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Law & Mercy
We have an interesting study in contrasts here. On one hand, we have Congress and the President violating the Constitution in order to preserve a single life. We have a respected religious authority calling the removal of Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube “nothing more than state-sanctioned murder.” ...

...On the other hand, we have a US soldier in Iraq making the determination that another severely damaged life wasn’t worth preserving. Let’s compare the extreme and unconstitutional (by definition, illegal) lengths the “culture of life” types have gone to over Terri Schiavo to the following tidbit...

...he killing of this wounded Iraqi human being is being treated as equivalent to shooting a wounded dog in order to “put him out of his misery.”...

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U.N.: Iraq kids suffer from malnutrition
GENEVA (AP) — Almost twice as many Iraqi children are suffering from malnutrition since the U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein, a U.N. monitor said Monday.

4% of Iraqis under age 5 went hungry in the months after Saddam's ouster in April 2003, and the rate nearly doubled to 7.7% last year, said Jean Ziegler, the U.N. Human Rights Commission's special expert on the right to food.

The situation is "a result of the war led by coalition forces," he said....

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In the Name of Politics
By JOHN C. DANFORTH

...Christian activists, eager to take credit for recent electoral successes, would not be likely to concede that Republican adoption of their political agenda is merely the natural convergence of conservative religious and political values. Correctly, they would see a causal relationship between the activism of the churches and the responsiveness of Republican politicians. In turn, pragmatic Republicans would agree that motivating Christian conservatives has contributed to their successes....

...The problem is not with people or churches that are politically active. It is with a party that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement.

When government becomes the means of carrying out a religious program, it raises obvious questions under the First Amendment. But even in the absence of constitutional issues, a political party should resist identification with a religious movement. While religions are free to advocate for their own sectarian causes, the work of government and those who engage in it is to hold together as one people a very diverse country. At its best, religion can be a uniting influence, but in practice, nothing is more divisive. For politicians to advance the cause of one religious group is often to oppose the cause of another....

...During the 18 years I served in the Senate, Republicans often disagreed with each other. But there was much that held us together. We believed in limited government, in keeping light the burden of taxation and regulation. We encouraged the private sector, so that a free economy might thrive. We believed that judges should interpret the law, not legislate. We were internationalists who supported an engaged foreign policy, a strong national defense and free trade. These were principles shared by virtually all Republicans.

But in recent times, we Republicans have allowed this shared agenda to become secondary to the agenda of Christian conservatives. As a senator, I worried every day about the size of the federal deficit. I did not spend a single minute worrying about the effect of gays on the institution of marriage. Today it seems to be the other way around.

The historic principles of the Republican Party offer America its best hope for a prosperous and secure future. Our current fixation on a religious agenda has turned us in the wrong direction. It is time for Republicans to rediscover our roots.

John C. Danforth, a former United States senator from Missouri, resigned in January as United States ambassador to the United Nations. He is an Episcopal minister.

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Panel: Agencies 'Dead Wrong' on Iraq WMDs
WASHINGTON (AP) -- In a scathing report, a presidential commission said Thursday that America's spy agencies were "dead wrong" in most of their judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction before the war and that the United States knows "disturbingly little" about the threats posed by many of the nation's most dangerous adversaries....

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General approved extreme interrogation methods
The highest-ranking US general in Iraq authorised the use of interrogation techniques that included sleep manipulation, stress positions and the use of dogs to "exploit Arab fears" of them, it emerged today.

A memo signed by Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez authorised 29 interrogation techniques, including 12 that exceeded limits in the army's own field manual and four that it admitted risked falling foul of international law, the Geneva conventions or accepted standards on the humane treatment of prisoners.

The memo, dated September 14 2003, also stated that the Iraq interrogation policy was modelled on the one used at Guantánamo Bay "but modified for applicability to a theater [sic] of war in which the Geneva conventions apply".

On Friday, a US court ordered the papers' release under the American Freedom of Information Act, following a request by the American Civil Liberties Union.

"The memo clearly establishes that Gen Sanchez authorised unlawful interrogation techniques for use in Iraq, and, in particular, these techniques violate the Geneva conventions and the army's own field manual governing interrogations," ACLU lawyer Amrit Singh said in a statement. "He and other high-ranking officials who bear responsibility for the widespread abuse of detainees must be held accountable." ...

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So you'd like to... kill a dude

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Death threats rattling pols
TAMPA - As Terri Schiavo weakens and legal remedies peter out, tension here is intensifying.

Some activists are making ugly threats, making up "Wanted" posters for lawmakers and handing out the home addresses of judges who rejected legal appeals to keep Schiavo alive.

"I am afraid," said state Sen. Frederica Wilson (D-Miami), who has received numerous death threats by phone and mail because she voted against a measure to reinsert Schiavo's feeding tube. "We're talking about the sanctity of life, and [they're] threatening my life."

The nine Republican lawmakers who voted against the measure showed up on anonymous "Wanted" posters that appeared in the state capitol in Tallahassee. State Sen. Nancy Argenziano said one of the "un-Christian" voice mails she's received wished stomach cancer on her.

Guards have been posted outside the politicians' offices.

Police won't discuss their security measures, but Michael Schiavo and Judge George Greer, who has consistently upheld Schiavo's requests to end his wife's life, are under around-the-clock protection and staying out of sight. Both have been the targets of a flood of fury, branding them corrupt and abusive murderers who are flouting God....

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WASHINGTON, March 28 - The parents of Terri Schiavo have authorized a conservative direct-mailing firm to sell a list of their financial supporters, making it likely that thousands of strangers moved by her plight will receive a steady stream of solicitations from anti-abortion and conservative groups.

"These compassionate pro-lifers donated toward Bob Schindler's legal battle to keep Terri's estranged husband from removing the feeding tube from Terri," says a description of the list on the Web site of the firm, Response Unlimited, which is asking $150 a month for 6,000 names and $500 a month for 4,000 e-mail addresses of people who responded last month to an e-mail plea from Ms. Schiavo's father. "These individuals are passionate about the way they value human life, adamantly oppose euthanasia and are pro-life in every sense of the word!"

Privacy experts said the sale of the list was legal and even predictable, if ghoulish....

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The other Iraq war
There is another war going on today in Iraq about which little is heard. It is a war against Christianity. Christians in Iraq are a comparatively small, windling minority: fewer than 800,000, merely 3 percent out of a population of 26 million.

Though Iraqi Christians are a minuscule minority, they suffering unrelenting Muslim persecution. The Iraqi Christian population, once was more than 15 percent, decreases daily due to emigration to safety in Western countries. Muslim persecution in Iraq of Christians was highlighted in January when Archbishop Basil Georges Casmoussa in Mosul was kidnapped. Cooler Muslim heads must have prevailed because he was released the next day.

Iraqi Christians have historically played an important role in the country. Tariq Aziz, 69, now in coalition custody, and once a familiar face on Western TV, is a Chaldean Catholic. During Saddam's dictatorship, he was Iraqi foreign minister and later deputy prime minister and at one time was even targeted in an assassination attempt by Iranian Islamic terrorists.

It is a paradox that during the Saddam Hussein dictatorship, Iraqi Christians "enjoyed considerable religious freedom," according to Nimrod Raphaeli, senior analyst with the Middle East Media Research Institute. Successors to the dictator Abdul Karim Qassem, assassinated in 1963, employed Christian women, who all spoke excellent English, as I then noted. They were practicing Chaldean Catholics under guidance of a Belgian priest who conducted his office without let or hindrance.

All that has changed. Last August, five churches in Baghdad and four in Mosul were hit in a single day's attacks that killed 12 people. In October, five churches in Baghdad were hit on the first day of the Muslim month of Ramadan. In November, eight people were killed in two church bombings. It is considered justifiable homicide to kill a Muslim convert to Christianity. ...

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Christian Soldier
PINELLAS PARK, Fla., March 28 - The legal battle over the life of Terri Schiavo may have ended, but a thick, fervent crowd remains in the makeshift encampment outside the Woodside Hospice House here....

..."No, we're not going to go home," said Bill Tierney, a young daughter at his side. "Terri is not dead until she's dead."...

...Mr. Tierney, a former military intelligence officer in Iraq who works as a translator and investigator for private companies, cried as he talked about watching the Schiavo spectacle on television and feeling the utter need to be at the hospice.

Like many of the protesters, Mr. Tierney said he had experienced proof in his own life that God is real. He held out his left hand showing the traces of scars from injuries he suffered in a gas explosion in 1987....

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...The greatest frustration was evident in rank and file intelligence and law enforcement officers. After explaining his various psychological tactics to the audience, interrogator Bill Tierney (a private contractor working with the Army) said, ''I tried to be nuanced and culturally aware. But the suspects didn't break.''

Suddenly Tierney's temper rose. ''They did not break!'' he shouted. ''I'm here to win. I'm here so our civilization beats theirs! Now what are you willing to do to win?'' he asked, pointing to a woman in the front row. ''You are the interrogators, you are the ones who have to get the information from the Iraqis. What do you do? That word 'torture'. You immediately think, 'That's not me.' But are we litigating this war or fighting it?''

Some listeners murmured in assent; others sat in rapt attention. In all the recent debates about the Bush administration's stance on torture, this voice, the voice of the interrogators themselves, has been almost entirely absent.

Asked about Abu Ghraib, Tierney said that for an interrogator, ''sadism is always right over the hill. You have to admit it. Don't fool yourself - there is a part of you that will say, 'This is fun.'''...

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Is No One Accountable?
The Bush administration is desperately trying to keep the full story from emerging. But there is no longer any doubt that prisoners seized by the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere have been killed, tortured, sexually humiliated and otherwise grotesquely abused.

These atrocities have been carried out in an atmosphere in which administration officials have routinely behaved as though they were above the law, and thus accountable to no one. People have been rounded up, stripped, shackled, beaten, incarcerated and in some cases killed, without being offered even the semblance of due process. No charges. No lawyers. No appeals.

Arkan Mohammed Ali is a 26-year-old Iraqi who was detained by the U.S. military for nearly a year at various locations, including the infamous Abu Ghraib prison. According to a lawsuit filed against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Mr. Ali was at times beaten into unconsciousness during interrogations. He was stabbed, shocked with an electrical device, urinated on and kept locked - hooded and naked - in a wooden, coffinlike box. He said he was told by his captors that soldiers could kill detainees with impunity.

(This was not a boast from the blue. On Saturday, for example, The Times reported that the Army would not prosecute 17 American soldiers implicated in the deaths of three prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

Mr. Ali's story is depressingly similar to other accounts pouring in from detainees, human rights groups, intelligence sources and U.S. government investigators. If you pay close attention to what is already known about the sadistic and barbaric treatment of prisoners by the U.S., you can begin to wonder how far we've come from the Middle Ages....

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Young Marines polish kids, teens
Most days, Elizabeth Capawana is busy with things you might expect for a 15-year-old. The Osborne High School sophomore goes to class, socializes with friends, rides horses and plays the French horn.

Two Saturdays a month, she takes on another persona: drill instructor.

Wearing camouflage uniform and black utility boots, she barks orders to dozens of other kids as they push their way through physical fitness tests and marching drills at the Naval Air Station base in Marietta.

Staff Sgt. Capawana is a Young Marine, one of about 10,000 in 291 units across the country. Elizabeth is in the Gen. Raymond G. Davis Metro Atlanta unit, one of two Young Marines groups in Georgia. The other is in Albany.

Little known to the general public, Young Marines accept members at age 8, and have seen their ranks swell the past decade.

Supporters say the group's emphasis on academic achievement, physical development and a drug-free lifestyle is good for children.

Critics say the organization also operates as a recruiting tool for the all-volunteer military, taking kids who are too young and encouraging them to join the U.S. Marine Corps when they grow up.

"Programs such as the Young Marines are successful because they give youth a sense of belonging and a higher purpose in life, yet I think parents need to ask themselves what that purpose is," said Marietta's Debbie Clark, a member of Veterans for Peace, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the abolishment of war.

"The primary function of the military is to be a killing machine, and it needs to attract future combatants."

Elizabeth's mother, Penny Capawana, disagrees.

"They're not like little kids in cammies playing war," she said. "It teaches them discipline, respect for the country, independence and accountability."...

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Pentagon Will Not Try 17 G.I.'s Implicated in Prisoners' Deaths
WASHINGTON, March 25 - Despite recommendations by Army investigators, commanders have decided not to prosecute 17 American soldiers implicated in the deaths of three prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004, according to a new accounting released Friday by the Army.

Investigators had recommended that all 17 soldiers be charged in the cases, according to the accounting by the Army Criminal Investigation Command. The charges included murder, conspiracy and negligent homicide. While none of the 17 will face any prosecution, one received a letter of reprimand and another was discharged after the investigations....

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Army Probe Finds Abuse at Base Near Mosul
Army Investigation Finds Systematic Abuse, Possible Torture of Iraqi Prisoners at Jail Near Mosul

WASHINGTON Mar 26, 2005 — Newly released government documents say the abuse of prisoners in Iraq by U.S. forces was more widespread than previously reported.

An officer found that detainees "were being systematically and intentionally mistreated" at a holding facility near Mosul in December 2003. The 311th Military Intelligence Battalion of the Army's 101st Airborne Division ran the lockup.

Records previously released by the Army have detailed abuses at Abu Ghraib and other sites in Iraq as well as at sites in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The documents released Friday were the first to reveal abuses at the jail in Mosul and are among the few to allege torture directly.

"There is evidence that suggests the 311th MI personnel and/or translators engaged in physical torture of the detainees," a memo from the investigator said. The January 2004 report said the prisoners' rights under the Geneva Conventions were violated....

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One Nation Under Bush
At a campaign rally, Republicans recite the "Bush Pledge."

PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla.—"I want you to stand, raise your right hands," and recite "the Bush Pledge," said Florida state Sen. Ken Pruitt. The assembled mass of about 2,000 in this Treasure Coast town about an hour north of West Palm Beach dutifully rose, arms aloft, and repeated after Pruitt: "I care about freedom and liberty. I care about my family. I care about my country. Because I care, I promise to work hard to re-elect, re-elect George W. Bush as president of the United States."

I know the Bush-Cheney campaign occasionally requires the people who attend its events to sign loyalty oaths, but this was the first time I have ever seen an audience actually stand and utter one. Maybe they've replaced the written oath with a verbal one. ...

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Conservatives Invoke Case in Fund-Raising Campaigns
Videotape of Terri Schiavo blinking at her parents has inspired donations from people around the country to the foundation set up to help pay for the family's legal battle. But many other groups are soliciting donations in her name as well, some for a much broader agenda.

"Help Save Terri Schiavo's Life!" says the Web site of the Traditional Values Coalition, a Christian conservative group best known for its campaigns against gay rights. Next to a link to the Web site of her parents' foundation is a pitch to "become an active supporter of the Traditional Values Coalition by pledging a monthly gift."

"What this issue has done is it has galvanized people the way nothing could have done in an off-election year," said Rev. Lou Sheldon, the founder of the group, acknowledging that the case of Ms. Schiavo, a severely brain-damaged Florida woman, had moved many to open up their checkbooks. "That is what I see as the blessing that dear Terri's life is offering to the conservative Christian movement in America." ...

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Doubts Surface On Iraq Raid Toll
BAGHDAD, March 24 -- New details about an intense battle between insurgents and Iraqi police commandos supported by U.S. forces cast doubt Thursday on Iraqi government claims that 85 rebels were killed at what was described as a clandestine training camp.

Accounts of the fighting continued to indicate that a major battle involving dozens of insurgents occurred Tuesday on the eastern shore of Tharthar Lake, which is about 50 miles northwest of Baghdad. However, two U.S. military officials said Thursday that no bodies were found by American troops who arrived at the scene after the fighting. A spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry, meanwhile, said he presumed the announced death toll was accurate, but he played down the scope of the fighting.

"I wouldn't call it a major incident," said the spokesman, Sabah Kadhim. ...

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How Family's Cause Reached the Halls of Congress
...On Friday, as the leaders of both chambers scrambled to try to stop the removal of Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube, Mr. DeLay, a Texas Republican, turned his attention to social conservatives gathered at a Washington hotel and described what he viewed as the intertwined struggle to save Ms. Schiavo, expand the conservative movement and defend himself against accusations of ethical lapses.

"One thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America," Mr. DeLay told a conference organized by the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group. A recording of the event was provided by the advocacy organization Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

"This is exactly the issue that is going on in America, of attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many others," Mr. DeLay said.

Mr. DeLay complained that "the other side" had figured out how "to defeat the conservative movement," by waging personal attacks, linking with liberal organizations and persuading the national news media to report the story. He charged that "the whole syndicate" was "a huge nationwide concerted effort to destroy everything we believe in." ...

Tom DeLay Uncensored
You got a taste yesterday in the New York Times. Think Progress brings you the uncensored version DeLay’s speech to the Family Research Council on Friday....

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Baptist Leader Suggests Youth Ministers Be Men
While official teaching of the Southern Baptist Convention is that women ought not lead churches as senior pastors, at least one seminary president says his preference would be that youth ministries also be male-led.

Paige Patterson, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, offered 17 “iconoclastic principles of youth ministry” Tuesday in Baptist Press, a follow-up to a similar column on church planting.

Among them: “Call a man as your minister to youth or your pastor in charge of youth ministry. If possible, have an associate who is a woman. If money is in short supply, have the youth minister find a woman who will volunteer to serve in this capacity.”

Patterson said it is “imperative that the youth minister be both a minister and a man’s man whom the young men will respect.”

Also vital, he said, is “that the associate be a woman who is godly, pure of heart and a model of what biblical womanhood is all about.”...

...While Southern Baptist seminaries continue to enroll large numbers of women, nowadays they typically steer them toward traditional roles, such as pastor’s wives or to minister to other women. New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary was the first Southern Baptist school to offer formal, specialized theological education in the area of women’s ministry....

...Other recommendations by Patterson, whose article appeared also in Southwestern News magazine, include:

“Make men out of the boys and women out of the girls. You may protest here that this goal is the natural end. Unfortunately, our society today is bent on trying to feminize boys and create as many masculine traits as possible in girls. This distortion leads not only to serious misinformation about gender but also to other disasters. Teaching boys the responsibilities that men must assume and teaching girls that true beauty before God is the ‘attitude of a gentle and quiet spirit’ will immeasurably bless their lives, their homes and their churches.”

Patterson said youth ministers should lead young people to ask about and follow God’s will for their lives.

“If the youth minister and the pastor of the church are positive examples of godly men, the young people will respond quickly, and many of them affirmatively, to the possibility that God may want some of them to serve as pastors, missionaries or other Christian vocational leaders,” he wrote. ...

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Groundhog Surfaces for Sunlight
...One of the side-effects of the 2004 election revealed by this despicable exploitative schmaltzfest is that the media has to tippytoe around making any disparaging remarks about religious fervor and its pathologies. Compare how little ink and airtime is given to the fact that the accused BTK serial killer is a prominent member of his church (and a registered Republican) to all the inspirational uplift being wrung out of the Atlanta hostage case, with CNN devoting a whole kabob to The Purpose-Driven Life. The positive side of religious faith is hailed to the rafters while the sadism and mastery over others seething in the negative side is now considered impolite to mention, as is the willful, retarded ignorance of those who cling to their Bibles and reject reason and science. "It is true that the rules of civil discourse demand that Reason wears a veil when she ventures out in public," writes Sam Harris in The End of Faith. "But the rules of discourse must change." Especially when the alternative is a sordid circus like we have now with those prayer vigils and cro-magnon conservatives in Florida....

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Republicans Respond to Evangelicals on Schiavo
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Christian evangelicals, a key component in President Bush (news - web sites)'s Republican Party, believe the case of brain-damaged Florida woman Terri Schiavo may help inject new life into their long campaign against abortion.

"The right-to-life issue has been with us for over 30 years but never has it dominated the news headlines day after day as it is doing now," said Louis Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition (news - web sites).

"This case has generated a kind of inspirational activism. It is giving revival and renewal to millions of people who feel strongly about the culture of life and the protection of life," he said.

Republican leaders and President Bush had little choice other than to respond to Christian evangelical demands on the Schiavo case or risk alienating a crucial part of their political base, political analysts said.

"Bush and the Republicans can't do all that much on many of the things the religious right cares about. They can't end abortion rights and they can only ban gay marriage so many times," said American University political scientist David Lublin, who has studied the evangelical community.

"Here's a way they can tell their supporters, 'Look, we're acting on your agenda,"' Lublin said....

... Writing in the Wall Street Journal last Friday, conservative columnist and former White House speechwriter Peggy Noonan set out the stakes for Republicans.

"The Republican Party controls the Senate, the House and the White House. The Republicans are in charge. They have the power. If they can't save this woman's life, they will face a reckoning from a sizable portion of their own base. And they will of course deserve it," Noonan wrote. ...

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The Pentagon Unleashes a Holy Warrior
A Christian extremist in a high Defense post can only set back the U.S. approach to the Muslim world.

In June of 2002, Jerry Boykin stepped to the pulpit at the First Baptist Church of Broken Arrow, Okla., and described a set of photographs he had taken of Mogadishu, Somalia, from an Army helicopter in 1993.

The photographs were taken shortly after the disastrous "Blackhawk Down" mission had resulted in the death of 18 Americans. When Boykin came home and had them developed, he said, he noticed a strange dark mark over the city. He had an imagery interpreter trained by the military look at the mark. "This is not a blemish on your photograph," the interpreter told him, "This is real."

"Ladies and gentleman, this is your enemy," Boykin said to the congregation as he flashed his pictures on a screen. "It is the principalities of darkness It is a demonic presence in that city that God revealed to me as the enemy."

That's an unusual message for a high-ranking U.S. military official to deliver. But Boykin does it frequently.

This June, for instance, at the pulpit of the Good Shepherd Community Church in Sandy, Ore., he displayed slides of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and North Korea's Kim Jung Il. "Why do they hate us?" Boykin asked. "The answer to that is because we're a Christian nation We are hated because we are a nation of believers."

Our "spiritual enemy," Boykin continued, "will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus."

Who is Jerry Boykin? He is Army Lt. General William G. "Jerry" Boykin. The day before Boykin appeared at the pulpit in Oregon, the Pentagon announced that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had nominated the general for a third star and named him to a new position as deputy undersecretary of Defense for intelligence.

In this newly created position, Boykin is not just another Pentagon apparatchik or bureaucratic warrior. He has been charged with reinvigorating Rumsfeld's "High Value Target Plan" to track down Bin Laden, Hussein, Mullah Omar and other leaders in the terrorism world.

But Gen. Boykin's appointment to a high position in the administration is a frightening blunder at a time when there is widespread acknowledgment that the position of the United States in the Islamic world has never been worse.

A monthlong journalistic investigation of Boykin reveals a 30-year veteran whose classified resum� reads like a history of special operations and counter-terrorism. From the failed Iranian hostage rescue attempt in 1980 to invasions in Grenada and Panama, to the hunt for drug lord Pablo Escobar in Colombia, to Somalia and various locales in the Middle East, Boykin has been there. He also was an advisor to Atty. Gen. Janet Reno during Waco.

He has risen in the ranks, starting out as one of the first Delta Force commandos and going on to head the top-secret Joint Special Operations Command. He has served in the Central Intelligence Agency and, most recently, he commanded Army Special Forces before being brought into the Rumsfeld leadership team.

But Boykin is also an intolerant extremist who has spoken openly about how his belief in Christianity has trumped Muslims and other non-Christians in battle.

He has described himself as a warrior in the kingdom of God and invited others to join with him in fighting for the United States through repentance, prayer and the exercise of faith in God.

He has praised the leadership of President Bush, whom he extolled as "a man who prays in the Oval Office." "George Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters in the United States," Boykin told an Oregon congregation. "He was appointed by God."...

... General Casts War in Religious Terms
The top soldier assigned to track down Bin Laden and Hussein is an evangelical Christian who speaks publicly of 'the army of God.'

WASHINGTON � The Pentagon has assigned the task of tracking down and eliminating Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and other high-profile targets to an Army general who sees the war on terrorism as a clash between Judeo-Christian values and Satan.

Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin, the new deputy undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, is a much-decorated and twice-wounded veteran of covert military operations. From the bloody 1993 clash with Muslim warlords in Somalia chronicled in "Black Hawk Down" and the hunt for Colombian drug czar Pablo Escobar to the ill-fated attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980, Boykin was in the thick of things.

Yet the former commander and 13-year veteran of the Army's top-secret Delta Force is also an outspoken evangelical Christian who appeared in dress uniform and polished jump boots before a religious group in Oregon in June to declare that radical Islamists hated the United States "because we're a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian ... and the enemy is a guy named Satan."

Discussing the battle against a Muslim warlord in Somalia, Boykin told another audience, "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."

"We in the army of God, in the house of God, kingdom of God have been raised for such a time as this," Boykin said last year.

On at least one occasion, in Sandy, Ore., in June, Boykin said of President Bush: "He's in the White House because God put him there."...

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What's worse? The exploitation of tragedy in the Terri Schiavo case, or the exploitation of triumph in the previous big media human interest story, Ashley Smith? (In case you somehow missed it, Smith was the young woman who managed to pacify and then escape serial murderer Brian Nichols in Atlanta, ultimately leading to his peaceful surrender)....

...But now The New Republic's Lee Siegel has broken the general taboo against publicly uttering what I heard many people privately saying at the height of the Smith furor: the media, and especially CNN, bought into the religious interpretation of Smith's courageous acts with an almost evangelical avidity. As you probably know, the part of the story that's led it to be described as some sort of theodicy (an illustration of the divine purpose in apparent evil) is the fact that Smith read Nichols a passage from The Purpose Driven Life, Rick Warren's evangelical self-help bestseller. She also discussed her own difficult life with Nichols, and cooked him pancakes with "real butter," but it's the Warren book that's getting the credit, almost as much as Smith's own level-headedness....

...But the idea that Smith was simply the Handmaiden of the Lord--the instrument for Nichols' redemption, and for the ever-more-efficient disseminatinon of the Therapeutic Gospel according to Rick Warren--is a story line that's gaining a surprising amount of currency, even in mainstream media sources (I can only imagine what conservative Christian media are doing with it)....

...Those Christians who are rushing to take sectarian credit for Ashley Smith's courage are committing a whole host of spiritually dangerous and ethically questionable acts, among them the breezy dismissal of Brian Nichols' victims as collateral damage in the divine plan to get more readers for Reverend Rick. They need to get away from the cameras, and the cameras need to get away from this story, for good.

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GOP memo says issue offers political rewards
WASHINGTON — Republican leaders believe their attention to the Terri Schiavo issue could pay dividends with Christian conservatives whose support they covet in the 2006 midterm elections, according to a GOP memo intended to be seen only by senators.

The one-page memo, distributed to Republican senators by party leaders, called the debate over Schiavo legislation "a great political issue" that would appeal to the party's base, or core, supporters. The memo singled out Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., who is up for re-election next year.

"This is an important moral issue, and the pro-life base will be excited that the Senate is debating this important issue," said the memo, reported by ABC News and later given to The Washington Post. "This is a great political issue, because Senator Nelson of Florida has already refused to become a co-sponsor and this is a tough issue for Democrats."...

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"laughter is carbonated holiness"
Writer Anne Lamott dips into a rich well of faith to quench fires great and small

... Lamott's writing on faith touches a nerve among those "who've given up on God and church because of how far away God seems in this modern world," says Lamott. She also sees herself as an antidote to religious conservatives. "I try to carry this candle around for regular people about Christ and counter the dogma of the Christian right. I speak about the simple, accepting love of Jesus," she says. "That's what I have to offer."

Theologically, Lamott admits, she's not especially articulate. "I'm saying that spiritually this might be helpful, if you have a minute," she says. Readers, she adds, "are struggling with their old painful relationship with God, and they're asking a lot of questions about faith." Lamott believes she's helping the spiritually disenfranchised "find their way back into the fold."

If that's so, she's doing it in a distinctly unorthodox way. In "Plan B's" first essay, titled "Ham of God," for instance, Lamott prays for help in dealing with the George Bush presidency and the war in Iraq, both of which she opposes. God's response is to let her win a ham at a supermarket.

She's not exactly happy about the ham - which she rarely eats - but in the parking lot outside the supermarket, she runs into a desperately needy friend who loves ham, and Lamott gives it to her.

It's not exactly loaves and fishes, but it works in today's world....

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The Schiavo Case and the Islamization of the Republican Party
The cynical use by the US Republican Party of the Terri Schiavo case repeats, whether deliberately or accidentally, the tactics of Muslim fundamentalists and theocrats in places like Egypt and Pakistan. These tactics involve a disturbing tendency to make private, intimate decisions matters of public interest and then to bring the courts and the legislature to bear on them. President George W. Bush and Republican congressional leaders like Tom Delay have taken us one step closer to theocracy on the Muslim Brotherhood model.

The Muslim fundamentalists use a provision of Islamic law called "bringing to account" (hisba). As Al-Ahram weekly notes, "Hisba signifies a case filed by an individual on behalf of society when the plaintiff feels that great harm has been done to religion." Hisba is a medieval idea that had all be lapsed when the fundamentalists brought it back in the 1970s and 1980s....

...One of the most objectionable features of this fundamentalist tactic is that persons without standing can interfere in private affairs. Perfect strangers can file a case about your marriage, because they represent themselves as defending a public interest (the upholding of religion and morality).

Terri Schiavo's husband is her legal guardian. Her parents have not succeeded in challenging this status of his. As long as he is the guardian, the decision on removing the feeding tubes is between him and their physicians. Her parents have not succeeded in having this responsibility moved from him to them. Even under legislation George W. Bush signed in 1999 while governor of Texas, the spouse and the physician can make this decision. (The bill Bush signed in Texas actually made ability to pay a consideration in the decision!)

In passing a special law to allow the case to be kicked to a Federal judge after the state courts had all ruled in favor of the husband, Congress probably shot itself in the foot once again. The law is not a respecter of persons, so the Federal judge will likely rule as the state ones did.

But the most frightening thing about the entire affair is that public figures like congressmen inserted themselves into the case in order to uphold religious strictures. The lawyer arguing against the husband let the cat out of the bag, as reported by the NYT: ' The lawyer, David Gibbs, also said Ms. Schiavo's religious beliefs as a Roman Catholic were being infringed because Pope John Paul II has deemed it unacceptable for Catholics to refuse food and water. "We are now in a position where a court has ordered her to disobey her church and even jeopardize her eternal soul," Mr. Gibbs said. '

In other words, the United States Congress acted in part on behalf of the Roman Catholic church. Both of these public bodies interfered in the private affairs of the Schiavos, just as the fundamentalist Egyptian, Nabih El-Wahsh, tried to interfere in the marriage of Nawal El Saadawi.

Like many of his fundamentalist counterparts in the Middle East, Tom Delay is rather cynically using this issue to divert attention from his own corruption. Like the Muslim fundamentalist manipulators of Hisba, Delay represents himself as acting on behalf of a higher cause. He said of the case over the weekend, ' "This is not a political issue. This is life and death," '

Republican Hisba will have the same effect in the United States that it does in the Middle East. It will reduce the rights of the individual in favor of the rights of religious and political elites to control individuals. Ayatollah Delay isn't different from his counterparts in Iran.

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The man has his priorities
It's been interesting to see just how much time the president spends away from work and on vacation, but Bush's personal priorities are even more revealing when one considers what it takes for him to cut a vacation short.

In August 2001, for example, Bush received an intelligence briefing that told him, "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US." In response, the president took the entire month off, never even meeting with his CIA director...

...Bush could have signed the Schiavo legislation in Texas, but preferred to cut his vacation short and make the dramatic trip back to the White House just for this occasion.

To recap, Osama bin Laden, Israel, war, and devastation? Vacation on. The religious right wants action on a woman who has been in vegetative state for 15 years? Vacation off. The man has his priorities.

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DeLay, Frist, Bush Dramatically Out of Touch
...New polling numbers on the Schiavo case have been released by ABC News. Here are some highlights:

- 70% of Americans say it is inappropriate for Congress to involve itself in the Schiavo case.

- 67% of Americans “think the elected officials trying to keep Schiavo alive are doing so more for political advantage than out of concern for her or for the principles involved.” (Just 19% believe the elected officials are acting out of concern for her or their principles.)

- 58% of Republicans, 61% of independents and 63% of Democrats oppose federal government intervention in the case.

- 50% of evangelicals oppose federal government intervention in the case, just 44% approve of the intervention.

- 63% of Catholics and a plurality of evangelicals believe Schiavo’s feeding tube should be removed....

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Feeding tube could be reconnected today
WASHINGTON - Lawyers entered a Florida courthouse with a lawsuit in hand as nurses stood ready at Terri Schiavo's bedside early today after Congress approved and President Bush swiftly signed a bill that could prolong her life....

...But those Democrats opposed to the bill said it was the Republicans who were exploiting the issue for their political benefit.

The Washington Post published a memo it said had been circulated to GOP senators. ''This is an important moral issue and the pro-life base will be excited that the Senate is debating this important,'' the memo reportedly said.

It appeared to target Sen. Bill Nelson, Florida's top Democrat, saying, ``This is a great political issue because Senator Nelson of Florida has already refused to become a cosponsor and this is a tough issue for Democrats.''

Democrats said the memo revealed their opponents' real motivation.

''We're making a medical decision about which we know nothing,'' said Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass. ``We should not be making decisions because we're trying to please someone politically.''

Congressional Republicans sought to distance themselves from the memo and denied any political motivation....

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A Threat Greater Than Terrorism
Delusion has settled over America. Washington cannot tell fact from fantasy. Neither can sycophantic media nor nothink economists.

The Bush administration is the first government in history to initiate a war based entirely on fantasy--fantasy about nonexistent "weapons of mass destruction," fantasy about nonexistent "terrorist links," fantasy about "liberating" a people from their culture, fantasy about a "cakewalk" invasion, fantasy about America's omnipotence.

Reality has yet to penetrate the Oval Office or America's "red state" consciousness. The gratuitous invasion of Iraq, the torture and the war crimes have made America despised the world over. Our once formidable alliances are shattered.

The Muslim world, which perceives America as Israel's enabler of Palestine's oppression, has uniformly turned against us.

$300 billion--red ink to the last cent--has been wasted in a pointless war and occupation that has emboldened Islamic revolutionaries, who will be more successful than the US in changing the face of the Middle East.

Bush's invasion of Iraq has proved the limits of America's "hegemonic" military power: Eight heavily armored high tech US divisions are tied down by a few thousand lightly armed insurgents who control most of the roads and many towns and cities.

Any Iraqi collaborator with the US occupation who is foolish enough to leave the heavily fortified "Green Zone" is shot down or blown up in the streets.

Such an outcome is proclaimed a "success" by the White House, Republican politicians and a cheerleading media.

The reality is that an ignorant and blundering Bush administration has created a Shi'ite crescent from Iran to Lebanon that is revolutionizing the Middle East. The reality will not penetrate the Bush administration. Reality contradicts Bush fantasy and is "against us." Facts that don't support Bush fantasy are "liberal" and "anti-American." Truth is dismissed as anti-Bush propaganda.

It is America that has undergone regime change. The Bush administration constitutes a Jacobin revolution. Its fanatics have declared world war on political diversity. The first victim of Bush's "war on terror" is the Bill of Rights. In its place we have an incipient police state....

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Local radio host arrested for child porn
NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Agents with the FBI's Violent Crimes Task Force arrested a Christian radio station personality as part of a child pornography investigation....

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Guantanamo abuse 'videotaped'
VIDEO footage of the treatment of prisoners by the US military at Guantanamo Bay would reveal many cases of substantial abuse as "explosive as anything from Abu Ghraib", a lawyer said today.

Adelaide lawyer Stephen Kenny, who represented Australian David Hicks during the early part of his detention at the military prison in Cuba, told a law conference today 500 hours of videotape of prisoners at the US base existed.

Hicks, 29, from Adelaide, has been in American custody awaiting trial since being captured in Afghanistan in 2001 and accused of having links to terror group al-Qaeda. He is charged with conspiracy to commit war crimes, attempted murder and aiding the enemy.
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Mr Kenny said the full story of abuse at Guantanamo Bay would not be told until the tapes were released, but they could be as damaging as the images of Iraqi prisoners being abused by US soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison.

"I believe that these videos, if they are ever released, will be as explosive as anything from Abu Ghraib," Mr Kenny told the LawAsia Downunder conference....

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Bush’s Napoleon Complex
What the French experience in Spain could teach us about Iraq

No two wars are ever the same any more than you can step on the same banana peel twice. That said, Napoleon’s invasion and occupation of Spain, from 1808 to 1814—the war that gave us the word “guerrilla” and was immortalized in Goya’s “Third of May,” the war that drained France’s army, smashed Napoleon’s reputation for invincibility, and left Spain thrashing like a broken-backed snake for decades—has striking similarities to our invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Both wars started under the influence of similar delusions. Napoleon thought that the Spanish would roll over and play dead as so many other European states had; he thought marching to Madrid and placing his brother Joseph on the throne would complete the subjugation of Spain. We pretty much thought the same: crushing Saddam’s army would be easy; we would then install a pro-American government (Ahmad the Thief) and have most of our Army home by fall.

The invasions went well, as expected, but in each case a tiresome guerrilla war broke out. The French eventually lost over a quarter of a million men in “the Spanish ulcer,” as Napoleon called it, while Iraq has tied down half of the Army and is costing us more than $75 billion a year. What went wrong? As it turns out, Boney and Bush made some of the same mistakes.

Despite his tremendous organizational skills, Napoleon never managed to establish authority in Spain. He smashed the Bourbon state without ever being able to replace it with his own. We’ve done the same in Iraq. We have been much more systematic about it, sacking the Iraqi army and banning most of the top layer of Ba’athist civil servants from government employment. The French made their mistakes rather casually: “Who wouldn’t want to have my big brother as king?” Napoleon seems to have thought. On the other hand, our administration seems to have tried to fail, going out of its way to alienate and radicalize the entire Iraqi ruling class.

Like the French, we’ve managed not to have much of a side in Iraq: few Iraqis seem eager to wage war in our interest. Some of them are against us, while for the most part the others just watch as if it’s not their fight. We hear a lot about how Iraqi National Guard units need more training. The true problem is that they’re short on motivation. The insurgents manage to fight without years of professional training. The French too had some Spanish troops, who usually deserted at the first opportunity. They didn’t make up fantasies about a training deficiency to explain it.

Both Spain and Iraq had notoriously inefficient armies, and that must have made the idea of invasion seem more plausible. The Spanish were certainly weaker and easier to beat (in conventional battles) than the Prussians or Austrians, while the Iraqis—some of the worst soldiers the world has ever seen—have been known to surrender to a film crew in an unarmed helicopter back in 1991. Compared to them, the Italians of World War II were unkillable demons of battle.

The odd thing is that the same qualities that make an army fight well—strong central control, discipline, and a grassroots inclination to co-operate and obey orders—also allow it to surrender completely, rather like a CEO and his dominatrix. According to historian John Tone in The Fatal Knot, the French in Napoleon’s time found the “Germans and Austrians, conditioned by militarism and centralization, unable or unwilling to act without the permission of their superiors.” We’ve seen it too, more recently: the Germans fought all too well in World War II but once defeated were quiet as mice under Allied occupation. The Japanese went further in that direction: willing, even eager, to die for the Emperor, more fanatical than any other army in history, they were utterly peaceful after surrender. Of course, Donald Rumsfeld seems to think that those post-World War II occupations were plagued by guerrilla resistance—but then, he also thinks that Iraq is a lot like colonial America: you know, prosperous, bourgeois, literate, British, Protestant, used to self-government and rule of law. Most likely he’s from some other dimension. If only we could get him to say his name backwards. ...

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U.S. Misled Allies About Nuclear Export
North Korea Sent Material To Pakistan, Not to Libya

In an effort to increase pressure on North Korea, the Bush administration told its Asian allies in briefings earlier this year that Pyongyang had exported nuclear material to Libya. That was a significant new charge, the first allegation that North Korea was helping to create a new nuclear weapons state.

But that is not what U.S. intelligence reported, according to two officials with detailed knowledge of the transaction. North Korea, according to the intelligence, had supplied uranium hexafluoride -- which can be enriched to weapons-grade uranium -- to Pakistan. It was Pakistan, a key U.S. ally with its own nuclear arsenal, that sold the material to Libya. The U.S. government had no evidence, the officials said, that North Korea knew of the second transaction.

Pakistan's role as both the buyer and the seller was concealed to cover up the part played by Washington's partner in the hunt for al Qaeda leaders, according to the officials, who discussed the issue on the condition of anonymity. In addition, a North Korea-Pakistan transfer would not have been news to the U.S. allies, which have known of such transfers for years and viewed them as a business matter between sovereign states.

The Bush administration's approach, intended to isolate North Korea, instead left allies increasingly doubtful as they began to learn that the briefings omitted essential details about the transaction, U.S. officials and foreign diplomats said in interviews. ...

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A Closer Look at the Attempted Coup
The extreme conservatives, specifically the American Anglican Council, are not pleased with the recent Covenant Statement issued by the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church. Keep in mind that this statement was written by David Anderson, one of those exposed by name by Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold as lurking in the shadows when the Archbishops met in Ireland.

What some folks don't seem to understand is that NOTHING will ever appease the AAC, or the Network (same group, different name). They want a split. That's been their goal from the beginning. The plan has been to get themselves recognized as an "alternative Anglican province" in North America, get the Episcopal Church kicked out of the Anglican Communion, and then claim ownership of all assets previously held by TEC (with Bob Duncan as the new Archbishop, of course).

One would think that the article in the Washington Post over a year ago; Plan to Supplant Episcopal Church USA Is Revealed, regarding the leaked Chapman letter would have been enough to wake up most Episcopalians to what was going on. Here's just a small piece of that document;...

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Blair was told US 'Fixed' case for war
03/20/05 "SMH" - - The head of Britain's foreign intelligence agency told the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, that the case for war in Iraq was being "fixed" by Washington to suit US policy, a BBC documentary will claim today.

Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, briefed Blair and a group of ministers on the United States' determination to launch the invasion nine months before hostilities began in March 2003, the Sunday Times reported, citing the BBC program, which is due to be aired later in the day.

After attending a briefing in Washington, he told the meeting that war was "inevitable", according to the newspaper.

"The facts and intelligence" were being "fixed round the policy" by US President George Bush's administration, Dearlove said....

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The Democracy Lie
...Ironically, most democratization in the region has been pursued without reference to the United States. Some Middle Eastern regimes began experimenting with parliamentary elections years ago. For example, Jordan began holding elections in 1989, and Yemen held its third round of such elections in 2003. Morocco and Bahrain had elections in 2002. All of those elections were more transparent than, and superior as democratic processes to, the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq. They all had flaws, of course. The monarch or ruler typically places restraints on popular sovereignty. The prime minister is not elected by Parliament, but rather appointed by the ruler. Some of these parliaments may evolve in a more democratic direction over time, but if they do it will be for local reasons, not because of anything that has happened in Baghdad.

The Bush administration could genuinely push for the peaceful democratization of the region by simply showing some gumption and stepping in to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. There are, undeniably, large numbers of middle- and working-class people in the Middle East who seek more popular participation in government. Arab intellectuals are, however, often coded as mere American and Israeli puppets when they dare speak against authoritarian practices.

As it is, the Bush administration is widely seen in the region as hypocritical, backing Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and of the Golan Heights (the latter belonging to Syria) while pressuring Syria about its troops in Lebanon, into which Kissinger had invited Damascus years ago. Bush would be on stronger ground as a champion of liberty if he helped liberate the Palestinians from military occupation and creeping Israeli colonization, and if he brokered the return of the Golan Heights and Shebaa Farms to Damascus in return for peace between Syria and Israel. The end of Israeli occupation of the territory of neighbors would deprive the radical Shiite party in Lebanon, Hezbollah, of its ability to mobilize Lebanese youth against this injustice. Without decisive action on the Arab-Israeli front, Bush risks having his democratization rhetoric viewed as a mere stalking horse for neoimperial domination.

Bush's invasion of Iraq has left the center and north of the country in a state of long-term guerrilla war. It has also opened Iraq to a form of parliamentary politics dominated by Muslim fundamentalists. This combination has little appeal elsewhere in the region. The Middle East may open up politically, and no doubt Bush will try to claim credit for any steps in that direction. But in Jordan, Yemen, Lebanon and elsewhere, such steps much predated Bush, and these publics will be struggling for their rights long after he is out of office. They may well see his major legacy not as democratization but as studied inattention to military occupation in Palestine and the Golan, and the retrenchment in civil liberties authorized to the Yemeni, Tunisian and other governments in the name of fighting terrorism.

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Couple Sells Candles That Smell Like Jesus
Product Flying Off Shelves

A South Dakota couple makes and markets candles they say smell like Jesus.

You can find candles with just about every fragrance imaginable, from blueberry to ocean mist to hot apple pie.

Now there's a candle that lets you experience the scent of Jesus, and they've been selling out by the case.

"We see it as a ministry, " says Bob Tosterud, who together with his wife came up with the idea for the candle.

Light up the candle called "His Essence" and its makers say you'll experience the fragrance of Christ....

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Why not torture terrorists?
As an indignant reader (one of many) wrote to me after last week's column on the cruel abuse of some US detainees, ''The terrorists . . . would cut your heart out and stuff it into the throat they would proudly slash open." So why not torture detainees, if it will produce the information we need?

Here's why:

First, because torture, as noted, is unambiguously illegal -- illegal under a covenant the United States ratified, illegal under federal law, and illegal under protocols of civilization dating back to the Magna Carta.

Second, because torture is notoriously unreliable. Many people will say anything to make the pain stop, while some will refuse to yield no matter what is done to them. Yes, sometimes torture produces vital information. But it can also produce false leads and desperate fictions. In the ticking-bomb case, bad information is every bit as deadly as no information.

Third, because torture is never limited to just the guilty. The case for razors and electric shock rests on the premise that the prisoner is a knowledgeable terrorist like Mohammed or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. But most of the inmates in military prisons are nothing of the kind. Commanders in Guantanamo acknowledge that hundreds of their prisoners pose no danger and have no useful information. How much of the hideous abuse reported to date involved men who were guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time?

And fourth, because torture is a dangerously slippery slope. Electric shocks and beatings are justified if they can prevent another 9/11? But what if the shocks and beating don't produce the needed information? Is it OK to break a finger? To cut off a hand? To save 3,000 lives, can a terrorist's eyes be gouged out? How about gouging out his son's eyes? Or raping his daughter in his presence? If that's what it will take to make him talk, to defuse the ticking bomb, isn't it worth it?

No. Torture is never worth it. Some things we don't do, not because they never work, not because they aren't ''deserved," but because our very right to call ourselves decent human beings depends in part on our not doing them. Torture is in that category. We can win our war against the barbarians without becoming barbaric in the process.

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Where's the outrage on torture?
...Then there is the government's use of ''extraordinary rendition," a euphemism for sending terror suspects to be interrogated by other countries -- including some where respect for human rights is nonexistent and interrogation can involve beatings, electric shock, and other torture. The CIA says it always gets an assurance in advance that a prisoner will be treated humanely. But of what value are such assurances when they come from places like Syria and Saudi Arabia?

Of course the United States must hunt down terrorists and find out what they know. Better intelligence means more lives saved, more atrocities prevented, and a more likely victory in the war against radical Islamist fascism. Those are crucial ends, and they justify tough means. But they don't justify means that betray core American values. Interrogation techniques that flirt with torture -- to say nothing of those that end in death -- cross the moral line that separates us from the enemy we are trying to defeat.

The Bush administration and the military insist that any abuse of detainees is a violation of policy and that abusers are being punished. If so, why does it refuse to allow a genuinely independent commission to investigate without fear or favor? Why do Republican leaders on Capitol Hill refuse to launch a proper congressional investigation? And why do my fellow conservatives -- those who support the war for all the right reasons -- continue to keep silent about a scandal that should have them up in arms?

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Wellington Boone, editorial board member of Promise Keepers magazine New Man: “I want to boldly affirm Uncle Tom. The black community must stop criticizing Uncle Tom. He is a role model.”

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Pastors: Join Vision America As A Patriot Pastor Here!

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Is Biblical Counseling Biblical?
It should come as no surprise that Southern Seminary has announced that the pastoral care and counseling curriculum formed under the direction of Wayne Oates should now be replaced by model known as “biblical” counseling. The reductionistic logic of biblical fundamentalism would lead one to consider this to be a conclusive outcome.

But predictable or not, the announcement still arrives as a shock to the system. While it seems a likely possibility the leaders who control the denomination would want the seminary’s approach to pastoral care to reflect their beliefs, the chilling insult to the legacy of one of Southern Baptists’ great thinkers is startling.

Wayne Oates was a profound Baptist practitioner of the healing arts. One can measure his influence by the deep respect he had from his peers outside the Baptist family. He was a giant of his time who influenced the shape and direction of the entire field of study. He was certainly the best known among many Baptist theologians in helping define the ministry of healing that pastors, chaplains and pastoral counselors may have in the practice of ministry.

Just what is “biblical counseling?” It is a loosely held view that the Bible alone provides guidance for the myriad of concerns persons in pain may present to the counselor (one of the many roles pastors may be called upon to play in ministry).

Biblical counseling may take many forms depending solely upon the theological beliefs of the pastor. At its heart it reduces both the person in pain and the God who loves them in this condition to something less than who and what they are.

It reduces human pain to sin. It reduces Christian belief to a set of rules that must be followed. Break the rules and one will suffer. It implies the Bible has a definitive plan for life for every person. It also implies that it is the job of the counselor to advise the person in pain about that plan in prescriptive fashion.

The biblical counseling model has no place for the healing power of one who truly listens beyond the words to the sources of pain that plague the human heart. In short, biblical counseling is motivated by the desire to direct and control. It is shaped by the person in pain doing what the counselor says regardless of whether it is appropriate or even healing....

...What does the biblical counselor say to the one suffering from the depths of acute depression? How does the pastoral counselor help the person in pain who contemplates thoughts of suicide?

How does the pastor hear the anger that would lead to self-harm or the harm of others? How does the minister care for the one suffering from psychotic delusions? What is said to the one suffering from Bi-Polar Disorder?

What does the biblical counselor derive from the Bible other than platitudes and advice? Does every mental ailment or pain of the soul reduce down to sin? If not sin, then what? Biblical reductionism violates the oath that the healer will at the very least, “do no harm.”...

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Questions Are Left by C.I.A. Chief on the Use of Torture
WASHINGTON, March 17 - Porter J. Goss, the director of central intelligence, said Thursday that he could not assure Congress that the Central Intelligence Agency's methods of interrogating terrorism suspects since Sept. 11, 2001, had been permissible under federal laws prohibiting torture.

Under sharp questioning at a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Mr. Goss sought to reassure lawmakers that all interrogations "at this time" were legal and that no methods now in use constituted torture. But he declined, when asked, to make the same broad assertions about practices used over the last few years.

"At this time, there are no 'techniques,' if I could say, that are being employed that are in any way against the law or would meet - would be considered torture or anything like that," Mr. Goss said in response to one question.

When he was asked several minutes later whether he could say the same about techniques employed by the agency since the campaign against Al Qaeda expanded in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks in the United States, he said, "I am not able to tell you that." ...

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CIA, White House Defend Transfers of Terror Suspects
The CIA and the White House yesterday defended the practice of secretly transferring suspected terrorists to other countries, including some with poor human rights records, and reiterated that proper safeguards exist to ensure detainees are not tortured.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan would not answer repeated questions about whether President Bush was aware of -- or believed or discounted -- assertions made recently by freed detainees that they were tortured by other governments after they were transferred abroad by the CIA. But he said the United States has "an obligation not to render people to countries if we believe they're going to be tortured."

It is illegal under U.S. and international law to send someone to a country where torture is likely. To abide by the law, the CIA obtains a verbal assurance of humane treatment from the intelligence service of another country before it transfers suspected terrorists, a practice called rendition. Many intelligence and counterterrorism experts, however, say such assurances are ineffective and virtually impossible to monitor. ...

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For evangelicals, a bid to 'reclaim America'
...For more than 900 other Christians from across the US, the draw at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church last month was a national conference aimed at "reclaiming America for Christ." The monument stood as a potent symbol of their hopes for changing the course of the nation.

"We have God-sized problems in our country, and only God can solve them," Richard Land, a prominent leader of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), told the group.

Their mission is not simply to save souls. The goal is to mobilize evangelical Christians for political action to return society to what they call "the biblical worldview of the Founding Fathers." Some speak of "restoring a Christian nation." Others shy from that phrase, but agree that the Bible calls them not only to evangelize, but also to transform the culture.

In material given to conference attendees, the Rev. D. James Kennedy, Coral Ridge pastor wrote: "As the vice-regents of God, we are to bring His truth and His will to bear on every sphere of our world and our society. We are to exercise godly dominion and influence over our neighborhoods, our schools, our government ... our entertainment media, our news media, our scientific endeavors - in short, over every aspect and institution of human society."

This is the 10th conference to spread this "cultural mandate" among Christians, and although the church's pastor couldn't speak due to illness, others presented the message intended to rouse the conservative faithful, eager to capitalize on gains won during the November election.

This melding of religion and politics, Christianity and patriotism, makes many uneasy, particularly those on the other side of the so-called culture war, who see a threat to the healthy discourse of a pluralistic society....

...Christianity and patriotism are interwoven throughout the gathering, from Christian and American flags marched into the sanctuary, to red, white, and blue banners festooning the church complex, to a rousing "patriotic concert." Several speakers emphasize the idea that America's founders were largely Christian and that their intent was to establish a biblically based nation. (No mention is made of other influences on the Founding Fathers, such as Englightenment thinkers or issues of freedom of conscience.)

David Barton, a leading advocate for emphasizing Christianity in US history, deftly selects quotes from letters and historical documents to link major historical figures such as George Washington to a Christian vision, and to suggest that the courts and scholars in the last century have deliberately undermined the original intent of the Founding Fathers.

Critics, including historians and the Baptist Joint Committee, challenge the accuracy of some of Mr. Barton's work, including what he calls "the myth of separation of church and state."

In "Blessed Assurance: A History of Evangelicalism in America," religious historian Randall Balmer of Columbia University writes that a "contrived mythology about America's Christian origins" has been a factor in the reentry of evangelicals into political life, helping sustain the conservative swing in American politics. Barton and others say they are recapturing truths hidden behind a secularist version of history, while critics say they are producing revisionist history that cherry-picks facts and ignores historical evidence.

But Barton is clearly a favorite speaker, with a theme buttressing the identity and purpose of those eager to reform the country. And there's plenty for them to do. Coral Ridge's Center for Reclaiming America is building a grass-roots alliance around five issues: the sanctity of life, religious liberty, pornography, the "homosexual agenda," and creation vs. evolution.

The Center aims to increase its 500,000-strong "e-mail army" to 1 million, and to encourage Christians to run for office. It has plans for 12 regional offices and activists in all 435 US House districts. And a new lobbying arm in Washington will target judicial nominations and the battle over marriage.

"If they don't vote our way, we'll change their view one way or another," executive director Gary Cass tells the group. As a California pastor, Dr. Cass spearheaded efforts to close abortion clinics and recruit Christians to seek positions on local school boards. "We're going to take back what we lost in the last half of the 20th century," he adds.

"Taking back" is a major theme - taking back the schools, the media, the courts.

It's time to "take back the portals of power," and particularly those of commerce, because "commerce controls all the gates - to government, the courts, and so on," says businessman Michael Pink in a workshop. Recounting his own business success based on in-depth Bible study, Mr. Pink says he's now urging wealthy Christian businessmen to start using their earnings to purchase such prizes as ABC and NBC....

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Many Iraqis Losing Hope That Politics Will Yield Real Change
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 16 - Haithm Ali, a wiry blacksmith, was welding an iron gate in his shop in Sadr City, the vast Shiite slum in northeastern Baghdad, when he was asked for his thoughts about the country's new national assembly. Mr. Ali's face broke into a bitter smile.

"I don't expect any government to be formed," he said, his welding glasses pushed up over his forehead. "And they won't find any solutions to the situation we find ourselves in."

Nothing like a scientific poll is possible yet in Iraq. But as the national assembly's first brief meeting came and went, broadcast into thousands of Iraqi homes on television, a sampling of street opinion in two Iraqi cities found a widespread dismay and even anger that the elections have not yet translated into a new government. ...

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Truth Is, Bush's Propaganda Hurts the U.S.
When I was growing up in Mexico, we subscribed to the local Chihuahua newspaper and a Mexico City paper whose arrival around lunchtime was a much-anticipated treat — it had a far better sports section. My exposure to U.S. news in that pre-Internet, pre-satellite-TV era was intermittent, mostly by way of the El Paso Times and Time magazine.

If my worldview had been entirely shaped by media, I would have believed that one of the two countries separated by the Rio Grande was a mess, a total basket case, and the other a prosperous democracy envied around the world. But I would have gotten it backward.

It was Mexico's TV and newspapers, tightly controlled by the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, that trumpeted the wonders of the nation's democracy, economic progress and social cohesion. Candor seemed to seep only into those treasured sports pages.

American media, by contrast, were brimming with woe. You would have thought it was only a matter of days before the U.S. would disintegrate.

Two decades later, it's troubling to see Washington emulating the PRI's media strategy, and it's especially troubling to those of us who have lived in other countries and always admired the distinctive candor of public discourse in this country. ...

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Charles Spurgeon on Christian War Fever
We know all too well about Christian war fever – that sickening blind worship of the state that elevates George W. Bush to Messiah status and seeks to justify his immoral, unscriptural, unconstitutional war in Iraq by incessantly repeating the mantras "obey the powers that be" and "God is a God of war." But who is Charles Spurgeon and why should we care what he said about war?

Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–1892) was an English Baptist minister who served as pastor of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London from 1861 until his death. But Spurgeon was no ordinary minister. He was a pastor, a preacher, a teacher, an author, an editor, and the overseer of a pastor’s college, a Christian literature society, and an orphanage. He is still widely revered today among Baptists (and others as well) as one of the greatest Baptist ministers in history....

...Spurgeon on Imperialism in the Name of Christianity

Imperialism is bad enough, but it is even worse when it is done in the name of Christianity. Unlike Christian pragmatists today who think that U.S. wars and interventions will be a boon to Christianity, Spurgeon was not deceived:

The church, we affirm, can neither be preserved nor can its interests be promoted by human armies. We have all thought otherwise in our time, and have foolishly said when a fresh territory was annexed to our empire, "Ah! what a providence that England has annexed Oude," – or taken to itself some other territory – "Now a door is opened for the Gospel. A Christian power will necessarily encourage Christianity, and seeing that a Christian power is at the head of the Government, it will be likely that the natives will be induced to search into the authenticity of our revelation, and so great results will follow. Who can tell but that, at the point of the British bayonet, the Gospel will be carried, and that, by the edge of the true sword of valiant men, Christ’s Gospel will be proclaimed?" I have said so myself; and now I know I am a fool for my pains, and that Christ’s church hath been also miserably befooled; for this I will assert, and prove too, that the progress of the arms of a Christian nation is not the progress of Christianity, and that the spread of our empire, so far from being advantageous to the Gospel, I will hold, and this day proclaim, hath been hostile to it.

But I have another string to my bow, I believe that the help of Government would have been far worse than its opposition, I do regret that the [East India] Company sometimes discourages missionary enterprise; but I believe that, had they encouraged it, it would have been far worse still, for their encouragement would have been the greatest hindrance we could receive. If I had to-morrow to go to India to preach the Gospel, I should pray to God, if such a thing could be, that he would give me a black face and make me like a Hindoo; for otherwise I should feel that when I preached I should be regarded as one of the lords – one of the oppressors it may sometime be added – and I should not expect my congregation to listen to me as a man speaking to men, a brother to brother, a Christian full of love, but they would hear me, and only cavil at me, because even my white face would give me some appearance of superiority. Why in England, our missionaries and our clergymen have assumed a kind of superiority and dignity over the people; they have called themselves clergy, and the people laity; and the result has been that they have weakened their influence. I have thought it right to come amongst my fellow men, and be a man amongst men, just one of themselves, their equal and their friend; and they have rallied around me, and not refused to love me. And I should not expect to be successful in preaching the gospel, unless I might stand and feel that I am a brother, bone of their bone, and flesh of their flesh. If I cannot stand before them thus, I cannot get at their hearts. Send me, then, to India as one of the dominant ruling race, and you give me a work I cannot accomplish when you tell me to evangelise its inhabitants. In that day when John Williams fell in Erromanga, ye wept, but it was a more hopeful day for Erromanga than the day when our missionaries in India first landed there. I had rather go to preach to the greatest savages that live, than I would go to preach in the place that is under British rule. Not for the fault of Britain, but simply because I, as a Briton, would be looked upon as one of the superiors, one of the lords, and that would take away much of my power to do good.

Now, will you just cast your eye upon the wide world? Did you ever hear of a nation under British rule being converted to God? Mr. Moffat and our great friend Dr. Livingstone have been laboring in Africa with great success, and many have been converted. Did you ever hear of Kaffir tribes protected by England, ever being converted? It is only a people that have been left to themselves, and preached to by men as men, that have been brought to God. For my part, I conceive, that when an enterprise begins in martyrdom, it is none the less likely to succeed, but when conquerors begin to preach the gospel to those they have conquered, it will not succeed, God will teach us that it is not by might All swords that have ever flashed from scabbards have not aided Christ a single grain. Mahommedans’ religion might be sustained by scimitars, but Christians’ religion must be sustained by love. The great crime of war can never promote the religion of peace. The battle, and the garment rolled in blood, are not a fitting prelude to "peace on earth, goodwill to men." And I do firmly hold, that the slaughter of men, that bayonets, and swords, and guns, have never yet been, and never can be, promoters of the gospel. The gospel will proceed without them, but never through them. "Not by might." Now don’t be fooled again, if you hear of the English conquering in China, don’t go down on your knees and thank God for it, and say it’s such a heavenly thing for the spread of the gospel – it just is not. Experience teaches you that, and if you look upon the map you will find I have stated only the truth, that where our arms have been victorious, the gospel has been hindered rather than not; so that where South Sea Islanders have bowed their knees and cast their idols to the bats, British Hindoos have kept their idols, and where Bechuanas and Bushmen have turned unto the Lord, British Affairs have not been converted, not perhaps because they were British, but because the very fact of the missionary being a Briton, put him above them, and weakened their influence. Hush thy trump, O war; put away thy gaudy trappings and thy bloodstained drapery, if thou thinkest that the cannon with the cross upon it is really sanctified, and if thou imaginest that thy banner hath become holy, thou dreamest of a lie. God wanteth not thee to help his cause. "It is not by armies, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord" ("Independence of Christianity," August 31, 1857, Music Hall, Royal Surrey Gardens)...

...Charles Spurgeon was not alone, for as I have pointed out elsewhere, Baptist ministers in America during the nineteenth century held the same opinions about Christianity and war. Christian agitation or apology for war is an aberration from the principles of Christianity, the folly of which is exceeded only by its appalling misuse of Scripture.

Modern conservative, fundamentalist, and evangelical Christians, all of whom might claim him as one of their own, have much to learn from Spurgeon, not only for his example of an uncompromising and successful Christian minister, but also for his consistent opposition to war and Christian war fever.

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Another Shameful Navy Cover-Up
Six Americans dead and 34 wounded. What a terrible waste. I have a hard time understanding why a group of naval warriors gathered closely together out in the open, creating a super-juicy target for an Iraqi insurgent mortar team that’s been hammering Base Junction City ever since our troops first set up there.

“Always spread out, or one round will get you all,” was the First Commandment of Survival when I was a kid serving in Italy. The terrible tragedy that occurred in Iraq last May underscores the importance of this often-neglected rule.

Junction City sits right in the middle of Injun country – in Anbar province about 60 miles west of Baghdad, where the insurgents are serious fanatics and the fighting is fierce. A very bad place.

The word from many surviving Seabees of the gallant Reserve Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 14 that took these catastrophic casualties is that they were ordered to assemble in an open yard at their base for a pep talk from Rear Adm. Charles Kubic, who, according to a salty Navy commander, was making one of his monthly self-serving visits to Iraq from Norfolk, Va. “Kubic came to Iraq for the last two days of every month and the first two of the next to get tax breaks.”

The same source says: “Several officers argued with Kubic, saying it wasn’t smart to assemble the men. But they were rudely overrode.”

Family members of the dead reservists are furious that heads have not rolled. Their specific target is Kubic, whom they hold responsible for the loss of their loved ones even though he now denies giving the fatal order. Phone calls have been placed and letters written to lawmakers, and the bereaved keep getting promised swift action.

The surviving Seabees, a most patriotic group, love the U.S. Navy and almost to a man want to return to Iraq to finish the job. So they will only speak off-record. But they don’t have kind words for Kubic, since he ordered them to make his bed, bring ice-cold water to his quarters and generally act as his personal houseboys during his trips to Iraq. The admiral’s attitude didn’t go down well with these rugged reservist warrior-builders, the proud inheritors of a legendary tradition: “We're the Seabees of the Navy, we can build and we can fight; We’ll pave our way to victory and guard it day and night.”

The irony is that Kubic apparently fancies himself as a heroic warrior. In the first days of the invasion of Iraq, he was hunkered down in a bunker with his staff when a Scud missile whistled several thousand feet overhead – for which daring feat he was later awarded a Bronze Star for heroism under fire. ...

...That aside, here's the kicker: Numerous sailors have told me that Kubic “liberated” a fancy bar from Fallujah and shipped it back to the States on a USAF C-17. For sure, souvenirs are swell – but not when a mission-essential aircraft is dragooned to make an incompetent admiral’s day....

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move over, Jenna Jameson
Several years ago I left a screening of “Black Hawk Down” with two male friends. One of them look around him as the other patrons left the theater. “All men,” he said. “It’s like a porn theater.” It’s true, and it’s significant. Whether it’s Jeff Gannon on hotmilitarystuds.com, Rush Limbaugh calling the Abu Ghraib photos “good old American pornography,” or right-wingers joking about LynndieEngland, the pornogrification of war is endemic. Glorifying violence is no longer enough – now it’s being sexualized. It’s conservatism as sexual deviance. Welcome to the world of the sexcons.

The new pornographers are usually voyeurs in the world of war, not participants, and that aspect of the movement starts at the top. The President is not as overtly erotic in his celebration of war, but he certainly panders to the sexcons. Parading in flight gear on an aircraft carrier deck was a form of dress-up more suitable to sexual role-playing than it was to the behavior of a head of state who has been forced to order the deaths of others....

...When non-soldier Jeff Gannon wasn’t lobbing “softballs” (interesting word, that) to the President he dressed like a sexualized version of a soldier and called himself “Bulldog” and “usmcpt” while advertising prostitution services on the above-mentioned site, malecorps.com, and militaryescorts4m (for men). That suggests that there are not only hookers like Gannon working this market, but presumably johns too. Anybody care to speculate on who they might be?...

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The Citizen or the Police
Or, Why I Am Not a Liberal.

...I am a “my sister” libertarian.

Nobody worth performing the Heimlich Maneuver on is going to tell the police they saw their sister smoking pot. Am I okay with my sister going to jail if she sells some pills or her favors? Do I think my sister or brother should be dragged into court if she drains her field or he hires too many people of the wrong color? No. So I have no business supporting a regime that subjects other people’s siblings to those things. Would I have to agree that if my sister drowned my niece, or my brother defrauded credit card companies or my mother burned down her building for the insurance, that they should be subject to arrest and imprisonment. Yes, I’m afraid. And a note to you smartypants readers: Not all of the examples in this item have been hypotheticals. So I really do mean it.

Which brings us back to guns - not the guns that citizens might or might not own, but the ones the State most definitely does. Behind every law is a weapon. That goes for all the nice regulatory laws too. Sure, it’s only “civil proceedings,” but try telling them to tie a tail and a string to their civil proceedings and run into a headwind and its the sherrifs and marshalls who come round to uphold “the majesty of the law.” Which ends up in the same place the criminal law does - jail or, if you take the armed fugitive route, death. “Contempt of Court” - dissing da judge - is the thing that judges will lock you up for indefinitely, and on their own say-so, and try checking and balancing that if you don’t like it. They don’t ask you to go politely, either. It’s sherrifs and marshalls time again. For the system to survive, resistance must prove futile. Even the most “innocuous” law has, potentially, the entire weight of the State and the State’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence behind it. I can bitch about the Ravens’ stadium deal, but watch what happens if I keep my share in protest and get stubborn....

...This is the core problem with contemporary liberalism: liberals can be very good at noting the dangers of police power (though they used, present company excepted, to be a lot better at it); but the liberal program of strengthening the regulatory state amounts to turning more and more of life into police business. Here in Montgomery County, Maryland, we have a County Executive, Doug Duncan, whose enthusiasm for undercover operations seems boundless. Teen smoking? Undercover operations to catch insufficiently zealous store owners. Minority Hiring? Undercover operations to “catch” local businesses not hiring…undercover officers. When there was a brouhaha recently about dog barking I fully expected Doug Duncan to dress cops up in cat suits and troll for trouble. Waco started as a tax case. Show me a law and I’ll show you a district attorney who wants to be governor.

“I never saw any of them again,” Philip Marlowe says at the end of The Long Goodbye. “Except the police. No way has yet been found to say goodbye to them.”

But ways must be found to say, “Some other time.” Because that’s my sister you’re talking about.

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To Anacreon in Heaven
... the tune to "The Star Spangled Banner" comes from the old British drinking song "To Anacreon in Heaven." I wonder how many people who sing it today know that the song they're belting out was originally a paean to a homosexual Greek poet best renowned for his love odes to young boys? ...

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Reclaiming Christianity From the Christian Right
On the train ride back to Yale from Boston in the morning hours of Nov. 3, 2004, my best friend looked at me through eyes tearing with frustration and said, “Your people did this.” She turned her head to the aisle and spent our trip upset and without words.

I am a Christian. I also grew up in the American South. “My people”--both Christians and Southerners, according to my friend and many Yale students--are changing our nation with a conservative agenda....

...Some Christian students at Yale may feel especially conflicted about how and when to acknowledge their positions, because the public mood skeptically asks, “How can you still be a Christian and not be a radical conservative?”...

...Critics rarely acknowledge the many Christians who fight private battles against the upsurge of Christian conservatism and frequently find their integrity challenged. These tests have occurred at a frightening pace over the past two decades.

In one Southern community, the employment of a black woman to care for children in a church nursery set off an ideological rift between a pastor and a right-wing minority in a church congregation. That minority used this situation in a community struggling with racism to push forward the radical conservative agenda in which all persons must think alike and be alike in order to be accepted. The situation led to personal attacks and the dismissal of my uncle as pastor of this church in Georgia.

On an even more personal level, as the daughter of a minister whose opposition to new conservatism in the Southern Baptist Convention meant that he regularly confronted the use of racism in struggles for power, I experienced firsthand the threats and the conflicts of this ideological war--a war that eventually led to my father’s separation from his heritage.

In my view, this new political Christian right is seriously wrong, because its view of God is so narrow that few are included except its own.

We must better articulate the more moderate side of Christianity as it exists today in the South and Middle America in order to counteract the popular assumption that the entire region is sold on the radical Rightist principles.

The Christian Conservative movement has duped more mainstream and liberal Christians into silence, because we have been fearful about questions we cannot answer concerning the radicals who tout our faith but do not share our ideals.

However, we must now stand firm and be unafraid to say, “I profess a different Christianity from the Christianity professed by the Christian Right.” Otherwise, individuals our age who find it difficult to sometimes hold onto any faith will begin to lose faith in Faith itself, and our generation’s predicament will be what was my own: not knowing whose side the church is really on. Our faith must be converted to God and not conquered by man.

The point of Christianity is missed when people do not live out their convictions and when faith becomes a borrowed opinion, flaunted in the disguise of that which it dishonors. If a distinct, clear voice is not given to mainstream, moderate and liberal Christians, our generation risks an increased misconception of Christianity--a misconception that already exists in our backyard and will continue to take hold of world opinion.

Christians must refuse to allow the conception of Christianity to become a borrowed opinion--derived from a conviction based in bigotry, prejudice and ignorance--that dishonors the very thing it should represent.

Many Christians are careful when picking their battles, but this is one battle I believe must be fought by this generation of students, or else we risk a populace that forever doubts the representation of true Christian faith.

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Church Where Shooting Occurred Fosters Paranoia, Professor Says
A man who went on a rampage last Saturday, killing seven members of a suburban Milwaukee congregation meeting in a hotel before committing suicide, belonged to an unusual, cult-like denomination that fosters a sense of “apocalyptic paranoia” with a heightened sense that the end of the world is near, says a Baptist professor of theology.

Police said 44-year-old computer programmer Terry Ratzmann fired 22 bullets into the gathering of the Living Church of God before turning the gun on himself.

Investigators aren’t sure what prompted the attack, but some media reports quoted people who knew Ratzmann as saying he had been upset after recently hearing a taped speech by founding evangelist Roderick C. Meredith that told people to prepare for the end times and major economic upheavals.

Meredith started the church in the mid-1990s. It is one of more than 200 splinter offshoots of the Worldwide Church of God, started by the late famed radio evangelist Herbert W. Armstrong, whose empire included Plain Truth magazine and “The World Tomorrow!” radio broadcasts....

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Seminary Adopts ‘Biblical’ Counseling
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is changing the way it will train ministers to deal with the needs of hurting parishioners.

After decades of integrating secular psychology and biblical training in a course of study known as “pastoral care,” the seminary in Louisville, Ky., announced a “wholesale change” of emphasis built on the idea that the Bible alone is sufficient to answer “the deepest needs of the human heart.”

The “biblical counseling movement” is a popular evangelical approach to counseling that promotes resolving personal problems through a strict Bible-based foundation, while rejecting psychology, and especially psychotherapy, as a “pseudoscience” that is incompatible with biblical truth.

“Our churches need pastors and leaders who understand depravity and the Fall to the degree that they are able to see the ways in which fallen human self-interest often masquerades as objective ‘science’—especially when this ‘science’ seeks to explain and prescribe a cure for the fallen condition of humanity,” Russell Moore, dean of Southern’s School of Theology, said in a seminary news story.

Seminary President Albert Mohler said the new program would focus on teaching pastors and other church leaders to apply the truths of Scripture comprehensively to the concerns and crises of everyday life....

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How Come It's Still 1984?
..."But let's be honest about this: It was a Republican administration that sent in Major Smedley Butler and the U.S. Marines to overthrow the democratically elected government of Nicaragua, forcing the legislature in Managua to sign a peace treaty in English as American warships loomed offshore, a treaty giving us the right to run the Nicaraguan railroads under the laws of the state of Maine.

"It was a Republican administration that overthrew the popular government of Mohammed Mossadegh, the 'weeping mullah,' in Iran in 1953, re-installing the Pahlavi shahs, whose secret police surely ranked them among the most repressive despots in recent history.

"Let's not even get started on the regime-change assassinations we backed in places like Chile and Vietnam, as little as 30 and 40 years ago. And if we're so in favor of democracy and self-determination, why is President Bush making nice with KGB assassin Boris Putin, when just last week the Russian special forces murdered Aslan Maskhadov, the last elected president of independent Chechnya?

"If we're really going to change our stripes now, a good start might be to acknowledge to our own people the things we did that caused our government to be so widely feared, hated and distrusted, out there in the world at large."...

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Blackwell, Running to the Hard Right
...I have spent the last couple of days in Ohio where I spoke to over 2,800 people at Fairfield Christian Church outside Columbus. Today I joined Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell and former Ohio Congressman Bob McEwen as we spoke to about 70 key members of the clergy. We reflected back upon America's godly heritage and the key role that pastors played in this nation. The meeting, which was hosted by Pastor Rod Parsley at World Harvest Church, was organized by Pastor Russell Johnson of Lancaster.

Many of these pastors were instrumental in working with the president of Ohio's Citizens for Community Values, Phil Burress, in passing Ohio's marriage amendment over tremendous obstacles foes of marriage placed in their way. This was the first of a series of meetings designed to enlist hundreds of members of the clergy as "Patriot Pastors" to further organize the Church in Ohio for social engagement. What I see happening across the country with pastors is unprecedented - pastors and their flocks are not going back to life as usual after the election. Christians are committed to the battle not only for the heart and souls of people but for the heart and soul of this nation....

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The Little Church of Horrors
Apocalypse now in Wisconsin: Carnivorous plants and the "end times"

...IF THE CURRENT news reports are true, it looks like the suspected gunman in the church massacre in suburban Milwaukee grew carnivorous plants as a hobby. He's described as an avid gardener, press reports say he raised such meat-eating vegetables as Venus flytraps, and I found on the Web what may be Ratzmann's photo (see above) of a carnivorous plant.

But the Living Church of God, the small sect he belonged to, was also one of Terry Ratzmann's passions. Perhaps he was driven past the edge by the right-wing sect's nonstop apocalyptic warnings—a set of scare-tactic teachings similar to those used to great effect by the Bush regime's religious zealots.

Incessant fear-mongering is a proven strategy of evangelists and other politicians. It worked in the last presidential election. ...

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What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
...Values? Fear? To understand the current state of the electorate we need to recall Max Weber’s critique of the notion that economic interests are the sole engine of societal power. According to Weber, power is not just about money; status and prestige play an equally important role in politics. In his classic work Symbolic Crusade, Joseph Gusfield uses Weber’s idea to explain an earlier expression of conservative populism, the temperance movement. Gusfield sees that movement as an example of “status politics”: its goal was not to put an end to drinking, but to assert the preeminence of the Protestant way of life in the face of the rapid transformation of society by waves of ( wine-swilling ) immigrants from Catholic Europe. In much the same way, Bush supporters in 2004 voted to protect their way of life from the threats of the 21st-century terrorists, yes, but also gays, evolutionists, and those who believe abortion should be legal. Today’s conservatives are voting primarily to protect not their means of making a living but the meaning of their lives.

Given the president’s public commitment to the hope of the gospel, it is odd to hear him so often preaching fear and using that fear to pit people against each other. Those who seek a society in which justice and love prevail need to understand how public outrage is stirred up, manipulated and used to serve the ends of power. Frank’s highly readable ( and highly partisan ) exploration of that process provides a starting point for that understanding.

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Italy 'to pull troops from Iraq'
Italy is to begin withdrawing its troops from Iraq in September 2005, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has said.

He told Rai state television the pullout would take place "in agreement with our allies".

Italy has 3,000 troops in Iraq - the fourth largest foreign contingent.

Domestic opposition to Italy's involvement in Iraq intensified after the killing of an Italian agent by US troops in Baghdad earlier this month.

The surprise announcement came as Italy's lower house of parliament backed a recent Senate vote to extend the country's military presence in Iraq beyond June.

Mr Berlusconi has been one of US President George W Bush's staunchest allies in the US-led war in Iraq.

But, he said, after speaking to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair he concluded that public opinion in both countries favoured a troop withdrawal.

"In September we will begin a progressive reduction of the number of our soldiers in Iraq.

"I spoke to Tony Blair about it, and public opinion in our countries is expecting this decision," he told Rai. ...

...Also on Tuesday, two other members of the US-led coalition in Iraq - the Netherlands and Ukraine - began a phased withdrawal from the country.

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U.S., Pakistan admit bin Laden trail is cold
Pakistan's leader says forces once were close to al-Qaida chief

LONDON - Pakistani and American officials said Tuesday the hunt for top al-Qaida and Taliban leaders would continue, but acknowledged the trail was cold.

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf said his forces believed they had nearly hunted down Osama bin Laden about 10 months ago, but had since lost track of him.

“Through interrogation of those who have been captured, the al-Qaida members who were apprehended here, and through technical means there was a time when the dragnet had closed,” Musharraf told the British Broadcasting Corp. in an interview.

“We thought we knew roughly the area where he possibly could be. That was I think ... not very long (ago), maybe about 10 months back,” said Musharraf, a close ally of the United States.

The BBC quoted Musharraf as saying his forces had since lost track of bin Laden’s possible whereabouts....

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Extreme Cinema Verite
GIs shoot Iraq battle footage and edit it into music videos filled with death and destruction. And they display their work as entertainment.

BAQUBAH, Iraq — When Pfc. Chase McCollough went home on leave in November, he brought a movie made by fellow soldiers in Iraq. On his first night back at his parents' house in Texas, he showed the video to his fiancee, family and friends.

This is what they saw: a handful of American soldiers filmed through the green haze of night-vision goggles. Radio communication between two soldiers crackles in the background before it's drowned out by a heavy-metal soundtrack.

"Don't need your forgiveness," the song by the band Dope begins as images unfurl: armed soldiers posing in front of Bradley fighting vehicles, two women covered in black abayas walking along a dusty road, a blue-domed mosque, a poster of radical cleric Muqtada Sadr. Then, to the fast, hard beat of the music — "Die, don't need your resistance. Die, don't need your prayers" — charred, decapitated and bloody corpses fill the screen.

"It's like a trophy, something to keep," McCullough, 20, said back at his cramped living quarters at Camp Warhorse near Baqubah. "I was there. I did this."

Film cameras arrived at the front during World War II, but soldiers didn't really document their own combat experience until the Vietnam War. (The technology didn't lend itself to amateur moviemaking until the arrival of the smaller Super 8 cameras.)

Today, video cameras are lightweight and digital technology has cut out the need for processing. Having captured a firefight on video, a soldier can create a movie and distribute it via e-mail, uncensored by the military. With editing software such as Avid and access to Internet connections on military bases here, U.S. soldiers are creating fast-paced, MTV-style music videos using images from actual firefights and killings.

Troops often carry personal cameras and video equipment in battle. On occasion, official military camera crews, known as "Combat Camera" units, follow the troops on raids and patrol. Although the military uses that footage for training and public affairs, it also finds its way to personal computers and commercial websites.

The result: an abundance of photographs and video footage depicting mutilation, death and destruction that soldiers collect and trade like baseball cards. ...

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U.N. Faces More Accusations of Sexual Misconduct
Officials Acknowledge 'Swamp' of Problems and Pledge Fixes Amid New Allegations in Africa, Haiti

UNITED NATIONS -- The United Nations is facing new allegations of sexual misconduct by U.N. personnel in Burundi, Haiti, Liberia and elsewhere, which is complicating the organization's efforts to contain a sexual abuse scandal that has tarnished its Nobel Prize-winning peacekeepers in Congo.

The allegations indicate that a series of measures the United Nations has taken in recent years have failed to eliminate a culture of sexual permissiveness that has plagued its far-flung peacekeeping operations over the last 12 years....

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Europeans Investigate CIA Role in Abductions
Suspects Possibly Taken To Nations That Torture

MILAN -- A radical Egyptian cleric known as Abu Omar was walking to a Milan mosque for noon prayers in February 2003 when he was grabbed on the sidewalk by two men, sprayed in the face with chemicals and stuffed into a van. He hasn't been seen since.

Milan investigators, however, now appear to be close to identifying his kidnappers. Last month, officials showed up at Aviano Air Base in northern Italy and demanded records of any American planes that had flown into or out of the joint U.S.-Italian military installation around the time of the abduction. They also asked for logs of vehicles that had entered the base.

Italian authorities suspect the Egyptian was the target of a CIA-sponsored operation known as rendition, in which terrorism suspects are forcibly taken for interrogation to countries where torture is practiced.

The Italian probe is one of three official investigations that have surfaced in the past year into renditions believed to have taken place in Western Europe. Although the CIA usually carries out the operations with the help or blessing of friendly local intelligence agencies, law enforcement authorities in Italy, Germany and Sweden are examining whether U.S. agents may have broken local laws by detaining terrorist suspects on European soil and subjecting them to abuse or maltreatment. ...

... In Sweden, a parliamentary investigation has found that CIA agents wearing hoods orchestrated the forced removal in December 2001 of two Egyptian nationals on a U.S.-registered airplane to Cairo, where the men claimed they were tortured in prison.

One of the men was later exonerated as a terrorism suspect by Egyptian police, while the other remains in prison there. Details of the secret operation have shocked many in Sweden, a leading proponent of human rights. ...

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Children Said Among Abu Ghraib Prisoners
WASHINGTON - Children held by the U.S. Army at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison included one boy who appeared to be only about 8 years old, the former commander of the prison told investigators, according to a transcript.

"He looked like he was eight years old. He told me he was almost 12," Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski told officials investigating prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. "He told me his brother was there with him, but he really wanted to see his mother, could he please call his mother. He was crying." ...

... The transcript released Thursday is the first government document indicating that a child no older than 11 was held prisoner at Abu Ghraib.

Military officials have said that no juvenile prisoners were subject to the abuses captured in photographs from Abu Ghraib. However, some of the men shown being stripped naked and humiliated had been accused of raping a 14-year-old prisoner.

The documents released Thursday offer rare details about the children the U.S. military has held in Iraq. Karpinski said the Army began holding women and children in a high-security cellblock at Abu Ghraib in the summer of 2003 because the facility was better than lockups in Baghdad where they had been held.

The documents also include statements from six witnesses who said three interrogators and a civilian interpreter at Abu Ghraib got drunk one night and took a 17-year-old female prisoner from her cell. The four men forced the girl to expose her breasts and kissed her, the reports said. The witnesses - whose names were blacked out of the documents given to the ACLU - said those responsible were not punished. ...

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Branching out
CHICAGO -- Scott and Michelle Knollenberg, of Plainfield, Ill., can spend their Sundays letting national chains cater to their every need -- physical, material and, now, spiritual.

They can grab an Egg McMuffin at McDonald's, a stylish lamp at Target, towels at Bed Bath & Beyond and a double tall nonfat mocha at Starbucks. But Sunday's highlight is the church service prepared by Naperville, Ill., pastor Dave Ferguson and his national staff, which will be virtually identical in music, sermon, videos and skits at 10 locations throughout the country.

The Knollenbergs are members of Community Christian Church, which has Chicago-area sites in Naperville, Shorewood, Romeoville and Montgomery. Nationally, the network started by Ferguson and his brother Jon also has churches in Denver, Detroit, New York and Bakersfield, Calif.

In the business world, they call this kind of thing franchising. In evangelicalism, it's known as the multisite church, and it is a growing trend with a similar aim: providing consistent quality and service wherever you go....

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Looting at Weapons Plants Was Systematic, Iraqi Says
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 12 - In the weeks after Baghdad fell in April 2003, looters systematically dismantled and removed tons of machinery from Saddam Hussein's most important weapons installations, including some with high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms, a senior Iraqi official said this week in the government's first extensive comments on the looting.

The Iraqi official, Sami al-Araji, the deputy minister of industry, said it appeared that a highly organized operation had pinpointed specific plants in search of valuable equipment, some of which could be used for both military and civilian applications, and carted the machinery away.

Dr. Araji said his account was based largely on observations by government employees and officials who either worked at the sites or lived near them.

"They came in with the cranes and the lorries, and they depleted the whole sites," Dr. Araji said. "They knew what they were doing; they knew what they want. This was sophisticated looting."

The threat posed by these types of facilities was cited by the Bush administration as a reason for invading Iraq, but the installations were left largely unguarded by allied forces in the chaotic months after the invasion. ...

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Army Details Scale of Abuse of Prisoners in an Afghan Jail
WASHINGTON, March 11 - Two Afghan prisoners who died in American custody in Afghanistan in December 2002 were chained to the ceiling, kicked and beaten by American soldiers in sustained assaults that caused their deaths, according to Army criminal investigative reports that have not yet been made public.

One soldier, Pfc. Willie V. Brand, was charged with manslaughter in a closed hearing last month in Texas in connection with one of the deaths, another Army document shows. Private Brand, who acknowledged striking a detainee named Dilawar 37 times, was accused of having maimed and killed him over a five-day period by "destroying his leg muscle tissue with repeated unlawful knee strikes."

The attacks on Mr. Dilawar were so severe that "even if he had survived, both legs would have had to be amputated," the Army report said, citing a medical examiner.

The reports, obtained by Human Rights Watch, provide the first official account of events that led to the deaths of the detainees, Mullah Habibullah and Mr. Dilawar, at the Bagram Control Point, about 40 miles north of Kabul. The deaths took place nearly a year before the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Among those implicated in the killings at Bagram were members of Company A of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, from Fort Bragg, N.C. The battalion went on to Iraq, where some members established the interrogation unit at Abu Ghraib and have been implicated in some abuses there....

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Sex Scandal At Guantanamo
As if the situation at Guantanamo isn't messy enough, there is now a sex scandal involving senior military officers who were running the prison, reports CBS National Security Correspondent David Martin.

The colonel in charge of prison operations, a Lt. colonel who commanded the military police guarding the prisoners, and another lieutenant colonel who commanded the soldiers responsible for base security have all been relieved of duty. They are accused of committing adultery with a female Navy Lt. and a number of female civilian contractors.

An Army general who was the deputy commander of the task force which runs Guantanamo is also under investigation for adultery, which is a violation of military law, Martin reports. That case has been turned over to the Army's inspector general at the Pentagon since it involves such a high ranking officer.

The investigation began after a soldier -- who himself had been disciplined for adultery -- blew the whistle on the officers. Once the investigation began, it turned up e-mails in which the officers were exchanging information about the women they were having sex with.

Although the conduct involves private behavior off duty, Martin notes, it involves four of the most senior officers at the camp. And it raises questions about the quality and discipline of the officers running the prison there....

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Army, CIA Agreed on 'Ghost' Prisoners
Top military intelligence officials at the Abu Ghraib prison came to an agreement with the CIA to hide certain detainees at the facility without officially registering them, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. Keeping such "ghost" detainees is a violation of international law.

Army Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, who was second in command of the intelligence gathering effort at Abu Ghraib while the abuse was occurring, told military investigators that "other government agencies" and a secretive elite task force "routinely brought in detainees for a short period of time" and that the detainees were held without an internment number, and their names were kept off the books.

Guards who worked at the prison have said that ghost detainees were regularly locked in isolation cells on Tier 1A and that they were kept from international human rights organizations. ...

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Sex motive behind wife's slaying, prosecutors say
Mistress, daughter testify as ex-Christian school leader ordered to stand trial

Prosecutors alleged Wednesday that a well-known carpenter and former Christian school leader strangled his wife so he could pursue relationships with other women.

"It's very clear that ... divorce was not an option, that it was frowned upon by the Lord, he believed," Assistant Dist. Atty. Brandon Jones said. "This was the easier way out for him, rather than divorce."

At the time of his wife's death, Martin K. "Marty" Miller, 46, was advertising himself on Internet dating sites and having an affair with a woman he'd met in an online adult chat room, according to testimony at Miller's preliminary hearing in District Court...

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Why Are We Worried About Income? Nearly Everything that Matters is Converging
Convergence of national GDP/capita numbers is a common, but narrow, measure of global success or failure in development. This paper takes a broader range of quality of life variables covering health, education, rights and infrastructure and examines if they are converging across countries. It finds that these measures are converging as a rule and (where we have data) that they have been converging for some time. The paper turns to a discussion of what might be driving convergence in quality of life even as incomes diverge, and what this might mean for the donor community....

...Much of the development debate recently has been motivated by the idea that we are failing—developing countries are being left behind and 40 years of state action and foreign aid has done nothing to help that. A broader measure of quality of life should perhaps make us look at the Third World “failures” a little differently. Other quality of life gaps were never as bad for other variables as they were for income—the income measure has always overplayed the difference between India and the United States. Further, and despite the tragedy of AIDS and looming environmental catastrophes, it appears difficult to argue with the statement that quality of life has improved over the past 50 years worldwide and that, for 50 years and sometimes longer, it has improved more rapidly in the developing world than in the developed world. Comparing India to the United Kingdom and United States, for example, convergence began sometime prior to 1950 for literacy and life expectancy and prior to 1913 for primary education. If we are concerned about broader quality of life measures, then, developing countries may have seen their performance excessively maligned (along with inter-war colonies and international donor agencies, perhaps).

The evidence presented above also suggests something about the nature of that success. There has been convergence across a wide range of indicators of the quality of life. Given that there has not been convergence in the standard income indicator, this may suggest that income is only one among a number of factors in determining quality of life outcomes. In turn, this suggests some hope that improvements can be sustained even in the absence of sustained income growth.

The extent of the role that governments have had to play in improving quality of life remains arguable. Literacy appears to be an important factor and government efforts to expand schooling must have played a role here. It seems plausible to argue that even though some government health expenditure is wasted, efforts to (for example) spread vaccines and improve primary care can have a significant payoff.

Whatever the role of government, literacy and vaccine programs surely helped only in combination with technologies that the skill of literacy or the vaccine programs helped to spread. These technologies, which appeared to have done little in increasing Third World income, have at least improved other measures of the quality of life. Given the role that globalization has been argued to play in transferring technology it may be that, along with government, globalization has been too quickly dismissed by some as a driver of development....

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In Seeking War, George W. Bush Held True to Form
In a recent post, I demonstrated that aspiring historians of the current U.S. war against Iraq need not go to the trouble of composing a completely new narrative. Patterns persist. To set out the character of the personalities and the actions that led to this war, historians need only employ the narrative of a past war, altering the names and places to suit the present occasion. My previous template originated in an account of President William McKinley and the U.S. war against Spain in 1898, which set the stage for the protracted, if nearly forgotten, U.S. war against the Filipino resistance fighters. McKinley in the war of '98, however, is not the only presidential warmonger who might be employed as a model for George W. Bush in his war against Iraq. The following text, in which my changes appear in brackets, illustrates the relevance of a different precursor and the conditions that fostered his resort to war....

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Why Is Alan Yurko Still in Jail?
In last week's column, the Florida judge looked over the new evidence – it turned out the autopsy used to convict Alan Yurko of killing his sick infant son via "shaken baby syndrome" had not even been conducted on a child of the right race – and vacated the conviction. After seven years, Alan Yurko was a free man ... right?

Ha, good one. You're not thinking like a government prosecutor.

"As soon as the judge said, 'I'm vacating this sentence,' the prosecution said, 'Your honor, we're appealing your decision,' which would have left him sitting in jail another two to three years, which would have come out the same way with the botched autopsy and the discredited medical examiner," Francine Yurko told me.

"So what they did is they offered him a plea bargain. They said, 'We won't appeal the judge's decision if right here you are willing to plead out to simple manslaughter, no child abuse, in which case we'll give you immediate release.' "

A deal which would prevent the Yurkos from suing the state of Florida for Alan's seven years of false imprisonment, of course.

"They cleared out the courtroom and gave me and Alan a chance to discuss it. It came down to three more years and the amount of money it would take to keep fighting, and he decided to take it, and he made it known that with the plea to manslaughter, what he was willing to work with was the fact of culpable negligence being a form of manslaughter.

"The way he phrased it in court was, 'I should have been a more informed parent; I should have taken a more active role in my child's health care, and if in fact I had been a more informed parent I would not have let him be given those shots.' "

You might want to make note of that. The state of Florida has now officially accepted, as grounds for a guilty plea to the crime of manslaughter, an admission by a grieving father that he committed a felony when he allowed his son to be killed by allowing medical authorities to give the infant a "standard" dose of vaccinations.

Alan "was given immediate release on Aug. 27 (2004) and he was home for two weeks," Francine says. Finally, a happy ending. The innocent man at home with his wife and stepdaughter ... right?

You are still not thinking like a government agent. Pay attention, now.

"Then Ohio decided to reactivate an old parole violation that stemmed back to when he was 19 years old," Francine says. "We believe law enforcement here or even the prosecution here, because of his being released, it was a retaliation kind of thing."...

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Army frowns on Dungeons and Dragons
IDF says players are detached from reality and automatically given a low security clearance

Does the Israel Defense Forces believe incoming recruits and soldiers who play Dungeons and Dragons are unfit for elite units? Ynetnews has learned that 18-year-olds who tell recruiters they play the popular fantasy game are automatically given low security clearance.

“They're detached from reality and suscepitble to influence,” the army says.

Fans of the popular role-playing game had spoken of rumors of this strange policy by the IDF, but now the army has confirmed that it has a negative image of teens who play the game and labels them as problematic in regard to their draft status.

So if you like fantasy games, go see the military psychologist....

...A security official tells Ynetnews there are specific criteria for deciding the level of a soldier's security clearance.


"One of the tests we do, either by asking soldiers directly or through information provided us, is to ask whether they take part in the game," he says. "If a soldier answers in the affirmative, he is sent to a professional for an evaluation, usually a psychologist."


More than half of the soldiers sent for evaluation receive low security clearances, thus preventing them from serving in sensitive IDF positions, he says.

Igor says exposing soldiers who play the game could result in the soldiers being sent to a military psychologist or even being kicked out of the army.

"Exposing them could also harm their chances at being accepted to other military courses," he says.

Matan says he has personally met soldiers whose military career was harmed due to their connection to the game. Most soldiers who play Dungeons and Dragons simply do not admit to it while they are in teh army, he says.

Why does the IDF believe the game is so dangerous?

"These people have a tendency to be influenced by external factors which could cloud their judgment, a military official says. "They may be detached from reality or have a weak personality – elements which lower a person's security clearance, allowing them to serve in the army, but not in sensitive positions."...

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American Wahabbis and the Ten Commandments
...In a strange way, George Bush may now find himself in the same kind of trap that ensnared Saudi Arabia's founder, King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud. To gain political support, Saud mobilized the fanatical, ultra-religious Wahabbi movement -- the same movement which is spiritually at the core of al-Qaeda. Once the bargain was done, the Saudi Royal Family repeatedly found itself held political hostage to an extremist, barely controllable movement populated by radical ideologues. Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has found himself in a similar situation, drawing political power from the swing votes of the ultra-orthodox rightwing religious and fanatical settler's movement, and then finding his options limited by their obstinacy to change. President Bush has spent the last several months cajoling evangelicals and trying to pay off the political bill for their support.

In Saudi Arabia, the Wahabbis consider themselves ultra-religious, but what really drives their passions is a deep sense of grievance and an underlying conviction that a return to spiritual purity will restore the lost power they believe once belonged to their forefathers. The extremism that delights in stoning a woman to death for adultery or severing the hand of a vagrant accused of stealing depends on extreme interpretations of texts that are at best ambiguous. What is at stake is not so much service to God, as convincing oneself that it is still possible to enforce draconian discipline in a world that seems increasingly chaotic. We joke about a hassled husband kicking his dog to show he still has power. In the Middle East, it is often women who bear the brunt of the impotence of men. Nothing in the Koran calls for the mistreatment of women or even asks that a woman wear a veil. What is at stake here is not religion, but power, and who has a right to it.

The Christian Right, the evangelical movement that provided the added push needed to nudge President Bush past a tight election, is equally prone to selective interpretations of scripture. The Ten Commandments are used as a wedge to put across what is essentially a cultural protest against social change, but in the bitter disputes that have followed these seemingly ridiculous arguments the message of the commandments is usually lost....

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For Guard recruiters, a tough sell
... O'Ferrell and 4,100 other Army Guard recruiters across the country are facing their most daunting challenge since the Vietnam War, one that may define the limits of the Bush administration's use of Guard and reserve troops in the war on terrorism.

Last year, Army Guard recruiters fell nearly 7,000 short of their goal of 56,000 soldiers. This year, the Guard's recruiting goal is an even more ambitious 63,000 soldiers, in part to make up for the 2004 shortfall. But through January, four months into the recruiting year that began in October, the Guard had recruited just 12,821 new soldiers, almost 24% below its target for that period.

Other military branches are struggling to find recruits, too, but not as much as the Army Guard. The Marine Corps met its target for sending recruits to boot camp in January and February, but for the first time in almost a decade, it missed its overall recruiting goal, which includes recruits who agree to go to boot camp later. In February, the active-duty Army fell short of its goal for sending recruits to boot camp for the first time in almost five years, missing by more than 1,900 soldiers. It is 6% below its target for the year to date.

By contrast, the Navy and Air Force are having no trouble recruiting. Those branches play only a small role in combat in Iraq (news - web sites) and Afghanistan (news - web sites).

Unless the Army Guard can reverse its shortfall, it is headed for one of the worst recruiting years for any branch for at least the last 15 years, something the nation's all-volunteer military can ill afford in wartime.

Guard and reserve troops make up about one-third of the 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. The Guard's recruiting problems could make it tougher for the Pentagon (news - web sites) to find enough troops to fight ongoing wars....

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Ex-Marine Says Public Version of Saddam Capture Fiction
A former U.S. Marine who participated in capturing ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein said the public version of his capture was fabricated.

Ex-Sgt. Nadim Abou Rabeh, of Lebanese descent, was quoted in the Saudi daily al-Medina Wednesday as saying Saddam was actually captured Friday, Dec. 12, 2003, and not the day after, as announced by the U.S. Army.

"I was among the 20-man unit, including eight of Arab descent, who searched for Saddam for three days in the area of Dour near Tikrit, and we found him in a modest home in a small village and not in a hole as announced," Abou Rabeh said.

"We captured him after fierce resistance during which a Marine of Sudanese origin was killed," he said.

He said Saddam himself fired at them with a gun from the window of a room on the second floor. Then they shouted at him in Arabic: "You have to surrender. ... There is no point in resisting."

"Later on, a military production team fabricated the film of Saddam's capture in a hole, which was in fact a deserted well," Abou Rabeh said. ...

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‘Counter-recruiters' shadowing the military
They say potential enlistees are being misled and need to know their options

NEW YORK — The Marines didn't have to recruit Greg McCullough. He signed a promise to enlist last year, while he was still in high school. But now McCullough has had second thoughts, and he's talking to a different kind of recruiter.

Jim Murphy is a “counter-recruiter,” one of a small but growing number of opponents of the Iraq war who say they want to compete with military recruiters for the hearts and minds of young people.

“I don't tell kids not to join the military,” says Murphy, 59, a member of Veterans for Peace. “I tell them: ‘Have a plan for your future. Because if you don't, the military has a plan for you.' ”

Since the advent of the all-volunteer military three decades ago, the armed services have used an array of tools, from recruiting in schools to TV advertising, to successfully sell careers in the military. But with ground troops in Iraq still under fire, the Army and Marines are struggling to get enough enlistments.

The armed services need many recruits each year — the Army and Army Reserve alone need more than 100,000 — and less than 10% come knocking on the door. The rest must be recruited.

Anti-war activists such as Murphy charge that to fill their quotas, some military recruiters make promises they can't guarantee, such as money for college or training in a particular specialty, and give misleading descriptions of military life.

Murphy says high school graduates don't need to join the military to learn a skill, pay for college, see the world or learn discipline.

Counter-recruiters formed a national network at meetings in Philadelphia in the summers of 2003 and 2004. They range from Vietnam War veterans, such as Murphy, to high school students trained to talk to their peers about enlistment.

The American Friends Service Committee, one of several peace groups opposed to what it calls “militarization of youth,” has prepared a brochure titled Do You Know Enough to Enlist? In a tip of the hat to the opposition, it's deliberately designed to look like a military recruiting brochure.

Using a 1986 federal appeals court decision that supported the rights of draft registration opponents to equal access to students, the Los Angeles Unified School District teachers union has helped get counter-recruiting into some schools regularly visited by military recruiters in the nation's second largest public district. The counter-recruiters make public address announcements, distribute literature, show documentaries and give classroom presentations.

In the San Francisco area, members of a group called the Raging Grannies dress up in flamboyant old-lady attire (big hats, long, flowered dresses) and visit high schools. They offer a selection of political buttons and make their pitch while students are choosing. Sometimes the Grannies sing peace songs and dance.

“When you kick up your heels, it gets their attention,” says Ruth Robertson, a 52-year-old Granny.

But in most places, the contest between military recruiters and counter-recruiters is a mismatch. The former are full-time, uniformed servicemembers; the latter are volunteers working on a small budget, if any.

While military recruiters often enjoy free rein in high schools, anti-war activists say it's difficult just to get in the door.

Eric Peters is an anti-war organizer in Chicago, where most public high schools have Junior ROTC programs. He says some administrators think counter-recruiters are unpatriotic, and others fear parental or public criticism. As a result, his group must distribute fliers off school grounds.

“Where the need is greatest, it's hard to find groups committed to go into schools,” says Bob Henschen of the Houston Action Committee for Youth and Non-Military Options. He says it's so hard to get permission to enter schools that he won't say where his group has access. He says he's afraid publicity would jeopardize the arrangement....

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Pro-Syria Party in Beirut Holds a Huge Protest
BEIRUT, Lebanon, March 8 - Shouting anti-American and anti-Israeli slogans, hundreds of thousands of Lebanese poured into central Beirut on Tuesday in a show of strength by the militant Shiite Muslim party Hezbollah, which opposes a withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon.

The enormous crowd, in which many had been bused in from the Shiite slums of southern Beirut, was far larger than the anti-Syrian demonstrations of recent weeks that have drawn broad international support....

...But Hezbollah, which the State Department classifies as a terrorist group, is now Lebanon's best organized political party and maintains a militia of some 20,000 men....

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Plus Ça Change . . .
A Template for the U.S. War in Iraq

The composition of a coherent historical narrative is no easy task. Fortunately, the aspiring historian of the current U.S. war in Iraq can draw upon earlier narratives to ease the burden, merely substituting a word here and there in order to make the text accord with the specific names and places that are now pertinent. As the following illustrative statements show, however, basic patterns tend to persist, so one need not suffer through a protracted new search for how a particular war has come to be fought. My textual changes to apply the model to the present war appear in brackets....

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The Onion | Bush Announces Iraq Exit Strategy: 'We'll Go Through Iran'
WASHINGTON, DC—Almost a year after the cessation of major combat and a month after the nation's first free democratic elections, President Bush unveiled the coalition forces' strategy for exiting Iraq.

"I'm pleased to announce that the Department of Defense and I have formulated a plan for a speedy withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq," Bush announced Monday morning. "We'll just go through Iran."

Bush said the U.S. Army, which deposed Iran's longtime enemy Saddam Hussein, should be welcomed with open arms by the Islamic-fundamentalist state.

"And Iran's so nearby," Bush said. "It's only a hop, skip, and a jump to the east."...

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Bush, God, and the Media
How the president has used religion to control American politics

American presidents beginning with George Washington have included religious language in their public addresses. Claims of the United States as a divinely chosen nation and requests for God to bless U.S. decisions and actions have been commonplace. Scholars have labeled such discourse "civil religion," in which political leaders emphasize religious symbols and transcendent principles to engender a sense of unity and shared national identity.

George W. Bush is doing something altogether different.

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the president and his administration have converged a religious fundamentalist worldview with a political agenda -- a distinctly partisan one, wrapped in the mantle of national interest but crafted by and for only those who share their outlook. It is a modern form of political fundamentalism, that is, the adaptation of a self-proclaimed conservative religious (Christian) rectitude, that uses strategic language choices and communication approaches designed for a mass-media culture to shape and implement political policy.

Motivated by this ideology, the Bush administration has sought to control the national discourse by engendering a climate of nationalism in which large parts of the public views supporting the president as a patriotic duty, and where Congress and the United Nations are compelled to rubber-stamp administration policies.

The goal is a national mood of spiritual superiority under the guise of a just sovereignty. The ultimate irony is that in combating the Islamic extremists responsible for the World Trade Center attacks the administration has crafted, pursued and engendered its own brand of political fundamentalism, one that, while clearly tailored to a modern democracy, nonetheless functions ideologically in a manner similar to the version offered by the terrorists. I'm well aware that merely by pointing out this fact I become another target for the media machine behind the Bush Administration. ...

...In combination, these characteristics have transformed Bush's "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists" policy to "Either you are with us, or you are against God." To the great misfortune of American democracy and the global public, such a view looks, sounds and feels remarkably similar to that of the terrorists it is fighting.

One is actually hard-pressed to see how the perspective of Osama bin Laden, that he and his followers are delivering God's wishes for the United States (and others who share Western customs and policies), is much different from the perspective of George W. Bush, that the United States is delivering God's wishes to the Taliban or Iraq.

Clearly, flying airplanes into buildings in order to kill innocent people is an indefensible, immoral activity. So, too, some traditional allies told the Bush administration, is an unprovoked pre-emptive invasion of a sovereign nation. In both instances, the aggression manifested in a form that was available to the leaders. Fundamentalism in the White House is a difference in degree, not kind, from fundamentalism exercised in dark, damp caves. Democracy is always the loser....

...While Christian conservatives and hard-line neo-conservatives may see the developments after Sept. 11, 2001 in a positive light (after all, one might say that God and the United States have been given a larger piece of the planet with which to work), all Americans should be leery of any government that merges religiosity into political ends. Noble ideals such as freedom and liberty are clearly worth pursuing, but the administration promoted those concepts with its left hand while using its right hand to treat others, including many U.S. citizens, in an authoritarian, dismissive manner. Unfortunately, the Bush administration appears to be the latest entry in a historical record that shows that beliefs and claims about divine guidance are no guarantee that one will exercise power in a consistently liberating, egalitarian or even rational manner.

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Video Shows U.S. Soldiers in 'Ramadi Madness' Abuse
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Army soldiers in Iraq (news - web sites) filmed themselves kicking a gravely wounded prisoner in the face and making the arm of a corpse appear to wave, then titled the effort "Ramadi Madness" after the city where it was made.

The video, made public on Monday, was shot by Florida National Guard soldiers. They edited and compiled it into a DVD in January 2004, with various sections bearing titles such as "Those Crafty Little Bastards" and "Another Day, Another Mission, Another Scumbag."

The soldiers' unit served in the restive Sunni Muslim city Ramadi, about 70 miles west of Baghdad, before returning home a year ago.

The video's existence had been revealed in Army documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (news - web sites) under court order through the Freedom of Information Act.

The Pentagon (news - web sites) did not release the video, saying it believed it had been destroyed. But a Florida newspaper, The Palm Beach Post, obtained it and posted some of it on its Web site on Monday. ...

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Blogged Down
Pseudo-journalistic Web sites are another way conservatives get around “the filter” of mainstream media. It’s a new medium, but, for the Republican Party, it’s an old story.

...But unlike traditional news outlets, right-wing blogs openly shill, fund raise, plot, and organize massive activist campaigns on behalf of partisan institutions and constituencies; they also increasingly provide cover for professional operatives to conduct traditional politics by other means -- including campaigning against the established media. And instead of taking these bloggers for the political activists they are, all too often the established press has accepted their claims of being a new form of journalism. This will have to change -- or it will prove serious journalism’s undoing.

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I'm all for democratization in the Middle East, as a good in its own right. But I don't believe that authoritarian governance produced most episodes of terrorism in the last 60 years in the region. Terrorism was a weapon of the weak wielded against what these radical Muslims saw as a menacing foreign occupation. To erase that fact is to commit a basic error in historical understanding. It is why the US military occupation of Iraq is actually a negative for any "war on terror." Nor do I believe that democratization, even if it is possible, is going to end terrorism in and of itself.

You want to end terrorism? End unjust military occupations. By all means have Syria conduct an orderly withdrawal from Lebanon if that is what the Lebanese public wants. But Israel needs to withdraw from the Golan Heights, which belong to Syria, as well. The Israeli military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank must be ended. The Russian scorched earth policy in Chechnya needs to stop. Some just disposition of the Kashmir issue must be attained, and Indian enormities against Kashmiri Muslims must stop. The US needs to conduct an orderly and complete withdrawal from Iraq. And when all these military occupations end, there is some hope for a vast decrease in terrorism. People need a sense of autonomy and dignity, and occupation produces helplessness and humiliation. Humiliation is what causes terrorism.

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Many Missteps Tied to Delay in Armor for Troops in Iraq
The war in Iraq was hardly a month old in April 2003 when an Army general in charge of equipping soldiers with protective gear threw the brakes on buying bulletproof vests.

The general, Richard A. Cody, who led a Pentagon group called the Army Strategic Planning Board, had been told by supply chiefs that the combat troops already had all the armor they needed, according to Army officials and records from the board's meetings. Some 50,000 other American soldiers, who were not on the front lines of battle, could do without.

In the following weeks, as Iraqi snipers and suicide bombers stepped up deadly attacks, often directed at those very soldiers behind the front lines, General Cody realized the Army's mistake and did an about-face. On May 15, 2003, he ordered the budget office to buy all the bulletproof vests it could, according to an Army report. He would give one to every soldier, "regardless of duty position."

But the delays were only beginning. The initial misstep, as well as other previously undisclosed problems, show that the Pentagon's difficulties in shielding troops and their vehicles with armor have been far more extensive and intractable than officials have acknowledged, according to government officials, contractors and Defense Department records.

In the case of body armor, the Pentagon gave a contract for thousands of the ceramic plate inserts that make the vests bulletproof to a former Army researcher who had never mass-produced anything. He struggled for a year, then gave up entirely. At the same time, in shipping plates from other companies, the Army's equipment manager effectively reduced the armor's priority to the status of socks, a confidential report by the Army's inspector general shows. Some 10,000 plates were lost along the way, and the rest arrived late. ...

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Radical Christians to target abortion clinics
A MILITANT evangelical Christian group plans to target pregnant women and medical staff at abortion clinics as it steps up its campaign against what it calls a tidal wave of filth, The Times has learnt.

An MP will make a written statement to the House of Commons next week calling on the Home Secretary to investigate the activities of Christian Voice, which shot to prominence with its campaign against Jerry Springer — The Opera. Adopting the tactics of American fundamentalist Christians, the group pickets buildings and posts the home addresses and phone numbers of its targets on the internet.

Last week, a cancer charity turned down a £3,000 donation from the show after Christian Voice threatened to picket its clinics if it accepted “tainted” money from the show.

Abortions in Britain have reached a record level. In 2003, the total number of abortions was 181,600, compared with 175,900 in 2002, a rise of 3.2 per cent. The number of girls aged 14 and under having abortions is above 1,000 a year.

The group, led by Stephen Green, gained notoriety when it circulated the home addresses and telephone numbers of senior BBC figures when the musical was screened on BBC Two last month. Some people on the list received calls threatening them with bloodshed. ..

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Does Rick Warren Read a Small Bible?
Rick Warren tacitly endorsed George Bush six days before the 2004 presidential election, claiming that the Bible was on his side and that the two major candidates could not “have more opposite views.”

“For those of who accept the Bible as God’s Word ... there are five issues that are non-negotiable,” wrote Warren, a Southern Baptist, to fellow pastors across the country. “To me, they’re not even debatable, because God’s Word is clear on these issues.”

Abortion, stem-cell harvesting, homosexual marriage, human cloning and euthanasia were non-negotiable issues about which Warren said the Bible was clear.

“There can be multiple opinions among Bible-believing Christians when it comes to debatable issues such as the economy, social programs, Social Security and the war in Iraq,” wrote Warren.

What was not clear from his column was how some issues become morally non-negotiable, not even debatable, and other issues become morally secondary, basically unimportant to how a Christian should vote.

Warren offered no evidence from the biblical witness to support his assertions. He simply spoke ex cathedra for God’s Word, assuming that the few passages related to abortion and homosexuality were well-known. Nor did he bother to explain how he came up with a list that ignores the teachings of Jesus, the Hebrew prophets and the Mosaic code.

Aside from advancing the agenda of the religious right, where did Warren get the phrase “non-negotiable?” And how did he decide to shrink the Bible’s moral agenda to five issues?

Would you be surprised to learn that Warren’s language and list are identical to Catholic Answers, a rightwing organization?

On Aug. 26, Catholic Answers put out a press release that said over a million Catholics would read a full-page ad in USAToday that told them how to vote on “five non-negotiable” issues.

The press release said, “The issues Catholics are forbidden to vote in favor of are abortion, homosexual marriage, embryonic stem-cell search, human cloning and euthanasia.”

Karl Keating, the president of Catholic Answers, said: “A Catholic is free to support or to oppose any politician or ballot measure on issues such as jobs, trade, taxes or the war in Iraq. But with issues such as abortion, euthanasia, homosexual marriage, human cloning and embryonic stem-cell research, all Catholics are forbidden to endorse them or vote for them.”

So, how is it that a Baptist pastor’s language and list are identical to those of a rightwing Catholic?

Keating’s position was based on his interpretation of Catholic moral teaching. Instead of providing proof-texts from the Bible, Keating offered proof-texts from Catholic documents to defend his argument.

Warren’s position is really Keating’s position. The only difference is that Warren did not credit Catholic moral tradition for his argument. Instead, he claimed that he got it from the Bible, something that Keating doesn’t claim.

The problem here is twofold. First, Warren didn’t give credit where credit was due. The similarities are too profound for Warren to beg off with the excuse that he forgot where he got the idea. A more likely answer for Warren’s failure was that he knew that citing a Catholic as the source for his moral position would not sit well with his evangelical and fundamentalist readers, many of whom believe Catholics are not Christians....

...For 50 years, Southern Baptist fundamentalists have claimed that the Bible was on their side, when, of course, they were reading their agenda into the Bible. Rather than following the Bible’s agenda, they found proof texts to support their rightwing conservative ideology on matters from integration to the Panama Canal Treaty.

Like fundamentalists, Warren reads from a small Bible, as evidenced by his political endorsement of Bush.

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America’s New Nationalism
[America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, Anatol Lieven, Oxford University Press, 274 pages]

...For example: “trailing one’s coat.” Lieven resurrects this 18th-century phrase for provoking a quarrel by dragging one’s coat along a crowd so that another man will step on it. As he puts it, “American imperialists trail America’s coat over the whole world and rely on America to react with ‘don’t tread on me’ nationalist fury when the coat is trodden on.” The analogy explains something of the seeming paradox that while most Americans aren’t much interested in foreign interventions in the abstract, they always rally when the fighting starts. Opposed in principle to an imperialist policy, they end up supporting one.

Lieven admires the formal elements of the American Creed as stated in the Constitution and Declaration, stressing individual rights and liberties. But even the positive has its drawbacks. When a nation’s self-definition is grounded in the idea of democracy, potential enemies spring up everywhere—any country that does not share the creed is a candidate. American leaders who have fully internalized the creed are prone to conclude that those who oppose the United States must do so because of opposition to democracy itself, not for more banal or concrete reasons of state. Thus, wide swatches of the American establishment quickly convinced themselves that al-Qaeda initiated war on the United States because it “hated freedom” rather than because of opposition to American presence and policies in the Mideast.

Lieven views American nationalism as drawing sustenance from a pool of reactionary racial and ethnic resentments, and here his critique is conventionally liberal (and somewhat overstated). But he has novel and challenging observations to make as well. One is a link between America’s foreign policy and the new reign of political correctness, most pronounced on matters pertaining to race. He admires America’s transformation from a slave-holding country waging an expansionist war against Indian tribes to a nation upholding equal rights for all. But there might be a cost to the new anti-racist consciousness. He suggests an analogy in the Claymore mine. Shrapnel and explosives are packed in, the rear and sides blocked, so the explosion hurls the shrapnel out in one direction. Since proponents of any sentiment deemed racist now face social censure and often loss of employment in the United States, the only permissible focus for group hostility is outward. As Lieven puts it, “the suppression of feelings at home may have only increased the force with which they are directed at foreigners, who remain a legitimate and publicly accepted target of hatred.”

Lieven closes with a long and tightly argued chapter on America and the Israel-Palestine conflict—that realm where the distance between American attitudes and those of the rest of the world is greatest and poses the most peril for the United States. What has occurred, Lieven argues, is a sort of fusion of Israeli and American nationalisms so that American and Israeli actions in the Middle East are largely perceived as one. To some degree, that foreign perception is correct: Israeli and American attitudes have actually fused.

There are historical reasons for this development. America’s own Protestant past and a literalist reading of the Bible among many churches plays a role. So too does America’s early conception of itself as a New Israel. Add to that the American frontier narrative, so large a part of our national imagination. Our frontier is now closed and the Indians long since subjugated, but on the West Bank “civilized” Israeli settlers are carving out communities amidst natives who do not want them—or at least the story can be played that way. Add the institutional power of the Israel lobby, and the sum is something more than a relationship between a great power and a dependent ally.

One corollary of Israel’s becoming embedded in America’s own nationalist narrative is that many American intellectuals have adopted for themselves some of the more extreme ideas circulating in Israel—most dangerously the notion that the entire rest of the world is blindly, irrationally anti-Semitic and malevolent, so it is futile to listen to what other nations actually say.

Historical analogies to such a relationship between a major power and a client state are hard to come by. But Lieven suggests one: in 1914, Russia’s rulers, heavily influenced by the ideology of Pan-Slavism, gave Serbia a sort of blank check, a license to press irredentist claims against Austria it would never have dreamed of doing otherwise. The results were lamentable for all concerned. ...

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3 3/4” Plastic “Jesus Is The Light” Flashlight Necklaces. Each on 29” nylon cord. Assorted colors. Requires one ”AA” battery not included.

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We're in the Spin Cycle of God's Washing Machine
Marianne Williamson talks about motherhood, aging, her dad, her spiritual practice--and what we all must do now to change.

Many people think that the spiritual movement afoot in the United States comes from evangelical Christianity because the president is an evangelical.

I don’t find evangelical Christianity very spiritual at all. In many ways it is about fear and domination. Traditional Christianity does not have a monopoly on the interpretation of the life and inspiration of Christ. ...

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Clowning For Christ
...Tom Rives considers himself a lucky guy. He's the pastor at Carrollwood Baptist Church and founder of the King's Clowns, an outreach ministry that puts a spiritual spin on the art of clowning....

...``I don't think people should be going around with a Bible tucked under their arms and a scowl on their face,'' he says. ``I know some people think that if you're a Christian, you're supposed to suck on a sour pickle all day and walk around that way. Well, that's not how I live, whether I'm in costume or not.''

Son T.J., a local sports broadcaster, concurs. He's a big admirer of his father's infectious energy, his knowledge of sports and his handyman ability to repair anything. But most of all, he likes how his nontraditional dad chooses not to play by the book.

``Most pastors wouldn't even consider doing this, for fear of how it would look,'' the younger Rives says. ``But he's never taken himself seriously. He knows how to laugh at himself and have a good time. It seems to rub off on people when he's around.''

To critics - those who say mixing clowning and religion is sacrilegious or undignified - the Rev. Rives has a ready response.

``I tell them that all Baptist preachers are clowns,'' he says. ``I just went to class and got certified.'' ...

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Bush rejects any partial withdrawal by Syria
..."Syria, Syrian troops, Syria's intelligence services, must get out of Lebanon now," the president said.

"The world is beginning to speak with one voice. We want that democracy in Lebanon to succeed, and we know it cannot succeed so long as she is occupied by a foreign power and that power is Syria," Bush said.

Bush told the New York Post in an interview published Friday that he wants Syria's longtime presence in Lebanon and influence on its political affairs ended by May.

McClellan said that deadline was pegged to the parliamentary elections planned for a new government in Lebanon.

"We want to make sure those are free and fair elections without outside interference," McClellan said.

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Unlike their secular cousins, these eggs are little plastic shrines to Our Savior's suffering. Imagine your child's delight when he opens his egg to find a cross made of nails just like the ones the Romans drove through the wrists and feet of Our Lord. Other eggs hold treasures like miniature versions of the crown of thorns used to tear His scalp and the spear with which the Romans brutally stabbed Him....

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Analyst: Iraq is a 'beacon'for terrorists
DAVOS, Switzerland - The war in Iraq has become a homing beacon for Islamic militancy, threatening to destabilize neighboring countries and embolden terrorists to attack elsewhere, a senior RAND Corp. analyst told business and political elites at the World Economic Forum yesterday.

The head of Human Rights Watch echoed that sentiment, warning high-profile abuse scandals such as Abu Ghraib have become the "recruitment poster"for terrorists around the globe.

"In terms of perception, we've already lost the war," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism analyst who heads the Washington office of RAND Corp., a think-tank known for its problem-solving research. "I believe that a cult of the insurgent has emerged from Iraq."

Hoffman did not say whether he thought the 2003 invasion was justified, but did criticize the Bush administration for failing to consider it's consequences.

"Our failure there was to not anticipate the repercussions and the blowback that Iraq could bring, and the fact that Iraq would become a clarion call for the Islamist cause," Hoffman said.

He said the success of the insurgency has shown potential terrorists everywhere how best to defeat a superpower. That, he added, will come back to haunt the West.

"The insurgents have been able to inflict a degree of pain on the United States military, the most vaunted military in the world, that Saddam Hussein's conventional forces couldn't have achieved,"Hoffman said. "The foreign jihadists who have come to Iraq, when this ends, are going to go back to their own countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, but also Europe. . . . These people are going to have been trained in urban terrorism."...

..."The pictures from Abu Ghraib have become the recruitment posters for terrorists around the world," said Roth, referring to photographs of Iraqi prisoners being abused by American jailers.

He said the scandal "was not an aberration . . . Abu Ghraib was the predictable consequence of policy decisions taken at senior levels of the Bush administration." ...

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He Did Time, So He's Unfit to Do Hair
...The avenues open to Mr. La Cloche, 39 and living in the Bronx, might best be described with Joseph Heller's memorable phrase Catch-22.

Mr. La Cloche served 11 years in New York prisons for first-degree robbery. While behind bars, he turned his life around. He learned a trade, barbering. He even had the image of a barber's clippers and comb tattooed on his right arm.

In 2000, as he prepared to be freed, he applied for a required state license. He was denied it. But that decision was reversed when reviewed by a hearing officer. For a while after his release, Mr. La Cloche worked in a Midtown barber shop.

That job did not last long.

New York's secretary of state, who has jurisdiction in these matters, appealed the granting of the license and won. Mr. La Cloche's "criminal history," an administrative law judge ruled, "indicates a lack of good moral character and trustworthiness required for licensure."

In plain language, the fact that Mr. La Cloche had been in prison proved that he was unworthy for the trade that the state itself taught him in prison....

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Christian Right Regroups for a New Attack
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Frustrated by slow going on the marriage amendment and confused by Bush's increasingly enigmatic stance on faith-based social welfare, the Christian Right is regrouping for a new attack.

To the outside world, things couldn't look better for religious conservatives. Yesterday's nit-picking arguments in the Supreme Court over whether and where and what parts of the Ten Commandments could be posted in public spaces were swept aside by the crisp comments of Justice Antonin Scalia, who at one point told Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott (who was arguing for a Ten Commandments display in his state), "'Our laws come from God.' If you don't believe it sends that message, you're kidding yourself." At another point, Scalia declared: "It is a profoundly religious message, but it's shared by the vast majority of the people . . . It seems to me the minority has to be tolerant of the majority's view."

Scalia, of course, is locked in a political struggle with Justice Clarence Thomas for the hearts and minds of conservatives who are debating which of the two to support for chief justice. He has become the Christian Right's charismatic champion here, but whether he has the political weight to push the fight forward is another matter.

Meanwhile, religious conservatives momentarily have shifted their attention away from the stalled campaign to ban same-sex marriage and instead are concentrating on getting behind a bill that would allow religious leaders to openly endorse political candidates. As Jim Backlin of the Christian Coalition explained to The Hill newspaper yesterday, the theory is that such a bill would give religious bigs a chance to promote candidates who support the marriage amendment from the pulpit, where they exercise considerable sway. ...

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Jacksonville officer investigated for using stun gun on teen
State Attorney Harry Shorstein said Wednesday that excessive force may have been used by police officers who used a stun gun on a 13-year-old girl who was being uncooperative after they took her into custody for fighting with her mother.

The 65-pound girl was handcuffed in the back of a patrol car Feb. 7 when she was shocked twice with a 50,000-volt Taser, according to a Sheriff's Office report. Police departments in Florida and nationwide have been criticized for their use of Taser guns, which some say have caused deaths.

Shorstein said he met with Sheriff John Rutherford and Undersheriff Frank Mackesy, who assured him an internal investigation was being conducted.

"I expressed my concern. They were generally defending the use of Tasers, even against smaller children," the prosecutor said.

"It's not the age, but the size of the child and the fact that she was handcuffed," Shorstein said.

Shorstein said an assistant state attorney called the case to his attention and thought it was a questionable use of a Taser.

The child was originally charged with domestic battery, but the charges were later dismissed.

"We did not think it was an appropriate case to prosecute," he said....

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CIA Avoids Scrutiny of Detainee Treatment
Afghan's Death Took Two Years to Come to Light; Agency Says Abuse Claims Are Probed Fully

In November 2002, a newly minted CIA case officer in charge of a secret prison just north of Kabul allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young Afghan detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets, according to four U.S. government officials aware of the case.

The Afghan guards -- paid by the CIA and working under CIA supervision in an abandoned warehouse code-named the Salt Pit -- dragged their captive around on the concrete floor, bruising and scraping his skin, before putting him in his cell, two of the officials said.

As night fell, so, predictably, did the temperature.

By morning, the Afghan man had frozen to death.

After a quick autopsy by a CIA medic -- "hypothermia" was listed as the cause of death -- the guards buried the Afghan, who was in his twenties, in an unmarked, unacknowledged cemetery used by Afghan forces, officials said. The captive's family has never been notified; his remains have never been returned for burial. He is on no one's registry of captives, not even as a "ghost detainee," the term for CIA captives held in military prisons but not registered on the books, they said.

"He just disappeared from the face of the earth," said one U.S. government official with knowledge of the case.

The CIA case officer, meanwhile, has been promoted, two of the officials said, who like others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to talk about the matter. The case is under investigation by the CIA inspector general.

The fact that the Salt Pit case has remained secret for more than two years reflects how little is known about the CIA's treatment of detainees and its handling of allegations of abuse....

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The color photo was invented in 1903 by the Lumiere brothers, and the French army was the only one taking color photos during the course of [WWI].

The photographs of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) offer a vivid portrait of a lost world--the Russian Empire on the eve of World War I and the coming revolution. His subjects ranged from the medieval churches and monasteries of old Russia, to the railroads and factories of an emerging industrial power, to the daily life and work of Russia's diverse population....

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The Founding Evangelicals?
David Barton wants to put God back into American history. But whose God—history's or his?

Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson may have been dyed-in-the-wool deists, but did you know that “compared to today’s secularists these two guys look like a couple of Bible-thumping evangelicals”?

So says David Barton, a leading conservative Christian advocate for putting God—that is, the God of conservative Christianity—in public school history classes....

...As part of his mission to “educate the nation concerning the Godly foundation of our country,” Barton personally leads “spiritual heritage” tours of the United States Capitol Building, and David Kirkpatrick took one. Kirkpatrick writes that Barton stood barefoot on a bench in the rotunda and told the group that Thomas Jefferson signed letters “in the year of Our Lord Christ.” “What would happen if George Bush did that?” Barton asked. “They’d rip his head off!” (And you thought liberal secular humanists were wusses!)

Frankly, I wish George Bush would embrace religion more the way Thomas Jefferson did. Wouldn’t it be great for this God-fearin’ nation if Bush, like Jefferson, sat in the White House study one night with a Bible and a razor and cut out all the stuff in the Gospels that don’t make sense, including the virgin birth, the miracle stories, and all claims to Jesus' divinity and the resurrection. Then, like Jefferson, he could publish the result. Maybe call it “The Freedom Bible,” for helping to liberate us from "the most perverted system that ever shone on man," as Jefferson called Christianity.

Of course, if Bush did such a blasphemous thing, then evangelicals would rip his head off....

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Meat diet boosts kids' growth
Meat is a vital part of a child's diet, according to a two-year study of Kenyan schoolkids. Without it, children grow up smaller, less strong and less intelligent, the results suggest.

So clear are the benefits, in fact, that denying children meat or dairy products in the first few years of life is unethical, argues Lindsay Allen of the University of California, Davis, who carried out the research.

The 544 children in the study, who had an average age of seven years, were given two spoonfuls (about 60 grams) of minced beef each day to supplement their ordinary diet. Other groups were given a cup of milk, an equivalent amount of energy as vegetable oil, or no supplement at all.

Over two years, kids given food supplements gained an average of 400 grams more than those without, Allen told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC on 20 February. Those given meat showed the biggest benefits.

Children in the meat-supplemented group showed up to an 80% greater increase in upper-arm muscle compared with the non-supplemented children; for milk drinkers, this figure was 40%1.

Kids who were fed meat also outperformed their peers in tests of intelligence, problem solving and arithmetic. "The group that received the meat supplements were more active in the playground, more talkative and playful, and showed more leadership skills," Allen said....

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Democrats blast Gibbons’ comments about liberals
...While praising the efforts of American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gibbons accused liberals, movie stars and song makers of “trying to divide this country.”

“I say we tell those liberal, tree-hugging, Birkenstock-wearing, hippie, tie-dyed liberals to go make their movies and their music and whine somewhere else,” he told the crowd, according to the Elko Daily Free Press.

He then said it was “too damn bad we didn’t buy them a ticket” to become human shields in Iraq....

...Gibbons, a combat pilot veteran of the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars, said “Hollywood established a climate that made our returning troops feel ostracized” during the Vietnam War.

“I see similar actions on the part of some members of the entertainment community today,” he said. “Today, such efforts to break our resolve in Iraq are also used to inspire the insurgents to continue their assault.”

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Government Child Protection
...Baby Alan was born five weeks premature. He had underdeveloped lungs and respiratory distress. He was sent home after seven days in intensive care, but he did not thrive. At two months of age – but only three weeks after his actual due date – the baby was given a routine dose of vaccinations.

"He was given six vaccines in one day," Francine told me in a phone conversation last week. "He already had a compromised immune system. ... You have to keep in mind that our child was seen virtually every week from the time he was born to the time he collapsed, either by his pediatrician or by some other medical professional, so we're not talking that this was a healthy, thriving child. It just amazes me how they failed to recognize the connection."

The baby's health spiraled downward. On Nov. 24, he stopped breathing. His young father, home alone with the baby, borrowed a neighbor's car and raced to the hospital with his son in one arm, trying to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation as he drove. The child reached the emergency room alive, but died soon thereafter.

Police detectives arrived and questioned Alan at length. He was arrested and charged with killing his child through the newly recognized crime of "shaken baby syndrome." When Francine refused to cooperate and try to get Alan to make a secretly taped confession for police, Francine was also arrested. Her daughter was seized and placed in foster care, where she was molested.

Alan was in an isolation cell for a year and a half, awaiting trial. Other prisoners threw urine and feces on him through the bars, calling him a "baby killer." The family had no money for a private attorney, but the sole expert defense witness did testify the baby had died of natural causes. Regardless, Alan Yurko was sentenced to life in prison. He and Francine were married in prison....

...Then there was the autopsy. The official state autopsy that sent Alan Yurko to prison with its diagnosis of "shaken baby syndrome" was of a 2-month-old black male child, and contained a description of an examination of the inner heart muscle. But the Yurkos and their baby were white. Baby Alan was 10 weeks old, and his heart had been donated before the medical examiner saw the body.

They mixed up the babies.

Francine Yurko filed a complaint with state medical regulators. In an unprecedented move, the state of Florida in February 2004 ordered Orange-Osceola Medical Examiner Shashi Gore to perform no more autopsies pending his June retirement. "It was the strictest discipline ever taken against a chief medical examiner in Florida," the Orlando Sentinel reported. "Commissioners said they were prepared to remove Gore from office if he weren't already planning to retire."

Ah, government work.

Alan Yurko's case was reopened. The judge looked over the new evidence, and vacated the conviction. After seven years, Alan Yurko was a free man ... right?

Ha, good one. You're not thinking like a government prosecutor.

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The Wrath Of God
They see themselves as defenders of the faith, Christian sanity’s last line of defence against the ruthlessly advancing forces of immorality and decline. The fire in their bellies burning with the white heat of righteous outrage, these new soldiers of the cross are taking their fight on to the streets, and this time they vow that it will be no war of words: just a bitter moral conflict in which there will be no hiding places and no choice but to take sides.

Firing the opening salvoes of a campaign that looks set to rage for decades to come, last week they launched an attack that took Britain by surprise when the evangelical cadre Christian Voice stepped in and, demonstrating the militant guerrilla tactics set to become a familiar feature of 21st-century politics, pressured a small Scottish cancer charity, Maggie’s Centre, into rejecting a £3000 donation. The proceeds of a benefit performance by the cast of the controversial mus ical Jerry Springer – The Opera could have had a significant impact upon the work of Maggie’s Centre, but amid reported warnings of picket action and the thinly veiled threat that accepting the funds could lead to a backlash from devout donors, the Glasgow-based voluntary organisation felt compelled to decline.

It was, Labour MP John Cryer told parliament, the work of “fundamentalist thugs,” an act of theological blackmail so far beyond the pale that it beggared belief. Sending a storm of liberal outrage sweeping through the nation’s media and provoking a deluge of hate mail directed at the perpetrators, it was an incident that the popular consensus might hope was a single unacceptable aberration but was in fact merely a taste of things to come.

“This was not democracy or reasoned debate – it was an act of tyranny, a breathtaking demonstration of the power of the mob and a harsh introduction to the unacceptable face of things to come,” said Paul Edwards, a media analyst whose company Publicis is conducting research into the rise of protest culture. “The Christian assault on Maggie’s Centre was only a taste of the future,” he added. “We are entering a new age of protest, and before long every organisation, charity and business in Britain is going to have to come terms with the threat posed by the emerging militant ranks.”...

...“All that happened here was that we explained that the Maggie’s Centres were at grave risk of alienating Christian donors by accepting money that had been raised from a performance of filth and blasphemy, especially in a Scottish homeland where faith in God is still very strong. You might call that intimidation – I call it my Christian duty.”...

...“We want to see a return to a society governed not merely by the laws of man but also by the word of God,” said Suit. “In America they have always had the advantage of the bible belt’s ability to exert a strong moral influence over national affairs, and we would certainly like to see something similar in Britain to provide the country with the guidance it so desperately needs.”...

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Report Criticizes Interim Iraq Government
WASHINGTON - Serious human rights abuses occurred under the interim Iraqi government installed by the United States after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites), including torture, illegal detention by police and forced confessions, according to a State Department report.

Though the interim government did reverse "a long legacy of serious human rights abuses" under Saddam, the report said that "corruption at all levels of government remained a problem" during the period and Iraqis continued to be victimized by police, courts and others in authority.

Iraqi officials were correcting these practices, the report said. It said the January elections and continuing struggle against insurgent violence had helped "create momentum for the improvement of human rights practices."

The report, in which the State Department assesses the state of human rights around the world, said that tens of thousands of people across the world suffered last year at the hands of repressive governments, some of them — like Iraq (news - web sites) — friendly to the United States.

Under the interim Iraq government, there were reports of local police and other government agents killing members of Saddam's Baath Party, a mother and daughter accused of prostitution and kidnappers of police officers, the State Department noted. It cited a report by Human Rights Watch that said "torture and ill treatment of detainees by police was commonplace."

The report, released Monday, did not address incidents in Iraq in which Americans were involved, such as the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

In the Iraqi judicial system, the report noted, defendants were generally given short shrift. There were no jury trials; a defendant's guilt or innocence was decided by a three-judge panel and those convicted were sentenced immediately after the verdict. There were reports that "the judiciary was subject to external influence," the State Department report said.

And while various laws and regulations were in place to prevent forced child labor, the report said "children were routinely tapped as an additional source of labor or income for the family unit."

A total of 196 countries were monitored by the State Department, but not the United States.

Overall, the findings were similar to those in three decades of annual human rights reports to Congress. "Freedom and the ability to choose one's government still elude many people and many portions of the globe," Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky said.