Date: Friday, June 30, 2006

Dateline: Akron, Ohio, U.S.A.

It’s hard to find an Internet connection in Akron. Nine out of ten people you ask will direct you to a highway. Seven out of ten won’t shut their lawnmowers down when answering a stranger’s question and if you mention laptop they’ll send you to a bar. I didn’t dare ask about a hotspot. Suggesting that analytic converters be mandatory on all lawnmowers? That might have gotten me a tire neckless.

During the months of May and June ‘no less than 5,818 Iraqi civilians were killed’. That information wouldn’t appear in print until August. Total deaths in this protracted war in August were put at 2,500 American troops and 50,000 Iraqi civilians. Two years ago at least one credible news source but the number of Iraqi civilian deaths at or near 100,000. Why the discrepancy? Because the U.S. Army doesn’t register body counts. It did that in Vietnam and we all should know what happened there. The body counts always favored U.S. troops and their allies but even exaggerated, the news depressed the public. Recently the Sunday Times of London put the total death toll in Iraq at 200,000. Then an independent agency put the total Iraqi death toll at 655,000 which was denied by the American government. The problem now in Iraq, with around 100 deaths a day, is that the government doesn’t want to call what’s going on a civil war. And how much is this war costing the U.S. government? Only billion a month.

As for local news in Ohio during my stay, there wasn’t much of worldly consequence. Around the country there was plenty going on but if you listened to Fox News on TV you got the government’s censored reports delivered by bias news readers. If that wasn’t an indication that democracy was going down the tubes in American and totalitarianism was on the rise, a new study claimed the Associated Press (AP) favored U.S. government positions in its news reports.

For example, 44 autopsy reports acquired from American military reports and posted on the American Civil Liberties web site proved that widespread torture had been used by U.S. forces. The AP did file that report but 98% of U.S. newspapers didn’t pick up the story and the AP never followed up on coverage. Remember that the AP reaches over a billion people everyday ‘via print, radio, or television’ and look at their distortions on casualty reports during the Israel-Palestine conflict. Here you will seen that less Israelis were killed than reported and more Palestinian died than reported. The list goes on but the fact is that the U.S. government lies and AP does its bidding. Then you get a real bone crushing statistic for democracy, American President George W. Bush has an IQ of 91. Another study puts his IQ between 111 and 120 which still doesn’t explain how he managed to graduate from Yale University. Obviously he didn’t major in economics. The national budget was balanced when he became president in 2000. A month later the budget was more than 00 billion in the red and the national debt was .4 trillion. Two months later it was trillion.

How bad is it? Take one day back in June, the 16th, and note the beast, 6, 16, 06 and here are another six: 1. Congress passes the draconian indecency TV law that muddles up the airwaves with bleeps. 2. Media journalists are denied access to Guantanamo Bay prisoners. 3. The Senate sends the president an additional (hum) 6 billion for military operations in Iraq. 4. The Supreme Court allows no-knock searches which means if you lock your door you might not have one anymore. 5. The CBS TV network asks its best journalist, Dan Rather, 74, to leave on bequest, no doubt, of the government. 6. Congressional Republicans reject timetable for Iraq military pullout.

The next article will report on how I got out of Ohio without being arrested. Meanwhile I’ll sign off with some promised blasphemy statistics: ‘With five percent of the world’s population, the U.S. has a quarter of the world’s prisons [and with] 2.2 million incarcerated, the most of any nation on earth.’ And, no surprise, with George Bush as governor, the state of Texas lead the nation in the number of prisoners incarcerated and executed. However in fairness to Bush, most American prisons were filled during the two presidential terms of Bill Clinton. With Bush as president in 2006, Halliburton was granted a 85 million contract to build a network of detention centers across the U.S. Each center could hold up to 5,000 people and could possibly be located on unused military bases and run by homeland security authorities. This is a ‘contingency contract’ which means it won’t receive a go-ahead if the public behaves itself after martial law is declared or Mexico decides not to invade. Not enough? Vice President Dick Cheney may sill call the shots at Halliburton. Question: What’s the difference between chaos and god? Answer: God is less reliable. Happy flossing, P.G.

Date: Monday, July 31, 2006

Dateline: Brussels, Belgium

Back in June I was sniffing around Green, Ohio, one hot afternoon trying to penetrate the perimeter of the Diebold Corporation which was not easy considering that it makes security systems. It also makes the voting machines that deprived Democratic presidential candidates Al Gore and John Kerry of election victories. On record is Diebold’s director, Walden O’Dell, promising George W. Bush that he would win the 2000 election and I’m guessing maybe even the 2004 election because he knew something about his fraudulent voting machines. O’Dell resigned in December, 2005 but that corporation deserves to be shaken down before the 2008 election if there is one. Why? Well we know that Bush won Ohio from John Kerry by 51% to 48% but Kerry won all hand counted ballots by 54.46 % and, here’s a good one, ‘in Cuyahoga County, the number of recorded votes was more than 93,000 greater than the number of registered voters.’ Bush won Cuyahoga county.

Anyway I got to the front desk at Diebold by passing myself off as an American Medical Association representative interested in pacemakers because Diebold also makes them. Vice President Dick Cheney happens to have one, embedded, and I was keen on finding the registration number with the idea that with a black box it could be turned off. Alas, I was in the pacemaker library when the security check came in and I was asked to leave with my hidden little camera. A car followed me back to Akron but I gave it the slip and rented another car before driving to Columbus where I took an international flight to Brussels, arriving on July 7th.

Noting that I wasn’t being observed on a terrace café I used a landline to phone an operative with a Deep Throat and he arrived within the hour. Over a beer he told me the precise date for the installation of Cheney’s heart pacemaker in 2001 and over the table I passed him a pre- written napkin with a list of registration numbers corresponding to the model that year.

Before leaving he passed me a copy of the Herald Tribune which contained photocopies on the editorial page of Jack Anderson’s notes linking Diebold with the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas which taught torture techniques and psychological warfare. That school is now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

On extended leave in Grenoble, Switzerland, for a brain tumor I picked up in the States I was wondering, if your vote doesn’t count unless you are a Republican then what alternatives are available? The Bush administration has dug a hole for itself so deep that it can’t get out and if Diebold doesn’t deliver another victory in 2008 the Democrats will surely be clear winners. Then you think back to the Nixon administration and what the U.S. Congress was worried about--that Nixon would declare Martial Law so he couldn’t be impeached. Fortunately he resigned but he probably did so with assurances that he would be pardoned for his crimes.

It was in the radiation room, seeing a blue light through a green mask with closed eyes and smelling a chemical cesspool that I became convinced that the Bush administration would declare martial law. When the Supreme Court slapped him on the hand for overstepping the law of the land and the Geneva convention there was a of moment rejoicing, the spirit of freedom was back but the administration replied that it was already complying with the court’s decision. So nothing changed. Then Congress finally got its act together to pass legislation permitting stem cell research. Bush vetoed it, his first veto since becoming president and that was like telling the U.S. Congress they were irrelevant. In other words he really doesn’t care about the health of Americans. And because he thinks he his the law his vision probably extends no further than World War IV and Armageddon.

So what are Americans up against if Martial Law is declared? They’ll discover that the Constitution and Bill of Rights have been trashed and they have no rights at all. The administration will, in theory, be backed up by Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency (NSA) and the U.S. military. Another barrier is the 33% rise in the number (800) of racist groups since Bush’s election in 2000. I don’t have all the stats but FBI personnel is put at 12,000 and the police, local, state and tribal is 700,000 according to a U.S. News & World Report. You may subtract tribal and figure that most of Homeland is already in uniform. In 1979 there were 20,000 employees working for the NSA, mostly suits, with a budget of .5 billion. Located in Maryland it’s described as the largest and most secretive U.S. government agency.

However there is a ray of light, a new field manual has been issued by the U.S. Army on how to deal with an insurrection. It’s too late for Iraq but not the United States and claims that a loss of moral legitimacy means losing the war. The French, says the manual, lost Algeria because they employed torture. The manual also implies that revolutions don’t last long enough. Incidently, the Army has 470,000 troops but they are spread around the world.

Could it happen? Could American citizens rise up to declare war on its government? And will the military step in to support them?

Could George W. Bush be deported to Texas to stand trial for crimes against humanity and nature? Remember, this is the former Governor of Texas who was responsible for 252 executions in the Lone Star State. The same governor who was overheard making jokes about Karla Faye Tucker’s letters begging him to no avail for clemency. Naturally the disposed president would receive a fair trial, Texas justice, by a jury of his peers which shouldn’t be too hard to find in Texas as his IQ of 91 is about the norm there. Ah, Lonesome George, a cowboy without cows. He would be strung up under a leafless dead oak astride a donkey to ponder his fate. Will it occur to him that it’s the only time in his life that he’s riding a Democratic ticket? Also remember that in the 1993 film, Geronimo–An American legend, Robert Duvall said ‘Texans are the lowest form of white man there is.’

Date: Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Dateline: Brussels

Presume that after all the hole digging they couldn’t get out of it so the Bush administration declared martial law. What then would Bush have left as his presidential legacy? Nothing. As he said himself, ‘We’re all going to be dead.’ That’s probably why he has done nothing on environmental issues, ‘he’s determined,’ as American columnist Tom Teepen observed, ‘not to let Mother Nature outlive him.’ Oh, he did cede an enormous chunk of Hawaiian islands as a national nature reserve on June 6 but that chunk was nearly a no-go area established by Hawaiians. I can’t trust Bush anymore, he has lied too much so I can only conclude that he had ulterior motives in establishing that reserve and it must have something to do with government control of a potential financial fortune under Hawaiian waters. Other than that his legacy is the savaging of the land, air, and waterways of America, factory farming, toxic dumping, the savaging of the constitution and its amendments, two bungled wars, the .4 trillion national debt, the loss of America’s respect in the world, the destruction of the cultural and constitutional order in America, his repression of the media and suppression of documents previously in the public domain, illegal spying and wire tapping, book banning, re-editing American literature, intimidating librarians, violating human rights while talking about democracy and freedom, and more you can just call hypocrisy as he defies international and historical law relating to the rights of all humans. the environmental pollution and the legislation to make industry less culpable for the damage. Did you know that almost 50% of Americans have no health insurance and since Bush took office in 2000 the numbers living in poverty have risen by one million a year? Do you recall what his first piece of legislation was? He forbid the federal government from distributing contraceptives to poor countries around the world. Couple this was the 2005 Human Development Report comparing the United States infant mortality rate with Malaysia--a country with a quarter of the U.S. income. Then consider that 10 per cent of the world’s richest receive about 50 percent of the world’s income. In the U.S. it’s about 54 percent.

Now even his own party and the military are showing signs of turning against him. This regime, the Bush administration, has all the hallmarks of Stalinism and Naziism and this son of a bitch, this ‘swaggering mediocrity’ must pay for his crimes. It’s time for Bobby Seal fans to put on their combat boots. It’s time for highschool shooters to move to D.C.

P.G.