Friday, December 28, 2007
Domestic Terrorism
A burned out office. If it had been a military recruiting center before it was firebombed, you know what the media and authorities would be calling it.
If it had been a lab where animals were subjected to experimentation, you know what the media and authorities would be calling it.
Unfortunately for the women who relied upon it, this was an abortion clinic, so it isn’t called “terrorism”, it’s merely arson. Hell, since it’s ONLY an abortion clinic, attacks on it and other such women’s healthcare facilities are noted with soft headlines like: Albuquerque Has Renewal of Attacks on Abortion.
A rash of attacks on abortion and family planning clinics has struck Albuquerque this month, the first such violence there in nearly a decade.
Two attacks occurred early Tuesday at two buildings belonging to Planned Parenthood of New Mexico, according to Albuquerque police and fire officials. An arson fire damaged a surgery center the organization uses for abortions, and the windows of a Planned Parenthood family planning clinic 12 blocks away were smashed, the officials said.
Neither building sustained significant damage, and activities at both of them resumed Wednesday, a spokeswoman said.
The attacks came just weeks after the Albuquerque clinic run by a nationally known abortion provider, Dr. Curtis Boyd, was destroyed by arsonists on Dec. 6.
On Wednesday, agents with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, along with local arson investigators, arrested two suspects in the fire at Dr. Boyd’s clinic, which has provided abortions to women from throughout the region and Mexico since 1972.
The suspects, Chad Altman and Sergio Baca of Albuquerque, both 22, were arrested on arson charges after the authorities received a tip, said Jake Gonzales, the agent in charge of the firearms agency’s Albuquerque office.
Mr. Gonzales said it was not clear whether the Dec. 6 attack was related to those at the Planned Parenthood offices, which are still under investigation by federal and local authorities.
The small, tightknit group of abortion providers here reacted with a mix of shock and fear over the attacks. In 1999, the same Planned Parenthood surgical center was set ablaze. An ex-convict, Ricky Lee McDonald, who has a history of violence against New Mexico abortion clinics, was found guilty in that attack and sent to prison.
It just sort of HAPPENS. Never mind the long pattern of violence directed at women’s healthcare for forty years now.
It’s been reported that this particular attacker was motivated by an ex-girlfriend’s intent to get an abortion, but one must recognize that generations of agit-prop directed at demonizing abortion, birth control and healthcare providers made this course of action much easier to contemplate for the young Catholic who lists Jesus as one of his heroes, and if there is one thing that the Prince of Peace would smile upon, it’s burning something down.
Planned Parenthood affiliate health center in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
© Planned Parenthood South Central Michigan
Clinic-directed violence waxes and wanes, but it is no different from the violent attacks used by ALL extremist groups to advance their agenda. A group of people are demonized, supporters are fired up, and eventually some young testosterone case decides to be a hero against the devil he’s been told he knows. If he’s got a personal stake in it, all the better. What is important is that the target be made fearful, that they retreat behind barricades, that they are shunned by people who would normally either not care about them or who would at least moderately support them.
One of those testosterone cases is getting out of jail soon:
As investigators grapple with three attacks on Albuquerque abortion clinics in as many weeks, Planned Parenthood of New Mexico is bracing itself for the release of the man convicted of setting fire to its clinic during the last wave of abortion clinic violence here nearly a decade ago.
Ricky Lee MacDonald will be released in February after serving five years in prison for setting fire to a Planned Parenthood clinic in Albuquerque in 1999, said Michelle Featheringill, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of New Mexico.
Featheringill said the organization has been reviewing its security measures since the U.S. Justice Department informed them of MacDonald’s upcoming release.
Abortion rights advocates across the state plan to meet after the holidays to discuss his release and the recent attacks on abortion clinics in Albuquerque by what Featheringill called “domestic terrorists.”
“Clearly they’re trying to intimidate anyone who provides abortion services or any patient who is seeking an abortion that is constitutionally protected,” she said. “I find it deplorable. I think it’s completely reprehensible."
We could be entering another ramp-up of such attacks:
On Christmas morning, a Planned Parenthood surgical center was damaged after a Molotov cocktail was thrown on its roof and the windows on a nearby Planned Parenthood clinic were broken. Both incidents were minor and the clinics opened on time the next day.
Investigators are still trying to determine if the Christmas Day attacks were the work of a national anti-abortion group or connected to the earlier attack.
“You have some radical groups that go around nationwide and deliberately attack abortion clinics, but we don’t know if that’s the case here,” Albuquerque Fire Department Capt. Mike Paiz said. “It’s too early to tell."
Featheringill said since she’s worked at Planned Parenthood for the last 10 years, she’s seen waves of violence against abortion clinics that are cyclical with rashes of serious attacks interspersed with smaller incidents.
She said Planned Parenthood gets phoned-in hate messages and has been spray-painted with graffiti. On Friday, about 50 protesters were picketing Planned Parenthood, she said.
“We completely recognize and understand people’s First Amendment right to conduct themselves in a peaceful protest. We have no problem with that,” she said.
Featheringill said Planned Parenthood patients have not called with specific concerns related to the attacks, except to ask whether the offices would remain open.
But that doesn’t mean the events in recent weeks doesn’t worry patients and clinic professionals.
“It’s very upsetting for the staff and I’m sure for patients as well to have these kinds of incidents occur,” Featheringill said. “I can’t think of another way to phrase it, which is intimidation through domestic terrorist activities."
Domestic terrorists. That’s what these people are. That’s how they should be treated. That they aren’t is just another demonstration that we don’t live under the rule of law, but rather the fiat of the powerful, who pick and choose their priorities, and those priorities generally do not include the protection of women.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Borders of Darkness and Light
I’m not a believer in any religion, or supernatural explanations for life, but the old pagan and animist beliefs make a little more sense to me than the more elaborate belief systems. Rituals like the two solstices make sense, tied as they are to very real questions of survival and experienced life. Over at Crooked Timber I found (in addition to the picture above):
Newgrange is a clock. The shaft leading out to the roof box is precisely aligned so that on the morning of the Winter Solstice the first light of day will run directly into the middle of the tomb. Or, at least, it was precisely so aligned. It is so old that changes in the Earth’s orbit have affected its operation. When it was built, the sun would have struck the back wall of the chamber, rather than the floor, and the light would have remained in the chamber for about four minutes longer than it does now. It was very accurate. The people who built Newgrange knew what they were doing.
A society—a civilization, if you like—is a hard thing to hold together. If you live in an agrarian society, as the overwhelming majority of people did until about two hundred years ago, and you are on the western edge of Europe, few times are harder than the dead of Winter. The days are at their shortest, the sun is far away, and the Malthusian edge, in Brad DeLong’s phrase, is right in front of you. It’s no wonder so many religious festivals take place around the solstice. Here were a people, more than five millennia ago, able not only to pull through the Winter successfully, but able also to build a huge timepiece to remind themselves that they were going to make it. It’s astonishing.
The winter solstice is the border between advancing darkness and returning light. It is a celebration of hope, of greener futures and warmer days and fertility and growth. I was reading a lot of stories about borders this week. There was another border celebration like that festival of oldthis past week:
Europe just got bigger. At one minute after midnight local time on early Friday morning, border controls vanished for nine more European Union members, many of them former members of the Soviet Bloc. Fireworks, cheers, music and speeches throughout the morning welcomed the expansion, which means that travelers can move from the far corners of Estonia all the way to the Atlantic coast in Portugal without once encountering a border guard.
“This is an especially beautiful moment,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel at a Friday morning ceremony at the German border with Poland and the Czech Republic. “It is a source of great pleasure that coming generations will experience open borders as the European normalcy."
Borders, at their best, should be ephemeral things, permiable, as brief as a splash of light across a stone floor. Transitions, not barriers. Places where people meet and trade and interact. Healthy, growing, peaceful cultures know this. It is interesting to watch the nations of Europe, after centuries of religious war and imperial war and ethnic war, make this leap of faith, to take this chance on one another.
There was another story about a border this week, a physical border and a cultural border. Banksy paid a visit to the “fence” in the West Bank, where he got varied responses to his impish work:
Banksy also records on his website how an old Palestinian man said his painting made the wall look beautiful. Banksy thanked him, only to be told: ‘We don’t want it to be beautiful, we hate this wall. Go home.’
Soldier: What the f*** are you doing?
Banksy: You’ll have to wait until it’s finished.
Soldier (to colleagues): Safety’s off
Sometimes borders and barriers are rooted in so much hatred and fear and prejudice that there is no crossing them, not in the mind or in spirit or art or commerce. They become more than physical impediments, multi-dimensional markers that scream, beyond here there be monsters. It is interesting that two of the most militarily powerful nations on earth are retreating behind walls that blot out the light, the “other”, the hope for better futures.
Border: Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Mexico
The tensions between agents of the US government and residents across the border are heating up:
For years, people here have joked that they live just a stone’s throw from the United States, but last August that turn of phrase became a challenge.
Rubis Guadalupe Argumedo’s kitchen window looks out at the border fence. She says one sweltering night last summer she had all the windows open and tear gas poured inside.
She says Border Patrol agents lobbed a canister over the border fence and told her it was payback for the rocks that were being hurled at them.
Argumedo says the tear gas gave her son nosebleeds for two weeks.
11 Injured in Attacks
The Mexican Consulate has confirmed that at least 11 neighbors have been treated at Tijuana hospitals as the assaults have continued.
Argumedo says after a tear gas attack one recent Saturday night, she yelled at a Border Patrol agent from her front porch. “I told him, ‘Don’t throw anything. There are kids here,’” she recalled. “I said, ‘You’re not in Iraq.’”
She said he responded that he was sorry, but that the tear gas attacks would continue because rocks were being thrown at the agents.
Two nights later, on the opposite side of the fence, Border Patrol agent Damon Forman’s radio crackles with news of the latest rock-throwing incident.
“It just happens. Just moments ago when the sun was up, it was quiet. And now, slowly but surely, there’s going to start being movement,” Forman said.
Forman is perched on a dirt mound on the U.S. side of the border and can see Argumedo’s home.
He says assaults on agents have increased five-fold in the area since October compared to the same time last year.
“At one time, they’ll be maybe 15 people on the south side of the fence,” he said, “and you’ll see the sky fill with rocks, and all of them will come over on top of our agents at one time.”
Forman won’t acknowledge the use of tear gas, but he says whatever means the agents employ is aimed only at protecting themselves. “I can stand by my word in saying that I am sure those agents — whatever tactics they are using — it’s not targeted toward anyone but the people who are committing the assaults and trying to harm our agents."
Eighteen years ago on the 22nd, around another solstice, the West, celebrated the opening of the Brandenberg Gate. A celebration accompanied by much backpatting by Americans and our belligerent President who liked to claim credit for it. We shame ourselves now as we build walls ourselves, as we hide in fear and revulsion and hatred and greed. It’s too bad that we can’t follow the example of the Europeans, that we are so unwilling to take a chance and open our faces to the rising sun at the end of the longest night of the year in a spirit of openness and opportunity. No, we prefer to cower in a dark corner, behind fortifications like our ally in the middle east, detaining and abusing and torturing and building more walls, more fortresses, more barriers to the light.
I fear it will be a long dark night before we allow the sun to brighten our floors again.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Run Cynthia Run
You should not choose the lesser of two lessers, even if it means a short-term victory for the far right. To vote for Clinton, or Obama, or Edwards, is to vote for the corporations locking in their theft of your civil liberties, in continued war, in the destruction of human rights.
Vote for your values.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
I Don't Care, Shut Up
You have GOT to be kidding me. Former Senator Mitchell referred to the Northern Ireland peace talks today, when he was talking about A FUCKING GAME:
NPR: You raised Northern Ireland.
CLUELESS OLD MAN: Yes.
NPR: You invoked your experience as a Northern Ireland mediator. What did you learn in Northern Ireland that is germane to steroid abuse in Major League Baseball?
RICH FUCK WITH NO SENSE OF PROPORTION: That letting go of the past and looking to the future is a very hard thing to do. But it’s necessary to deal with an ongoing problem.
NPR: Are you struck by any irony here that the Ulster men and Provos in Northern Ireland may have been more forthcoming to your mission than the baseball players union was in this case?
POSTER CHILD FOR STUPID AMERICANS: (Laughter.) Well, I thought about that from time to time.
I’m so fucking sick of the phrase “sanctity of the game” that I could puke.
IS
JUST
A
GAME!
It’s not people killing each other over who has the bestest imaginary Friend. It’s not feeding children, or clothing them, or housing them, or providing healthcare or a living wage for their parents. It’s not ending criminal wars of choice, or impeaching the war pigs that started it, or who continue to fund it.
No, this is a seemingly ENDLESS story about grown men playing a children’s game for large sums of money. Grown men who obviously want to maximize their earnings in this society where how much you have seems to be the only measure of a person’s worth that matters, and what fans want is bigger muscles, faster pitches, farther homeruns. BIGGER BETTER FASTER STRONGER MORE! should actually replace “In God We Trust” on our money, because they are plainly the things that Americans really value.
This is a nation that places profit over everything else, that all-but looks the other way as massive corporations rape the environment and poison their neighbors. Who cares if a bunch of overly competitive ‘roid freaks destroy their own bodies?
It barely counts as a “problem”, unless it’s fucking up the betting on a game, and anybody who thinks that is a REAL problem needs to take a look around.
Retired Senator Mitchell is a perfect example of the fucked up priorities of the ruling political class in this country. A political class which spends time on victimless crimes and MoveOn ads and declaring that Xtianity is more wonderful than puppies, warm apple pie and a mother’s hugs. A political class that goes to work solving small problems for big money for corporations and the rich people who control them when they’re done doing that exact same they did when they held office.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Warrior Woman
CNN and the rest of the infotainment hucksters are so excited. Their very own Christian version of a hot woman with a gun and a DEAD BODY, in a CHURCH! A blonde with a license to kill, from GAWD himself:
"I saw him coming through the doors,” she told reporters on Monday. “I took cover, and I waited for him to get closer, and I came out of cover and identified myself, and engaged him, and took him down. And that’s pretty much it."
Actually, that wasn’t actually pretty much it, as the young gunman had delivered the coup de grâce himself, but back to our soldier of Gawd.
"I give the credit to God. And I say that very humbly. God was with me and the whole time I was behind cover—this has got to be God, because of the firepower that [the gunman] had vs. what I had,” Assam said.
“I did not run away and I didn’t think for a minute to run away, I just knew that I was given the assignment to end this before it got too much worse. I just prayed for the Holy Spirit to guide me.”
She told reporters she had not slept since the shooting, “as I’m sure you can tell.”
She said she was on the third day of a three-day regimen of fasting and prayer, wanting to know God’s will for what to do with her life, when the shooting took place.
“I was weak, and where I was weak, God made me strong,” she said. “He filled me and he guided me and protected me and many other people. And I’m honored that God chose me."
Not much humility in evidence when you claim Gawd is your very own laser sight, but we can’t expect humility from an armed fanatic being proclaimed a hero by pretty much everybody. Even better, she has turned out to have a reportedly spotty record, so the talking heads can ladle another flavor of pre-sweeted sauce onto the story: she was REDEEMED! In a church! (cue choir of cherubum in gun belts)
We’re awash in Gawd, here in the Land of Free and the home of the heavily-armed brave. Just in the last week, Gawd wants us to:
- Have Obama as our President.
- Save us from the “liberal media” that makes boys in black kill His people.
- Put Hillary Clinton in the White House.
- Wants a grand jury to investigate the healthcare provided to women in Kansas.
- Be homeschooled and vote for Huckabee.
He probably wants someone to ski faster, score a touchdown and see His mama in a waterstain somewhere, too.
Too bad Gawd’s Very Own Country didn’t have readily available mental healthcare for a troubled young man who was kicked out out of the school where he sought meaning:
The gunman was identified as Matthew Murray, 24, who was home-schooled in what a friend said was a deeply religious Christian household. Murray’s father is a neurologist and a leading multiple-sclerosis researcher.
Five people _ including Murray _ were killed, and five others wounded Sunday in the two eruptions of violence 12 hours and 65 miles apart.
How did this lead him into the path of the gunwoman with Gawd guiding her hungry red right hand?
In a statement, the training center said health problems kept Murray from finishing the program but elaborated little. Murray did not complete the lecture phase or a field assignment as part of a 12-week program, Youth With a Mission said.
“The program directors felt that issues with his health made it inappropriate for him to” finish, it said.
Police gave no immediate details on the hate mail. And the training center said that Murray left in 2002 _ five years ago, not three _ and that no one there can recall any visits or other communication from him since then.
Earlier Monday, a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said it appeared Murray “hated Christians."
I wonder why he might have “hated Christians”?
Boyd said members will hold a family meeting Wednesday. “We will gather to worship, pray, mourn and begin our healing process,” a statement said.
“If we could find some motive, some written motive or some recorded motive that he gave, it would be helpful for the healing process, sure, because that is the question: Why? Why, why, why is going to be the number one question that we answer,” Boyd said.
Some answers may be gleaned from a warning Murray posted online just 90 minutes before he went to New Life Church.
The message attributed to Matthew Murray—using the screen name “nghtmrchld26”—mirrored the wording of a warning posted in 1999 by Eric Harris before he and Dylan Klebold went on a shooting rampage at Columbine High School.
“I’m coming for EVERYONE soon and I WILL be armed to the @.%$ teeth and I WILL shoot to kill,” the posting obtained by CNN affiliate KUSA-TV read. This was the same wording used by Harris, with the exception of symbols used to replace an expletive.
Murray, who lived in Englewood, Colorado, just 13 miles from the Columbine campus, titled his entry “You Christians brought this on yourselves.” It was published on a Web site for people who had left Pentecostal and fundamentalist religious groups.
The message, first reported Monday by KUSA-TV, was taken offline by the site’s administrator after he talked to the FBI, but has since been put back online.
The posting on the online forum, maintained by the group Association of Former Pentecostals, indicated it was published at 11:03 a.m. on Sunday—two hours before the shooting at New Life Church and about 11 hours after the shooting at Youth With A Mission.
In earlier postings, “nghtmrchld26” railed against the Rev. Ted Haggard, founder of New Life Church.
Gawd has been all over the place lately, little more than a hired shill for whatever story we’re being sold, and now we’re being sold that most fond fantasy of the theofascist right. A Christian warrior woman, killing a heathen, in a church, in an act of redemption smack in the middle of the holiday season that repeatedly rebrands the birthday of Gawd’s Own Son/Self/Sacrificial Lamb. (A birthday that no one knows the actual day when it actually happened, if myths can actually happen on a given day.)
What fun, and good ratings for the infotainment scum, all the better to sell SUVs and boner pills and financial “services” and bigger gas-guzzling cars. All of which, I’m sure, are what Gawd wants as well.
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Ahistorical Puritans
"Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone. - Mitt Romney
One of my favorite games as a young philosophy major was arguing with the theology students. Pascal’s Wager, all the various and sundry explications of choosing salvation as an act of “free will” ... you’ve heard many of them, I’m sure. I know I did in the student lounges and cafeterias.
Depending on whether they were Catholic (at my university most were) or protestant, they explained that I had the “free will” to choose the Sacraments of the Church / Jesus Christ as my personal Savior (depending on the flavor) ... OR ... eternal damnation. The Catholic version of eternal damnation sounded a little less scary, and they seemed to take less joy in my limitless punishment (sometimes described as “the absence of God’s love, FOREVER!") than the protestants, who seemed to get tiny little erections at the thought of hot pitchforks sodomizing me.
I would point out that this sounds much like the relationship that a less-than-patient adoptive owner would have with a new puppy. Scratch at the door so I can be let out, earning love and approval, maybe learn to fetch, or back to the pound for punishment or death.
They were bemused by this response. “How can you say that? you make the choice of your FREE WILL.”
I was free because an omnipotent being had given me a choice between submission or eternal suffering. I would tell them that wasn’t much of a choice, and if they were going to present life as such a limited “choice”, they should at least be as honest as Kierkegaard and admit that it wasn’t much of a choice but still the only leap we have left to make.
Well, Mitt is much like those earnest students, falling back on cant and platitude, on threat and fear, and reliant on a pinched idea of “freedom” that is at odds with the founding fathers that he cherry-picks quotes from as earnestly as any evangelical theofascist:
“There are some who may feel that religion is not a matter to be seriously considered in the context of the weighty threats that face us. If so, they are at odds with the nation’s founders, for they, when our nation faced its greatest peril, sought the blessings of the Creator. And further, they discovered the essential connection between the survival of a free land and the protection of religious freedom. In John Adams’ words: ‘We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion… Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people.’
Of course, if that was true there would never have been the whole balance of powers thing, Adams would never have worked with friend and foe to develop a government that was more a house of cards than a structure, a system held up by competing pressures from all sides.
Mitt forgets all of that, preferring to join the modern puritans in the evangelical movement in the erection of straw secularists, for him to tie to a stake and rhetorically burn:
"As a young man, Lincoln described what he called America ‘s ‘political religion’ - the commitment to defend the rule of law and the Constitution. When I place my hand on the Bible and take the oath of office, that oath becomes my highest promise to God. If I am fortunate to become your president, I will serve no one religion, no one group, no one cause, and no one interest. A President must serve only the common cause of the people of the United States .
“There are some for whom these commitments are not enough. They would prefer it if I would simply distance myself from my religion, say that it is more a tradition than my personal conviction, or disavow one or another of its precepts. That I will not do. I believe in my Mormon faith and I endeavor to live by it. My faith is the faith of my fathers - I will be true to them and to my beliefs.
Well, no. If a person’s faith inspires them to speak truth to our common trials, to ACT for the public good regardless of others’ beliefs, then I have absolutely no problem with them. If only that was the case for so many of the theofascist activists, then they wouldn’t be so much of a danger to this fragile house of cards that Adams and the rest erected.
"It is important to recognize that while differences in theology exist between the churches in America , we share a common creed of moral convictions. And where the affairs of our nation are concerned, it’s usually a sound rule to focus on the latter - on the great moral principles that urge us all on a common course. Whether it was the cause of abolition, or civil rights, or the right to life itself, no movement of conscience can succeed in America that cannot speak to the convictions of religious people.
“We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America - the religion of secularism. They are wrong.
“The founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation ‘Under God’ and in God, we do indeed trust. (well, NO, but if they keep saying it then it must be true - Madman)
“We should acknowledge the Creator as did the Founders - in ceremony and word. He should remain on our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our history, and during the holiday season, nativity scenes and menorahs should be welcome in our public places. Our greatness would not long endure without judges who respect the foundation of faith upon which our constitution rests. I will take care to separate the affairs of government from any religion, but I will not separate us from ‘the God who gave us liberty.’
Therein lies the kernel of truth about what all of this religious blather is about. This isn’t about what Mitt’s religion tells HIM to do, it’s about what his and the evangelical right’s religions want OTHER PEOPLE, notably women, to do.
It’s a game being played by members of both parties now. This is about imposing religious beliefs upon other people, especially women.
“Freedom” has nothing to do with any of this, nor does religious tolerance. I will be perfectly tolerant of your magic underwear or plural marriage as long as you aren’t using your fairy tales to work with other zealots to enslave women to the fruit of their uteruses. This isn’t about religion, this is about REAL freedom, the kind of freedom that Adams and the rest talked about (while falling far short of it) for a free people in a truly public square.
If you and others (this goes for Clinton and Obama and Edwards too) insist on bringing up your Imaginary Friend as an excuse to appeal to bigotry and fear and misogyny to obtain power, then you deserve all of the scorn directed at your beliefs that I and others can heap on you. Shut up about your superstitions, and I will stop caring about them.
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Stuffing the Djinn Back Into the Magnetic Bottle
Why don’t people get this, that the President of the United States is a radical idealogue who will NEVER let facts stand in the way of his bloody agenda?
"I still feel strongly that Iran’s a danger. I think it is very important for the international community to recognise the fact that if Iran were to develop the knowledge that they could transfer to a clandestine programme, it would create a danger for the world."
Wow, THAT’S the problem?
I hate to break it to that cokehead/religious fanatic/war pig, but the thermonuclear Ifrit have long ago made themselves known to people possessed of a modern knowledge of physics, mathematics and engineering, and the Iranians have long been a sophisticated, well-educated people. The technology is fairly well known, and has been for decades.
The problem isn’t “knowledge”. If that WAS the problem, then a whole lot of people would need to be killed, and you could start at nearly every large university (not to mention Pakistan, Israel and South Africa and a bunch of other countries).
The danger only comes when there is money, resources and commitment to develop and possess those terrible weapons, and as we learned recently the Iranians backed away from that commitment FOUR YEARS AGO. Four years ago, in other words BEFORE the supposed “Hitler” we’re all supposed to be afraid of was elected to his all-but powerless office as President of Iran.
Bush is dangerous. He’s a liar, or he’s a fool. He’s a bloodthirsty criminal, or a treacherous fanatic. He’s a threat to life on earth, and has a pliant mainstream press that STILL won’t stand up to him.
Take away the damned button from this murderer.
Impeach Cheney, and impeach Bush. The fate of the world may very well depend upon getting the capability to set the world aflame away from them.