---

The left's eyeing your home
WHEN THE Supreme Court decided seven weeks ago in Kelo vs. New London to loosen constitutional restraints on local governments taking your house and selling it to Wal-Mart, it triggered a wave of public revulsion from New England to South Los Angeles. Ninety-three percent of Granite State residents in a University of New Hampshire poll opposed using eminent domain for private development. Legislators in 28 states have made at least preliminary noises about restricting the practice, with Alabama being first to enact a new law.

State Sen. Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks) has introduced a ballot initiative to, according to his website, "prohibit the [government] seizure of one person's property for the private gain of another." Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) cosponsored a successful amendment to stop federal Community Development Block Grants from going to any locale that doesn't prohibit eminent domain seizures for private development.

"It's like undermining motherhood and apple pie," Waters told the San Francisco Chronicle. "I mean, people's homes and their land — it's very important, and it should be protected by government, not taken for somebody else's private use."

Yet Waters' folksy wisdom about Kelo proved too simple by half for some of her fellow liberal activists and Democratic politicians, who see the backlash as either a sneaky Republican plot or a prophylactic separating potential tax dollars from their grubbing hands.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) opposed Waters' amendment, arguing that the Supreme Court decision "is almost as if God has spoken." The New York Times editorial page, virtually alone among the country's newspapers, hailed the decision as "a welcome vindication of cities' ability to act in the public interest" and "a setback to the 'property rights' movement, which is trying to block government from imposing reasonable zoning and environmental regulations."

Locally, pols reveal their feelings through their continued addiction to state-sanctioned robbery. ...

...So where is that Democratic Party concern for the "little guy" we've heard so much about? Subsumed by paranoia about the right. "The Kelo backlash is tempting, but it's wrong," warned Alyssa Katz in American Prospect Online. "In seeking to limit public power over urban planning, well-meaning community activists are lending strength to [the] conservative movement."

And we mustn't have that, even if it means razing an entire black neighborhood for a shopping mall that never gets built. That's exactly what happened in Indio in 1993, when more than 90 apartments and homes were bulldozed for an extension of the Indio Fashion Mall that never happened. Obscenely, the new owner of the property is pressuring the city to once again clear out two nearby churches to restart the project.

Eminent domain for private development is nothing more than a market shortcut and nothing less than government-sanctioned bullying of the people who least deserve it. Just ask the former residents of Chavez Ravine and Bunker Hill. If Democrats talk themselves into supporting this noxious practice only because Republicans oppose it, or because they aren't satisfied with the taxes generated by the mom-and-pop stores, they will get the electoral results they deserve.

---

U.S. Lowers Sights On What Can Be Achieved in Iraq
Administration Is Shedding 'Unreality' That Dominated Invasion, Official Says

The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end in four months, according to U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad.

The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.

"What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground," said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. "We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning."...

---

There are two great powers," the man said, "and they've been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.
-- Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials

---

Christian Groups Press Bush About North Korea
...Some in Midland prefer to say Mr. Bush naturally shares their view of the world.

"God has put a man in office who has a heart for the nations, and for the pain and suffering that is happening all over the world," Ms. Younger said near a "sponsor's tent" as she recalled a talk with Mr. Bush about Mr. Kang's book when she visited the White House early last month.

Because the president's "hands are tied" at times, she added, "we are his arms reaching out to the nations."

To help press the human rights case, Ms. Fikes and a delegation from Midland traveled to Seoul in June, where they met the leaders of both major South Korean parties, they said, and invited several ministers and human rights advocates back to Midland for the concert.

The festival was a showcase for their efforts. Before the music began on Saturday, Mr. Kang spoke to the crowd through a translator about his decade in a prison camp.

The daughter of a Korean-American missionary, the Rev. Phillip Jun Buck, said her father had been arrested in China for trying to help North Koreans. "I know that president Bush and his community cares for cases like my father," she said.

Later, the festival screened part of a documentary, "Seoul Train," about North Korean refugees. The protagonist, the Rev. Chun Ki Won, told the audience through a translator a secondhand account of a North Korean Christian whose fingers were cut off by authorities demanding the names of other believers.

It was such accounts of persecution - though in southern Sudan - that first moved the Midland Alliance, once a strictly local group, to take an interest in foreign affairs. Ms. Fikes invited a group of refugees to address the 2002 Rock the Desert festival, where they worked with a Christian group for troubled teenagers to build a copy of a Sudanese village. They burned part of it in a mock raid to demonstrate the refugees' plight.

Soon after, Ms. Fikes, a former schoolteacher, decided to advertise on the alliance letterhead that Midland was Mr. Bush's hometown. She learned that foreign embassies were suddenly quick to respond.

Before long, she was traveling monthly to Washington and entertaining the Sudanese ambassador at her house. In the months leading up to the January peace agreement that ended the civil war there, Ms. Fikes and her group held private talks with both sides.

Her husband, an oil entrepreneur, pays for her travel.

"The Midland Alliance has had a major impact in the Sudan," Gen. Lazaro Sumbeiywo, a Kenyan who helped mediate the peace, wrote last week in an e-mail message.

"I believe the saying that 'the closer to the bone, the sweeter the meat' is quite effective," General Sumbeiywo said. "It has therefore made a major difference - a positive one - to have their letterhead identified as the home of President Bush."...

---

HOUSES OF WORSHIP: From Gospel to Government
...A final weakness of Christian progressives is one shared by some Christian conservatives: the impulse to leap directly from the Bible to contemporary politics. Few are as blatant as Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners magazine and a darling of Democratic leaders. In his best-selling book "God's Politics," Mr. Wallis discerns from a short passage in Isaiah a blueprint for government welfare spending. "The starting point to check how our society measures up to Isaiah's platform," Mr. Wallis writes, "is by examining our federal budget." Or, as the Christian Alliance for Progress argues, rather confusedly: "In his sermons and in his parables, Jesus teaches that poverty can certainly be an effective weapon of mass destruction."

Their Web sites are awash with this kind of talk. In all of it, there is little room for political philosophy, or civil society, or even an appreciation of the different roles of church and state. Whatever the argument -- whether it's a big government approach to poverty or a pacifist stance on terrorism -- Bible verses are at the ready.

Call it fundamentalism from the left. If religious progressives help the Democratic Party to "find religion," we're going to see a lot more of it. Heaven help us.

---

Saved by the bomb?
In August, 1945, near Manila, and for years later, I thought my life had been spared by the use of nuclear weapons against Japan. Now, I'm not so sure

On Aug. 6, 1945, at a staging area a few miles north of Manila, I was a non-commisioned officer in a company of Army Special Forces preparing for yet another amphibious assault.

For two years we had leapfrogged from southern New Guinea to the heart of the Philippines under Gen. MacArthur's command. Everyone knew that the D-Day of all D-Days was near at hand and was preparing for the mother of all landings with stoic resignation.

On that day the stunning news came that a super bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima with devastating effect. After confusing and contradictory reports we learned what the word "radioactive" meant and that the war was over.

Soon, orders came through for us to land at Wakayama on Honshu Island. Ours was the first contingent to hit the beach and, while we were prepared for combat, it was immediately obvious that there was no opposition and little to defend. After establishing a perimeter we cautiously reconnoitered. For several weeks I was able to move around freely and made a point of observing the damage that our B-29s had inflicted on every aspect of civilian and defense installations. There were no uniformed enemy soldiers except at the Osaka train station and those demoralized individuals were trying to slip home, one by one. Japan's main defense forces had been obliterated by the B-29s.

For years after, I was among those who felt that dropping the A-bomb was not only justified, but a military necessity. "I was one of those saved by dropping the bomb!" was my stock answer to the anti-nuke peaceniks. That usually shut them up, since I was most often the only one who had been anywhere near Japan during WW II.

End of story? Not quite. ...

...The truth is, I now believe, that in August of 1945, the Japanese Imperial Army could not have defended its homeland against a well-trained troop of Eagle Scouts....

---

Baghdad Mayor Is Ousted by a Shiite Group and Replaced
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 9 - Armed men entered Baghdad's municipal building during a blinding dust storm on Monday, deposed the city's mayor and installed a member of Iraq's most powerful Shiite militia.

The deposed mayor, Alaa al-Tamimi, who was not in his offices at the time, recounted the events in a telephone interview on Tuesday and called the move a municipal coup d'état. He added that he had gone into hiding for fear of his life.

"This is the new Iraq," said Mr. Tamimi, a secular engineer with no party affiliation. "They use force to achieve their goal."...

---

‘Full-Quiver’ Baptists Say No to Contraception
Southern Seminary President Al Mohler recently charged married couples who decide to remain childless are guilty of “moral rebellion” against God’s design.

“Marriage, sex, and children are part of one package,” Mohler said July 27 in Baptist Press. “To deny any part of this wholeness is to reject God’s intention in creation--and His mandate revealed in the Bible.”

Mohler quoted a declaration in Psalm 127: “Behold, children are a gift of the Lord, the fruit of the womb is a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, so are the children of one’s youth. How blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them; they will not be ashamed when they speak with their enemies in the gate.”

Mohler did not explain why he and his wife, Mary, stopped after two children,...

---

Forthcoming Book, Movie Show Man ‘Living Biblically’
Writer A.J. Jacobs has a mission: to obey the Bible literally for a full year.

The senior editor at Esquire magazine will share the results of that endeavor in The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Obey the Bible As Literally As Possible, which Simon & Schuster plans to publish in fall 2006....

---

'War for Righteousness' Book Garners National Attention
Read a statement about America's moral duty "to show the paths of freedom to all the world" and you might think it was a quote taken from the day's newspapers. But that statement was made 90 years ago by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, three years before America became involved in World War I.

The similarities that modern-day war terminology has with that of World War I has drawn national attention to Dr. Richard M. Gamble's book, "The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation." ...

---

Onward, Christian Soldiers
...What Richard Gamble has done in this important study is to show that this violent tradition of liberal righteousness extends much further into the past. The War for Righteousness chronicles the story of “progressive” Christian clergy, whom we might expect to be faithful to the Prince of Peace, but who instead overwhelmingly favored U.S. involvement in World War I. German militarism, which they viewed as responsible for the war, was in their eyes a scourge upon civilization that had to be eradicated; otherwise the international order would not be redeemed and ultimately set on the path of righteousness.

That is an important piece of history in itself. But Gamble also shows how these clergymen, caught up in their conviction that the U.S. was at least in some sense the savior of the world, applied to America the same language that Christians had traditionally applied to Christ. The Christian categories and concepts that Social Gospel theologians had found malleable enough to make railroad regulation sound like a direct command of Christ were thus drafted into service in the conflict that had engulfed Europe. It thus became impossible for them to conceive of the war in measured, rational terms: to America they had assigned the righteousness of Christ, and there could be no compromise between Christ and Satan....

... These thinkers likewise criticized a transcendent view of the kingdom of God, suggesting instead that the kingdom of God would be achieved once “justice” had come to characterize human relations and social ills were at last eradicated. According to Rev. C. Arthur Lincoln, pastor of Buffalo’s First Congregational Church, the church’s goal was “not that men should become Christians and thus save their souls from hell but that men should become Christian and work hard to save the world from hell.” It was with such thoughts in mind that progressive Christians threw themselves into the holy cause of World War I.

It was once the conventional wisdom that World War I marked the end of progressivism in America. But as economist and historian Murray N. Rothbard showed, the war in fact represented the culmination of progressivism. The progressive mentality that was so anxious for Americans to shed Jeffersonian cautions about big government was gratified by the domestic consequences of the war. Progressives, who overwhelmingly supported U.S. entry, were delighted at the opportunity both to extend state power through the massive economic planning that Woodrow Wilson adopted during the war and to exploit wartime patriotism to promote collectivism and the idea of service to the state as American values.

And that is just how progressive Christianity saw things as well. Christian Century happily predicted that “the right of the State to commandeer its able-bodied citizens for service will survive the war and will be greatly strengthened by it.” Military training camps, they hoped, would become “permanent features of our national life,” though they would train men for social service rather than for war.

Christian Century likewise spoke of the increasing acknowledgment of “the social sin of the German nation as a whole.” Now that America understood the important progressive Christian concepts of social sin and guilt, it would “be incomparably easier to apply the principle of social sinning to groups and institutions within a single nation and to bring to bear upon them through the social gospel the super-personal forces of condemnation and destruction.” The war had thus facilitated the application of the social gospel both domestically and internationally.

According to Gamble, progressive Christians viewed the war in Manichaean terms rather than as the morally ambiguous clash of imperial rivals that it was. “For some of the clergy,” he explains, “the European War by 1916 had already assumed the character of a holy war.” He quotes a seminary professor as saying that “pacifism does not mean passivity” and “does not renounce physical force.” To remain neutral while Europe fought its own wars “may have been justifiable for our nation in its infancy; it is not now. The pacifists do not advocate any such peace policy as that. Their motive is not safety but service. They would have ours not a hermit nation but a humanitarian nation.”

Gamble cites a number of figures who actually feared that the conflict might end prematurely, before righteousness had had the opportunity to triumph. One progressive Christian told a meeting of the World Alliance for International Friendship Through the Churches, “We do not want the war stopped until peace can be established on the basis of justice. For myself I believe it must be fought out.”

When in December 1916 Woodrow Wilson invited the major powers to state their war aims (as a prelude to possible talks aimed at an end to hostilities), 60 prominent clergymen signed a letter of rebuke to the president. “We are apt to forget,” they wrote, “that there are conditions under which the mere stopping of warfare may bring a curse instead of a blessing. We need to be reminded that peace is the triumph of righteousness and not the mere sheathing of the sword.”

The idiom of the progressive Christian even made its way into the halls of Congress on the eve of war. More than one congressman compared Christ’s sacrifice for the sins of the world to the divine mission that the U.S. was about to undertake. A New York congressman declared that “Christ gave his life upon the cross that mankind might gain the Kingdom of Heaven, while to-night we shall solemnly decree the sublimest sacrifice ever made by a nation for the salvation of humanity, the institution of world-wide liberty and freedom.”

Gamble contends that in the name of bringing about perpetual peace, progressive clergy, through their crude application of Christian language and concepts to the war and its contending parties, helped to legitimize the 20th century’s first total war....

...In the progressive mindset, the war became the proving ground for Christians who possessed a social consciousness. Instead of focusing on the hereafter, the truly saved Christian was the one who offered himself here and now in service to his fellow man. “The best mark of a ‘saved’ man,” wrote Rev. William P. Merrill in his book Christian Internationalism, “is not that he wants to go to heaven, but that he is willing to go to China, or to the battle-field in France, or to the slums of the city, or to the last dollar of his resources, or to the limit of his energy, to set forward the Kingdom of God.” This is a particularly revealing remark, according to Gamble: “In Merrill’s expansive ideal, there was apparently no distinction between personal redemption, social service, and enlistment in the United States Army.”

Ecumenism is an inevitable byproduct when a pluralistic society goes to war, since it becomes urgent to emphasize that what unites the citizenry is more important than what divides them. Serving in the trenches alongside men of a variety of creeds and performing reciprocal acts of heroism can only have a similar effect.

Recognizing this, a New York Morning Telegraph editorial in 1918 observed that “loyalty to the flag swiftly is coming to be recognized as of equal or even greater virtue than fidelity to a church, a religious sect, or an ordained priesthood. … Soldiers of Moses, soldiers of Christ, and soldiers of Democracy have become unified in the one Grand Army of Liberty, which is giving the only meaning worth while to …‘The Church Militant.’” Thus was the United States made something sacred, higher than all other fidelities and obligations....

---

The Most Famous Christian of the 20th Century?
Here’s a little trivia question for you. Who was the most famous Christian of the 20th century?

Mother Teresa? Nope. Billy Graham? Nope. Martin Luther King, Jr.? Guess again. Albert Schweitzer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, any and all popes, any and all U.S. presidents…Nah, throw ‘em out.

The most famous Christian of the 20th century was Adolf Hitler.

Sure, we call Hitler infamous today. But before he started gobbling up European countries like they were little bratwurst sausages, Hitler was famous as a world leader with high moral values and a distinctly Christian vision.

In fact, no present politician has more blatantly declared his Christianity than Hitler, or has had his faith so widely accepted. Millions of Christians around the world admired the savvy tyrant; a couple of his more recognizable fans included Britain’s Lloyd George and that all-American idol of idols, Charles Lindbergh. The most appealing of Hitler’s “Christian” attributes included:

•His morality. He did not smoke or drink and he abhorred pornography and homosexuality.

•His call for his nation to repent. “Providence withdrew its protection and our people fell… And in this hour we sink to our knees and beseech our almighty God that He may bless us, that He may give us the strength to carry on the struggle for the freedom, the future, the honor, and the peace of our people. So help us God.” (March 1936)...

...*His war on atheism: “We were convinced that the people need and require [the Christian] faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.” (October 1933)

*His blending of church and state: “National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary it stands on the ground of a real Christianity… For their interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of today, in our fight against a Bolshevist culture, against atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for a consciousness of a community in our national life…These are Christian principles!” (August 1934)

•His faith-based charity: “With a tenth of our budget for religion, we would thus have a Church devoted to the State and of unshakable loyalty.” ...

...On the other hand, Hitler privately loathed Christianity, calling it “a drug” and “senseless,” the “invention of sick brains.” He also perceived it as a potential threat to his leadership, and intended to abolish the church. And let’s not forget: He did make Nazism the official state religion and he replaced school and church Bibles with copies of “Mein Kampf.”...

...f Hitler were an American politician today, based solely on his faith and God-talk, he’d make an attractive candidate to the Christian right.

That Hitler exploited religion for political gain, however, is a given. He knew that he lived in a nation that was overwhelmingly Christian, and he used Christianity to pander to mass idiocy in order to draw the biggest crowd in history....

---

Lawsuit says officer dumped baby's ashes
A man calls a Mount Dora police search illegal, saying the officer mistook his daughter's remains for cocaine.

TAVARES -- A father who accused a Mount Dora policeman last year of dumping out his infant daughter's cremated remains sued the city and the officer Monday.

Filed in Lake Circuit Court, the lawsuit accuses the city and Officer Brad Cline of illegally stopping and searching Jason Burnham, 34, as he was walking home after Hurricane Charley.

During the stop, Burnham's suit says, Cline emptied the ashes from a cross-shaped pendant worn by Burnham, suspecting it contained cocaine.

"This is probably the most mean-spirited violation of a person's civil rights that I have seen in many years," said Winter Park lawyer Howard Marks, one of Burnham's attorneys. "That conduct is not acceptable -- it's not warranted."

Mount Dora Mayor James Yatsuk would not comment on the case, saying the city's insurance company likely would select the attorney to represent the city.

The seven-count lawsuit accuses the city of false arrest/false imprisonment and detention of Burnham, and violation of his right to privacy. It accuses the city and Cline of invasion of privacy and violation of Burnham's civil rights. Finally, it accuses Cline of intentional infliction of emotional distress on Burnham.

It asks for damages in excess of $15,000 each from the city and the officer.

"Burnham was illegally patted down, illegally searched and illegally detained, all without probable cause or reasonable suspicion that Burnham had committed a crime," the suit states....

...Cline was on patrol Aug. 14 in the aftermath of Hurricane Charley when he said he saw Burnham walking on Highland Street about 2:30 a.m. According to the police report, Cline said Burnham "appeared to be intoxicated."

The officer questioned Burnham about "a variety of issues, including illegal drug use," according to the lawsuit.

Burnham said he had a prescription for Xanax that he was taking because he was depressed over his daughter's death.

After examining the pills, Cline questioned Burnham about the pendant, the lawsuit says. It contained the ashes of Carli Miracle Burnham, who died at the age of 9 months in 2002. She was napping with her father when he mistakenly rolled on top of her, suffocating her. The death was ruled accidental, and no charges were filed.

Taking the pendant from Burnham, the officer broke its seal and dumped the ashes on the hood of his patrol car, the suit says.

"Defendant Cline, after seeing that the ashes were not cocaine, wiped Plaintiff Burnham's daughter's ashes to the ground," the suit says....

---

Guardsmen Took 'Rent' From Iraqi Businesses
California Army National Guard troops sought unauthorized, off-the-books "rent" from Iraqi-owned businesses inside Baghdad's Green Zone to raise money for a "soldiers fund," military officials and sources within the troops' battalion said Friday.

The disclosure is the latest to emerge from a wide-ranging investigation into the conduct of the 1st Battalion of the 184th Infantry Regiment of the Guard, which is headquartered in Modesto.

Military officials had confirmed previously that the battalion's commander, Lt. Col. Patrick Frey, had been suspended and that one of the battalion's companies, based in Fullerton, had been removed from patrol duties and restricted to an Army base south of Baghdad....

...Army officials say the total amount involved was $4,000, but troops in the battalion have said the scheme raised more than $30,000. The investigation resulted in disciplinary action against one officer from the battalion's Bravo Company. Army officials declined to reveal the officer's name, and his identity could not be confirmed independently....

---

Jim Wallis tells a tired tale: the faith-based politics of a liberal activist are as suspect as Bush's
... As much as I admire the other-centered work of Jim Wallis--as a husband, father, community organizer and writer--I think he's wasting his time and energy arguing in his latest book that he has an inside line to the thinking of his God. "Here's the big news," he writes: "The politics of God calls all the rest of our politics into question.... Clearly, the politics of God is different from ours."

I'd be more accepting of Wallis' views if it weren't for the old saying, "Pay heed to those who seek God but watch out for those who say they've found him"--whether the finder is Bush, Wallis or whomever.

It's futile to mix politics and religion. Ask a dozen people, or a dozen dozen, to define either and no answer is the same. Politics is about perception: yours, mine and everyone else's, and all of it flavored with the subjective. Isn't religion, too, about perceptions--hunches that a God, or gods, exists. With more than 10,000 organized religions now in operation on a planet that Alfred North Whitehead called a third-rate rock spinning around a second-rate sun, we have little more than a jumble of hunches on what may or may not be divine. Does evidence exist that faith-based social justice is more productive than faithless-based?

I realize this is a secularist argument, and it should be. The first mistake of Wallis is to push the idea that public policy and personal theology can not only be compatible but can be mutually supportive--so long-as it's the policies and theological preferences backed by Wallis and not those of the Bush administration. Wallis labels Bush's foreign policy as "bordering on the idolatrous and blasphemous." True enough, except that's been true of every president, all of whom believed in military killing and violence to solve international conflicts.

Wallis's second mistake is to place his faith in government. What will it take for him and other conventional liberals to wake up and see that Tolstoy was right: "Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us"? Instead of fruitlessly hoping to shape up both the political right and the left--as in his book's subtitle, Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It--it might be better for Wallis to join those who oppose, resist and defy the militaristic U.S. government. How? Dozens of ways, from the public witness of the traditional peace churches--Quakers, Mennonites, the Brethren--to those engaged in war tax resistance, boycotts of products of antisocial corporations, civil disobedience, peace education, simple living, refusing jury duty and supporting those who have broken free from the stale notion that government can be reformed with just a little prayerful tinkering....

---

The bomb didn't win it
The idea that it was militarily necessary to drop the atomic bomb in 1945 is now discredited. The first exhaustive examination of Japanese, Soviet and US archives, by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, confirms the argument that Truman went ahead in order to get Japan to end the war quickly before the Soviet Union came into the Pacific war and demanded a say in Asia.

The use of atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not provide the US with the free hand it had wanted and has proved disastrous for the world.

The idea that it was militarily necessary to drop the atomic bomb in 1945 is now discredited. The first exhaustive examination of Japanese, Soviet and US archives, by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, confirms the argument that Truman went ahead in order to get Japan to end the war quickly before the Soviet Union came into the Pacific war and demanded a say in Asia.

The use of atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not provide the US with the free hand it had wanted and has proved disastrous for the world.

It did not bring about surrender. With 62 Japanese cities destroyed by firebombs and napalm, Japan was not overwhelmed by the destruction of one more. The army minister, General Korechika Anami, told the supreme war council that he would fight on. What actually brought about surrender was the combination of the Soviet Union's entry into the war on August 8 and the US decision to let Japan retain the emperor....

---

90-day penalty in fatal shooting
Denver - The police officer who shot and killed Frank Lobato, Jr. after mistaking a soda can for a gun faces a 90-day suspension without pay....

...As police approached, Martinez fled out an upstairs window. Officers, unaware he had left, used a ladder to enter a different second-story bedroom window, where Ford encountered Lobato, who was in ill health, in bed. Ford shot Lobato once in the chest after apparently mistaking the glint of the soda can he was holding for a gun, and Lobato died at the scene....

---

Evangelical Chaplains Test Bounds of Faith in Military
Walk into just about any Christian bookstore and you are likely to find a copy of The Soldier's Bible. The leather cover comes in a choice of green for the Army, black for the Navy, burgundy for the Marines, blue for the Air Force and -- just released -- blue for the Coast Guard.

These are handsome Bibles with gilt edges, just the right size for a service member to stuff into his or her pack. Printed on the front is the emblem for the appropriate branch of the armed services. And that's a problem.

One could be excused for thinking that this Bible was put out by the military. But it's not. Holman Bible Publishers of Nashville developed, printed and distributes The Soldier's Bible at its own expense.

Still, critics think the emblem on the front brings up legal questions -- and may even violate the Constitution's ban on government-established religion.

What's especially troubling to some is that this particular Bible is clearly evangelical. Holman Bible Publishers is owned by the Southern Baptist Convention. On the first few pages, there's a "Plan for Salvation" that says you must be baptized as an adult believer to have eternal life.

Printed in the back are inspirational words from military leaders such as Lt. Gen. William Boykin. He raised a few eyebrows back in 2003, when he said of his battle against a Muslim warlord in Somalia, "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."

Evangelicals are playing an increasing role in the military. Department of Defense statistics show that 40 percent of active duty personnel are evangelical Christians. Sixty percent of taxpayer-funded military chaplains are evangelical.

"It does raise the question of whether we are, effectively, as a country -- with tax dollars -- promoting a particular evangelical religious viewpoint," said Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Add to that a privately funded evangelical Bible that looks official, and critics say the military has a problem that needs to be addressed.

The Army says the use of its emblem "is authorized in publications and other printed matter of an official or quasi-official nature." The Army's Institute of Heraldry is the keeper of the emblem. If you want to put it on a T-shirt or bumper sticker, you first have to get permission from Stanley Haas at the Institute.

Haas says to his knowledge, Holman was never granted permission to put the Army's emblem on The Soldier's Bible. But he also doesn't keep a list or database of people who've been given permission.

Haas says people simply write in to request permission and he writes back, telling them yes or no. He says that normally, permission would not be granted for anything religious. ...

---

Men overcompensate when their masculinity is threatened, Cornell study shows
THACA, N.Y. -- Threaten a man's masculinity, and he will assume more macho attitudes, according to a study by a Cornell University researcher.

"I found that if you made men more insecure about their masculinity, they displayed more homophobic attitudes, tended to support the Iraq war more and would be more willing to purchase an SUV over another type of vehicle," said Robb Willer, a sociology doctoral candidate at Cornell. Willer is presenting his findings Aug. 15 at the American Sociological Association's 100th annual meeting in Philadelphia. ...

---

Don't get into a lather over sweatshops
...We use "sweatshop" to mean those foreign factories with low pay and poor health and safety standards where employees choose to work, not those where employees are coerced into working by the threat of violence. And we admit that by Western standards, sweatshops have abhorrently low wages and poor working conditions. However, economists point out that alternatives to working in a sweatshop are often much worse: scavenging through trash, prostitution, crime, or even starvation.

Economists across the political spectrum, from Paul Krugman on the left, to Walter Williams on the right, have defended sweatshops. Their reasoning is straightforward: People choose what they perceive to be in their best interest. If workers voluntarily choose to work in sweatshops, without physical coercion, it must be because sweatshops are their best option. Our recent research - the first economic study to compare systematically sweatshop wages with average local wages - demonstrated this to be true.

We examined the apparel industry in 10 Asian and Latin American countries often accused of having sweatshops and then we looked at 43 specific accusations of unfair wages in 11 countries in the same regions. Our findings may seem surprising. Not only were sweatshops superior to the dire alternatives economists usually mentioned, but they often provided a better-than-average standard of living for their workers.

The apparel industry, which is often accused of unsafe working conditions and poor wages, actually pays its foreign workers well enough for them to rise above the poverty in their countries. While more than half of the population in most of the countries we studied lived on less than $2 per day, in 90 percent of the countries, working a 10-hour day in the apparel industry would lift a worker above - often far above - that standard. For example, in Honduras, the site of the infamous Kathy Lee Gifford sweatshop scandal, the average apparel worker earns $13.10 per day, yet 44 percent of the country's population lives on less than $2 per day.

In 9 of the 11 countries we surveyed, the average reported sweatshop wages equaled or exceeded average incomes and in some cases by a large margin. In Cambodia, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Honduras, the average wage paid by a firm accused of being a sweatshop is more than double the average income in that country's economy.

Our findings should not be interpreted to mean that sweatshop jobs in the third world are ideal by US standards. The point is, they are located in developing countries where these jobs are providing a higher wage than other work.

Antisweatshop activists - who argue that consumers should abstain from buying products made in sweatshops - harm workers by trying to stop the trade that funds some of the better jobs in their economies....

---

Once upon a time, a dangerous radical gained control of the US Republican Party.
Reagan increased the budget for support of the radical Muslim Mujahidin conducting terrorism against the Afghanistan government to half a billion dollars a year.

One fifth of the money, which the CIA mostly turned over to Pakistani military intelligence to distribute, went to Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, a violent extremist who as a youth used to throw acid on the faces of unveiled girls in Afghanistan.

Not content with creating a vast terrorist network to harass the Soviets, Reagan then pressured the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia to match US contributions....

...In the US, the Christian Right adopted the Mujahideen as their favorite project. They even sent around a "biblical checklist" for grading US congressman as to how close they were to the "Christian" political line. If a congressman didn't support the radical Muslim Muj, he or she was downgraded by the evangelicals and fundamentalists....

---

'One of them made cuts in my penis. I was in agony'
Benyam Mohammed travelled from London to Afghanistan in July 2001, but after September 11 he fled to Pakistan. He was arrested at Karachi airport on April 10 2002, and describes being flown by a US government plane to a prison in Morocco. These are extracts from his diary....

---

Third prosecutor critical of Guantanamo trials
A third US military prosecutor has walked out of the commissions process set up to try Guantanamo Bay detainees because of concerns it was unfair, the ABC has learned....

---

"War is the Health of the State"
by Randolph Bourne (1918)

To most Americans of the classes which consider themselves significant the war [World War I] brought a sense of the sanctity of the State which, if they had had time to think about it, would have seemed a sudden and surprising alteration in their habits of thought. In times of peace, we usually ignore the State in favour of partisan political controversies, or personal struggles for office, or the pursuit of party policies. It is the Government rather than the State with which the politically minded are concerned. The State is reduced to a shadowy emblem which comes to consciousness only on occasions of patriotic holiday.

Government is obviously composed of common and unsanctified men, and is thus a legitimate object of criticism and even contempt. If your own party is in power, things may be assumed to be moving safely enough; but if the opposition is in, then clearly all safety and honor have fled the State. Yet you do not put it to yourself in quite that way. What you think is only that there are rascals to be turned out of a very practical machinery of offices and functions which you take for granted. When we say that Americans are lawless, we usually mean that they are less conscious than other peoples of the august majesty of the institution of the State as it stands behind the objective government of men and laws which we see. In a republic the men who hold office are indistinguishable from the mass. Very few of them possess the slightest personal dignity with which they could endow their political role; even if they ever thought of such a thing. And they have no class distinction to give them glamour. In a republic the Government is obeyed grumblingly, because it has no bedazzlements or sanctities to gild it. If you are a good old-fashioned democrat, you rejoice at this fact, you glory in the plainness of a system where every citizen has become a king. If you are more sophisticated you bemoan the passing of dignity and honor from affairs of State. But in practice, the democrat does not in the least treat his elected citizen with the respect due to a king, nor does the sophisticated citizen pay tribute to the dignity even when he finds it. The republican State has almost no trappings to appeal to the common man's emotions. What it has are of military origin, and in an unmilitary era such as we have passed through since the Civil War, even military trappings have been scarcely seen. In such an era the sense of the State almost fades out of the consciousness of men.

With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again. The Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling, the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country into war. For the benefit of proud and haughty citizens, it is fortified with a list of the intolerable insults which have been hurled toward us by the other nations; for the benefit of the liberal and beneficent, it has a convincing set of moral purposes which our going to war will achieve; for the ambitious and aggressive classes, it can gently whisper of a bigger role in the destiny of the world. The result is that, even in those countries where the business of declaring war is theoretically in the hands of representatives of the people, no legislature has ever been known to decline the request of an Executive, which has conducted all foreign affairs in utter privacy and irresponsibility, that it order the nation into battle. Good democrats are wont to feel the crucial difference between a State in which the popular Parliament or Congress declares war, and the State in which an absolute monarch or ruling class declares war. But, put to the stern pragmatic test, the difference is not striking. In the freest of republics as well as in the most tyrannical of empires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war, are equally the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves.

The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed themselves. They then, with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government's disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense and hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual bears and should bear toward the society of which he is a part.

The patriot loses all sense of the distinction between State, nation, and government....

...War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense. The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties; the minorities are either intimidated into silence, or brought slowly around by a subtle process of persuasion which may seem to them really to be converting them. Of course, the ideal of perfect loyalty, perfect uniformity is never really attained. The classes upon whom the amateur work of coercion falls are unwearied in their zeal, but often their agitation instead of converting, merely serves to stiffen their resistance. Minorities are rendered sullen, and some intellectual opinion bitter and satirical. But in general, the nation in wartime attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values culminating at the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be produced through any other agency than war. Loyalty - or mystic devotion to the State - becomes the major imagined human value. Other values, such as artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty, the enhancement of life, are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed, and the significant classes who have constituted themselves the amateur agents of the State are engaged not only in sacrificing these values for themselves but in coercing all other persons into sacrificing them....

---

Exclusive: Secret Memo—Send to Be Tortured
Aug. 8, 2005 issue - An FBI agent warned superiors in a memo three years ago that U.S. officials who discussed plans to ship terror suspects to foreign nations that practice torture could be prosecuted for conspiring to violate U.S. law, according to a copy of the memo obtained by NEWSWEEK. The strongly worded memo, written by an FBI supervisor then assigned to Guantanamo, is the latest in a series of documents that have recently surfaced reflecting unease among some government lawyers and FBI agents over tactics being used in the war on terror. This memo appears to be the first that directly questions the legal premises of the Bush administration policy of "extraordinary rendition"—a secret program under which terror suspects are transferred to foreign countries that have been widely criticized for practicing torture.

In a memo forwarded to a senior FBI lawyer on Nov. 27, 2002, a supervisory special agent from the bureau's behavioral analysis unit offered a legal analysis of interrogation techniques that had been approved by Pentagon officials for use against a high-value Qaeda detainee. After objecting to techniques such as exploiting "phobias" like "the fear of dogs" or dripping water "to induce the misperception of drowning," the agent discussed a plan to send the detainee to Jordan, Egypt or an unspecified third country for interrogation. "In as much as the intent of this category is to utilize, outside the U.S., interrogation techniques which would violate [U.S. law] if committed in the U.S., it is a per se violation of the U.S. Torture Statute," the agent wrote. "Discussing any plan which includes this category could be seen as a con-spiracy to violate [the Torture Statute]" and "would inculpate" everyone involved....

---

Leaked emails claim Guantanamo trials rigged
Leaked emails from two former prosecutors claim the military commissions set up to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay are rigged, fraudulent, and thin on evidence against the accused.

Two emails, which have been obtained by the ABC, were sent to supervisors in the Office of Military Commissions in March of last year - three months before Australian detainee David Hicks was charged and five months before his trial began.

The first email is from prosecutor Major Robert Preston to his supervisor.

Maj Preston writes that the process is perpetrating a fraud on the American people, and that the cases being pursued are marginal.

"I consider the insistence on pressing ahead with cases that would be marginal even if properly prepared to be a severe threat to the reputation of the military justice system and even a fraud on the American people," Maj Preston wrote....

---

Iraq: Bush's Islamic Republic
...A Shiite list won a narrow majority in Iraq's January elections. Sponsored by Iraq's leading Shiite, Ali al-Sistani (himself an Iranian who was therefore ineligible to vote for his own list), the list includes Shiite religious parties, some secular Shiites including the one-time Pentagon favorite Ahmad Chalabi, and even a few Sunni Arabs. Real power in Shiite Iraq rests, however, with two religious parties: Abdel Aziz al-Hakim's Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the Dawa ("Call," in English) of Iraq's Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari. Of the two, SCIRI is the more pro-Iranian. Both parties have military wings, and SCIRI's Badr Corps has grown significantly from the five thousand fighters that harassed Saddam's regime from Iran in the decades before the war; it now works closely with Iraq's Shiite interior minister, until recently the corps' commander, to provide security and fight Sunni Arab insurgents.

SCIRI and Dawa want Iraq to be an Islamic state. They propose to make Islam the principal source of law, which most immediately would affect the status of women. For Muslim women, religious law—rather than Iraq's relatively progressive civil code—would govern personal status, including matters relating to marriage, divorce, property, and child custody. A Dawa draft for the Iraqi constitution would limit religious freedom for non-Muslims, and apparently deny such freedom altogether to peoples not "of the book," such as the Yezidis (a significant minority in Kurdistan), Zoroastrians, and Bahais.

This program is not just theoretical. Since Saddam's fall, Shiite religious parties have had de facto control over Iraq's southern cities. There Iranian-style religious police enforce a conservative Islamic code, including dress codes and bans on alcohol and other non-Islamic behavior. In most cases, the religious authorities govern—and legislate—without authority from Baghdad, and certainly without any reference to the freedoms incorporated in Iraq's American-written interim constitution—the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL).

Dawa and SCIRI are not just promoting an Iranian-style political system —they are also directly promoting Iran- ian interests. Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, the SCIRI leader, has advocated paying Iran billions in reparations for damage done in the Iran–Iraq war, even as the Bush administration has been working to win forgiveness for Iraq's Saddam-era debt. Iraq's Shiite oil minister is promoting construction of an export pipeline for petroleum from Basra to the Iranian port city of Abadan, creating an economic and strategic link between the two historic adversaries that would have been unthinkable until now. Iraq's Shiite government has acknowledged Iraq's responsibility for starting the Iran–Iraq war, and apologized. It is an acknowledgment probably justified by the historical record, but one that has infuriated Iraq's Sunni Arabs.

Through its spies, infiltrators, and sympathizers, Iran has a presence in Iraq's security forces and military. It is virtually certain that Iran has access to any intelligence that the Iraqis have. Not only does Iran have an opportunity to insert its people into the Iraqi apparatus, it also has many Iraqi allies willing to do its bidding. When I asked an Iraqi with major intelligence responsibilities about foreign infiltration into Iraq, he dismissed the influx from Syria (the focus of the Bush administration's attention) and said the real problem was from Iran. When I asked how the infiltration took place, he said simply, "But Iran is already in Baghdad."

On July 7, the Iranian and Iraqi defense ministers signed an agreement on military cooperation that would have Iranians train the Iraqi military. The Iraqi defense minister made a point of saying American views would not count: "Nobody can dictate to Iraq its relations with other countries." However, even if the training is deferred or derailed, it is only the visible—and very much smaller—component of a stealth Iranian encroachment into Iraq's national institutions and security services.

So far, the Bush administration seems surprisingly untroubled by the influence in Baghdad of a country to which it has shown unrelenting hostility. But should the President want to understand why the Shiites have shown so little receptivity to his version of democracy, he need only go back to his father's presidency. On February 15, 1991, the first President Bush called on the Iraqi people and military to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The Shiites made the mistake of believing he meant it. Three days after the first Gulf War ended, on March 2, 1991, a Shiite rebellion began in Basra and quickly spread to the southern reaches of Baghdad. Then Saddam counterattacked with great ferocity. Three hundred thousand Shiites ultimately died. Not only did the elder President Bush not help, his administration refused even to hear the pleas of the more and more desperate Shiites. While the elder Bush's behavior may have many explanations, no Shiite I know of sees it as anything other than a calculated plan to have them slaughtered. By contrast, Iran, which backed SCIRI and Dawa and equipped the Badr Brigade, has long been seen as a reliable friend....

---

Millennium bomber sentenced to 22 years
SEATTLE - Ahmed Ressam, the man convicted four years ago of plotting to bomb the Los Angeles Airport on the 2000 millennium, has been sentenced to 22 years in prison. ...

... U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour's made a statement during Wednesday's sentencing hearing for Ahmed Ressam. "Okay. Let me say a few things. First of all, it will come as no surprise to anybody that this sentencing is one that I have struggled with a great deal, more than any other sentencing that I've had in the 24 years I've been on the bench.

"I've done my very best to arrive at a period of confinement that appropriately recognizes the severity of the intended offense, but also recognizes the practicalities of the parties' positions before trial and the cooperation of Mr. Ressam, even though it did terminate prematurely.

"The message I would hope to convey in today's sentencing is twofold:

“First, that we have the resolve in this country to deal with the subject of terrorism and people who engage in it should be prepared to sacrifice a major portion of their life in confinement.

"Secondly, though, I would like to convey the message that our system works. We did not need to use a secret military tribunal, or detain the defendant indefinitely as an enemy combatant, or deny him the right to counsel, or invoke any proceedings beyond those guaranteed by or contrary to the United States Constitution.

Ressam arrived at the courthouse with a heavy security guard detail early Wednesday morning.

"I would suggest that the message to the world from today's sentencing is that our courts have not abandoned our commitment to the ideals that set our nation apart. We can deal with the threats to our national security without denying the accused fundamental constitutional protections.

"Despite the fact that Mr. Ressam is not an American citizen and despite the fact that he entered this country intent upon killing American citizens, he received an effective, vigorous defense, and the opportunity to have his guilt or innocence determined by a jury of 12 ordinary citizens.

"Most importantly, all of this occurred in the sunlight of a public trial. There were no secret proceedings, no indefinite detention, no denial of counsel.

“The tragedy of September 11th shook our sense of security and made us realize that we, too, are vulnerable to acts of terrorism.

"Unfortunately, some believe that this threat renders our Constitution obsolete. This is a Constitution for which men and women have died and continue to die and which has made us a model among nations. If that view is allowed to prevail, the terrorists will have won.

"It is my sworn duty, and as long as there is breath in my body I'll perform it, to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. We will be in recess."

---

Army Probes Guard Unit
Members of a California battalion in Iraq are under investigation for alleged abuse of detainees and extortion of merchants.

A company of the California Army National Guard has been put on restricted duty and its battalion plunged into disarray amid allegations that battalion members mistreated detainees in Iraq and extorted shopkeepers, according to military officials and members of the unit....

---

Cop gets sweet deal in rape of 13-year-old
TEXAS -- Wayne Rowe was arrested, charged, and indicted for sexual assault of a child, but that's not the charge he plead to. Instead, Rowe plead no contest to injury to a child. The new charge means Rowe does not have to register as a sex offender for having sex with a 13-year-old girl.

Ranger Pete Maskunas said, "The child had endured enough problems and enough mental anguish of having to just go through it the first time, that if they could come to another agreement, they would go ahead and plead it out to prevent her from having to testify."...

---

In a series of books written over the past decade, Paul Ormerod has criticised orthodox economics for being too mechanistic and divorced from reality and has argued the case for a new approach. As one might expect from a successful business consultant, these books have eye-catching titles—The Death of Economics, Butterfly Economics and now Why Most Things Fail. Their unifying theme is that economics is in thrall to a 19th-century model based on physics when it should really be looking to biology for inspiration. This would make economics focus on what really matters: complexity, ignorance, rivalry, failure and evolution....

...Ormerod made a similar point in his earlier book Butterfly Economics, where he explored the implications of "non-linearity." Most empirical work in the social sciences is based on the assumption that relationships are linear, so that small changes produce small effects and large changes large effects. However, if relationships are non-linear, the link between cause and effect is more complex. Over a certain range small changes may produce small effects, but at a "tipping point" a small change may produce a very large effect. Moreover, this very large effect may be extremely hard to reverse.

This is the vision that underlies the conservative argument on crime. The extent of criminality in a society, it is argued, is partly a matter of material incentives in the form of rewards and punishments, and partly a matter of socialisation. Consider a society in which the crime rate is initially very low and young people rarely meet criminals who lead them into crime. Suppose that punishments are gradually reduced with the result that crime slowly increases. In itself, this may not be a serious problem. However, at a certain point the crime rate may suddenly shoot upwards, perhaps stabilising at a new and very high plateau. Policymakers are likely to respond to this development by reverting to the harsher penalties which they had previously abandoned. Unfortunately, such penalties may have only a limited impact on the crime rate because decades of liberal policy have given rise to a criminal underclass which reproduces itself by transmitting its values to young people.

Conservatives make similar arguments in many other areas, such as divorce law and welfare for lone parents. In each case, they believe that liberal policies set in train social processes that eventually end in disaster and create situations that are very hard to reverse. The liberal response is to dismiss such fears as paranoid and unsupported by the evidence. This is not the place to adjudicate on the issue. The point is that liberals have a rather linear view of social policy in which small changes normally produce small and reversible effects, whereas conservatives have a non-linear view, believing that small changes often give rise to large, unpredictable and irreversible effects. On environmental issues, such as global warming and biodiversity, the positions of these two groups are reversed. Liberals tend to believe that the world is on the brink of disaster and if we do not mend our ways there will be huge and irreversible changes, whereas conservatives take a more relaxed view.

Like Ormerod's previous books, Why Most Things Fail is both intellectually stimulating and entertaining. And despite his initial dismissal of orthodox economics, Ormerod's attitude is actually rather ambivalent. For example, he praises economics for its emphasis on the role of incentives in social life, and he points out that the new economic ideas which inspire his work were all developed by leading and highly regarded members of the economics profession.

Ormerod, despite being a man of the left, is sceptical of human ability to predict and plan. If this is true, what is the role for government? Should it be merely a nightwatchman, defending the polity against internal and external threats, enforcing property rights and preventing crime, or should its role be much wider? Can the state intervene effectively to achieve aims that commend widespread support? Ormerod does not discuss this issue explicitly, although his stress on failure would suggest that most state intervention is pointless. For example, he argues that government attempts to alter the distribution of income have had little long-term impact....

---

Man accused of killing his 'gay' baby son
Ronnie Paris would shake, wet himself and vomit as his father forced him into a box and repeatedly slapped him on the head in an effort to prevent him from being gay, the child's mother, Nysheerah Paris, testified Monday. The boy was 3 years old when he died from swelling on both sides of the brain on January 28.

Others backed up the mother's testimony on the first day of the capital murder trial of Ronnie Paris Jr., 21, of Tampa, Florida. Paris is accused of physically abusing the toddler until the boy slipped into a coma.

"He was trying to teach him how to fight," the boy's aunt, Shanita Powell, told the court. "He was concerned that the child might be gay."

"He didn't want him to be a sissy," Shelton Bostic, the defendant's Bible-study friend, testified. ...

---

Feds: Fire was hate crime

Federal agents on Monday confirmed the weekend blaze at St. John’s Reformed United Church of Christ in Middlebrook was arson and a hate crime against the church.

“We’re looking at it as a civil rights violation,” Lawrence Barry, spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said Monday.

The arson falls in line with federal hate-crime statutes banning attacks on property “with a religious character.”

Meanwhile, investigators with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms have “definitely” ruled the Saturday morning fire as arson, said Bart McEntire, resident agent in charge of the ATF in southwest Virginia.

Scrawled on the outer brick walls of the Middlebrook church were “SINNER,” “LESB HELL” and “GAYS LOVER.” Investigators, along with St. John’s Pastor Dorcas Lohr, are convinced the graffiti refers to last week’s decision by the national United Church of Christ to endorse gay marriage. The decision is not binding on individual churches....

---

Dog Days of Summer
Reporter’s notebook: Amid explosions, suicide bombers and oppressive heat, an optimist reaches his breaking point.

July 16 - I’ve always been something of an optimist, but everyone has a breaking point. Mine came on Saturday as I toured the infamous “Green Zone” in central Baghdad. This fortress is quite literally the heart of the new Iraq, not to mention the only safe place in the country. Then again, maybe not. Roadblocks, blast walls and barbed wire are the most common sights in this walled-in mini-city, called the international zone, which is fitting because these days it’s guarded by soldiers from Georgia—and I don’t mean the U.S. state.

The Green Zone has changed a lot since I was last here, around 18 months ago, and so has Iraq. But from what little I’ve seen in the last 24 hours, I wonder whether it’s for the worse. The security situation has deteriorated so badly that journalists rarely venture out unless they’re embedded with U.S. soldiers. That wasn’t the case early last year, when foreigners could walk the streets outside the Green Zone, shop in local markets, and, most important to journalists, talk to the Iraqi people. Those days are long gone.

The situation inside the Green Zone is scarcely better. Heavily armed troops guard government buildings and hospitals, menacingly pointing their weapons at any one who approaches. Soldiers manning checkpoints can use deadly force against motorists who fail to heed their instructions, so the warning signs say, and I have no doubt they’d exercise that right in a heartbeat if they felt threatened. All this fear and tension, and inside a six square mile area that’s supposed to be safe.

Amid this insecurity, confusion and oppressive summertime heat, my mind keeps returning to one thing: Dick Cheney. I don’t understand how the U.S. vice president concluded recently that the insurgency terrorizing Iraq was in its “last throes.” We’re obviously not reading the same newspapers. The mere fact that there is a Green Zone should tell you something....

...Say what you will about whether the United States was justified to invade this country. We’re well into the game, and it’s too late to argue over who got the ball first. But prior to April 2003, there were no suicide bombers in Baghdad, there was 24-hour electricity and people went out at night. Now, if you drive into town from the airport, there is a legitimate possibility you will get killed. How long can the insurgents keep it up? Who knows, but they haven’t let the dust and heat of summertime Iraq stop them. Let’s just say that the insurgency doesn’t take the day off because of weather conditions....

---

Christians and Terrorism
When did my departure from evangelicalism begin? On the day the war in Iraq began. Nearly each Sunday was a sorrow; each Thursday Bible study worse.

It wasn't that war was preached from the pulpit. It usually wasn't. It's that there seemed to be utter unanymity among my fellow church members that the war was right and just, beyond question or biblical challenge.

Every Sunday I opened the church bulletin to see a call to pray for our soldiers, who were "defending our freedom." Never once was there a call in print or aloud to pray for the people of Iraq.

When we would visit other churches when we were traveling it was far worse. Once I walked out in protest of the pro-war rally that the Sunday service had become.

I had stopped listening to Christian radio long before--just after September 11, when suddenly people for whom Christ died were "monsters" who deserved our deepest revenge.

Never talk of peace, never a mention of answering a curse with blessing, never a word about forgiveness or reconciliation, never a prayer for our nation's enemies.

But always unquestioning support of war and the war president.

In church. On Christian radio. Week in. Week out....

---

Bush honesty rating drops to lowest point
NBC/WSJ poll: Iraq replaces jobs as most important American priority

WASHINGTON - The last two weeks certainly have been eventful ones in America and across the globe: President Bush gave a prime-time speech on Iraq and attended a G-8 summit in Scotland; Sandra Day O’Connor announced her retirement from the Supreme Court (with perhaps another retirement on the way); and suicide bombers killed approximately 50 people in London. After these events, the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that Bush’s overall job rating has slipped and that his rating for being “honest and straightforward” has dropped to its lowest point.

Regarding Bush’s upcoming pick to replace O’Connor on the court, moreover, the poll shows that strong majorities believe Bush would be taking a step in the right direction if he appointed a woman and someone who supports references to God in public life. But a majority also thinks that Bush would take a wrong step if he chose someone who would vote to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion.

The survey, which was conducted from July 8-11 among 1,009 adults, and which has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, finds that respondents, by a 49 percent-to-46 percent margin, disapprove of Bush’s job performance. That’s a drop from the last NBC/Journal poll in May, when 47 percent approved and 47 percent disapproved. In addition, the only time when Bush’s job rating has been worse was in June 2004, when 45 percent approved of his performance. ...

...Furthermore, only 41 percent give Bush good marks for being “honest and straightforward” — his lowest ranking on this question since he became president. That’s a drop of nine percentage points since January, when a majority (50 percent to 36 percent) indicated that he was honest and straightforward. This finding comes at a time when the Bush administration is battling the perception that its rhetoric doesn’t match the realities in Iraq, and also allegations that chief political adviser Karl Rove leaked sensitive information about a CIA agent to a reporter. (The survey, however, was taken just before these allegations about Rove exploded into the current controversy.)...

---

Abu Ghraib Tactics Were First Used at Guantanamo
Interrogators at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, forced a stubborn detainee to wear women's underwear on his head, confronted him with snarling military working dogs and attached a leash to his chains, according to a newly released military investigation that shows the tactics were employed there months before military police used them on detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The techniques, approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for use in interrogating Mohamed Qahtani -- the alleged "20th hijacker" in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks -- were used at Guantanamo Bay in late 2002 as part of a special interrogation plan aimed at breaking down the silent detainee.

Military investigators who briefed the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday on the three-month probe, called the tactics "creative" and "aggressive" but said they did not cross the line into torture.

The report's findings are the strongest indication yet that the abusive practices seen in photographs at Abu Ghraib were not the invention of a small group of thrill-seeking military police officers. The report shows that they were used on Qahtani several months before the United States invaded Iraq.

The investigation also supports the idea that soldiers believed that placing hoods on detainees, forcing them to appear nude in front of women and sexually humiliating them were approved interrogation techniques for use on detainees.

A central figure in the investigation, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who commanded the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and later helped set up U.S. operations at Abu Ghraib, was accused of failing to properly supervise Qahtani's interrogation plan and was recommended for reprimand by investigators. Miller would have been the highest-ranking officer to face discipline for detainee abuses so far, but Gen. Bantz Craddock, head of the U.S. Southern Command, declined to follow the recommendation.

Miller traveled to Iraq in September 2003 to assist in Abu Ghraib's startup, and he later sent in "Tiger Teams" of Guantanamo Bay interrogators and analysts as advisers and trainers. Within weeks of his departure from Abu Ghraib, military working dogs were being used in interrogations, and naked detainees were humiliated and abused by military police soldiers working the night shift.

Miller declined to respond to questions posed through a Defense Department liaison. Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said it is not appropriate to link the interrogation of Qahtani -- an important al Qaeda operative captured shortly after the terrorist attacks -- and events at Abu Ghraib. Whitman said interrogation tactics in the Army's field manual are the same worldwide but MPs at Abu Ghraib were not authorized to apply them, regardless of how they learned about them.

Some of the Abu Ghraib soldiers have said they were following the directionsof military intelligence officials to soften up detainees for interrogation, in part by depriving them of sleep. Pvt. Charles A. Graner Jr., characterized as the ringleader of the MP group, was found guilty of abusing detainees and is serving 10 years in prison. Others have pleaded guilty and received lesser sentences.

The photos that caused alarm around the world included some showing the MPs sexually humiliating the detainees.

While Rumsfeld approved a list of 16 harsh techniques for use at Guantanamo on Dec. 2, 2002, most of the techniques were general and allowed for interpretation by interrogators. Many of the techniques involving humiliation were part of a standard "futility" or "ego down" approach.

"Reasonable people always suspected these techniques weren't invented in the backwoods of West Virginia," said Tom Malinowski, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch. "It's never been more clear than in this investigation."...

---

Baptists run amok II
...At the other extreme, the wimps lack all manly conviction and character. Robbed of ambition, moral formation, and courage, wimps "make worthless watchdogs." The wimp is incapable of living up to his responsibilities as a man, and shows no valor in his public or private life. "Many of today's young men seem to have no fight in them at all. Not for them to rescue damsels in distress from the barbarians," Moore sadly reflects. The wimp is always looking for the easiest way out of a problem.

With respect to women, barbarians demonstrate a crudeness, profanity, and violence that treats women merely as sex objects for male pleasure. Barbarians show women no respect, and are completely lacking in the manly virtues of protection and respect for the well being of women. Wimps, on the other hand, look to women for emotional support, consider girlfriends to be conversation partners, and look to women for pity. They are shameless....

---

Baptists run amok I
...This is because of my overall philosophy of childrearing. I am aiming to raise up violent sons.

I am not seeking to raise sons who are violent in the amoral, pagan sense of contemporary teenagers playing "Grand Theft Auto" video games or carjacking motorists. I want them to be more violent than that.

I want them to understand that the Christian life is not a Hallmark Channel version of baptized sentimentality. Instead, it is a cosmic battle between an evil dragon and the child of the woman, an ancient warfare that now includes all who belong to the Child of the Promise (Rev 12). I want them to forgive their enemies, not because they are good boys, but because they understand that vengeance against the Serpent comes not from their hand, but from that of the anointed Warrior-King (Rev 19), whose blood-soaked garments don't often transfer to the imagery of a Precious Moments wall-hanging. And I want them to exercise self-control of their passions, not because it is polite, but because they are called to struggle against the Evil One, even to the point of cutting off their own limbs rather than succumb to devices. ...

---

Bomb suspects 'had been arrested before'
Some of the suspected suicide bombers who attacked London last week had been arrested in 2004 but freed in a bid to catch a wider network, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy has claimed.

"It seems that part of this team had been subject to partial arrest... in Spring 2004," Sarkozy told a news conference, reportedly quoting what British Home Secretary Charles Clarke had told an emergency meeting of EU justice and home affairs ministers.

But Mr Clarke has strenuously denied the claims. ...

---

A Hawk Questions Himself as His Son Goes to War
...As I watched President Bush give his speech at Fort Bragg to rally support for the war the other week, I contemplated this question from a different vantage than my usual professorial perch. Our oldest son now dresses like the impassive soldiers who served as stage props for that event; he too wears crossed rifles, jump wings and a Ranger tab. Before long he will fight in the war that I advocated, and that the president was defending....

...But a pundit should not recommend a policy without adequate regard for the ability of those in charge to execute it, and here I stumbled. I could not imagine, for example, that the civilian and military high command would treat "Phase IV" -- the post-combat period that has killed far more Americans than the "real" war -- as of secondary importance to the planning of Gen. Tommy Franks's blitzkrieg. I never dreamed that Ambassador Paul Bremer and Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the two top civilian and military leaders early in the occupation of Iraq -- brave, honorable and committed though they were -- would be so unsuited for their tasks, and that they would serve their full length of duty nonetheless. I did not expect that we would begin the occupation with cockamamie schemes of creating an immobile Iraqi army to defend the country's borders rather than maintain internal order, or that the under-planned, under-prepared and in some respects mis-manned Coalition Provisional Authority would seek to rebuild Iraq with big construction contracts awarded under federal acquisition regulations, rather than with small grants aimed at getting angry, bewildered young Iraqi men off the streets and into jobs.

I did not know, but I might have guessed....

---

Allegations of Fake Research Hit New High
Allegations of misconduct by U.S. researchers reached record highs last year as the Department of Health and Human Services received 274 complaints _ 50 percent higher than 2003 and the most since 1989 when the federal government established a program to deal with scientific misconduct.

Chris Pascal, director of the federal Office of Research Integrity, said its 28 staffers and $7 million annual budget haven't kept pace with the allegations. The result: Only 23 cases were closed last year. Of those, eight individuals were found guilty of research misconduct. In the past 15 years, the office has confirmed about 185 cases of scientific misconduct.

Research suggests this is but a small fraction of all the incidents of fabrication, falsification and plagiarism. In a survey published June 9 in the journal Nature, about 1.5 percent of 3,247 researchers who responded admitted to falsification or plagiarism. (One in three admitted to some type of professional misbehavior.)

On the night of his 12th wedding anniversary, Dr. Andrew Friedman was terrified.

This brilliant surgeon and researcher at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School feared that he was about to lose everything _ his career, his family, the life he'd built _ because his boss was coming closer and closer to the truth:

For the past three years, Friedman had been faking _ actually making up _ data in some of the respected, peer-reviewed studies he had published in top medical journals.

"It is difficult for me to describe the degree of panic and irrational thought that I was going through," he would later tell an inquiry panel at Harvard.

On this night, March 13, 1995, he had been ordered in writing by his department chair to clear up what appeared to be suspicious data.

But Friedman didn't clear things up.

"I did something which was the worst possible thing I could have done," he testified.

He went to the medical record room, and for the next three or four hours he pulled out permanent medical files of a handful of patients. Then, covered up his lies, scribbling in the information he needed to support his study.

"I created data. I made it up. I also made up patients that were fictitious," he testified. ...

---

America's neo-conservative world supremacists will fail
Current US megalomania is rooted in the Puritan colonists' certainties

...The third thread of continuity links the neo-conservatives of George Bush with the Puritan colonists' certainty of being God's instrument on earth and with the American Revolution - which, like all major revolutions, developed world-missionary convictions, limited only by the wish to shield the the new society of potentially universal freedom from the corruptions of the unreconstructed old world. The most effective way of finessing this conflict between isolationism and globalism was to be systematically exploited in the 20th century and still serves Washington well in the 21st. It was to discover an alien enemy outside who posed an immediate, mortal threat to the American way of life and the lives of its citizens. The end of the USSR removed the obvious candidate, but by the early 90s another had been detected in a "clash" between the west and other cultures reluctant to accept it, notably Islam. Hence the enormous political potential of the al-Qaida outrages of September 11 was immediately recognised and exploited by the Washington world-dominators.

The first world war, which made the US into a global power, saw the first attempt to translate these world-converting visions into reality, but Woodrow Wilson's failure was spectacular; perhaps it should be a lesson to the current world-supremacist ideologists in Washington, who, rightly, recognise Wilson as a predecessor....

---

A formula for unchecked power
For the most part, conservatives and libertarians have cheered the decline of the liberal media establishment over the past two decades.

But if that liberal establishment falls completely - if reporters are threatened with jail for doing their jobs - there will be occasion for second thoughts, as we are reminded that the ultimate enemy of freedom is the unchecked power of the state....

...Without question, the new media in aggregate are much more representative of the true ideological diversity of the country. So what's not to like?

Only this. The decline of the MSM has led to the rise, in terms of relative power, of the federal government. And while the institutional Right might be happy about that as long as George W. Bush is president, surely everyone who leans starboard will feel differently when, say, President Hillary Rodham Clinton sits atop the commanding heights of state power. If a right-leaning Federal Communications Commission can use "decency" as a hammer against Howard Stern today, what's to stop an imaginative lefty lawyer from smashing Rush Limbaugh tomorrow?

But the immediate flashpoint is the case of Valerie Plame, the "outed" CIA agent and wife of a former diplomat critical of U.S. policy on Iraq. In a nutshell, two reporters, Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matt Cooper of Time magazine, were threatened with jail for not revealing their sources and telling a federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, what they learned about Plame from the White House - perhaps from Mr. Big himself, Karl Rove.

The two reporters had tried to invoke traditional "shield" privileges, but Fitzgerald aims to pierce that shield. And the public, for its part, has seemed uninterested in the case. In an era of downsizing and market segmentation, no MSM entity has the resources to wage a long struggle against the government. Cooper has agreed to testify, while the sturdier Miller has gone to jail.

Thus the new landscape: The government is bigger and stronger than ever. The media are fragmented. It's a perfect formula for the government's divide-and-conquer strategy. So the state can curl its fist anytime it wishes, confident it can smash any single one of us, one by one by one.

---

Secret Plan To Quit Iraq
07/10/05 "Mail on Sunday" - - Britain And America are secretly preparing to withdraw most of their troops from Iraq - despite warnings of the grave consequences for the region, The Mail on Sunday has learned.

A secret paper written by Defence Secretary John Reid for Tony Blair reveals that many of the 8,500 British troops in Iraq are set to be brought home within three months, with most of the rest returning six months later.

The leaked document, marked Secret: UK Eyes Only, appears to fly in the face of Mr Blair and President Bush's pledges that Allied forces will not quit until Iraq's own forces are strong enough to take control of security.

If British troops pull out, other members of the Alliance are likely to follow. The memo says other international forces in Southern Iraq currently under British control will have to be handled carefully if Britain withdraws. It says they will not feel safe and may also leave.

Embarrassingly, the document says the Americans are split over the plan - and it suggests one of the reasons for getting British troops out is to save money. Mr Reid says cutting UK troop numbers to 3,000 by the middle of next year will save £500 million a year, though it will be 18 months before the cash comes through.

The document, Options For Future UK Force Posture In Iraq, is the first conclusive proof that preparations for a major withdrawal from Iraq are well advanced. ...

---

In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not
aboriginal, though they existed before we were born; that they are not superior
to the citizen; that every one of them was once the act of a single man; every
law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular case; that they all
are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better."
-- Ralph Raldo Emerson - (1803-1882) Source: Essays, Second Series (1844)

---

Pastor, teachers beat teen for not going to church
A PASTOR and two Bible studies teachers bashed a 19-year-old Korean woman because they thought she had been disrespectful to her parents and had stopped attending church.

Chi Yeong Yun, a junior pastor at the Open Door Presbyterian Church in Chatswood, and Bible study teachers James Kang and Tom Chae-Young Lee pleaded guilty yesterday to assaulting Angela Kim at a park at Sydney's Bobbin Head in July last year.

The NSW District Court heard the men believed the young woman had stopped going to church, had been disrespectful to her elders and had been spending too much time on her web page. ...

---

Paper Says Edible Meat Can be Grown in a Lab on Industrial Scale
Experiments for NASA space missions have shown that small amounts of edible meat can be created in a lab. But the technology that could grow chicken nuggets without the chicken, on a large scale, may not be just a science fiction fantasy.

In a paper in the June 29 issue of Tissue Engineering, a team of scientists, including University of Maryland doctoral student Jason Matheny, propose two new techniques of tissue engineering that may one day lead to affordable production of in vitro - lab grown -- meat for human consumption. It is the first peer-reviewed discussion of the prospects for industrial production of cultured meat.

"There would be a lot of benefits from cultured meat," says Matheny, who studies agricultural economics and public health. "For one thing, you could control the nutrients. For example, most meats are high in the fatty acid Omega 6, which can cause high cholesterol and other health problems. With in vitro meat, you could replace that with Omega 3, which is a healthy fat....

..."The challenge is getting the texture right," says Matheny. "We have to figure out how to 'exercise' the muscle cells. For the right texture, you have to stretch the tissue, like a live animal would."...

---

Trooper Accused Again Of Making Suspects Strip
CHICAGO -- A suspended Illinois State Police trooper was charged for the second time in less than a week for allegedly forcing people to strip while on the job.

Jeremy Dozier faces official misconduct charges, NBC5 reported.

Police said last April in Gurnee, Dozier forced two occupants of a car -- a 17-year-old woman and a 20-year-old man -- to undress and run around a construction site.

Dozier is also accused of forcing another young couple to strip on Interstate 94 last week....

---

Baltimore Sun
THE ARMY can't find enough recruits. Could there be a clearer expression of Americans' disenchantment with the war in Iraq?

This is democracy where it matters. No one should doubt that young Americans would willingly go to war if they believed in it. But this is a war of choice that began with fabrications and has been marked by blunders at the highest level -- blunders that have resulted in many lives lost. Over two years, the aims of this war have shifted like dunes in the desert. President Bush, moreover, has told Americans they need not make any sacrifices; to the contrary, he has pursued tax cuts. This is not inspiring. This is deceptive and dishonorable. Yet the Army expects young idealists to sign up anyway, for hazardous duty in a treacherous country, where the violence shows no signs of letting up and the generals show no signs of knowing what to do about it.

It's no surprise that the idealists are staying away. Certainly, the sons and daughters of the unimpeachably idealistic neoconservatives who prayed for the war and brayed for what they stupidly supposed was victory back in 2003 are staying as far away from it as they possibly can. So now the Army's recruiters, who reached their goal in June for the first time in five months, but still expect to fall short for the year, have another plan. ...

---

YRNC2005 Convention Chairman Responds to Attacks by Leftists
...The childish insults and threatened protests of these leftists reveal ignorance of, and disrespect for, the sacrifice borne by many hosted by the Convention,” Taylor continued. “Most of our members either serve, have served, or plan to serve in the United States Armed Forces, or have participated in events or projects supporting the United States Armed Forces. We will not be intimidated....

---

The Stain of Torture
Having served as a doctor in the Army Medical Corps early in my career and as presidential physician to George H.W. Bush for four years, I might be expected to bring a skeptical and partisan perspective to allegations of torture and abuse by U.S. forces. I might even be expected to join those who, on the one hand, deny that U.S. personnel have engaged in systematic use of torture while, on the other, claiming that such abuse is justified. But I cannot do so.

It's precisely because of my devotion to country, respect for our military and commitment to the ethics of the medical profession that I speak out against systematic, government-sanctioned torture and excessive abuse of prisoners during our war on terrorism. I am also deeply disturbed by the reported complicity in these abuses of military medical personnel. This extraordinary shift in policy and values is alien to my concept of modern-day America and of my government and profession....

---

Apocalyptic book series gets first video game
‘Left Behind: Eternal Forces’ to be released between December and April

SAN FRANCISCO - The first video game tied to the best-selling apocalyptic "Left Behind" book series will be released in coming months, a spokesman for Left Behind Games said Wednesday.

The PC game is titled "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" and will be released between December and April. Retail pricing was not immediately available....