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Politics : The Donkey's Inn -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Patricia Trinchero who wrote (6062)	2/7/2003 10:05:54 AM
From: TigerPaw	Respond to of 15516

The Venezuelan crisis seems to be diminishing. The timing of the crisis, and it's easing is strong circumstantial evidence that Bush and his CIA were behind these strikes all along. They failed once, now they ran our of time and must release the Venezuelan oil supplies before attacking Iraq. I expect Hugo Chavez will be confronted with another coup attempt if oil prices ever stabalize. washingtonpost.com washingtonpost.com It's all part of the meglomatic scheme to conquer the world. TP

To: Patricia Trinchero who wrote (6062)	2/7/2003 11:44:50 AM
From: Skywatcher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15516

UK war dossier a sham, say experts British 'intelligence' lifted from academic articles Michael White and Brian Whitaker Thursday February 06 2003 The Guardian Downing Street was last night plunged into acute international embarrassment after it emerged that large parts of the British government's latest dossier on Iraq - allegedly based on "intelligence material" - were taken from published academic articles, some of them several years old. Amid charges of "scandalous" plagiarism on the night when Tony Blair attempted to rally support for the US-led campaign against Saddam Hussein, Whitehall's dismay was compounded by the knowledge that the disputed document was singled out for praise by the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, in his speech to the UN security council on Wednesday. Citing the British dossier, entitled Iraq - its infrastructure of concealment, deception and intimidation in front of a worldwide television audience Mr Powell said: "I would call my colleagues' attention to the fine paper that the United Kingdom distributed... which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities." But on Channel 4 News last night it was revealed that four of the report's 19 pages had been copied - with only minor editing and a few insertions - from the internet version of an article by Ibrahim al-Marashi which appeared in the Middle East Review of International Affairs last September. Though that was not the only textual embarrassment No 10 seemed determined to tough it out last night. Dismissing the gathering controversy as the latest example of media obsession with spin, officials insisted it in no way undermines the underlying truth of the dossier, whose contents had been re-checked with British intelligence sources. "The important thing is that it is accurate," said one source. What Whitehall may not grasp is the horror with which unacknowledged borrowing of material - the crime of plagiarism - is regarded in American academic and media circles, even though successive US governments have a poor record of misleading their own citizens on foreign policy issues at least since the Vietnam war. On a special edi tion of BBC Newsnight, filmed before a critical audience last night, Mr Blair stressed that he was willing to forgo popularity to warn voters of the dangers of weapons of mass destruction: "I may be wrong, but I do believe it." With trust a critical element in the battle to woo a sceptical public the first sentence of the No 10 document merely states, somewhat cryptically, that it "draws upon a number of sources, including intelligence material". But Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge University, told Channel 4: "I found it quite startling when I realised that I'd read most of it before." The content of six more pages relies heavily on articles by Sean Boyne and Ken Gause that appeared in Jane's Intelligence Review in 1997 and last November. None of these sources is acknowledged. The document, as posted on Downing Street's website at the end of January, also acci dentally named four Whitehall officials who had worked on it: P Hamill, J Pratt, A Blackshaw and M Khan. It was reposted on February 3 with the first three names deleted. "Apart from passing this off as the work of its intelligence services," Dr Rangwala said, "it indicates that the UK really does not have any independent sources of information on Iraq's internal policies. It just draws upon publicly available data." Evidence of an electronic cut-and-paste operation by Whitehall officials can be found in the way the dossier preserves textual quirks from its original sources. One sentence in Dr Marashi's article includes a misplaced comma in referring to Iraq's head of military intelligence during the 1991 Gulf war. The same sentence in Downing Street's report contains the same misplaced comma. A Downing Street spokesman declined to say why the report's public sources had not been acknowledged. "We said that it draws on a number of sources, including intelligence. It speaks for itself." Dr Marashi, a research associate at the Centre for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, said no one had contacted him before lifting the material. But on the regular edition of Newsnight he later gave some comfort to No 10. "In my opinion, the UK document overall is accurate even though there are a few minor cosmetic changes. The only inaccuracies in the UK document were that they maybe inflated some of the numbers of these intelligence agencies," he said. Explaining the more journalistic changes inserted into his work by Whitehall he added: "Being an academic paper, I tried to soften the language. "For example, in one of my documents, I said that they support organisations in what Iraq considers hostile regimes, whereas the UK document refers to it as 'supporting terrorist organisations in hostile regimes'. "The primary documents I used for this article are a collection of two sets of documents, one taken from Kurdish rebels in the north of Iraq - around 4m documents - as well as 300,000 documents left by Iraqi security services in Kuwait. After that, I have been following events in the Iraqi security services for the last 10 years." Iraq's decision last night to let weapons inspectors interview one of its scientists for the first time without government "minders" signalled that Baghdad may be bending under international pressure. But diplomats will be trying to determine over the next few days whether it is a token gesture or a real shift away from what they describe as Iraq's "catch us if you can" approach to inspections. Hours before the announcement, a Foreign Office source in London signalled that this was the kind of change of heart that Iraq would have to make to avoid war. Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited CC

To: Patricia Trinchero who wrote (6062)	2/7/2003 1:56:50 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15516

And folks using medical marijuana are going to jail...I thought this was the 21st but it's looking more like Grand Inquisitor Torquemada's 15th century....Publication date: 02/03/2003 examiner.com Medical pot jury may speak out BY J.K. DINEEN Of The Examiner Staff Ed Rosenthal did some things over the weekend that he may not be able to do for a long time: He went to see a matinee with his family and played some ferocious games of Scrabble with his son, Nick. "We just got back from seeing 'Rabbit Proof Fence,'" his wife, Jane Klein, said from the family's Oakland home. "It's an Australian movie about blindness to human circumstance. The scenery of Australia was beautiful." Rosenthal's lawyers also had a busy weekend. They spent it writing an appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn a conviction that could land Rosenthal in federal prison for a minimum of 10 years. Rosenthal, a 58-year-old medical marijuana advocate who had been deputized to grow cannabis by Oakland city officials, was convicted Friday in federal court for cultivating more than 100 marijuana plants and for maintaining an Oakland building for the purpose of growing pot. The case has attracted national attention, in part because it pitted the federal government against state and local laws that allow the sick and dying to use marijuana as medicine. Federal law prohibits any use or production of marijuana and Charles Breyer, the judge in the case, repeatedly threw out any testimony or questions dealing with state medical marijuana laws. Rosenthal faces five years for each charge. His sentencing hearing is scheduled for Tuesday. After the verdict, several members of the jury expressed regret and anger that they were explicitly forbidden from considering testimony about medical pot and that Oakland city officials who worked with Rosenthal were not allowed to testify. Juror Marney Craig, 58, a property manager from Novato, said, "it seems like we made a horrible mistake." "We were made to feel like we had no choice, even though we were residents of a state that has legalized medical marijuana," jury foreman Charles Sackett, a construction contractor from Sebastopol, told reporters. Sources told The Examiner that several members of the jury are planning to hold a press conference in support of Rosenthal before the sentencing hearing on Tuesday. "The only way the federal government can get a conviction on a medical marijuana case is to stack the deck to keep the actual issue out," said Bruce Mirken, spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project. "Can you think of another criminal case where the accused isn't allowed to say why he did it? Ed Rosenthal grew some plants and wasn't allowed to say why." Mirken predicted that the case may be the "turning point that heads us to the end of the federal ban on medical marijuana." "His spirits are excellent," said Klein. "He feels his case has opened a national debate and conversation looking not only at medical marijuana but the whole hypocrisy and corruption in the judicial system under Attorney General John Ashcroft."