OT: From hash cake to SpongeBob
G-Ride
Teachers Treated After Eating Doped Cake
http://tinyurl.com/ypmsw
BERLIN (Reuters) - Teachers in a German school were treated in hospital
after gobbling up an anonymously donated chocolate cake, unaware it was
laced with hashish, authorities said on Thursday
Dozens of couples line up for same-sex marriages
http://tinyurl.com/23eoy
More than 90 gay and lesbian couples took their wedding vows at San
Francisco City Hall this morning - with scores more lined up - even as
two groups filed suit to try to stop the city from performing same-sex
marriages.
Senate's Iraq Probe to Include Bush, Aides
http://tinyurl.com/3g5jy
WASHINGTON - In a blow to the Bush administration, the Senate
Intelligence Committee said Thursday that it planned to investigate
whether White House officials exaggerated the Iraq threat or pressured
analysts to tailor their assessments of Baghdad's weapons programs to
bolster the case for war.
AN UN-FUNNY VALENTINE: Greeting card picture evokes race stereotype
http://tinyurl.com/2e9kv
American Greetings Corp. calls it a regrettable printing error.
Somehow, boxes of SpongeBob SquarePants Valentine's Day cards are
popping up in local Wal-Mart stores -- but the popular cartoon character
found inside isn't his traditional yellow color.
Group fails in bid to keep commandments in Idaho city park
http://tinyurl.com/352mc
BOISE, Idaho - Saying the separation of church and state has served the
nation
well for more than 200 years, a federal judge yesterday rejected a
request to keep
a Ten Commandments monument in a city park.
"Undeniably, there will be many that disagree with today's conclusion,"
U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge wrote. "This decision, however, is not
one dictated by the court but by the founding fathers who in their
wisdom constructed a democracy that separated government from religion."
--
Aloha, G-Ride
"I'm funky, not a junkie but i know where to get it."
Smagmapig333
>http://tinyurl.com/3g5jy
>
>WASHINGTON - In a blow to the Bush administration, the Senate
>Intelligence Committee said Thursday that it planned to investigate
>whether White House officials exaggerated the Iraq threat or pressured
>analysts to tailor their assessments of Baghdad's weapons programs to
>bolster the case for war.
gee, i wonder if they will look into 1998 as well...
changey
"Smagmapig333" <smagma...@aol.communism> wrote in message
news:20040213223141...@mb-m21.aol.com...
go for it. hold EVERYONE responsible.
lapzirdonocomad
especially the ones that AREN'T in office...
jeremy
--
http://www.morealivedeadthanyoulleverbealive.com
G-Ride
news:c0kis8$18kqvj$1...@ID-199763.news.uni-berlin.de...
This is a relevant quote from the article:
"The statement said the committee would examine public comments and claims
made not only by the current administration but by officials in the Clinton
administration."
So there's no need to lose any sleep over that particular concern.
Here's the article in its entirety for anyone who doesn't want to deal with
the LA Times registration:
Senate's Iraq Probe to Include Bush, Aides
By Greg Miller, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON - In a blow to the Bush administration, the Senate Intelligence
Committee said Thursday that it planned to investigate whether White House
officials exaggerated the Iraq threat or pressured analysts to tailor their
assessments of Baghdad's weapons programs to bolster the case for war.
The move puts claims made by President Bush and other senior officials in
his administration squarely in the sights of the committee's investigation,
and could add to the White House's political troubles as it tries to keep
questions about the war from becoming a drag on Bush's reelection campaign
The White House and Republican leaders in Congress had sought for months to
confine the inquiry to the performance of the CIA and other intelligence
agencies, and to insulate the administration. But the Senate panel voted
unanimously Thursday to expand the probe after some GOP members appeared
ready to break from the Republican position.
The expansion was a victory for Democrats, who have argued for months that
many of the claims made by Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and others were
not backed up by the intelligence.
"We will address the question of whether intelligence was exaggerated or
misused by reviewing statements by senior policymakers to determine if those
statements were substantiated by the intelligence," said Sen. John D. "Jay"
Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the committee.
The change in scope was announced in a statement issued by Rockefeller and
the chairman of the panel, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.). The statement outlined
a new course for an investigation that is already several months along, and
has involved interviews with dozens of U.S. intelligence officials and
reviews of thousands of pages of classified documents.
New areas of inquiry will include "whether any influence was brought to bear
on anyone to shape their analysis to support policy objectives," the
statement said. Sources involved in the investigation said they had turned
up no evidence so far that there was such pressure, or that analysts shaded
their assessments to please the White House.
The committee said it would examine the role played by a controversial
intelligence unit set up secretly at the Pentagon to search for ties between
Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network. The unit in the so-called Office of
Special Plans has been accused of cherry-picking data to help bolster White
House claims of Iraq-Al Qaeda ties that the CIA and other agencies viewed
far more skeptically.
The committee also will focus new scrutiny on the intelligence community's
use of information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition
group during Saddam Hussein's regime that lobbied for years for a U.S.
effort to oust the Iraqi president, and whose leaders have ties to senior
members of the Bush administration. Critics say the INC has served up a
stream of Iraqi defectors with exaggerated or unfounded claims about Iraq's
weapons programs and other activities.
But the most significant shift for the committee is its determination to now
examine "whether public statements and reports and testimony regarding Iraq"
by administration figures were "substantiated by intelligence information."
The statement said the committee would examine public comments and claims
made not only by the current administration but by officials in the Clinton
administration.
A senior aide on the committee said the panel had yet to determine exactly
how it would decide whether White House officials' claims were supported by
the underlying intelligence. But he said it had already collected claims and
statements dating to the early 1990s, and had assembled all of the relevant
intelligence assessments and reports. "All that has to be done now is the
comparison," he said.
The committee now plans to issue an initial report based on its review of
the performance of the intelligence agencies in late March or early April,
the aide said, and the new areas of investigation could be the subject of a
subsequent report. No date has been set, but Democrats are likely to push to
get the information released well before the November elections.
The expansion marks a surprising shift in direction for the committee.
Roberts and other Republicans had resisted the idea of scrutinizing the
administration's public statements or interactions with intelligence
analysts on the grounds that it was inherently political and beyond the
jurisdiction of a congressional intelligence panel. Recent developments put
new pressure on Republicans to give ground to Democrats.
The possibility that a compromise might be reached surfaced Wednesday when
Roberts and Rockefeller met in a closed-door session with Sen. Carl Levin
(D-Mich.) and Sen. Charles Hagel (R-Neb.) to discuss an expansion of the
investigation. Hagel is said by several sources to be one of the Republicans
who believed the expansion was necessary. A spokesman for Hagel declined to
comment.
The former chief U.S. weapons hunter in Iraq, David Kay, said recently that
he believed an examination of the administration's claims should accompany
the review of the intelligence. After he resigned last month, Kay said that
the prewar intelligence on Iraq was wrong and that he does not believe there
were any banned weapons in Baghdad when the United States invaded last year.
Last week, CIA Director George J. Tenet gave a speech defending his agency,
acknowledging problems with its prewar estimates but stressing that it never
portrayed Iraq as an imminent threat to the United States. That remark
seemed to undercut one of the administration's principal cases for launching
the war over objections from France, Germany and other longtime allies.
White House officials have recently said they never used the word "imminent"
to describe the threat, but a review of their statements shows they
repeatedly portrayed the danger as urgent. Bush described Hussein's regime
as a "grave and growing" danger and warned that the United States could not
wait for definitive proof that Hussein had weapons stockpiles.
"Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - the
smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud," Bush said in
a speech in Cincinnati in October 2002. Since Hussein was ousted, some in
the administration have retreated from insisting that weapons would be
found.
--
Aloha, G-Ride
"I'm funky, not a junkie but I know where to get it."
Smagmapig333
>From: "lapzirdonocomad" lapzirdo...@SPAMhotmail.com
>Date: 2/14/2004 2:31 AM Eastern Standard Time
>Message-id: <c0kis8$18kqvj$1...@ID-199763.news.uni-berlin.de>
most of them are. the same people that allowed clinton to do it in 98 still
hold office, some of the same hypocrites in office that voted for this
particular action happen to be running for president.
so no, not "especially" the ones not in office.