"Butcher of Washington, you are not only defeated and a liar, but also a failure," he said, speaking of Mr. Bush. "You are a curse on your own nation and you have brought and will bring them only catastrophes and tragedies."
    
An American counterterrorism official said that the videotape "demonstrates that Al Qaeda's propaganda apparatus is still functioning." 
    
Thirteen villagers were killed in the strike, setting off widespread protests in Pakistan. American officials say that several Qaeda figures were among those killed, but have not determined who they were. 
    
 Iran Calling Wider World to Its Side
Tehran Looks Beyond Muslim Nations as It Faces Off With West

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, February 1, 2006; A18

TEHRAN -- On the afternoon of Jan. 4, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reached for the phone and got Latin America on the line. In quick succession, he chatted with President Fidel Castro of Cuba, rang up President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and, sensing yet another kindred spirit, reached out to Evo Morales, the young firebrand who had just been elected president of Bolivia.


    But the approach was viewed as largely futile, especially after President Bush lumped Iran with North Korea and Iraq in an "axis of evil" in his 2002 State of the Union address. The speech strengthened Iranian hard-liners who argued that the country must define itself in opposition to the United States.

"Especially after Iran was branded in the axis of evil, these guys turned to the leader and said, 'What has Khatami gotten us?' " said an Iranian political analyst who asked not to be named because his employer had not authorized public comment.



   
The Bush Administration AGAIN tried to silence a scientist on global warming. This administraton has tried to silence many who would speak the truth which would be in polar opposite of what the administration wanted the American public to know. The New York Times reports: 
    
January 29, 2006
    Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him 
    The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.
    The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists. 
    
Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. "They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public," he said. 
    
Dean Acosta, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs at the space agency, said there was no effort to silence Dr. Hansen. "That's not the way we operate here at NASA," Mr. Acosta said. "We promote openness and we speak with the facts."
    
He said the restrictions on Dr. Hansen applied to all National Aeronautics and Space Administration personnel. He added that government scientists were free to discuss scientific findings, but that policy statements should be left to policy makers and appointed spokesmen.
    
Mr. Acosta said other reasons for requiring press officers to review interview requests were to have an orderly flow of information out of a sprawling agency and to avoid surprises. "This is not about any individual or any issue like global warming," he said. "It's about coordination."
    
Dr. Hansen strongly disagreed with this characterization, saying such procedures had already prevented the public from fully grasping recent findings about climate change that point to risks ahead. 
    
"Communicating with the public seems to be essential," he said, "because public concern is probably the only thing capable of overcoming the special interests that have obfuscated the topic."
    
Dr. Hansen, 63, a physicist who joined the space agency in 1967, directs efforts to simulate the global climate on computers at the Goddard Institute in Morningside Heights in Manhattan. And our state of the union is good and freedom rings.

Pakistan, our odd allie, has its people continuing to protest against us for our bombings.