Religions > Atheism > OT: Great explanatory videos from the Swifties of what really happened!
| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Fester" |
| Date: |
27 Oct 2004 06:14:20 PM |
| Object: |
OT: Great explanatory videos from the Swifties of what really happened! |
http://www.swiftvetsandpows.com/
--
"Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and
he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion"
Edmund Burke
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| User: "wbarwell" |
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| Title: Re: OT: Great explanatory videos from the Swifties of what really happened! |
27 Oct 2004 08:37:20 PM |
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Fester wrote:
http://www.swiftvetsandpows.com/
Does it tell how Bush allowed those terrorists to steal
380 tons of explosives?
Kerry, it has to be Kerry, who could vote for a
moron like Bush?
Except another far right moron that does not care
about this nation.
The New York Times
October 25, 2004
TRACKING THE WEAPONS
Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq
By JAMES GLANZ, WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER
This article was reported and written by James Glanz, William
J. Broad and David E. Sanger.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 24 - The Iraqi interim government has
warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors
that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives -
used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads and detonate
nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive
former military installations.
The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under
American military control but is now a no man's land, still picked
over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons
inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but
White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives
vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year.
The White House said President Bush's national security adviser,
Condoleezza Rice, was informed within the past month that the
explosives were missing. It is unclear whether President Bush
was informed. American officials have never publicly announced
the disappearance, but beginning last week they answered questions
about it posed by The New York Times and the CBS News program
"60 Minutes."
Administration officials said Sunday that the Iraq Survey Group,
the C.I.A. task force that searched for unconventional weapons, has
been ordered to investigate the disappearance of the explosives.
American weapons experts say their immediate concern is that the
explosives could be used in major bombing attacks against American
or Iraqi forces: the explosives, mainly HMX and RDX, could produce
bombs strong enough to shatter airplanes or tear apart buildings.
The bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie,
Scotland, in 1988 used less than a pound of the same type of
material, and larger amounts were apparently used in the bombing
of a housing complex in November 2003 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia,
and the blasts in a Moscow apartment complex in September 1999
that killed nearly 300 people.
The explosives could also be used to trigger a nuclear weapon,
which was why international nuclear inspectors had kept a watch
on the material, and even sealed and locked some of it. The other
components of an atom bomb - the design and the radioactive
fuel - are more difficult to obtain.
"This is a high explosives risk, but not necessarily a
proliferation risk," one senior Bush administration official
said.
The International Atomic Energy Agency publicly warned about the
danger of these explosives before the war, and after the invasion
it specifically told United States officials about the need to
keep the explosives secured, European diplomats said in
interviews last week. Administration officials say they cannot
explain why the explosives were not safeguarded, beyond the fact
that the occupation force was overwhelmed by the amount of munitions
they found throughout the country.
A Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said Sunday evening
that Saddam Hussein's government "stored weapons in mosques,
schools, hospitals and countless other locations," and that
the allied forces "have discovered and destroyed perhaps
thousands of tons of ordnance of all types." A senior military
official noted that HMX and RDX were "available around the world"
and not on the nuclear nonproliferation list, even though they
are used in the nuclear warheads of many nations.
The Qaqaa facility, about 30 miles south of Baghdad, was well
known to American intelligence officials: Mr. Hussein made
conventional warheads at the site, and the I.A.E.A. dismantled
parts of his nuclear program there in the early 1990's after the
Persian Gulf war in 1991. In the prelude to the 2003 invasion,
Mr. Bush cited a number of other "dual use" items - including
tubes that the administration contended could be converted to
use for the nuclear program - as a justification for invading
Iraq.
After the invasion, when widespread looting began in Iraq,
the international weapons experts grew concerned that the Qaqaa
stockpile could fall into unfriendly hands. In May, an internal
I.A.E.A. memorandum warned that terrorists might be helping
"themselves to the greatest explosives bonanza in history."
Earlier this month, in a letter to the I.A.E.A. in Vienna,
a senior official from Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology
wrote that the stockpile disappeared after early April 2003
because of "the theft and looting of the governmental installations
due to lack of security."
In an interview with The Times and "60 Minutes" in Baghdad,
the minister of science and technology, Rashad M. Omar, confirmed
the facts described in the letter. "Yes, they are missing," Dr.
Omar said. "We don't know what happened." The I.A.E.A. says it
also does not know, and has reported that machine tools that
can be used for either nuclear or non-nuclear purposes have
also been looted.
Dr. Omar said that after the American-led invasion, the sites
containing the explosives were under the control of the Coalition
Provisional Authority, an American-led entity that was the
highest civilian authority in Iraq until it handed sovereignty of
the country over to the interim government on June 28.
"After the collapse of the regime, our liberation, everything
was under the coalition forces, under their control," Dr. Omar
said."So probably they can answer this question, what happened
to the materials."
Officials in Washington said they had no answers to that
question. One senior official noted that the Qaqaa complex
where the explosives were stored was listed as a "medium
priority" site on the Central Intelligence Agency's list
of more than 500 sites that needed to be searched and secured
during the invasion. "Should we have gone there? Definitely,"
said one senior administration official.
In the chaos that followed the invasion, however, many of
those sites, even some considered a higher priority, were
never secured.
A No Man's Land
Seeing the ruined bunkers at the vast Qaqaa complex today,
it is hard to recall that just two years ago it was part of
Saddam Hussein's secret military complex. The bunkers are so
large that they are reminiscent of pyramids, though with
rounded edges and the tops chopped off. Several are blackened
and eviscerated as a result of American bombing. Smokestacks
rise in the distance.
Today, Al Qaqaa has become a wasteland generally avoided
even by the marines in charge of northern Babil Province.
Headless bodies are found there. An ammunition dump has been
looted, and on Sunday an Iraqi employee of The New York Times
who made a furtive visit to the site saw looters tearing out
metal fixtures. Bare pipes within the darkened interior of
one of the buildings were a tangled mess, zigzagging along
charred walls. Someone fired a shot, probably to frighten
the visitors off.
"It's like Mars on Earth," said Maj. Dan Whisnant, an
intelligence officer for the Second Battalion, 24th Marine
Regiment. "It would take probably 10 battalions 10 years to
clear that out."
Mr. Hussein's engineers acquired HMX and RDX when they
embarked on a crash effort to build an atomic bomb in the late
1980's. It did not go smoothly.
In 1989, a huge blast ripped through Al Qaqaa, the boom
reportedly heard hundreds of miles away. The explosion, it
was later determined, occurred when a stockpile of the high
explosives ignited.
After the Persian Gulf war in 1991, the United Nations
discovered Iraq's clandestine effort and put the United Nations
arms agency in charge of Al Qaqaa's huge stockpile. Weapon
inspectors determined that Iraq had bought the explosives
from France, China and Yugoslavia, a European diplomat said.
None of the explosives were destroyed, arms experts familiar
with the decision recalled, because Iraq argued that it should
be allowed to keep them for eventual use in mining and civilian
construction. But Al Qaqaa was still under the authority of the
Military Industrial Council, which ran Iraq's sensitive weapons
programs and was led for a time by Hussein Kamel, Mr. Hussein's
son-in-law. He defected to the West, then returned to Iraq
and was immediately killed.
In 1996, the United Nations hauled away some of the HMX and
used it to blow up Al Hakam, a vast Iraqi factory for making
germ weapons.
The Qaqaa stockpile went unmonitored from late 1998, when
United Nations inspectors left Iraq, to late 2002, when they
came back. Upon their return, the inspectors discovered that
about 35 tons of HMX were missing. The Iraqis said they had
used the explosive mainly in civilian programs.
The remaining stockpile was no secret. Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei,
the director general of the arms agency, frequently talked about
it publicly as he investigated - in late 2002 and early 2003 -
the Bush administration's claims that Iraq was secretly
renewing its pursuit of nuclear arms. He ordered his weapons
inspectors to conduct an inventory, and publicly reported their
findings to the Security Council on Jan. 9, 2003.
During the following weeks, the I.A.E.A. repeatedly drew
public attention to the explosives. In New York on Feb. 14,
nine days after Secretary of State Colin L. Powell presented
his arms case to the Security Council, Dr. ElBaradei reported
that the agency had found no sign of new atom endeavors but
"has continued to investigate the relocation and consumption
of the high explosive HMX."
A European diplomat reported that Jacques Baute, head of the
arms agency's Iraq nuclear inspection team, warned officials
at the United States mission in Vienna about the danger of
the nuclear sites and materials once under I.A.E.A. supervision,
including Al Qaqaa.
But apparently, little was done. A senior Bush administration
official said that during the initial race to Baghdad, American
forces "went through the bunkers, but saw no materials bearing
the I.A.E.A. seal." It is unclear whether troops ever returned.
By late 2003, diplomats said, arms agency experts had obtained
commercial satellite photos of Al Qaqaa showing that two of
roughly 10 bunkers that contained HMX appeared to have been
leveled by titanic blasts, apparently during the war. They
presumed some of the HMX had exploded, but that is unclear.
Other HMX bunkers were untouched. Some were damaged but not
devastated. I.A.E.A. experts say they assume that just before
the invasion the Iraqis followed their standard practice of
moving crucial explosives out of buildings, so they would
not be tempting targets. If so, the experts say, the Iraqi
must have broken seals from the arms agency on bunker doors
and moved most of the HMX to nearby fields, where it would
have been lightly camouflaged - and ripe for looting.
But the Bush administration would not allow the agency
back into the country to verify the status of the stockpile.
In May 2004, Iraqi officials say in interviews, they warned
L. Paul Bremer III, the American head of the occupation
authority, that Al Qaqaa had probably been looted. It is
unclear if that warning was passed anywhere. Efforts to
reach Mr. Bremer by telephone were unsuccessful.
But by the spring of 2004, the Americans were preoccupied
with the transfer of authority to Iraq, and the insurgency was
gaining strength. "It's not an excuse," said one senior
administration official. "But a lot of things went by the
boards."
Early this month, Dr. ElBaradei put public pressure on
the interim Iraqi government to start the process of accounting
for nuclear-related materials still ostensibly under I.A.E.A.
supervision, including the Qaqaa stockpile.
"Iraq is obliged," he wrote to the president of the Security
Council on Oct. 1, "to declare semiannually changes that have
occurred or are foreseen."
The agency, Dr. ElBaradei added pointedly, "has received
no such notifications or declarations from any state since
the agency's inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq in March 2003."
A Lost Stockpile
Two weeks ago, on Oct. 10, Dr. Mohammed J. Abbas of the
Iraqi Ministry of Science and Technology wrote a letter to
the I.A.E.A. to say the Qaqaa stockpile had been lost. He
added that his ministry had judged that an "urgent updating
of the registered materials is required."
A chart in his letter listed 341.7 metric tons, about 377
American tons, of HMX, RDX and PETN as missing.
The explosives missing from Al Qaqaa are the strongest and
fastest in common use by militaries around the globe. The
Iraqi letter identified the vanished stockpile as containing
194.7 metric tons of HMX, which stands for "high melting
point explosive,"141.2 metric tons of RDX, which stands for
"rapid detonation explosive," among other designations, and
5.8 metric tons of PETN, which stands for "pentaerythritol
tetranitrate." The total is roughly 340 metric tons or nearly
380 American tons.
Five days later, on Oct. 15, European diplomats said, the arms
agency wrote the United States mission in Vienna to forward the
Iraqi letter and ask that the American authorities inform the
international coalition in Iraq of the missing explosives.
Dr. ElBaradei, a European diplomat said, is "extremely
concerned" about the potentially "devastating consequences"
of the vanished stockpile.
Its fate remains unknown. Glenn Earhart, manager of an
Army Corps of Engineers program in Huntsville, Ala., that is
in charge of rounding up and destroying lost Iraqi munitions,
said he and his colleagues knew nothing of the whereabouts
of the Qaqaa stockpile.
Administration officials say Iraq was awash in munitions,
including other stockpiles of exotic explosives.
"The only reason this stockpile was under seal," said one
senior administration official, "is because it was located
at Al Qaqaa," where nuclear work had gone on years ago.
As a measure of the size of the stockpile, one large truck
can carry about 10 tons, meaning that the missing explosives
could fill a fleet of almost 40 trucks.
By weight, these explosives pack far more destructive power
than TNT, so armies often use them in shells, bombs, mines,
mortars and many types of conventional ordinance.
"HMX and RDX have a lot of shattering power," said Dr. Van
Romero, vice president for research at the New Mexico Institute
of Mining and Technology, or New Mexico Tech, which specializes
in explosives.
"Getting a large amount is difficult," he added, because
most nations carefully regulate who can buy such explosives,
though civilian experts can sometimes get licenses to use them
for demolition and mining.
An Immediate Danger
A special property of HMX and RDX lends them to smuggling
and terrorism, experts said. While violently energetic when
detonated, they are insensitive to shock and physical abuse
during handling and transport because of their chemical
stability. A hammer blow does nothing. It takes a detonator,
like a blasting cap, to release the stored energy.
Experts said the insensitivity made them safer to transport
than the millions of unexploded shells, mines and pieces of
live ammunition that litter Iraq. And its benign appearance
makes it easy to disguise as harmless goods, easily slipped
across borders.
"The immediate danger" of the lost stockpile, said an
expert who recently led a team that searched Iraq for
deadly arms, "is its potential use with insurgents in
very small and powerful explosive devices. The other danger
is that it can easily move into the terrorist web across
the Middle East."
More worrisome to the I.A.E.A. - and to some in Washington
- is that HMX and RDX are used in standard nuclear weapons
design. In a nuclear implosion weapon, the explosives crush
a hollow sphere of uranium or plutonium into a critical mass,
initiating the nuclear explosion.
A crude implosion device - like the one that the United
States tested in 1945 in the New Mexican desert and
then dropped on Nagasaki, Japan - needs about a ton of
high explosive to crush the core and start the chain
reaction.
James Glanz reported from Baghdad and Yusifiya, Iraq,
for this article, William J. Broad from New York and Vienna,
and David E. Sanger from Washington and Crawford, Tex.
Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting from Baghdad.
--
Kerry - two medals a silver and bronze star.
Bush? Well they don't give medals
for going AWOL, missing your medical and
getting grounded or falling off of a bar stool.
Kerry - a hero, Bush - a zero
Cheerful Charlie
--
Kerry - two medals a silver and bronze star.
Bush? Well they don't give medals
for going AWOL, missing your medical and
getting grounded or falling off of a bar stool.
Kerry - a hero, Bush - a zero
Cheerful Charlie
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| User: "Tukla Ratte" |
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| Title: Re: OT: Great explanatory videos from the Swifties of what reallyhappened! |
28 Oct 2004 04:11:42 PM |
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Fester wrote:
Ah, so they've fessed up to illegally conspiring with Karl Rove to smear
John Kerry's reputation!
http://www.swiftvetsandpows.com/
Oh. Guess they're still lying. Ah, well. It's a habit for right-wingers.
--
Tukla, Eater of Theists, Squeaker of Chew Toys
Official Mascot of Alt.Atheism
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| User: "Fester" |
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| Title: Re: OT: Great explanatory videos from the Swifties of what really happened! |
28 Oct 2004 06:38:09 PM |
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"Tukla Ratte" <tukla_ratte@tukla.net> wrote in message
news:2ud5kgF28ft3kU1@uni-berlin.de...
Fester wrote:
Ah, so they've fessed up to illegally conspiring with Karl Rove to smear
John Kerry's reputation!
http://www.swiftvetsandpows.com/
Oh. Guess they're still lying. Ah, well. It's a habit for
right-wingers.
I noticed that you haven't tried to back any of that BS up.
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| User: "Tukla Ratte" |
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| Title: Re: OT: Great explanatory videos from the Swifties of what reallyhappened! |
29 Oct 2004 02:52:45 PM |
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Fester wrote:
"Tukla Ratte" <tukla_ratte@tukla.net> wrote in message
news:2ud5kgF28ft3kU1@uni-berlin.de...
Fester wrote:
Ah, so they've fessed up to illegally conspiring with Karl Rove to smear
John Kerry's reputation!
http://www.swiftvetsandpows.com/
Oh. Guess they're still lying. Ah, well. It's a habit for
right-wingers.
I noticed that you haven't tried to back any of that BS up.
That's because every chordate on the planet knows it already.
Oh! I see the problem, now. Here you go.
http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx@docID=231.html
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/08/21/edwards.swiftboat/
--
Tukla, Eater of Theists, Squeaker of Chew Toys
Official Mascot of Alt.Atheism
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| User: "Fester" |
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| Title: Re: OT: Great explanatory videos from the Swifties of what really happened! |
29 Oct 2004 04:45:31 PM |
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"Tukla Ratte" <tukla_ratte@tukla.net> wrote in message
news:2uflcgF2ahkj8U1@uni-berlin.de...
Fester wrote:
"Tukla Ratte" <tukla_ratte@tukla.net> wrote in message
news:2ud5kgF28ft3kU1@uni-berlin.de...
Fester wrote:
Ah, so they've fessed up to illegally conspiring with Karl Rove to smear
John Kerry's reputation!
http://www.swiftvetsandpows.com/
Oh. Guess they're still lying. Ah, well. It's a habit for
right-wingers.
I noticed that you haven't tried to back any of that BS up.
That's because every chordate on the planet knows it already.
Oh! I see the problem, now. Here you go.
http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx@docID=231.html
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/08/21/edwards.swiftboat/
I've read factcheck's and they blew it. They rely principally on Navy
records which were forged by Flipper himself. IOW, go to the source of the
lie to confirm the veracity fo the lie. Very convincing.
As for CNN, they don't even attempt to address the issue. All they've done
is "expose" who paid for the initial ads. Well hte message was there before
the ads, and the vets have consistently maintained and backed up their
version of well before the money showed up.
Sorry, you get a lump of coal in your H'Ween bag this time around.
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| User: "Gregory Gadow" |
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| Title: Re: OT: Great explanatory videos from the Swifties of what reallyhappened! |
28 Oct 2004 08:11:41 AM |
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You mean, from the group already proven to consist of liars, who have already
presented two commercials chock full of untruths and distortions?
--
Gregory Gadow
techbear@serv.net
http://www.serv.net/~techbear
"Vote for John Kerry. He's by no means the
Messiah, but at least he's not the Antichrist."
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| User: "Fester" |
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| Title: Re: OT: Great explanatory videos from the Swifties of what really happened! |
28 Oct 2004 06:37:07 PM |
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"Gregory Gadow" <techbear@serv.net> wrote in message
news:4180F00D.7F9B8593@serv.net...
You mean, from the group already proven to consist of liars, who have
already
presented two commercials chock full of untruths and distortions?
They have not been discredited. Once again, you're FOS.
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| User: "JTEM" |
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| Title: Re: OT: Great explanatory videos from the Swifties of what really happened! |
28 Oct 2004 09:35:10 PM |
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"Fester" <not@home.com> wrote
"Gregory Gadow" <techbear@serv.net> wrote
You mean, from the group already proven to consist of liars,
who have already presented two commercials chock full
of untruths and distortions?
They have not been discredited. Once again, you're FOS.
...unless you want to go by their own previous (and, in some
cases, present) testimonies, as well as official military records.
The "Doctor" who treated Kerry for example. The military
records demonstrate that he didn't treat John Kerry, that
another doctor treated him.
The after-action report they pretended that Kerry wrote. He
didn't. They military records releveal that a DIFFERENT
officer wrote them.
The firefight they pretend never took place: One of the very
smearboat veterans was decorated for his bravery under
fire that same day, for action seen at the very same location.
Another smearboat veteran from the commercials in on
record -- including video tape -- *Praising* John Kerry
and his military service. For 35 years he told one story
about John Kerry, and he only changed it after Bush
recruited him to smear Kerry in order to make a draft-dodger
-turned-deserter look better next to a war hero.
The founder of the Smearboat campaign, John O'Neill,
was Richard Nixon's hand-picked man to counter John
Kerry. His voice appears on the famous Nixon Whitehouse
tapes, where he discusses John Kerry with Richard Nixon.
Yet, even Nixon would stoop as low as Bush. As sleazy as
Nixon was, and as interested as he was in discrediting John
Kerry, Nixon simply refused to sink as low as Bush has sunk.
Nixon wouldn't invent the smears that Bush now cowers
behind.
As bad as Nixon was, he wasn't as chicken ***** as you and
Bush.
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| User: "Tukla Ratte" |
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| Title: Re: OT: Great explanatory videos from the Swifties of what reallyhappened! |
28 Oct 2004 04:12:42 PM |
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Gregory Gadow wrote:
You mean, from the group already proven to consist of liars, who have already
presented two commercials chock full of untruths and distortions?
Yeah, them. Doesn't it make you want to find out what they have to say
today?
--
Tukla, Eater of Theists, Squeaker of Chew Toys
Official Mascot of Alt.Atheism
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: OT: Great explanatory videos from the Swifties of what really happened! |
28 Oct 2004 12:43:20 PM |
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On Thu, 28 Oct 2004 06:11:41 -0700, Gregory Gadow <techbear@serv.net>
wrote:
You mean, from the group already proven to consist of liars, who have already
presented two commercials chock full of untruths and distortions?
"Vote for John Kerry. He's by no means the
Messiah, but at least he's not the Antichrist."
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/041028/480/iass10410280026
...... ;-)
atheist#1554
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