The Guild 3-30-2004 Kerry cuddles KKK

LOL!

My first impression of David Kay was correct, he's a weasel. Mr. Deulfer seems to have a better grasp of the weapons search.

**********
The CIA released a redacted version of Duelfer's opening statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday. It suggests he believes there were problems with Kay's sources -- particularly the Iraqi officials he interviewed -- and, therefore, his conclusions.

"While ISG has met with hundreds of scientists, we have yet to identify the most critical people in any programmatic effort. Many people have yet to be found or questioned, and many of those we have found are not giving us complete answers," Duelfer said. "Many perceive a grave risk in speaking with us. On one hand, there is a fear of prosecution or arrest. On the other, there is a fear former regime supporters will exact retribution."

Duelfer also said the ISG may be unable to get the information it needs because it doesn't have the expertise or resources to do so. "Most of those in the ISG are not experts on Iraq, and most do not have extensive experience in the kinds of investigative operations and analysis they are asked to undertake," Duelfer said. Can you say October surprize?

I hope they get everything related to a connection of Saddam and OBL translated in time for some campaign ads.

I was thinking Soros looked like a flock of pigeons had landed on him, but your observation will do just fine, Mae.

What's with the pseudo military bomber jacket Effin's wearing? How dare he? Is he exploiting 9/11? What will he do next, land on an aircraft carrier?

Teresa looks like she's thinking, "Take my husband - please!"

He sure leans left! That bomber jacket is him subconsciously emulating the President.

How the heck does Lurch assume those wacky poses?

It's almost like he practices looking goofy.

Good yob with the new treads for gd.

Exactly my thoughts on Terri's look of supplication for a Divine Intervention.

Whenever the haters complain that Dubya "lied about the WMD in Iraq" I sure do wish we could ask them: "So what do YOU think happened to them?". I'm getting tired of this routine where they whine and whine, but never have to offer their own plan or explanation.

Freepmail on the way:

Way-Gay Aging Lesbian Kerry....

Ta-Ta, press-persons. Now NO FAIR takin' pictures if I fall. Hee Hee.

Oooooo, that was a cute ski hat!!

Like my little flower friend?

Well, don't just stand there, you s-- of a b----!

HEADS UP!

Clarke's on Hardball tonight. While Chris will mew over the anti-Iraq stuff, I think he may be very tough on Clarke. We'll see.

Yep, W's taking off the gloves and I couldn't be happier!

So glad you are collecting Kerry photos...there are lots of goodies out there. His surgery was successful and they now say he will be off the campaign trail for a week because of pain...here he is waving with his good arm...Now please Mr. K, go away for awhile and recup in private...

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry , D-Mass., left, waves to the media from the back seat of an automobile as he departs Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, Wednesday, March 31, 2004. Kerry underwent shoulder surgery at the hospital Wednesday. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

I hope John Kerry keeps stopping in gas stations to pay exhorbitant prices for bottled water - no one here in flyover country buys much bottled water at the convenience store. Bottled beer, yes, water, no. Me, I buy Arizona Iced Tea.

I bet Pepe le Pew was pumped so full of painkillers he thought it was 1969. Groovy.

Wouldn't you like to see that "man of the people" stop at a gas station not for the bottled water, but to pump gas? He wouldn't have a clue how we little people do it.

Our Viet War Friends Betrayed by John Kerry
Knight Ridder Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON - Betrayal is an ugly word, but sometimes it needs to be spoken. The Montagnard people of the Vietnam highlands have been betrayed by both friends and enemies, time and again. The betrayal continues.

It's not a pretty story, and among the names that figure into this is that of Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who is running for the presidency of the United States.

The Montagnards are a simple mountain people who were pawns in foreign wars that dragged on in Vietnam for decades. They were loyal soldiers for first the French and then the U.S. Special Forces, the Green Berets, during the period from the 1940s through much of the 1970s. Today they are still paying the price for that, and for wanting to be left alone in their high green mountains.

The French dubbed them "Montagnards," or mountain people. The Americans nicknamed them "the Yards" and loved them both for their loyalty and their warrior spirit. The lowland Vietnamese, both North and South, applied the contemptuous name "Moi," or savages, to them and have, at various times and under various governments, sought to wipe them out and bury them and their high homeland in a tide of ethnic Vietnamese immigration.

For a thousand years and more the Montagnards, or Dega People as they call themselves, inhabited the Central Highlands of Vietnam, living the lives of hunter-gatherers and slash-and-burn farmers. They would clear small patches of the red laterite soil and for a few seasons grow a bit of grain and manioc and yams. When the soil wore out they moved their thatch-roofed homes on stilts to another place and cleared another bit of ground.

In 1954 the South Vietnamese government under President Ngo Dinh Diem forced thousands of Montagnards into resettlement camps and began a program to resettle ethnic Vietnamese on tribal lands. The communist government of Vietnam, since its victory in 1975, has done much the same thing.

The Montagnards, who once numbered more than 1 million, have dwindled to fewer than 650,000 during a time when the Vietnamese population has more than doubled to 60 million in a postwar baby boom.

I wish I could tell you that the missing Montagnards, who soldiered for our Green Berets, could be found among the hundreds of thousands of refugees from Vietnam who have settled and prospered in the United States since the end of the war. But I can't. No more than 2,000 of the Montagnard have found sanctuary in this country, most in the area of North Carolina around Fort Bragg where the Special Forces headquarters is located.

Many were killed in the desperate fighting that enveloped the Central Highlands during the war. Many more just died, their villages destroyed, their way of life and living likewise destroyed.

In early 2001 thousands of Montagnards demonstrated for freedom of religion and for a return of their land. The Hanoi government sent in soldiers and police to crush them. Many were killed; many were tried and sentenced to prison. More than a thousand fled across the border into Cambodia. In 2002-2003 the Bush administration took almost all of them in and they joined 600 Montagnard resettled in two earlier batches - 200 in 1986, and 400 in 1992.

In 2001 the Vietnam Human Rights Act was introduced in Congress. It tied future U.S. aid to Vietnam to the Hanoi government improving its abysmal human rights record, including persecution of the Montagnards. It passed the House with 410 ayes and only one no. But in the Senate, Kerry locked the bill up in committee and refused to allow it to go the floor for debate and a vote. In effect, Kerry killed the human rights bill.

At the time, Kerry said the measure would not improve human rights but instead would weaken Vietnamese human rights activists and strengthen the hard-liners who oppose U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

My military friends who fought in the Central Highlands alongside the loyal Montagnards carry memories, pain and guilt over the fate of their friends who were left behind when the last helicopters lifted off the roof in Saigon in 1975.

I carry a memory of my own from a hot November morning in 1965 when a battalion of the 1st Cavalry Division marched into a remote Montagnard village east of Plei Me. As we came into the village a toothless old man rushed out, hurriedly buttoning his old French army tunic, clutching a tattered little French flag. He thought his old comrades had finally come back to get him.

They never came, just as we will never come. The only question is whether the Vietnamese can somehow be persuaded to allow the Montagnards to survive as a people in what is left of their mountains, now heavily logged and denuded.

Betrayal is an ugly word, and an even uglier memory.
___

ABOUT THE WRITER
Joseph L. Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and co-author of the national best-seller "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young." Readers may write to him at: Knight Ridder Washington Bureau, 700 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045.
http://www.ktok.com/script/headline_newsmanager.php?id=278495&pagecontent=opinion&feed_id=60

I truly hope that folks mash your link.

This is important information to which you've linked us.

Thank you, M.

So far we've established that J. Forbes Kerry doesn't give a rat's rear end about the POWs who possibly remained in Vietnam, about the Montagnards and, obviously, about the unborn (or soon to be born):

.... Last week, by a vote of 61-to-38, the Senate passed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, also known as "Laci and Conner's Law," which makes the death or injury to a "child in utero" a federal crime when it is committed in the course of another violent federal crime. President Bush immediately applauded: "Pregnant women who have been harmed by violence, and their families, know that there are two victims -- the mother and the unborn child -- and both victims should be protected by federal law. I look forward to signing this important legislation into law."

Abortion, medical treatment, and the acts of the woman herself are specifically exempted. But some people can't get abortion politics out of their heads.

Sharon Rocha, Laci Peterson's mother and Conner Peterson's grandmother, wrote in 2003: "What I find difficult to understand is why groups and senators who champion the pro-choice cause are blind to the fact that these two-victim crimes are the ultimate violation of choice." In a Feb. 26 statement rejecting a substitute bill proposed by Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., Rocha said: "Laci knew that Conner was her son, and I know it too. Two people, Laci and Conner, would be here with us today if they had not been murdered. There were two victims in this crime, not one."

Last week, only 38 senators voted against Laci and Conner's law. Sen. John Kerry was one of them. In a letter to constituents, Sen. Kerry expressed concern that, even though abortion is specifically exempted, recognizing two victims might somehow undermine Roe v. Wade. full story

Miniter finally speaks and is way too nice if you ask me.

A year ago, I thought Richard A. Clarke, President Clinton's counterterror czar, was a hero. He and his small band of officials fought a long battle to focus the bureaucracy on stopping Osama bin Laden long before 9/11. For my own book, I interviewed Mr. Clarke extensively and found him to be blunt and forthright. He remembered whole conversations from inside the Situation Room.

So I looked forward to reading "Against All Enemies." Yes, I expected him to put the wood to President Bush for not doing enough about terrorism--a continuation of his Clinton-era complaints--and I expected that he might be right. I assumed, of course, that he would not spare the Clinton team either, or the CIA and FBI. I expected, in short, something blunt and forthright--and, that rarest thing, nonpartisan in a principled way.

I was wrong on all counts. Forthright? One momentous Bush-era episode on which Mr. Clarke can shed some light is his decision to approve the flights of the bin Laden clan out of the U.S. in the days after 9/11, when all other flights were grounded. About this he doesn't say a word. The whole premise of "Against All Enemies" is its value as an insider account. But Mr. Clarke was not a Bush insider. When he lost his right to brief the Cabinet, he also lost his ringside seat on presidential decision-making.

Mr. Clarke's ire is largely directed at the Iraq war, but its preparation was left to others on the National Security Council. He left the White House almost a month before the war began. As for its justification, he acts as if there is none. He dismisses, as "raw," reports that show meetings between al Qaeda and the Mukhabarat, Iraq's intelligence service, going back to 1993. The documented meeting between the head of the Mukhabarat and bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan, in 1996--a meeting that challenged all the CIA's assumptions about "secular" Iraq's distance from Islamist terrorism--should have set off alarm bells. It didn't.

There is other evidence of a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda that Mr. Clarke should have felt obliged to address. Just days before Mr. Clarke resigned, Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations that bin Laden had met at least eight times with officers of Iraq's Special Security Organization. In 1998, an aide to Saddam's son Uday defected and repeatedly told reporters that Iraq funded al Qaeda. South of Baghdad, satellite photos pinpointed a Boeing 707 parked at a camp where terrorists learned to take over planes. When U.S. forces captured the camp, its commander confirmed that al Qaeda had trained there as early as 1997. Mr. Clarke does not take up any of this.

Curiously, about the Clinton years, where Mr. Clarke's testimony would be authoritative, he is circumspect. When I interviewed him a year ago, he thundered at the political appointees who blocked his plan to destroy bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan in the wake of the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Yet in his book he glosses over them. He has little of his former vitriol for Clinton-era bureaucrats who tried to stop the deployment of the Predator spy plane over Afghanistan. (It spotted bin Laden three times.)

He fails to mention that President Clinton's three "findings" on bin Laden, which would have allowed the U.S. to take action against him, were haggled over and lawyered to death. And he plays down the fact that the Treasury Department, worried about the effects on financial markets, obstructed efforts to cut off al Qaeda funding. He never notes that between 1993 and 1998 the FBI, under Mr. Clinton, paid an informant who turned out to be a double agent working on behalf of al Qaeda. In 1998, the Clinton administration alerted Pakistan to our imminent missile strikes in Afghanistan, despite the links between Pakistan's intelligence service and al Qaeda. Mr. Clarke excuses this decision--bin Laden managed to flee just before the strikes--as a diplomatic necessity.

While angry over Mr. Bush's intelligence failures, Mr. Clarke actually defends one of the Clinton administration's biggest ones--the bombing of a Sudanese "aspirin factory" in 1998. Even at the time, there were good reasons for doubting that it made nerve agents. He fails to mention that in 1997 the CIA had to reject more than 100 reports from Sudan when agency sources failed lie-detector tests and that the CIA continued to pay Sudanese dissidents $100 a report, in a country where the annual per-capita income is about $400. The soil sample he cites, supposedly showing a nerve-gas ingredient, is now agreed to contain a common herbicide.

Last year Mr. Clarke made much of such failures. But this year he treats Mr. Clinton with deference. Indeed, the only man whom he really wants to take to the woodshed is President Bush. Mr. Clarke believes the Iraq war to be a foolish distraction from the fight against terrorism, driving a wedge between the U.S. and its Arab allies. In fairness, he might have noted that, since the war started, our allies (e.g., Saudi Arabia and Sudan) have given us more intelligence leads, not fewer. Considering its anti-Bush bias, maybe Mr. Clarke's book should have been called "Against One Enemy."

Or, better, "Against All Evidence." Mr. Clarke misstates a range of checkable facts. The 1993 U.S. death toll in Somalia was 18, not 17. He writes that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed became al Qaeda's "chief operational leader" in 1995; in fact, he took over in November 2001. He writes (correctly) that Abdul Yasim, one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, fled to Iraq but adds the whopper that "he was incarcerated by Saddam Hussein's regime." An ABC News crew found Mr. Yasim working a government job in Iraq in 1997, and documents captured in 2003 revealed that the bomber had been on Saddam's payroll for years.

Mr. Clarke gets the timing wrong of the plot to assassinate bin Laden in Sudan; it was 1994, not 1995, and was the work of Saudi intelligence, not Egypt. He dismisses Laurie Mylorie's argument that Iraq was behind the 1993 World Trade Center blast as if there is nothing to it. Doesn't it matter that the bombers made hundreds of phone calls to Iraq in the weeks leading up to the event? That Ramzi Yousef, the lead bomber, entered the U.S. as a supposed refugee from Iraq? That he was known as "Rasheed the Iraqi"?

In recent days we have been subjected to a great deal of Mr. Clarke, not least to replays of his fulsome apology for not doing enough to prevent 9/11. But he has nothing to apologize for: He was a relentless foe of al Qaeda for years. He should really apologize for the flaws in his book. Link

Clarke's on Hardball tonight.

I tried to watch but those two together made my skin crawl. The only part I saw Matthews was slobbering over Clarke, did he ever get tough with Clarke?

One thing I did hear Matthews say was something about Condi putting Clarke in charge on 9/11. Do we know if that's true or just another Clarke fantasy? It makes me crazy the way Matthews takes Clarke's assertions as gospel and then repeats them as fact.