Halliburton exploits hundreds of Latino slaves on the Gulf coast

Halliburton and its subcontractors hired hundreds of undocumented Latino workers to clean up after Katrina - only to mistreat them and throw them out without pay.

Arnulfo Martinez recalls seeing lots of hombres del ejercito standing at attention. Though he was living on the Belle Chasse Naval Base near New Orleans when President Bush spoke there on Oct. 11, he didn't understand anything the ruddy man in the rolled-up sleeves was saying to the troops.

Martinez, 16, speaks no English; his mother tongue is Zapotec. He had left the cornfields of Oaxaca, Mexico, four weeks earlier for the promise that he would make $8 an hour, plus room and board, while working for a subcontractor of KBR, a wholly owned subsidiary of Halliburton that was awarded a major contract by the Bush administration for disaster relief work. The job was helping to clean up a Gulf Coast naval base in the region devastated by Hurricane Katrina. "I was cleaning up the base, picking up branches and doing other work," Martinez said, speaking to me in broken Spanish.

Even if the Oaxacan teenager had understood Bush when he urged Americans that day to "help somebody find shelter or help somebody find food," he couldn't have known that he'd soon need similar help himself. But three weeks after arriving at the naval base from Texas, Martinez's boss, Karen Tovar, a job broker from North Carolina who hired workers for a KBR subcontractor called United Disaster Relief, booted him from the base and left him homeless, hungry and without money.

"They gave us two meals a day and sometimes only one," Martinez said.

He says that Tovar "kicked us off the base," forcing him and other cleanup workers - many of them Mexican and undocumented - to sleep on the streets of New Orleans. According to Martinez, they were not paid for three weeks of work. An immigrant rights group recently filed complaints with the Department of Labor on behalf of Martinez and 73 other workers allegedly owed more than $56,000 by Tovar. Tovar claims that she let the workers go because she was not paid by her own bosses at United Disaster Relief. In turn, UDR manager Zachary Johnson, who declined to be interviewed for this story, told the Washington Post on Nov. 4 that his company had not been paid by KBR for two months.

Wherever the buck may stop along the chain of subcontractors, Martinez is stuck at the short end of it - and his situation is typical among many workers hired by subcontractors of KBR (formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root) to clean and rebuild Belle Chasse and other Gulf Coast military bases.

Pentagon Admits Using White Phosphorous in Iraq

Italian communists held a sit-in Monday in front of the U.S. Embassy in Rome to protest the reported use by American troops of white phosphorous. Italy's state-run RAI24 news television aired a documentary last week alleging the U.S. used white phosphorous shells in a ''massive and indiscriminate way'' against civilians during the Fallujah offensive.

The State Department, in response, initially denied that U.S. troops had used white phosphorous against enemy forces. ''They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters.''

The department later said its statement had been incorrect.

Bush Poetry

This is a poem made up entirely of actual quotations from George W. Bush, arranged, for "aesthetic" purposes, by Washington Post writer Richard Thompson.

A poem like this is too good not to share, and its a testament to literacy in the age of Every Child Left Behind!

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MAKE THE PIE HIGHER!

I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential
mental losses.
Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning?
Will the highways of the internet
Become more few?
How many hands have I shaked?
They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull on the pant leg of opportunity.
I know that the human being and the fish can coexist.
Families is where our nation finds hope,
where our wings take dream.
Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize society!
Make the pie higher!
Make the pie higher!

(Please pass this on,
and help cure Mad Cowboy disease!)

The Carlyle Group

Exposed: The Carlyle Group

Shocking documentary uncovers the subversion of Americas democracy.

I defy you to watch this 48 minute documentary and not be outraged about the depth of corruption and deceit within the highest ranks of our government.

Note: The first one minute forty seven seconds of this program is in broadcast in Dutch, The remainder is in English.

None Of Us Are Free - If One Of Us Is Chained

Wag the Dog - Crisis Scenarios for Deflecting Attention from the President's Woes

In the 1998 movie Wag the Dog, White House spinmeister Conrad Brean seeks to deflect public attention from a brewing scandal over an alleged sexual encounter in the White House between the president and an all-too-young Girl Scout-type by concocting an international crisis. Advised by a Hollywood producer (played with delicious perversity by Dustin Hoffman), Brean "leaks" a fraudulent report that Albania has acquired a suitcase-sized nuclear device and is seeking to smuggle it into the United States. This obviously justifies an attention-diverting military reprisal. The press falls for the false report (sound familiar?) and all discussion of the president's sex scandal disappears from view -- or, as Brean would have it, the "tail" of manufactured crisis wags the "dog" of national politics.

As Brean explains all this to the White House staff in the film, American presidents have often sought to distract attention from their political woes at home by heating up a war or crisis somewhere else. Now that the current occupant of the White House is facing roiling political scandals of his own, it stands to reason that he, too, or his embattled adviser Karl Rove (not to speak of his besieged Vice President, Dick Cheney) may be thinking along such lines. Could Rove -- today's real-life version of Conrad Brean -- already be cooking up a "wag the dog" scenario? Only those with access to the innermost sanctum of George Bush's White House can know for sure, but it is hardly an improbable thought, given that they have done so in the past.

It bears repeating that this administration -- more than any other in recent times -- has employed deception and innuendo to mold public opinion and advance its political agenda. Indeed, the very scandal now enveloping the White House -- the apparent conspiracy to punish whistle-blower Joseph Wilson by revealing the covert CIA identity of his wife, Valerie Plame -- is rooted in the President's drive to mobilize support for the invasion of Iraq by willfully distorting Iraqi weapons capabilities. Why then would he and his handlers shrink from exaggerating or distorting new intelligence about other hostile powers, and then using such distortions to ignite an international crisis?

Add to this the fact that a rising level of belligerence is already detectable in the statements of top administration officials regarding potential adversaries in the Middle East and Asia. Most striking perhaps was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's truculent appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on October 19. Under questioning from both Democratic and Republican Senators, she refused to rule out the use of military force against Syria or Iraq, nor would she acknowledge any presidential obligation to consult Congress before engaging in such an action. Asked by Senator Paul Sarbanes (Dem.-Md.) whether the administration actually "entertains the possibility of using military action against Syria or against Iran" and "could undertake to do that without obtaining from Congress an authorization for such action," she replied: "What I said is that the President doesn't take any of his options off the table and that I will not say anything that constrains his authority as Commander in Chief." While insisting that the administration was still relying on diplomacy to resolve its differences with Syria and Iran, she left no doubt as to Bush's preparedness (and right) to employ force at any time or place of his choosing.

UN Diary: Robert Fisk criticises rise of patriot journalism in US

UN Diary: Robert Fisk, 59, Middle-East correspondent for Britain's The Independent newspaper, began his address to a roomful of United Nations correspondents by mentioning that the last time he was at the UN was to hear Colin Powell make his airtight case for Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. This time around, it was Fisk making an airtight case for America’s failure in the Middle East.

"The United States must leave Iraq and will leave Iraq but can’t," said Fisk, who is currently touring the United States to launch the American edition of his new book, "The Great War for Civilisation".

Dressed in a rumpled blue shirt with his wearied face bearing the signs of a hectic travel schedule, Fisk spoke animatedly about the situation in Iraq and the state of American journalism today.

"After World War I, Britain and France drew the borders of the Middle East," he said. "I have spent my career watching the people within these borders burn." When Fisk was offered the position of Middle East correspondent at The Independent, his editor sold him onto the job by saying: "There will be lots of sunshine and lots of adventures," remembers Fisk. After reporting on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iran-Iraq war, the Iranian revolution and the US-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, Fisk has encountered numerous adventures but maybe not enough sunshine.

Pinochet's Secret Police Chief Sentenced

[Hopefully, the Bush regime is next. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rove need to spend a little time in Abu Ghraib, subjected to their own interrogation techniques. After all, we need to learn the extent of their involvement in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.]

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) - The head of Chile's secret police under Gen. Augusto Pinochet was sentenced to three years in prison for the killing of a teacher opposed to the dictator's regime.

Retired Gen. Manuel Contreras, who is already serving a 12-year term for a political killing, was sentenced Monday for the 1976 killing of Julia Retamal. Retamal was arrested in August 1976 and was last seen at a detention and torture center used by Contreras' feared secret police force.

Contreras, 79, served an eight-year prison term ending in 2003 for the 1976 bombing death in Washington of Orlando Letelier, a prominent opponent of Pinochet.

In January, he returned to prison after being convicted in the 1976 disappearance of another dissident.

He faces dozens of other criminal cases related to human rights abuses.

Pinochet, who has never been convicted, faces possible prosecution in two cases. One relates to the killing of 15 dissidents by Contreras' secret police; the other is on charges of tax evasion for multimillion dollar secret bank accounts he held abroad.

The Corporate Media's Threat to Freedom

There is no similarity between the corporate media and a "free press." The corporate media operates according to its structural make up, which requires it to serve the interests of ownership and maximize profits. Its top down style of management ensures that it will align itself with the political centers of power, which create the opportunity for greater prosperity. This explains why the media giants have consistently concealed the Bush administration’s attacks on civil liberties, supported the expansion of executive power, and paved the way for global war. After all, they are just acting in their own best interest, accommodating the political establishment to allow for more consolidation and expansion. One hand washes the other.

The cozy relationship between the administration and the media has made it nearly impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. In fact, the media is the primary instrument of state policy. Its task is to shape the public's perception of government and to project a benign image of the US to the world beyond.

13,514 Detainees in Iraq?

13,514 Detainees in Iraq?

RAW STORY has an interesting article today, stating that the US military acknowledges approximately 13,514 detainees currently held in prisons inside Iraq. Very few, less than 2%, have been found quilty of any crimes.

Here's the money quote:

This information supports what sources close to the Defense Department have previously expressed concern about to RAW STORY, namely that detainees held and tortured and then released essentially become the enemy army. According to these sources, who declined to go on the record by name, hundreds of detainees are released each month, having been detained for periods of six to twelve months, during which they are subjected to torture or other abuse.

Along these lines, note that there has been no shortage of Iraqis describing this kind of experience to journalists like Dahr Jamail and Robert Fisk. My belief has always been that the public misunderstands the true purpose of our detainee policy. It is not motivated, despite pronouncements to the contrary, by the urgency to preemptively seize potentially dangerous people and indefinitely incarcerate them. Instead, the purpose is one of general intimidation with the emphasis upon casting a broad net that captures a few possible insurgents along with many unconnected with the conflict in any meaningful respect.

One need only look to Guantanamo Bay, where many Afghani detainees claim that they were sold to US forces by tribal leaders. In other words, we deliberately aspire to catch a lot of dolphins, along with some tuna, expecting the dolphins, upon release, to spread the message that resistance to the Americans is futile. Predictably, the enraged dolphins are communicating quite the opposite.

The US used chemical weapons in Iraq - and then lied about it

Now we know napalm and phosphorus bombs have been dropped on Iraqis, why have the hawks failed to speak out?

Did US troops use chemical weapons in Falluja? The answer is yes. The proof is not to be found in the documentary broadcast on Italian TV last week, which has generated gigabytes of hype on the internet. It's a turkey, whose evidence that white phosphorus was fired at Iraqi troops is flimsy and circumstantial. But the bloggers debating it found the smoking gun.

Dueling presidentes: Chavez says Fox will be "stung"

November 15, 2005 -- Spat between Vicente Fox and Hugo Chavez involves Mexican presidential election. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called Mexican President Vicente Fox a "lap dog for the empire" over the Mexican leader's support for George W. Bush's dead-on-arrival Free Trade Area of the Americas. It is clear that the Bush administration relishes the resulting diplomatic spat between two of Latin America's major oil producers. As Venezuela and Mexico recalled their ambassadors from each other's capitals, Chavez warned Fox that if he didn't let up, he would be "stung."

Fox is clearly worried about the 10 point lead in presidential election polls of progressive former Mexico City mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, an ally of Chavez. Obrador leads Roberto Madrazo, of the main opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), a party with a long history of corruption, in polls for next year's presidential election. Fox's National Action Party candidate, Felipe Calderon, trails a distant third, a fact that clearly rankles Fox. '

Obrador and Bolivia's populist leader, Evo Morales, stand a good chance of being elected presidents of their countries and joining Chavez in an anti-Bush bloc of Latin American states that will also encompass Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Cuba. Nicaragua's Sandinistas are also poised to make a comeback.

Toxic Truths from the Iraqi Battlefront

When a war is illegal, the methods of warfare are bound to go beyond what is permissible under the laws of war. But don't expect the American media to tell you any of this.

Fiction:

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning." Lt. Col. William Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, 1979.

Non-fiction:

"At the end of the fight we thought back on some of the things we were the proudest of. What jumped to the forefront was infantry and tank platoon sergeants ... telling us that the artillery and mortars were awesome. At the end of the day, that is what it is all about: our maneuver brethren recognizing why we are called the `King of Battle'." Captain James T. Cobb, First Lieutenant Christopher A. LaCour, and Sergeant William H. Hight in "The Fight for Fallujah," Field Artillery magazine, 2005. (Among the 'awesome' mortars fired were White Phosphorous chemical munitions).

Concerned at the environmental consequences of having dumped thousands of pounds of chemical weapons of various types into the ocean off its coast soon after World War II, the U.S. in the 1980s decided to prepare a master-list of all such dumps for future monitoring.

The report, authored by William R. Brankowitz of the Army Chemical Materials Agency, was titled "Summary of Some Chemical Munitions Sea Dumps by the United States" and was printed for internal circulation on January 30, 1989. Among the 50-plus incidents catalogued involving mustard gas, lewisite, and other nasty chemicals were the following two: Between September 14 and December 21, 1945, 924 canisters of White Phosphorous (WP) cluster bomb munitions from the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland were loose-dumped in the Atlantic Ocean along with WP smoke canisters and smoke projectiles and arsenic trichloride; and then on June 18, 1962, 5,252 WP munitions were dumped in the Atlantic along with mustard projectiles, 20 drums of cyanide and 421,157 pounds of radiological waste. Another report prepared in March 2001 titled "Offshore disposal of chemical agents and weapons conducted by the United States" by the Historical Research and Response Team of the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, corroborated the same information, including the dumping of WP.

These reports are significant because they tell us that as far as the U.S. military's own inventory of weapons was concerned, White Phosphorous was classified as a "chemical munition" or a "chemical agent and weapon" as recently as 1989 and 2001. And for good reason too. The WP had been dumped into the ocean in 1945 and 1962 but was obviously considered dangerous enough for the U.S. Army to be concerned about its toxicity five decades later.

Donald Rumsfeld profits from Avian Flu Vaccine and the 'coordinated' bird flu global panic.

Defense Secretary, major stock holder and ex-chairman of flu treatment rights holder, sees portfolio value growing.

In July, the Pentagon ordered $58 million worth of the treatment for U.S. troops around the world, and Congress is considering a multi-billion dollar purchase.

NEW YORK (Fortune) - The prospect of a bird flu outbreak may be panicking people around the globe, but it's proving to be very good news for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other politically connected investors in Gilead Sciences, the California biotech company that owns the rights to Tamiflu, the influenza remedy that's now the most-sought after drug in the world.

Rumsfeld served as Gilead (Research)'s chairman from 1997 until he joined the Bush administration in 2001, and he still holds a Gilead stake valued at between $5 million and $25 million, according to federal financial disclosures filed by Rumsfeld.

The forms don't reveal the exact number of shares Rumsfeld owns, but in the past six months fears of a pandemic and the ensuing scramble for Tamiflu have sent Gilead's stock from $35 to $47. That's made the Pentagon chief, already one of the wealthiest members of the Bush cabinet, at least $1 million richer.
Read Full Fortune Article

IN AN AREA POPULATED BY OVER 2 BILLION PEOPLE, ONLY 126 PEOPLE HAVE BEEN INFECTED, AND ONLY 64 PEOPLE HAVE DIED. ("Cumulative Number of Confirmed Human Cases of Avian Influenza A/(H5N1) Reported to WHO as of 14 November 2005.")

Hell, in the U.S., there are over 500 aspirin deaths per year. This is not to say aspirin is dangerous, but I want to keep things in perspective.

In 2002, an entire issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA 2002 vol. 287 #21) was devoted to looking at major problems with the relationship between drug companies, physicians, the FDA, and medical journals.

Japan links Tamiflu to 2 teen suicides 64 cases of disorders connected to avian flu treatment

What I'm saying is that ALL medications will have some type of negative side effects in a certain percentage of any population. That's a given. I have a friend who would die if he ate peanuts.

The question I am raising is... Is Avian Flu, based on the number of deaths within the affected areas, the threat it is hyped to be? OR... is this just one more neocon scare tactic to further enrich Rumsfeld and his cronies???

Who Owns the Rights on Tamiflu: Rumsfeld To Profit From Bird Flu Hoax
Bird Flu Epidemic is a Hoax
Rumsfeld To Profit From Avian Flu Hoax

white phosphorus and cluster bombs, favorite weapons of war criminals

'I treated people who had their skin melted'

By Dahr Jamail
Published: 15 November 2005

Abu Sabah knew he had witnessed something unusual. Sitting in November last year in a refugee camp in the grounds of Baghdad University, set up for the families who fled or were driven from Fallujah, this resident of the city's Jolan district told me how he had witnessed some of the battle's heaviest fighting.

"They used these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud," he said. He had seen "pieces of these bombs explode into large fires that continued to burn on the skin even after people dumped water on the burns".

As an unembedded journalist, I spent hours talking to residents forced out of the city. A doctor from Fallujah working in Saqlawiyah, on the outskirts of Fallujah, described treating victims during the siege "who had their skin melted".

He asked to be referred to simply as Dr Ahmed because of fears of reprisals for speaking out. "The people and bodies I have seen were definitely hit by fire weapons and had no other shrapnel wounds," he said.

Burhan Fasa'a, a freelance cameraman working for the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBC), witnessed the first eight days of the fighting. "I saw cluster bombs everywhere and so many bodies that were burnt, dead with no bullets in them," he said. "So they definitely used fire weapons, especially in Jolan district."

Mr Fasa'a said that while he sold a few of his clips to Reuters, LBC would not show tapes he submitted to them. He had smuggled some tapes out of the city before his gear was taken from him by US soldiers.

Some saw what they thought were attempts by the military to conceal the use of incendiary shells. "The Americans were dropping some of the bodies into the Euphrates near Fallujah," said one ousted resident, Abdul Razaq Ismail.

Dr Ahmed, who worked in Fallujah until December 2004, said: "In the centre of the Jolan quarter they were removing entire homes which have been bombed, meanwhile most of the homes that were bombed are left as they were."

He said he saw bulldozers push soil into piles and load it on to trucks to carry away. In certain areas where the military used "special munitions" he said 200 sq m of soil was being removed from each blast site.

The author is an unembedded journalist reporting from Fallujah

Also see: The fog of war: white phosphorus, Fallujah and some burning question

Darkness Over Empire

Why is it that the US military's use of napalm in Fallujah is a surprise? It does symbolize whopping moral hypocrisy in that the US government insisted the casus belli for invading Iraq was that country’s asserted possession of weapons of mass destruction; so what does the US military do? They use the self-same weapons on Iraqi civilians: napalm is a banned chemical weapon.

But hypocrisy drenched in evil is not new to US politicos, nor was it new to history's miscreants. Adolf Hitler in his Mein Kampf wrote: "... the world will be governed by the law of natural distribution of power, and then those nations will be victorious who are of more brutal will and are not the nations who have practiced self-denial." The US embodies this pre-Straussian philosophy close to its breast. It is for the world to see, as the US regime continues to pressure Iran and northern Korea over their alleged nuclear intentions while defying nuclear treaties, upgrading their own nuclear arsenal, and ignoring the possession of nuclear weapons by US client states such as Israel.

Why should the use of napalm surprise anyone when the US authorities approve the use of indiscriminate weapons such as cluster bombs? Why should the use of napalm surprise when it uses depleted uranium-laced weapons that are strongly linked to the ill health of US troops (rendering them to the status of cannon fodder)? Heavy bombing and a wholesale disregard for Iraqi civilians (over 100,000 of which have been slaughtered), undeniably adduces a callous insouciance for human life.

Rigged: Senate Fails Public, Gives Oil Moguls Red-Carpet Treatment by Ralph Nader

It was Wednesday, November 10th and the Senators had the five bosses of the largest oil conglomerates in the world facing them and the media in a large hearing room. Millions of Americans are indignant over gouging gasoline and natural gas prices and want action.

So what did the two Senate Committees do? They blew it. As Dana Milbank wrote in the Washington Post, "instead of calling oil executives on the carpet yesterday, senators gave them the red-carpet treatment." Not quite. Senator Barbara Boxer, among a few, gave the oil tycoons a hard time. But generally, by the end of the hearing, none of the executives broke a sweat.

There was at least a high expectation for some tough rhetoric and demands for information, though nobody thought there would be any action whether for an excess profits tax, tougher anti-gouging legislation or antitrust crackdowns. But surely some table thumping.

After all, it was the people-frightened Republicans who called the hearing to expose, in their majority leader, Senator Bill Frist (R-TN)'s words "those who abuse the free-enterprise system to advantage themselves and their businesses at the expense of all Americans."

Instead, what the public saw was the astonishing workings of corporate power, ideology and campaign money on Capitol Hill. Senators, like Mary Landrieu (D-LA), were tossing soft questions and deep praise on the oil moguls, after receiving big time campaign money from their oil and gas paymasters. Landrieu took $249,155 over the past five years. Observing the moguls, one got no sign that any of them were at all worried about the hearing. Many of the Senators were marinated in oil. The rest were frustrated or not courageous enough to come adequately prepared to take apart the all-purpose response that these oil companies were merely responding to the global marketplace. It is always the impersonal market, the all-encompassing ideology that leaves these oil giants powerless - just so many profit-gushing buoys on the ocean of market determinism.

The US rope trick, or how to keep the dollar up

The deficit is at a new high but the greenback defies gravity. Where's the logic?

Burn the textbooks. Forget that fuddy-duddy stuff about demand and supply. Blow a raspberry at economic theory. That, apparently, is the message being sent out by the foreign exchange markets, where the dollar reached a two-year high against the euro and the yen last week.
But isn't it the case, I hear you ask, that the United States notched up a record trade deficit of $66.1bn last week - equivalent to 6% or so of its gross domestic product? Yes it is. And isn't the US financing that trade deficit by flooding the global markets with dollar-denominated assets that are snapped up by its creditors? Right again. And when the supply of something goes up, isn't it customary for the price to come down? Full marks for impeccable logic.

--------------------------------

When you get down to it, there are only two reasons for an appreciating dollar. One is that it is going up because it is going up; the herd mentality of markets means that you do what everybody else is doing even if you think they are wrong. The second is that the markets have deluded themselves into thinking that a country that is spending one dollar and six cents for every dollar that it is earning doesn't have a problem.

The fact that the Chinese, the Japanese and the other big exporting nations of Asia are colluding in this financial fantasy should come as no surprise. A strong dollar is wonderful for these countries since it helps them to build up their industrial - and, in China's case, political -power even as American manufacturing is hollowed out.

Evolution, Ecology and 'Malignant Design' by Noam Chomsky

President George W. Bush favors teaching both evolution and "intelligent design" in schools, "so people can know what the debate is about."

To proponents, intelligent design is the notion that the universe is too complex to have developed without a nudge from a higher power than evolution or natural selection.

To detractors, intelligent design is creationism -- the literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis -- in a thin guise, or simply vacuous, about as interesting as "I don't understand" as has always been true in the sciences before understanding is reached.

Accordingly, there cannot be a "debate."

The teaching of evolution has long been difficult in the United States. Now, a national movement has emerged to promote the teaching of intelligent design in schools.

The issue has famously surfaced in a courtroom in Dover, Pa., where a school board is requiring students to hear a statement about intelligent design in a biology class -- and parents mindful of the U.S. Constitution's church/state separation have sued the board.

Fallujah Revisited (MUST READ)

Nearly a year after they occurred, a few of the war crimes committed in Fallujah by members of the US military have gained the attention of some major media outlets (excluding, of course, any of the corporate media outlets in the US).

Back on November 26, 2004, in a story I wrote for the Inter Press Service titled 'Unusual Weapons' Used in Fallujah, refugees from that city described, in detail, various odd weapons used in Fallujah. In addition, they provided detailed descriptions such as "pieces of these bombs exploded into large fires that burnt the skin even when water was thrown on the burns."

This was also mentioned in a web log I'd penned nine days before, on November 17, 2004, named Slash and Burn where one of the descriptions of these same weapons by the same refugee from Fallujah said, "These exploded on the ground with large fires that burnt for half an hour. They used these near the train tracks. You could hear these dropped from a large airplane and the bombs were the size of a tank. When anyone touched those fires, their body burned for hours."