Posted 12:27 PM by Steve
April 15, 2005

Iraqis Find Graves Thought to Hold Hussein's Victims


BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 14 - Investigators have discovered several mass graves in southern Iraq that are believed to contain the bodies of people killed by Saddam Hussein's government, including one estimated to hold 5,000 bodies, Iraqi officials say.
The graves, discovered over the past three months, have not yet been dug up because of the risks posed by the continuing insurgency and the lack of qualified forensic workers, said Bakhtiar Amin, Iraq's interim human rights minister. But initial excavations have substantiated the accounts of witnesses to a number of massacres. If the estimated body counts prove correct, the new graves would be among the largest in the grim tally of mass killings that have gradually come to light since the fall of Mr. Hussein's government two years ago. At least 290 grave sites containing the remains of some 300,000 people have been found since the American invasion two years ago, Iraqi officials say.
Forensic evidence from some graves will feature prominently in the trials of Mr. Hussein and the leaders of his government. The trials are to start this spring.
One of the graves, near Basra, in the south, appears to contain about 5,000 bodies of Iraqi soldiers who joined a failed uprising against Mr. Hussein's government after the 1991 Persian Gulf war. Another, near Samawa, is believed to contain the bodies of 2,000 members of the Kurdish clad led by Massoud Barzani.
As many as 8,000 men and boys from the clan disappeared in 1983 after being rounded up in northern Iraq by security forces at the command of Ali Hassan al-Majid, widely known as Chemical Ali. It remains unclear, however, how the victims ended up in the south.
Investigators have also discovered the remains of 58 Kuwaitis spread across several sites, including what appears to be a family of two adults and five children who were crushed by a tank, Mr. Amin said. At least 605 Kuwaitis disappeared at the time of the first gulf war, and before the latest graves were discovered, fewer than 200 had been accounted for, he added.
A smaller site was discovered near Nasiriya earlier this week. Arabic satellite television showed images of residents digging up remains there.
Mr. Amin declined to give the exact locations of the graves, saying it could endanger witnesses to the massacres and anyone working at the sites.
One obstacle to exhuming bodies has been an absence of DNA labs and forensic anthropologists in Iraq, Mr. Amin said.
In the aftermath of Mr. Hussein's fall, thousands of Iraqis overran mass grave sites, digging for their relatives' remains with backhoes, shovels, even their bare hands. A number of sites were looted, making identification of victims difficult, said Hanny Megally, Middle East director for the International Center for Transitional Justice.
The American occupation authority, after some initial hesitation, began classifying grave sites, and international teams began traveling to the sites in 2003 to conduct assessments or exhumations. But toward the end of 2004, rising violence led nearly all the teams to abandon their work.
Only one site has been fully examined, a grave of Kurdish victims in northern Iraq, Mr. Megally said. That work was overseen by the Regime Crimes Liaison Office, which is gathering evidence for the trials of Mr. Hussein and his deputies.
The interim Iraqi government, working with the United Nations, has drawn up plans for a National Center for Missing and Disappeared Persons that would have authority over all aspects of the process, from exhumations to providing assistance to victims' families.

Posted 11:47 PM by Steve
My review of "Sahara"

Turn your brain off and have FUN!

Bring on Dirk Pitt! Here is a movie that wants to have fun, the cast
wants to have fun. The audience ends up having fun. Steve Zahn is
hilarious. Matthew McConaughey handles the demands of his role
quite well he appeals to people by coming off as confident yet sincere.

Penelope Cruz brings her ever-present charm and beauty to a
role which is notable for being one of the few action-adventure roles
written for a female that is not obnoxious in recent memory. You can't
take your eyes off William H. Macy whenever he is on screen in ANY
movie. He's that good.

It's kind of a Bond meets Indiana Jones film (I swear they used the
same canyon from "Raiders of the Lost Ark") The villains are one
dimensional, but who cares? We are here to follow the exploits of our
heroes. If we have to suspend our disbelief, we do it willingly because
we are grinning ear to ear.

Posted 7:27 PM by Steve
Why "Earth Day" is stupid.



"Earth Day", the very idea of it is about as rational as "termite mound day" or "tree trunk day". To celebrate an inanimate object as if it is some magical, holistic deity is a primitive superstitious paganism that mankind should have discarded eons ago.

The Earth is simply a planet. It's an object in space. For humans to pretend as if they have some special link or relationship with this object is decidedly irrational and illogical.

Here's a thought experiment: Let's compress the history of the Earth into a smaller more manageable size for our brains. We'll make it four months, say September through December. Before the dinosaurs ever lived, the Allende meteoroid became the oldest piece of the solar system ever discovered. It's arrival on our planet came on about September 9th. The first dinosaurs showed up on Christmas Eve. Humans appeared at roughly 10:30 P.M. on New year's Eve. All of recorded history occupies the last ten seconds of December 31.

For humans to claim some magical kinship with the earth by celebrating "Earth Day" is akin to a flea celebrating "Dog Day".

Dinosaurs have a much longer relationship with the planet earth. They were the dominant species for more than 100 million years. Mammals have only dominated the upper 1.3% of Earth's history. The first mammals were small, furry, rat-like creatures that first appeared 130,000,000 B.C. it wasn't until about 1,500,000 that stone tool wielding homo erectus first appeared. How "human" that creature truly was is not known, but it was about one million more years before we know he started controlling fire, building huts, driving herds of wild animals, using language, etc.

Even back then Earth was no Eden. The Homo Erectus race was actively killing our closest competitors Homo habilis, Australopithecus robustus, and Australopithecus boisei.

It is a dangerous myth to confer upon the planet Earth some sort of positive status or to deify the planet to the extent that "Earth Day" does. Look what happened to the dinosaurs. Their presence was far more established and extensive than ours when nature suddenly made them extinct.

It's arrogant delusion for mankind to believe that Earth will somehow protect and nurture us if we "take care of it." If this isn't the best argument for actively exploring, colonizing and discovering more in our solar system as soon as possible, I don't know what is.

Posted 11:48 PM by Steve
One comment about the Miss USA pageant (not that I spend my time watching such trite and trivial events) Miss California was ROBBED!!!

Posted 12:44 PM by Steve
Witch hunts are O.K. if they are against conservatives


Tom Delay has been the target of a new form of "Mcarthyism" at the hands of the left wing media organizations. It is a fact that the New York Times has been fishing for dirt on Delay even going so far as to actually contacting other high level G.O.P. and trying to bribe them with promises of op-ed pieces.

I guess in the twisted mind of a liberal it's abhorrent for a U.S. Senator to use their power to try and bring down Anti-American, Pro-Communist forces within our own government but it is perfectly acceptable for a left leaning news organization to abuse it's power and throw objectivity to the wind in order to attack high level Republicans.