NATO airstrike kills 90

KABUL, Afghanistan (CNN) -- A NATO airstrike on a pair of hijacked fuel trucks early Friday in northern Afghanistan killed at least 90 people -- a mix of Taliban militants and civilians, NATO and provincial officials said.

A victim of an ISAF airstrike on a hijacked oil tanker is carried into the Kunduz hospital on Friday.

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Capt. Elizabeth Mathias of NATO's International Security Assistance Force, also known as ISAF, said the military believed there were no civilians near the trucks at the time of the attack.

NATO learned afterward that was not the case. "Based on what we know, there were civilians there," Mathias said.

Local Afghan officials were quoted as saying in some news reports that nearly half the people killed in the airstrike were civilians who rushed the fuel trucks. Mathias declined to confirm those numbers.

Investigators are trying to determine who was at the site and whether a mistake was made, Mathias said. She said a local NATO team is already in Kunduz province conducting an investigation with Afghan forces and another team from the central office is on its way. Watch more about the airstrikes »

"Because of the prevalence of reports of civilian casualties, we don't want to be seen as ignoring the situation," Mathias said. "We don't want to wait. If something happened, we want to apologize."

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, is following the investigation, his public affairs officer, Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, said in an e-mail.

"He takes the possible loss of any innocent life seriously, and while he will not rush to judgment on the facts, he is following the investigation very closely," Sholtis said.

Brigadier General Eric Tremblay released a statement that said, "ISAF will do whatever is necessary to help the community, including medical assistance and evacuation as requested. ISAF regrets any unnecessary loss of human life, and is deeply concerned for the suffering that this action may have caused to our Afghan friends." See images of the strike aftermath »

Afghan President Hamid Karzai said he was "deeply saddened" by the deaths and reiterated that no civilians should be killed or injured in anti-terrorist military operations.

Sholtis said McChrystal "has been in touch with President Karzai and leadership of the major ministries on the incident."

Karzai's office issued a statement saying he had ordered a delegation to the area to investigate the incident and report back to him as soon as possible. The delegation includes representatives of the Ministry of Interior Affairs, National Directorate of Security, and the Provincial Administrative Department, according to the statement.

A spokesman for the provincial governor, Mahboobullah Sayeedi, said more than 90 people were killed.

The fuel trucks were hijacked late Thursday in Kunduz province and were spotted several hours later on the banks of the Kunduz River, ISAF said.

The hijacked vehicles became stuck in the Chardara area of the Ali Abaad district while trying to cross the river, according to Sayeedi. Militants had commandeered the trucks, which were carrying fuel for NATO forces, he said. People tried to empty fuel from the tankers when they couldn't go any farther.

With the trucks stuck on the riverbank, the German commander of the NATO forces called in the airstrike around 2:30 a.m., the German military said.

No German soldiers or planes were involved in the airstrike, but a German patrol made it to the site about 10 hours after the attack and came under small-arms fire, the German military said. The patrol continued its investigation Friday afternoon

Random

During a 1956 speech for his campaign of de-Stalinization, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was asked by an unseen audience member why, as an advisor to the dictator, he had never stopped Stalin from committing his atrocities. Khrushchev immediately lashed out, "Who said that?" The room grew quiet. Khrushchev repeated his query to more silence, waited a beat, and then said, "Well, now you understand why."

The "french" in french fries actually describes the way the spuds are sliced, not their country of origin.

Dog tags are always worn in pairs in case of the unthinkable; one tag remains with the body, and the other is sent to Mortuary Affairs.

While sailing around the world in 2000, TV journalist Geraldo Rivera was followed along the coast of Somalia and nearly attacked by modern-day, Uzi-wielding pirates. The good ship Geraldo could have been a major haul for the pirates, but they were foiled when the newsman had his crew fired flare guns, drawing attention to the vessel and frightening off the attackers.

Alfred Hitchcock was notoriously hard on actors. He was once quoted as saying, "Actors are cattle"—a quip that stirred up a huge outcry. In response, he issued this correction: "I have been misquoted. What I really said is, 'Actors should be treated as cattle.'"

Holy fuck

When NASA first started sending astronauts into space, they realized that the ball-point pen would not work at zero gravity.

A million dollar investment and two years of tests resulted in a pen that could write in space, upside down, on almost any surface and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300 Degrees Celsius.

When confronted with the same problem, the Russians used a pencil

Who is Xenu?

Seriously Read this in its entirety.

I'm going to tell you a story. Are you sitting comfortably? Right, then I'll begin.

Once upon a time (75 million years ago to be more precise) there was an alien galactic ruler named Xenu. Xenu was in charge of all the planets in this part of the galaxy including our own planet Earth, except in those days it was called Teegeeack.

Now Xenu had a problem. All of the 76 planets he controlled were overpopulated. Each planet had on average 178 billion people. He wanted to get rid of all the overpopulation so he had a plan.

Xenu took over complete control with the help of renegades to defeat the good people and the Loyal Officers. Then with the help of psychiatrists he called in billions of people for income tax inspections where they were instead given injections of alcohol and glycol mixed to paralyse them. Then they were put into space planes that looked exactly like DC8s (except they had rocket motors instead of propellers).

These DC8 space planes then flew to planet Earth where the paralysed people were stacked around the bases of volcanoes in their hundreds of billions. When they had finished stacking them around then H-bombs were lowered into the volcanoes. Xenu then detonated all the H-bombs at the same time and everyone was killed.

The story doesn't end there though. Since everyone has a soul (called a "thetan" in this story) then you have to trick souls into not coming back again. So while the hundreds of billions of souls were being blown around by the nuclear winds he had special electronic traps that caught all the souls in electronic beams (the electronic beams were sticky like fly-paper).

After he had captured all these souls he had them packed into boxes and taken to a few huge cinemas. There all the souls had to spend days watching special 3D motion pictures that told them what life should be like and many confusing things. In this film they were shown false pictures and told they were God, The Devil and Christ. In the story this process is called "implanting".

When the films ended and the souls left the cinema these souls started to stick together because since they had all seen the same film they thought they were the same people. They clustered in groups of a few thousand. Now because there were only a few living bodies left they stayed as clusters and inhabited these bodies.

As for Xenu, the Loyal Officers finally overthrew him and they locked him away in a mountain on one of the planets. He is kept in by a force-field powered by an eternal battery and Xenu is still alive today.

That is the end of the story. And so today everyone is full of these clusters of souls called "body thetans". And if we are to be a free soul then we have to remove all these "body thetans" and pay lots of money to do so. And the only reason people believe in God and Christ was because it was in the film their body thetans saw 75 million years ago.

Well what did you think of that story?

What? You thought it was a stupid story?

Well so do we. However, this story is the core belief in the religion known as Scientology.* If people knew about this story then most people would never get involved in it. This story is told to you when you reach one of their secret levels called OT III. After that you are supposed to telepathically communicate with these body thetans to make them go away. You have to pay a lot of money to get to this level and do this (or you have to work very hard for the organisation on extremely low pay for many years).

We are telling you this story as a warning. If you become involved with Scientology then we would like you to do so with your eyes open and fully aware of the sort of material it contains.

Now you have read this you know their big secret. Don't let us put you off joining though.

* Dianetics and Scientology are trademarks of the Religious Technology Centre. This document is not connected with that organisation in any way. Most of the Scientologists who work in their Dianetics* centres and so called "Churches" of Scientology do not know this story since they are not allowed to hear it until they reach the secret "upper" levels of Scientology. It may take them many years before they reach this level if they ever do. The ones who do know it are forced to keep it a secret and not tell it to those people who are joining Scientology.

Palin Blessed by 'Witchhunter'

From The Times Online


The pastor whose prayer Sarah Palin says helped her to become governor of Alaska founded his ministry with a witchhunt against a Kenyan woman who he accused of causing car accidents through demonic spells.

At a speech at the Wasilla Assembly of God on June 8 this year, Mrs Palin described how Thomas Muthee had laid his hands on her when he visited the church as a guest preacher in late 2005, prior to her successful gubernatorial bid.

In video footage of the speech, she is seen saying: “As I was mayor and Pastor Muthee was here and he was praying over me, and you know how he speaks and he’s so bold. And he was praying “Lord make a way, Lord make a way.”

“And I’m thinking, this guy’s really bold, he doesn’t even know what I’m going to do, he doesn’t know what my plans are. And he’s praying not “oh Lord if it be your will may she become governor,” no, he just prayed for it. He said “Lord make a way and let her do this next step. And that’s exactly what happened.”

She then adds: “So, again, very very powerful, coming from this church,” before the presiding pastor comments on the “prophetic power” of the event.

An African evangelist, Pastor Muthee has given guest sermons at the Wasilla Assembly of God on at least 10 occasions in his role as the founder of the Word of Faith Church, also known as the Prayer Cave.

Pastor Muthee founded the Prayer Cave in 1989 in Kiambu, Kenya after “God spoke” to him and his late wife Margaret and called him to the country, according to the church’s website.

The pastor speaks of his offensive against a demonic presence in the town in a trailer for the evangelical video “Transformations”, made by Sentinel Group, a Christian research and information agency.

“We prayed, we fasted, the Lord showed us a spirit of witchcraft resting over the place,” Pastor Muthee says.

After the spirit was broken, the crime rate dropped to almost zero and there was “explosive church growth” while almost every bar in the town closed down, the video says.

The full Transformations video featuring Pastor Muthee’s story has recently been removed from YouTube but the rest of the story is detailed in a 1999 article in the Christian Science Monitor, as well as on numerous evangelical websites.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, six months of fervent prayer and research identified the source of the witchcraft as a local woman called Mama Jane, who ran a “divination” centre called the Emmanuel Clinic.

Her alleged involvement in fortune-telling and the fact that she lived near the site of a number of fatal car accidents led Pastor Muthee to publicly declare her a witch responsible for the town’s ills, and order her to offer her up her soul for salvation or leave Kiambu.

Says the Monitor, “Muthee held a crusade that “brought about 200 people to Christ”.” They set up round-the-clock prayer intercession in the basement of a grocery store and eventually, says the pastor “the demonic influence – the ‘principality’ over Kiambu –was broken”, and Mama Jane fled the town.

According to accounts of the witchhunt circulated on evangelical websites such as Prayer Links Ministries, after Pastor Muthee declared Mama Jane a witch, the townspeople became suspicious and began to turn on her, demanding that she be stoned. Public outrage eventually led the police to raid her home, where they fired gunshots, killing a pet python which they believed to be a demon.

After Mama Jane was questioned by police – and released – she decided it was time to leave town, the account says.

Pastor Muthee has frequently referred to this witchhunt in his sermons as an example of the power of “spiritual warfare”. In October 2005, he delivered ten sermons at the Wasilla Assembly of God, the audio of which was available on the church’s website until it was removed around the time Mrs Palin’s candidacy was announced. The blog Irregular Times has listings and screen grabs of the sermons.

It was during that these sermons that Mrs Palin, who was then preparing for her gubernatorial run, was anointed by Pastor Muthee. His intercession, she says, was “awesome”.

Her June 8 speech was to mark the graduation of students from the Wasilla Assembly of God’s Masters’ Commission, which, as Pastor Ed Kalins explains, believes Alaska will be the refuge for American evangelicals upon the coming “End of Days”. After her speech, Mrs Palin was presented with an honorary Masters’ Commission diploma.

The world around me pt. 2

The world around me pt.1