Illustration: Iranian bomb by Linas Garsys for The Washington Times

By Alan Caruba–The Washington Times

As a child in the 1950s, I learned how to “duck and cover” in order to protect myself from an atomic bomb explosion. Little did I know the instruction should have been, “Kiss your asterisk goodbye.”

The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the Soviets wanted to put nuclear-tipped long-range missiles there, led to a confrontation between President Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev that had both sides changing their underwear after it was over.

What do the United States, Great Britain, France, Russia, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea have in common? They all have nuclear weapons, and, of course, Iran has been working toward that goal and is very close to achieving it.

Some will argue that Israel should not be on the list because it has never acknowledged its nuclear capabilities, but everyone knows it has them. Presumably, the Iranian mullahs know that as well, but they are waiting for the mythical 12th Imam to come out of a well and smite the enemies of Islam and, in their view, a catastrophic exchange of nuclear weapons might help that occur.

It is instructive that both Pakistan and India acquired their nuclear weapons without anyone being aware of it until after the fact. At CIA headquarters, when India announced its successful test, it came as a very big surprise. These days, the United States is busy reassuring Israel that Iran is “at least a year away” from nuclear status, and you can imagine how relieved they are to hear that.

North Korea is a wild card, and, given the lack of success the United States or anyone else has had in getting it to abandon its nukes, the same can be assumed for Iran when it makes its announcement. Meanwhile, it has to content itself with announcing new missiles, the latest of which it has dubbed the “ambassador of death.”

The Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization designated last Sunday as the International Day Against Nuclear Tests. Given the total lack of success in thwarting any nation that wants a nuke, my confidence in the United Nations’ treaty is zero.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. component, has been kicked out of North Korea, Iraq and Iran on several occasions, so one might rationally assume it is useless when it comes to stopping the manufacture of A-bombs.

Olli Heinonen, the former chief of U.N. nuclear inspections worldwide, told the French newspaper Le Monde that Iran has stockpiled enough low-enriched uranium for one or two nuclear arms, but he thought doing so made no sense. Betting on the rationality of the Iranian ayatollahs is not a good idea.

Who doesn’t want a ban on nuclear weapons testing? The U.S. Senate, for one.

While the U.S. has “signed” a number of the test-ban treaties that have been around since the 1960s, the Senate has not ratified any of them lately, thus avoiding having to commit the nation to no longer testing new nuclear weapons. For some reason, the Senate does not trust Russia or the other nuke nations.

In April, President Obama journeyed to Russia to sign a nuclear arms reduction treaty dubbed New START with Dmitry Medvedev.

Robert R. Monroe, a retired vice admiral in the U.S. Navy and former director of the Defense Nuclear Agency from 1977 to 1980, expressed the opinion, “The treaty has many problems from being unverifiable to giving Russia virtual veto power over U.S. missile defense, and more.” That’s bad enough, but it’s worse than that.

Two days before meeting with the Russians, the Obama administration released its Nuclear Posture Review (NPR). Adm. Monroe said, “The NPR is joined at the hip with New START, and together they take this country down a dangerous path. For 65 years, the very existence of our nation has depended upon a strong nuclear deterrent. The new NPR wipes out this proven policy, substituting one of weakness in its place.”

There are those who love test-ban treaties. They love the idea of unilaterally disarming the United States in a world where there are nations that may not love us.

Not surprisingly, the nations with nukes have not signed onto anything that would take away their deterrent factor, and, of course, Iran is hellbent on getting nukes for itself.

Not a single conflict since the United States dropped two A-bombs on Japan in 1945 to end a war the Japanese had started has used nuclear weapons. Rational people – even if they have nuclear weapons – know that using them is probably suicidal. Irrational people – like the Iranian ayatollahs – probably are the exception.

It appears that the GOP — with the help of the Tea Parties, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and the Devil — is out to revise the 14^th Amendment to the point of meaninglessness. Maybe even write the amendment out of the Constitution itself — if not discard the Constitution completely. And all so that poor foreign newborns, who have never hurt a fly, won’t be awarded with free American citizenship upon first seeing the light of day. Makes you sick, doesn’t it? Continue Reading

Story Here

El Paso Times

CARACAS, Venezuela—A Venezuelan politician is holding an unusual raffle to raise campaign cash. The grand prize: breast implants. For a little under $6 a ticket, donors get the chance to win the pricey operation free of charge.

Breast enlargement is widely popular in image-conscious Venezuela. In recent years as many as 30,000 women have had the operation annually, according to the nation’s Plastic Surgery Society.

Gustavo Rojas, who is running as an alternate for the National Assembly in Sept. 26 elections, said there is a great demand for the surgery.

The prize for his fund-raising effort may be a little unusual, Rojas conceded Friday, but he said it’s like raffling off a TV set or a telephone.

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One of these things is not like the other…

Flat Screen T.V.

Slim-line Telephone

Breast Implants

NewsFirst5

The Pentagon has told Colorado Secretary of State Bernie Buescher that it has denied a waiver to exempt the state from a federal requirement to mail ballots to military service members overseas 45 days before the November election.

Spokesman Rich Coolidge confirmed that Colorado’s waiver request has been denied. There was no word from the Secretary of State on how he would respond.

Coolidge said before the ruling that the ballots will still be mailed. He said if the state still cannot meet the deadline, some soldiers in remote battlefields might not have enough time to return them even though the state will give them an extra seven days after the election.

KGUN9

By JEFF KAROUB
Associated Press Writer

DETROIT (AP) – More than 1,000 documents, including some dating back to the beginning of the Nation of Islam, were found in the attic of a home in Detroit, the city where the secretive movement started 80 years ago, a lawyer said.

Attorney Gregory Reed unveiled some documents, letters and a booklet Thursday at a Detroit mosque, including a rare 1933 signature of Nation of Islam founder W.D. Fard. Reed said the well-preserved documents detail the early structure and teachings of the group founded on the ideals of black nationalism.

“Very few have seen the internal workings of how (the Nation of Islam) was put together,” said Reed, whose Keeper of the Word Foundation oversees collections and exhibits that include the works of Malcolm X, Rosa Parks and Nelson Mandela.

He said the boxes which also included detailed literature about the early movement’s educational and leadership training were recently discovered by an unidentified man whose family members were Nation of Islam “pioneers.” Reed said he was contacted by the family, which owns the home, because of his work with other collections.

Reed described another piece as a “manifesto” handwritten by Fard that became required reading for Nation of Islam members through the 1950s. It was not displayed at the mosque, remaining instead with the vast majority of artifacts remaining in a vault.

He said the material has been reviewed and appraised by several collectors and auctioneers he didn’t name. A foundation set up by the family in association with Keeper of the Word controls the rights to the collection.

Reed said officials with the Chicago-based Nation of Islam are aware of the documents and Reed’s plans to publicly display them at a proposed center in Detroit. He said the family is working with him on plans for the “W.D. Fard Founder’s Center,” which they hope to jointly announce within 60 days.

Messages left Friday by The Associated Press for top leaders of the Nation of Islam were not immediately returned.

Lawrence Mumiya, a Vassar College professor of religion and Africana studies, said the documents should be most revealing and rewarding for scholars and others outside the movement. He said the Nation of Islam has a significant collection that isn’t shared with nonmembers.

“I think this trove of 1,000 documents is very important for scholarship and for the writing of the history of the Nation,” he said. “It won’t change much for the Nation itself, but it may change things for people like myself who have never seen these documents.”

Fard attracted black Detroiters on the margins of society with a message of self-improvement and separation from whites. Fard said whites were inherently evil because of their enslavement of blacks.

The Nation of Islam was rebuilt by Farrakhan in the late 1970s after W.D. Mohammed, the son of longtime leader Elijah Mohammed, broke away and moved many followers toward mainstream Islam.

The Nation of Islam continues to be led by Farrakhan, who has haltingly moved toward mainstream Islam but maintains a separatist ideology.

Nation of Islam members traditionally have believed that God came in the form of Fard; Islam recognizes only one God.

In the past, Farrakhan’s most inflammatory comments have included referring to Judaism as a “gutter religion” and calling Adolf Hitler “wickedly great.” Farrakhan has over the years denied claims of anti-Semitism, arguing his remarks are often taken out of context and that criticism of Jews in any light automatically earns the “anti-Semite” label.

A longtime target of federal surveillance, the movement is highly secretive. Even researchers who follow the group closely do not know how many members or mosques it has, or how much money it makes.

By Benjamin Weinthal

On Monday the head of Finland’s branch of Amnesty International, Frank Johansson, termed Israel a “scum state.” Writing in his blog, which appears on the Web site of Iltalehti, one of Finland’s largest newspapers, he based his characterization of Israel on his “own visit[s], which occurred during the 1970s and for the last time in the 1990s.” Johansson further justified his rhetoric toward Israel because he has previously invoked strong language against former Pres. George Bush on Finnish TV. He called Mr. Bush “the biggest executioner in the Western Hemisphere.”

Turning Israel and the United States into whipping boys is hardly new territory among human-rights NGOs, but now a high-level official of AI has exposed his pathological obsession with rejecting Western democratic values. His biological language mirrors that of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who calls Israel a “cancer” that needs to be “removed.”

Once Johansson was caught with both hands deep in the anti-Semitic cookie jar, he offered the defense that “I am writing those [blogs] in my capacity as a private person, not as an Amnesty official.” However, on Iltalehti’s Web site, his title as “director of the Finnish branch of Amnesty International” appears above his blog.

Human-rights organizations such as the London-based Amnesty International and the U.S. Human Rights Watch have long developed a cottage industry of playing down repression of human rights in the Islamic world while devoting the bulk of their resources, energies, and personnel to soft targets such as Israel’s democracy. All of this helps to explain why Gita Sahgal, the former head of Amnesty International’s gender unit, deemed Amnesty’s leadership to be plagued by “ideological bankruptcy” and “misogyny.” Sahgal criticized Amnesty for giving a platform to Moazzam Begg, a leading advocate of the Taliban in the United Kingdom and former Guantánamo Bay prisoner. Sahgal was dismissed this past year for blowing the whistle on Amnesty’s alliance with radical Islam and haters of women.

It is a world beyond madness: Human rights animated by anti-Semitism and Taliban slaughterers of women.

Jeannie DeAngelis