DSCN1248

DSCN1248
Originally uploaded by shadigradi.

Is there a mini-crisis taking place here?
Or could it be his DAD's mid-life crisis that has them looking rather VEXED?

Me & my Little Buddy!

DSCN1338
Originally uploaded by shadigradi.

(unfortunately- I've become the SKIPPERRRR!!) ;-P

GNOME_Chomsky

GNOME_Chomsky
Originally uploaded by shadigradi.

This is the BOY-YEEEEEEEE!!!! Go check out his books- puts the lie to the lying liars just about every damn word on the pages!!!

Noam Chomsky, speaking at the 25th Anniversary of Coalition for Peace Action in Princeton, New Jersey.

This past weekend, MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky spoke at the 25th Anniversary of Coalition for Peace Action in Princeton, New Jersey. The historian and author of over 100 books spoke about Yasser Arafat, Iraq and the military draft. This is an excerpt of what he had to say.

Noam Chomsky, speaking at the 25th Anniversary of Coalition for Peace Action in Princeton, New Jersey.

AMY GOODMAN: This past weekend, MIT linguistics professor, Noam Chomsky spoke at the 25th anniversary of the Coalition for Peace Action in Princeton, New Jersey. Noam Chomsky has written over 100 books, well-known political analyst, linguist at MIT. He talked about Yasser Arafat, about Iraq, about the military draft here in this country. He spoke on Sunday. This is an excerpt of what he had to say.

NOAM CHOMSKY: I had a little time on the airplane and read this morning's Times and there is, as expected, a front page story that is in the weekend review by a very good reporter. It's about a highly significant topic, how to establish democracy -- or the president's messianic vision, as the Boston Globe calls it, my own newspaper. And it discusses a current example, which has had a huge amount of media commentary in the last couple days, the Palestinian issue, what happens after Arafat. The first paragraph says that the post-Arafat era will be the latest test of a quintessentially American article of faith, that elections provide legitimacy, even to the frailest institutions. Okay, that's our quintessential article of faith. Then it goes on, and we'll skip to the last paragraph. The last paragraph on the continuation page says there's a paradox. In the past, the Bush administration, and he could have added every previous one, resisted new national elections among Palestinians. The thought was that the elections would make Mr. Arafat look better, and give him a fresher mandate, and might have helped give credibility and authority to Hamas. So in other words, we have a quintessential commitment to democracy, but in the single example that is given we oppose democracy because the outcome might come out the wrong way. Well, there are some conclusions you can draw from that one example. Yes, we support democracy, as long as it comes out the right way. Otherwise, we'll block it. Now, more has to be said. The first paragraph is not false. If by Americans you mean American people, that's quite true. It is a quintessential article of faith among the general population that we ought to have democracy and elections. It simply is rejected by every single government, and by the media and by elite opinion. Their position is we should are democracy and elections when it comes out the right way, as in this case. So, there's really no contradiction, if you sort of interpret it properly, but the lessons are there, and the single example chosen does in fact illustrate them, and incidentally, it's not unusual to re-find them. I often discover, probably others do too, that if you want to read an article in a major newspaper, the best way to do it is to start with the end. The last paragraph quite often has something interesting. The first paragraph usually has something for the headline writers and for the casual reader. And I don't know if this is done consciously or not, but it's pretty consistent. Well, let's continue. What is illustrated by this front page article and in a series of front page articles and editorials in the last few days is a principle. The principle is that we, and we is identified with the government, not the population and - I’ll come back to this, there's a radical difference in opinion between them, but that we, the government, are always guided by benign intent. That's kind of like an axiom. We can make mistakes along the way, but the intention was benevolent. Try to find an exception to that way at the left liberal end of criticism in the mainstream. Well in conformity with these guidelines, the New York Times before had a front page think-piece on Arafat's death. So did many other journals, but I’ll keep to the Times, they're all approximately the same. The article begins by informing us, first paragraph again, that Arafat was both the symbol of the Palestinians' hope for a viable independent state and the prime obstacle to its realization. He was never, it goes on, he was never able to reach the heights of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, who won back the Sinai through a peace treaty with Israel in 1979 because he was able to reach out to Israelis and address their fears and hope with his visit to Jerusalem in 1977. That was the same story in every newspaper I looked at with slight nuances. There is a documentary record, rich as possible sources, unambiguous, and it happens to tell a different story. But it's not allowed. And it is not allowed because it would violate the fundamental principle that what we do is benign, we, meaning the government, not the population. So, let's take a look at that. The documentary record shows uncontroversially and explicitly and unambiguously that the main obstacle to the realization of the Palestinian state was Washington, and competing pretty well for second place is the New York Times and its colleagues, which have consistently “mispressed” or misrepresented the crucial facts. And the crucial facts are not in doubt. I’ll run through a small sample because it's brief. Let's pick some examples. So in 1976, the United States became the chief obstacle to a Palestinian state, very simply. The Security Council of the United Nations debated a resolution calling for a two-state settlement, a Palestinian settlement, a Palestinian state alongside of Israel, both states having all the rights guaranteed in the international system. This was in accord with a very broad international consensus that was supported by the Arab states, backed by the PLO and just about everybody. And in fact by then it had crystallized as an overwhelming international consensus. The U.S. vetoed. It was vetoed. The U.S. veto, incidentally, is a double veto. It vetoes the resolution and also vetoes recording in history. So it's out of history but it happened. It happened again in 1980, the same resolution, the same again. There is a long record up to the present. It continues consistently, General Assembly initiatives from Europe, initiatives from the PLO, initiatives from the Arab states. Whatever they are, the U.S. blocks them. And that continues, the most recent dramatic case, there are plenty of others, was in Geneva in the year 2002. There are a series bases for settlement along the lines of the international consensus. It was presented by prominent Israeli and Palestinian negotiators. It was strongly supported by almost the whole world with the notable exception the United States, which alone refused to send even a message of support as was indeed reported in the New York Times in a very dismissive article, saying, this is all nonsense. Let's go to Sadat. Well again, the facts are clear. Sadat in fact did go to Jerusalem and make a proposal, but it was not - but that proposal in 1977 repeated one that he had made in 1971. In 1971, not 1977, Sadat offered a full peace treaty to Israel in accord with official U.S. government policy offering nothing to the Palestinians. Their rights had not yet entered the international agenda. That was recognized by Israel to be a genuine peace offer. They rejected it. They preferred expansion to peace. This is the labor government. Expansion then meant into the northeastern Sinai. Important question as always is what's the U.S. going to do under Kissinger's initiative. The U.S. decided to reject its official policy and to support Israeli rejectionism, the policy was what Kissinger called stalemate in his memoirs. Stalemate, we prefer to stalemate not negotiations, just force. That led directly to the 1973 war. A very close call for Israel. Nuclear alert. Very close call for the world. After that, Kissinger recognized that you cannot just dismiss Egypt as a basket case, began his famous shuttle diplomacy, that led to the Camp David agreements where indeed in 1979 the United States and Israel accepted Sadat's 1971 offer, okay. Actually from the U.S.-Israeli point of view, a harsher offer because by that time, it included a call for a Palestinian state in accordance with a new emerging international consensus, which faced an impossible obstacle, namely the U.S. government and its median commentary. Well, that goes down in history as a diplomatic triumph for the United States. In real history it's a diplomatic catastrophe. The U.S. refusal to accept a peaceful settlement in 1971 led to a terrible war, very dangerous one, years of suffering and misery with effects that still are very much there. But it shows the advantages of owning history. You can kind of reshape it into your own -- to satisfy your own needs. And you therefore get the first paragraph that I just read from the world's leading newspaper, front page think-piece, duplicated just about everywhere in the media, and that includes journals of opinion. You might try to look for an exception. The example does illustrate again the basic guidelines of commentary, media in particular, but commentary generally. We're good, meaning the government, not the people, we accept the totalitarian notion that we identify the people with the state, so when they say we, it means the government. The government is good. We are good, benevolent, well-intentioned, that we seek peace and justice. We're foiled by villain who cannot rise to our exalted level. It doesn't matter what the facts are. Not that it matters what simple logic tells us.


AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, speaking on Sunday in Princeton, New Jersey. Afterwards, he was asked a series of question, one of them was, would the draft be reinstated.

NOAM CHOMSKY: I think it's extremely unlikely. I should tell you this as a word of personal background. I was very much involved in the resistance movement in the 1960's. In fact, I was just barely -- the only reason I missed a long jail sentence is because the Tet Offensive came along and the trials were called off. So I was very much involved in the resistance, but I was never against the draft. I disagreed with a lot of my friends and associates on that, for a very good reason, I think at least as nobody seems to agree. In my view, if there's going to be an army, I think it ought to be a citizen's army. Now, here I do agree with some people, the top brass, they don't want a citizen's army. They want a mercenary army, what we call a volunteer army. A mercenary army of the disadvantaged. And in fact, in the Vietnam war, the U.S. military realized, they had made a very bad mistake. I mean, for the first time I think ever in the history of European imperialism, including us, they had used a citizen's army to fight a vicious, brutal, colonial war, and civilians just cannot do that kind of a thing. For that, you need the French foreign legion, the Gurkhas or something like that. Every predecessor has used mercenaries, often drawn from the country that they're attacking like England ran India with Indian mercenaries. You take them from one place and send them to kill people in the other place. That's the standard way to run imperial wars. They're just too brutal and violent and murderous. Civilians are not going to be able to do it for very long. What happened was, the army started falling apart. One of the reasons that the army was withdrawn was because the top military wanted it out of there. They were afraid they were not going to have an army anymore. Soldiers were fragging officer. The whole thing was falling apart. They were on drugs. And that’s why I think that they're not going to have a draft. That's why I’m in favor of it. If there's going to be an army that will fight brutal, colonial wars, and that's the only likely kind of war, I’m not talking about the militarization of space and that kind of thing, I mean ground wars, it ought to be a citizen's army so that the attitudes of the society are reflected in the military.


AMY GOODMAN: MIT Professor, Noam Chomsky, speaking in Princeton, New Jersey, celebrating 25 years of the Coalition for Peace Action.

Dear Limey assholes

Nice Find Chuck Brown! ;-)


Last week G2 launched Operation Clark County to help readers have a say in the American election by writing to undecided voters in the crucial state of Ohio. In the first three days, more than 11,000 people requested addresses. Here is some of the reaction to the project that we received from the US

Monday October 18, 2004
The Guardian

Dear wonderful, loving friends from abroad,
We Ohioans are an ornery sort and don't take meddling well, even if it comes from people we admire and with their sincere goodwill. We are a fairly closed community overall. In my town of Springfield, I feel that there are some that consider people from the nearby cities of Columbus or Dayton, as "foreigners"- let alone someone from outside our country.
Springfield, Ohio

Have you not noticed that Americans don't give two shits what Europeans think of us? Each email someone gets from some arrogant Brit telling us why to NOT vote for George Bush is going to backfire, you stupid, yellow-toothed pansies ... I don't give a rat's ass if our election is going to have an effect on your worthless little life. I really don't. If you want to have a meaningful election in your crappy little island full of shitty food and yellow teeth, then maybe you should try not to sell your sovereignty out to Brussels and Berlin, dipshit. Oh, yeah - and brush your goddamned teeth, you filthy animals.
Wading River, NY

Right on! Just wanted to say thanks from California for your effort and concern. This IS a very important election ... There are so many people here in the States that care about the impact America has on the rest of the world. I am personally saddened for the loss of all innocent lives. The best statement Americans can make to the rest of the world is to not elect Bush for president. Thank you so much for getting involved in our world.
California

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Consider this: stay out of American electoral politics. Unless you would like a company of US Navy Seals - Republican to a man - to descend upon the offices of the Guardian, bag the lot of you, and transport you to Guantanamo Bay, where you can share quarters with some lonely Taliban shepherd boys.
United States

I am a student and life-long resident of Clark County, Ohio. I just wanted you to know that this is a wonderful idea you've initiated; people here love and respect the United Kingdom, especially the prime minister. I hope this campaign will be successful for your newspaper and for us voters.
Springfield, Ohio

KEEP YOUR FUCKIN' LIMEY HANDS OFF OUR ELECTION. HEY, SHITHEADS, REMEMBER THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR? REMEMBER THE WAR OF 1812? WE DIDN'T WANT YOU, OR YOUR POLITICS HERE, THAT'S WHY WE KICKED YOUR ASSES OUT. FOR THE 47% OF YOU WHO DON'T WANT PRESIDENT BUSH, I SAY THIS ... TOUGH SHIT!
PROUD AMERICAN VOTING FOR BUSH!

Shame on you for using the people of Ohio like this. The US presidental election isn't just about foreign policy, it's about healthcare, taxes, education, transportation, natural resources and all manner of issues with little to no impact on the people of Britain.

We live in a globalised, interconnected world. If China shuts its borders to US imports, you better believe American companies, shareholders and workers are affected. Should US citizens therefore have a direct say in Chinese policies? No - Americans should demand that their own elected leaders address the issues with their Chinese counterparts. The British have a similar voice in US policies - through your own elected representatives who have any number of diplomatic, economic and military tools at their disposal. You vote for your leaders and we'll vote for ours. Your problem is with your leaders, not ours.
Washington DC

Real Americans aren't interested in your pansy-ass, tea-sipping opinions. If you want to save the world, begin with your own worthless corner of it.
Texas, USA

Thank you, thank you, thank you! What a wonderful idea! I am a US citizen who is scared to death that Bush and Klan will get back in. We need all the help we can get to ditch this bunch of maniacs.
United States

I just read a hilarious proposal to involve your readership in the upcoming US presidential election. At least, I'm hoping that it is genius satire. Nothing will do more to undermine the Democratic cause in Ohio than having patronising Brits wander around Clark County telling people how to vote. Just, for a second, imagine if the Washington Post sent folks from Ohio to do the same in Oxfordshire. I'm saying this as a Democrat, and as someone who has spent the last few years in the UK. That is, with all due respect. Please, please, be rational, and move slowly away from the self-defeating hubris.
United States

I enjoy reading your paper and agree with your politics, but this is really too much.Your plan, if carried out, will hurt the Bush opposition TERRIBLY. We cannot afford to have this associated with John Kerry or anyone else. It will be; the press is going in for a kill, days before the election.
United States

Your idea is superb and frankly, we need a little help over here right now.
Ohio

My dear, beloved Brits,
I understand the Guardian is sponsoring a service where British citizens write to Americans to advise them on how to vote. Thank heavens! I was adrift in a sea of confusion and you are my beacon of hope!

Feel free to respond to this email with your advice. Please keep in mind that I am something of an anglophile, so this is not confrontational. Please remember, too, that I am merely an American. That means I am not very bright. It means I have no culture or sense of history. It also means that I am barely literate, so please don't use big, fancy words.

Set me straight, folks!
Dayton, Ohio

Hey England, Scotland and Wales,
Mind your own business. We don't need weenie-spined Limeys meddling in our presidental election. If it wasn't for America, you'd all be speaking German. And if America would have had a president, then, of the likes of Kerry, you'd all be goose-stepping around Buckingham Palace. YOU ARE NOT WANTED!! Whether you want to support either party. BUTT OUT!!!
United States

Please be advised that I have forwarded this to the CIA and FBI.
United States

As an American who is very anti-Bush, I applaud your letter-writing campaign. I have read some of the letters that you published, and while I agree with most of the content, I also believe they will not be persuasive. This is because they are too aggressive and, as stated on your website, you don't know anything about these voters. If they happen to be leaning toward Bush, these letters will not put them off.
New York

THE AMERICAN TAXPAYERS HAVE SPENT TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS PROTECTING THE PEOPLES OF THE EU, AND WHAT DO WE GET IN RETURN. BETRAYAL, BETRAYAL, BETRAYAL. I HAVE BEEN TO YOUR COUNTRY, THE COUNTRY OF MY ANCESTORS, AND I KNOW WHY THEY LEFT.

MAY YOU HAVE TO HAVE A TOOTH CAPPED. I UNDERSTAND IT TAKES AT LEAST 18 MONTHS FOR YOUR GREAT MEDICAL SERVICES TO GET AROUND TO YOU. HAVE A GREAT DAY.
Harlan, Kentucky

We all enjoyed this at work. Cheers.
United States

Thank you for taking such an active interest in the elections here in America. I appreciate what the Guardian is doing. Your effort to reach out to "swing states" and make a difference is commendable. I hope that many of your readers will take your challenge to help make a change in Washington by contacting voters.
Clarke County, Georgia

Keep your noses out of our business. As I recall we kicked your asses out of our country back in 1776. We do not require input from losers and idiots on who we vote for in our own country. Fuck off and die asshole!!!!!
Knoxville, Iowa

Gentle folks at the Guardian,
In your plea to get your non-American readers to write to voters in Clark County, Iowa, you are correct that events in the US have had, and will have, effects on world events. For example, we have pulled your chestnuts out of the fire in two world wars that were occasioned by European diplomacy. Maybe you'd like a vote in which American president will oversee the next rescue. The next time you have elections in Great Britain, I shall endeavour to send names of your citizens to people in France, Iraq, India, the United Arab Emirates, Botswana, Pakistan, China and Argentina so that they may attempt to influence your election. It's only fair that everybody in the world should have a say in the selection of the prime minister.
California

Mind your own flipping business.
United States

Dear Guardian folks,
While I empathise with your plight, this attempt to influence voters by sending letters from foreigners will have a negative effect on your ultimate goal. You will cause people to empathise with the president, not the other way around. People will read these letters and say, "John Le who? Never heard of him, but who is he to tell me who to vote for?"
Ohio

I am a registered voter in Clark County, Ohio, and am very much interested in hearing what our overseas friends have to say about our election. You are correct in assuming that this election in the US is the most important election in memory. The threat of terrorism is a very real threat, not just in our country, but all over the world. In this day and age there must be worldwide unity against these fanatical groups who just hate. Not just Americans, but all western civilisation.
United States

Thanks for running this initiative. It may be the only way I get to have an impact on the American election, despite the fact that I'm a registered American voter. See, I vote in New York, which is solidly Democratic. Due to the electoral college system, once a majority is secured in any state, subsequent votes don't really matter. Whether NY goes 51% or 99%, the impact on who actually wins is the same. So thanks for the opportunity to impact somebody else's vote, where it may really matter.
Amsterdam, Holland

Who in the hell do you think you are??? Well, I'll tell you, you're a bunch of meddling socialist pricks! Stay the hell out of our country and politics. And another thing, John Kerry is a worthless lying sack of crap so it doesn't surprise me that a socialist rag like yours would back him. I hope your cynical ploy blows up in your cowardly faces, you bunch of mealy-mouthed morons!
United States

I used to visit the UK every year. I love the history and culture of your country. But after I heard about your campaign to influence our elections, I've decided that neither myself, nor my family will ever visit again. I'm offended by your campaign and because of it, I'm remembering more of the negative aspects I've seen in the UK than the positive ones. Though I still love the castles!
Detroit

Dear British friends,
I think you have an interesting idea to encourage international grassroots efforts, but I sincerely doubt most Springfielders are going to be influenced by letters from a country they probably can't even point to on a map. I wish you luck with your campaign, but I warn you that you're not likely to accomplish much.
Dayton, Ohio

You radical leftwingers are worse than the Taliban. I suggest you stand back and take a good hard look at yourselves.

PS: When do you propose to add Michael Moore to your staff of lunatics?
United States

I suggest that if a particular reader of the Guardian would like to vote in America - would really like to influence the American election, say - that reader should move to America, become a citizen of the United States. Everyone is welcome here. Even the readers of the Guardian. But if you don't wish to be an American, to live in Ohio, for instance, and participate in the American political process, that is too bad. Perhaps there is something wrong with you. Perhaps it is your teeth.
New York

Go back to sipping your tea and leave our people alone.
Ohio

As an American who is afraid of the terrible ramifications if Bush is elected, I commend your efforts to try to get Britons involved. Although many Americans would be critical of British people "meddling" with our politics and elections, all the world will share in the disaster if Bush is re-elected. Many of us are very concerned. I teach young adults, most of whom have been very uninvolved in voting and politics. Many of them are going to vote. We need all the help we can get.
United States

As a US citizen, I want to advise you that you and anyone that participates in subverting the US presidential election can be criminally charged and perhaps even charged as spies.
California

Thank God above for you English! Just when I was beginning to despair at the thought of Bush being re-elected, you come along with a strategy to help us! Your invitation to your readership and rationale for offering it are provocative at the least, and laudable at best.
Springfield, Ohio

· www.guardian.co.uk/clarkcounty

Big Bang part deux...

This story really BLOWS... and so does the P.O.T.U.S. and his puppeteers!

U.N.: 400 Tons of Iraq Explosives Missing

By WILLIAM J. KOLE
Associated Press Writer / Chicago Tribune

October 25, 2004, 9:51 PM CDT

VIENNA, Austria -- The U.N. nuclear agency warned Monday that insurgents in Iraq may have obtained nearly 400 tons of missing explosives that can be used in the kind of car bomb attacks that have targeted U.S.-led coalition forces for months.

International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei reported the disappearance to the U.N. Security Council on Monday, two weeks after he said Iraq told the nuclear agency that the explosives had vanished from the former Iraqi military installation as a result of "theft and looting ... due to lack of security."

The disappearance raised questions about why the United States didn't do more to secure the Al-Qaqaa facility 30 miles south of Baghdad and failed to allow full international inspections to resume after the March 2003 invasion.

The White House played down the significance of the missing weapons, but Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry accused President Bush of "incredible incompetence" and his campaign said the administration "must answer for what may be the most grave and catastrophic mistake in a tragic series of blunders in Iraq."

Al-Qaqaa is near Youssifiyah, an area rife with ambush attacks. An Associated Press Television News crew that drove past the compound Monday saw no visible security at the gates of the site, a jumble of low-slung, yellow-colored storage buildings that appeared deserted.

"The most immediate concern here is that these explosives could have fallen into the wrong hands," IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said.

The agency first placed a seal over Al-Qaqaa storage bunkers holding the explosives in 1991 as part of U.N. sanctions that ordered the dismantlement of Iraq's nuclear program after the Gulf War.

IAEA inspectors last saw the explosives in January 2003 when they took an inventory and placed fresh seals on the bunkers, Fleming said. Inspectors visited the site again in March 2003, but didn't view the explosives because the seals were not broken, she said.

Nuclear agency experts pulled out of Iraq just before the U.S.-led invasion later that month, and have not yet been able to return for general inspections despite ElBaradei's repeated urging that they be allowed to finish their work. Although IAEA inspectors have made two trips to Iraq since the war at U.S. requests, Russia and other Security Council members have pressed for their full-time return -- so far unsuccessfully.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said coalition forces were present in the vicinity of the site both during and after major combat operations, which ended May 1, 2003 -- and searched the facility but found none of the explosives material in question. That raised the possibility that the explosives had disappeared before U.S. soldiers could secure the site in the immediate invasion aftermath.

The Pentagon would not say whether it had informed the nuclear agency at that point that the conventional explosives were not where they were supposed to be.

Saddam Hussein's regime used Al-Qaqaa as a key part of its effort to build a nuclear bomb. Although the missing materials are conventional explosives known as HMX and RDX, the Vienna-based IAEA became involved because HMX is a "dual use" substance powerful enough to ignite the fissile material in an atomic bomb and set off a nuclear chain reaction.

Both are key components in plastic explosives such as C-4 and Semtex, which are so powerful that Libyan terrorists needed just a pound to blow up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 170 people.

Insurgents targeting coalition forces in Iraq have made widespread use of plastic explosives in a bloody spate of car bomb attacks. Officials were unable to link the missing explosives directly to the recent car bombings, but the revelations that they could have fallen into enemy hands caused a stir in the last week of the U.S. presidential campaign.

"These explosives can be used to blow up airplanes, level buildings, attack our troops and detonate nuclear weapons," senior Kerry adviser Joe Lockhart said in a statement. "The Bush administration knew where this stockpile was, but took no action to secure the site."

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the administration's first concern was whether the disappearance constituted a nuclear proliferation threat. He said it did not.

"We have destroyed more than 243,000 munitions" in Iraq, he said. "We've secured another nearly 163,000 that will be destroyed."

McClellan said the IAEA informed U.S. mission in Vienna on Oct. 15 about the missing explosives at Al-Qaqaa. He said national security adviser Condoleeza Rice was notified "days after that," and she then informed President Bush.

ElBaradei told the council the agency had been trying to give the U.S.-led multinational force and Iraq's interim government "an opportunity to attempt to recover the explosives before this matter was put into the public domain."

But since the disappearance was reported Monday in The New York Times, ElBaradei said he wanted the Security Council to have the letter dated Oct. 10 that he received from Mohammed J. Abbas, a senior official at Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology, reporting the theft of 377 tons of explosives.

The letter from Abbas informed the IAEA that since April 9, 2003, looting at the Al-Qaqaa installation had resulted in the loss of 215 tons of HMX, 156 tons of RDX and six tons of PETN explosives.

Diplomats said there was nothing to suggest that ElBaradei, who had irritated the Bush administration before the war by insisting there was no evidence that Saddam had revived his nuclear program, had intended to keep the report a secret until after the Nov. 2 election.

Copyright © 2004, The Associated Press

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/sns-ap-nuclear-agency-iraq,1,2149350.story?coll=chi-news-hed

the big-bang....

...initiate blog-in-vitr-fertilization... ka-powwwwwww.... and so it begins... only about two years after the craze began and is consuming itself... and I'm running on this sentence like there's no tomorrow...

And to think- I'm only doing it out of desperation to get a Google G-MAIL account... somebody HELP MEEEEEEE!!!!