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Akihiro Arimoto, the father of Keiko, has said that the impasse over the abductees has been tremendously frustrating.
"That's what's wrong with Japan," he said. "All the evidence was on the table - that she had been taken to North Korea.
"But for years no-one in the government would help - it was too sensitive for them."

He (Kim) also said that North Koreans responsible for the abductions would be punished.

A North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said that North Korea is considering allowing the survivors to return to Japan temporarily.

4. Is it not true that the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency was able to complete its yearly verification mission to Iraq just this year with Iraqi cooperation?

It is also true I told my third grade teacher, Mrs. White, that the dog, truly, had eaten my homework.

13. How can Hussein be compared to Hitler when he has no navy or air force, and now has an army 1/5 the size of twelve years ago, which even then proved totally inept at defending the country?

“Adolph Hitler stayed in power through the clever combination of secret police, death for dissenters, and megalomania. Saddam Hussein stays in power through the clever use of secret police, death for dissenters, and megalomania -- but Saddam Hussein is no Hitler.

Hitler launched surprise attacks against his neighbors, Poland and France. Hussein launched surprise attacks against his neighbors, Iran and Kuwait -- but Saddam Hussein is no Hitler.

Hitler gassed millions of Jews. Hussein gassed thousands of Kurds -- but Saddam Hussein is no Hitler.”

Right, Mr. Paul?

35. Why don't those who want war bring a formal declaration of war resolution to the floor of Congress?

Because of morally suspect congressmen such as yourself, Mr. Paul, with a penchant for grandstanding, moral ineptitude, and purposeful ignorance of the worthiness of this nation to stand, fight, and win.

18. Are we willing to bear the economic burden of a 100 billion dollar war against Iraq, with oil prices expected to skyrocket and further rattle an already shaky American economy? How about an estimated 30 years occupation of Iraq that some have deemed necessary to "build democracy" there?

Yes, yes, and yes. Scare tactics might work against gullible Texans in your district, but don’t try that crap in Manhattan.

What makes Japan so expensive? Why? And does it have to be that way? What can the foreign resident in Japan do to avoid getting fleeced? There is no simple, single reason. ... Read on to find a few of the causes--

Land Prices, Rents, and Taxes
Cartels and Collusion
The Rigged, Bulky Distribution System (Or: Do you really need 3 people to wrap your hamburger?)
Snob Appeal
Non-Tariff Barriers
Consumer Apathy/Ignorance

For a business to succeed in Japan, it needs at least 2 essential things. One of course is capital. The other, however, is control of the distribution channels, and this is where many foreign firms fall short. Japan's distribution system is a complex maze and their are thousands of regulations to follow. After WWII Japan had millions of people who needed work fast. So a system was made that employed lots of workers, though many of the jobs were (and still are) redundant. Also there are often several wholesalers sitting between the producer and retailer, each taking their cut. This is one of the principal reasons why just sending the value of the dollar through the floorboards didn't work. From Sept. '85 the value of the dollar vs. the yen fell by more than half. Yet products in Japan made from imported parts/ingredients didn't budge. The real reason was that the middlemen were eating up nearly all the savings. When the dollar hit 100 yen, the Japanese booksellers still used the old 175 yen/dollar rate, and didn't pass any savings on to the consumers. (You'd be wise to buy whatever books you want in Japan before you come, since the very same books in Japan will cost 2 or 3 times more)

... One other significant but often glossed over barrier is the nature of the Japanese themselves. This too is a problem which won't be going away overnight. While in the west people are taught to think critically and analyse, Japanese are taught all the more to put up, shut up, and do what they're told. Thinking is again a group-oriented activity. In this group is a strong "village mentality", and anything outside the group is generally secondary, or worse, ignored. Charity and grassroots movements are nearly unheard of in Japan. The ideas of personal growth, individual liberty, and privacy are not well defined in Japan. In fact, there is no real Japanese word for "privacy" at all, and the English word privacy has been borrowed (purabashi). Standing up for yourself is another new concept to Japanese. So whatever retailers charge, the Japanese just pay, no questions asked. A lot of Japanese media and TV also use sensationalism to sell, and objective reality is often trampled over. What's that? Don't you pay $25 for a melon and $18 for a bottle of aspirin?? Must be something wrong with your country's products--there have been lots of stories about shoddy or "dangerous" foreign goods...

"Beggars are not unusual in the wealthy socities of Europe and North America--many American cities, like New York, even run shelter systems--but in Japan there are no beggars. They do not exist." --- EPA bureaucrat Taichi Sakaiwa, in his book _What is Japan?_, 1993, pp.6

"There is essentially no poverty in Japan." --- Eamonn Fingleton, Japan Revisionist extraodinaire, in his book _Blindside: Why Japan Is Still On Track to Overtake the U.S. by the Year 2000_, 1995, pp.65

The Beltway Boys Sun. 3 am ET

The Fight for U.N. Support -- We'll look at backdoor diplomacy going on right now.

Anyone who sees fit to joke about 9/11 around the time of 9/11 is unfit to practice medicine in the USA. Perhaps they should go to Gaza and transport weapons in ambulances.

Plato's Republic is not for everyone. Aristotle, his pupil, scorned it as an attempt to create a happy state full of miserable people. Plato would have replied -- with Stalin's hearty approval, no doubt -- that its aim was not individual happiness, but justice -- the happiness of the whole. The Tokugawa aim was neither happiness nor justice; it was order. Whatever conduced to order was good; whatever upset it -- even justice, at times -- was evil.
The bakufu, writes Harvard historian Howard Hibbett, "prohibited everything it did not require."

A rebellion by starving peasants, one of many, shows how committed the bakufu was, at the expense of every other consideration, to its supreme virtue. In 1651, a poor Chiba farmer named Sakura Sogoro presented a petition to the shogun on behalf of 300 followers suffering under a local lord's misrule. The lord was found guilty and punished -- but for having dared to challenge authority, Sakura was crucified. So was his wife. Their children were beheaded. It is an early instance of collective responsibility, a key Tokugawa tenet aimed at keeping the people terrified to the point of paralyzed, grovelling orderliness.

.... Tokugawa Japan was a philosophical state. Its ruling class was steeped in philosophy, its laws were founded on philosophically defined virtues, essences and universal absolutes that only philosophers could see -- hence their claim to the obedience of the masses, who were expected to recognize, if nothing else, their own incurable blindness. Tokugawa philosophers, like Plato's, were, ideally, military men trained to soar so high above the imprisoning ego-self that life and death were a matter of perfect indifference to them. Service to the state was all. Self-gratification was contemptible.

The FBI's suspicions of Mad were fed by a steady drip of letters from Middle America, which make up most of the files. "I feel that this magazine is a diabolical form of Red Propaganda used to infiltrate the minds of our Teenagers to destroy the American way of life," wrote Greater Knoxville Youth for Christ. "This magazine constantly rebukes George Washington and Abraham Lincoln," wrote another who detected the influence of Moscow in the editorial office. "Satire is one thing; but to disrespect our American heritage and our way of life ... is startling to see. The leaders of our country are made to look like fools. In the October issue, you are ridiculed!"

Before Tammy Millikin moved to Memphis she had one big question about her new city: "Where are the bad neighborhoods?"

Then she promptly moved to an area she was warned against.

"That's where the diverse neighborhoods are," said Millikin. "It's critical that I find a place where my children could grow up around people with different backgrounds."

In fact, some free speech experts might say the same of Spade's lawyers. "I suspect what is going on here is a SLAPP suit," says Gary Daniels, spokesman for the National Coalition Against Censorship. In a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) case, "a very large corporation will sue an organization or individual even if they know they don't have a case. Their goal is to either bankrupt the person or shut them up." ... After reading Stocky's piece, Daniels said that while one line of the story was "problematic," the piece as a whole "seems pretty tame. My fear is that even if David Spade's people don't have a case, they're forcing her to shut up because they don't like the message."

The administration immediately set about negotiating the language of one or more resolutions giving Bush the diplomatic backing to go to war amid indications that some prominent critics are beginning to fall into line.

An official briefed on U.S. diplomacy told the Daily News that in exchange for Russia's support, Bush is prepared to assure President Vladimir Putin that a new Iraqi regime would honor its debts to Moscow, including a 10-year, $40 billion trade deal.

Efforts to stroke China - which, like Russia, has veto power in the Security Council - are less certain, but U.S. officials believe Beijing ultimately can be persuaded to abstain.

According to an ex-North Korean intelligence agent, who we'll call Aoyama, beautiful North Korean women are usually put at the beck and call of visiting foreign VIPs.... Aoyama says the receptionists are told to take care of their guests' needs from morning to midnight. Indeed, one Japanese politician, who has visited North Korea in the past, said that the services of these women left nothing to be desired....

The women all come from a well-known group called Yorokobi-gumi (group of joy). Yorokobi-gumi was started in the mid-1970s for the benefit of Kim who was then chief secretary. It was divided into three groups �Eone to sing and dance to entertain guests at banquets; one to give guests massages; and one to provide sexual services....

Said an ex-dancer, who took asylum in South Korea, "The dancers all had to have pretty much the same appearance �Esmall and round-faced. That's how Kim Jong Il prefers them."... Considering the importance of Koizumi's visit, we can expect the most stunning women to be on duty next Tuesday.

Norway's Justice Department interprets the law to mean that sexual maturity defines child pornography.... The ministry said: "...the answer must therefore be a person that has not reached the age of 16, but if the process of sexual maturity is obviously over, they shall not be considered a child according to penal code paragraph 204."

Nihad Awad, executive director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a U.S.-based lobby group, said that not only is American culture aberrant to Muslims, American entertainment is guilty of perpetuating negative stereotypes.

Awad lived in Jordan in the 1970s and remembers watching such American programs as "Baretta," "Hawaii Five-0" and "The Three Stooges." But he now supports the efforts to suppress American entertainment in the Middle East.

"They don't want their societies bombarded by sex," he said. "I don't see anything strange about not letting such things be shown."

Military careers spent in hierarchical, rule-bound, tightly controlled organizations are not necessarily the best preparation for accurately judging the fluid world of politics at home and abroad.

I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Grenada? Grenada?
That didn't make any sense. I'd seen President Reagan on television about a month earlier, telling the nation about the airfield the Cubans were helping to build in Grenada, but everybody knew there was no threat in that. The Cuban military had no forces that could use the airfield, and the Soviets would never hang their asses out in such a remote and indefensible place. It was just a good propaganda mission -- socialist goodwill at work, helping a brother third world nation.

Answers? No, I never got any answers to my questions about the mission, only orders to shut up. I did as I was told. In the private world of my own thoughts, I never stopped wondering what it was all about, if Keekee had really gone over to the Sandinistas, or if he was just expendable pawn in another incomprehensible game. I just kept my thoughts to myself as my disillusion and distrust continued to grow. To this day, I'm still not sure I have any real answers. I believe this to the core of my being: When he was killed, Keekee Saenz was still working for the United States.

Howell Raines is a pain is the ass, to be sure. But he grew up in a place where to speak out against spitting on little (black) girls on their way to a (white) school was to risk ostracism as a dangerous radical.

In the 1940s and ’50s, it wasn’t the Southern conservative press that called for the overthrow of Jim Crow. It was Southern liberal editors. In doing so, they showed great insight and integrity.


While the conservative James J. Kilpatrick of the Richmond News Leader was formulating legal arguments in the 1950s to justify the white South’s “massive resistance” to school desegregation, left-leaning editors such as Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution, Hodding Carter of the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Miss., and Jonathan Daniels of the News & Observer of Raleigh were prodding their readers to step away from white supremacy and embrace a new vision for the region.

Last Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal explored this issue in its article "One reason stocks in Japan stay low: zombie companies." (Actually, its subtitle contains the most important theme: "Near-dead firms help fuel rash of price manipulation that turns off investors.") The Journal story highlights what is similar about America's bubble and what is different. What's similar is that during Japan's mania, it was an open secret that the market was manipulated. People didn't seem to mind, and in fact, stock manipulation still runs rampant there.

What's different is that part of the reason Japan has been unable to come off the mat, aside from the aftermath of its mania, is that the Japanese banks have kept businesses alive that should have gone bust. These are often referred to as the zombie companies: "alive, but nearly moribund." One thing we tend to do here in America is to let capitalism work. The dead wood does get swept away. However, the Fed is trying to use all its power to thwart the bust that follows the boom -- and this is exactly what's wrong with its present policies. Capitalism is all about creative destruction, and booms and busts are part of the landscape. Regrettably, our Fed thinks it's so omnipotent that it can stem the tide.

"One of my fears is that they'll use one of these for a spectacular event against a large population centered at a sporting event or some other attraction," said Mica. "And that's a real concern for me."
---Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., the chairman of Congress' Subcommittee on Aviation

The Development Bank of Japan will invest as much as 7.5 billion yen ($63 million) to help fund university start-ups, part of a government plan to create 1,000 new companies within three years to boost the economy.
...
Using government funds to encourage college students and professors to turn research into businesses may spur more private investment. New funding sources are vital to supplement a banking system that for decades has focused on cementing ties with large businesses such as the Mitsubishi, Sumitomo and Mitsui groups.

"The venture capital industry is really immature compared with the U.S.,'' said Hiroshi Miyamoto, Japan representative at Constellation Partners, which has invested $450 million in venture capital funds worldwide. "Japan has a herd mentality and everybody wants to do what the guy next door is doing.''

College campuses spawned some of the biggest new U.S. companies in recent years, including Dell Computer Corp., the world's second-largest personal computer maker. Stanford University electrical engineering students Jerry Yang and David Filo formed Yahoo! Inc. in 1994, the most-used Internet search site, receiving funds a year later from Japan's Softbank Corp.

After the O.J. verdict, it was noted by some feminists that "race trumped gender." What we've seen since September 11th is that multiculturalism trumps everything. Its grip on the imagination of the Western elites is unshakeable. Even President Bush, in the month after September 11th, felt obliged to line up a series of photo-ops so he could declare that "Islam is peace" while surrounded by representatives of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an organization which objected, on the grounds of "ethnic and religious stereotyping," to the prosecution of two men in Chicago for the "honour killing" of their female cousin.

The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists. Of course we expected bewilderment from people who still think of race as biology. We frequently get letters accusing us of being "racists," just like the KKK, and have even been called a "hate group." ...

Every group within white America has at one time or another advanced its particular and narrowly defined interests at the expense of black people as a race. That applies to labor unionists, ethnic groups, college students, schoolteachers, taxpayers, and white women. .... The editors meant it when they replied to a reader, "Make no mistake about it: we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as 'the white race' is destroyed—not 'deconstructed' but destroyed."

"The influence of American pro-Communist ideologues in the government heightened tensions that brought about the war between Japan and the United States," the authors assert.
The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin feared being drawn into a two-front war with Germany and Japan; hence it was essential to turn Tokyo's attentions elsewhere. The Soviets dispatched an intelligence operative to Washington, where he met with Harry Dexter White, a high Treasury Department official, at the Old Ebbitt Grill.
White had been under the control of GRU (Red Army intelligence) since the early 1930s, and he willingly followed Soviet instructions. Over the next month, in his role as a key economic adviser, White steered the Roosevelt administration into bargaining demands that he knew the Japanese would not accept, chiefly withdrawal of their troops from China and Manchuria and "an end to expansionism." He also urged an oil embargo — a taunt that led to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

If God gave us the telephone book instead of the Bible, would people kill each other over area codes?

Why aren't people climbing trees anymore? Are they afraid to find out what's up at the top?

Ever since I was a kid, I've always glanced at Italy whenever I'm near a globe.

No matter how many times people try to tell me that it's wonderful, I still don't see the need for scenery.

First of all, it is flawed to place stock market Bubbles at the epicenter of economic analysis. The U.S. equity Bubble was only one (conspicuous) component of the ongoing Great Credit Bubble. It is, moreover, simply failed doctrine for Dr. Greenspan to completely disregard the Credit system when discussing asset Bubbles, especially considering the revolutionary developments and unprecedented expansion experienced over the past decade. Not once in Greenspan’s speech does he use the word “Credit.” There is no mention of lending excess, money or Credit expansion, destabilizing speculation, the overly aggressive financial sector, or the expansive mortgage finance super-industry. No mention of junk bonds, agency debt, mortgage or asset-backed securities, bank loans, or other Credit instruments that provided the purchasing power for the boom now turning bust. After shunning his responsibility for protecting the stability of our financial system, Dr. Greenspan would today like us to believe that it was outside of the control of the Fed to prevent the stock market Bubble. While we would certainly dispute this point, we in the past did write that to get the developing Bubble under control would have required only three phone calls - and they would have been local calls to leading instigators of Credit excess, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Home Loan Bank System. A few additional New York calls to speak with Goldman, Merrill, JPMorganChase, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup could have worked wonders.


These institutions evolved into the core of an expansive and uncontrolled Credit mechanism and Chairman Greenspan had a courtside seat next to the players (the coach or the trainer?). Any analysis that ignores the key role played by the ballooning financial sector and leveraged speculation is a disservice and intellectual injustice. Greenspan goes so far as to state, “It is generally the changing risk preferences of investors, not of corporate managers, that govern the mix of risk investment in an economy… To be sure, managers’ personal sense of risk aversion can sometimes influence the capital investment process, but it is probably a secondary effect relative to the vagaries of investor psychology.”


No way; this is erroneous analysis. An uncontrolled Credit system and monetary excess will reward risk-taking, reckless spending, and destabilizing speculation, while nurturing the resulting financial and economic maladjustments. Monetary recklessness ensures the unstable vagaries of the marketplace, and propels the dominance of speculators over true investors throughout the equity, Credit and currency markets. The responsibility of financial and economic instability lies first and foremost with the accommodative Federal Reserve and the ungoverned financial sector, not “the vagaries of investor psychology.” Have we learned nothing from history?

[W]ere it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

I would like to host my own radio talk show. Does anyone care? Would anyone like to sponsor my efforts? Does anyone care about what I've learned about my 37 years in travel on this planet? Most of you are unaware of the things I have to tell. The information that I can share is important to the future, health and survival of all things including mother earth, the play and future of our children. Not everything can be set to music. If anyone cares to respond or help me in my endeavors, please email me.

Sincerely, Merle Haggard

merle@merlehaggard.com

Lance Hatler, was irritated with the "measly 60 Hz" that the electric company fed into his house and decided he could do better. "I thought my overclocked computer system is pretty sweet. Why can't I apply the same principle to my house? I mean besides the fire code," questioned Hatler.... Next on the agenda for Hatler is adding water cooling so he can safely break the 1 GHz barrier. “There's always a network of pipes around the house. I just have to add more tubes," said Hatler. "I just wish I could find a place that would sell thermal compound in 55 gallon drums."

Worried by the sharp rise in city temperatures during the summertime, top government experts are drawing up an action plan to try to tackle the phenomenon of urban ``heat islands.''

Suggestions are set to include incentives to persuade the owners of buildings in Tokyo to allocate more space for greenery on the top of high-rise buildings. Also in the works is a revolutionary plan to try to cool the capital by channeling water through underground pipes.

The United States accused the Taliban of protecting al Qaeda, the group Washington holds responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.

Driving across America is to traverse a mosaic of local radio stations. Outside the metropolitan areas, two kinds of programme dominate: the God channels and "C&W". Bible-bashers threatening hellfire and fat guys with silly hats, twanging geetars, fu-manchus and pony tails, serenading purty gals, Chevy Tahoes, bars duskily lit by Budweiser neon, and the "real" values of red neck and blue collar.

DiLorenzo cites John Quincy Adams as supporting a right to secession in his 1839 Discourse, "The Jubilee of the Constitution," pp 66-69. On page 68 of the Discourse, Adams writes, "In the calm hours of self-possession, the right of a state to nullify an act of Congress, is too absurd for argument, and too odious for discussion.. The right of a state to secede from the union is equally disowned by the principles of the Declaration of Independence."
Adams's subsequent reference to a right of the people in the states to dissolve the political bands that had held them in union is explicitly compared by him to the revolution of 1776. But that makes it, not a legal right, but a natural, extra-legal right. In short, it is the right of revolution as found in Locke and acknowledged by nearly every American statesman from Jefferson to Lincoln, and measured, as Adams says, by "[t]he tie of conscience, binding them to the retributive justice of Heaven." Since DiLorenzo apparently does not understand the distinction between legal and natural right, he completely misreads the whole speech.

There is an active hostility toward graduates of elite universities, and an emphasis on tests of rugged physical bravado (jumping out of planes) rather than intellect (acquiring foreign languages). Evidence of intellectual standards that would embarrass an ox pervade the endless mandatory classes and briefings: George Tenet’s recent assurances to agency employees that whereas they missed the warnings about the terrorist attacks of September 11th, they have prevented many others, and should therefore feel good about themselves, is characteristic of the endless stream of meaningless, self-congratulatory, insipid pablum in which agency employees routinely bathe and are bathed.

But the central reason that the agency cannot get a handle on the Middle East is its myopic internal security screening, a process that winnows out the most talented candidates or humiliates them so profoundly they no longer want anything to do with the intelligence community.

Common sense suggests that the most coveted employees in an intelligence service would be those who speak languages such as Arabic, Farsi, Dari and Urdu; those who have lived for many years in the countries where those languages are spoken; and those who therefore have a rich and profound knowledge of the target countries’ culture. But it is precisely these employees who cannot pass the agency’s security gauntlet.

Foreign affairs. Prospective employees are required to list the names and addresses of every foreign person with whom they have a close or continuing relationship. Someone who speaks Arabic with native fluency almost certainly has friends and relatives in the Middle East. If he has too many of either, it is unlikely that he will receive a security clearance. He’ll be required to return for polygraph after polygraph, during which time he will be abused and insulted. His application will sit for years; he will be given no information about its status, and will be treated dismissively when he calls for information. After the seventh polygraph and the second year of waiting for a clearance, he will give up. The clever candidate with fluent Arabic and a degree from Harvard will probably take a job with Shell, where he’ll be paid six times what he would be paid by the CIA, and treated with at least that much more respect.

In one case, security investigators became exercised because an employee was discovered to have visited the embassies of several Middle Eastern countries years prior to his entry on duty – not surprisingly, since he had worked for six years as an oil industry executive. Rather than joyously celebrating their good fortune in finding this espionage gem, they fired him. As a consequence, the case officer cadre tends to be full of Mormons and big, blond, beefy Pentecostals from the South, men as out of place in the bazaars as Chandler’s tarantula on angel food.

"Do we really need a book for sale in every store in America that outlines our weaknesses?" asked the administration source, who asked not to be named for this report. "If Mr. Gertz is trying to embarrass the country, I would simply ask, 'What is to gain?' And where is his loyalty?"

Here's my nightmare scenario:

We call off the dogs on Iraq. We cancel the invasion, and what's more we put an end to the no-fly zone and sanctions. Saddam thinks he's stared us down and we blinked. So does much of the rest of the Muslim world. The flight from Beirut after the Marine barracks bombing, the flight from Somalia after "Black Hawk down," our failure to respond effectively to the Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings, our failure to respond at all to the Cole bombing, our failure (so far) to kill bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and most of their top henchmen -- and now, on top of all that, Saddam's survival of the Gulf War, sanctions, and another threatened invasion rounds out the image of the United States as a contemptible paper tiger. They don't hate us any less, but they despise us all the more. Around the world, al Qaeda and similar groups are flush with new recruits.

Meanwhile, back in Iraq, the Saddam regime continues to develop weapons of mass destruction. And it continues to work with various terrorist groups. It helps some of them to develop biological or chemical weapons. Those weapons are used in a U.S. city and thousands more die. And by now, Saddam has nukes -- maybe he's even smuggled one into a U.S. city -- so we can't do to him what we did to the Taliban without risking the lives of millions.

Nagai, who appeared to be drunk during his alleged escapade, admits to the allegations against him.
"I'd come here to interview the governor once before, but was turned down, so I came here again today," he told the police.

Van Riper, who retired in 1997 as head of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, is a frequent player in military war games and is regarded as a Red team specialist. He said the constraints placed on the Opposing Force in Millennium Challenge were the most restrictive he has ever experienced in an ostensibly free-play experiment.

Exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against Blue, and on several occasions directed the Opposing Force not to use certain weapons systems against Blue. It even ordered him to reveal the location of Red units, he said

“We were directed … to move air defenses so that the Army and Marine units could successfully land,” he said. “We were simply directed to turn [the air-defense systems] off or move them. … So it was scripted to be whatever the control group wanted it to be.”

Retired Ambassador Robert Oakley, who participated in the experiment as Red civilian leader, said Van Riper was outthinking the Blue Force from the first day of the exercise.

Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders, negating Blue’s high-tech eavesdropping capabilities, Oakley said. Then, when the Blue fleet sailed into the Persian Gulf early in the experiment, Van Riper’s forces surrounded the ships with small boats and planes sailing and flying in apparently innocuous circles.

When the Blue commander issued an ultimatum to Red to surrender or face destruction, Van Riper took the initiative, issuing attack orders via the morning call to prayer broadcast from the minarets of his country’s mosques. His force’s small boats and aircraft sped into action

“By that time there wasn’t enough time left to intercept them,” Oakley said. As a result of Van Riper’s cunning, much of the Blue navy ended up at the bottom of the ocean. The Joint Forces Command officials had to stop the exercise and “refloat” the fleet in order to continue, Oakley said.

But by preventing the Opposing Force from employing the full range of its capabilities, Van Riper said, Joint Forces Command sacrificed intellectual rigor on the altar of expedience. In an Aug. 14 e-mail he sent to “professional friends” — a copy of which was obtained by Army Times — Van Riper expressed bitter frustration with what he viewed as the experiment’s failure to challenge the command’s future war-fighting concepts, of which he acknowledged he had been “a vocal critic.”

“Unfortunately, in my opinion, neither the construct nor the conduct of the exercise allowed for the concepts of rapid decisive operations, effects-based operations, or operational net assessment to be properly assessed,” he wrote. “… [I]t was in actuality an exercise that was almost entirely scripted to ensure a Blue ‘win.’ ”

Van Riper said this approach ran counter to his notion of how an experiment should function. “You don’t come to a conclusion beforehand and then work your way to that conclusion. You see how the thing plays out,” he said.

Retired Army Col. Bob Killebrew, an experienced war-game participant who did not take part in Millennium Challenge, echoed this view. “If you want a true research game, one that really tests things and stresses concepts, Red has to be allowed to win,” he said.

"I was just thinking about what I felt I missed seeing when I was growing up, a woman who could kick ---," he says. "To me, her popularity shows that I wasn't the only one missing her."

Some social critics say a sea change it is: If legislation hadn't forced schools to give girls space of their own, they say, we wouldn't be seeing images of physically powerful girls on TV today.

"Charlie's Angels" underscores their point. In the 1970s TV version, the leads were sexy, but rarely taxed much physically beyond picking up a telephone. The Angels in the recent feature remake are still babes. But their physical prowess is evident, too, as they leap free of an exploding helicopter and kick male captors into submission – while tied to a chair, no less.

Gen Van Riper, who was in command of the Red forces, meant to simulate the enemy, said exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against the Blue, or friendly, forces.

The Red forces were often directed not to use certain weapons against the Blue forces.

His complaints were reported on Friday by the Army Times, a private newspaper that covers army issues, which had a copy of an e-mail by Gen Van Riper telling his colleagues why he quit.

Mr Robert Oakley, a retired ambassador who played the role of civilian leader of the Red forces, told the Times that Gen Van Riper was outhinking the Blue forces.

For example, during computer simulations, he used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders, negating the high-tech eavesdropping capabilities of the Blue forces.