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Rumsfeld Helped Al Qaeda Establish a Stronghold in Northwestern Pakistan
Prof. Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research
Sat, 28 Jul 2007 13:26 EDT

"From a military standpoint, it does not make sense. Evacuate the enemy to safe-haven, and then a few years later "go after them" in the tribal hills of Northwestern Pakistan.

Why did they not arrest these Al Qaeda fighters in November 2001?

Was it incompetence or poor military planning? Or was it a diabolical covert op to actually safeguard and sustain "enemy number one"?

Because without this "outside enemy" personified by Osama bin Laden, there would be no "war on terrorism".

The operation certainly makes sense from the point of view of war propaganda

The terrorists are there, we put them there.

And then "we go after them" and show the World that we are committed to weeding out the terrorists."

The Bush administration is contemplating sending US Forces to Pakistan with a view to neutralizing Al Qaeda in its safe haven in the Northwestern region of Waziristan.

This initiative is part of the Administration's "preemptive war doctrine".

The Al Qaeda stronghold in a remote mountainous area is said to constitute a threat to the security of the American Homeland. According to the Directorate of National Intelligence,

""Al Qaeda remains the most serious threat to the United States (...)

We assess the group has protected or regenerated key elements of its homeland attack capability, including: a safe haven in the Pakistan Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA), operational lieutenants and its top leadership." ( Inside The Pentagon July 26, 2007), )

At closed sessions of the Senate and House Armed Services and Intelligence committees, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence James Clapper confirmed the Administration's resolve to dismantle the "terror network" inside Pakistan:

"The United States was not content to sit still while the militant network blamed for the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington regenerated its strength in North Waziristan. (...)

"I think our objective will be to neutralize, not eliminate, but certainly make this safe haven -- as we have the others -- less safe and less appealing for AQ [Al Qaeda]," (quoted by Reuters, 26 July 2007)

This statement was made following the release on July 11, 2007 of the CIA's "National Intelligence Estimate" which points to a possible Al Qaeda attack on America. The intelligence report also suggests that Al Qaeda's stronghold from which it plans its terrorist operations is in the tribal areas of Northwestern Pakistan. Both Washington and Islamabad accuse militant tribesmen in Waziristan of "harboring al Qaeda and supporting the Taliban".

<>The White House Favors a US Military Operation in Pakistan<>
Bush's Homeland Security adviser Frances Townsend, who advises the president on domestic security issues, concurs with this assessment:

"the White House is not ruling out using [the] U.S. military to attack terrorists camps in Pakistan." (Fox News, July 22, 2007)

In Chorus

In an evolving interagency consensus, the State Department has made similar statements. In separate hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns broadly concurs with The Pentagon and the White House:

"The United States would take unilateral action against Al Qaeda in Pakistan under certain circumstances." (Reuters 26 July 2007).

The logic of these statements is that Al Qaeda is indelibly plotting a second major attack on America out of its Waziristan stronghold, and "we must go after them".

According to the Senate and House committees, Pakistan's military involvement has been ineffective. A carefully planned and targeted US military operation directed against Al Qaeda's headquarters is called for:

"Al Qaeda is now in a part of Pakistan that is largely inaccessible to Pakistani forces, the Pakistani government. Always has been. And it is a very difficult operating environment for them," said Edward Gistaro, the top U.S. intelligence analyst on transnational threats. (Reuters op cit)

Providing a Safe-haven to Al Qaeda Fighters?

(The following section of this article is in part based on the author's earlier analysis in "War on Terrorism", Chapter XIV entitled Providing a Safe-haven to Al Qaeda Fighters)

The Bush administration is using the alleged presence of Al Qaeda operatives in Northwestern Pakistan with a view to justifying a pre-emptive military intervention on a sovereign country. Such an action on the part of the US adminstration would have farreaching implications. It could potentially lead to an escalation of the US sponsored "war on terrorism" beyond the boundaries of the Middle East -Central Asian region.

Is the Al Qaeda stronhold in Waziristan a real threat to the security of America?

How did Al Qaeda manage to establish its headquarters in Northwestern Pakistan in the first place? This question in crucial in assessing recent Bush administration's commitments to neutralizing the terror network:

The Al Qaeda stronghold was established in the months following the US-NATO invasion of Afghanistan. The military campaign commenced in early October and was completed in late November 2001. The invasion was a war of retribution directed against Afghanistan, for the alleged sponsorship of the September 11, 2001 attacks by the Taliban government. (To this date there is no evidence that the Afghan government had any involvement in these attacks.)

In late November 2001, the Northern Alliance supported by US bombing raids took the hill town of Kunduz in Northern Afghanistan. Eight thousand or more men "had been trapped inside the city in the last days of the siege, roughly half of whom were Pakistanis. Afghans, Uzbeks, Chechens, and various Arab mercenaries accounted for the rest."

(Seymour M. Hersh, The Getaway, The New Yorker, 21 January 2002)

Also among these fighters, were several senior Pakistani military and intelligence officers, who had been dispatched to the war theater by the Pakistani military.

The presence of high-ranking Pakistani military and intelligence advisers in the ranks of the Taliban/ Al Qaeda forces was known and approved by Washington. Pakistan's military intelligence, the ISI, which also played a direct role in the 9/11 attacks, was overseeing the operation.

(For details on the links of ISI to the CIA, see Michel Chossudovsky, America's "War on Terrorism", ch. II, IV and X.)

President Bush in a November 2001 statement in the Rose Garden of the White House confirmed America's resolve to going after the terrorists:

I said a long time ago, one of our objectives is to smoke them out and get them running and bring them to justice... I also said we'll use whatever means necessary to achieve that objective -- and that's exactly what we're going to do. (The White House, November 26, 2001)

Ironically, rather than arresting Al Qaeda "foreign fighters" who were combating alongside the Taliban, the US military actually facilitated their evacuation in military planes to Northwestern Pakistan.

A large number of these "foreign fighters" were never brought to justice, nor were they detained or interrogated. In fact quite the opposite: as confirmed by Seymour Hersh, they were flown to safety on the orders of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld:

The Bush Administration ordered US Central Command to set up a special air corridor to help insure the safety of the Pakistani rescue flights from Kunduz to the northwest corner of Pakistan ...

[Pakistan President] Musharraf won American support for the airlift by warning that the humiliation of losing hundreds-and perhaps thousands-of Pakistani Army men and intelligence operatives would jeopardize his political survival. "Clearly, there is a great willingness to help Musharraf," an American intelligence official told me [Seymour Hersh]. A CIA analyst said that it was his understanding that the decision to permit the airlift was made by the White House and was indeed driven by a desire to protect the Pakistani leader. The airlift 'made sense at the time,' the CIA. analyst said. 'Many of the people they spirited away were the Taliban leadership'-who Pakistan hoped could play a role in a postwar Afghan government. According to this person, "Musharraf wanted to have these people to put another card on the table" in future political negotiations. "We were supposed to have access to them,' he said, but 'it didn't happen,'' and the rescued Taliban remain unavailable to American intelligence.

According to a former high-level American defense official, the airlift was approved because of representations by the Pakistanis that "there were guys- intelligence agents and underground guys-who needed to get out. (Seymour Hersh, op cit)

In other words, the semi-official story was: "we were tricked into it" by the Pakistanis.

Out of some 8000 or more men, 3300 surrendered to the Northern Alliance, leaving between 4000 and 5000 men "unaccounted for". According to Indian intelligence sources (quoted by Hersh), at least 4000 men including two Pakistani Army generals had been evacuated. (Ibid). The operation was casually described as a big mistake, leading to "unintended consequences". According to US officials:

"what was supposed to be a limited evacuation, apparently slipped out of control, and, as an unintended consequence, an unknown number of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters managed to join in the exodus." (quoted in Hersh op cit)

An Indian Press report confirmed that those evacuated, courtesy of Uncle Sam, were not the moderate elements of the Taliban, but rather "hard-core Taliban" and Al Qaeda fighters. (Times of India, 24 January 2002).

"Terrorists" or "Intelligence Assets"?

The foreign and Pakistani Al Qaeda fighters were evacuated to Northwestern Pakistan as part of a military-intelligence operation led by officials of Pakistan's ISI in consultation with their CIA counterparts.

Many of these "foreign fighters" were also incorporated into the two main Kashmiri terrorist rebel groups, Lashkar-e-Taiba ("Army of the Pure") and Jaish-e-Muhammad ("Army of Mohammed"). In other words, one of the main consequences of the US sponsored evacuation was to reinforce these Kashmiri terrorist organisations.

Saving Al Qaeda Fighters, Kidnapping Civilians

Why would the US military arrange for several thousand "foreign fighters" to be airlifted and flown to safety?

Why were they not arrested and sent to Camp Delta, Guantanamo?

What is the relationship between the evacuation of "foreign fighters" on the one hand and the detention (on trumped up charges) and imprisonment of so-called "enemy combatants" at the Guantanamo concentration camp.

While Defense Secretary Rumsfeld claimed at the time that the Guantanamo detainees, were "vicious killers", the evidence suggests that most of those arrested and sent to Guantanamo were in fact civilians:

...The Northern Alliance has received millions of dollars from the U.S. Government, and motivated the arrest of thousands of innocent civilians in Afghanistan on the pretext they were terrorists, to help the U.S. Government justify the "war on terror". Some Guantanamo prisoners "were grabbed by Pakistani soldiers patrolling the Afghan border who collected bounties for prisoners" 13. Other prisoners were caught by Afghan warlords and sold for bounty offered by the U.S. for Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters8. Many of the prisoners are described in classified intelligence reports as "farmers, taxi drivers, cobblers, and laborers.

(Testimony provided by the Lawyer of Sageer, quoted in America's War on Terrorism)

Whereas Al Qaeda fighters and their senior Pakistani advisers were "saved" on the orders of Donald Rumsfeld, also on the orders of the Secretary of Defense, innocent civilians, who had no relationship whatsoever to the war theater, were routinely categorized as "enemy combatants", kidnapped, interrogated, tortured and sent to Guantanamo.

Why?

Did the Bush administration need to "recruit detainees" among the civilian population and pass them off as "terrorists" with a view to bearing out its resolve and commitment to the "global war on terrorism" (GWOT).

Did they need to boost up the numbers "to fill the gap" resulting from the several thousand Al Qaeda fighters, who had been secretly evacuated, on the orders of Donald Rumsfeld and flown to safety?

In other words, are these detentions part of the Pentagon's propaganda campaign?

Conversely, did the Bush administration require the existence of an Al Qaeda stronghold to continued military interventions in its preemptive war on terrorism. Were these "terrorists" needed in the Kashmiri Islamic militant groups in the context of a ISI-CIA covert op?

Whatever the motivation, we are dealing with a diabolical intelligence operation.

More than 600 people from 42 countries, have been held in the Camp Delta concentration camp in Guantanamo. While US officials continue to claim that they are "enemy combatants" arrested in Afghanistan, a large number of those detained had never set foot in Afghanistan. They were kidnapped in several foreign countries including Pakistan, Bosnia and The Gambia on the West Coast of Africa, and taken to the US military base in Bagram, Afghanistan, before being transported to Guantanamo.

Several children were held in Guantanamo, aged between 13 and 15 years old. According to Pentagon officials: "the boys were brought to Guantanamo Bay because they were considered a threat and they had "high value" intelligence that US authorities wanted." (Washington Post, 23 August 2003). According to Britain's Muslim News: "out of the window has gone any regard for the norms of international law and order ... with Muslims liable to be kidnapped in any part of the world to be transported to Guantanamo Bay and face summary justice."

Link

The children were arrested but none of the real "foreign fighters" who had been evacuated, courtesy of Uncle Sam, were considered a security threat. Quite the opposite they had been flown to safety in US and Pakistani military planes.

Going after Al Qaeda in Northwestern Pakistan

In the months following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon decided to boost its counter terrorism operations in Northwestern Pakistan with the support of the Pakistani military. These operations were launched in the tribal areas of northern Pakistan, following the visit to Islamabad of Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca in October 2003.

The operation was aired live on network TV in the months leading up to the November 2004 US presidential elections. The targets were bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri, who were said to be hiding in these border regions of Northern Pakistan.

The Pentagon described the strategy of "going after" bin Laden as a "hammer and anvil" approach, "with Pakistani troops moving into semiautonomous tribal areas on their side of the border, and Afghans and American forces sweeping the forbidding terrain on the other". (The Record, Kitchener, 13 March 2004).

In March 2004, Britain's Sunday Express, quoting "a US intelligence source" reported that:

bin Laden and about 50 supporters had been boxed in among the Toba Kakar mountainous north of the Pakistani city of Quetta and were being watched by satellite... Pakistan then sent several thousand extra troops to the tribal area of South Waziristan, just to the north. (quoted in South China Morning Post, 7 March 2004)

In a bitter irony, it was to this Northern region of Pakistan that the estimated 4000 "foreign fighters" had been airlifted, in the first place, in November 2001, on the orders of (former) Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. And these Al Qaeda units were being supplied by Pakistan's ISI. (UPI, 1 November 2001)

In other words, the same units of Pakistan's military intelligence, the ISI, --which coordinated the November 2001 evacuation of foreign fighters on behalf of US military --- are now involved in the "hammer and anvil" search for Al Qaeda in northwestern Pakistan, with the support of Pakistani regular forces.

From a military standpoint, it does not make sense. Evacuate the enemy to safe-haven, and then a few years later "go after them" in the tribal hills of Northwestern Pakistan.

Why did they not arrest these Al Qaeda fighters in November 2001?

Was it incompetence or poor military planning? Or was it a diabolical covert op to actually safeguard and sustain "enemy number one"?

Because without this "outside enemy" personified by Osama bin Laden, there would be no "war on terrorism".

The operation certainly makes sense from the point of view of war propaganda

The terrorists are there, we put them there.

And then "we go after them" and show the World that we are committed to weeding out the terrorists.

The Bush campaign needs more than the rhetoric of the "war on terrorism". It needs a "real" "war on terrorism", with an Al Qaeda headquarters in the chosen theater of the tribal areas of Waziristan.

Where is the Threat?

In recent developments, the existence of this Al Qaeda stronghold is now being used as a justification for a US military intervention in Pakistan on the pretext that a coordinated "attack on the American Homeland" is being designed and masterminded from these inaccessible mountainous areas, which have little in terms of infrastructure and communications networks.
Believe it or Not!
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Energy Bill Aids Expansion of Atomic Power
July 31, 2007
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS and MATTHEW L. WALD

WASHINGTON, July 30 — A one-sentence provision buried in the Senate’s recently passed energy bill, inserted without debate at the urging of the nuclear power industry, could make builders of new nuclear plants eligible for tens of billions of dollars in government loan guarantees.

Lobbyists have told lawmakers and administration officials in recent weeks that the nuclear industry needs as much as $50 billion in loan guarantees over the next two years to finance a major expansion.

The biggest champion of the loan guarantees is Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy Committee and one of the nuclear industry’s strongest supporters in Congress.

Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico and the energy bill’s author, has long argued that nuclear power plants do not need federal loan guarantees. Mr. Bingaman said that the industry was over-interpreting the provision and that it would provide loan guarantees for only the most innovative power plants.

But the provision has the potential to considerably expand the nuclear industry, which plans to build 28 new reactors at an estimated cost of about $4 billion to $5 billion apiece. And while the nuclear industry would be the biggest beneficiary, the provision could also set the stage for billions of dollars in loan guarantees for power plants that use “clean coal” technology and renewable fuels.

The nuclear industry is enjoying growing political support after decades of opposition from environmental groups and others concerned about the risks. An increasing number of lawmakers in both parties, worried about global warming and dependence on foreign oil, support some expansion of nuclear power.

But the provision could go much further than many lawmakers had in mind by giving the Department of Energy the power to approve an unlimited amount of loan guarantees for “clean” power generation. Under legislation enacted in 2005, nuclear power qualifies as a clean technology because it does not emit carbon gases that contribute to global warming.

Power companies have tentative plans to put the 28 new reactors at 19 sites around the country. Industry executives insist that banks and Wall Street will not provide the money needed to build new reactors unless the loans are guaranteed in their entirety by the federal government.

The federal government guarantees many billions of loans each year to help farmers, exporters, small businesses and students. The government does not actually lend the money but agrees to pay it back in case the borrower defaults.

While the nuclear industry says it will need $25 billion in loan guarantees in 2008 and $50 billion over the next two years, President Bush had proposed a far smaller amount — $4 billion — in new loan guarantees next year for “clean” electric power technologies, which include plants that run on so-called clean coal technologies and renewable fuels.

Many experts fear that the proposed subsidies could leave taxpayers responsible for billions of dollars in soured loans.

“Such projects, by their nature, pose significant technical and market risks,” the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office warned last month in an analysis of the provision. “Studies of the accuracy of cost estimates for pioneering technologies have found that estimates are consistently low.”

Michael J. Wallace, the co-chief executive of UniStar Nuclear, a partnership seeking to build nuclear reactors, and executive vice president of Constellation Energy, said: “Without loan guarantees we will not build nuclear power plants.”

The little-noticed provision in the Senate bill subtly refines and expands the loan guarantee program that Congress passed in the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

As before, the Department of Energy would be allowed to guarantee 100 percent of the loans and up to 80 percent of the total cost to build a reactor.

But the bill essentially allows the department to approve as many loan guarantees as it wants for both new reactors and plants that use other “clean” technologies.

That is a big change. Under current law, the government is only allowed to guarantee a volume of loans authorized each year by Congress. Last year, Congress limited the government to awarding just $4 billion in loan guarantees for clean energy projects during the 2007 fiscal year.

Mr. Domenici, who has been pushing the Energy Department to move much more aggressively in approving loan guarantees, has argued that there is no need for limits on the loan volume because power companies will be required to pay an upfront fee to cover the estimated cost of the guarantee. In essence, the “credit subsidy” payments would be used as a kind of insurance premium that could be used to cover the cost of any defaulted loan.

“It is very clear that this is a self-financing program,” Mr. Domenici told James Nussle, Mr. Bush’s nominee to become the White House budget director, at Mr. Nussle’s confirmation hearing last week. “There should already be $25 billion to $30 billion in the loan guarantee fund.”

But the Bush administration opposes the measure, fearing that it could prove extremely costly.

The provision would “remove appropriate controls over the size of the program and increase taxpayer liability,” the Office of Management and Budget wrote in an official position statement on the energy bill.

Michele Boyd, legislative director of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said the measure would subsidize plants with conventional technology.

“None of these so-called ‘advanced’ nuclear reactors deal with the fundamental flaws of nuclear power, such as dangerous radioactive waste, vulnerabilities to air attack and excessive cost,” said Ms. Boyd, whose staff began investigating the provision shortly after the Senate passed the bill last month.

Mr. Bingaman, the bill’s primary architect, said that he was aware of the provision but believed that it would apply only to reactors with fundamentally new technology.

“I would be amazed if this generic loan program applied to most of the plants that are being proposed, either for the nuclear industry or coal industry,” Mr. Bingaman said Monday night. “The idea of this is not just to help an industry build plants. It’s to demonstrate new technology that meets the nation’s energy needs.”

But industry officials say the measure would directly affect the reactors on the drawing board.

“I think we can say that with all the projects moving forward on the schedule they are now on, that there could be a need for $20 to $25 billion in loan guarantees,” said Richard Myers, vice president for policy development at the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade association.

The House is hoping to pass its own energy bill this week. But leading House Democrats have made it clear they oppose any kind of loan guarantees for nuclear reactors.

The House recently passed an appropriations bill for energy and water programs that included $7 billion in loan guarantees for projects involving renewable energy and specifically excluded nuclear plants.

Representative Peter J. Visclosky, Democrat of Indiana and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee’s panel on energy and water, said last month that the nuclear industry had estimated a need of $25 billion in guaranteed loans for next year and “more than that” in 2009.

The industry’s request, Mr. Visclosky warned, “overwhelms” what the committee had been willing to offer the entire energy industry.

Still, nuclear industry executives say they hope the Senate’s loan guarantee provision will be adopted by House lawmakers.
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Sex for the motherland: Russian youths encouraged to procreate at camp
By EDWARD LUCAS - More by this author » Last updated at 08:35am on 29th July 2007

Comments Comments (6)
Remember the mammoths, say the clean-cut organisers at the youth camp's mass wedding. "They became extinct because they did not have enough sex. That must not happen to Russia".

Obediently, couples move to a special section of dormitory tents arranged in a heart-shape and called the Love Oasis, where they can start procreating for the motherland.

With its relentlessly upbeat tone, bizarre ideas and tight control, it sounds like a weird indoctrination session for a phoney religious cult.

But this organisation - known as "Nashi", meaning "Ours" - is youth movement run by Vladimir Putin's Kremlin that has become a central part of Russian political life.


(Sinister: Millions of young Russians at a youth camp discerningly similar to the Hitler Youth)

Nashi's annual camp, 200 miles outside Moscow, is attended by 10,000 uniformed youngsters and involves two weeks of lectures and physical fitness.

Attendance is monitored via compulsory electronic badges and anyone who misses three events is expelled. So are drinkers; alcohol is banned. But sex is encouraged, and condoms are nowhere on sale.

Bizarrely, young women are encouraged to hand in thongs and other skimpy underwear - supposedly a cause of sterility - and given more wholesome and substantial undergarments.

Twenty-five couples marry at the start of the camp's first week and ten more at the start of the second. These mass weddings, the ultimate expression of devotion to the motherland, are legal and conducted by a civil official.

Attempting to raise Russia's dismally low birthrate even by eccentric-seeming means might be understandable. Certainly, the country's demographic outlook is dire. The hard-drinking, hardsmoking and disease-ridden population is set to plunge by a million a year in the next decade.

But the real aim of the youth camp - and the 100,000-strong movement behind it - is not to improve Russia's demographic profile, but to attack democracy.

Under Mr Putin, Russia is sliding into fascism, with state control of the economy, media, politics and society becoming increasingly heavy-handed. And Nashi, along with other similar youth movements, such as 'Young Guard', and 'Young Russia', is in the forefront of the charge.

At the start, it was all too easy to mock. I attended an early event run by its predecessor, 'Walking together', in the heart of Moscow in 2000. A motley collection of youngsters were collecting 'unpatriotic' works of fiction for destruction.

It was sinister in theory, recalling the Nazis' book-burning in the 1930s, but it was laughable in practice. There was no sign of ordinary members of the public handing in books (the copies piled on the pavement had been brought by the organisers).

Once the television cameras had left, the event organisers admitted that they were not really volunteers, but being paid by "sponsors". The idea that Russia's anarchic, apathetic youth would ever be attracted into a disciplined mass movement in support of their president - what critics called a "Putinjugend", recalling the "Hitlerjugend" (German for "Hitler Youth") - seemed fanciful.

How wrong we were. Life for young people in Russia without connections is a mixture of inadequate and corrupt education, and a choice of boring dead-end jobs. Like the Hitler Youth and the Soviet Union's Young Pioneers, Nashi and its allied movements offer not just excitement, friendship and a sense of purpose - but a leg up in life, too.

Nashi's senior officials - known, in an eerie echo of the Soviet era, as "Commissars" - get free places at top universities. Thereafter, they can expect good jobs in politics or business - which in Russia nowadays, under the Kremlin's crony capitalism, are increasingly the same thing.

Nashi and similar outfits are the Kremlin's first line of defence against its greatest fear: real democracy. Like the sheep chanting "Four legs good, two legs bad" in George Orwell's Animal Farm, they can intimidate through noise and numbers.

Nashi supporters drown out protests by Russia's feeble and divided democratic opposition and use violence to drive them off the streets.

The group's leaders insist that the only connection to officialdom is loyalty to the president. If so, they seem remarkably well-informed.

In July 2006, the British ambassador, Sir Anthony Brenton, infuriated the Kremlin by attending an opposition meeting. For months afterwards, he was noisily harassed by groups of Nashi supporters demanding that he "apologise". With uncanny accuracy, the hooligans knew his movements in advance - a sign of official tip-offs.

Even when Nashi flagrantly breaks the law, the authorities do not intervene. After Estonia enraged Russia by moving a Sovietera war memorial in April, Nashi led the blockade of Estonia's Moscow embassy. It daubed the building with graffiti, blasted it with Stalinera military music, ripped down the Estonian flag and attacked a visiting ambassador's car. The Moscow police, who normally stamp ruthlessly on public protest, stood by.

Nashi fits perfectly into the Kremlin's newly-minted ideology of "Sovereign democracy". This is not the mind-numbing jargon of Marxism-Leninism, but a lightweight collection of cliches and slogans promoting Russia's supposed unique political and spiritual culture.

It is strongly reminiscent of the Tsarist era slogan: "Autocracy, Orthodoxy and Nationality".

The similarities to both the Soviet and Tsarist eras are striking. Communist ideologues once spent much of their time explaining why their party deserved its monopoly of power, even though the promised utopia seemed indefinitely delayed.

Today, the Kremlin's ideology chief Vladislav Surkov is trying to explain why questioning the crooks and spooks who run Russia is not just mistaken, but treacherous.

Yet, by comparison with other outfits, Nashi looks relatively civilised. Its racism and prejudice is implied, but not trumpeted. Other pro-Kremlin youth groups are hounding gays and foreigners off the streets of Moscow. Mestnye [The Locals] recently distributed leaflets urging Muscovites to boycott non-Russian cab drivers.

These showed a young blonde Russian refusing a ride from a swarthy, beetle-browed taxi driver, under the slogan: "We're not going the same way."

Such unofficial xenophobia matches the official stance. On April 1, a decree explicitly backed by Mr Putin banned foreigners from trading in Russia's retail markets. By some estimates, 12m people are working illegally in Russia.

Those who hoped that Russia's first post-totalitarian generation would be liberal, have been dissapointed. Although explicit support for extremist and racist groups is in the low single figures, support for racist sentiments is mushrooming.

Slogans such as "Russia for the Russians" now attract the support of half of the population. Echoing Kremlin propaganda, Nashi denounced Estonians as "fascist", for daring to say that they find Nazi and Soviet memorials equally repugnant. But, in truth, it is in Russia that fascism is all too evident.

The Kremlin sees no role for a democratic opposition, denouncing its leaders as stooges and traitors. Sadly, most Russians agree: a recent poll showed that a majority believed that opposition parties should not be allowed to take power.

Just as the Nazis in 1930s rewrote Germany's history, the Putin Kremlin is rewriting Russia's. It has rehaabilitated Stalin, the greatest massmurderer of the 20th century. And it is demonising Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first democratically-elected president. That he destroyed totalitarianism is ignored. Instead, he is denounced for his "weak" pro-Western policies.

While distorting its own history, the Kremlin denounces other countries. Mr Putin was quick to blame Britain's "colonial mentality" for our government's request that Russia try to find a legal means of extraditing Andrei Lugovoi, the prime suspect in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko.

Yet the truth is that Britain, like most Western countries, flagellates itself for the crimes of the past. Indeed, British schoolchildren rarely learn anything positive about their country's empire. And, if Mr Putin has his way, Russian pupils will learn nothing bad about the Soviet empire, which was far bloodier, more brutal - and more recent.

A new guide for history teachers - explicitly endorsed by Mr Putin - brushes off Stalin's crimes. It describes him as "the most successful leader of the USSR". But it skates over the colossal human cost - 25m people were shot and starved in the cause of communism.

"Political repression was used to mobilise not only rank-and-file citizens but also the ruling elite," it says. In other words, Stalin wanted to make the country strong, so he may have been a bit harsh at times. At any time since the collapse of Soviet totalitarianism in the late 1980s, that would have seemed a nauseating whitewash. Now, it is treated as bald historical fact.

If Stalin made mistakes, so what? Lots of people make mistakes.

"Problematic pages in our history exist," Mr Putin said last week. But: "we have less than some countries. And ours are not as terrible as those of some others." He compared the Great Terror of 1937, when 700,000 people were murdered in a purge by Stalin's secret police, to the atom bomb on Hiroshima.

The comparison is preposterous. A strong argument can be made that by ending the war quickly, the atom bombs saved countless lives.

Franklin D Roosevelt and Harry Truman-may have failed to realise that nuclear weapons would one day endanger humanity's survival. But, unlike Stalin, they were not genocidal maniacs.

As the new cold war deepens, Mr Putin echoes, consciously or unconsciously, the favourite weapon of Soviet propagandists in the last one.

Asked about Afghanistan, they would cite Vietnam. Castigated for the plight of Soviet Jews, they would complain with treacly sincerity about discrimination against American blacks. Every blot on the Soviet record was matched by something, real or imagined, that the West had done.

But the contrasts even then were absurd. When the American administration blundered into Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of people protested in the heart of Washington. When eight extraordinarily brave Soviet dissidents tried to demonstrate in Red Square against the invasion of Czechoslovakia, in 1968, they were instantly arrested and spent many years in labour camps.

For the east European countries with first-hand experience of Stalinist terror, the Kremlin's rewriting of history could hardly be more scary. Not only does Russia see no reason to apologise for their suffering under Kremlin rule, it now sees the collapse of communism not as a time of liberation, but as an era of pitiable weakness.

Russia barely commemorates even the damage it did to itself, let alone the appalling suffering inflicted on other people. Nashi is both a symptom of the way Russia is going - and a means of entrenching the drift to fascism.

Terrifyingly, the revived Soviet view of history is now widely held in Russia. A poll this week of Russian teenagers showed that a majority believe that Stalin did more good things than bad.

If tens of thousands of uniformed German youngsters were marching across Germany in support of an authoritarian Fuhrer, baiting foreigners and praising Hitler, alarm bells would be jangling all across Europe. So why aren't they ringing about Nashi?
• Edward Lucas is author of the forthcoming The New Cold War And How To Win It.
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Japanese S/W developers - outsourcing to China, India
Outsourcing to keep up
Terrie Lloyd
July 31, 2007

Recently, NEC and Fujitsu announced that they each plan to increase the number of foreign software developers they employ to more than 10,000 people over the next three years. For NEC, this will mean doubling its foreign workforce, adding 3,000 people to the 4,000 already in China, another 1,000 people in India, and more in the Philippines and Vietnam. For Fujitsu, it means increasing its China workforce from 1,000 to 2,000 engineers, and tripling its Indian staff to 10,000.

These are both significant increases, and obviously comprise a major trend, following as they do a number of other companies such as Hitachi and Matsushita who have already this year announced ambitious off-shoring targets. The impetus to suddenly go global with their coreworkforces is the same, though — a drastic shortage of IT engineers in Japan, and the increasing demand for smarter consumer electronics products and services infrastructure.


Although there are about 700,000 qualified IT engineers in Japan, according to METI only 190,000 — less than 1/3 — are software developers. The number of new software engineering graduates coming out of Japanese universities each year numbers just 20,000, creating a current needs gap of more than 90,000 positions. In contrast, India graduates 230,000 IT people a year and has more than 1.6 million software engineers — not including the tens of thousands working in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world.

Compared to Western SI firms, the Japanese are well behind in off-shoring their workforces, although they have been experimenting with it for quite some time. Among their foreign counterparts, IBM already employs 53,000 engineers in India, and Accenture has around 30,000.

So why are Japanese companies so behind the curve?

My take is that the problem is three-fold: 1) an increasing requirement for smart devices, 2) global competitiveness forcing Japan as a nation to implement proper infrastructure (ranging from e-government to Suicadebit cards), and 3) language and culture. Let's look at these points a bit closer.

According to a recent article in the Nikkei, the level of software now appearing in HD-DVD video recorders is around twice as complex and costly to develop as it was in earlier generation devices. Further, METI says that 70% of the cost of developing a new cell phone model these days is due to software complexity. This pace of increasing sophistication is impacting production schedules for factories turning outthe hardware, and thus is impacting companies across the board. Indeed, both NEC and Fujitsu have said that cell phone development was a major motivation for them to expand their engineering teams overseas. Quite simply, companies are finding out that the software component can't be ignored any longer.

Global competitiveness is another deciding factor pushing Japanese firms to get IT help abroad. In the consumer electronics sector, although the Japanese have long been manufacturing hardware off-shore, the costs that can be coaxed out of the system are now being matched by competing firms from other nations who are using the samemanufacturing centers. Although there is always another lower cost destination (e.g., Vietnam), the ability to compete on lower manufacturing costs alone is starting to disappear. The new frontier now is improving usability and functionality.

The problem for Japanese firms, though is that they have traditionally hard-coded functionality into their devices, with drivers servicing all the buttons and flashing lights. But with the lowered costs of display screens and the appearance of superior functionality from competitors(think Apple's iPod and iPhone), Japanese firms are now being forced to use standard operating systems on these devices and write proper applications to drive them. But with a shortage of such people, off-shoring is the only quick answer.

Additionally, on an infrastructure level, Japan is going through a major transformation in computer systems — all of which need substantial programming. Although you may have already taken it for granted, the move by JR and various other transportation operators in March this year to create a single commuter card (Suica/Pasmo) has been a huge achievement in software compatibility and data interchange. Then there is Seven-eleven's new Nanaco e-money system, which was rolled out to 11,750 stores in April and already in June has recorded an amazing 30 million transactions — making it the most widely used e-moneysystem in Japan today. Big complex systems like these need global-class architecting and rigorous quality control techniques, all of which India is well known for.

Then there is language and culture. Ah, yes, reader already know my take on what I think of Japanese companies' ability in this area. If there was ever such a basic and obvious reason holding up the development of a nation — this would be it. While there are indeed truly multinational companies, such as Sony and Fujitsu, the vast majority are not able to integrate their local R&D teams and marketing people with those overseas. Just look at the cell phone debacle in Europe and the subsequent loss of Japanese leadership to Samsung and Nokia to see the extent of this problem.

At the core of this inability to operate globally is the lack of bilingual engineers who can interface Japan client specifications with the foreign development teams. Not only is the skill-set hard to fill, but the conditions that such people have to work under are also really tough. The work typically involves long hours and lots of cultural friction.

By virtue of the need for accurate communication, it also requires someone who is really smart. However, smart people don't want to work in a cultural pressure cooker for peanuts. And as a result, the turn-over for project interfacing people is high.

Japanese companies trying off-shoring need to realize that just as you protect your key performers in other parts of the company, so too, these interface people are worth rewarding well. Further, these positions should be held up to other employees as being desirable, so as to create future supply from within to fill them. Instead, sinceoff-shoring is usually intended to reduce costs, typically everyone involved in the project finds themselves getting squeezed financially. For example, recently I interviewed an older engineer who, upon agreeing to move to China, suddenly found his salary being "normalized" to match the living standards in that country.

One way to deal with the shortage and keep costs down is to employ foreigners with Japanese skills. Increasingly, in Dalian (China) and Pune (India), such people are starting to appear. I know of a number of companies and schools in Pune, for example, turning out hundreds of Japanese-speaking engineers. From this base, they can be brought to Japan and their skills further polished. But even after 3-4 years of such programs being in place, we're still only talking hundreds, not thousands of bilingual engineers. So one wonders where NEC and Fujitsu are going to get their language people from.

Private recruiting companies such as Recruit, Caplan, and Softbridge Solutions, are hoping to be part of the solution. Last year Recruit started a web site for companies wanting to recruit foreign students working part-time in and around Tokyo. According to the Justice Ministry, the number of foreigners either studying in college or technical trainingwas about 180,000 in 2004, and is expected to hit 1.2 million by 2015. Japanese firms are certainly a lot more willing to take on foreign employee than they were. A recent survey by online recruiting firm DIP Corporation found that about 40% of the companies polled had a favorable view of hiring foreigners.
http://tinyurl.com/2twqdx

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
2007 Results
posted 31 July 2007

Gerald began--but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them "permanently" meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash--to pee.

Jim Gleeson
Madison, WI

The winner of 2007 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is Jim Gleeson, a 47-year-old media technician from Madison, Wisconsin. Purportedly splitting his time between living in Madison and living in his own head, Gleeson claims to be working on a self-help book for slackers, "Self-Improvement Through Total Inactivity."

2007 is the silver anniversary of the Contest that began at San Jose State University in 1982, making Jim Gleeson the 25th grand prize winner.

An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for "The Last Days of Pompeii" (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression "the pen is mightier than the sword," and phrases like "the great unwashed" and "the almighty dollar," Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the "Peanuts" beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."

Most entries are submitted electronically through the Contest's Web site: http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/. There is also a collection of previous winners being published in August by The Friday Project. It will be available through Amazon.com.uk.

Runner-Up
The Barents sea heaved and churned like a tortured animal in pain, the howling wind tearing packets of icy green water from the shuddering crests of the waves, atomizing it into mist that was again laid flat by the growing fury of the storm as Kevin Tucker switched off the bedside light in his Tuba City, Arizona, single-wide trailer and by the time the phone woke him at 7:38, had pretty much blown itself out with no damage.

Scott Palmer
Klamath Falls, OR

Grand Panjandrum's Award
LaVerne was undeniably underdressed for this frigid weather; her black, rain-soaked tank top offered no protection and seemed to cling to her torso out of sheer rage, while her tie-dyed boa scarf hung lifeless around her neck like a giant, exhausted, pipe cleaner recently discarded after near-criminal overuse by an obviously sadistic (and rather flamboyant) plumber.

Andrew Cavallari
Northfield, IL

Winner: Adventure
As the hippo's jaws clamped on Henry's body he noted the four huge teeth badly in need of a clean, preferably with one of those electric sonic toothbrushes, and he reflected that his name would be immortalized by his unusual death, since hippo killings are not a daily occurrence, at least not in the high street of Chipping Sodbury.

Tim Lafferty
Horsell, Woking, UK

Runner-Up
"This is no time for safety," Lance Steele thought to himself as he raced in hot pursuit of the evildoer through the cold night along the narrow road winding through the desolate twisting pass, the smell of burnt rubber rising from the macadam and the occasional spark bursting from the gravel heaved against the titanium guard rail, and he wished that he had remembered to turn the oven off, and that he were not on foot and wearing his new Florsheims.

P.C. Burchard
San Diego, CA

Dishonorable Mentions
Miss Cardinal mused over the singularly decadent manner in which Master Hammond consumed the steak and kidney pie and was reminded of the practices of certain cannibalistic tribes with whom she had lived during her travels in Borneo, not New Guinea, although New Guinea is certainly nice this time of year, despite the fact steak and kidney pie is rarely served there, at least not the kind made from sheep or cows.

Brad R. Frazer
Boise, ID

Agent 53986262.9 was strapped precariously to a giant Chinese firework, the fuse slowly shortening like a noodle getting slurped into someone's pursed lips, and although he knew he was running out of time and still had no plan for escape, all he could think of was the song about the Muffin Man and how the word "polyurethane" made it sound like the material was made out of multiple urethras.

Allison Kelly
Great Falls, VA

Winner: Children's Literature
Danny, the little Grizzly cub, frolicked in the tall grass on this sunny Spring morning, his mother keeping a watchful eye as she chewed on a piece of a hiker they had encountered the day before.

Dave McKenzie
Federal Way, WA

Runner-Up
Mary had a little lamb; its fleece was Polartec 200 (thanks to gene splicing, a diet of force-fed petrochemical supplements, and regular dips in an advanced surface fusion polymer), which had the fortunate side effect of rendering it inedible, unlike that other Mary's organic lamb which misbehaved at school and wound up in a lovely Moroccan stew with dried apricots and couscous.

Julie Jensen
Lodi, CA

Dishonorable Mention
Out of a hole in the ground popped a bunny rabbit which had a long thick orange carrot between its teeth and a big splotch of mud on its back that had dried into a dirt clump the size of a tumor.

Veronica Perez
Palm Springs, FL

Winner: Detective
I'd been tailing this guy for over an hour while he tried every trick in the book to lose me: going down side streets, doubling back, suddenly veering into shop doorways, jumping out again, crossing the street, looking for somewhere to make the drop, and I was going to be there when he did it because his disguise as a postman didn't have me fooled for a minute.

Bob Millar
Hässelby, Sweden

Runner-Up
She'd been strangled with a rosary-not a run-of-the-mill rosary like you might get at a Catholic bookstore where Hail Marys are two for a quarter and indulgences are included on the back flap of the May issue of "Nuns and Roses" magazine, but a fancy heirloom rosary with pearls, rubies, and a solid gold cross, a rosary with attitude, the kind of rosary that said, "Get your Jehovah's Witness butt off my front porch."

Mark Schweizer
Hopkinsville, KY

Dishonorable Mention
What shocked Juliette as she entered the room was not that there was an escaped convict under her coverlet snuggling with her best teddy bear, but that there was a knife through his back, "And who," she wondered out loud, steadying herself against the faux-taffeta wallpaper, "would stab a teddy bear?"

Katie Alender
Studio City, CA

Winner: Fantasy Fiction
Lady Guinevere heard it distinctly, a sharp slap, as if a gauntlet had been thrown, and yet it was hardly plausible that she, perched delicately on the back of her cantering steed, should be challenged to ride faster, since protocol determined that Arthur should ride in front, then she, then Lancelot, for that was the order prescribed by Merlin, ever since he invented the carousel.

Celine Shinbutsu
Hino City, Tokyo, Japan

Runner-Up
Hiram had been a three-toed dragon, well on his way to a promotion to Imperial five-toed dragon, when he accidentally choked on the pink chiffon scarf of Princess Chloe's hat, and his coughing set the new oaken parapet, on the old stone bulwark, ablaze, thereby earning a demotion to Troll 3 -- now his only responsibility was to keep billy goats off the bridge.

Michael L. VanBlaricum
Santa Barbara, CA

Dishonorable Mention
At Elvenheim there was great joy, in that the legendary Ring of the Nordlings had been retrieved from the evil Sudlings by the hero Bill Baggydrawers, who it must be said looked nothing like a hero, at least none I've ever seen, and the Ring had once again been placed on the middle finger of the left hand of the Elvenking, who did rather resemble a king, even if his buck teeth made him look for all the world like a great rabbit.

Wayne McCoy
Gainesville Fl

Winner: Historical Fiction
Samson looked in the mirror and, when he saw what a fantastic haircut Delilah had given him, he went weak at the knees.

Neil Prowd
Charnwood, ACT, Australia

Winner: Purple Prose
Professor Radzinsky wove his fingers together in a tweed-like fabric, pinched his lips together like a blowfish, and began his lecture on simile and metaphor, which are, like, similar to one another, except that similes are almost always preceded by the word 'like' while metaphors are more like words that make you think of something else beside what you are describing.

Wayne McCoy
Gainesville Fl

Runner-Up
The highway coiled up and around the mountain like a snake ready to strike because it was being harassed by one of those annoying guys on "Animal Planet."

Brent Sheppard
Morganton, NC

Dishonorable Mentions
Marilyn's main feature was her mountainous breasts, with an associated sharp ravine of cleavage--the breasts not awesome like Everest, but like one of the Highland peaks near Balquhidder, where the notorious outlaw Rob Roy spent his last days.

John O'Byrne
Dublin, Ireland

There was a numbing chill in the air--harsher than a localized anesthetic, far less jarring than your average epidural, but still effective at creating that tingly sensation which often precludes a general lack of feeling in one's extremities or sometimes leads to uncontrollable drooling if administered within the confines of a dentist's chair.

Randy Wilson
New Albany, IN

The tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife, not even a sharp knife, but a dull one from that set of cheap knives you received as a wedding gift in a faux wooden block; the one you told yourself you'd replace, but in the end, forgot about because your husband ran off with another man, that kind of knife.

Lisa Lindquist
Oak West, Jackson, MI

The inebriated sailor cast himself into the safe harbor of the diner, and once he had run aground in one of the orange Formica booths, without a nod of recognition or greeting brought the distracted waitress into the present by ordering in a voice both blustery and belligerent the vegetable soup, an unctuous amalgam of the kitchen's leftover odds and ends sunk in a sulfurous sea of brine.

Jack Mac'Kie
Naples, Florida

The car headlights were pale--like a struck match viewed through a piece of smoked glass which you think you remember using to watch a solar eclipse around the time Alison and the children were still living here, which would have been the year before you got the job at the all-night bakery, twenty humid summers ago--because the alternator was faulty.

Richard Preddy
London, England

His feelings for Lydia became a jumbled mess, like when the pen slips out of the hole on a Spirograph wheel, ruining the drawing you have been working on for hours, or possibly, the pen running out of ink during the process, snagging and tearing a hole in the 110# cover rated vellum of his heart.

Russell Wren
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

She had curves that just wouldn't quit, like on one of those car commercials where a stunt driver slides a sexy new sports car around hairpin turn after hairpin turn while some poor musician, down on his luck and having been forced to sell out his dream of superstardom for a lousy 30-second ad jingle, sings "Zoom, zoom, zoom" in the background.

Amber Dubois
Denver, CO

Her hair was the color of old copper, not green with white streaks like you see on roofs and statues where birds have been messing, but the kind you find on dark pennies from back in the nineteen-forties or fifties after God knows how many thumbs have been rubbing Abe Lincoln's beard.

Michael A. Cowell
Norwalk, CA

Stanley frowned, his brow wrinkled like the furrows of a newly ploughed field in the far reaches of East Anglia, England's prairie, when the mighty Massey Ferguson has just completed its traverse of God's good soil in the heat haze of a late August afternoon, and wondered for the umpteenth time where on earth he had left his reading glasses.

Pamela Hibbert
Crowthorne, Berkshire, England

The moon rose in the east, a thin, yellow sliver like a fingernail ripped off with a jagged edge that goes to the quick and hurts like the dickens, making Selena wince as she looked on from Dirk's strong embrace and, recalling the last time she clutched at something so hard she broke a nail, brooded as she remembered that tomorrow was her annual pap smear.

Kathleen Luisa
Falls Church, VA

Karl awoke with a start, his heart pounding away like a drum, not a well mannered tympani such as one might hear in a Boston Pops rendition of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" but rather more like a snare drum in the hands of Terry Bozzio during the time when he was performing with Frank Zappa.

Christopher D Brunkhorst
Oxford, NJ

Winner: Romance
As her quivering lips met his, and her eyelashes fluttered softly on his sweating cheek, Dr Robbins reflected, "I didn't realize she had upper dentures . . . in fact, her slippery plastic palate reminds me of going down a waterslide that hasn't been properly chlorinated, as evidenced by the distinct nitrous and sulfurous emanations, or could it be sinus trouble?"

Philip Bateman
Kenilworth, South Africa

Runner-Up
There was a pregnant pause-- as pregnant as Judith had just told Darren she was (about seven and a half weeks along), which was why there was a pause in the first place.

Tracy Stapp
Santa Ana, CA

Dishonorable Mentions
She clung to the memory of their love like those tiny bits of used tissues he always left in his pockets, which mostly ended up in the dryer lint basket although enough of them welded themselves to her favorite navy blue, polar fleece pullover, rendering it as permanently flawed and unappealing as his name tattooed on her butt.

Pamela Patchet Hamilton
Beaconsfield, Quebec, Canada

He held her desperately in his arms and stroked her silken hair, and as he drew her full red lips to his, he ravenously smothered her with lots of smooches.

Bill Kerschbaum
Ann Arbor, MI

Ruthanne felt as though she was frozen in time, staring into Steve's eyes, deep turquoise pools of Tidy-Bowl blue, reflecting back the deep passionate love that Ruthanne felt in her heart because Steve certainly didn't feel anything, being in a coma as he was, so what Ruthanne had reflected back to herself was what she herself felt, bouncing off Steve's eyes, because there was absolutely zip going on behind those eyes.

Linda Morgan
Manassas, VA

Winner: Science Fiction
What a pity Dave was too young to have seen "2001: A Space Odyssey," for he might have been able to predict what would happen next, when the ape standing next to the big black slab picked up the tapir bone.

Ann Medlock
Lenah Valley, TAS, Australia

Runner-Up
"So that was your Earth emotion 'love'," gasped Zyxwlyxgwr Noopar, third in line to the holo-throne of S-6, as he hosed down his trunk and removed the shallots.

Mike Bollen
Brighton, UK

Dishonorable Mention
Racing through space at unimaginable speeds, Capt. Dimwell could only imagine how fast his spaceship was going.

Gary Smith
Florissant, CO

Winner: Vile Puns
I was in a back alley in Fiji, fighting desperately and silently for my life, fighting desperately for oxygen, clawing at the calm and almost gentle pressure of the fabric held over my face by implacable, ebony thighs when I realized -- he was killing me softly with his sarong.

Karl Scott
Brisbane, Australia

Runner-Up
The droppings of the migrating Canada geese just missed the outdoor revelers at the inaugural Asian math puzzle competition, marking the first time that dung flew over Sudoku Fest.

Kevin P. Craver
Lakewood, IL

Dishonorable Mentions
He was often found lurking behind the bakery, begging for scraps and practicing his rap, which is why he was known locally, as the synonym bum.

Ed Harrison
Lyman, ME

Upon discovering that his chief executioner Dr. Szekely had been secretly releasing prisoners, Vlad the Impaler ordered him to be skewered on one of the good doctor's own fiendish spears, when suddenly, not recognizing the type of wood that was slowly advancing through the screaming victim, the nutty Romanian ruler quipped "What's up doc?"

David K. Lynch Topanga, CA

A rather youthful Billy Joel was fascinated when he entered the Green Room at the Tonight Show and saw a group of matronly nuns hastily applying hair color to the noggin of the show's next guest, Neil Young, whose agent offered an explanation from the corner of the room: "Only the good dye Young."

Joe Wyatt
Amarillo, TX

Determined to slip the leash, Everett reflected upon his folly, for he had followed the dusky Doberman of his desire into the kennel of lust, telling himself that here, at last, was the perfect pedigree for him, only to learn that she was a Bichon wheels.

Frank Kahren
Danville, CA

Winner: Western
The easy and comforting roll of the saddle was second nature to Luke, and as he gazed off into the distant setting sun, he wondered whether he had enough change for one more ride at the supermarket before he had to return to the home.

Glenn Lawrie
Chungnam, South Korea

Runner-Up
Slim pulled the branding iron away from the yearling's seared flank and looked up to see Tuffy Edwards, the boss's daughter, trotting towards him on her sorrel mare, Brandi, wearing absolutely nothing but tight blue jeans and a green tank top---her gi-normous, heaving, unrestrained hooters resembling nothing so much as a pair of fat Charolais heifers trying to beat each other through a loading chute.

Syler Womack
Eustace, Texas

Miscellaneous Dishonorable Mentions
A par on the final hole would clinch the U.S. Open for the in-form Tiger Woods but, in truth, this mattered little to Herbert Cruddle as a gigantic wave swept him over the side of his floundering shrimp trawler.

Terry Drapes
Taipa, Macau

Morty, a dedicated track and field athlete, was disqualified and charged with animal cruelty after giving Viagra to his 20-foot boa constrictor and using the snake to pole vault.

JL Strickland
Valley, AL

Nothing looked good on the two young celebrities, Scarlett Johansson and Kiera Knightly, as they posed on the cover of a fashion magazine, with their lips the color of a Big Ben Hybrid Teas Rose, and flawless complexions, but they could not compare to the one with Jennifer Lopez with her smoky gray diaphanous blouse, high heels, and a black leather belt that would leave a nasty red mark if she were to spank you with it.

Wayne Spivey
Huntsville, TX

The stench would have been too much for most people to take, but Karl was used to it, having served as a Mess Specialist on board the "U.S.S. Constitution," an aircraft carrier that launched planes off its deck like so many maggots off a hot skillet.

Lupe Amezquita
San Jose, CA

His hat fit his head as snugly as a manhole cover does the thing it fits into. Steve McAllister
Austin, TX

The small boat pitched violently upon the heaving bosom of the ocean, causing Johnson to reflect that, although he generally liked bosoms, he was getting really tired of the ocean's bosom, and wished that it would at least drop from a 44D to a 34B.

Mr. William J. Harvey
Midwest City, OK

As master luthier Francesca turned the night-black ebony tuning pegs of her latest creation, a flamenco negra guitar with glowing palosanto back and sides, she thought about Vicente, his manly left hand soon caressing this same fretboard in an outpouring of mournful tarantas and siguiriyas, and at that very moment her g-string snapped.

Jim Holman
Gresham, OR

Joshua was as dumb as a bunny and not at all like the egg-carrying one, more like the one who has never gone to middle school, or even the schools at either end.

Patrick Baker
Caledonia, Ontario, Canada

The poetry teacher's bullet-riddled body lay sprawled on the verandah floor like a patient etherized upon a table.

Michael D. Bess
Nashville, TN

There was only one thought in Kurt's mind as his trembling hand and timid fingertips edged closer to the neck of Annabelle's silk blouse, his heart pounding ever faster in syncopation with her panting breaths, gentle cries coming from her slightly-parted lips, her pleading eyes wide with a primitive emotion--if only he'd kept a tighter hold on that gerbil.

Jonathan Blay
Bedford, Nova Scotia, Canada

Clark Kent, in his alter ego known as Superman, the Man of Steel, huddled deep into the doorway to escape the pelting Spring shower, well knowing that wearing wet clothes for any length of time would give him surface rust, which he would have to remove by bathing in dilute phosphoric acid, and then sanding with 400-grit wet-and-dry sandpaper.

John H. Borden
Delta, British Columbia, Canada

Allison sipped her tea as she thought about the Isabella Rosselini types--tiny, fragile, etiolated, willowy creatures of ethereal beauty whose delicate spaghetti-strapped sundresses seemed to hover about a quarter of an inch above their skin, while Alison's sundress cut into her flesh at the straps and bound at the waist or it ballooned out like the muumuu it really was.

Katy Brezger
Dowagiac.MI

Hector had just met Sabina minutes before, and yet there they were, knees touching, faces just inches apart in the dimly-lit room, and her gazing deep into his eyes, which should not have been a surprise to either of them given that she was an ophthalmologist and he was a boxer whose left retina may have become detached the night before when "Mad Dog" Washington clocked him with a vicious right cross.

Ray Campbell
Redwood Shores, CA

It was pleasant for Zandra to remember the beach at Cannes where she and Jean-Yves had lain, his pianist hands touching her in patterns of the Rachmaninov he'd played at Languedoc, to recall the scent of his lavendar mosquito repellant, his deep laugh when she'd said: "Tu es le premier homme pour jouer la musique classique sur mon estomac," and his reply: "C'est dommage, Zandra."

Ellen Diamond
New York, NY

Maurice slathered on the cherry colored lipstick continually, like some transvestite from a low-budget, 70's rock opera, and plotted his next escape attempt, as he watched carefully once again while the absent-minded guard turned the knob to his prison with such ease, and cursed his Creator for giving him a luscious, silver, hairy back, but no opposable thumbs.

Cale Dempster
North Las Vegas

Miles Otterman thought he could get away with carving his initials on the old oak tree in the town square - and he just might have if Sheriff Mitchell hadn't recognized his MO.

Terry Drapes
Taipa, Macau

If you think that the resemblance between the characters in this book and any person living or dead is only coincidental, you're just not trying hard enough.

Janina Eggensperger
Conway, AR

"Send an ambulance; I'm glistening profusely . . . bosom heaving . . . luscious, ripe orbs threatening to burst the seams of my black lace bodice . . . . pulse galloping apace like a knight's sleek steed . . . exquisite pain radiating down my graceful, alabaster arm, shooting upward to the finely chiseled jaw . . . I shall swoon---oh, my address?" the romance writer gasped into the phone before collapsing.

Linda A. Fields
Framingham, MA

It was dark that night, dark as the hood of a black '77 Firebird and with the same glossy feel as rain had washed the Big Easy, but New Orleans did not seem any cleaner, just hot and sweaty like the back of a French Quarter stripper.

Marc "Zeke" Kossover
San Francisco, CA

Everything about Randy proclaimed him to be a man's man, though neither in the sense of being the kind of man women are drawn to and men want to be nor in the homosexual sense, rather, in the sense of being a highly efficient and well-compensated valet.

Barbara Lauriat
Oxford, England

Jake entered the small suburban bank, his face as cold and frozen as Theodore Roosevelt's on Mount Rushmore while at the same time his sweaty hands clenched and unclenched nervously in his pockets like one of those fast motion movies of flowers blooming and dying, to open a savings account.

Frank Leggett
Sydney, NSW, Australia

As the budgies and parrots descended upon him, Rolf began to regret his decision to wear an outfit made entirely of cuttlebones; unfortunately, this was the first of many a fashion faux-pas resulting from Beatrice's none-so-sensible advice.

Ella Meumann
Lenah Valley, Tasmania

Cooter--prone to deep cogitation when troubling bouts of constipation resulted in long-winded visits to the loo--reflected sentimentally on the oft underrated pork rind, envisioned its golden "pigmentation," its pleasingly rough exterior where marriage of deep fryer to fat-rendered skin hath borne progenies of crispy bubbles, deceptive in their parchment-skinned fragility-in reality a coordinated cacophony of crunch hitherto unmatched in the snack world.

Leslie Muir
Atlanta, GA

It was a dark and stormy night, although according to meteorologists since the lightning density on the satellite imagery for the area was only about 0.5 strikes per square mile, it wasn't stormy, and according to members of the American Society of Cinematographers because the lights from the city reflected off the clouds and created about 13 lumens of light, it didn't really fit the technical definition of dark.

Steve Petermann
Plano, TX

My tongue moistened my parched lips and my stomach started to churn as I hungrily admired Leslie's hair, which loosely resembled my great aunt Betty's daughter Cornelia's famous tuna casserole--brown, dry and crisp around the edges, yellow and creamy in the center with just a hint of grease spilling out over the top.

Paula Price
California, MO

With "Bambi" eyes and an angelic face made for singing "The hills are alive" while traipsing across an Alpine meadow, Heidi Weissbrot seemed as pure as driven snow to older folks around Peach Blossom, but among boys her own age, there was a nasty rumor that her purity was more akin to snow driven to the river in dump trucks after being scraped from roads and parking lots.

Tom Rohde
Minneapolis, MN

The crater of the volcano glowed red against the black sky, looking as if God had taken a drag of His cigar - if He smoked - which of course, He didn't.

Wendy Spoelstra
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

John lay in the morning dew next to his sleeping love as the pink hues of the sun rose over the rolling hills, illuminating a tender scene where for the first time satisfaction had come for a happy couple, who had fought all manner of obstacles to come to this one glorious moment, defiant in the face of Montana's repressive bestiality laws.

Dan Stuart
Burlington, VT

"I love the library," Hilary said for no particular reason except to hear her own soft voice among the myriad of books which contained characters as familiar and recognizable to her as the neighborhood bum she passed everyday, who looked like Ted Danson when he dressed up as Dracula in Three Men and a Little Lady.

Jessamyn Sudhakaran
New Boston, OH

When Marcel sank his dentures into the tarte frappée aux moules demi-tantalisées à la provençale to be suffused not with a pot-pourri of gilded remembrances of infancy, nor with vignettes of past hurly-burlies on the chaise longue, but with a bland mélange of ephemeral insipidities of quotidian contemporaneity, "That takes the biscuit," he thought, Madeleine's forgotten the salt, again."

Graham Thomas
St Albans, Hertfordshire, England

The Archbishop, imprisoned for ten years in various palaces where he was called "Traitor" instead of Christoph, returned home amid cheers of those who knew his happiness and stature soon would be cut short by the sword of the Black Knight, who was actually quite pale since sunlight doesn¹t penetrate armor, chain mail, and woolen underwear.

Mary Ann R. Unger
Ewing, NJ

Dane worked the Spyrograph furiously, first red, then green, then red again, and finally blue; the pattern he sought was in there somewhere, and the correct combination would open the doors to a euphoria only known to dogs getting their stomachs scratched and parakeets viewing themselves in the mirror.

Matthew Warnock
Elgin, IL

"I'll have a pack of cigarettes please.no, Marlboro 100's . . . lights please, in a box yeah, no, wait, give me a soft pack, no, not those, the ones right above them, no, no, right next to those, yeah, wait, make it two packs, no wait, how much are they . . . no, one pack will do me, and a lighter please, no the other one, yeah, that one will be fine," he said quickly.

Shane Spears
Blytheville, AR
http://tinyurl.com/yvc69b

Scientists breed world’s first mentally ill mouse
July 29, 2007
Jonathan Leake Science Editor

SCIENTISTS have created the world’s first schizophrenic mice in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the illness.

It is believed to be the first time an animal has been genetically engineered to have a mental illness. Until now they have been bred only for research into physical conditions such as heart disease. It will allow researchers to study the disease and develop treatments using a limitless supply of laboratory animals.

Animal rights campaigners have condemned the research, saying that it is morally repugnant to create an animal doomed to mental suffering.

The mice were created by modifying their DNA to mimic a mutant gene first found in a Scottish family with a high incidence of schizophrenia, which affects about one in every 100 people. The mice’s brains were found to have features similar to those of humans with schizophrenia, such as depression and hyperactivity.

“These mutant mice may provide an important new tool for further study of the combinations of factors that underlie mental illnesses like schizophrenia and mood disorders,” said Takatoshi Hikida, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, a leading researcher.

The egg cells of mice were genetically modified by inserting a gene associated with schizophrenia into their DNA. The eggs were fertilised and grown into viable baby mice using surrogate mothers.

Animal Aid, a campaign group, said rodents were not a reliable way of modelling human disease.

* Have your say

It's all very well finding risk genes in illness or even character traits, but it is our behaviour that primarily makes us ill, lack of exercise, sexual misconduct and poor diet are easily understood to be factors in physical and mental illness.

It almost seems as though we would like to find treatments, or even engineer ourselves to become resistant to our own paucity of humanity, correcting natural "defects", to allow ourselves to smoke cannabis in front of the TV!

Mutant genes allowing schizophrenia or physical illness aren't defects. They are things we should work around, by lifestyle and selecting a healthy partner, who has some integrity, and who rides a bicycle, for instance.
I say this: clone David Cameron!

Keith Murray, Brighton, UK

Our current longer lifespan is not because of animal-testing (we don't go to the vet to treat our illnesses because a cat or mouse is not a human being and there are great many scientists who assert that vivisection presents fallacious results). We live longer lives because we have better access to food, shelter, treatment of injuries such as broken bones and rotting teeth. We live a more hygienic lifestyle which means less women die in childbirth, and people no longer throw sewerage and refuse into the streets to rot as we did. We now also make provisions for the disabled and aging citizens (rather than leaving them out in the wilderness to die as was done in earlier times). There are many reasons why humans live longer, but animal-testing is not the reason. Animal testing is big business, and definitely erroneous. Only clinicial trials in humans reveal the answers on which we can rely. (When a mouse is given a drug, it cannot tell you if it has a headache or feels nauseous.)

S, Birsbane, Australia

Some questions for those who seem to be of the view that "if it takes 100 mice fatalities to cure one human, then its worth it."

How far are you prepared to take this logic? Are you willing to accept that we perhaps genetically engineer one person condemned to misery by by their chromosomes if it will cure 100 human beings?

"Ah" you say "that's different." Why? Because humans have souls and mice don't? I don't see why anyone would believe that.

It is true that human beings have a more sophisticated level of consciousness, of course. But anyone who thinks that mice have completely no level of consciousness is simply foolish and dogmatic. Perhaps, then, we must accept that even a lowly mouse's limited awareness gives it a certain set of rights.

"But" you say, "what rights exactly?" Yes, well... now the ethics of this situation start to seem a little more subtle and interesting, a little less black and white than they initially did, don't they?
http://tinyurl.com/2kk6k2