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Pat Robertson says Bush told him there would be no casualties in Iraq war
Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson says he warned President Bush before U.S. troops invaded Iraq that the United States would sustain casualties but that Bush responded, "Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties."

White House and campaign advisers denied Bush made the comment, with adviser Karen Hughes saying, "I don't believe that happened. He must have misunderstood or misheard it." ...

..."He was just sitting there, like, 'I'm on top of the world,' and I warned him about this war," Robertson said.

"I had deep misgivings about this war, deep misgivings. And I was trying to say, 'Mr. President, you better prepare the American people for casualties.' 'Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties.' 'Well,' I said, 'it's the way it's going to be.' And so, it was messy. The Lord told me it was going to be, A, a disaster and, B, messy." ...

...Robertson, the founder of the Christian Coalition and a candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 1988, said he supports Bush's re-election and believes the president is blessed by God.

"I think God's blessing him, and I think it's one of those things that, even if he stumbles and messes up -- and he's had his share of goofs and gaffes -- I just think God's blessing is on him," Robertson said. "And you remember, I think the Chinese used to say, you know, it's the blessing of heaven on the emperor. And I think the blessing of heaven is on Bush. It's just the way it is."

In January, Robertson told viewers during his "700 Club" television program that God had told him Bush would win re-election in a blowout." In the CNN interview, Robertson said he believes Bush will win by a "razor-thin" margin but by a substantial Electoral College victory.

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Generation Chickenhawk
...Munching on a chicken quesadilla at a table nearby was Edward Hauser, a senior at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas--a liberal school in a liberal town in the ultimate red state of Texas. "Austin is ninety square miles insulated from reality," Hauser said. When I broached the issue of Iraq, he replied, "I support our country. I support our troops." So why isn't he there?

"I know that I'm going to be better staying here and working to convince people why we're there [in Iraq]," Hauser explained, pausing in thought. "I'm a fighter, but with words."

At a table by the buffet was Justin Palmer, vice chairman of the Georgia Association of College Republicans, America's largest chapter of College Republicans. In 1984 the group gained prominence in conservative circles when its chairman, Ralph Reed, formed a political action committee credited with helping to re-elect Senator Jesse Helms. Palmer's future as a right-wing operative looked bright; he batted away my question about his decision to avoid fighting the war he supported with the closest thing I heard to a talking point all afternoon. "The country is like a body," Palmer explained, "and each part of the body has a different function. Certain people do certain things better than others." He said his "function" was planning a "Support Our Troops" day on campus this year in which students honored military recruiters from all four branches of the service.

Standing by Palmer's side and sipping a glass of rose wine, University of Georgia Republican member Kiera Ranke said she played her part as well. She and her sorority sisters sent care packages to troops in Iraq along with letters and pictures of themselves. "They wrote back and told us we boosted their morale," she said.

By the time I encountered Cory Bray, a towering senior from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, the beer was flowing freely. "The people opposed to the war aren't putting their asses on the line," Bray boomed from beside the bar. Then why isn't he putting his ass on the line? "I'm not putting my ass on the line because I had the opportunity to go to the number-one business school in the country," he declared, his voice rising in defensive anger, "and I wasn't going to pass that up." ...

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Society's unhealthy obsession with abuse
Sir Roy Meadow is not single-handedly responsible for a culture that sees child abuse everywhere.

Retired paediatrician Roy Meadow is currently facing charges of gross professional misconduct before the General Medical Council in connection with his evidence against a number of parents wrongfully convicted of killing their children.

Over the past two decades he has helped to popularise the view that children are being abused and even killed by their parents much more commonly than was previously believed. But he did not single-handedly create the obsession with abuse that led to these unjust convictions. Nor are these parents the only victims of a climate of opinion that is predisposed to believe the worst about how people behave in intimate relationships.

According to Dr James Le Fanu, 'the medical advocacy of contentious theories of the mechanisms of child abuse is likely to have been responsible for a systematic miscarriage of justice on a scale without precedent in British legal history - with devastating consequences for the parents wrongly convicted'. Though the scale of these injustices remains unclear - in only a handful of cases has a guilty verdict so far been overturned - the consequences of such wrongful convictions are undoubtedly devastating.

Dr Le Fanu traces the origins of the current situation back to the 1980s, when Professor Meadow (and Dr David Southall, the subject of earlier disciplinary proceedings at the GMC) described 'two covert forms of child abuse' - factitious illness (which Meadow labeled Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy) and smothering (famously exposed by Southall through covert video surveillance) (1).

Individual doctors, no matter how brilliant and charismatic, do not have the power to transform the culture of society in relation to a matter as important as the ill-treatment of children by their parents. A closer look at the new outlook on children that emerged in British society in the 1980s reveals that when Professor Meadow and his colleagues suggested that there was 'a hidden epidemic of child abuse' there was widespread acceptance of this view, among medical - and legal - professionals, the media and the general public....

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The Young & the Sexless
..."The world hasn't yet seen what God can do with an army of young men free of sexual fevers," write the authors of Every Young Man's Battle, one volume in a hugely popular series of "purity" manuals. "You can remain pure so that you might qualify for such an army."...

...Wrapped around his wrist, in a figure eight, is a black plastic bracelet. "This," he says, "is a 'masturband.' " One of their friends at college -- Pepperdine University -- came up with the idea. As long as you stay pure -- resist jerking off -- you can wear your masturband. Give in, and off it goes, a scarlet letter in reverse. No masturband? No one wants to shake your hand. "It started with just four of us," says Dunbar. "Then there were, like, twenty guys wearing them. And girls too. The more people that wore them, the more people knew, the more reason you had to refrain." Dunbar even told his mother. He lasted the longest. "Eight and a half months," he says. I notice he's not wearing one now. He's not embarrassed. Sexuality, he believes, is not a private matter....

...But it's not just feminism that's to blame. It's also what the Christian right sees as an effeminized church. "Christianity, as it currently exists, has done some terrible things to men," writes John Eldredge, the author of a best-selling manhood guide called Wild at Heart. He thinks that church life in America has pacified Christian men and made them weak. Women who are frustrated with their girlie-man husbands and boyfriends seize power, and the men retreat to the safe haven of porn instead of whipping the ladies back into line. What women really want, he says, "is to be fought for." And men, he claims, are "hard-wired" by God for battle; Jesus wants them to be warriors in the vein of Braveheart and Gladiator.

Wild at Heart and Eldredge's other best sellers, The Journey of Desire and The Sacred Romance (as well as "field manual" workbooks that can be purchased separately), address sexual "purity" as part of the fabric of Christian manliness. The most important of these books is Every Man's Battle, which, in the past five years, has become a powerful brand name unto itself, with dozens of Every Man spinoff titles: Every Young Man's Battle, Every Woman's Battle, Preparing Your Son for Every Man's Battle and on and on. There's also an Every Young Man's Battle movie filmed on actual battlefields from history and featuring an interview with former NFL player William White and a discussion between Christian-right leader Dr. James Dobson and serial killer Ted Bundy.

The Every Man premise is that men are sexual beasts, so sinful by nature that, without God in their lives, they don't stand a chance of resisting temptation in the form of premarital sex, masturbation and straying eyes. I first heard about the Every Man books from a volunteer at the Journey, a twenty-five-year-old man who said he'd slept with forty women before he re-virgined with the help of the series.

"Your goal is sexual purity," write Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker. "You are sexually pure when no sexual gratification comes from anyone or anything but your wife." To achieve this, they argue, men must go to a kind of war. Citing Dobson, they note the "fact" that men experience a buildup of sperm demanding "release" approximately every seventy-two hours. For single men, wet dreams, if purged of sexual imagery, can act as "God's natural release valve." (Arterburn and Stoeker believe you can actually train yourself to remove the lust from such dreams.) "Your life is under a withering barrage of machine-gun sexuality that rakes the landscape mercilessly," they report. They encourage making lists of "areas of weakness." They seem particularly concerned with shorts: "nubile sweat-soaked girls in tight nylon shorts"; "female joggers in tight nylon shorts"; "young mothers in shorts, leaning over to pull children out of car seats." To avoid these temptations, men must train themselves to "bounce" their eyes off female curves. They recommend memorizing the locations of sexy billboards so that you can look away and switching your TV to ESPN or Fox News if a tempting commercial comes on the screen. And there's always Scripture. The authors hold up the books of Joshua and Ezekiel as armor against non-Christian women. "Mixture," they write, "can destroy a people."...

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Politics
...The attitude on both sides of the aisle is that the ultimate principle is, simply, getting your guy in power. Donkeys and elephants above all else. The Elite Left's reaction to Raich and to Kelo has been abominable, and a wholesale selling out of traditional leftist principles. Why'd they do it? Because someday, the donkeys might run this country again. And when/if they do, they want an all-powerful federal government at their disposal.

And what of the right? The Bush administration sided with the leftist justices on Raich. And had the Bush administration filed a brief in Kelo, it would have filed it in opposition to the homeowners. Of course, that might have something to do with the fact that our president himself abused eminent domain to make room the baseball stadium the state of Texas gave him. Shortly before he became governor. But that doesn't matter. A conservative activist told me recently that he sort of sympathized with medical marijuana patients but that frankly, he was okay with Raich, because he didn't want the give those hippies any victories (his words). He also conceded that the only guiding principle in his political activism is to "help my team move the ball down the field."

The sports analogy is apt. Political activism is about for your favorite team. Nothing more. The actual consequences are the same no matter who wins -- more government, more collectivism, fewer individual rights, less freedom. The last ten years have proven that. The last four have emphatically driven it home....

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Kelo, Raich and the Left
You know, the next time some thick-headed liberal spouts off about how I or my employer, the Cato Institute, shouldn't be taken seriously because we're "funded by corporations," (a vacant charge, but that's beside the point) I think I'll point to Kelo....

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GOD AND COUNTRY
A college that trains young Christians to be politicians.

...Muench, like eighty-five per cent of the students at Patrick Henry, was homeschooled, in her case in rural Idaho. Homeschoolers are not the most obvious raw material for a college whose main mission, since its founding, five years ago, has been to train a new generation of Christian politicians. Politics, after all, is the most social of professions, and many students arrive at Patrick Henry having never shared a classroom with anyone other than their siblings. In conservative circles, however, homeschoolers are considered something of an élite, rough around the edges but pure—in their focus, capacity for work, and ideological clarity—a view that helps explain why the Republican establishment has placed its support behind Patrick Henry, and why so many conservative politicians are hiring its graduates....

...Farris’s manifesto for the school, “The Joshua Generation,” embraces the Rove principle: the “Moses generation,” he wrote, had “left Egypt,” and now it was time for their children to “take the land.”...

...On a Wednesday afternoon, I sat in on a class on the Presidency. There were fourteen students, all of whom arrived on time and got out their laptops to take notes. Today, they were talking about Machiavelli. The professor, Robert Stacey, who has a trim ginger-colored beard and is a popular, lively teacher, pushed the students to think about Machiavelli’s suggestion that leaders create fear to maintain their authority. He brought up the example of the federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993. One student asked, “Did they really represent such a big threat to our country?”

“No, but it unified the country, in an us-versus-them sort of way,” another answered.

Then Stacey moved on to Machiavelli’s principle that politics is governed by conspiracies and lies. “Come on, we know politicians lie,” he began. “This is a bit sensitive. How about our beloved George W. Bush? Does he deceive us with what he says in public? Does he lie?”

The students, who had been fully engaged on the subject of Machiavelli and Waco, were silent. Bush has been President since they were teen-agers, and the school newspaper’s editorials never deviate from the White House position. Finally, one student said, “No, I don’t think so.”

Stacey didn’t say anything. After a pause, the student said, “I mean, it would be nice if he didn’t.”...

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The Supreme Court's Jackboot Liberals
So much for the right to die in your own home, smoking a joint to take your mind off the pain. Thanks to the liberals on the U.S. Supreme Court, the feds haul you to prison from from your death bed for smoking medical marijuana and any local authority raze your house and give the land to Walmart for a parking lot. ...

...Liberals love eminent domain, as much as conservatives love the death penalty, and like many liberal passions it destroys far more lives than the gas chamber or the lethal needle....

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Worship as Higher Politics
Political priorities for citizens of the kingdom.
A Christianity Today editorial

George W. Bush is not Lord. The Declaration of Independence is not an infallible guide to Christian faith and practice. Nor is the U.S. Constitution, nor the U.N. Universal Declaration on Human Rights. "Original intent" of America's founders is not the hermeneutical key that will guarantee national righteousness. The American flag is not the Cross. The Pledge of Allegiance is not the Creed. "God Bless America" is not the Doxology.

Sometimes one needs to state the obvious—especially at times when it's less and less obvious.

Understandably, megachurch pastor Rod Parsley (World Harvest Church in Columbus, Ohio) has had enough of America's moral confusion. But in his newly published Silent No More: Bringing Moral Clarity to America … While Freedom Still Rings (Charisma House, 2005), he writes (not so understandably), "I can be silent no more. Not until the land of our fathers' dream arises. Not until we become the truly kind and noble society we were fashioned to be. Not until the commitment of our fathers truly does become the calling of our times."...

...Family Research Council (FRC) Action is a lobbying arm of FRC, and as such it is not explicitly religious in its public presentation. But it is known far and wide as an outpost of the Christian Right. So it can only reap confusion when it posts this endorsement from former U.S. Senator Bob Smith of New Hampshire: "Just beneath our superficial prosperity is a moral and cultural center that is in serious disrepair. We have the tools to fix it: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution … and a people whose hearts, courage, and dedication have never been questioned."

As important as the Declaration and Constitution are to the political health of our nation, surely nobody at FRC Action believes that these documents are the key to fixing the "serious disrepair" at our nation's "moral center."

And for some time now, we've been hearing from David Barton, Peter Marshall, and James Kennedy, among others, about "renewing the vision of our founding fathers, as expressed in America's founding documents," and the need "to defend and implement the biblical principles on which our country was founded."

The not-so-subtle equation of America's founding with biblical Christianity has been shown time and again to be historically inaccurate. The founding was a unique combination of biblical teaching and Enlightenment rationalism, and most of the founding fathers, as historian Edwin Gaustad, among many others, has noted, were not orthodox Christians, but instead were primarily products of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, we should recall, has never been much of a friend of biblical Christianity....

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Jesus and Justice
How Billy Graham tactfully led evangelicals on race at his first New York City crusade.

...Graham chose to make his stand in the heart of the segregated South. He initially agreed to segregate the audience during his 1952 campaign in Jackson, Mississippi, but rejected Governor Hugh White's suggestion to conduct separate meetings for blacks. Meanwhile, Graham prepared to make a much bolder statement. Holding segregated events had always struck him as wrong, but he'd never chosen to take decisive action—until now. Walking toward the ropes that separated blacks and whites, Graham tore them down.

Mystified and uncomfortable ushers tried to put the ropes back up. Graham personally stopped them.

This symbolically powerful gesture marked a major ministry watershed. He never again led a segregated campaign....

...Graham's brief foray into Harlem produced the intended result of involving African Americans and marked the beginning of an important relationship. Two rally organizers were close friends and advisers of Martin Luther King Jr. Together with King, they huddled with Graham in private strategy meetings and even swapped dreams of conducting joint evangelistic crusades. But the union was not to be. King's approach was too political for Graham's taste, and they agreed to seek change in separate spheres.

Graham did invite King to give a prayer at the meetings, a symbolic move that further solidified his commitment to the movement toward racial equality. "A great social revolution is going on in the United States today," Graham said as he introduced King. "Dr. King is one of its leaders, and we appreciate his taking time out of his busy schedule to come and share this service with us tonight."...

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Billy Graham’s Final Crusade
...Rather than speak to the issue of segregation directly, Graham invited Dr. King to lead in prayer during one of crusade’s services. Some Christian leaders criticized Graham for what they saw as his failure to use his own national reputation to help advance the cause of civil rights. But sympathetic historians argue that Graham’s willingness to reach out to Dr. King sent a clear signal of support. Graham is reported to have said that a Christian racist was an oxymoron....

...The experience of Watergate, however and the revelations of Nixon’s corruption was a sobering epiphany for Graham. In fact, during the early days of the rise of the Moral Majority—the early flag ship venture of the religious right—Graham warned of the dangers of linking faith’s reputation to political parties. A lesson he learned the hard way.

And a lesson that seems to continue as a source of wisdom. In a recent interview about the upcoming evangelistic campaign, Graham said he would not preach about any of the political issues important to evangelical conservatives, including abortion, homosexuality and stem cell research.

“I’m just going to preach the gospel and am not going to get off on these hot-button issues,” Graham told the New York Times. “If I get on these other subjects, it divides the audience.” ...

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Young Republicans support Iraq war, but not all are willing to join the fight
NEW YORK - Young Republicans gathered here for their party's national convention are united in applauding the war in Iraq, supporting the U.S. troops there and calling the U.S. mission a noble cause.

But there's no such unanimity when they're asked a more personal question: Would you be willing to put on the uniform and go to fight in Iraq?

In more than a dozen interviews, Republicans in their teens and 20s offered a range of answers. Some have friends in the military in Iraq and are considering enlisting; others said they can better support the war by working politically in the United States; and still others said they think the military doesn't need them because the U.S. presence in Iraq is sufficient.

"Frankly, I want to be a politician. I'd like to survive to see that," said Vivian Lee, 17, a war supporter visiting the convention from Los Angeles...

... "I think I could do more here," Hokel said, adding that she's focusing on political action that supports the war and the troops.

"We don't have to be there physically to fight it," she said.

Similarly, 20-year-old Jeff Shafer, a University of Pennsylvania student, said vital work needs to be done in the United States. There are Republican policies to maintain and protect and an economy to sustain, Shafer said. ...

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Undercover From the CRNC
...A little later, Tony Perkins from the Family Research Council took the [College Republican National Convention] stage, noting with courageous enthusiasm, "There are some things that are worth fighting for." He proceeded to talk about the Iraq War, and some very heroic veterans (give credit where credit's due, 'sall good). Then he said, "They're giving their lives as you're giving your time." Right. These (military-age) folks helped create this war, but they're letting everybody else fight it. The irony was lost on this crowd.

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Obfuscating Intolerance
A Pentagon inquiry's finding of no overt religious discrimination at the Air Force Academy strains credibility, considering the academy superintendent has already acknowledged it will take years to undo the damage from evangelical zealots on campus. Indeed, amid its thicket of bureaucratese, the report by an Air Force investigative panel goes on for page after page describing cases of obvious and overt religious bias. But it tosses all of these off as "perceived bias," as if the blame lies with the victims and not the offenders, and throws up a fog of implausible excuses, like "a lack of awareness" of what is impermissible behavior by military officers.

This muddle stands in stark contrast to an earlier investigation by Yale Divinity School that found widespread problems with intolerance at the academy. That study described faculty members, chaplains and even the football coach as pressuring cadets toward Christian beliefs and hazing them about divergent views on religion. The Pentagon study insisted that this did not amount to a widespread problem for non-Christian cadets who complained of ranking officers encouraging an evangelical fervor....

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A report from the SBC
Comin’ at you from Nashville at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Not a lot of what you’d call news here this week, unless you really care about the inner working of the SBC. Folks got elected. People got baptized. Resolutions in accord with well-known SBC theology were passed. For the exhaustive details on all that, you can visit the official and unofficial Baptist information Web sites.

But lack of news doesn’t mean there weren’t some interesting things going on. Here’s one of 'em:

If you’ve ever been to any convention exhibit hall, you know what they look like. Lines of pre-fab setups draped with photos and posters, with tables covered with printed material and bowls filled with cheap candy, staffed by wearily cheerful people hoping-just-hoping that someone will stop and ask a question.

That’s pretty much the way it was here – except for the booth run by Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. It looked like a jungle military encampment straight out of a WWII-era war movie:

Camo netting above, a camp table with maps spread out on top, ammo boxes (filled in this case with printed material, not bullets). In a hall filled with pastels and bright lights, this booth was defiantly Army drab.

The first time I walked by, I must admit it gave me the whim-whams. There’s an inherent violence to warfare that seemed to clash with the spiritual work the seminary says it’s trying to do.

The next time I wandered by, I looked at the supporting material – really large posters set up in front. They made it clear that “Camp Southwestern” was supposed to be about spiritual warfare. Well, maybe.

So I stopped to talk to one of the wearily cheerful folks. William Goff teaches Christian ethics at the seminary. And he acknowledged that the daily real violence of Iraq and elsewhere might lead to misunderstanding of the SWBTS booth. But it also might lead to curiosity and understanding, he said.

After all, with war so much on the American mind, a booth like this is more likely to draw attention than the mostly vanilla competitors. And the seminary’s PR people were trying to make a specific point about the seminary’s emphasis on overseas work, “hard, risky ministry in a resisting world,” Dr. Goff said.

The seminary has a goal that every student before graduation – and every professor at least once every four years – will head overseas on a mission trip. Three locales are their chosen targets of opportunity: Cuba, northern Zambia and Siberia. No junkets there.

So is the potentially creepy military theme appropriate for a seminary? Dr. Goff said one young visitor told him “you have the only booth here that rocks.” ...

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Bush Highlights CBF Church at Southern Baptist Convention
...Introducing Bush, SBC president Bobby Welch said, “It is always a blessing when our nation has a president who really knows the Lord.”

Following the president’s broadcast comments, White House assistant Tim Goeglein took the platform to describe Bush as “a president rooted in faith” committed to “compassionate conservatism at home and the march for freedom abroad.”

That policy, he said, is “a reflection of this faith but also a confirmation that this country is exactly what Abraham Lincoln said it was, the last, best hope of earth.”

“At the end of the day what makes us the greatest country in the history of man is always to remember from where our freedom derives,” Goeglein said. “At the end of the day, it is God Almighty himself who blesses the United States of America.”

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Veteran Republican Alleges Democratic "War on Christianity" on House Floor
Washington, DC: During a debate today surrounding an amendment by Rep. David Obey (D-WI) to fully examine allegations of proselytizing and religious intolerance at the United States Air Force Academy, six-term Republican Rep. John Hostettler (IN) rose to assert that "Democrats can't help denigrating and demonizing Christians." [Rush transcript.] Rep. Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, interrupted Hostettler's deeply disturbing remarks and demanded that they be formally retracted; Hostettler ultimately agreed to retract one sentence from his diatribe.

Earlier in his remarks, Hostettler discussed the drive by Democrats to erase every "vestige" of Christianity from America; he also prefaced his remarks by noting that "The long war on Christianity today continues on the floor of the House of Representatives." ...

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Ten Days in Iraq: A Trip Report
Speaker: Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus, Council on Foreign Relations
Presider: Richard Haass, president, Council on Foreign Relations

...I said, "Well, where is all this heading?" And no kidding, he said to me, "A 10-division Iraqi armed force." And I lost it at that point, the only time in the whole trip I just lost it. I said, "Ten divisions! The United States Army has 10 divisions!" And he said, "And two mechanized divisions." I said, "We have two mechanized divisions! You're going to create an Iraqi army as big as the American Army? Are you nuts?"

And then the next PowerPoint chart comes up: "Well, we need a division here and we need a division here and we need a division" -- it became very apparent to me that these 10 divisions were to fight some future war against Iran. It had nothing to do -- nothing to do -- with taking that country over from us and fighting the insurgents. ...

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Soldier Sues Over Guantanamo Beating
A U.S. military policeman who was beaten by fellow MPs during a botched training drill at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison for detainees has sued the Pentagon for $15 million, alleging that the incident violated his constitutional rights.

Spc. Sean D. Baker, 38, was assaulted in January 2003 after he volunteered to wear an orange jumpsuit and portray an uncooperative detainee. Baker said the MPs, who were told that he was an unruly detainee who had assaulted an American sergeant, inflicted a beating that resulted in a traumatic brain injury....

...The drill took place in a prison isolation wing reserved for suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees who were disruptive or had attacked MPs.

Baker said he put on the jumpsuit and squeezed under a prison bunk after being told by a lieutenant that he would be portraying an unruly detainee. He said he was assured that MPs conducting the "extraction drill" knew it was a training exercise and that Baker was an American soldier.

As he was being choked and beaten, Baker said, he screamed a code word, "red," and shouted: "I'm a U.S. soldier! I'm a U.S. soldier!" He said the beating continued until the jumpsuit was yanked down during the struggle, revealing his military uniform.

The lawsuit says of the extraction team: "Armed with the highly inflammatory, false, incendiary and misleading information that had been loaded into their psyches by their platoon leader, these perceptions and fears … became their operative reality, and they acted upon these fears, all to the detriment of Sean Baker."

No one has been disciplined or punished for the assault, said Baker's lawyer, T. Bruce Simpson Jr....

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The Dark Side of Public Choice
Stop the Drug War points to this extremely unsettling website where DEA agents congregate to anonymously post about whatever's on their minds....

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Relatives of some troops killed in Iraq seek hearings on Downing Street memo
By Leo Shane III, Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Friday, June 17, 2005

Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., left, speaks to members of Military Families Speak Out about his experience at a soldier’s funeral last month. With him are, from left, Dianne Davis Santorello, Celeste Zappala and Bill Mitchell. All three had a son killed serving in Iraq.

WASHINGTON — Several parents of soldiers killed in Iraq visited Capitol Hill on Wednesday to ask for congressional hearings on the Downing Street memo, which one mother called President Bush’s “Watergate.”...

...But members of Military Families Speak Out, whose members are relatives of troops killed in Iraq, said Congress must investigate whether the president lied to the country to justify military action.

“This war was based on lies and deception,” said Celeste Zappala of Philadelphia, whose son was killed in April 2004 while providing security for investigators searching for WMD. “The only way we can understand how we’ve come to this disastrous position is to find out what the truth is.”

The group, which has frequently criticized the administration, met with congressmen and left flyers petitioning for a full investigation at the offices of Republican House leaders.

“I envy the parents who support this war, because if I did I’d sleep better,” said Dianne Davis Santorello, a Pennsylvania resident whose son was killed in August 2004. “But I don’t sleep well. My son died for a lie.”

She said the Downing Street memo would “bring down the house of cards” if lawmakers choose to investigate it, and compared it to the Watergate scandal which eventually forced President Richard Nixon from office....