yea, like the rest of you i did watch Whitney make a complete fool of herself on tv. WHY WAS BOBBY SWEATING BULLETS? yo, it's sad.. here are some of the highlights:
when Diane Sawyer asked:
"are you smoking crack?"
whitney responded:
"Crack? Crack? let me get one thing clear, Crack is cheap. I make too much money to smoke crack. Crack is wack..."
(ok whitney, that was real wack.. just say you don't do it... what do you smoke?)
then Diane Sawyer asked:
(showing her the picture of her performance at the Michael Jackson Concert)
"look at this...look at this picture. people are talking and saying 'what is going on'"
Whitney pointing at the picture:
"what? what's wrong with that picture? it's a bad shot..."
Diane Sawyer:
"well okay, they did fix it up a little, but this is evident" (she pointed at the bones that were visible)
Whitney:
"i have always been thin"
then later she admits that sometimes she won't eat for days at a time when she is stressed.
BUT WHY WAS BOBBY SWEATING BULLETS...
i stopped and went to bed like midway thru the program. it was a shame.. all i can do is pray for the sister....word.
let me stop talking about people...
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check this is out AQUI
Material Breach: U.S. Crimes in Iraq
Heather Wokusch, December 3, 2002
Timing is everything. In London yesterday, Tony Blair released a "terrifying" report detaling alleged human rights abuses by the Saddam regime, trying to rally a lukewarm British public behind an Iraq invasion. Amnesty International responded with a statement criticizing the report, calling it suspect. In Washington, Bush focused on the weapons inspections process, saying Iraq's compliance was "not encouraging," despite the inspectors' own comments that Iraq has been cooperative. The allies' attempts to undermine UN weapons inspections and trigger a war are becoming increasingly transparent. As former assistant secretary general of the UN Hans von Sponeck recently said, "No one, not even the casual reader, can miss the almost desperate attempts by the U.S. authorities to destroy the arms inspection before it's properly begun.":
Material Breach: U.S. Crimes in Iraq
D-Day of December 8th quietly approaches - the day Iraq must provide the UN Security Council with a complete accounting of its weapons programs, plus its civilian chemical/biological/nuclear production and research activities [today Iraq said they would beat the deadline by a day and submit their report on the 7th]. Even though UN weapons inspectors have criticized the December 8th deadline as unrealizable, the consequences for missing it will be catastrophic: Iraq will be in "material breach" of UN resolution 1441, and therefore subject to swift and decisive military action.
But at this point, UN 1441 seems little more than a whitewash pretext for a U.S.-led attack on Iraq. With U.S. warplanes patrolling Iraq's no-fly zone, bombing raids against Iraq ongoing, multiple aircraft carriers on alert and 60,000 U.S. troops currently in or around the Persian Gulf, it's clear the war has already begun, "material breach" or not. When it's convenient for the Bush administration, Iraq will be found to have violated some aspect of the UN resolution, and the current buildup and covert military activity will explode into an all-out attack.
The justification (that Iraq's Hussein violates international law with his weapons of mass destruction and is thus a menace to world peace) seems a bit ironic in light of U.S. actions in Iraq these past eleven years.
Case in point. Article 54 of the Geneva Conventions clearly states that destroying or rendering useless items essential to the survival of civilian populations is illegal under international law and a war crime. Hard then to explain the 1991 US bombing of electrical grids that powered 1,410 water-treatment plants for Iraq's 22 million people. An excerpt from a 1998 U.S. Air Force document, entitled "Strategic Attack," chillingly explains: "The electrical attacks proved extremely effective ... The loss of electricity shut down the capital's water treatment plants and led to a public health crisis from raw sewage dumped in the Tigris River." A second U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency document, 1991's "Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities," predicted how sanctions would then be used to prevent Iraq from getting the equipment and chemicals necessary for water purification, which would result in "a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population" leading to "increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease."
So basically, in defiance of international law, the United States knowingly destroyed Iraq's water supply, then for the past eleven years has prevented the contaminated drinking water from being treated, even though it was obvious those most affected would be millions of citizens doomed to preventable disease and death. If that's not a material breach, what is?
Then there's the depleted uranium (DU) weaponry the United States and its allies used on Iraq during the Gulf War, despite foreknowledge its radioactivity would make food and water in the bombed regions unsafe for consumption on an indefinite basis (DU remains radioactive for 4.5 billion years). Add in the fact that trails of carcinogenic dust left in a DU bomb's wake spread in the wind to be absorbed by plants and animals, thereby devastating a region's food chain. Of course, humans inhale and absorb DU dust as well, which has most likely led not only to dramatically elevated levels of birth defects and cancer cases among Iraqi civilians, but also to a wide litany of suffering among Gulf War vets; a recent study, for example, found that even nine years after the war, veterans afflicted with Gulf War Syndrome ailments still had DU traces in their urine. This while there has yet to be any U.S. governmental study on the effects of DU inhalation...
We can expect DU to be used in the next attack on Iraq too, in spite of the inhumane risks to civilians and military personnel alike. According to a Defense Department report, "the U.S. Military Services use DU munitions because of DU's superior lethality" adding, "Gulf War exposures to depleted uranium (DU) have not to date produced any observable adverse health effects attributable to DU's chemical toxicity or low-level radiation." With more than one out of six American Gulf War vets having reported health problems since their service, and over 9,000 having died since the war ended, not to mention the marked increase in Iraqi birth defects and cancer cases in DU-bombed regions, denial like that is nothing short of material breach, an affront to both human rights and common sense.
And what if the December 8th deadline is met, and no weapons of mass destruction are found by U.N. weapons inspectors inside Iraq? Says U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: "What it would prove would be that the inspection process had been successfully defeated by the Iraqis. There's no question but that the Iraqi regime is clever, they've spent a lot of time hiding things, dispersing things, tunneling underground." So it would appear regardless of how the inspections turn out, the Iraqis will be attacked anyway.
In facing a no-win situation, Hussein could seem like a martyr to others in the region; he could also see little option but to unleash whatever destructive powers he has left. Backing someone like him into a corner is foreign policy at its most disastrous, a dangerous development for the entire region and very bad news for the unfortunate service men and women thrown into that quagmire.
It's clear that Saddam Hussein is a loathsome ogre who has shown criminal disregard for his population. What's also clear though is that the U.S. record in the region is disgraceful if not downright criminal. Consider that for the two years following Hussein's infamous 1988 gas attack on the Kurds at Halabja (an attack in which U.S.-built helicopters were apparently among those dropping the bombs) the U.S. government seemed quite uninterested in his possession of chemical weapons, or any other weapons for that matter. Remember too, that a 1992 Senate committee report entitled "U.S. Chemical and Biological Warfare-Related Dual-Use Exports to Iraq," demonstrated that Hussein bought technology and materials necessary to create nuclear, biological and chemical weapons from none other than the States and Britain - and continued to make purchases even after the attack at Halabja. Factor in the water supply degradation, DU toxicity and debilitating sanctions and it's hard to imagine the average Iraqi embracing American forces as welcome liberators.
The bottom line is that the U.S. has some questions to answer about its past conduct in Iraq, questions that can't be answered by another full-scale war.
Heather Wokusch is a freelance writer. She can be contacted via her web site: www.heatherwokusch.com.
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check this out though:
Bodies? What Bodies?
By Patrick J. Sloyan, AlterNet
November 25, 2002
Leon Daniel, as did others who reported from Vietnam during the 1960s, knew about war and death. So he was puzzled by the lack of corpses at the tip of the Neutral Zone between Saudi Arabia and Iraq on Feb. 25, 1991. Clearly there had been plenty of killing. The 1st Infantry Division (Mechanized) had smashed through the defensive front-line of Saddam Hussein's army the day before, Feb. 24, the opening of the Desert Storm ground war to retake Kuwait. Daniel, representing United Press International, was part of a press pool held back from witnessing the assault on 8,000 Iraqi defenders. "They wouldn't let us see anything," said Daniel, who had seen about everything as a combat correspondent.
The artillery barrage alone was enough to cause a slaughter. A 30-minute bombardment by howitzers and multiple-launch rockets scattering thousands of tiny bomblets preceded the attack by 8,400 American soldiers riding in 3,000 M1A2 Abrams main battle tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, Humvees, armored personnel carriers and other vehicles.
It wasn't until late in the afternoon of Feb. 25 that the press pool was permitted to see where the attack occurred. There were groups of Iraqi prisoners. About 2,000 had surrendered. But there were no bodies, no stench of feces that hovers on a battlefield, no blood stains, no bits of human beings. "You get a little firefight in Vietnam and the bodies would be stacked up like cordwood," Daniel said. Finally, Daniel found the Division public affairs officer, an Army major.
"Where the hell are all the bodies?" Daniel said.
"What bodies?" the officer replied.
Daniel and the rest of the world would not find out until months later why the dead had vanished. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers, some of them alive and firing their weapons from World War I-style trenches, were buried by plows mounted on Abrams main battle tanks. The Abrams flanked the trench lines so that tons of sand from the plow spoil funneled into the trenches. Just behind the tanks, actually straddling the trench line, came M2 Bradleys pumping 7.62mm machine gun bullets into the Iraqi troops.
"I came through right after the lead company," said Army Col. Anthony Moreno, who commanded the lead brigade during the 1st Mech's assault. "What you saw was a bunch of buried trenches with people's arms and legs sticking out of them. For all I know, we could have killed thousands."
A thinner line of trenches on Moreno's left flank was attacked by the 1st Brigade commanded by Col. Lon Maggart. He estimated his troops buried about 650 Iraqi soldiers. Darkness halted the attack on the Iraqi trench line. By the next day, the 3rd Brigade joined in the grisly innovation. "A lot of people were killed,"' said Col. David Weisman, the unit commander.
One reason there was no trace of what happened in the Neutral Zone on those two days were the ACEs. It stands for Armored Combat Earth movers and they came behind the armored burial brigade leveling the ground and smoothing away projecting Iraqi arms, legs and equipment.
PFC Joe Queen of the 1st Engineers was impervious to small arms fire inside the cockpit of the massive earth mover. He remained cool and professional as he smoothed away all signs of the carnage. Queen won the Bronze Star for his efforts. "A lot of guys were scared," Queen said, "but I enjoyed it." Col. Moreno estimated more than 70 miles of trenches and earthen bunkers were attacked, filled in and smoothed over on Feb. 24-25.
What happened at the Neutral Zone that day has become a metaphor for the conduct of modern warfare. While political leaders bask in voter approval for destroying designated enemies, they are increasingly determined to mask the reality of warfare that causes voters to recoil.
There was no more sophisticated practitioner of this art of bloodless warfare than President George H. W. Bush. As a Navy pilot during World War II, Bush knew the ugly side of war. He once recounted how a sailor wandered into an aircraft propeller on their carrier in the South Pacific. The chief petty officer in charge of the flight deck called for brooms to sweep the man's guts overboard. "I can still hear him," Bush said of the chief's orders. "I have seen the hideous face of war."
Bush was badly stung by the reality of warfare while president. After the 1989 American invasion of Panama – where reporters were also blocked from witnessing a short-lived slaughter in Panama City – Bush held a White House news conference to boast about the dramatic assault on the Central American leader, Gen. Manuel Noriega. Bush was chipper and wisecracking with reporters when two major networks shifted coverage to the arrival ceremony for American soldiers killed in Panama at the Air Force Base in Dover, Del.
Millions of viewers watched as the network television screens were split: Bush bantering with the press while flag-draped coffers were carried off Air Force planes by honor guards. Dover was the military mortuary for troops killed while serving abroad. On Bush's orders, the Pentagon banned future news coverage of honor guard ceremonies for the dead. The ban was continued by President Bill Clinton.
Shortly after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Bush summoned battlefield commanders to Camp David, Md., for a council of war. Army Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, chief of Central Command with military responsibility for the Persian Gulf region, flew from Tampa, Fla. He and Central Command's air boss, Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles Horner, were flown from Andrews Air Force Base, Md., by helicopter to the retreat in the Catoctin Mountains near Thurmont, Md. Horner said golf carts took them to the president's cabin. Bush was wearing a windbreaker.
"The president was very concerned about casualties," Horner recalled. "Not just our casualties but Iraqi casualties. He was very emphatic. He wanted casualties minimized on both sides. He went around the room and asked each military commander if his orders were understood. We all said we would do our best."
According to Horner, he took a number of steps to limit the use of anti-personnel bombs used during more than 30 days of air attacks on Iraqi army positions. Schwarzkopf's psychological warfare experts littered Iraqi troops with leaflets that warned of imminent attacks by B52 Strategic Bombers. Arabic warnings told troops to avoid sleeping in tanks or near artillery positions which were prime targets for 400 sorties by allied aircraft attacking day and night.
"We could have killed many more with cluster munitions," Horner said of bomblets that create lethal minefields around troop emplacements once they are dropped by aircraft.
But Bush's Camp David orders were also translated into minimizing the perception – if not the reality – of Desert Storm casualties. The president's point man for controlling these perceptions was Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense. To Cheney, that meant controlling the press, which he saw as a collective voice that portrayed the Pentagon as a can't do agency that wasted too much money and routinely failed in its mission.
"I did not look on the press as an asset," Cheney said in an interview after Desert Storm. He was interviewed by authors of a Freedom Forum book, "America's Team – The Odd Couple," which explored the relationship between the media and the Defense Department. To Cheney, containing the military was his way of protecting the Pentagon's credibility. "Frankly, I looked on it as a problem to be managed," Cheney said of the media.
This management had two key ingredients: Control the flow of information through high level briefings while impeding reporters such as Leon Daniel. According to Cheney, he and Army Gen. Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, orchestrated the briefings because "the information function was extraordinarily important. I did not have a lot of confidence that I could leave that to the press."
The relentless appetite of broadcasting networks made Pentagon control a simple matter. Virtually every U.S. weapon system is monitored by television cameras either on board warplanes and helicopters or hand-held by military cameramen or individual soldiers. This "gun camera" footage may be released or withheld depending on the decisions of political bosses of the military. So when the air war began in January 1991, the media was fed carefully selected footage by Schwarzkopf in Saudi Arabia and Powell in Washington, DC. Most of it was downright misleading.
Briefings by Schwarzkopf and other military officers mostly featured laser guided or television guided missiles and bombs. But of all the tons of high explosives dropped during more than a month of night and day air attacks, only 6 percent were smart bombs. The vast majority were controlled by gravity, usually dropped from above 15,000 feet – 35,000 feet for U.S. heavy bombers – where winds can dramatically affect accuracy. And there never was any footage of B-52 bomber strikes that carpeted Iraqi troop positions.
Films of Tomahawk cruise missiles being launched by U.S. Navy ships in the Persian Gulf were almost daily fare from the military. Years later, the Navy would concede these subsonic jets with 2,000 pound warheads had limited success. These missiles are guided by on-board computers that match pre-recorded terrain maps, shifting left or right as landmarks are spotted. But the faceless desert offered few waypoints and most Tomahawks wandered off, just as the French Legion's lost platoon did in the Sahara. The only reliable landmark turned out to be the Tigris River and Tomahawks were programmed to use it as a road to Baghdad and other targets. But Iraqi antiaircraft gunners quickly blanketed the riverside. The slow moving Tomahawks were easy targets. Pentagon claims of 98 per cent success for Tomahawks during the war later dwindled to less than 10 per cent effectiveness by the Navy in 1999.
Just as distorted were Schwarzkopf's claims of destruction of Iraqi Scud missiles. After the war, studies by Army and Pentagon think tanks could not identify a single successful interception of a Scud warhead by the U.S. Army's Patriot antimissile system. U.S. Air Force attacks on Scud launch sites were portrayed as successful by Schwarzkopf. The Air Force had filled the night sky with F-15E bombers with radars and infrared systems that could turn night into day. Targets were attacked with laser guided warheads.
In one briefing in Riyadh, Schwarzkopf showed F15E footage of what he said was a Scud missile launcher being destroyed. Later, it turned out that the suspected Scud system was in fact an oil truck. A year after Desert Storm, the official Air Force study concluded that not a single Scud launcher was destroyed during the war. The study said Iraq ended the conflict with as many Scud launchers as it had when the conflict began.
In manipulating the first and often most lasting perception of Desert Storm, the Bush administration produced not a single picture or video of anyone being killed. This sanitized, bloodless presentation by military briefers left the world presuming Desert Storm was a war without death.
That image was reinforced by limitations imposed on reporters on the battlefield. Under rules developed by Cheney and Powell, journalists were not allowed to move without military escorts. All interviews had to be monitored by military public affairs escorts. Every line of copy, every still photograph, every strip of film had to be approved – censored – before being filed. And these rules were ruthlessly enforced.
When a Scud missile eventually hit American troops during the ground war, reporters raced to the scene. The 1,000 pound warhead landed on a makeshift barracks for Pennsylvania national guard troops near the Saudi seaport of Dahran. Scott Applewhite, a photographer for the Associated Press, was one of the first on the scene. There were more than 25 dead bodies and 70 badly wounded.
As Applewhite photographed the carnage, he was approached by U.S. Military Police who ordered him to leave. He produced credentials that entitled him to be there. But the soldiers punched Applewhite, handcuffed him and ripped the film from his cameras. More than 70 reporters were arrested, detained, threatened at gunpoint and literally chased from the frontlines when they attempted to defy Pentagon rules.
Army public affairs officers made nightly visits to hotels and restaurants in Hafir al Batin, a Saudi town on the Iraq border. Reporters and photographers usually bolted from the dinner table. Slower ones were arrested.
Journalists such as Applewhite, who played by the rules, fared no better. More than 150 reporters who participated in the Pentagon pool system failed to produce a single eyewitness account of the clash between 300,000 allied troops and an estimated 300,000 Iraqi troops. There was not one photograph, not a strip of film by pool members of a dead body – American or Iraqi. Even if they had recorded the reality of the battlefield, it was unlikely it would have been filed by the military-controlled distribution system.
As the ground war began, Cheney declared a press blackout, effectively blocking distribution of battlefield press reports. While Cheney's action was challenged by Marlin Fitzwater, the White House press secretary, the ban remained in effect. Most news accounts were delayed for days, long enough to make them worthless to their editors.
Accounts of Iraqi troops escaping from Kuwait – the carnage on the Highway of Death – were recorded by journalists operating outside the pool system.
Schwarzkopf repeatedly brushed off questions about the Iraqi death toll when the ground war ended in early March. Not until 2000, during a television broadcast, would he estimate Iraq losses in the "tens of thousands." The only precise estimate came from Cheney. In a formal report to Congress, Cheney said U.S. soldiers found only 457 Iraqi bodies on the battlefield.
To Cheney, who helped Bush's approval rating soar off the charts during Desert Storm, the press coverage had been flawless. "The best-covered war ever," Cheney said. "The American people saw up close with their own eyes through the magic of television what the U.S. military was capable of doing."
Patrick J. Sloyan won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Desert Storm while working as a senior correspondent for Newsday. He wrote this article as a Fellow at the Alicia Patterson Foundation. This article has been republished with permission from the Alicia Patterson Foundation.
crazy huh?
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from my girl meca..
Do not BELIEVE in ANYTHING simply because you have HEARD it. Do not BELIEVE
in ANYTHING simply because it is SPOKEN and RUMORED by MANY. Do not BELIEVE
in ANYTHING simply because it is found WRITTEN in your RELIGIOUS BOOKS. Do
not BELIEVE in ANYTHING merely on the AUTHORITY of your TEACHERS and ELDERS.
Do not BELIEVE in traditions because they have been HANDED DOWN for many
generations. But after OBSERVATION and analysis, when you find that anything
agrees with reason and is CONDUCIVE to the good and benefit of ONE and ALL,
then ACCEPT IT and LIVE UP TO IT.
-Buddha, The Enlightened One
word....
i love this ish...
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