Update 7 AM: “The drilling is going well and should be completed soon, officials said.”(CNN) See Below…

9:30 AM: ” Lobbyist Jack Abramoff, a close associate of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, to plead guilty to corruption, other charges, source tells CNN.”

BACK IN THE MINES
IRAQ’S NEW OIL SCANDAL
NEWS DISSECTOR IN THE TIMES

Yesterday, CNN carried some breaking news: “The Associated Press reports explosion in Upshur County, West Virginia, coal mine traps 13 miners, county emergency official says.”

It happened on what was my late mother’s birthday, and reminded me of a poem she had written, perhaps her first, well before I was born on July 16th 1940 marking an earlier mine blast. I wrote about it here back in 2002 when another mine accident occurred, but since much of the news repeats itself, here we go again, and here I go again.

The update on the story last night was this:

”Rescuers are inside a West Virginia coal mine trying to save 13 miners trapped underground after an explosion, an official said. It is not known whether the miners survived the blast early Monday. Lila Muncy, the sister of trapped miner Randall McCoy, is at a local church which has become a meeting place for relatives of miners waiting for news. “Everybody is just distraught,” she told CNN.

DARK AS A DUNGEON

My mom, from whence this dissector sprang, was upset about “the unnecessary and premature deaths of the ‘dark men’ of the mines who go to their doom without even a chance to fight back.”

It “has always made me feel sick and angry,” she wrote.

She confessed this in a letter sent to to Eleanor Roosevelt. She explained in that letter: “Long ago, I read a book called “Germinal’ by Emile Zola that made me clench my fists; and after that there were many newspaper accounts telling of accidents. One after another, like little obituary notices. Hardly noticed, but always there. Men dying in the dark, doing their jobs, trapped.

“One day, this July, it happened again. It was the way the article was written with the inference that “mine accidents will always be with us,’ as something that just can’t be helped’ like locusts or the measles that made me feel like getting on a house top and yelling…”

She wrote this “the expression of one average citizen ‘Mary Doe’ who is a little fed up…and who understands that you, too, feel that something should be done in the way of safeguards to prevent the all too frequent occurrence of so-called accidents.”

THE WHITE HOUSE RESPONDS TO A POET

On December 6, l941, the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Malvina Thompson, secretary to Mrs. Roosevelt, responded on the stationery of “The White House, Washington.” to my mom, who had not yet married. It was sent to her apartment on Grant Avenue in the Bronx. People in that neighborhood rarely heard from anyone in power—or close to power.
“I am writing to acknowledge your letter of December 20 and to tell you I will bring it to Mrs. Roosevelt’s attention at the first opportunity.”
As you can bet, she saved that letter as a precious possession, even though the White House would have other disasters to worry about in the day and years ahead.

And so, for miners around the world still fighting for life, I dust off these words from another century again, written more than 65 years ago, and serve them up in their honor and with hopes for their survival.

“MINE BLAST IN PENNSLVANIA

July 16, 1940
The earth is a jealous lover giving men
treasures for a kiss of death
You and I and each one lost sixty-three
Brothers today.
All quite like us, maybe better.
Not as often, not every day do we seek
our own dark words
Nor do we seek it to put bread on a table.
(It’s a small town except for the mine;
the mine swallows the town.)
It was in the print, not in front
That no bullet killed them; no one to blame
Just one of those things — a blast tore through
Some fought with choking breath, but they
Took them to the morgue,–
The brothers, the fathers, the sons.
(It’s a small town except for the mine;
the mine swallows the mine.)
Sighs are cheap, turn the palms upward,
Say “Too Bad; happened before, — worse.”
Miners are like rain, dying away, coming again,
Good for the earth,
But the dead are dead and words are as big
As ants crushed by a leather heel,
And there’s a kind of tears no words can stop,-
Silver cold — too deep to see.
Later on, at night, they tell the children,
The earth is a jealous lover giving men treasures
for a kiss of death.
Yes, but where my father, my brother, my son.”
Ruth Lisa Schechter,
December 20, 1940

ON TO THE NEWS: WHAT TO LEAD WITH?

Should it be spying or torture or Iraq or all three? That seems to be the choice dujure.

As the military loses Iraq, Bush seems to be losing the military. Bear in mind that the Armed Forces works for Bush and is there to follow orders, not question policies. Despite that:

Support for Bush drops among US military: poll

”Support for President George W. Bush’s Iraq policy has fallen among the US armed forces to just 54 percent from 63 percent a year ago, according to a poll by the magazine group Military Times.

“In its annual survey of the views of military personnel, the group reported on its website that support for Bush’s overall policies dropped over the past year to 60 percent from 71 percent.

“While still significantly more supportive of the president than the broad US population, the fall in support by military personnel tracks a similar decline in the president’s popularity among the general public.”

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/01/02/060102234337.if0cb0yj.html

AFTER THIS WAR HAS ENDED

Howard Zinn calls for an end to war
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2006-01/03zinn.cfm

SCOTT RITTER ON IRAQ: WHATS NEXT

Scott Ritter: Elections in 2005, Civil War in 2006?
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/themix/30299

MISSION LEAP AWARD

Tom Dispatch.com is giving an award to some in our military:

The Mission Leap Award (until this year, the Mission Creep Award, also known as the Security Begins Under Your Bed Award) went to the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity or CIFA. This new counterterrorism agency grew in three brief years from a small coordinating office located in a five-sided broom closet into “an analytic and operational organization with nine directorates and ever-widening authority” (as well as a sizeable secret budget). Without oversight itself, it now oversees a data-mining operation including a database codenamed Talon that contained surveillance reports on peaceful American civilian protests and demonstrations. It was, one PF judge commented, the best mission-leap example of the militarization of civilian counterintelligence seen in years.”

TomDispatch.com

BOMBS AWAY

Dov Zakheim, a senior Pentagon official during Bush’s first term in office, said: “The goal is not democracy, it is a united Iraq that doesn’t bother its neighbours. There is no law that says American troops have to be in the most hostile areas.” … If the use of planes proves effective, US troop levels should fall below 100,000 by next autumn in time for the American mid-term congressional elections. … “The biggest problem we have is that our strategy has to include winning the war at home,” said Zakheim.

This is from a story in the Sunday Times of London: ”US forces step up Iraq airstrikes”

”American forces are dramatically stepping up air attacks on insurgents in Iraq as they prepare to start the withdrawal of ground troops in the spring.

“The number of airstrikes in 2005, running at a monthly average of 25 until August, surged to 120 in November and an expected 150 in December, according to official military figures.

“The tempo looks set to increase this year as the Americans pull back from urban combat, leaving street fighting increasingly to Iraqi forces supported by US air power.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1965182,00.html

HOT AIR WAR

As the air war escalates, the hot air propaganda war follows

Al Jazeera reports: “The Pentagon recently awarded Lincoln a new contract in Iraq:

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/8683E77C-6707-469B-AE8D-BBA9D544206E.htm

IRAQ: THE OIL FACTOR/LATEST SCANDAL

ICH reports: Iraq Oil Minister Resigns Under Pressure :

Iraq’s oil minister said Monday he resigned after the government last week gave him a forced vacation and replaced him with Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi following criticism about fuel price increases.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5517606,00.html

The Washington Post adds on this story:

Iraqi Oil Minister Resigns to Protest Higher Fuel Prices
Official Had Been on Leave Since Criticizing Government

Iraq oil exports hit post-war low :

Iraq’s oil exports in December fell to their lowest level since the official end of the conflict in 2003, Iraqi interim government figures have shown.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4574954.stm

THE YEAR IN SPYING FROM JEFF STEIN OF CQ

http://www.cq.com/public/20051230_homeland.html

TORTURE IN THE UK; BLOGGERS PUBISH LEAKED EVIDENCE

Bloggers all over the world are picking up reports from Britain that the Blair government is threatening to ban:

Here is Craig Murray’s site and several segments for attention. Murray is the former ambassador to Uzbekhistan for Great Britain, and who has recently broken the secrecy seal on understandings he has gained about Uzbek traditions of ‘human rights.’ At the top of the site is a short, illuminating BBC interview with him and a member of parliament. Murray is ‘good’ enough to give, there and elsewhere, brief details about what is actually meant by torture, with little need for additional imagination.

http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2006/01/bbc_radio_craig.html

Even more light to push back the dungeon darkness here and overseas, comes from blairwatch.co.uk (Here,

http://www.blairwatch.co.uk/node/716, and below)