Mood:  incredulous

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) consists of 1,700 people.  Thanks to the open wallets of terrorist-supporting organizations such as the Holyland Institute, they have over $3,000,000 to spend, and they spend it in the halls of Congress, where since the Democratic victory in the last Congressional elections, they have increasing amounts of influence.

They are also in the business of threatening critics of terrorism and trying to influence advertisers who support journalists who oppose terrorism.

They got to Office Max when talk show host Michael Savage came out against CAIR's sleazy tactics.  Office Max pulled their ads from Savage's show.  I asked them why they did that, on the "contact us" page of their website:

"Why did you withdraw sponsorship from the Michael Savage show at the insistence of radical Muslim organizations?

The Council for American Islamic Relations only has 1,700 members.  Its primary funding appears to be from such terrorist financiers as "the Holyland Foundation" and from terrorist organizations such as HAMAS,

By acceding to demands from CAIR and their front organizations, Office Max is taking the side of terrorism against an independent critic of terrorism.whose only offense was to call attention to this tiny group of terrorist abetters.

Should Office Max be in this particular line of business?  If I had to choose between a firm that supported Michael Savage's right to comment against terror and the people who support terrorism and a firm which withdrew that support, I know I'd have to give my business to people who oppose terror.  

My son died fighting the people who CAIR supports in Iraq when his Bradley drove over a bomb they buried in the side of a road north of Baghdad."

When Office Max gets back to me, I'll pass on their explanation.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 12:34 PM MST

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Iran's Nuclear capable missiles

Posted on Yahoo.com's Open Source Intelligence group by: "Beowulf" Beowulf@thedurendal.com   brucetefft

Thu Dec 13, 2007 5:24 am (PST)

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 10:25 AM MST

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Video Tapes of Al-Jazeera in bed with Saddam - Gorbachev Ordering Biological Warfare - Not Newsworthy?

Whether we wished it or not, the imagery of Abu Ghraib, photographs of Army Reserve worker bees with moronic grins on their faces pointing to dogpiles of naked Iraqis and, more tragically, what appear to be corpses under thick plastic wrapping were etched into the television viewing public's minds.   

When it wants to the news media in this country can be incredibly effective in getting information out to us - heck, in making us see it in our nightmares.  It can even create information that doesn't exist.   One of many examples was when Peter Arnett started his career of flacking for tyranny by emoting before an ABC News camera about an American officer's supposedly saying of a South Vietnamese town (Ben Tre) "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it."

No American officer was ever identified as the source of the quote - and in the postwar 1970s, he would probably have been lionized, graced with a book deal and much money for the movie rights to his "ordeal" had he stepped forward.  No American officer was ever found to even corroborate the truth of the remark, despite a serious and extensive military investigation (it is not the policy of the US military to destroy cities in order to save them, and any US officer who ordered such an action - or falsely alleged to a reporter that such a thing happened under US military control would have been court-martialed).

Despite a lack of supporting evidence for Arnett's famous trope ever having been true (Arnett was the same guy who insisted that downtown Baghdad was firmly under Saddam's control at the same time that a convoy of US Army tanks and armored personnel carriers were driving toward him from the airport without much in the way of armed resistance), it was picked up by the rest of the news media and applied toward the city of Hue, which actually was rebuilt, repopulated and working pretty much as it had been by the end of the year, and Communist troops either killed in place or evicted from Hue a matter of days after large numbers of US and South Vietnamese troops got there.  

Those inconvenient truths, and the mass graves, some of them containing as many as 3,000 civilians each, all slaughtered by the Communists, were ignored by most of the news media.  Stanley Kubrick's movie "Full Metal Jacket" was most people's first exposure to that ugly fact - 20 years after the fact.  

NOT burned into our brains by the news media were the million-plus Southeast Asian civilians who died AFTER the North Vietnamese won their war of expansion - or even that it WAS a war of expansion started by the Communists in violation of a formal peace treaty and numerous truces.

NOT burned into our brains was the confirmation in 1993 - after the fall of the Soviet Union - that the Soviets had been conducting a billion-dollar biological and biotoxic warfare research program for over twenty years, part of which was undoubtedly the "Yellow Rain" which sickened and killed many Laotian villagers in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  

Instead, Dr. Matthew Meselson, the architect of Nixon's Biological Warfare Protocol, under which the US and UK got out of the biological warfare business, was trotted out by the news media and the political left to ridicule the very IDEA that the Soviets would violate Dr. Meselson's wonderful treaty.  Meselson is the same guy who helped the Soviets whitewash their accidental release of weaponized anthrax in the city of Sverdlovsk - they had a biological weapons plant right in the middle of town - as being from tainted beef.  

There are two possible scenarios for Meselson's involvement in the Soviets' cover-up -

- Meselson felt comfortable working with medical records which could have been (and, it turns out, were, according to the deputy director of the biological warfare program, who has since defected to the United States) edited by the KGB to remove any indications of the anthrax having spread through inhalation or contact with the weaponized dust on the streets, walls, curbs, mailboxes, and other surfaces of the city near the plant.  

This is itself a gross violation of biomedical research ethics - to write a paper asserting that the people who died in Sverdlovsk in the late 1970s died of anthrax from tainted meat without first-hand observation of the medical evidence supporting that claim is not acceptable research procedure.  Meselson's paper, flawed - and flat wrong - as it was, is still out there in the body of medical literature on anthrax.  

- the second reason, of course, is that Meselson, who has since accepted the Lasker Prize for "his work in formulating public policy," was not interested in having it known that the Biological Weapons Convention he has reaped so many accolades for pushing through Congress and getting the White House to promote was worse than useless - it was a smoke screen under which grave atrocities may have been perpetrated in Southeast Asia against helpless villagers.  The Biological Warfare Convention certainly did not hamper Soviet production of tons of biological weapons in any way.

Even though Boris Yeltsin (mayor of Sverdlovsk at the time of the anthrax release) himself admitted - after his election as President of the Russian Republic - that the release occurred, that it was military anthrax, and that his help in covering up the incident was requested, we have only a quiet retraction of Meselson's loudly-trumpeted announcements and op-ed pieces that the Soviets were not, could not ever be doing research in biological warfare, much less manufacturing BW agents (as we now know they did).

To give the news media credit, there have been documentaries (mainly by PBS, but a few johnny-come-lately pieces by commercial network news divisions) showing the cavernous buildings and vast fermentation vats in which Biopreparat, the secret Soviet biological warfare agency made huge lots of anthrax, plague and smallpox for use on Western Europe, China, and their partners in signing the Biological Weapons Protocol, the USA and UK.

But NOT seared into our brains is this crucial bit of imagery - Gorbachev personally ordering that ICBM warheads be filled with these biological warfare agents in 1986, to be launched on a moment's notice at the cities of the United States and Great Britain. (source - first chapter of Ken Alibek's Biohazard.  At the time Dr. Alibek was deputy director of the Soviet biological warfare agency and took part in the secret meetings held to implement Gorbachev's orders) 

Good old peaceful Gorby, while he was loudly declaiming that not only did he never envision murdering the populace of the West, but neither had any of his predecessors, had actually personally ordered just that very thing.

This IS a big story - nuclear weapons can be justified by the fact that they can be used to destroy the enemy's nuclear weapons in what is known as "counterforce strikes."  The fact that this is an unreliable tactic and unlikely to work on the submarine forces of the major nuclear powers may account for the fact that so far, no one has used a nuclear weapon in anger since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

When the US was the sole nuclear power of Earth, we were too principled to launch nuclear attacks - we even proposed several times that all nuclear weapons be placed in the hands of the UN (we missed a bullet there, huh?) but the Soviets refused to go along with that, every time.  They had plans of their own, and a nuclear-armed UN led by the Western allies could have thwarted those plans (remember, this was back when the UN sent troops into South Korea to kill invading Communists).

But biological weapons have no ability at all to do more than blunt another nation's nuclear capability.  Bomber bases would probably be affected - as ground crews and pilots left service to care for their dying loved ones or get them out of danger, if nothing else.  But the crews of missile silos are just as capable of sitting out biological attacks as nuclear ones, and the bombers and missiles themselves are unaffected by biological weapons at all.

Why did Gorbachev want to use biological weapons on the West?  Was there a problem with their nuclear weapons program?  Western nuclear scientists who have seen the Russian program close-up haven't seen signs of anything but carelessness in accounting for nuclear material that could be used to make A-bombs, and ICBM silos that might not have been usable to launch their missiles (although, since the Soviets use cold-launch - ejecting the entire ICBM out of the silo with compressed gas like a cork from a champagne bottle, not igniting the rocket motor until the ICBM is out of the silo, allowing a reload if necessary - water in the bottom of their silos might not be the problem it would be in an American missile silo).  Why add an additional bit of overkill to the ten thousand missiles held by both sides?   

This is a big question mark which, in my opinion, permanently stains Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev's reputation - that he would not only put his signature to orders that broke a treaty which the US and UK had honored for over ten years, but that if the missiles had been launched, might have wiped out half the populations not only of the targeted countries but their neighbors. 

Why aren't more people aware of this horror story?  

Because the news media, which ordinarily is so dedicated to finding a good story that it hauls secretaries from Texas Air National Guard units who had been retired for twenty years in front of cameras on prime-time TV to make foggy guesses about what President Bush did back in 1972 as a fighter pilot, can't be bothered to open its eyes about real news that might change the public's perception of a man now considered to be a great statesman by people all over the world (I'm talking about Gorbachev, who the Nobel Peace Prize folks saw fit to canonize while ignoring his blatant violation of treaties against biological warfare).

Sounds like a story Seymour Hersh might be interested in, if he wasn't interested primarily in digging up dirt for the political left to use and in propounding his wack-o conspiracy theories on college campuses. 

I mean, he was all over My Lai, but not one bit concerned with the 2,900 people murdered by the Communists during the Tet offensive, found in mass graves at Hue, or any of the other murders of civilians by the Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese Army - or in the million-plus people overall who died at the hands of the Communists AFTER the war.   This, of course, was a generic failing of the news media.

In fact, Seymour Hersh never as much as put a toe inside the Republic of Vietnam, relying instead on hearsay for ALL of the "facts" he published about My Lai.   I'm not saying that My Lai didn't happen - there's independent corroboration from many of the troopers involved, and a nearby helicopter crew - just that Hersh was never in a position to fully fact-check his story.  Hersh was never in a position to do more than relay rumors.  

In fact, Hersh has admitted on several occassions using informants who he knew to be habitual liars as sources for allegations such when he said (in his The Samson Option) that Israel had nuclear missiles (at the time that book was published, this was not true, although some sources now indicate that there are several intermediate-range nuclear missiles in the Israeli arsenal).

Case in point - a picture may tell a thousand words, but it sometimes also tells a lie, if only by gross omission.   

The famous, Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of some guy getting his brains blown out by a South Vietnamese officer doesn't mention
- that the man being shot was a commander of a North Vietnamese Army infiltration squad
- who had murdered several members of the South Vietnamese government, with their families
- and that just by fighting in civilian clothes behind enemy lines, this man could, in full compliance with the Geneva Convention, legally be shot on the spot for spying in wartime, which he was - (for murder alone, he would have gotten a trial).  

The photo doesn't document that it was a picture of a murderer and spy being executed according to international law - just that a man had his brains blown out on a street during an unpopular war.

So much for balance and objectivity. 

Where are all the fearless investigative reporters when we need them?  Where's the William Shirer who can tear the false face off of Gorbachev's public image and reveal the man who could, like Hitler, order steps to be taken which could result in the deaths of millions.  More importantly, where's the news network brave enough to broadcast THAT news - to risk being torn apart by the rest of the mainstream media for speaking the truth (as FoxNews routinely is)?

Each of the companies comprising the mainstream media are in a strange situation - in our capitalist, freedom-loving, largely patriotic society, which protects (among other things) the media's very right to speak freely, they often must, to protect their stockholders, behave like malignant sheep, ruining reputations of honest and brave men while taking the sides of tyrants and murderers against our own society.  

Only Fox News - which is still ultimately controlled by one man, Rupert Murdoch - can afford to buck the majority and report the truth - no matter what it is.  (Fox News has come under fire for daring to say that the bad guys - terrorists, murderers and tyrants - are bad and that our government, our Armed Forces, and our people are the good guys - which says a lot more about the people abusing Fox's reputation than it does about Fox itself).  

The other networks feel that they must report the news in a way that ultimately helps tyranny and is likely ultimately to lead to the loss of the very freedoms that allow them to destroy our society - with sloppy, inaccurate, and sometimes knowingly false reporting that favors tyranny and undermines democracy.  

We've seen Newsweek push that tendency to the limit by their erroneous report (we have to give them the benefit of the doubt that Michael Isikoff wasn't pulling a Hersh and simply printing rumors which are not substantiated, although that seems to be what happened - once you scrape off the whitewash) that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay flushed a copy of the Koran down the toilet during an interrogation.  The resulting riots and demonstrations have resulted in fifteen deaths - blood that will be on Newsweek's hands forever.  Not that they seem to care.

Another big, unreported story is the existence of videotapes of major officials in Al-Jazeera slobbering all over the shoes of Saddam Hussein's psychopathic sons (for those who don't know yet, Al-Jazeera is the Arab satellite news network which has been cheerleading the insurgents who have murdered thousands in Iraq since the fall of Saddam.  

In the interest of fairness, I have to include my son, Sgt. Armand Luke Frickey, Louisiana Army National Guard, among those murdered (roadside bomb north of Baghdad) because I can't even pretend to be objective on this - if Al-Jazeera's studios and broadcast facilities suddenly got hit by 2,000 pound bombs during a broadcast, it would not break my heart.

It turns out that not only have important people in Al-Jazeera been taking money from Saddam and his sons, but directions on whom to hire. 

In one case, a journalist who has been openly biased in his reporting toward the insurgent murderers (as I have said before, I can't even pretend to be objective - these people are scumbags and some of them killed my youngest son) was apparently hired by Al-Jazeera at the request of Saddam and company, and the videotapes indicate that Saddam and his sons were very happy with the job he was doing at the time - a job he continues to do, indicating that he and his bosses may still be getting encouragement of the kind that fits in a wallet or a bank account to stir up trouble in the Middle East.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 8:34 AM MST

Updated: Sunday, 16 December 2007 8:53 AM MST

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Pictures of my son, Sgt. Armand Luke Frickey, late of the 256th Infantry (Louisiana) Brigade, US Army and Louisiana National Guard, who with his squad mates who died when their Bradley Fighting Vehicle (armored personnel carrier) struck a roadside bomb made of three large Iraqi artillery shells wired to a remote detonator, and his memorials.

My son Luke was a good man, just as my son Eric is a good man, a good and loving father to our grandson Brandon.  Just as Eric lives to care for his son and protect him, Luke died to protect all of us.   Just as Eric is a generous, hearty, loving person with nothing mean or little about him, Luke was also a good man.  Not a day passes that I don't miss him so badly it hurts.  And I am prouder of both of my sons than I can say.

In a little while I'll post pictures from the ceremony at which the troopers of the New York National Guard's 69th "Wolfhound" Infantry Brigade did my son Luke and the others of his unit the honor of induction into their unit as honorary members.

The officers and men of the 69th Infantry couldn't have been nicer to us or more gallant in their tribute to our war dead, or more hospitable to us in inviting us to join with them in the induction ceremony.  I plan to take enough time to convey the rich history of that unit and its contributions to our nation's military prowess. 

Suffice it to say that the fallen Blacksheep of the 256th (Louisiana) were at home next to the honored dead of the Irish Wolfhounds of New York's Fighting 69th.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 12:56 PM MST

Updated: Wednesday, 28 November 2007 1:38 PM MST

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Man on this earth has a mission - to survive and go on getting worse."

"Cradle Song," Samuel Hoffenstein

It's interesting to note that rats and cockroaches were not only found alive on an island in the Pacific which scientists visited a year after a nuclear weapon was detonated on it, but were found thriving.

Human beings seem to be the same way. God tends to call the good ones home early sometimes, leaving those of us who need a little finishing work on what Ursula K. LeGuin called "The Lathe of Heaven."

When my younger son and the other men who were in the Bradley Fighting Vehicle with him were murdered in Iraq by terrorists, I was stumbling around half-numb, half in agony.

My son's body wasn't cool from having been locked in a burning armored vehicle for hours before we started getting calls... and calls... and calls... from my mother-in-law demanding that we order my son's wife to put notice of a second memorial service, one that neither our daughter-in-law nor I nor my wife had asked for or authorized.

Apparently my wife's mother, whose last direct communication with my son was an Email to him in Iraq griping about the fact that he left a party at her house too early (he didn't want to be there at all because of rude and hurtful remarks my wife's family had made about him and his wife over a period of months), and my wife's father decided that they should make Luke's funeral arrangements.

That was the impression they had given several newspaper reporters on the day Luke died, anyway (it seems never to have occurred to them to defer to Luke's widow's judgment in the matter of divulging information about Luke or in the matter of his funeral details).

I had misunderstood Luke's final wishes myself and talked to reporters, conveying that misunderstanding here in Denver. Then I heard from our daughter-in-law that she and Luke had discussed the matter before he died, so I wrote several letters to papers in the area sorting out the misimpression that several people in the family had managed to create.

God bless the Army and the National Guard - they stood by our daughter-in-law and made sure her wishes were respected.  Everything the Army did for Luke was according to his and our daughter-in-law's wishes.  The same goes for several prominent businessmen in the area who support the Louisiana National Guard's mission and without whose help we'd never have gotten through the tragedy of my son's death.  They were there for us.

Apparently that wasn't good enough for my wife's mother, though. She didn't have much to say to my son Luke but complaints when he was alive, but (again) his body wasn't cool before she was on local television bawling about how tragically he had been taken from us, and how they hadn't even given her a grandchild!

Anyway, starting a few hours after the notification team from Ft. Carson had left us, we started getting calls from my wife's mother demanding that we get our daughter-in-law to put a notice into our son Luke's obituary of a SECOND memorial service to be held at HER church. The implication was that the Army's memorial service just wouldn't cut it as far as my wife's parents were concerned.  Nor would Luke's own religious preferences - which were not the same as my wife's parents.

Again, my wife's mother knew nothing and cared even less about Luke's own religious preferences but was going to push a sectarian memorial service on him and the rest of us survivors against his will, against the wishes of the widow, against my wishes - my poor wife was the only person who wasn't actively opposed to this dog-and-pony show, probably because she was too tired and grief-stricken to fight her Mom on the issue.

I was the poor guy who took calls at our home in Denver that horrible day, which meant that I got to field the increasingly pushy and abusive calls from my wife's mother regarding the second, unsolicited, UNWANTED second memorial service held by clergy of a religious denomination to which Luke did not even belong.  Finally, my wife's mother called me to demand my SISTER'S phone number, supposedly so she could call her to tell her when the memorial service would be.

Having been married to this woman's daughter about 26 years, I could recognize a fake and end run when I saw it - the idea apparently was to get my family to try to help bully my daughter-in-law into letting my wife's mother run all over her. I told my wife's mother that I would be glad to give her number to my sister and have her call my wife's mother back if she needed any further information apart from the time of the memorial service, which I would gladly pass along.  I was as courteous as a man who just found out one of his sons had just died could manage.

My offer elicited an ominous silence, after which there was an incredulous gasp, then three increasingly angry repeats of the demand for my sister's phone number. I repeated my offer to give my wife's mother's phone number and the time of the memorial service to my sister three times.

After each iteration, my wife's mother got more upset. About fifteen minutes later, my older son called me from Florida (where he lived at the time), telling me that my wife's mother told him I had been rude to her on the phone. Apparently my wife's mother had confused "not getting her way" with "someone was rude to her."

I thought my wife's mother had been raised with more consideration and empathy for others, and possibly an ability to distinguish her whims from laws of nature, so I'm at a loss to explain her confusion and anger.

I was much nicer to my wife's mother than she deserved after several increasingly pushy, demanding and inconsiderate telephone calls, that's for sure.  I wish I hadn't wasted the politeness on her, because she seems to take such consideration as her due.

Telling her what I thought of her boorish behavior toward a newly bereaved father and mother and war widow would have been much more satisfying, but might have been used as an excuse to abuse my wife over the telephone (it's happened before, and my wife didn't need any more pain that day), so I declined to let her have it.

The morning of my son's actual viewing, the day after we and our son's remains had both gotten back into Terrebonne Parish, I got a screaming phone call from my wife's mother informing me in a ragged shout that I was NOT going to lose my temper at her (I hadn't said a word to her yet) and that I was going to get the all-important notice of her second, unsolicited, unasked-for memorial service into my son's obituary.

My sister-in-law got the receiver away from her and said something I can't remember - nicer than what my wife's mother said, but then my sister-in-law Anne is an unfailingly nice person.

My youngest son died just before he turned 21. He hadn't celebrated his first wedding anniversary, hadn't had a chance to start college, hadn't done so many things we all take for granted. He DID do a lot of things, though. He earned two military occupational specialty qualifications, or MOS-es - he was trained as an artillery fire director at Ft.Sill and as an Infantryman while with the Louisiana Army National Guard.

My son was an expert marksman with the standard infantry rifle and a self-taught linguist who had tested out very well on the Army's linguistics aptitude test. However, he decided that the best thing to do was to complete his tour as a rifleman. He went to Germany while with the Louisiana Guard (where he had a pretty good time and would have had a better time if he'd learned any German at all before going, because real Germans kept on walking up to him and asking him questions in rapid-fire Deutsch) to train.

He went to Iraq, and his death counted for something. He went out of his way a week before he died to tell me how happy he was with what he was doing. He wasn't perfect, but he was pretty darn good, if I do say so myself. It seems as though a couple of hundred people, in and out of uniform, singled me out privately to tell me I should be proud of my son. I knew that, but it was nice to hear confirmation from so many people.

I also have several big grocery store boxes of letters and cards, some from dear friends of Luke's and ours, some from people in Luke's chain of command, some from politicians (and while I'm a pretty cynical guy, I respected and appreciated the fact that these people thought of our son and of us).

Against all of the good stuff, I got yelled at on the telephone by my mother-in-law. someone whose last contact with my son was to hang a guilt trip on him about leaving a party early, a party that he only attended to stop my wife's mother from verbally abusing his MOM if he didn't attend. He only went to the party to save my wife from being screamed at over the phone by her mom.

Of all the stupid, self-centered, fatuous, venal things to bother someone who is in actual combat with - and I had to put up with snottiness from my wife's niece and nephews (her brother's kids) when they showed up for the viewing.  I yearned to shove draft cards in their fat little hands and ask W. to start that lottery up again.

Those kids should have stayed home if they couldn't have behaved better.  No one would have missed them.  When Luke was as old as the oldest of those kids, he was already signed up in the Indiana National Guard and going on weekend drills and summer training camp, exercising and following fad diets to lose weight and pass his service physical.

And while he wasn't perfect, Luke was NEVER rude to the family of a dead soldier at his funeral. You have to wonder what these kids - who are not usually unpleasant - heard at home about their cousin, his wife, and my wife and me to have been as disrespectful as they were.

My son gave his life to defend these people.

Another fear and loathing at my in-laws' moment: one of my wife's mother's friends came into the viewing room, very impatient and irritated-looking, trying to find my wife's mother.  When she couldn't, my daughter-in-law says that she started asking around for the "family," managing to make the word sound like a social disease.  Got to wonder what she heard about us from my wife's mother.  When my daughter-in-law identified herself, the woman thrust an envelope in my daughter-in-law's hands and brusquely said "Tell Peggy I came," then quickly spun on her heel and left.

My daughter-in-law threw the envelope into the nearest trash pail, showing again that my son had chosen wisely. My older son retreived it - it had a card and check in it - and my daughter in law STILL told him to chuck it.

My son said he was going to try to call the woman in question in order to ask why she felt it necessary to add more pain to that we were already feeling. I'll have to ask what reason, if any, she came up with for crapping all over a war widow at the viewing of the dead man's casket.

Anyway, my son showed his decency in the most extreme way possible - by dying in combat to defend the rest of us. Even after that, though, there were people for whom that wasn't good enough - who had to go around making demands of the dead man's widow and parents and were rude to us, even screamed at us when we didn't jump through the hoops they held out so imperiously.

These people did not venture out into Iraq and were not shot, nor even shot at, and yet they demonstrated an attitude of unjustified superiority toward my son and those of us who were there to pay our respects to a man who had just made the transcendental act of sacrificing himself so these people showing attitude in the viewing room could do so in safety.

Samuel Hoffenstein's lines in the "Cradle Song" - "Man on this earth has a mission - to survive and go on getting worse" - seem to have been borne out twice in the story of my son's death:

- once in the case of the cowardly little shit who killed my son and the others in the Bradley by remote control,

- then again in the cases of the people who showed up or called around the time of my son's funeral specifically to show us how superior they thought they were to us, we who had just lost a son, a brother, a husband, that they could scream at us and be rude to us with impunity.

I did not attend the second "memorial service" organized by my wife's mother. Attending that service, or paying it any attention whatsoever would have been an insult to my son's memory in my opinion. My son knew from the complaining Email he got from my wife's mother while he was doing combat patrols in Iraq how my wife's family remembered him.  They had already gotten their chance at a memorial in advance - and were simply interested in pretending they hadn't done it.

The fact that these people are all fat and happy feeds a sense of skepticism to the idea of a just God who remembers what passes on Earth.  My son dies and his widow, mother and father are crapped on by those he died to defend - all with the blessing of a Church which supposedly frowns on such behavior.  Mea culpa, my ass.

Commemorating that with anything but a blistering tirade directed at galling, obscene, fatuous hypocrisy - a tirade I had promised my surviving son I would not deliver to placate him after he had just been lied to about me by my wife's mother - would have dishonored my son.  So until now, I remained silent - just dealt with all of the anger and confusion, and the deep sadness at losing a wonderful, caring son.  There will never be another Luke.

So far, at least in our family's exposure to the War on Terror, my son Armand Luke Frickey's life was taken by gutless cowards in Iraq so that, during the viewing of his closed casket, people with an unaccountable sense of superiority toward my son and his close, immediate family could behave in a rude, inconsiderate manner towards us.

If this is going on across the nation with all of the war dead, Gresham's Law will have its say - the bad will drive out the good, as the good get blown up or shot overseas so that snotty cretins can grow up to be decision-makers and live out the fantasy that they might be entitled to say and do the disrespectful things at the viewing of real war dead. Again, the rats and cockroaches on that island in the Pacific where a nuclear weapon went off weren't only alive, they thrived.

This, to me, is Nature's metaphor - decency, honor and self-sacrifice aren't necessarily survival traits.  If we don't push them back to the forefront of our national value system, we just may not deserve to survive.  Sooner or later we're going to run out of folks like my son Luke - and then we'll be defenseless.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 8:32 AM MDT

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From the Newspaper of Record:

"Teenager Released in Louisiana Case

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: September 28, 2007

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 27 — One of six black teenagers arrested in the racially charged beating of a white youth in Jena, La., was released on bail on Thursday, a week after the case drew thousands of protesters to the small town in the central part of the state.

The release on $45,000 bail came shortly after the district attorney in Jena, Reed Walters, announced that he would not seek to maintain adult charges against the teenager, Mychal Bell.

Mr. Bell, 17, was convicted of aggravated second-degree battery as an adult, but that conviction was thrown out by a state appeals court, which said he should have been tried as a juvenile.

Mr. Bell still faces the same charges in juvenile court, but instead of a possible sentence of 15 years in prison he can now be held only until he is 21.

Others involved in the December beating of Justin Barker also still face charges. Mr. Barker, knocked unconscious in the beating, has $14,000 in medical bills, according to lawyers in the case. "

______ 

Sharpton just keeps on trying.  He couldn't frame those guys for raping the girl in New York, so when 6 other guys jumped a school kid and beat him unconscious, doing $14,000 in medical damage, it's Al Sharpton to the rescue.  Not to the kid who was left for dead, but his attackers.

And the mainstream, liberal press is printing everything Sharpton says as gospel. 

It sounds evil when you leave race out of it.  

Put race back into it and it's even worse.  Thousands of people have converged on a small Louisiana town to try to get six would-be murderers out of jail.  Why? 

Six thugs beat one kid unconscious.   Why?

Because three kids with too much time on their hands tied three pieces of rope to a tree.  

Idiotic, hateful, sure.  Racist?  No doubt, and psychotic to boot.  But no reason to beat another kid unconscious.  Why, then?

Racism is STILL at work.

Al Sharpton and his followers are full of it.  Racism caused a stupid prank to be blown up into a week of violence and racism caused six men to try to kill a high school kid in the modern equivalent of a lynching.

And racism is dressing up the attempt to rescue these men from justice as something other than an attempt to create a monumental injustice and free six would-be killers.

How would Sharpton and the press feel if it were six white men who had beaten a black student unconscious?  Oops, we already know that one.  Sharpton gave us the answer to that one in the Tawana Brawley case.

There was a song that went like this:

"Free your minds and the rest will follow...  " 

Pity everyone forgot how it went.   It's almost as though the song didn't mean a single thing.  Just a lot of noise made to sell records.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 3:54 PM MDT

Updated: Friday, 28 September 2007 4:34 PM MDT

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We haven't heard much about the assassination of former Russian agent Aleksandr Litvinenko at the hands of persons unknown who just happen to have had ready access to a fast-decaying radioactive byproduct of a major national nuclear weapons program.  Well, it's an old story, and Gospodin Litvinenko is still dead.

But in the meantime, the Russians have been burning up press time with denunciations of the United States of America of a tenor unheard of since Communism in Europe self-destructed and the Russian state effectively went on international welfare.

Ok, you might be forgiven for thinking "Money talks, bullshit walks" - that this stuff is for home consumption, in order to make the Russian voter think his best chance is still with a paranoid murderer who pines for the good old days of the Soviet Union. 

This is obviously why

- Russia has resumed long-range reconnaissance patrols of the North Atlantic - a Russian "Bear" recon bomber was recently intercepted by Royal Air Force fighters near British airspace, and

- why they're running exercises simulating nuclear cruise missile attacks on the continental United States, and

- why Russia and China are running joint military exercises simulating action against... well, against us.

(that was a sarcastic remark, folks.)

So I've decided to try to fill in the background on a disturbing trend where Russia has decided to resume its old role as an active military threat to the national security of the United States of America with a page from my Weapons of Mass Destruction Web site. 

Perhaps it's time to consider which is the greater threat - Al-Qaeda with NO nuclear weapons as of yet (though the Russian-provided Iranian nuclear program may change this), or Russia, with over 6,000 nuclear weapons, most of them which can be re-targeted to strike us in a matter of minutes, and which is now holding exercises to simulate nuclear strikes on the US mainland and indulging in some of the most provocative and threatening rhetoric against the US since the Khrushchev regime.

Then it's time to consider cutting off the flow of American tax money to Russia via such pointless programs as the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program.  While we're pissing money away helping the Russians clean up their antiquated nuclear weapons program, the closed cities have never stopped making new nuclear weapons, and whole new units of Topaz-M ICBMs are coming on line, at the behest of Putin, who has all but promised to aim them at us.

We really do have better uses for the money.  Under Vladimir Putin's leadership, Russia is becoming part of the problem, not the solution.

 
Polonium-210 and other Assassination Poisons

The practice of assassination spans the gap between individual deaths and use of weapons of mass destruction; while assassins normally murder one or two people at a time, they sometimes use chemical, biological and radiological warfare agents (by definition, a poison is a chemical or biotoxic agent, even though the point is not often made).

In December of 2006, former Russian intelligence operative Aleksandr Litvinenko was murdered by what proved to be ingestion of polonium-210, (Table of the Nuclides entry on Polonium-210 (courtesy Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute), showing the particles it emits during radioactive decay and other pertinent information) a costly and rare radioactive isotope normally available only in lethal quantities in nations with heavy water reactors (with only a few exceptions, these would be nations with nuclear weapons production facilities because of polonium 210's usefulness in manufacture of nuclear weapons). Scientists familiar with his case estimate from the time it took Litvinenko to die after onset of symptoms and the amounts of the isotope detected that he absorbed a microgram (1/1,000,000 of a gram) of polonium-210.

Polonium-210 emits alpha radiation, which is not dangerous unless taken internally. Once inside the body, though, polonium-210 seeks out the spleen and liver. Depending on how large a dose is taken in, polonium-210 can kill within days to years by causing various cancers. Irene Joliot-Curie is thought to be the first person to die from the radiation effects of polonium. She died in the 1950s, ten years after a sealed capsule of the element exploded on her laboratory bench. Between 1957 and 1969, several laboratory workers also died in Israel after exposure to trace quantities of polonium-210 from leaks at the Weizmann Institute laboratory in 1957.

The problem with polonium-210 is that it emits a LOT of alpha radiation, and each alpha particle emitted by polonium-210 decay is expelled with a very high energy - which can cause even tiny amounts of the substance to disperse throughout its surroundings, eventually entering the air bystanders breathe and the surfaces that they touch.

Polonium-210 is infamously difficult to contain safely in the laboratory environment, probably explaining how the material which killed Litvinenko also managed to contaminate locations throughout London and multiple aircraft. Adequate precautions against dispersal of polonium-210 into the environment after a poisoning would have been impossible to take without immediately arousing suspicion.

Finally, as polonium concentrates in liver and spleen rather than being distributed more evenly throughout the human body, a little of it goes a long way. The comments in the news media about "a large amount" of polonium being necessary to kill someone are somewhat misleading - as I stated earlier, British medical authorities and scientists estimate that only a millionth of a gram was required to kill Litvinenko.

While this is a lot of polonium-210 by commercial standards (United Nuclear here in the United States sells safe, fairly innocuous "exempt quantities" of polonium-210 to anyone with US$69 for 0.1 microcuries of activity - which is about 0.18 trillionths of a gram of the isotope), one suspects that the stuff doesn't cost anywhere near as much to make as it sells for. And the Russians are getting it wholesale. Anyway, nobody's going to tell the President of the Russian Republic "Volodya, do you have any idea how much a lethal dose of that stuff COSTS? Why can't we just put a .22 bullet in his brain pan?"

Then again, Russia exports about 8 grams of polonium-210 a month to the US, or eight MILLION times the amount that killed Litvinenko. It is not difficult to imagine how, with a flow of that much material, a microgram or two could be diverted without tripping too many alarms - especially since the Russian mafiya has a very large and influential presence in the "closed cities" which comprise the Russian nuclear industry. It would not be particularly surprising if the security system which was so expensively procured for the Russian nuclear program by the United States has largely or even completely been infiltrated and co-opted by the mafiya to allow profitable diversions of many special nuclear materials.

Why?

Aleksandr Litvinenko was a vocal critic of Russian president Vladimir Putin, having accused Putin of complicity in the murder of a Russian woman journalist and assorted other mopery and dopery. He had met with another former Russian security operative just before falling ill - a man who is now himself contaminated with polonium-210, as is Mrs. Litvinenko. While neither of the latter two is probably going to die soon, their chances of expiring from cancer ten years from now are, unfortunately, excellent.

Another prominent Russian critic of Putin's, politician and economist Yegor Gaidar, also fell ill in Ireland not long after Litvinenko and is in hospital in Russia at this time. Mr. Gaidar is not thought to have ingested polonium-210. He and his daughter have publicly stated their belief that opponents of the Putin administration are responsible for his poisoning. I will discuss that theory later.

Poison is a traditional means for the Russian government to deal with people that it finds troublesome. Among several other methods tried in desperation, cyanide crystals sprinkled on the frosting of a cake were used in an attempt to kill the cultist monk Grigori Rasputin during the reign of Tsar Nikolai II just before the Revolution.

After the revolution and throughout the history of the Soviet Union, Soviet security services used poison to murder dissidents and defectors when more direct methods were not practical.

The US Central Intelligence Agency has also used poison in assassination attempts, at least twice to try to kill Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Also, CIA pilots and other spies were sometimes given extremely rapid-acting poison darts to allow them to commit suicide rather than be captured in enemy territory - the U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers had to warn his KGB captors to be careful in handling a hollowed-out coin containing a lethally-poisoned needle which was confiscated from him shortly after he was shot down by Soviet anti-air missiles.

The range of these poisons is impressive - from relatively simple inorganic poisons such as arsenic and thallium to highly-toxic biotoxins extracted from the glands of puffer fish, and at least two types of radioactive material chosen for their rapid decay, intense radioactivity, rapid concentration in vital organs, and elimination from the body, making a diagnosis of poisoning very difficult unless the use of radioactives was suspected.

Did Putin order the assassination? Is it a red herring (no pun intended)?

Litvinenko's death seems a very cruel and cynical act, since polonium-210 is so expensive and difficult to obtain in lethal quantities that it virtually amounts to a "signature hit" pointing to Russia (or another country with an active nuclear weapons program). Who besides the Russians would want to see Litvinenko dead badly enough to use a million dollars' worth of a highly specialized radioisotope to kill him? We in the US might peel that much money off the roll to kill Osama bin Laden, and getting Zawahiri may have cost somewhere in that neighborhood when you figure in the airstrikes, the intelligence operation, the cost of overrunning his compound... but even if we were in the business of killing overseas dissidents, we probably wouldn't go to that expense to do it.

Was Litvinenko's murder authorized by Vladimir Putin - or are we seeing an impressively realistic campaign to destabilize Russia and destroy relations between the Putin administration and the West?

The simplest and most plausible explanation is that this assassination and the ones that came before it were and are official acts of the Russian state. Their unsubtlety and arrogance may reflect basic differences in power psychology between Russia and the West, or even stability issues within the Russian leadership.

Vladimir Putin has stated publicly that the fall of the Soviet Union was "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century." We must assume that he is interested in returning Russia to the status quo ante 1990 - if not Communist by ideology, certainly an authoritarian government with what we would consider an expansionist foreign policy (as demonstrated by the attempted assassination in 2004 of the democratically-elected president of the Ukraine in an apparent attempt to prevent that country from moving away from Russian hegemony).

Certainly, the public utterances of leadership figures in Russia are veering away from conciliation with the West lately. An increasingly anti-Western and anti-American bias in the Russian print and electronic media is troubling. Much more troubling than what Putin and company are saying, though, is what they are doing. Despite assurances to the contrary, Russia seems to be supplying Iran with an increasing flow of nuclear technology. Without Russian assistance, Iran would never have gotten as far as it has already toward a fully-functional nuclear weapons production program.

The ugly truth is that assassination may be one of the signs that the world is sliding into another worldwide conflict - it may be up to the historians to decide exactly when World War III began.

A short and sketchy list of poisons used in assassination and other covert operations:

KGB/FSB (Russian spy and secret police agencies)

US Central Intelligence Agency

criminals

terrorists
anthrax (biological terror by mail campaign, fall 2001, US)
sarin nerve gas (Aum Shinrikyo Supreme Truth cult subway attack, Tokyo, 1992; Iraqi terrorists, 2005)

Carey Sublette, author of the Nuclear Weapon Archive, has published an interesting analysis of the Litvinenko murder: http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/News/PoloniumPoison.html

Since Mr. Sublette has researched nuclear weapons and related issues extensively (and polonium-210 is used for, among other things, neutron sources to increase the efficiency of nuclear weapons) his views on the origin and quantity of the polonium-210 used in the Litvinenko hit are worth reading.

Mr. Sublette estimated in a post to the USENET newsgroup alt.war.nuclear that far from the million-dollar plus figure mentioned for the quantity of polonium-210 needed to induce Mr. Litvinenko's rapid death, the necessary quantity would have been contained in about $4,000 worth of consumer-grade "Staticmaster" antistatic brushes made for cleaning of phonograph records. (see http://www.2spi.com/catalog/photo/statmaster.shtml for corroborative details)

Mr. Sublette's post:

"Chris wrote:

'http://www.mosnews.com/news/2006/12/18/poloniumprice.shtml

$10 Million Worth of Polonium Used to Poison Former Russian Agent Litvinenko - Paper

Created: 18.12.2006 13:26 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 13:26 MSK, 4 hours 28 minutes ago...

British investigators on Litvinenko`s case believe the radioactive substance used to poison former FSB agent cost in excess of 10 million U.S. Dollars, The Times newspaper reported on Monday.

Preliminary results from the post mortem on Litvinenko's body have discovered he was given more than ten times the lethal dose of polonium 210. Large quantities of the radioactive substance were found in his urine.

"You can't buy this much off the internet or steal it from a laboratory without raising an alarm, so the only two plausible explanations for the source are that it was obtained from a nuclear reactor or very well-connected black market smugglers," said an anonymous British security source.'

On Nov. 24, the day the polonium poisoning was announced, I estimated in my post to this newsgroup (Fri, Nov 24 2006 6:29 pm): "I think that 50 millicuries is about the right dose for the observed effect (there are 4490 curies/g for Po-210), this would be 11 micrograms. This about 200 times the amount in a Staticmaster® Brushes: http://www.2spi.com/catalog/photo/statmaster.shtml"

Anyone reading this post, and following the Staticmaster link would find that the real cost was more like $4000. Or if they had read William Broad's Dec. 3 article in the New York Times, they would have seen his estimate of $212 (he was estimating for a single lethal dose, not the 10X dose I was using).

I guess the "anonymous British security source" does not read the New York Times.

Note that the description of symptoms from the initial news reports in November allowed one to conclude that the dose administered was about 10 times the lethal dose (the approx. 50 millicuries I estimated on Nov. 24, above), which is what the autopsy results just reported.

I put a page up on my website last week walking the interested reader through the analysis that supports this conclusion: http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/News/PoloniumPoison.html

Carey Sublette"

Note: The US$1 million figure was obtained by multiplying the price per exempt quantity - 0.1 microcurie - source from the United Nuclear Web site by the number of such sources required to make up the estimated dose given to Litvinenko - which resulted in a grossly inflated estimate of the cost of the Litvinenko hit.

It would be much easier, economical and probably safer for someone wanting to have access to useful quantities of polonium-210 to grind down the source containers from inside several Staticmaster® brushes than to get it from United Nuclear's line of exempt quantity sources. As an added bonus, Staticmaster® brushes are probably not as tightly monitored as United Nuclear's product line.

The recent public assurances that polonium-210 is essentially unavailable to the public in lethal quantities are empty.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 2:36 PM MDT

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