October 17th, 2006
Dear Readers,
I do not think President George Bush should be tortured and executed.
I do, however, think he should be arrested and tried for treason.
If you haven't already done so, add "waterboarding" (and all its variations) to your spell-checker. It looks like it's here to stay, and you, my fellow American Citizens, might even be the subject of it.
So it's good to know what it is (and how to spell it).
It's drowning someone, often, if not usually, in puke-filled sewage, but most of the time they stop it a hare's breath away from death. Sometimes? Well, nobody's perfect, right?
Today, President Bush enacted the Waterboard Your Neighbor Act of 2006. It allows not just waterboarding but any activity deemed effective in eliciting information from anyone the federal government deems knowledgeable about anything the federal government deems important enough for... you got it... waterboarding.
As I mentioned in a recent newsletter, I'm now 50 years old. One thing I've noticed is that I cannot hold my breath for nearly as long as I used to. I hope that when / if I am waterboarded, the Army of One (or his or her contractor) takes that into account when determining how long to hold me under before I am nearly dead.
We are told waterboarding is not a particularly dangerous technique for scaring the prisoners (and I should mention, every other technique the interrogators can think of to get the information will probably be tried when waterboarding doesn't seem to be working).
I suspect waterboarding and most other "effective" torture techniques are all very dangerous, statistically speaking. Captivity is very dangerous, statistically speaking. It shortens life-spans, drives people mad, causes suicides, hardens criminals. Adding the most extreme torture techniques George Bush will ignore is not likely to ever produce a single converted, repaired, humanized, former terrorist. It will, however, surely produce the immediate repercussion that all U.S. citizens and service personnel will be subject "routine" torture when captured by all future enemies.
It didn't have to be that way. It didn't used to be that way. It doesn't have to be that way. But George Bush, today, has made it that way.
We were told, last week, that the North Korean nuclear test did not release any radioactivity. North Korea told us so.
More than a week later our spy plane suddenly can detect radioactivity from North Korea's nuclear test, and viola! We are now to believe it happened! Just in time for their second blast, due any day now. And who says this one has to be underground?
There is something very fishy in all this. Couldn't this second blast have been avoided if Bush had admitted that we had detected the first one "fair and square?" Instead, millions of Curies of new fission products are about to be created in a second blast. And if the "sanctions" don't cease -- which Il calls an act of war -- will there be a third blast, perhaps in SOUTH Korea, or somewhere else?
I suspect that Bush is playing Il like a poorly-tuned fiddle, simply to prove that he (Bush) still holds the cards. And Il can ill afford to set off too many more nukes, lest they all look like duds, or he destroy even more of his precious little peninsula, where land is scarce and resources (like coal, which surrounds where the blast occurred) are extremely valuable.
Toshiba, which makes about 35% of Japan's nuclear power plants, just bought Westinghouse, which is expected to get a lion's share of the billions of dollars provided by Dick Cheney's secret energy plan to build new nuclear power plants in the United States. Westinghouse currently builds replacement parts for old decrepit nuclear power plants. Meanwhile, Japan is threatening to rewrite their Constitution to make nuclear weapons to threaten North Korea with. Well, North Korea, today.
North Korea got the plutonium and uranium for their nuclear weapons program from the nuclear power plants a French firm called ABB sold them in the 1990s. On ABB's board of directors at the time was Donald Rumsfeld.
Treason, anyone?
Bush is lying. Il is lying. Toshiba is lying. Westinghouse is lying. ABB is lying.
And me?
I'm not holding my breath.
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
P.S. Last week, amidst all the ruckus, I finally released a new educational computer software program I had been working on for over a year, which I think you will all enjoy, and which can help you understand things like "tritium" and "transuranic" and "isotope" and "electron" and so forth. So without further ado, here's the URL for my new Interactive Animated Periodic Table of the Elements:
As usual, the password NO NUKES! (with one, two, or three exclamation points) works so activists (and reporters) can use the programs for free. (And as usual, any LOGIN ID will do.) The program is designed for chemistry teachers to use in a classroom situation, as well as for physics teachers, students, and everyone else who is curious about the elements. Drown yourself in knowledge!