The Guild 3-23-2004 Our house is a very, very, very fine house...

This is an aerial view of some of the buildings on Teresa Heinz Kerry's 90-acre family farm in Fox Chapel, Pa., just outside Pittsburgh, on Monday, March 22, 2004. This is one of at least five sites that Heinz Kerry and her husband, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry (news - web sites), own with a cumulative value at nearly $33 million. (AP Photo/Keith Srakocic)

Democratic Presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites)'s Ketchum, Idaho vacation home on the Wood River is seen in this March 17, 2004 photo. From a sailing mecca to a ski resort, presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, enjoy the trappings of their wealth in at least five homes and vacation getaways across the country valued at nearly $33 million. (AP Photo/Troy Maben)

The Nantucket, Mass., home of Teresa Heinz Kerry is seen, Thursday, March 18, 2004. From a sailing mecca to a ski resort, presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry (news - web sites) and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, enjoy the trappings of their wealth in at least five homes and vacation getaways across the country valued at nearly $33 million. (AP Photo/Rob Benchley)

This is a view of the Georgetown home of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites), D-Mass., and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, on O Street NW in the Georgetown area of Washington, D.C., Thursday, March 18, 2004. From a sailing mecca to a ski resort, presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, enjoy the trappings of their wealth in at least five homes and vacation getaways across the country valued at nearly $33 million. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Sen. John Kerry sold his foreign mansion in Italy just weeks before he announced a run for the White House in January of 2003, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

Actor George Clooney purchased the stunning 18th century mansion located in the Italian village of Laglio [50 miles north of Milan] from Kerry and his wife for $7,800,000. Clooney first learned about the listing from Brad Pitt, who had been holidaying with his wife Jennifer Aniston at Versace's compound nearby.

While Kerry and his wife's homes in the United States are worth at least $23,733,705, it is not clear if the candidate currently owns property overseas.

The campaign has repeatedly denied requests for any information on foreign assets held by Kerry.

If you bring the dust bin I'll bring the broom because he'll be crumbs at the end of this election if not sooner.

It will be interesting to see if Kerry embraces Clarke. If Kerry starts talking up the clinton years like he tried to last night it will light a path to their failures because questions will eventually be asked.

What shouldn't be forgotten is that in 1993 al Qaeda tried to bring down the WTC. They didn't drive that van full of explosives into the garage just to blow a hole in six floors of the parking garage, they intended to bring down one tower hoping it would take out the other.

Since Clarke wasn't 'thinking outside the box' nobody in the clinton administration thought it'd be a good idea to mount a war on terror, they just continued "swatting at flies" and the Bush campaign needs to talk that up.

And that bullbleep Albright was trying to feed us, that America and it's allies didn't have the stomach for such an operation, doesn't make sense once the voters remember Kosovo. We certainly got talked into that mess, they could have educated the nation to the dangers and we would have supported it.

More on the Dem ersatz lovefest:

For $1,000 a plate, donors ate barbecue family-style and gawked at Carter, Clinton and Gore. Hardly the best of friends, the three have not been together since the 9/11 memorial in 2001.

But the desire of Democrats to send Bush back to Texas is almost palpable, transcending past squabbles. "I want to start by saying something nice about President Bush," Kerry told the crowd. "Of all the Presidents we've had with the last name of Bush, his economic plan ranks in the top two." [Why are the Dems' attempts at humor so lame?]

While Clinton's speech overshadowed everyone, it was Carter who had the sound bite of the night. Referring to his long friendship with consumer activist and current candidate Ralph Nader, Carter said, "When I was President, he gave me a lot of advice. Tonight, I want to return the favor. ... Go back to examining the rear ends of automobiles and don't risk costing the Democrats the White House as you did four years ago." [Can't tell - was that another lame attempt at humor?] rest of story

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Former rock singer news babe Ashleigh Banfield has been told by NBC to pack up her scarves and go home, story here

UNTANGLING TERROR
By JOHN PODHORETZ
March 26, 2004 -- DAYS of public hearings into the 9/11 attacks have given us a few unambiguous answers to important questions.

Did the Clinton and Bush administrations do enough to stop the 9/11 attacks? The answer is no - for the simple reason that the attacks took place. The only way either administration could have "done enough" is to have acted to pre-empt those attacks.

Could America have acted to pre-empt the attacks? Theoretically, yes. Practically, no.

In theory, President Bill Clinton could have tried to frame the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa as a war on the United States. He could have sought to rally the public to a new understanding of the threat of terrorism.

It's important to carry this theoretical question as far back as this because the 9/11 plot was well under way in the year 2000. If you want to play this speculative game - and clearly the 9/11 commission does - the only way to be sure the 9/11 plot could never have gone off would have been to destroy al Qaeda before the plan was even formulated.

Thus, the only real moment of maximum opportunity came at the time of the embassy bombings. Clinton's actions then - firing cruise missiles at al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and at a plant in the Sudan we wrongly believed was making chemical weaponry - received broad support in this country.

But look. We were all alive and sentient in the summer of '98. Can anyone seriously contemplate that America was ready to go all-out against terrorism, even if the president had used the powers of the bully pulpit to stir the nation? It's absurd.

The horrible but true fact is that, in the context of the time, al Qaeda's actions did not sufficiently horrify or galvanize the American people into understanding that we were now in the crosshairs of mass murderers. These simultaneous car bombings were simply too far away, and because they were conventional acts of conventional terrorism, they did not stir the public into believing that something new and deadly was going on.

There was certainly a failure of vision here, but the failure belongs to us all.

Could the United States have made it clear to the international community that there needed to be a War on Terror? No. Absolutely not. Europe was far more concerned with the war on its own continent in the former Yugoslavia. Before 9/11, the government in Pakistan - whose cooperation made possible our military efforts in Afghanistan - was the great protector of the Taliban. And so on and so on.

But couldn't the United States have destroyed al Qaeda by covert means, with U.S. Special Forces in collaboration with the Afghani resistance forces in the north? No. The best answer to this question came from William Cohen, Clinton's secretary of defense, in his testimony on Tuesday.

First, Special Forces couldn't have done much to find bin Laden: "We have 13,500 troops in Afghanistan right now, not to mention the Pakistanis, and we can't find bin Laden to date. So, the notion that you're going to put a small unit, however good, on the ground, or a large unit, and put them into Afghanistan and track down bin Laden, I think is folly."

But if such a covert effort had paid off and we had found bin Laden, then what? It's not so easy to call in an airstrike at that point. As the Israelis learned from their multiple efforts against certain terrorist targets in Gaza, "It's very difficult to kill an individual with a missile. We all know that."

So the only choice then is to get a force in on the ground to nail him. And here's the rub: You have to get them into Afghanistan from somewhere. And as Cohen pointed out, the time between spotting bin Laden and getting boots on the ground is probably at least 12 hours.

"You're talking about six hours from the time . . . you've got the coordinates, GPS signals, target that individual - you're six hours away. To put troops on the ground, it was probably double that time. By the time you take a package and fly them from Fort Bragg, or compose some elements that were already in the Gulf, you're talking more than six hours."

Cohen concluded: "The notion that you could put thousands, or hundreds, or even tens of people on the ground and hope to locate him under those circumstances I think is simply unrealistic."

What if we had had U.S. forces injured in an attack on bin Laden? What if they had been captured? Obviously, the risk of disaster would have been worth it - if everybody could have looked into a crystal ball and seen that 9/11 would inevitably happen without extraordinary measures. But our leaders are not psychics.

What are the lessons to be drawn from these hearings? This nation and its leadership failed to act preemptively against Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, to our eternal grief.

At the very least, this suggests why the war in Iraq was not only justified but necessary - as a pre-emptive action against a terrorist state that could have placed us in unimaginable jeopardy at some point in the near future.
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/17546.htm

Oh yeah, that pic is the keeper, it will do the trick.

I'd like to know who pinned the funny label on dems, whomever has a wet moldy rag for a sense of humor.

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Not much in the news of late about the poor little oil for food program scandal so here is the latest.

As the United Nations struggles to defend itself against allegations of corruption in the multi-billion dollar oil-for-food programme for Iraq, UN officials have revealed internal documents showing they knew of the problem as early as 2000.

The documents refer to illegal commissions levied by the Iraqi government on oil-for-food supply contracts given to foreign companies.

The UN investigated, but was unable to find sufficient evidence at the time, and efforts to address the issue among Security Council governments simply fell off the agenda.

US conservatives have long alleged that the oil-for-food programme - started by the UN in 1996 to import humanitarian goods to Iraq - was abused by Saddam Hussein, and that a system of kickbacks and surcharges funded a vast illegal armaments programme.

Last week, the US General Accounting Office, a congressional investigatory body, estimated Mr Hussein acquired $10.1bn in illegal revenues. Of this, $5.7bn came from oil smuggled out of Iraq and $4.4bn in illicit surcharges on oil sales. More

In a letter to the 9/11 commission on Wednesday, Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) told panel members that "Clarke was part of the problem before Sept. 11 because he took too narrow a view of the terrorism threat."

Shays said that before the Sept. 11 terror attacks, a House panel held twenty hearings and two formal briefings on terrorism -- and Richard Clarke "was of little help in our oversight."

"When he briefed the subcommittee, his answers were both evasive and derisive," Shays said in his March 24, 2004 letter.

Shays noted that "no truly national strategy to combat terrorism was ever produced during Mr. Clarke's tenure."

Shays also released a copy of a letter he wrote to Clarke on July 5, 2000, telling Clarke that Shays' subcommittee found the information Clarke had given them "less than useful," and asking him to answer additional questions.

And Shays released a January 22, 2001 letter he wrote to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, complaining that Clarke had not answered the subcommittee's questions. "During a briefing to this Subcommittee, Mr. Clarke stated that there is no need for a national strategy," Shays wrote to Rice.

"This Subcommittee, and others, disagree with Mr. Clarke's assessment that U.S. government agencies do not require a planning and preparation document to respond to terrorist attacks," Shays wrote.

http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1105478/posts

More Clarke.

Q: You tried to convince him, it has been written, to take your job. Can you tell me a little bit about that what happened?

RC: Shortly after the Bush administration came into office, we were asked to think about how we organized the White House for a number of issues, including cybersecurity, computer security, homeland security, and counterterrorism. I was asked for my advice, and I proposed that the counterterrorism responsibility be broken off be a separate job, and that the cybersecurity job be broken off as a separate job. I said I had done counterterrorism for about a decade, and I wanted to start working on cybersecurity, which I think is terribly important. That was later approved by the president. Link

Clarke didn't think al Qaeda was enough of a problem to keep him in his counterterrorism position.

Color me naive, I didn't think there was a bigger flip flopper than Kerry.

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