Recycled steel from the World Trade Center will be used to build part of a new U.S. warship, according to defense contractor Northrop Grumman.

The ship is to be named the New York, in honor of the almost 2,800 people who died in the attacks of Sept. 11 2001, Dan Knecht, said a spokesman for the firm.

Steel is set to be shipped to Northrop's shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, for construction to begin in the middle of next year. The 684-foot ship should be ready for service in 2007.

The recycled steel from the Twin Towers, if it meets quality standards, will be used to form the ship's "stem bar", Knecht told Reuters. That is part of the ship's bow, where the vessel cuts the water.

The United States, said Mr. Powell, was prepared to spend $29 million for...what is arguably one of the most critically urgent tasks for draining the swamp of terrorism — $35 million to reform Pakistan's madrassas (Koranic schools) where some 5 million young boys, including contingents from most Muslim countries, have been taught to hate America, Israel and India during the past decade, all generously bankrolled by Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi clergy.

Fifteen months after September 11, there are still 750,000 Pakistani boys in some 11,000 madrassas where they are also taught that jihad (holy war) is the noblest of human endeavors. And the imams and mullahs in charge of the schools have told government inspectors and reformers to butt out.

You don't get much traction in the Mideast for $29 million. There is still little realization in the Bush administration that democracy in most Arab countries would bring the terrorists — or at least their sympathizers — to power in a subterfuge known as one-person-one-vote-one-time. That was almost the case in Algeria a decade ago when Muslim extremists won a free election fair and square. The army stepped in to deprive them of their victory at the ballot box — and bullets have been flying ever since, along with bombs and Molotov cocktails, with a death toll of well over 100,000.

U.S. policy-makers have convinced themselves that the Muslim world's penchant for blue jeans and Big Macs means the masses are already part of the global village even though their leaders are still living in palatial nationalist cocoons. This is a dangerous optical illusion. The masses relate, not to America's globalism, but to Islam's global umma. Poll after poll, from Maylasia in Southeast Asia to Morocco in North Africa, show the masses in rhythmic tune with Hollywood's steady drumbeat of movies that portrayed the ugly American operative as licensed to kill by the CIA, NSA, FBI and NSC.

The Arab world in particular has been conditioned to believe that Israel's Mossad, with CIA assistance, organized the September 11 attacks and that the 15 Saudi hijackers were recruited by Israeli agents posing as members of al Qaeda. No less a personage than Saudi Arabia's minister of the interior (including the police), Prince Naif bin Abdul Aziz, publicly stated recently that Israel had engineered the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. This is now believed by an overwhelming majority of Muslims throughout the world, including many of the imams who run some 2,000 mosques in the United States.

Al Qaeda has had a very good year with America's one-size-fits-all free elections mantra. Two of Pakistan's four provinces — Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) and Baluchistan — fell to Islamist extremist control in last October's national elections.

Bahrain's recent elections, cited favorably by Mr. Powell, were boycotted by the tiny island's largest political group, the Shi'ite al Wefaq, because of what its leaders described as a powerless legislature. Other Islamists still managed to garner 19 seats in the 40-seat body.

Two highly-placed Saudi non-royals — one of them close to ailing King Fahd — said, not for attribution, that if a free election were held in Saudi Arabia and Osama Bin Laden were running as a candidate for prime minister, the world's most wanted terrorist would win in a landslide. The Saudi masses are even more conservative Wahhabis than the royal family, and Bin Laden derives his popularity from his strict adherence to a rigid interpretation of Prophet Mohammed's five pillars of Islam. In Pakistan, more than 80 percent of male adults polled believe Bin Laden is a "freedom fighter," not a "terrorist."

Jordan's King Abdullah follows public opinion closely. There is mounting evidence that genuine free elections in his country would easily give fundamentalists a decisive edge. The king, a former special forces commander, recently had to dispatch some of these same forces, along with tanks and helicopter gunships, to impose a curfew in the city of Maan, 125 miles south of Amman, normally a peaceful Bedouin town loyal to the pro-Western monarchy.

A local extremist preacher had declared the king an "unbeliever" and was wanted for questioning in the assassination of Lawrence Foley, an American diplomat. The fugitive imam, Muhammad Shalabi, had also issued a fatwa for a holy war to be unleashed if the United States attacks Iraq. He managed to slip through the army's blockade of the town, but Jordanian security forces caught the two self-confessed al Qaeda operatives, one Libyan and the other Jordanian, who had killed Mr. Foley in his carport as he was about to drive to the embassy...

There is a reluctance in Washington that borders on paralysis to face up to the principal obstacle to rapprochement with the Arab world in particular and the larger Muslim community in general, and that is the conviction that the United States and Israel are now as one to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state.

Muslims represent one fifth of humanity and they are a majority in 63 countries. [about a third of all countries - B] Islam is the world's fastest growing religion. Daily television news coverage humiliates Arabs as they watch, powerless, Israeli tanks and gunships beating up on Palestinians while the U.S. focuses on attacking another Arab state. Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based Arab television network with the highest ratings in the region, describes Palestinian suicide-bombers as "commando raids against the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Arab commentators are convinced the Bush administration has dropped even the pretense of an even-handed Middle Eastern policy. The Israeli elections next month — and the likely continuation of Ariel Sharon as Prime Minister — will present Washington with its next opportunity to ditch Tartuffery and regain its reputation as an honest broker. But a regime change war on Iraq is bound to further delay the day when President Bush, as a peacemaker, can work his magic in the Middle East.

Until then, Mr. Powell's $29 million in democratic seed money to close what he called "the hope gap" and open up Arab countries to the democratic process will have all the impact of 29 pennies in Rome's Trevi fountain. A wish list is no substitute for the forceful shaping of a Mideastern settlement the present crisis requires.

All of these “desk reporters” and others like them, copying from each other and from a corrupt Commercial Media in Venezuela (instead of doing real reporting by interviewing real people and wearing out their own precious shoe leather) tried to portray a series of orchestrated media stunts and some isolated acts of sabotage by the former ruling class as a massive nationwide action with popular support. It wasn’t. It was an “imagined strike,” simulated, invented - a fantasy repeated daily over three weeks so often that many people began to believe that it was reality - the pinnacle example of everything that is wrong with “pack journalism” in this day and age. Asking for Mommy Bush or Daddy Military to trash their Constitution and remove, by force, the president twice elected by their country’s majority. They have cynically – and led by oligarchs of Commercial Media who write the script – tried to provoke the conditions for a coup d’etat.

On May Day, starting out from the Hilton Hotel, 200,000 blondes marched East through Caracas' shopping corridor along Casanova Avenue. At the same time, half a million brunettes converged on them from the West. It would all seem like a comic shampoo commercial if 16 people hadn't been shot dead two weeks earlier when the two groups crossed paths.

The May Day brunettes support Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. They funnelled down from the ranchos, the pustules of crude red-brick bungalows, stacked one on the other, that erupt on the steep, unstable hillsides surrounding this city of five million. The bricks in some ranchos are new, a recent improvement in these fetid, impromptu slums where many previously sheltered behind cardboard walls. 'Chávez gives them bricks and milk,' a local TV reporter told me, 'and so they vote for him.'

Chávez is dark and round as a cola nut. Like his followers, Chávez is an 'Indian'. But the blondes, the 'Spanish', are the owners of Venezuela.

MADD’s activities were originally geared towards legitimate educational and victim support oriented functions. MADD’s political focus was geared towards removing chronic/alcoholic drunk drivers from the nation’s highways. Responsible social drinkers who drove home after a wedding or after good conversation with friends at the neighborhood pub were not targets of MADD’s efforts. To the extent that MADD has worked to support victims and to educate the public about legitimate chronic alcoholic/drunk driving issues it should be commended. Unfortunately, in recent years the national MADD organization and most of it’s local chapters have been taken over by ultra-conservative, anti-alcohol extremists who have adopted a political agenda that threatens the second coming of Prohibition.

Instead of focusing on ways to remove the chronic/alcoholic drunk driver from our highways, MADD’s primary focus is upon "drivers who have had something to drink.....

MADD’s modus operandi is to use generalizations, misstatements, scapegoating, distortions of the truth and victimization propaganda to force the federal and state governments to pass increasingly irrational and draconian DUI laws. MADD seeks to clone itself onto local governments (in much the same manner as did the National Socialist Party in Germany during the years following World War I ) by entering into government/private sector "partnerships"; by having it’s propaganda displayed in government buildings; by having it’s logo attached to government vehicles and police uniforms; by giving awards and political support to judges and other public officials who are either afraid of, or who support, their agenda; and by working to require citizens who have been criminalized for DUI to attend mandatory MADD propaganda seminars as a condition of probation.

If MADD’s political agenda is ever fulfilled, no person in the U.S. will be able to drive home after drinking a couple of beers at a ball game or after enjoying wine with a meal at a restaurant without violating the law, risking arrest and being subjected to unlimited civil liability. If MADD’s attempts to criminalize low BAC drivers really saved lives it would be one thing. However, all available valid government data indicates that it does not. Even the principal founder of MADD has left the organization, citing a lack of focus on the real public safety issue, that of getting high BAC chronic/alcoholic drunk drivers off the road.

Helped by interviewer Margaret Carlson of Time, retired Senator Fred Thompson, now a star on “Law and Order,” said on Capital Gang:


"I had to go to Hollywood to get anybody to listen to my political views." - Fred Thompson

Guess who got the FBI's award for distinguished performance? Agent Spike Bowman, who denied the Minneapolis office a warrant to search the 20th hijacker Moussaoui's laptop. Guess who didn't get one? Coleen Rowley, who had the goods linking Moussaoui to Osama. She later joked that resistance from Washington was so great there must be a mole from al Qaeda there. - Margaret Carlson

Accused rebel groups include the Congolese Liberation Movement of Jean-Pierra Bemba, one of two key insurgent movements now promised a leading role in Congo's government under a power-sharing agreement to end the central African nation's war.

Rebels called their terror campaign Operation Clean the Slate, said Patricia Tome, spokeswoman for the U.N. Congo mission in the capital, Kinshasa.

"The operation was presented to the people almost like a vaccination campaign, envisioning the looting of each home and the rape of each woman," Tome said. ...

"The testimony given by victims and of witnesses was of cannibalism and forced cannibalism," including people made by rebels to eat members of their own family, Tome said.

Atrocities found by investigators include the removal and consumption of hearts of infants, small girls killed and mutilated, "people executed alive before the members of their families, and the rape of children," Tome said.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan is on the job, though, and promises to decide very soon whether the UN should actually do anything, as soon as he finishes the latest batch of resolutions condemning Israel.

The West has been able to do this while still shrewdly cultivating the myth that much of Africa's problems today are African made--we have all heard the usual Western defenses that Africa's problems are the fault of corrupt African administrations, centuries-old tribal hatreds, the fault of unsophisticated peoples. But we know that those statements are all a lie. We have always known it.

Sources in the Great Lakes region consistently report the presence of a U.S.-built military base near Cyangugu, Rwanda, near the Congolese border. The base, reported to have been partly constructed by the U.S. firm Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, is said to be involved with training RPF forces and providing logistics support to their troops in the DRC.

The increasing reliance by the Department of Defense on so-called Private Military Contractors (PMCs) is of special concern. Many of these PMCs -- once labeled as "mercenaries" by previous administrations when they were used as foreign policy instruments by the colonial powers of France, Belgium, Portugal, and South Africa -- have close links with some of the largest mining and oil companies involved in Africa today. PMCs, because of their proprietary status, have a great deal of leeway to engage in covert activities far from the reach of congressional investigators. They can simply claim that their business in various nations is a protected trade secret and the law now seems to be on their side.

...these leaders, who include the current presidents of Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Angola, Eritrea, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo preside over countries where ethnic and civil turmoil permit unscrupulous international mining companies to take advantage of the strife to fill their own coffers with conflict diamonds, gold, copper, platinum, and other precious minerals including one that is a primary component of computer microchips.

Some of the companies involved in this new "scramble for Africa" have close links with PMCs and America's top political leadership. For example, America Minerals Fields, Inc., a company that was heavily involved in promoting the 1996 accession to power of the late Congolese President Laurent-Desire Kabila, was, at the time of its involvement in the Congo's civil war, headquartered in Hope, Arkansas. Its major stockholders included long-time associates of former President Clinton going back to his days as Governor of Arkansas. America Mineral Fields also reportedly enjoys a close relationship with Lazare Kaplan International, Inc., a major international diamond brokerage whose president remains a close confidant of past and current administrations on Africa matters.

One of the major goals of the Rwandan-backed Rassemblement Congolais pour la Democratie (RCD), a group fighting the Kabila government in Congo, is restoration of mining concessions for Barrick Gold, Inc. of Canada. In fact, the rebel RCD government's "mining minister" signed a separate mining deal with Barrick in early 1999. Among the members of Barrick's International Advisory Board are former President Bush and former President Clinton's close confidant Vernon Jordan.

Currently, Barrick and tens of other mining companies are stoking the flames of the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Each benefits by the de facto partition of the country into some four separate zones of political control. First the mineral exploiters from Rwanda and Uganda concentrated on pillaging gold and diamonds from the eastern Congo. Now, they have increasingly turned their attention to a valuable black sand called columbite-tantalite or "col-tan." Col-tan is a key material in computer chips and, therefore, is as considered a strategic mineral. It is my hope that the Bush administration will take pro-active measures to stem this conflict by applying increased pressure on Uganda and Rwanda to withdraw their troops from the country. However, the fact that President Bush has selected Walter Kansteiner to be Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, portends, in my opinion, more trouble for the Great Lakes region. A brief look at Mr. Kansteiner's curriculum vitae and statements calls into question his commitment to seeking a durable peace in the region. For example, he has envisaged the splitting up of the Great Lakes region into separate Tutsi and Hutu states through "relocation" efforts and has called the break-up of the DRC inevitable. I believe Kansteiner's previous work at the Department of Defense where he served on a Task Force on Strategic Minerals and one must certainly consider col-tan as falling into that category -- may influence his past and current thinking on the territorial integrity of the DRC. After all, 80 per cent of the world's known reserves of col-tan are found in the eastern DRC. It is potentially as important to the U.S. military as the Persian Gulf region.

The present turmoil in central Africa largely stems from a fateful incident that occurred on April 6, 1994. That was the missile attack on the Rwandan presidential aircraft that resulted in the death of Rwanda's Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana, his colleague President Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi, Habyarimana's chief advisers, and the French crew.

This aerial assassination resulted in a genocide coordinated by the successor militant Hutu Rwandan government that cost the lives of some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. This was followed by a counter-genocide orchestrated by the Tutsi-led Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) government that resulted in the deaths of 500,000 mostly Hutu refugees in Rwanda and neighboring Zaire/Congo.

there is concrete evidence to show that the plane was shot down by operatives of the RPF. At the time, the RPF was supported by the United States and its major ally in the region, Uganda. Prior to the attack, the RPF leader, the current Rwandan strongman General Paul Kagame, received military training at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Many of Kagame's subordinates received similar training, including instruction in the use of surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) at the Barry Goldwater Air Force Range at Luke Air Force Base, Arizona. It was Soviet-designed SAMs that were used to shoot down the Rwandan president's airplane. By its own admission, the U.S. Defense Department provided official military training to the RPF beginning in January 1994, three months before the missile attack on the aircraft.

Former moderate Hutu Defense Minister James Gasana, who served under Habyarimana from April 1992 to July 1993, stated before the French inquiry that his government declined to purchase SAMs because they realized the RPF had no planes and, therefore, procurement of such weapons would have been a waste of money.

[French intelligence]...insisted that the two SAM-16s used in the attack on the aircraft were procured from Ugandan military stocks and were "probably delivered by the Americans . . . from the Gulf War."

After the former RPF intelligence team revealed details of the attack, they were supported by yet another former RPF intelligence officer named Jean Pierre Mugabe. In a separate declaration, Mugabe contended that the assassination was directed by Kagame and RPF deputy commander-in-chief James Kabarebe. The RPF, according to Mugabe, campaigned extensively for the regional peace meeting in Dar es Salaam from which Habyarimana was returning when he was assassinated. Mugabe claimed the idea was to collect the top Hutu leadership on the plane in order to easily eliminate them in the attack.

Also, particularly troublesome is a conclusion the CIA is said to have reached in an
assessment written in January 1994, a few months before the genocide. According to key officials I have interviewed during my research, that analysis came to the conclusion that in the event that President Habyarimana was assassinated, the minimum number of deaths resulting from the mayhem in Rwanda would be 500 (confined mostly to Kigali and environs) and the maximum 500,000. Regrettably, the CIA's higher figure was closer to reality. [an interesting study for the CIA to be conducting - B]

Certain interests in the United States had reason to see Habyarimana and other pro-French leaders in central Africa out of the way. As recently written by Gilbert Ngijol, a former Assistant to the Special Representative of the Secretary General of the UN to Rwanda in 1994, the United States directly benefited economically from the loss of influence of French and Belgian mining interests in the central Africa and Great Lakes regions.

There is also reason to believe that a number of people with knowledge of Kagame's plot against the presidential aircraft have been assassinated. These possibly include Tanzania's former intelligence chief...

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[The Congo] ...is a western syndicated proxy war, and like Sierra Leone, Angola and Sudan, it is war-as-cover for the rapid and unrestricted extraction of raw materials, [how does this fit into Suddan slaughter and slavery in the south? - B] and war as a means to totally disenfranchise the local people. Diamonds, gold, columbium tantalite, niobium, cobalt, manganese and petroleum, natural gas and timber and possibly uranium -- are a few of the major spoils being pillaged behind the scenes as war ravages DRC and some of these minerals are almost solely found in DRC, especially cobalt, niobium, columbium tantalite.

Barrick Gold provides a convenient example using war-as-cover. According to testimony I took in western Uganda in November, Barrick Gold is operating in the Kilo Moto mines near Bunia. These mines are reportedly protected by UPDF. An Israeli General was awarded another Kilo Moto concession and UPDF and RCD operate others. And there is massive ivory poaching again protection rackets going on. Barrick Advisory Board member George Bush and his CIA connections certainly play into these mining deals and lay the groundwork a.k.a. slaughter if necessary to get the product. That includes long-time links to people like CIA station operative in Zaire Lawrence Devlin for example, and his associations with the Templesmans.

George Bush apparently telephoned Mobutu just prior to the first US supported invasion of Congo August 1996 on behalf of Swedish Financier Adolph Lundin to negotiate a deal over the Kilo Moto fields. And the US Presidential Election outcome of 1996 was completely irrelevant to the invasion of Zaire and the replacement of Mobutu. Remember that Kagame was in Washington about August 1996 checking his battle plans with the Pentagon. Mobutu's days were numbered.
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When Lumumba, Congo's first elected leader, spoke of using the Congo's resources to benefit the Congo. De Beers feared it would lose access to the one-third of world's diamond supply in the Congo - as would also Tempelsman. Shortly after this, the CIA facilitated Lumumba's assassination.
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In the late 1950s democracy arrived in Africa with the election of President Nkrumah - who thought Black Africans should not have to sell diamonds to an apartheid company - so took Ghana's diamonds from the cartel. A short while later, the State Department wrote a furious letter to Maurice Tempelsman saying that his office, by using an unguarded phone line, had betrayed the identity of the plotters against Nkrumah and the identity of the CIA Head of Station. The plotters seemingly were communicating to the White House via Tempelsman's office. (Memorandum for the President from WW Rostow, 24 September 1961) Tempelsman clearly had advanced knowledge of this coup attempt. Shortly afterwards President Kennedy decided not to "downgrade" (his word) Tempelsman for this error.

For years, Egypt has been engaged in missile and weapons of mass destruction programs with countries such as Iraq and North Korea, reports Geostrategy-Direct, the online intelligence newsletter. The problem was that the CIA had difficulty uncovering these programs.

Now, after years of searching, the CIA has come up with the reason.

Egypt has devised a concealment and deception program that exceeds that of North Korea's, intelligence operatives say. Many of the Egyptian missile and WMD programs are based in the Sahara and huge Western deserts between Egypt and Libya.

The two countries have built a series of tunnels along the Egyptian-Libyan border. The tunnels conceal development and production of North Korean missiles and nuclear weapons components from the prying eyes of Israeli and U.S. spy satellites.

North Korea reportedly built the tunnel network. Pyongyang used its expertise in digging its way to South Korea for the Egyptian and Libyan concealment program.

North Korea currently is working on a mega-tunnel project through Libya. Thousands of North Korean workers are building a reinforced concrete tunnel that is 1,300 feet underground and can't be destroyed even by U.S. nuclear weapons. Or, at least that is the hope by Egypt and the Libyans.

The presence of so many North Koreans as well as Filipinos in Libya has not been easy to hide. That's where the deception comes in. Libyan ruler Moammar Gadhafi has told Western guests that the laborers are going to build a 2,000-mile tunnel from Egypt to Tunisia in what the colonel calls the "Great Man-Made River Project."

Quietly, U.S. officials have probed Egypt for information on the project. Egyptian officials, who have stymied every U.S. investigation on Iraqi- or North Korean-linked WMD programs, have shrugged their shoulders.

A Rwandan pastor was convicted of aiding and abetting genocide yesterday over the killing of 6,000 parishioners during the country's massacres in 1994.

Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, 78, a Seventh Day Adventist pastor, was sentenced to 10 years in jail by the United Nations tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania. Human-rights activists protested at the leniency, saying that, with time already served, he could be free in four years.

Ntakirutimana's son Gerard, a doctor, was convicted of genocide and crimnes against humanity and sentenced to 25 years.

Up to a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in a 100-day orgy of bloodshed in 1994. The tribunal heard that Ntakirutimana lured 6,000 of those fleeing death squads into his church complex in Kibuye, western Rwanda. He and his son then brought in the killers.

Some of the refugees had heard of the plot to kill them, and wrote to the pastor: "We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families."

The phrase became the title of a book by an American journalist, Philip Gourevitch, who first highlighted the case. He said Ntakirutimana told the victims: "You must be eliminated. God no longer wants you."

Priest from hell - "Ntakirutimana [a Seventh Day Adventist pastor]...

The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch. 'Tis one of the sacred relics Brother Maynard always carries with him.

Consult the Book of Armaments.

BROTHER MAYNARD - Armaments Chapter Two Verses Nine to Twenty One.

ANOTHER MONK - And St. Attila raised his hand grenade up on high saying "O Lord bless this thy hand grenade that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy. "and the Lord did grin and people did feast upon the lambs and sloths and carp and anchovies and orang-utans and breakfast cereals and fruit bats and...

BROTHER MAYNARD - Skip a bit brother ...

ANOTHER MONK -... Er ... oh, yes ... and the Lord spake, saying, "First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin, then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shalt be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thou foe, who being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it.

“no, Plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to own and use a dairy cow or a dairy herd;”

“no, Plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to consume the milk from their own cow;”

“no, Plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to produce and consume the foods of their choice…”