the postmark burning jet black in the summer sun

* Paul Craig Roberts on Attention Deficit America. excerpt:

"The story is: How did the US Congress, the opposition party, the news media, and the US public let the Bush administration start a war based on phony documents?"
...
"Speaking of questionable documents, the Bush administration has swallowed a large number. What about the obviously forged 'yellowcake' documents that were the basis for the 'mistaken' claim that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear weapons program?

The Bush administration did not check out the 'stovepiped' phony 'intelligence' fed them by Iraqi exiles with an agenda and by neoconservatives determined to turn the 'war on terror' into a war against Iraq, Iran, and Syria.

"The Bush administration ignored all warnings from real experts and CIA and State Department analysts. Bush invaded a country that not only posed no threat to the United States, but also had no weapons of mass destruction and no connections to Osama bin Laden.

"The Bush administration's forged war has cost more than 1,000 American families their sons, husbands, fathers, brothers and a few their sisters, daughters and mothers. Another 7,000-8,000 American soldiers have been wounded, more than half too grievously to be returned to combat. Many have lost arms, legs, eyes.

"What have we achieved with these enormous casualties?"

* Bush's Faustian Deal With the Taliban, written May 2001. [via drug war rant] excerpt:

"Enslave your girls and women, harbor anti-U.S. terrorists, destroy every vestige of civilization in your homeland, and the Bush administration will embrace you. All that matters is that you line up as an ally in the drug war, the only international cause that this nation still takes seriously.

"That's the message sent with the recent gift of $43 million to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, the most virulent anti-American violators of human rights in the world today. The gift, announced last Thursday by Secretary of State Colin Powell, in addition to other recent aid, makes the U.S. the main sponsor of the Taliban and rewards that 'rogue regime' for declaring that opium growing is against the will of God. So, too, by the Taliban's estimation, are most human activities, but it's the ban on drugs that catches this administration's attention.

"Never mind that Osama bin Laden still operates the leading anti-American terror operation from his base in Afghanistan, from which, among other crimes, he launched two bloody attacks on American embassies in Africa in 1998.

"Sadly, the Bush administration is cozying up to the Taliban regime at a time when the United Nations, at U.S. insistence, imposes sanctions on Afghanistan because the Kabul government will not turn over Bin Laden.

"The war on drugs has become our own fanatics' obsession and easily trumps all other concerns. How else could we come to reward the Taliban, who has subjected the female half of the Afghan population to a continual reign of terror in a country once considered enlightened in its treatment of women?"

* Last Plane to Jakarta lists 101 Things to which you can compare Interpol besides Joy Division. excerpt:

- Edward Elgar
- Sonic Youth minus the noise fixation
- imaginary band named "Youth Sonique"
- old time hockey
- breakfast in Paris
- the sun setting after the monsoon rains
- the Manic Street Preachers
- Nirvana
- the credits to a French movie playing in a theater in S.E. Portland on a rainy day
- Sarah Records
- Blanco y Negro
- David Bowie's early singles on Pye
- "Downtown"
- Susan Amway-era Magnetic Fields
- lack of water
- lack of air