My cousin Ed sent me the following e-mail about politicians: 

An Iraqi legislator said authorities found telephone numbers of senior officials in Al-Zarqawi’s cell phone after his  death. Waiel Abdul-Latif, a member of former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi’s party, did not give names of the  officials. But he said they included ministry employees and members of parliament

I try to operate under the Don’t believe everything you read or hear theory and to see the word former in the statement above makes me wonder about his possible motives for saying that.

On the other hand, I do believe something very fishy is going on with our government. This is off topic but then again maybe not but I wonder what the Religous Right’s stand is on gun control. They have gained a tremendous amount of power and I can forsee a clash between the NRA and the RR.

We’ve gotten ourselves into a terrible situation over there in Iraq and took our eye off the real problems being Iran and North Korea. Personally I think these things should be handled regionally i.e. by China, Russia, and Japan.

We’ve been losing about a soldier a day in Afganistan here at Fort Drum (10th Mountain Division) in my neck of the woods. They are doing a lot of mountain work trying to get Osama and it would appear we should not have turned our eye on Iraq before finishing our mission in Afganistan.

It’s a real mess and I don’t believe for a minute that an established government in those countries is going to stop it. It’s a pipe dream on the part of our administration to think so and to tell the American people that. These people are hell bent on draining our money, killing our soldiers, and making us pay thru the nose for energy products. I believe countries that Bush calls our allies are funding the terrorists and hoping to bring about our demise in doing so.

It’s a sad, sad situation with no end in sight and all it will take is another attack in the U.S. for us to become a military state. They’ll tell us it’s only temporary and that it is for our protection but it will be the beginning of the end of the U.S.of A. as we know it.

As far as I’m concerned our government has lost all credibilty and if you believe what they are telling you just think back to a while ago when these fools told us the insurgency was in its last gasps. They just don’t get it.

Never will and the sooner we can get them out of the power holding positions they are in the better. Personally I will be voting for every non-incumbent on the ticket this fall and in 2008. Bush and his Good vs. Evil crap needs to go. They want us to be scared (OF THEM) but I’m not. I’ve got more chances of getting killed by lightning than I do a terrorist attack.

May you be in heaven a half an hour before the devil knows you are dead.

Signed,
     Ed

Update:  This article was uploaded in 2006 when it still seemed like the politicians wanted to get out of Iraq. But later on, the focus changed somewhere along the line and being in Iraq became an accepted practice that anyone questioning was regarded as insensitive. 

Skeptically yours,
          Mim

My cousin Ed sent me the following e-mail about politicians: 

An Iraqi legislator said authorities found telephone numbers of senior officials in Al-Zarqawi’s cell phone after his  death. Waiel Abdul-Latif, a member of former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi’s party, did not give names of the  officials. But he said they included ministry employees and members of parliament

I try to operate under the Don’t believe everything you read or hear theory and to see the word former in the statement above makes me wonder about his possible motives for saying that.

On the other hand, I do believe something very fishy is going on with our government. This is off topic but then again maybe not but I wonder what the Religous Right’s stand is on gun control. They have gained a tremendous amount of power and I can forsee a clash between the NRA and the RR.

We’ve gotten ourselves into a terrible situation over there in Iraq and took our eye off the real problems being Iran and North Korea. Personally I think these things should be handled regionally i.e. by China, Russia, and Japan.

We’ve been losing about a soldier a day in Afganistan here at Fort Drum (10th Mountain Division) in my neck of the woods. They are doing a lot of mountain work trying to get Osama and it would appear we should not have turned our eye on Iraq before finishing our mission in Afganistan.

It’s a real mess and I don’t believe for a minute that an established government in those countries is going to stop it. It’s a pipe dream on the part of our administration to think so and to tell the American people that. These people are hell bent on draining our money, killing our soldiers, and making us pay thru the nose for energy products. I believe countries that Bush calls our allies are funding the terrorists and hoping to bring about our demise in doing so.

It’s a sad, sad situation with no end in sight and all it will take is another attack in the U.S. for us to become a military state. They’ll tell us it’s only temporary and that it is for our protection but it will be the beginning of the end of the U.S.of A. as we know it.

As far as I’m concerned our government has lost all credibilty and if you believe what they are telling you just think back to a while ago when these fools told us the insurgency was in its last gasps. They just don’t get it.

Never will and the sooner we can get them out of the power holding positions they are in the better. Personally I will be voting for every non-incumbent on the ticket this fall and in 2008. Bush and his Good vs. Evil crap needs to go. They want us to be scared (OF THEM) but I’m not. I’ve got more chances of getting killed by lightning than I do a terrorist attack.

May you be in heaven a half an hour before the devil knows you are dead.

Signed,
     Ed

Update:  This article was uploaded in 2006 when it still seemed like the politicians wanted to get out of Iraq. But later on, the focus changed somewhere along the line and being in Iraq became an accepted practice that anyone questioning was regarded as insensitive. 

Skeptically yours,
          Mim

The best solution to the illegal alien problem from Mexico is to make Mexico the 51st state of the United States. Skeptical World has changed the Mexican flag to show it as the 51st state.

Since the Spanish-American war, or the battle at Alamo in which Texas lost but nobody seems to remember that part of the story, Americans and Mexicans have flowed back and forth across the southern border of the United States – or perhaps it should be stated as the northern most border of Mexico.

The southern states in particular, California, Arizona, Texas and the southeastern states have prospered due to the cheap labor provided by Mexicans, who work as migrants or laborers in the United States, but do not have the benefit of insurances, the right to vote, or to enlist in the army and fight in Iraq.

There is a very thick animosity in the United States attempting to draw a color barrier between Americans and Mexicans, but the division is artificial. Rather than send 15 million Mexicans back to Mexico, let’s solve the problem once and for all.

Border patrol is tired of grabbing illegal immigrants and sending them back to Mexico, and the ones already here, live in fear of being captured, like pre-World War II Germany when the Jewish people had to wear the star of David bands on their arms to announce they were Jewish rather than German. Germans were the ones attempting to make a distinction, and in the United States, many Americans are attempting to create a difference that is not real for Mexicans.

Picture courtesy of Alipac, Americans for Legal Immigration, April 11, 2006 at a rally in New York.

Mexicans are already living and working in the United States. Most of them are working in hospitals, restaurants, landscaping and other service industries. Instead of playing tag at the border with illegal immigrants, it would be simpler to make Mexico the 51st state!

Changing border boundaries would eliminate the need to patrol the border and would save a lot of money. Then too, Americans wanting to vacation in Can Cun or other tropical paradises in Mexico, could freely travel to those spots. Then there would be no need to patrol the southern United States border any longer.

Civil liberties and lifestyles would greatly improve for all Mexicans as the United States could spend its middle east war money on a worthwhile cause – namely, bring Mexico up to the same standard of living as what the Americans have already.

Strategically, Mexico is on the southern most border of the United States and rather than target hard-working Mexicans as felons, the United States need to start thinking about protecting its southern borders and make Mexico part of the United States.

Right now, the United States is enjoying the freedom of having no enemies on its borders. What if the Al-Qaida setup shop in Mexico along the border? The best way to prevent this is to make Mexico the 51st state.   

With its rich culture and citizens known for their willingness to work hard for everything they have, the United States could only benefit from having these wonderful people call themselves citizens of the United States. Make Mexico the 51st state!

Update:  Since this article was first uploaded in 2006, many Americans have been obsessing over Mexicans swimming, boating, or flying over the border, but to date, no one has considered the fact that maybe the focus should be on searching for terrorists and getting rid of them before they hurt innocent people.

Skeptically yours,
          Mim

Military supremacy is the hallmark of the American fighting machine. Tanks and soldier manpower dominated two previous world wars in the last century and threatened monopolization of countries boasting insubordination. From Germany to Vietnam, and from Grenada to Libya, daringly defiant countries encroaching on United States interests paid a steep price for their anti-American propaganda.

The empowered United States military force, with its heavy artillery and technically trained troopers, would storm onto enemy territory and discourage politically unfriendly countries. Enemies surrendered or withdrew their aggression knowing that conflict with the United States meant an apocalypse for their country. The only real enemy to outsmart the United States military kingdom was Vietnam, an agrarian country whose combat strategies were unorthodox.

The Vietnamese were unconventional soldiers using ambush warfare with countless precision. They devoured United States military positions and produced staggering causalities. President Johnson and his closest advisors, using counterintelligence maneuvers, truly believed they were ahead of the Vietnamese offense, ordering more soldiers abroad and advancing their position exponentially.

Playing by the Geneva Convention War-rule book, the retreating Vietnam forces, so they thought, would lose their momentum. Attrition of their soldiers through the brutal beating of American air and land assaults, would guarantee American victory. 

But as American attacks began, sparking Vietnamese ingenuity, the enemy bypassed war-games and copiously retaliated with snipers and ambush squads using underground tunnels. Their usurpation of United States power came from a combat strategy they used for years that the United States was just learning about:  Guerrilla warfare. 

Invisible assaults

Unrelenting Guerrilla warfare, once a fierce Ninja-like invisible assault tactic, premised on two simple ideas. First was the element of captive surprise, of catching the enemy off guard through unsuspecting advances considered counter-intuitive by American military strategists. After all, who would think of randomly shooting from treetop posts or laying death-booby-trap grenades in civilian backpacks and huts? Second was a savagery of bludgeoning enemy forces with a primitive kill-instinct.  

It was the same Neanderthal instinct that was capable of mutilating animals. Killing became a barbaric lust for bloodshed celebrated by the assassins as a victory. This included senseless soldier beheadings, torturous hostage starvations and extreme temperature exposure, and coercion of dehumanizing sexual acts.  Trophies abounded for their sterling roust in the fields hunting prey.

Random brutal killings

Fast forward to the pandemonium of countless dead American and allied soldiers killed under a remarkably similar pathos of barbarism. Iraqi  insurgents protesting the American presence in their country awaken a déjà vu memory of randomly brutal killings last seen in Vietnam.

Militants donned in explosives, teens sacrificed in suicidal bombs, cars detonated at American and Iraqi police stations; and how about the latest act of ravenous savagery? The mutilating of burned human corpses and displaying them as public effigies to stir national hatred. Or the slaughtering decapitation of Nick Berg, an anti-Semitic coup disguised as political retaliation for the Abu Ghairb prison abuses.

Human taxidermy

Such symbols of unconventional brutality are nothing new. Like the Vietnamese army, who were inveterate hunters since Biblical time, Iraqis basked in the glory of capturing and torturing their own hunted animals. Killing the chased animal-the helpless human victims—was not enough. No, their morbid obsession to showcase their prey resembled a form of human taxidermy.

The war games of Iraqi resistance resurrects the same subhuman fascination for genocide witnessed repeatedly in the archives of American military history. Whether shocked by the massacre of Jews under Hitler’s tyranny, angered by countless body bags of air-lifted soldiers in Vietnam, or repulsed by vivid televised images of carnage surrounded by cheering Iraqis, the inescapable truth is that not all human beings are civilized or subscribe to the same moral codes of humanity. That means that war with savages does not play by conventional war rules. Rules for animal warriors surviving on primitive instincts call for drastic measures that destroy the feeding frenzy for bloodshed.

Following the Israeli army’s example against enemy Palestinians, and in the words of the police officer O’Mally played by Sean Connery in the movie Untouchables, “When they shoot one of yours, you shoot two of theirs.” You hunt against those who hunt you. An eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth.  

Israeli’s superior military force can outsmart their border antagonists because they retaliate swiftly, aggressively, and show no compassion or political diplomacy for perpetrators. Bombing the hide-outs of Hamas leaders sent a viciously clear message to its enemies—we play by your rules, and we do it better. Unlike the American military, once an invincible superpower and now the laughing stalk of the international community, the Israeli army proves its invulnerability by flexing its muscle against Palestinian mind-set of savagery, futility of human life, and their celebrated feast of vengeance. 

Learn from Israel’s experience

Wake up President Bush and realize your top-seated Generals and military advisors are obsolete. They strategize in a tightly sealed vacuum suffocating on anti-Deluvian ideas of Judeo-Christian principles. They espouse  bringing terrorists to justice as if rounding up petty thugs living in America. They do not grasp the Iraqi insurgents operate under Guerrilla-war mentality. Terrorists cannot be brought to justice; they can only be killed.

Middle East Scholars, historians, Israeli leaders, and Iraqi-American consultants are America’s real secret weapons. Let them portray the Vietnam-surrealism of today’s conflict and how prosecution of savagery begins and ends with one method: Retribution and obliteration.

Update:  This article was originally uploaded May 16, 2004. The man who beheaded Nick Berg was later identified as Al-Zarqawi, who was killed in 2006 by the Americans. The gruesome stillframe of the beheading process was made by me from the video. I found the three minute video of the beheading process of Nick Berg to be deeply disturbing. Either the Taliban used a dull knife blade, or their intent was to prolong the victim’s suffering, but watching the continuous sawing at his neck bones must have caused him unbelievable suffering.

The terrorists, performing for the camera, deliberately did not sever Nick Berg’s windpipe, so for three minutes while Al-Zarqawi was sawing the sides and back of Nick’s neck, the viewer can hear Nick screaming through his bloody windpipe. Only at the very end of the three minute videotape when it is apparent they have finally sawed through his spinal cord in the back of his neck, does Al-Zarqawi rip the knife through Nick Berg’s vocal cords, silencing the screams, and then jerks the head up off the shoulders.

My reason for telling you this is because you don’t want to see this video and yet, you need to be aware of how mentally disturbed the Taliban supporters really are.

Skeptically yours,
          Mim