Given this history, it's not surprising that Acorn is so hostile to voter identification laws and other efforts to ensure fairness and accuracy at the polls. In Missouri last month, the state Supreme Court held that a photo ID requirement to vote was overly burdensome and a violation of the state constitution. Acorn was behind the original suit challenging the statute, and it has brought similar challenges in several other states, including Ohio.
A recent Pew Research Center survey found that blacks today are almost twice as likely as they were in 2004 to say they have little or no confidence in the voting system. Such a finding would seem like a powerful argument for voter ID laws, which consistently poll well among people of all races and incomes and would increase confidence in the voting process. Of course, voter ID laws would also cut down on fraud, which, judging from the latest indictments, would put a real crimp in Acorn's style.
Amen, brother, Amen.H/T to A.J. Strata at The Strata-Sphere.
Looks like the nuts over at ACORN now have been caught in Pennsylvania again committing election fraud with phony voter registration forms.
From Delaware County in the Keystone State comes this story:
Question: If your last name were Abortion would you name any of your children Alternative? Probably not! So a more pertinent question is this: If you saw the name Alternative Abortion on a voter registration form, complete with an address and a social security number, you’d be suspicious, right?
You’d think somebody was playing a tasteless joke. Or maybe even committing a crime, because that’s what fraudulently filling out a voter registration form is, a crime.
This one is currently under investigation by Delaware County District Attorney’s office, along with hundreds of other suspicious voter registration forms turned into the county voter registration commission.
Not dozens. Not scores. But hundreds!
“If not thousands,” says county Solicitor John McBlain.
So far, the county has found more than 100 people who have told investigators and/or signed affidavits claiming someone wrongly tried to register to vote in their name. Another 542 registration forms were identified as having phony addresses and some 1,200 to 1,300 more also appear to be fraudulent.
What’s most interesting about this is that one organization submitted every single one of the near 2,000 registrations that are suspected or proven frauds.
That group is the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, otherwise known as ACORN.
ACORN is not, as it claims, a nonpartisan group involved in improving education and helping communities. ACORN has been involved in minimum wage increase proposals, Wal-Mart bashing, advocating government-run health care and is a leftwing activist group which has been involved in numerous shady activities regarding voter registration all across the country.
Just last week, four ACORN workers were indicted by a federal grand jury for submitting false voter registration forms in Kansas City, Mo. ACORN people have already been convicted in Colorado and Wisconsin and more are under investigation here and in Ohio.
Late last month, Delaware County Assistant District Attorney Joe Brielmann sent out a press release warning residents to be on the lookout for this sort of fraud and identity theft.
Of the four ACORN workers under investigation by county detectives, two are convicted felons (one a drug dealer, the other a convicted rapist.) Who better to help work for social justice in our communities?
By law, convicted felons cannot vote and cannot register voters. ACORN knows this, yet time and time again we see convicted felons filing phony voter registration cards, registering such names as “Mary Poppins,” “Dick Tracy” and “Jeffrey Dahmer” to vote, all from the same address in the same handwriting with the same signature.
Every time one of those fictitious people votes — or an illegal alien, or a convicted felon, or a dead person, for that matter — it makes my legitimate vote — and yours too — worthless.
If you go out and vote for Candidate A and I go vote for Candidate B, you didn’t render my vote worthless, nor mine yours, because we both legally participated in the process. But if Jose who snuck across the border and got a consular ID illegally from Voces de la Frontera and then used that consular ID to illegally obtain a state driver’s license which was used to illegally register to vote votes for Candidate A, then my vote is meaningless.
Same thing when the cemetery precincts all show up to vote. Same thing when the Racine Correctional Institution precincts, and so on. Notice they all vote Democrat — even the dead Republicans.
It’s high time the Attorney General and the Justice Department look at a federal prosecution of ACORN under any existing laws. This is clearly a nationwide campaign to commit election fraud. ACORN leaders are aware it’s happening and at least tacitly condone it, if not participate in and encourage it.
If the federal government can use RICO to go after protesters at abortion clinics, perhaps RICO might be applied here as well. The election fraudsters are a much bigger threat to our freedom than some protesters at an abortion clinic.
Big deals send up red flags
Sales of 14 upscale homes at well-above-market prices raise suspicions of flipping
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Geoff DuttonThe peculiar but tempting offers sometimes came a year or more after homeowners planted for-sale signs in their front yards.
Interested buyers suddenly appeared, proposing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the asking price for houses in some of central Ohio’s elite neighborhoods, including Muirfield Village and Tartan Fields.
The catch: the sellers must agree to immediately refund the difference between the asking price and the sale price.
At least 14 such deals worth more than $11 million have closed since spring, and the offers continue.
Rather than celebrate, some suspicious realestate brokers, lawyers and title agents advised sellers to reject the offers and walk away from the deals.
Some called the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, because most of the buyers were Middle Eastern.
"We turned down five of them," said Bryan Wing, executive vice president of CV Perry Builders. "Believe me, in this day and age, we could have used it." Others couldn’t resist.
The elusive buyers who could be located by The Dispatch offered little if any explanation. The real-estate professionals, two of whom have troubled track records, wouldn’t discuss the sales in detail. Bankers holding the mortgages wouldn’t talk, and neither would FBI or Homeland Security officials.
With few people talking, and a limited public paper trail, key details remain a mystery. But some observers fear the worst — that dealmakers might abandon the houses and disappear with the mortgage money, leaving neighbors and lenders to sort out the mess.
I'm not so worried about the rich folk having abandoned houses in their neighborhood. I'm interested to see where the money is going. Hezbollah? Hamas? Al Queda? The Muslim Brotherhood?
I'm sure the FBI will say it's just a coincidence. Move along. Nothing to see here. After all, they've had muslim sensitivity training.
This is a similar story that is appearing over and over again. Middle eastern-descent families move here to make their fortune, then send money back to their country of origin or give it to an islamic charity.
Follow the money. It could be that these people are simply hucksters and con men that have a found a gaping hole in Ohio's mortgage lending laws and are taking advantage of it (like so many others). Or, they could be terror financiers. Only time will tell.
Read the complete story here.
By Jack Kingston
November 2, 2006
In a stunning performance on "60 Minutes," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi proved again why she cannot be trusted to keep America safe from the threat of global terrorism and Islamic extremists.Mrs. Pelosi demonstrated that she does not understand the global nature of the threat when she stated flatly "the war on terror is the war in Afghanistan." She may think the war is limited to Afghanistan, but where does al Qaeda believe the war is? Al Qaeda's No. 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in a letter to the leaders of al Qaeda in Iraq, was clear about the location of the global jihad and the importance of victory in Iraq:
"Victory of Islam will never take place until a Muslim state is established in the manner of the Prophet in the heart of the Islamic world ... As for the battles that are going on in the far flung regions of the Islamic world, such as Chechnya, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Bosnia, they are just the groundwork and the vanguard for the major battles which have begun in the heart of the Islamic world."
Zawahiri reminds Iraqi terrorists, like Abu Musab Zarqawi, that God has blessed them "with the splendor of the spearhead of Jihad." Translation: Islamic fascists led by al Qaeda are fighting a global jihad to establish a Muslim caliphate from Egypt to Iraq. They will attack anyone, anywhere, with any means, that will further their violent cause.
Tourists in Indonesia, embassy workers in Africa, commuters in Spain and London, schoolchildren in Russia, office workers in New York and Washington, and 40 Americans on a plane over Pennsylvania could all tell Nancy Pelosi where the war on terror is, if their voices had not been silenced.
For Mrs. Pelosi, Iraq is not even part of the war on Islamic terrorism, while for our terrorist enemies Iraq is "the spearhead of jihad." Zawahiri's letter details a four-part strategy for global jihad starting with Iraq; "the first stage: expel the Americans from Iraq." In this first stage at least, Zawahiri seems to have found his "useful idiot" in Mrs. Pelosi.
She acknowledges that there are terrorists in Iraq, but naively submits that "they'll stay as long as we're there. They're there because we're there." What Mrs. Pelosi doesn't say is where she thinks the terrorists will go if we leave Iraq to fall into chaos. According to Mrs. Pelosi, our presence created the terrorists and when we leave they will put down their suicide belts and IEDs. She might want to read the rest of al Qaeda's plan before she is so sure:
"The second stage: Establish an Islamic authority ... over as much territory as you can to spread its power in Iraq ... in order to fill the void stemming from the departure of the Americans ... The third stage: Extend the jihad wave to the secular countries neighboring Iraq ... The fourth stage: It may coincide with what came before: the clash with Israel."
Our actions to liberate Iraq from the butcher of Baghdad did not cause Islamic terrorists, but our premature departure will surely embolden them. Zawahiri's letter exhorts his followers to learn the lessons of history as "things may develop faster than we imagine. The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam and how they ran and left their agents is noteworthy... we must take the initiative and impose a fait accompli upon our enemies."
While we may not have entered Iraq to defeat al Qaeda, there is no doubt that al Qaeda has entered Iraq to defeat us and begin the defeat of all nations in the region who do not share their extreme view of an Islamic caliphate, under strict Sunni rule, stretching across the entire Middle East. Like Osama bin Laden's fatwas declaring war on the United States and the civilized world, Zawahiri points to American retreat from Vietnam for inspiration. Maybe Mrs. Pelosi can answer how giving al Qaeda what they want in Iraq will keep Americans safe and secure from Islamic terrorism in the future.
Al Qaeda knows that they are in a war with many fronts. Zawahiri concludes that "more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media ... we are in a media battle in a race for the hearts and minds of our umma (people)." Part of the battle against terrorism is taking place in our media as well. Last week, Mrs. Pelosi lost one battle for our side. America cannot take the risk that she will lose the war.
Rep. Jack Kingston, Georgia Republican, is vice chairman of of the House Republican Conference and a member of the Defense Appropriations Committee.
Now, we can question their patriotism.Kennedy Offered to Help Soviets Thwart U.S. Policies, KGB Papers Show
By Kevin Mooney
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
November 02, 2006
(CNSNews.com) - While Soviet troops occupied Afghanistan in 1980, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) worked in close concert with high level Kremlin officials to alter the direction of U.S. policy, according to documents made available through a KGB defector.
Details concerning Kennedy's correspondence with KGB agents are included in the writings of the late Vasiliy Mitrokhin who defected to Britain in 1992. The Mitrokhin papers highlight a meeting that took place at the behest of Kennedy between former Sen. John Tunney (D-Calif.) and KGB agents in Moscow on March 5, 1980.
The exchange of information between Tunney and the KGB is included as part of a report Mitrokhin filed with the Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C. The former KGB man continued to work with British intelligence until the time of his death.
Noted Cold War author and researcher Herbert Romerstein told Cybercast News Service Mitrokhin was a "highly credible source" with vast knowledge of the now-closed KGB archives.
Prior to his defection, Mitrokhin made meticulous copies of KGB documents by hand, explained Romerstein, who headed the U.S. government's Office to Counter Soviet Disinformation and Active Measures during the 1980s.
The KGB defector smuggled out six cases of notes that formed the basis of his reporting.
The KGB files Mitrokhin retrieved indicate that Kennedy fixed the blame for heightened international tensions on the Carter White House, not on the Kremlin. Kennedy at the time was challenging incumbent Carter for the Democratic nomination for president.
Tunney told his KGB counterparts that Kennedy was impressed by the foreign policy statements made by then General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. Kennedy saw in Brezhnev a leader who was firmly committed to the policy of "détente," the report said.
But, in Kennedy's estimation, the Carter administration had assumed an overly belligerent posture toward the Soviet Union after the invasion of Afghanistan, Mitrokhin wrote.
In Kennedy's view, "the atmosphere of tension and hostility towards the whole Soviet people was being fuelled by Carter" as well as by some key advisors, the Pentagon and the U.S. military industrial complex, the Mitrokhin report states.
Throughout the meeting Tunney remained focused on the separation between Kennedy's proposals and the official stance of the Carter White House. While official U.S. policy called for the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan, Kennedy avoided "touching the question of the legality of the presence of Soviet troops," Mitrokhin reported.
Instead, Kennedy relayed through his envoy, Tunney, his support for a withdrawal of Soviet forces that would be coupled with policy directives that "guaranteed non-interference" by competing foreign powers in the internal affairs of Afghanistan.
Since there was intense disagreement between Kennedy and the administration on policy toward the Soviets, Tunney told the KGB that the Massachusetts senator had concluded "it was his duty to take action himself, which could force the Carter administration to act to de-escalate the crisis," Mitrokhin wrote.
In 1980 Kennedy lost to Carter in the Democratic primary, and the incumbent in turn lost to Ronald Reagan in the general election.
As was previously reported by the Cybercast News Service Kennedy also subsequently made overtures to Soviet officials aimed at thwarting Reagan's military buildup in the 1980s.
Kennedy had offered to help the Soviets organize a public relations campaign in the U.S. that would dilute support for Reagan's policies. Once again, it was Tunney who traveled to Moscow on Kennedy's behalf to relay the senator's proposals.
The particulars of Kennedy's proposals are discussed in a letter dated May 14, 1983, that was sent from the head of the KGB to Yuri Andropov, who was then general secretary. Romerstein acquired a copy of the letter from a contact in Moscow who had access to the Kremlin archives.
"The letter speaks to the degree of opposition and the lack of understanding liberals like Kennedy had toward Reagan's policies," said Lee Edwards, a distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
"Reagan knew we had to build up our armed forces before we could apply pressure to the Soviets." The notion of fighting to win the Cold War was an alien concept to liberals like Kennedy, Edwards added, because they had grown accustomed to the policies of containment.
A copy of the letter is reproduced in a new book entitled "The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism." The author, Paul Kengor is a professor of political science at Grove City College.
The pattern of behavior should concern members of both political parties, Kengor said, because it shows Kennedy was willing to work against American foreign policy, regardless of who occupied the White House.
In his book, Kengor points out that Tunney acknowledged making 15 separate trips to the Soviet Union where he acted as an intermediary not only for Kennedy but for other U.S. senators.
'Clear violation'
Charles Dunn, dean of the Robertson School of Government at Regent University, told Cybercast News Service Kennedy's activities were in "clear violation of the U.S. Constitution and at the expense of presidential authority."
The secret overtures to the KGB during the Reagan years were particularly insidious, Dunn said, because Tunney and Kennedy were working to undermine what ultimately proved to be a very successful policy that brought an end to the Cold War.
"If another country gets the idea that it can deal outside of official channels then that undermines presidential leadership," he said.
For his part, Romerstein said that Kennedy, and other senators, may have violated the Logan Act, which has been on the books since 1799, but is rarely enforced. The law prohibits American citizens from engaging in private diplomacy with a foreign government with the intention of influencing public policy.
At the same time, however, Romerstein cautions against viewing Kennedy as an agent for the Soviets. Instead, he said, it is appropriate to label him a "collaborationist" who sought out Soviet contacts to advance his own interests, not theirs.
When Kennedy spoke highly of Soviet leaders like Brezhnev and Andropov, he may have been "pretending," in an attempt to curry favor, Romerstein said.
"He [Kennedy] was no more loyal to the Soviets than he was to the United States.," Romerstein said.
Kennedy's office was contacted but declined to comment on the communication the senator had with the KGB, as reported in the Mitrokhin papers.
The Homosexual Agenda
by kender on 10-31-06 @ 11:26 pmFiled under ACLU
Wow, things are heavy this week, what with elections a week away with control of the country hanging in the balance. Then along comes this info from one of my operatives. I always knew there was a homosexual agenda, now we have the proof.
You’ve heard Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and others speak of the“Homosexual Agenda,” but no one has ever seen a copy of it.Well,someone managed to sneak into Homosexual Headquarters and got acopy…Here it is:
THE HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA
6 a.m. Gym
8 a.m. Breakfast (oatmeal and eggwhites)
9 a.m. Hair appointment
10 a.m. Shopping (Macy’s or Nordstrom)
12 p.m. Brunch
2 p.m.
(1) Assume complete control of U.S. Federal, state, and local governments,as well as all the other national governments(2) Destroy all healthy marriages
(3) Replace all school counselors in grades K-12 with militant homosexuals who seek to recruit children for the homosexual lifestyle
(4) Bulldoze all houses of worship
(5) Seize control of Internet and all other media
(6) Be utterly fabulous
3 p.m. Beauty treatment to prevent facial wrinkles from the stresses ofworld conquest, followed by aromatherapy
4 p.m. Cocktails
5 p.m. Light dinner (soup, salad with arugula & balsamic vinegar dressing,Chardonnay)
8 p.m. Theater
10 p.m. Cocktails in a charming neighborhood bistro
12 a.m. Bed (du jour)
Now, I think we can question her patriotism.Leaders: Rep. Nancy Pelosi has her own "grapes of wrath" scenario going on. Is her opposition to enhanced border security due to the fact that the House Democratic leader personally profits from a steady supply of cheap foreign labor?
If Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives, the San Francisco Democrat will not only be the first female speaker, but also the richest. The liberal Center for Responsive Politics puts her net worth as high as $55 million.
There is no record of Pelosi's ever returning her portion of those "tax cuts for the rich" to the U.S. Treasury. Or any record, for that matter, of using her (dare we use the word?) windfall to give the workers at her Napa Valley vineyards a raise.
As Peter Schweizer notes in his best-selling expose of liberal hypocrisy, "Do As I Say (Not As I Do)," part of the fortune of this defender of the working man is a Napa Valley vineyard worth $25 million that she owns with her husband. The vineyard produces expensive grapes for high-end wines. Napa grapes bring up to $4,000 a ton compared with $300 a ton for, say, San Joaquin grapes.
But Pelosi, winner of the 2003 Cesar Chavez award from the United Farm Workers, hires only nonunion workers and sells these grapes to nonunion wineries. Schweizer places Pelosi in a chapter titled "Workers of the World Unite Somewhere Else." UFW members need not apply at the Pelosi family vineyards.
Which makes Pelosi's steadfast opposition to any attempts to enhance border security and stem the flow of illegal immigration into the U.S. all the more interesting since she seems to be among those rich employers who financially benefit from a steady supply of cheap foreign labor.
She led the opposition and voted against the Secure Fence Act of 2006 recently signed into law by President Bush to build a 700-mile fence along the U.S.-Mexican border.
She opposed the Real ID Act of 2005, a valuable anti-terror tool, while bragging that Democrats under her leadership "defeated Republican attempts to restrict the easily forged Matricula Consular card" issued by the Mexican government.
She voted against a bill to make employers such as herself financially liable for hospital costs if undocumented employees seek medical attention, preferring that either taxpayers foot the bill or that hospitals close under the burden, as many are doing throughout the Southwest.
In 2005 she voted against barring the issuance of driver's licenses to illegal aliens and against a requirement that businesses use an electronic system to verify whether new hires have the legal right to work in the U.S.
Nor has Pelosi been a fan of employer sanctions against the hiring of illegal aliens. In 2003, she accused immigration officers of conducting "terrorizing raids" on Wal-Mart stores that led to the arrest of more than 300 illegal aliens.
Loraine Stewart, a farmworker advocate with Napa Valley Community Housing, in a 2004 San Francisco Chronicle article estimated that half of the migrant labor force in the valley consisted of undocumented workers, without whom "not one bottle of wine would get made here."
The people coming across our southern border aren't just seeking better lives. They're joined by drug smugglers and an assortment of people with criminal records. There are also what Immigration and Customs Enforcement calls OTMs (Other Than Mexicans) among whom potential terrorists could sneak in undetected.
Pelosi apparently puts her financial interests above the security of this nation and the safety of its citizens, exploiting undocumented workers in the process. If the people at Immigration and Customs are looking for an employer to check out, we know this little vineyard in the Napa Valley.
What's scary is this dipsh*t is roaming the streets. Put this nutjob in a straight jacket and put him away.“There has never been an American army as violent and murderous as the one in Iraq”
Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh slams Bush at McGill address
By Martin Lukacs
The McGill Daily“The bad news,” investigative reporter Seymour Hersh told a Montreal audience last Wednesday, “is that there are 816 days left in the reign of King George II of America.” The good news? “When we wake up tomorrow morning, there will be one less day.”
Hersh, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine, has been a thorn in the side of the U.S. government for nearly 40 years. Since his 1969 exposé of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, which is widely believed to have helped turn American public opinion against the Vietnam War, he has broken news about the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia, covert C.I.A. attempts to overthrow Chilean president Salvador Allende, and, more recently, the first details about American soldiers abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
During his hour-and-a-half lecture – part of the launch of an interdisciplinary media and communications studies program called Media@McGill – Hersh described video footage depicting U.S. atrocities in Iraq, which he had viewed, but not yet published a story about.
He described one video in which American soldiers massacre a group of people playing soccer.
“Three U.S. armed vehicles, eight soldiers in each, are driving through a village, passing candy out to kids,” he began. “Suddenly the first vehicle explodes, and there are soldiers screaming. Sixteen soldiers come out of the other vehicles, and they do what they’re told to do, which is look for running people.”
“Never mind that the bomb was detonated by remote control,” Hersh continued. “[The soldiers] open up fire; [the] cameras show it was a soccer game.”
“About ten minutes later, [the soldiers] begin dragging bodies together, and they drop weapons there. It was reported as 20 or 30 insurgents killed that day,” he said.
If Americans knew the full extent of U.S. criminal conduct, they would receive returning Iraqi veterans as they did Vietnam veterans, Hersh said.
“In Vietnam, our soldiers came back and they were reviled as baby killers, in shame and humiliation,” he said. “It isn’t happening now, but I will tell you – there has never been an [American] army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq.”
Hersh came out hard against President Bush for his involvement in the Middle East.
“In Washington, you can’t expect any rationality. I don’t know if he’s in Iraq because God told him to, because his father didn’t do it, or because it’s the next step in his 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous program,” he said.
Hersh hinted that the responsibility for the invasion of Iraq lies with eight or nine members of the administration who have a “neo-conservative agenda” and dictate the U.S.’s post-September 11 foreign policy.
“You have a collapsed Congress, you have a collapsed press. The military is going to do what the President wants,” Hersh said. “How fragile is democracy in America, if a president can come in with an agenda controlled by a few cultists?”
Throughout his talk Hersh remained pessimistic, predicting that the U.S. will initiate an attack against Iran, and that the situation in Iraq will deteriorate further. “There’s no reason to see a change in policy about Iraq. [Bush] thinks that, in twenty years, he’s going to be recognized for the leader he was – the analogy he uses is Churchill,” Hersh said. “If you read the public statements of the leadership, they’re so confident and so calm…. It’s pretty scary.”
