US soldiers traumatized by fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are to be offered the drug ecstasy to help free them of flashbacks and recurring nightmares as well as improve their dancing capabilities. The Pentagon has yet to make clear whether it will be distributing whistles with the pills. Still, the anti-war movement hopes that the intense feelings of pleasure, empathy, warmth, and happiness brought about by the drug could bring a ceasefire in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The US food and drug administration has given the go-ahead for the soldiers to be included in an experiment to see if MDMA, the active ingredient in ecstasy, can treat post-traumatic stress disorder.

According to the US National Center for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, up to 30 percent of combat veterans suffer from the condition at some point in their lives. And department of defence statistics also reveal that only a lamentable 13% of the military can dance. These happy pills are designed to resolve both issues, ensuring GIs get over the guilt complex of killing innocents in an illegal war.

Of course, getting soldiers hooked up to manner of zany drugs has been a long running sport at the Pentagon — LSD being one of the most common since the 1950s. However, the worst medicine in recent years have undoubtedly been the anthrax vaccines which were compulsory for all soldiers up until October last year when a judge called a halt to their involuntary nature. Donald Rumsfeld could be in trouble over this one, though as since that ruling 931 soldiers have been forced to have the injection.

Indeed the whole programme is of deeply questionable benefit. There are many chronic debilatating side effects from the shots which at first were estimated to occur in 0.002% of recipients are currently occurring in about 7%, and they have even resulted in deaths. Add to this the fact that in a practical biological warfare setting the vaccine is most likely useless against unaltered anthrax, and a committed BW programs can and will develop strains for which the vaccine is ineffective. And finally get the side salad of pharma-fiddle and Penta-pork: the vaccination supplier has received FDA licensing only for an old manufacturing process — it’s current process is in fact unlicensed, and the labs have failed quite a few inspections and standards, such as purity and contamination. With the FDA threatening to close the lab and revoke its license just a few months before the contract was up for bidding, MBPI, AKA BioPort, emerged as front runner in the bid.

About 1.2 million DoD and contractor personnel have received anthrax shots since the vaccination program began in 1998. Almost 500 service members have refused to take the vaccine, and more than 100 have been court-martialled for their refusal.

For the full Spiegel article on ecstasy’s entrance into the US military, click here.

And for all you ever wanted to know about the Pentagon’s use of LSD, click here to visit the memory hole.

Also look out for articles on BZ, a US Army super-hallucinogen, here.

“When the leaders curse war the mobilisation order is already written out.”
— Bertolt Brecht

Methinks Washington doth protest too much that is not looking for more war. The timetable for Middle Eastern subordination has seemingly been hastened these past few days with the murder of the former Lebanese prime minister and the continued breast beating over Iran.

The US was quick to blame Syria for the death of Rafik Hariri with White House spokesman Scott McLellan saying: “This murder today is a terrible reminder that the Lebanese people must be able to pursue their aspirations and determine their own political future, free from violence and intimidation and free from Syrian occupation.” No hint of hypocrisy there then, with Lebanon shelled by US ships in support of an Israeli occupation just over 20 years ago.

As well as getting the media to point an accusing finger at Damascus and a getting a small crowd to march in front of a TV camera in Damascus voicing outrage at Syria, Washington recalled its Damascus ambassador just to hammer the point home.

Syria has nothing to gain from murdering this man, who resigned from his long held post last October. The US and Israel though could use Hariri’s death to skewer Syria, a country it blames for supporting Iraqis against US occupation in Iraq.

In October 2003, in the first such strike within Syria since 1977 and with US approval, Israeli warplanes bombed alleged Palestinian training camps near Damascus. The following month the US Congress passed the fiery Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act (SALSA), which demanded that Syria withdraw its forces from Lebanon and desist both from supporting “terrorist” groups and developing WMD.

Hariri “understood all too well,” writes Robert Fisk in The Independent, “that the Bush administration wanted — in more than one country — to combine its “war on terror” with its campaign for “democracy” in the Middle East.”

He continued: “If Iraq could be invaded for democracy while forming a front line in the “war on terror” — however delusional this was — then Syria’s presence in Lebanon seemed to mirror the same set of circumstances. Syria supported “terrorism”, or at least, sponsored militants that were opposed to Israel, while occupying a neighbouring country, Lebanon, against international law.”

Bush and Jacques Chirac were able to push through UN Security Council resolution 1559, calling for Syrian military withdrawal from Lebanon, “Damascus found itself facing a miniature version of Saddam Hussein’s predicament in 2003: submit to UN resolutions or else,” writes Fisk.

Bush called last Thursday once again for the Syrians to withdraw its forces from Lebanon, keen to get them out ahead of forthcoming elections where the current government is decidedly pro-Syrian. Bush would like Lebanon to be a US client state. Those that refuse to be the US’ bitch in the region — namely Iran and Syria — face war.

Israel would dearly love a demilitarized Lebanon, the disarmament of the Hizbollah and to humiliate Syria and the much-needed water from Lebanon’s Wazzani River.

There are reports that the US has already sent clandestine teams into Syria to undertake “battlefield preparation”. In the north of Syria, the Kurdish minority has rioted and demanded more rights — a move Syria believes was inspired by pro-American Kurds from Iraq.

“If we look at the way the assassination has been conducted, it is very sophisticated, I knew al-Hariri’s security measures — no local system could have breached them,” Bushra al-Khalil, a Lebanese lawyer and political activist, told Aljazeera. Echoing the little red email’s own thoughts, al-Khalil continued: “The question is, who stands to benefit from his death? Syria’s enemies. I think al-Hariri’s death is part of the plan to divide the region into tiny helpless sectarian states. This plan has started in Iraq and it will continue to hit all other Arab countries.”

The US’ Iraqi embassy under construction costing $1.5 billion is the largest US embassy in the world, and will house 1,800 employees and will act as the regional nerve centre for America to assert its hegemony through out the region via the disguise of fighting terror and disseminating democracy.

Since the mid-1990s many in the Bush administration including Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith, Cheney and his shadowy Middle East adviser, David Wurmser have advocated working with Israel to “roll back” the Ba’ath-led government in Syria. Since the Iraqi invasion started these threats have become more regular and vocal.

Syria is considered a vital pivot to establishing blanket control in the region by these loonies who cannot get it into their heads that they have not won one war yet — both Afghanistan and Iraq are out of their control — and any further fronts would surely raise the spectre of conscription in the US as the military is already stretched too thin.

The stellar cast of evil miscreants Bush has assembled for his second reign has been completed with John Negroponte selected to become chief of intelligence. Got something nasty and illegal to be done in a conflict, who you going to call? Ambassador BlackOps, janitor to the all the nastier Republican stars. Negroponte has been a US ambassador for Honduras, Mexico, the Philippines, the UN and currently Iraq. Prior to that on this man’s military messing CV, he served as a political officer in Saigon from 1964 to 1968, and then headed up the Vietnam desk at the National Security Council from 1971 to 1973.

In Central America, Blackbridge, as English translators referred to him, was responsible for the behind-the-scenes dirty wars that went on throughout the Reagan administration, helping the Contras plunder Nicaragua via Honduras without the knowledge of Congress.

Among other things he supervised the creation of the El Aguacate air base, where the US trained Nicaraguan Contras during the 1980s. The base was used as a secret detention and torture centre, in August 2001 excavations at the base discovered the first of the corpses of the 185 people, including two Americans, who are thought to have been killed and buried at this base.

During his ambassadorship, human rights violations in Honduras became systematic. The infamous Battalion 316, trained by the CIA and Argentine military, kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of people. Negroponte, now 65, knew about these human rights violations and yet continued to collaborate with them, while lying to Congress.

Negroponte joins the torture adherent Alberto Gonzalez (attorney general) and the lawyer who looked the other way when 762 innocent immigrants (mostly of Arab and South Asian descent) were swept up in a post-9/11 dragnet and held as “terrorism suspects” for several months, Michael Chertoff, (homeland security secretary) as new fearsome faces in the Cabinet to go alongside the already highly dangerous melting plot of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Rice. Further second tier appointments lend credence to the feeling this is an administration populated by rehabilitated Iran-Contra crusties.

From one of the little red email’s least favourite diplomats, to one of our most favourite, who has been at it again, shooting his mouth off denouncing the US for propping up dictators and promising to give his erstwhile British boss a few sleepless nights between now and May. Craig Murray, 46, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who lost his job for his public and forthright views over Tashkent’s miserable human rights record, has announced he will run against British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw for the constituency seat of Blackburn at this May’s British parliamentary elections. Canned Revolution has a new political hero!

Last week, the undiplomatic diplomat spoke to Radio Free Europe on how his campaign was aiming to challenge the British government over their part in the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq.

“I think that under this government,” he said, “Britain has moved away from the basic principles that governed foreign policy for many years, in particular support for the United Nations, support for the role of international law. And that’s really quite a serious step, which the British people didn’t approve of, people didn’t approve of us entering into an illegal war against Iraq without the sanction of the UN Security Council. So I’m trying to bring that home to the foreign secretary, because he obviously carries the responsibility for foreign policy.”

He summed up his tactics, saying: “I want to make the illegal war on Iraq, the government’s attacks on human rights at home, its failure to support human rights abroad — I’m hoping to make those key issues which get more national attention than they would otherwise” emulating former journalist who, running as an independent, won his seat by focusing on political sleaze.

Last year Murray accused the United States and United Kingdom of using intelligence gained from people tortured in Uzbekistan. And in a widely published speech in November, he criticized the United States for helping prop up what he called President Islam Karimov’s "brutal" regime so as to get a toehold in the region for the all-pervading War on Terror™ (TWOT™).

Speaking to Radio Free Europe on the sad plight of Uzbekistan, Murray said: "When I first arrived in Uzbekistan [in 2002] and called on other European Union ambassadors and said to them, ’Goodness, the human rights situation here is terrible, this is a really nasty dictatorship,’ two of them said to me absolutely directly, ’Yes we know, but we don’t mention that because [Uzbekistan is a] close ally of the U.S.’ And there was an understanding among ambassadors in Tashkent that they just pretended not to notice what was going on." (Click here or the full transcript)

"I think they’re propping up one of the worst regimes in the world very actively and it’s a complete disgrace," he said categorically.

Cases of torture in Uzbek prisons have been widely documented by human rights organizations. United Nations’ rapporteur Theo van Boven said three years ago that torture was "systematic" in the country.

"It has given a great deal of financial, military, moral support to a dreadful regime which would otherwise crumble under the weight of its own corruption and inefficiency. I think they’re propping up one of the worst regimes in the world very actively and it’s a complete disgrace. It’s particularly a disgrace when allied with the hypocrisy of [President] George Bush’s election inauguration address [in January] when he said that the U.S. would be working to counter dictatorships and support democracy worldwide, whereas in Uzbekistan they’re doing exactly the opposite of that," Murray said.

Contrasting Karimov’s Uzbekistan with neighbouring pariah state, Belarus, Murray noted: "There is certainly no more freedom in Uzbekistan than there is in Belarus, and the regime in Tashkent is still more vicious and violent than the regime of [Belarusian President Alyaksandr] Lukashenka. And Lukashenka, we’re quite happy to ostracize and bring sanctions against, while we court Karimov. Uzbekistan is certainly in the ‘Top 10’ for dictatorial regimes in the world and we should treat it as such. We don’t have any difficulty treating [ Zimbabwe’s President Robert] Mugabe and Lukashenka as pariahs, so why should we not treat Karimov in the same way?”

In July 2004, Murray told The Guardian that “there is no point in having cocktail-party relationships with a fascist regime,” and that “you don’t have to be a pompous old fart to be an ambassador.”

Vote Murray 2005!

For more on Canned Revolution’s new political here, click here.

Right up there in terms of disgustingness with ingratiating France championing the cause to allow the EU to sell arms to China again, the US, fresh from its goodwill operations in tsunami ravaged Indonesia is all set to restore full military training ties with the archipelago.

Military ties were downgraded 13 years ago as the repeated outrages by Jakarta against areas looking to secede such as East Timor became too much for the American public to take. Now though Condi Rice, the newly installed, demonic Secretary of State, has told a Senate panel she was in the “final stages” of consultations with Congress on certifying Indonesia as eligible to benefit from the International Military Education and Training (IMET) program.

“I think it’s a good time to do that,” she said.

A good time, eh? How come movement around the battered Aceh is so restricted then? Because there is a huge, bitter war there with the government fighting another set of people keen to secede. All of which is being nicely — and in a very timely fashion — being whitewashed over by the visit of Bush senior and slick Willie Clinton, as they glad hand their way through the Indonesian army in Aceh on a tsunami relief photo-op.

Likewise in the Molucca islands, in the south centre of the archipelago, a heavy-handed military presence keeps the locals at bay. Throughout this enormous country, the world’ s most populous Muslim nation, there are tribes, ethnic minorities, and islands that have little in common with the majority and are keen for greater independence.

There are many more East Timors waiting to happen. Ms Rice will give Jakarta the hardware and the training to ensure this divided nation is beaten into submission, just like Tony Blair’s ‘ethical’ foreign policy ensured the planes to strafe the East Timorese continued to be sold. Those ‘goodwill’ helicopter missions in the wake of the tsunami were clearly serving a double purpose.

For a more in depth look at US-Indonesia military ties, check out previous musings here.

US intransigence and sheer pig-headedness is prolonging the suffering in the Darfur region of Sudan. As the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, prepares to brief the UN Security Council on the report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, Amnesty International is calling on the United States of America (USA) and other Security Council members to immediately implement the Commission’s recommendations.

Amnesty International reiterated its concern that the USA is refusing to adopt the Commission of Inquiry’s recommendation that the situation in Darfur should be referred to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

“The Sudanese people’s right to justice, truth and full reparations should not be overridden by the political interests of any State,” said Kolawole Olaniyan, Director of the Africa Program of Amnesty International.

“The Commission of Inquiry, which was established by the Security Council itself, has written a detailed and authoritative report on war crimes and crimes against humanity committed on a large scale in Darfur. It has devoted many pages to analysing why the ICC is the best means to investigate and prosecute some of those suspected of these crimes. The Security Council should now implement this recommendation, ensure that the referral includes the entire situation in Sudan and call for the development of a long-term comprehensive plan to end impunity in Sudan.”

In recommending referral to the ICC, the Commission of Inquiry said that the Sudanese authorities have proved unable and unwilling to investigate and prosecute the crimes committed in Darfur, and that setting up an ad hoc tribunal or extending the mandate of the present tribunal for Rwanda would be slow and expensive.

“The Sudanese people deserve justice and redress. It should not be denied them just because it does not sit comfortably with the USA’s political agenda,” said Kolawole Olaniyan. “The latest draft resolution to the Security Council to be put forward by the USA simply states that perpetrators be brought to justice by ‘internationally acceptable means’. To ignore the ICC in this case would mean that the USA believes that the fight against impunity is a secondary consideration to its own interests.”

Like earlier in this debacle, where the West refused to term the disaster in Darfur a genocide so that they didn’t have to interfere with men on the ground, the US’ fear of the ICC, and having its own troops (and indeed politicians) tried there is stopping justice be served for the heinous crimes perpetrated in this central African country over the past two years.

A hotchpotch of stuff we’ve found and enjoyed recently on the Weird Wide Web.

Get your lovely T-shirts while they’re hot!
Everybody loves a winner. Nobody likes a loser. Nobody likes to be a loser. So with this in mind, Canned Revolution have set it up so that you can now buy your own Canned Revolution T-Shirt, and pretend that you won it in our competition. We’ll back up any claims to being a lucky winner by anyone who purchases a freshly tinned t-shirt to help the cause.

Owning your own Canned Revolution shirt could be a great way of life for you — imagine the friends, the opportunities, the fame, the copious offers of gratuitous sex.

Don’t delay! Buy your way into coolness today by clicking here.

 

If you fancy your luck, on the other hand...
You could try our latest competition! Yes, that’s right: another chance to be cool for free. Head on over to here to try your luck in our latest revolutionary contest.

 

Coming soon: the Revolution launches its new bulletproof vest
On March 18th, the Revolution will be celebrating two glorious years of Iraqi occupation, and offering help to North Americans as they face the highest levels of anti-US sentiment seen throughout the world. Come along and get bombed on b-52s at Canned Revolution’s expense and witness the unveiling of the latest bulletproof technology. The venue will be the wonderful 5 o.p.t. Studio Gallery. More details will be forthcoming soon.

 

Quote of the week
"In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy."
—Philosopher Ivan Illich

 

It’s all going to Shiite for the US
Mr Bush seems to be developing a reverse Midas touch — everything he touches turns to Shiite. They won the elections, and according to Noam Chomsky, the US might Face their “Ultimate Nightmare” in Middle East.

This from Democracy Now: One of the country’s leading dissidents, MIT Professor Noam Chomsky, gives a major new address on the Iraq war, the re-election of President Bush and imperialism. On Iraq’s elections, Chomsky predicts what a Shiite-controlled Iraq may look like: “The first thing they’ll do is re-establish relations with Iran... The next thing that might happen is that a Shiite-controlled, more or less democratic Iraq might stir up feelings in the Shiite areas of Saudi Arabia, which happen to be right nearby and which happen to be where all the oil is. So you might find what in Washington must be the ultimate nightmare-a Shiite region which controls most of the world’s oil and is independent.”

Watch him speak here.

 

Fallujah: how the US killed a city
One doctor’s recent trip to this razed area.

Plus see the amateur video, Legacy of Fallujah. This was shot on the first day of one of the biggest festivals in the Muslim year. But instead of buying new clothes for their children and visiting family and friends, the men of Fallujah are digging graves.

 

Du’h-plomacy 101: Whatever you do, don’t mention Taiwan
Talk about pissing on your chips! Condi and Donnie, having stated that the Bush administration is relying on China to bring North Korea back to the table, then manage to upset the Chinese by mentioning the most prickly of subjects: Taiwan. But not content with raising the touchy subject, they drag Japan into the fray, a country guaranteed to raise the hackles of any Chinese nationalist.
And the rebuke was out straight away: "The Chinese Government and people resolutely opposes the United States and Japan in issuing any bilateral document concerning China’s Taiwan, which meddles in the internal affairs of China, and hurts China’s sovereignty," said the PRC Foreign Ministry.

 

Madrid office fire raises WTC questions again
Isn’t it odd, the WTC collapsed after an hour, and the black smoke indicates that fire wasn’t even burning hot. Now compare- this is the Madrid Fire, it burned for 10 hours and still has not collapsed. See the pix here.

 

Justice is meant to be blind — but is it colour blind?
Let’s take the US incarcerated population as a classic example.

• Official numbers show an incarceration level for black males of 4,800 per 100,000 of population.
• For whites this falls to 715 per 100,000.
• The black male child born this year will have just under one chance in three of being jailed at some point in his life.
• The white child only one in 23.
• In the USA at this moment there are 603,000 young African males in college versus 791,600 in prison.
• One third of all African-American males between 20-29 years of age are in jail, on parole or under probationary supervision.
• Between 1987 and 1999 the Federal penal system grew from 41,000 prisoners to 130,000.
• In the combined State systems, between 1991 and 1997, the drug prisoners increased from 21.3% to 57.9% of total population.
• And the same period for the Federal gulag: 20.7 to 62.6%.

Thanks to the excellent www.Narconews.com for these stats.

 

Chinese researchers crack major US government algorithm used in digital signatures
From Wikinews comes this gem:

According to computer security expert Bruce Schneier, one of the United States government’s algorithms used for digital signatures, known as SHA-1, has been broken by three researchers at Shandong University in China. The three female researchers, Xiaoyun Wang, Yiqun Lisa Yin, and Hongbo Yu, have reduced the amount of time needed to find two documents with the same signature by a factor of more than 2000.

The SHA-1 algorithm is used to compute a short string of numbers, known as a hash, for any digital document. The algorithm is constructed such that small changes in the document cause the hash to change drastically. By this means, the hash can be used to verify that a document has not been tampered with.

The attack that Schneier describes is a “collision attack,” rather than the more useful “pre-image” attack. In a pre-image attack, the codebreaker is able to find a document with different contents that matches an existing hash and so can claim an existing signature was on something else. In the somewhat less valuable “collision attack,” the codebreaker is able to devise two documents that both have some particular hash. A crafty adversary might use this to claim that an altered document is the original on the grounds that they have the same hash. If the researchers Schneier cites are correct, SHA-1 will no longer vouch for a document’s authenticity.

The attack, for now, is more of a theoretical than a practical kind: it would currently take thousands of years on a modern personal computer, and would still be slow even if a large number of computers were used in parallel.

Xiaoyun Wang is currently a professor at Shandong University, while Hongbo Yu is a doctoral candidate at the same institution. Yiqun Lisa Yin is currently a visiting researcher at the Princeton Architecture Laboratory for Multimedia and Security (PALMS). Last year, Xiaoyun Wang and Hongbo Yu also took part in breaking a series of similar algorithms, including the widely used MD5 hash, as documented in their paper presented at the Crypto 2004 conference.

In what may eventually be seen as related news, officials from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have recently recommended dropping SHA-1 in favour of stronger, slower algorithms, such as SHA-256, Federal Computer Week reported on February 7, 2005, just 7 days before Schneier announced the SHA-1 break. Despite deprecating SHA-1, William Burr, the head of NIST’s security technology group, said that “SHA-1 is not broken, and there is not much reason to suspect that it will be soon.”

 

Pentagon having trouble getting it up
Perhaps taking heed of the Viagra spammers might help the Bush Star Wars project, which was due to be on active duty last year:

Second U.S. anti-missile defence system test fails
The United States’ second attempt to test a ballistic missile defence system ended in failure on Monday when the interceptor missile did not leave the launch pad.

An unarmed ballistic missile was fired from Kodiak Island, Alaska, which was supposed to have been shot down by the interceptor missile. However the missile remained in its silo in the Ronald Reagan test site on the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean.

The test is the second straight failure of the system; in a test two months ago, the missile also failed to fire, that time due to a software fault. Initial investigations into Monday’s failure blamed a malfunction in ground support equipment, rather than a fault with the missile itself.

The tests are the first in two years; in an earlier series of tests, the system intercepted five of eight target missiles launched.

The project, known as the ‘son of Star Wars’ (the cancelled 1980s Strategic Defense Initiative was known as the Star Wars program), was announced by President George W. Bush in 2002. The system was supposed to have been operationally deployed last autumn.

This year, $9.1 billion is to be spent on the development of the system. But in his budget for 2006, Bush has cut the spending to $7.8bn.

 

Dresden: one of the war crimes without a trial
Hot on the heels of the Auschwitz anniversary, the Dresden firebombing was sixty years ago last week. No Nuremberg trial for those responsible for this attrocity: statues and medals all round. Here’s one survivor’s view of the Dresden raid (His comment is at the bottom of the bomber’s Baedeker quote):

FROM “THE BOMBER’S BAEDEKER”
(GUIDE TO THE ECONOMIC IMPORTANCE OF GERMAN TOWNS AND CITIES, 1944)

DRESDEN ( Saxony )
51∞3’ N. 13∞45’ E. 600 miles: (640,000)
Dresden, the capital of Saxony, is situated on both banks of the river Elbe, and stands at approximately 360 feet above sea level. The left bank, with the Altstadt, or old town, as nucleus is the larger of the two parts; in it are found the commercial centre, the residential area and public buildings, and some industries, mainly in its S-Suburbs. Neustadt, on the right bank, and its suburbs contain industrial centres and administration.
In peace time tobacco, chocolate, and confectionery manufacture played a large part in Dresden’s industrial activity; there are also a large number of light engineering works and makers of machinery which are now engaged on all kinds of war production, many of which are too small to be listed individually. Several important factories are making electric motors, precision and optical instruments and chemicals.
The munitions workshops in the old arsenal occupy an extensive area to the North of Neustadt, along the railway to Klotsche, in the industrial region which extends past the aerodrome to the Dresdner Heide. In the Heide, a large heath, munitions are reported to be stored in quantities.
Dresden is an important railway centre. The main connections between South and East Germany and the direct line from Berlin to Prague and Vienna pass through Dresden whence several branch lines lead to Leipzig and other parts of industrial Saxony. The river harbour is of considerable importance to the freight traffic of the Elbe.
To the SW. of the town in the valley of the Weisseritz is the industrial town of Freital (dealt with under its own heading) and a small coal field which supplies the light industries that have been developed in Dresden.
Along the northern bank of the Elbe between Dresden and Meissen are a number of industrial settlements which are outside the municipal area of Dresden. These have been dealt with separately under the town headings Radebeul, Coswig near Dresden, and Meissen.

COMMENT:
This is a page from a sort of directory kept aboard British and American bombers, from which crews might pick targets on their own in case they hadn’t been able to carry out their assigned mission that night or day. I reproduce it here to show that there wasn’t much in the Dresden area worth bombing out of business according to our own Intelligence experts. So burning the whole place down wasn’t an exercise in military science. It was religious. It was Wagnerian. It was theatrical. It should be judged as such.

From Fates Worse Than Death by Kurt Vonnegut

 

The Little Red Email Osama bin Laden Sweepstakes Shirt Contest!
Well we had been for sometime advocating that Osama bin Laden would be paraded in front of the US public for a little publicity boost. Time ran out for the little red email, but not for you. We guessed October 23rd for a pre-election Osama... and we feel a mite foolish, although Osama did show up on video. If you fancy a free Canned Revolution t-shirt, why not sign up. There is of course much speculation that Osama was caught ages ago and now is stewing in jail awaiting his upcoming moment in front of the cameras. Now, by simply guessing the date of Osama’s media debut as a US prisoner you can win a t-shirt. Send your expected date of bin Laden’s first television appearance as an American prisoner to osamasweepstakes@cannedrevolution.com. May you be luckier than us.