FDNY Chaplain Resigns After 9/11 Remarks
Habib told Newsday in an interview published Friday that he was skeptical of the official version of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, which killed 343 firefighters.
"I've heard professionals say that nowhere ever in history did a steel building come down with fire alone," he told the newspaper.
"It takes two or three weeks to demolish a building like that. But it was pulled down in a couple of hours," he said. "Was it 19 hijackers who brought it down, or was it a conspiracy?"

George is Worst Natural Disaster to Hit Country

Well, folks, the only thing left up in the air now is whether George Bush is the worst president ever. Herbert Hoover has held the title since 1933.
It's been neck and neck for a while, but I think Bush pulled ahead with his spectacular failure in handling Katrina.
George Bush is a walking catastrophe. Far more than even Katrina, he is one of the worst disasters to ever hit America. His performance these past two weeks seemed a showcase for his utter stupidity and indifference, complete with flood, fire and floating bodies.

Two Britons held in Iraq for firing at police

Angry crowds attacked a British tank with petrol bombs and rocks in Basra on Monday after Iraqi authorities detained two British undercover soldiers in the southern city for firing on police.
UNDERCOVER
Reuters photographs showed one of the two detained men with a bandage on his head. Police and Interior Ministry officials said the men were wearing traditional Arab headdresses for their undercover mission.
Mohammed al-Abadi, an official in the Basra governorate, said the two men looked suspicious to police.
"A policeman approached them and then one of these guys fired at him. Then the police managed to capture them," Abadi told reporters.
"They refused to say what their mission was. They said they were British soldiers and (suggested) to ask their commander about their mission," he added.
(If they had not been caught this would have been reported as insurgents shot an Iraqi police officer.)

Tons of British aid donated to help Hurricane Katrina victims to be BURNED by Americans
HUNDREDS of tons of British food aid shipped to America for starving Hurricane Katrina survivors is to be burned.
US red tape is stopping it from reaching hungry evacuees.
"The FDA has recalled aid from Britain because it has been condemned as unfit for human consumption, despite the fact that these are Nato approved rations of exactly the same type fed to British soldiers in Iraq."
"Under Nato, American soldiers are also entitled to eat such rations, yet the starving of the American South will see them go up in smoke because of FDA red tape madness."
"Everyone is revolted by the chaotic shambles the US is making of this crisis. Guys from Unicef are walking around spitting blood."
"This is utter madness. People have worked their socks off to get food into the region."
"It is perfectly good Nato approved food of the type British servicemen have. Yet the FDA are saying that because there is a meat content and it has come from Britain it must be destroyed."

Bush And Cabinet Sing -
'It Is Well With My Soul'

Samuel Johnson once remarked: "The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good."
A generalized stereotyping and labeling of the 'others'; as the "herd, human resources, simpletons, vermin, breeders, criminals, dope addicts, drunks, pimps and whores"; excuses them from all bias, prejudice, and malignant contempt.

Obviously wealth covers a multitude of sins.

Condi was shopping, playing tennis, and attending a Broadway show. President Bush was still on vacation, and Vice-President Cheney was fly fishing, in the pristine streams of Wyoming; and so missed the elderly couple scrambling to escape the flood waters, when 21 hours after the hurricane hit, the levees suddenly gave way. Residents reported hearing a loud explosion, at 4:00 am Tuesday morning, Aug 3O. Then according to the Mayor, the pumping station in the city's poorest section - the lower 9th ward failed, and then the Industrial canal levee gave way in the 9th ward, a few hours later. Meantime the people who survived the hurricane unscathed; rushed to escape the flood waters, from levees poorly maintained by officials they trusted (all levels) to do their jobs.
The water rose so quickly and most never had a chance.

With hug a Black week over - the lights all on (they're not) and the smell of money in the air, it's rebuild the Gulf (minus the poor) bigger and better, and let the good times roll. According to reporters; as of Sept 16, 05, the bloated swollen bodies; of those who won't make it into this Casino - Mardi Gras - Corporate theme park - of this new Jerusalem; are still mired in the thick chemically laden - muck and mire, of the poor sections of New Orleans, being chewed on by rats - dogs - and alligators.

George Bush Don't Like Black People
Remixed by The Legendary K.O, Words by Big Mon and Damien a/k/a Dem Knock-Out Boyz.
Five days in this motherfucking attic
I can't use the cellphone I keep getting static
Dying 'cause they lying instead of telling us the truth (...)
Screwed 'cause they say they're coming back for us, too
but that was three days ago and I don't see no rescue(...)
Swam to the store, tryin' to look for food
Corner store's kinda flooded so I broke my way through
Got what I could but before I got through
News say the police shot a black man trying to loot

U.S. Military in Paraguay Prepares to "Spread Democracy"

Controversy is raging in Paraguay, where the U.S. military is conducting secretive operations. 500 U.S. troops arrived in the country on July 1st with planes, weapons and ammunition.

Hurricanes will happen faster and stronger
Financial Times
September 15 2005
Devastation similar to that caused by Hurricane Katrina is likely to be repeated in the next few decades, perhaps with greater ferocity, if a spate of recent studies into the science of hurricanes is correct.
Several influential groups of climate scientists have predicted that the rise in global sea temperatures caused by climate change will lead to an increase in the strength of storms around the world. Linking hurricanes to global warming is contentious, and some US researchers have rebuffed such a conclusion, preferring to blame the recent increase in the number of hurri­canes on a cycle that can be ­perceived in storm activity. However, even they agree that we have entered a period of greater activity.

Overkill in New Orleans
Heavily armed paramilitary mercenaries from the Blackwater private security firm, infamous for its work in Iraq, are openly patrolling the streets of New Orleans.
Some of the mercenaries say they have been "deputized" by the Louisiana governor; indeed some are wearing gold Louisiana state law enforcement badges on their chests and Blackwater photo identification cards on their arms.
They say they are on contract with the Department of Homeland Security and have been given the authority to use lethal force. Several mercenaries we spoke with said they had served in Iraq on the personal security details of the former head of the U.S. occupation, L. Paul Bremer and the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte.

9/11
Sept. 10, 2005, 5:14PM
Four years later, the nation is hobbled by debt and ill-prepared to handle disaster.
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
The Freedom Walk is limited to those who register and submit to being searched. The route of the march will be fenced and lined with police officers. No one can join the march en route. No one can leave it. The press cannot walk along the route. The walk to proclaim Americans' freedom reveals how much freedom we have lost.
Four years after 9/11, a country music concert can't dispel what ails the country.

TERROR IN TINY TOWN
Sunday, September 11, 2005
Greg Palast reporting from Southold, New York
Al Qaeda could quite easily gain a couple of recruits in our town: all Bin Laden has to do is offer health insurance.

Bush has presided over three national debacles
We may even be seeing the fulfillment of Osama bin Laden's oft-stated strategic plan, begun by the 9/11 attacks, of goading the U.S. into overseas wars that bleed it financially until it can no longer afford to deploy power across the globe. Bush swaggered right into this trap.

How Bush Blew It
By Evan Thomas
Newsweek Print Edition
Sept. 19, 2005
It's a standing joke among the president's top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of the president of the United States, or, as he is known in West Wing jargon, POTUS.
How this could be—how the president of the United States could have even less "situational awareness," as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century—is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace.
Late last week, Bush was, by some accounts, down and angry. But another Bush aide described the atmosphere inside the White House as "strangely surreal and almost detached." At one meeting described by this insider, officials were oddly self-congratulatory, perhaps in an effort to buck each other up. Life inside a bunker can be strange, especially in defeat.

Frustrated: Fire crews to hand out fliers for FEMA
ATLANTA - Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: "What are we doing here?"
"There are all of these guys with all of this training and we're sending them out to hand out a phone number," an Oregon firefighter said. "They [the hurricane victims] are screaming for help and this day [of FEMA training] was a waste."
Firefighters say they want to brave the heat, the debris-littered roads, the poisonous cottonmouth snakes and fire ants and travel into pockets of Louisiana where many people have yet to receive emergency aid.
But as specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew's first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.

An Irate Soldier’s Open Letter Regarding George W. Bush
George Bush is going to go down in history as the President Who Destroyed America.
The American people don’t want your lies, excuses, and apologies anymore. How many mistakes can you make before you stop making them? How many more people have to die for your stupidity? Should we just wait for the next major disaster to strike, just in case you do better next time? We don’t want a "next time", Mr. Bush. We don’t want your promises of a better tomorrow.
We want your resignation.
Michelle J. d’Entremont
2LT, US Army Reserves
Engineer Corps
I have no fear of publicly using my name for this. Pass it on. These are my words, and I stand behind them with my name, rank, and convictions.

At War against Washington
Was George W. Bush watching television? Or did he continue to ride his bicycle around his ranch, located about an hour's flight away from the foundering of New Orleans? How did he manage not to see those images of clusters of humanity clinging to rooftops, screaming for help, or shut in without water or food, side by side with corpses left in their wheelchairs - those images that American television showed live to all America and the whole world? In any case, at the end of four days, Bush understood that it was time to have a look-see on the ground, in Baton Rouge.
We saw news stars like Brian Williams (from NBC, which belongs to General Electric) on the ground in New Orleans, exhausted, get angry: "I saw the bodies...I saw the horrible despair in the eyes of people who were going to die...I saw things I never expected to see in the United States." While an NBC reporter, Martin Savidge, observed, incredulous: "This is not Iraq; this is not Somalia...This is home." Flabbergasted by the silence and indifference of the political power against a background of images of haggard crying people, for four days journalist Brian Williams (NBC) never stopped asking: "Washington, are you looking? Do you hear?" On CNN, Chris Matthews also cried out, "Where are the buses? Where is the aid?"
Even the very Republican Fox News stopped its incessant coverage of looting and insecurity, finally comprehending that the scandal was not in the vandalized stores, but elsewhere.

"Bush's policies have crippled disaster response capabilities"
Financial Times
September 3, 2005
Pico, a network of faith-based community organisations, says: "We are watching catastrophic failure by public officials to respond to those who are most vulnerable." The criticism is ironic - as Washington has scaled down taxpayer-funded public services, it has encouraged such faith-based charities to step into the breach. The Salvation Army was the first group to get aid into the ravaged Mississippi Gulf coast, well before any government help arrived.

Survival Of The Richest
Bob Shieffer Blasts the response to Katrina
As the floodwaters rose, local officials in New Orleans ordered the city evacuated. They might as well have told their citizens to fly to the moon. How do you evacuate when you don't have a car?
Yet as scenes of horror that seemed to be coming from some Third World country flashed before us, official Washington was like a dog watching television. It saw the lights and images, but did not seem to comprehend their meaning or see any link to reality.

An open letter to the President
State Rep. Karen Carter was right Friday when she said the city didn’t have but two urgent needs: "Buses! And gas!" Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially.
In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn’t known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, "We’ve provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they’ve gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day."
Lies don’t get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.
Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, "You’re doing a heck of a job."
That’s unbelievable.

The tear-filled eyes of Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard as he was interviewed by Tim Russert on today's Meet the Press:
Broussard: "We have been abandoned by our own country."
...The guy who runs this building I’m in, Emergency Management, he’s responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, “Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?” and he said, “Yeah, Mama, somebody’s coming to get you.” Somebody’s coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Friday… and she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night! [Sobbing] Nobody’s coming to get us. Nobody’s coming to get us…

New Orleans Begins Grisly Cleanup
No one knows how many people were killed by Hurricane Katrina and how many more succumbed waiting to be rescued. But the bodies are everywhere: hidden in attics, floating in the ruined city, crumpled in wheelchairs, abandoned on highways.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff:
"We need to prepare the country for what's coming, ... It is going to be about as ugly of a scene as I think you can imagine."
In addition to civilian deaths, New Orleans emergency service agencies have had to deal with some suicides among their ranks, Mayor Ray Nagin said.
"I've got some firefighters and police officers that have been pretty much traumatized," he said. "And we've already had a couple of suicides... They need physical and psychological evaluations."

Bodies Are Strewn 'Like Roadkill'
The dilemma is not restricted to the civilian population. Watts said a distraught New Orleans police officer shot and killed himself at a staging area in Algiers, across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, on Friday night.
"We didn't even have a body bag to put him in," Watts said.
Sixty-five miles northwest of New Orleans in the small town of St. Gabriel, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has set up a mortuary in a private warehouse.
Police guarding the entrance would not let anyone pass. But the mayor, George Grace, said he believed bodies were already arriving in refrigerated tractor-trailers.
With a population of only 5,000, the town is too small to offer any assistance to hurricane survivors, Grace said. "I wasn't able to help the living," the mayor said, so instead he will "house the dead."

"Let Them Eat Shit..."
There is something sinister going down -- it's not just incompetence or negligence.


We need to understand that the capability has been there from the start to drive water and food right up to the convention center, as those roads have been clear -- it's how the National Guard drove into the city.
Let me say this again: The government is intentionally not allowing food or water in.
This is for real.

Rapes, killings hit Katrina refugees in New Orleans
"They killed a man here last night," Steve Banka, 28, told Reuters. "A young lady was being raped and stabbed. And the sounds of her screaming got to this man and so he ran out into the street to get help from troops, to try to flag down a passing truck of them, and he jumped up on the truck's windshield and they shot him dead."

Homeland Security won't let Red Cross deliver food
Saturday, September 03, 2005
By Ann Rodgers, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
As the National Guard delivered food to the New Orleans convention center yesterday, American Red Cross officials said that federal emergency management authorities would not allow them to do the same.
Other relief agencies say the area is so damaged and dangerous that they doubted they could conduct mass feeding there now.
"The Homeland Security Department has requested and continues to request that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans," said Renita Hosler, spokeswoman for the Red Cross.

Horrible scenes at New Orleans airport
In triage center, baggage conveyor used for grim task of moving bodies
I’ve been reporting for 21 years around the world and I've never seen the likes of this.
This is, I think, the hardest story I’ve ever covered. Emotionally, I’m just really being tested. I cannot believe what I’m seeing.
A reporter is supposed to remain detached and just report what’s going on. But, when there is a man lying on the ground, and he’s yelling out to anyone walking by, “Help me! I need some water! Help me!” and there is no one to help this man.
There is no one to reach down, give him some water, or hold his head, and tell him to breath slowly.
It is unimaginable. It is absolutely gut-wrenching. It’s horrible.
NBC News correspondent Kerry Sanders spent the night at the The New Orleans International Airport, now a make-shift triage center. He filed this report by satellite phone.