We should have locked Abrams up the first time we caught him breaking the law. Or at least banned him from working for the government in any way.

Another name for the passenger manifest for the Slow Boat to Haifa.

Deport.

Should we trust that Powell knows what he has done in the past? He seemed pretty caught-off-guard about those mobile bio-weapons labs. He may suffer from “They pushed it under my nose, so I signed it” syndrome.

If you go back thousands of years, it’s my understanding that the concept of ‘justice’ (Greek = ‘Dike’, or ‘pathway of wise action’) traces back to an association with pillars of stone set up to mark property boundaries.

Originally, the pillars were probably grave markers; over time, they marked off territories between clans, tribes, and eventually cities. These pillars were called by many names, but eventually their names were brought into the realm of law and associated with concepts of ‘justice’ and ‘paths of wise conduct’.

To act wisely, or ‘justly’ was integrally related to the concept of recognizing boundaries, and to following ’safe paths’. A wise man did not ‘overstep his boundaries’, nor overstep his ‘fate’.

The notion of ‘fate,’ was embodied in the imagination as women spinning cloth used to swaddle infants at birth; the the ‘fates’ (or “Moira”) were linked to the notion of allotment: to each, his own. But to seek more than one’s ‘fate’, or ‘portion’ was to invite disaster.

One of the Moira was called “Lachesis”, which is a term related to a piece of marked bone used to cast lots. You ‘cast your lot’ to determine what land you were able to farm or use to sustain your family.

To ‘overstep one’s boundaries’ in behavior, or territory, inevitably aroused avenging ‘furies’ (or ‘Erinyes’) of the violated territory (or customs). The ‘Furies’ were bloodsucking, relentless forces that aroused such anger and rage that men became blinded to wise judgment, thereby dooming themselves to certain and inevitable destruction — either through their own hand, or that of the enemies they’d awakened.

Hence, the Greek wisdom embodied in the edict to ‘Know Thyself’, which also implied recognizing one’s own boundaries, one’s own spheres of expertise and weakness.

The human race has not altered so much in the last 5,000 years that the fundamental dynamics synthesized in these ancient tales no longer apply. We’re still wired to recognize these relationships and dynamics.

People are being blinded by anger, and doing stupid things.

The chances of doing stupid, dangerous things are enormously heightened any time a person is in an ambiguous situation.
Things like ‘verbal agreements’ and ’secret agreements’ CREATE ambiguity, which then makes it almost inevitable that useless, needless tragedies will occur.

I think thou dost protest too much…

http://www.news.com.au/heralds…..61,00.html

ISRAEL has assured the US that it has not spied on its key ally since 1985, after the arrest in New York of a US Army veteran charged with passing defence secrets to the Jewish state nearly 30 years ago.

“The events go back to the early 1980s. Since 1985 there have been clear orders from (Israel’s) prime ministers not to conduct these kind of activities,” foreign ministry spokesman Arye Mekel said.

You know t-shirts with just the simple word

“flaccid”

could be interesting at political events…

Back to Abrams and Israel…And everything spy and lobby related, read this over at Asian Times forum:

http://forum.atimes.com/post.a…..FORUM_ID=8

Well, perhaps it is as Bob Woodward reported, W goes out into the Rose Garden every once in a while, and has this little phone conversation over his super-secret cell phone connection with God, And just as God ordered the invasion of Iraq, he later ordered W to give Palestinian Lands to Israel. And W hath obeyed his master.

But I suspect one of W’s BFF will be most upset by this; The Saudi Arabian King who nearly broke off relations with the US during the summer of 2001 when he was still Crown Prince. Under pressure from his own subjects, who were watching on TV the Israeli Military response to the second Intifada, and demanding a response from the Saudi Royal Family, Bandar Bush visited W in Crawford in that uneventful August of 2001, complete with tapes of the IDF shooting children, and a scrap-book of additional pictures, and a letter from the Crown Prince drawing some lines in the sand, and extracted a response to the Crown Prince’s letter. One aspect of the response was Bush’s later Rose Garden statement favoring a Two State solution — with the Rose Garden Statement coming after the 9/11 attack. The Rose Garden Statement is important because it really is the first time an American Principle has been clear on this matter — and it was in response to the Saudi threat delivered by Bandar. One of the threats was the immediate removal of all American Personnel, Civilian and Military from Saudi Arabia.

For a good footnoted version of the backroom politics that transpired in the late summer, early fall of 2001, and then into 2002 — check out Chapter 7 in Mearsheimer & Walt’s book, “The Israel Lobby” — Chapter 7 being “The Lobby Versus the Palestinians.” By the way, Tenet also has a partial version of this story.

I assume that one reason the Joint Committee Intelligence Report on 9/11 had 28 pages censored out, was not only because it traced the finance behind 9/11 back to Saudi sources, but because it probably dealt with the profoundly conflicted policy clearly obvious to the players, that the US had adopted. On one hand, respond to Saudi threats by putting the US in support of the Two State Solution, (and everyone knows that does not involve Settler’s taking over West Bank Lands,) and in direct conflict, the now revealed Bush letter to Sharon that says the exact opposite. I can see the Saudi’s making the sands of the desert fly the way a Siberian Husky does when it is of a mind to bury something. In the past, I assume they knew that secretly Bush did something like that, (they are no strangers to deception), but they cannot tolerate it being public knowledge. Given that the BBC last night was running stories about the situation in Gaza, where the Israeli’s have not permitted the delivery of fuel for the electrical system, and the fresh water is nearly off, and the sewage is not being pumped, and is running in the streets, and the UN has decided to remove personnel because they can no longer deliver services, which means cutting about 600,000 off from their food supply, I would not be at all surprised if we don’t see a fairly nasty reaction in short order. I suspect some of the revelations are part of a build up to whatever is contemplated.