Iraq Battle(s) For an Iranian Colony?

Six U.S. Soldiers Killed In Iraq
BAGHDAD, April 8, 2007(CBS/AP) Six U.S. soldiers died in Iraq on Sunday, the U.S. military announced.

Three were killed by a roadside bomb during a patrol south of Baghdad, the military said. One soldier was wounded in that incident.

Another soldier died and three were wounded by a mortar or rocket attack in a separate incident south of the capital, the military said in another statement.

Two more soldiers died Sunday from wounds sustained in combat, the military said — one each in Diyala and Salahuddin provinces, both north of Baghdad.

Earlier, the military announced that four U.S. soldiers were killed Saturday in an explosion near their vehicle in Diyala. Another soldier was also wounded in the attack, and evacuated to a U.S. military hospital, a statement said.

The victims' names were withheld pending family notification.

At least 3,280 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes seven military civilians.

Violence in Iraq remained as relentless as the deepening debate in the United States about the way forward in the war four years after Marines and the Army's 3rd Infantry Division swept into the Iraqi capital 20 days into the American invasion.

In Other Developments:

# The powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his militiamen on Sunday to redouble their battle to oust American forces and argued that Iraq's army and police should join him in defeating "your archenemy."

# Security remained so tenuous in the capital on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the U.S. capture of Baghdad that Iraq's military declared a 24-hour ban on all vehicles in the capital from 5 a.m. Monday. The government quickly reinstated Monday as a holiday, just a day after it had decreed that April 9 no longer would be a day off.

# The Senate will not stop paying for the Iraq war nor relent from insisting that President George W. Bush keep pressing the Baghdad government for a negotiated end to the violence, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, said Sunday.

# Iran's foreign minister warned Sunday that cooperation with Iraq could deteriorate if five Iranian diplomats detained by U.S. troops in Iraq are not set free.


© MMVII, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Les Vampires (1915) - Stacia Napierkowska

Another fragment....perhaps inspirational of the "Theatres des Vampires" in "Interview With The Vampire" Henry_Allen

HOWARD HUNT AND JFK - TAKE ONE THOUSAND

From Rolling Stone, discussion of E. Howard Hunt's "deathbed confession" re JFK assassination, thanks again to our friend Brad Steiger for calling this to our attention.. When Gerald Ford passed on, the Warren Commission passed into history. When Hunt passed on, the mystery of who killed John Kennedy deepened once again. I'm not much on conspiracy theories, but Hunt was a key "dirty tricks" player, and what he said at the end of his life needs to be considered. Henry_Allen

URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/13893143/the_last_confessions_of_e_howard_hunt

Rollingstone.com

Back to The Last Confessions of E. Howard Hunt
The Last Confessions of E. Howard Hunt
He was the ultimate keeper of secrets, lurking in the shadows of American history. He toppled banana republics, planned the Bay of Pigs invasion and led the Watergate break-in. Now he would reveal what he'd always kept hidden: who killed JFK

ERIK HEDEGAARD

>> Who assassinated JFK? The conversation continues in our politics blog, National Affairs Daily.

Once, when the old spymaster thought he was dying, his eldest son came to visit him at his home in Miami. The scourges recently had been constant and terrible: lupus, pneumonia, cancers of the jaw and prostate, gangrene, the amputation of his left leg. It was like something was eating him up. Long past were his years of heroic service to the country. In the CIA, he'd helped mastermind the violent removal of a duly elected leftist president in Guatemala and assisted in subterfuges that led to the murder of Che Guevara. But no longer could you see in him the suave, pipe-smoking, cocktail-party-loving clandestine operative whose Cold War exploits he himself had, almost obsessively, turned into novels, one of which, East of Farewell, the New York Times once called "the best sea story" of World War II. Diminished too were the old bad memories, of the Bay of Pigs debacle that derailed his CIA career for good, of the Watergate Hotel fiasco, of his first wife's death, of thirty-three months in U.S. prisons -- of, in fact, a furious lifetime mainly of failure, disappointment and pain. But his firstborn son -- he named him St. John; Saint, for short -- was by his side now. And he still had a secret or two left to share before it was all over.

They were in the living room, him in his wheelchair, watching Fox News at full volume, because his hearing had failed too. After a while, he had St. John wheel him into his bedroom and hoist him onto his bed. It smelled foul in there; he was incontinent; a few bottles of urine under the bed needed to be emptied; but he was beyond caring. He asked St. John to get him a diet root beer, a pad of paper and a pen.

Saint had come to Miami from Eureka, California, borrowing money to fly because he was broke. Though clean now, he had been a meth addict for twenty years, a meth dealer for ten of those years and a source of frustration and anger to his father for much of his life. There were a couple of days back in 1972, after the Watergate job, when the boy, then eighteen, had risen to the occasion. The two of them, father and son, had wiped fingerprints off a bunch of spy gear, and Saint had helped in other ways, too. But as a man, he had two felony convictions to his name, and they were for drugs. The old spymaster was a convicted felon too, of course. But that was different. He was E. Howard Hunt, a true American patriot, and he had earned his while serving his country. That the country repaid him with almost three years in prison was something he could never understand, if only because the orders that got him in such trouble came right from the top; as he once said, "I had always assumed, working for the CIA for so many years, that anything the White House wanted done was the law of the land."

Years had gone by when he and St. John hardly spoke. But then St. John came to him wanting to know if he had any information about the assassination of President Kennedy. Despite almost universal skepticism, his father had always maintained that he didn't. He swore to this during two government investigations. "I didn't have anything to do with the assassination, didn't know anything about it," he said during one of them. "I did my time for Watergate. I shouldn't have to do additional time and suffer additional losses for something I had nothing to do with."

But now, in August 2003, propped up in his sickbed, paper on his lap, pen in hand and son sitting next to him, he began to write down the names of men who had indeed participated in a plot to kill the president. He had lied during those two federal investigations. He knew something after all. He told St. John about his own involvement, too. It was explosive stuff, with the potential to reconfigure the JFK-assassination-theory landscape. And then he got better and went on to live for four more years.

They sure don't make White House bad guys the way they used to. Today you've got flabby-faced half-men like Karl Rove, with weakling names like "Scooter" Libby, blandly hacking their way through the constraints of the U.S. Constitution, while back then, in addition to Hunt, you had out-and-out thugs like G. Gordon Liddy, his Watergate co-conspirator and Nixon's dirty-tricks chief, who would hold his own hand over an open flame to prove what a real tough guy he was. It all seems a little nutty now, but in 1972 it was serious business. These guys meant to take the powers of the presidency and run amok. Hunt, an ex-CIA man who loved operating in the shadows and joined Nixon's Special Investigations Unit (a.k.a. "the Plumbers") as a $100-a-day consultant in 1971, specialized in political sabotage. Among his first assignments: forging cables linking the Kennedy administration to the assassination of South Vietnam's president. After that, he began sniffing around Ted Kennedy's dirty laundry, to see what he could dig up there. Being a former CIA man, he had no problem contemplating the use of firebombs and once thought about slathering LSD on the steering wheel of an unfriendly newspaperman's car, hoping it would leach into his skin and cause a fatal accident. But of all his various plots and subterfuges, in the end, only one of them mattered: the failed burglary at the Watergate Hotel, in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1972.

The way it happened, Hunt enlisted some Cuban pals from his old Bay of Pigs days to fly up from Miami and bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters, which was located inside the Watergate. Also on the team were a couple of shady ex-government operators named James McCord and Frank Sturgis. The first attempt ended when the outfit's lock picker realized he'd brought the wrong tools. The next time, however, with Hunt stationed in a Howard Johnson's hotel room across the way, communicating with the burglars by walkie-talkie, the team gained entry into the office. Unfortunately, on the way into the building, they'd taped open an exit door to allow their escape, and when a night watchman found it, he called the cops. The burglars were arrested on the spot. One of them had E. Howard's phone number, at the White House, no less, in his address book. Following this lead, police arrested Hunt and charged him with burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping. Abandoned by his bosses at the White House, he soon began trying to extort money from them to help pay his mounting bills, as well as those of his fellow burglars, the deal being that if the White House paid, all those arrested would plead guilty and maintain silence about the extent of the White House's involvement.

That December, his wife, Dorothy, carrying $10,000 in $100 bills, was killed in a plane crash, foul play suspected but never proved. Two years later, impeachment imminent, Nixon resigned his presidency. And in 1973, E. Howard Hunt, the man who had unwittingly set all these events in motion, pleaded guilty and ultimately spent thirty-three months in prison. "I cannot escape feeling," he said at the time, "that the country I have served for my entire life and which directed me to carry out the Watergate entry is punishing me for doing the very things it trained and directed me to do."

After his release, Hunt moved to Miami, where he remarried, had two more children and spent three decades living a quiet, unexceptional life, steadfastly refusing to talk about Watergate, much less the Kennedy assassination. His connection to the JFK assassination came about almost serendipitously, when in 1974 a researcher stumbled across a photo of three tramps standing in Dallas' Dealey Plaza. It was taken on November 22nd, 1963, the day of Kennedy's shooting, and one of the tramps looked pretty much like E. Howard. In early inquiries, official and otherwise, he always denied any involvement. In later years, he'd offer a curt "No comment." And then, earlier this year, at the age of eighty-eight, he died -- though not before writing an autobiography, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate & Beyond, published last month. Not surprisingly, those things he wrote down about JFK's death and gave to his eldest son don't make an appearance in the book, at least not in any definitive way. E. Howard had apparently decided to take them to the grave. But St. John still has the memo -- "It has all this stuff in it," he says, "the chain of command, names, people, places, dates. He wrote it out to me directly, in his own handwriting, starting with the initials 'LBJ' " -- and he's decided it's time his father's last secrets finally see some light, for better or for worse.

Out in eureka, a few days before his father's death, St. John is driving through town in a beat-up mottled-brown '88 Cutlass Sierra. He is fifty-two. His hair is dark, worn long, and despite his decades as a drug addict, he's still looking good. He has a Wiccan girlfriend named Mona. He's also an accomplished and soulful guitar player, leaning heavily toward Eric Clapton; he can often be found playing in local haunts during open-mike nights and is working on putting a band together, perhaps to be called Saint John and the Sinners or, though less likely, the Konspirators. He's got a good sense of humor and a large sentimental streak. The last time he saw his father, in Miami, was a week ago.

"I sat by his bedside holding his hand for about ten hours the first day," St. John says somberly. "He hadn't been out of bed in ten weeks, had pneumonia twenty-seven times in the last sixteen months. He's such a tough old motherfucker, that guy. But he had all this fluid in his lungs, a death rattle, and I thought, 'Any minute now, this is it, his last breath, I'm looking at it right here.' A couple of times my stepmom, Laura, would say, 'Howard, who is this?' He'd look at me and her, and he didn't have a clue. Other times, he would quietly say, 'St. John.' He said he loved me and was grateful I was there."

At the moment, Saint doesn't have a job; his felonies have gotten in the way. He has to borrow money to put gas in his Cutlass. Beach chairs substitute for furniture in the tiny apartment where, until recently, he lived with an ex-girlfriend, herself a reformed meth addict, and two kids, one hers, one theirs. "I would've loved to have lived a normal life," he says. "I'm happy with who I am. I don't have any regrets. But all the shit that happened, the whole thing, it really spun me over."

And not only him but his siblings, too -- a brother, David, who has had his own problems with drugs, and two older sisters, Kevan and Lisa, who still hold their father responsible for the tragedy of their mom's death. Dorothy Hunt was staunchly loyal to her husband and, after his arrest, helped him with his plans to blackmail the White House. On December 8th, 1972, carrying $10,000 in what's regarded as extorted hush money and, some say, evidence that could have gotten Nixon impeached, she boarded United Airlines Flight 553 from Washington to Chicago. The plane crashed, killing forty-three people onboard, including Dorothy. The official explanation was pilot error, but St. John doesn't believe it. He thinks that the Nixon White House wanted to both get rid of his mother and send a message to his father. Nonetheless, he says he tries not to place blame.

"She got on that plane willingly and lovingly, because that's the kind of woman she was," he says. "They had lots of marital problems, but when it came down to it, she had his back, and she could hang in there with the big dogs. She was really pissed at Nixon, Liddy, all those guys, and she was saying, 'We're not going to let them hang you out to dry. We're going to get them. Those motherfuckers are going to pay.' So I've never held what happened against him. I had bitterness and resentment, but I always knew he did what he had to do given the circumstances."

And at times, he even seems to think of his dad with pride: "Did you hear that the character that Tom Cruise plays in the Mission: Impossible movies is named after him? Instead of Everette Hunt, they named him Ethan Hunt. I know he's been portrayed as kind of an inept, third-rate burglar, but burglary wasn't really his bag. My dad was a really good spy, maybe a great spy."

But then he starts talking about what it was like growing up the eldest son of Everette Howard Hunt, and a different picture emerges. "He loved the glamorous life, cocktail parties, nightclubbing, flirting, all that," Saint says. "He was unfaithful to my mom, but she stayed with him. He was a swinger. He thought of himself as a cool dude, suave, sophisticated, intellectual. He was Mr. Smooth. A man of danger. He was perfect for the CIA. He never felt guilt about anything."

In the early days of the cold war, the CIA's mandate was simple: to contain the spread of communism by whatever means necessary; it was tacitly given permission to go about its dirty business unfettered by oversight of any kind. For much of the Cold War, it was answerable to no one. And if you were lucky enough to become one of its agents, you had every right to consider yourself a member of an elite corps, a big swinging all-American dick like no other.

The middle-class son of a Hamburg, New York, attorney, E. Howard Hunt graduated from Brown University in 1940 with a bachelor's in English, joined the Navy during World War II, served in the North Atlantic on the destroyer Mayo, slipped and fell, took a medical discharge and wound up in China working under "Wild" Bill Donovan in the newly formed Office of Strategic Services. When the OSS was transformed into the CIA, Hunt jumped onboard. He loved action as much as he hated communism, and he soon began operating with a level of arrogance entirely typical of the CIA. He was instrumental, for instance, in planning the 1954 coup in Guatemala that overthrew the left-leaning, democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, and ushered in forty years of military repression, which ultimately cost 200,000 Guatemalans their lives. Years later, when asked about the 200,000 deaths, E. Howard said, "Deaths? What deaths?" Like Saint says, he never felt guilt about anything: "He was a complete self-centered WASP who saw himself as this blue blood from upstate New York. 'I'm better than anybody because I'm white, Protestant and went to Brown, and since I'm in the CIA, I can do anything I want.' Jew, nigger, Polack, wop -- he used all those racial epithets. He was an elitist. He hated everybody."

In the early Fifties, his father could often be seen cruising around in a white Cadillac convertible; he loved that car. He also loved his cigars and his wine and his country clubs and being waited on by servants and having his children looked after by nannies. He was full of himself and full of the romantic, swashbuckling, freewheeling importance of his government mission. He had quite an imagination, too. When he wasn't off saving the world from Reds, he spent much of his time in front of a typewriter, hacking out espionage novels, some eighty in all, with titles such as The Violent Ones ("They killed by day, they loved by night") and I Came to Kill ("They wanted a tyrant liquidated, and cash could hire him to do it").

Wherever E. Howard was stationed -- he'd pop up Zelig-like in hot spots from Japan to Uruguay to Spain -- he and his family lived lavishly and well, all presumably to lend credence to his cover job as a high-ranking embassy official. One estate was as large as a city block, and one dining table as long as a telephone pole, with the parents sitting at distant opposite ends. Sadly, he treated his children the way he and the CIA treated the rest of the world. They were supposed to bend to his will and otherwise be invisible. God forbid during a meal one of them should speak or rattle a dish.

"Whenever I made a sound, he looked at me with those hateful, steely eyes of his, a look of utter contempt and disgust, like he could kill," St. John says. "He was a mean-spirited person and an extremely cruel father. I was his firstborn son, and I was born with a clubfoot and had to have operations. I suffered from petit-mal seizures. I was dyslexic and developed a stutter. For the superspy not to have a superson was the ultimate disappointment, like, 'Here's my idiot son with the clubfoot and glasses. Can we keep him in the closet, Dorothy?' "

Later, E. Howard moved the family to the last home it would ever occupy as a family, in Potomac, Maryland. It was called Witches Island. It was a rambling affair, with a horse paddock, a chicken coop, the Cold War bonus of a bomb shelter, and a fishing pond across the way. E. Howard wanted Saint to attend a top-flight prep school and one night took him to a dinner at St. Andrew's School, to try and get his son enrolled. In the middle of the meal, Saint leaned over to his dad and whispered, "Papa, I have to go to the bathroom." His father glared at him. Pretty soon Saint was banging his knees together under the table. "Sit still," his father hissed. Saint said, "Papa, I really have to go."

"I ended up pissing in my pants at the dinner," Saint says. "Can you imagine how humiliating that was? Unbelievable." He didn't get into St. Andrew's. He ended up settling for a lower-tier boarding school called St. James, near Hagerstown, Maryland. His second year there, in 1970, after being repeatedly molested by a teacher, he broke down and told his mother what was going on. She told his father. And rumor had it that E. Howard came up to St. James with a carload of guns to make the teacher disappear. "He was really, really pissed off," says Saint. "He wanted to kill." In any case, at the school, neither the teacher nor St. John was ever seen again.

That same year, his father retired from the CIA after being relegated to the backwaters for his role in the Bay of Pigs. He went to work as a writer for a PR firm. He was bored and missed the hands-on action of the CIA.The following year, however, his lawyer pal Chuck Colson, who was special counsel to Nixon, called him up with an invitation to join the president's Special Investigations Unit as a kind of dirty-tricks consultant. He signed on. He really thought he was going places.

Around the time of st. john's Miami visit in 2003 to talk to his ailing father about JFK, certain other people were also trying to get things out of E. Howard, including the actor Kevin Costner, who had played a JFK-assassination-obsessed DA in the Oliver Stone film JFK and had become somewhat obsessed himself. Costner said that he could arrange for E. Howard to make $5 million for telling the truth about what happened in Dallas. Unbeknown to St. John, however, Costner had already met with E. Howard once. That meeting didn't go very well. When Costner arrived at the house, he didn't ease into the subject. "So who killed Kennedy?" he blurted out. "I mean, who did shoot JFK, Mr. Hunt?"

E. Howard's mouth fell open, and he looked at his wife. "What did he say?"

"Howard," Laura said, "he wants to know who shot JFK."

And that ended that meeting, with E. Howard grumbling to himself about Costner, "What a numskull."

But then St. John got involved, and he knew better how to handle the situation. For one thing, he knew that his stepmother wanted to forget about the past. She didn't want to hear about Watergate or Kennedy. In fact, E. Howard swore to Laura that he knew nothing about JFK's assassination; it was one of her preconditions for marriage. Consequently, she and her sons often found themselves in conflict with St. John.

"Why can't you go back to California and leave well enough alone?" they asked him. "How can you do this? How dare you do this? He's in the last years of his life."

But Saint's attitude was, "This has nothing to do with you. This stuff is of historical significance and needs to come out, and if you're worried that it'll make him out to be a liar, everybody knows he's a liar already. Is this going to ruin the Hunt name? The Hunt name is already filled with ruination."

So when Saint arrived in Miami to talk to his dad, the two men spent a lot of time waiting for Laura to leave the house. Saint painted the living room and built a wheelchair ramp. In the mornings, he cooked breakfast. In the afternoons, he plopped a fishing hat on E. Howard's head and wheeled him around the neighborhood. They drank coffee together. And watched lots of Fox News. And when Laura finally left, they talked.

Afterward, another meeting was arranged with Costner, this time in Los Angeles, where the actor had fifty assassination-related questions all ready to go. (The actor declined comment for this article.) Though the $5 million figure was still floating around, all Costner wanted to pay E. Howard at this point was $100 a day for his time. There would be no advance. St. John called Costner.

"That's your offer? A hundred dollars? That's an insult. You're a cheapskate."

"Nobody calls me a cheapskate," said Costner. "What do you think I'm going to do, just hand over $5 million?"

"No. But the flight alone could kill him. He's deaf as a brick. He's pissing in a bag. He's got one leg. You want him to fly to Los Angeles and for $100 a day? Wow! What are we going to do with all that money?!"

"I can't talk to you anymore, St. John," Costner said. And that was the end of that, for good. It looked like what E. Howard had to say would never get out.

One evening in Eureka, over a barbecue meal, St. John explains how he first came to suspect that his father might somehow be involved in the Kennedy assassination. "Around 1975, I was in a phone booth in Maryland somewhere, when I saw a poster on a telephone pole about who killed JFK, and it had a picture of the three tramps. I saw that picture and I fucking -- like a cartoon character, my jaw dropped, my eyes popped out of my head, and smoke came out of my ears. It looks like my dad. There's nobody that has all those same facial features. People say it's not him. He's said it's not him. But I'm his son, and I've got a gut feeling."

He chews his sandwich. "And then, like an epiphany, I remember '63, and my dad being gone, and my mom telling me that he was on a business trip to Dallas. I've tried to convince myself that's some kind of false memory, that I'm just nuts, that it's something I heard years later. But, I mean, his alibi for that day is that he was at home with his family. I remember I was in the fifth grade. We were at recess. I was playing on the merry-go-round. We were called in and told to go home, because the president had been killed. And I remember going home. But I don't remember my dad being there. I have no recollection of him being there. And then he has this whole thing about shopping for Chinese food with my mother that day, so that they could cook a meal together." His father testified to this, in court, on more than one occasion, saying that he and his wife often cooked meals together.

St. John pauses and leans forward. "Well," he says, "I can tell you that's just the biggest load of crap in the fucking world. He was always looking at things like he was writing a novel; everything had to be just so glamorous and so exciting. He couldn't even be bothered with his children. That's not glamorous. James Bond doesn't have children. So my dad in the kitchen? Chopping vegetables with his wife? I'm so sorry, but that would never happen. Ever. That fucker never did jack-squat like that. Ever."

Not that it was all bad back then, in Potomac, at Witches Island. E. Howard played the trumpet, and his son was into music too, so sometimes the pair went down to Blues Alley, in Georgetown, to hear jazz. Back home, E. Howard would slap Benny Goodman's monster swing-jazz song "Sing, Sing, Sing" on the turntable, and the two would listen to it endlessly. And then, sometimes, during the stomping Harry James horn solo, E. Howard would jump to his feet, snapping his fingers like some cool cat, pull back his shirt sleeves, lick his lips and play the air trumpet for all he was worth. It was great stuff, and St. John loved it. "I would sit there in awe," he says. But the best was yet to come.

It was well past midnight on June 18th, 1972. Saint, eighteen years old, was asleep in his basement bedroom, surrounded by his Beatles and Playboy pinup posters, when he heard someone shouting, "You gotta wake up! You gotta wake up!"

When he opened his eyes, Saint saw his father as he'd never seen him before. E. Howard was dressed in his usual coat and tie, but everything was akimbo. He was a sweaty, disheveled mess. Saint didn't know what to think or what was going on.

"I don't need you to ask a lot of questions," his father said. "I need you to get your clothes on and come upstairs."

He disappeared into the darkness. Saint changed out of his pajamas. Upstairs, he found his father in the master bedroom, laboring over a big green suitcase jumble-filled with microphones, walkie-talkies, cameras, tripods, cords, wires, lots of weird stuff. His father started giving him instructions. Saint went to the kitchen and returned with Windex, paper towels and some rubber dishwashing gloves. Then, in silence, the two of them began wiping fingerprints off all the junk in the suitcase. After that, they loaded everything into E. Howard's Pontiac Firebird and drove over to a lock on the C&O Canal. E. Howard heaved the suitcase into the water, and it gurgled out of sight.

They didn't speak on the way home. St. John still didn't know what was going on. All he knew was that his dad had needed his help, and he'd given it, successfully.

The next day, dressed in one of his prep-school blazers, he drove to a Riggs Bank in Georgetown and met his father inside the safety-deposit-box cage. His father turned him around, lifted his blazer and shoved about $100,000 in cash down the back of his pants. The boy made it home without picking up a tail. Then his father had him get rid of a typewriter. Saint put the typewriter in a bag, hoofed it across the Witches Island property onto the neighboring spread and tossed it into the pond where he and his brother David used to go fishing.

"Don't ever tell anybody you've done these things," his father said later. "I could get in trouble. You could get in trouble. I'm sorry to have to put you in this position, but I really am grateful for your help."

"Of course, Papa," Saint said.

Everything he had done, he'd done because his father and his gang of pals had botched the break-in at the Watergate Hotel. Soon his mother would be killed in a plane crash, and his father would be sent to jail, and Nixon would resign, and his own life would fracture in unimaginable ways. But right now, standing there with his father and hearing those words of praise, he was the happiest he'd ever been.

Years later, when saint started trying to get his father to tell what he knew about JFK, he came to believe the information would be valuable. He both needed money and thought he was owed money, for what he'd been through. Also, like many a conspiracy nut before him, he was more than a little obsessed.

"After seeing that poster of the three tramps," he says, "I read two dozen books on the JFK assassination, and the more I read, the more I was unsure about what happened. I had all these questions and uncertainties. I mean, I was trying to sort out things that had touched me in a big way."

Touched him and turned him upside down, especially the death of his mother. He had been particularly close to her. She was part Native American and had sewed him a buckskin shirt that he used to wear like a badge of honor, along with a pair of moccasins. At the same time, Saint feels that he never got to know her. She told him that during World War II, she'd tracked Nazi money for the U.S. Treasury Department, and Saint believes that early in her marriage to his father, she may have been in the CIA herself, "a contract agent, not officially listed." But he isn't sure about any of it, really.

"In our family, everything was sort of like a mini-CIA," he says. "Nothing was ever talked about, so we grew up with all of these walls, walls around my father, walls around my mother, walls around us kids, to protect and insulate us. You grow up not knowing what really happened. Like, who was my mom, for Christ's sake? Was she a CIA agent? What was her life really like?" The one thing he does know is that when she died, so in large part did the Hunt family.

Once his father went to prison, Saint moved to Wisconsin, where he worked in a potato-processing plant and spent the rest of his time dropping acid. In 1975, he moved to the Oakland, California, area, started snorting coke and for five years drove a bakery truck. He was in a band and hoped to become a rock star, though touring alongside Buddy Guy was about the biggest thing that ever happened. Then he gave up coke and took up meth and a while later started dealing meth. Twenty years flew by. He had wild sexual escapades; he shacked up with two sisters -- "nymphs," he calls them. But mainly his life, like his father's, was a rolling series of misfortunes. He received insurance money after his mom died, and bought a house; a week later, it burned down in some drug-related fiasco. His brother David followed a similar path; leaving boarding school, he hooked up with Saint, and together they set about snorting and dealing away the years.

Finally, in 2001, on the heels of two drug busts, Saint decided to go straight. With his ex-girlfriend, their daughter and her son, he stayed in a series of shelters, then took them to live in Eureka, several hours north of Oakland. He's since earned a certificate in hotel management, but jobs don't last. And the questions and uncertainties about his father continue to circulate in his head.

"In some ways we turned out similarly," he says. "He was a spy, into secrets and covert activity. I became a drug dealer. What has to be more covert and secret than that? It's the same mind-set. We were just on opposite sides of the -- well, actually, in our case, I guess we weren't even on opposite sides of the law, were we?" That time in miami, with saint by his bed and disease eating away at him and him thinking he's six months away from death, E. Howard finally put pen to paper and started writing. Saint had been working toward this moment for a long while, and now it was going to happen. He got his father an A&W diet root beer, then sat down in the old man's wheelchair and waited.

E. Howard scribbled the initials "LBJ," standing for Kennedy's ambitious vice president, Lyndon Johnson. Under "LBJ," connected by a line, he wrote the name Cord Meyer. Meyer was a CIA agent whose wife had an affair with JFK; later she was murdered, a case that's never been solved. Next his father connected to Meyer's name the name Bill Harvey, another CIA agent; also connected to Meyer's name was the name David Morales, yet another CIA man and a well-known, particularly vicious black-op specialist. And then his father connected to Morales' name, with a line, the framed words "French Gunman Grassy Knoll."

So there it was, according to E. Howard Hunt. LBJ had Kennedy killed. It had long been speculated upon. But now E. Howard was saying that's the way it was. And that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't the only shooter in Dallas. There was also, on the grassy knoll, a French gunman, presumably the Corsican Mafia assassin Lucien Sarti, who has figured prominently in other assassination theories.

"By the time he handed me the paper, I was in a state of shock," Saint says. "His whole life, to me and everybody else, he'd always professed to not know anything about any of it. But I knew this had to be the truth. If my dad was going to make anything up, he would have made something up about the Mafia, or Castro, or Khrushchev. He didn't like Johnson. But you don't falsely implicate your own country, for Christ's sake. My father is old-school, a dyed-in-the-wool patriot, and that's the last thing he would do."

Later that week, E. Howard also gave Saint two sheets of paper that contained a fuller narrative. It starts out with LBJ again, connecting him to Cord Meyer, then goes on: "Cord Meyer discusses a plot with [David Atlee] Phillips who brings in Wm. Harvey and Antonio Veciana. He meets with Oswald in Mexico City. . . . Then Veciana meets w/ Frank Sturgis in Miami and enlists David Morales in anticipation of killing JFK there. But LBJ changes itinerary to Dallas, citing personal reasons."

David Atlee Phillips, the CIA's Cuban operations chief in Miami at the time of JFK's death, knew E. Howard from the Guatemala-coup days. Veciana is a member of the Cuban exile community. Sturgis, like Saint's father, is supposed to have been one of the three tramps photographed in Dealey Plaza. Sturgis was also one of the Watergate plotters, and he is a man whom E. Howard, under oath, has repeatedly sworn to have not met until Watergate, so to Saint the mention of his name was big news.

In the next few paragraphs, E. Howard goes on to describe the extent of his own involvement. It revolves around a meeting he claims he attended, in 1963, with Morales and Sturgis. It takes place in a Miami hotel room. Here's what happens:

Morales leaves the room, at which point Sturgis makes reference to a "Big Event" and asks E. Howard, "Are you with us?"

E. Howard asks Sturgis what he's talking about.

Sturgis says, "Killing JFK."

E. Howard, "incredulous," says to Sturgis, "You seem to have everything you need. Why do you need me?" In the handwritten narrative, Sturgis' response is unclear, though what E. Howard says to Sturgis next isn't: He says he won't "get involved in anything involving Bill Harvey, who is an alcoholic psycho."

After that, the meeting ends. E. Howard goes back to his "normal" life and "like the rest of the country . . . is stunned by JFK's death and realizes how lucky he is not to have had a direct role."

After reading what his father had written, St. John was stunned too. His father had not only implicated LBJ, he'd also, with a few swift marks of a pen, put the lie to almost everything he'd sworn to, under oath, about his knowledge of the assassination. Saint had a million more questions. But his father was exhausted and needed to sleep, and then Saint had to leave town without finishing their talk, though a few weeks later he did receive in the mail a tape recording from his dad. E. Howard's voice on the cassette is weak and grasping, and he sometimes wanders down unrelated pathways. But he essentially remakes the same points he made in his handwritten narrative.

Shortly thereafter, Laura found out what had been going on, and with the help of E. Howard's attorney put an end to it. St. John and his father were kept apart. When they did see each other, they were never left alone. And they never got a chance to finish what they'd started. Instead, the old man set about writing his autobiography and turned his back on his son. He wrote him a letter in which he said that Saint's life had been nothing but "meaningless, self-serving instant gratification," that he had never amounted to anything and never would. He asked for his JFK memos back, and Saint returned them, though not before making copies.

There is no way to confirm Hunt's allegations -- all but one of the co-conspirators he named are long gone. St. John, for his part, believes his father. E. Howard was lucid when he made his confession. He was taking no serious medications, and he and his son were finally on good terms. If anything, St. John believes, his father was holding out on him, the old spy keeping a few secrets in reserve, just in case.

"Actually, there were probably dozens of plots to kill Kennedy, because everybody hated Kennedy but the public," Saint says. "The question is, which one of them worked? My dad has always said, 'Thank God one of them worked.' I think he knows a lot more than he told me. He claimed he backed out of the plot only so he could disclaim actual involvement. In a way, I feel like he only opened another can of worms." He takes a deep breath. "At a certain point, I'm just going to have to let it go."

Out in Eureka, Saint has been reading an advance copy of E. Howard's autobiography, American Spy. In it, his father looks at LBJ as only one possible person behind the JFK killing, and then only in the most halfhearted, couched-and-cloaked way. He brings up various other possibilities, too, then debunks each of them.

But of all the shadings and omissions in the book, the only one that truly upsets St. John has to do with the happiest moment in his life, that time in 1972, on the night of the Watergate burglary, when he helped his father dispose of the spy gear, then ran money for him and ditched the typewriter.

The way it unfolds in the book, St. John doesn't do anything for his dad. And it's E. Howard himself who dumps the typewriter.

"That's a complete lie," Saint says, almost shouting. "A total fabrication. I did that. I mean, he never took me aside and thanked me in any kind of deep emotional way. But I'm the one who helped him that night. Me! And he's robbing me of it. Why?"

Like so many other things, he will never know why, because the next day, on January 23rd, in the morning, in Miami, the old spymaster dies.

Later in the day, Saint started reading a few of the obituaries.

One starts off, "Sleazebag E. Howard Hunt is finally dead."

"Oh, God," Saint says and goes looking for how The New York Times handled his father's death. The obit reads, "Mr. Hunt was intelligent, erudite, suave and loyal to his friends. But the record shows that he mishandled many of the tasks he received from the CIA and the White House. He was 'totally self-absorbed, totally amoral and a danger to himself and anybody around him. . . .' "

"Wow," Saint says. "I don't know if I can read these things. I mean, that is one brutal obituary."

But the Times is right, of course. E. Howard was a danger to anybody around him, and any list of those in danger would always have to include, right at the top, his firstborn son, St. John.

>> Who assassinated JFK? The conversation continues in our politics blog, National Affairs Daily.

Posted Mar 21, 2007 1:15 PM

WAKING UP AND GETTING OUT

A little late, but better just to go. It isn't the troops, its a givernment that thinks we can fight terrorists by reworking Viet Nam. No way. TIMZ video says it, now congress is starting to...late out is better than another four years. Henry_Allen

Will Bush Go Up That Lazy River?

Look, Bill Clinton just got a blow job. Bush is America's blow job. Time to change. Can we wait two years? Henry Allen

Justice official to plead the Fifth before Senate panel
Story Highlights
• NEW: White House says decision shows how investigation has become political
• Justice official to refuse to answer questions about attorneys' firings
• Democrats disappointed that Monica Goodling will not testify
• Former Gonzales chief of staff Sampson expected to defend firings

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A Justice Department official will refuse to answer questions during a Senate committee hearing on the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, citing her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself, her lawyer said Monday.

In a letter sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Monica Goodling's lawyer said she would not testify because senators have already decided that wrongdoing occurred.

"The public record is clear that certain members of the Senate Judiciary Committee have already reached conclusions about the matter under investigation and the veracity of the testimony provided by the Justice Department to date," John Dowd, Goodling's lawyer, said in a letter to the committee's chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont.

The letter said Goodling learned that a senior Justice Department official blamed her and other Justice Department officials for any misleading statements he had made to one of the Democratic senators who has pushed for answers about the firings, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York.

Goodling is a senior counsel and White House liaison to Gonzales. She is taking a leave of absence from the department.

The committee has subpoenaed Goodling to testify Thursday. Democratic and Republican senators have raised questions about the firings, which e-mail released by the Justice Department suggests may have been done for political reasons.

Democrats said they continue to want Goodling to testify.

"It is disappointing that Ms. Goodling has decided to withhold her important testimony from the committee as it pursues its investigation into this matter, but everybody has the constitutional right not to incriminate themselves with regard to criminal conduct," Leahy said in a written statement. "The American people are left to wonder what conduct is at the base of Ms. Goodling's concern that she may incriminate herself in connection with criminal charges if she appears before the committee under oath."

Goodling's decision to plead the Fifth Amendment "raises even more questions concerning the potential misconduct and legal violations by the administration in this ongoing scandal," said Rep. John Conyers, the Michigan Democrat who leads the House Judiciary Committee. That committee also wanted to hear Goodling's testimony on the firing.

The White House said Goodling's decision shows how political the investigation has become.

"It is unfortunate that a public servant no longer feels comfortable that they will be treated fairly in testimony in front of Congress," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

"The attorney general, with the president's support, has urged members of the Justice Department to cooperate with Congress' request for testimony," Perino said. "However, we must respect the constitutional rights of the people involved and the decision of those individuals and their counsel to protect those rights."
Gonzales under fire

Partially due to conflicting accounts of how the firings were carried out, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has come under increasing political pressure, with a growing number of lawmakers calling for his resignation. (View a timeline of the firing of the U.S. attorneys)

Gonzales has said he had a limited role in last year's firings, which have triggered a dispute between Congress and the White House over the testimony of top presidential aides. After his chief of staff's resignation in the firings uproar, the attorney general told reporters that he "was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on."

But documents released Friday night show Gonzales attended a meeting in late November in which the firings were discussed. Justice Department officials said that meeting does not contradict Gonzales' previous statements that he was not involved in the details of the dismissals or in selecting specific prosecutors -- a task he said was left to his chief of staff, Kyle Sampson. (Read more about Sampson's role and his upcoming testimony)

President Bush continues to stand by his attorney general and expressed confidence in him in a White House statement Friday. (Watch how the president shows no signs of backing away from his attorney generalVideo)
Sampson expected to defend firing

Sampson will testify on the firing of the U.S. attorneys before the committee on Thursday.

Sampson was the key Justice Department official in charge of deciding who should be dismissed and the main liaison with the White House over the process. Gonzales has said that Sampson was "charged with directing the process."

Friends familiar with his expected testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee say he will testify that he did what he was told and will defend the power of the Justice Department to be able to fire the prosecutors, because they serve at the pleasure of the White House.

"Kyle is very much a supporter of the president and the attorney general," one friend told CNN. "His main interest is in telling the truth."

The friend said Sampson would "never do anything to hurt any of them" and doesn't believe his version of events will do that.

Friends say Sampson believes innocent bungling was more to blame for the firestorm over the firings than anything malicious.

Friends also say Sampson will tell the truth and is not expected to go on the attack against any former officials. They say he is very quiet, very loyal and isn't the type of person who will try to "get" anyone.

What is not known is how Sampson will answer questions from lawmakers such as how the specific U.S. attorneys were chosen, what specific role did the attorney general play in the process given some of the conflicting evidence, and how much influence the White House exerted.

Sampson has said he did not resign because he had misled anyone or withheld information, but for "failing to appreciate the need for and organize a more effective political response to the unfounded accusations of impropriety in the replacement process," according to a statement his attorney, Bradford Berenson, released on March 16.

The statement also said, "The fact that the White House and Justice Department had been discussing this subject for several years was well known to a number of other senior officials at the department."
Specter: Firings have left a 'cloud' over department

A leading GOP senator Sunday questioned whether Attorney General Alberto Gonzales "has been candid" about the firings of the attorneys, while another said the issue has left a "cloud" over the Justice Department chief.

Sen. Arlen Specter, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, told NBC's "Meet the Press" that Gonzales would have a chance to "present his case" but had some explaining to do. The attorney general is scheduled to appear before the committee April 17.

"We have to have an attorney general who is candid, truthful," Specter said. "And if we find he has not been candid and truthful, that's a very compelling reason for him not to stay on."

President Bush has said he stands solidly behind Gonzales, who was White House counsel before becoming attorney general in 2005.

Two other Republican lawmakers -- Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska -- also expressed doubt about Gonzales' credibility Sunday.

CNN's Kevin Bohn and Dana Bash contributed to this report.



Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/03/26/fired.attorneys/index.html

POSER GENERATION

The Ugly Face of "Suicidal" Goth Teens
Written by Al Barger
Published March 25, 2007


Blogcritics' groovy Retro Music Chick wrote a pointed little satire a week ago

called "Teen Suicide - What's Stopping You?" It focused specifically on the

music and personae of Gerard Way and My Chemical Romance and their grand crusade

to provide the voice and courage to the afflicted and misunderstood teenagers

who go around cutting themselves. Message boards and Gerard Way will tell you

their music has help snatch back countless teens from the edge of suicide. Retro

Music Chick ain't buying it.

It has gotten a lot of predictable indignant responses from cheesed off MCR

fans, most of them in typically illiterate teenage chat room style - like we're

even supposed to consider the opinions of folks who aren't serious enough about

their thoughts to at least attempt writing a legible sentence.

I note that she never actually used the word "Goth" in her story, but this

modern Goth youth culture goes back to the 1980s. Without over analyzing and

categorizing, a lot of this "Gloomy McMopeypants" (RMC's term) stuff comes from

the Smiths and the Cure from back in my college days, who inspired the "unearned

unhappiness" of Ben Folds' classic "Battle of Who Could Care Less."

The Smiths and the Cure, and now stuff like My Chemical Romance, don't entirely

sound that much alike stylistically, but are basically inspirations in mopiness.

Upping the ante from mopy Morrissey and Robert Smith, Gerard Way and such have

become more morbid, dealing frequently in suicidal shtick like "Bury Me in

Black."

They have a big, new morbid audience of faux-suicidal teens as a market niche.

We've got some whining, narcissistic teenagers these days who like to go around

cutting themselves for attention and such. There are teens who go to school

showing off their self-mutilation for attention and sympathy.

As some have pointed out, it's unlikely that truly deeply troubled, actually

suicidal kids would be showing that stuff off. They would more likely be hiding

it in shame and quietly planning their personal end of days. That's sad, and you

can only hope that such kids seek out help and find some relief, but that's only

a relatively few young folk.

Essentially though, a lot of this modern self-mutilation and carrying on is a

huge and incredibly abusive bluff. Most of these kids are not that truly sad,

and are never really even considering killing themselves. They talk about it for

attention, sympathy, and manipulation. If Mom and Dad don't try harder to please

them, then they might do it.

This showing off of self-mutilation and threats of suicide is a particularly

ugly form of narcissistic attention grabbing. Kids carrying on this way need

beaten. Worrying your parents this way is a horrible form of abuse, worse than

most child beating. How evil is it to make the people who gave you life and

raised you waiting for you to snuff it? Kids can be just as evil as parents. If

you carry on like this to your friends at school, milking them for sympathy,

then you're no kind of a friend.

The ugliest part of it is how these little wankers, at the likes of

ImNotOkay.net, are crassly exploiting the tragedy of the truly suffering. There

are always a few poor lost souls who, from bad situations or bad medical

depression, absolutely go out and kill themselves. Then a bunch of heartless

little bastards use the fallen to buy credibility for their attention ploy and

ward off the obvious criticism.

This jumped out at me reading the same type of comments over and over in the

thread for RMC's piece. How can you judge? You don't know what people are going

through! Quit whining about your job at Cinnabuns? Yeah, you tell that to a poor

girl being beaten and raped by her stepdad every night.

That's true enough. I don't know the personal histories, much less the internal

emotions of these anonymous posters on the RMC article or the message boards. I

strongly suspect 99% of them are morally ugly suicidal pretenders, but maybe

there are a couple of sincerely distraught folks drawn into such things. Again

though, it seems unlikely that the really distraught, a Kurt Cobain say, would

be carrying on with these kinds of displays.

Others of you are ugly little bastards merely exploiting the suffering of others

for sympathy though, and that right there is one of the ugliest and most morally

depraved things you could do. What you need is some real hardship and suffering

more substantive than having to work a double shift at Cinnabuns. Maybe some of

you whining jackasses could use a few weeks trying to live in North Korea or

Darfur. Then you'd have something to bitch about.

Since I am speaking fairly harshly, let me prune it back a bit. For starters,

this is an if-the-shoe-fits thing. It doesn't apply to just any kid who likes a

certain band or to any band that might be designated as Goth. It certainly

doesn't apply to any teenager who just takes a spell at dressing in black,

generally trying to look cool and put off the straights. Personally, I tend to

find a lot of that cute and endearing, particularly if it comes off as more

rebellious rather than mopey.

Heck, I'll even say a few words in some defense of Gerard Way and My Chemical

Romance. The shtick behind song titles like "Bury Me in Black" and "Welcome to

the Black Parade" is clearly some cheesy niche marketing, but that's pretty much

marketing to these cheesy fakers. Screw 'em. Let 'em work an extra shift at

Cinnabuns to pay for some overpriced concert tickets and posters. They need to

be exploited.

In my never-ending quest to be fair and balanced like Fox News, I've made a

point of actually listening to some My Chemical Romance, even now on the first

Sunday morning of spring as I'm writing this. (Thanks to the nice folks for

their suggestions of what to hunt down.) I'm not overly impressed with most of

this corporate music food product, but I've definitely heard worse. Just as

songs separated from all the marketing, "Famous Last Words" is pretty good,

"Welcome to the Black Parade" strikes me as definitely their best thing

musically, in significant part because of the creative nuances of the

orchestration.

If you're actually seriously torn up inside, you don't need any of this teenage

foolishness. I would suggest instead for your meditation the Roger Miller

classic "You Can't Rollerskate in a Buffalo Herd": You can't rollerskate in a

buffalo herd / But you can be happy if you've a mind to / All you got to do is

put your mind to it / Knuckle down, buckle down - do it, do it, do it."

Thing is though, that knuckling and buckling down is the hard part. It takes

real work and effort to actually do something for yourself, rather than just

whining and looking for sympathy. Just from my point of view though, the more

effort I see you putting out for yourself, the more sympathy I'm going to give

you. By doing something for yourself, I do not mean taking a trip to the mall to

buy more cheesy Goth paraphernalia.

Let us close this meditation with a bit of understated homespun wisdom from a

classic Wilburn Brothers song, "The sun is going to shine on anyone who's got

enough sense to get out in it."

You know, this is now the first Sunday afternoon of spring - and that's just

what I'm fixing to do.


Unreformed hawkish Hoosier hillbilly and sometimes candidate Al Barger runs the

still squeezin' down the psychodelic Kentucky moonshine at MoreThings.com, what

with the paranoid religious visions and the Pentacostal music and visions of God

and anarchy running amok and such. Somebody oughta call the cops. Drop Al a

note, and try to talk some sense into him, will ya? gadfly at morethings.com

Comments
#1 — March 25, 2007 @ 15:20PM — diana hartman [URL]

"As some have pointed out, it's unlikely that truly deeply troubled, actually

suicidal kids would be showing that stuff off. They would more likely be hiding

it in shame and quietly planning their personal end of days. That's sad, and you

can only hope that such kids seek out help and find some relief, but that's only

a relatively few young folk."

The young people who do seek mental healthcare know little of the ways in which

to do this. Unlike their adult counterparts, their resources are limited and are

often poorly prepared to recognize, much less deal with or refer a troubled

young person appropriately. Young people are not privy to their own medical

records, they don't pay for their own insurance, and they aren't schooled in the

etiquette of mental healthcare and the chain of command, as it were. They are

instead (uselessly and sometimes tragically) subjected to the judgment of those

who would simultaneously dismiss their cries of help and "hope that such kids

seek out help and find some relief."

Heads-up: Those who engage in attention-getting behavior are trying to get

someone's attention. (If you just said "duh," you didn't really understand that

last sentence.) Give a young person attention when they're engaged in a behavior

you don't like (negative reinforcement) and they will offer up more of the same.

Give it to 'em when they're engaged in behavior you do like (positive

reinforcement) and they will offer up more of the same. It would be appropriate

at this point to challenge the author (and those who frequent chat rooms of

teenage angst) to tell of experiences in chat rooms where teenagers post about

the ways they found through their troubles.

Because teenagers are not adults yet, they still equate any attention with the

end goal: positive attention. (This is why abused children will insist on

returning to the abusive parent regardless of more positive, alternative living

conditions made available to them.) Teens often labor under the delusion that

negative attention, being better than none, will eventually result in positive

attention. It doesn't matter that this isn't true because it's what they

believe.

Decry narcissistic behavior if you will. The bottom line is that anyone

displaying narcissistic behavior is likely doing so because they are

narcissistic. Look it up: it's a diagnosable, treatable personality disorder

with an onset in adolescence or early adulthood.

Teenagers are, for all their angst, drama and free-for-all histrionics, still on

the cusp of a child's resilience to disorder, disease and trauma such that yes,

something as simple as lyrics from a song could very well pull them back

(temporarily, or set the stage for permanent resistance) from that which they

simultaneously fear and crave (loss of dependence) and enable them to face head

-on that which they also simultaneously fear and crave (independence).

There is an irony in one spending so much time stalking the expressions of

today's youth and decrying their lack of substance when, if that same amount of

time were spent with befuddled, confused youth, it would bring about the very

thing so tirelessly thought to be youth's greatest lack.

Ironic, too, is that any adult would specifically seek out and/or explore

expressions of teenage angst when clearly one finds it so distressing. Me thinks

thou doth protest too much.

#2 March 25, 2007 @ 18:22PM Retro Music Chick

Thanks for clarifying my essay for the satire impared. :)

#3 March 25, 2007 @ 18:46PM Al Barger

You're welcome, Ma'am. You had a lot of folks very carefully not getting the

point, so I figured on trying to make it as straightforward and crystal clear as

possible.

Chaos In Iraq - The Real "Surge"

Suicide Bomb Attacks Kill Dozens In Iraq
BAGHDAD, March 24, 2007(CBS/AP) Two suicide bomb attacks claimed the lives of 30 people in Iraq today, a day after a deputy prime minister was himself injured in another bombing.

A suicide truck bomber struck a police station in a mainly Sunni area in Baghdad, killing at least 20 people. According to police, the suicide bomber hid the explosives under a load of bricks to bypass tight security around the station, where construction work was being done.

In another incident, a suicide bomber wearing an explosives belt struck a pastry shop in a predominantly Sunni Turkomen city northwest of Baghdad, killing at least 10 people including two off-duty policemen dressed in civilian clothes, and wounding three, an official said.

The shop is in a busy market area in central Tal Afar, said the city's top administrator, Najim Abdullah said. The attack came just over a year after U.S. President George W. Bush declared that Tal Afar was an example of progress made in bringing security to Iraq.

Officials said insurgents apparently have stepped up their campaign against fellow Sunnis seen to be collaborating with the U.S. and the Iraqi government.

The attacks came a day after Deputy Prime Minister Salam al-Zubaie was seriously wounded in a suicide bombing during prayers at his home in Baghdad. Nine other people were killed in the attack, including al-Zubaie's brother and an aide.

Al-Zubaie was in stable condition and moved out of the intensive care unit Saturday morning, but he remained under anaesthesia at a U.S.-run hospital in the heavily guarded Green Zone, Sunni lawmaker Dhafer al-Ani said.

Brig. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, a military spokesman, said he had visited al-Zubaie in the hospital and found him in good condition.

"The medical situation of Dr. al-Zubaie is stable after he had a surgical operation to remove shrapnel from his lungs," al-Moussawi told state-run Iraqiya television in a telephone interview.

The attacks — along with a rocket that slammed to earth 50 meters yards from visiting U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Thursday — have shaken the image that the situation in the capital is calming during a security sweep that began Feb. 14, aimed at quelling the Sunni-Shiite violence that surged after last year's bombing of a Shiite mosque in Samarra.

They also appeared to signal a renewed focus by insurgents targeting Iraqi security forces, politicians and tribes perceived as cooperating with the U.S.-Iraqi efforts. The bomber attacked al-Zubaie a day after a statement purportedly posted on the Internet by an al Qaeda umbrella group singled him out as a stooge "to the crusader occupiers."

The Sunni Iraqi Accordance Front, the biggest Sunni parliamentary bloc to which al-Zubaie belonged, denounced the assassination attempt and said such attacks will not force Sunnis to abandon the political process.

"Whether al Qaeda or other organizations were behind such attacks, this will not force us to abandon our principles and firm stances in moving ahead with the political process," said Sunni lawmaker Amil al-Qadhi. "Our decision was a strategic one and we do believe that our presence is very critical in this period and it is impossible to withdraw from the political process."

In Other Developments:

# The military said two U.S. soldiers were killed yesterday in Iraq. The statement said one soldier was killed by a roadside bomb while on foot patrol south of Baghdad. The other died during fighting yesterday in Anbar province, a Sunni insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad. The deaths bring the total number of Americans to die in Iraq since the war began to at least 3,234, according to an Associated Press count.

# At least 11 other people were killed or found dead on Saturday, including a civilian who died after a parked truck packed with explosives struck a Shiite mosque in Haswa, 30 miles south of Baghdad, and the bullet-riddled bodies of eight men showing signs of torture were found in Fallujah.

# Speaking in Tokyo, Iraq's vice president Tariq al-Hashimi said a quick withdrawal of American troops would not benefit Iraq or Western interests, and that U.S. forces should not be before his country's own armed forces are functioning autonomously and professionally. "If troops are pulled out on short notice, it will create a security vacuum in Iraq," al-Hashimi said. "This is not going to benefit either Iraqi or Western interests."

# The outgoing U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, said he regrets leaving the country mired in violence, but pointed to Iraq's relatively peaceful Kurdish region as an example of the way Iraq should be. Khalilzad, who has been nominated to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, made his remarks during an outdoor ceremony officially opening a $200 million dollar water treatment plant in the regional capital of Irbil. "There has been too much pain and violence in many parts of Iraq, but thank God not in Kurdistan," Khalilzad said.



The suicide bomber targeting police in the volatile Sunni neighborhood of Dora managed to bypass tight security to get within 25 yards of the station by hiding the explosives under a load of bricks, detonating them after being stopped by a long barricade guarded by policemen and surrounded by concrete blast walls.

The force of the blast caused part of the blue and white, two-story building to collapse, including the ceiling of a room in which some detainees were being held, police said. Those killed included five policemen and 13 civilians, including some detainees, while 15 officers and 11 civilians were wounded, according to the authorities.

A crane was brought in to help remove debris as police searched for survivors or more victims.

Police Cpl. Hussam Ali, who witnessed the blast from a nearby guard post, said the attacker took advantage of construction work being done inside the station and was able to circumvent the tight security to reach the main gate by hiding the explosives under bricks.

He said trucks had been coming in and out all day so the attack vehicle did not raise suspicions.

The blast caused part of the building to collapse and knocked down blast barriers over a car parked near the gate.

"We were very cautious, but this time we were taken by surprise," Ali said. "The insurgents are inventing new methods to hurt us."

The 10:45 a.m. explosion occurred nearly three hours after two mortar shells landed on a Shiite enclave elsewhere in Dora, killing three people and wounding seven, police said.

Gunmen also ambushed an Iraqi army checkpoint in Baghdad's western Sunni neighborhood of Jami'a, killing a soldier and wounding two others, police said, adding that a militant also was killed in subsequent clashes.

The Islamic State in Iraq claimed responsibility for the bombing against al-Zubaie in which the bomber detonated an explosives vest after weekly prayers in a small mosque attached to al-Zubaie's home near the Foreign Ministry, just north of the capital's heavily guarded Green Zone.

The Iraqi military spokesman al-Moussawi called the sucide bombing an inside job, telling state television that an al Qaeda fighter had infiltrated al-Zubaie's security detachment, but he offered no details and repeated calls to his office to verify the claim went unanswered. The Interior Ministry, which oversees Iraq's police forces, said it had no information on that claim.

Al-Maliki aide Mariam Taleb al-Rayes also told al-Sharqiyah television the attacker had "infiltrated" al-Zubaie's inner circle, but did not elaborate. She added that the bomber's car blew up outside the house seconds after he detonated his explosives vest.

Al-Zubaie's loss would be a blow to the government, but the al-Maliki administration would not be derailed. There is no legal requirement the post be filled by a Sunni Arab — only an informal agreement among the political parties that formed the current government, and leaders would likely be able to find another Sunni if necessary.

The White House condemned the attack, and U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad promised the United States would work with the Iraqi government and security forces to capture those behind it.

Hundreds of Iraqis also turned out in the southern city of Basra for the funeral of al-Zubaie's regional aide, Mufid Abdul Zahraa, who was killed in the attack.

The deputy prime minister belongs to a tribe that is centered in Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad, and has been divided between members who support al Qaeda and others who have joined an alliance that has been created to fight the insurgents in Anbar province, which stretches to the borders with Syria, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

If the Islamic State in Iraq, an organization linking al Qaeda in Iraq and several other Sunni extremist groups, was responsible for the attack, that might signal a growing concern within al Qaeda about recent success by U.S. troops in Anbar.

Tariq al-Dulaimi, a senior security official in Ramadi, said the attack showed increasing desperation by al Qaeda in Iraq.

"This terrorist organization is trying to compensate for its big defeats in Anbar by attacking al-Zubaie, who is an outspoken critic of the terrorists," he said.

Al-Zubaie is among a long list of politicians — Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds — who have been targeted by militants seeking to undermine a succession of U.S.-backed governments in Iraq. Close relatives of government officials have also been victims of assassinations, abductions and roadside bombs.


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