BEIT HANOUN, Gaza (Reuters)

Rasmiya Mahmoud has seen plenty of Israeli raids into the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun. But nothing like this.

Dozens of Israeli tanks have encircled the town of 30,000 people since Wednesday. Heavily armed soldiers, trying to stop militant rocket fire at the nearby Jewish state, have fought running battles with militants.

The army has curbed movement, telling people to stay home, and rounded many men up for questioning. It is hard for reporters to move from the outskirts of town to the center.

On Saturday, however, the army allowed women in Beit Hanoun to go out for two hours to buy food.

“Myself and other women were shocked. It’s unbelievable,” Mahmoud, a teacher, said by telephone after venturing outside.

“Electricity poles have been uprooted, the road has been torn up. Sewage has flooded into the streets,” she added.

More than 30 Palestinians, half of them civilians, have been killed in Beit Hanoun in the past four days, medical officials said. One Israeli soldier has also been killed.

Israel’s army has denied suggestions it had seized the town, saying it was under a “general closure”.

continue reading

By MATT APUZZO
Associated Press Writer
Posted November 4 2006, 7:23 AM EST

WASHINGTON — A suspected terrorist who spent years in a secret CIA prison should not be allowed to speak to a civilian attorney, the Bush administration argues, because he could reveal the agency’s closely guarded interrogation techniques.

Human rights groups have questioned the CIA’s methods for questioning suspects, especially following the passage of a bill last month that authorized the use of harsh — but undefined — interrogation tactics.

In recently filed court documents, the Justice Department said those methods, along with the locations of the CIA’s network of prisons, are among the nation’s most sensitive secrets. Prisoners who spent time in those prisons should not be allowed to disclose that information, even to a lawyer, the government said.

Continue reading at the Sun Sentinel

because he could reveal the agency’s closely guarded interrogation techniques.
Ya……like TORTURE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Too late Perle……you planned it, you promoted it……. you can’t change that you evil greedy pig. May the hundreds of thousands of dead haunt you the rest of your days!

And my brother has a little message for you shithead:

You wanted the oil, you got it, now crawl back into your think tank and shut the fuck up. How you have the balls to open your piehole now is beyond me. As I said before, the incompetent people implementing and executing YOUR PLAN only proved to emphasize its flaws, not create them. It’s your plan and you’re not going to BS your way out of it now. Eat shit and die, I’ve had enough of your lies.

AP Diplomatic Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - A leading conservative proponent of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq now says dysfunction within the Bush administration has turned U.S. policy there into a disaster. Richard Perle, who chaired a committee of Pentagon policy advisers early in the Bush administration, said had he seen at the start of the war in 2003 where it would go, he probably would not have advocated an invasion to depose Saddam Hussein. Perle was an assistant secretary of defense under President Reagan.

“I probably would have said, ‘Let’s consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists,”’ he told Vanity Fair magazine in its upcoming January issue.

More at the Guardian

CNN VIDEO: VideoTheVote.org will videotape polling places on voting day and
post issues online immediately. They are looking for volunteers with
camcorders. Also a report on “Hacking Democracy”. If you missed “Hacking
Democracy” on HBO you missed one of the scariest movies of all time because
it showed how easy it was to hack the 2000 and 2004 election. “Hacking
Democracy” also showed how Diebold etc. did not tell the truth when they
were ordered to improve their code and how election officials often take the
easy way out as opposed to the proper way.

h/t JoeWo in San Mateo California for this post

DON’T LET THIS DETER YOU FROM VOTING!!!!!!!!!! VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE!!!!

An editorial scheduled to appear on Monday in Army Times, Air Force Times, Navy Times and Marine Corps Times, calls for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

The papers are sold to American servicemen and women. They are published by the Military Times Media Group, which is a subsidiary of Gannett Co., Inc.

Here is the text of the editorial, an advance copy of which we received this afternoon.
—————-
Time for Rumsfeld to go

“So long as our government requires the backing of an aroused and informed public opinion … it is necessary to tell the hard bruising truth.”

That statement was written by Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Marguerite Higgins more than a half-century ago during the Korean War.

But until recently, the “hard bruising” truth about the Iraq war has been difficult to come by from leaders in Washington. One rosy reassurance after another has been handed down by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: “mission accomplished,” the insurgency is “in its last throes,” and “back off,” we know what we’re doing, are a few choice examples.

Read more here

Way to support the troops. Punish this kid, yet he did what he was instructed to do…..no punishment for the torture loving Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney……. and then send him back to Iraq…..to train Iraqi security forces, no less. Hope they don’t find out who he is. God help the kid. The kid’s family said he is extremely depressed.

FORT BRAGG, N.C. — An army dog handler convicted of abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has returned to the country with his military police unit, a spokesman said.

Sgt. Santos Cardona boarded a plane Monday for the trip to Iraq.

A spokesman said it wasn’t known exactly what Cardona’s job would be. His unit will focus on law enforcement, detainee operations and route security.

Source here

You idiots out there… yeah… the ones that tune in to Falwell each week in hopes of getting one step closer to your ‘maker’… well, listen up. Falwell just publicly stated men who solicit sex from underage boys was actually less evil than consensual sex between two adult heterosexuals. HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THAT?

On CNN, Falwell declared Foley scandal “minuscule in comparison” to having “lived through Bill Clinton”; no follow-up from Zahn

On the November 2 edition of CNN’s The Situation Room, Moral Majority Coalition founder and chairman Rev. Jerry Falwell declared that the scandal surrounding former Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) is “not going to discourage any evangelicals I know from voting” because “[w]e lived through Bill Clinton, and this situation with Foley is minuscule in comparison.” Co-host Paula Zahn did not follow up on Falwell’s assertion or note a major difference between the two cases, as Media Matters for America has noted: Foley allegedly sent sexually explicit Internet communications to underage former House pages, while former President Bill Clinton had an affair with an adult.

Link

Every time this moron opens his mouth I question the existence of God. If Falwell is the best that God can come up with in terms of “God’s representative on earth”, then fucking-forget-it! Moral majority, my ass!