It's 2006 folks: Happier New Year! :-)
It ain't like we can't win, there's a million souljahs fighting for our lives and a billion more fighting for their own.
Which side are you on?
Either way, it's clear that irrespective of the math used to come to the answer or the answer itself, the more important concern is the practical impact of how you look at it.
Which one works for you?
There's too much at stake to waste time: do you want to enjoy that Simpson's re-run or not? No I mean REALLY enjoy it, as opposed to distracting yourself from the malaise of a cold and confusing world for a half-hour.
Enjoy your job? Your lover? Your friends and family?
Enjoy...
Happiness is a fickle friend if one has no faith, and faith is a fickle friend if one has no facts. Are facts an enemy of faith? Not necessarily, as people provide facts to have faith in.
Are people lying?
Maybe. Maybe not.
Either way, we've got to believe in the noblest of intentions to believe in ourselves, for as droplets in the ocean of humanity our sanity and vanity are only maintained if we believe in the tides that bind.
What if we believed in our worst fears?
Is that better than being afraid to?
Is there value in knowing that millions of others said it without repercussions? With millions of other providing peerage? A noblesse oblige to speak truth to a clearly mad and corrupted power? Gods on Earth walking among us untouched by mortal concerns?
Badass.
As the truth comes to light and reveals obvious truths are lurking around darker corners, who can believe we know all there is to know with comfortable half-knowledge half-heartedly half-steppin' to help the halve-nots?
Who can believe this is a world designed by men of good intentions?
Suppose one believed in people who fill in the cracks in our warped reality, who spackle over the questions that validate our existence in this global village, who connect the dots in the matrix until images appear to clarify our curiousity.
What then?
Can we understand?
Can we enjoy life enough to handle the truth?
Just for the hey-diddle-diddle of it, the last rhyme of 2005...
[Ed note: I'd just finished listening to "Jay-Z: Rap Phenomenon III", it's not bad, nowhere near as good as "2Pac: Rap Phenomenon II" which Chris Rock just said was the third best hip hop album of all time in Rolling Stone magazine. He's almost right: it's the best hip hop album of all time. Anyway, the former inspired the freestylin' flow here, as damn, Jigga-man gettin' his while on earth, the God-MC be eatin' off a full-plate of compliments. And yes, he got the "hottest chick in the game, wearin' my chain", plus the illest stop'n'start conversationalist freestyle-flow ever, though I agree with the widely held belief that his first album "Reasonable Doubt" is certainly his best. Nonetheless, given time to my destination I drew off inspiration to take a little vacation from my situation...] BKave to Chick-Check
31/DEC/05
I'm looking forward,
To looking forward,
To looking forward,
Looking backward is awkward,
Just for the record,
Setting a record for vettin' the settin' without a record,
Jet-settin' plans sound like a broken record,
A spoken record,
Trap these old thoughts of mine,
These old faults of mind,
Are a goldmine,
Fold mine,
Hands,
Over my face,
Eyes water,
Like,
I've been hit with mace,
Feelin' distaste,
Take the pace of the world and slow it down,
Screw and chop the growing cop-shop,
So I can break it down,
We all down,
We don't know just how far the rabbit-hole goes,
My soul knows flows that fight foes for those not in the know,
In the throes of battle,
I hear the death-rattle,
Of cattle,
The best prattle-on,
'Til they stress even get 'em rattled,
The evil that men do,
Offend you?
Why bend 'til you break?
Life's at stake?
See how real men do,
Spend through the pain of a pleasure sought,
Pleasure bought is meant to treasure so long as a real measure's sought,
Leisure,
A life I treasure most,
Ready to toast and boast,
About how I can coast and still play the most,
A deal with the devil like Dr. Faust,
Study ya history,
Or ya present's a mystery,
Stuck in a sentence like Kafka's dissin' me,
I'm at half-knowledge,
Still speak the truth,
So you ack-nowledge,
One verse is better than 4 years of cursing college,
Sold-out schools tools for fools to get bought,
Registrate-Late,
Like Ye-say,
Don't get caught,
A prisoner of conscience,
'Cause I chose to be conscious of my conscience,
Sometimes I'm nauseous,
Sometimes the world spins too fast for me to wash it's-
Imprint on my mind,
Imprinted my grind,
So line after line,
I'll tell you it's fine while tellin' you I'm lyin'...
Peace,
BK
(...)
[Ed note: And if you believe this, I've got a cave in Tora Bora to sell you... ]
Infowars.com
CIA operative says Bush, military leaders let bin Laden escape
Tune into the Alex Jones Show on Wednesday, January 4 for a live interview with Gary Bernsten, the CIA operative who says Bush and military leaders let bin Laden Escape. How to listen -- click here
This is, of course, not new information, although we're glad that Bernsten has come forward to expose this truth. After all, bin Laden's always been the CIA's boy.
As for the White House, read these quotes from Bush below on how the Administration's public stance has changed on the importance of his capture:
"The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him."- G.W. Bush, 9/13/01
"I want justice...There's an old poster out West, as I recall, that said, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive,'"- G.W. Bush, 9/17/01, UPI
"...Secondly, he is not escaping us. This is a guy, who, three months ago, was in control of a county [sic]. Now he's maybe in control of a cave. He's on the run. Listen, a while ago I said to the American people, our objective is more than bin Laden. But one of the things for certain is we're going to get him running and keep him running, and bring him to justice. And that's what's happening. He's on the run, if he's running at all. So we don't know whether he's in cave with the door shut, or a cave with the door open -- we just don't know...."- Bush, in remarks in a Press Availablity with the Press Travel Pool,
The Prairie Chapel Ranch, Crawford TX, 12/28/01, as reported on
official White House site
"I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority."- G.W. Bush, 3/13/02
"I am truly not that concerned about him."- G.W. Bush, repsonding to a question about bin Laden's whereabouts,
3/13/02 (The New American, 4/8/02)
Capitol Hill Blue | January 2 2006
The top CIA counterterrorism officer who tracked Osama bin Laden through the mountains of Afghanistan says the United States could have captured the terrorist leader if President George W. Bush and the American military had devoted the necessary resources to the hunt and capture.
In addition, says Gary Bernsten, a decorated espionage officer, the post-Cold War downturn in recruitment and attention to espionage has left a crippled spy agency that will need a decade or more to build up its clandestine service for the U.S. war on terrorism.
RELATED
Bush, Cheney continue to deny Kerry charge that they let the Al Qaeda leader escape in 2001.
Document suggests bin Laden escaped at Tora Bora
THE SEARCH FOR OSAMA
Did the government let bin Laden’s trail go cold?Berntsen led a paramilitary unit code-named "Jawbreaker" in the war that toppled the Taliban after the September 11 attacks.
He says his Jawbreaker team tracked bin Laden to Afghanistan's Tora Bora region late in 2001 and could have killed or captured the al Qaeda leader there if military officials had agreed to his request for an additional force of about 800 U.S. troops. But the administration was already gearing up for war with Iraq and troops were never sent, allowing bin Laden was able to escape.
His account contradicts public statements by Bush and former Gen. Tommy Franks, who maintained that U.S. officials were never sure bin Laden was at Tora Bora.
Berntsen says CIA Director Porter Goss faces an uphill battle to fill the agency's senior ranks with aggressive, seasoned operatives.
"He's probably more aggressive than most of the senior officers in the clandestine service. So I think he's having to pull them along a bit," Berntsen said in an interview.
"(Goss) is trying to improve the situation. But it's going to be tough. The rebuilding is going to take years. A decade, at least," he told Reuters late last week.
The CIA, widely criticized for lapses involving prewar Iraq and the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, has seen its clandestine staff dwindle to less than 5,000 employees from a peak of over 7,000, intelligence sources say.
Experts blame a post-Cold War downturn in recruitment for a current lack of seasoned clandestine operatives that has been exacerbated by a rush to lucrative private sector jobs in recent years.
"We have a smaller number of really, really aggressive, creative members of our leadership in the senior service," said Berntsen, who recently published a book about his exploits in the war on terrorism, titled "Jawbreaker" (Crown Publishing).
Former CIA Director George Tenet told the September 11 commission in April 2004 the CIA would need five years to produce a clandestine service fully capable of tackling the terrorism threat.
Goss later said at his September 2004 Senate confirmation hearings that rebuilding the clandestine operation would be "a long build-out, a long haul."
President George W. Bush issued an order last year that called for a 50 percent increase in CIA clandestine officers and analysts to be completed "as soon as feasible."
"The CIA is moving aggressively to rebuild and enhance its capabilities across the board," CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said.
But intelligence sources say the rebuilding process has been complicated by disaffection for Goss' leadership within the clandestine service.
Years of double-digit growth in federal spending on intelligence that followed the September 11 attacks may also be about to end.
John Negroponte, the new U.S. director of national intelligence, has endorsed an intelligence budget for fiscal year 2007 that is relatively flat, with current spending levels believed to total about $44 billion for the 15-agency intelligence community. Fiscal 2007 begins in October.
Berntsen, 48, who also led the CIA Counterterrorism Center's response to the 1998 al Qaeda bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa, sued the CIA in July, accusing the spy agency of trying to stop him from publishing his book.
Gimigliano said the CIA reviewed Bernsten's book before publication only to ensure that it contained no classified information.
In the book, Berntsen says his Jawbreaker team tracked bin Laden to Afghanistan's Tora Bora region late in 2001 and could have killed or captured the al Qaeda leader there if military officials had agreed to his request for an additional force of about 800 U.S. troops.
But the troops were never sent and bin Laden was able to escape, he said.
His account contradicts public statements by Bush and former Gen. Tommy Franks, who maintained that U.S. officials were never sure bin Laden was at Tora Bora.
REAL SOURCE - http://www.infowars.com/articles/iraq/let_laden_escape.htm
