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As much as I find stories like this the apex of "OH GOD WHAT ABOUT MY CHILDREN" ninnyism, the Powers That Be only have themselves to blame that nobody is giving their kid a flu shot. Sure, part of the reason is due to dangerously-ill-informed numbskulls like Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy (who would rather have you listen to them than someone who spent eight years in med school) but pharmaceutical companies have not exactly been bastions of trust.
I get the feeling people would be a lot less squeamish about vaccination if it weren't contained in a needle that gets thrust into your skin. The mere act of impalement, no matter how small, creates fear that is rooted in our caveman ancestry and came of age during the frickin' jousts of the Middle Ages. If the flu vaccine was a jello shot, we wouldn't be having this little chat.
But let's look at recent history - as of a few months ago, your Tylenol dosage is suddenly all wrong, the estrogen therapy my mom was on back in the '90s was classified as "cancer-causing" by the WHO, and apparently the Vioxx that I occasionally took after hoops was givin' folks heart attacks. Companies do whatever the hell they want, whenever the hell they want, with only an actuarial table standing between their product and your untimely demise - I don't say this as an enraged McLeftyShorts with a macramé dreamcatcher helmet, I say it with the acceptance of someone who gives thanks for the warning, but will storm the castle anyway.
The flu vaccine safety record is unparalleled. It'd be awesome for everyone to get the shot and create a herd immunity every winter, even if the term "herd" isn't all that inspiring. I certainly got my flu shot at Target last week, the same day Lucy did the FluMist spray (full disclosure: most of the spray ended up on the pediatrician's ceiling, as my daughter's lungs and will power are not easily sublimated).
The Times did an excellent Q&A piece on the two flu vaccines, but I doubt there's much wiggle room among American parents - either you're going to do it or you aren't. I will say two contradictory things to sum up my feelings, however: first off, if companies in general treated human beings as something more than feed cattle with wallets, those people might be slightly more inclined to believe their products were safe. Secondly, my doctor and I think I had the swine flu in May, and let me tell you that it MOTHERFUCKING SUCKS.
I have some LFMD family history to share.
My mother was on that estrogen therapy, and lo and behold, she ended up with breast cancer. No previous family history. (P.S. - a mastectomy later, she is doing well).
The first anti-depressant I was on, Serzone, was working well for me. Then one day, I got a call from my doc telling me that I might want to consider some other med because Serzone was causing severe liver damage in some patients. I had been taking Serzone daily for 2 years. Who knows how my liver looks inside.
In 1976, my husband's grandfather was a dutiful citizen and got the swine flu vaccine. After all, he was the local postmaster and was in contact with many people on a daily basis. Well, as a result of the shot, he contracted Guilliam-Barre (sp?) and was paralyzed from the waist down. A fiesty midwesterner, he sued the federal government and was awarded a judgement in 1980 of nearly $700,000. That $$ was put in a trust for his grandchildren, and next year it will pay for our new kitchen remodeling.
Given all this, I don't see anything wrong with questioning the "expertise" of the medical community and federal government. We are all guinea pigs in the big scheme of things these days.
Everyone pretty much does get the herd immunity every year (if you're old). I think what creeps people out is that most younger parents and kids don't normally get a flu vaccine. They don't know that these vaccines are produced in an entirely different scheme than some of the developed drugs you mention. They combine the horror stories of drugs with ignorance about "the vaccine is ready in two months" and come out with a reasonable conclusion that "this is untested!"
Like LFMD says, it's not just big pharma; the government/military/research universities/etc. have also done this. I think this is one of those "ignorance issues" that has merit, primordial or not-
Most friends/parents of young kids I have spoken with are not planning on getting the H1N1 vaccine, and no more than half have gotten the flu one. Selfishly, we wish more in our 2 yr old daughter's class were opting for it. She has asthma and at times a cold has ultimately translated to hospital admittance. However, she is allergic to eggs and can't get any type of flu shot. So, My husband and I, and our 6 year old will get both vaccines this year.
Flu vaccine = ok. H1N1 vaccine = questionable. Two of our doctors are saying not to get it even though it is supposedly just a strain change. Note if you do get it that some forms contain thimerisol and FDA seems to have reserved the right to add squalene, too.
My daughter was in the hospital for a week last winter with the Flu. Ever try to entertain a 2 year old in a bed for a week?
She will get the shots. We all will. They try to anticipate the active strains each year when they make the vaccine. Some years they are closer than others.
I understand the mistrust, but this is not a case of a drug company making a bazillion dollars to make sure that 60 year old men can get it up. BTW, would you take Viagra and then go to an island that was only accessable by boat and had no doctor? I love marketing.
My daughter was in the hospital for a week last winter with the Flu. Ever try to entertain a 2 year old in a bed for a week?
She will get the shots. We all will. They try to anticipate the active strains each year when they make the vaccine. Some years they are closer than others.
I understand the mistrust, but this is not a case of a drug company making a bazillion dollars to make sure that 60 year old men can get it up. BTW, would you take Viagra and then go to an island that was only accessable by boat and had no doctor? I love marketing.
From the Washington Post last Saturday:
"The deaths of another 19 children and teenagers from the new H1N1 virus were reported in the past week around the country, including two in Maryland, pushing to 76 the number of fatalities this year among those under 18, officials said. It was the largest number of pediatric deaths reported in a single week since the pandemic began in the spring."
"Between 46 and 88 children died from the seasonal flu in each of the past four years, so the fact that so many have already succumbed is disturbing, Schuchat said."
"...an enraged McLeftyShorts with a macramé dreamcatcher helmet" = One of your finest descriptions. :-)
My teen son just had the flu mist vaccine two weeks ago. He will get the swine vaccine as soon as it's available.
Ian, that's interesting about last May. We think our 18 year old daughter had it then, too. She was incredibly sick for more than a week at college (late April actually) just as finals approached. She had the cough, the fever, lethargy, aches, whole nine yards. It was fierce.
But just in case, she too will get the vaccine when it's available at her university.
LFMD, wow. That is scary about your husband's grandfather.
I still can't understand why all the fuss about Swine flu.
It is so much more mild than seasonal flu and, if treated quickly, is nothing more than a high fever for 1-2 days.
The seasonal flu is the one that always kicks my ass.
I believe all the hype is due to the name "Swine Flu" and nothing more. Or am I confused about this?
We've never gotten the flu shot--and we've never gotten the flu (my kids are 5 and 6). I haven't had the flu since I was 10 years old and I'm unwilling to put a needle in my arm on the off chance that I may get it again this year. Also, my neighbors (and kids' playmates) get the flu shot every year. 2 out of the last 3 years, they have ALSO gotten the flu. What is the point if it might not even work? As for H1N1, there has been an outbreak at our local school--in my son's class, in fact, 5 kids were out with it. Only two were out for more than 2 days, the rest had one day of fever and sniffles and that was it. I can handle a day of fever and sniffles. Though of course I hope we don't get it. So far, so good.
I will reiterate my recent experience with the swine flu. My very healthy 8 year old came home with a fever, headache and sore throat. She was sick for 4 more days with fever as high as 103.6 and terrible croup with enough respiratory distress to need a doctor visit and steroids. She missed 4 days of school at that time. 3 days after getting well she got a return of fever and terrible cough and ended up in the ER with a secondary pneumonia and missed 4 more days of school. I will admit this was more severe than some of her classmates but most were out of school for 3-5 days and pretty sick.
As anon said above, kids are dying and possibly at higher rates than with typical seasonal flu. Or perhaps it seems like a higher rate because more kids are getting sick from the flu this year so the denominator is bigger but any way you cut it - kids are dying. It also may mutate and get more severe as the season goes on.
The most susceptible group this year seems to be the school age kids (and maybe preschool).
I try to weigh the risk from the shot vs. the risk of getting very ill from the disease and it almost all cases, the vaccine wins out and definitely this year I think it does, for me and my family, at least.
Schultz - I think you are confused. I haven't heard anyone say this is milder than seasonal flu and it certainly hasn't been in my family or our friends..
two quick things...
Claverak, did the doctors actually recommend against it ? Or perhaps did you ask if you should get it and they said not at this time (becuase you are not in a high risk group)?
Amy ,I hope your string of good luck continues. Risky, I think, to continue to use that logic.
Lots of interesting thoughts today. Since my life is all H1N1 all the time right now, may I respond to some posts?
Ian, I so agree that part of the reason vaccines freak people out is the needle. It's one of those lizard brain things, the way we all instinctively fear snakes and falling off cliffs. We are programmed to avoid painful things. Couple a painful thing with NO IMMEDIATELY VISIBLE BENEFIT and it's easy to see why vaccines are scary to people. I think it's basically a premodern suspicion/gut feeling that people then wrap in a vaguely scientific-sounding objection (e.g. "I heard there is too much thimerosal", "what about the squalene?" etc) so as not too appear too superstitious. All the disease and death averted by vaccines is too abstract and diffuse for people to grasp on that basic intuitive level at which this fear operates. Maybe the nasal spray vaccine will help with this a bit.
Other things that contribute to fear of vaccines are the common feeling, call this the parental guilt factor, that if a child gets an extremely rare side effect of vaccines, you the parent did that to him, while if a child gets a vaccine-preventable disease, then that was just sheer bad luck. People consistently prefer errors of omission to those of commission, even if the error omission is demonstrated to be more harmful. It's well known form of cognitive bias:
"Herd" immunity is definitely uninspiring and vaguely bovine. It's unfortunate, because if it could be rebranded as "group" immunity or "protecting the vulnerable" who can't get vaccinated, like Scruggs' daughter, I think it would be much more appealing to people.
I agree, the corporate malfeasance of drug companies and their cozy relationships with doctors (all those professionally flirtatious drug reps with their briefcases full of company-branded loot), the disgusting ghost-written journal articles, and the company names all over every physician's pens and post-it notes... there's enough atrocious conflicts of interest, profiteering and influence-peddling to make anyone suspicious of Pharma and their products.
LFMD: I am so sorry to hear about your husband's grandfather. Guillain-Barre syndrome is a frightening thing. It's important to note that many things cause it, including influenza infection itself, along with a lot of other bacterial and viral infections (and thus, if a flu pandemic was avoided by the vaccine, overall the number of GBS cases is lower than it would have otherwise been!) Over the last 20 years, we estimate that there has been 1 additional case of GBS for every million persons vaccinated for seasonal flu. So is this increase in risk worth it? From a public health perspective, in terms of severe illness and death from flu that has been avoided, definitely. But it's hard to say that when it is you or someone you love who is that one person with the rare side effect.
Claverack Weekender: "Flu vaccine = ok. H1N1 vaccine = questionable." H1N1 vaccine is a flu vaccine, made in the same way by the same methods as the regular seasonal flu vaccine. The only difference is the type of antigen (the H and the N stand for different protein fragments from the outer viral coat) included, which always changes from year to year anyway. In fact, if H1N1 had emerged earlier in the year it would have just been included as one of the strains in the regular seasonal flu vaccine. "note if you do get it that some forms contain thimerisol and FDA seems to have reserved the right to add squalene, too". I discussed this in my post a few days ago. Thimerosal-free vaccine is available. The US flu vaccine does not contain squalene. But we are studying some squalene-containing vaccines -- like the ones approved in Europe -- just in case the flu pandemic takes an unexpected much more severe turn (with 1918 type death rates), because this would allow lower doses of vaccine to be given and let us stretch the vaccine supply to cover many more people.
Schultz, this disease is not "more mild than seasonal flu". It is as or more severe, and affects a population that is not at high risk for severe disease from seasonal flu -- children and young adults. Neva is right, even though most will recover uneventfully and only a small percentage will require ICU care or die from H1N1, this will still be a lot of kids and young adults, since they have no immunity and tons of them are getting sick.
Amy, you don't have to put a needle in your arm. You could get the nasal spray instead. "Also, my neighbors (and kids' playmates) get the flu shot every year. 2 out of the last 3 years, they have ALSO gotten the flu. What is the point if it might not even work?" Actually, the H1N1 vaccine works very well. The thing is, there are lots of viruses that cause colds. People often say they had "the flu" when they mean a bad cold. I doubt that your neighbors' kids were really infected with the flu strain in the vaccine. The same logic applies to people who claim that the flu vaccine gave them the flu. This is just not possible, but it is very possible they were coming down with something at around the time they got the shot.
Dr. C is awesome.
Haven't commented here too much (though I visit everyday), but couldn't stop myself today. First of all I really appreciate Dr. C's comments. My daughter and I have gotten the flu shot every year and have not gotten the flu. I know some people really don't like needles, but even my 7 year old says that the flu shot is "really no big deal". Tomorrow I'm attending a memorial service for a 9 year old boy who it appears died thanks to H1N1. Yes, he did have some underlying health issues, but it still makes me scared for my kids and other kids out there. I have a nearly 6 month old baby and let me say I have no desire to find out how bad it could be. The rest of our family has had the seasonal flu shot, the baby will get his as soon as he's old enough, and we'll all be getting the H1N1 as soon as it's available. For what it's worth, our pediatrician is recommending it and a good friend of mine who happens to be a physician will be giving it to her own 3 children. So I say get vaccinated, for your own good and for the good of kids like my friend's son who are at a higher risk for complications.
Doggone it, Dr. C, if you're going to present your points so convincingly, how in the world can the rest of us gloss over them when we're trying to rationalize our crackpot preconceived notions?


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Cole Movement
My name is Marquia Green and I am aware that this ia a forum but the need to reach out to a person who was given a gift . . . that has the potential to change lives forever is exactly what complelled me to write this. I am a writer - a poet, and looking for a canvas.

subset: commoncrawl


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Botchford: Sedins escape the blame game unscathed
The Canucks' twin stars have managed to avoid having the solde accountability for the team's downfall laid at their feet; call it 'survivor's guilt'
It's an accepted truism in sports that the bigger the name, the bigger the scrutiny.
Think quarterbacks in football. Sidney Crosby in Pittsburgh. Alex Ovechkin in Washington.
The problem, of course, is not all sports are equal. In basketball, one player can mean everything.
But one player in hockey will never be able to give a team a LeBron James-like bounce. There are just too many moving parts and variables.
Still, the stars continue to be draped with too much of the glory in the good times, and bombarded with too many slurs when things bottom out.
Oddly, this hasn't been the case recently in Vancouver.
The Canucks are the Sedins' team. They have the richest contracts, the most influence, the biggest names and the letters "C" and "A" emblazoned on their chests.
Yet, during their most miserably disappointing season in a decade, there weren't a lot of scathing attacks directed toward the twins as they plummeted from 80-point players to 50-point players, taking the team down with them. It could be the other way around too, depending on your view.
Generally, the fans and the media laid off. Often, their right winger gets more heat than they do. Even when the Sedins kept saying they don't need to score, people shrugged and said "They're right."
This is either a reflection of a sophisticated market where people realized the coach, injuries and bad luck all viciously conspired to work like lightning, striking down their point totals in an anomaly season. And that the underlying statistics show the season wasn't nearly as catastrophic for the Sedins as it looked.
Or, and I think this is more likely, there is some survivor's guilt going on.
The Sedins were ripped so unfairly early in their careers, only to burn those critics later with some monster seasons, flush with Art Ross Trophies, a Hart Trophy and a whole lot of love for this city, many people reluctant to go down that wormhole again.
So now, this is a town that's more than willing to spread the pressure — and blame — around.
By default, a lot of it is going to tumble toward Nick Bonino, the centrepiece player in the Ryan Kesler trade.
He will literally be expected to fill Kesler's skates, centring a second line that will need to produce if the Canucks plan on being even an average goal-scoring team.
A significant factor in the twins' lack of success last season was a lack of support. Now, that falls mainly to Bonino and his wingers.
The problem for him is he is coming off a career year where he put up 49 points, with 20 of those coming on the power play.
He's unlikely to match that on the Canucks' second power-play unit, which means it's up to him to make it happen at even strength. Last year, he averaged 11:40 in ice time at even strength, and spent most of it against third- and fourth-liners.
He won't be protected like that in Vancouver, where the Canucks will need him to take on first and second lines, and do it nightly.
But I do think there will be patience in this market for Bonino, mostly because of the scorched Earth Kesler left behind, mostly for cutting his "I'll waive my no-trade clause for" list from six to really one, which limited Jim Benning.
It was a bush move.
There will also be patience for Linden Vey, the other newcomer expected to start the season centring the Canucks' third line.
Most people can appreciate it's a lot to ask of Vey, who has just 18 mostly unimpressive NHL games to his resume.
Head coach Willie Desjardins may see him as a critical component of this uptempo style he's promising, but fans, I think, will get it if he struggles early.
The real heat will be where it always seems to be — on the goalie. Ryan Miller, is probably Benning's only strange and controversial acquisition this summer.
Miller not only has an expectation to live up to a $6 million-a-year contract, he has to do it in a market which is obsessed about goalies and in front of a charismatic, young backup who many believe is ready to at least share a No. 1 job.
It's hard to imagine a healthy Eddie Lack not putting up lights-out numbers playing his five or six games a month behind Miller.
Can Miller keep up at 34 years old?
And if he can't, what kind of pressure is going to be on him in December when Lack has better numbers?
The answer — a lot.
Alex Edler: If he doesn't rebound in a big way, he's at risk of becoming the No. 1 whipping boy in Vancouver. But there's no way he can be as bad as last year. He suffered from the team having an extraordinarily low shooting percentage when he was on the ice. He also suffered when paired with Jason Garrison. Don't expect either to happen again.
Kevin Bieksa: His love of Vancouver and engaging personality has helped alleviate the pressure on him over the years. He does have critics, and those could increase exponentially if he struggles, for two reasons: One, he's the clear No. 2 defenceman, and two, you can't blame Jason Garrison for anything anymore.
Alex Burrows: He just may be the most-beloved Canuck, which is partly why people didn't freak out over his five-goal season. You don't turn your back on the dragon-slayer in an instant. Most realized he was victimized by injuries and insanely bad luck. But his cap hit is $4.5 million, and if continues to put up David Booth numbers, everything changes.
Radim Vrbata: From the moment he arrives in Vancouver, the questions will topple over him about how he fits with the Sedins. There is no way he has any real idea of what he's in for. Vancouver always obsesses over the Sedins' winger.
Pressure will mount quickly for two reasons: One, many believe Zack Kassian should be given a shot there, and two, we all know Burrows can work there.
© Copyright (c) The Province


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Today's Leader Post
Latest News
More prison time for James
Scott Edmonds, The Canadian PressPublished: Saturday, February 16, 2013
Victims praised the decision of the Manitoba Court of Appeal on Friday to more than double the sentence of child molester and former junior hockey coach Graham James.
"This is a great day for all survivors," retired NHL star Theo Fleury, who played for the Calgary Flames, said on Twitter after the court boosted James's sentence to five years from two.
It was largely because of Fleury that James faced a second set of charges for molesting junior hockey players under his care.
Graham James
Cp File
He had been convicted in 1997 for sex assaults against three others, including former NHLer Sheldon Kennedy.
Kennedy also posted an online comment after the court announced its decision.
"Everyday together we try to create a better place for our kids. I am confident the trauma our kids suffer from abuse is becoming visible," he said on Twitter.
Later, Fleury appeared on a radio talk show in Winnipeg where he repeated that he was happy with the decision, even though he would have liked to see an even longer sentence.
"A win's a win in hockey terms," he said on CJOB. "We have a long way to go, but today was a breakthrough."
Federal Justice Minister Rob Nicholson issued a statement in which he suggested the decision had helped to maintain faith in the justice system.
"The public loses faith in the justice system when they feel that the consequences of breaking the law are inadequate," he said.
"Child sexual abuse and exploitation are very serious crimes that call out for serious penalties. I am pleased that the Manitoba Court of Appeal has recognized through this decision that children - the most vulnerable members of our society - must be protected from sexual predators."
He referred to his government's plan to introduce legislation this year that "further cracks down on child sexual predators."
Appeal courts don't often interfere with sentences.
"An appellate court should not intervene in either the duration of the sentence, or the type of sentence ordered, absent an error in principle or unless the sentence is demonstrably unfit," Justice Alan MacInnes wrote on behalf of the three-judge panel.
In this case, he said, trial judge Catherine Carlson did make a mistake during James's sentencing in Winnipeg last year.
"The decision of the judge was thorough and thoughtful. Notwithstanding, I have concluded that she erred."
James was a rising star among junior hockey coaches in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He had been named man of the year by The Hockey News in 1989 after coaching the Swift Current Broncos to a WHL championship and Memorial Cup.
He became general manager and coach of the Calgary Hitmen in 1994. At that point, he'd already been molesting players under his guidance for years.
He started with Fleury in 1984 and selected Fleury's cousin Todd Holt for similar treatment in 1989. James pleaded guilty to molesting both men when they were teenagers.
He was given two years but the Crown argued in its appeal that Carlson had erred in her application of sentencing principles and put too much weight on the 3 1/2 years he received in 1997 for abusing other young players, including Kennedy.


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Zacarias Moussaoui sent a letter to the judge presiding over a lawsuit against Jordanian Arab Bank, offering to testify against that bank and several Saudi banks that he says supported 9/11.
I want to testify against financial institutions such as Arab Bank, Saudi American Bank, the National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia for their support and financing of Usama bin Laden and Al Qaeda from the time of the Eastern Africa embassy bombing, U.S.S. Cole bombing and 9/11.
As Alison Frankel — who broke this story — noted, Moussaoui's testimony would be inappropriate in the case in question, which found that Arab Bank funded Hamas.
But that's not the most interesting part of her report (and Moussaoui's letter). He claims the lawyers for the 9/11 victims have tried to meet with him in the SuperMax at Florence, CO, and also claims he sent a letter to the judge presiding over that case, where his testimony would be on point.
Moussaoui said that plaintiffs' lawyers representing victims of the Sept. 11 attacks have requested permission to meet with him but that prison officials have denied the request. Moussaoui also claimed that he has previously offered to testify about al Qaeda financing in letters to the judge overseeing the Sept. 11 victims' consolidated litigation, U.S. District Judge George Daniels of Manhattan, but that he does not know if the prison has mailed them. The docket in that case does not show any communications from Moussaoui, who was once named as a defendant by Sept. 11 victims.
The implication is that the Special Administrative Measures to which Moussaoui is subject may be preventing his letters from getting out or plaintiffs lawyers from being able to meet with him.
I'm not convinced Moussaoui would really have known about the financing of the 9/11 attack; from reports, al Qaeda kept the operation much better compartmented than that, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed reportedly had real questions about the competence of Moussaoui (which is why he got others for the mission). Plus, Moussaoui's been in solitary so long, it's unclear how cogent he can be (though his letter sounds more cogent than some of what he sent during his own trial).
Still, I am curious whether the government has been using the SAMs imposed on Moussaoui as yet another way to bury larger Saudi complicity in the attacks.
Yesterday, the Telegraph reported that the "waterboarding" used with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri was far worse than described before — more actual drowning to the point of death than "pours."
The description of the torture meted out to at least two leading al-Qaeda suspects, including the alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, far exceeds the conventional understanding of waterboarding, or "simulated drowning" so far admitted by the CIA.
"They weren't just pouring water over their heads or over a cloth," said the source who has first-hand knowledge of the period. "They were holding them under water until the point of death, with a doctor present to make sure they did not go too far. This was real torture."
That CIA was drowning people rather than "pouring" water over them is not news. Details described by the Telegraph exactly match the WaPo's description of CIA's drowning of Ammar al-Baluchi just months after KSM's worst torture.
If declassified, the report could reveal new information on the treatment of a high-value detainee named Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, the nephew of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. The Pakistanis captured Ali, known more commonly as Ammar al-Baluchi, on April, 30, 2003, in Karachi and turned him over to the CIA about a week later. He was taken to a CIA black site called "Salt Pit" near Kabul.
At the secret prison, Baluchi endured a regime that included being dunked in a tub filled with ice water. CIA interrogators forcibly kept his head under the water while he struggled to breathe and beat him repeatedly, hitting him with a truncheon-like object and smashing his head against a wall, officials said.
As with Zubaida and even Nashiri, officials said, CIA interrogators continued the harsh treatment even after it appeared that Baluchi was cooperating.
But I'm a little curious about this story.
It comes from a "security source" (which sounds like a contractor), single sourced. And it describes the treatment of two detainees whose torture has been most closely scrutinized, which makes it interesting this is only coming out now.
All that said, one question I hope we'll answer once the summary of the SSCI torture report gets released later this year is what happened with Nashiri's waterboarding.
Two things distinguish his treatment from Abu Zubaydah and KSM's, after all: at least according to public reports, he was only waterboarded twice (by whatever twisted means you want to quantify torture). More interestingly, even Liz BabyDick Cheney doesn't claim Nashiri gave up useful information after being waterboarded.
There's a story about Nashiri's "waterboarding" that's overdue to be told. I wonder how close to death CIA brought him?
I've been writing for a long time about the "Scary Memos" the government used to justify its dragnet.
As the Joint IG Report described, they started in tandem with George Bush's illegal wiretap program, and were written before each 45-day reauthorization to argue the threat to the US was serious enough to dismiss any Fourth Amendment concerns that the President was wiretapping Americans domestically.
Jack Goldsmith relied on one for his May 6, 2004 memo reauthorizing some — but not all — of the dragnet.
Yesterday, James Clapper's office released the Scary Memo included in the FISA Court application to authorize the Internet dragnet just two months later, on July 14, 2004.
ODNI calls it the Tenet Declaration — indeed it is signed by him (which, given that he left government on July 11, 2004 and that final FISC applications tend to be submitted days before their approval, may suggest signing this Scary Memo was among the very last things he did as CIA Director).
Yet the Memo would have been written by the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, then headed by John Brennan.
Much of the Scary Memo describes a "possible imminent threat" that DOJ plans to counter by,
seeking authority from this Court [redacted] to install and use pen register and trap and trace devices to support FBI investigations to identify [redacted], in the United States and abroad, by obtaining the metadata regarding their electronic communications.
There is no mention of NSA. There is no mention that the program operated without legal basis for the previous 2.5 years. And there's a very curious redaction after "this Court;" perhaps CIA also made a show of having the President authorize it, so as to sustain a claim that all this could be conducted exclusively on Presidential authority?
After dropping mention of WMD – anthrax! fissile material! chemical weapons! — the Scary Memo admits it has no real details about this "possible imminent threat."
[W]e have no specific information regarding the exact times, targets, or tactics for those planned attacks, we have gathered and continue to gather intelligence that leads us to believe that the next terrorist attack or attacks on US soil could be imminent.
Reporting [redacted] does not provide specific information on the targets to be hit or methods to be used in the US attack or attacks.
But based on "detainee statements and [redacted] public statements since 9/11," the Scary Memo lays out, CIA believes al Qaeda (curiously, sometimes they redact al Qaeda, sometimes they don't) wants to target symbols of US power that would negatively impact the US economy and cause mass casualties and spread fear.
It took an "intelligence" agency to come up with that.
Based on that "intelligence," it appears, but not on any solid evidence, CIA concludes that the Presidential conventions would make juicy targets for al Qaeda.
Attacks against or in the host cities for the Democratic and Republican Party conventions would be especially attractive to [redacted].
And because of that — because CIA's "intelligence" has decided a terrorist group likes to launch attacks that cause terror and therefore must be targeting the Presidential conventions — the FBI (though of course it's really the NSA) needs to hunt out "sleeper cells."
Identifying and disrupting the North American-based cells involved in tactical planning offers the most direct path to stopping an attack or attacks against the US homeland. Numerous credible intelligence reports since 9/11 indicate [redacted] has "sleepers" in North America. We judge that these "sleepers" have been in North American, and the US in general, for much of the past two years. We base our judgment, in part, [redacted] as well as on information [redacted] that [redacted] had operatives here.
Before we get to what led CIA to suggest the US was targeted, step back and look at this intelligence for a moment. This report mentions detainee reporting twice. It redacts the name of what are probably detainees in several places. Indeed, several of the claims in this report appear to match those from the exactly contemporaneous document CIA did on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to justify its torture program, thus must come from him.
Yet, over a year after KSM had been allegedly rendered completely cooperative via waterboarding, CIA still did not know the answer to a question that KSM was probably one of the only people alive who could answer.
We continue to investigate whether the August 2001 arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui may have accelerated the timetable for the 9/11 attacks because he knew of al-Qa'ida's intention to use commercial aircraft as weapons.
Nevertheless, they believed KSM was being totally straight up and forthcoming.
Note, too, the CIA relied on claims of sleeper cells that were then two years old, dating back to the time they were torturing Abu Zubaydah, whom we know did give "intelligence" about sleeper cells.
To be sure, we know CIA's claims of a "possible imminent threat" in the US do not derive exclusively from CIA's earlier torture (though CIA had claimed, just months earlier, that their best intelligence came from that source for the Inspector General's report).
Less than 3 weeks after this Scary Memo was written, we'd begin to see public notice of this "possible imminent threat," when Tom Ridge raised the threat level on August 1, 2004 because of an election year plot, purportedly in response to the capture of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan in Pakistan on July 13 (which could only have been included in "the Tenet declaration" if Khan were secretly arrested and flipped earlier, because Tenet was no longer CIA Director on July 13). But what little basis the election year plot had in any reality dated back to the December 2003 British arrest and beating of Khan's cousin, Babar Ahmed, which would lead to both Khan's eventual capture as well as the British surveillance of Dhiren Barot as early as June 10 and the latter's premature arrest on August 3. KSM's nephew, Musaad Aruchi, was also handed over by Pakistan to CIA on June 12; best as I know, he remains among those permanently disappeared in CIA's torture program. This would also lead to a new round of torture memos reauthorizing everything that had been approved in the August 1, 2002 Bybee Memo plus some.
The claims the US was a target derive, based on the reporting in the NYT, from Dhiren Barot. Barot apparently did want to launch a terrorist attack. Both KSM and Hambali had identified Barot during interrogations in 2003, and he had scouted out attack sites in the US in 2000 and 2001. But his active plots in 2004 were all focused on the UK. In 2007 the Brits reduced his sentence because his plots weren't really all that active or realistic.
Which is to say this election plot — the Scary Plot that drives the Scary Memo that provided the excuse for rolling out (or rather, giving judicial approval for continuing) an Internet dragnet that would one day encompass all Americans — arose in significant part from 2003 torture-influenced interrogations that led to the real world detention of men who had contemplated attacking the US in 2000, but by 2004 were aspirationally plotting to attack the UK, not the US, as well as men who may have been plotting in Pakistan but were not in the US.
That, plus vague references to claims that surely were torture derived, is what John Brennan appears to have laid out in his case for legally justifying a US dragnet.
You see, it's actually John Brennan's dragnet — it all goes back to his Scary Memo — and his role in it is presumably one of the reasons he doesn't want us to know how many lies went into the CIA torture program.
Brennan's Scary Memo provides yet more evidence how closely linked are torture and the surveillance of every American.
Matt Apuzzo collects the thoughts of a number of people who are getting frustrated with the way the CIA and FBI (though I suspect it might be CIA and CIA) keep holding up the Gitmo show trials.
Most damning of them is this quote from top military justice lawyer professor, Eugene Fidell.
"It's a courtroom with three benches," said Eugene R. Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School. "There's one person pretending to be the judge, and two other agencies behind the scenes exerting at least as much influence."
That assessment is not all that far from the claim Khalid Sheikh Mohammed made in the propaganda tract behind this latest delay.
Every democratic country in the west has a constitution, an executive branch, a judicial branch, and a legislative branch. They also have a big black box above and beyond these branches that implements all that it sees as being in the interest of the country or ruling party without consideration for any constitution, morality, religion, or principle. This black box is called Intelligence and its authority supersedes all other considerations.
The Kangaroo Court trying KSM is proving him right. That's not a good thing.
Yesterday, in announcing the public release of documents relating to CIA's publication of a Russian edition of Dr. Zhivago, the CIA bragged (justifiably) about its Cold War success in making books Warsaw Pact governments had banned available within those countries.
In a memo dated April 24, 1958 a senior CIA officer wrote: "We have the opportunity to make Soviet citizens wonder what is wrong with their government when a fine literary work by the man acknowledged to be the greatest living Russian writer is not even available in his own country [and] in his own language for his people to read."
Obtaining, publishing, and distributing banned books like Doctor Zhivago was an important Cold War-era success story for the CIA.
Even as CIA was declassifying the documents underlying Peter Finn's book on this topic, the 9/11 Gitmo trial was being stalled, once again, by issues arising from the Court's fragile Constitutional foundation.
The issue, this time, makes for ironic comparison with CIA's boasts of making banned texts available to societies where the government was too fragile to release such texts.
On Monday, the 9/11 defense lawyers revealed that their Defense Security Officer had been recruited as an informant by the FBI as part of an investigation into how an unclassified 36-page tract written by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed became available to the HuffPo.
The Gitmo prosecutors claim to have no knowledge of the FBI investigation.
At Monday's hearing, the judge pointedly asked the prosecutor, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, if his prosecution team was "aware of this visit" by two agents to the bin al Shibh team member's house on Sunday, April 6, to question him after church. At issue, in part, was how the Huffington Post and Britain's Channel 4 television got a copy of the Mohammed commentary.
"No, we were not," Martins replied — even before the judge had finished his question.
At the prison, spokesman Navy Cmdr. John Filostrat on Monday night replied to a question of whether the prison staff asked the FBI to investigate the document this way: "I am unaware of any investigation and won't get into ongoing legal proceedings, anyway."
Tuesday, a Pentagon spokesman said that while Martins did give the FBI the copy of the Mohammed document neither the chief prosecutor "nor the prosecution team had any idea that an investigation was launched."
"He gave it to the FBI to maintain as evidence in event that there could at some point be an investigation," said Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, "and in the event that it is determined that releasing [Mohammed's 36-page commentary] was unlawful."
Nevertheless, it appears someone requested an investigation into the disclosure. And DOJ's part of the prosecution team suggests the judge would infringe on Executive Branch privileges if he investigates the FBI investigation.
Separately, a lead case prosecutor, Ed Ryan of the Justice Department warned the judge against asking to question the FBI agents who visited a defense team member.
"Your Honor is suggesting that you want to investigate an ongoing investigation. There are numerous government privileges that would be at stake," Ryan said at the hearing. "I think the commission would be greatly mistaken to go down a road of trying to look inside an ongoing investigation being conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation if, in fact, one exists."
Defense Attorneys also complained that a (perhaps now former) member of the Prosecution team is the Chief of Staff to FBI Deputy Director Mark Giuliano.
And then finally, there's a member of the trial team, Ms. Baltes, who is also — who also serves as the Chief of Staff to the Deputy Director of the FBI. And I appreciate counsel's unequivocal statement that the prosecution was not aware of this investigation, did not know — did not know that an investigation was taking place and did not direct FBI agents to go and try to penetrate Mr. Harrington's team, but somebody did, and somebody at the FBI did. And I don't think it's too much of a leap to imagine that when a member of the trial team has a dual role as the Chief of Staff to the Deputy Director of the FBI, that there could be an interface there, and I think it would be appropriate to examine Ms. Baltes as well.
Joanna Baltes happens to have been the lawyer who, in January, refused to admit in public that the CIA had installed a means to censor Gitmo proceedings, unbeknownst to the Judge. Is she, once again, answering to the CIA above and beyond her obligations to a court purportedly delivering independent justice?
So our attempt to hold the perpetrators for 9/11 responsible for their crimes has once again ground to a halt as the Judge investigates whether and why (and at whose behest) the FBI is investigating the release of KSM's unclassified writings.
Americans might ask, like Russians before them, "wonder what is wrong with their government" that we must delay justice in the 9/11 attack because someone made a shitty tract from KSM publicly available.
Don't get me wrong. Unlike Boris Pasternak's novel, KSM's tract is not literature, not even close. Continue reading
Monday, WaPo made big news for reporting what Ron Wyden made clear 14 months ago: a key conclusion of the Senate Torture report is that CIA lied to Congress (and DOJ and the White House).
But much of this has been clear for even longer, having been exposed in some form in 2009-10.
Yet much of that got lost in CIA's aggressive attack on Congress — one that anticipated what we've seen and will surely continue to see with the release of the Torture Report. At the time, CIA attempted to claim Congress had been fully briefed on torture, and therefore shouldn't criticize the agency. Yet it gradually became clear how laughable CIA's claims were. Along the way details of the lies CIA told in briefings came out.
The lies CIA told Congress in its first several years of the torture program include that it,
There are a number of claims CIA made that are almost certainly also false — most notably with regards to what intelligence came from torture — but most of that didn't get recorded in the CIA's records. I fully expect we'll find details of those in the Senate Intelligence Committee report.
September 17, 2001: Bush signs "Gloves Come Off" Memorandum of Notification that authorizes capture and detention of top al Qaeda leaders, but leaves CIA to decide the details of that detention
Before I focus on the briefings, some background is in order.
Torture started as a covert operation authorized by the September 17, 2001 Memorandum of Notification. Under the National Security Act, the Intelligence Committees had to be briefed on that Finding and they were. However, the Finding was structured such that it laid out general ideas — in this case, the capture and detention of senior al Qaeda figures — and left the implementation up to CIA. As a result, key members of Congress (notably, Jane Harman, who was Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee for much of the period during which the program operated) apparently had no idea that the Finding they had been briefed on in timely fashion actually served as the Presidential authorization for torture until years later. Also, since that September 17, 2001 Finding authorized both torture and the outsourcing of nasty jobs to foreign intelligence partners, the earliest torture, such as that of Ibn Sheikh al-Libi in Egyptian custody starting in February 2002 and Binyam Mohamed in Pakistani custody starting in April 2002, should be considered part of the same covert op.
April to July 2002: CIA tortures Abu Zubaydah based solely on Presidential authorization
By now there is no dispute: the CIA started torturing Abu Zubaydah well before the August 1, 2002 memo that purportedly prospectively authorized that treatment. CIA even exceeded early verbal guidance on things like sleep deprivation, after which CIA unilaterally authorized what CIA had done retrospectively. The CIA appears to have gotten in real trouble when they moved to conduct mock burial with Abu Zubaydah, to which Ali Soufan objected; his objections appear to be the reason why mock burial (and by extension, mock execution) was the only technique John Yoo ultimately rejected. On July 13, after Michael Chertoff refused to give advance declination of prosecution to CIA for things they were ostensibly talking about prospectively but which had in fact already occurred, Yoo wrote a short memo, almost certainly coached by David Addington but not overseen by Yoo's boss Jay Bybee, that actually served as the authorization CIA's CTC would rely on for Abu Zubaydah's torture, not the August 1 memos everyone talks about. As a result, CIA could point to a document that did not include limits on specific techniques and the precise implementation of those techniques as their authorization to torture.
CIA had, in internal documents, once claimed to have briefed the Gang of Four (then Porter Goss, Nancy Pelosi, Richard Shelby, and Bob Graham) in April 2002. But after being challenged, they agreed they did not conduct those briefings. This, then, created a problem, as CIA had not really briefed Congress — not even the Gang of Four — about this "covert op."
Septmber 4, 2002: CIA provides initial trial balloon briefing to Pelosi and Goss, then starts destroying evidence
On September 4, 2002, 7 months after Egypt started torturing Ibn Sheikh al-Libi at America's behest, almost 5 months after CIA started torturing Abu Zubaydah, and over a month after the OLC memo that purportedly started a month of torture for Abu Zubaydah, Jose Rodriguez, a CTC lawyer, and Office of Congressional Affairs head Stan Moskowitz first briefed Congress on torture techniques.
The record supports a claim that CIA provided some kind of description of torture to Nancy Pelosi and Porter Goss. It supports a claim that neither objected to the techniques briefed. Both Pelosi and Goss refer to this briefing, however, as a prospective briefing. Goss referred to the torture techniques as "techniques [that] were to actually be employed," not that had already been employed, and when asked he did not claim they had been briefed on techniques that had been used. Pelosi claimed,
I was informed then that Department of Justice opinions had concluded that the use of enhanced interrogation techniques was legal. The only mention of waterboarding at that briefing was that it was not being employed.
Those conducting the briefing promised to inform the appropriate Members of Congress if that technique were to be used in the future.
Thus, at least as far as Goss and Pelosi are concerned, over a month after they first waterboarded Abu Zubaydah (and many more after Egypt had waterboarded al-Libi for us), CIA implied they had not yet done so with any detainee.
As striking as the evidence that CIA only briefed prospectively on torture that had been used for as many as 7 months, however, is what happened next. CIA moved to destroy evidence.
The day after that initial briefing in which CIA told Congress it might torture in the future, it "determined that the best alternative to eliminate those security and additional risks is to destroy these tapes." Then, the following day, CTC altered its own notes on the substance of the briefing, taking out a sentence (it's not clear what that sentence said). CIA's Office of Congressional Affairs never finalized a description for this, and at one time even listed Jane Harman as the attendee rather than Pelosi. In fact, in a list of the briefings on torture compiled in July 2004, it did not treat this briefing as one covering torture at all.
In addition, for some reason a briefing for Bob Graham and Richard Shelby initially scheduled for September 9 got rescheduled for the end of the month, September 27. According to available records, Jose Rodriguez did not attend. According to Bob Graham's notoriously meticulous notes, the briefing was not conducted in a SCIF, but instead in Hart Office Building, meaning highly classified information could not have been discussed. Graham says it chiefly described the intelligence the CIA claimed to have gotten from their interrogation program. Graham insists waterboarding did not come up, but Shelby, working off memory, disputes that claim.
February 4 and 5, 2002: CIA gets Republican approval to destroy the torture tapes, kills SSCI's nascent investigation, and refuses to explain torture's Presidential authorization
By November 2002, Bob Graham had started to hear vague rumors about the torture program. He did not, he says, receive notice that CIA froze Gul Rahman to death after dousing him with water or even hear about it specifically. But because of those rumors, Graham moved to exercise more oversight over the torture program, asking to have another staffer read into the program, and asking that a staffer see a Black Site and observe interrogation. That effort was thwarted in the first full briefing CIA gave Congress on torture on February 4, 2002, when CIA told Pat Roberts (who had assumed Senate Intelligence Chair; newly Ranking Member Jay Rockefeller was not present at this briefing, though a staffer was) they would not meet Graham's requests. CIA claims — but Roberts disputes — that he said he could think of "ten reasons right off why it is a terrible idea" to exercise such oversight.
In addition to getting Roberts to quash that nascent assessment, CIA gave Roberts the following false information:
The Memorandum of Understanding of this briefing appears to be one of only two that got finalized (it actually included a reference that Goss and Harman had been briefed on the torture tape, but not that Harman warned against destroying it).
The February 5, 2003 briefing involving Porter Goss and Jane Harman is just as interesting, though CIA has refused to release their notes from it.
Five days after the briefing, Harman wrote a letter questioning whether torture had been reviewed from a policy perspective and advising against destroying Abu Zubaydah's torture tape. In addition, she asked if the President had signed off, revealing that she didn't know that the Finding she had been briefed on included torture. The CIA and the White House met to decide how to respond. In the end, CIA General Counsel Scott Muller's response didn't really answer any of Harman's questions, nor note her warning against destroying the torture tape.
Also note: in the month before these briefings, the CIA prepared what appears to be a tear-line document on Abu Zubaydah. While it's not certain the document was prepared to brief the Gang of Four, it matches what we know to have been said to Roberts, especially as regards to the torture tapes. But it also reveals real discrepancies between the tear-line (Secret) claims and the Top Secret claims it was based on, notably inflating the value of Abu Zubaydah's intelligence below the tear-line.
September 4, 2003: An innocuous briefing left off some of the tracking
We don't really know what happened in the September 4, 2003 briefings of both Goss and Harman and Roberts and Rockfeller, which is a shame because it would have covered Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's treatment (and that of Ammar al-Baluchi, whom we now know may have been treated even worse than his uncle). In fact, it was left off lists of "sensitive" briefings at different times.
July 2004: CIA has to tell Congress even CIA('s IG) thinks they lied
On May 7, 2004, CIA's IG John Helgerson completed his report finding that the torture had exceeded guidelines and questioning the value of the intelligence obtained using it. On June 23, the Roberts and Rockefeller got copies (it's not clear whether Goss and Harman got advance copies). On July 13, 2004, CIA briefed Goss and Harman again.
The briefing did include some details from CIA IG John Helgerson's report on the program — that it violated the Convention Against Torture and did not comply with the OLC memos. He also explained that both Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's waterboarding was problematic, the first in execution and the second in number.
As part of that briefing (or by reading the IG Report), Harman learned that the Finding authorized this torture; in the briefing she pointed out the Finding had only authorized detention and capture, not interrogation.
But CIA persisted in a narrow dodge and two false claims:
There are few details on the briefing CIA gave Roberts and Rockefeller on July 15.
These are just the details of the lies CIA itself has documented and released CIA telling Congress. There are other allegations of CIA lies in briefings, though those records were not released under FOIA. And things started getting really funky in 2005, as Dick Cheney started participating in CIA briefings to try to defeat the Detainee Treatment Act. In addition, CIA briefed Pete Hoekstra (who had become the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee) on the morning they destroyed the torture tapes; the content of that briefing has never been revealed.
None of this excuses Congress, of course: the knew enough to know this was problematic.
But it is clear that CIA lied to them both to boost the value of the torture they were doing and to diminish the problems and abuses.
Today's New York Times has a fascinating update on the investigation into the killing of Swedish reporter Nils Horner on March 11. Although there have been systematic attacks on journalists in the region for years, it appears that in the case of Horner, suggestions of the involvement of Western intelligence agencies are getting significant attention:
Now, some are saying Mr. Horner may have been killed as part of some shadowy intelligence war in Afghanistan waged by foreigners.
The allegation first surfaced in a widely disputed claim of responsibility issued by a group calling itself Feday-e-Mahaz, and thought to be an offshoot of the Taliban.
"This was certainly not the work of the Taliban," Mr. Faizi said in an interview, adding that he did not believe there were any breakaway factions. "They are fictions."
Afghan officials linked Mr. Horner's death to the attack on Taverna du Liban, a Lebanese restaurant popular with foreigners that suicide attackers struck in January, killing 21 people, most of them foreigners.
Though the Taliban took credit for that attack, Mr. Karzai has suggested that it may be linked to foreigners and not Afghan insurgents. Mr. Horner was shot as he tried to find and interview a chef who had escaped from that Lebanese restaurant, officials said.
"Perhaps there are some of those with fears about what he would find out," one Afghan official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation.
The official emphasized that he was speaking of the possibility that Westerners were responsible in both the restaurant attack and Mr. Horner's shooting, and not Pakistanis, whom Afghan officials often blame after attacks because of what the official called Pakistan's clandestine support of the Taliban.
But how on earth could such a ludicrous story get started? I mean, it's not like the US meddles and tries to prevent the outbreak of peace talks or anything like that. Oh, wait.
Okay, but surely this meddling is recent. The history of our motives in the region must be pure. Just ask someone who has observed our actions over the years, like, say, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, (pdf):
But it was too late because some of the organizations had become a part of the Afghan
people. As for Afghanistan itself, the West did not support the Afghan organizations in
order to bring about peace, prosperity, and security in Afghanistan. The U.S. proxies in the
lSI under American control foiled every attempt to reconcile or integrate the various
Afghan organizations. Every time they saw a strong leader or an organization, they
supported him in order to split his organization off from the others. They split the group
Hezb Al-Islami Hekmatyar into two parties- one by the same name and one by the name
Hezb Al-Islami Younis Khalis and so on.
Well, yes, as Marcy notes, KSM is trolling, but there are bits that can't be denied.
Oh, and don't forget the use of a doctor in a vaccination ruse to obtain intelligence on the compound where Osama bin Laden was living prior to the attack that killed him. So why wouldn't the West use a journalist? And look at Horner's history:
Horner, 51, was an experienced Hong Kong-based reporter who had previously been in Afghanistan to witness the fall of the Taliban in 2001 and in Iraq during the war in 2003.
And just to make things juicier, even though Horner worked for Swedish radio, he held British citizenship. The Wall Street Journal article linked here notes that Horner covered Asia generally since 2001 and "had visited Kabul many times in the past".
I'm not ready to embrace these conspiracies, but it sure is easy to see how the concept can take hold when we consider how the US has behaved in the region for decades.
Earlier today I noted that torture defender Philip Mudd argued the benefits of sitting across from top al Qaeda figures to learn more about them.
Now you can have that opportunity.
In the Suleiman Abu Ghaith trial, his lawyers have just posted the 14-pages of answers Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gave to their questions.
He was not a friendly witness. He said he suspected the US government had a hand in the questions, and used the opportunity to voice his suspicions as an opportunity to air what had been done to him.
I received the set of questions from the lawyer for Sulaiman Abu Ghayth (Allah preserve him) consisting of 24 pages and 451 questions. It reminded me of the interrogations at the Black Sites and the questions from the dirty team at Guantanamo.
I want to inform Sheikh Sulaiman Abu Ghayth's lawyer that I suspect the U.S. government has a hand in the questions because they correspond precisely with the way the CIA and FBI posed questions. I may be right or wrong in this assumption, but I feel that most of the questions do not serve the interests of his client or anyone for that matter; yet they are primary directed to me.
And there are several other places where KSM clearly engages in craft (which I'll post in updates).
Nevertheless, this is a fairly uncensored view of that which Mudd insisted was so instructive — instructive enough to torture to get.
On camps
KSM claims that the camps the US has used as a sign of terrorism aren't the best measure.
I don not have any information on [the training camps] during this period because I was appointed by Sheikh Osama bin Laden (Allah have mercy upon him) as head of operations abroad, meaning all the jihadist operations conducted outside of Afghanistan.
The candidates were sent to me and I had other means of training them apart from the well-known camps. I did not need the camps to prepare my men because of the nature of the special operations that were conducted outside Afghanistan.
This is presumably true: shooting guns in the desert isn't going to train one to live in the US inconspicuously and case out plane hijacking. But it's also a taunt that all the attention the US pays to people who've trained at generalized camps isn't going to find the people most apt to attack the US.
This claim to limited knowledge also allows him to claim Abu Ghaith did not train militarily, based on his limited knowledge.
On fighting Russia
This passage makes me wonder how recent of news coverage KSM gets.
At that time, during that particular war, the U.S. government was against the Russian forces for political and strategic reasons of their own. Thus they gave their proxies in the Arabian Peninsula countries the green light to flood the Afghan Mujahideen with money, resources, and Arab fighters; they also opened the doors for merchants and businessmen to donate money without conditions or restrictions. The selfishness and stubbornness of Uncle Sam pushed the U.S. government to flood their agent, the Paksitani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), with millions or billions of dollars in order to defeat the Russian Army by supporting the Afghan Mujahideen. This indirect support was the principle cause of the development of the non-Afghan groups and organizations in Afghanistan and their ability to achieve what they desired withotu any security pressures imposed by U.S. allies such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and other countries around the world. They never supported the non-Afghan groups directly with money or weapons, but by allowing absolute freedom for young people to spend their own money and take advantage of the open land contributed to attaining these achievements. In the end, Uncle Sam destroyed his own country by his own hand with his stupid foreign policy.
it was in this climate of complete inattention from the West that the groups in Afghanistan were able to develop their capabilities. The countries in the West were busy settling scores with the Russians and licking their chops over Mujahideen victories, and for the most part remained completely blind to what was happening in the camps and on the non-Afghan Mujahideen front.
The American media had not yet used terms such as "foreign fighters" or "Afghan Arabs" or "terrorists" or even "the Afghan resistance", rather the fixed term in the Western media policy at that time was "Mujahideen". CNN, BBC, Reuters, France Press were all united in using the term "Jihad" to describe the Afghan resistance and "Mujahideen["] to describe the fighters, whether Afghan or Arab, and the term "martyrs" for those among them who were killed.
All this was to impart international legitimacy on the Western and Islamic support for the Mujahideen in an effort to limit the expansion of the Red Bear and prevent it from obtaining a warm water port.
KSM is totally trolling here. But given events in Russia (especially concerning its warm weather port in Crimea) or — even moreso — Syria, his trolling should carry some weight (but won't).
On Lists of Names
One of the key pieces of evidence the government used against many Gitmo detainees — and Abu Ghaith — was the list of names found on various computers captured in raids (I believe, though have not confirmed, that Abu Ghaith's name appeared on the same computer list that Adnan Latif's did, for example).
But KSM says they shouldn't be used in that way.
[T]here was not a single, fixed system for dispersing funds, especially the expenses and financial guarantees distributed by Al-Qaeda and its beneficiaries. It did not limit its embers, families, and sympathizers, rather it gave freely to all needy families, regardless of their loyalties or affiliation, for two reasons: one, because it was a religious obligation ordering them to consider all the needy equally and fairly and without discriminating between them; and two, because it was a requirement for many donors to not limit funding to any particular category of people but to give to all those who needed it. There were tables and charts and lists of names of the families who received aid and these lists did not delineate the affiliation of the person on record.
I suspect KSM is partly blowing smoke here, and he's not talking about the specific list at issue in this trial. But I also suspect there's some truth to what he says, and that the government has been overstating the value of these lists in large numbers of terrorism trials and, more importantly, Gitmo habeas cases. Philip Mudd says we learn from KSM; is this a fact (or partial truth) we should have learned but refused to?
On bayat
KSM similarly challenges the way the government treats bayat — swearing loyalty to the Taliban or al Qaeda — pointing out that swearing bayat to Mullah Omar but swearing bayat to Osama bin Laden was not (and he did not swear bayat to OBL for years).
That said, his claim here does not entirely rebut US claims.
The United States tries to fabricate charges against innocent people, saying they swore bayat or incited others to do so. Swearing bayat does not mean that a person is placed on a list to carry out an operation; even the cook has sworn bayat.
This, of course, is not the way US law currently works. You swear loyalty to al Qaeda, you're materially supporting them. For Abu Ghaith, the issue is somewhat different as material support laws changed with his involvement. But KSM's rebuttal here doesn't address the key issue of bayat.
The Colbert Report
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Philip Mudd — who was a top CIA analytical official until 2005 and then became a Deputy Director of FBI — has written a defense of torture in anticipation of the release of the Senate Torture Report.
The argument is actually fairly crafty. He acknowledges he probably will "question [the Report's] merits" once it comes out.
I don't know what's in the report, and I wasn't approached during its preparation. I can only guess that I would be among those who question its merits once it enters the public domain.
Given that he effectively admitted to Steven Colbert back in September, above, he was responsible for inserting the tortured claim from Ibn Sheikh al-Libi that Iraq had ties to al Qaeda, and given that he left government after being denied a promotion because his analysts pushed for more torture [correction from Nada Bakos: the claim his analysts pushed for more torture floated when he retired is not accurate], what he likely means is that the Report is going to show very damning evidence about his actions.
But then Mudd appears to say nice things about democracy — as he did with Colbert.
This judgment, though, isn't particularly relevant. In our system of checks and balances, there will often be times when overseers and officials from executive branch agencies don't agree, and both parties have a right to speak on a matter that is of such interest to the public. We're in a finger-pointing Beltway battle between two entities nobody much trusts. Let the people sort it out, after they see what both sides say; let the public decide where the pendulum rests.
There are key points that might get lost in this ugly rumble. Primary among them is the quality of the Senate report, which the CIA evidently argues is profoundly flawed and therefore misleading. This may well be true, but it's not clear it should stand in the way of the report's release. The agency has its perspective; the overseers have theirs.
Time the release of the Senate report to coincide with the release of a CIA rebuttal. Give both sides their say, and then let the public weigh in. [my emphasis]
But in fact, Mudd's defense of democracy — let the people sort it out! — is instead an appeal for a relativism in which there is no truth, only competing truths. Mudd suggests that since both sides get to have their say, we'll come to an adequate outcome.
Of course, Mudd is full of shit on this point. FIrst, because Mudd, a torture defender, has for years been permitted by CIA to go on TV and write Daily Beast columns. He and other torturers have had opportunity to give uncontested rebuttals for years, even with the help of Hollywood. CIA's torture critics, however, have been and even still are getting ominous warnings not to talk to the press. We've had 5 years in which only the torture fans get to defend torture, and that's what Mudd considers a fair fight.
But also because while John Brennan's CIA may argue the report is flawed, whoever drafted the Panetta Report actually agreed with the Senate Report. Let's have that report as CIA's rebuttal, what say you, Mudd?
The "CIA" doesn't think the report was flawed; the CIA's institutional defenders do.
Then, couched in another apparent nod to democracy, Mudd suggests that torture was useful.
Do Americans, and their representatives in lawmaking bodies, want their security services to interrogate prisoners using these tactics? Do they believe these tactics represent American values?
If the answer is "no," the question of whether the tactics are successful becomes moot. Let's assume, for the moment, that we all accepted as fact that the tactics were hugely successful in eliciting valuable intelligence. Would this then change the argument? I hope not: If you want to judge that these programs aren't appropriate for a democratic society, that judgment shouldn't come with a sliding scale. So why waste time on the question of the program's utility? Why pretend that the answer would sway those who believe America should never again return to the tactics the CIA used?
As an intelligence officer who was at the CIA's Counterterrorist Center during the early 2000s, and was once its deputy director, my views of this debate are not complex, and they won't be changed by this report. The al Qaeda prisoners we held at CIA facilities helped us understand the adversary. A lot? A little? Somewhere in between? Outside observers can debate it, but it's hard to argue that sitting across from the most senior leaders of your adversary, over a long period of time, isn't helpful to understanding how they think and act. It is.
This judgment, though, is as irrelevant today as it will be the day this Senate report appears in public.
One of America's top analysts lays out the defense for torture efficacy this way:
"Sitting across from the most senior leaders of your adversary [is] helpful to understanding how they think and act."
Torture is useful.
This is what CIA considers crack analysis!!!! It's useful to sit down with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and therefore it was useful to waterboard him 183 times!!!
Apparently one of CIA's former top analysts doesn't understand that one can sit down with someone — the FBi had a pretty good track record at doing this — without engaging in medieval torture first. This former top analyst feigns not understanding that "sitting across from" someone is different from "pretending you're drowning" someone over and over and over and over.
Maybe instead of releasing the report we should just let CIA's torturers continue to expose just how stupid they really are (or pretend to be). Because while Mudd's pre-rebuttal was meant to sound all democratic and whatnot, when you look closely it just exposes the stupidity of those who defend torture.
Update: I've changed the title of this to match exactly how Mudd characterized the sitting with KSM.
A bit of a row has started between Jay Rosen and Will Saletan for the latter's attempt to "see how [the torturers] saw what they did" in this post. Frankly, I think Rosen mischaracterizes the problem with Saletan's post. It's not so much that Saletan parrots the euphemisms of the torturers. It's that he accepts what John Rizzo, Michael Hayden, Jose Rodriguez, and Marc Thiessen said – in a presentation with multiple internal contradictions even before you get to the outright demonstrable lies — as the truth.
I'm particularly troubled by the way Saletan takes this assertion (which is based on the pseudo science behind the torture):
EITs were used to break the will to resist, not to extract information directly. Hayden acknowledged that prisoners might say anything to stop their suffering. (Like the other panelists, he insisted EITs weren't torture.) That's why "we never asked anybody anything we didn't know the answer to, while they were undergoing the enhanced interrogation techniques.
And concludes this, which I take to be Saletan's belief, not the torturers':
Fourth, the right question to ask about the EIT program isn't whether people lie under torture but whether using torture to train human beings in obedience is wrong despite the payoffs.
In an effort to take the torturers' comments — and very notable silences, which Saletan doesn't discuss — in good faith, Saletan presumes we might treat obedience among detainees being exploited as one of its "payoffs."
Doing so ignores how the Bush Administration used torture to get detainees to tell useful lies, the most important of those being that Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda, which is one of the key pieces of "intelligence" that was used to get us into the Iraq War. That lie from Ibn Sheikh al-Libi — extracted through the use of mock burial and waterboarding, the two main forms of torture discussed in the panel – contributed directly to the unnecessary deaths of 4,000 Americans, to say nothing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
Hayden's claim we always knew the answer to questions we asked under torture
Here's the full exchange from which Saletan takes as truthful the assertion that torture is about "learned helplessness" (no one here uses Mitchell and Jessen's term, but that's what we know they called it).
MR. THIESSEN: Mike, one of the – one of the scenes, you have the interrogator throws the – whoever the detainee is down and starts pouring water over his face and starts shouting, when's the last time you saw bin Laden? And I think that gets to a deep misunderstanding of how interrogation actually worked. And one of the things you explained to me when I was working on my book and on the president's speech was that there's a difference between interrogation and debriefing, and the purpose of interrogation was not – we actually didn't ask questions that we didn't know the answers to. It was to ascertain whether they were being truthful or not. (So if you ?) walk through that?
MR. HAYDEN: I'm almost willing to make an absolute statement that we never asked anybody anything we didn't know the answer to while they were undergoing the enhanced interrogation techniques. The techniques were not designed to elicit truth in the moment – which is what was, you know, tell me this or I'll hurt you more, I'm not your friend – for about a third of our detainees. By the way, for two thirds of our detainees, this wasn't necessary. Now, I'm willing to admit that the existence of the option may have influenced the two-thirds who said, well, let's talk, all right? I mean – I mean, let's be candid with one another. But for about a third, techniques were used not to elicit, again, information in the moment, but to take someone who had come into our custody absolutely defiant and move them into a state or a zone of cooperation, whereby – and then you recall the scene in the movie after the detainee is cleaned up and they're having this lengthy conversation – for the rest of the detention, and in some cases it's years – it's a conversation. It's a debriefing. It's going back and forth with the kind of dialogue that you saw in that scene about a – about a third of the way through the movie.
You know a lot of people kind of reflexively say – they'll say anything to make you stop, which may actually be true. That's why we didn't ask them questions while this was going on. Again, as John said, I mean, you know – these things weren't gentle or kind, but the impact – and I think Jose's written very thoughtfully about this – the impact was psychological. The impact is you are no longer in control of your destiny, all right? You are in our hands, and therefore, that movement into the zone of cooperation as opposed to the zone of defiance. But Jose's got more of the fine print on that. [my emphasis]
As I mentioned the other day, I still haven't seen the movie, so I'm not sure. But Thiessen's effort to dismiss the claim that we asked detainees where Osama bin Laden was while being waterboarding may be an effort to rebut Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's assertion that he lied about OBL's location to get them to stop waterboarding him — all while hiding the importance of the courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, who would eventually lead to OBL.
Now, Hayden's claim is so obviously false as to be almost pathetic.
The ticking timebomb that blows up Hayden's claim
It's a claim that Rodriguez — in the very same appearance — undermines, when he describes turning to torture out of sheer ignorance.
MR. THIESSEN: Follow-up, Jose. I mean, take us back to – since we're pulling the broader picture – take us back to September 11 th , 2001. You know, we've just been hit – there's smoke in the ground in New York, buildings have fallen, the Pentagon is broken. And what do we know about al-Qaida? I mean, did we know that KSM was the operational commander of al Qaida or that he had this – or that members of his network – or all this information that we take for granted that we know now?
MR. RODRIGUEZ: Yeah, we didn't know that much. Continue reading


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Reconfigure your network connection with isp-switch
When an Internet provider goes down, users suffer. Alternatively, users can immediately switch to another ISP. We'll show you a Perl script that can help you reconfigure your computer to make the switch.
In California, two major competitors currently offer Internet access to private households: AT&T with broadband DSL and Comcast with broadband Internet via the TV cable. A DSL or cable modem picks up data off the wire, and a router connects the machines on the home network with the Internet. Both providers have their advantagesand disadvantages. The cable solution suffers from too many kids in the neighborhood playing World of Warcraft because bandwidth drops as more users join the network.
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TOR Network Isn't So Anonymous
A new study says it is possible to unmask 81% of TOR users.
.NET Goes Open Source
Redmond joins the revolution by turning the .NET Core Runtime into a GitHub project.
Drupal Advisory Unleashes a Torrent of Attacks
Users only had 7 hours to update before the intrusions started.
HTML5 Gets Promoted to a Standard
It's official: The new web arrives
Linus Addresses Criticism for Harsh Language
Kernel king admits his tone has alienated volunteers, but says the demands of the process require directness.
New SSL Attack Lets a Malicious Listener Steal Session Cookies
New flaw in an old encryption scheme leaves the experts scrambling to disable SSL 3
Leading Open Source Coder Rants about Rants
Lennart Poettering wants to change the way Linux developers talk to each other.
HP Splits into Two Companies
Enterprise giant frees itself from ink and home PCs (and visa versa).
Mozilla Labs Shuts Down
Mozilla's product think tank sinks silently into history.
Internet Giants Launch Collaboration to Improve Open Source
TODO group will focus on open source tools in large-scale environments.


text:
Ayushmann Khurrana was among the celebs who graced the launch of a luxury shoe store
Aditya Hitkari and Divya Palat were also at the launch
Designer Pria Kataria Puri looked chic in smart casuals
Sharman Joshi smiles for the cameras at the event
Hrithik, Katrina sizzle on 'Bang Bang'...
Aditi Rao Hydari sizzles on HELLO! magazine
GQ India's 2014 Best Dressed Party!
'Humshakals' team visit 'Jhalak...


text:
- Age / Gender:
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- 6/25/12
- All Stats >
User Statshot
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Level 2 Blank Slate
Normal Whistle
Ranked as Civilian
Contact Info / Websites
Recent Game Medals
M1 ABRAMS 10 Points Purchase an M1 ABRAMS from the Reinforcements Menu Medal Stats.
Only One Shot Will Kill 100 Points Complete a wave with only headshots Medal Stats.
The Gambler 50 Points Make a bet Medal Stats.
CAPTCHA 10 Points Win a game of Capture the Flag Medal Stats.
The Captor 50 Points Capture the enemy flag in Capture the Flag Medal Stats.
Apache AH-64 10 Points Purchase an Apache AH-64 from the Reinforcements Menu Medal Stats.
SECRET MEDAL 10 Points Unlock this medal to see it's details. Medal Stats.
Enemy Down 10 Points Win a game of Team Deathmatch Medal Stats.
Weapon Acquired 5 Points Purchase a weapon from the Class Editor Medal Stats.
Attachment Acquired 5 Points Purchase an attachment from the Class Editor Medal Stats.
Total Medals Earned: 54 (From 8 different games.)


text:
Councilors Watch from Sidelines
City councilors not up for re-election say they're enjoying watching the primary race from the outside.
Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris and councilor Kristin Szakos are not in a primary race. The other three seats on city council are up for grabs.
Norris said he's proud to see a high number of candidates running in the primary because it shows how much interest there is in local politics.
"There might be ideas, even candidates that might not be successful in winning an election, may have ideas we might want to look at and implement," Norris said. "I love the fact that all these folks are out there engaging with voters."
Norris and Szakos are up for re-election in 2013. Councilors Holly Edwards and David Brown are not running for re-election, while councilor Satyendra Huja is among the seven contenders.
August 14, 2011
Ten candidates are vying for a total of four open seats in next week's Democratic firehouse primary as voters prepare to cast their ballots for Charlottesville City Council and the clerk of circuit court.
With less than one week left, 10 Democratic candidates for public office made a final push at Forrest Hills Park in Charlottesville.
"It's more than we've had in recent years," said James Nix, co-chair of the Charlottesville Democrats.
In all, there are seven Democratic candidates vying for three open seats on Charlottesville City Council. They are incumbent Satyendra Huja, Paul Beyer, Colette Blount, Brevy Cannon, Kathleen Galvin, James Halfaday and Dede Smith.
There are three people running for clerk of court: incumbent Paul Garrett, Llezelle Dugger and Pam Melampy.
"[The primary] allows us to ensure that every candidate that is nominated actually has the support of a majority of those casting ballots," Nix said.
At the primary, voters will rank all the candidates in the order they want them elected.
When it comes to tallying the votes, candidates will receive one vote for each of the top three rankings. Instructions will be on the back of the ballots.
Meet-and-greets like the one Sunday at Forrest Hills Park are important for candidates to get to know voters. Even a Democrat in a left-leaning city like Charlottesville isn't a shoo-in for public office.
"A majority of Charlottesville voters in recent years have been Democrats, so we have high hopes our nominees will be elected, but no assurance that they will," Nix said.
In the final days of getting to know candidates, Democratic leaders hope for a smooth election that could pave way for victory in November.
The firehouse primary will take place Saturday at Burley Elementary School from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Any registered voter can cast a ballot. For city residents not registered, it's not too late to fill out paperwork and vote in Saturday's primary.


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24 Oct - first proper snow
I think my street has a lovely view, don't you agree? After light snow that melted quickly it has now snowed properly in Hakuba. Autumn is still in full swing, however winter has sent its advance party as a reminder of what is coming. How slowly summer passes, yet how quickly it seems to be almost winter again. It has been two months since went ski touring, and I am getting past itchy again. Luckily, I am spending the entire early season in Canada, so hopefully I will get a lot of rewarding exploration on my spare days. Sadly, this also means I miss most of my favourite time of year, and wont see my wife or dog for 2 months. So unlike past years, when the Hakuba season kicks off, I wont be hear to see it nor report on it in this blog. Sorry. ideally there would be an Avalanche Operations Level 1 graduate in Hakuba who is enthusiastic enough to manage my weather study plot in December for me. Any takers?
I can give you a weather plot
I can give you a weather plot for Tazawako (Akitakomagateke) ; )
Best wishes on the work and study. Waiting on your AST 2 course.


text:
Kaz you need to remember one thing...there is no RL, only AFK.
@bloodwraith, welcome to the club!
i used to be a warrior and when wotlk hit i had the same experience with DKs as you did. Its definitely fun to be OP and the dk abilities as a whole really cater to what i was looking for in a warrior during BC


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FORT LAUDERDALE — Before you can get rental housing assistance from the city's Housing Authority, you first have to get your name on its Section 8 waiting list — an opportunity that doesn't happen every day.
Here's your chance.
The agency is opening its waiting list for the first time in four years as it plans to have a lottery to add 1,000 names to its backlog for the rental-assistance vouchers, which are paid for through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.


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Book your room at Quality Inn & Suites Beachfront
Standard Double Room, 2 Double Beds, Non SmokingMax Occupancy: 4 guests (up to 3 children, 3 infants)
Standard Double Room, 2 Double Beds, SmokingMax Occupancy: 4 guests (up to 3 children, 3 infants)
Standard Double Room, 2 Double Beds, Ocean ViewMax Occupancy: 6 guests (up to 5 children, 5 infants)
Standard Double Room, Ocean ViewMax Occupancy: 2 guests (up to 1 child, 1 infant)
Delightful beach hotel with a sauna
This Ocean City hotel is set on the beach a short distance from Planet Maze, Jolly Roger Amusement Park, and Roland E. Powell Convention Center. Also nearby are Ember's Island Miniature Golf and Maui Golf.
Hotel Features
Guests of this beach hotel will appreciate convenient onsite amenities such as a fitness center and a sauna.
Room Amenities
Flat-screen televisions come with premium cable channels. Guestrooms also feature kitchenettes, complimentary wireless Internet access, and microwaves.Information missing or incorrect? Tell us!
Quality Inn & Suites Beachfront
Hotel Amenities
The hotel offers a restaurant. High-speed wireless Internet access is complimentary. In addition to an indoor pool and a seasonal outdoor pool, Quality Inn & Suites Beachfront provides a sauna and a fitness center. This beach hotel also offers an arcade/game room, laundry facilities, and a safe deposit box at the front desk. Onsite self parking is complimentary.
- 24-hour front desk
- Arcade/game room
- ATM/banking
- Breakfast available (surcharge)
- Elevator/lift
- Fitness facilities
- Laundry facilities
- Number of floors - 8
- Total number of rooms - 110
- Safe-deposit box at front desk
- Free self parking
- Sauna
- Indoor pool
- Outdoor seasonal pool
- Free Wi-Fi
- Restaurant
Available in all rooms: Free Wi-Fi
Available in some public areas: Free Wi-Fi
Room Amenities
- Premium TV channels
- Air conditioning
- Balcony
- Climate control
- Kitchenette
- Microwave
- Private bathroom
- Hair dryer
- Iron/ironing board
- Cable TV service
- Rollaway/extra beds available
- Cribs/infant beds available
- Coffee/tea maker
- Free local calls
- Cookware, dishware, and utensils
- Flat-panel TV
- Dishwasher
- Stovetop
- Phone
- Full-sized refrigerator/freezer
- Free Wi-Fi
Where to Eat
Cooked-to-order breakfasts are available for a surcharge and are served each morning between 7 AM and 11 AM.
Oceans at 33rd St - This restaurant serves breakfast only.
Nearby Things to Do
An indoor pool and a seasonal outdoor pool are on site. Other recreational amenities include a sauna and a fitness center.
The recreational activities listed below are available either on site or nearby; fees may apply.
- Golfing nearby
- Windsurfing nearby
- Bicycle rentals nearby
To make requests for specific accessibility needs, complete the "Special or Accessibility Requests" section of "Trip Preferences" when you book your hotel.
- Accessible path of travel
- Accessible bathroom
- Roll-in shower
- Accessible parking
- In-room accessibility
- Accessibility equipment for the deaf
- Braille or raised signage
Hotel Policies
Check-in time starts at 4 PM
Check-out time is 11 AM
Payment types
You need to know
Extra-person charges may apply and vary depending on hotel policy.
Government-issued photo identification and a credit card or cash deposit are required at check-in for incidental charges.
Special requests are subject to availability upon check-in and may incur additional charges. Special requests cannot be guaranteed.


text: Lady Vivian, As the Authorization Marshal from Gleann Abhann, AND also a combat archer, I can assure you the paperwork you have will be sufficient to participate at Gulf Wars in lieu of an actual card. In Service, Visc. Miriel du Bois, OP Authorization Marshal, Gleann Abhann On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 11:23 AM, pamela bedwell <pbedwell38 at gmail.com>wrote: > I appreciate any and all help anyone can and will give me on this issue. I > just really want to know if I am going to be able to do comet archery at > war. I have copies of the paperwork that Ironwyrm sent me, but I don't know > if that will be acceptable at War since it is an out of Kingdom event. > Lady Vivian McKinnon > Shire of Loch Ruadh > >


text:
Celebrity Central / Top 25 Celebs
Credit: Janet Mayer/Splash News Online; Rex USA
Published: Friday February 01, 2013 12:00 PM EST
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We all know that Jordan Catalano wins the plaid button-down Fashion Faceoff, but if we take him out of the running, who wins? January, who wears the Splendid top with skinny jeans, or Selma, who pairs it with beaten-up boyfriend denim?
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Nutritional Facts
Lemon Orange Ice
We enjoy this treat on special occasions, like birthdays, or when we have lots of ice chips from ice fishing in winter. It has the sharp, tangy flavor of a sherbet but a creamier texture. My recipe originated years ago with my grandmother. It's her favorite ice cream, and I always think of her when I make it. She still likes serving it to all her many grandchildren!
16 Servings
Prep: 10 min. Freeze: 30 min.
Juice of 6 lemons
Juice of 7 oranges
3-1/2 cups sugar
1 pint heavy whipping cream
1 quart whole milk
In a large bowl, combine juices, sugar, cream and milk. Mix well.
Pour mixture into an ice cream freezer and freeze according to
manufacturer's directions. Serve immediately for a soft consistency
or place in refrigerator/freezer. Yield: 2 quarts.
Nutritional Facts:
1 serving (1/2 cup) equals 331 calories, 13 g fat (8 g saturated fat), 49 mg cholesterol, 42 mg sodium, 53 g carbohydrate, trace fiber, 3 g protein.
Sweet White Wine: Enjoy this recipe with a sweet white wine such as
or a sweet
© Taste of Home 2014


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An amazing woman! Loves sex... Has a huge circle of friends of all varieties... Loves her family and devotes her life to them.... Loves to party.... Easy to love.... you are one lucky son of a bitch if you've got her , without a doubt, is the perfect woman. Full of life and laughter. She has a smile that can light up a dark room. Beautiful on the outside and beautiful within, she's flawless and her beauty stands out. Sweet, caring, funny, smart, classy and determined. Estefany always gets what she wants. She may be sweet but don't take her kindness for a weakness, she stands her ground. Once you meet a real Estefany, don't ever let her go.
"Man I wished I had a Estefany."
"Estefany is unforgettable."
"Estefany is unforgettable."
by urbandictionarynamequotes November 20, 2013


text:
Learn why downsizing to a condo doesn't always mean sacrificing space. Tour the spacious penthouse of Elte owners Renee and Ken Metrick. Designed by Brian Gluckstein, the 5,500-square-foot home boasts modern floor-to-ceiling windows balanced by traditional elements and classic furniture. Tour through a luxurious principal suite, complete with a TV den, his and hers walk-in closets, inviting fireplace area and spa-like bathroom. Draw inspiration from the calming neutral colour scheme, timeless materials and flowing layout. Finally, Allyson Bobbitt and Sarah Bell from Toronto's Bobbette & Belle bakery share their tips on how to decorate cookies for the winter season.
Interior design, Brian Gluckstein, principal, Stephen Wagg, design director, Gluckstein Design Planning, Toronto (416) 928-2067 or visit Glucksteindesign.com.
Living room: Wall colour, Maritime White (OC-5) from the Off White collection, Benjamin Moore, call 1-800-361-5898 or visit Benjaminmoore.ca for retailers across Canada; Ralph Lauren collection Moderne armchairs in walnut, Council collection aubergine coffee table, sofas and ottoman, antique Saraband rug circa 1930, Elte, Toronto (416) 785-7885, 1-888-276-3583 or visit Elte.com.
Bar: Moscou Metro (2001) by Nicolas Ruel (photography on stainless steel), Thompson Landry Gallery, Toronto (416) 364-4955 or visit Thompsonlandry.com; leather bar stools with Java finish, bar, Elte, as above.
Entryway: Untitled (1981) from the Red series by Barbara Astman (colour print), Corkin Shopland Gallery, Toronto (416) 979-1980 or e-mail email@example.com; Bolier collection walnut console, telescope floor lamps with oval linen shades, Elte, as above.
Dining room: Theodore Alexander collection rosewood dining table with nickel banding and rosewood chairs, chandelier, Elte, as above.
Kitchen: Brown leather and polished chrome stools, Country Industrial pendant ceiling lamps with bronze finish, Elte, as above; library pulls, Summerhill Hardware, Toronto (416) 785-1225; cabinetry, Elite Custom Cabinets, Concord, Ont. (905) 660-6670 or visit Elitecabinets.com.
Seating area off kitchen: Metro sofa in chocolate brown mohair, Ralph Lauren collection Bohemian armchairs with polished chrome arms, Ralph Lauren collection coffee table in oak, Flow rug in silk finish, Elte, as above.
Outdoor seating area: Landscaping, Ronald Holbrook, Holbrook + Associates Landscape Architects, Toronto (416) 924-8165 or e-mail email@example.com; woven outdoor furniture, Elte, as above.


text:
This listing closed and did not sell.
- Browse Cars
Nissan Caravan Coach DX 2002
- No reserve
- Closed: Wed 26 Dec 2012, 1:15 pm
MotorWeb report: Get vehicle report
Air conditioning
Central locking
Driver airbag
Passenger airbag
A new paint job already done to our car,has 7 seater inside,two sub-woofer 15"inch each inside with two amps and already got some mags wheels but I will explain everything to the buyer.
Car buyer's checklist
Shipping details
- To be arranged
- Seller allows pick-ups
- Seller location: Manukau City, Auckland, NZ
Payment details
- Cash
About the seller
- 100% positive feedback
- Member since Jan 2008
Closes: Wed 26 Dec, 1:15 pm. 2012


text:
unishivaji.ac.in Shivaji University Results 2012 Of BE/BA/B.COM/BSC/BBA/BCA/BSC Part 1/2/3 - I/II/III Year
Shivaji University Already Has Conducted Various Examination April month 2012 Like as BE/BA BCOM , BCA , BBA , BSC Of Part I , II , II .
Shivaji university Will Going TO Soon Declared Result of B.E (1st/2nd/3rd/4th/6th/7th/8th Sem And BE , BSC , B.COM , BBA , BCA Results 2012 at Official Website Of Shivaji University.
Following Given below Url For Check Result Of Shivaji university - www.unishivaji.ac.in
BE,BA, BCOm, BSc, BBA, BCA, MCA, MBA, LaW, BCS,MSc, BEd Results 2012 of 1st year , 2nd year , 3rd year final year result 2012 .
When Shivaji University Will Declared Any Examination Result Then We will Update soon All examination results on this website so keep visiting on this page .
Best Of luck To All of you candidates