Digest the estimable pragmatism, and shareholder value, of Boeing to Build 'Virtual Fence' at Southern Border:

Boeing's "virtual fence" concept includes an estimated 1,800 towers along the border equipped with cameras and motion sensors.

Then take a sip of Bust nets $35m of cocaine:

... the container of 420 monitors was selected by Customs for x-ray ...

What, may I ask, were in the thousands of containers not selected for Xray?

What would have been the fate of the detainees in this case, if the powder was not cocaine, but weaponised anthrax spores?

But, no matter, these were only ordinary criminals (assuming they could pass the Aussie Values test) who would never, ever mix in with dirty, extremist business. And, cocaine is the fuel of our creativities and board-room frolics, so give them light sentences, please.

From Chavez Calls Bush ‘the Devil’ in U.N. Speech: 

... “Right here. Right here. And it smells of sulfur still today, this table that I am now standing in front of.” ...

A wry jape by the Senor, who must have read Consortiumnews.com:

Now we’re told that George W. Bush has another way of demonstrating his supremacy over subordinates: when new White House aides are brought in to be introduced to the President of the United States, the President farts.

More material for Blue Flames -
1. Follow the worthless career of a paedophile.

2. Pick a selection from Fox Faith, but I can't find Page Three Girls.

from the Centre for American Progress ….

‘Five years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States is not winning the war against terrorist networks. The world has become a more dangerous place, yet the Bush administration’s approach remains the same, with too much energy and money focused on the wrong policy in Iraq. 

When historians look back on the summer of 2006, they will see it as the period when the Bush administration lost control of events: American troops stuck in the middle of a growing civil war in Iraq that costs American taxpayers $8 billion a month; a resurgent Al Qaeda and Taliban on the offensive in Afghanistan; Islamist terrorist groups attacking Israel’s northern and southern borders; global terrorist networks still plotting against America and its allies; America’s adversaries advancing their nuclear programs; and gas prices rising out of control at home.’

Taking Control Of The Fight Against Terrorism

from the Centre for American Progress  .....

‘For the past few weeks, President Bush and members of his administration have undertaken an aggressive public relations campaign to spread the message about their stay the course strategy for Iraq. Bush couches such pronouncements with the precondition that he will first "listen to [military] generals." Yesterday, Gen. John Abizaid, the chief of the U.S. Central Command, gave Bush what he demanded, telling reporters that the current contingent of more than 140,000 troops "will probably have to be sustained through the spring" of next year. The statement "effectively ended hopes for a big troop withdrawal from Iraq this year." Abizaid suggested, however, that the Bush's administration's strategy in Iraq is failing. He said he had hoped six months ago for the withdrawal of several thousand U.S. troops from Iraq by now, but noted, "We clearly did not achieve the force levels that we had hoped to." Given the dysfunctional and evolving mission the U.S. military has been given, it is unsurprising that force levels have remained high. Bush has previously stated that as Iraqi troops stand up, U.S. forces will stand down. Yet, there are now 294,000 Iraqi troops according to the Pentagon, and the American troop levels have only experienced "a big jump" over the last several months. Bush refuses to acknowledge that the massive troop presence is fueling, rather than calming, the insurgency. A policy of strategic redeployment might be the last best hope for the Iraqi people, who are growing frustrated with their political leadership and a government which is being hampered by the presence of U.S. forces.

While the media's attention has largely strayed from the ongoing chaos in Iraq, the American public remains focused on that issue, ranking it as the most important factor they will consider when going to the polls this November. Sixty-one percent of Americans believe that the Bush administration does not have a clear plan for handling Iraq, and 58 percent believe Congress is not doing enough to oversee the administration's policy. Recognizing their weakness on this issue, conservatives such as Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) have said "the focus should not be on Iraq, it should be on Iran." Rather than addressing the key questions that the public has about Iraq, administration officials have instead offered beyond-the-pale rhetoric comparing war critics to Hitler appeasers and assailing them as terrorist abetters.

The conditions on the ground in Iraq continue to reflect an anarchic civil war, characterized by a lack of order and rampaging violence. "The everyday life of Iraqi people is dominated by the constant threat of sectarian violence and civil strife," U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said recently. "Both the Bush administration and military have said sectarian killings and violence are surging around Iraq and in the capital." "It's barbaric but sadly we've become used to it," an Iraqi Interior Ministry official said of bodies found around the capital, in both Sunni and Shi'ite areas. "Forty bodies, 60 bodies -- it's become a daily routine." Nearly 200 bodies of Iraqis who had been tortured and shot have turned up around Baghdad in the past week. Today, a suicide truck bomb slammed into the Baghdad police headquarters, killing seven and wounding more than a dozen. The problem isn't isolated to Baghdad. The situation in western Iraq -- the Anbar province -- is also "dire," and the military has reported that the battle for hearts and minds has been lost there.

The dimming prospects for troop withdrawals from Iraq "means the Pentagon may soon face a difficult and politically sensitive decision: either make more frequent call-ups of some National Guard and Reserve troops or expand still further the size of the active-duty Army." The Army is undersized and should be increased by at least 86,000 troops over the next five years, according to a defense review published by the Center for American Progress. But in the interim, sending more troops to Iraq would "threaten to break our nation's all-volunteer Army and undermine our national security." Yet that is what some conservatives are calling for. The strategic cost of staying the course is immense. Financially, "it costs about $1.2 billion a month to keep a U.S. Army division in combat in Iraq." The costs of restoring destroyed and damaged Army and Marine Corps equipment is now estimated to be close to $30 billion, and it will grow by an additional $14 billion for every additional year we stay in Iraq. And staying in Iraq will continue to strengthen Iran's hand and weaken U.S. influence in the region.

Vice President Cheney said recently that going into Iraq "was the right thing to do and if we had it to do over again, we’d do exactly the same thing." While Cheney may be unwilling to concede that all the justifications the administration proffered for going into Iraq have collapsed, a new Senate Intelligence Committee report makes that point clear. Declassified portions of Committee's Phase II report on pre-war Iraq intelligence explain that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were enemies, not collaborators. The report states, "Postwar findings indicate that Saddam Hussein was distrustful of al-Qa’ida and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime, refusing all requests from al Qa’ida to provide material or operational support. Debriefings of key leaders of the former Iraqi regime indicate that Saddam distrusted Islamic radicals in general, and al Qa’ida in particular… Debriefings also indicate that Saddam issued a general order that Iraq should not deal with al Qa’ida. No postwar information suggests that the Iraqi regime attempted to facilitate a relationship with bin Ladin." The report also claims Saddam "did not have a relationship with, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi." Yet Bush and other White House officials continue to assert the false link.

A new book by Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran reveals that early decisions made by the administration to rebuild Iraq were guided by political considerations and resulted in the selection of unqualified candidates. The entire post-war reconstruction phase has been marked by incompetence. Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) released a new report by the Campaign for America's Future that provides an overview of the corporate profiteering and mismanagement in Iraq. At a hearing on the issue, former Halliburton truck drivers accused the company of sending its employees into hazardous areas, despite warnings that the routes were unsafe. Dorgan is calling for a Truman-style commission to investigate the gross misuse of government funds spent by contractors in Iraq. "Nobody seems to give a damn" about the abuses ongoing in Iraq due to no-bid, unsupervised contracts, he said. Dorgan's efforts have been amplified by the release of a new movie that documents "the connections between private companies making a killing in Iraq and the decision makers who allow them to do so." Click here to see if Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers, a film produced and directed by Robert Greenwald, is being screened in a location near you, or buy a copy for yourself.’

From Al Jazeera

UN: Human rights worsening in Iraq

Thursday 21 September 2006, 5:47 Makka Time, 2:47 GMT

"Human rights violations, particularly against the right to life and personal integrity, [have] continued to occur at an alarming daily rate in Iraq," the report, released on Wednesday, said.

Bodies found in the Baghdad morgue "often bear signs of severe torture including acid-induced injuries and burns caused by chemical substances, missing skin, broken bones - back, hands and legs, missing eyes, missing teeth and wounds caused by power drills or nails," the report said.

The monthly report said that terrorist attacks, the growth of militias, the emergence of organized crime had resulted in the large-scale and indiscriminate killing of civilians.

Every month the Iraqi police continue to find hundreds of bodies bearing signs of "severe torture and execution style killing" the report said.

From Al Jazeera

Musharraf: US threatened to bomb Pakistan

Friday 22 September 2006, 2:29 Makka Time, 23:29 GMT

The Pakistani president has said that after the 9/11 attacks the United States threatened to bomb his country if it did not cooperate with America's campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

In an interview with the CBS news show "60 Minutes" that will air on Sunday, Pervez Musharraf said the threat came from Richard Armitage, the US deputy secretary of state, and was given to Musharraf's intelligence director.

Musharraf said: "The intelligence director told me that [Armitage] said, 'Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age.'

"I think it was a very rude remark."

Armitage was not immediately available to comment. A Bush administration official said there would be no comment on a "reported conversation between Mr. Armitage and a Pakistani official".

But the official said: "After 9/11, Pakistan made a strategic decision to join the war on terror and has since been a steadfast partner in that effort. Pakistan's commitment to this important endeavor has not wavered and our partnership has widened as a result."

Interest of the nation

Musharraf is now in Washington and is due to meet George Bush in the White House on Friday.

The Pakistani leader said he reacted to the threat in a responsible way.

"One has to think and take actions in the interest of the nation, and that's what I did."

from the Centre for American Progress

‘America is losing the war on terrorism, and the war in Iraq bears a large part of the blame. An April National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) -- the key findings of which the Bush administration declassified yesterday -- reveals that Islamic extremists are "are increasing in both number and geographic dispersion."

A big reason why: "the Iraq conflict has become the 'cause celebre' for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement." Worse, the NIE found that "the underlying factors fueling the spread of the movement outweigh its vulnerabilities." One of the main factors fueling terrorists: "the Iraq jihad." Meanwhile, the Bush administration has insisted that "America is winning the war on terror,""America is safer" and the idea that Iraq is fueling terrorism "doesn't hold water."

Nevertheless, nothing in the NIE will come as a surprise to the nation's national security experts. A bipartisan survey of 100 national security experts conducted by American Progress and Foreign Policy magazine found that overwhelming majorities believed: 1) we are losing the war on terror (84 percent), 2) the Iraq War is making the terror threat worse (87 percent) and 3) we are not safer (86 percent).  Staying the course means putting America at risk.

In 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wrote a memo that famously asked the question, "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?" The NIE definitively answers this question: "a large body of all-source reporting indicates that activists identifying themselves as jihadists...are increasing in both number and geographic dispersion."

The Bush administration's response to the NIE was puzzling. White House homeland security official Fran Townsend sought to undermine the conclusions of the administration's intelligence services: "It's difficult to count how many have been added. ... It would be very difficult to count them." Townsend also said of the new jihadists: "it's not clear that those are people willing to commit murder." 

As grim as the April NIE is, there is evidence that, if anything, it's overly optimistic. The report says that if leaders like Musab al-Zarqawi were killed, "the resulting splinter groups would, at least for a time, pose a less serious threat to US interests than does al-Qaida." Zarqawi was killed in June. Since that time, violence in Iraq has increased sharply. 

The White House released only three pages from a document that is reportedly 30 pages long. What are they trying to hide? Yesterday, Jane Harman, the ranking member on the House intelligence committee said that "the body of the NIE provides additional information to support the key judgments, and I see no reason why it cannot also be declassified."

There is another NIE being created by the intelligence community that focuses specifically on Iraq. Yesterday, Harman "called for it to be shared with the American public - before the November elections." Thus far, it hasn't even been shared with Congress. Yesterday, Townsend acknowledged it's existence but said it wouldn't be ready for distribution, conveniently, until Jan. 2007.

From the Washington Post

Heralded Iraq Police Academy a 'Disaster'
By Amit R. Paley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 28, 2006; A01

BAGHDAD, Sept. 27 -- A $75 million project to build the [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/27/AR2006092702134_pf.html|largest police academy] in Iraq has been so grossly mismanaged that the campus now poses health risks to recruits and might need to be partially demolished, U.S. investigators have found.
The Baghdad Police College, hailed as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country's security, was so poorly constructed that feces and urine rained from the ceilings in student barracks. Floors heaved inches off the ground and cracked apart. Water dripped so profusely in one room that it was dubbed "the rain forest."
"This is the most essential civil security project in the country -- and it's a failure," said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an independent office created by Congress. "The Baghdad police academy is a disaster."