MLM Directory

How can I get a hold of people with large social networking groups or network marketing lists? My company is looking to find some people who have a large following on twitter, myspace, linkedin, etc. or someone who has a large e-mail list. Part of my job now is seeking them out. We're looking to start a new mlm and give some people with exposure a chance to be at the top right off the bat. I've found a few doing whois searches on network marketing forums and I've been trying to get through the ring of customer service people to get to an owner, but that hasn't helped much so far. Craigslist hasn't done it. People with large facebook followings never respond to their messages. Any other ideas?

Which MLM company is the best one to join? I have been approached by many mlm companies, I am just wondering which one I should join (if any) There are too many network marketing companies to choose from and every one of them tell me they are on the Top 10 MLM companies. Do I trust the lists that say they are top 10 MLM companies?

what are the chances for getting into a TOP b school with amazing work ex and a great GMAT score? i went to IIT, but never finished (left it with 3courses to finish), i have been working in a start up, where i help create a complete distribution network n I handle marketing for the whole western region of India. Here i created a turnover of more than50crores within a span of 2 years n made the company grow from Not to the market leader in its product n am currently overlooking expansion plans for the same company. I plan to work for 2-3 more years and by then we would be a public listed company and i would be running the complete marketing show for the same firm. What are the chances of me getting into a TOP B school so that i can make up for my screwed up bachelors.

ISAC Congress is held how often according to this Marketing on the Purdue University Cytometry Mail List? RE: Report from ISAC Meeting San Diego From: Adam Treister (adam@treestar.com) Date: Wed May 22 2002 - 01:45:52 EST •Next message: Susan DeMaggio: "Re: Core Manager's Workshop" •Previous message: Simon Watson: "Computer Networks" •Maybe in reply to: J.Paul Robinson: "Report from ISAC Meeting San Diego" •Next in thread: Adrian Smith: "Biotinylation reagents" •Reply: Adrian Smith: "Biotinylation reagents" •Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ] ________________________________________ > From: J.Paul Robinson [mailto:jpr@flowcyt.cyto.purdue.edu] > Subject: Report from ISAC Meeting San Diego > Colleagues: > Hello from sunny California and the ISAC XXI congress. This message comes to you > from the CYBER CAFE generously provided by Adam Triester of Tree Star, Inc of FLOJO land! > Adam has made a bank of 12 computers, a wireless network and, lots of network cables for > laptops. He has a T1 fast line and is providing FREE access for the entire congress. > The room is ALWAYS full and is definitley the most popular place in the congress. > It has nothing to do with the outstanding FREE coffee from Ryan Bros, Coffee again > generously provided by Adam. This is the best facility provided by any vendor ever!..... > so long live FLOJO.....and more free coffee and internet access.... Paul, Thanks for the kind words, but I can't take all the credit for the CyberCafe. Apple generously provided all the Macs. IT departments around the world may say that Macs are hard to network, but we put a dozen Macs on the Internet in under an hour. Apple sent top of the line G4s with Cinema displays, and Titanium PowerBooks, as well as a bunch of iMacs. Imagine what the lines would have been like if we only had three computers, as we did in Montpelier. The true highlight of the cafe was the free espresso. Thanks to Phoenix Flow Systems, Guava Technologies, PROzyme and Becton Dickinson for contributing to the coffee fund. By the time we got to the coffee I had blown the marketing budget on this endeavor, and these companies stepped in to make sure you had Ryan Brothers coffee instead of the swill we'd have gotten from the hotel. I also extend a special thanks to Kevin Becker for bringing the Mar Dels to the banquet. The best band of any ISAC I've attended. The CyberCafe crew was Jennifer Wilshire, Maciej Simm, Adam Treat and Amy Hsu. They thought they were getting a leisurely week on the beach, and ended up working 9 to 9 every day to keep the CyberCafe running. It was an exhausting schedule, and they were tireless in their support of the attendees' Internet needs. It never would have come off without them. Sophia Ascani and Alexandra Treister tie-dyed the 350 shirts. Each one is a unique work of art, and each was hand-dipped. Our garage floor has the stains to prove it. So wear them proud, and wash them in cold water. We've agreed to do it again at ISAC XXII in Montpelier. I'm just thankful this congress is only held every second year. All this marketing crap just gets in the way of my programming. Au revoir, Adam ------------------------------------------------------------------ Adam Treister Tree Star, Inc. ph: 800-366-6045 intl: 1-650-591-2854 fax: 1-650-508-9186 adam@treestar.com www.flowjo.com ------------------------------------------------------------------ ________________________________________ •Next message: Susan DeMaggio: "Re: Core Manager's Workshop" •Previous message: Simon Watson: "Computer Networks" •Maybe in reply to: J.Paul Robinson: "Report from ISAC Meeting San Diego" •Next in thread: Adrian Smith: "Biotinylation reagents" •Reply: Adrian Smith: "Biotinylation reagents" •Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ] ________________________________________ This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.6 : Thu Jan 01 2004 - 17:41:43 EST

network design homework? Adventureworks Corporation is a business process outsourcing (BPO) company catering to a clientele who sought out their needs for call support and back-end processing to 3rd party vendors. The company started in 2007 as a small enterprise focusing on call center operations with 100 agents divided into two 8-hour shifts (morning and night shifts) that accepts incoming calls. As the company outgrew its targets and expanded massively in 2008, they hired 80 additional agents for its call center operations. For their expansion into medical transcription business, they also hired 60 medical professionals. By 2009, 50 more employees were hired to focus on back-end processing, where activities include data encoding, journaling and finance support. Today, the company has 320 employees and is targeting to double this number in 2 years’ time and by 2015, their stretch goal is to increase their coverage and cater to global customers with 1200 employees. Adventureworks Corporation currently serves 14 call center, 4 medical transcription and 2 back-end processing accounts. They have an IT staff pool of 4 personnel servicing the desktops and servers which are currently not centrally managed. A total of 160 desktops, 140 of which are deployed to the account projects while the remaining are used by administration, finance, human resources, sales, marketing and IT personnel. Each desktop was purchased with applications pre-installed. For each of the accounts served by the company, a dedicated server is purchased for the repository of documents and files related to each. During a review, the following concerns were raised and the top management is determined to make the necessary changes that will have the optimum impact to the productivity of the employees while minimizing cost: • Lack of security in the file servers • No central management tool for the users as well as the desktops and servers • Information and resources are redundant and not shared • Access to email and information via internet is unavailable to employees • No web presence or website where prospective accounts or customers may view the profile and case studies of Adventureworks Corporation The requirements defined above are just some of the things they identified as priority requirements although the management acknowledges that additional services may be implemented to further improve their efficacy and efficiency as an organization. As an IT consultant, you were asked to submit a bid for this project. You are required to submit the following as a proposal for the said project: 1. Scope of the project 2. Network infrastructure design 3. List of all components that needs to be purchased and cost 4. Total project cost (including your company’s service fee)

Name the year Adam Triester announced on the Purdue Cytometry Mail List his need for help in developing FlowJo? RE: Report from ISAC Meeting San Diego From: Adam Treister (adam@treestar.com) Date: Wed May 22 2002 - 01:45:52 EST Next message: Susan DeMaggio: "Re: Core Manager's Workshop" Previous message: Simon Watson: "Computer Networks" Maybe in reply to: J.Paul Robinson: "Report from ISAC Meeting San Diego" Next in thread: Adrian Smith: "Biotinylation reagents" Reply: Adrian Smith: "Biotinylation reagents" Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > From: J.Paul Robinson [mailto:jpr@flowcyt.cyto.purdue.edu] > Subject: Report from ISAC Meeting San Diego > Colleagues: > Hello from sunny California and the ISAC XXI congress. This message comes to you > from the CYBER CAFE generously provided by Adam Triester of Tree Star, Inc of FLOJO land! > Adam has made a bank of 12 computers, a wireless network and, lots of network cables for > laptops. He has a T1 fast line and is providing FREE access for the entire congress. > The room is ALWAYS full and is definitley the most popular place in the congress. > It has nothing to do with the outstanding FREE coffee from Ryan Bros, Coffee again > generously provided by Adam. This is the best facility provided by any vendor ever!..... > so long live FLOJO..... and more free coffee and internet access.... Paul, Thanks for the kind words, but I can't take all the credit for the CyberCafe. Apple generously provided all the Macs. IT departments around the world may say that Macs are hard to network, but we put a dozen Macs on the Internet in under an hour. Apple sent top of the line G4s with Cinema displays, and Titanium PowerBooks, as well as a bunch of iMacs. Imagine what the lines would have been like if we only had three computers, as we did in Montpelier. The true highlight of the cafe was the free espresso. Thanks to Phoenix Flow Systems, Guava Technologies, PROzyme and Becton Dickinson for contributing to the coffee fund. By the time we got to the coffee I had blown the marketing budget on this endeavor, and these companies stepped in to make sure you had Ryan Brothers coffee instead of the swill we'd have gotten from the hotel. I also extend a special thanks to Kevin Becker for bringing the Mar Dels to the banquet. The best band of any ISAC I've attended. The CyberCafe crew was Jennifer Wilshire, Maciej Simm, Adam Treat and Amy Hsu. They thought they were getting a leisurely week on the beach, and ended up working 9 to 9 every day to keep the CyberCafe running. It was an exhausting schedule, and they were tireless in their support of the attendees' Internet needs. It never would have come off without them. Sophia Ascani and Alexandra Treister tie-dyed the 350 shirts. Each one is a unique work of art, and each was hand-dipped. Our garage floor has the stains to prove it. So wear them proud, and wash them in cold water. We've agreed to do it again at ISAC XXII in Montpelier. I'm just thankful this congress is only held every second year. All this marketing crap just gets in the way of my programming. Au revoir, Adam ------------------------------------------------------------------ Adam Treister Tree Star, Inc. ph: 800-366-6045 intl: 1-650-591-2854 fax: 1-650-508-9186 adam@treestar.com www.flowjo.com ------------------------------------------------------------------ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Next message: Susan DeMaggio: "Re: Core Manager's Workshop" Previous message: Simon Watson: "Computer Networks" Maybe in reply to: J.Paul Robinson: "Report from ISAC Meeting San Diego" Next in thread: Adrian Smith: "Biotinylation reagents" Reply: Adrian Smith: "Biotinylation reagents" Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.6 : Thu Jan 01 2004 - 17:41:43 EST a tractor and other farm tools From: Larry Seamer (la...@athena.unm.edu) Date: Fri Jul 22 1994 - 15:12:34 EST • Next message: Brian Hall: "Employment Opportunity" • Previous message: Larry Seamer: "CD-ROM" • Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ] ________________________________________ The time has come the walrus said to speak of many things of shoes and ships and sealling wax of cabbages and kings of why the B-D is giving not and whether a tractor sings. I finally feel philosophical enough to impose some of my thoughts regarding the recent B-D software debate on my colleagues. I use B-D in this discussion as a paradigm for all flow manufacturers and biotech companies. Many of the arguments I've read on this network seem to reflect a disdain for business in academia. In other words, the notion exists that a profit motive is less than honorable and often interferes with legitimate scientific inquiry. I contend that corporate profit is in the best interest of academic science. B-D makes money by selling cytometers, not software. Software sales can not support the overhead necessary to build the hardware. Every company tries to get a "leg-up" on their competition with innovation, low price, more features, etc. We are the beneficiaries of this competition. I concede B-D's point, giving away their 'leg-up' will in the end be counterproductive to B-D and to those of us who rely on B-D. If B-D does not make money, they go away and we all build Cytomuts. I am not very handy, so, this institution would probably be flow-less if someone did not sell cytometers. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is fodder for future discussions. Many of us have been in this field long enough to remember when our monoclonal antibodies were limited, quality was inconsistent, standardization was poor and support was nonexistent. Also, new antibodies were slow in appearing. Thankfully, it is profitable to sell monoclonal antibodies and the research which requires them has flourished. One final point on software. As some have noted in past messages, the best software has come from independent providers (Verity, Phoenix, TrueFacts, TechTeam, etc). If software is given away, it will no longer be feasible to sell it and those who make a living by providing us with innovative and useful software will go the way of the Dodo. We will be left with only those who are willing to give it away or (B-D, Coulter and Ortho). As those companies have argued, they do not make money on software. Therefore, it is unreasonable to think that we can count on the flow manufacturers to meet our analysis needs. That leaves only our colleagues who are willing to give it away as a source new software. I hope the parallel to monoclonal antibodies is apparent. ________________________________________ • Next message: Brian Hall: "Employment Opportunity" • Previous message: Larry Seamer: "CD-ROM" • Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ] ________________________________________ This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.6 : Thu Jan 01 2004 - 17:27:06 EST Re: Thanks for the suggestions - was rendering in 3D This message: [ Message body ] [ More options ] Related messages: [ Next message ] [ Previous message ] [ In reply to ] [ Next in thread ] [ Replies ] From: Adam Treister <...@treestar.com> Date: Thu May 18 2006 - 20:20:18 EDT On May 12, 2006, at 10:02 AM, Bushnell, Timothy wrote: > Thanks to everyone who suggested possible software to view data in > 3D. I’ll be trying several different platforms to see which works > best for our applications. > > The suggested platforms include (in alphabetical order): > > Coulters CXP software for the FC500 > > Rflowcyt > > Weasel: http://www.wehi.edu.au/cytometry/WEASELv... > > Winlist 3d from Verity House Software (www.vsh.com) > > Regards > > TimTim, With all due respect to these solutions, you shouldn't think that Mario could sleep at night if anyone could perform high dimensional analysis better than FlowJo. Disclaimer: (it shows up as a Quicktime movie), but that too is very difficult to use in a way that's better than two 2D graphs connected by a gate. If you really want to increase your dimensionality, we're just adding a new "Polyvariate Plot" to the Mac version of FlowJo for next week's ISAC. The idea was taken from RFlowCyt. We've added interface refinements to make it more interactive, but like any good R tool, it'll astound and confuse you. http://www.flowjo.com/v8/html/polyvarplo... The Polyvariate Plot can model transformations in any number of dimensions. So it will produce a 3D plot, or as many dimensions as you want (Shown below in 5D). And it projects these transformations onto a graph window, so you can gate on them. We're still trying to figure out the applications for this visualization, but if you're looking for another dimension as a way to differentiate populations, we think this is potentially much more power powerful than conventional spatial projections. This is explained in the poster P178 at ISAC next week, or at the web page above. Be forewarned: This is the opposite end of the sizzle/steak spectrum. Most people use 3D graphs to make their PowerPoints look spiffy. These graphs are absolutely impossible to explain in a presentation. Adam ----------------------- A 3D plot:  A 5D plot:  Received on Fri May 19 17:58:00 2006 This message: [ Message body ] Next message: Jerry Spangrude: "Making tandem conjugates" Previous message: Rebe...@UCHSC.edu: "Sorting dendritic cells and platelets on FACSAria" In reply to: Bushnell, Timothy: "Thanks for the suggestions - was rendering in 3D" Next in thread: Jerry Spangrude: "Making tandem conjugates" Reply: Jerry Spangrude: "Making tandem conjugates" Reply: A.J. Rossini: "Re: Thanks for the suggestions - was rendering in 3D" Contemporary messages sorte http://advenet.com/flowcytometry/blog/default.aspx

What sort of punishment does this man desirve? Man described as a top spammer arrested By GENE JOHNSON, AP Legal Affairs WriterThu May 31, 8:02 AM ET A 27-year-old man described as one of the world's most prolific spammers was arrested Wednesday, and federal authorities said computer users across the Web could notice a decrease in the amount of junk e-mail. Robert Alan Soloway is accused of using networks of compromised "zombie" computers to send out millions upon millions of spam e-mails. "He's one of the top 10 spammers in the world," said Tim Cranton, a Microsoft Corp. lawyer who is senior director of the company's Worldwide Internet Safety Programs. "He's a huge problem for our customers. This is a very good day." A federal grand jury last week returned a 35-count indictment against Soloway charging him with mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering. Soloway pleaded not guilty Wednesday afternoon to all charges after a judge determined that — even with four bank accounts seized by the government — he was sufficiently well off to pay for his own lawyer. He has been living in a ritzy apartment and drives an expensive Mercedes convertible, said prosecutor Kathryn Warma. Prosecutors are seeking to have him forfeit $773,000 they say he made from his business, Newport Internet Marketing Corp. A public defender who represented him for Wednesday's hearing declined to comment. Prosecutors say Soloway used computers infected with malicious code to send out millions of junk e-mails since 2003. The computers are called "zombies" because owners typically have no idea their machines have been infected. He continued his activities even after Microsoft won a $7 million civil judgment against him in 2005 and the operator of a small Internet service provider in Oklahoma won a $10 million judgment, prosecutors said. U.S. Attorney Jeff Sullivan said Wednesday that the case is the first in the country in which federal prosecutors have used identity theft statutes to prosecute a spammer for taking over someone else's Internet domain name. Soloway could face decades in prison, though prosecutors said they have not calculated what guideline sentencing range he might face. The investigation began when the authorities began receiving hundreds of complaints about Soloway, who had been featured on a list of known spammers kept by The Spamhaus Project, an international anti-spam organization. The Santa Barbara County, Calif., Department of Social Services said it was spending $1,000 a week to fight the spam it was receiving, and other businesses and individuals complained of having their reputations damaged when it appeared spam was originating from their computers. "This is not just a nuisance. This is way beyond a nuisance," Warma said. Soloway used the networks of compromised computers to send out unsolicited bulk e-mails urging people to use his Internet marketing company to advertise their products, authorities said. People who clicked on a link in the e-mail were directed to his Web site. There, Soloway advertised his ability to send out as many as 20 million e-mail advertisements over 15 days for $495, the indictment said. The Spamhaus Project rejoiced at his arrest. "Soloway has been a long-term nuisance on the Internet — both in terms of the spam he sent, and the people he duped to use his spam service," organizers wrote on Spamhaus.org. Soloway remained in federal detention pending a hearing Monday.

how will demo explain their lies about insurance companys profits now that the truth is out? WASHINGTON – Quick quiz: What do these enterprises have in common? Farm and construction machinery, Tupperware, the railroads, Hershey sweets, Yum food brands and Yahoo? Answer: They're all more profitable than the health insurance industry. In the health care debate, Democrats and their allies have gone after insurance companies as rapacious profiteers making "immoral" and "obscene" returns while "the bodies pile up." Ledgers tell a different reality. Health insurance profit margins typically run about 6 percent, give or take a point or two. That's anemic compared with other forms of insurance and a broad array of industries, even some beleaguered ones. Profits barely exceeded 2 percent of revenues in the latest annual measure. This partly explains why the credit ratings of some of the largest insurers were downgraded to negative from stable heading into this year, as investors were warned of a stagnant if not shrinking market for private plans. Insurers are an expedient target for leaders who want a government-run plan in the marketplace. Such a public option would force private insurers to trim profits and restrain premiums to compete, the argument goes. This would "keep insurance companies honest," says President Barack Obama. The debate is loaded with intimations that insurers are less than straight, when they are not flatly accused of malfeasance. They may not have helped their case by commissioning a report that looked primarily at the elements of health care legislation that might drive consumer costs up while ignoring elements aimed at bringing costs down. Few in the debate seem interested in a true balance sheet. But in pillorying insurers over profits, the critics are on shaky ground. A look at some claims, and the numbers: THE CLAIMS _"I'm very pleased that (Democratic leaders) will be talking, too, about the immoral profits being made by the insurance industry and how those profits have increased in the Bush years." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who also welcomed the attention being drawn to insurers' "obscene profits." _"Keeping the status quo may be what the insurance industry wants their premiums have more than doubled in the last decade and their profits have skyrocketed." Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen, member of the Democratic leadership. _"Health insurance companies are willing to let the bodies pile up as long as their profits are safe." A MoveOn.org ad. THE NUMBERS: Health insurers posted a 2.2 percent profit margin last year, placing them 35th on the Fortune 500 list of top industries. As is typical, other health sectors did much better — drugs and medical products and services were both in the top 10. The railroads brought in a 12.6 percent profit margin. Leading the list: network and other communications equipment, at 20.4 percent. HealthSpring, the best performer in the health insurance industry, posted 5.4 percent. That's a less profitable margin than was achieved by the makers of Tupperware, Clorox bleach and Molson and Coors beers. The star among the health insurance companies did, however, nose out Jack in the Box restaurants, which only achieved a 4 percent margin. UnitedHealth Group, reporting third quarter results last week, saw fortunes improve. It managed a 5 percent profit margin on an 8 percent growth in revenue. Van Hollen is right that premiums have more than doubled in a decade, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation study that found a 131 percent increase. But were the Bush years golden ones for health insurers? Not judging by profit margins, profit growth or returns to shareholders. The industry's overall profits grew only 8.8 percent from 2003 to 2008, and its margins year to year, from 2005 forward, never cracked 8 percent. The latest annual profit margins of a selection of products, services and industries: Tupperware Brands, 7.5 percent; Yahoo, 5.9 percent; Hershey, 6.1 percent; Clorox, 8.7 percent; Molson Coors Brewing, 8.1 percent; construction and farm machinery, 5 percent; Yum Brands (think KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell), 8.5 percent. ___

I need your reactions about this article. Make it long please...? RP ranks 71st in WEF competitiveness index MANILA, Philippines--THE PHILIPPINES' economic competitiveness improved slightly this year, although it remained one of the least competitive in the Southeast Asian region, according to the latest report of the World Economic Forum. In the WEF Global Competitiveness Report 2007-2008, the Philippines was at No. 71, a four-notch improvement over the rank of 75 last year. The United States maintained its ranking as the world's most competitive economy due to "a winning combination of highly sophisticated and innovative companies operating in very efficient factor markets." Singapore led the Southeast Asian region in the list, improving its rank to seventh from eighth place last year. Among the eight Asean countries covered, the Philippines came ahead only of Cambodia and Timor-Leste. Other Asean countries that were included in the report were Malaysia (ranked 21st from 19th), Thailand (28th), Indonesia (54th) and Vietnam (68th from 64th). Asean members Brunei, Laos and Myanmar were not included. "The Asia region encompasses the entire gamut in our ranking, from highly competitive countries to the most challenged, drawing an extremely heterogeneous picture with respect to the levels of growth and development achieved in the region," WEF's head of strategic insight teams Fiona Paua said in a statement. "Nine Asia-Pacific countries are among the top 30 in the Global Competitiveness Index rankings, led by Singapore, Japan (8th), Korea (11th) and Hong Kong SAR (12th), while Mongolia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Nepal and Timor-Leste are all positioned at the very bottom of the rankings," she added. The rankings are determined based on publicly available data and the Executive Opinion Survey, a yearly survey conducted by the WEF with its network of partner institutes. In the Philippines, this survey is conducted by the Makati Business Club.

Does one need a degree to become a CEO ? I say No .? Success Without a College Degree? Six Hot Shots Who Made It Kate Lorenz, CareerBuilder.com Editor Many think the only way to succeed is through education. While piling on the degrees can earn you piles of dough -- and debt -- it's not the only option. Some of today's most successful people don't have a college degree. But what they lack in academic credentials, they make up for in tenacity, brains, guts and strong business sense. Richard Branson In 1970, Richard Branson founded Virgin as a mail order record retailer, and not long afterward he opened a record shop in London. Two years later, the first Virgin artist, Mike Oldfield, recorded "Tubular Bells." Since then many household names, including Ben Harper, Fatboy Slim, Perry Farrell, Gorillaz, Lenny Kravitz, Janet Jackson and The Rolling Stones have helped to make Virgin Music one of the top record companies in the world. Branson sold the equity of Virgin Music Group -- record labels, music publishing and recording studios -- in 1992 in a $1 billion deal, but he remains chairman of Virgin Group, which today includes Virgin Atlantic, Books, Games, LifeCare, Limousines, Megastores and Hotels. Barry Diller Barry Diller started his career in the mail room of the William Morris Agency after dropping out of UCLA after one semester. He was hired by ABC in 1966 where he created the ABC Movie of the Week, pioneering the concept of the made-for-television movie. At age 32, he became president of Paramount Pictures, which produced a string of successful television shows (Laverne and Shirley, Taxi, Cheers) and feature films (Saturday Night Fever, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Beverly Hills Cop) under his helm. From 1984 to 1992, he was chairman and CEO of Fox Studios and was responsible for creating the Fox Broadcasting Company. Today, Diller is the chairman of Expedia and the chairman and CEO of IAC/InterActiveCorp, which includes Citysearch, Evite, Home Shopping Network, Lending Tree, Match.com and Ticketmaster . Matt Drudge Pundit, blogger and radio personality Matt Drudge is best known as the proprietor of the Drudge Report Web site. "The only good grades I got in school were for current events," he has said of his education. Drudge opted out of college and floated among a number of odd jobs including convenience store clerk, book salesman and grocery store sales assistant. In 1989, he moved to Los Angeles and took a job in the gift shop of CBS studios, eventually working his way up to manager. The inside scoop he learned while in this position was allegedly part of the inspiration for founding his gossip rag The Drudge Report. The tabloid made gained notoriety when it was the first to break the news of a relationship between White House intern Monica Lewinsky and President Bill Clinton in 1998. Janus Friis Named to Time Magazine's 2006 list of 100 most influential people, Janus Friis holds no formal education. He worked at the help desk of CyberCity, one of Denmark's first ISPs and later worked at Tele2, the leading alternative consumer oriented pan-European telecom operator. It was at Tele2 where Friis met Niklas Zennström, with whom he co-founded the file-sharing application KaZaA and Skype, the peer-to-peer telephony application. In early 2006, Friis and Zennström sold Skype to eBay for $2.6 billion. Rachael Ray Rachael Ray's career started at Macy's department store, first at the candy counter and then as the manager of the fresh foods department. Ray quickly followed with stints in gourmet markets and restaurants in New York. At gourmet food market Cowan & Lobel, she began a series of cooking classes -- 30 Minute Meals. Those classes became so popular that she was soon doing weekly segments for the evening news. Today, Ray is an Emmy-winning television personality who hosts a nationally syndicated talk show and four different programs the Food Network, publishes her own magazine, and has written multiple cookbooks. Jeff Valdez Named one of AdAge's Marketing 50 in 2005, Jeff Valdez grew up the youngest of nine children in a housing project in Pueblo, Colorado. As a young adult, he moved through several jobs and ended up as a drummer with a lounge band called Wildfire. Valdez later returned to Colorado after about 10 years of touring and opened a comedy club where he did stand-up. In 1990, he threw his hat into the political ring and made a failed bid for mayor of Colorado Springs. But in 2004, he launched Si TV, the first all-English language network targeting a Hispanic audience. Anna Wintour Best identified by her trademark sunglasses and pageboy hairstyle, Anna Wintour is an icon of the fashion world. She reportedly attended North London Collegiate School, but never graduated. She started in 1970 working in the fashion department of Harpers and Queen in London. In 1976, she was named fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar, followed by a brief stint at New York Magazine, three years as creative director of American Vogue, and finally named editor of British Vogue in 1986. In 1998, she became editor-in-chief of American Vogue. Wintour's work style is so notorious, the novel "The Devil Wears Prada" and its subsequent motion picture are said to be based on her. In recent years, she's focused on many philanthropic endeavors including raising more than $10 million for AIDS, putting Vogue's support behind women-owned businesses in Kabul, Afganistan, and promoting various post-9/11 campaigns. Sources: Virgin Group Web site, "Tavis Smiley" on PBS, FoodTV.com, Washington Post Company Web site, Museum of Broadcast Communications, Time.com, BusinessWeek.com, Hispanictrends.com, Skype.com, Vogue.com

Need something else to do? eRepublik is about changing the course of history in a huge virtual society. As a citizen in this New World of 98,295 you have the power to make a difference and fulfill your economic, political or military goals like never possible before. Lead your citizens to prosperity as a country president or control the market as a rich company manager. With over 52 countries, 10,879 businesses, and varied country resources, your strategy and know-how can take you to the top. Become influential with the power of your words, win others over with your ideas, or interview celebrities - the choice is yours. By starting your own newspaper and networking with your fellow citizens the impact of your voice is up to you. Diplomacy helps, but when it comes to war you will need to get a weapon and defend your country's borders - or expand them. From showing your patriotism to being a mercenary, the future of the New World is in your hands. If you would like to join - send supersoccerdude@gmail.com a message, I'll send you an invite. :D If you ever need some in-game help, toss me a pm, if you accept my invite, I should be automatically on your friends list :)

TODAY IS GOOGLE BIRTH DAY? HAPPY BIRTH DAY GOOGLE Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products,[5] and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program.[6][7] The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, often dubbed the "Google Guys",[8][9][10] while the two were attending Stanford University as PhD candidates. It was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998, and its initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. At that time Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for twenty years, until the year 2024.[11] The company's mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful",[12] and the company's unofficial slogan – coined by Google engineer Amit Patel[13] and supported by Paul Buchheit – is "Don't be evil".[14][15] In 2006, the company moved to its current headquarters in Mountain View, California. It has been estimated that Google runs over one million servers in data centers around the world,[16] and processes over one billion search requests[17] and about twenty-four petabytes of user-generated data every day.[18][19][20][21] Google's rapid growth since its incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond the company's core web search engine. The company offers online productivity software, such as its Gmail email service, and social networking tools, including Orkut and, more recently, Google Buzz and Google+. Google's products extend to the desktop as well, with applications such as the web browser Google Chrome, the Picasa photo organization and editing software, and the Google Talk instant messaging application. Notably, Google leads the development of the Android mobile operating system, used on a number of phones such as the Motorola Droid and the Samsung Galaxy smartphone series', as well as the new Google Chrome OS,[22] best known as the main operating system on the Cr-48 and also, since 15 June 2011, on commercial Chromebooks such as the Samsung Series 5[23] and Acer AC700.[24] Alexa lists the main U.S.-focused google.com site as the Internet's most visited website, and numerous international Google sites (google.co.in(14) and most visited site in India, google.co.uk etc.) are in the top hundred, as are several other Google-owned sites such as YouTube (Alexa:3), Blogger (Alexa:6), and Orkut.[25] Google also ranks number two in the BrandZ brand equity database.[26] The dominant market position of Google's services has led to criticism of the company over issues including privacy, copyright, and censorship.

What are the best MLN/network marketing companies out there? I was just curious as to what are some 5 star MLN/Network Marketing Companies out there now a days. I would like to see you list them. Give me your Top 5. What are the big Names right now that are being successful. Please leave me a link to each company if possible.

Oxy Morons List Them !!? Yes, this is for all those oxy morons, just list them i don't care, how many you list, just have fun ! Heres Some I Kno ~ FreezerBurn Jumbo Shrimp Lets be Alone Together.. Fresh Food Awfully Cute Thats Cold As Hell Pretty Ugly Calm Wnd Cold Fire Found Missing Living Dead Old News hair growth Haitian former President-for-life Jean-Claude Duvalier half dead Half dressed half empty half full half naked half true Halfway done Ham steak handgun safety Happily married happy apathy happy demise happy fault happy Monday happy pessimist hard curve hard cushion hard liquor hard pillow Hard Roll harmless abuse harmless crime harmless lie harmless pollution harmless pornography harmless sin toll free tomorrow today tomorrows' headlines today top floor totalitarian democracy totally partial tough love traditionally radical traffic flow tragic comedy train schedule tranquil fiesta transient stability traumatic bonding harmonious discord hasten slowly Hazardous waste disposal head butt health-care system healthful-city environment healthy chocolate healthy city environment HEALTHY COMPETITION Healthy tan Heartfelt Politics heavy gas heifer bull Helicopter flight Hell’s Angels here and there high ground Higher education highly visible covert operation High-Speed Computer hilarious funeral history of the future Historical Current Event Holistic Healing hollow point holy hell holy land Holy Roman Empire holy war home office home school Homeopathic Medicine homework honest bureaucratic snafu honest convict honest crook honest graft honest insurance companies honest liar Honest Politician honest thief hopeful pessimist hopelessly optimistic horribly decent horse fly hospital food hot chili Hot Ice / Icy Hot Hot water heater house boat House Ethics Committee huge market niche huge shortage Human evolution human robot humane robotics humanitarian invasion hypothetical situations Hyundai Excel Back to Top IBM compatible IBM-Apple compatible icy hot Idiot Savant idly laborious ignorant professor ill fortune ill health immigration control impatient patient important trivia inarticulate writer Income Tax incomplete cure increasing declines increasingly little incredibly common incredibly dull incredibly real Indecent exposure indifferently attentive indirect communication Industrial Park inexpensive car inexpensive house inexpensive medical care Information Superhighway initial conclusion initial results initial retirement innocent bureaucratic blunder Innocent Criminal Insane logic Insanely Normal Insomniac dreams inside out insincere thanks insincere vow Instant Classic instant folk hero intelligent fight intelligent news coverage intense apathy intense disinterest interested students interest free loan internal exile Internal Revenue Service intimate murder intimate strangers invisible ink irate patient ironwood Back to Top Job security journalistic integrity joyful trouble jumbo shrimp Jump start jungle gym junior senator junk bonds junk food just war justice rehnquist Justice Thomas justifiable genocide justifiably paranoid justified rape Back to Top known-covert operation kosher ham Back to Top Lace-up loafers lady-mud wrestler ladies man laid-back compulsive lame skills lamp shade land developer land development large ant larger half last initial lasting aid least favorite legal ethics legal justice legally drunk legitimate conspiracy legitimate politics lemon lime less is more lesser evil lesser good liberal conservative liberal fundamentalists light armor Light-Heavyweight lightweight Light traffic limited immunity limited incursion limited lifetime guarantee Limited Freedom LIMITED NUCLEAR WAR linear curve liquid crystal liquid gas liquid metal liquid natural gas liquid smoke lite beer literal interpretation literary illiterates little big little big horn little bit big little deceptive little giant Live Recording live television Living Dead living end living fossil local long distance local network locks on 7-11 stores which are open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year LONERS CLUB long and short of it long brief (for lawyers) Long Island Expressway long recess long shorts long sleeve t-shirt loose knot loose tights loquacious librarian loss prevention specialist loud librarian loud whisper Loud silence love-hate relationship lovers' quarrel Low Altitude low insurance rates low tax lower inflation low-fat ice cream low-intensity conflict low-rise loyal opposition lucky stiff luke-warm enthusiasm luxury beer luxury bus LUXURY COMPACT Back to Top macro-microorganism mail delivery major minority male compassion Male Lady Bug man child managed competition Management Action Management science Management Style Management support Mandatory judgment Mandatory Option Mandatory volunteerism mannish woman marijuana initiative marital bliss Marketing strategy Married life martial law mass customization Massively thin master slave maternity fashion mature student maxi thins mean smile meaningful nonsense meaningful-overnight relationship meatless meat Medicaid payment Medium Large medium well Melted Ice Mercy Killing Metal Woods (it's a golf thing) metaphysics mexican american micro-mainframe Microsoft Works Middle East Middle East peace midnight sun Mighty Weak mild abrasive mild cigar mild interest mild jalepeno mild mannered reporter Mild PMS mildly psychotic militant pacifist military accountability military intelligence military justice military peace military system mind-expanding drugs mini jumbo minor crisis minor disaster minor miracle misanthropic humanitarian missing present mobile home mobile house

Anyone intrested in writing a two page summary of this? FIBER KEEPS ITS PROMISE BY GEORGE GILDER "Today, I await the death of television, telephony, VCRs, and analog cameras with utter confidence as Moore's law unfolds." Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner, John Malone, are you listening?" Get ready. Bandwidth will triple each year for the next 25, creating trillions in new wealth. Editor's note: Four years ago, Forbes ASAP published its first issue with a stunning prophecy by contributing editor George Gilder. Fiber optics, said George, had the potential to carry 25 trillion bits per second down a single strand. This represented a ten-thousandfold leap in carrying capacity over the 2.5 billion bits "barrier" long assumed by most experts in the field. What did George see that others had missed? One, a little-recognized (at the time) breakthrough called an erbium-doped amplifier, which keeps optical signals pure and strong over long distances. The other was a deep technical shift, with roots in the 1940s-era work of information theory pioneer Claude Shannon. If you believed Shannon, his logic dictated a new messaging scheme called wave division multiplexing. Though scorned by the experts four years ago, WDM now is emerging as the winner George had prophesied. The real winners will be all of us, as the coming world of cheap, unlimited bandwidth unfolds and at last fulfills the true potential of the information age. Here is George with an update. IMAGINE THAT IN 1975 YOU KNEW that Moore's law--the Intel chairman's projection of the doubling of the number of transistors on a microchip every 18 months--would hold for the rest of your lifetime. What if you knew that these transistors would run cooler, faster, better, and cheaper as they got smaller and were crammed more closely together? Suppose you knew the law of the microcosm: that the cost-effectiveness of any number of "n" transistors on a single silicon sliver would rise by the square of the increase in "n." As an investor knowing this Moore's law trajectory, you would have been able to predict and exploit a long series of developments: the emergence of the PC; its dominance over all other computer form factors; the success of companies making chips, disk drives, peripherals, and software for this machine. With a slight effort of intellect, you could have extended the insight and prophesied the digitization of watches, records (CDs), cellular phones, cameras, TVs, broadcast satellites, and other devices that can use miniaturized computer power. If you did not know precisely when each of these benisons would flourish, you would have known that each one was essentially inevitable. To calculate approximate dates, you had only to guess the product's optimal price of popularization and then match its need for mips (millions of instructions per second) of computer power with the cost of those mips as defined by Moore's law. Merely by using this technique of Moore's law matching--and holding to it with unshakable conviction for nearly 20 years--I became known as a "futurist." Today I await the death of television, telephony, VCRs, and analog cameras with utter confidence as Moore's law unfolds. You can tell me about the 98% penetration of TVs in American homes, the continuing popularity of couch-potato entertainments, the effectiveness of broadcast advertising, and the profound and unbridgeable chasm between the office appliance and the living-room tube. But I will pay no attention. Just you wait--Jack Welch, Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch, John Malone, and David Jennings--the TV will die and you may be too late for the Net. It is now 1997, and a stream of dramatic events certifies that another law, as powerful and fateful and inexorable as Moore's, is gaining a similar sway over the future of technology. It is what I have termed the law of the telecosm. Its physical base lies in the same quantum realm of eigenstates and band gaps that governs the performance of transistors and also makes photons leap and lase. But the telecosm reaches beyond components to systems, combining the science of the electromagnetic spectrum with Claude Shannon's information theory. In essence, as frequencies rise and wavelengths drop, digital performance improves exponentially. Bandwidth rises, power usage sinks, antenna size shrinks, interference collapses, error rates plummet. The law of the telecosm ordains that the total bandwidth of communications systems will triple every year for the next 25 years. As communicators move up-spectrum, they can use bandwidth as a substitute for power, memory, and switching. This results in far cheaper and more efficient systems. In 1996, the new fiber paradigm emerged in full force. Parallel communications in all-optical networks became the dominant source of new bandwidth in telecom. Like Moore's law, the law of the telecosm will reshape the entire world of information technology. It defines the direction of technological advance, the vectors of growth, the sweet spots for finance. AMERICA'S DARK SECRET FOR MORE THAN A DECADE, American companies have been laying optical fiber strands at a pace of some 4,000 miles a day, for a total of more than 25 million strand miles. Five years ago, the top 10% of U.S. homes and businesses were, on average, a thousand households away from a fiber node; now they are a hundred households away. However, the imperial advance of this technology conceals a dark secret, which has led to a pervasive underestimation of the long-term impact of photonics. Sixty percent of the fiber remains "dark" (unused for communications) and even the leading-edge "lit" fiber is being used at less than one ten-thousandth of its intrinsic capacity. This problem has prompted leaders in the industry, from Bill Gates and Andy Grove to Bob Metcalfe and Mitch Kapor, to underrate drastically the impact of fiber optics. Restricting the speed and cost-effectiveness of fiber has been an electronic bottleneck and a regulatory noose. In order for the signal to be amplified, regenerated, or switched, the light pulses had to be transformed into electronic pulses by optoelectronic converters. For all the talk of the speed of light, fiber-optic systems therefore could pass bits no faster than the switching speed of transistors, which tops out at a cycle time of between 2.5 and 10 gigahertz. Meanwhile, telecom companies could not deploy new low-cost fiber products any faster than the switching speed of politicians and regulators, which tops out roughly at a cycle time of between 2.5 years and a rate of evolution measurable only by means of carbon 14. Nonetheless, the intrinsic capacity of every fiber line is not 2.5 gigahertz. Nor is it even 25 gigahertz, which is roughly the capacity of all the frequencies commonly used in the air, from AM radio to kA band satellite. The intrinsic capacity of every fiber thread, as thin as a human hair, is at the least one thousand times the capacity of what we call the "air." One thread could carry all the calls in America on the peak moment of Mother's Day. One fiber thread could carry 25 times more bits than last year's average traffic load of all the world's communications networks put together: an estimated terabit (trillion bits) a second. Over the last five years, technological breakthroughs and legislative loopholes have begun to open up this immense capacity to possible use. Following concepts pioneered and patented by David Payne at the University of Southampton in England, a Bell Laboratories group led by Emmanuel Desurvire and Randy Giles developed a workable all-optical device. They showed that a short stretch of fiber doped with erbium, a rare earth mineral, and excited by a cheap laser diode can function as a powerful amplifier over fully 4,500 gigahertz of the 25,000 gigahertz span. Introduced by Pirelli of Italy and popularized by Ciena Corporation of Savage, Maryland, and by Lucent and Alcatel, today such photonic amplifiers are a practical reality. Put in packages between two and three cubic inches in size, the erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) fit anywhere in an optical network for enhancing signals without electronics. This invention overcame the most fundamental disadvantage of optical networks compared to electronic networks. You can tap into an electronic network as often as desired without eroding the voltage signal. Although resistance and capacitance will leach away the current, there are no splitting losses in a voltage divider. Photonic signals, by contrast, suffer splitting losses every time they are tapped; they lose photons until eventually there are none left. The cheap and compact all-optical amplifier solves this problem. It is an invention comparable in importance to the integrated circuit. Just as the integrated circuit made it possible to put an entire computer system on a single sliver of silicon, the all-optical amplifier makes it possible to put an entire system on a seamless seine of silica--glass. Unleashing the law of the telecosm, it makes possible a new global economy of bandwidth abundance. Five years ago when I first celebrated the radical implications of erbium-doped amplifiers, skepticism reigned. I was summoned to Bellcore, where the first optical networks had been built and then abandoned, to learn the acute limits of the technology from Charles Brackett and his team. I had offered the vision of a broadband fibersphere--a worldwide web of glass and light--where computer users could tune into favored frequencies as readily as radios tune into frequencies in the atmosphere today. But Brackett and other Bellcore experts told me that my basic assumption was false. It was no simpler, they said, to tune into one of scores of frequencies on a fiber than to select time slots in a time-division-multiplexed (TDM) bitstream. Indeed, electronic switching technology was moving faster than optical technology. In the face of the momentum and installed base of electronic switching and multiplexing, the fibersphere with hundreds of tunable frequencies would remain a fantasy, like Ted Nelson's Xanadu. In 1997 the fantasy is coming true around the world. Xanadu has become the World Wide Web. The erbium-doped fiber amplifier is an explosively growing $250 million business. Electronic TDM seems to have topped out at 2.5 gigabits a second. TDM gear has suffered a series of delays and nagging defects and so far has failed in the market. Electronic TDM failed not only because it pushed the envelope of electronics but also because it violated the new paradigm. In single-mode fiber, the two key impediments are nonlinearities in the glass and chromatic dispersion (the blurring of bit pulses because even in a single band different frequencies move at different speeds). Chromatic dispersion increases by the square of the bit rate, and the impact of nonlinearities rises with the power of the signal. High-powered, high-bit-rate TDM flunked both telecosm tests. By contrast, wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) follows the laws of the telecosm; it succeeds by wasting bandwidth and stinting on power. WDM takes some 33% more bandwidth per bit than TDM, but it reduces power to combat nonlinearity and divides the bitstream into multiple frequencies in order to combat dispersion. Thus it can extend the distance or increase capacity by a factor of four or more today and can lay the foundations for the fibersphere tomorrow. In 1996 the new fiber paradigm emerged in full force. Parallel communications in all-optical networks, long depicted as a broadband pipe dream, crushed all competitors and became the dominant source of new bandwidth in the world telecom network. The year began with a trifold explosion at the Conference on Optical Fiber Communication in San Jose when three companies--Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs, NTT Labs, and Fujitsu--all announced terabit-per-second WDM transmissions down a single fiber. Sprint confirmed the significance of the laboratory breakthroughs by announcing deployment of Ciena's MultiWave 1600 WDM system, so called because it can increase the capacity of a single fiber thread by 1,600%. The revolution continues in 1997. At the beginning of January, NEC declared that by increasing the number of bits per hertz from one to three, it had raised the laboratory WDM record to three terabits per second. During 1996, MCI had increased the speed of its Internet backbone by a factor of 25, from 45 megabits a second to 1.2 gigabits. On January 6, Fred Briggs, chief engineering officer at MCI, announced that his company is in the process of installing new WDM equipment from Hitachi and Pirelli that increases the speed of its phone network backbone to 40 gigabits per second. Accelerating MCI's previous plans by some two years, the new system will use a more limited form of wavelength-division multiplexing to put four 10-gigabit in-cause formation streams on a single fiber thread. The first deployment will use existing facilities on a 275-mile route between Chicago and St. Louis, but the technology will be extended to the entire network. This move will consummate a nearly thousandfold upgrade of the MCI backbone, from 45 megabits per second to 40 gigabits, within some 36 months. Ciena, meanwhile, has announced technology that allows transmission of 100 gigabits per second. Its February IPO was the most important since Netscape (market cap at the end of the first trading day: $3.4 billion). Why? Ciena is the industry leader in open standard WDM gear. During the first six months the MultiWave 1600 was available, through October 1996, the firm achieved $54.8 million in sales and $15 million in net income. (Lucent is believed to be the overall leader with more than $100 million of mostly proprietary AT&T systems.) At the same time, the trans-Pacific consortium announced that it would deploy 100-gigabit-per-second fiber in its new link between the United States and Asia. A powerful new player in these markets will be Tellabs, currently the fastest-growing supplier of electronic digital cross-connect switches and other optical switching gear. In a further coup, following its purchase of broadband digital radio pioneer Steinbrecher, Tellabs has signed up all 12 principals in IBM's all-optical team. Headed by Paul Green, recent chairman of the IEEE Communications Society and author of the leading text on fiber networks, and by Rajiv Ramaswami, coauthor of a new 1997 text on the subject, the IBM group built the world's first fully functioning all-optical networks (AONs), the Rainbow series. Tellabs now owns the 11 AON patents and 100 listed technology disclosures of the group. The implications of the WDM paradigm go beyond simple data pipes. The greatest impact of all-optical technology will likely come in consumer markets. A portent is Artel Video Systems of Marlborough, Massachusetts, which recently introduced a fiber-based WDM system that can transmit 48 digital video channels, 288 CD-quality audio bitstreams, and 64 data channels on one fiber line. Aggregating contributions from a variety of content sources--each on different fiber wavelengths--and delivering them to consumers who tune into favored frequencies on conventional cable, the Artel system represents a key step into the fibersphere. It can be used for new services by either cable TV companies or telcos. The deeper significance of the Artel product, however, is its use of bandwidth as a replacement for transistors and switches. The Artel system works on dark fiber without compression. The video uses 200-megabit-per-second bitstreams (compare MPEG2 at 4 to 6 megabytes per second) that permit lossless transmissions suitable for medical imaging, and obviate dedicated processing of compression codes at the two ends. A move to massively parallel communications analogous to the move to parallel computers, all-optical networks promise nearly boundless bandwidth in fiber. According to Ewart Lowe of British Telecom, whose labs at Martlesham Heath in Ipswich have been a fount of all-optical technology, the new paradigm will reduce the cost of transport by a factor of 10. For example, the optoelectronic amplifiers previously used in fiber networks entailed nine power-hungry bipolar microchips for each wavelength, rather than a simple loop of doped silica that covers scores of wavelengths. As these systems move down through the network hierarchy, the growth of network bandwidth and cost-effectiveness will not only outpace Moore's law, it will also excel the rise in bandwidth within computers--their internal "buses" connecting their microprocessors to memory and input-output. While MCI and Sprint move to deploy technology that functions at 40 gigabits a second, current computers and workstations command buses that run at a rate of close to 1 gigabit a second. This change in the relationship between the bandwidth of networks and the bandwidth of computers will transform the architecture of information technology. As Robert Lucky of Bellcore puts it, "Perhaps we should transmit signals thousands of miles to avoid even the simplest processing function." Lucky implies that the law of the telecosm eclipses the law of the microcosm. Actually, the law of the microcosm makes distributed computers (smart terminals) more efficient regardless of the cost of linking them together. The law of the telecosm makes broadband networks more efficient regardless of how numerous and smart are the terminals. Working together, however, these two laws of wires and switches impel ever more widely distributed information systems, with processing and memory in the optimal locations. WHAT SHOULD THE MAJOR PLAYERS DO NOW? FOR THE TELEPHONE COMPANIES, the age of ever smarter terminals mandates the emergence of ever dumber networks. Telephone companies may complain of the large costs of the transformation of their system, but they command capital budgets as large as the total revenues of the cable industry. Telcos may recoil in horror at the idea of dark fiber, but they command webs of the stuff 10 times larger than any other industry. Dumb and dark networks may not fit the phone company self-image or advertising posture. But they promise larger markets than the current phone company plan to choke off their own future in the labyrinthine nets of an "intelligent switching fabric" always behind schedule and full of software bugs. Telephone switches (now 80% software) are already too complex to keep pace with the efflorescence of the Internet. While computers become ever more lean and mean, turning to reduced instruction-set processors and Java stations, networks need to adopt reduced instruction-set architectures. The ultimate in dumb and dark is the fibersphere now incubating in their magnificent laboratories. The entrepreneurial folk in the computer industry may view this wrenching phone company adjustment with some satisfaction. But computer firms must also adjust. Now addicted to the use of transistors to solve the problems of limited bandwidth, the computer industry must use transistors to exploit the nearly unlimited bandwidth. When home-based machines are optimized for manipulating high-resolution digital video at high speeds, they will necessarily command what are now called supercomputer powers. This will mean that the dominant computer technology will first emerge not in the office market but in the consumer market. The major challenge for the computer industry is to change its focus from a few hundred million offices already full of computer technology to a billion living rooms now nearly devoid of it. Cable companies possess the advantage of already owning dumb networks based on the essentials of the all-optical model of broadcast and select--of customers seeking wavelengths or frequencies rather than switching circuits. Cable companies already provide all the programs to all the terminals and allow them to tune in to the desired messages. But the cable industry cannot become a full-service supplier of telecommunications unless the regulators give up their ridiculous two-wire dream in which everyone competes with cable and no one makes any money. Cash-poor and bandwidth-rich, cable companies need to collaborate with telcos--which are cash-rich and bandwidth-poor--in a joint effort to create broadband systems in their own regions. In all eras, companies tend to prevail by maximizing the use of the cheapest resources. In the age of the fibersphere, they will use the huge intrinsic bandwidth of fiber, all 25,000 gigahertz or more, to simplify everything else. This means replacing nearly all the hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of switches, bridges, routers, converters, codecs, compressors, error correctors, and other devices, together with the trillions of lines of software code, that pervade the intelligent switching fabric of both telephone and computer networks. The makers of all this equipment will resist mightily. But there is no chance that the old regime can prevail by fighting cheap and simple optics with costly and complex electronics and software. The all-optical network will triumph for the same reason that the integrated circuit triumphed: It is incomparably cheaper than the competition. Today, measured by the admittedly rough metric of mips per dollar, a personal computer is more than 2,000 times more cost-effective than a mainframe. Within 10 years, the all-optical network will be thousands of times more cost-effective than electronic networks. Just as the electron rules in computers, the photon will rule the waves of communication. I know people would not write it..But worth a try:)

How should true patriots reclaim the media from Republican/Fascist interests? http://www.nowfoundation.org/issues/communications/tv/mediacontrol.html http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=fascism+in+america&btnG=Search ) Powerful and Continuing Nationalism: Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays. September 11 Freedom Walk New Majority Leader: Iraq War “May Be The Greatest Gift That We Give” Our Grandchildren Headstones of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are inscribed with the Pentagons war-marketing slogans White House and the RNC are going to make a habit of using uniformed military personnel as props at Republican political rallies, despite the fact that it is a plain violation of military regulations banning politicization of the armed forces. "You must glorify war in order to get the public to accept the fact that your going to send their sons and daughters to die." The inside story of the cozy relationship between big box office American war movies and the Pentagon More... 2.) Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights: Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc. Bush threatens to veto $442b defense bill if Congress investigates detainee abuses. Guantanamo Judge: “I don’t care about international law. I don’t want to hear the words ‘international law’ again. We are not concerned with international law.” Rumsfeld to approve new guidelines that will formalize the administration's policy of imprisoning without the protections of the Geneva Conventions and enable the Pentagon to legally hold "ghost detainees," US 'preparing to detain terror suspects for life without trial' U.S. oks evidence gained through torture July 1, 2003: U.S. Suspends Military Aid to Nearly 50 Countries: because they have supported the International Criminal Court and failed to exempt Americans from possible prosecution. US has at least 9000 prisoners in secret detention More... 3.) Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause: The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc. Congressman: Muslims 'enemy amongst us' SB 24, Ohio law to muzzle "liberals" World history textbook used by seventh-graders at Scottsdale’s Mohave Middle School was pulled from classrooms mid-semester amid growing right criticism of the book’s unbiased portrayal of Islam Rallies planned against 'Islamofacism': Event to 'unify all Americans behind common goal' More... 4.) Supremacy of the Military: Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized. If you haven't seen the Oreo flash animation yet, see it here Bush’s Domestic Program Hit List Bush slashes domestic programs, boosts defense. Arlen Spector calls it "scandalous" Funding for job training, rural health care, low-income schools and help for people lacking health insurance would face big cuts under a bill passed Friday by the House Pentagon to spend 75 billion for three new brigades Three cable channels now feed news, information and entertainment about the armed services into millions of living rooms 24 hours a day, seven days a week: The Military Channel, the Military History Channel and the Pentagon Channel. More... 5.) Rampant Sexism: The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy. It's legal again, to fire gov't workers for being gay Bush calls for Constitutional ban on same-sex marriages Bush refuses to sign U.N proposal on women's "sexual" rights W. David Hager chairman of the FDA's Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee does not prescribe contraceptives for single women, does not do abortions, will not prescribe RU-486 and will not insert IUDs. The State Department has awarded an explicitly anti-feminist U.S. group part of a US$10 million grant to train Iraqi women in political participation and democracy. More... 6.) Controlled Mass Media: Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common. FBI Acknowledges: Journalists Phone Records are Fair Game Report shows U.S. government has been engaged in illegal propaganda aimed at its own citizens and the story gets only 41 mentions in the media Free Press details recent governmental propaganda efforts, from faux-correspondent Jeff Gannon to paid-off pundit Armstrong Williams, and from the demise of FOIA to video news releases passed off as news. also... See a Whitehouse fake news release here (opens realplayer) US seizes webservers from independent media sites Bush's war on information: US editors forbidden to publish certain foreign writers More... 7.) Obsession with National Security: Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses Bush Aides ADMIT 'stoking fear' for political gain: Bush adviser said the president hopes to change the dynamics of the race. The strategy is aimed at stoking public fears about terrorism, raising new concerns about Kerry's ability to protect Americans and reinforcing Bush's image as the steady anti-terrorism candidate, aides said. The Bush administration periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist attacks even though then-Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge argued there was only flimsy evidence to justify raising the threat level. Keith Olbermann: "The Nexus of Politics and Terror." Cheney warns that if Kerry is elected, the USA will suffer a "devastating attack" GOP convention in a nutshell (quicktime) Rove: GOP to Use Terror As Campaign Issue in 2006 More... 8.) Religion and Government are Intertwined: Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions. Jerry Falwell cleared of charges that he broke federal election law by urging followers to vote for Bush NC congressman proposes law making it ok to preach politics from the pulpit Texas Governor Mobilizes Evangelicals Family research council: Justice Sunday Thou shalt be like Bush: What makes this recently established, right-wing Christian college unique are the increasingly close - critics say alarmingly close - links it has with the Bush administration and the Republican establishment. Park Service Continues to Push Creationist Theory at Grand Canyon and other nat'l parks More... 9.) Corporate Power is Protected: The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite. The K Street Project is a project by the Republican party to pressure Washington lobbying firms to hire Republicans in top positions, and to reward loyal GOP lobbyists with access to influential officials. It was launched in 1995, by Republican strategist Grover Norquist and House majority leader Tom DeLay. American Conservative Magazine: One U.S. contractor received $2 million in a duffel bag... and a U.S. official was given $7 million in cash in the waning days of the CPA and told to spend it “before the Iraqis take over.” There are 6 Congressional Committees investigating the Oil-for-Food (UN) scandal, yet not a single Republican Committee Chairman will call a hearing to investigate the whereabouts of 9 billion dollars missing in Iraq Bush money network rooted in Florida, Texas: Since Mr. Bush took office in 2001, the federal government has awarded more than $3 billion in contracts to the President's elite 2004 Texas fund-raisers, their businesses, and lobbying clients More... 10.) Labor Power is Suppressed: Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed. Labor Department warns unions against using their money politically President Bush Attacks Organized Labor: Bush attacked organized labor Saturday, issuing orders effectively reducing how much money unions can spend for political activities and opening up government contracts to non-union bidding. March 2001: President Bush signed his name to four executive orders on organized labor last month, including one that cuts the money unions will have for political campaign spending. Congress and the Department of Labor are trying to change the rules on overtime pay, eliminating the 40 hour work week, taking eligibility for overtime pay away from millions of workers, and replacing time and a half pay with comp days. More... 11.) Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts: Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts. Bush's new economic plan cuts funding for arts, education Artists from all over the world are being refused entry to the US on security grounds. A group of more than 60 top U.S. scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates and several science advisers to past Republican presidents, on Wednesday accused the Bush administration of manipulating and censoring science for political purposes Freedom of Repression: New ruling will allow censorship of campus publications More... 12.) Obsession with Crime and Punishment: Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations American Gestapo is here: "There is hereby created and established a permanent police force, to be known as the 'United States Secret Service Uniformed Division.'" America: secret jails, secret courts, secret arrests, and now secret laws Snitch-or-Go-to-Jail bill will make pretty much anything short of reporting on everyone you see for doing just about anything a jailable offense. With minimum sentences, up to and including life without parole. The problem with Gonzales is that he has been deeply involved in developing some of the most sweeping claims of near-dictatorial presidential power in our nation's history, allowing him to imprison and even (at least in theory) torture anyone in the world, at any time Police officers don't have to give a reason at the time they arrest someone, the U.S. Supreme Court said in a ruling that shields officers from false-arrest lawsuits. More... 13.) Rampant Cronyism and Corruption: Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders. Bush Cronyism: Foxes Guarding the henhouse Making Sense of the Abramoff Scandal If Bush's pick is confirmed, that will mean the five top appointees at Justice have zero prosecutorial experience among them. Iran-Contra Felons Get Good Jobs from Bush Big Iraq Reconstruction Contracts Went To Big Donors Bush Wars -- Crooks Get Contracts : The main companies that were awarded billions of dollars worth of contracts in Iraq have paid more than $300 million in fines since 2000, to resolve allegations of fraud, bid rigging, delivery of faulty military equipment, and environmental damage. US Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) lost track of $9 billion "Contracting in the aftermath of the hurricanes has been marked by waste, corruption and cronyism" More... 14. Fraudulent Elections: Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections. Rolling Stone does some investigative and rather exhaustive digging into public documents and says we’re almost guaranteed the 2004 election results were massively rigged Powerful Government Accounting Office report confirms key 2004 stolen election findings Conyers hearing in which Clinton Curtis testifies that he was hired to create hackable voting machines (.wmv) The Republican Party has quietly paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide private defense lawyers for a former Bush campaign official charged with conspiring to keep Democrats from voting in New Hampshire. The Conyers Report (.pdf) No explanation for the machines in Mahoning County that recorded Kerry votes for Bush, the improper purging in Cuyahoga County, the lock down in Warren County, the 99% voter turnout in Miami County, the machine tampering in Hocking County Less access than Kazakhstan. Fewer fail-safes than Venezuela. Not as simple Republic of Georgia. The 2004 Elections according to international observers. This picture is what stopped the ballot recounts in Florida shortly after it seemed that legitimate President Gore had a lead. The "citizens" started what was later called "the preppy riot". Screaming, yelling, pounding on the walls, these "outraged citizens" intimidated the polling officials to halt the court mandated recount. A closer look reveals who they really were. They were bussed and flown in at Republican lawmakers expense. Some even flew in on Tom Delay's private plane. More... If Mussolini defines fascism as "the merger of corporate and government power" what does that make the K Street project? Related Articles: "Now and Then"- Part 1 A 3 part series by W David Jenkins III on the similarities between America now and Germany post Reichstag fire Click here to purchase this image on POAC merchandise "Now and Then"- Part II: The Propaganda Machine Now and Then- Part III Hitler's Playbook: Bush and the Abuse of Power It may sound crazy to some, but the style of governing into which America has slid is most accurately described as fascism. Is America Becoming Fascist? Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt The Danger of American Fascism: With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power. Sheila Samples: Freedom To Fascism -- A Bumpy Ride: Republicans don't seem to realize that they are no longer individual members of a coherent "party," but are merely part of a mean-spirited and dangerous movement that is threatening to sweep away democracy as we know it. Germany In 1933: The Easy Slide Into Fascism The Brownshirting of America: Bush’s supporters demand lock-step consensus that Bush is right. They regard truthful reports that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and was not involved in the September 11 attack on the US – truths now firmly established by the Bush administration’s own reports – as treasonous America-bashing. Fascism then. Fascism now? When people think of fascism, they imagine Rows of goose-stepping storm troopers and puffy-chested dictators. What they don't see is the economic and political process that leads to the nightmare. What is Fascism? Some General Ideological Features Hello. You are now living in a fascist empire Neo-fascism in America : Too many people believe fascism is only about goose-stepping, jack-booted Nazis. Too many people believe that American democracy is so strong that fascists could never take control of America. If you are sympathetic to those views, I invite you to consider the possibility that you are mistaken. It is in times of fascism rising that armies of ignorance are once more resuscitated from the bowels of a society bordering on the edge of mass psychosis. The America at the dawn of the twenty-first century is no exception... Republican Party Brown Shirts: "The Wide-Awakes": The organization was known for virulent anti-Catholicism, secretive rituals, and a military-style organization complete with "officers" and units. Harper's Magazine: We Now Live in a Fascist State They Saw It Coming: The 19th-Century Libertarian Critique of Fascism Victims of Creeping Fascism: We are witnessing nothing less astonishing than the demise of the American experiment. 12-20 The ten phases of a Bush scandal. 12-22

How should true patriots combat the rising fascism in America? http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=fascism+in+america&btnG=Search http://207.44.245.159/article7553.htm http://www.oldamericancentury.org/14pts.htm 1.) Powerful and Continuing Nationalism: Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays. September 11 Freedom Walk New Majority Leader: Iraq War “May Be The Greatest Gift That We Give” Our Grandchildren Headstones of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are inscribed with the Pentagons war-marketing slogans White House and the RNC are going to make a habit of using uniformed military personnel as props at Republican political rallies, despite the fact that it is a plain violation of military regulations banning politicization of the armed forces. "You must glorify war in order to get the public to accept the fact that your going to send their sons and daughters to die." The inside story of the cozy relationship between big box office American war movies and the Pentagon More... 2.) Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights: Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc. Bush threatens to veto $442b defense bill if Congress investigates detainee abuses. Guantanamo Judge: “I don’t care about international law. I don’t want to hear the words ‘international law’ again. We are not concerned with international law.” Rumsfeld to approve new guidelines that will formalize the administration's policy of imprisoning without the protections of the Geneva Conventions and enable the Pentagon to legally hold "ghost detainees," US 'preparing to detain terror suspects for life without trial' U.S. oks evidence gained through torture July 1, 2003: U.S. Suspends Military Aid to Nearly 50 Countries: because they have supported the International Criminal Court and failed to exempt Americans from possible prosecution. US has at least 9000 prisoners in secret detention More... 3.) Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause: The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc. Congressman: Muslims 'enemy amongst us' SB 24, Ohio law to muzzle "liberals" World history textbook used by seventh-graders at Scottsdale’s Mohave Middle School was pulled from classrooms mid-semester amid growing right criticism of the book’s unbiased portrayal of Islam Rallies planned against 'Islamofacism': Event to 'unify all Americans behind common goal' More... 4.) Supremacy of the Military: Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized. If you haven't seen the Oreo flash animation yet, see it here Bush’s Domestic Program Hit List Bush slashes domestic programs, boosts defense. Arlen Spector calls it "scandalous" Funding for job training, rural health care, low-income schools and help for people lacking health insurance would face big cuts under a bill passed Friday by the House Pentagon to spend 75 billion for three new brigades Three cable channels now feed news, information and entertainment about the armed services into millions of living rooms 24 hours a day, seven days a week: The Military Channel, the Military History Channel and the Pentagon Channel. More... 5.) Rampant Sexism: The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy. It's legal again, to fire gov't workers for being gay Bush calls for Constitutional ban on same-sex marriages Bush refuses to sign U.N proposal on women's "sexual" rights W. David Hager chairman of the FDA's Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee does not prescribe contraceptives for single women, does not do abortions, will not prescribe RU-486 and will not insert IUDs. The State Department has awarded an explicitly anti-feminist U.S. group part of a US$10 million grant to train Iraqi women in political participation and democracy. More... 6.) Controlled Mass Media: Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common. FBI Acknowledges: Journalists Phone Records are Fair Game Report shows U.S. government has been engaged in illegal propaganda aimed at its own citizens and the story gets only 41 mentions in the media Free Press details recent governmental propaganda efforts, from faux-correspondent Jeff Gannon to paid-off pundit Armstrong Williams, and from the demise of FOIA to video news releases passed off as news. also... See a Whitehouse fake news release here (opens realplayer) US seizes webservers from independent media sites Bush's war on information: US editors forbidden to publish certain foreign writers More... 7.) Obsession with National Security: Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses Bush Aides ADMIT 'stoking fear' for political gain: Bush adviser said the president hopes to change the dynamics of the race. The strategy is aimed at stoking public fears about terrorism, raising new concerns about Kerry's ability to protect Americans and reinforcing Bush's image as the steady anti-terrorism candidate, aides said. The Bush administration periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist attacks even though then-Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge argued there was only flimsy evidence to justify raising the threat level. Keith Olbermann: "The Nexus of Politics and Terror." Cheney warns that if Kerry is elected, the USA will suffer a "devastating attack" GOP convention in a nutshell (quicktime) Rove: GOP to Use Terror As Campaign Issue in 2006 More... 8.) Religion and Government are Intertwined: Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions. Jerry Falwell cleared of charges that he broke federal election law by urging followers to vote for Bush NC congressman proposes law making it ok to preach politics from the pulpit Texas Governor Mobilizes Evangelicals Family research council: Justice Sunday Thou shalt be like Bush: What makes this recently established, right-wing Christian college unique are the increasingly close - critics say alarmingly close - links it has with the Bush administration and the Republican establishment. Park Service Continues to Push Creationist Theory at Grand Canyon and other nat'l parks More... 9.) Corporate Power is Protected: The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite. The K Street Project is a project by the Republican party to pressure Washington lobbying firms to hire Republicans in top positions, and to reward loyal GOP lobbyists with access to influential officials. It was launched in 1995, by Republican strategist Grover Norquist and House majority leader Tom DeLay. American Conservative Magazine: One U.S. contractor received $2 million in a duffel bag... and a U.S. official was given $7 million in cash in the waning days of the CPA and told to spend it “before the Iraqis take over.” There are 6 Congressional Committees investigating the Oil-for-Food (UN) scandal, yet not a single Republican Committee Chairman will call a hearing to investigate the whereabouts of 9 billion dollars missing in Iraq Bush money network rooted in Florida, Texas: Since Mr. Bush took office in 2001, the federal government has awarded more than $3 billion in contracts to the President's elite 2004 Texas fund-raisers, their businesses, and lobbying clients More... 10.) Labor Power is Suppressed: Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed. Labor Department warns unions against using their money politically President Bush Attacks Organized Labor: Bush attacked organized labor Saturday, issuing orders effectively reducing how much money unions can spend for political activities and opening up government contracts to non-union bidding. March 2001: President Bush signed his name to four executive orders on organized labor last month, including one that cuts the money unions will have for political campaign spending. Congress and the Department of Labor are trying to change the rules on overtime pay, eliminating the 40 hour work week, taking eligibility for overtime pay away from millions of workers, and replacing time and a half pay with comp days. More... 11.) Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts: Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts. Bush's new economic plan cuts funding for arts, education Artists from all over the world are being refused entry to the US on security grounds. A group of more than 60 top U.S. scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates and several science advisers to past Republican presidents, on Wednesday accused the Bush administration of manipulating and censoring science for political purposes Freedom of Repression: New ruling will allow censorship of campus publications More... 12.) Obsession with Crime and Punishment: Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations American Gestapo is here: "There is hereby created and established a permanent police force, to be known as the 'United States Secret Service Uniformed Division.'" America: secret jails, secret courts, secret arrests, and now secret laws Snitch-or-Go-to-Jail bill will make pretty much anything short of reporting on everyone you see for doing just about anything a jailable offense. With minimum sentences, up to and including life without parole. The problem with Gonzales is that he has been deeply involved in developing some of the most sweeping claims of near-dictatorial presidential power in our nation's history, allowing him to imprison and even (at least in theory) torture anyone in the world, at any time Police officers don't have to give a reason at the time they arrest someone, the U.S. Supreme Court said in a ruling that shields officers from false-arrest lawsuits. More... 13.) Rampant Cronyism and Corruption: Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders. Bush Cronyism: Foxes Guarding the henhouse Making Sense of the Abramoff Scandal If Bush's pick is confirmed, that will mean the five top appointees at Justice have zero prosecutorial experience among them. Iran-Contra Felons Get Good Jobs from Bush Big Iraq Reconstruction Contracts Went To Big Donors Bush Wars -- Crooks Get Contracts : The main companies that were awarded billions of dollars worth of contracts in Iraq have paid more than $300 million in fines since 2000, to resolve allegations of fraud, bid rigging, delivery of faulty military equipment, and environmental damage. US Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) lost track of $9 billion "Contracting in the aftermath of the hurricanes has been marked by waste, corruption and cronyism" More... 14. Fraudulent Elections: Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections. Rolling Stone does some investigative and rather exhaustive digging into public documents and says we’re almost guaranteed the 2004 election results were massively rigged Powerful Government Accounting Office report confirms key 2004 stolen election findings Conyers hearing in which Clinton Curtis testifies that he was hired to create hackable voting machines (.wmv) The Republican Party has quietly paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide private defense lawyers for a former Bush campaign official charged with conspiring to keep Democrats from voting in New Hampshire. The Conyers Report (.pdf) No explanation for the machines in Mahoning County that recorded Kerry votes for Bush, the improper purging in Cuyahoga County, the lock down in Warren County, the 99% voter turnout in Miami County, the machine tampering in Hocking County Less access than Kazakhstan. Fewer fail-safes than Venezuela. Not as simple Republic of Georgia. The 2004 Elections according to international observers. This picture is what stopped the ballot recounts in Florida shortly after it seemed that legitimate President Gore had a lead. The "citizens" started what was later called "the preppy riot". Screaming, yelling, pounding on the walls, these "outraged citizens" intimidated the polling officials to halt the court mandated recount. A closer look reveals who they really were. They were bussed and flown in at Republican lawmakers expense. Some even flew in on Tom Delay's private plane.

Who thinks is a good idea? This is a pretty smart idea in my opinion!!! Zeroties Ze • rot • ies · This decade (2000-2009) needs a name and Zeroties is it. · Like the Twenties, Thirties, Forties, Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties, Zeroties follows the pattern. · Zeroties is up against one other candidate name – Aughties/Oughties. This British word “aught” means zero and does not appeal to Americans. (As a hidden bonus, when you say Zeroties you hear “Aughties” in the middle.) · Zeroties makes sense because zero has been a very dominant idea and word in this decade. · Zeroties “says” zero ties the decade together… …and it really does. · Once everyone sees the need for and usefulness of the word Zeroties, it will win their hearts and minds. · ZERO has my hero ever since School House Rocks declared it so. Ever since kindergarten, zero has rolled off our rounded lips. · Zero is both the lowest and the mightiest number. It is a value of none, but it makes the place-value system work. 1 is 1 until 12 zeros follow it. Then it jumps all the way to a Trillion 1,000,000,000,000 Wow! That is going to be a “looo,ooo,ooo,ooot” to pay back. Y2K (Year 2000)(The world panicked about how computer programs would crash because they did not have four spaces for dealing with years. Computers would register the year 2000 as 00 and think it is before 1999, which they recorded as 99.) Zero major world crisis caused by Y2K Zero airplanes in the air on New Year’s night for most airlines Since there is no year 0 in the calendar, the new millennium didn’t even start on January 1, 2000…feeling duped we learn it starts on January 1, 2001 Ground Zero -- The catastrophe of the 9/11(01) – The anchor of this decade and this proposal Zero Tolerance Policies – get IU’s Bobby Knight fired and Swiss Army knife carrying Kindergarteners expelled Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation -- blockbuster book published in 2003 Marine “motto” Leave No Man Behind goes to education No Child Left Behind Zero percent – the US household savings rate in 2005 and 2006 Zero Grams of Sugar rather than Sugar Free CokeZero (and Pepsi One – how perfect for the digital age)…Coke runs commercials about how CokeZero steals the recipe of Coke Diet Pepsi packaging – 0 Cal Carb Sug Zero Calorie Sweetener – Pure Via Zero Down … Zero Interest … Zero Payments Zero, Zero, Zero Sales by GM …and everyone else “Hurricane Katrina Zeros in on New Orleans” – as many stories read Zero Calories Zero Grams of Fat Zero Grams of Trans Fat – from McDonald’s fries to Girl Scout cookies 0.???? second Google searches 16-0 Patriots (2007) 0-16 Lions (2008) Oprah O Magazine, Obama O Logo The Oval is the logo shape of the decade – look at car company logos… Zero Weapons of Mass Destruction found Michael Phelps wins his 7th of 8 Gold Medals by .01 seconds…effectively zero Chinese Olympics “Bird’s Nest” a big Zero Zero percent net gain for the NY Stock Market from 1998 to 2008 Zero new large malls built in America in 2007, 2008, and 2009 Zero or No Income Verification Loans Zero principal payment loans Zero Degrees – or a Credit Freeze Zero Dollar is mockingly passed out on Wall Street Zero International banks willing to make inter-bank loans at the global inter-bank clearinghouse in New York City at the height of the meltdown -- this was the official credit freeze 10/10/2008 – this bank-to-bank loan exchange is in-between Ground Zero and Wall Street…which are themselves less than 10 blocks apart --- “Economic Ground Zero” Salary Freezes – Home Depot leads the way Zero raises in many governments Pay freeze for top 100 White House Officials Digital TV (Digital information is all coded as Zero’s and One’s) – digital everything – binary bliss 2009 in binary is 00110010001100000011000000111001 Zero Percent Federal Funds rate – many things in the list like this, insiders would see as rare absurdities Already with no calories, Diet Mountain Dew changes its label from “Low Calorie” to Zero Calories NASA’s new fascination is studying Dark Matter -- the nothing in outer space Zero Environmental Footprint Zero Carbon Emissions Zero Pollution Restaurant growth may be below 1% (or 0%) for the first time since it was measured in 1970 For a time Citi (Citigroup/Citibank) – Citibank was the US’s largest bank in May 2008 and Citigroup is the world’s largest financial network -- trades on Wall Street for less than a dollar $0.?? ... …threatening its listing status 41 Companies trimmed or eliminated their dividends by $40 Billion – Blue Chip Stocks with Zero dividends? … GE, JP Morgan, Dow Chemical Treasury Bills sold for “Zero” percent returns – during the global economic collapse foreigners battle to bu

help i have no idea wat this means some body explain in short text 10 points best answer in plain explantion? Overview Instant messaging (IM) and chat are technologies that facilitate near real-time text based communication between two or more participants over a network. It is important to understand that what separates chat and instant messaging from technologies such as e-mail is the perceived synchronicity of the communication by the user - Chat happens in real-time before your eyes. For this reason, some people consider communication via instant messaging to be less intrusive than communication via phone. However, some systems allow the sending of messages to people not currently logged on (offline messages), thus removing much of the difference between Instant Messaging and e-mail. Instant Messaging allows instantaneous communication between a number of parties simultaneously, by transmitting information quickly. Some IM systems allow users to use webcams and Microphone which made them more popular than others. Due to this feature users can have a real-time conversation. In addition IM has additional features such as: the immediate receipt of acknowledgment or reply, group chatting, conference services (including voice and video), conversation logging and file transfer. IM allows effective and efficient communication, featuring immediate receipt of acknowledgment or reply. In certain cases Instant Messaging involves additional features, which make it even more popular, i.e. to see the other party, e.g. by using web-cams, or to talk directly for free over the Internet. It is possible to save a conversation for later reference. Instant messages are typically logged in a local message history which closes the gap to the persistent nature of e-mails and facilitates quick exchange of information like URLs or document snippets (which can be unwieldy when communicated via telephone). [edit] History In early instant messaging programs each character appeared when it was typed. The UNIX "talk" command shown in these screenshots was popular in the 1980s and early 1990s.Instant messaging actually predates the Internet, first appearing on multi-user operating systems like CTSS and Multics[1] in the mid-1960s. Initially, many of these systems, such as CTSS'.SAVED, were used as notification systems for services like printing, but quickly were used to facilitate communication with other users logged in to the same machine. As networks developed, the protocols spread with the networks. Some of these used a peer-to-peer protocol (eg talk, ntalk and ytalk), while others required peers to connect to a server (see talker and IRC). During the Bulletin board system (BBS) phenomenon that peaked during the 1980s, some systems incorporated chat features which were similar to instant messaging; Freelancin'_Roundtable was one prime example. In the last half of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, the Quantum Link online service for Commodore 64 computers offered user-to-user messages between currently connected customers which they called "On-Line Messages" (or OLM for short). Quantum Link's better known later incarnation, America Online, offers a similar product under the name "AOL Instant Messages" (AIM). While the Quantum Link service ran on a Commodore 64, using only the Commodore's PETSCII text-graphics, the screen was visually divided up into sections and OLMs would appear as a yellow bar saying "Message From:" and the name of the sender along with the message across the top of whatever the user was already doing, and presented a list of options for responding.[2] As such, it could be considered a sort of GUI, albeit much more primitive than the later Unix, Windows and Macintosh based GUI IM programs. OLMs were what Q-Link called "Plus Services" meaning they charged an extra per-minute fee on top of the monthly Q-Link access costs. Modern, Internet-wide, GUI-based messaging clients, as they are known today, began to take off in the mid 1990s with ICQ (1996) being the first, followed by AOL Instant Messenger (AOL Instant Messenger, 1997). AOL later acquired Mirabilis, the creators of ICQ. A few years later ICQ (by now owned by AOL) was awarded two patents for instant messaging by the U.S. patent office. Meanwhile, other companies developed their own applications (Excite, MSN, Ubique, and Yahoo), each with its own proprietary protocol and client; users therefore had to run multiple client applications if they wished to use more than one of these networks. In 1998 IBM released IBM Lotus Sametime, a product based on technology acquired when IBM bought Haifa-based Ubique and Lexington-based Databeam. In 2000, an open source application and open standards-based protocol called Jabber was launched. Jabber servers could act as gateways to other IM protocols, reducing the need to run multiple clients. Multi-protocol clients such as Digsby,Pidgin, Trillian, Adium and Miranda can use any of the popular IM protocols by using additional local libraries for each protocol. IBM Lotus Sametime's November 2007 release added IBM Lotus Sametime Gateway support for XMPP. Recently, many instant messaging services have begun to offer video conferencing features, Voice Over IP (VoIP) and web conferencing services. Web conferencing services integrate both video conferencing and instant messaging capabilities. Some newer instant messaging companies are offering desktop sharing, IP radio, and IPTV to the voice and video features. The term "instant messenger" is a service mark of Time Warner[3] and may not be used in software not affiliated with AOL in the United States. For this reason, the instant messaging client formerly known as Gaim or gaim announced in April 2007 that they would be renamed "Pidgin"[4]. [edit] Cooperation Standard free instant messaging applications offer functions like file transfer, contact lists, the ability to have similtaneous converstations etc. These may be all the functions that a small business needs but larger organisations will require more sophisticated applications that can work together. The solution to finding applications capable of this is to use enterprise versions of instant messaging applications. These include titles like Jabber, Lotus Sametime, Microsoft Office Communicator, etc., which are often integrated with other enterprise applications such as workflow systems. These enterprise applications, or Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), are built to certain constraints, namely storing data in a common format. There have been several attempts to create a unified standard for instant messaging: IETF's SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and SIMPLE (SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions), APEX (Application Exchange), Prim (Presence and Instant Messaging Protocol), the open XML-based XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), more commonly known as Jabber and OMA's (Open Mobile Alliance) IMPS (Instant Messaging and Presence Service) created specifically for mobile devices. Most attempts at creating a unified standard for the major IM providers (AOL, Yahoo! and Microsoft) have failed and each continues to use its own proprietary protocol. However, while discussions at IETF were stalled, Reuters head of collaboration services, David Gurle (the founder of Microsoft's Real Time Communication and Collaboration business), signed the first inter-service provider connectivity agreement on September 2003. This agreement enabled AIM, ICQ and MSN Messenger users to talk with Reuters Messaging counterparts and vice-versa against an access fee. Following this, Microsoft, Yahoo! and AOL came to a deal where Microsoft's Live Communication Server 2005 users would also have the possibility to talk to public instant messaging users. This deal established SIP/SIMPLE as a standard for protocol interoperability and established a connectivity fee for accessing public instant messaging clouds. Separately, on October 13, 2005 Microsoft and Yahoo! announced that by (the Northern Hemisphere) summer of 2006 they would interoperate using SIP/SIMPLE which is followed on December 2005 by the AOL and Google strategic partnership deal where Google Talk users would be able to talk with AIM and ICQ users provided they have an identity at AOL. There are two ways to combine the many disparate protocols: One way is to combine the many disparate protocols inside the IM client application. The other way is to combine the many disparate protocols inside the IM server application. This approach moves the task of communicating to the other services to the server. Clients need not know or care about other IM protocols. For example, LCS 2005 Public IM Connectivity. This approach is popular in Jabber/XMPP servers however the so-called transport projects suffer the same reverse engineering difficulties as any other project involved with closed protocols or formats. Some approaches, such as that adopted by the Sonork enterprise IM software or the Jabber/XMPP network or Winpopup LAN Messenger, allow organizations to create their own private instant messaging network by enabling them to limit access to the server (often with the IM network entirely behind their firewall) and administer user permissions. Other corporate messaging systems allow registered users to also connect from outside the corporation LAN, by using a secure firewall-friendly HTTPS based protocol. Typically, a dedicated corporate IM server has several advantages such as pre-populated contact lists, integrated authentication, and better security and privacy. Some networks have made changes to prevent them from being utilized by such multi-network IM clients. For example, Trillian had to release several revisions and patches to allow its users to access the MSN, AOL, and Yahoo! networks, after changes were made to these networks. The major IM providers typically cite the need for formal agreements as well as security concerns as reasons for making these changes. [edit] Mobile Instant Messaging Mobile Instant Messaging (MIM) is a presence enabled messaging service that aims to transpose the desktop messaging experience to the usage scenario of being on the move. While several of the core ideas of the desktop experience on one hand apply to a connected mobile device, others do not: Users usually only look at their phone's screen — presence status changes might occur under different circumstances as happens at the desktop, and several functional limits exist based on the fact that the vast majority of mobile communication devices are chosen by their users to fit into the palm of their hand. Some of the form factor and mobility related differences need to be taken into account in order to create a really adequate, powerful and yet convenient mobile experience: radio bandwidth, memory size, availability of media formats, keypad based input, screen output, CPU performance and battery power are core issues that desktop device users and even nomadic users with connected network. [edit] Friend-to-friend networks Instant Messaging may be done in a Friend-to-friend network, in which each node connects to the friends on the friendslist. This allows for communication with friends of friends and for the building of chatrooms for instant messages with all friends on that network. Emotions are often expressed in shorthand. For example; lol. But a movement is currently underway to be more accurate with the emotional expression. Real time reactions such as (chortle) (snort) (guffaw) or (eye-roll) are rapidly taking the place of acronyms.[citation needed] [edit] Business application Instant messaging has proven to be similar to personal computers, e-mail, and the WWW, in that its adoption for use as a business communications medium was driven primarily by individual employees using consumer software at work, rather than by formal mandate or provisioning by corporate information technology departments. Tens of millions of the consumer IM accounts in use are being used for business purposes by employees of companies and other organizations. In response to the demand for business-grade IM and the need to ensure security and legal compliance, a new type of instant messaging, called "Enterprise Instant Messaging" ("EIM") was created when Lotus Software launched IBM Lotus Sametime in 1998. Microsoft followed suit shortly thereafter with Microsoft Exchange Instant Messaging, later created a new platform called Microsoft Office Live Communications Server, and released Office Communications Server 2007 in October 2007. Both IBM Lotus and Microsoft have introduced federation between their EIM systems and some of the public IM networks so that employees may use a single interface to both their internal EIM system and their contacts on AOL, MSN, and Yahoo!. Current leading EIM platforms include IBM Lotus Sametime, Microsoft Office Communications Server, and Jabber XCP. In addition, industry-focused EIM platforms such as IMtrader from Pivot Incorporated, Reuters Messaging, and Bloomberg Messaging provide enhanced IM capabilities to financial services companies. The adoption of IM across corporate networks outside of the control of IT organizations creates risks and liabilities for companies who do not effectively manage and support IM use. Companies implement specialized IM archiving and security products and services like those from Secure Computing, Akonix, SurfControl, and ScanSafe to mitigate these risks and provide safe, secure, productive instant messaging capabilities to their employees. [edit] Practical Use in Enterprise The popular embrace of IM technology for sharing information has quickly led to organizations adopting IM solutions for the perceived advantages that can be brought by it. As organizations are becoming more information based (McNurlin & Sprague, 2006, p.499) the need for effective knowledge sharing, team working and collaborative environments amongst employees has become vital, especially within more geographically dispersed teams. Typically IM conversations tend to have a certain "character", they are often short and only cover one topic. Media-switching and multitasking are common throughout, however IM might also be used between established coworkers and friends for longer, more intermittent conversation. In their report of IM use at the workplace Nardi et al. (2000) identifies the four primary functions of IM which are often cited in other reports, These primary functions are: Quick Questions and Clarifications Coordinating and scheduling tasks Coordinating impromptu social meetings Keeping in touch with friends and family IM is perhaps best suited to "Quick Questions and Clarifications" as this is the most often mentioned attribute in other reports. A user can "respond rapidly without the overhead of telephone or FTF interaction. For example, IDC reports, "Users see IM as a medium for quick, semi-permanent ‘flashes’ that beg a near-immediate response" (Isaacs et al., 2002). Nardi's second and third observations are enabled in part due to the "Presence Awareness" feature of IM clients in which the user knows who is "available". This is the most relevant for colleagues who share the same physical space as each other and even paves the way for other mediums to take up the task of communication e.g. F2F or Phone. The implication is that viable communication of any sort can in someway be encouraged through IM's "Presence Awareness" feature. (Issacs et al, 2002) supports this view, "IM in business might not be the main tool for of communication, it could just be the meeting point for another type of media e.g. conference calls. Nardi's third and fourth observations focus on the social use of IM, which have also been widely publicized in other report. That IM is used for keeping in touch with friends and arranging social events has led some employers to believe that it is used primarily for this purpose. According to (Issacs et al, 2002) a market study found that "'Fear of losing employee productivity’ was the greatest concern of businesses in regards to instant messaging". The study by (Issacs et al, 2002) goes on to suggest this fear is unfounded as it was found that on average "only 13% of conversations contained personal topics", and "only 6.4% were exclusively personal". [edit] Review of Products "IM solutions can typically be catagorised into two types: Enterprise Instant Messaging (EIM) and Consumer Instant Mesaging (CIM). Enterprise solutions use an internal IM server, however this isn't always feasible, particularly for smaller businesses with limited budgets. The second option, using a (CIM) provides the advantage of being inexpensive to implement and has little need for investing in new hardware or server software. However, in recent years open source IM clients such as Jabber have emerged that provide free EIM grade solutions. (Wikipedia,. 2008) For corporate use encryption and conversation archiving are usually regarded as important features due to security concerns. Sometimes the use of different operating systems in organizations calls for the use of software that supports more than one platform. For example many software companies use Windows XP in administration departments but have software developers who use Linux. Most people have had experience of using online chat and messaging over the internet whether it is with Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger, Skype or e-mail. One form of chat and messaging currently popular is Bebo. It is a non-corporate form of messaging which allows its user to create and maintain a social network. Libraries use chat applications and Morris Messenger is an application commonly used by them. This is a power based instant messenger, which uses Perl, SQL, and small Java. It accepts input from both staff and regular customers and saves important information in an SQL database built for the system. [edit] Risks and liabilities Although instant messaging delivers many benefits, it also carries with it certain risks and liabilities, particularly when used in workplaces. Among these risks and liabilities are: Security risks (e.g. IM used to infect computers with spyware, viruses, trojans, worms) Compliance risks Inappropriate use Intellectual property leakage Crackers (malicious "hacker" or black hat hacker) have consistently used IM networks as vectors for delivering phishing attempts, "poison URL's", and virus-laden file attachments from 2004 to the present, with over 1100 discrete attacks listed by the IM Security Center[5] in 2004-2007. Hackers use two methods of delivering malicious code through IM: delivery of virus, trojan, or spyware within an infected file, and the use of "socially engineered" text with a web address that entices the recipient to click on a URL that connects him or her to a website that then downloads malicious code. Viruses, worms, and trojans typically propagate by sending themselves rapidly through the infected user's buddy list. An effective attack using a poison URL may reach tens of thousands of people in minutes when each person's buddy list receives messages appearing to be from a trusted friend. The recipients click on the web address, and the entire cycle starts again. Infections may range from nuisance to criminal, and are becoming more sophisticated each year. In addition to the malicious code threat, the use of instant messaging at work also creates a risk of non-compliance to laws and regulations governing the use of electronic communications in businesses. In the United States alone there are over 10,000 laws and regulations related to electronic messaging and records retention.[6] The more well-known of these include the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, HIPAA, and SEC 17a-3. Clarification from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority ("FINRA") was issued to member firms in the financial services industry in December, 2007, noting that "electronic communications", "email", and "electronic correspondence" may be used interchangeably and can include such forms of electronic messaging as instant messaging and text messaging.[7] Changes to Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, effective December 1, 2006, created a new category for electronic records which may be requested during discovery (law) in legal proceedings. Most countries around the world also regulate the use of electronic messaging and electronic records retention in similar fashion to the United States. The most common regulations related to IM at work involve the need to produce archived business communications to satisfy government or judicial requests under law. Many instant messaging communications fall into the category of business communications that must be archived and retrievable. Organizations of all types must protect themselves from the liability of their employees' inappropriate use of IM. The informal, immediate, and ostensibly anonymous nature of instant messaging makes it a candidate for abuse in the workplace. The topic of inappropriate IM use became front page news in October 2006 when Congressman Mark Foley resigned his seat after admitting sending offensive instant messages of a sexual nature to underage former House pages from his Congressional office PC. The Mark Foley Scandal led to media coverage and mainstream newspaper articles warning of the risks of inappropriate IM use in workplaces. In most countries, corporations have a legal responsibility to ensure harassment-free work environment for employees. The use of corporate-owned computers, networks, and software to harass an individual or spread inappropriate jokes or language creates a liability for not only the offender but also the employer. A survey by IM archiving and security provider Akonix Systems, Inc. in March 2007 showed that 31% of respondents had been harassed over IM at work.[8] Companies now include instant messaging as an integral component of their policies on appropriate use of the World Wide Web, e-mail, and other corporate assets. Within the company there is also the risk of employees using instant messaging to release confidential information and project details to an outside source. This issue is best controlled by a combination of written policy and technology. An organization's policies on use of IM in the workplace should be an integral part of the overall computing and network use policies, and should be published and communicated at least annually. In addition to written policy, organizations should implement "gateways" or IM security products to monitor content of inbound and outbound messages. Products from IM security providers (See section on IM security) typically allow administrators to set alerts and enforce policy (i.e. allow or block messages) based on keywords and regular expressions within instant messages. Employees may also misuse IM to communicate on a personal level with friends and family. This is poor use of a business’s time and resources, as the employee’s effectiveness will most certainly decrease due to the added distractions. (Licari, J., May 2005). Businesses often use IM security products to monitor and archive IM conversations for the purpose of minimizing this type of productivity drain. [edit] Security and archiving In the early 2000s, a new class of IT security provider emerged to provide remedies for the risks and liabilities faced by corporations who chose to use IM for business communications. The IM security providers created new products to be installed in corporate networks for the purpose of archiving, content-scanning, and security-scanning IM traffic moving in and out of the corporation. Similar to the e-mail filtering vendors, the IM security providers focus on the risks and liabilities described above. With rapid adoption of IM in the workplace, demand for IM security products began to grow in the mid-2000s. By 2007, the preferred platform for the purchase of security software had become the "appliance", according to IDC, who estimate that by 2008, 80% of network security products will be delivered via an appliance.[9] [edit] User base Note that many of the numbers listed in this section are not directly comparable, and some are speculative. Some instant messaging systems are distributed among many different instances and thus difficult to measure in total (e.g. Jabber). While some numbers are given by the owners of a complete instant messaging system, others are provided by commercial vendors of a part of a distributed system. Some companies may be motivated to inflate their numbers in order to increase advertisement earnings or to attract partners, clients, or customers. Importantly, some numbers are reported as the number of "active" users (without a shared standard of that activity), others indicate total user accounts, while others indicate only the users logged in during an instance of peak usage. Service User count Date/source AIM 53 million active September 2006 >100 million total January 2006 Jabber 40-50 million total January 2007, based on calculations of Jabber Inc 90 million total Based on calculations of Process-One: Process-One uses ejabberd as Jabber server software. If it is assumed that ejabberd has a 40% market share amongst public and private open source server deployments, there are 50 million users using open source servers. With Jabber Inc's numbers, this adds up to the 90 million number stated here. eBuddy 35 million total October 2006, including 4 million mobile users Windows Live Messenger 294 million active worldwide November 2007 Yahoo! Messenger 22 million total September 2006 QQ 20 million peak online (majority in China) 3 June 2006 221 million "active" (majority in China) 3 June 2006 IBM Lotus Sametime 17 million total (private, in enterprises) November 2007 ICQ 15 million active July 2006 Skype 12 million peak online February 2008 309 million total April 2008 Xfire 10 million total May 2008 MXit 7 million total (>560,000 outside of South Africa) 10 August 2007. Note that these users are part of the Jabber user base as MXit federates with the Jabber network. Gadu-Gadu 5.6 million total June 2006 Paltalk 3.3 million unique visitors per month August 2006 IMVU 1 million total June 2007 Mail.ru Agent 1 million active (daily) September 2006 Meebo 1 million total October 2006 PSYC 1 million active (daily) (majority in Brazil) February 2007. Total count cannot be accurately estimated due to the decentralized nature of the protocol. VZOchat >200,000 October 2007 [edit] IM Language Users sometimes make use of internet slang or text speak to abbreviate common words or expressions in order to quicken conversations or to reduce keystrokes. [edit] See also Comparison of instant messaging clients Comparison of instant messaging protocols Instant messaging manager LAN messenger Text messaging it is a question

What is the relationship between 911 and Saddam? By The Numbers On September 11th, 2001 4 Flights were hijacked. American Airlines Flight 11 which left Boston's Logan Airport bound for Los Angeles before being piloted into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.American Airlines Flight 77 which left Washington's Dulles International Airport bound for Los Angeles before being flown into the Pentagon. United Airlines Flight 93 which left Newark, N.J., bound for San Francisco before crashing in Stony Creek Township, Pa United Airlines Flight 175 which left Boston's Logan Airport bound for Los Angeles before being piloted into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Why did the mastermind behind the attacks on America of September 11th, 2001 choose these particular flight numbers? MY THEORY ABOUT THE CHOICE OF FLIGHT 93 WAS THAT 1993 WAS THE YEAR IN WHICH SADDAM FIRST TRIED TO ASSASSINATE FORMER PRESIDENT BUSH IN KUWAIT, IT WAS ALSO THE YEAR IN WHICH SADDAM HUSSEIN FIRST TRIED TO DESTROY THE WORLD TRADE CENTER. IT TURNED OUT TO BE AN UNLUCKY NUMBER FOR SADDAM HUSSEIN BECAUSE THE PASSENGERS ON FLIGHT 93 BECAME HEROES AND STOPPED THE PLANE FROM GOING INTO THE WHITE HOUSE. "White House Was Flight 93 Target http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/20/attack/main509535.shtml May 23, 2002 Volunteers in Shanksville this past weekend. (Photo: AP) The San Francisco-bound jet had turned toward Washington and U.S. fighter jets were flying to intercept it when it crashed. All 44 people aboard were killed. (CBS) A high-ranking al Qaeda detainee told investigators the intended target of United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed into a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11, was the White House. Government sources said Abu Zubaydah, now in U.S. custody, is believed to be the source of the information. He is being interrogated by U.S. officials at an undisclosed location. Investigators have linked Zubaydah directly to hijackers on board Flight 93. United Flight 93 took off from Newark, N.J., and crashed in Somerset County, Pa.. A recorder on the plane and calls made to people on the ground indicate passengers fought for control with the hijackers before it went down. The San Francisco-bound jet had turned toward Washington and U.S. fighter jets were flying to intercept it when it crashed. All 44 people aboard were killed. Officials previously had assumed the White House was a likely target, but said the Capitol and CIA headquarters in McLean, Va., near Washington were other possibilities.Abu Zubaydah is believed to have played a key role in organizing the Sept. 11 attacks, officials said. As al Qaeda's top operational planner, he ran the Khalden camp in Afghanistan, where U.S. investigators have learned many of the Sept. 11 hijackers trained. This suggests Abu Zubaydah may have had direct contact with the hijackers and chosen them for training. He also had telephone contacts with at least one Arab student at U.S. flight schools, according to a July 10, 2001, memo from a Phoenix FBI agent. The CIA, FBI and Pakistani authorities captured and wounded Abu Zubaydah in a raid by in Faisalabad, Pakistan, in March. He is believed to have masterminded the failed millennium bombing plots in Los Angeles and Jordan, and has been linked to failed plots on the U.S. embassies in Paris and Sarajevo. Abu Zubaydah was also indirectly linked, through a web of associations with other al Qaeda members in Europe, to lead Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and his cell in Hamburg, Germany. Three members of the Hamburg cell were suicide hijackers; three others are still at large. Ziad Jarrah, believed to be the pilot-hijacker of Flight 93, was a member of the Hamburg cell." http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/20/attack/main509535.shtml The first attack on the World Trade Center on February 26th, 1993. The February 26th, 1993 attack marked the 11th anniversary to the day of the declaration by the Reagan-Bush Administration of February 26th, 1982 that Iraq was no longer a state sponsor of terrorism and as such was eligible for American loans and grants, which it subsequently got. The February 26th, 1993 attack also marked the 2nd anniversary to the day of the liberation of Kuwait by the U.S. in the first Gulf War. Remarks at the Commemoration of the Tenth Anniversary of the Liberation of Kuwait Secretary Colin L. Powell Kuwait City, Kuwait (US Embassy) February 26, 2001 The World Trade Center was attacked by terrorists associated with Sheik Rahman on February 26th, 1993. It was Sheik Rahman's group that murdered Egyptian President Anwar Sadat on the 8th anniversary to the day of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, October 6th. Sheik Rahman's son was subsequently found with bin Laden's group in Afghanistan when the U.S. liberated Afghanistan. "White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer: we have real and credible information that the airplane that landed at the Pentagon was originally intended to hit the White House." http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010912- 8.html#intended-targets American Airlines Flight 77 which left Washington's Dulles International Airport bound for Los Angeles before being flown into the Pentagon. 7/7 is one way to write the date July 7th On July 7th, 1994 Yasser Arafat, PLO chairman drove from Egypt into Gaza, after 27 years in exile. What Arafat was doing was using the date of July 7th to re-write a perceived wrong he had felt some years earlier on another July 7th. It was on July 7th 1986 that the government of Jordan closed the offices of Yasser Arafat's al-Fatah. Because a bus bombing occurred in London on July 7th, 2005 it struck me that the nation that has endured more bus bombings than any other nation is Israel. There may be a connection between the July 7th, 2005 attacks in London and the terrorists who have targeted Israel with bus bombings for years. Recently terrorists in Iraq murdered Egypt's envoy to Iraq. "Zarqawi group reportedly killed Egyptian ambassador in Iraq Iraq-Egypt, Politics, 7/7/2005 News reports from al-Jazeera and al-Arabia satellite TV stations said that Egypt's top diplomat in Iraq to Iraq, Eyhab al-Sharif, had been executed. Meantime, Al-Qaida organization in Iraq, led by Abu Musab al- Zarqawi, had threatened in a statement on the Internet to execute the chairman of the Egyptian diplomatic mission al-Sharif. The threat to execute Sharif came a short time after al-Qaida organization in Iraq issued pictures for the identity cards of the Egyptian diplomat as an evidence that they are the ones which kidnapped him. The statement said the legitimate court of al-Qaida organization in Mesopotamia decided to "send the ambassador of the state of Egypt to the Mujahideen (indivduals from Egypt and other states that go to Iraq to fight with the insurgents) to execute the death penalty against him." The statement considered that "the embassies in Baghdad are but monitoring sites to snipe the arriving Mujahideen and preventing them from having access to their brothers in Jihad in the land of Mesopotamia (Iraq) and in Afghanistan." In an attempt to prove that the Egyptian ambassador is their possession, al-Qaida organization published documents including a driving Sharif's license and a work card for him at the foreign ministry and another one for health insurance. On Tuesday the organization claimed responsibility for kidnapping Sharif." American Airlines Flight 11 which left Boston's Logan Airport bound for Los Angeles before being piloted into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Saddam Hussein assassinated his first victim when he was 11 years old. Fixated on the number 11 ever since then he easily focused on the World Trade Center as a target because it looked so much like a number 11 that WPIX TV Channel 11 in New York City used the World Trade Center in its logo for years. The World Trade Center also housed an office of the Bank of Kuwait. Saddam used Rahman's group to punish Sadat for failing to defeat Israel in the attack on Israel of October 6th, 1973. Saddam also used Sheik Rahman's group to hit the Speaker of the Egyptian Parliament during the first Gulf War when Egypt sided with America against Iraq. Saddam, acting like a child who is deprived of a toy, who subsequently breaks that toy, set fire to the Kuwaiti oil fields as he was being driven out of Kuwait during the first Gulf War in 1991. "Aired 9/11/2001 "Baghdad Republic of Iraq TV: These are the fruits of the new US order.[Video of explosion rocking World Trade Center] Panic has spread among US official circles, which evacuated the White House following a series of explosions." "CNN LARRY KING LIVE Aired October 2, 2001 LARRY KING: Have you spoken to your father- in-law? (George Herbert Walker Bush) LAURA BUSH: I've spoken to my father-in-law. They were-they had actually spent that Monday night here.(at the White House) I had just seen them off that morning (9/11/2001) when I got in the car and found out about the first plane.(going into the World Trade Center.)" "CNN LARRY KING LIVE America's New War: Laura Bush Discusses the Impact of September 11 Aired October 2, 2001 - 21:00 LARRY KING: A couple of other things: Have you spoken to your father- in-law? (Not in transcript, but the father in law in question is one George Herbert Walker Bush !!!) LAURA BUSH: I've spoken to my father-in-law. They were-they had actually spent that Monday night here. (not in transcript but "here" means at the White House !!!) LARRY KING: Really? LAURA BUSH: I had just seen them off that morning when I got in the-got in the car and found out about the first plane. LARRY KING: Didn't know that. LAURA BUSH: They were-they were on their way to St. Paul, Minnesota to give a speech, and they were in a private plane, and their plane was diverted to Minneapolis." http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0110/02/lkl.00.html "September 11th, 2001 - The White House is evacuated. White House Sealed" http://www.september11news.com/AAWhiteHouseEvacReuters.jpg "try to avoid having the principal travel by commercial airline on terrorist anniversaries" from "The Art of Executive Protection" http://www.securitymanagement.com/library/000450.html " Saddam tried to kill former President Bush in 1993. Former President Bush's Speech to Congress September 11th 1990. 11 years to the day before September 11th 2001 "In the early morning hours of August 2d,(1990),a powerful Iraqi army invaded Kuwait. The crisis in the Persian Gulf also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective-a new world order-can emerge." White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer: we have real and credible information that the airplane that landed at the Pentagon was originally intended to hit the White House." "White House Was Flight 93 Target A high-ranking al Qaeda detainee told investigators the intended target of United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed into a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11, was the White House. Government sources said Abu Zubaydah, now in U.S. custody, believed to be the source of the information." Perhaps the following may explain how Saddam knew where former President Bush might be spending the night of September 10th-11th 2001: "Like everyone else in the United States, the group stood transfixed as the events of September 11 unfolded. Present were former secretary of defense Frank Carlucci, former secretary of state James Baker III, and representatives of the bin Laden family. This was not some underground presidential bunker or Central Intelligence Agency interrogation room. It was the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C., the plush setting for the annual investor conference of one of the most powerful, well-connected, and secretive companies in the world: the Carlyle Group. And since September 11, this little-known company has become unexpectedly important. That the Carlyle Group had its conference on America's darkest day was mere coincidence, but there is nothing accidental about the cast of characters that this private-equity powerhouse has assembled in the 14 years since its founding. Among those associated with Carlyle are former U.S. President George Bush Sr., former U.K. Prime Minister John Major, and former President of the Philippines Fidel Ramos. And Carlyle has counted, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz Alsaud of Saudi Arabia, and Osama bin Laden's family among its high-profile clientele." "The White House is bordered on three sides by buildings that are as tall or taller than itself. (OEOB, Treasury, and Blair House.) Beyond these buildings there are still more buildings, that also are taller than the White House. The only flight path that is relatively unobstructed if making a controlled, straight-in approach, is from the south, over the ellipse. Even the Marine helicopter the president uses comes in from this direction and lands on the South Lawn. The problem with flying a plane the size of a 757 or 767 in from this direction is that there's a 555 ft tall structure in the way called the Washington Monument. The Capitol, although a bigger target, is similarly situated. There are buildings on all sides except for the west side, which faces the Mall. Again, for a controlled, straight-in approach, a pilot first would need to avoid the Washington Monument, and then fly straight down the Mall. There is more room to do this, but again, it would take considerable skill. Moreover, the buildings in Roslyn, just across the river from and to the west of the Mall, would have to be cleared, which means the plane's altitude would probably be too high, or the angle of descent too steep to permit a successful attack by anyone other than a skilled, experienced pilot." To indicate September 1990 one might well write or type 9/90 It was in September of 1990 that President George Herbert Walker Bush spoke to Congress on Iraq. On September 11th, 1990 in fact. What of EgyptAir Flight 990? Weeks after the last pile of debris from EgyptAir Flight 990 was pulled from the sea, investigators say they are more convinced than ever of their original theory: The jet was crashed deliberately." "The co-pilot under scrutiny in the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 uttered an Arabic prayer not once but as many as 10 times just before the doomed airliner went down" "Aviation Analyst John Nance Talks About Flight 990 When a commercial aircraft goes into a dive as steep and precipitous as the preliminary radar data seems to indicate." An example of terrorists striking on an anniversary came on October 7th, 2004 in Taba. "Images of Destruction | Taba Hilton Before and After Terrorist Attack on October 7, 2004" According to initial findings Naveh said, a car bomb blew up at the entrance to the Hilton Taba Hotel and there was a combined bomb and shooting attack in two restaurants usually frequented by Israelis in Ras Al-Satan." http://www.hospitalitynet.org/news/4020867.html On October 7th,2001 "America Retaliates for the September 11 Attacks. October 7, 2001 President George W. Bush Speaks to America After the Strikes Begin. "On October 7th, 1959, Saddam and others attempted, but failed, to assassinate the prime minister of Iraq. Wanted by the Iraqi government, Saddam was forced to flee. He lived in exile in Syria for three months and then moved to Egypt where he lived for three years." http://history1900s.about.com/od/saddamhussein/p/saddamhussein.htm "President Saddam Hussein chairs 48th Cabinet Session Baghdad, Oct. 22, 2001 INA President Saddam Hussein chaired on Sunday the 48th Cabinet session. The Cabinet discussed recent events of Palestinian Intifadha and praised Palestinians brave and persistent struggle for liberating their lands. The cabinet reviewed the current international situation, especially the U.S aggression on Afghanistan. The Cabinet brought back a historic stance Iraq had taken in 1979 when it condemned the military Soviet invasion of Afghanistan though Iraq had then deep relations with the Soviet Union and there was a friendship and cooperation agreement between Iraq and the Soviet Union, yet this had not prevented Iraq from taking the national independent stand rejecting Soviet's behavior. History repeats itself once again in 2001 as Iraq takes the same stance and condemns the US aggression on Afghanistan....this confirms Iraq's principled stance rejecting all forms of foreign intervention and aggressions. The Cabinet discussed issues listed on its agenda and made necessary decisions and recommendations." Saddam loves 11th anniversaries, for instance " Saddam Hussein's speech on the 11th Anniversary of the Great Victory Day In the Name of God, Most Compassionate, Most Merciful Great People, The Valiant of Our Brave Armed Forces, Sons of our Glorious Arab Nation…" "Middle East Correspondent, Robert Fisk: Why was it that the bombing of the two embassies in Tanzania and Kenya occurred on the eighth anniversary to the very day of the first arrival of American troops of the 82nd airborne in Saudi Arabia in 1990?" "The 12th of October 2002 will for the rest of Australian history be counted as a day when evil struck with indiscriminate and indescribable savagery," "On October 12th, 2000 terrorists in a boat laden with explosives carried out a suicide bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in the harbor at Aden, Yemen. In what President Clinton described as a "despicable and cowardly act," 17 U.S. sailors were killed, and over 30 others were wounded." After the liberation of Iraq terrorists struck the Baghdad Hotel on October 12th. If you add 1 to 9 you get 10. If you add 1 to 11 you get 12. Thus the 9/11/2001 attack was presaged by the attack on the U.S.S. Cole on 10/12/2000. The terrorists were engaging in what to them was a private joke regarding their plans for 9/11/2001. "Iraq has the motivation and the means to actively support the Islamist networks of the region*** In the past, there have been intelligence reports of possible cooperation between Iraq and Osama bin Laden. Iraq has already tried to assassinate President Bush Senior in 1993, when he visited Kuwait as a private citizen. In the attack on the USS Cole in Aden (in) October (of 2000), there could have been an Iraqi connection. Iraq has excellent relations with the anti-Western Yemeni Islamists of the Army of Aden-Abyan, whose militants have been arrested by the Yemenite authorities in connection with the attack. Such an attack required long preparations, technical and military skills and good operational intelligence. In addition, the explosive used in the attack was sophisticated, a "shaped charge" like a torpedo or a missile, a device not in use by terrorist organizations, and which may have come from a military stockpile." 4 DAYS BEFORE SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 Saddam's Stepson in USA "Authorities said Saffi" (Saddam's Stepson), " triggered red flags for four reasons: the family relationship to the Iraqi dictator; training at an American flight school; arrival on the eve of the Independence Day celebrations; and his only documented prior entry into the United States occurred just four days before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks." "Saddam's Stepson to Be Deported Fri Jul 5th 2002 (Saffi) was planning to study at a flight school believed by the FBI to have been used by one of the Sept. 11 hijackers." "US officials state that an FBI investigation had substantiated charges that the Iraqi government plotted the assassination of former President Bush while visiting Kuwait in April 1993." "Terrorist Pilot Met With Iraqi Intelligence Agent By RICK JERVIS Special to The Wall Street Journal Europe Wall Street Journal, Europe October 4, 2001 [With thanks to Laurie Mylroie - Iraq News] PRAGUE-Mohamed Atta, who allegedly crashed the first plane into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, met at least one Iraqi intelligence agent last year in Prague before moving to the U.S., a Czech official close to the investigation said." United Airlines Flight 175 which left Boston's Logan Airport bound for Los Angeles before being piloted into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY 15 December 1988 43/175. Question of Palestine RECORDED VOTE ON RESOLUTION 43/175 A: 123-2-20 Did Anniversary Assassins Strike Again November 22nd 2004 What do you think the chances are that the plane crash which would have killed the 41st President of the United States, George Herbert Walker Bush,had he been on board the plane which was enroute from Love Field in Dallas, Texas to pick him up, on the 41st anniversary of the assassination of JFK 11/22/1963 was a botched assassination attempt? Saddam Hussein, who may be running the show from his jail cell, assassinated his first victim when he was 11 years old, took power in Iraq in 1968, made it official 11 years later in 1979, invaded Kuwait 11 years later in 1990 sent bin Laden to assassinate former President Bush 11 years later on 9/11/2001 on the 11th anniversary to the day of the 9/11/1990 Bush speech to Congress on Iraq in which Bush mentioned The New World Order."US plans to dominate the world under the cover of what is called the new [world] order. These are the fruits of the new US order. [Video of explosion rocking World Trade Center] [Description of Source: Baghdad Republic of Iraq Television in Arabic-Official television station of the Iraqi Government." The World Trade Center looked so much like the number 11 that WPIX-TV Channel 11 in New York City used the World Trade Center as its logo. Note 11 times 2 equals 22. The Madrid attacks were done exactly 911 days after 9/11/2001. Sadat, criticized by arafat and Saddam for making peace with Israel, was assassinated on 10/6/1981 exactly 8 years after the 10/6/1973 Yom Kippur War in which he failed to defeat Israel. The American Embassies in Africa were hit on August 8th, 1998, exactly 8 years after the US entered Saudi Arabia in response to Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. A gentlemanly John Connally reaches to remove his hat as Jackie Kennedy enters presidential limousine at Love Field, Dallas, November 22, 1963 Source: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/images/jbc-love.htm The shocking news that narco-terrorists in Colombia plotted to assassinate current President George W. Bush on Monday November 22nd, 2004, the 41st anniversary of the JFK assassination, needs some examination. BCCI, the infamous drug-terror-arms bank that allegedly gave former President Jimmy Carter $10 million for the Carter Library,had offices in Peru, where coca leaves are grown, in Colombia, where the coca leaves are processed into cocaine, and in Castro's Cuba, and Baathist Syria and Baathist Iraq. Banks did not get offices in any of those 3 tyrannies without the approval of the tyrant. "Colombian Rebels Planned to Kill President Bush November 27th, 2004 U.S. National - Reuters By Hugh Bronstein BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) - President Bush was targeted for assassination by Colombia's biggest Marxist rebel group this week when he visited the Caribbean port city of Cartagena, a top Colombian official said on Saturday. "According to informants and various sources, we had information indicating that various members of the FARC had been instructed by their leaders to make an attempt against President Bush," Defense Secretary Jorge Alberto Uribe told reporters. He would not be drawn out on the details of the threat. The White House had no immediate comment. The U.S. Secret Service, which protects the president, said it "does not comment or release information regarding our protective intelligence and protective methods." "We do not discuss any alleged threats to our protectees," said Jonathan Cherry, a Secret Service spokesman. There was heavy security in Cartagena when Bush visited the city on Monday(November 22nd, 2004)on his way back from the APEC forum in Chile. Military helicopters packed with armed soldiers flew over Bush's motorcade while naval vessels kept watch offshore. Many shops were shuttered." Source: http://news.yahoo.com/news? tmpl=story&u=/nm/20041127/us_nm/colombia_bush_plot_dc_5 "In early August, 1991, the Committee was provided with documents from the Latin American and Caribbean Region Office (LACRO) of BCCI, describing the offer for sale by the Argentine air force of 22 Mirage aircraft for $110 million. (63) The planned sale was to have been made to Iraq, as part of Saddam Hussein's massive military buildup prior to the Gulf war. BCCI was acting as the broker for the transaction, which was to take place in August or September of 1989...As Robert Mazur, the Customs agent in Tampa who selected BCCI as the target of the Customs money laundering sting testified, BCCI bank executives volunteered methods to enhance and improve his techniques for money laundering, and shortly before the sting ended the operation, offered to introduce Mazur to other potential "cash" customers for money laundering services from Bogota, Colombia...." Source: http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/04crime.htm "The Ba'ath leadership gave the orders for Qasim's assassination...On October 7th,1959, a six-,man assassination squad was waiting...the night before one member of the squad had fallen ill. A new recruit was drafted in...his full name was Saddam Hussein al-Takriti." Page 22 "The Ba'athist led forces...participated in the coup of 8th February 1963...Immediately after the coup, Saddam Hussein returned to Iraq, where he was appointed as the head of Al-Jihaz Al Khas, known popularly as Jihaz Haneen (the Yearning Apparatus), the clandestine intelligence organization of the Ba'ath Party. Saddam proceeded to turn it into an instrument of terror....on 18th November (1963) the army seized power in a swift military coup...the new leadership of the Ba'ath Party...was arrested. However, some of its members immediately collaborated with the new regime..." Pgs 25-26 "7th October 1959 A Ba'athist assassination squad fails to kill Qasim. A member of the team, twenty-two-year old Saddam Hussein, escapes to Syria and then to Egypt...8th February 1963 A Ba'athist coup overthrows Quasim amidst several days of terrible street fighting...18th November 1963 Following bitter infighting between...factions of the Baath, Arif overthrows the Ba'athist regime..." Pages 312-313 "Saddam...inherited from his uncle an admiration for Nazi principles...he was attracted to the ideas of the Ba'ath nationalist movement. The movement had been established in Damascus in 1943" (when Syria was a French colony and Hitler ruled France) "by two Syrians, Greek Orthodox Christian Michel A'flaq and Sunni Muslim Salah al-Bitar. Their philosophy was based on the ideology of German national socialism" (Nazism) "and on Italian fascism." Page 199 "After the Ba'ath Party came to power in February 1963...Saddam was promoted into the Regional Command Council and it was soon found that this was his metier. He was put in charge of a special force responsible for terror and assassination and was an interrogator and torturer in the Qasr al-Nihayyat (`The Palace of the End'). Eyewitnesses say Saddam excelled in creating new methods and revealed a sadistically inventive mind. He designed new instruments of torture and then experimentd with them on his victims. ...By the summer of 1963, Saddam was urging the party to put him in charge of creating a special security apparatus modelled on the Nazi SS. This was the Jihaz Haneen....following nationalisation of banks and certain foreign companies in 1964, the Ba'ath Party instructed Saddam to assassinate the president Abd al-Salam Arif. The proposed assassination was designed to trigger off another Ba'ath coup. Critics say it was a plan on behalf of the CIA but according to some Ba'athist defectors the CIA did not have direct contact with the Ba'ath itself but with army officers who were co-ordinating a joint coup with the party. The main contact with the Americans was Iraq's own ambassador in Washington, Dr. Nasser al-Hanni." Pages 201-203 "The second part of the plot was carried out by the Jihaz Haneen...Members of the Iraqi Jewish community...were...arrested. Eleven of them were among the first fourteen `spies' to be pubicly hanged on 27th January 1969....The public hangings turned into a national holiday with live television and radio coverage, and the Ba'ath Party organized the transport of some hundred thousand `workers and peasants' from outside Baghdad to join in...Families picknicked under trees while watching the hangings. This public orgy of death went on for twenty-four hours..." Page 206 Source: Unholy Babylon-The Secret History of Saddam's War by Adel Darwish and Gregory Alexander St. Martin's Press, New York 1991 ISBN 0-312-06530-2 "Compare the January 1969 show trial with another spectacle organized by the first Ba'thi regime in 1963 and designed to counter the continuing popularity of the ousted president, `Abd al-Karim Qassem, among certain sectors of the Shi'ite population of Baghdad. In the first week of the coup, the citizens of al-Thawra, a suburb of Baghdad, had fought the army and Ba'thist militia in some of the bloodiest street battles in the history of the country. They refused to believe that Qassem had been overthrown....The Ba'ath...dealt with this emotive imagery by televising a lengthy film clip displaying Qassem's bullet-ridden corpse. Night after night, they made their gruesome point. The body was propped up on a chair in the studio. A soldier saunter around, handling its parts. The camera would cut to scenes of devastation at the Ministry of Defence where Qassem had made his last stand. There, on location, it lingered on the mutilated corpses of Qassem's entourage...Back to the studio, and close-ups now of the entry and exit points of each bullet hole. The whole macabre sequence closes with a scene that must forever remain etched on the memory of all those who saw it: the soldier grabbing the lolling head by the hair, came right up close, and spat full face into it. The fear that the Ba'th were trying to instill in this and other instances was brutally direct. The centuries-old message was simple: he is dead, you had better believe it, we can do the smae to you. The fact that it was on television extended its reach..." Pages 58-59. Source: Republic of Fear The Inside Story of Saddam's Iraq by Samir al Khalil Pantheon Books, New York 1989 ISBN 0-679-73502-X "An Afghani tends to a field of heroin poppies, the sale of which provides much of the financing for the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. Afghanistan is the world's No. 1 producer and distributor of heroin, and illicit drug trafficking is the biggest funding source for By Rachel Ehrenfeld / Special to The Detroit News About the author Rachel Ehrenfeld is director of the New York-based Center for the Study of Corruption and the author of "Evil Money" (HarperBusiness) and "Narco-Terrorism" (Basic Books). Moving the money... In the welter of events following the bombing of the World Trade Center in Feb. 26, 1993, few noticed that the first man arrested, Mohammed Salameh—the poor, unemployed illegal immigrant— offered $5 million for bail. Where could he get this kind of money? The judge refused bail. But was the source of Salameh's offer the same as the one that funded the eight men—arrested shortly afterward—who planned to blow up Manhattan's tunnels and bridges and to assassinate public officials? Were the same money sources behind the final attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11? ... For a long time, there has been evidence that terrorist, international drug trafficking and criminal organizations use the same fund-raising methods to enrich themselves. Yet no one seemed to connect the dots. And no one seriously tried to crack down on their financing. Bin Laden's is only one among many hostile international criminal organizations, often state-sponsored, that will do whatever they can to diminish the status of the United States as the only superpower. According to a State Department report, the Taliban, who are at bin Laden's service, has the advantage of controlling the world's largest heroin production and distribution in the world. Since the Taliban took over Afghanistan, the heroin production soared to hundreds of tons each year. In 1999 alone, the world production of heroin was estimated at 500 metric tons; 400 were produced by the Taliban and available to fund bin Laden and his associates worldwide. First warning The writing was on the wall on July 5, 1991, when the Bank of England shut down what was the most important Islamic bank in the world, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). This criminal entity was created by the Pakistani Aaga Hassan Abedi "to fight the evil influence of the West"; to help with the creation of the "Islamic Bomb"; to finance all Muslim terrorist organizations; and to launder the money that was generated mostly by illicit drug trafficking and other illegal activities, including arms trafficking. When BCCI went belly up, we learned from thousands of documents that Abu Nidal—the notorious Palestinian terrorist organization that now enjoys the hospitality of Iraq's Saddam Hussein, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Hezbollah and bin Laden—had accounts in the bank. By the end of the 1980s, the "special services" provided by BCCI included access to Western humanitarian and international development funds, as well as drug money laundering, secret transfers of cash and bribes. A "Black Network," a special enforcement unit supported by Abu Nidal and other terrorist organizations, operated from Pakistan. The same Pakistan that harbored bin Laden for many years while its officials told the United States that they didn't know his whereabouts. And the same Pakistan that for decades, even according to the State Department's annual report, had been a major drug trafficking and money laundering center. Western blindness Yet, now more importantly, we also discovered that the American and British governments knew and kept the bank open for a long time. The bank "that would bribe God" was able to get away with its criminal activities for decades due to Abedi's clever portrayal of the Muslim nations as victims of Western—and particularly U.S.— "imperialism." And when the bank was shuttered, the accusation in the Muslim/Arab and Third World countries was that the U.S. and the United Kingdom governments closed the bank to curtail the growing fiscal power of Muslim countries. Like Abedi, anti-American, anti-Western terrorist and radical Muslim states and organizations, such as the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the PLO, Iraq and Iran, use Western democratic rhetoric to their advantage. But it is the willful blindness, mainly toward the growing volume of drug money laundering, exercised by Western bankers on the one hand and Western politicians on the other, that makes money laundering possible, despite the many laws and international conventions to control this phenomenon. The BCCI was the first warning to the West. The second warning about the abuse of European and American financial markets by terrorist organizations, as well as their involvement in the illicit arms and drug trade, was made in February 1994 by the British National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS). The Organized Crime Unit of the NCIS warned that Middle East terrorist groups and states were targeting the financial centers of London, Frankfurt and other Western countries, and that they favor illegal drug trafficking, money laundering and fraud.... Clinton appeasement Despite its stated policy of not negotiating with terrorists, the Clinton administration went out of its way to appease a few of the 20th century's most notorious terror groups: the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the PLO and the Irish Republican Army. All are heavily involved in the drug trade. On the eve of the 1993 handshake on the White House lawn between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, Britain's National Criminal Intelligence Service estimated the PLO's ill-gotten gains to total between $8 billion to $10 billion, with an annual income of about $1.5 billion to $2 billion from "donations, extortion, payoffs, illegal arms dealing, drug trafficking, money laundering, fraud, etc." Since then, Washington has only aided and abetted the PLO. Since the start of the Oslo process, Arafat has received at least $3 billion more from the United States and the international community, without any serious demand for accountability, according to a report this year to Congress. Arafat, in well-documented instances, has been systematically skimming off portions of these funds, as he has with monies given to him on behalf of the refugees in the camps. The PLO was in the drug trafficking business almost from the beginning. Operating from Lebanon, under Habash's able leadership and assisted by a PLO-owned shipping company SUMUD, the organization exported hashish, opium, heroin and cocaine, first to Europe and later even to the United States and Australia. In return, it obtained weapons for their war against Israel and the West, and amassed a massive treasure trove. In addition, the PLO and Arafat, who enjoy the financial and strategic support of Hussein and bin Laden, have the distinction of being the organization that promoted "suicide bombers" as a weapon. Yet the Clinton administration subsidized a multitude of radical Palestinian groups, ranging from Arafat's Fatah branch of the PLO and its military wing, the Tanzim, to the socialist-nationalist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), headed by George Habash, all with close ties to bin Laden, Iraq and Iran. ...It was the Clinton White House that, despite evidence to the contrary, removed Syria from its list of the drug trafficking countries, to entice Syria to join the "peace process" in the Middle East. The failure of that process and the compromises the United States has made to maintain an illusion of peaceful prospects had no doubt added to the Muslim radical terrorists' resolve to attack what they see as a naive and vulnerable America. In another example of self-delusion, in 1999, then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright suggested a U.S.-led coalition to negotiate with the FARC and supported Colombia President Pastrana's "land for peace" initiative, despite a report from the General Accounting Office that the FARC is running a major international criminal enterprise that, among other things, supplies hundreds of tons of cocaine and heroin to the U.S. black market. This second Clinton "land for peace" initiative gave half of Colombia to the narco-terrorist FARC, while doing nothing to diminish its violence or appetite to control the rest of the country...." Source: http://www.detnews.com/2001/editorial/0109/30/a17-306400.htm Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called the Palestinian Authority a "gang of corrupt assassins and terrorists." "There is an obstacle [to peace] with the gang of corrupt assassins and terrorists that lead the Palestinian Authority," Sharon said in a televised speech in Israel. "The only way to peace is to remove this murderous posse." – Source: New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com Sharon raps Arafat `assassins' By KENNETH R. BAZINET DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU Thursday, August 8th, 2002 "Bush back from surprise Iraq trip President Bush has arrived back in the United States after a surprise trip to Baghdad, where he spent two hours with US troops celebrating Thanksgiving Day. Mr. Bush told troops the US would not be swayed by ongoing attacks in Iraq. "We did not charge hundreds of miles into the heart of Iraq, pay a bitter cost of casualties, defeat a ruthless dictator and liberate 25 million people only to retreat before a band of thugs and assassins," he told 600 US soldiers. Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3245584.stm "President Bush and his wife, Laura, along with former president George H. W. Bush, welcome the King and Queen of Spain, Juan and Sofia Carlos, to their ranch Wednesday, Nov. 24, 2004, in Crawford, Texas.(AP Photo/Lawrence Jackson)" Source: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news? tmpl=story&u=/041124/480/txlj10111241820 A small jet chartered to fly former President Bush to Ecuador Monday,November 22nd, 2004 was well below normal altitude when it clipped a toll road light tower and crashed into a muddy field three miles south of Hobby Airport, killing the crew of three.The plane, which belonged to Jet Place Inc. of Tulsa, Okla., came from Love Field in Dallas. It was approaching the runway when the wing and the landing gear on the right side clipped the pole on a tollway road....." "Weeks after the last pile of debris from EgyptAir Flight 990 was pulled from the sea, investigators say they are more convinced than ever of their original theory: The jet was crashed deliberately." http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/egyptair000121.html "The co-pilot under scrutiny in the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 uttered an Arabic prayer not once but as many as 10 times just before the doomed airliner went down" http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/egyptair991121.html "Aviation Analyst John Nance Talks About Flight 990 When a commercial aircraft goes into a dive as steep and precipitous as the preliminary radar data seems to indicate." http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/chat_johnnance110199.html "The White House is bordered on three sides by buildings that are as tall or taller than itself. (OEOB, Treasury, and Blair House.) Beyond these buildings there are still more buildings, that also are taller than the White House. The only flight path that is relatively unobstructed if making a controlled, straight-in approach, is from the south, over the ellipse. Even the Marine helicopter the president uses comes in from this direction and lands on the South Lawn. The problem with flying a plane the size of a 757 or 767 in from this direction is that there's a 555 ft tall structure in the way called the Washington Monument. The Capitol, although a bigger target, is similarly situated. There are buildings on all sides except for the west side, which faces the Mall. Again, for a controlled, straight-in approach, a pilot first would need to avoid the Washington Monument, and then fly straight down the Mall. There is more room to do this, but again, it would take considerable skill. Moreover, the buildings in Roslyn, just across the river from and to the west of the Mall, would have to be cleared, which means the plane's altitude would probably be too high, or the angle of descent too steep to permit a successful attack by anyone other than a skilled, experienced pilot." Imagine the rage and fury of Saddam Hussein "On February 26th, 1982 the Reagan Administration told Congress that it had dropped Iraq from the list of nations that supported acts of international terrorism. Baghdad would now be eligible for American government loan guarantees." source: SPIDER'S WEB: THE SECRET HISTORY OF HOW THE WHITE HOUSE ILLEGALLY ARMED IRAQ by Alan Friedman ASIN: 0553096508 Imagine Saddam's rage and fury when Kuwait was liberated on February 26th, 1991, 9 years to the day after the event described above! Is it any wonder that Saddam would launch the first of his 2 attacks on the World Trade Center on February 26th, 1993, the 2nd anniversary of the liberation of Kuwait City, and the 11th anniversary of the event described above, and that he would launch his 2nd attack on the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001, the 11th anniversary of the Bush I speech to Congress on Iraq. Saddam loves 11th anniversaries, for instance " Saddam Hussein's speech on the 11th Anniversary of the Great Victory Day In the Name of God, Most Compassionate, Most Merciful Great People, The Valiant of Our Brave Armed Forces, Sons of our Glorious Arab Nation…" http://www.index.com.jo/iraqtoday/auguste.html Saddam took credit for the September 11th attacks on America on Baghdad Republic of Iraq Television. Saddam sent his henchman Osama bin Laden to attack America and to assassinate former President Bush, who was at the White House on the morning of September 11th, 2001,just as he had tried to assassinate former President Bush in Kuwait in 1993. That is why Flight 93 was selected to hit the White House on the morning of September 11th, 2001. Fortunately the heroes of Flight 93 stopped that from happening and the plane went down in Pennsylvania. Second Attempt to Assassinate President Bush. We all know that Saddam Hussein attempted to assassinate former President Bush in Kuwait in 1993. Laura Bush, wife of the current President Bush, along with the current President Bush's brothers, his parents, and former Secretary of State Baker were actually in the air enroute to Kuwait when the intelligence came in and their plane was turned back. Then President Clinton later bombed an empty Iraqi intelligence building in retaliation for that attempt in which Saddam's homicide bombers were caught in Kuwait. We believe that the Second Attempt to assassinate former President George Herbert Walker Bush was made by Saddam Hussein using his henchman Osama bin Laden on September 11th, 2001. September 11th, 1990 Dubya's Dad Speaks to Congress on Iraq When September 11th Yes ! September 11th 1990. Exactly 11 years to the day before the infamous September 11th 2001 attacks on America. Saddam's Revenge !!! How clear it is!!! "Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the Persian Gulf Crisis and the Federal Budget Deficit September 11, 1990. We gather tonight, witness to events in the Persian Gulf as significant as they are tragic. In the early morning hours of August 2d, following negotiations and promises by Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein not to use force, a powerful Iraqi army invaded its trusting and much weaker neighbor, Kuwait. *** The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective-a new world order-can emerge. ***" READ THE WHOLE OF DUBYA'S DADDY'S SPEECH TO CONGRESS ON SEPTEMBER 11TH, 1990 AT http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/ "Note: The President spoke at 9:09 p.m.in the House Chamber at the Capitol.. The address was broadcast live on nationwide television and radio." http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/ Iraq Cheers September 11th Attacks on America "Wednesday, September 12, 2001 Baghdad TV Commentary: US `Reaping Fruits of Crimes Against Humanity' Baghdad Republic of Iraq Television in Arabic 1700 GMT 11 Sep 01 [TV Commentary by Sa'd Yasin Yusuf read by announcer over footage of explosions in New York] [FBIS Translated Text] [With thanks to Laurie Mylorie - Iraq Watch] The American cowboy is reaping the fruits of his crimes against humanity. It is a black day in the history of America, which is tasting the bitter defeat of its crimes and disregard for peoples' will to lead a free, decent life. The massive explosions in the centers of power in America, notably the Pentagon, is a painful slap in the face of US politicians to stop their illegitimate hegemony and attempts to impose custodianship on peoples. It was no coincidence that the World Trade Center was destroyed in suicidal operations involving two planes that have broken through all US security barriers to carry the operation of the century and to express rejection of the reckless US policy. Panic has spread among US official circles, which evacuated the White House following a series of explosions. They also evacuated the Pentagon, the State Department, and Congress and closed down the airports and government institutions. The collapse of US centers of power is a collapse of the US policy, which deviates from human values and stands by world Zionism at all international forums to continue to slaughter the Palestinian Arab people and implement US plans to dominate the world under the cover of what is called the new [world] order. These are the fruits of the new US order. [Video of explosion rocking World Trade Center] [Description of Source: Baghdad Republic of Iraq Television in Arabic-Official television station of the Iraqi Government]" http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3 "BLITZER: That's Osama bin Laden's group. Now you also have some new information, David, about Mohamed Atta. He's the suspected ringleader of the September 11th hijackings. ENSOR: Well, that's right. As you know, he was one of the suicide hijackers who died on September 11th on one of those aircraft. And we had previously reported on September 19th that he met with an Iraqi intelligence official somewhere in Europe. Well, I'm now able to tell you, based on information from U.S. sources, he met not once but twice with Iraqi intelligence officers in Prague in the Czech Republic: once last year in June of 2000 and once in April of 2001." http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0110/10/lkl.00.html Aired 9/11/2001 "Baghdad Republic of Iraq TV: These are the fruits of the new US order.[Video of explosion rocking World Trade Center]Panic has spread among US official circles, which evacuated the White House following a series of explosions." "CNN LARRY KING LIVE Aired October 2, 2001 LARRY KING: Have you spoken to your father- in-law? (George Herbert Walker Bush) LAURA BUSH: I've spoken to my father-in-law. They were-they had actually spent that Monday night here.(at the White House) I had just seen them off that morning (9/11/2001) when I got in the car and found out about the first plane.(going into the World Trade Center.)" http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0110/02/lkl.00.html "Senator Joseph Lieberman: (Saddam) tried to kill former President Bush (in 1993)" http://cnnstudentnews.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0401/25/le.00.html Former President Bush Speech to Congress September 11th 1990. 11 years to the day before September 11th 2001 "In the early morning hours of August 2d,(1990),a powerful Iraqi army invaded Kuwait.The crisis in the Persian Gulf also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective-a new world order-can emerge." http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/ "(White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer: we have real and credible information that the airplane that landed at the Pentagon was originally intended to hit the White House." http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010912- 8.html#intended-targets "White House Was Flight 93 Target http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/20/attack/main509535.shtml A high-ranking al Qaeda detainee told investigators the intended target of United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed into a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11, was the White House. Government sources said Abu Zubaydah, now in U.S. custody, believed to be the source of the information." "Moussaoui Says He Was to Hijack 5th Plane By MATTHEW BARAKAT, Associated Press Writer (Monday March 27, 2006) Al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui testified Monday that he and would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid were supposed to hijack a fifth airplane on Sept. 11, 2001, and fly it into the White House. Moussaoui's testimony on his own behalf stunned the courtroom. His account was in stark contrast to his previous statements in which he said the White House attack was to come later if the United States refused to release a radical Egyptian sheik imprisoned on earlier terrorist convictions. On Dec. 22, 2001, Reid was subdued by passengers when he attempted to detonate a bomb in his shoe aboard American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami. There were 197 people on board. The plane was diverted to Boston, where it landed safely. Moussaoui told the court he knew the World Trade Center attack was coming and that he lied to investigators when arrested in August 2001 because he wanted it to happen. "You lied because you wanted to conceal that you were a member of al- Qaida?" prosecutor Rob Spencer asked. "That's correct," Moussaoui said. Spencer: "You lied so the plan could go forward?" Moussaoui: "That's correct." The exchange was key to the government's case that the attacks might have been averted if Moussaoui had been more cooperative following his arrest. Moussaoui told the court he knew the attacks were coming some time after August 2001 and bought a radio so he could hear them unfold. Specifically, he said he knew the World Trade Center was going to be attacked, but asserted he was not part of that plot and didn't know the details. Nineteen men pulled off the Sept. 11 attacks on New York in Washington in the worst act of terrorism ever on U.S. soil. "I had knowledge that the Twin Towers would be hit," Moussaoui said. "I didn't know the details of this." Asked by his lawyer why he signed his guilty plea in April as "the 20th hijacker," Moussaoui replied: "Because everybody used to refer to me as the 20th hijacker and it was a bit of fun." Before Moussaoui took the stand, his lawyers made a last attempt to stop him from testifying, but failed. Defense attorney Gerald Zerkin argued that his client would not be a competent witness because he has contempt for the court, only recognizes Islamic law and therefore "the affirmation he undertakes would be meaningless." Moussaoui at first denied he was to have been a fifth hijack pilot Sept. 11 but under cross examination spoke of the plan that would have him attack the White House. He said Reid was the only person he knew for sure would have been on that mission, but others were discussed. The 19 terrorists on Sept. 11 hijacked and crashed four airliners, killing nearly 3,000 people in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and on the planes. The intended target of the plane that crashed into a Pennsylvania field remains unknown. Moussaoui said he talked with an al-Qaida official in 1999 about why a 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center failed to bring the towers down. He said "was asked in the same period for the first time if I want to be a suicide pilot and I declined." Just before Moussaoui took the stand, the court heard testimony that two months before the attacks that a CIA deputy chief waited in vain for permission to tell the FBI about a "very high interest" al-Qaida operative who became one of the hijackers. The official, a senior figure in the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit, said he sought authorization on July 13, 2001, to send information to the FBI but got no response for 10 days, then asked again. As it turned out, the information on Khalid al-Mihdhar did not reach the FBI until late August. At the time, CIA officers needed permission from a special unit before passing certain intelligence on to the FBI. The official was identified only as John. His written testimony was read into the record. "John's" testimony was part of the defense's case that federal authorities missed multiple opportunities to catch hijackers and perhaps thwart the 9/11 plot. His testimony included an e-mail sent by FBI supervisor Michael Maltbie discussing Moussaoui but playing down his terrorist connections. Maltbie's e-mail said "there's no indication that (Moussaoui) had plans for any nefarious activity." He sent that e-mail to the CIA even after receiving a lengthy memo from the FBI agent who arrested Moussaoui and suspected him of being a terrorist with plans to hijack aircraft. Prosecutors argue that Moussaoui, a French citizen, thwarted a prime opportunity to track down the 9/11 hijackers and possibly unravel the plot when he was arrested in August 2001 on immigration violations and lied to the FBI about his al-Qaida membership and plans to hijack a plane. Had Moussaoui confessed, the FBI could have pursued leads that would have led them to most of the hijackers, government witnesses have testified. To win the death penalty, prosecutors must first prove that Moussaoui's actions — specifically, his lies — were directly responsible for at least one death on Sept. 11. If they fail, Moussaoui would get life in prison. ___ Associated Press Writer Michael J. Sniffen contributed to this report source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060327/ap_on_re_us/moussaoui_14&printer= 1;_ylt=Ags6isPJuz93w2EYYRP9gnVH2ocA;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MXN1bHE0BHNlYwN0bWE-

plz. help me to write the main idea of this article in the NY Times. in two pages.? November 5, 2006 Where Plan A Left Ahmad Chalabi By DEXTER FILKINS 1. London, August 2006 Many miles away in a more dangerous place the dream is ending badly. The bodies pile up. Good people stream to the borders. Leaders pile money onto planes. The center is giving way. The apartment on South Street in London is an antidote to Baghdad in nearly every respect. Where the Iraqi capital rings with chaos and violence, the sidewalks of Mayfair are quiet enough to hear your own voice above the cars. Baghdad is treeless and tan; the South Street apartment opens onto a private park filled with the lushness of an English garden. Just across the way is the Anglican church where General Eisenhower, stationed here as the commander of Allied forces during the war, came to pray. A maid greets you at the door, an elderly Lebanese woman who doubles as an Arabic teacher for the children. The parlor is neatly appointed and filled with art, most of it European, different from the Baghdad house, where most of it is Iraqi. There is “Sketch of a Woman,” by Lucien Pissarro, the French painter who propagated Impressionism in London; it catches the light nicely. The furniture is expensive, the kind that makes you hesitate to sit down. But the place has a lived-in quality too; family members come and go, clutching bags and calling to one another down the hallways. No one seems the least bit awed by the man of the house, who is dressed in a bespoke suit and carries himself like a monarch, and who, until now, hasn’t spent more than a day at a time here since before the Iraq war began. For Ahmad Chalabi, Iraq is an abstraction again. Once again, his native country is a faraway land ruled by somebody else, a place where other people die. It’s a place to be discussed, rued, plotted over, from a parlor on an expensive Western street. Iraq’s new leaders, the men who excluded Chalabi from the government they formed this spring, still call for advice — several times a day, Chalabi says. He is here in London, his longtime home in exile, temporarily, he says, taking his first vacation in five years. At lunch at a nearby restaurant an hour before, he ordered the sea bass wrapped in a banana leaf. He walks the streets unattended by armed guards. But the interlude, Chalabi says, is just that, a passing thing. His doubters will come back to him; they always have. As ever, he wears a jester’s smile, wide and blank, a mask that has carried him through crises of the first world and the third. Still, a touch of bitterness can creep into Chalabi’s voice, a hint that he has concluded that his time has come and gone. Indeed, even for a man as vain and resilient as Chalabi, his present predicament stands too large to go unacknowledged. Once Iraq’s anointed leader — anointed by the Americans — Chalabi, at age 62, is without a job, spurned by the very colleagues whose ascension he engineered. His benefactors in the White House and in the Pentagon, who once gobbled up whatever half-baked intelligence Chalabi offered, now regard him as undependable and — worse — safely ignored. Chalabi’s life work, an Iraq liberated from Saddam Hussein, a modern and democratic Iraq, is spiraling toward disintegration. Indeed, for many in the West, Chalabi has become the personification of all that has gone wrong in Iraq: the lies, the arrogance, the occupation as disaster. “The real culprit in all this is Wolfowitz,” Chalabi says, referring to his erstwhile backer, the former deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz. “They chickened out. The Pentagon guys chickened out.” Chalabi still considers Wolfowitz a friend, so he proceeds carefully. America’s big mistake, Chalabi maintains, was in failing to step out of the way after Hussein’s downfall and let the Iraqis take charge. The Iraqis, not the Americans, should have been allowed to take over immediately — the people who knew the country, who spoke the language and, most important, who could take responsibility for the chaos that was unfolding in the streets. An Iraqi government could have acted harshly, even brutally, to regain control of the place, and the Iraqis would have been without a foreigner to blame. They would have appreciated the firm hand. There would have been no guerrilla insurgency or, if there was, a small one that the new Iraqi government could have ferreted out and crushed on its own. An Iraqi leadership would have brought Moktada al-Sadr, the populist cleric, into the government and house-trained him. The Americans, in all likelihood, could have gone home. They certainly would have been home by now. “We would have taken hold of the country,” Chalabi says. “We would have revitalized the civil service immediately. We would have been able to put together a military force and an intelligence service. There would have been no insurgency. We would have had electricity. The Americans screwed it up.” Chalabi’s notion — that an Iraqi government, as opposed to an American one, could have saved the great experiment — has become one of the arguments put forth by the war’s proponents in the just-beginning debate over who lost Iraq. At best, it’s improbable: Chalabi is essentially arguing that a handful of Iraqi exiles, some of whom had not lived in the country in decades, could have put together a government and quelled the chaos that quickly engulfed the country after Hussein’s regime collapsed. They could have done this, presumably, without an army (which most wanted to dissolve) and without a police force (which was riddled with Baathists). In fact, the Americans considered the idea and dismissed it. (But not, Wolfowitz insists, because of him. His longtime aide, Kevin Kellems, said that Wolfowitz favored turning over power “as rapidly as possible to duly elected Iraqi authorities.”) The Bush administration decided to go to the United Nations and have the American role in Iraq formally described as that of an “occupying power,” a step that no Iraqi, not even the lowliest tea seller, failed to notice. They appointed L. Paul Bremer III as viceroy. Instead of empowering Iraqis, Bremer set up an advisory panel of Iraqis — one that included Chalabi — that had no power at all. The warmth that many ordinary Iraqis felt for the Americans quickly ebbed away. It’s not clear that the Americans had any other choice. But here in his London parlor, Chalabi is now contending that excluding Iraqis was the Americans’ fatal mistake. “It was a puppet show!” Chalabi exclaims again, shifting on the couch. “The worst of all worlds. We were in charge, and we had no power. We were blamed for everything the Americans did, but we couldn’t change any of it.” It’s three and a half years later now. More than 2,800 Americans are dead; more than 3,000 Iraqis die each month. The anarchy seems limitless. In May 2004, American and Iraqi agents even raided Chalabi’s home in Baghdad. He has been denounced by Bremer and by Bush and accused of passing secrets to America’s enemy, Iran. At the heart of the American decision to take over and run Iraq, Chalabi now concludes, lay a basic contempt for Iraqis, himself included. “In Wolfowitz’s mind, you couldn’t trust the Iraqis to run a democracy,” Chalabi says. “ ‘We have to teach them, give them lessons,’ in Wolfowitz’s mind. ‘We have to leave Iraq under our tutelage. The Iraqis are useless. The Iraqis are incompetent.’ “What I didn’t realize,” Chalabi says, “was that the Americans sold us out.” Turkish coffee is served, then tea. I consider Chalabi’s predicament: the Iraqi patrician, confidant of prime ministers and presidents, the M.I.T.- and University of Chicago-trained mathematics professor, owner of a Mayfair flat, complaining of being regarded, by the masters he once manipulated, as a scruffy, shiftless native. “I’ve been a friend of America, and I’ve been its enemy,” he says. “America betrays its friends. It sets them up and betrays them. I’d rather be America’s enemy.” And so he is. Sort of. With Chalabi, it’s hard to be certain, and not just because his motives are so opaque, but because he is never still. He is enigmatic, brilliant, nimble, unreliable, charming, narcissistic, finally elusive. The journey to Mayfair is a long one. What happened to Chalabi? Well, you might ask: What happened to Iraq? 2. Mushkhab, January 2005 The election is coming, and we are heading south. Twenty cars, mostly carrying men with guns. They hang out the windows, pointing their Kalashnikovs at the terrified drivers. Get out of the way or we shoot, and maybe we shoot anyway — that’s the message. But that’s Iraq. We move quickly, weaving, south in the southbound, south in the northbound. Very fast. Unbelievably fast. Drivers veer and career. We go where we want. We’re low on fuel, and a gas station beckons. It is one of the strange and singular facts of Iraqi life that despite sitting atop an ocean of oil, Iraqis must wait hours — often days — for gasoline at the pumps. Lack of refining capacity, smuggling, stealing, insurgent attacks, Soviet subsidies: it’s complicated. On the road outside Salman Pak, the line is perhaps 300 cars long. The Chalabi convoy cuts straight to the front of the line. No one protests. It’s the guns. The Iraqis wait for days, and our effrontery brings no protest. Not a peep. We get our gas and we speed away, guns out the windows. Very fast. An hour later, we arrive at our destination, Mushkhab. It’s a mostly Shiite town about 100 miles south of Baghdad. It is friendly country — to Chalabi, and still, then, to Americans. The whole town — the males, anyway — gathers round. Chalabi stands in the center, dressed in a dark gray Western suit. The Iraqis clap and read poetry; some of it they sing. It’s a tradition, a kind of serenade to the honored guest. “Hey, listen, Bush, we are Iraqis,” the poet says, and everyone is clapping. “We never bow our heads to anyone, and we won’t do it for you. We have tough guys like Chalabi on our side — be careful.” Everyone laughs. We move inside the mudhif, a tall, long, fantastic structure woven of dried river reeds, a kind of pavilion of rattan. The room is laid with hand-woven carpets, and on the walls hang framed yellowed photographs of the leaders of the tribe, Al Fatla, meeting with their British overlords many years ago. A pair of loudspeakers are set up in the front. Chalabi takes a microphone. “My Iraqi brothers, the Americans pushed out Saddam, but they did not liberate our country,” Chalabi tells the group. “We are asking you to participate in this election so that we can have an independent country. This is not just words. The Iraqi people will liberate the country.” He goes on a little more, warming to the Iraqis assembled about him. “On my way here, I saw a huge line of people waiting for gasoline,” Chalabi tells the group. “Some of them were there for two nights, carrying blankets with them. It makes me very sad to see my brothers wait for days to get gas at the station.” Shameless, huh? I thought so, too. Almost a thing of beauty. It was so outrageous I almost wanted to forgive him, as a teacher might her sassy but cleverest boy. And that’s the thing about Chalabi: he’s very difficult to dislike. It may be his secret. It was Chalabi, after all — a foreigner, an Arab — who persuaded the most powerful men and women in the United States to make the liberation of Iraq not merely a priority but an obsession. First in 1998, when Chalabi persuaded Congress to pass the Iraq Liberation Act (in turn leading to payments to his group, the Iraqi National Congress, exceeding $27 million over the next six years) and then, later, in persuading the Bush administration of the necessity of using force to destroy Saddam Hussein. And when it all went bad, when those nuclear weapons never turned up, the clever child shrugged and smiled. “We are heroes in error,” Chalabi told Britain’s Daily Telegraph. Almost with a wink. Lunch is served: a long table heaped with rice and roasted lamb. No seats. Everyone stands, dozens of us, and we dig in with our fingers. After a time, we prepare to leave. The table and the ground around it are littered with rice and lamb bones. We re-form into a convoy and speed toward the holy city of Najaf. By the time we arrive in Najaf, it’s dark. The fighting between American soldiers and the Mahdi Army irregulars laid waste to the city only a few months before, but on this night, Najaf seems remarkably calm. The pilgrim hotels lie in ruins, but the golden dome of the shrine of Imam Ali shimmers under a January moon. Chalabi exits his S.U.V. and strides inside through the 20-foot-high wooden doors. A clutch of Sunni leaders, whom Chalabi has agreed to show around, trail in step. The curiosities intersect: the Sunnis are not Shiites, and this is the holiest of Shiite places, the tomb of the son-in-law of the Holy Prophet and the very heart of the Shiite faith. But they are still Muslims, and they are allowed to pass. As a non-Muslim, I wait outside in the street. More unlikely than the presence of the Sunnis is their tour guide, Chalabi. Or it was unlikely. Not anymore. Chalabi, the Westernized, Western-educated mathematician, has entered his Islamist phase. It’s not terribly convincing. He does not don a turban. He has no beard. He does not pray. He does not, really, even pretend. But as a practical politician — as an exile come home to a strange land getting stranger by the day — Chalabi had to do something. Relations between Chalabi and the Bush administration began to sour almost immediately after the fall of Hussein, when the Americans decided against putting Iraqis — presumably Chalabi — in charge. Bremer considered him an egomaniac. When no W.M.D. turned up, more and more Americans came to blame Chalabi for the war. Chalabi’s association with the Americans grew more disadvantageous by the day. The break came on May 20, 2004, when the Americans, accusing Chalabi of telling the Iranian government that the Americans were eavesdropping on their secret communications, swooped in on his Baghdad compound. American troops sealed off Mansour, the neighborhood where Chalabi lived, while scores of Iraqi and American agents kicked in the compound doors. One of the Iraqis, Chalabi said, put a gun to his head. “Look, I think they tried to kill him,” Richard Perle, the former Pentagon adviser and longtime Chalabi friend, said of the American and Iraqi agents. “I think the raid on his house was intended to result in violence. They had sent 20 or 40 Humvees over there. Chalabi was being protected by a force of about 100 guys with machine guns. It is a miracle that it didn’t result in a massive shootout.” No shots were fired, but the break seemed final. Isolated, Chalabi turned to Islam — and, in particular, to Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric and leader of two armed uprisings against the Americans and the Iraqi government. Sadr is an erratic and unpredictable young man who sometimes ends his sermons with apocalyptic visions of the “hidden” 12th imam revealing himself. He is also the most popular man in Iraq. In the anarchy that ensued following the fall of Hussein, Iraqis, once known for their largely secular outlook, ran headlong toward Islam. Religion and anarchy moved together: the worse conditions got in the streets, the more Islamic Iraqis became. In the three and a half years that I have known Chalabi, I never once saw him pray. Or give any indication that he harbored religious beliefs at all. Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security adviser and a devout Shiite, told me once that when he and a group of five senior Iraqi politicians visited the Imam Ali shrine in 2004, all of them prayed but Chalabi. While the others knelt, Rubaie said, Chalabi stood quietly with his hands folded in front of him. On this return visit to the Imam Ali shrine, Chalabi and his Sunni colleagues spent 10 minutes inside and exited without saying a thing. But word travels quickly down Najaf’s narrow streets, and by the time our convoy sped back to Baghdad, there were very few people in Najaf who did not know that Chalabi had come. Once, when I asked Chalabi about his flirtation with the Islamists, he answered not in terms of religion but of politics. Moktada, he explained, was not essentially dangerous but merely misunderstood, an outsider who could be coaxed into Iraq’s new democratic order. Chalabi was happy to act as the bridge, and if he benefited politically from his efforts, he was not complaining. “The Americans made a mistake when they excluded Moktada in the beginning,” Chalabi told me. “Our real business is to persuade everybody that Sadr is better inside than outside, and to provide some measure of comfort to the middle class that he is not going to eat them up.” Indeed, Chalabi and Sadr are not as unlikely a pair as they may seem. Musa al-Sadr, the late Iranian-born ayatollah and Moktada’s cousin, presided over Chalabi’s wedding in Beirut in 1971. Chalabi’s wife, Leila, is the daughter of Adel Osseiran, a leader of the Lebanese independence movement. Musa al-Sadr was the founder of Amal, which became the prototypical Shiite party in the Middle East. It seemed like a game, and not one that Chalabi liked to give away. Whenever I asked him about his coziness with Moktada, and how it squared with his own religious beliefs, I usually received a curt retort. For a time, Chalabi — and the Americans — got the better of the deal. Moktada fielded candidates in the January 2005 election, and his militia, though still untamed, fell into line behind its leader. He endorsed something less than an absolute role for Islam in the Iraqi Constitution. By early 2006, parties loyal to Sadr held the largest bloc in the Iraqi Parliament. As for Chalabi, Moktada kept him afloat a little longer. But in siding with the Islamists, Chalabi helped make them stronger than they were, and he threw his weight behind a number of trends that were only then becoming dominant: the Islamization of Iraqi society, the division of Iraq into sectarian cantons. Those trends later spiraled out of control, into the de facto civil war that is unfolding now. Some Iraqis who watched Chalabi then still don’t forgive him — and they think that ultimately, the Islamists got the better of him. “Ahmad’s problem is that Ahmad is usually the smartest man in the room, and he thinks he can control what happens,” I was told by an Iraqi official who worked with Chalabi at the time and who would speak only anonymously. “But these guys don’t care if you have a Ph.D. in math; they’ll kill you. In the end, things went way past the point where Ahmad thought they would ever go. I can’t imagine he wanted that. But he helped start it.” 3. Baghdad, October 2005 Chalabi is standing on the rooftop of his ancestral home in Khadimiya, a heavily Shiite neighborhood known for its shrine. Mansour, the area where he has lived since Hussein’s fall, has slipped into anarchy. The final round of nationwide elections is a couple of months away. For the moment, Chalabi is the deputy prime minister, behind the affable but ineffectual Ibrahim Jaafari. Across the street stand a pair of grain silos built by his father, Abdul Hadi Chalabi. Downstairs, on a wall in the sitting room, there is an old British map dating to the 1920’s, showing Baghdad, which was much smaller than it is now. North of Baghdad, in what was then farmland and what is now Khadimiya, a dot indicates a town. The dot says, “Chalabi.” At the time, Chalabi’s family owned nearly two and a half million acres throughout Iraq. Those vast holdings are reduced to the compound where Chalabi now stands. It’s about 10 acres, including the main house, which a team of workers is renovating, a large swimming pool, a grove of date palms and, in the back, a mudhif. There is a row of garages, decrepit now, where workers once serviced the machinery and trucks that brought the wheat and dates to market. “Imagine,” Chalabi says, turning to me. “And C.I.A. says I have no roots here.” Chalabi spent 45 years in exile. Under the Hashemite monarchy installed by the British after World War I, the ruling class of the new Iraq was largely made up of Sunni Muslims, as it had been under the Ottoman Turks. The Chalabis were part of the small Shiite elite; most of the rest of the Shiite majority formed a vast underclass. The remnants of that Shiite elite now form a sizable slice of the political establishment of post-Saddam Iraq. In addition to Chalabi, there is Adil Abdul Mahdi, the vice president, a Chalabi friend since boyhood; Ayad Allawi, the former president, who is a Chalabi relative by marriage; and Feisal al-Istrabadi, the deputy ambassador to the United Nations in New York. In the 1950’s, Chalabi, Mahdi and Allawi were schoolmates at Baghdad College, an elite Jesuit high school. Even in their class photos, nearly a half-century old, all three men are instantly recognizable: Mahdi, the soft-spoken intellectual; Allawi, the charming bully; and Chalabi, the boy genius in a bow tie. On July 14, 1958, King Faisal II, the British-backed monarch, was deposed and killed; a day later, the prime minister, Nuri al-Said, fled to the home of Chalabi’s sister, Thamina. She dressed Said in an abaya, the head-to-toe gown worn by women. With the army closing in, Thamina Chalabi took Said to the home of Feisal al-Istrabadi’s grandparents. Ahmad Chalabi, then 14, watched his mother and Bibiya al-Istrabadi weep as they pondered the prime minister’s fate. “Three or four hours later, Said was dead,” Chalabi told me. “He shot himself.” Chalabi fled Iraq a few months later, first for Lebanon, then England and then America, where he received a degree in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate from the University of Chicago. (Dissertation title: “Jacobson Radical of Group Algebras Over Fields Characteristic p.”) He did not return to Baghdad until April 11, 2003. Chalabi’s homecoming, after the U.S. invasion, was not the triumphant return he hoped it would be. What should have been his principal claim to legitimacy — his central role in toppling Saddam — never carried him very far; it became a liability as Iraq descended into chaos. In the new Iraq, Westernized elites carried less and less authority. Power belonged to the clerics and to the populists. And then there was the scandal at Petra Bank in Jordan, the outlines of which every Iraqi, no matter how dimly educated, seemed already to know: that Chalabi had been convicted in absentia for fraud and sentenced to 22 years in prison for embezzling almost $300 million. (Chalabi, who fled Jordan before he could be arrested, has long denied the charges, maintaining that they were cooked up by the Jordanian government under pressure from Saddam Hussein. Last year, the Jordanians signaled that they were willing to pardon Chalabi. But Chalabi insisted on a public apology, which the Jordanians refused to give.) Even the small army of Iraqi exiles that Chalabi had raised before the war never grew to be much more than a personal militia. One poll, conducted in early 2004, showed him to be the least trusted public figure in Iraq — even less trusted than Saddam Hussein. Dexter Filkins The suspicions that ordinary Iraqis harbored about Chalabi were never relieved by his industriousness. As oil minister and deputy prime minister, Chalabi worked night and day, often on the minutiae of Iraq’s oil pipelines and electricity lines or the precise wording, in Arabic and English, of the Iraqi Constitution. I typically went to see Chalabi at night, sometimes at 9 or 10, and usually had to wait an hour or so while he finished with his other visitors. If it was true that Chalabi had returned to Iraq with the expectation of acquiring power, it was not true that he was unwilling to work for it. Chalabi, like all Iraqi political leaders, functioned in conditions of mortal danger at nearly all times. Even when he wanted to walk into his backyard, he had to be followed by armed guards. It’s an exhausting and debilitating way to live. But while many Iraqi exiles either gave up and returned to the West, or now spend as much time outside the country as in, Chalabi stayed in Iraq almost continuously following Hussein’s fall. For all the hard work, his zigging and zagging across the political spectrum frustrated many of the Iraqi elites — his only natural constituency — especially after his flirtation with the Islamists. “I don’t think Chalabi has any credibility left,” Adnan Pachachi, the 83-year-old former foreign minister, told me before the 2005 elections. “He is not acceptable to Iraqis. People don’t like him shifting all the time. This thing with Moktada — it’s ridiculous.” One who remained true was his friend Mahdi, who seemed, perhaps from his boyhood days swimming in the Tigris with Chalabi, to carry a deeper understanding of his old friend. “This is the style of Ahmad,” Mahdi told me just before the elections. “He was a banker. He works a dossier. Each time it’s different — he invests here, he invests there, he invests elsewhere. He has had successes, he has had maybe his failures. I can work with him.” Chalabi never grasped his essential unpopularity. In the first round of elections, in January 2005, Chalabi rode into office as a member of the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite coalition pulled together by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the powerful Shiite religious leader. Nearly every Shiite in Iraq voted for the U.I.A., and a name on its slate all but guaranteed a seat in the Parliament. The leadership of the U.I.A. was sharply Islamist. Nearly a year later, as the December 2005 elections approached, Chalabi veered again, away from the Islamists, away from Moktada. Chalabi publicly chided the Shiite coalition as being too Islamic-minded, declaring he didn’t want to be a member of a government that was planning to transform Iraq into an Islamist state. By that time, of course, Iraq was already quite Islamist anyway. “They’re Islamist, and I don’t want to be part of the sectarian project,” Chalabi told me just before the elections that December. I actually believed him, but given his association with Moktada, it didn’t seem that many other Iraqis would. The reality, anyway, was more complicated. In the weeks before the election, the Shiite alliance offered Chalabi and his supporters 5 seats on its 275-seat slate; Chalabi demanded 10. Some Shiite leaders told me that they had deliberately offered Chalabi a low figure in the hope that he would leave their alliance for good. Mahdi, the vice president, denied that this was true. “For four days I tried to convince him; I even threatened him,” Mahdi told me. “I said, ‘Ahmad, if you leave this room, we will be no more friends.’ I was not serious. I was only threatening.” So Chalabi went his own way. If he had wanted only a seat for himself, he could have taken his place in the Shiite alliance; plenty of other Iraqis did. In going alone, he must have known that he was risking disaster. He went ahead anyway. A few days before the election, I drove up to Chalabi’s compound in Khadimiya for a lunch he was holding for tribal leaders. In much the same fashion as in Mushkhab 11 months before, about 100 sheiks from Sadr City listened to a Chalabi speech before descending on heaps of lamb and rice. One of the sheiks, a man named Sahaeh Masif al-Kindh, approached me as he walked out. “Chalabi didn’t forget us when we were living under Saddam,” al-Kindh told me. “He was Saddam’s biggest enemy. We don’t forget that.” 4. Washington, November 2005 The second round of Iraqi elections is only a few weeks away, and the wheel is turning again. Chalabi, once in favor, then out, is back in. Ostensibly, he has been invited to Washington by Treasury Secretary John Snow to talk about the Iraqi economy. But it’s more than that. He’s going to see Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The allegations that prompted the raid on Chalabi’s compound 18 months before, that he tipped the Iranians to American eavesdropping, are mysteriously forgotten. Indeed, everything seems to have been forgotten. Chalabi is rising on the catastrophe that Iraq has become. The Bush administration is grasping for anyone who might help them. On paper at least, Chalabi has a shot at becoming prime minister. Most of the meetings are private. There is a dinner at the home of Richard Perle for some of Chalabi’s old Washington friends. One of the events, a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, is public. The room is filled. At the end of a speech, Chalabi is asked by someone in the crowd if he would like to apologize for misleading the Bush administration about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Chalabi nods as if he knew the question was coming. “This is an urban myth,” he says. The audience gasps. Chalabi told me later that his role as an intelligence conduit on weapons of mass destruction began shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, when he was contacted by the Department of Defense. Not vice versa. “They came to us and asked, ‘Can you help us find something on Saddam?’ ” he said. “We put out feelers.” By that time, the autumn of 2001, Chalabi had a long record of working with the American government in its shadow war against Hussein. Throughout the 1990’s, however, Chalabi demonstrated time and again that he would pursue his own interests, even if they clashed with those of the United States. There was the time in 1995, for instance, when Chalabi, under the employ of the C.I.A. in the Kurdish-controlled city of Erbil, launched an unauthorized attack on Hussein’s army. The attack failed to spark an uprising against Hussein; the Turks sent troops into northern Iraq; the C.I.A. was furious. It was a fiasco. “Very quickly he got out of control,” one retired C.I.A. officer who worked with Chalabi told me. “We didn’t know what he was doing over there. He was trying to provoke a war with Saddam.” Then there was the time, in 1996, when Chalabi interfered with a C.I.A. plot to topple Saddam. I heard the story not from Chalabi but from Perle, the Bush defense adviser and Chalabi friend. As Perle tells it, Chalabi called him in a panic from London, telling him that a C.I.A.-backed plot against Hussein was fatally compromised. The fact that the C.I.A.’s Iraqi front-man for the plot, Ayad Allawi, was a rival of Chalabi’s (as well as his relative) had nothing to do with his concerns, Perle said. As Perle tells it, he quickly telephoned the C.I.A. director at the time, John Deutch, who agreed to meet in downtown Washington. Perle said he spent an hour laying out Chalabi’s worries. “He was obviously concerned,” Perle said of Deutch. The plot went ahead anyway. It was a catastrophe. Hussein arrested as many as 800 people and reportedly executed dozens of high-ranking officers. As a final indignity, Hussein’s men dialed up Allawi’s headquarters in Amman, Jordan, on a C.I.A.-provided communications device they captured from the plotters and left a message: “You might as well pack up and go home.” Some people in the C.I.A. held Chalabi responsible, believing that he had spread word of the plot in order to deny Ayad Allawi the upper hand in the exile movement. “There was abiding suspicion in the agency that Chalabi blew it,” the former C.I.A. agent said. The fallout over the failed coup precipitated the C.I.A.’s decision to break ties with Chalabi. Chalabi dismisses those claims, and some in the C.I.A. from the period back him up. “Chalabi was as true to me as the day was long,” says Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. field agent in northern Iraq. “If Chalabi was going to blow the operation, why would he tell the C.I.A.?” There was the money issue, too. Throughout the 1990’s, as the C.I.A. and Congress funneled millions of dollars to Chalabi’s organization, the Iraqi National Congress, rumors swirled about corruption. One of the skeptics was W. Patrick Lang, a senior official at the Defense Intelligence Agency. In 1995, Lang told me, he was sitting in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, when he overheard a group of Iraqis talking about the money they had received from the American government. “I knew who these guys were, and I heard them speaking Arabic, and it was obviously Iraqi Arabic,” Lang said. “So I went over and sat next to them and listened. So what they were talking about was how to spend the Americans’ money, going on shopping trips, stuff like that. Oh, they were talking about going shopping for jewelry for women, toys for kids. Consumer goods. They were also talking about Las Vegas. ‘We will sneak out of here and go to Las Vegas. We have a lot of money now.’ ” A couple of years later, Lang said, he visited the office of Senator Trent Lott, then the Senate majority leader. After introducing an Arab businessman to Lott, Lang sat in Lott’s anteroom with a number of Capitol Hill staff members who helped draft the Iraq Liberation Act, which provided millions of dollars to Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. They were praising Chalabi: “They were talking about him, that Chalabi fits into this plan as a very worthwhile, virtuous exemplar of modernization, somebody who could help reform first Iraq and then the Middle East. They were very pleased with themselves.” Lang, an old Middle East hand who had worked in Iraq in the 1980’s, said he was stunned. “You guys need to get out more,” Lang recalls saying at the time. “It’s a fantasy.” Years later, Lang said, many of the same men who were sitting in Lott’s office that day became key players in the Pentagon’s plans for an invasion of Iraq. Which brings us back to Chalabi’s “urban myth”: the notion that he provided bogus intelligence to the Bush administration and helped persuade them — or provide the pretext — to invade Iraq. In his speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Chalabi exhorted the audience to turn to Page 108 of the Robb-Silverman report, a recently completed blue-ribbon investigation, which, he said, exonerates him. It does, in a way. The report does not say that Chalabi & Company played an important role in the events leading to the war. It says only that the Bush administration did not rely much on intelligence Chalabi handed over in making the decision to invade. “In fact, overall, C.I.A.’s postwar investigations revealed that I.N.C.-related sources had a minimal impact on prewar assessments,” the report says. This is also Chalabi’s version. In the run-up to war, he says, he provided only three defectors to the American intelligence community. “We did not vouch for any of their information,” Chalabi told me. One of the people whom the I.N.C. made available to American intelligence was Adnan Ihsan al-Haideri, who claimed that he had worked on buildings that were used to store biological, nuclear and chemical weapons equipment. Chalabi told me that he made Haideri available to American intelligence at a safe house in Bangkok. He didn’t think much of Haideri or his information, he says, and was astonished to learn later that the information he provided became a pillar of the Americans’ charges against Hussein. “We told them, ‘We don’t know who this guy is,’ ” Chalabi said. “Then the Americans spoke to him and said, ‘This guy is the mother lode.’ Can you believe that on such a basis the United States would go to war? The intelligence community regarded the I.N.C. as useless. Why would the government believe us?” Perle, from his perch on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Advisory Committee Board, backs Chalabi’s version. He was privy to much of the intelligence the administration was collecting on Hussein in the days before the war. He says that American intelligence officials began from the premise that Hussein had never destroyed his stocks of banned weapons and that he had kept his programs alive. American spies were only looking to confirm what they thought they already knew. In any event, Perle said, very little of their information came from Chalabi. “I had all the security clearances,” Perle said. “I was pretty much aware of the people that the I.N.C. was bringing to the table to talk about what they knew. Everything they did came with a disclaimer. To the best of my knowledge, there was no single important fact that was uniquely conveyed to U.S. intelligence by anyone who had been assisted by the I.N.C.” Indeed, Chalabi says, much of the most important evidence that led America to war did not come from the I.N.C.: not the report on the uranium from Niger, and not Curveball, the Iraqi defector who made bogus claims about mobile biological weapons labs. “It’s not our fault,” Chalabi says. But the story doesn’t end there. A second report, released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in September 2006, reached far more damning conclusions. The report states flatly that Chalabi’s group introduced defectors to American intelligence who directly influenced two key judgments in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, which preceded the Senate vote on the Iraq war: that Hussein possessed mobile biological-weapons laboratories and that he was trying to reconstitute his nuclear program. The report said that the I.N.C. provided a large volume of flawed intelligence to the United States about Iraq, saying the group “attempted to influence United States policy on Iraq by providing false information through defectors directed at convincing the United States that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to terrorists.” (Five Republican senators disagreed with the report’s conclusions about the I.N.C.) Chalabi’s denials are unconvincing for another reason. His role in the preparations for war was not just as a source for American intelligence agencies. He was America’s chief public advocate for war, spreading information gathered by his own intelligence network to newspapers, magazines, television programs and Congress. (A New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, was one of Chalabi’s primary conduits; in an e-mail message sent in 2003 that has been widely quoted since, she wrote that Chalabi “has provided most of the front-page exclusives on W.M.D. to our paper” and that the Army unit she was then traveling with was “using Chalabi’s intell and document network for its own W.M.D. work.”) Indeed, the press proved even more gullible than the intelligence experts in the American government. In a June 2002 letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee, the I.N.C. listed 108 news articles based on information provided by the group. The list included articles concerning some of the wildest claims about Hussein, including that he had collaborated in the Sept. 11 attacks. David Kay, the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, offers one of the most compelling explanations for how pivotal Chalabi’s role was in taking America to war. Kay said that while the C.I.A. had long regarded Chalabi with suspicion, disregarding much of what he gave them, Chalabi had succeeded in persuading his more powerful friends in other parts of the government — Vice President Dick Cheney, for instance, and Wolfowitz. The pressure brought by those men, Kay told me, ultimately persuaded George Tenet, director of the C.I.A., that the White House was committed to war and that there was no point in resisting it. “In my judgment, the reason George Tenet and the top of the agency came over to the argument that Iraq had W.M.D. was that they really knew that the vice president and Wolfowitz had come to that conclusion anyway,” Kay said. “They had been getting information from Chalabi for years.” Of Wolfowitz, whom he has known for years, Kay said: “He was a true believer. He thought he had the evidence. That came from the defectors. They came from Chalabi.” Kay said he continued to feel Chalabi’s influence with Wolfowitz even after the invasion, when Kay was leading the team searching for W.M.D. from mid- to late 2003. “Paul, when faced with evidence that we had developed on the ground, would say, Well, Chalabi says this, the I.N.C. says this, why are you not seeing it?” Kellems, the Wolfowitz assistant, disputed Kay’s story, saying that Tenet’s views were shared by officials across the government. “The position taken on weapons was the consensus view of the United States, including of the Clinton administration and other Western intelligence agencies — as well as that of Mr. Kay himself prior to visiting Iraq,” Kellems said. Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell in Bush’s first term, adds a final turn to the labyrinth. In the frantic days leading up to Powell’s speech at the United Nations in February 2003, when he laid out the case for war, Wilkerson said he spent many nights sleeping on a couch in George Tenet’s office. During those preparations, Wilkerson told me, Powell insisted that every point he would make at the U.N. had to be supported by at least three independent sources. “We had three or four sources for every item that was substantive in his presentation,” Wilkerson told me in an interview in Washington. “Powell insisted on that. But what I am hearing now, though, is that a lot of these sources sort of tinged and merged back into a single source, and that inevitably that single source seems to be either recommended by, set up by, orchestrated by, introduced by, or whatever, by somebody in the I.N.C.” Wilkerson said that the revelations, some of which he says he has heard from his own friends inside American and European intelligence agencies, have forced him to rethink how America went to war. “I have maintained pretty much the same thing that the president said, ‘Well, we all got fooled, it was lousy intelligence, and no one in the national leadership spun the intelligence,’ ” Wilkerson said. “I am having to revisit that. And that is disturbing to me.” Wilkerson raises a crucial point. Assuming that Chalabi was a source for at least some of the bogus intelligence, we might ask ourselves: so what? Was the American national security apparatus so incompetent that it could be hoodwinked by a handful of shopworn engineers and an Iraqi mathematician to take the country into war? Or is the lesson more disturbing — that Chalabi simply gave the Bush administration what it wanted to hear? “I think Chalabi and the I.N.C. were very shrewd,” Wilkerson said. “I think Chalabi understood what people wanted, and he fed it to them. From everything I’ve heard, no one says he is dumb.” 5. Tehran, November 2005 Amid the debate about Chalabi’s role in taking America to war, one little-noticed phrase in a Senate Intelligence Committee report on W.M.D. offered an important insight into Chalabi’s identity. One of the principal errors made by the Bush administration in relying on Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, the report said, was to disregard conclusions by the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency that “the I.N.C. was penetrated by hostile intelligence services,” notably those of Iran. The Iran connection has long been among the most beguiling aspects of Chalabi’s career. Baer, the former C.I.A. operative, recalled sitting in a hotel lobby in Salah al-Din, in Kurdish-controlled Iraq, in 1995 while Chalabi met with the turbaned representatives of Iranian intelligence on the other side of the room. (Baer, as an American, was barred from meeting the Iranians.) Baer says he came to regard Chalabi as an Iranian asset, and still does. “He is basically beholden to the Iranians to stay viable,” Baer told me. “All his C.I.A. connections — he wouldn’t get away with that sort of thing with the Iranians unless he had proved his worth to them.” Pat Lang, the D.I.A. agent, holds a similar view: that in Chalabi, the Iranians probably saw someone who could help them achieve their long-sought goal of removing Saddam Hussein. After a time, in Lang’s view, the Iranians may have figured the Americans would leave and that Chalabi would most likely be in charge. Lang insists he is only speculating, but he says it has been clear to the American intelligence community for years that Chalabi has maintained “deep contacts” with Iranian officials. “Here is what I think happened,” Lang said. “Chalabi went and told the guys at the Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Tehran: ‘The Americans are giving me money. I’m their guy. I’m their candidate.’ And I’m sure their eyes lit up. The Iranians would reason that they could use this guy to manipulate the United States to get what they wanted. They would figure that the U.S. would invade. They would figure that we would come and we would go, and if we left Chalabi in charge, who was a good friend of theirs, they would be in good shape.” Lang’s thesis is impossible to prove, and Chalabi denies it. And even if it were true, Chalabi’s role would be difficult to discern: so many different Iranian agencies are thought to be pursuing so many different agendas in Iraq that a single Iranian national interest is difficult to identify. Still, if Lang’s and Baer’s argument is true, it would be the stuff of spy novels: Chalabi, the American-adopted champion of Iraqi democracy, a kind of double agent for one of America’s principal adversaries. In late 2005, I accompanied Chalabi on a trip to Iran, in part to solve the riddle. We drove eastward out of Baghdad, in a convoy as menacing as the one we had ridden in south to Mushkhab earlier in the year. After three hours of weaving and careering, the plains of eastern Iraq halted, and the terrain turned sharply upward into a thick ridge of arid mountains. We had come to Mehran, on one of history’s great fault lines, the historic border between the Ottoman and Persian Empires. As we crossed into Iran, the wreckage and ruin of modern Iraq gave way to swept streets and a tidy border post with shiny bathrooms. Another world. An Iranian cleric approached and shook Chalabi’s hand. Then he said something curious: “We are disappointed to hear that you won’t be staying in the Shiite alliance,” he said. “We were really hoping you’d stay.” The border between Iraq and Iran had, for the moment, disappeared. More curious, though, was the authority that Chalabi seemed to carry in Iran, which, after all, has been accused of assisting Iraqi insurgents and otherwise stirring up chaos there. For starters, Chalabi asked me if I wanted to come along on his Iranian trip only the night before he left — and then procured a visa for me in a single day: a Friday, during the Eid holiday, when the Iranian Embassy was closed. Under ordinary circumstances, an American reporter might wait weeks. Then there was the executive jet. When we arrived at the border, Chalabi ducked into a bathroom and changed out of his camouflage T-shirt and slacks and into a well-tailored blue suit. Then we drove to Ilam, where an 11-seat Fokker jet was idling on the runway of the local airport. We jumped in and took off for Tehran, flying over a dramatic landscape of canyons and ravines. We landed in Iran’s smoggy capital, and within a couple of hours, Chalabi was meeting with the highest officials of the Iranian government. One of them was Ali Larijani, the national security adviser. I interviewed Larijani the next morning. “Our relationship with Mr. Chalabi does not have anything to do with his relationship with the neocons,” he said. His red-rimmed eyes, when I met him at 7 a.m., betrayed a sleepless night. “He is a very constructive and influential figure. He is a very wise man and a very useful person for the future of Iraq.” Then came the meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president. I was with a handful of Iranian reporters who were led into a finely appointed room just outside the president’s office. First came Chalabi, dressed in a tailored suit, beaming. Then Ahmadinejad, wearing a face of childlike bewilderment. He was dressed in imitation leather shoes and bulky white athletic socks, and a suit that looked as if it had come from a Soviet department store. Only a few days before, Ahmadinejad publicly called for the destruction of Israel. He and Chalabi, who is several inches taller, stood together for photos, then retired to a private room. At the time of Chalabi’s visit, Iran and the United States were engaged in a complicated diplomatic dance; the American ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, had been authorized to open negotiations with the Iranians over their involvement in Iraq. Still, Chalabi insists he carried no note from the Iranians when he flew to Washington the next week. Officially, at least, Iran and the United States never got together. As ever, Chalabi had multiple agendas. One was to learn whether the Iranians would support his candidacy for the prime ministership (the same reason he traveled to the United States). It makes you wonder, in light of the Baer and Lang thesis: was Chalabi telling the Iranians, or asking them for permission? Or making a deal, based on his presumed leverage in the United States? The possibilities seemed endless. Chalabi played it cool. “The fact that Iraq’s neighbor is also a country that is majority Shia is no reason for us to accept any interference in our affairs or to compromise the integrity of Iraq,” he said after his meeting with Ahmadinejad. Richard Perle, Chalabi’s friend, discounted the idea that Chalabi might be a double agent. “Of course Chalabi has a relationship with the Iranians — you have to have a relationship with the Iranians in order to operate there,” Perle said. “The question is what kind of relationship. Is he fooling the Iranians or are the Iranians using him? I think Chalabi has been very shrewd in getting the things he has needed over the years out of the Iranians without giving anything in return.” For all of the skullduggery surrounding the trip to Iran, though, the greatest revelation came later in the day. When the meeting with Ahmadinejad ended, he asked Chalabi if there was anything he could to do to make his stay more comfortable. Chalabi said yes, in fact, there was: would he mind if he, Chalabi, took a tour of the Museum of Contemporary Art? So there we were, in the middle of the Axis of Evil, strolling past one of the finest collections of Western Modern art outside Europe and the United States: Matisse, Kandinsky, Rothko, Gauguin, Pollock, Klee, Van Gogh, five Warhols, seven Picassos and a sprawling garden of sculpture outside. The collection was assembled by Queen Farah, the shah’s wife, with the monarchy’s vast oil wealth. And now, with the mullahs in charge, the museum is largely forgotten. The day we were there, the gallery was all but empty. We had the museum’s enthusiastic English-speaking tour guide all to ourselves. “Thank you, thank you, for coming!” Noreen Motamed exclaimed, clapping her hands. We walked the empty halls. Chalabi moved through the place deliberately, nodding his head, pausing at the Degas and the Pissarro. “Wow,” Chalabi said before Jesus Rafael Soto’s painting “Canada.” “Look at that.” A retinue of Iranian officials walked with us, unmoved by the splendor. Ahmadinejad had stayed behind. For all of the furies that emanate from the halls of the Iranian government, it has taken fine care of Queen Farah’s collection. Indeed, about the only way you would know you were not in a museum in New York or London was the absence of the middle panel from Francis Bacon’s triptych “Two Figures Lying on a Bed With Attendant,” which depicts two naked men. “It is in the basement, covered,” Motamed said with disappointed eyes. Finally, we came across a pair of paintings by Marc Chagall, the 20th-century Modernist and painter of Jewish life. The display contained no mention of this fact. Chalabi gazed at the Chagalls for a time. Then, with a rueful smile, turned, to no one in particular, and said loudly: “Imagine that. They have two paintings by Marc Chagall in the middle of a museum in Tehran.” The Iranian officials seemed not to hear. 6. Baghdad, December 2005 A winter rain is falling. Chalabi is standing inside a tent in Sadr City, the vast Shiite slum of eastern Baghdad. He’s talking about his plans for restoring electricity, boosting oil production and beating the insurgency. People seem to be listening, but without enthusiasm. The violence here, worsening by the day, is washing away the hopes of ordinary Iraqis. Less and less seems possible anymore. People are retreating inward, you can see it in the glaze in their eyes. As Chalabi speaks, I pull aside one of the Iraqis who had been listening. What do you think of him? I ask. “Chalabi good good,” the Iraqi man says in halting English. Whom are you going to vote for? “The Shiite alliance, of course,” the Iraqi answers. “It is the duty of all Shiite people.” When the election came, Chalabi was wiped out. His Iraqi National Congress received slightly more than 30,000 votes, only one-quarter of 1 percent of the 12 million votes cast — not enough to put even one of them, not even Chalabi, in the new Iraqi Parliament. There was grumbling in the Chalabi camp. One of his associates said of the Shiite alliance: “We know they cheated. You know how we know? Because in one area we had 5,000 forged ballots, and when they were counted, we didn’t even get that many.” He shrugged. But the truth seemed clear enough: Chalabi was finished. Chalabi, who could plausibly claim that he, more than any other Iraqi, had made the election possible, had been shunned by the very people he had worked so hard to set free. No amount of deal making or of public relations foot-work, or of endorsements from friends, was able to save him. Chalabi may have helped bring democracy to Iraq, but it was democracy that finished him. He was, in the end, a parlor politician, someone from the world of his father or grandfather, or maybe of Victorian England: a brilliant negotiator and schemer who might settle a country’s problems over a cup of tea. But in Iraq, by late 2005, real power was no longer held by the parlor men, or by politicians at all. It was held by people like Moktada al-Sadr, populist leaders with a militia and a mass following in the street. The election results were a harbinger of the civil war. Iraqis voted almost entirely along sectarian and ethnic lines: Kurds for the big Kurdish parties, Sunnis for the Sunni parties and Shiites for the big Islamist Shiite alliance. Iraqis who tried to run on a secular platform — Chalabi, for instance, and his relative, Allawi, in another party — found themselves abandoned. Just two months later, in February of this year, following the destruction of the Askariya shrine, a holy Shiite temple in Samarra, the civil war began in earnest: Shiite gunmen, who had for years been restrained by the Shiite leadership in the face of the Sunni onslaught, were finally free to retaliate. Chalabi, shut out of the government, claimed that his sin was one of miscalculation. There was some truth to this: in all likelihood, Chalabi did not lose because he had been convicted of stealing millions of dollars from a Jordanian bank. Or because of the rumors swirling around Baghdad that he had looted the treasury. Or even because he was an exile close to the Americans. No: plenty of Westernized Iraqi exiles were elected to Parliament — among them Mowaffak al-Rubaie and Adil Abdul Mahdi — who, like Chalabi, didn’t have local followings and were trailed by similar questions. Practically speaking, Chalabi lost because he had broken from the big cleric-backed Shiite alliance that swept the election. “I had not realized how polarized Iraq had become,” Chalabi told me after the election. He might have gotten a seat in the cabinet, but that didn’t work out, either. That stung: the new Iraqi government is staffed with Chalabi’s old colleagues, many of them members of the exile alliance he once led. Jalal Talabani is president. Adil Abdul Mahdi, his boyhood friend, is vice president. Barham Salih, comrade of many years, is deputy prime minister. His old confidant Zalmay Khalilzad, who played a central role in forming the new government, is the American ambassador. In the end, they couldn’t — or wouldn’t — bring him aboard. “Chalabi really made a mess of things,” said one Iraqi political leader who now occupies a key post in the government. He declined to elaborate. As anticlimactic as was Chalabi’s fall, its real meaning lay in a paradox: democratic politics no longer mattered. For three years, the American-backed enterprise in Iraq rested on the assumption that the exercise of democratic politics would drain away the anger that was driving the violence. Instead of bullets, there would be ballots. But at the culmination of that long process — two constitutions, two elections and a referendum — the violence was worse than ever. It turns out that democratic politics does not stop violence; indeed, the elections, by polarizing Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic communities, may have helped push the country into civil war. Effectively, by the fall of 2006, the overwhelming majority of Iraq had no government at all. It was a failed state. Yes, there were Iraqis — Chalabi’s friends — who went to their jobs every day, toiling dutifully and not so dutifully inside the Green Zone, which every day seemed more and more divorced from the reality outside. In the Red Zone, as the real Iraq is called, Iraq was a nightmarish, apocalyptic place, where gunmen kidnapped children and sometimes killed them, where bodies turned up at the morgue peppered by holes from electric drills and corpses lay uncollected in the streets, along with the trash, for days on end. Ahmad Chalabi devoted his whole adult life to toppling a dictator and achieving power in the place of his birth. He felled the dictator, helping along a reckless gamble that wagered the future of a nation. The gamble failed, a nation imploded and Chalabi never ascended to the throne he so coveted. But in an odd turn of fortune, the throne no longer had anything to offer. 7. London, August 2006 The conversation is wrapping up. The talk turns to the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the machinations of those around him, what the future might hold. Chalabi, in an expansive mood, gets up, goes into a closet and brings out a note that Bob Baer, the C.I.A. agent, scribbled to him in that hotel lobby when the two men plotted a coup many years before. The talk, improbably, turns to memoirs; at the moment, Baer’s, “See No Evil,” was a best seller. I ask Chalabi, who is back on the couch, if it isn’t time that he write his own. He doesn’t hesitate to answer. “Too early!” Chalabi says. “Too early!”

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