which incredibles super hero are you ?

Which Incredibles Character Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla


ok , so while clowning around , i took the test courtesy of a blogging acquaintance , the lovely and cerebral "psyche grad momma" --ms donyell and...surprise...look who i am ...

"Woman , where's my super suit ?" --tho if i had one , i think i would always know where it was...probably wouldn't take it off-- except for daily showers ---and umm...night time "superhero" stuff

"keep lookin ...somethin keeps tellin me that them evil-doers got somethin overthere.."  

"iraq has wmd and they can launch in 45 minutes..." ---remember that ?

US closes book on Iraq WMD hunt

The US chief weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, has said inquiries into weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have "gone as far as feasible".

Mr Duelfer also said an official transfer of WMDs to Syria ahead of the Iraq war was not likely.

The CIA adviser reported last year that neither expected stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons, nor evidence of recent production had been found.

However, he did say Saddam Hussein had wanted to restart WMD programmes.

Terror risk

"After more than 18 months, the WMD investigation and debriefing of the WMD-related detainees has been exhausted," Mr Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), wrote in a 92-page addendum to the report issued in October.


IRAQ SURVEY GROUP
Set up in May 2003
First leader, David Kay, quit in Jan 2004 stating WMD would not be found in Iraq
New head, Charles Duelfer appointed by CIA
1,200 experts from the US, Britain and Australia
HQ in Washington, offices in Baghdad and Qatar
However, Mr Duelfer warned that Iraq's original weapons programme had created a pool of experts whose skills could be sought by other countries or terrorist groups, and that while this risk was presently very small, it should not be ignored.

"The use of a single even an ineffectual chemical weapon would likely cause more terror than deadlier conventional explosives," the supplementary report warned.

Mr Duelfer said that while the ISG believed that it was unlikely that WMD material had been officially moved to Syria in the run up to the war, it was "unable to rule out unofficial movement of limited WMD-related materials".

The US and Britain used allegations that Iraq possessed WMDs as the primary justification for invading Iraq in 2003.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/4484237.stm

Published: 2005/04/26 03:47:33 GMT

© BBC MMV

got oil? 

... more on peak oil

*i still respect mike ruppert and believe him to be genuine in his efforts to warn the world of a danger he believes the world facing . of course all the evidence is not yet in , so either side or both sides could one day be proven wrong on this matter --obviously more research on this vital question is needed .



'Peak Oil' Scam Unravels, Oil Reserves Increasing

by GEORGE CRISPIN

'Peak Oil' Scam Unravels, Oil Reserves Increasing (EDITOR'S NOTE: Could this be the beginning of the end of the so-called "Peak Oil Scare Scam"? You know - the one where they say, "Help, help, we're running out of oil.That's why the price of gas is going up. That's why the US invaded Iraq. That's why... blah blah blah." Don't hold your breath. As long as well-paid disinfo guys like Mike Ruppert are doing speaking engagements, all bets are off, pal.)

Eugene Island is an underwater mountain located about 80 miles off the coast of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico. In 1973 oil was struck and off-shore platform Eugene 330 erected. The field began production at 15,000 barrels a day, then gradually fell off, as is normal, to 4,000 barrels a day in 1989.

Then came the surprise; it reversed itself and increased production to 13,000 barrels a day. Probable reserves have been increased to 400 million barrels from 60 million.

The field appears to be filling from below and the crude coming up today is from a geological age different from the original crude, which leads to the speculation that the world has limitless supplies of petroleum.

This really interested some scientists.

Thomas Gold, astronomer and professor emeritus of Cornell held for years that oil is actually renewable primordial syrup continually manufactured by the earth under ultra hot conditions and tremendous pressures.

This substance migrates upward picking up bacteria that attack it making it appear to have an organic origin, i.e., come from dinosaurs and vegetation.

As best I have found so far Russian scientists support his position, at least that petroleum is of primordial origin. There is now plenty of evidence around proving the presence of methane in our universe. It is easy to see it as a part of the formation of the earth. Under the right conditions of temperature and pressure, it converts to more complex hydrocarbons.

Roger Andersen, an oceanographer and executive director of Columbia’s Energy Research Center proposed studying the behavior of this reservoir.

The underwater landscape around Eugene Island is weird, cut with faults and fissures that belch gas and oil. The field is operated by PennzEnergy Co.

Andersen proposed to study the action of the sea bottom around the mountain and the field at its top and persuaded the U S Dept of Energy to ante up ten million which was matched by a consortium of oil giants including Chevron, Exxon, and Tex Corp. This work began about the time 3-D seismic technology was introduced to oil exploration.

Anderson was able to stack 3D images resulting in a 4D image that showed the reservoir in 3 spatial dimensions and enabled researchers to track the movement of oil.

Their most stunning find was a deep fault at a bottom corner of the computer scan that showed oil literally gushing in. "We could see the stream," says Andersen. "It wasn’t even debated that it was happening."

Work continued for five years until funds ran out and they were unable to continue.

With the world having 40 years of proven reserves in hand it is difficult to interest the major oil producers in much exploration, let alone something done merely for research, and so far from the current accepted theory of a fossil origin for oil.

Similar occurrences have been seen at other Gulf Of Mexico fields, at the Cook Inlet oil field, at oil fields in Uzbekistan, and it is possible this accounts for the longevity of the Saudi Arabian fields where few new finds have been made, yet reserves have doubled while the fields have been exploited mercilessly for 50 years.

Not only can the doom and gloomers not show us running out of the natural resources we recycle, but now there appears to be good odds of a limitless supply of petroleum working its way up to where we can capture it.

A caveat: Gold’s theory is not yet accepted by all scientists, probably all the more reason to trust it.

April 6, 2005

*** George Crispin (crispin73@charter.net) is a retired businessman who heads a Catholic homeschooling cooperative in Auburn, Alabama.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/crispin8.html

"when you rattling them sabers , boys..."

legendary south african jazz trumpeter hugh masakela had this song my dad used to love to play that was on the same lp containing masakela's famous hit remake of "grazing in the grass" .

as a "recorded live" intro to the song , masakela would speak in his original south african mother tongue a bit of homebrewed advise warning the local cattle driving youth that, "when you driving them cattle , boy --be cool" .

the audience would errupt in laughter recognizing across the cultural barrier the universality of the wisdom contained in the advice-- whether entrusted with the hugely important task of guiding a modern nation , or the important task of guiding to water and grass , animals vital to a pastoral peoples livelihood ---do not let your own exuberance and energy or inexperience cause you to get out of control, behave irresponsibly and screw it all up.

excellent advice ---immediately called to mind upon reading the following article about the outcome of a Us wargame --especially considering that it has been said that the saber rattlers in the pentagon and tel aviv , have naval and air strikes on the drawing board for knocking out iran's "nuclear weapons production sites" --attacks scheduled to begin late this spring ...when you rattling them sabers , boys --be cool--you never know what might spring out from the underbrush and bite you in the ass...

Myth Of US Invincibility
Floats In The Persian Gulf
By Mark H. Gaffney
mhgaffney@aol.com
4-16-5

During the summer of 2002, in the run-up to President Bush's invasion of Iraq, the US military staged the most elaborate and expensive war games ever conceived. Operation Millennium Challenge, as it was called, cost some $250 million, and required two years of planning. The mock war was not aimed at Iraq, at least, not overtly. But it was set in the Persian Gulf, and simulated a conflict with a hypothetical rogue state. The "war" involved heavy use of computers, and was also played out in the field by 13,500 US troops, at 17 different locations and 9 live-force training sites. All of the services participated under a single joint command, known as JOINTFOR. The US forces were designated as "Force Blue," and the enemy as OPFOR, or "Force Red." The "war" lasted three weeks and ended with the overthrow of the dictatorial regime on August 15.

At any rate, that was the official outcome. What actually happened was quite different, and ought to serve up a warning about the grave peril the world will face if the US should become embroiled in a widening conflict in the region.

As the war games were about to commence on July 18 2002, Gen. William "Buck" Kernan, head of the Joint Forces Command, told the press that the operation would test a series of new war-fighting concepts recently developed by the Pentagon, concepts like "rapid decisive operations, effects-based operations, operational net assessments," and the like. Later, at the conclusion of the games, Gen. Kernan insisted that the new concepts had been proved effective. At which point, JOINTFOR drafted recommendations to Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, based on the experiment's satisfactory results in such areas as doctrine, training and procurement.

But not everyone shared Gen. Kernan's rosy assessment. It was sharply criticized by the straight-talking Marine commander who had been brought out of retirement to lead Force Red. His name was Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, and he had played the role of the crazed but cunning leader of the hypothetical rogue state. Gen. Van Riper dismissed the new military concepts as empty sloganeering, and he had reason to be skeptical. In the first days of the "war," Van Riper's Force Red sent most of the US fleet to the bottom of the Persian Gulf.

Not all of the details about how Force Red accomplished this have been revealed. The Pentagon managed to keep much of the story out of the press. But a thoroughly disgruntled Van Riper himself leaked enough to the Army Times that it's possible to get at a sense of how a much weaker force outfoxed and defeated the world's lone remaining Superpower.1

The Worst US Naval Disaster Since Pearl Harbor

The war game was described as "free play," meaning that both sides were unconstrained, free to pursue any tactic in the book of war in the service of victory. As Gen. Kernan put it: "The OPFOR (Force Red) has the ability to win here." Much of the action was computer-generated. But representative military units in the field also acted out the various moves and countermoves. The comparison to a chess match is not inaccurate. The vastly superior US armada consisted of the standard carrier battle group with its full supporting cast of ships and planes. Van Riper had at his disposal a much weaker flotilla of smaller vessels, many of them civilian craft, and numerous assets typical of a Third World country.

But Van Riper made the most of weakness. Instead of trying to compete directly with Force Blue, he utilized ingenious low-tech alternatives. Crucially, he prevented the stronger US force from eavesdropping on his communications by foregoing the use of radio transmissions. Van Riper relied on couriers instead to stay in touch with his field officers. He also employed novel tactics such as coded signals broadcast from the minarets of mosques during the Muslim call to prayer, a tactic weirdly reminiscent of Paul Revere and the shot heard round the world. At every turn, the wily Van Riper did the unexpected. And in the process he managed to achieve an asymmetric advantage: the new buzzword in military parlance.

Astutely and very covertly, Van Riper armed his civilian marine craft and deployed them near the US fleet, which never expected an attack from small pleasure boats. Faced with a blunt US ultimatum to surrender, Force Red suddenly went on the offensive: and achieved complete tactical surprise. Force Red's prop-driven aircraft suddenly were swarming around the US warships, making Kamikaze dives. Some of the pleasure boats made suicide attacks. Others fired Silkworm cruise missiles from close range, and sunk a carrier, the largest ship in the US fleet, along with two helicopter-carriers loaded with marines. The sudden strike was reminiscent of the Al Qaeda sneak attack on the USS Cole in 2000. Yet, the Navy was unprepared. When it was over, most of the US fleet had been destroyed. Sixteen US warships lay on the bottom, and the rest were in disarray. Thousands of American sailors were dead, dying, or wounded.

If the games had been real, it would have been the worst US naval defeat since Pearl Harbor.

What happened next became controversial. Instead of declaring Force Red the victor, JOINTFOR Command raised the sunken ships from the muck, brought the dead sailors back to life, and resumed the games as if nothing unusual had happened. The US invasion of the rogue state proceeded according to schedule. Force Red continued to harass Force Blue, until an increasingly frustrated Gen. Van Riper discovered that his orders to his troops were being countermanded, at which point he withdrew in disgust. In his after-action report, the general charged that the games had been scripted to produce the desired outcome.

Later, Van Riper also aired his frustrations in a taped-for-television interview: "There were accusations that Millennium Challenge was rigged. I can tell you it was not. It started out as a free-play exercise, in which both Red and Blue had the opportunity to win the game. However, about the third or fourth day, when the concepts that the command was testing failed to live up to their expectations, the command at that point began to script the exercise in order to prove these concepts. This was my critical complaint. You might say, 'Well, why didn't these concepts live up to the expectations?' I think they were fundamentally flawed in that theyleaned heavily on systems analysis of decision-making. I'm angered that, in a sense, $250 million was wasted. But I'm even more angry that an idea that has never been truly validated, that never really went through the crucible of a real experiment, is being exported to our operational forces to use.

What I saw in this particular exercise and the results from it were very similar to what I saw as a young second lieutenant back in the 1960s, when we were taught the systems engineering techniques that Mr. [Robert] McNamara [Secretary of Defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson] had implemented in the American military. We took those systemsto the battlefield, where they were totally inappropriate. The computers in Saigon said we were winning the war, while out there in the rice paddies we knew damn well we weren't winning. That's where we went astray, and I see these new concepts potentially being equally ill-informed and equally dangerous."2

"We didn't put you in harm's way purposely. It just...happened."

As a result of Van Riper's criticism, Gen. Kernan, the JOINTFOR commander, faced some pointed questions at a subsequent press briefing. In defending the operation, the general explained the embarrassing outcome as due to the unique environment in which the war simulation, by necessity, had been conducted:

Q: General, one thing that Van Riper made much of was the fact that at some point the blue fleet was sunk.

Gen. Kernan: True, it was.

Q: I want to set-aside for a moment the allegation that the game was rigged because the fleet was "re-floated." I mean, I understand, I've been told that happens in war games.

Gen. Kernan: Sure.

Q: And I'm curious. In the course of this experiment or exercise, your fleet was sunk. I'm wondering if that did teach you anything about the concepts you were testing or if that showed anything relevant.

Gen. Kernan: I'll tell you one of the things it taught us with a blinding flash of the obvious, after the factAnd of course, it goes back to live versus simulation, and what we were doing. There are very prescriptive lanes in which weconduct sea training and amphibious operations, and these are very, obviously, because of commercial shipping and a lot of other things, just like our air lanes. The ships that we used for the amphibious operations, we brought them in because they had to comply with those lanes. Didn't even think about it.

Now you've got basically, instead of being over the horizon like the Navy would normally fight, and at stand-off ranges that would enable their protective systems to be employed, now they're sitting right off the shore, where you're looking at them. I mean, the models and simulation that we put together, it couldn't make a distinction. And we didn't either, until, all of a sudden, whoops, there they are. And that's about the time he attacked. You know?

The Navy was just bludgeoning me dearly because, of course, they would say, 'We never fight this way.' Fair enough. Okay. We didn't mean to do it. We didn't put you in harm's way purposely. I mean, it just, it happened. And it's unfortunate. So that's one of the things that we learned"3

Gen. Kernan's nuanced defense was that the simulation had necessarily been conducted in the vicinity of busy sea lanes, hence, in the presence of live commercial shipping; and this required the Navy to "turn off" some of its defenses, which it would not have done in a real wartime situation. All of which is probably true, but the general's remark that in a real Gulf war the fleet would be deployed differently, in a stand-off manner, with its over-the-horizon defenses fully operable, was a misrepresentation of the actual situation in the Persian Gulf, today. The US Navy's biggest problem operating in Gulf waters are the constraints that the region's confined spaces impose on US naval defenses, which were designed for the open sea. The Persian Gulf is nothing but a large lake, after all, and in such an environment the Navy's over-the-horizon defenses are seriously compromised.4 Nor can the Navy withdraw to a safe distance, so long as its close-in presence is required to support the US occupation forces in Iraq. The serious implications of this simple fact for a possible future conflict, for instance, involving Iran, have never, to my knowledge, been discussed in the US press.

Gen. Kernan's remark was not a misstatement. He repeated himself again, later in the same interview, while fielding another question:

Q: As a follow-up...Van Riper also said that most of the blue Naval losses were due to cruise missiles. Can you talk about that and say how concerned you are about that?

Gen. Kernan: "Well, I don't know. To be honest with you, I haven't had an opportunity to assess...what happened. But that's a possibility, once again, because we had to shut off some of these self-defense systems on the models that would have normally been employed. That's a possibility. I think the important thing to note is that normally the Navy would have been significantly over-the-horizon. They would've been arrayed an awful lot differently than we forced them to because of what they had to do for the live-exercise piece of it....Yeah, I think we learned some things. The specifics of the cruise-missile piece...I really can't answer that question. We'd have to get back to you."5

Safely Over-the-Horizon?

Gen. Kernan's remarks are surprising, because at the time he made them, in August 2002, as he well should have known, at least two separate studies, one by the US Government Accounting Office (GAO,) based on the Navy's own data, and another by an independent think-tank, had already warned the Office of the Navy about the growing threat to the US fleet posed by anti-ship cruise missiles.6 As recently as 1997 some forty different nations possessed these awesome weapons. By 2000 the number had jumped to 70, with at least 100 different types identified, and a dozen different nations actively pursuing their own production and research/development programs.

While the numbers are not available for 2004, there is little doubt that the technology has continued to spread rapidly. And why are anti-ship cruise missiles so attractive? The answer is that they are relatively simple to develop, especially in comparison with ballistic missiles. Cruise missiles can be constructed from many of the same readily available parts and components used in commercial aviation. They are also reliable and effective, easy to deploy and use, and are relatively inexpensive. Even poor nations can afford them. One cruise missile represents but a tiny fraction of the immense expenditure of capital the US has invested in each of its 300 active warships. Yet, a single cruise missile can sink or severely disable any ship in the US Navy.

According to the GAO report, "the key to defeating cruise missile threats is in gaining additional reaction time," so that ships can detect, identify and destroy the attacking missiles. The thorny problem, as I've pointed out, is that the Navy's long-range AWACs and intermediate-range Aegis radar defense systems are significantly less effective in littoral (or coastal) environments, the Persian Gulf being the prime example.

The other important factor is that cruise missile technology itself is racing ahead. The GAO report warned that the next generation of anti-ship missiles that will begin to appear by 2007 will be faster and stealthier, and will also be equipped with advanced target-seekers, i.e., advanced guidance systems. In fact, one of these advanced anti-ship cruise missiles is already available: the Russian-made Yakhonts missile. It flies at close to Mach 3 (three times the speed of sound), can hit a squirrel in the eye, and has a range of 185 miles: enough range to target the entire Persian Gulf (from Iran), shredding Gen. Kernan's glib remark that in a real war the US expeditionary force will stand-off in safety "over the horizon" while mounting an amphibious attack. Nonsense. Henceforth, in a real Gulf war situation there will be no standing off in safety. The Yakhonts missile has already erased the concept of the horizon, at least, within the Persian Gulf, and it has done so without ever having been fired in combat---yet.

Gen. Kernan should have known also that, according to Jane's Defense Weekly and other sources, Iranian government officials were in Moscow the previous year (2001), shopping for the latest Russian anti-ship missile technology.7 By their own admission the Russians developed the Yakhonts missile for export. No doubt, it was high on Iran's shopping list.

The 2000 GAO report's conclusions were not favorable. It stated that for a variety of reasons the Navy's forecasts for upgrading US ship defenses against cruise missile attack are overly optimistic. The Navy's own data shows that there will be no silver bullet. The technology gap is structural, and will not be overcome for many years, if at all. US warships will be vulnerable to cruise missile attack into the foreseeable future, perhaps increasingly so.

But the GAO saved its most sobering conclusion for last: It so happens that the most vulnerable ship in the US fleet is none other than the flagship itself, the big Nimitz-class carriers. This underscores the significance of Force Red's victory during Millennium Challenge. Just think: If Van Riper could accomplish what he did with Silkworms, the lowly scuds of the cruise missile family, imagine what could happen if the US Navy, sitting in the Gulf like so many ducks, should face a massed-attack of supersonic Yakhonts missiles, a weapon that may well be unstoppable.

It would be a debacle.

So, we see that the 2002 US war games afforded a glimpse of the same military hubris that gave us the Viet Nam War and the current quagmire in Iraq. The difference is that the peril for the world today in the "Persian Lake" is many times greater than it ever was in the Gulf of Tonkin.
_____

Mark Gaffney's first book was a pioneering study of the Israeli nuke program. His latest is a best-selling book about early Christianity, Gnostic Secrets of the Naassenes. Mark can be reached for comment at mhgaffney@aol.com

peak oil ?

i have considerable respect for michael ruppert because of his direct confrontation with john deutch over charges of c.i.a. complicity in drug smuggling during public hearings conducted in the los angeles area black community.

the embarrassment from this confrontation , when ruppert came forward and declared to the public that he had evidence of cia complicity in drug smuggling and that it had gone on for decades --ravaging black communities across the nation in the process --was believed by some to have cost
deutch --then head of cia - a sure shot as the future secretary of defense .

i admired ruppert's willingness to put himself on the line in the cause of the underdog , doing what is right and honorable--in the mold of other whistleblowers on government corruption like former d.e.a. central american station chief cellerino castillo and michael levine who spoke out about the government sponsored drug traffickers and who , for their decency , paid a heavy price both personally and professionally.

these gentlemen are three "cops" that i actually hold respect for , because of the stands they each have taken at significant cost to self , career and family .


i'm saying this to confirm the respect i have for mike ruppert but also to say that i'm forced to rethink what i had come to believe was true concerning the theory of peak oil that ruppert and others champion .

peak oil is the theory that the world's major reserves of petroleum and natural gas have already been discovered and what is left of known supplies are dwindling rapidly , heading us in the industrial world irreversibly towards a precipice over which the modern world will collapse -- agriculture , manufacturing , information and communication and transport all grind to a halt , civilization breaks down and millions --perhaps billions of humans die off in the ensuing crisis --that's peak oil .

a few years ago i had read an article at the reference website of the late colonel l. fletcher prouty
where prouty, described a luncheon he had attended back in the 70s in which a group of oil geologists were debating whether oil is a fossil fuel or a function of the earth's mantle .

one side gave the old theory we all learned in grammar school about dinosaurs and forrests dying off millions of years ago and over time being transformed into coal , oil , and natural gas--and thus a FINITE resource and due to sooner or later by humans , be exhausted .

the other side , advanced the idea that oil is not a fossil fuel , but instead , a function of the greater depths of the earth and basically unlimited once technology advanced and we could drill deep enough to reach it .

the same other side offered as proof , the fact that oil was even then , being found in geological layers of the earth too deep to contain any fossils . also the amounts of oil already extracted from the earth was much more than the once living plants and animals of early earth could have ever produced .

in fact the other side then said that old wells in pennsylvania , some of the first drilled in the Us that were long thought dry , were recently found able to produce small amounts of oil again --indicating that oil was gradually seeping upwards into the depleted resevoir from sources deeper below .

from what i understand , today there are those who say that the russians have for years been quietly putting considerable resources into deep drilling technology and have reached depths deep enough --in the 20,000 ft. range -- to tap into the supposedly limitless oil supplies manufactured by the inner regions of the earth .

if this is true , russia by controlling the technology , could for a while , possibly dominate global energy production .

elements in the Us and the rest of the developed world might have a keen interest in preventing the post-soviet russia from getting on firm financial footing , using economic and political instability as some of the chips to force-bargain the technology out of a desperate russia --similar to the way a defeated post first world war germany was forced by treaty to give up lucrative synthetic fibers technology and patents to the victors of the war ...or the same way that rebel and guerrilla movements today are being used by the Us and the west in Africa to force-bargain african "leaders" to trade tens of billions of dollars in mineral rights for a few million in overpriced weaponry from long obsolete stockpiles from the cold war era .

this also makes one look again at the seizure of russia's Yukos oil by vladimir putin and the subsequent imprisonment of russian oligarch mikhail khodorkovsky believed to be ultimately working in the interests of the western multinationals .

this is cool ...espcially for us net-izens of cyberspace

ARTICLE 19
of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
adopted by the United Nations General Assembly
on December 10, 1948,

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression;
this right includes freedom to hold opinions
without interference and to seek, receive and impart
information and ideas
through any media and regardless of frontiers."

"it's all about perception" , quipped the magician...

*while the bush administration continues to pat themselves on the back over the recent elections in iraq , reality , unimpressed by spin , reasserts itself once again ...

Attacks on Abu Ghraib highlight continuing Iraqi armed resistance

By James Cogan
9 April 2005

On April 2, Iraqi insurgents launched one of the highest profile attacks of the two-year guerilla war against the US-led occupation: an assault on the Abu Ghraib prison complex in Baghdad where thousands of Iraqis are being detained.

As dusk fell, as many as 50 well-armed guerillas unleashed a barrage of mortar rounds and rocket-propelled grenades at a prison watchtower, giving cover to suicide bombers who detonated two explosive-filled vehicles in attempts to blow a hole in the prison walls.

Over the next two hours, the insurgents fought a pitched battle with prison guards and US military reinforcements before carrying out a military-style withdrawal into the surrounding residential neighbourhoods. In the course of the firefight, 44 American troops and at least 13 prisoners were wounded.

On April 4, a second attack on the prison was carried out. A suicide bomber detonated a tractor laden with explosives outside the complex, wounding five civilians in the vicinity.

There is little doubt that Abu Ghraib was targeted to ensure the insurgents’ actions were widely reported and to develop political support for the armed resistance. Once notorious for the brutality of Saddam Hussein’s rule, the prison has become a symbol of the crimes being committed against the Iraqi people under US occupation, especially since the publication last year of photos showing detainees being tortured and degraded by American interrogators and prison guards.

Many of the 3,500 Iraqis currently held in the prison camp were seized by American troops during the massive US assault that reduced the city of Fallujah to rubble last November, or in the course of more recent raids. Hundreds of men are being held for little more than being of fighting age, members of the former ruling Baathist Party or the relatives of suspected insurgent leaders—so-called “security detainees”. Many have no idea when or if they will face trial and have no access to legal counsel. There are widespread allegations of overcrowding, abuse, poor food and denial of family visits.

A leaflet had been circulated at Baghdad’s Sunni mosques just days before the first attack, allegedly authored by a female prisoner at the complex, claiming she was being raped by American troops and appealing for the resistance to carry out a rescue operation.

On April 1, the day before the attack, the appalling conditions facing US-held detainees provoked a riot at Camp Bucca, the largest US-run prison camp, located near the southern city of Umm Qasr. The riot was led by supporters of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who have been held in the facility since being rounded up during the uprising of Iraqi Shiites from April to September 2004.

The timing of the guerilla assault on Abu Ghraib—which had little prospect of military success—suggests that it was also a propaganda effort by the insurgent groups to demonstrate they had not been broken by the wave of American crackdowns over the past six months.

Amid the manoeuvring over the formation of an Iraqi transitional government over the past two months, the American military and the locally-recruited security forces have conducted another series of offensives in primarily Sunni Muslim areas of Iraq, where the majority of the population boycotted the January 31 elections.

In February, US forces initiated a major operation, codenamed River Blitz, to round up suspected insurgents in the area around Ramadi. The city, with a population of 300,000, was placed under an 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew, with US tanks stationed on the main streets. By March 5, the US military claimed that over 400 Iraqis had been detained in American raids and at roadblocks.

More recently, two major operations have been carried out by US and local Iraqi forces against alleged insurgent training camps and hideouts. On March 21, US forces claimed to have killed 85 guerillas at a camp on the outskirts of Baghdad. On March 26, they reported the capture of 131 insurgents during raids near Karbala, 100 kilometres south of the capital. Iraqi defence ministry sources asserted that the captured men were members of the Sunni fundamentalist organisation Ansar al-Sunna.

On Monday, another raid by US and Iraqi government troops on a suspected guerilla hideout, this time in Diyala province to the east of Baghdad, resulted in a four-hour battle and left at least 17 insurgents and two American soldiers dead.

The number of anti-occupation fighters killed, wounded or detained this year in what is called the “Sunni Triangle” almost certainly exceeds 1,000. Despite the repression, however, there are few indications that the insurgency is close to being quelled or, as British general John Kiszely declared on April 4, “running out of steam”.

At the beginning of 2004, guerilla groups were mounting an estimated 10 to 20 attacks per day on American-led forces. In March this year, despite what has been described as a “lull” since the large number of clashes from November 2004 to January 2005, at least 40 to 45 attacks were carried out each day.

Commenting on the security conditions this week, the New York Times noted that it “showed that Baghdad was still very much a city under siege. Apache attack helicopters circled the skies, while the Iraqi police set up checkpoints along the major roads downtown”.

One justification for asserting that the insurgency is dying out is the fall in the American casualty rate since the end of the January 31 elections. Whereas 107 American troops were killed in January, the death toll fell to 58 in February and 36 in March. A large factor in the decline in American dead and wounded, however, is the increasing use of Iraqi military units and police to conduct the more dangerous operations. Instead of US troops, Iraqis are being deployed to repress the population with roadblocks, armed patrols through the streets and night raids on residential areas.

While the rate of US casualties has fallen back to one or two deaths and 10 to 20 wounded per day, an estimated 200 locally-recruited Iraqi security personnel were killed in March. As well, at least 240 civilians died, many of them employees of the US-sponsored government or people associated with the pro-occupation Iraqi political factions.

The casualties are shaping up to be even higher this month. On April 5, three Iraqi soldiers were killed and over 40 wounded in western Iraq, when the bus in which they were traveling was struck by a remotely-detonated car bomb. Other attacks in the past seven days include: a deputy director of education was assassinated and an interior ministry general kidnapped in Baghdad; 11 Iraqi employees at a US base near Ramadi were found executed; an official of a pro-US Kurdish party was assassinated in Mosul; the headless bodies of 10 Iraqi soldiers were found south of Baghdad; a provincial government representative in Hillah was gunned down; a government translator was wounded in a drive-by shooting in Baqubah; and police were hit by car bombs in Basra.

An Iraqi army officer told Associated Press this week: “The Iraqi army and police are easy targets for the terrorists. They lack the modern equipment of the Americans.”

Nevertheless, the Bush administration and the Pentagon are stepping up the use of Iraqi forces to enforce the occupation. The Washington Post reported this week that an entire area of the volatile city of Mosul has been handed over to Iraqi army units. The trial use of Iraqi troops in Mosul, the article stated, is “at the centre of the US military’s strategy to hand off counterinsurgency operations to Iraqi security forces and ultimately draw down the number of American troops”.

Over the coming weeks, US troop numbers in Iraq are expected to fall back to 135,000—down from the 150,000 deployed in the country to suppress the insurgency in the months before the January elections. The reality in Iraq remains that the anti-occupation resistance has not been broken. The local forces ostensibly loyal to the US-sponsored government in Baghdad are not capable of doing so.

A US military advisor attached to the Iraqi units, Staff Sergeant Craig E. Patrick, commented to the Washington Post: “It’s all about perception, to convince the American public that everything is going as planned and we’re right on schedule to be out of here. I mean, they [the Bush administration] can [mislead] the American people, but they can’t [mislead] us. These guys [the Iraqi security forces] are not ready.”

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merrily down the stream...

i am someone .who has his entire life. never quite felt at home. an illegal alien no matter. where. i roam. at times there has been only you who were there only you who understood that you made me exactly as i am and then as if in practical jest at my given chronic impracticality set your creations at odds with me -strange since you made me so odd from my very beginning choking off my normality with my own mother's umbilical rope wound around so tightly darkening the right side so much deeper than all the rest of infant me foreshadowing what i would grow to be and i was loved and held .kissed and fed. nourished not once but three times and eras in my life-each experience folding dovetailing becoming the next foundation blended into the newest floor of edifications story of mind unfolding into story mine is long deep and old as time before fire as old as we discovering that we could remember our birth and death and rebirthdayof death into life's first dawning in us of the oddity of thinking self awareness of that i am aware of my difference -of the other animal's nakedness and now my own too yesterday gave me today as a thing in my mind gave me tomorrow the burden of time nothing but an awareness a consciousness that some things change without moving forward but did that awareness come from my source must be the source of these awarenesses but if i see the source then also the Optic line must see see an end and now there is the awareness of flooding sadness of the impending sadness held within the memory of my own doom again as i know i know that this life don't last winding down the wind up and the pitch swung on and missed too bad after two called strikes against you by the ump with his devilish smiling sense of humor in who i'm left in a righthander's world to confide that you my greater other half are my only friend you guide and give me all that i know but that you already know because it was already you long ago who created me to be the man that i am the son of a woman and man so glowingly bright for only so briefly a moment...sobeit...i accept except that i am only a mere fragment of a shadow of you and yet i know that this game you made i willsomehowwin.